Psychological Visibility


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Plato Alcibiades 1 132e–33c

Socrates: Have you, then, noticed that when someone looks at an eye, his face appears, as if in a mirror, in the eye of the person opposite? We call this the pupil [korê is literally a girl] because it is an image of the one looking.

Alciabiades: True.

Soc: So an eye would see itself when gazing at an eye and looking at that part of it which is best and with which it sees?

Alc: Apparently.

Soc: It would not see itself, if it looked at another part of a person or at anything else other than what it happens to resemble.

Alc: True.

Soc: So if an eye is to see itself, it has to look at an eye and at that place in the eye where we happen to find generated the excellence of the eye—and I presume that is sight?

Alc: Quite so.

Soc: Well then, dear Alcibiades, with a soul too, if it is to know itself, it must look at a soul, and especially at that place in a soul where the excellence of a soul is generated, namely wisdom, and at anything else which this happens to resemble.

Alc: So I think, Socrates.

Soc: Can we, then, say that any part of the soul is more divine than that involved in knowing and understanding?

Alc: No.

Soc: This part of the soul, then, resembles God, and anyone who looks at it and knows everything divine, God and understanding, would most know himself.

Alc: Apparently.

Soc: So as mirrors are clearer and purer and brighter than the reflection in the eye, so God turns out to be purer and brighter than the best that is in our soul?

Alc: It looks like it Socrates.

Soc: So it is when looking at God that we would use that finest of reflectors, and among human things when looking at the soul’s excellence, and that is how we would see and know ourselves most.

Richard Sorabji, translator

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  • 2 years later...

.

“Where is the being that knew her as mine did? in what mirror did the rays of this light converge as they did in me? was she not joyfully frightened by her own gloriousness when she first became aware of it in my joy?”

Hyperion – Höderlin (1794)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also: “. . . when the dear being, more faithfully than a mirror, betrayed to me every change in my cheek . . .”(ibid.).

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  • 3 months later...

Note on Children

Across her novels, Rand had upheld joy, enjoyment, and happiness, as ends in themselves, as purposes of life, and as tokens of the fact that life is an end in itself. Nathaniel Branden wrote in “Self-Esteem and Romantic Love” (1968):

In sex, one’s own person becomes a direct, immediate source, vehicle, and embodiment of pleasure. And since pleasure is experienced by man as the good, sex offers him the most intense and immediate form of experiencing himself as a good, as a value. And further: sex offers man the most intense and immediate form of experiencing life as a value.

That same year, Rand wrote, in “Of Living Death,” that sex is an end in itself, not only a means to procreation. Further: “Man is an end in himself. Romantic love—the profound, exalted life-long passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act—is the living testimony to that principle.”

Emerson wrote in “The Transcendentalist” (1842) that “the height, the deity of man is, to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. . . . Everything divine shares the self-existence of Deity.” (Where Emerson had embraced a transmogrified Kantian intuition as engine of individual soul, Rand’s Howard Roark embraces reason. See also, for comparison of Rand and Emerson, Peikoff 1982, 120.)

Dagny and Galt in the tunnel is definitely a divinity-occasion of human existence. I’d like to suggest that the option of having children, like romantic love and making love, is a divinity-occasion of human existence. Where divinity is necessarily tied to human existence, of course.

In “Benevolence versus Altruism” (1962), Nathaniel Branden wrote :

The respect and good will that men of self-esteem feel toward other human beings is profoundly egoistic; they feel, in effect: ‘Other men are of value because they are of the same species as myself.’ In revering living entities, they are revering their own life. This is the psychological base of any emotion of sympathy and any feelings of species solidarity.

I am suspicious, to say the least, of the proposition that all one’s valuation of other life is due to valuation of one’s own life. I don’t want to develop that reservation in this post, only to register it. I want to take as correct everything else in the passage quoted and think a bit on how parent-child relationships might be taken into the frame Branden 1968 proposed for various relationships of self to various living others.

Marsha Enright once remarked “Almost anyone who has had children knows what immense joy they can bring to life” (1998, Remarks*). She expects that our being rigged that way fits well in an ethics of self-interest whose purpose is happiness. I expect there is a better ethics, one not throwing out the virtue of rational self-interest and the virtue of aiming for happiness, but in fuller tune with good human nature.

Branden 1968 discussed the kinds of pleasures we get from the presence of plants, from interactions with domestic pets, from friendships, and from romantic love (which, I should note, continues into the post-sexual stage of lives). I don’t agree with the old view of Rand and Branden that romantic, sexual love is only possible between persons of the opposite sex. But that is readily repaired, without rejecting the rest of what they had to say about relations of romantic love.

Mariska Leunissen 2010 conveys the view of Aristotle:

The capacity for reproduction has as its final cause “the production of another just like itself” (DA 415a28; cf. GA 717a21–22), such that sublunary living beings—which as individuals are perishable—can participate in the eternal and the divine by eternally replicating themselves in form (DA 415a29–b7). . . . Note that individual living beings are not themselves concerned with the preservation of their species; rather it is the individual’s striving for participation in the divine for its own individual good that is the true final cause of reproduction. (63; also Lennox 2001, 137)

There is at least one place in Rand’s literature in which a character finds some goodness by touching a species-goodness. At the close of her short life, Kira thinks of a kind of human life that she had briefly been and known. “Life had been,” her kind of life had been and was possible, she knows, and to this she smiles.

