Tiresias: de ziener en zijn blinde vlek

In his tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus Sophocles opposes Oedipus, the seeker for knowledge who is blinded by the belief he can see through the catastrophic situation, against the figure of Tiresias, the blind seer. Using the metaphor of sight, Sophocles interrogates the possibilities and limits of human knowledge and control. In this article, the figure of the blind seer leads to a further search for the meaning of this metaphor: from the mythology of Tiresias we learn that Sophocles’ subject matter was circulating in Greek imagination long before Oedipus Tyrannus. From the three myths involving Tiresias’ blinding and consequent initiation in the art of prophesy arises the image of the seer as intermediary, a hybrid between man and woman, god and mortal, life and death. This mediator should possess knowledge in its fullest form, since he, as opposed to normal man in all his confinement, participates in both halves of reality. Tiresias’ blindness however reveals the fundamental impossibility to incorporate the Other: as the counterpart of the ‘enlightened’ Oedipus he represents a self-knowledge that consists in knowing one's lack of knowledge, in knowing how not to know.