Reflection

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0:30Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where the two philosophy professors you've come to know and love, bring big ideas into everyday life. I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzman. And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. And for our entire backlog of extended episodes, community discussion, and more, check us out on Substack. David, it is a momentous day.

1:00This is our last ever podcast recording for Overthink. This is our final episode. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Okay, yeah, my musical effects are not very good, but I am feeling a mixture of emotions about the end of this project that we've been doing for half a decade. And it's just wild to think that we would end up here when we began this project from our living rooms and under our laundry baskets and containers and closets.

1:33Under our laundry baskets? Well, I was under a laundry basket. I was, like, under a laundry rack, maybe. That's more of the spatially accurate description. I was like, how do you get under a laundry basket? It's because I'm so tiny, Ellie.

1:54When we started the show, we were living in a very different time. I mean, for many reasons. But one of the things was related to how philosophy was perceived. I think in 2020, philosophy hadn't quite, like, really surged into the public.

2:13And I'm just really proud of the small part that we've been able to play there, to show people that our discipline is relevant to everyday life. It's important. It has tons of ideas worth thinking about. And yeah, I feel so happy with the audience that we've built, the community we've built. And I'm excited to see what's next for both of us. I'm just, like, I look back at our past episodes. I'm so proud. Like, look at this baby we made. It's been really validating, actually, to hear from people

2:44say how meaningful this project has been for them. That includes people who are professors and who incorporate our episodes into their teaching. But it also includes people who are completely outside of academia, who, in my case, they've come up to me and they've asked me, like, hey, are you David from Overthink? Like, I just want to let you know that I really love your show. And it's brought me back sort of under the wing of thinking conceptually and theoretically and enjoying that as part of my every day.

3:15Totally. I mean, I think it's safe to say this is the beginning, not the end for us in terms of our public-facing philosophy work. I mean, in the meantime, folks can continue to follow my work on Substack, where I'm on Instagram at EleanderPhD. I know the PhD is like a cringe part of the handle now. There has been a lot of change around that. But, you know, try having a name like Ellie Anderson and you'll see your options are relatively limited. So those are sub-second Instagram are currently the best ways to keep in touch with me. People can find me also on Instagram

3:45and they can also contact me via email at, oh my God, what is my email? DavidMPena at gmail.com. DavidMPena at sfsu.edu. Thank you, Ellie. Oh, SFSU. Yeah, it's just like over the years, I've had multiple versions at various universities and I just like hesitate all the time to give the right one. But, you know, you can- I had it right. I just didn't have the I. Yeah, you can Google the both of us and you can find us very quickly. But you are right that it is a momentous episode. And, you know, you said that the dominant experience or feeling for you right now is joy.

4:15I think I find myself in a meditative and reflective moment in connection to the end of the show. And I think that's part of the reason why we decided to do our final episode on the topic of reflection. Absolutely. Because I find myself wanting to reflect on what this project has meant, both for me as an individual, but also for me as an academic. And just the act of reflection is such a central element of philosophical discourse and philosophical practice that it just seemed like the rational thing to do

4:48to end reflecting on what we have done and reflecting on the very activity of reflecting. I'm feeling good about this final episode choice. I also want to say, I mean, when we were thinking about what final episode to do, we also wanted to keep in mind that, you know, hopefully people continue to discover Overthink for years and years to come. And if and when they do, this is going to be the first episode that comes in their feed. So they might not want an episode that's like a meta reflection on a podcast they've never listened to before. So I will say we have now indulged in some,

5:21you know, sweet reflection about the end of Overthink, but the rest of the episode is going to be about the concept of reflection in classic Overthink style. So we're going to pull back from the meta analysis now and get into the heart of it. David, what do you think about when you think about the term reflection? So as somebody who is interested in science and the philosophy of science, I immediately go to the literal definition of reflection, which is a property of how light behaves, right?

