For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  Beginning in the thirteenth century, the blind became the focus of what Weygand calls “profane theater” in France, the farcical and often vulgar entertainment for the general public. In these comedies the blind man was always a beggar, buffoonish, drunken, vice-ridden, outwardly pathetic, and yet full of wile and deceit, playing disingenuously on the emotions of passersby. The belief that blindness was a punishment for sin was still strong at this time. “It is therefore not surprising,” Weygand writes, “that medieval literature was able to cast the blind beggar—whose disability symbolized blindness of the spirit and the dimming of intelligence—as a negative character who could be mercilessly laughed at by the public of farces and fabliaux.”

  That the blind were considered fair targets for ridicule and contempt is beautifully illustrated in a scene from Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, known in English as A Parisian Journal. The anonymous author recorded a street event (he called it “an entertainment”) on the rue Saint-Honoré in the year 1425. Four blind men were given batons, were placed in a pen with a piglet, and were told that if they could kill the piglet, they could keep it.

  And this made for a battle so strange…because however much they thought to strike the piglet, they struck each other, and if they had really been armed, they’d have killed each other. On Saturday, following the Sunday vigils, the said blind men were led through Paris in suits of armor and were preceded by a large banner on which there was the image of a pig, and in front of them, a man playing a tabret.

  At the same time that the blind were being mocked and taunted, charitable public institutions such as hospices and hospitals were being founded all over France at the behest of the Catholic Church, and as part of this trend, the first organizations specifically for the aid of the blind were established. In the mid-thirteenth century, the just, crusading, and pathologically pious6 king Louis IX lobbied for the foundation of a hospice that would house, feed, and generally support three hundred blind Parisians. Because of the number of inmates, the hospice came to be called the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts. In exchange for their protection and care, the blind inmates of the Quinze-Vingts were required to pray concertedly for their benefactors and to venture into the city seeking alms and further donations. On these trips into the city, the Quinze-Vingts blind wore special uniforms identifying them as legitimate and respectable inmates of the hospice, as opposed to those shiftless bands of blind beggars who for centuries had been plaguing the streets of Paris with their pitiable cries and their battered tin cups. The Quinze-Vingts blind would prevail upon passersby with the relatively inoffensive plea “For the Quinze-Vingts, the bread of God!” Their religious slant and their favor with the crown brought them success enough that other organizations for the blind began to copy their model and compete with them for funds and donations. Weygand argues that although the establishment of the Quinze-Vingts was the first move the French monarchy ever made in aid of the handicapped, the hospice’s focus on alms-collecting further cemented the already strong association between blindness and begging. “Even privileged, the blind of the Quinze-Vingts remained beggars, and as such, they were still objects of mockery as much as pity.”

  Medieval literature is rife with blind beggars. Dante’s vivid description of them in Purgatorio is surely an accurate representation of the methods and demeanor of the average European blind beggar at the beginning of the fourteenth century:

  Covered with sackcloth vile they seemed to me,

  And one sustained the other with his shoulder,

  And all of them were by the bank sustained.

  Thus do the blind, in want of livelihood,

  Stand at the doors of churches asking alms,

  And one upon another leans his head,

  So that in others pity soon may rise,

  Not only at the accent of their words,

  But at their aspect, which no less implores.

  This “want of livelihood” persisted for at least another hundred years and into the sixteenth century before the rise of humanism and its move to eradicate poverty gave birth to the idea that the blind could—and should—work and be educated. In 1526 the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives published On Assistance to the Poor, in which this novel idea was formally articulated for the first time:

  Not even the blind shall be allowed to remain idle; there are many things they can do. Some have a literary disposition, provided that someone read to them. Let them study, for we observe that a number of them make progress in erudition that is not to be disdained. Others have a talent for music: let them sing and play string and wind instruments. Let others work at the press houses to help maneuver the wine presses, and may others do their best at the bellows in the workshops of blacksmiths. We know that the blind make boxes, baskets, trays, and cages, and that blind women spin and wind skeins. In sum, if they neither wish to be unemployed nor to flee work, they will easily find something to keep themselves occupied. Laziness or indolence, and not a bodily defect, is the only excuse they may put forward for doing nothing.

  According to Weygand, Vives had no particular interest in the blind but was simply arguing that elements of society that had heretofore been deemed unemployable could in fact be economically productive. His treatise was a step toward treating the blind the same way as everyone else in society.

