In Saxe’s retelling, a gathering of blind men struggles to understand an elephant, each touching a single part of the great creature, unable to perceive the animal in its totality-thus, none of the blind men can entirely perceive the elephant, each too-content with their limited perception. Although versions of the story have appeared across more than a millennium, Saxe’s riff on the ancient parable took as its starting point his era’s often contentious debate over the existence of God, given the rise of the new sciences that challenged and even revoked deeply-held beliefs about the Christian God.
No one wise man here is wise enough, and even assembling all of their observations into a single reality still falls short of the goal of absolute understanding.Originally published in 1872 in the pages of Harper’s, a popular New York City magazine, John Godfrey Saxe’s “The Blind Men and the Elephant” upcycled a Buddhist parable from five centuries before the birth of Christ. Saxe’s insight, however, is that given such a plethora of exemplary and earnest exchange of ideas, it is evident that human understanding, while impressive in its reach and its breadth, is limited. Saxe was writing in an era that witnessed an explosion in the sciences as a culture began to appreciate the rewards of investigation and observation. Each blind man and each assertion is allowed its moment each is allowed to stand. Each blind man is given the opportunity to expound of his particular insight-no observation is challenged in the poem, and no one wise man is exposed as a fool. The premise of the poem is not to dismiss the attempts to perceive a reliable and verifiable truth in a world full of confusing and often contradictory phenomena. The blind men in the poem are wise, given to analysis rather than emotion, curious, and confident in their ability to divine certainty and truth through the rigorous and careful application of observation.
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