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Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691637815 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #782 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France
By William R. Paulson
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1987 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06710-0
CHAPTER 1
"SUPPOSE A MAN BORN BLIND ..."
In the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke exposed a problem concerning a person born blind and restored to sight that was to attract the attention of every major figure of the French Enlightenment. The Swiss philosopher Jean-Bernard Mérian, writing for the Berlin Academy in 1770, summed up its importance in these terms:
Ce problème tient, dans la Philosophic moderne, une place distinguée. Les Locke, les Leibnitz, les hommes les plus célèbres de notre siècle en ont fait l'objet de leurs recherches. Il a été le germe de découvertes importantes, qui ont produit des changemens considérables dans la science de l'Esprit humain, & surtout dans la Théorie des sensations.
Locke's friend William Molyneux, author of a Dioptrica Nova, had proposed the problem in a letter, and Locke inserted it, with his own comments, into his discussion of perception. He claims that Molyneux's question relates directly to the problem of the role, in perception, of judgments of which we are unaware, and also shows it to be indirectly related to his overall argument against the existence of innate ideas.
Locke devotes the first book of the Essay to the refutation of arguments in favor of innate ideas, propositions such as "Whatever is, is" and "It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be," often taken as innate on the grounds that they are universally accepted. In the second book, entitled "Of Ideas," he sets out to show that everything in the understanding is derived from experience, that is, that there is no need for innate ideas. This book was to become the most influential part of the Essay in eighteenth-century France, where it would serve almost as a bible for thinkers opposed to the church, the universities, and Cartesian philosophy. Locke declared that all ideas came into the understanding from two kinds of experience: sensation of external, material things, and reflection on the operations of the mind. He classified ideas according to whether they came from one sense only, from more than one sense, or from reflection. Ideas of light and color are said to be unique to the eyes, while "Space or Extension, Figure, Rest and Motion" are common to both touch and sight. In fact, this last group of ideas are the only ones which, according to Locke, come from more than one sense. These ideas (like those of solidity and number as well) are of what Locke designates as primary qualities and hence are resemblances of those qualities as they actually exist in objects. Ideas of secondary qualities, as of light and color, however, resemble nothing existing in the objects of sensation.
The chapter "Of Perception," in which Molyneux's question appears, follows the classification of ideas and the discussion of primary and secondary qualities. Locke offers no strict definition of perception, stating rather that the reader must "reflect on what passes in his own Mind," but he makes clear that he uses the word to mean the entry of ideas into the mind. The Molyneux problem was added in the second edition to supplement a discussion of how ideas received by sensation can be altered by judgments of which we are not aware. Locke's original discussion hinges on the question of how a three-dimensional object can be perceived through sight. The visual idea of a globe, he writes, "is of a flat Circle variously shadow'd." He continues:
But we having by use been accustomed to perceive, what kind of appearance convex Bodies are wont to make in us; what alterations are made in the reflections of Light, by the difference of the sensible Figures of Bodies, the Judgement presently, by an habitual custom, alters the Appearances into their Causes: So that from that, which truly is a variety of shadow or colour, collecting the Figure, it makes pass for a mark of Figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex Figure, and an uniform Colour; when the Idea we receive from thence, is only a Plain variously colour'd, as is evident in Painting.
Locke goes on to state that this habitual substitution of causes for appearances, this use of one kind of idea as the mark or sign of another kind, is unique to ideas arising from sight. Sight, he argues, has a special domain (light and color, "peculiar only to that Sense") and a general domain common to sight and touch ("the far different Ideas of Space, Figure, and Motion"). In effect, Locke argues here that sight produces ideas of light, color, and perhaps two-dimensional form, but that ideas of three-dimensional space arise more properly from touch and can arise from sight only through the intervention of habitual and thus unconscious judgment. Thus when in an earlier section he defined the ideas of space as arising indifferently from sight or touch, he was really referring to sight-plus-judgment or touch. Only in the argument concerning the role of judgment does he unpack and analyze this ellipsis made elsewhere in the Essay.
To this discussion of the role of unconscious judgments in relating ideas of sight and touch, Locke adds in 1694 the question put to him in a letter from Molyneux:
Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quere, Whether by his sight, before he touch'd them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. To which the acute and judicious Proposer answers: Not. For though he has obtain'd the experience of, how a Globe, how a Cube affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the Experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; Or that a protuberant angle in the Cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye, as it does in the Cube.
