There is a more than notable tendency among human beings to adopt profound attachments to other human faces, even if those faces are known not as flesh but only as patterns of light. In the much-seen, or much-envisaged, visage, there comes an air of the familiar, almost the attachment of identity. The face celebrated either by adoration or by derision can have the effect of assisting in a psychology whereby the individual sees him or herself in the face of another.

It is from this sense of identification that the subject of ethical interaction extends its reach and offers its vast projections and proposals. One is confronted with the call of the Other, the moral demand that there arise some form of cooperation and mutual struggle between individuals, so that the species may have its own culture, through which it may survive. There is a basic compassion that motivates this experience of the call of the Other, a sense that one should reduce suffering wherever possible. But there is more than altruism; there is also a fundamental curiosity, and an instinct to interact favorably with one's surroundings, so as not to provoke or stumble into any hidden dangers.

Entangled in these considerations is the heart of psychological temptation: the urge to persist, to overcome the mortal limits of physical existence, to perfect the activities of one's inner life in a way that will somehow ensure their immortality. It is in this stew of altruism and the urge to self-preservation that basic human sympathies, agonies, and affections are forged. It is for the sake of this potent mix of personal motivations, interpersonal ambitions, and sublime sensations, that we celebrate individuals and their activities, their mannerisms, their proclamations, their creations. We choose a face that has meaning to us, that touches a chord, and we assign surpassing value to it, to that image, to the personality we believe it represents, to the extended landscape of the relationship we may have or may imagine we have with a familiar visage.

Of course, we celebrate the faces of those closest to us; they are the substance of our lives, and they incur a profound wealth of meaning, protection, and identification, through which we openly seek to perpetuate the moments of our own existence, and of theirs. But the face of the known Other, the intimate, the cherished or despised, is not the only celebrated visage. Often, it is the unknown stranger, the famous paragon of societal attractions, the much-discussed, the photographically ubiquitous visage that gains our affection.

The celebrity face becomes an icon, a fetish which indicates continuity over time, familiarity, the protected condition of a home one has chosen, one's identity. The icon works as a proof, a certificate of authenticity for the context in which it occurs, and the proof of the icon is the power of visual familiarity. Once the individual moves toward identifying with the icon, the act of recognizing the icon's image is projected onto an external plane inhabited by the celebrated individual. The priveleged space of the icon becomes an extension of the internal life of the one who perceives and recognizes it. The face of a celebrated individual, or the landscape of a favorite place, becomes symbolic, a vessel for the conveyance of perceived reality.

By providing, by accessing, pools of recognition, in the landscape of the mind, a fixed symbol carries the weight of time's passing, of the role of the individual in the navigation of time's current, and of perpetuating a preferred identity. The proof of the icon, the authority lent to any situation by the apparition of a particular image to which one has ascribed particular meaning, is the beginning of art, of discourse, of politics. What is familiar becomes good, because it promises not so much the continuity of the Known, taken altogether and at once, but the continuity of Me as I know Myself, the continuity of my way of seeing, of being as I am, something which is both more diffuse and more essential than what is perceived as fact or archived as data.

Here, the celebration of the familiar visage is not so much an ethical matter as an economic pursuit. The cultural agent who engages the familiar face of the unknown celebrity intends an economic guarantee of continuation. There is an implicit alliance, in the abstract, between the celebrated individual (through the act of celebration—repetition, elevation, promotion, reception) and the spectator. In this way, the common culture fulfills a sense of the need to address the call of the Other, in oneself, and in the world at large, for mutual protection and coherence; it acts as an ethical soup that makes few demands but projects a vision for constant approval.

It is in the impersonal nature of this intimate sense of identification, that the familiar visage surpasses ethical relevance and becomes a primarily psychological tool. In this light, immortalizing celebrated faces amounts to immortalizing the contents of our selfhood, to the extent possible, or as a trick of the psyche. The mind acts upon itself to modify one's perception of the familiar visage, the celebrated icon, so that in recognizing a pattern of light, one's mind is assured that its existence has been shared, in a way, and that proof of having existed is manifest in the proof of the icon.

The ultimate irony of this process is that celebrating certain popular icons exaggerates their importance to the actual circumstance of the individual as such, and tips the ethical balance within a society toward foci which do not necessarily require such assistance. The result is a distortion of perceived reality, and a complication of the most basic human project of pursuing some knowledge about existence and its meaning.

There is a fundamental peril which resides within the urge to experience the repetition of those faces, places, and icons, with which one has a sense of identification. This peril is intellectual, and emerges when one's predilection for the Known becomes a tacit approval of all familiar or repetitious phenomena. The face of the Other is vital to the human pursuit of understanding, both of self and of the world of circumstance, but the focus of this pursuit should be sincere involvement, acknowledgement, deferrence and understanding.

The call of the Other (the possibility of recognition, or protection) should not serve as an impetus to psychological self-satisfaction, but rather to challenging oneself to reside within the world gracefully, and without deceptive disguises. It is only at this deeper level, where the biases of mass culture cannot reach, that the call of the Other, the lure of the familiar visage, makes genuine sense. It is in this inner sanctum, unprotected by the high walls and the labyrinth of pretense, naked repetition, or dogma, where the real humanity, the real Self and Other, can be found. It is from there that the human Self should emerge to confront the face of the Other, to transcend self-serving protocols and express meaning for the sake of sharing the shelter of what is human.