I can be a bit of a Luddite at times and am generally skeptical of anything lots of people are praising. The recent eruption of adulation for AI language model chatbots are no exception. My initial reaction was to try to find reasons to criticize them, reasons they weren’t as great as everyone was saying—not from me necessarily, but from people who know more about the subject than I do. I suppose my bias is showing here, but I have found some confirmation from some knowledgeable people that there are good reasons to be skeptical (if not worried).
An article published on Verge caught my attention in this regard. It suggested that a lot of very smart people were getting so swept up in the chatbot (ChatGPT, Bing, etc.) hype that they were failing the mirror test. Just like animals that can’t recognize they are looking at their reflection in a mirror, all these journalists and other very smart people were unable to recognize they too were looking at their reflection in the chatbot mirror. They shouldn’t be failing because they should know that the content generated by these autocomplete tools, trained and modeled after our blogs, forums, social media posts, etc., is just reflecting back to us our own language patterns and habits.
The article ends by urging us to take caution and approach these language models with a hefty dose of skepticism:
“But in a time of AI hype, it’s dangerous to encourage such illusions. It benefits no one: not the people building these systems nor their end users. What we know for certain is that Bing, ChatGPT, and other language models are not sentient, and neither are they reliable sources of information. They make things up and echo the beliefs we present them with. To give them the mantle of sentience—even semi-sentience—means bestowing them with undeserved authority—over both our emotions and the facts with which we understand in the world.”
As I finished the article, grateful that I had found the confirmation for my bias, I was left wondering two things. First, how is it we are failing the mirror test? These AI chatbots are created in our image but it’s an image we do not recognize as ourselves. Second, there is an obvious parallel to the story of Narcissus and Echo, a cautionary tale we clearly have not heeded. Is there another way to think about this story that might prevent us from collapsing entirely into narcissism?
Because I am lazy, here is a summary of the story of Narcissus and Echo from Wikipedia:
“When Liriope gave birth to the handsome child Narcissus, she consulted the seer Tiresias, who predicted that the boy would live a long life only if he never discovered himself. One day Narcissus was walking in the woods when Echo, an Oread (mountain nymph) saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he was being followed and shouted “Who’s there?”. Echo repeated “Who’s there?” She eventually revealed her identity and attempted to embrace him. He stepped away and told her to leave him alone. She was heartbroken and spent the rest of her life in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound remained of her. Nemesis (as an aspect of Aphrodite), the goddess of revenge, noticed this behaviour after learning the story and decided to punish Narcissus. Once, during the summer, he was getting thirsty after hunting, and the goddess lured him to a pool where he leaned upon the water and saw himself in the bloom of youth. Narcissus did not realize it was merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it, as if it were another young man. Unable to leave the allure of his image, he eventually realized that his love could not be reciprocated and he melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him, eventually turning into a gold and white flower.”
The parallels to the article are obvious enough: unable to recognize the reflection of ourselves we all become more and more enamored with the image we see reflected back to us. Like Narcissus, who surely failed the mirror test, we are failing the mirror test because we can’t see that the image reflected back to us is us.
This is all unsurprising, really. Our American culture is unapologetically narcissistic, arrogantly ignoring every cautionary tale about the dangers of such a perspective, and (sometimes) unwittingly encouraging everyone to adopt this way of being in the world through sheer force of habit. In an attempt to try to prevent myself from treading any further down the path of collective narcissism, and maybe to get some others to join me, I want to take seriously the cautionary tale of Narcissus and Echo, and see if I can’t find a way to reinterpret its warnings in ways that might resonate differently.
That we are currently failing the mirror test isn’t new, I don’t think. In fact, drawing on the work of Jicarilla Apache philosopher Viola Cordova, the Euro-descendant American (aka, Western) worldview has always had trouble with the relationship between self and other: knowing how to relate, the limits and scope of our responsibility to the other, and, I would argue, where the boundaries are between self and other. And that’s really what the failing of the mirror test points to, not just that we can’t recognize ourselves, but that we cannot properly situate our selves in relation to that which is not our selves.
In her book How It Is, Cordova quotes a character from the novel Solaris as stating: “man doesn’t really want communication with the Other; he wants a mirror.” She then adds, “He wants self-affirmation.”1 Here the other functions as a mirror with their only purpose being to reflect back to us our selves. We relate to the other primarily as a means to affirm ourselves. The other disappears behind the mirror and we are left with only ourselves.
This is one of the primary ways in which narcissism destroys social relations. indigenous Australian author Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech Clan) writes about the figure of the Emu in indigenous Australian Dreaming stories:
“Emu is often a narcissist who damages social relationships. These stories teach us about the protocols for living sustainably, and warn us about unsustainable behaviours. The basic protocols of Aboriginal society, like most societies, include respecting and hearing all points of view in a yarn.
Narcissists demand this right, then refuse to allow other points of view on the grounds that any other opinion somehow infringes their freedom of speech or is offensive.
