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Concept
The Art of Seeing
Summary
The Art of Seeing: An Adventure in Re-education is a 1942 book by Aldous Huxley, which details his experience with and views on the discredited Bates method, which according to Huxley improved his eyesight.
In the preface to the book, Huxley describes how, at the age of sixteen, he had a violent attack of keratitis punctata which made him almost totally blind for eighteen months, and left him thereafter with severely impaired sight. Strong spectacles were of help, but reading, in particular, was a great strain. In 1939 his ability to read became increasingly degraded, and he sought the help of Margaret Corbett, who taught the Bates method. He found this immensely helpful, and in 1942 wrote “At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal, is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles, and before I had learned the art of seeing”.
The book is not an autobiography, however. Although his own history fuelled his interest in vision, and there are references in passing throughout the book to his own case, it is written as a general study of vision as he came to understand it.
Huxley writes that his aim in writing the book was
... to correlate the methods of visual education with the findings of modern psychology and critical philosophy. My purpose in making this correlation is to demonstrate the essential reasonableness of a method, which turns out to be nothing more or less than the practical application to the problems of vision of certain theoretical principles, universally accepted as true.
Unlike many other texts on the Bates method, Huxley's book contains no diagrams of the eye, and very little description of its physiology.
According to Huxley, the prevailing medical view is that
the organs of vision are incapable of curing themselves ... then the eyes must be totally different in kind from other parts of the body. Given favourable conditions, all other organs tend to free themselves from their defects. Not so the eyes. ... it is a waste of time even to try to discover a treatment which will assist nature in its normal task of healing.
Official source
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