Face-coverings were widely mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the assumption that they limit the spread of respiratory viruses and are therefore likely to save lives. I argue that by en-masking the face in a way that is phenomenally inconsistent with or degraded from what we are innately programmed to detect as human likeness, we are degrading the social quality of our relations. Drawing on my previously published proof that Self is socially reflexive (mutually mirrored) rather than monadic in its constitution, I conclude that any widespread en-masking is also deleterious to humanity and therefore unethical.
Modern political systems, in particular democracy and socialism, are based on the premise that all humans within the systemic jurisdiction are qualitatively the same, value the same fundamental things and have the same fundamental needs. The problem with this assumption is that individuals can disagree about what values and needs are fundamental. While we are all limited by qualitatively the same physical needs, we generally do not derive meaning from the satisfaction of those needs. Unlike the animal world, the needs and values that sustain society are always different from the existential minimum. For example, an individual who values safety above all else (apart from the bare existential needs) may forgo all creative freedom for the sake of safety, but the order of preferences may be different for another individual, who is willing to forgo all guarantees of safety for the sake of creative freedom. Disagreements about preferences and values are inescapable even in groups centred on the same ideology. We must therefore understand society as something non-homogenous in the socially-relevant qualities. The only qualitatively universal property is the capacity for rational thought, for making sense and communicating this sense to others, which in turn generates common meaning. This and this alone is the basis of society, the glue that holds us together. Any political system or government that limits the freedom to communicate and therefore the capacity to generate meaning, is on the path of self-destruction.
In addition to verbal and written communication, facial expression is the most intuitive mode of meaning-exchange. It allows for mutual recognition as sensible beings and making sense of one another as one-who-is-alike, which is in turn the phenomenological foundation of moral equivalence, and by implication of moral conscience. Without this equivalence all the higher, more abstract modes of communication lose their sense, their justification, because there is no one ‘like-me’ left to talk to. The kind of silencing entailed by defacement, which amounts to censorship of facial expression, is arguably the most inhuman and destructive, universally harmful even if practiced only in some social settings. This last point requires elaboration.
One of the most replicated protocols in developmental psychology, the Still Face Experiment designed by Edward Tronick, examines the function of reciprocal face-to-face relations in child development (for a historical overview see Adamson & Frick 2003). The protocol became a benchmark for measurements of infant cognition and behaviour; infants find the absence of responsive facial expression more disturbing than other violations of normal social interactions. An infant, when faced with an expressionless mother, "makes repeated attempts to get the interaction into its usual reciprocal pattern. When these attempts fail, the infant withdraws [and] orients his face and body away from his mother with a withdrawn, hopeless facial expression." (Tronick, et al. 1975) Reciprocal face-to-face interaction with the primary care-giver affects brain development, promoting neural sensitivity to social cues that is "critical for understanding others' internal states, and thus for regulating social relationships" and "serving as a basis for the development of more advanced socio-cognitive skills". (Rayson, et al. 2017) In adulthood, our emotional states are determined more strongly by the facial expressions of others than by our own predisposition (Moore, Gorodnitsky and Pineda 2011), suggesting that social engagement is driven by reflexive face processing.
Phenomenologically, our sense of Self is grounded in the reflexivity (mutual mirroring) of face-to-face relations. As I have shown elsewhere, we can identify as I, as Self, only in terms of what we identify with, and we can rationally identify with only in terms of what we perceive to be a-like (Kowalik 2020). We are the likeness of Man, the universal face in which we recognise our humanity as the humanity of others, and vice versa. The ancient concept of Anthropos, 'one who is alike', 'of human likeness', is not merely a historical artefact but a profound, metaphysical insight. Unless I can compare my innate human likeness to the likeness of another there is literally nothing like being me, because being me entails awareness that I am like someone else. The mask conceals our innate human-likeness from one another, and thus progressively, phenomenologically, disrupts the recognition of our common humanity. By erasing or enmasking the face in our social relations we are therefore degrading the social quality of those relations. Critically, relating face to face is a condition of ethical intuition: "The access to the face is lived in the ethical mode. The face, all by itself, has a meaning." (Levinas 1999, 104)
“Directness of the face-to-face, a ‘between us’, already conversation, already dialogue and hence distance and quite the opposite of the contact in which coincidence and identification occur. But this is precisely the distance of proximity, the marvel of the social relation. In that relation, the difference between the I and the other remains. But it is maintained as the denial, in proximity which is also difference, of its own negation, as non-in-difference toward one another. Like the non-indifference between close friends or relatives. Being concerned by the alterity of the other: fraternity.” (Levinas 1999, 93-94)
Your face is that which speaks to me, that sees me, that hears me; all these modes of reflexive communication occur simultaneously, in one embodiment, phenomenally unified and individualised as another Self. Conversely, my face is that which speaks of others, and sees others seeing me. If these signals were disjointed, emanated without a face, there would be no phenomenological unity to these distinct modes of information, no personhood. Ultimately, the face itself communicates, non-verbally, visually; it conveys those subtleties of expression that make us human vis-a-vis one another, barely perceptible but nevertheless crucially, innately meaningful. This reflexive recognition is perhaps detected subconsciously, as an instantaneous bond that we may honour (and thus be true to kind) or violate (and thus negate our kind and, implicitly, our own agency).