Molyneux does not directly address the problem of unconscious judgment, but rather the problem of distinction between figures and of their recognition or naming. His solution can be interpreted in two ways. According to Mérian, Molyneux assumes (following Locke's statements in II.v and II.viii) that the idea of a figure, entering the mind either by sight or by touch, resembles the material figure that gives rise to it, so that the blind man's incapacity is solely in naming or recognition. In other words, there would be a resemblance between the ideas received through touch and sight, but the blind man would have no way of anticipating or even conceiving of it. However correct this may be if Molyneux's formulation is taken out of context, the history of the question suggests that he intended it as a thought experiment concerning Locke's argument. He appears to have invented the problem in response to this section of the Essay, and the considerable correspondence between the two men contains no hint of disagreement on their understanding of it. If one assumes that a figure can be perceived by the eyes only with the aid of judgment, then the analogy expressed by the "so or so ... so or so" of Molyneux's syntax can only be the acquired result of experience.
The blind man provides a way for philosopher and reader to conceive of a mind without experience, to verify that what is in the understanding is property acquired through experience, and to abolish for a moment the workings of the prejudices of understanding in their own minds. The conceptualization of a lack of experience, more than an illustration of his argument concerning perceptual judgments, is for Locke the real contribution of the Molyneux problem; in fact, he does not offer an original solution to it. "This I have set down, and leave with my Reader, as an occasion for him to consider, how much he may be beholding to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks, he has not the least use of, or help from them." To conceive of the role of experience is to understand better the workings of perception, but even more so it is to avoid the temptation of ascribing faculties to innate ideas.
The price paid for experience, Locke seems to argue, is a degree of confusion about the source of the mind's operations, and that confusion can be resolved only by recourse to an original state before experience. In the case of sight, judgment has made one kind of idea into the marks or signifiers of another kind; light and colors are interpreted as indicating three-dimensional figures. Thus the ideas properly of sight, whose role becomes merely that of signifying other ideas, are devalued to the point of passing unnoticed, "as a Man who reads or hears with attention and understanding, takes little notice of the Characters, or Sounds, but of the Ideas, that are excited in him by them." Something has been lost, excluded; the spatial ideas acquired by the habitual use of judgment now cover up their visual origin as ideas of light and color. The philosopher must try to undo and reverse the operation of understanding, turn back the clock and inspect the beginning so as to authenticate the present state of affairs. The philosopher is already implicitly what Condillac will call him in the Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, one who retraces the steps of understanding, who comes afterward, and yet who discovers what came first. The mind's return to the state of origin is blocked by the substitution of a cause for an appearance; the mind is "blind" to the appearances before it, for causes seem to appear in their place. In effect, a censor has been created, "by use," and now certain sensations simply do not enter consciousness because of what has taken their place, the cause evoked by the unconscious judgments of the mind. The term "unconscious" is not out of place here, though certainly we could not speak of an unconscious in the Freudian sense, since for Locke the perceptions not admitted do not constitute a stockpile but are simply lost. To study these impressions, then, one has not to recover them from the past as from a reservoir, but merely to open the present paths of perception and understanding to them. A kind of experiment or exercise must be performed, and then under the right conditions the origin will once again exist anew.
The man born blind has never sensed or perceived visual appearances. His knowledge, unlike that of a person who has become "blind" to these appearances by long use of the understanding, has been directly and originally that of three-dimensional figures perceived by touch. Locke, as we have noted, assumes these three-dimensional figures to be the cause of two-dimensional images in light and color. In the case of the blind man, the philosopher and his friend ask, what could possibly exist of the judgment or process of substitution to which most people become "blind" through experience, ceasing to notice that they have substituted cause for appearance, figure for "mark of figure"? Summoned to bear witness before the bar of philosophy, the blind man is of interest to his hearers for his prior sensory lack, for his negativity, for the unused portion of his understanding where certain acquisitions have not yet been made. He also interests them only insofar as he can be cured, made suddenly like (and yet unlike) one of the seeing. Locke and Molyneux consider the absence of sight only as a means of producing a moment of first sight. The new sight of the blind person, unsullied by experience, helps the philosopher free his interlocutor or reader from common-sense prejudices by enabling the reader to imagine a more original state of his own mind.
