The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections

Conclusion: The Face of the Mirror

Conclusion: The Face of the Mirror [In dreams] Everything says “I,” even the things and the animals , even the empty space, even objects distant and strange which populate the phantasmagoria. . . . To dream is not another way of experiencing another world, it is for the dreaming subject the radical way of experiencing its own world. —Michel Foucault I think that it is incumbent upon nondisabled scholars to pay particular attention to issues of their own identity , their own privilege as nondisabled people, and the relationship of these factors to their scholarship. —Simi Linton In unmasking certain philosophical faces of intellectual disability, I have explored multiple ways in which the “intellectually disabled,” the “severely cognitively disabled,” the “mentally retarded” have been portrayed as profoundly other. Yet there is another face that is worthy of consideration, one that takes us back to the questions that Foucault posed in defining the task of historical ontology: “How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?”1 In thinking about these 190 the faces of intellectual disability questions, it is important for us to consider what they mean if we interpret the “we” as the non–intellectually disabled. Chapter 6 concluded with the problem of projection: those who construct certain portraits of persons (or distinctly non-persons) with intellectual disabilities may impute fears, assumptions, and biases onto the other in the attempt to render her intelligible. In this respect, then, one might say that the intellectually disabled function as a mirror for the non-disabled. The more I think about the mirror role, however, the more complex this face becomes, for it seems to work at so many different levels in relation to intellectual disability. In her discussion of how Third World subjects have functioned as mirrors for the West, Uma Narayan says, “To be positioned as a mirror is to be put out of countenance, to lose face.”2 Though I will not explore the possibilities in depth here, I think it is important to point out a number of ways in which the intellectually disabled can lose face if they merely serve as a mirror for the non-disabled.3 The first two mirror roles play what might be called an ontological or existential function: they point to some dimension of my own nature, though as we shall see, they do so in slightly different ways. The first is a version of the “there but for the grace of God go I” sentiment. As MacIntyre writes, “Of the braindamaged , of those almost incapable of movement, of the autistic, of all such we have to say: this could have been us. Their mischances could have been ours, our good fortune could have been theirs. (It is this fact about us that makes our relationships to seriously disabled human beings quite other than our relationship to seriously disabled animals of other species.)”4 Yet this mirror can become akin to a funhouse mirror in that when I see the intellectually disabled individual, I see myself in a distorted form. This is what Hauerwas sees in Adam Smith’s characterization of the non-rational other, an account that powerfully captures the sense in which I construct the other as a projection of my own fears. Hauerwas quotes Smith and then continues in his own words: “Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human ‘wretchedness’ with deeper commiseration than any other. But the poor wretch, who is in it, laughs and sings perhaps, and is altogether insensible of his own misery. The anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object, cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what, perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment.” We Conclusion 191 thus persist in our assumption that the retarded suffer from being retarded not because we are unsympathetic with them but because we are not sure how to...