The Soul of the World by Scruton Roger

Author:Scruton, Roger [Scruton, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Masking the Self

It is, I hope, not too fanciful to extend this phenomenology of the face a little further, and to see the face as a symbol of the individual and a display of his individuality. People are individual animals; but they are also individual persons, and as I argued in chapter 2, there is a puzzle as to how they can be both. On one tradition—that associated with Locke—the identity of the person through time is established by the continuity of the “I,” and not by reference to the constancy of the body. Although I don’t accept this, I do accept that being a person has something to do with the ability to remember the past and intend the future, while holding oneself accountable for both. And this connection between personality and the first-person case has in turn something to do with our sense that human beings are individuals of a special kind and in a special sense that distinguishes them from other spatiotemporal particulars. The knowledge that I have of my own individuality, which derives from my direct and criterionless awareness of the unity that binds my mental states, gives substance to the view that I am maintained in being as an individual, through all conceivable bodily change. My Istigkeit or haecceitas is exemplified in me, as something that I cannot lose. It is prior to all my states and properties and reducible to none of them. In this I am godlike too. And it is this inner awareness of absolute individuality that is translated into the face and there made flesh. The eyes that look at me are your eyes, and also you: the mouth that speaks and cheeks that blush are you.

The sense of the face as irradiated by the person and infused with his self-identity underlies the power of masks in the theater. In the classical theater of Greece, as in that of Japan, the mask was regarded not only as essential to the heightened tension of the drama, but also as the best way to guarantee that the emotions expressed by the words are reflected in the face. It is the spectator, gripped by the words, who sees their meaning shining in the mask. The impediment of human flesh has been removed, and the mask appears to change with every fluctuation of the character’s emotions, to become the outward sign of inner feeling, precisely because the expression on the mask originates not so much in the one who wears it as in the one who beholds it. To make a mask that can be seen in this way requires skills acquired over a lifetime—perhaps more than a lifetime, the mask-makers of the Noh theater of Japan handing on their art over many generations, and the best of the masks being retained in the private collections of patrons and performers, to be brought out only on occasions of the greatest solemnity.

The mask was a symbol of Dionysus, the god at whose festival the tragedies were performed.

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.