The Judgement of Experience: Reading and Seeing in Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles

In addition to the usual question underlying empiricist epistemology, namely how we are to judge our sensory experience, Diderot raises the question as to how we are to judge our reading experience, explicitly asking 'Madame', the reader, to come to a view as to whether his presentation of the blind man of Puiseaux as a real person is persuasive or not. This essay, building on an earlier article published in French Studies Bulletin (2006) which provided original evidence as to the historical reality of the blind man, revisits the question as to his imaginary nature by arguing for the intertextual presence of Montaigne's description of 'un gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle nay' in the 'Apologie de Raimond Sebond'. The presence of this intertext, which has not been identified as such before, suggests that in order accurately to judge his or her reading experience the reader requires knowledge of the Lettre's literary and philosophical context, a view which is echoed in a different form in Diderot's discussion of Molyneux's Question. In Diderot's view, the woman who sees for the first time will be unable to judge her sensory experience and unable therefore to answer Molyneux's Question, if she does not have knowledge of the question's metaphysical and mathematical background. Where other readers have recently argued that the Lettre emphasizes the importance of language in understanding experience, this essay thus argues that the Lettre also makes a case for the importance of a literary and philosophical education in our understanding and judgement of experience, be it visual or textual.