“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” says Duncan, justifying his deluded trust in the treacherous thane of Cawdor. Yet the face of the newly made thane, Macbeth, “is as a book where men may read strange matter”, warns his wife. She counsels him to “look like the innocent flow’r / But be the serpent under’t”; which, presumably, is what his seemingly loyal predecessor did. For of course Duncan had (if ineptly) used the very art he claims to be impossible.
The actors playing these parts rely on it, too. Their craft—and the audience’s understanding of it—is on a continuum with the skills of enactment and interpretation that we all unthinkingly employ offstage. “False face must hide what the false heart doth know,” says Macbeth; Claudius can “smile, and smile, and be a villain”. A face may simulate, dissimulate or genuinely (perhaps inadvertently) display emotion, attitudes, personality.
We talk as if the face were a screen that can conceal, or be inscribed with, what lies behind it. The eyes are sometimes called the windows to (or of) the soul, as if they were apertures that the face-owner’s essence looks out of and can be glimpsed through. Implicit in metaphors of the face’s legibility is the inner-outer, mind-body dualism, which theoretically we repudiate and blame René Descartes for initiating. But Descartes was trying to accommodate subjectivity and free will in an otherwise-mechanical universe. According to his would-be scientific account of mental-physical interaction, the soul—united to the entire body—is most active at the pineal gland in the brain. There it galvanises “a very subtle air or wind” (“the animal spirits”) to run through the veins, nerves and muscles so as to enable whatever bodily movements are desired, including facial expression, and (in a reverse process) to convey sensations and feelings back to the soul.
The 17th-century painter and physiognomist Charles Le Brun set out, following Descartes, to specify the particular facial movements involved in particular emotions (the eyebrow is the clearest emotional indicator, he wrote) and, in his famous treatise, used drawings of faces to illustrate the resulting expressions. Unfortunately, as labelled, many of these emotions seem interchangeable. “Fear”, for instance, is a face that has been extracted from Le Brun’s Battle of Arbela painting in which, as part of a body frozen in fleeing, with legs and arms in suspended hectic motion, it does indeed convey fear. By itself, however, in isolation from the body, it might just as well be portraying amazement, anger or hatred.
What exactly is it, in each case, that we are supposed to be expressing or interpreting through certain configurations of the face? And how? In what shared script? The question is further complicated if emotions are specific to cultures—if “liget” is unique to the Ilongot, for instance, and “song” to the Ifaluk, as some anthropologists maintain; though they themselves seem somehow able to detect and paraphrase the emotions and emotional concepts that they declare to be untranslatable. Paul Ekman was initially an adamant holder of this cultural-emotion view, but revised it in the 1960s after photographing a man in Papua New Guinea who had been asked to imagine himself in different situations: meeting a long-lost friend, hearing of a child’s death, receiving an insult. Although Papua was at that time all but cut off from western contact, the expressions captured in the resulting photos were, claimed Ekman, recognisably similar to those a westerner might have worn in equivalent situations; which shows, he said, that emotional expression is a biological code common to the entire human species. But Ekman’s depictions of emotion suffer from the same problems as Le Brun’s. Certainly, the Papuan’s expressions are recognisable—unsurprisingly, since humans share the same basic physiognomy—but not necessarily identifiable as specific emotions.
Until the mid-19th century, it was standardly assumed that emotions were unique to humans, and that the human face was specially designed to express them. “I suspect he never dissected monkey,” was Charles Darwin’s marginal annotation in his copy of a well-respected anatomy book purveying that view. The human is not an independent creation, he argued, and human emotion is on a spectrum with the whole-body responses of primates and other species to the situations that affect them. Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) contains photos and drawings of dogs, cats, swans, hens and babies in various recognisable postures of fear, aggression, deference, pleasure—hair or feathers bristling, tensed or leisurely limbs, backs arched or inflected.
The face may require a body and, more than that, a context, scenario and human interpreter in order to mean anything
In Faces, the cultural historian David Le Breton cites an experiment conducted in the 1910s and 1920s. The filmmaker Lev Kuleshov extracted the facial close-up of a famous Russian actor from a film, then intercut it with three different moving shots: a steaming bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, a woman sprawled on a sofa. Viewers of the three sequences unanimously praised the actor’s consummate skill in portraying (respectively) hunger about to be satisfied, grief for a dead child, or lust. Yet not only is the actor’s face identical in each case, but also, apart from his staring eyes, it is remarkably neutral and immobile. Just as eyes surely do not sparkle, shine, flash or look lustreless and sad, in themselves—they would express little without the mouth and face muscles—so even the face may require a body and, more than that, a context, scenario and human interpreter in order to mean anything.
