I just joined this group and have no experience reading philosophy.
It occurs to me the evidence for Mumford's "mirror" thesis could be found in literary and art history. How people wrote about or portrayed themselves might be correlated to the development and spread of mirrors. For example, Shakespeare's sonnet 3 uses three images of glass (mirrors and windows) in a poem about how we're going to die and only live through our children (more or less). Is this evidence of introspection? I'm not sure. People have been thinking about dying for a long time.
I also googled around and found a couple of books that could shed light on this: "The Mutable Glass" by Herbert Grabes and "The Self Portrait: A Cultural History" by James Hall.
The description of Grabes' book reads in part:
"This 1982 book was the first major and comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery to be found in medieval book-titles and English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century... Professor Grabes not only traces the shifting historical usages of the mirror (as the metaphor's 'vehicle') but also studies the metaphor's structural function in individual works... by investigating the function of a metaphor central to literature over a long period of time, he reveals the interplay between cultural history, the changing attitude towards life and the world, and literary imagination."
The introduction to "The Self Portrait" says that "Conventional wisdom has it that... good quality crystal glass mirrors... [led to] the irresistible rise of self-portraiture." But it later discounts that idea, writing "[d]evelopments in mirror technology are largely irrelevant, and this 'mirror myth' has clouded discussions of [self-portraits]."
Anyway, that's all I got: some vague ideas and possible sources for further study, if you're inclined. Don't expect any better!
I started investigating this this morning. This is still preliminary. But I found a few things.
First, Hall’s The Self Portrait directly contradicts Mumford’s claims, because many of the artists producing self-portraits were not using mirrors of Venetian glass; they relied on less-accurate, more ancient mirrors.
Second, he says that Jean Jacques Rousseau is evidence of his thesis because Rousseau painted portraits and was an introspectionist. But I looked, and I don’t think Rousseau ever painted portraits. I could be missing something.
Yeah, my instinct was immediately to recognize that in terms of proving the mirror thesis, there HAS to be anthropologists and sociologists who've done work on this too alongside historians.
And it turns out, lots of people have thought about this and expanded it further:
The above Big Think article quotes at least several thinkers who've written entire books on the impact of the mirror on human history and how it influenced our sense of ourselves - historian Sabine Melchior-Bonnet's The Mirror: A History, philosopher Mark Pendergrast's Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair With Reflection, psychologist Tara Wells's Mirror Meditation - in additional to quoting an evolutionary anthropologist they talked to. I have to imagine that those books and resources probably link further out to studies of historical documents or different people groups around the world or other things that confirm or refute Mumford's ideas. The way to support it would likely be to just go back and examine historical diaries or writings to note shifts in self-conception or to track differences in approaches to the self noted in places where mirrors were introduced earlier or later in a more impactful way.
I also think that some of that research probably overlaps with research done on one of my favourite weird historical concepts: the glass delusion. The glass delusion was a mental illness that emerged in the middle ages and into the early modern period in which people became convinced that they were either some part of them was made of glass or that they had a glass object inside of them that would shatter easily if jostled. Famously, Princess Alexandria of Bavaria believed that she had a full-sized glass piano inside of her. Descartes and Locke even bring it up in their writings. Much like the way in which you couldn't have The Truman Show delusion without the presence in the world of cameras and reality television appearing first, it is generally believed by historians and psychologists that the glass delusion evolved out of the novelty of glass at that time and interacted in some way with the shifts in self-conception of mirrors but also the fragility it represented as a metaphor or the way mirrors and glass objects could so easily shatter and seem to fragment or trap people within them. It's a very interesting historical rabbit hole to go down.
Re: evidence for increased introspection / focus on the self: I recently re-read Anna Kornbluh's book IMMEDIACY, and there she tracks the popularity of first-person novels as evidence for a related concern. As a parallel move I'd offer tracking the proliferation of the first-person (or the sheer frequency of the pronoun "I") in published works (poems especially) alongside Mumford's glance at portraiture and a brief mention of romantic poetry; there's collectable data there that could help prove the point a little bit, I think.
Second, you highlight the effect the greenhouse had on a grower's relationship to the seasons -- I've been struck by how profoundly technology and machinery has altered our relationship to time. First the clock created a new definition of time itself, essentially, but from there we as a species have had so many touch-points with time made less organic and more machine-like: the greenhouse, the mine (forgive me, I'm nearly done with next week's chapter, so, ya know, spoilers), even "the rhythm of movement disappeared; within the factory the quick staccato of the machine displaced the organic rhythms, measured to song, that characterized the old workshop."
