[find] nothing in contradiction to what he had believed, nor would anything look wrong to him … Still there would be two great changes, the second dependent on the first: first the daybreak on a new visual world, and second, his great joy. (Ibn Tufayl 2009: 97)

The Molyneux problem challenges Ibn Tufayl’s confident assumption that a blind man will be immediately able to identify his new vision with what he learned from his seeing peers, the use of his other senses and the application of reason. This implies, in its turn, a doubt as to whether the exercise of the limited faculties of our human mind can attain knowledge of the divine.

When Berkeley answers the Molyneux problem in the negative, he reinforces its sceptic attitudes towards the possibility of “pure” knowledge that is untainted by prejudice or experience. Berkeley is careful to distinguish between the theological and epistemological aspects of the Molyneux problem, contending that “we have some notion, though infinitely inadequate, of those divine attributes, yet still more than a man blind from his birth can have of light and colours” (Berkeley 2000b: 233. Emphasis mine), and yet the doubt cast on human cognition lingers and the nature of the notion that we have of God remains unspecified (Hill 2010: 3-15).

In addition to the cognitive, experiential and religious aspects of the Molyneux problem, it should be noted that the situation described in it involves an interpersonal interaction. It is most clearly detailed in Ibn Tufayl’s description of the townspeople teaching the blind child about his surroundings, but a similar educational act is also implied in Molyneux’ more succinct formulation. The man is “taught” to distinguish the cube from the sphere, and is later “made” to see. The passive verbs obscure the identity of the persons who performed these acts, but they must nevertheless exist, and the blind man’s interaction with them is necessary to the experiment. Such interaction becomes crucial in 20^th century Irish theatre.

Saintly Cures: Restoration of Sight in early 20^th-century drama

In early 20^th-century two plays stand out for featuring the restoration of sight: W.B. Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon and J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints. Both plays share with Irish philosophy an interest in religion and mysticism and highlight the importance of interpersonal exchange in the restoration of sight. In Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon a blind beggar is persuaded by his lame companion to find a saint who can cure both of their afflictions. The blind beggar is concerned with material things and even questions the utility of gaining his eyesight, since this would put him at a disadvantage in begging. The lame beggar is more spiritual, speculating that “maybe we’ll see the blessed saint this day… and maybe that will be a grander thing than having my two legs” (Yeats 2001: 308). The difference between the two beggars is brought into relief when the saint asks them “Will you be cured or will you be blessed?” (309), forcing them to choose between physical and spiritual well-being. Each beggar answers according to his inclination – the materialistic blind chooses a cure for his blindness, while the spiritual cripple prefers to be blessed by the saint. The process of the cure is simple, consisting of nothing more than an evocation of the holy trinity, and has immediate effect – the blind man responds with “I see it all now” (310). He then proceeds to describe what he sees which includes the sky, a tree and the well, as well as other details of scenery. Unlike the blind imagined by Molyneux, he has no difficulty in identifying what he has hitherto only felt by touch or heard about from others, such as the sky.

This restoration of sight has a negative side for both beggars, as the formerly blind man notices that his companion has stolen a sheepskin from him. The discovery of the theft breaks the connection between the two men, and the formerly-blind one leaves after beating up the thief. Thus, the eyes of the blind are opened not only to the beauty of nature, but also to the ugliness in human relations. Finally, it is important to note that the blind man remains partially blind, since he cannot see the saint who cured him (310). It is implied that his inability to see the saint stems from his material inclination and his choice to reject the blessing of the saint, a partial blindness that is noteworthy as a precedent for the other plays to be discussed here.

In contrast to Yeats’s symbolic play, Synge’s The Well of Saints focuses on social relations between the blind characters and the other people in the village. The play tells the story of Mary and Martin Doul, a blind couple who believed they were extremely beautiful until a passing saint gives them vision. Like Ibn Tufayl’s intelligent blind man, they thought they knew everything about their environment through the descriptions of their fellow-villagers, but instead of teaching them the villagers were pulling a cruel joke at their expense. The couple’s attempt to integrate into the life of the village as seeing people is short-lived and ends in disappointment and a return to blindness. When the saint arrives to restore their sight a second time, this time permanently, they refuse and are cast away from the village, possibly going to their death.

