I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses--A Philosophical History

by Jonathan Rée

A groundbreaking study of deafness, by a philosopher who combines the scientific erudition of Oliver Sacks with the historical flair of Simon Schama.

There is nothing more personal than the human voice, traditionally considered the expression of the innermost self. But what of those who have no voice of their own and cannot hear the voices of others?

In this tour de force of historical narrative, Jonathan Rée tells the astonishing story of the deaf, from the sixteenth century to the present. Rée explores the great debates about deafness between those who believed the deaf should be made to speak and those who advocated non-oral communication. He traces the botched attempts to make language visible, through such exotic methods as picture writing, manual spellings, and vocal photography. And he charts the tortuous progress and final recognition of sign systems as natural languages in their own right.

I See a Voice escorts us on a vast and eventful intellectual journey,taking in voice machines and musical scales, shorthand and phonetics, Egyptian hieroglyphs, talking parrots, and silent films. A fascinating tale of goodwill subverted by bad science, I See a Voice is as learned and informative as it is delightful to read.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Language, Science

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jonathan Rée is a freelance philosopher who used to teach at Middlesex University in London, but gave up lecturing in order to "have more time to think," and was for many years associated with the magazine Radical Philosophy. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and elsewhere.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book plays its cards close to its chest, and maybe people will accuse me of dropping spoilers if I reveal the point; though since hardly anyone seems to have read it, I hope I'm doing the author a favor. Briefly, Jonathan Rée makes the unusual claim that philosophy might have something useful to say about how we live our everyday lives. He illustrates with an extended case study, the story of how sign languages, after many vicissitudes, eventually came to be accepted as a form of communication just as valid as ordinary spoken language.

I had seen some of this before in the first part of Oliver Sacks's Seeing Voices; even though the Sacks version now comes across as not much more than a cartoon, I was familiar with the bare bones of the plot. Sign language was developed in France during the second half of the 18th century and became widely adopted. It was then snatched away from the deaf community at the 1880 Congress of Milan, where the "oralist" faction succeeded in driving through policies to ban the use of signs and try to force deaf people to learn how to lip-read and speak instead. This pushed sign language underground for about eighty years, until it gradually emerged again around 1960.

Rée's treatment is more nuanced. To begin with, he seems to be a rather more competent historian than Sacks. He's read a great many primary sources, the majority of which are in French or German, and he reveals many twists that I hadn't previously come across. But the most interesting thing is his analysis of the underlying philosophy. He argues that the central issue was the opposition between hearing and vision, and how they relate to the elusive concepts of understanding and intelligence. From our 21st century viewpoint, it seems obvious that people can understand a visual language in just the same way as they understand a spoken one; but one and a half centuries ago, this was anything but obvious.

The change of perspective I experienced as I followed Rée's careful reconstruction was startling. The "oralists", whom I'd been thinking of as straightforward paternalistic oppressors, were in their own terms doing something perfectly reasonable, leading deaf people along the difficult but necessary road towards use of true spoken language while evading the tempting lure of using the pseudo-language of signs; while the Abbé de l'Epée, for all his saintly qualities as the originator of modern sign language, had some seriously misguided ideas about language, and developed his system in entirely the wrong way. If I'm prepared to believe Rée's analysis - I must admit I still have some doubts - what ultimately saved the deaf community was the revolution in linguistics started by de Saussure, which he links to Husserl's philosophy. Language doesn't depend on mystical properties of the voice; it's just a correspondence between meanings and forms, the physical realization of which is unimportant.

The book suggests some thought-provoking questions. Does philosophy really influence our lives this much without us even noticing? And do we now know the real story about cognition and language, in particular sign language? We're confident that we do, more or less; but people in the 19th century also believed they understood these things, and they were wrong. It still seems almost miraculous that a brain which has been evolved to understand speech can straightforwardly rewire itself to understand signs; I'm sure that tells us things about the nature of the mind that we don't yet understand very well. It would be nice to see more people looking at this strange and fascinating subject.

[Campbell Rider]

sign language was invented to teach deaf people about jesus

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I might go blind one day I figured I needed to know how to deal with muteness. Muteness of the eyes...