Abstract

This article examines the relationship between blindness and the Enlightenment concept of the system, arguing that blindness is used as a weapon to discredit 17th-century metaphysics, as well as a tool through which thought can take shape or even systematize itself apart from dogmatism. Philosophers use blindness metaphorically, thus equating systematics within the obscurity of ignorance; yet, with Diderot, they also demonstrate that philosophy, for better or for worse, is literally an affair of blindness.