I'm not sure if he'll dive into it, but I'd be curious about how all of this invention directly changed the sleep habits of different cultures.
Regarding Jared's mirror question, I'm reminded that the story of Narcissus was from ancient Rome, possibly even Greece. Narcissus used a pond. So, maybe the invention of mirrors afforded the persistence, but definitely not the incipience, of self-image. That's still a shift though. Self-image goes from a murky occasion to a clear and practical everyday consideration.
In Bernard Cornwell's version of the Arthurian legend, Lancelot is a narcissist, and one of the signs is that he collects polished metal mirrors so he can look at himself, though the image is far less clear than a mirror made of polished glass. It's good, quick characterization.
What it made me think of: we can see ourselves instantly due to our phone cameras. The selfie as the new mirror.
Hi Jared, I'm very interested in the subject of this and last week's post, and familiar with a good bit of widely relevant background. Just thought to come and recommend a brilliant short story to you, "the Truth of fact, the truth of feeling," by Ted Chaing. One subplot is set during a shift from tribal oral to written culture, and another is set during a shift from current to on-line culture (interestingly relevant to your recent discussion of "profilicity.")
I second this! I mentioned Ted Chiang the other day. Jared, you need to rectify not having read his work - the stuff is brilliant and easily relatable to the concepts discussed in book club. Both Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others have must-reads in them.
I second this! I mentioned Ted Chiang the other day. Jared, you need to rectify not having read his work - the stuff is brilliant and easily relatable to the concepts discussed in book club. Both Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others have must-reads in them.
So regarding Mumford as a historian and the shift in methodology that the field of history has undergone since his time…
My understanding of it from some quite interesting conversations with my favourite history professor who specialized in intellectual history and had been around it teaching and attending conferences for decades is that the field of history was - like so many other academic fields - rattled enormously by the emergence of post-modernism. He told me that things became quite embattled even during the 70’s - 90’s as traditional historians found themselves under attack and feeling defensive not only against the implications of arguments by people like Richard Rorty but also by feminist, post-colonial and other groups of scholars who challenged the very foundations upon which their authority and knowledge rested. Everyone has noticed that Mumford is not particularly interested in scholarly sourcing to the degree we might expect today in an academic work despite making some pretty bold statements. And this was not unusual at the time - every historian approached what they did with the idea of having to tie their point together in a grand sweeping narrative of cause and effect in the model of early influences like Edward Gibbons. This model got relentlessly attacked by mid-century thinkers who accused historians of essentially having too many biases they used to fill in gaps and being too uncritical of their own declarations or conclusions and the way they reflected political and sociological contexts they emerged from. After some time fighting against the most extremist relativist positions that argued historians didn’t, in fact, have any authority at all from which to state they could know much about history with certainty, in the end where things ended up was somewhere in the middle. Historians began to respect and integrate the post-modern and other positions that challenged them and start to become more self-reflexive and therefore became more aware of the political or sociological nature of their work and how it was used by the public, and they then began to just set different standards of responsible history that included obtaining more viewpoints, positioning themselves within their work and acknowledging their own subjectivities, and being careful not to overconfidently assert their assumptions. Along with “Great Man” histories, grand narratives that tie together huge historical time periods and attribute an enormous level of momentum to them in ways that oversimplify cause and effect also became seen as outmoded. My impression is that more historians now tend to work within narrower fields of interest and work more closely with anthropologists and scientists and other social science fields to validate their ideas. And historiography is also often a mandatory part of university history programs from what I experienced in school. You will often see them hyperfixate on one element of causation or one effect that poses a question, but almost never make the same kinds of conclusions about either on a larger scale that they used to.