5:53Like light can be reflected off of surfaces and enable vision in that way. That's why we can see things because of the mechanics of light. And in thinking about that in relation to philosophy, it makes me reflect on how philosophers have understood and conceptualized the act of knowledge and thinking as a kind of reflection using light as a metaphor, right? Like we reflect upon the world and sort of reflect it back,

6:25creating representations of things outside of us. And what I maybe want us to just keep in mind is that the metaphor of literal light might be useful for thinking about what we're doing when we're thinking. But the metaphor also breaks down because in many, many ways, the act of thinking is not actually a reflective practice. It's not actually a reflection in the literal sense. And what is a reflection in the literal sense of things? It's the bouncing off and away of light.

6:55And so it is largely a passive practice. It's a bouncing back with some distortion. You know, like colors are like the part of the spectrum that an object does not reflect back. So there is a little bit of a change there. But in general, the idea that the mind is almost like a beacon of light that shines upon the world is what grounds this notion that we are reflecting. Yeah. But it also might lead us astray if we think about it too much under that frame. Well, yeah, absolutely. And I think this idea of thinking as something

7:25that passively occurs or even of like experiencing of something that passively occurs is implied within a certain tradition of the philosophy of reflection, namely the tradition that emerges in the early modern period. And I think that's a view that you and I would like to cut against. So some of our reflections on reflection will be very much in contrast to that dominant picture. Today, we are talking about reflection. What does the myth of Narcissus tell us about viewing ourselves from the outside?

7:55How can reflection both pull us out of our everyday lives and connect us back to them? And how much do we know about non-human animals' capacity for reflection? If you've listened to our recent episode on weddings, you'll know that I'm currently in my bridal era and my sister asked me recently what I might want as a gift for my friends at my bachelorette party. I responded, well, I do have a tab open for a classic piece of jewelry from Quince.

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9:59Insurance, availability, different types of provider. RULA simplifies all of it. You can sign up in a few minutes, you get matched, you see your cost, and you even book an appointment as soon as the next day. So instead of overthinking it, you can actually take the first step. If you're ready to stop talking yourself out of finding care and making progress, then head to RULA.com, that's R-U-L-A.com, and take the first step. David, you and I are going to start in a place of myth with the myth of Narcissus, especially as it's articulated in Ovid's Metamorphosis.

10:32We decided to read this myth and use it as an opportunity for thinking about one of the central images of reflection that culture has to offer us, right? Narcissus is this youth who basically dies because he falls in love with himself in front of a reflecting pool. Yeah, he falls in love with his own reflection. And the myth is great. So I hadn't read it in a very long time. I don't think I had read the myth since I was in undergrad. And so it was nice to go back to it,

11:03pick up my copy of Ovid once again, Metamorphosis. I couldn't find mine, so I had to borrow Trevor's. Oh. And it's a wonderful story that raises fundamental philosophical questions, like perennial questions about the nature of reality, about the nature of the self, about the nature of love, about the way in which we relate to other people. And so, Ellie, maybe you can begin us by telling us just some of the basics of the story, the myth of Narcissus. Who is he? What happened to him?

11:34Why did he end up falling in love with himself? He was born beautiful, essentially, from birth adorable Ovid, right? He's named Narcissus. And she asks the seer, the very famous ancient seer Tiresias, famous thanks to Oedipus and other important supporting roles in ancient myths. She asked Tiresias, will Narcissus live long? Will he live to old age? And Tiresias answers, if he shall himself not know.

12:04She's like, what does this mean? What does this mean? Okay, so Narcissus is kind of going about his life. He is the object of many people's obsession. He's particularly appealing to girls and young guys who think he's like the hottest guy that they've ever seen. And he just rejects. He's rejecting the young girls and the young guys left and right. I know, he's like the hot commodity in high school. He's 16, he's 16, yeah. And he's pretty arrogant as well. He not only dismisses all these would-be suitors

