The Miracle Worker
When pondering on life as not only a blind child but also a deaf child, one might say perception of the world and life is impossible. In the movie The Miracle Worker, Helen Keller was blind, deaf and mute since she had been a baby. Helen was incapable of communicating to anyone. The question, “do you think she had an accurate idea of color,” to me, is defined through her inability to know the difference between colors and physical appearance on objects certain colors, for instance the sun being yellow. Because Helen was blind and deaf, she could not actually see the color pink or yellow I can see. Helen had never actually seen color; therefore an accurate idea of a color is nearly impossible.
Being blind or deaf would be very difficult, as the person who is blind has no way of visualizing the current world they live in, and being deaf, one cannot hear about the world. In the book What is it like to be a bat by Thomas Nagel, Nagel states an idea that without experience we cannot comprehend nor be conscious of what the world is truly like. Nagel believes that, “without some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of a physicalist theory” (Nagel, 1974, 437). Nagel is saying that without having any experience, one cannot fully know physical or mental truth. As Nagel explains the lifestyles of bats, it helps justify the outlook humans have on life in comparison. As a human, we cannot comprehend the reality of a bat, we cannot see what they see or hear what they hear unless we actually do see it instead of just assuming. It ‘s like a deaf and blind child to a child who is neither, reality is different, and they only know as much as they have learned throug...
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...hen she is let out of the black and white room or given a color television, she will learn what it is like to see something red,”(Jackson, 2012, pg. 281-282), which describes a woman who lives in a black-and-white room. In comparison, this helps me believe that Helen has not experienced colors being blind; therefore Helen cannot possess the ideas of any color in her mind because she has yet to experience it.
I think that Helen cannot see the accurate colors we can perceive. It is because of my own perception that I can actually see colors in the world. If I were blind I could never visualize the color pink that someone who can actually see, would. Helen for instance, had been blind since she was born, meaning Helen had never seen an accurate color in reality, nor could she fully imagine what a color looks like. Helen’s inexperience with colors justifies my belief.
In Wendy Mass’ novel, A Mango Shaped Space, the main character Mia Winchell is very secretive. Mia Winchell appears to be a typical kid, but she's keeping a big secret, her ability, called synesthesia. Sounds, numbers, and words all have color for her. No one knows, and Mia wants to keep it that way. While Mia was in the principal's office she thought, “I wanted to tell the principal that his name was the color of freshly piled hay. I quickly thought better of it. Even at eighty years old, I was smart enough to realize that something was very wrong and until I figured out what it was, I’d better not get myself in deeper trouble. So I pretended I made everything up,” (4).
Humans in general, take many things for granted: life, money, security, but what about color? Usually nobody ever stops to think, “what if there was no color?” Color is seen by almost everyone so no one necessarily has to wonder what it would be like if color wasn’t there. However, philosophy professor James Landesman has provided a theory in which people learn color may really not exist. Although this seems like a shocking and even ludicrous proposal, his essay Why Nothing Has Color: Color Skepticism brings up many points that can lead anyone to doubt the existence of something so trivial.
The book Blind, written by Rachel DeWoskin, is about a highschool sophomore named Emma, who went blind after being struck in the face with a firework. When she first lost her sight, Emma was placed in a hospital for over 2 months, and once she was released, she could finally go home again. DeWoskin uses the characterization of Emma throughout the beginning of the text to help the reader understand the character’s struggle more. Especially in the first few chapters, it was difficult for Emma to adapt to a world without sight. For instance, DeWoskin writes, “And sat down, numb, on our gold couch. And tried to open my eyes, rocked, counted my legs and arms and fingers. I didn’t cry. Or talk” (DeWoskin 44). As a result of losing a very important scent, she’s started to act differently from a person with sight.
How do you define healing? In the dictionary it says that to be healed you are cured, resolved, free from worry. But is that what everyone else thinks of healed as. In the novel Ordinary People, written by Judith Guest, Conrad Jarret goes from being a young boy to an adult within a year. He did not know what he was like himself, in the beginning of the story, then there were things that made him grow, and lastly did he heal?
