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Human Blindness
John Lachs |
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| Abstract:
Starting from William James's classic essay, I distinguish ten different sorts of human blindness. I ask which, if any, of these can be eradicated, and conclude that it is neither desirable nor possible to make more than gradual improvements in our moral vision. |
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In
writing about a certain blindness,1 William James proves himself less than sharpsighted about the variety of human
intellectual-ocular impediments. He thinks he has identified a single
disability when in fact he is focused on a broad range of problems. I do not
want to be grudging in my praise of James; it is always cause for joy when
philosophers tackle issues of moment for daily life. James is superb at this:
his essays, such as "What Makes a Life Significant" and "The Moral Equivalent
of War," illuminate issues of great personal and social importance. But he is
notoriously reluctant to draw distinctions, even when they are vital for clear
vision or for the outcome of his argument. In the case of the essay on
blindness, failing to see the diversity of phenomena he addresses garbles the
message he wants to convey. Human blindness is far more widespread, far more
variegated and far more insidious than James represents it, yet overcoming it,
even if it were possible, would create as many problems as it would solve.
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The
primary form of blindness in James' line of sight is the failure to see how
others view the world. This actually consists of two disabilities, the first
that of not being able to see the world the way others see it, and the second
that of closing our eyes to the divergent devotions of other people. James
conflates the two through his example of coming across a hideous house and
clearing in the woods that the mountaineer sees as his beautiful home. James
finds the realization that someone can value something so primitive shocking.
But he thinks the woodman's perception of his bit of reality is equally
dismaying. |
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Our
view of the world is deeply influenced by our values, but perceptions differ
not only as a result of embracing different goods. Color-defective people, for
example, cannot even imagine what a world of reds and greens might be like.
Similarly, individuals lacking a sense modality, such as hearing, operate in an
environment not easily understood or replicated by people without that deficit.
And I doubt that any human being can experience in the rich olfactory fashion
common to dogs. One's condition or circumstances also serve as perceptual
determinants: in a child's world, even short parents appear as towering
giants. Social conditioning influences the look of the world no less: South
American Indian parents taught their children to see invading Spaniards as
creatures, each of whom, with his horse, constituted a single animal.
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The
influence of values on our view of reality is profound. Love offers a striking
example: it can make ugly children and a toothless spouse appear as creatures
of magic and light. A similar chemistry renders it difficult to see ourselves
as others see us, or others as they see themselves. If we don't share the
values of people, we remain strangers to their worlds. Yet embracing what
others prize is a rare achievement. For the most part, even a sympathetic
grasp of why they hold their values eludes us. Such incomprehension may lead
to overt conflict; at the very least, it fuels a quiet antagonism to much that
is not ours. |
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There
is also a third form of blindness, that connected with the emotive tone of
experience or the way life feels to other people. We encounter this, for
example, in the excited activity of the lantern-bearers James describes, hiding
their lights under their coats. The problem is that our view of the
excitements of others is always external: we see the things they do but not how
it feels to be doing them. Yet, James correctly avers, much of the joy of life
resides in the rich emotive feel that accompanies our activities. Without it,
we are rocks in the meadow or the burnt out hulls of meteors. |
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When
a new dog joins the pack, it sniffs with delight and its tail wags happily. In
a similar fashion, laughter and smiles spread readily from one person to
another; it is difficult to escape the contagion of the group. But
existentialists, though dour, are right that each person smiles alone, that the
feel of the smile, the smile of the inner face, is open only to one. So it is
with suffering, as well, both in the form of pain and of the anxiety that casts
a shadow over life. We simply don't know what exhilaration and depression feel
like in our neighbors; we view them and deal with them as though we were
behaviorists, attentive to their outward movements but unmindful of their inner
life. Distance from others exaggerates this blindness to their pain,
yet—paradoxically, perhaps—close presence does not enhance our
access to their joys.
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The
inevitable corollary of such ignorance is a fourth sort of blindness, namely
that to who others are. This does not mean that we fail to remember the names
of people or don't know them by their social positions or their jobs. What we
lack is a clear view of what makes them tick, that is, of what we might
appropriately call the constitution of their souls. Ignorant of their
motivations, surprised by their purposes and unlettered in their principles, we
live near them the way birds and squirrels share a tree as home, each in its
own nest, indifferent to all the rest. Thus we see spouses of fifty years
realize that they are married to a cipher. A trusted partner is not
necessarily a person whose soul is known; loyalty in marriage may give the
relation stability, but the routine that reassures also induces sleep, inviting
people to go through life blind in their intimacy. |
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Our
sightlessness is by no means limited to such subjective elements of the world as
persons, their views, their feelings and their values. Sometimes we are
victims of a fifth kind of blindness, that of operating in ignorance of
objective parts of reality and their meanings. Such undiscerning ways differ
from those we have discussed so far in a variety of ways, among them by being
relatively easy to remedy. In subjective matters, there is a wall between
persons that may be scaled only with much trouble; the facts we overlook, however, tend to stare us in the face. The
attitudes of people are reflected in their eyes and in their acts; it is not
difficult to discern changes in their moods. Yet many marriage partners feel
crushing surprise at infidelity, even though they had ample early signals.
