How the Eyes Express Emotions and Bodily States

The eyes are “the windows of the soul,” we are told. They may also be curtains, hiding the soul and the self. Belief in the evil eye is widespread.

The Eye and the I

Through windows, we can see the self. Even Hegel, in his Aesthetics (1835), trusted the window theory of the soul, writing that "in the eye, the soul is concentrated"; thus, "through the eyes, we look into a man's soul." And: "a man's glance is what is most full of his soul, the concentration of his inmost personality and feeling" (1975:153, 434, 732). In this, eyes have unique importance. No other organs of the body have such power.

Eyes flash and blaze, sparkle and twinkle, stare, glare and glower, glance, peer, leer and ogle, and goggle. There are flirtatious eyes, laughing eyes, bedroom eyes, and occasionally blank, expressionless, dead eyes, which we might avoid.

The eyes express all the emotions and states of mind and body. They soften in love, harden with anger, widen in fear and horror, narrow in suspicion, roll in exasperation, glaze with boredom, weep in sadness or joy. The “far-away look in her eyes,” the cold stare of contempt, the hot glare of anger, the cheer-up wink, the come-hither glance, the guilty look. Eye language is as eloquent as verbal language, but if the two conflict, believe the eye language, remembering that it too can lie.

In his amusing The Art of Love (Bk 1:573-4), Ovid pioneered eye language:

Let your eyes gaze into hers, let the gazing be a confession

Often the silent glance brings more conviction than words

Shakespeare understood this language clearly:

There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,

Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive in her body.

(Troilus and Cressida, Act 4, Scene 5)

The Eye and the Lie

Still, the eye may lie. Lady Macbeth ordered her husband:

...bear welcome in your eye,

Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under it.

The Eagles sang that "you can't hide your lyin' eyes." But Ekman says you can. So the eyes may not always be the windows of the soul. They may be the curtains of the soul.

But lying successfully with the eyes and the body is not easy. Body language often negates verbal language; if you can use your eyes and not trust your ears, the truth will come out.

Freud said that:

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore (1977:114).

Experimental research with microphotography indicates that inexperienced liars may give the game away by, for instance, gaze aversion; others, aware of this and better able to monitor their actions, may employ the frank and open gaze as a deception behaviour.

In Telling Lies (1985), Paul Ekman suggested that "leakage" may occur through other eye language such as pupil dilation, blinking, and tearing. However, expert liars and psychopaths are extremely hard to detect, he said; so are people who believe their own lies.

There is a struggle of skills between the hider and the seeker. Some training in perceiving micro-expressions (fleeting "leaks" lasting less than one-quarter of a second) can be helpful. He insisted, "A lie catcher should never rely upon one clue to deceit; there must be many" (1985:147). But he cautioned: "Most liars can fool most of the people most of the time" (1985:162).

The credibility of the entire justice system rests on the perception of the difference between lies and truth. Both issues: disbelieving the truth, and believing the lie, have put the justice system on trial.

The Evil Eye

Belief in the evil eye has been widespread throughout history and around the world, as The Evil Eye by F.T. Elworthy (1989 [c.1900]) and C. Maloney (1976) attest. In the end, the eye can kill. The evil eye is known and feared in most cultures and is widely believed to be as effective as the eye sighting down the barrel of a rifle unless one takes precautions.

In the modern West, the belief may be dismissed as superstition, for the eyes are not "seen" as weapons, but if words can wound, then perhaps looks can kill.

The Eye and Evolution

The eye is a magnificent organ: beautiful, expressive, and useful. Indeed, the eye is often cited as proof not only of the existence of God but especially as proof of the truth of creationism. Evolution, it is argued, could never have created the eye.

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In The Origin of Species, Darwin discussed the eye:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus for different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. (1968:217)

Absurd, maybe, but "any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensible to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound." Hence, through "numerous gradations…useful to an animal under changing conditions of life," each of these variations being inherited over time, then "the difficulty of believing...can hardly be considered real" (1968:217). ·

In Climbing Mount Improbable (1997), Richard Dawkins explained that about a dozen different types of eyes exist today. While the path of ocular evolution cannot be traced exactly since there is no fossil record of soft tissue, it probably all began with light-sensitive single-celled organisms, perhaps like such creatures as jellyfish and leeches today.

Conclusion

What are the eyes? Obviously organs of sight and emotional expression, and thus very useful and highly valued, but also possibly windows of the soul, or perhaps curtains of the soul, or maybe evil weapons; but certainly wonders of evolution over millions of millennia.¹