Reposted from November 2006. I devised lots of my own theories then, or explored odd ones I heard from others. I am less interested now.
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Most human beings didn’t know what their faces looked like. The familiarity with our own looks that we take for granted because of mirrors and photography was unknown for centuries. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have your face unknown to you, and all knowledge of it derived from what others said. We occasionally see our faces reflected in still water, but we bring the knowledge we have from mirror and photo to that experience. Rarer still, and more recent historically, people saw themselves in polished metal. There are many living today who have still never seen their own faces with any clarity.
One school of thought (Alfred Crosby, Alan MacFarlane) dates the beginning of the Renaissance to the last quarter of the 13th C, with the improvements in glass and mirrors in northern Italy (Venetian mirrors were the first widespread mirrors of excellence). As one of the key features of the Renaissance was supposed to be the emergence of the individual, this makes a sort of intuitive sense.
I don’t mean to be reductionist. It is a favorite sport of historians to try and identify the one unnoticed factor that changed a culture, or even the world. Double-entry bookkeeping, Toledo steel, and a dozen other advances have been proposed as the key. I don’t believe in the Renaissance anyway, so I won’t offer an opinion on its putative beginning. (For the record, I believe in a period called the Enlightenment even less than one called the Renaissance.) Major technological changes were always coming along and remaking Europe from the 8th to the 20th Centuries: the moldboard plow, the stirrup, vaccination.
Yet I ask you to consider this one, this improvement in glass and silver backing which allowed people to see who they were – to see of themselves what others had always seen. More than the day before, you as an individual could see you existing without depending on the village to tell you who you were.
9 comments:
Hmmm....never thought of mirrors as Media before, but I guess they kind of are.
To be fair, it could be a just-so theory. How the hell are you going to measure this?
But we don't see ourselves as we are in mirrors. We see a mirror image.
In Zoom meetings, I choose to "mirror my video." It's unsettling to see a non-mirror image of oneself.
It's unsettling to see any image of myself.
Stupid broken glass!
Just out of curiosity, why is it that you don't believe in the Renaissance or Enlightenment? I have no strong opinion about either, except I do enjoy Renaissance fairs. I've never heard of an Enlightenment fair, so that era can't have been as fun.
I first heard of the concept from CS Lewis, that even among the ill-defined historical eras with porous boundaries, there was no clear break between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was a retrospective construction by the Enlightenment trying to show that faith was bad and that they were the highest achievement of mankind. The definition categories of the (supposed) Renaissance were not only present, but strongly present in Medieval times.
Once i heard the idea, I kept my eyes open for whether I thought it held up or not. In about five years, I decided Lewis was right.
Yes, that seems right. These "eras" were often localized, such that maybe the Renaissance wasn't so much of a when as a where and with whom, I think. And I suspect, as you suggest, the Enlightenment even more so.
On mirrors, you might be interested in these monographs:
Renaissance Theories of Vision (2010), Hendrix, John S. (Editor), Carman, Charles H. (Editor)
It has a chapter on mirrors.
The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (2009), Edgerton, Samuel Y. (Author)
I don't know how much interest you have in the history of the social sciences, but I also found this:
The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences (2022), Guenther, Katja (Author)
The blurb reads:
Since the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects―humans, infants, animals, and robots―in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines―psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience―came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity. The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. But because researchers could not rely on language to determine what their nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across disciplines. From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The Mirror and the Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a century.
Very cool stuff. thanks
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