Similarly, we may not notice danger on the road, the missing coffee table or
that someone cleaned the house. Such inattention is fed by routine, falsely
suggesting that our corner of the world is adequately explored and can
therefore be disregarded.
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This
problem of what James calls "the jaded eye" naturally leads to a sixth sort of
blindness, one that makes us view the world as old and boring. This is a
tragic loss: it colors our days gray and fills life with ennui. We miss a
great source of happiness when we no longer see the world as ever new. The
joyous symmetry and asymmetry that pervade the real, the energy with which each
being occupies its slot in the scheme of things and, in the end, the delightful
improbability of everything should be enough to amaze us for the few years we
are here. Yet we meet people who can summon no ideas out of what I just said
and see the world as if through dead men's eyes. |
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A
Mozart can love every note and endlessly caress their sequences. A Picasso may
be in love with shape and color, and a Frank Lloyd Wright with how walls
articulate space. But we don't have to be artists to see the marvelous riches
of the world; attention to details is enough. The swirl of lines in wood and
the way water runs downstream can make children of adults. The construction of
insect bodies and the grand complexities of a single molecule are simply
astonishing. The explosive growth of bamboo is as fascinating as the slow
deterioration of wood on the forest floor. There is hardly a thing or a
relationship that fails to offer food for reflection or at least to induce
amazement. All we need is eyes for it, that is, a receptive and energetic
appreciation of what surrounds us. Blindness to the beauty of the world is at
once blindness to what is best in our earthly lives. |
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A
seventh sort of unseeing is easily confused with failure to connect with the
vibrancy of the world. James refers to this blindness only briefly in his
essay, though it is a recurrent theme in his other writings. We detect the
beauty of the world by enhancing our sensations, by living—we might
say—through the senses. But our "sensorial life" yields much more than
beauty, and if we efface it, we lose more than the eye-opening newness of
existence. When we downplay it, we become crippled by concepts, people who
live in their thoughts or fall prey to ideologies. Like D.H. Lawrence and
others, James is a champion of sensory life and an implacable critic of
abstraction. This form of blindness is the failure to notice the concrete, the
specific and, on the reading of empiricists, the real in the world. Since concepts are so much easier to deal with
than recalcitrant facts, people gladly turn away from harsh reality to thin and
pliable ideas. Our sensations may be "powerful and ineffaceable," but they do
not command the attention our favorite notions do. They are constantly
overruled by being interpreted, so that we end up seeing what we think. |
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Blindness
to our sensations suggests an eighth and altogether different sort of
inattention. The desire to be considered a member of "the elite" turns us away
from our simpler functions toward a celebration of sophisticated but derivative
activities. We enjoy going to dinner parties, for example, but overlook the
joys that come of chewing and swallowing. We seek to engage in conversations
but forget to savor the delight of pronouncing words or of the togetherness of
quiet cuddling. Children take pleasure in the simple functions when they first
master them; adult attention turns that way only when we have to relearn them
on account of illness or accident. Yet life would be immeasurably richer if
candidates for president worried less about what they say in interminable
debates and took time to show the electorate that they know the value of
silently breathing. |
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There
is a ninth, special sort of blindness that besets spectators. One might
suppose that the spectatorial stance, devoted to observing everything of
moment, is particularly well suited to overcoming sightlessness. Yet its very
nature sets obstacles in its way, limiting onlookers to the benefits of
perception and denying them knowledge of the feel and of the consequences of
action. Dogs in the act of love have access to experiences sadly unavailable
to their packmates looking on. The same is true of soldiers whose exploits on
the battlefield remain their private possessions and cannot be captured by
those who stay at home. This blindness is not a matter of choice or the habit
of inattention; it is the inevitable outcome of failing to be in a certain
position. Its remedy is not enhanced awareness but shouldering the burden of
agency by going to war or plunging into love. |
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This
leads me to the tenth and last blindness, which is at once the greatest and
most lamentable. We can be so taken with the past and the future that we
become unmindful of the present. The young see the failures of the past, the
old its victories; in either case, what has been casts a long shadow over the
only thing real, which is what exists now.
Expectations can terrorize life or else charm it; when they do, we live for
what is not yet and will perhaps never be. The present always ends up as the
victim, seen only as residue or preparation, appreciated only in its passing.