In this role the blind man restored to sight becomes a paradigmatic figure in Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709, French translation 1734). The heterogeneity of the perceptions of touch and sight, suggested by the remarks of Locke and Molyneux, is for Berkeley a fundamental thesis, and Molyneux's question is but one of many appeals to the construct of newly original sight. "In order to disentangle our minds from whatever prejudices we may entertain with respect to the subject at hand, nothing seems more apposite than the taking into our thoughts the case of one born blind, and afterwards, when grown up, made to see." Whether the concept previously acquired by touch be distance, magnitude, spatial orientation, number, figure, or motion, the blind man will not recognize it in his new perceptions, for "he would not think the things that he perceived by sight to be at any distance from him, or without his mind." The perceptions of sight and touch are simply incommensurable, and they can represent one another only if linked by the experience of their association: "It is a mistake to think that the same thing affects both sight and touch. If the same angle or square which is the object of touch be also the object of vision, what should hinder the blind man at first sight from knowing it?"
Although Berkeley, like Locke and Molyneux, used the blind man primarily as a conceptual device in a philosophical discourse intended to incite the reader to take an inventory of his own mind, he did indicate an interest in an experimental verification, upon learning of its technical possibility. In the appendix to the second edition of the New Theory of Vision (1710), he mentions a cure of blindness and suggests questioning the patient "to decide how far some tenents laid down in several places of the foregoing essay are agreeable to truth." The cure in question was an operation performed by a surgeon named Grant and reported in the Tatler of 1709, where it was hailed as a matter "of a yet higher consideration" than the history of princes, empires, and wars, as an experience "proper at once to exercise our humanity, please our imaginations, and improve our judgements." Although the Molyneux problem is not explicitly mentioned, the preparations made for the operation suggest a philosophic interest in the first observations of the new seer: "Mr. Caswell [the local minister], being a Gentleman particularly curious, desired the whole company, in case the blindness should be cured, to keep secret, and let the Patient make his own observations, without the direction of any thing he had received by his other senses, or the advantage of discovering his friends by their voices." Whereas Berkeley was to propose questioning a former blind person long after his cure, inviting him to recall his first impressions upon seeing and to compare them with his former understanding, Caswell and Grant sought to observe and overhear the first spontaneous expressions of their patient at the moment of origin of his visual experience, a prerational moment when presumably his judgments would directly reflect his perceptions.
But at the moment of first sight, philosophical investigation gives way to an exemplary display of wonder and sensibility. "When the Patient first received the dawn of light, there appeared such ecstasy in his action, that he seemed ready to swoon away in the surprise of joy and wonder." For a moment, the narrator describes the patient's visual scrutiny of the surgeon standing before him — his hands and his instruments — and it appears that the inquiry into ideas can coexist with the sense of wonder. But the young man has been staring at the surgeon in "amazement," and in fact the origin of ideas has been occulted by the dazzling power of the visible, and the blindness of excess replaces the blindness of lack. Here sight is incommensurable with other senses because of a difference not of form but of energy. The blind man cannot believe that the language he has already heard is adequate, or powerful enough, to name his new experience: "Is all this about me, the thing I have heard so often of? is this the light? is this seeing? Were you always so happy, when you said, you were glad to see each other?" In this mythical awakening, this enlightenment version of Plato's fiction of the cave, there is no place for philosophical interrogation. The recovery of sight provokes a shift from one kind of discourse to another, in that after a preamble suggesting a philosophical experiment, the narrative passes into a sentimental and melodramatic mode as soon as the young blind man begins to see. In this brief article, the cure of blindness already constitutes a point of intersection between the intellectual problems of sensory perception and the emotional or rhetorical implications of the awakening of sight. The patient suddenly becomes a character, the hero of an edifying little apologue on fidelity. He recognizes successively his mother and his fiancée, who, alas, is rather plain. When the young girl expresses her fear that through his eyes he may come to love another more beautiful than her, he replies that their love surpasses by far even the pleasures of vision, and that for her he would sacrifice his newly opened eyes. "I wished for them but to see you; pull them out, if they are to make me forget you." Sight calls forth a dangerous sexuality that threatens their idyllic love but is held in check by the symbolic possibility of renewed blindness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France by William R. Paulson. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- INTRODUCTION: UNSEEING IN THE EYE, pg. 1
- 1. “SUPPOSE Α ΜΑΝ BORN BLIND . . .”, pg. 21
- 2. DIDEROT: PHILOSOPHY AND THE WORLD OF THE BLIND, pg. 39
- 3. CURING BLINDNESS: A MODERN MYTH, pg. 72
- 4. A MODERN PROJECT: EDUCATING THE BLIND, pg. 95
- 5. FROM CHATEAUBRIAND TO BALZAC: LITERATURE AND LOSS OF SIGHT, pg. 121
- 6. HUGO: BLIND SEERS, BLIND LOVERS, AND THE VIOLENCE OF HISTORY, pg. 167
- EPILOGUE, pg. 199
- NOTES, pg. 213
- INDEX, pg. 257