The restoration of sight is performed off-stage, but like the miraculous cure of the blind beggar, it is religious in nature and immediately effective. The water that cures blindness must be delivered by a “a fine holy man … a saint of the Almighty God” (Synge 2001: 137) and the saint affirms that God “[will] have pity on you, and put sight into your eyes” (141) Moreover, the failure of a cure is due to moral and social reasons, not physical or cognitive ones – after their sight is restored, the Douls find it difficult to adjust to the idea of working for a living. Ironically, the saint who gives them sight, and who portrays himself as forgiving and generous, is the one instigating the villagers to chase the blind couple away at the end of the play. The blind couple had their eyes opened to the deceitfulness and narrow-mindedness of their community, and this revelation creates an irreparable rift between them and their neighbours.

The disturbed relations between the blind couple and the villagers contains an inherent critique of the assumption that the sighted experience of reality is superior. The seeing people in the play take it for granted that Martin and Mary Doul lead a miserable life because they are unable to see, but in fact the couple enjoys its own world which is as rich and satisfactory for them as the world of the seeing. At the beginning of the play the Douls are also shown to be confident in their knowledge of themselves and their environment. After experiencing both sighted and blind life, the couple prefers to stay blind. Mary Doul tells the saint: “Let us be as we are, holy father, and then we’ll be known again in a short while as the people is happy and blind, and be having an easy time, with no trouble to live, and we getting halfpence on the road” (167). Faced with the determination of the villagers and the saint to give Mary sight again, Martin Doul lashes out:

If you’re a fine Saint itself, it’s more sense is in a blind man, and more power maybe than you’re thinking at all … I’m thinking it’s a good right ourselves have to be sitting

blind, hearing a soft wind turning round the little leaves of the spring and feeling the sun, and we not tormenting our souls with the sight of the gray days, and the holy men, and the dirty feet is trampling the world. (170)

In this final speech, Martin Doul attempts to reclaim his own dignity and separate identity, even while he is being driven away to a possible death. The Douls’ affirmation of their separate identity makes the case for a view of knowledge as composed of heterogeneous discourses which are equally valid, against the strict hierarchies of the saint who in this context represents not only the church, but also the claim to rationality of Enlightenment epistemology. As Mary Burke writes, the play “ostensibly pits settled culture and broadly allied and implicitly admirable ‘unsettled’ subcultures in opposition … Synge … reveals that the perceived moral chasm between the minority and majority communities is largely constructed” (2009: 45).

The creation of an individual, isolated world may be criticised as a turning away from reality, and according to Ronan McDonald, Synge himself had doubts about the value of such private worlds: “The scientist in Synge refuses the idea that the imagination can wholly redeem and transform reality. It can … transform people’s perceptions of themselves… but perceptions of the external world are far less liberating” (2002: 65). This very criticism, however, rather begs the question by assuming the existence of an objective external reality that can best be understood through science. Regardless of Synge’s personal judgement of the fantasy world preferred by the Douls, the play makes a powerful case for the existence of incommensurable types of experience.

As in The Cat and the Moon, the blind couple open their eyes to discover the lies told them by the very people who persuaded them to cure their blindness, in marked contrast to the benevolence of the teachers and physicians implied by the Molyneux problem. Synge’s play complicates the question of how can we interpret sensations of a completely new type by introducing a diversity of experiences that are equally valid. At the same time both Yeats and Synge share with earlier Irish philosopher an interest in the experience of blind people as a way to understand the encounter with any kind of new experience, as well as a practical approach and a realistic assessment of the difficulties involved in adjusting to new forms of knowledge.

