thanks Harish, great forword.
At 05:06 AM 3/10/2014, you wrote:
All
Something to ponder over.
Harish Kotian
From: Richard Seltzer [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 08 March 2014 21:13
To: [email protected]
Subject: Is Helen Keller's Experience a Counter Example to
"Philosophic Insight from the Blind?"
FYI -- I just posted this in my blog http://www.samizdat.com/blog/
_________
Since many people in my audience are blind and I am not, I feel
compelled to send a followup to yesterday's message about "The World
As I Have Found It" by Mary L. Day Arms. I'm hoping for feedback -
either validation or counter examples from personal experience.
I can't help but wonder if Helen Keller's experience is a counter example.
In her autobiography, "The Story of My Life", she says, "It seems to
me that there is in each of us a capacity to comprehend the
impressions and emotions which have been experienced by mankind from
the beginning. Each individual has a subconscious memory of the
green earth and murmuring waters, and blindness and deafness cannot
rob him of this gift from past generations. This inherited capacity
is a sort of sixth sense-a soul-sense which sees, hears, feels, all in one."
That concept is tantalizingly similar to Jung's collective
unconscious. And it is very tempting to take it as gospel that we
all start with the same capacity to understand the world - that the
human brain and the world it perceives are in harmony from birth;
that "green earth" and "murmuring waters" are primordial ideas that
we are born with and that there is a moment of recognition when we
first perceive the associated phenomena.
That concept of Helen Keller's is very different from the theory I
expressed yesterday that the brain is plastic at birth and that it
develops the capacity to process sense data in response to that
data, that the ways we think are contingent on our experiences,
leading to significant differences related to the abilities of our
senses, our cultural environment, our social roles, and even our
sexual roles. If that is the case, then instead of or in addition to
celebrating our inherent similarity as humans, we should celebrate
our differences. (I'm not trying to sound "politically correct". I
hate that kind of jargon. But the logic of my thoughts leads me to
that conclusion.)
My idea of the world of a blind and deaf person derives from the
movie "The Miracle Worker", with its striking scene in which Helen
learns the meaning of the word "water". Yesterday's thoughts
prompted me to read Helen Keller's book, where I found out that that
brilliant scene, that inspired teaching moment was made possible
because Helen remembered the word "water" and how it sounded and how
water itself felt, from the first 19 months of her life, when she
could see and hear. In that moment, she grasped the concept that
words could signify things and gradually she learned that words
could also signify emotions and abstract thoughts. She connected the
rudiments of an internal map of the world with language, as she had
done once before when she could see and hear. The moment of insight
and learning, when a whole world of possibilities flooded her mind
was like Proust's famous moment of memory which was triggered by
taste. She remembered and the strucutres of understanding that had
already developed when she had sight and hearing suddenly connected
with the sensations she was now able to perceive.
By the time Helen Keller was 19 months old, many of the structures
for processing the data of perception had already formed. She had
developed the mind of someone who could see and hear before she lost
her sight and hearing. Then she struggled mightily and brilliantly,
with the help of a brilliant guide and teacher, to come to
understand the world the way those who see and hear do.
Touch became her sight and vibration her hearing, filling those
niches in her already developed brain.
She strove hard to think and act like every one else, and she had a
basic map of the world to go by, from those first 19 months of sight
and sound. And she had been a precocious toddler - talking and
walking early. After she was stricken, she was like a sighted person
walking around a familiar room in the dark. She had learned the
connectedness and predictability and cause-and-effect of objects and
could link that to the data of her sense of touch, to extend and
enrich her mental image of the world.
Only once in her autobiography does she hint at a special intuition,
like that mentioned by L. V. Hall in his essay "How Do the Blind
See" which appears in "The World As I Have Found It" by Mary L. Day Arms.
___________
I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word,
"love." This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early
violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to
kiss me: but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me
except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and
spelled into my hand, "I love Helen."
"What is love?" I asked.
She drew me closer to her and said, "It is here," pointing to my
heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words
puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything
unless I touched it.
I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in
signs, a question which meant, "Is love the sweetness of flowers?"
"No," said my teacher.
Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us.
"Is this not love?" I asked, pointing in the direction from which
the heat came. "Is this not love?"
It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the
sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. But Miss Sullivan shook her
head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it
strange that my teacher could not show me love.
A day or two afterward I was stringing beads of different sizes in
symmetrical groups-two large beads, three small ones, and so on. I
had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again
and again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious
error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention
on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the
beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided
emphasis, "Think."
In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was
going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an
abstract idea.
For a long time I was still-I was not thinking of the beads in my
lap, but trying to find a meaning for "love" in the light of this
new idea. The sun had been under a cloud all day, and there had been
brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour.
Again I asked my teacher, "Is this not love?"
"Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the
sun came out," she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which
at that time I could not have understood, she explained: "You cannot
touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad
the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day.
You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it
pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play."
The beautiful truth burst upon my mind-I felt that there were
invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.
______________
Sensing those "invisible lines" reminds me of Hall's ability to
sense the presence and mood of other people, without seeing or hearing them.
But that is the only glimmer of unique perception or unique
processing of perception that appears in Helen Keller's autobiography.
Her words are a delight to read. It's amazing that she could write
like this, given her handicaps. If you read passages out of context
and didn't know who the author was, you would admire the writing and
simply presume that she had no handcap.
But, as the editor notes in his introduction to a collection of her
letters, which follows the autobiography: "The best passages are
those in which she talks about herself, and gives her world in terms
of her experience of it. Her views on the precession of the
equinoxes are not important, but most important are her accounts of
what speech meant to her, of how she felt the statues, the dogs, the
chickens at the poultry show, and how she stood in the aisle of St.
Bartholomew's and felt the organ rumble. Those are passages of which
one would ask for more. The reason they are comparatively few is
that all her life she has been trying to be "like other people," and
so she too often describes things not as they appear to her, but as
they appear to one with eyes and ears."
I so wish that we had an account of how things appeared to her.
This is like the account of a slave writing about life after
slavery, after she had adapted to ordinary life and found a niche
and role in society and had proudly come to see the ordinary world
as others did.
That accomplishment is wonderful. But I wish I could have heard a
first-hand account from the prison of darkness and silence, to have
gotten some hint of what the world was like to her before she was
freed by education. Because that could teach us about what the world
can be like when shorn of the categories of perception that we take
for granted and shorn of the habits and cultural biases which
normally filter the data before we process it.
I can't help but wonder in what unexpected ways the mind could
develop, what the mind can be, and what the "world" can be.
Rather than a good imitation of a sighted person, I'd like to hear
from a blind person with the confidence and insight to grasp the
implications of his or her unique perspective and with the talent to
express that in ways that sighted people can understand.
I a hoping to find the story of a bllind person who is proud to be
blind, proud of what he or she uniquely knows about what it means to
be human, about what life an mean.
Do any of you know of such books?
Richard Seltzer, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
________
A collection of Helen Keller's works is avaiaale at Quench Editions
http://www.samizdat.com/quencheditions/chalkblind.html
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