When I use the word “human” here, I am not referring just to homo sapiens sapiens, but a gestalt created through the shared set of experiences and archetypes which we refer to as the “human experience.” A person born brain-dead, for example, is still a member of our species, but lacks humanity.
A great deal of the human experience is visual. Of all our senses, vision is arguably the most important to us in terms of interaction with our environment; video games, for example, try very hard to simulate human vision, with hearing coming a distant second and the other senses (joystick rumble notwithstanding) entirely absent. For a person who has been blind from birth, their experience of the world is extremely different from that of a sighted person’s. This causes me to wonder whether their experience of the world, their dasein to use Heidegger’s term, is sufficiently alien from that of a sighted person’s to put them outside of what we recognize as human.
This is not to say that their experience is any worse (or better), simply different. If you’re still having difficulty understanding what I’m talking about, consider a very simple Platonic ideal, the circle. Chances are, when you think of a circle in your head, there is a visual representation. What does a blind person perceive when they think of a circle? The fact is, I can’t even imagine what the reality of a circle is for a blind person, and this makes their thought processes alien to me.
Is there anyone out there who has been blind from birth? I’d be interested to know what your perspective is on this.
There’s no rigorous way to nail down an absolute set of experiences that comprise ‘human’. You might as well be asking “Are Homo sapiens sapiens ‘human’ if they have never tasted pineapple”.
It’s a potentially interesting question, to which there is no proper answer.
While we can’t know truth, we can approximate facts, in the Kantian sense. For Kant, a “fact” is something which is accepted as valid by such an overwhelming supermajority of the human population that it can be taken as a given. While it is not true in the metaphysical sense, it is nonetheless factual by definition.
The overwhelming supermajority of the human race has vision, and, more to the point, relies on vision as the dominant sense. The blind are excluded from this set of shared experiences. While the taste of pineapple is a fairly minor part of the human experience, I think we can agree that vision is of paramount importance.
Weird question, Smash the State, but, strangely, I find it to be a very interesting question. While we may not be able to apply the blind man’s plight to that of the man who has not eaten a pineapple we can certainly apply it to those who are born with crippled limbs, no?
I imagine a blind person would have no problems knowing what a circle is. I could just hand him a hula hoop or help him trace a circle in the sand and he’d know what a circle was.
As far as the gestalt of shared experiences the blind love, hate, and are mortal just as the rest of us are. They seem to qualify as human in my book.
I read somewhere, that the deaf are actually more disconnected from society than the blind. The blind can talk, socialize and interact more easily with the rest of society than the deaf. Sorry, I don’t have a cite.
ok, well a quick google search turned up this:
as for your question… are you saying that ray charles is not part of the human experience?
I can testify that yes, they (the blind) are (human). I have direct physical evidence in my home* that they can interbreed with members of the human species.
Human experience, schmuman schmexperience. This question is impossible to take seriously. :rolleyes:
*Well, she’s spending the next couple of weeks at her aunt’s home, so indirect physical evidence, in the form of the dirty clothes that were in the laundry when she left.
Define “seeing” Blind people can’t see the way sighted people can…but on the other hand, their other senses might be able to work to create a “blind person’s” idea of seeing. (Legally blind simply means you can only see the biggest A on the chart) I am hard of hearing…Although I can’t hear the way a hearing person hears, I can still “hear” through vibrations as well as sight (speechreading)
Physical disabilites/differences can be adapted to quite easily…Having a physical disabilty or difference doesn’t make someone less human…I mean in the inside blind people are just like anyone else…
They could respond to his post if they found it actually. Unless you mean “see” in like a literal sense, and not just that they were informed of the OP’s post, heard the words contained within the post and then responded to the post. Because the Blind can use computers and do have software that can translate text to sound, and vice versa for them to use to compose essays, papers, etc. for school. Back when I was in college just a few years ago, we had a girl down the hall who used such programs to do her school work and to turn in papers, reports, and to read handouts and announcements.
I believe she was blind from birth, but given the right tools, she had been able to make it to college and beat plenty of us just fine with the gifts she’d been given.
In my opinion, the blind are certainly human. To simply state that because they’re down one sense is all one needs to lose one’s humanity- well, I don’t think that’s the case. Same with someone who loses the ability to speak, hear, or feel. They’re still human, just not in the same way as another human being. But they’re still capable of emotions, thought, and the ability to try to seek out their way in life- so chalk them up under being able to understand what it means to be human. They may even get to see a side of humanity that many of us do not really get to see because we ourselves are blinded by it because we DO tend to focus on what we have and our lack of a certain sense may cause us simply to be unable to understand what it’s like to live a life in such a way and to try to maintains one’s humanity in such circumstances. That’s more of a triumph of the human spirit to me than to simple measure the fact that someone can “see” in their minds what others can also “see”.
Not quite: it means you can only see the biggest A on the chart with correction. If your vision can be corrected to better than 20/200, you are not legally blind.
Sure. But this doesn’t do anything for us, in terms of being able to apply your Kantian rule. What does let us apply the rule, though, is the following observation: the overwhelming supermajority of the human race accepts as valid the notion that blind people are human. Ergo, in precisely the sense you stated, it is a fact that blind people are human; it can be taken as a given.
There may be interesting discussion to be had about the thoughts and perceptions of the life-long blind. But there’s nothing much interesting to say about whether they can be called “human”; words mean what they are used to mean, and the overwhelmingly common usage of the word “human” is in manners which encompass the blind.