Aristotle was incorrect in thinking the species human to be immortal, and he was incorrect in thinking any living intelligence, such as in a divine mind, could be immortal. It remains that the enjoyment of one’s children likely includes the pleasant thought now and then that something with one’s likeness may continue a while beyond one’s life and that memory of you and what they had known of you and experienced with you continues. A stepchild too can continue some of one’s likeness. I continue some physical and psychic likeness of my natural parents, but continue also some likeness to my stepmother who raised me from age two (with my father). There is a touch of eternity in repetition and a portion of the good in the repetitions of life.

Friendship, romantic love, and parent-child relations contain mirrors and echoes of oneself. That is a genuinely good thing and enjoyment in them. I say goodness and our response to it in those relationships is not only from mirror, echo, and self. New vistas are waiting dawn.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lennox, J. G. 2001. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge.

Leunissen, M. 2010. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge.

Peikoff, L. 1982. The Ominous Parallels. Stein and Day.

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Great thoughts, Stephen.

"... not only from mirror, echo, and self. New vistas are waiting dawn".

(I look with amazement at pictures of my grand-daughter - she lives in Sydney, Australia - and can see my mother as she must have looked and been as a child, serious and strong-willed).

Is there a reaching beyond one's own life? In time, and in collective life? Without doubt. Because we are man and can know what was behind (and the astronomical odds against existing at all) and can presume to look ahead to those who follow us, and value lives we will never know. At this point, this may seem to flirt close to selflessness, but I don't think so. The base of this understanding is one's own life and mind - it is an egoistic discovery, I think, albeit of species-goodness. You can get there from here, but never here from there. ;-]

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  • 8 months later...
2 hours ago, Guyau said:

.

Addition to the compilation:

"He looked into her flaming eyes with eyes that were like mirrors which could reflect a flame no longer" (Rand 1936, 445).

 

 

Can you indicate what the means in objective terms?

The Aspie me is  romance blind. 

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2 hours ago, Guyau said:

.

Addition to the compilation:

"He looked into her flaming eyes with eyes that were like mirrors which could reflect a flame no longer" (Rand 1936, 445).

LOL. That'll do it. It's a wonder he didn't spontaneously combust.

I once talked about psychological visibility with Nathaniel after an exercise and the role the eyes played. Now I wonder how blind people might compensate using other senses.

Psychological visibility is more basic than love for love follows--if it can. It's so powerful you gotta be careful. You might wake up wrapped around the wrong mate, mate.

There's looking and there's really looking.

--Brant

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42 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Can you indicate what the means in objective terms?

The Aspie me is  romance blind. 

It merely means you are looking into, not at, someone. And it's reciprocated, but it's not a staring contest. You can do it with anyone--even things--for the reciprocation is optional. Go look at a rock. Or something. Imagine you are seeing inside the rock or even just the superficial totality of what it is. If you don't break your focus after two or three minutes, you'll start to get perceptual distortions.

--Brant

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2 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

It merely means you are looking into, not at, someone. And it's reciprocated, but it's not a staring contest. You can do it with anyone--even things--for the reciprocation is optional. Go look at a rock. Or something. Imagine you are seeing inside the rock or even just the superficial totality of what it is. If you don't break your focus after two or three minutes, you'll start to get perceptual distortions.

--Brant

That is why I do not stare.  How long I look at something depends on three things:

1. How quickly do I comprehend what I am looking at

2. How complex is the thing I am looking at. 

3. How curious am I about the thing I am looking at.

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7 hours ago, Guyau said:

.

Addition to the compilation:

"He looked into her flaming eyes with eyes that were like mirrors which could reflect a flame no longer" (Rand 1936, 445).

 

 

In this case, the exchange of glance is not about romance, just lack of induction of simple excitement from one close person to another. The man is Leo, and the other person is Kira. She is still in love with him, or at least with what he would have been on his way to be when she met him, had they not lived in that country in that era. Leo has wound down on life. His fire is going out in that social system. Here is the surrounding setting:

"Leo, . . . I know what your'e doing [black market]. I know why your doing it. But listen: it's not too late; they haven't caught you; you still have time. Let's make an effort, a last one: let's save all we can and apply for a foreign passport. Let's run to the point of the earth that's farthest from this damned country."

He looked into her flaming eyes with eyes that were like mirrors which could reflect a flame no longer.

"Why bother?" he asked.

"Leo, I know what you'll say. You have no desire for living left. You don't care anymore. But listen: do it without desire. Even if you don't believe you'll ever care again. Just postpone your final judgment on yourself; postpone it till you get there. When you're free in a human country again---then see if you still want to live."

. . .

"Leo, . . . It can't do that to you. Let it take a hundred and fifty million living creatures. But not you, Leo! Not you, my highest reverence. . . ."

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  • 4 weeks later...

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