They destroy the basic social contracts of reciprocity (which allow people to build a reputation of generosity based on sharing to ensure ongoing connectedness and support), shattering these frameworks of harmony with a few words of nasty gossip. They apply double standards and break down systems of give and take until every member of a social group becomes isolated, lost in a Darwinian struggle for power and dwindling resources that destroys everything.”
In the obsessive pursuit of self-affirmation not only are relationships between ourselves and others destroyed, relationality itself is destroyed. In this isolation nothing can survive—the narcissist and all others are annihilated. The logic of narcissism seems to, if I extrapolate from Yunkaporta and Cordova, progress from an intolerance of difference, separation and isolation, and finally ignorant self-obsession into oblivion.
As a side note, this pattern is paralleled in the anthropocentrism that ushered in the Anthropocene. Arne Johan Vetlesen says this in the introduction to his book Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: “By restricting the capacities for mind and soul, intelligence and reason, spontaneity and purpose to human beings, the mechanistic worldview has helped entrench anthropocentrism—literally, human-centeredness—in all key domains of modern Western society to this very day.”2 I think there is a strong (and fairly straightforward) argument for viewing the Anthropocene and its concomitant destruction of natural systems as rooted in narcissism at the species level. But this is a much bigger issue that others much smarter and more eloquent than I have addressed.
Back to the logic of narcissism. One component, as I mentioned, seems to be the intolerance of difference. Again, this is a very large topic that others have discussed better than I ever could. But it bears mentioning, even in an abbreviated way. Cordova says: “It is generally thought, in the West, that a concentration on differences is grounds for intolerance. ‘We should seek out commonalities,’ I often hear. We are disappointed when disagreements arise. The disagreements are a result of the intolerance that arises out of the need to concentrate on commonalities. True tolerance consists, not of ignoring differences, but in acknowledging them and acknowledging with equal weight that even small differences carry tremendous import.”3 So the more we focus only on the similarities between different people, cultures, philosophies, worldviews, etc., the more we ignore the differences between them, and in turn the more intolerant we are to disagreement and to difference. In other words, the inability to tolerate that which is different from us results in the breaking down of systems, social, political, environmental, etc.
If the separation and isolation that accompanies narcissistic patterns is fueled by the intolerance to difference, to that which is different from us, then it is achieved by transforming that difference—the other—into a mirror that only reflects sameness, only reflects our own likeness back to us. Cordova again:
“We must, as philosophers, not lose sight of the fact that the reason for exploring alien ideas is to expand our understanding of the diversity of human thought and not to expand our own specific way of thinking so that it encompasses all others. It is common to examine the Other as a means of gaining understanding about ourselves, but we should not mistake the Other for a mirror. We can learn something about ourselves as well through a contrast with the Other.”4
As the other and difference disappear we are left alone with ourselves, awash in sameness: without the contrast of the other our selves become washed-out in the process. There is no way to recognize ourselves when we lose the ability to recognize the other. That contrast with the other-than-us is what creates us, as selves, in the first place.
This process, which begins with the inability to tolerate difference, then moves through a self-obsession which eliminates the other by making them a mirror of ourselves, reflecting back only that which is similar to us—is us—culminates in our ignorance not just of the other, not just of difference, but of our selves. Narcissus’s undoing is our undoing as well.
Where do I go from here? Is there a way to heed the warning of Narcissus and learn again how to have healthy social relationships that don’t end in mutual destruction?
I think there are multiple ways, actually. But I want to humbly offer one suggestion for rethinking the relationship between self and other found not in Ancient Greek or Roman mythology, but in a quintessentially American myth.
“In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush, — this the light dust-cloth, — which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.”5
In her essay “Sounding Walden,” Laura Zebuhr draws attention to the fact that while many critics have drawn parallels between Thoreau at Walden and Narcissus at the pool, there is never a moment in Walden where he explicitly describes seeing his own reflection in Walden Pond. Despite describing the pond as a mirror several times, he avoids (intentionally, she adds, as he was most definitely familiar with the myth of Narcissus) describing his own reflection and instead describes all the other things reflected on its surface. The closest Thoreau comes to describing his reflection in the pond comes near the end of “The Ponds” chapter:
“He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?”6
This passage leaves open the question of what exactly was being reflected, but as Zebuhr notes, “the point of looking is not to see himself; whatever is reflected in Walden’s face, whatever is seen, is just what can almost be said.”7 Thoreau, unlike Narcissus, does not preoccupy himself with finding his own reflection in Walden. Thoreau’s story ends differently, too: while Narcissus was unable to detach himself from the water’s edge and ultimately perished there, Thoreau left Walden Pond and his cabin altogether. Zebuhr argues that it is not Narcissus that concerns Thoreau, but the other character in the story, Echo.
If Narcissus is the figure of self-obsession, then Echo is the figure of otherness. It is Narcissus’s rejection of Echo that leads to his curse (“Thus, though he should love, let him not enjoy what he loves!”), that is, his rejection of otherness, of the other, ends in not only his death, but the death of Echo as well—despite her immortality she wasted away, leaving behind only her petrified bones and the sound of her voice.
