On Human Blindness

On Human Blindness

By Levi Duren

“How would you describe color to a blind man?” they ask, glowing with a self-satisfied smirk as they revel in their own cleverness. There is, of course, no obvious answer to this question, perhaps no answer at all. A true thought experiment! But the problem is not the trite, dinner party philosophy; rather, the problem is that most people believe that they are the ones who see the color.

Philosophy, for all its glorious history and progress, condemns humanity to a prison of subjective experience. Descartes’ cogito reveals the impenetrable barrier that lies between me and everything else. In a cold universe that I like to imagine is full of other things, I must face the even colder reality that I have no way of knowing for sure. 

When I teach Descartes to my students, there are always several who challenge the usefulness of such thought experiments: if I’m not going to live like I know nothing for certain, why bother acknowledging it in the first place? Isn’t it more worthwhile to spend my time trying to gather what limited and inductive knowledge may be available to me? To a certain extent, this is a valid pragmatic response to an otherwise insurmountable obstacle, but it also misses the point. Not Descartes’ point, but Socrates’.

The Father of Western Philosophy himself claimed that his wisdom was in his humility. He was better off than the other academics in Athens, he argued, because he was acutely aware of his own ignorance. This is what caused him to question himself and others to the extent that he was murdered by an angry mob of the people whose ignorance his questions revealed. But Socrates saw the barrier between him and the knowledge he craved. This is what overcame his blindness.

The blindness of humanity is frankly obvious to any who have devoted any serious time to studying any of the humanities, and I suspect the sciences (though I admit I am not well-studied enough to say). Much of my time reading and learning I’ve spent in a jealous rage against those who seem to have looked at the universe, heard its cryptic messages, and somehow understood these coded mysteries. When I read from other thinkers, however, I find that what seemed so obvious a truth to one mind seems absurd in the next. Precious few ideologies endure the centuries unscathed by the next generation of philosophers. This inability to discover whatever is true is, at its best, exhilarating and at its worst, maddening. 

Yet this problem is compounded by something much more damning: when we are unaware of our own ignorance. It is a cliche to say that “You don’t know what you don’t know”, but most people spend most of their time convinced that they somehow do know what they don’t actually know. In fact, it would seem the majority of ideological conflict is due the fact that one or more parties take the stance that they are the authority on the given topic and refuse to consider that they may be woefully and even hilariously wrong.

I do recognize the unfortunate irony in that, by criticizing the “double-blindness” of others, I am likely falling to the same pitfall. I wish I had some clever argument with which to show how my claim is tenable and epistemically humble while those whom I condemn remain guilty of their accused crimes. But I don’t. And that again is the point. The horrible, beautiful point. I don’t know what the hell is going on - with any of it - and I’m sick and tired of those who spend so much of their time naively convincing themselves and others that they do.

I am blind, you are blind, they are blind. We must stop adding insult to injury by pretending otherwise.