Physiognomy

Physiognomy

Physiognomy is the ability to determine the character or personality of a person by observing their physical appearance with an emphasis on facial features. It is the practice to look at a person’s physical body, especially his face, in order to determine the person’s personality and ability.

Physiognomy is a pseudoscience based on the association of personal characteristics and traits with the physical differences between elements of people’s faces. Physiognomy (from Greek phusis physis means “nature” and gnomon means “interpreter” or “characterist) is the practice of judging a person’s character or personality by their appearance on the face. While this technological frontier is explored by dubious researchers and unscrupulous start-ups, we can remember the discredited pseudosciences of physiognomy, such as phrenology, which claims to use facial structure and head shape to assess character and mental performance.

Physiognomy was developed in ancient Greece by philosophers and its inclusion in the Virtuosi discourses confirms that the practice of physiognomy has persisted in European society for at least two millennia, with Hippocrates and Aristotle reflecting on its existence. The best known systematic treatise on this subject is attributed to Aristotle.

In his best-selling essays on physiognomy, Johann Caspar Lavater mixed the study of silhouettes, profiles, portraits, and proportions. This included a detailed reading of a face that had broken into its most important parts, including the eye, eyebrow, mouth, and nose.

The Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, considered the father of physiognomy, drew analogies with the human being and suggested that an individual character be derived from the empirical observation of its physical characteristics.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, considered father of physiognomy, was instrumental in spreading the idea of character throughout European the sixteenth century. David Brafman, curator of rare books at the Getty Research Institute, told me that physiognomy, beginning with ancient Greek gnomos (character) and physics (character) became popular in Europe with doctors, philosophers and scientists looking for tangible external clues to inner temperaments. Numerous English authors of the 19th century influenced the concept, as shown by the detailed physiognomic descriptions of characters in Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte novels.

Physiognomy, or the “junk science” of reading a figure’s facial expression, has a long history, with the first surviving document dating back to the time of Aristotle. The first evidence of a well-developed physiognomic theory can be found in the Athenian work The Zopyrus of the 5th century BC, which contains a dialogue from the Phaedo of Elis, which is said to have come from an expert in Chinese physiognomy (facial reading in Mianxiang). Physiognomy is considered to be cultivated because it is a method of distinguishing the external appearance of a character and a method of divination of form and features.

Textual references to physiognomy date back to the 5th century BC [8], but its acceptance as legitimate theory is not well understood and there is no general consensus on the validity of the scientific practice of physiognomy. It is a subject that has been associated with phrenology and fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, when it was deemed pseudoscience.

The outlawing of physiognomy was part of a process to remove it from its association with the racial and other whitewashing of the subject from Christian practice in England. Physiognomy had been thoroughly discredited at the end of the 16th century. But that didn’t stop some rogue figures from exploring the subject further.

The idea that a person is from a cursory glance at his face a figure was popularized in the late 18th century by Swiss poet Johann Lavater and the idea became a talking point in intellectual circles.

At one point, the conversation turned to the physiognomy, the pseudoscientific assessment of a person based on facial features. A few thousand years ago, people were concerned because they believed there was a bit of “physiognomy” – the art of reading the human personality from their faces. Bird-like features mean bird-like personalities, and with this knowledge you could figure out how to avoid talking to them.

Emily H. Vaught described a paper used in a 1902 book called “Vaught’s Practical Character Reader,” published in 1907 and revised with a new introduction (from Wikipedia) of the theory of physiognomy, the idea that all sorts of things can be said about a person’s character and personality based on their appearance.

The proponents of physiognomy claim that a connection between physical appearance and temperament can be derived. The idea that a person or a character can be recognised by their face goes back to ancient Greek. Robert Fitzroy, a Beagle captain, believed physiognology is the idea that a person can be recognised by their appearance.

Other remnants of physiognomy include the term “stick up for nothing” derived from the theory that people with errant noses have contemptible attitudes and the term “stubborn” to describe stupidity.

Phrenology is a variation of physiognomy based on the associated personal characteristics and skull dimensions. Physiognomy is the study of the systematic correspondence between psychological characteristics, facial features and body structure. Since genetic errors can reveal physical features and features of appearance (e.g. Down syndrome, slanted eyes, wide, flat face), elements of the subject have evolved in physiology and biochemistry.

FRT, unlike physiognomy, does not attach facial features any intrinsic value or meaning. At its core, it is a technology that draws dots on a face and measures distance between them to generate a facial signature and compare it with others. The coding of FRT is based on a new underlying logic: information about a person’s face is used in FRT to identify the underlying truth about that person and to make decisions about how to treat that person which is rooted in the millennia of physiognomy.

These experiments suggest that our quick judgments of faces contain a kernel of truth about the personality of their owners and that the connection between facial expression and personality can be severaged with a little stress. The fallacy that facial images are representative of facial owners is also played out more subtly in AI studies, which claim that algorithms can measure invariant facial features in 2-D images.