The book Revealing the Invisible was written by Sherry Marx, a formal teacher, who went in-depth to explore the racist beliefs of white female teacher education students. The book began with Marx talking about pre service teachers that focused on English-language learning school children (ELLs). During this course she discovered just how low the expectations her students had for ELLs students. Throughout her interviews she will explore more beliefs of white females and their thoughts about race, racism, whiteness, and the children they tutored.
In the short story Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, there is a direct contrast between a blind man named Robert, and the narrator. The narrator has full use of his senses, and yet he is limited to the way he sees things, and the way he thinks. Robert however, has a very different outlook on life and how he sees things, as well as the use of his senses. At the end of the story, Robert has the narrator close his eyes to try and get him to experience the world the way he does. The narrator ends up being able to not only see the way Robert does, but he also is able to feel the world in a completely different way. The author suggests that the mind is most important in how people view things, and the judgements we make are based on what we see in our heads, instead of what is really there.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, it became one of his greatest legacies. In the first line he wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" (U.S. Constitution, paragraph 2). Jefferson wrote these words to give inspiration to future generations in the hopes that they would be able to change what he either would or could not. The word “men” in the Declaration in the early 1700 and 1800’s meant exactly that, but even then it only was true for some men, not all. Women, children, and other segments of the population such as slaves and Native Americans were clearly not included. Jefferson himself was a slave owner and held the belief that women were inferior to men. Though women played no role in the political environment, they were crucial to the development and economic success of the times. The strength, courage and work ethic of pioneer women like Martha Ballard in “A Midwife’s Tale” (Thatcher, 1990) created the very fabric of the community and wove it together so the community could thrive.
Some might refer to "seeing" as simply to watch with a naked eye, while some would refer to it as being able to witness an event and recall upon it later. In fact, some would even go as far as that if someone hasn't witnessed something visually, he basically hasn't "seen" it. However, in his essay "The Mind's eye," Oliver Sacks seemingly breaks the norm. In his essay, the blind's adaptation to their disadvantaged is talked about. Yet, it seems like those who were victims of the neurological disorder seem better off blind. Furthermore, another question hanging in the balance is whether the blind people are actually "adapting" to their new lives or rather "reforming" how they will live? Through various stories of blind people, he is able to
Jackson contends that if physicalism were true, Mary would know what a color looks like before she would ever see that color. This, however, is false since Mary could not possibly know what the color looks like before exposure to it. It is impossible for any person to imagine what a color looks like before they see any color at all. Jackson writes, "imagination is a faculty that those who lack knowledge need to fall back on."
In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the character Claudia struggles with a beauty standard that harms her sense of self-esteem. Claudia tries to make sense of why the beauty standard does not include black girls. The beauty standard determines that blonde-haired blue-eyed white girls are the image of beauty and therefore they are worthy of not only attention, but are considered valuable to American culture of the 1940s. Thus, learning she has no value or beauty as a black girl, Claudia destroys her white doll in an attempt to understand why white girls are beautiful and subsequently worthy, socially superior members of society. In destroying the doll, Claudia attempts to destroy the beauty standard that works to make her feel socially inferior and ugly because of her skin color. Consequently, Claudia's destruction of the doll works to show how the beauty standard was created to keep black females from feeling valuable by producing a sense of self-hate in black females. The racial loathing created within black women keeps them as passive objects and, ultimately, leads black women, specifically Pecola, to destroy themselves because they cannot attain the blue eyes of the white beauty standard.