The above is why these days, most of the best-known “history” books that end up on the bestseller list and are cited by politicians and technologists and assorted other elites as being the greatest ever? Your Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari or Steven Pinker books that claim to provide that grand progressive historical narrative? Are typically written in fact by people with backgrounds in psychology or anthropology or other fields besides history, and are the ones on many actual academic historians list of books they wish they could erase from existence. If you ever want to hear a historian go on a rant, bring one of them up. 🤣
One thing though that I will say about Mumford: as much as he is working within the grand narrative framing of stages of history and of progressive history? He is also actually anticipating in this work a lot of the later post-modern arguments in ways that we don’t quite view now as being as radical as they likely were. He throws shade at Spengler and he praises Marx as a historian, both of which weren’t the standard opinion at the time he was writing the way they are today. He’s critical of Western ideas of development that exclude other areas of the world from their consideration. He asserts throughout that humans had agency about their choices at various points in the narrative he sets up - he’s not assuming that technology itself or the forces of history are set by things outside of human control and direction. His belief in the progressive narrative and the stages, however, is what I suspect is most going to then lead him to the conclusion he stated upfront that we already well know is incorrect - that humans are poised to finally break the cycle of technological development rooted in exploitation and wealth inequality that he’s identifying. He’s still being selective in his evidence in ways that create massive blind spots. Like Marx, he is getting at something in elements of the causation of things and the ideas he’s exploring around the evolution of interconnected systems. But as Marx shows us, history is actually a terrible vantage point from which to try and predict the future - historians are often really bad at it - which is part of what historians learned and why they try not to really do it anymore.
I found the bit where Mumford is talking about glass to be interesting. Much of the argument in this chapter seems rather simple, but his discussion on the role of glass was something that I found convincing, and after hearing it , rather obvious.
Regarding his discussion on glass and mirrors - Zizek expands on this in his book on the parallax gap. Albeit, in a very Zizekian way. So, if you dare to go check it out, go with God and good humor.
I think Mumford's insight that a new technology doesn't get adopted out of nowhere, there needs to be an economic and socio-political foundation for its adoption. Take the mechanical clock as a case. It was not that suddenly our lives became mechanically rhythmic, Mumford points out, but it was already so, at least in the monasteries. Now, I'm not familiar with European history to that extent to verify this, but if it's true, then we need to change how we criticise a lot of present-day innovations. We have to approach them from multiple angles; this would imply that there is no solution but many solutions that might need to be applied in various proportions at different times by different people.
There it is explained that one of the reasons for the industrial revolution in England was the Glorious Revolution. I am not sure if this is 100% true, and I was confused that Mumford never even mentions it.
I would be curious to know what the modern consensus among historians is, in case we have one here in the group.
I just joined this group and have no experience reading philosophy.
It occurs to me the evidence for Mumford's "mirror" thesis could be found in literary and art history. How people wrote about or portrayed themselves might be correlated to the development and spread of mirrors. For example, Shakespeare's sonnet 3 uses three images of glass (mirrors and windows) in a poem about how we're going to die and only live through our children (more or less). Is this evidence of introspection? I'm not sure. People have been thinking about dying for a long time.
I also googled around and found a couple of books that could shed light on this: "The Mutable Glass" by Herbert Grabes and "The Self Portrait: A Cultural History" by James Hall.
The description of Grabes' book reads in part:
"This 1982 book was the first major and comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery to be found in medieval book-titles and English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century... Professor Grabes not only traces the shifting historical usages of the mirror (as the metaphor's 'vehicle') but also studies the metaphor's structural function in individual works... by investigating the function of a metaphor central to literature over a long period of time, he reveals the interplay between cultural history, the changing attitude towards life and the world, and literary imagination."
The introduction to "The Self Portrait" says that "Conventional wisdom has it that... good quality crystal glass mirrors... [led to] the irresistible rise of self-portraiture." But it later discounts that idea, writing "[d]evelopments in mirror technology are largely irrelevant, and this 'mirror myth' has clouded discussions of [self-portraits]."
Anyway, that's all I got: some vague ideas and possible sources for further study, if you're inclined. Don't expect any better!
Despite your disclaimers, this was very helpful. I need to check out the Grabes and Hall, definitely.
I started investigating this this morning. This is still preliminary. But I found a few things.
First, Hall’s The Self Portrait directly contradicts Mumford’s claims, because many of the artists producing self-portraits were not using mirrors of Venetian glass; they relied on less-accurate, more ancient mirrors.
Second, he says that Jean Jacques Rousseau is evidence of his thesis because Rousseau painted portraits and was an introspectionist. But I looked, and I don’t think Rousseau ever painted portraits. I could be missing something.
Yeah, my instinct was immediately to recognize that in terms of proving the mirror thesis, there HAS to be anthropologists and sociologists who've done work on this too alongside historians.