12:35and ladies who are pursuing him, but he also mocks them. And this nymph Echo falls in love with him. Narcissus rejects Echo, just as he has rejected everybody else. And one of the people he rejects, who is only described as one scorned youth in Ovid's myth, prays that Narcissus will never know love. And Nemesis is like, yeah, yeah, prayer fulfilled. So then Narcissus comes upon this pool, this sheltered pool surrounded by grass,

13:07nobody around. And he sees in the pool, the hottest person he's ever seen. Hair worthy of Bacchus or Apollo, face so fine, ivory neck, cheeks smooth, snowy pallor. Face card 10 for Narcissus. Doesn't realize it's himself, falls in love, and then is devastated when he realizes it's himself and basically dies of sadness. Okay, so now we have the basic ingredients of this Roman myth. Ellie, I want you to repeat one thing, though,

13:38because we were working with different translations. What was the prophecy that Tiresias gives of the condition under which he will be happy? If he shall himself not know. Okay, if he shall himself not know, because the version that I read translated that a little bit differently. And it was like, he will lead a happy and fulfilling life only on the condition that he shall not discover himself, which I actually like a little better as a translation. But that's neither here nor there. So the idea is that if he comes to know himself

14:09or to discover himself, that will be the source of his discontent. And I just want to say from the very beginning how quintessentially tragic that prophecy is. Because often we think that as you grow up, your self-knowledge is likely to bring about happiness, right? You become happier and more fulfilled as an adult, the more you get to truly know who you are. And here we have an inversion of that very common way of thinking about what it means to mature, where maturing is actually

14:41the very cause of your downfall, in this case, through this figure of Narcissus. Well, I wouldn't say it's maturing. It's so I hear your point that it's self-knowledge or self-discovery that is going to be his downfall. And so the idea is like he'll only live long if he doesn't know or discover himself. Equally important, though, I think is a second meaning here, which is he cannot know or discover himself as himself, right? And so he's not devastated when he knows himself

15:11by seeing himself reflected in the pool. He's devastated when he realizes, oh my God, that's me. That's not somebody else. The myth is so fertile for interpretation. It just like it leaves so many questions open and guides us to think about them in new ways. The idea here that he sort of gets broken down by getting to know himself, like the moment that he recognizes himself in his reflection on the pond. I'm not so sure about that. I think he really becomes heartbroken

15:42when he realizes that he can't possess himself because the person on the other side of the reflection cannot be grasped, cannot be touched. And so it's not the moment of seeing, but it's actually the failure of the moment of touching that follows that then throws him into a crisis. Yeah, yeah. But I didn't say it was the moment of seeing. I said it's the moment that he realizes that it's himself. Maybe that's not even quite right, though. Maybe it's more that when he realizes that it's himself and therefore that he cannot possess himself.

16:16Yeah. And so I actually had a lot of empathy for Narcissus, to be honest, on my reading of this story, which is funny because like I've always read him through the standard reading of the arrogant youth who is beautiful, who mocks everybody and whose ultimate vice or let's say his error is loving himself too much, right? So traditionally, this is read as a story of vanity. And now I'm not so sure that that's how I read this story.

16:47But I want to know what aspects of this myth stand out for you as particularly illuminating to keep with the light metaphor. Well, I think a number of different things stand out for me here. I actually think the natural place to start here, given that you mentioned you felt like maybe he wasn't arrogant, is just to directly address that. I think it's, I was getting that from the point that he mocks not only Echo, but also everybody else who loves him. So I feel like that's a fair characterization. Although I guess you could say, you know,

17:18one of the downsides of being super, super hot is that you're getting constant attention and that can be kind of annoying. So I suppose you could do like a, you know, reading of Narcissus where it's like naturally he was rejecting all the people who were trying to get his attention because he was so overwhelmed by constantly being forced to, you know, give them responses. Well, so the reason that I'm saying it, I want to think about that a little more is because yes, he is described as beautiful and yes, he is described as rejecting other people.