Many people view blindness as a disability, but could these people be blind to their surroundings? Even though the narrator can perfectly see with his eyes, he lacks in understanding awareness. The narrator blindness isn 't physical, like many vision impaired people. His blindness is psychological, and his blindness causes him to become jealous. His blindness blocks his perception of viewing the world in a different way. This only causes him to see the physical attributes of humans, and thus shut off his mindfulness of viewing human personalities. As a result of a closed mind, the narrator doesn 't understand how Robert was able to live with the fact that he was never able to see his wife in the flesh, but the narrator fails to see that Robert vision of his wife was intimate. On the other hand, Robert blindness is physical. This causes Robert to experience the world in a unique manner. Without Robert eyesight, he is able to have a glimpse of a human personality. He uses his disability to paint pictures in his head to experience the world. By putting his psychological blindness aside, the narrator is able to bond with Robert, and he grasps the understanding of opening his eyes for the first time, and this forms a new beginning of a
Colors of cretin things can appear different at some situations. For example, blood as we know it is red, that color that you see through your eyes of the blood in our veins is “red” but underwater, at 30 feet underneath the surface your blood turns, or rather appears green due to the light bouncing off of it is much less than it is at the surface as mentioned in the article “Did you know that your blood is green underwater?” by Fun Facts (see Article 2). These examples got me interested from the class discussions we had and how the philosophers viewed sense perception and the kind of thought they had of
I once spent a full three minutes looking for a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions. Finally I asked, ‘What color am I looking for?’ and a fellow said, ‘Green.’ When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: The thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark” (p. 695). This example illustrates how we can perceive colors differently from one another. Annie had visualized her idea of what the green bullfrog should look like, possibly from a picture she had seen in the past. The person that told her the frog was green may have meant that it was an olive green. For instance, what some might call burgundy, others would call dark red or even crimson. Furthermore, people who are colorblind have an entirely different perception of colors; depending on the degree of colorblindness, they may not be able to recognize the colors red, green, or
G. Wells, for its part, paints blindness as a symbol for ignorance in The Country of the Blind. The story starts off with a hiker falling into an enclosed valley. He finds out that not only is the valley inhabited, but its inhabitants are also all blind. Right from the start, the hiker, Nuñez, is certain that he’s superior to all the blind villagers. He repeats in his head that “In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.” (WELLS 4) Unfortunately, he quickly realizes that the inhabitants of the Country of the Blind can’t seem to imagine what “sight” is and they start to believe he has a mental illness. Just before they make him go under surgery to get his eyes removed and cure his “illness”, he finally escapes the Country of the Blind, despite having fallen in love with one of the villagers. Many have analyzed The Country of the Blind as a satire of the political scene of the time when it was written (early 1900s), representing “[…] a free-thinking, non-conformist hero in an oppressive world where all others are metaphorically as well as literally blind.” (BUCHANAN 17) Here, blindness isn’t necessarily related to a lack of humanity or civility, but more so of sign of close-mindedness and ignorance. The blinds in the short story are either unable or unwilling to even imagine there is more to their world that they can’t see or
Color Blindness means that you have trouble seeing the colors green, blue, or red or a mix of these colors. It is an abnormal condition characterized by the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum. It is very rare that a person doesn’t see any color at all. Color Blindness is also called color vision problem. The difficulties can range from mild to severe. Color blindness is a misleading term because people that have it aren’t really totally blind. They tend to see colors in a limited range of hue. The scientific name for total color blindness is Monochromasy. Having color blindness would change a normal person’s life. It makes it harder to read and learn, and you may not be able to have certain careers. Although having color vision problems can affect your life greatly, you can still learn to make up for your problems seeing color. There are many other types of color vision problem. Deuteranomaly is a type that is considered green weak. Dichromasy is another type, which can be divided into Protanopia and Deuteranopia. People with this see no difference between red, orange, yellow, and green. Protanopia has much reduced color vision of the colors red, orange, and yellow. Deuteranopia is the same thing as Protanopia except without the abnormal dimming which makes it different. Last would be Tritanopia and Tritanomoly. Both of these types of color blindness are blue-green –color blindness with not many differences between them. In Tritanopia the s-cones are completely missing from the eye, and in Tritanomoly the s- cones have some kind of mutation.