Othering blindness – on modern epistemological politics

Abstract

Since the 17th century, the ‘blind restored to light’ has become a relevant epistemological figure attracting philosophical, scientific, medical and pedagogical attention. Drawing on a key text of modernity, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690/1991), this paper analyses the historical constitution of blindness within modern epistemological concerns, whose social and political consequences can be traced to the present. Blindness is reduced to being (1) a mere function of vision (its lack); (2) an individual impairment; and (3) a state of epistemological ignorance. Moreover, Locke’s Essay introduces the bifurcation of nature into primary and secondary qualities. We will argue that this division still plays a crucial role in contemporary studies of disability, when individual and social models of disability are opposed. In concluding, the paper proposes a new epistemology that includes blindness instead of ‘othering’ it through exclusion.

What allows man to resume contact with childhood and to rediscover the permanent birth of truth is this bright, distant, open naïvety of the gaze. Hence the two great mythical experiences on which the philosophy of the eighteenth century had wished to base its beginning: the foreign spectator in an unknown country, and the man born blind restored to light. (Foucault, 1997, p. 65)

Notes

1. The essay was first published in 1690. The second edition introduces Molyneux’s problem. The fifth edition cited here was published in 1706.

2. Such operations, carried out by eye surgeons, consisted in ‘using a needle to move aside the opaque lens in the watery medium so that it no longer lies in the line of sight’ (Degenaar, 1996, p. 58).

3. Molyneux published in 1692 his widely recognised Dioptica Nova.

4. See Plato’s Republic (1979), books 6 and 7.

5. Cheselden (1729, pp. 447–450) published his finding, although he was ignorant about the riddle of Molyneux’s problem.

6. The surgery of cataracts viz. the recovery from blindness is also the theme in Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles ‡ l’usage de ceux qui voient. Diderot (1749/1970) (Paulson, 1987).

7. For the relation between functional vision and division as a major characteristic of modern practices, see Schillmeier (2005).