Blindness
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
blindness · cannot see · dark things plain · eyesight · knowledge · sight · truth
in the texts
Tusculan Disputations
Loss of sight, examined as a condition that does not preclude happiness or philosophical activity
For first, that dreadful blindness — of what pleasures, pray, is it deprived?
And so the augur Tiresias, whom the poets feign wise, they never bring on deploring his blindness;
They say that Asclepiades, no ignoble Eretrian philosopher, when someone asked what his blindness had brought him, answered:
Oedipus Tyrannus
The contrast between physical sight, blindness, ignorance, and prophetic truth, concentrated in the conflict between Oedipus and Teiresias.
And I tell you, since you have taunted my blindness, that though you have sight, you do not see what a state of misery you are in, or where you dwell, or with whom.
Teiresias, whose soul grasps all things, both that which may be told and that which is unspeakable, the Olympian secrets and the affairs of the earth, you feel, though you cannot see, what a huge plague haunts our state.
To our way of thinking, these words, both his and yours, Oedipus, have been said in anger.