Through other eyes

Laguagehat has a post on Proust as a sf writer. The following passage is quoted:

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is...

With that same premise, R. A. Lafferty wrote a story both funny and profound, unsurprisingly titled "Through Other Eyes". It is part of his collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

As the story begins, eminent scientists Gregory Smirnov and Charles Cogsworth have just completed their exploration of the past using a Time Machine. They were present at the most important events in History, they have met the central characters face-to-face. And they were bored. The great events were not as spectacular as advertised, and ended too soon. The kings, poets and philosophers turned out to be an uniformly dull and annoying lot. For example:

"I wasn't too happy with Aristotle the day we caught him. That barbarous north-coast Greek of his!" Three hours he had them all busy curling his beard. "And his discourse on the Beard in Essential and the Beard in Existential, did you follow that?"

"No, to tell the truth I didn't. I guess it was pretty profound."

(R. A. Lafferty: Through other eyes)

So, the Time Machine was a failure. But they have a new toy to play with: a device that allows one person to see through the eyes of another, not only in a strictly visual sense, but in the sense of inhabiting the other person's particular experience of the world.

"As he grew older Charles Cogsworth came to many signs that the world he saw was not the world others saw. There came smaller but persistent signs that every person lives in a different world."

(ibid.)

They soon test the machine on friends and associates:

"He is a greater man than I [...] And he lives in a better world."

It was a better world, greater in scope and more exiting in detail.

"Who would have thought of giving such color to grass, if it is grass? It is what he calls grass, but it is not what I call grass. [...] It is a finer sky that I have known, and more structured hills. The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins."

(ibid.)

The problem comes when Cogsworth tries to see the world through the eyes of his enchanting female colleague, Valery Mok. The results are not what he expected:

"And to her the grass it self is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. He sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them."

(ibid.)

This fiery view of the world is too much for Cogsworth, who ends having to spend six weeks in a sanatorium to recover. He now regards Valery as a base and excessively sensuous creature. Conversely, Valery finds Cogsworth's experience of the world to be stale and dead:

"Gregory Smirnov let me use your machine. I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man's eyes. You don't even know that the grass is alive. You think it's only grass. [...] How can you be so dead? And I always liked you so much. But I didn't know you were dead like that. [...] By the way, who gave you the idea that blood was that dumb color? Don't you even know that blood is red?"

"I see it red."

"You don't see it red. You just call it red. That silly color isn't red. What I call red is red."

(ibid.)

"Redness" is the canonical quale. Laffety's story serves as a good illustration of the inverted spectrum thought experiment in Philosophy of the Mind. The essay "What it is like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel also touches on related themes.