Face and twarz in student's perception

Abstract

In philosophical writings the perception of face changed over the centuries. As early as in the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote that face shows what someone is like. Later many philosophers contrasted face with mask. In different historical periods philosophers propagated either the regime of face or the regime of mask (e.g. Cyrenaics, Cynics, Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, Smith, Hegel, Foucault, Habermas). This dichotomy is still present in the twentieth-century philosophical writings. For Levinas (1961), who made the notion of face so important in modern philosophy, descriptions of contacts with face are the basis for the most important philosophical analyses, and are concerned with the questions of self-expression in speech, the relation between speech and thought, etc. In philosophy face is the subjective self, the self-creation the need of which creates it. Face is contrasted with mask, which is the reflected self, a social role the man creates (in theatrical sense) and wants to be identified with.(fragment tekstu)