In Mr. Burke, Meet Helen Keller, Ann George discusses the criticisms that Helen Keller faced when she wrote about experiences people viewed as outside her realm of understanding. They assumed that Keller could not have true knowledge of things such as poverty and war, and expressed complaints when she wrote of visual or aural experiences. These criticisms brought a question to my attention: is first-hand experience vital to our understanding of the world?
Keller's response to her criticisms is a firm push against the notion. "Of course, I am not always on the spot when things happen, nor are you... But that [does] not prevent me, anymore than it prevented you, from knowing about it" (346). Much of our understanding in the world is colored by our personal experiences; that is certainly not debatable. However, these personal experiences will never fully encompass the world as it is. We all rely on communication with others to fill in the missing pieces.
I feel that this argument for the necessity of first-hand experience does not take history into consideration. We read the accounts of the people who came before us, we study ruins and fossils to get a glimpse of what the world was like before we were here. And yet the knowledge we gain from these studies is not viewed as baseless or lacking. We may not have the exact same knowledge as the people who lived and experienced the past, but we can certainly come to reach a nuanced understanding. So why is it so difficult to believe that disabled people can form political beliefs and a sophisticated understanding of the world?
Burke argues that people do not realize "how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by 'reality' has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol system" (345). Language is the lens through which we see the world and make sense of our experiences. This is no different for disabled people. Keller states that a blind or deaf child "must be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, color, and song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language" (345). First-hand experience is not inconsequential, but ultimately, what one truly uses to form understanding is language.
Natalia,
ReplyDeleteI liked the argument that you brought up because it made me think back to our recent discussions in class on "representation." One of the concepts we talked about was "aura" and the context of historical and physical space when examining something. "Aura" was described by Favro and Benjamin as a "unique perspective of distance..." There was an example of one laying in a field on a hot summer day and if you see the range of the mountains in the distance, or the shade of a branch over you, you feel/see the aura of the mountains and the branch. Helen Keller, is almost like a walking example of aura, and with her point against her critics, so are all of us. Like you said, we rely on others for understanding.
Great post!