Like many intellectuals, I try to live a life away from commonplaces. There is one I have not been able to avoid however: playing the role of the short-eyesight intellectual requiring eyeglasses. Spectacles have been part of my life for over 30 years—which means that I have lived twice more with glasses on my nose, than without. I even remember the first day I wore my first ones in class. It was a day of laughing at me and teasing, mostly kindly teasing me, among my peers. I could well appreciate the fun of having some new appendix on my nose. Some girls giggled a little too much also. But, that, I was still too young to figure out that it might not totally be about my glasses.
I am also falling for the commonplace of the pusillanimous intellectual: laser surgery came at a rather late stage of my life, but anyway I would not have tried it. As for contact lenses, I cannot even bear the thought of touching my eyes.
It has been over a year now that a strange phenomenon has affected me: I could not read with my glasses on any more and that put me in the weird situation of having to take them off to see. What had helped me for decades was now an impediment. I could hardly get used to it.
I soon learned that I was far from being a single case on earth, and that needing different glasses to see from a distance and at close range was a perfectly identified sign of getting old. They have even invented progressive lenses for this very reason. So I went for the progressive (and extremely expensive) lenses. It is often said that it takes time to adjust. Depending on where you look (close of distant range) you must not use the same areas of the lenses, otherwise your perception becomes distorted and fuzzy. For once, I was no commonplace glasses person. In less than half a day, adjusting my sight to the different areas of my glasses had become a reflex. I am so used to seeing the world in a blurry way that any time it happened to me because I was not looking through the right area of my glasses I just adjusted without minding the least and giving any thought to it.
When I was a professor of philosophy, I used to tell my students that spectacles were the most philosophical tools. I had never had any difficulty to understand Descartes’ idea that you cannot be so sure of anything in the world (that is said until, for Descartes, you discover God) for even the simple perception is deceptive. I just had to take off my glasses to see a very different world. So what was the “real” world? The artificial one I saw through my spectacles, or the fuzzy one that I hardly grasp without them? Every time I gave this example, all the glasses bearers in the class felt justified, and grasped the basis of the Cartesian radical doubt.
Philosophe aux Lunettes - Giordano Luca (1632-1705), Fa Presto (dit)
Have I learned a philosophical lesson in my brand new glasses-condition? While regular glasses would be Cartesian, changing for progressive lenses would take us to Humian regions. Indeed, I share the Humian condition of being driven by habits: I still take off my spectacles when I want to read, and then put them back when I realize that it is better with them than without. Also, I have enriched this old conviction that philosophy is about knowing where to look. Now, it is not where to look in the world, but where to look in my glasses. That is what Kant says in the Critique of the Pure Reason after a fashion.
