An illustration of a person looking out through an eye
Illustration of an eye, with a tiny person inside it looking out
Illustration: looking through someone else’s eyes.
An eye with a face looking out through the pupil as though it’s a window or the entrance of a dark cave.
In this image the eye is a window with someone looking out through it. It may have something to do with the saying “The eyes are the windows to the soul”. Or maybe not.
It’s as though there’s a tiny person living inside the person’s eye, or maybe inside their head. This is related to the homunculus argument (homunculus: Latin for “little man”), which is a philosophical concept that imagines that there is a tiny person inside the head monitoring the activity of the person whose head it’s in.
Homunculus arguments are used in psychology and the philosophy of mind to detect where theories of mind fail or are incomplete, usually betrayed by the recursive nature of the concept under examination (where a problem isn’t resolved but is simply repeated at one step removed, as in “Who’s watching the watcher?” or “Is there a homunculus inside the head of a homunculus?”.
Cartoon reference number: a339