Imagine a world without faces; inhabitants of such a world could not possibly develop language, meaning or purpose, because they would lack phenomenal individuality - a discernible, unified likeness-to-kind. If their sight and language were manifested via some other unified source then That source would be the totalising feature of their personhood, their Face. In essence, the face is just an apprehension of conscious agency, the phenomenal realisation of personhood, so it is almost tautologically true that without a face there is no personhood, no Self, therefore no social relations. This is admittedly an extreme, purely hypothetical scenario; even at the height of Covid hysteria not everyone wore a mask, and certainly not everywhere, some face to face relations were maintained, or perhaps remembered, so we must more carefully examine the source of harm associated with only temporary human defacement?
To be clear, it is not just the 'lack' of face to face interaction that is deleterious to moral consciousness, but the phenomenological counterfeiting of faces; the act of negation "of an identity that is already performatively constituted via reflexive-relating of an individual with other individuals, already actualised by others 'for me' as someone who shares the evolved capacities, commitments or other properties of my identity-grounding kind." (Kowalik 2020) Face-masks function as a proxy for personhood that is not true to kind. By relating to others in a way that is phenomenally inconsistent with or degraded from what we are innately programmed to detect as human likeness, we are distorting and degrading our own, innate sense of self, our humanity, which is not individually self-sufficient but socially reflexive. Since our mutual recognition as sensible beings making sense of one another as one-who-is-alike, as a being true to the same moral kind, is the phenomenological foundation of moral conscience, then any disruption to this mode of moral communication can only demoralise, distort and displace our moral conscience. By defacing others, we dehumanise ourselves; by defacing ourselves, we dehumanise others, and therefore also ourselves.
The crucial ethical question is whether it is permissible to dehumanise ourselves and others to some degree for fear of death. If without face-to-face relations we are not human, and given that humanity is the basis of all our value commitments, then without it nothing has value or value-oriented purpose. Under these conditions the alleged utilitarian purpose of reducing the risk of spreading germs is no longer rational. Another way, by dehumanising ourselves we negate precisely that which we are aiming to protect, our Human existence, therefore contradiction. Self-negating reasons cannot be normative, therefore cannot be ethical.
References:
Adamson, L., and J. Frick. “The Still Face: A History of a Shared Experimental Paradigm.” Infancy, 2003.
Kowalik, Michael. “Ontological-Transcendental Defence of Metanormative Realism.” Philosophia, 2020: 573-586.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. London: The Athlone Press, 1999.
Moore, A., I. Gorodnitsky, and J. Pineda. “EEG mu component responses to viewing emotional faces.” Behavioural Brain Research, 2011.
Rayson, H., J. Bonaiuto, P. Ferrari, and L. Murray. “Early maternal mirroring predicts infant motor system activation during facial expression observation. .” Nature - Scientific Reports, 2017.
Tronick, E., L.B. Adamson, H. Als, and T.B. Brazelton. “Infant emotions in normal and perturbated interactions.” Paper presented at biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Denver, 1975.
An earlier version of this argument was published here.
Thank you for this very thoughtful and thorough philosophical explanation for why face masking/ muzzling is so unethical and detrimental to human beings sense of self. I’ve never experienced such anxiety as having to see so many people without faces, without the ability to communicate normally. Masking is very isolating, disturbing, dehumanizing and to me an extreme form of psychological torture. Covering our faces literally takes away our personhood. I also noticed that when people wear masks they make much less eye contact which is even further isolating. We must fight this dehumanizing agenda on all fronts.
Fascinating work. I plucked this out as the over riding result of these machinations: Any political system or government that limits the freedom to communicate and therefore the capacity to generate meaning, is on the path of self-destruction.