A Blind Woman Made to See: Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney

While Yeats and Synge pass in silence over the cognitive troubles encountered by blind people who suddenly gain sight, later Irish playwrights seem more attuned to it. A case in point is Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney which dramatises the Molyneux problem in a modern setting. Both Molyneux and Berkeley are mentioned by name with the addition that each was an “Irishman by the way” (Friel 1996: 368). Friel’s play tells the story of a blind woman who despite her disability led a satisfying life. She was working as a massage therapist, won swimming competitions, and was popular among her friends. In her husband’s eyes, though, this was not enough. Together with Dr. Rice, who dreams of restoring his shattered professional reputation, he persuades Molly to undergo an operation that will give her partial sight. The operation is successful, but the results are disastrous. After her initial exhilaration, Molly is unable to cope with the cognitive stress of the new sense and suffers from a condition that renders her practically blind again, has a nervous breakdown and relates her story from a bed in a psychiatric hospital.

Molly’s story closely follows a case history described by Oliver Sacks in An Anthropologist on Mars, where both Molyneux and Berkeley are mentioned as the first thinkers to raise the question and provide an answer that has been proven by later scientific discoveries to be correct (1995: 110). The difficulty of making sense from visual perception is described in detail in the medical case study, and repeated by Molly when the bandages are taken off after the operation:

‘Now, Molly. In your own time. Tell me what you see.’ Nothing. Nothing at all. Then out of the void a blur; a haze; a body of mist; a confusion of light, colour, movement. It had no meaning.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Anything? Anything at all?’

… ‘Well? Anything?’ Something moving; large; white. The nurse? And lines, black lines, vertical lines. The bed? The door? (350)

As in the plays previously discussed, Friel pays a lot of attention to the social setting in which the eye operation takes place, and the relations between the characters. Molly’s husband is a chaser of lost causes, whose misguided attempts to improve the world repeatedly end in failure and cause harm to the creatures he tries to help. When he makes his wife’s blindness his new project, the audience can already sense that Molly will only suffer as a result. The choice of writing the play about a female patient, rather than a male as in Sacks’ medical case, serves to highlight the power relations between Molly and the men who coax her into an operation she did not seek herself.

The story of the blind woman made to see continues the Irish tradition in its evocation of a mystical dimension, even though both disability and cure are presented in medical terms. This dimension is evident in the exaggerated expectations of Molly’s husband and her own feeling that her medical examination involved “questions about good and evil and about the source of knowledge and about big mystical issues!” (368). In George O’Brien’s words, they are concerned with “vision, healing, belief and beginning anew” (2006: 94). All three characters in the play speak about a “fantasy” that propels their actions. For Molly, the fantasy is to discover a new and mysterious world:

If there was a phantom desire, a fantasy in my head, it was this. That perhaps by some means I might be afforded a brief excursion to this land of vision … And during my stay to devour it again and again with greedy, ravenous eyes. To gorge on all those luminous sights and wonderful spectacles … And then, oh yes, then to return home to my own world with all that rare understanding within me for ever. (Friel 1996: 349-50)

Molly’s description of a successful operation is akin to a mystical experience – a literally eye-opening moment of revelation that will give her access to a “rare understanding” that is beyond her world (350). The play can thus be seen to follow the tragic plot of a hubristic attempt by Molly, her husband and her doctor, to overcome the limits of the knowable. The harsh realities of coping with the consequences of the operation will wake all three from their fantasy, and punish Molly cruelly. As Christopher Murray comments, “Even a little learning is a dangerous thing, how dangerous we usually prefer not to consider” (1998: 93). The knowledge Molly gains with the restoration of her sight is so difficult to reconcile with her previous experience of the world that she rejects it completely, renouncing her fantasy of salvation.

