Mick Hartley

Plastic surgery was born in the hospitals of the First World War, when doctors like Harold Gillies pioneered facial construction surgery on the appalling injuries that confronted them as the poor wounded soldiers were carted back from the horror of the trenches. Later, in peace time, it survived on nose jobs, blemish removals, and maybe dealing with those unfortunate bags under the eyes. Minor adjustments, basically. Now, though…well, it’s all about revealing the real you, exposing your inner beauty, These surgeons can reconstruct your face. Feminise it. Masculinise it. Above all – beautify it. Glamourise it. Take the years away.

So what about the lived-in face? About reading the inner life from the features? – as self-portraits by artists like Rembrandt manage so mysteriously and so powerfully. And as we all do to some extent, in every human interaction.

Kathleen Stock has some thoughts:

[T]reating other people as ensouled is constitutive of human interaction, built into the basic terms of engagement. There is not, first, the act of seeing some movements, and only then an intellectual inference to hidden pains or joys. The pain or joys are seen directly in the other person’s face and body. I smile meaningfully at you, and you smile meaningfully back. I literally see your mind in your smile, as you do in mine. Or as Wittgenstein also put it: “the human body is the best picture of the human soul”.…

But whereas physiognomy involves making predictions about general character traits, to say you can literally see someone’s mind or soul in their body and face is to make a different point – one about human uniqueness. It’s a gestalt: the alchemic interplay of features, gestures, facial movements, vocal tones, speech patterns, and other habits of mind that add up to an irreplaceable, particular person in the beholding of them. That this is the norm for meaningful human interaction is what makes even skilful impersonation of people you know so weird and hilarious: almost there, but not quite.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit too mystical to take seriously. Perhaps human faces are just bits of flesh performing functional tasks, as Descartes implied. But if you think otherwise – as I do – then it starts to look psychopathic that we culturally approve of faces being sliced up and rearranged into stiffly impersonal, generic masks, for no other reason than the owner’s vanity. At the very least, when the surgeon discards all those bits of muscle and skin, he is also cutting off others’ capacity to know you properly. At worst, he is doing some violence to your deepest self. When you look in the mirror, the eyes, nose, and mouth may all be in roughly the right places; but even you may not be able to tell who is looking back.