Seeking Enlightenment: Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749)

Almost two centuries earlier, the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot visited Puiseaux, just south of Paris, to meet a person “of good solid sense” who had been born blind. Arriving at five in the afternoon, he finds the man amid his morning routine. “He had only been up for an hour, for I must tell you the day begins for him when it is ending for us.” Despite the man’s lack of sight and preference for midnight oil, Diderot discovers that the situation is far from “impossible”: they have a conversation about the world of sight and his host exhibits a sophisticated understanding of optics, describing a mirror, for example, as an object that “sets things in relief at a distance from themselves”. Diderot is delighted. “Had Descartes been born blind”, effuses the philosopher, “he might, I think, have hugged himself for such a definition.”

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