Like the Douls in The Well of the Saints, Molly enjoys her blind world and rejects her characterisation as miserable or crippled, explaining that “I know only my own world. I didn’t think of it as a deprived world. Disadvantaged in some ways; of course it was. But at that stage I never thought of it as deprived” (Friel 1996: 336). Unlike Martin Doul, though, Molly comes to accept the point of view of the male figures who dominate her life and avoids confrontation with the hierarchical ordering of knowledge imposed on her. She continuously expresses gratefulness to her husband and her doctor even though she is paying the highest price for the forbidden knowledge they tried to give her. After the failure of her sight and her mental deterioration, she relinquishes the attempt to validate her own experience. For her, “Real – imagined – fact – fiction – fantasy – reality – there it seems to be … And why should I question any of it any more?” (370). These words, which end the play, may lead the spectators to reconsider the assumption that sight is superior to blindness, but the suggestion is undercut by the fact that they are spoken from a mental hospital bed. Molly Sweeney may have gained access to an alternative form of truth after losing her sight for the second time, but this new knowledge remains liminal and without authority. Furthermore, she is unable to express it without resorting to her husband’s terms “what I take to be imagined may very well be real – what’s Frank’s term? – external reality” (370. Emphasis mine.)

The story of Molly Sweeney challenges many of the assumptions implicit in the Molyneux problem – the benevolence of the father who taught Molly to overcome her disability, and even more so the good intentions of the eye specialist who gives her partial sight even though he senses that it may ruin her. It also strongly qualifies the progressive narrative of a blind person who gains sight and will henceforth become the same as sighted people. The story does not end when Molly manages to discern different objects, in fact it just begins because right from the beginning of the play Molly is hospitalised with a complex condition caused by her failure to adjust to vision. The optimistic and progressive Enlightenment narrative becomes a tragedy in Molly Sweeney, where the need of empowered male figures to improve and experiment result in marginalising and silencing a female subject.

The Blind Man and the Cripple yet again: Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I

The Molyneux problem, which is directly referred to by Friel, informs one of the plays of another famous Irish playwright – Samuel Beckett – in a more covert form. Even though the play does not refer to the problem directly, or indeed features a medical or miraculous restoration of sight, it can be seen to dramatise the story of a blind man made to see in an altered, but still recognisable form.

The play features two unnamed characters, a blind man and a cripple, who strongly evoke Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon. It is set in a post-apocalyptic urban space, where A, a blind beggar, is playing his fiddle on a street corner. B, a cripple in a wheelchair arrives to see where the music is coming from. B’s initial impulse to withdraw is checked when it occurs to him that he main join forces with the blind beggar “and live together” (Beckett 1990: 227). B wants to join forces with A, similar to the beggars in Yeats’s play but the crucial difference is that A and B have not yet formed such a bond. In order to achieve his goal, B offers a union couched in a discourse of courtship. He muses they could “live together, till death ensue” (227), asks A whether he thinks that “we could make a match”, and later confirms that “If you ask me we were made for each other” (229). A remains unmoved and only the mention of tinned food elicits a response from him, though even this is not enough to convince him. Dramatic tension is thus generated by B’s attempt to woo A out of his apathy and form a couple with him.

Unlike the blind beggar in Yeats’s play, however, A is not exclusively interested in material things and is asking B for more information about the world around him. A’s first question is “How are the trees doing?” (228). Trees are a motif that may suggest nature, regeneration, or even a source of food. But they are also a popular example of a remote object in treatises on optics. Berkeley writes about “the magnitude of anything, for instance a tree or a house” (Berkeley 2000a: 23). A confirms that unlike Molly Sweeney before her operation, he cannot perceive light and colour by remarking that “It seems to me sometimes I spend the night here, playing and listening.” (Beckett 1990: 228). Later in the play he will ask about the colour of B’s wen and “Is there no green anywhere?” (232). A insists on questioning B about what he sees but B is reluctant to answer, and to A’s question “But you look about you?”, B responds violently “No!” (230). Finally, A says that he was “always” blind (228), like the man in the Molyneux problem. A’s preoccupation with external appearances also calls to mind the Douls from Synge’s The Well of the Saints but more importantly, he is a blind man who wishes to see. His desire for knowledge is directed at practical things, but also at general information about the world.