The English word “face” is derived from the Latin facies (appearance, or the form imposed on something). The French visage, as Le Breton tells us, comes from Latin visus (that which is seen). While “face” in ancient Greek (prosopon) refers to how we appear to others, and also means “mask”. The face is not just seen; it is seen as—as angry, loving, joyful, perplexed, contemptuous, uneasy, distrustful or whatever, and as beautiful, plain, strange, familiar, my lover, my enemy, depending on its context and history.
But it is also seen-to-be-seeing. With the human—as opposed to the non-human—animal, that is not a purely neutral fact. How devastating it is, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, when, thinking I am alone in a public park, I suddenly become aware that someone else is nearby. For now it is no longer the case that I am “nothing”—that what I see is what-is-seen. The gaze of the other “denies my distances from objects and unfolds its own distances”, forces me to be an object in a world that had been all mine. The other is “a sink-hole” into which the world is draining away. Rather than encountering the other-as-object, what I face in his face is his “infinite freedom”, which not only curtails but threatens mine. He can know what I am, can judge me. Things would be quite different if I had spotted a dog or a deer in my vicinity.
“I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me; and to me / High mountains are a feeling,” rhapsodised Byron; but the human parts of nature block me off from it. How, as a world-container, can I accommodate other world-containers in the world I contain? Each of us struggles to be master of the situation, says Sartre, and not to be confined in one another’s perspective. Hell is the other. For him, the problem of other minds is not scepticism as to whether they exist—but agony that they do.
According to the more generous-spirited phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though, neither the other’s perspective on the world nor mine has “definite limits”; each “slips spontaneously into the other’s”. A baby, when an adult playfully pretends to bite her finger, will respond by opening her mouth, although she may never have seen her own reflection in a mirror and hasn’t yet got teeth. Biting in itself has an immediate “intersubjective significance” for the baby, says Merleau-Ponty; adding that this phenomenon can’t be accounted for as reasoning by analogy, for that would presuppose precisely what needs to be explained. David Hume compares us to finely tuned stringed instruments: when we perceive one another’s facial and bodily demeanour, it is not that we dispassionately infer the emotions that cause it but that our own strings twang in response. We feel modified versions of those emotions ourselves. We find ourselves having a pang of sorrow, or smiling.
But how is this marvellous metaphor actually implemented in humans? What physically causes us to be “in some degree… susceptible” to one another’s emotions, in the way Hume describes? What is the human equivalent of taut strings, plucking and soundwaves? “Mirror neurons,” the neuroscientists triumphantly answer. In 1992, it was discovered that, when you see someone perform a certain action (or manifest a certain emotion), the same brain cells fire as when you perform that action (or feel that type of emotion) yourself. But how explanatory are “mirror neurons”? What is supposed to distinguish them from normal neurons, which also serve to perform numerous functions? They look no different, though perhaps are located in a special area of the brain. How does the mirroring mechanism work? Without the “mirror” metaphor, what purports to be an explanation is surely little better than Descartes’s “animal spirits” and galvanising soul.
How can such incommensurable stuffs as the mental and physical interact?
Neurons mirroring and firing–something seems to be left out. However much we may officially disavow it, there is something about human, and even non-human, animals that seems intuitively to confirm mind-body dualism but that simultaneously also contradicts it. For how can such incommensurable stuffs as the mental and physical interact? Merleau-Ponty calls the existence of other people “an outrage to objective thought”—violating the conception of reality as merely “a cluster of physico-mathematical correlations”. It is incomprehensible that subjectivity and intentionality (the “aboutness” of thought) can inhabit, let alone be, molecular cells, he says: “Here Cartesianism is right.” He is dedicated to exploring how “my subjectivity draws its body in its wake”.
Sartre’s insight on the problematical other can be reversed. Emmanuel Levinas argues that the face is the starting-point of ethics, is what summons us to take responsibility for the human whose face it is. “The face, in its nudity and defencelessness, signifies: ‘Do not kill me’,” he declares. And there are, in fact, numerous anecdotes of how soldiers find themselves unable to kill someone whose face they look into and which looks at them.
But, equally, says Levinas, “… one can say that the face is not ‘seen’. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond.” It is this sense of beyondness that inspires us to invoke a mind or soul; and, for practical purposes, that is just as well—it doesn’t really matter if there is such a thing.
