The Epistemological Significance of Blindness in Plato’s Republic

Bridging Ancient Philosophy and Disability Studies

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to address the philosophical significance of Plato’s use of the metaphor of blindness, particularly regarding knowledge and cognition. To begin with, I shall summarise key arguments concerning blindness in Disability Studies. It will emerge that blindness is significantly employed to express ignorance or lack of knowledge due to the current ocularcentric prejudice, i.e. the view that sight is the most important sense. After a brief contextualisation of traditional ocularcentrism embedded in ancient Greek culture, I shall turn to analysing some occurrences of the metaphor of blindness from Book VI and VII of Plato’s Republic. The study reveals how Plato’s use of the metaphor of blindness in Book VI serves to make subtle epistemological points, such as differentiating knowledge from a cognitive state that only happens to be true. In Book VII, focusing on the famous simile of the Cave, the paper shows that Plato deliberately establishes a complex symmetry between metaphorical and literal blindness: to overcome one’s lack of knowledge (metaphorical blindness), one needs to be, temporarily and partly, blind to perceptible things (literal blindness). The striking outcome of this view is that, due to Plato’s ocularcentric framework, blindness provides him with the argumentative tool that opens the field of enquiry into the nature of knowledge and its objects.