The meaning of Blindness

In George Snedeker’s note for Blindness , he views the blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and social catastrophe. With a large number of people going blind, the public health officials are scared and the blind citizens are quarantined in a former mental hospital. According to George Snedeker, it is clearly a sign of limitation. It causes the entire society to no longer function.

Modern society

Saramago’s statement shows that people lost themselves in the modern society. They try

hard adapting to the changing society and fulfill their dreams. People make plans to carry out

their goal. They follow the “order” of the society and form their own principle to lead

meaningful lives. But if the order is destroyed, they may find themselves in a society that no

longer functions and suffer from the chaos.

Blindness and Plato’s allegory of the cave

Near the end of Blindness, one of the characters says that perhaps they had never really

been blind, that perhaps the sighted do not really see. The analogy between “seeing“ and

”understanding” is one of the oldest ideas in Western philosophy. Plato’s Allegory of the

cave may be helpful to illustrate the story.

To know the relationship between seeing and understanding, we can explore from the

Allegory of the cave. It is an allegory in The Republic. The story describes a group of people

are sitting in one long row in a dark underground cave.

Plato

Plato sends out some people to go out of the cave to experience the real world. John Day

says that those people are obtaining their reason and knowledge through this long and

difficult way. In Blindness, people do suffer from a great disaster to see the real world. What

they used to believe in turns out to be a trash. The thing they didn’t cast a glance at is a

treasure. They find the true meaning of lives.

The role of the doctor’s wife

Saramago creates a world of blindness to indicate people’s limited mind. It’s interesting

to have the only visible character, the doctor’s wife, to be the narrator of the story. She helps

the blind people to survive. Her eyes allow her to lead the others to safety. Her eyes enable

her to exercise a degree of control over the situation. She kills the blind people causing the

chaos.

wife as a prophet

In the review of Jose Saramago’s Blindness, Emre Peker views the doctor’s wife as a

prophet. She is a leader with vision and tries to deal with the chaos. In the Allegory of the

Cave, there are some men, the potential philosophers, climbing out of the cave before others.

They walk in a difficult and long way to go out. At first, they are dazzled by the strong light.

But soon, they get accustomed to the light and see the real world. Gaining the real

knowledge, those people go back to the cave.

Epistemology

The study of knowledge is called Epistemology. It tends to solve the problem of

distinguishing between thinking that we know something and actually knowing it. Without

the distinction, we might just be living in the fantasy. In Lowell Kleiman and Stephen

Lewis’s book, they think knowing is quite like a supermarket scanner. It can identify the milk

but does not know it’s a container of milk. A person, unlike a supermarket scanner, can not

only recognize things and know how to do things but can also know that something is the

case.

Allegory of the Cave

Instead of fleeing away from the chaos, the doctor’s wife decides to stay with the

blindness and helps people to reset the order. Seeing the world clearly, she can be viewed as

the philosopher with knowledge. People who can achieve enlightenment deserve to be the

leader and ruler of the rest. Some comments for the philosopher may also apply to her. There

are some statements about the philosophers of the Allegory of the Cave from John Day.

The decision of the doctor’s wife

The following paragraph is from Blindness. It’s the plot that the doctor finds out his

wife is not blind and urges her to leave. However, she refuses his suggestion. The world is

mad and blind. The decision of remaining silent is clever. If she told others the truth, she

might be expelled from the hospital. It would not improve the situation. Staying with the

blind people and leading them to reset the order, she cures the “blindness” little by little.