Face the Facts: No God, No Persons

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

In this famous passage, Paul gets to the heart of what it means to be seen and re-cognized, and therefore to have one's being -- one's humanness -- validated and made real. Made real, as in

God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.

And Love is the act that transforms its object from a thing into a person (NGD).

God, love, person, existence, transformation. All are fundamentally related.

In the book I referenced yesterday, Vision and Separation, the author writes that

The "space" of self-consciousness is a secondary development within the field of consciousness. It arises when the subject (the child) becomes aware of the looking of the object. It is the space within which the person looks at himself through the eyes of the other.

I often speak of consciousness as interface, or inter-face. This is to emphasize that both consciousness and self-consciousness, and the symbols that mediate these experiences, only arise between faces, in other words, in an interpersonal setting, within which relations between persons... are formative.

In fact, infant observation studies have been conducted in which mothers maintain a deadpan expression, but otherwise respond normally to their infant in every way. As you might imagine, the infants quickly become visibly distressed. They are literally dis-oriented, since the mother's face is not only the center of their universe, but their primary means of managing their own internal states.

In other words, the child looks to the mother to "know what's going on," both outside and "inside," in the emotional world. Without the mOther, the child is submerged in unintelligible experience, much like a crybullying snowflake college student who lashes out at projected fragments of unmetabolized emotional experience.

Like any other system, the facial recognition system -- in which we feel the need to be recognized by other faces -- can go awry. For example, pathological narcissism essentially revolves around an exaggerated or even bottomless need for human mirroring in order to fill a deficit inside.

The problem here is that the narcissistic mirroring doesn't reach to the level of being, but only touches a superficial "false self" unconsciously constructed by the narcissist. This means that the narcissist is actually in control of the process, and isn't truly "giving" or exposing his true self to the other. That would be too risky.

One can understand why so many narcissists gravitate toward entertainment, politics, and media, since these are an ideal way to submit a false self to a bunch of anonymous faces for validation.

But deep down the narcissist has a well-founded contempt for the loser who would idealize him, of all people, so he has some dim unconscious recognition that he is filling himself with psychic junk food. It tends to become addictive, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need.

I recently read a book called Mimesis and Science, which goes into some of the latest research on the centrality of the Face in human development. One author compares it to a force of attraction, much like gravity, except operating in interior space:

That natural force of cohesion, which alone grants access to the social, to language, to culture, and indeed to humanness itself, is simultaneously mysterious and obvious, hidden in and of itself, but dazzling in its effects -- like gravity and the attraction of corporeal masses in Newtonian space.

If gravity did not exist, life on earth would be impossible. Similarly, if this remarkable force that attracts human beings to one another, that unites them... -- if this force did not exist, there would be no humanity.

Yup. Makes one wonder if the physics of gravity is posterior to the physics of love, a la Dante, who speaks of ultimate reality as the love that moves the sun and other stars.

In the same canto, he describes a barely effable vision of circles, one of which seemed reflected by the second, / as rainbow is by rainbow, and a third, which is like fire breathed equally by those two circles. And then

I searched that strange light: I wished to see / the way in which our human effigy / suited the circle and found a place in it.

Back to Mimesis and Science:

from the very start, psychological actuality is found between individuals.... The self and the other are thus bound together in a fundamental way at the point of origin by a tie that is ontological and existential....

The genesis of the self cannot take place except by the mediation of the other and simultaneously with the other in a process of differentiation that is gradual and reciprocal.

I'm sure this is why For God there are only individuals (DNC); and why, conversely, without God, there could be no individuals.