Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 7: Blind Man Seeing

7 Blind Man Seeing From Chiasm to Hyperreality Once in a great while a play opens that should have irresistible appeal to afficionados of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Such a play is Molly Sweeney, Irish playwright Brian Friel’s extraordinary drama about the crisis in the sensory and affective life of a woman born blind who, through surgery, supplants a world of darkness with one of limited sight. Where does sensory richness lie, the play inquires, in the mingled conformation of sound, feeling, taste, and smell in which language and percept are commingled, or in the ability to experience the world as spectacle? Consider the preliminary account of Molly’s predicament as interpreted by her husband Frank, a Gaelic hippy, an autodidact of fluctuating enthusiasms. He explains that, bereft of touch and smell, Molly ‘‘wouldn’t know a flower from a football.’’ He goes on succinctly to summarize the history of the question: This problem was debated three hundred years ago by two philosophers , William Molyneux and his friend John Locke. I came across this discussion in a do-it-yourself magazine of all places! Fascinating stuff philosophy. If you are blind . . . said Molyneux . . . you can learn to distinguish between a cube and a sphere just by touching them, by feeling them. Right? . . . Now supposing your vision is suddenly restored, will you be able to tell which object is the cube and which the sphere? Sorry, friend, said Locke . . . you will not be able to tell which is which. 112 Then who comes along [seventeen years later] to join in the debate but another philosopher, George Berkeley, with his essay entitled ‘‘An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision.’’ . . . When the problem was put to the Lord Bishop he came to the same conclusion as his friends. But he went even further. He said there was no necessary connection at all between the tactile world . . . and the world of sight . . . that any connection between the two could be established only by experience.1 Molly’s surgeon corroborates this claim: the world built up by vision is not pregiven but constructed by memory and by the creation of categories and relations. The Siting of the Sightless The surgeon has got it right, if by seeing he means a specific mode of world-habitation. For Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception , the world is both preconstituted and made. To be sure, nowhere in this work does he mention Molyneux or even Locke. Let us nevertheless follow his recasting of their legacy in his general account of sensation and in his interpretation of blindness and later becoming sighted to see whether we can learn from him and from Molly Sweeney something about the experience of blindness that can provide an entering wedge into the hyperreal and the world of virtual reality. As described by Merleau-Ponty, sensation inundates; it is total and overwhelming, comparable to the experience of the sacrament of Communion for a believer. The communicant, he tells us, expects and apprehends not a symbol but the real presence of God, which has come to be localized in bread and wine, so that ‘‘sensation, is literally a form of communion.’’ For Molly, astonishingly, blindness provides the open sesame of sensation. Speaking of swimming, she reflects: ‘‘Just offering yourself to the experience every pore open and eager for that world of pure sensation, of sensation alone— sensation that could not have been enhanced by sight—experience that existed only by touch and feel; and moving swiftly and rhythmically through that enfolding world . . . such liberation, such concordance with it.’’2 Molly has provided a description of sensory experience that dispenses with what Merleau-Ponty calls the standpoint of ‘‘intellectualism ,’’ from which there are only determinate objects that present Blind Man Seeing 113 themselves through a series of possible experiences, objects that exist for a subject that recognizes them. Contrary to intellectualism, he states that individual colors are experiences that are incommunicable and that become my own when I coincide with color. I do not ‘‘lay siege’’ to impressions by means of thought, so that, for the sake of turning them into knowledge, I cease to be a living being immersed in a world but am changed into a subject of cognition. For the knower, expressions such as ‘‘I see with my eyes’’ are rendered meaningless, for the eye ceases to be me, an instrument of bodily excitation, and can...