Seeing with the Tongue: Sight through Other Means

Can a conceptual framework developed to theorize one sense modality generalise to transfers between other modalities? Expanding from the formulation of Molyneux’s original question about vision and touch, or eyes and hands, this chapter concerns research in the technology of sensory substitution. Paul Bach-y-Rita has experimented since the 1960s with his TVSS (Tactile-Visual Sensory Substitution) devices which transcode optical information from a camera feed onto the surface of the tongue and the back. Recent examples such as the BrainPort™ by WICAB (a spinoff of Bach-Y-Rita’s lab) leads to insights into the nature of ‘seeing’, extends the Molyneux problem into more recent technological territory, and speaks to the possibilities of cross-modal perception raised throughout the book.

Reading with the Fingers: Tactile Signs and the Possibilities for a Language of Touch

The accidental discovery in 1786 by Valentin Haüy that embossed script could be read by the fingers paved the way for the concrete development of a fully-fledged haptic reading system. The story of tactile writing systems is spurred in part by shame, a means to include the blind in literate culture. Haüy’s ‘An Essay on the Education of Blind Children’ of 1786 summarized his purpose: “to teach the blind reading, by the assistance of books, where the letters are rendered palpable by their elevation above the surface of the paper” (1894:9). Here the evolution of competing writing systems and their role in education and access to literature and mathematics is detailed, as Braille’s system spread to other countries including Britain and the US, and was famously endorsed by Helen Keller whose own remarkable story of reading and communicating through the skin is so compelling.

Voltaire, Buffon, and Blindness in France

After Voltaire introduced an enthusiastic French readership to Molyneux’s question and Cheselden’s case study, there followed intense interest in blindness in La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot in his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749), and Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (1749). To illustrate his ideas Buffon considers a hypothetical neonate who must correlate hands with eyes in order to see, the hand is “constantly measuring” so that distance and perspective can be learnt, implying that the blind still have spatial concepts.

Blindness, Empathy, and ‘Feeling Seeing’: Literary Accounts of Blind Experience

Since Descartes, most discussions of blindness have been in terms of what Kleegecalls ‘the Hypothetical Blind Man’, a blank-blind figure, rendered mute. In contrast, the twentieth century offered a number of personal accounts of blindness and the process of going blind, at once furthering the fascination by the sighted reader of what the blind supposedly ‘see’ whilst also personalizing the testimony. We start with what Jorge Luis Borges terms the ‘pathetic moment’ of his own becoming blind (1973) along with other first-person accounts of going blind, including the so-called ‘Blind Traveller’ James Holman, RN, Helen Keller’s celebrated autobiographies, and Oliver Sacks’ recent account of progressive blindness through ocular cancer.

The Testimony of Blind Men: Diderot’s Lettre

In 1749 Diderot composed his celebrated Letter on the Blind that dealt directly with blindness and what the blind supposedly ‘see’. Diderot sought out the testimony of an actual blind man in the French town of Puiseaux. Referring back to Molyneux’s question, and having considered Cheselden’s post-operative evidence, Diderot’s contribution here is a somewhat wide-ranging and multi-stranded essay that includes the marriage of blind testimony of spatial perception to now-familiar philosophical issues, suggests possible ways of communicating through touching on the skin. Diderot argues for a haptic language, the “clear and precise language for the touch” that would prefigure development of embossed scripts and eventually the systematic characters of Braille a century later.

‘Seeing with the Hands’: Descartes, Blindness, and Vision

The first engagement with blindness in modern philosophy, Descartes’ famous work ‘On Optics’ (1637)is introduced here. In his observation of a hypothetical blind man walking with a stick, Descartes makes the analogy between hands and eyes such that the blind are conceived as “seeing with their hands”. Descartes’ initial analogy therefore neatly solidifies an influential conceptualization of blindness for several centuries, initiating a philosophical relation between blindness, vision and touch.

Objects that ‘touch’d his eyes’: Surgical Experiments in the Recovery of Vision

Although there were unsubstantiated reports of ‘couching’ cataracts in the Middle East and Medieval Europe, William Cheselden’s cataract surgery and report to the Royal Society in 1728 caused a surge of public interest in the dramatic realization, after bandages are removed, of what the formerly blind now ‘see’. The importance of this for Molyneux’s question is clear: now subjects with prolonged experience of blindness could answer the question directly. The chapter is bookended by a famous 1963 case study in the psychology of perception, Richard Gregory’s patient ‘S.B.’ who, in Gregory’s words, “learned how to see” after an operation to restore his vision, but then retreated into his familiar world of darkness thereafter.

‘Suppose a man born blind…’: Cubes and Spheres, Hands and Eyes

In 1688 the Irishman William Molyneux posed his famous question to John Locke: if a man born without sight, and who already knew a solid cube and sphere through direct tactile experience, was now able to see, would he be able to tell which was which by sight alone, without touching them? The reason Ernst Cassirer called it “the central question of eighteenth century epistemology and psychology” in 1951 is the crux of this chapter.

On Questioning Blindness and What the Blind ‘See’

Introducing three types of ‘blindness’. Firstly, its conception as a philosophical problem in the Enlightenment. This hinges on the so-called Molyneux Question posed by Molyneux to John Locke. Therefore, the second form of blindness is hypothetical. In its original form, the Molyneux Question explicitly instantiates the Foucauldian mythical experience of the ‘man born blind restored to light’. Thirdly, ‘actual’ blindness, which examines definitions of blindness as opposed to vision impairment.