Unity in Diversity: The Virtues of a Metadisciplinary Perspective in Liberal Arts Education
Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Each man touches a different part of the animal (its side, trunk, tusk, leg, ear, and tail) and pronounces his find a wall, a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, or a rope. As the poet Godfrey Saxe (1816-1997) wrote of the blind men in his retelling of this ancient Indian parable, “Though each was partly in the right, they all were in the wrong” (Galdone, 1973). This allegory quickly encapsulates the benefits, and the challenges, of seeing, or not seeing, something through multiple perspectives—in short, it illuminates the perils of hasty reductionism. Consider that when people ask “Can I see that?,” 99% of the time what they truly mean is “Would you please hand that object to me so I can hold it in my own hands and turn it around, to see and feel and otherwise experience all sides of it?” This is what most of us mean by “seeing”: looking at something not from a distance or from one angle but closely, from all perspectives. Then, too, blind people do “see” with their hands, just as infants and toddlers “see” objects with their mouths. You can conduct your own “elephant” exercise in the classroom, both with blindfolded and “sighted” students, preferably using an unusually shaped or otherwise complex and unfamiliar item that cannot be described or understood from a single perspective.
Source: Lincoln (University of Nebraska)
Author: Alexander Werth
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2105915049