  One of the greatest changes in the perception of the blind over the past thousand years came as a by-product of the Enlightenment’s focus on reason, science, and the nature of human knowledge. Descartes and other philosophers of the age believed that human ideas were innate, imbued in them by God in the process of creation. John Locke dismissed this notion as superstition and argued instead that the principles of human knowledge were not innate but learned through both experience and the development of the five senses. The chief purpose of Locke’s 1690 essay Concerning Human Understanding was to explore the question of the true source of human thought and ideas. In a letter responding to Locke’s empiricist essay, the Irish philosopher William Molyneux posed a hypothetical question, asking Locke whether he thought that a person born blind who had learned to distinguish a cube from a sphere simply by touching them could, upon regaining his sight, distinguish the two simply by looking at them. Molyneux postulated that the answer was no. Locke agreed, and the question became the focal point of a decades-long philosophical debate concerning the origin and process of human knowledge and the role that the five senses play in human understanding. Sixteen years later another Irish philosopher, George Berkeley, joined Locke and Molyneux’s consensus in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.

  From what hath been premised it is a manifest consequence that a man born blind, being made to see, would, at first, have no idea of distance by sight; the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind.…For our judging objects provided by sight to be at any distance, or without the mind, is entirely the effect of experience, which one in those circumstances could not yet have attained to.

  Molyneux, Locke, and Berkeley were all correct in their supposition that sight lost early in life cannot be effectively regained, but their arguments were not supported by any empirical evidence until 1728, when the English surgeon William Cheselden performed the modern world’s first successful surgery to restore sight to a blind person. The patient was a thirteen-year-old boy born blind. When his cataracts were removed, the boy could indeed see, but as Cheselden observed,

  When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment of distances, that he thought all objects whatever touched his eyes…as what he felt did his skin [i.e., he believed that whatever he saw was literally touching his eyes, in the same way that whatever he felt was touching his skin]…He knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude; but upon being told what things were, whose form he knew before from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again.

  The Enlightenment inquiry into the role o
f the senses in the formation of human thought was scientific, theoretical, and philosophical in nature and was not inspired by any particular concern for the blind or by any attempts to improve their lives. It was, however, this debate over Molyneux’s question that prompted a closer understanding of the daily experience of the blind and that eventually led to Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those Who See, a fascinating treatise that contains probably the first formal investigation of and appreciation for a blind person as an intelligent, capable human being.

  Denis Diderot, who was born in 1713, was thirty-six years old when he published Letter on the Blind. He was a rationalist who openly questioned the tenets, dogmas, and authority of the Church, especially its definition of the nature of God. He was a Catholic who was capable of writing “I maintain that superstition is more of an insult to God than atheism.”

  Much of Diderot’s Letter on the Blind describes a visit he and a friend made to a man in Puiseaux, France, who was born blind. Upon interviewing the man and finding him intelligent and articulate, Diderot was exactly as surprised and amazed as I was two hundred and sixty years later upon meeting Sabriye Tenberken (which only confirms, I think, how ossified and entrenched society’s judgments and perceptions are on this subject and how little they have changed with the passage of time). Throughout the Letter, the blind man goes unnamed, but many details of his life are given. The son of a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, the blind man was “possessed of good solid sense,” was married, and had a young son whom he was teaching to read with the aid of raised letters. He had many acquaintances, understood some chemistry, made his living distilling liqueurs that he sold in Paris, and attended lectures on botany at the Jardin du Roi. He was in the habit of sleeping most of the day, getting up in the late afternoon, and working most of the night. He was particular about tidiness and order in his home, and at night, after his family went to bed, he would put everything in the house in its proper place. “The difficulty the blind have in finding things that are mislaid makes them orderly,” Diderot wrote. The blind man could (like many blind people) thread needles well and sew, and he had (like many blind people) a “surprising” memory for sounds and voices. According to Diderot, he was able to “distinguish as many differences in voices as we can in faces.” He had an uncanny ability to determine the precise weight of an object simply by holding it in his hand and could similarly determine how much liquid a vessel could hold just by feeling it. He could operate a lathe, could dismantle and reassemble small machines, could play an unfamiliar tune merely by being told the notes, and (like many blind people) he considered himself in some respects superior to sighted people. “This blind man,” Diderot wrote, “values himself as much as, and perhaps more than, we who see.” On being asked whether he wouldn’t like to have vision, the blind man responded (as congenitally blind people often do):

  If it were not for curiosity, I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me my hands would tell me more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes; and besides, eyes cease to see sooner than hands to touch. I would be as well off if I perfected the organ I possess, as if I obtained the organ which I am deprived of.7

  Diderot was impressed by the simplicity and accuracy of the blind man’s answer when asked to define what eyes actually are: “An organ on which the air has the effect that this stick has on my hand. When I place my hand between your eyes and an object, my hand is present to you, but the object is absent. The same thing happens when I reach for one thing with my stick and come across another.” Diderot was also struck by how keen the man’s audio perception was, how accurately he could tell where a sound was coming from, and with obvious admiration, he recounted a story about a heated argument the blind man had with his brother as a youth, during which he hurled a weighty object in the direction of the brother’s voice: He hit the brother square on the forehead and knocked him out. Diderot was also astonished, as I was with Sabriye, Choden, and Yangchen, that “he is so sensitive to the least atmospheric change that he can distinguish between a street and a closed alley.” Like Sabriye, the blind man of Puiseaux judged a person’s appeal by his pronunciation and “charm of voice.”

