Colorblind People are Wise Persons

Albert Schweitzer (January 14th 1875 – September 4th 1965) was a theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere. The pessimist sees only the red light. But the truly wise person is colorblind.

This quote was coined by Albert Schweitzer. I don’t want to start a philosophic discussion here but would like to have a closer look at the last sentence But the truly wise person is colorblind from a logical point of view. In short this means that all colorblind people are wise. Or doesn’t it? From my point of view where color blindness sits in my neck every second this would be very charming.

Let’s get mathematics out of the bag. The quote says out of being a truly wise person follows that this person is colorblind. Can we also saddle the horse from the back and say if somebody is colorblind he therefore must be a wise person? Unfortunately not. This becomes clear if we look at a little example:

If it rains the street is wet. Can we follow that if the street is wet that it has to rain? No, we can’t. Because there could also be somebody washing his car out on the street or a broken water pipeline fludding the street. But we can look at this situation even from a different angle: If the street is not wet there is no way that it is raining. This helps as a lot to understand the above quote a bit more in detail.

If you are colorblind it doesn’t follow after Albert Schweitzer that you are a wise person. But only if you are colorblind you have the possibility to be a wise person and therefore only colorblind people can be wise persons. I am happy to be one of them as I just showed you :-)

Further reading:
Wikipedia – necessary and sufficient conditions in logic
Albert Schweitzer