Willing Blindness

Being less able to see some things can make you more able to see other things.

During a solar eclipse, because the sun has been blotted out, removed from sight, you can see the stars in the daytime. I have read descriptions of methods used in telescopic observations of heavenly bodies to deliberately mimic the effect of solar eclipse; to obscure very bright bodies in order to see small dark objects that are close to them. Photographers are familiar with the limits, either imposed by conditions or used deliberately by choice, of the brightness range that can be contained in one exposure. Where the range of brightness exceeds the capabilities of your film or sensor exposure for either the darkest or the lightest will be at the expense of the other.

But what of a cognitive corollary to this mechanical sort of deliberate blindness?

The ocular figures that shape so many of our epistemological notions predispose us against blindness, taking blindness as opposed to understanding. I will argue for an opposite conclusion: sometimes it is precisely blindness that opens up modes of understanding, not only because it tells us something about blindness itself but also because it is itself an enabling condition, as well as a part of, the experience one wants to connect with.

That’s from the book, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, by Tzachi Zarnir (2007). More specifically, the quote, above, is from the last part of footnote 14 on page 123 of the chapter on Romeo and Juliet.

I think that it is generally believed that artists works from a particularly good, clear, deep vision. Isn’t that the opposite of blindness? I would have said so before reading Zarnir’s essay but now I think he makes a good point. It may well be that selective, deliberate, willful blindness can reveal or make visible many things not otherwise apparent in the same way that the solar eclipse reveals the stars in the daytime. And that can be what art is about.

Here is more from the essay. Try substituting ‘art’ wherever he writes ’literature.’

… Not seeing that skepticism should have arisen in Romeo intimates to us a pattern of response that duplicates his own blindness regarding the stability of his emotions. For him, such blindness is achieved through divorce from reality and stems from Juliet’s beauty. The blindness of enthusiastic reading is an effect of the strong formulation of love that the play articulates. In the fictional domain, a dreamlike experience involves perceiving the beauty of a person. On the level of response, forgetfulness results from moments in which one is overtaken by the beauty of fictions.

… Philosophical discourse may be able to explain how love operates or what it is. However, it fails to enact the epistemic conditions that enable perceiving love. Such perception is required in a theoretical activity on love since what some of us need from such intellectualization is not only explanation but also reformulation. Romeo and Juliet’s reformulation of falling in love boiled down to experiences of blindness that paradoxically open up an aspect of the world, rather than block it from view. Once again, what distinguishes literary discourse from the standpoint of philosophy is not primarily that it is particular, evocative, figurative, or simply denser in such elements than other discourse. Rather, literature reshapes our listening capacities in certain ways. Through a rhetorical strategy that is enacted by this play both internally and in its audience, a certain selectivity of inputs makes perception possible. This reconfigured receptivity also explains why philosophers should contemplate the previous claims into the love-as-blindness theme or the epistemic advantages of silencing skepticism as part of a reading of a play, rather than lifting such insights out of the context of the work and assessing them as part of a theory of beauty.

…. [I] sought to show that there exists an experience of personal and aesthetic beauty that involves blindness. Erotic blindness is not merely an epistemic limitation but also a form of opening to aspects of the world. [ ... ] Examining Romeo and Juliet and how some of us react to it imparts not only a conception of romantic love but also indicates how we recognize beauty. It tells us something about our perception and about how we can be made to listen. We need not oppose a critical, suspicious, philosophical reading experience to a trusting, yielding, literary one. If we must talk of trust, we may say that in rare moments when captured by some literary line, we also suspend reality, doubt, and reflection. All of these return almost at once. But for a few moments, we are blinded to doubt, which is what beauty of person and beauty of fictions involve.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/