  Eventually, displaying the inevitable impatience that blind people will if questioned too simplistically for too long about their blindness, the blind man asked Diderot and his friend a question of his own. “I perceive, gentlemen, that you are not blind. You are astonished at what I do, and why not as much at my speaking?”

  Diderot did in fact wonder how the blind could speak as well as the sighted, for there is so much in language that refers to phenomena perceptible only to the eyes—the mischievous glance, for example; the wry smile; the angry frown. How can a blind person know what these are or tell one from the other? Helen Keller addressed this question at length in The World I Live In. On reading one of her essays, Keller’s proofreader queried her use of the word see in the following sentence: “When I was a little girl I was taken to see a woman who was blind and paralyzed.” Keller protested, “If I had said ‘visit,’ he would have asked no questions, yet what does ‘visit’ mean but ‘see’ visitare?” Defending herself for using “as much of the English language as I have succeeded in learning,” Keller wrote critically of a newspaper article that announced the publication of a new magazine for the blind. The article explained that many poems and stories had to be omitted from the magazine “because they deal with sight. Allusion to moonbeams, rainbows, starlight, clouds, and beautiful scenery may not be printed, because they serve to emphasize the blind man’s sense of his affliction.” Keller scoffed that this was like suggesting “I may not talk about beautiful mansions because I am poor. I may not read about Paris and the West Indies because I cannot visit them in their territorial reality. I may not dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound whose meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy.”8

  In the second section of his Letter on the Blind, Diderot examined the life of the British mathematician Nicholas Saunderson, who was born in 1682 and lost his sight to smallpox at the age of twelve months. Saunderson eventually became Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University and was widely recognized as a mathematical genius and a brilliant teacher. He was expert in Greek, Latin, and French, and wrote The Elements of Algebra, in which, according to Diderot, the “only signs of his blindness are the peculiarity of certain demonstrations which a sighted man would probably not have thought of.” (This is surely a compliment.) He also devised an ingenious tablet for working out his mathematical calculations and algebraic formulations, which he performed with “astonishing rapidity.” Saunderson lectured on Newtonian philosophy, optics, the nature of light and color, hydrostatics, astronomy, mechanics, and the theory of vision, and he wrote about the properties of lenses and the phenomenon of the rainbow. “He taught his pupils as if they could not see,” Diderot wrote, “and a blind man who makes clear to the blind must be doubly lucid to the sighted.” Saunderson could tell a genuine coin from a counterfeit coin simply by feeling both, even though one particular counterfeit was well enough made to have duped a sighted expert numismatist. (From this Diderot concluded that the sense of touch, “when trained, could become more delicate than sight.”9) Saunderson was able to tell the size of a space he was standing in just by its atmosphere, and he could immediately recognize a place he had stood in just once before by the sound that the walls and pavement “reflected.” The entry on Saunderson in the Biographia Britannica of 1766 stated that he was “supposed not to entertain any great notion of revealed religion,” meaning that he preferred reason and ordinary experiences to scripture and religious experiences, ultimately implying he was an atheist. The Bio Britannica also prissily opined that while Saunderson was a vivacious and witty conversationalist, he “uttered his sentiments of men not only freely but licentiously, with a kind of contempt and disregard for decency and commonsens
e; and which is worse, he indulged himself in women, wine, and profane swearing to shocking excess; by which means he did more hurt to the reputation of mathematics than he did good by his eminent skill in the science.” (Can the reputation of mathematics, or any other science, be damaged by a nonconforming practitioner? This seems to me disregard for common sense. Isaac Newton, who had also occupied the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, was psychologically unstable, vindictive, violent of temper, depressive, and a moneylender. If I had had such complex math teachers, perhaps mathematics would have become comprehensible to me instead of remaining an occult mystery.)

  Diderot never met Saunderson, who died ten years before the Letter on the Blind was written, but in order to explore several metaphysical questions, among them deism and the weakness of the teleological argument of design, he presumed to devise in the Letter a fictional dialogue between the dying Saunderson and his friend Gervaise Holmes. When Holmes speaks of the wonders of nature as evidence enough that God exists, Saunderson responds skeptically from his deathbed, “Ah, sir, don’t talk to me of this magnificent spectacle, which it has never been my lot to enjoy.…If you want to make me believe in God, you must make me touch him.” Anticipating Darwin by a hundred years, Diderot had Saunderson speak compellingly, and transgressively, of a theory of natural selection, the extinction of imperfect creatures, and the survival and evolution of only those creatures most fit. Creation was a random act; God did not exist.