17:49But when Ovid talks about Echo pursuing him, at least in the translation that I had, Echo is presented as somebody who is threatening his autonomy. So it's an other that wants his body and his mind and he doesn't want to give it. He's not interested. And Echo, kind of like the rest of the people sexually interested in him, is described as having encircling arms, almost as if like the other person is trying to absorb him and possess him. Yeah, she does grab him.

18:20Yeah, and so I read in this rereading of the myth, his rejection of others as a combination of him being a 16-year-old who is, also he's a hunter, right? Like he spends his days like going after animals. He's not particularly social. He's not described as having a lot of friends. So I see him as a loner who happens to be hot, who wants to preserve his autonomy. He's like a hot lumberjack who's 16. I think it's definitely fair to say that Narcissus is a loner.

18:50But I guess one question we might have is the fact that he did fall in love, a signal that he was open to love. He just hadn't found the right person. Or is it a signal that actually he really just wanted an image to love? And I think it's actually, it's not the latter because as you pointed out, David, he doesn't just want the image. He's really saddened by the fact that he can't embrace this image. And so I think also the vision element is super interesting here when it comes to self-discovery, self-awareness.

19:22When Narcissus is looking at himself in the pool, not realizing it's him, he's observing himself as if another. And in fact, he's seeing himself as others see him. He's like, oh my God, this hair, these eyes, wow, just stunning. So he has an outsider's perspective on himself. And that is important, I would say, for a lot of accounts of reflection. So Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, talks about how reflection requires distance. And part of the challenge is that with ourselves, we really can't achieve the requisite distance

19:53because we are ourselves. And so as much as we attempt to see ourselves from the outside, that's never quite possible. And so it seems, I mean, it's possible when it comes to the image of Narcissus, but it's not possible once he tries to bridge that gap through touch, right? And there's this really cool line where Ovid writes, the image is my own. It's for myself I burn with love. Like, I fan the flames I feel. What now? Woo or be wooed? Why woo it all? My loves myself, my riches beggar me.

20:27Would I might leave my body? So he's like, he just wants to get out of his body so that he can love himself as another. Okay, so this all happens in that critical moment of looking in the pond, right? And so part of the question is, how do we interpret what's happening in that precise moment of the myth? So is it that he recognizes himself in his reflection and like makes a mistake of falling in love with himself? Is he even responsible for this?

20:58Because remember, somebody prayed for his downfall and then, you know, the goddess of revenge, Nemesis, overhears it and is like, yeah, I'm going to bring this guy down. Is this a punishment rather than a result of his personal actions? Because for me, what's intriguing is the possibility that maybe the problem with Narcissus is not that he recognizes himself, but that actually he fails to recognize himself, right? So there's actually a moment of recognition that is the source of the problem because when he looks in the pond, he sees his reflection as another person.

21:30And that's a mistake. And it's not as if, you know, the Greeks and the Romans were not familiar with reflections, with images. They were extremely attuned to that. And so in one way, what goes wrong here is not an excess of, let's say, subjectivity understood as like a self-relation. It's actually that his self-relation is not strong enough to recognize the boundaries between self and other. And so I kind of want to emphasize the element of misrecognition that is at work here. But your discussion about distance is really important

22:03because there is a moment where when he is lamenting on the fact that he can't have himself because it's all a reflection, he does make an allusion to distance. He says, quote, I desire what I love to be distant from me. And that's when he recognizes, like, I cannot really love myself. There needs to be a distance between self and other that does not exist in the case of my self-reflection on a pond. And that's when the tragedy finally unfolds

22:34where he knows that he can't have that distance with his image. And in the myth, he just sort of like withers away and dies. It's almost like he falls into such a pit of depression that he melts into the ground. His body disappears. And later we're told he is reborn on that spot as a flower. Yeah. So that and the flower that's constantly looking into the pool, into eternity. Yeah. So this is also super interesting. My translation has it that like, I wish I could wish my love were not so near.

