FYS: The Self, the Other, and the Self as Other . . .

Paper topic for next Thursday, Sept. 30 As always, you should bring a hard copy of the paper to class and submit a copy as an email attachment which should be a word document. (jshie@umich.edu) Please include a visual along with your paper. This may be a photograph, an illustration, or a diagram.

Please choose one topic. Your paper should be 2-3 pages typed, 12 font Times or Times Roman and you should identify quotes correctly, using any major style manual. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Topic 1: Using the excerpted sections of Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses (e.g., Smell and Touch) as a model, write a short vignette on one aspect of “Sight” that gets at some of the issues raised by Hull in his autobiography: Touching the Stone. Please try to write in as entertaining and as informative a way as Ackerman does and make sure that your title is catchy. I ask that you list the titles of all other “sight” vignettes you would write, if you were to include several vignettes in your chapter on sight, assuming that Ackerman may ask you to write that section of the next edition of her book. If you choose this topic, you may (should?) do a little research on sight, including possibly the web site of John M. Hull. www.johnmhull.biz

Topic 2: We have talked about and/or read about perception, seeing, and the senses of touch and smell. Write an essay that addresses the following statement by Hull (italics mine). (Below the quote, is a larger excerpt from that essay to give you more context and help you determine whether you are interested in pursuing this topic.).

“... [B]lindness is something which creates its own world. Of course, this is also true of sight. Sight also creates a world, but sighted people do not know this. After all, sighted people do not generally know that they are sighted; they just think that the world is like that.”
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Longer excerpt (same source):

“Blindness is a cognitive condition in the sense . . . that blindness does affect the brain. The brain is not like a computer which can be switched off, and quickly resumes its activities the moment it is switched on. The brain is never switched off. Even in sleep, the brain continues to carry out various functions e.g. dreaming. The brain is affected by its sources of knowledge. When I say that the brain becomes tactile I mean that the brain begins to operate, in the case of a blind person, a bit like the hand. The brain becomes a hand. This is expressed in the popular saying that blind people see with their fingers. I prefer to put it a little bit more cognitively and to say that the brain begins to act like a hand.

The hand does things one by one. The hand places things in positions, puts things next to each other, ignores subjective factors such as perspective and distance, since for the hand nothing is ever distant. Thus it is that the blind thinker becomes extremely economical with thought. Thoughts are arranged, filed, just as the objects in the drawer in a blind person’s office are carefully stored, each in its place, so the tactile brain becomes more concrete, more intimate, more orderly, and more sequential. It was going blind which taught me, a university academic, to think in concrete terms. It was blindness which taught my brain the importance of pictures.

However, we are not disembodied brains. The body provides an environment for the brain, and just as the brain is affected by the source of its knowledge, so the brain is affected by the whole of its physical surroundings. As I realized this, I began to understand that blindness is something which happens to your entire body.

In the first place, just as other people’s faces and images disappear, so to the blind person his or her own body disappears. Not only do you not know or care what other people look like, the whole idea that things have a look becomes strange to you, and most important for your identity, the idea that you yourself look like something becomes a strange and meaningless thought.

In a way, blindness is a regressive or atavistic condition. The blind person becomes primitive. What I mean by this is that in primitive or simple life forms, the organ of sight is not specific, like eyes at the end of your tentacles or in your forehead as the case may be but perception is generalized over the entire organism. The primitive organism sees with its skin. Thus, it is only half true to say that the blind person sees with the fingers. The truth is that the blind person sees with the skin. Perception is no longer specialized or located in a specific part of the body, but the whole body becomes an organ or perception. When I realized this, I no longer thought of myself as being blind, but as a whole body seer. Of course, whole body seeing is a kind of short range perception. Only through the wonder of sound and smell can the blind body perceive at a distance. The most detailed perceptions are available only at close contact. The world becomes a gigantic feeling. This means that the body, now an organ of knowledge, begins to behave in a different way. This is the true nature of those characteristics of behaviour which the sighted world calls blindisms. They are merely an indication that blindness affects the entire body.

Even as we say this we are moving towards a new conception of blindness. At first we thought blindness was something which affects the eyes, then the brain, and then the whole body. We begin to see that blindness is something which creates its own world. Of course, this is also true of sight. Sight also creates a world, but sighted people do not know this. After all, sighted people do not generally know that they are sighted; they just think that the world is like that. But the world is not like that. Only its world is like that, and there are many worlds. The existence of the blind person’s world relativizes the sighted persons world. But to realize this, the sighted person has to begin to think of blindness as a genuine, independent world with its own characteristics, its own wonders and terrors. Blindness affects the whole body when the subliminal bodily gifts, normally obscured by sight, begin to come to the surface of consciousness. When this happens, the blind experience begins to generate a world.”