The Testimony of Blind Men

In 1749 Diderot composed his celebrated Letter on the Blind that dealt directly with blindness and what the blind supposedly ‘see’. Diderot sought out the testimony of an actual blind man in the French town of Puiseaux. Referring back to Molyneux’s question, and having considered Cheselden’s post-operative evidence, Diderot’s contribution here is a somewhat wide-ranging and multi-stranded essay that includes the marriage of blind testimony of spatial perception to now-familiar philosophical issues, suggests possible ways of communicating through touching on the skin. Diderot argues for a haptic language, the “clear and precise language for the touch” that would prefigure development of embossed scripts and eventually the systematic characters of Braille a century later.

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