Milligan, Martin 1923-1993

views updated

Milligan, Martin 1923-1993

PERSONAL: Born 1923, in Glasgow, Scotland; died 1993. Education: Graduate of Edinburgh University and Balliol College, Oxford.

CAREER: Philosopher, educator, and author. Worked as a typist, administrative assistant, and lecturer; Leeds University, 1959-89, began as lecturer in philosophy, became head of department and dean of the Faculty of Arts. Cofounder of Edinburgh Peoples Festival, 1949.

AWARDS, HONORS: Library of the Leeds Resource Centre for Blind and Partially Sighted People was dedicated to Milligan's memory.

WRITINGS:

(With Bryan Magee) On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

SIDELIGHTS: Martin Milligan was a philosopher who lost his sight and his eyes to retinal cancer in the 1920s when he was eighteen months old. He attended schools that pioneered the teaching of blind, as well as sighted, students, and he eventually graduated from Edinburgh University in his native Scotland as well as from Balliol College, Oxford. Milligan belonged to the Communist Party from 1941 until the late 1970s, and the Labour Party until his death. Because of his physical disability and his politics, he was denied academic appointments and survived as a lecturer and office worker until 1959, when he began his career at Leeds University.

On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan was published a year after Milligan's death. Magee, also a philosopher, asked Milligan to assist him in his study of the senses. Magee wanted to communicate with someone who had never experienced the sense of sight but who was philosophically sophisticated. He first worked with a blind lawyer named Rupert Cross, but Cross died before a book could be developed. On Blindness consists of eight long letters. Magee's goal was to assess Milligan's perception of sight and the link between that sense and experience and knowledge.

Milligan reveals in his letters that to be blind is not to be in the dark. His dreams were similar to those of sighted people, filled with sensory imagery and a sense of space. Spectator contributor Sargy Mann wrote that "the correspondence [between the two writers] is … philosophy in the making in which we share. Like us, Milligan and Magee do not know what is coming next, and there are several surprises" along the way. The two men sometimes misunderstand each other. Milligan writes that although the blind are denied certain visual pleasures, they are also spared a certain amount of suffering experienced by the sighted. He also expresses his long-held advocacy for the education of the blind.

Magee feels that a blind person's perception of the world is greatly limited by his or her lack of sight. As Anthony Campbell reported on his Web site, Magee discloses in his autobiography, Confessions of a Philosopher, his belief that "our view of reality is inherently limited…. If we had more sensory capabilities than we actually do, he maintains, our understanding of the world would be radically different from what it is." Milligan, however, repeatedly expresses the belief that the perceived differences between what the sighted and the blind comprehend are greatly exaggerated.

"What the correspondence throws up is two worlds far more different than Magee had anticipated," noted Mann, "and since the two men cannot agree as to the nature of knowledge, they never really get started on Magee's intended subject. The paradox is that this failure supports Magee's premise far more powerfully than would have the meeting of ideas that he had hoped for. The 'every man is an island' aspect of all this is cruelly underlined by Milligan's untimely death." Henry H. Work wrote in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that in his conclusion, Magee "provides a most lucid and comfortable way of thinking about our various senses and the meaning of their composite worth for our knowing the world…. It is healthy to read this book, if only to complement our usual strains of thought."