Categories
Philosophy

Masked

If nobody is actually who they appear to be, then neither are we (and even to ourselves) any more than ghostly probabilities or insubstantial shadows, masked and knowable…

Having recently found myself in a social context with a diverse group of people I have known for some time, it dawned on me the extent to which that face and gestural presence or vocal mannerism and body type that I more commonly experience as each of these Others is no more them than am I similarly and simply reducible to or defined by my own superficial bodily presence and activity. Although the way someone looks and overtly acts tends to shape our communications with (and considerations of) them, there also exists an abstract mental space to which we might more concretely attribute personhood or subjective agency. We are all, it seems, hidden from one another in fundamental and irreducible ways.

Questions as to the extent that we are also implicitly hidden from ourselves in fundamentally problematic (if not troubling) ways must remain unanswered, if not unanswerable.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.