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often very flattering” (5). This “other eye” of Lessing’s is
the ability of see through and beyond …
[T]he great comforting illusions, and part illusions,
which every society uses to keep up its confidence in
itself. These are hard to examine, and the best we
can hope for is that a kindly friend from another
culture will enable us to look at our culture with
dispassionate eyes. (33)
To Lessing, it is the “novelist” – the writer – who can offer a
society, a culture, those “foreign eyes” because they and their
writing have the potential of “enabl[ing] us to see ourselves as
others see us” (7) through a possible movement forward into
greater objectivity – perhaps that same “lightning region” of
Cixous’ where the known clashes against the unknown. And it
this unfortunately all-too-rare “social self-consciousness,”
those “cool, serious questions and their cool, serious,
dispassionate answers,” that Lessing believes “could save us”
(42). For that “other eye” to remain closed and those “cool,
serious questions” never to be asked, let alone answered, is for
the “great comforting illusions” to be propagated as “truth” and
“reality,” authoritative in their utter certainty.
And this conversation, begun by Cixous and continued by
Lessing, was furthered by revolutionary Brazilian educational
philosopher Paulo Freire with his book, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, and, therein, the sociopolitical implications of this
perceiving and conceiving of the “uncertain” made much more
explicit. Freire’s titular pedagogical philosophy is a
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