The Passing Show
Ian Hacking
- On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan
Oxford, 188 pp, £16.99, September 1995, ISBN 0 19 823543 7
Bryan Magee is a brilliant philosophical entrepreneur, host of two BBC television series in which he interviewed live philosophers and dead ones (the latter mediated by other live ones). The late Martin Milligan was a talented philosopher, one who was blind, not from birth but early in life. Magee, with characteristic panache, had a splendid idea: let’s get at some philosophical issues about perception by pursuing a dialogue. The resulting exchange of letters between the two men is printed here, with an Introduction and Afterword by Magee.
[*] I’m here using the Penguin translation by R.J. Hollingdale (1968), omitting some of the phrases in the parentheses.
Letters
Vol. 19 No. 3 · 6 February 1997
From J.D. Manson
It seems obvious to me, as I am sure it is to most people who think about it, that we members of Homo sapiens perceive the world through a keyhole, and having read Ian Hacking’s review of On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan (LRB, 2 January), I am surprised that Magee should have thought that such an exchange with another member of the same species, albeit another philosopher (whose blindness seems to me to be totally irrelevant in the context of such an enquiry), would shed light on the limitations of our sensory systems. He would have been more profitably employed corresponding with a zoologist about the sensory systems of other creatures, such as ants, bees, birds or dogs. The evidence seems to suggest that they know the world as we do through touch, sight, smell, hearing, but that the range of their senses is different, frequently wider, as in the dog’s smell and hearing faculties, and it may be that the extraordinary navigational systems of many species hint at senses we don’t possess, at least to any significant degree.
J.D. Manson
London W1
From Alan Gabbey
Commenting on the famous Molyneux Problem, Ian Hacking claims that ‘the old philosophers’ denied that the newly-sighted man could tell a cube from a sphere before touching them. However, Leibniz was one old philosopher who thought otherwise. In his Nouveaux essais sur l’ entendement humain, a critical response to Locke’s Essay, Leibniz argued that if the newly-sighted man were told that he was being shown a cube and a sphere, then ‘it seems to me indubitable that [he] can distinguish them through the principles of reason conjoined with the sensitive knowledge previously given to him through the sense of touch.’ For Leibniz, the tactile geometry of the congenially blind must be conceptually congruent with the visual geometry of paralytics or others deprived of the normal range of tactile experience. So because there are no points on a spherical surface that are visually distinct from others on the same surface, whereas a cube has eight such points, Leibniz believed the newly-sighted man would discern this difference through sight alone, given his previously acquired tactile knowledge of the difference between spheres and cubes.
Alan Gabbey
Barnard College, New York
Vol. 19 No. 4 · 20 February 1997
From Jeannette Taylor
I was married to Martin Orr Milligan from 1955 to 1972, and would like to rebut the remark made by Ian Hacking in his review of On Blindness (LRB, 2 January) that Martin Milligan was a ‘womaniser’. Nothing could be further from the truth. He certainly enjoyed verbal flirtations with women but that was as far as it went, or needed to go, on both sides. Being totally blind, he made the best use of his main form of communication: speech. Nor did Milligan ever live in the slums. He had to attend school there and took the trouble to learn of the conditions in which his schoolmates lived. This made him realise why many poor people were unable to take advantage of the excellent teaching which was available in the Thirties even in the poorest parts of Glasgow.
Jeannette Taylor
Leeds
From Jim Milligan
Until he was seven years old, Martin Milligan lived on a newly-built Glasgow council estate and, thereafter, in Strathaven – a small, historic and delightful country town. It should also be said that he was the very opposite of a womaniser – a continuously caring man. In all his relationships, personal and political, he sought to square his personal conduct with his ideals and his philosophy. He gave a generalised expression of this in his essay on ‘Marxism and Morality’ (Marxism Today, January 1965).
Jim Milligan
Helensburgh
