"The Illiad," Scarry says (Dreaming, p. 202), "illustrates the observation made by Democritus and Plato that circles move easily in the mind, so easily that at times they seem the very shape of the mind itself." Circular movements come easily to the hominid imagination insofar as the hominid both understands movement directly and has the ability to move in circular fashion. The hominid gross anatomy, marked by some distinctive synovial joints, opens up possibilities of circular movement that are less expressed, one might say less emancipated, in other apes, though it almost goes without saying that all apes have interesting ball-and-socket joints. Naturally, positing a spherical shape of the mind hardly contradicts the observation that hominids make circular movements rather easily. However, I suggest that the mode of relation between joints and spherical images is not mimetic but methectic. Psyche does not reproduce its hidden image before itself in various modes but rather enacts its image in the modes it grows accustomed to, and possibly more. It participates in its own image. The extent to which the shape of the psyche is an habituation can be overstressed, but I find it worth noting anyway.
Labels: Democritus, humans, imagination, Leonardo da Vinci, movement, Plato, psyche, Scarry, Vitruvius