The philosophy of the face

Bernard Rhie

pp. 305-327

in: Garry L. Hagberg (ed), Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Not far into Jean-Paul Sartres' novel, Nausea, we learn that its narrator, Antoine Roquentin, suffers from a curious problem; one that might at first glance seem merely idiosyncratic, but which has in fact become surprisingly common in our late modernity. He has profound difficulty, that is, recognizing or understanding the psychological expressiveness of the human face…even his own. Looking in the bathroom mirror one day, his gaze is transfixed by an enigmatic, bizarre, even inhuman sight—a "grey thing" is how he first describes it—but the "thing" he sees is actually just the puzzling sight of his own apparently meaningless physiognomy: My glance slowly and wearily travels over my forehead, my cheeks: it finds nothing firm, it is stranded. Obviously there are a nose, two eyes and a mouth, but none of it makes sense, there is not even a human expression.… I draw my face closer until it touches the mirror. The eyes, nose and mouth disappear: nothing human is left. Brown wrinkles show on each side of the feverish swelled lips, crevices, mole holes.

Cited authors

Sartre Jean-Paul