23:07So it's cool that yours has the distance point because that does make it like a little bit more explicit. I think what is revealed here is the tragic paradox that narcissists find themselves stuck within, which is that love by nature wants to draw nearer to the beloved. But the condition for the possibility of that love is that you're not so close to the beloved that you are them. Like the distance is required in order, you know, in order for love to be love, it has to aim to traverse that distance that can never fully be traversed. And the problem is that he doesn't have

23:38that distance to begin with. Right. And so there's just it's just him. It's just him. But I also want to put this too complicated in the context of the whole flow of the story. So in the moment in front of the pond, yes, we see him as falling into a moment of vanity, self-obsession. And he's just like kind of all sameness. It's all the same. But then I thought about this in connection to his rejection of Echo. Remember, Echo is a nymph who was for in a different part of the story,

24:09was condemned to only ever being able to repeat the last part of what other people say. Right. So she cannot say things of her own because at some point in her past, she said too much. And so that was her punishment. And so when she expresses interest in Narcissus, she actually represents a form of a reflection herself. Right. Like it's an echo is a bouncing back. It is a reflection of sound. And so I think we make potentially a mistake if we read Narcissus as narcissistic straight, like through and through.

24:39Echo, because if he was, he would have fallen in love with Echo of all people. Yes. Like of all the people that are interested in him. She's the only one that can only give him a reflection, literally like sound back, give him what he wants, what he is. And still he does not want that. And so there is something else happening, I think, in his mind and in this myth beyond that traditional reading of it as you shouldn't love yourself too much because that cuts you off from the rest of the world.

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25:47What can reflection bring us regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world around us? Philosophy as a discipline has historically been a massive advocate for reflection. Reflection shows up in the work of countless philosophers as a source of truth, as a component of reason, as part of what makes us human, especially in comparison to the non-human world. And the function of reflection is often thought to be a kind of stepping back from experience, viewing it from a distance.

26:18We just talked about distance in connection to Narcissus. Maybe that's essential to reflection. And in that sense, it is closely tied with objectivity. Without reflection, we wouldn't be able to be objective. And so reflection, going back to what Ellie, you said about vision a few minutes ago, it allows us to be spectators of the world of experience. And that is essential for the task of thinking. Yeah, this is true.

26:48And I do feel bad that there's a lot of philosophers who wrote a heck of a lot about reflection and not tradition of reflection as enabling objectivity, being part of reason. And we're not going to get into much here. Sorry, John Locke, for instance. But I think what interests me, frankly, a bit more is the fact that in the 20th century, there were a bunch of philosophers who turned against this picture of reflection and often against reflection entirely. In existentialism, you have an emphasis on what Miguel de Unamuno calls

27:19the man of flesh and blood. He thinks that philosophy has gone wrong by focusing on the rational spectator and instead should emphasize the living, breathing body that philosophizes prior to reflection. And then in post-structuralist philosophy, you have the realization that reflection might give us a fictional representation of the world rather than a depiction of it as it really is. And then in phenomenology, you have the idea that reflection is not a primary component

27:49of our experience, but a secondary one. For phenomenologists, reflection is derivative of pre-reflective consciousness, right? So we have this experience, this what James calls a buzzing, blooming confusion, and then we can reflect on it, but we shouldn't take that to be fundamental. And it's on this that I want to focus this part of the conversation. Why do the phenomenologists caution against overvaluing reflection? Maurice Merleau-Ponty

28:20is a good person to go to here for this question. He, of course, is a French phenomenologist, writes extensively about the body. And in his book, The Phenomenology of Perception, he positions phenomenology as a school of thought that seeks to return us to the things themselves. That's the way he puts it very famously. And that's an expression that comes from the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl. And this return to the things themselves is for Merleau-Ponty.

