Mirrors, ancient and modern

In her recent book The Mirror of the Self, Shadi Bartsch argues that ancient notions of introspection and self-examination do not employ the image of the mirror in the way we do in post-Cartesian philosophy. In the words of the TLS reviewer, for the ancients "the mirror was the means by which we come to know our public selves: the self in the mirror was not some unique and authentic self, but the self as seen by others, object of the judgment of the community. In this mirror, the viewing self becomes a judging other, and so beings the path of self-improvement."

Plato uses the mirror image in a different way, not to evoke the public self but the self in the eyes of a lover.

For Plato, the mirror "is located in the eyes of the loved one and it reflects not the self as it is seen by others but the divine self that has contact with the truth. The lover sees his own ideals mirrored in the eyes of the beloved, who in turns sees his own beauty mirrored in the eyes of his lover; both are spurred on by this vision of the divine in themselves to engage in the quasi-erotic activity of philosophical dialogue and to ascend to a more direct vision of the divine."

Roman civilization was, in Bartsch's view, dominated by a "scopic paradigm" in which "the elite Roman aspired to be an exemplary model for others and guided himself by the exemplars of the past. Triumphs, funerals, law courts and political life all put Romans on display." Yet, it was a Roman, Seneca, who turned things in a modern direction. His proximity to imperial power left a mark on his thought, as he turned from the outward public world of display toward a more private world: "For Seneca, the public world that had held up to the elite Roman a mirror of his own virtus, or lack of it, becomes a scene of inauthenticity, and the sage must provide his own audience. We are on the way to some recognizably modern attitudes."

In contrast to Plato's lover of wisdom, Seneca's "sage aspires not to ascend to truth through philosophical dialogue, spurring on by the reflected image of an ideal in the eyes of a beloved interlocutor, but to hold himself, by means of constant self-examination and hectoring, to an ideal consonant with the moral absolutes of Stoic philosophy."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 06:57 PM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.