intaglio said:
We never actually see ourselves in a Mirror as we are. The person we see is a *mirror twin* with all the slight asymetries in our faces and bodies reversed.
And herein lies the crux: the reflection is simultaneously both 'us' but 'not us'. The mirror offers the chance to switch perspective and see oneself as another sees you: in the third and not first person. To gaze upon it is to be both observer and observed as it performs a transfomation between subject and object, allowing us to step outside of our own subjectivity in a limited fashion. This is important as the process of human living itself requires that the individual must strike an equilibrium between these two opposing positions, constantly striving to 'step outside ourselves' and consider how we are viewed as objects by other beings.
Further, and in part-reference to the earlier mention of 'celtic' and 'ancient' reflective fascination, the mirror's reflection both instantiates and demonstrates the age old distinction between appearance and reality in much the same way as a stick in water appears bent but is 'really' straight: it shows something that ostensibly
is on one level but yet
is not on another.
Importantly, with reference to antiquity, all their talk of mirrors does not translate seemlessly to the modern day, as their creations were far from the mimetically [near-]perfect surfaces we produce today. One would look upon oneself in panels of hammered and polished metals, often in a half light, or even use a reflecton in clear water, which shimmers all too easily. Images were, therefore,
imperfect and
inferior copies of reality that could not exist without their real-world counterparts. No doubt they evoked the first stirrings of a hierarchical view of reality in which all things do not 'exist' on the same level or to the same degree. [
Cf. Aristotle "A thing can be said to be in many ways"]. Clearly such reflections led Plato and the pre-socratics like Pythagoras and Parmenides to question whether humanity and the physical world is really the top-rung of existence, or whether, perhaps there may be a higher, less transient, less contingent reality of which we ourselves are mere reflections.
I think that ever since people were able to see their own reflections,they've been fascinated and woven stories around the possibilities.
