THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Four

[Note: this is the fourth installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Some nonlinguistic manifestations: Freud, Sophocles, and Jesus
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed the metaphor SEEING IS TOUCHING. This metaphor may have nonlinguistic manifestations that relate to THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS. First, let us examine a few linguistic expressions that support it. Lakoff and Johnson mention the phrases “I couldn’t take my eyes off him” and “I felt his glance.” By themselves, these sentences are not very useful to our cause, but they combine with phrases like “Our eyes met” to support Lakoff and Johnson’s extension of the SEEING IS TOUCHING metaphor to EYES ARE LIMBS—a hefty step closer to our territory! Indeed, the phallus is occasionally conceptualized as a limb, as seen especially in such euphemisms as “the middle leg” (euphemisms constitute linguistic data and will be considered in more detail later in this paper). Thus, THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS can be seen as a member (pardon the pun) of the more general metaphor EYES ARE LIMBS, thereby providing further evidence for that relation as well. Kövecses (2002) adds the expression “undressing someone with ones eyes” to make explicit the sexual (and socially taboo) nature of the nonlinguistic manifestation of these metaphors.

Recall Freud’s quote about Oedipus, “the self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis.” The Latin term means “law of retaliation in kind” and means simply that the punishment must fit the crime. Oedipus had committed no offense with his eyes; rather, his crime was attributable to the phallus: he had killed his father and married his mother. The only appropriate penalty was castration, but Oedipus did not emasculate himself in the traditional sense. Instead, he fulfilled the same crime-punishment correspondence by removing his own eyes. Freud does not indicate whether he believes Oedipus was conscious of the underlying appropriateness of this substitution, or whether it was simply natural. In either case, it speaks to the conceptual relation of the eyes to the phallus.

If an essay by Sigmund Freud is the most likely place for the putting forth of a correlation between the phallus and the eyes—between the phallus and anything, for that matter—perhaps the least likely place is the New Testament. Yet the link may have been addressed by Jesus Christ himself. In the Sermon on the Mount, he declares, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt. 5:27-28, NIV, emphasis mine). This is an explicit claim of the likeness of lustful looking to physical intercourse, a correlation that, by extension, connects the agents of each action, i.e., the eyes and the phallus.

As if this statement were not forceful enough, Jesus immediately follows it with this exhortation: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Mt. 5:29, NIV). Was Oedipus a Bible reader? It would be more likely that Jesus read Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus Rex, but there is no reason to believe that either. No, every one of these men was aware of the eye-phallus relation, and Oedipus obeyed the principle announced by Jesus without ever having heard it. It is worth noting that the eye cannot really cause a person to sin, except by Jesus’s first claim, and, as mentioned already, Oedipus’s crime was not really one committed with the eyes, but rather with the phallus—much more apt to transgress. Thus, the relation between the two is necessary for the second quote of Jesus ever to apply.[1]

[1] Actually, it could also apply with other relations of the eyes to agents of mental and physical activity, such as, perhaps, those established by Lakoff and Johnson’s eyes are limbs metaphor. the eye is the phallus is most relevant however, both in the context of Jesus’s original quote as well as to this paper.