And it turns out, lots of people have thought about this and expanded it further:
https://bigthink.com/the-past/mirrors-invention-sense-self/
The above Big Think article quotes at least several thinkers who've written entire books on the impact of the mirror on human history and how it influenced our sense of ourselves - historian Sabine Melchior-Bonnet's The Mirror: A History, philosopher Mark Pendergrast's Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair With Reflection, psychologist Tara Wells's Mirror Meditation - in additional to quoting an evolutionary anthropologist they talked to. I have to imagine that those books and resources probably link further out to studies of historical documents or different people groups around the world or other things that confirm or refute Mumford's ideas. The way to support it would likely be to just go back and examine historical diaries or writings to note shifts in self-conception or to track differences in approaches to the self noted in places where mirrors were introduced earlier or later in a more impactful way.
I also think that some of that research probably overlaps with research done on one of my favourite weird historical concepts: the glass delusion. The glass delusion was a mental illness that emerged in the middle ages and into the early modern period in which people became convinced that they were either some part of them was made of glass or that they had a glass object inside of them that would shatter easily if jostled. Famously, Princess Alexandria of Bavaria believed that she had a full-sized glass piano inside of her. Descartes and Locke even bring it up in their writings. Much like the way in which you couldn't have The Truman Show delusion without the presence in the world of cameras and reality television appearing first, it is generally believed by historians and psychologists that the glass delusion evolved out of the novelty of glass at that time and interacted in some way with the shifts in self-conception of mirrors but also the fragility it represented as a metaphor or the way mirrors and glass objects could so easily shatter and seem to fragment or trap people within them. It's a very interesting historical rabbit hole to go down.
Re: evidence for increased introspection / focus on the self: I recently re-read Anna Kornbluh's book IMMEDIACY, and there she tracks the popularity of first-person novels as evidence for a related concern. As a parallel move I'd offer tracking the proliferation of the first-person (or the sheer frequency of the pronoun "I") in published works (poems especially) alongside Mumford's glance at portraiture and a brief mention of romantic poetry; there's collectable data there that could help prove the point a little bit, I think.
Second, you highlight the effect the greenhouse had on a grower's relationship to the seasons -- I've been struck by how profoundly technology and machinery has altered our relationship to time. First the clock created a new definition of time itself, essentially, but from there we as a species have had so many touch-points with time made less organic and more machine-like: the greenhouse, the mine (forgive me, I'm nearly done with next week's chapter, so, ya know, spoilers), even "the rhythm of movement disappeared; within the factory the quick staccato of the machine displaced the organic rhythms, measured to song, that characterized the old workshop."
I'm not sure if he'll dive into it, but I'd be curious about how all of this invention directly changed the sleep habits of different cultures.
This is a good connection with Kornbluh—I'll need to check this out. Thanks for the lead.
Regarding Jared's mirror question, I'm reminded that the story of Narcissus was from ancient Rome, possibly even Greece. Narcissus used a pond. So, maybe the invention of mirrors afforded the persistence, but definitely not the incipience, of self-image. That's still a shift though. Self-image goes from a murky occasion to a clear and practical everyday consideration.
In Bernard Cornwell's version of the Arthurian legend, Lancelot is a narcissist, and one of the signs is that he collects polished metal mirrors so he can look at himself, though the image is far less clear than a mirror made of polished glass. It's good, quick characterization.
What it made me think of: we can see ourselves instantly due to our phone cameras. The selfie as the new mirror.
Hi Jared, I'm very interested in the subject of this and last week's post, and familiar with a good bit of widely relevant background. Just thought to come and recommend a brilliant short story to you, "the Truth of fact, the truth of feeling," by Ted Chaing. One subplot is set during a shift from tribal oral to written culture, and another is set during a shift from current to on-line culture (interestingly relevant to your recent discussion of "profilicity.")
Yes, I need to read Chiang. He's been on my list forever, and it's about time I made room for him on my nightstand.
I second this! I mentioned Ted Chiang the other day. Jared, you need to rectify not having read his work - the stuff is brilliant and easily relatable to the concepts discussed in book club. Both Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others have must-reads in them.
I second this! I mentioned Ted Chiang the other day. Jared, you need to rectify not having read his work - the stuff is brilliant and easily relatable to the concepts discussed in book club. Both Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others have must-reads in them.