What we seem not to understand is that the present never passes, that its riches
are inexhaustible and that in spurning it we discard all of life. |
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Objects
tend to be of interest to us for their instrumental value. The more we view
things, people and relationships as means to ulterior ends, the less we are
concerned with their intrinsic properties. We can quickly reach the stage
where we hardly notice what is immediately present, reading it only as the sign
of things past or yet to come. The firstness, as Peirce would say, of whatever
we deal with tends to give way to its secondness and thirdness; the immediacy
before us is quickly mediated. The genius of James, Peirce and Dewey is that
they did not go down the road of Hegelian mediation, maintaining a keen
consciousness of the importance of unmediated presence. Hegel, however, has
been more prescient of the common mind than the Americans. Busy people don't
linger over the appearance of things, savoring each marvelous aspect of the
world. They turn a blind eye to how things look and feel and thereby lose the
most direct contact we can develop with the real. This is the blindness of
people who have no trouble finding their way, but haven't a clue as to where
they have been. |
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I
have distinguished ten different sorts of blindness, undifferentiated by James,
all of which, however, are hinted at in his essay. Some of the blindnesses are
connected with each other in a variety of ways, others remain essentially
independent. They are different from each other because their objects, causes,
organs, processes or remedies differ. But they tend to travel in company so
that, for instance, the person who is blind to immediacies is likely also to be
nescient of how others see the world. Similarly, persons who take no delight
in our simpler functions probably also fail to lead an intense sensory life. |
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Should
we be distressed at seeing so much blindness built into the human frame? If
blindnesses are deficits of a cognitive, valuational or emotive sort, it would
presumably be much better to be without them. James certainly conceives his
essay as a call to action: he laments our inattentions and implies, even
though he does not state, that we must overcome them and try to see the
neglected riches of life. Surprisingly, perhaps, he says nothing about
blindness to ourselves in the form of self-deception and the sort of
subconscious impulses Freud worked so hard to bring to the light of day, but he
clearly considers unseeing a severe human failing. He may not go so far as his
colleague, Royce, and say that the willful narrowing of attention is the very
definition of sin, but he is convinced that we would be better off if we lived
in total conscious possession of our world or at least significantly expanded
the range of our sympathies. |
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Can
we rid ourselves of what James calls the "great cloud-bank of ancestral
blindness"? By the time he writes the next essay in the series, James is ready
to declare that we cannot. He avers that it "is vain to hope for this state of
things to alter much,"2 for practical-minded beings such as
ourselves are "necessarily short of sight." He is clearly right that in considering
the demands of animal and social life in a precarious environment, eliminating
all our blindnesses is impossible. I don't mean, of course, the dry logical
impossibility of contradiction, but impossibility measured by who we are and
what we have to do to secure our existence. Sensitivity to different
perceptions slows up response-time and constant empathetic access to the
sufferings of others makes action odious. Could we kill animals if we had a
vivid perception of their anxiety in the slaughterhouse? Could we compete for
mate or promotion if we felt the disappointment of the loser? Could we prefer
our own values if we saw justification for everybody else's? |
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Admittedly,
ridding ourselves of some of our blindnesses, reducing their scope or
increasing our voluntary control over what to be blind to could make for a
somewhat better life. If we bathed the values of others in the same warm light
as we bathe our own, there would likely be less conflict in the world and more
understanding. If we appreciated the immediate presence of things, our lives
would be richer and significantly more carefree. And if we focused on the
simpler functions of life, we would have a surer source of joy than sophistication
or competition can provide. This much is clear and it seems sensible to
encourage people to open their eyes a little wider so they may improve their
condition. |
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Unfortunately,
however, every benefit has a seamy underside. If we saw the world as forever
new, we could not develop work-reducing and life-saving habits. If we were
party to everyone's grief, we would be tortured and immobilized by the horror.
If we attended to the immediacies of life without reference to instrumentalities,
we would lose all practical sense and find ourselves gaping at the world. And
if we gloried in our simpler functions, we would have little use for the
sophisticated activities unique to humans and productive of satisfactions
unavailable otherwise. |
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So we
should take thought before we recommend the elimination of blindness or, for
that matter, any other general measure as a solution to the problems humans
face. Opening our eyes a little here and there, selectively resisting
sightlessness in certain contexts, can help us move in the right direction,
bringing us closer to loved ones or to the vivacity of the real. We should
work vigorously to make ourselves more perceptive in our intellectual life and
more generous in our responses. But we must not forget our finitude and we
must try to remember that much as blindness is, in the abstract, a lamentable
condition, in concrete life it protects us from being overwhelmed by reality. |
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Department
of Philosophy
Vanderbilt
University
john.lachs@vanderbilt.edu |
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Notes
1William James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human
Beings," in John J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 629-645.
2William James, "What Makes a Life Significant," in
John J. McDermott, The Writings of William James, p. 646.
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