28:50He says, a return to this world prior to knowledge. So there is something beneath the world of knowledge, something more primordial, something that is like a ground that is more basic and fundamental. And that primordial world is the world that we are typically immersed in. when we grab for a drink of water, when I go for a walk, when I give a hug to my mother, when I am sort of living in the moment in time, engaged in projects. And that's the world

29:22that, interestingly, philosophy overlooks all too frequently, precisely because it privileges that distancing, that reflection, that theoretical abstraction that takes us out of the flow of things. Yeah, and Merleau-Ponty thinks that starting with reflection, as so much philosophy does, simply goes backwards. What do we find in reflection? We find a subject looking out at a world

29:53that is distinct from that subject. But that's not the way our experience usually works. In most of our everyday experiences, there's no distinct subject. And there's also really no private sphere of consciousness. This is like always my secret gripe with the movie Inside Out, which we've talked about before. Many times. So philosophies that take consciousness to be, you know, the kind of separate from the flow of experience, because consciousness

30:23is a property of a subject, that's a problem. So Tu has this idea that consciousness is some organizing principle of experience that stands outside of experience itself. And that view would be associated for Merleau-Ponty with somebody like Kant. But I think we can also say the critique of reflection is targeted more broadly than at Kant. Descartes is also a culprit here for Merleau-Ponty. And he calls this picture of reflection reflective analysis. He thinks that reflective analysis substitutes

30:54a reconstruction of experience for a description of it. So what reflection claims to do is to describe experience, but it actually reconstructs it and kind of according to its own image. What philosophy should really be doing is describing experience as it is, not through this artificial reconstruction. Well, and I think that has a lot to do with phenomenology's picture of the self, of what the self is. And it's something that you have a forthcoming book about, Ellie. So to our listeners,

31:24be on the lookout for that. May 15, 2027. Anyway, so according to phenomenology, the point I want to make here is that we go wrong when we think about the self as a thing that exists inside of us, you know, kind of like in that movie. Like Inside Out. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Very much so. Even if it's five or more things inside of you, it's still you're thinking about the self as a thing inside of you. Yeah, you're thinking about it as a model of the self. Part contained that reflects the whole or something like that. And we've touched upon this misguided

31:54conception of the self in several past episodes. I'm here thinking about self-knowledge, but also authenticity. So if people want to hear more about that, they can check those out. But there is a quote from Merleau-Ponty that I think really encapsulates the spirit of this criticism of that notion of the self as like existing inside me as a thing or an object. Merleau-Ponty writes, There is no inner man. Man is in and toward the world and it is in the world

32:25that he knows himself. End quote. And so here the idea is that my primary mode of being is not setting myself apart from the world in order to look at it and attain something called truth or objectivity, but rather my primary mode of existing is being dynamically engaged with the world in the drama of the world, in the projects that are meaningful to me. And it's actually the act of stepping back in order to reconstruct it in language

32:56or through theories through this more like distance position that is the artifice. Yeah. And it's also not about like looking in the reflecting pool. The way that we relate to ourselves is not usually in that explicit fashion where we're looking at ourselves kind of as if from the outside, right? One of my favorite philosophy essays ever is Dieter Henrich's essay, Fichte's Original Insight, which is hard to find a full copy of in English translation. In fact, I would love to see somebody retranslate that. But in any case,

33:27Henrich in this article targets the idea that the self is reflection or also that it's a product of reflection. He thinks reflection really confuses us actually about the nature of the self rather than illuminating it or constituting the self. He says that the self can't be a product of reflection because reflection presupposes selfhood. So like in the case of Narcissus, it's not the act of looking in the pool that constitutes Narcissus's self, whether he recognizes it or not.

33:58He actually already had to have a self to begin with in order to be able to look at himself. And that's also definitely the condition for the possibility of him recognizing himself as himself, even though it took a while for him to get to that point. In order to be able to recognize your reflected self as you, that is, you have to have some pre-reflective awareness that you are already that self. And as you mentioned, you know, this is something I talk about in my book, so I could really go down a rabbit hole here. I will not, but I think the basic point for us is that reflection is an act of distancing

34:29and it's tempting for us to see in that act of distancing the origin of the self because that's the first place where we see our thought processes at work and we recognize that we're not reducible to the world around us. So the self shows up in reflection in a unique way and even explicitly for the first time. But even if the self shows up as separate from the world for the first time