Thinking is amateur
“The human face is a subjectivity.”
That is another way of saying that it isn’t terribly real, is not very significant, the human face, except when people look at themselves a certain way - that is, inhabit this subjectivity. But in what dimension can we be said to be present to or at home in the world except in the understanding that the world has this human expression? (How can it not have it?)
The zero begins numbers and the face begins the world.
Imagine the painted scene of a Virgin and Child and Saints, changed, - she and the child, the main figures, have been replaced by an image of the Cern particle accelerator.
A 14th C. altarpiece Virgin and Child with Saints: shows each saint in profile; each bearing the same expression, alert slightly narrowed eyes (revealed by the one eye visible) in a face sombre, reverent, pure, serene. The painting’s meaning is shown clear in each expression. (Collectively in mood embodied and betokened mysterious, knowing, transcendent.)
So an image of human possibility as knowledge.
I look at her, at her face that is never the same; but circumstantial, it looks different each time. So, “I both do and don’t know her when I look at her.” I look for its own sake, as in: I like her for herself - … Since it is not instrumentally understood in this aspect; it is not that it doesn’t serve me; for the purely instrumentally known stands as a fixed finite quantity. Like the woodblock on which rests the axe.
Hello … “Hello”
So - you exist. I acknowledge you.
… Or is the expression (in the terms intended) actually a kind of inadvertant lie? A kind of fraud? For how do I mean it when I say it, if actually it can’t be meant? If sharing the same world, in being companion to another in some sort, can be questioned and even disposed of by philosophy?
Do other people even exist? Can’t I ask: “Do I really exist?!”
We ask the question ”Do I know others?” The subjective: “I seem to know others” is set against the objective: “I do not actually know others.” This is our solution …
But … then again what if the truth is indicated by our doubts - even if the image is somewhat skewed - if this is the true case, so that the real enquiry is to examine the unknown?
We say: If the only thing I know is ‘me’ how do I know others?
Ask this question: If the betrayal in another’s face is not there except that I see it, how is my anger to be overcome?
I imagine that I know they are angry, but they are not! Suppose words not to be enough here to satisfy me.
Good manners form a behavioural quarantine. Stop us from being ‘infected’ by each other behaviourally. Perhaps are the primary means indeed. If I stay clear of the mud, if I am able to observe good manners, then I am immunised against an ensnaring instrumental clarity.
Where do I assemble my life?
Where is the shelter of ‘me’?
In my face. If you want to look at who I am - .
For human beings here is the centre of life. The place of life is the mask, dividing the known from the unknown.
Like a cloud that suddenly turns transparent, perhaps.
Life is paradoxical: the cloud of unknowing illuminates a transparency in the shape of the human face.
As to what someone is it is impossible to say. One can only look them in the face. Experience finds a coherence in the human physiognomy. Call it the home of human experience. Say that here in the human face is the house of knowledge. Here is where all the battles are fought, finally.
This is where ‘God’ sits; this is the inhabitation of ‘Nature’.
***
The human face is the face of the unknown.
To look at someone’s face is to glance at the truth. Only thus is there an ”I” or a being alive (so to speak).
… For what is the “I”; what is the thing that lives, is aware, what is the thing that in order to be, intends …?
