Letter on the Blind
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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An Essay on Visual Perception
In Letter on the Blind (French: Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient), Denis Diderot takes on the question of visual perception, a subject that, at the time, experienced a resurgence of interest due to the success of medical procedures that allowed surgeons to operate on certain cases of blindness from birth. Speculations were then numerous upon what the nature and use of vision was, and how much perception, habit, and experience allow individuals to identify forms in space, to perceive distances and to measure volumes, or to distinguish a realistic work of art from reality.
According to Diderot’s essay, a blind person who is suddenly able to see for the first time does not immediately understand what he sees, and he must spend some amount of time establishing rapports between his experience of forms and distances (understandings that he first acquired by touch) and the images that were thereafter apparent to him by sight.
