Metaphysical Anthropology: The Empirical Structure of Human Life by Julián Marías Frances López-Morillas (tr.)

Author:Julián Marías, Frances López-Morillas (tr.) [Julián Marías, Frances López-Morillas (tr.)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Human Countenance

A very high proportion of the magazine covers which fill newsstands everywhere in the world display a face: a pretty girl, an actor, a sports figure, a politician, a criminal, an intellectual. Our identity documents carry a picture, and that picture presents a countenance. When the newspapers announce an appointment or give a news story, the face of the person in question appears in their pages. The portrait made by the painter is probably only the face, and in any case the rest of the figure can be interchangeable. Moreover, clothing covers and conceals almost all of the body, leaving chiefly the face visible. When it is occasionally concealed—with the flap of a cape, the mantle of the seventeenth-century Spanish “hidden” woman, a veil or a mask—one has the impression that the face is indeed “hidden”; that is, negated, and that it is soon going to be “uncovered”; unlike the body, for which it is exceptional to be undressed.

All this is rather surprising, for the face is only one part of the human body, a small fraction of it. And let us not think of the head as the seat of the brain and consequently of the chief organs, for what appears is not the head but only its forepart, the countenance, and all the rest is either not shown or is overlooked, and functions merely as a frame.

We discover the strange reality of the countenance when we speak of the person. I have emphasized something which is commonly forgotten: that the meaning of the Greek word prósopon is also, and very importantly, the “façade,” the forepart. Now the face interests us for itself—or better still, the combination person–face seen from the latter. The face is a privileged part of the body, not only in the sense of being important—perhaps the most important part—but in the sense of functioning as a representative of the whole body. Therefore, to identify the body, to consider it as a particular body, we need only the face, and the portrait of the face “stands for” the corporeality of which it is only a fragment. We might say that the body contracts or becomes concentrated into a face, which functions as a unique abbreviation of the personal reality as a whole.

In fact, most personal relationships are facial ones. When faces are present, facing each other, we are “together.” We look into each other’s eyes, our mouths are seen and heard by organs which form part of the face, and messages of communication come from them. To the degree that this is relevant for man in our time, even smell affects our facial region; finally, the kiss—the contact of face with face—is the most personal form of bodily contact. Better still, it is primarily personal and secondarily somatic, and its varieties have strict personal significance, entirely out of proportion to their physical differences. Observe that, while it is accepted that the face is not an erogenous zone, or is one only minimally and exceptionally, beauty and attraction are concentrated there, especially in woman.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.