Visible souls....

[Sophia the Thunder Mistress]

Note: Bear with me, please, because this post is quite disorganized, and hopefully not entirely tangential; but I do have a point even if I haven't succeeded in making it clear.

I read this thread through the lens of a recent philosophy of mind class. The philosophical study of the mind/self/soul/what-have-you is concerned with basically pinning down the location of the self, whether that be internal (like in the modern psychological model) or external--although the word I'm looking for here may be something more like pervasive, because I don't think that the Anglo Saxons referenced below would have thought of themselves as existing like clothing on a body either.

Quite simply, the whole concept of the individual is a very recent invention. The idea that the “real me” is some kind of floating consciousness or conscience “inside” my mind is an alien thought to worlds like the ones from which Tolkien drew most of his inspiration. The idea that one’s “true” or “real” identity is internal and not external was anathema to the world view of the Anglo-Saxons. -Fordim Hedgethistle

Current philosophy is all in a twist because who knows how many centuries ago someone drew a hard and fast line between mind and body and now the concepts have been alienated from each other. In fiction it is no longer enough to portray the character through the minds and eyes of others, since they see only the body. In order to portray the locus of the self one has to describe the mind. Even the reductionist schools of thought that portray the mind as an offshoot of the body, or as identical to it are still thinking in terms of a mind and body dichotomy.

In Tolkien's characters this dichotomy and need to portray the inner self from the first person perspective is absent because the distinction between their internal and external selves simply does not exist.

At first I thought that the Lewis quote:

The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls.

Implied that Lewis was viewing only characters this way, with this lack of distinction, but when I looked more carefully at the quote in its entirety:

"Because, I take it... the real life of men is of that mystical and heroic quality... The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?"

I think there may be more to the sentiment than that characters are their souls. It seems to me that he is saying the same thing about the real life of man. We are the characters in the fairy story as well. When Lewis says the real life of men is of that mystical and heroic quality, the quality in reference is (and it's hard to tell exactly without having the whole context) something shared with the characters in the fairy story.

Tolkien and Lewis both consistently emphasize the similarities of life to fairy tale. Here is another example of this, where toward the end of the quote Lewis says (to paraphrase) "you haven't seen life until you recognize it for what it is: and this is it." I think it is more than likely that he would also say "you don't know yourself until you recognize yourself in this mirror." Perhaps we also are intended to be seen as visible souls.

Sophia