Blindness, Being Vs. Non-being, and the value of primary documents

It took almost 50 years, but slowly, slowly David Stewart went blind. Until the day, that is, that he saw again.

Upon his interview, David showed no signs of being a flake or a hysteric. He was a manager, a financial officer, a pioneer in arts broadcasting in Europe. He's a sober man. But he was very blind by the end of his trial. He lost his memory for color - for blues, yellows and reds - and he lived in a black and white world. Until the day, he discovered to his delight, that he can still experience color, even though, technichally there is nothing there for him to see.

It's an experience manufactured by his halluncinating brain. And after about 30 minutes, the images will fade, but then others will follow. Paintings coming to life. Wallpaper moving. Mysterious curtains appearing. Stewart said he wasn't frightened, but he wondered what triggered all this.

One of his sons, who is already experiencing the same disease, found the explanation. Stewart has Charles Bonnet syndrom, a condition that often affects people with macular degeneration or diabetic eye disease. "The brain is doing a mash-up of stored visual memories," says ophthalmologist Jonathan Trobe of the University of Michigan. "A surprisingly large number of people who lose sight start seeing things."

The example of David Stewart does some work on the Pre-Socratics.

The first philosophers conceived being as (being) made of matter. Democritus for instance, and other Atomists, viewed Being as comprised of an infinite number of small particles. Both Epicureans and Stoics in the Hellenistic age imagined an outside world of Being, comprised of atoms, literally meaning 'indivisible'. Many people have this same view, though there is more science to back up their groundwork. Today, atoms combine to form all the objects of the universe. They are solid, microscopic, move in space and join one another to form more complex objects. Movement of atoms is possible since inbetween each one of them is a void.

The void is nothing at all. Non-being. A Non-being that, for the Hellenistic philosophers, existed; though, just Greek philosophy had to pass through another thinking revolution in order to postulate the existence of it. A second sailing. The leading figure in this revolution was Plato who conceived the tenet of the Forms. The Forms as the ultimate real Beings, having no special nor material properties.

For me, David Stewart is pragmatically Platonic. And he reminds me that we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. That we see things internally. That in the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experineces make us know is very likely to be wrong. Discouse and exegesis of texts, formulating tenents based on reasonable arguments rather than on theological doctrine, and setting the foundation on which the future realizations can be created. That process is valuable in and of itself.

The article says, David Stewart in fact has learned to enjoy what he calls 'phantoms'. He can even tigger them, he thinks.