“On Recognizing Oneself in Others”

Abstract

Given the ubiquity of mirrors in modern life, you’ve probably had the odd experience of momentarily failing to recognizing yourself in a mirror and then suddenly realizing: “Oh, that’s me!” In an abrupt shift, a human being whom you momentarily saw as a stranger is recognized as, in fact, the most familiar person in the world—yourself. Think of that jolt of recognition. What if it were possible to experience a similar jolt of recognition with respect to every other human being who has ever lived or will live? What might it be like to realize—if we could somehow make sense of the idea—that all along, whenever you’ve looked at another human being, you’ve been looking right at yourself without recognizing yourself? The Upanishads contain what is, to my knowledge, the earliest recorded suggestion that such an experience is possible. But one finds the same suggestion in a wide variety of religious, philosophical, and poetic texts and traditions. In this lecture, I argue that we can make secular analytic sense of the idea. This effort is part of a larger project in metaethics, the ultimate aim of which is to argue that if someone fails to treat others as equal in value to herself, she is making a mistake in the same general category as the mistake that one makes when one sees oneself in a mirror but fails to recognize oneself.

About the Speaker

Sharon Street is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, specializes in metaethics, and is the author of a series of articles on how to reconcile our understanding of normativity with a scientific conception of the world. Her work concerns the nature of both practical and epistemic reasons, and draws especially on an evolutionary biological perspective.