In Beckett’s bleak outlook there is no moment in which truth is revealed, be it the scientific truth of the medical profession, a mystical truth of God, or a personal truth about one’s partner. And yet, B’s offer seems to promise an increase A’s knowledge of the world:

B: … Of course if you wish me to look about me I shall. And if you care to push me about I shall try to describe the scene, as we go along.
A: You mean you would guide me? I wouldn’t get lost any more?
B: Exactly. I would say, Easy, Billy, we’re heading for a great muckheap, turn back and wheel left when I give you the word … I see a round tin over there in the gutter, perhaps it’s soup, or baked beans. (230)

The mention of baked beans manages to elicit a positive reaction from A for the first time in the play, but there is a difference between B’s offer to “describe the scene” and A’s utilitarian interpretation of the request that he would “guide” him, which B picks up immediately by describing how he could help A avoid obstacles and find food. He thus transitions from aesthetic description to the practicalities of finding one’s way in the world. The attempt by A and B to form a couple, however, is expressed in the play not only as a practical union, but also as a religious revelation:

A: Baked beans! [He gets up, puts down fiddle and bowl on the stool and gropes towards B.] Where are you?
B: Here, dear fellow. [A lays hold of the chair and starts pushing it blindly.] Stop!
A: [Pushing the chair] It’s a gift! A gift! (230)

The ejaculation “It’s a gift!” conveys A’s enthusiasm in terms of a miraculous cure, a term that was also used by Frank Sweeney when he imagines the sensationalist headline in the newspaper – “Miracle of Molly Sweeney. Gift of sight restored to middle-aged woman” (Friel 1996: 338). The combination of A’s ambulatory powers with B’s vision creates a compound creature that gives some form of sight to the blind A. It is probably the closest a Beckett character can get to improving its powers of perception. Thus, although the union of A and B is not an accurate repetition of the Molyneux problem, it still situates itself within the parameters of this problem.

Inevitably, a Beckett play allows for no miracles and the direct result of A’s enthusiasm is that B changes his attitude, hitting him with the pole to stop him from madly pushing the wheelchair around (Beckett 1990: 230). A is yet another figure in Irish theatre who is promised sight, but is unable to make use of it and loses it again, like the blind man in The Cat and the Moon who gains material sight but cannot see the saint, the Douls in The Well of the Saints who choose to stay blind and Molly Sweeney who resigns herself to a state between vision and imagination. The pursuit of knowledge and practical utility implied in the trope of the blind man made to see, together with the aspiration to transcend human knowledge, repeatedly fail.

Beckett’s play can be seen as the most extreme form of this failure, with the attempt ending almost as soon as it begins. At the moment of ecstasy when A grabs the chair and endows B with motion, B offers no visual description, only a blow with the pole so that the man born blind remains as blind as ever. In return, A doesn’t take B anywhere. In both The Cat and the Moon and The Well of the Saints, the blind who are granted sight can immediately use their new sense, just as well as seeing people. Molly Sweeney is able to gain some vision after her operation and initially feels elated and delighted. The blind A never enjoys the visual description of B who rejects him immediately.

The trope of the blind man made to see which was central to Irish philosophy is critiqued in Irish theatre from different angles. Proposed as a way to cast doubt on our ability to understand unfamiliar sense impressions, it involves an interplay of personal identity, social relations and the limits of knowledge. The crux of Berkeley’s answer to the Molyneux problem is the need for a process of learning before a blind man can understand what he sees. For Yeats and Synge the knowledge gained through the new sense breaks up previous connections and reveals the negative side of the social fabric. In Friel, the fate of the blind woman is being overtaken by men who leave her to pay the price for their hubris on her own. Finally, the unwillingness of Beckett’s beggars to cooperate strikes a sceptical note regarding the human ability to transition from seeing to understanding, not because they are unable to do so, but because they do not try.