Zebuhr points out that right after Thoreau voices his uncertainty about what is reflected in the pond he writes,
“I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o’er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand.”8
These lines, “figure a relation without any concern for the absence of a constituted self. It is an entirely different notion of relations that is suggested here. One aspect of Walden’s gesture toward an echoistic practice, then, is to forsake a model of relations that seeks the self in the other.”9 In another passage Thoreau describes a more explicit echoistic practice:
“When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill-side.”10
Here Thoreau expands and enlarges our sense of relationality as the sound waves ripple outward into the woods touching and vibrating everything in its wake. Whereas Narcissus used his own voice, Thoreau enlists a larger chorus: “Paddle, boat, sound, and woods collide and communicate.”11 It’s interesting to note that the dilating and rippling is occurring in a different medium than one might expect in a book about a pond. Waves on the surface of the water distort and disfigure any reflected image; echoes cause the surrounding objects to resonate sympathetically. I’m reminded of a passage from the second chapter of the Zhuangzi describing the ways in which the wind, or the piping of the earth, elicits a chorus of difference:
“The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts. They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl, those in the lead calling out yeee!, those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again.”12
Each sound is unique and different, yet they all sound harmonious together. There is no coercion or force, each is allowed to be what it is and each voice is heard. Importantly, as Zebuhr points out, “a relation to Echo is initiated, but it is also presumed; there is never truly ‘none’ to commune with; there is never a one that stands in no relation whatsoever insensible to the touch of sound.”13
In total, Zebuhr names three potential echoistic practices. The first, “to forsake a model of relations that seeks the self in the other.” Second, “the affirmation of a relation that observes the… ‘relentless and demanding uncertainty’ of a response.”14 Because each response to the raising of echoes is permitted and encouraged to be what it is, it is free to respond (or not respond), free from the coercion and demands of narcissism. Finally, being attentive to the echoic in Walden avoids “placing Thoreau-as-protagonist at the centre of the text’s question regarding how to relate to the other.”15
Put differently, these three echoistic practices offer a counter logic to the narcissistic: rather than being intolerant to difference, Thoreau is enchanted by the multiplicity of images and reflections in the mirror-like surface of the pond that are not his own; raising echoes in the woods presumes a relation to the surrounding environment, enlarging the relational web much like concentric rings in water to include everything it touches, and, most crucially, includes and embraces their response to being touched by the sound waves without demanding anything from them. That is, allowing the other to respond as other. And by displacing Thoreau from the center of the story the narcissistic tendency to slide into self-obsessed oblivion is countered by an awareness that there is no center to the web of relations, no individual self without the other.
I want to suggest that Thoreau’s experiences of and at Walden are an off-ramp to the broadly narcissistic habits we exhibit when relating self and other. Through what Zebuhr calls echoistic practices, there are new ways of reading and interpreting our own stories that can help us avoid the destruction of social relationships sprouting on the banks of Narcissus’s pool. David M. Robinson says that in Walden, Thoreau’s description of Walden pond, “recreates the pond surface as a medium of cognition, an ideal analogue for the completely perceptive mind.”16 As a medium of cognition, the mirror-like surface of the pond is, “productive of ever-enlarging frames of reference,”17 reflecting all of the surrounding trees, birds, insects, plants, etc.
“It is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple again.”18
Rather than narrowing our view, focusing more and more intently on our own reflection and excluding all others, Thoreau’s experience of the pond expands his frame of reference, it widens his perception to include all life, all otherness. “Thoreau’s descriptive argument extends to his portrait of the remarkable power of the pond’s surface to record all the life and energy around it, its even, smooth plane a medium that can disclose the smallest presence and the finest movements above and below it.”19 He isn’t preoccupied with self-reflection but with other-reflection; what is reflected back to him is not an image of himself, but an image of the other.
Knowledge of the other, familiarity with and tolerance of difference, seeing and hearing the other as other are what gives rise to knowledge of the self, of the self as self-in-relation. Thoreau avoids the dangers of finding himself mirrored in the other, which leads to isolation and separation. Instead, the surface of the pond records all life—including his own. It is a mirror that reflects the other and self in proper relation because it is attentive to the other. This, I think, is what it would mean to truly pass the mirror test.
notes
- Cordova, V. F., How It Is, 58.
- Vetlesen, Arne Johan, Cosmologies of the Anthropocene, 1-2.
- Cordova, How It Is, 60.
- Ibid, 56.
- Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, too many different versions to give an accurate page number so I’ll link to this free online version and if you want to find it in context you can ctrl-f: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm.
- Ibid.
- Zebuhr, Laura, “Sounding Walden,” 43.
- Thoreau, Walden.
- Zebuhr, “Sounding Walden,” 46.
- Thoreau, Walden.
- Zebuhr, Laura, “Sounding Walden,” 47.
- Zhuangzi, trans. Burton Watson, again, here is a free online version: https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html.
- Zebuhr, Laura, “Sounding Walden,” 47.
- Ibid.
- Ibid, 48.
- Robinson, David M., “Thoreau and Idealism: ‘Face to Face to a Fact,’” in More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s Walden for the Twenty-first Century, 53.
- Ibid., 52.
- Thoreau, Walden.
- Robinson, Thoreau and Idealism, 53.