Mirrors, Minds, and Metaphors

Abstract

most scholars of classical Chinese philosophy are well aware, the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi both make use of the metaphor of the heart-mind (xin j\j) as a mirror. For Zhuangzi, a heart-mind like a mirror constitutes the ?deal state of unity with the Way: The sage's heart-mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things.1 For Xunzi, one must have a heart-mind like a mirror in order to learn about the Way. Just as a pan of water can be and pure enough to see your beard and eyebrows and to examine the lines on your face, so, too, can the heart-mind be clear and pure enough to respond appropriately to learning.2 A num ber of scholars have discussed the significance of the mirror metaphor in these and other Chinese texts.3 It may be of particular interest to comparative philosophers that the mirror metaphor is not confined to the Chinese tradition. Soren Kierkegaard is one example of a Western philosopher who used this metaphor, maintaining that the properly attuned heart the Good: As the sea mirrors the elevation of heaven in its pure depths, so may the heart when it is calm and deeply transparent mirror the divine elevation of the Good in its pure depths.4 Richard Rorty, too, makes use of the mirror metaphor in his work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, arguing that The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations?some accurate, some not?and capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods.5 What should comparative philosophers learn from the shared use of metaphors across different cultural and philosophical traditions? In his recent work, Edward Slingerland suggests that the shared use of metaphors across different cultural, philo sophical, and religious contexts points toward deeper similarities between what may at first appear to be contrasting views.6 In this article, by comparing the mirror met aphor in Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Kierkegaard, and Rorty, I argue that a properly contex tualized comparison of different uses of a metaphor sometimes uncovers more differ ences than similarities between philosophical views. I begin by discussing the uses of the mirror metaphor in the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi. I then turn to the uses of the metaphor in the work of Kierkegaard and Rorty, focusing on what makes their understanding of the mirror metaphor distinctively Western, thereby marking a con trast to Chinese understandings. In the final part of this article I discuss Slingerland's suggestion that shared metaphors indicate deeper similarities between views, and I show how the foregoing comparative analysis constitutes a counterexample to his view. I aim to show that an analysis of different understandings of the same meta phor is one way of coming to appreciate features of cultural, philosophical, and religious views that might otherwise be overlooked, but that these features are