So regarding Mumford as a historian and the shift in methodology that the field of history has undergone since his time…
My understanding of it from some quite interesting conversations with my favourite history professor who specialized in intellectual history and had been around it teaching and attending conferences for decades is that the field of history was - like so many other academic fields - rattled enormously by the emergence of post-modernism. He told me that things became quite embattled even during the 70’s - 90’s as traditional historians found themselves under attack and feeling defensive not only against the implications of arguments by people like Richard Rorty but also by feminist, post-colonial and other groups of scholars who challenged the very foundations upon which their authority and knowledge rested. Everyone has noticed that Mumford is not particularly interested in scholarly sourcing to the degree we might expect today in an academic work despite making some pretty bold statements. And this was not unusual at the time - every historian approached what they did with the idea of having to tie their point together in a grand sweeping narrative of cause and effect in the model of early influences like Edward Gibbons. This model got relentlessly attacked by mid-century thinkers who accused historians of essentially having too many biases they used to fill in gaps and being too uncritical of their own declarations or conclusions and the way they reflected political and sociological contexts they emerged from. After some time fighting against the most extremist relativist positions that argued historians didn’t, in fact, have any authority at all from which to state they could know much about history with certainty, in the end where things ended up was somewhere in the middle. Historians began to respect and integrate the post-modern and other positions that challenged them and start to become more self-reflexive and therefore became more aware of the political or sociological nature of their work and how it was used by the public, and they then began to just set different standards of responsible history that included obtaining more viewpoints, positioning themselves within their work and acknowledging their own subjectivities, and being careful not to overconfidently assert their assumptions. Along with “Great Man” histories, grand narratives that tie together huge historical time periods and attribute an enormous level of momentum to them in ways that oversimplify cause and effect also became seen as outmoded. My impression is that more historians now tend to work within narrower fields of interest and work more closely with anthropologists and scientists and other social science fields to validate their ideas. And historiography is also often a mandatory part of university history programs from what I experienced in school. You will often see them hyperfixate on one element of causation or one effect that poses a question, but almost never make the same kinds of conclusions about either on a larger scale that they used to.
The above is why these days, most of the best-known “history” books that end up on the bestseller list and are cited by politicians and technologists and assorted other elites as being the greatest ever? Your Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari or Steven Pinker books that claim to provide that grand progressive historical narrative? Are typically written in fact by people with backgrounds in psychology or anthropology or other fields besides history, and are the ones on many actual academic historians list of books they wish they could erase from existence. If you ever want to hear a historian go on a rant, bring one of them up. 🤣
One thing though that I will say about Mumford: as much as he is working within the grand narrative framing of stages of history and of progressive history? He is also actually anticipating in this work a lot of the later post-modern arguments in ways that we don’t quite view now as being as radical as they likely were. He throws shade at Spengler and he praises Marx as a historian, both of which weren’t the standard opinion at the time he was writing the way they are today. He’s critical of Western ideas of development that exclude other areas of the world from their consideration. He asserts throughout that humans had agency about their choices at various points in the narrative he sets up - he’s not assuming that technology itself or the forces of history are set by things outside of human control and direction. His belief in the progressive narrative and the stages, however, is what I suspect is most going to then lead him to the conclusion he stated upfront that we already well know is incorrect - that humans are poised to finally break the cycle of technological development rooted in exploitation and wealth inequality that he’s identifying. He’s still being selective in his evidence in ways that create massive blind spots. Like Marx, he is getting at something in elements of the causation of things and the ideas he’s exploring around the evolution of interconnected systems. But as Marx shows us, history is actually a terrible vantage point from which to try and predict the future - historians are often really bad at it - which is part of what historians learned and why they try not to really do it anymore.
I found the bit where Mumford is talking about glass to be interesting. Much of the argument in this chapter seems rather simple, but his discussion on the role of glass was something that I found convincing, and after hearing it , rather obvious.
Regarding his discussion on glass and mirrors - Zizek expands on this in his book on the parallax gap. Albeit, in a very Zizekian way. So, if you dare to go check it out, go with God and good humor.
I think Mumford's insight that a new technology doesn't get adopted out of nowhere, there needs to be an economic and socio-political foundation for its adoption. Take the mechanical clock as a case. It was not that suddenly our lives became mechanically rhythmic, Mumford points out, but it was already so, at least in the monasteries. Now, I'm not familiar with European history to that extent to verify this, but if it's true, then we need to change how we criticise a lot of present-day innovations. We have to approach them from multiple angles; this would imply that there is no solution but many solutions that might need to be applied in various proportions at different times by different people.
I landed on this substack out of pure luck:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-202593701
There it is explained that one of the reasons for the industrial revolution in England was the Glorious Revolution. I am not sure if this is 100% true, and I was confused that Mumford never even mentions it.
I would be curious to know what the modern consensus among historians is, in case we have one here in the group.