self-luminous

English

Adjective

self-luminous (comparative more self-luminous, superlative most self-luminous)

1. Light-emitting.
   • 1882, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual - Volume 15, page 112:

     It has been a question whether comets are self-luminous, or whether they simply reflect the solar light.

   • 1955, Frank Harris Johnson, The Luminescence of Biological Systems:

     The structure of the light organs and the observation of luminous phenomena of self-luminous fish have been investigated by Ohshima ( 1911 ) .

   • 1997, Claudia Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910-1935:

     In 1915 von Sochocky developed a formula for a self-luminous paint.

2. (vision, of a perceived color) Having a luminosity exceeding 100%.
3. (figurative) Prominent or famous for virtue or greatness.
   • 1840, William Henry Allen, A Baccalaureate Address delivered before the Senior Class of Dickinson College:

     How the few such that have lived in the world stand out, self-luminous, amidst the darkness of the past, surrounded by the wreck of names remembered only for their crimes, and pointing to the admiring gaze of men the true path to glory's temple!

   • 1892, The Maha Bodhi - Volumes 98-99; Volumes 1891-1991, page 267:

     Very few have been born on earth who were self-luminous, whose light was not a borrowed light, who stood fully revealed in their own radiance of truth.

   • 1918, Pacific Rural Press - Volume 95, page 698:

     On the whole, it is a good company of self-luminous men—fit to flash great beams of light from the academic Watch towers of agricultural progress.

4. (philosophy) Self-illuminating; knowable only as its unambiguous self; self-evident.
   • 1909, William James, A pluralistic universe. Hibbert lectures, page 347:

     The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.

   • 2012, Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, page 72:

     But as difference is a positive condition of the reason, I cannot deduce it without presupposing it; I cannot explain it except by itself, because it is an original, self-luminous, self-attesting reality.

   • 2013, Robin D. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, page 84:

     "The necessity to assent to them", according to Stumpf's paraphrase: is not rooted in a blind psychological compulsion, but rather in their inner, self-luminous evidence. [...] He [Brentano] conscluded further that what is evident is true not only for our understanding, but for every possible understanding, for it is only the special light of the thing itself.

5. (philosophy, India) Self-aware; knowable by itself.
   • 1978, Nundo Lall Kundu, Constructive Philosophy of India: Tantra, page 116:

     Finally, life emerges as a self-conscious, self-luminous Intelligence in man who not only thinks, feels and moves but is also conscious of being the subject, the knower of thinking, feeling and willing and controls, directs all these fluctuating States and processes of mind either towards the service of the self or towards bondage to mundane values.

   • 2000, Shyama Kumar Chattopadhyaya, The Philosophy of Sankar's Advaita Vedanta, page 267:

     A cognition is an illuminator in respet of its content only and this content, as the illuminated, is always other than itself. But a cognition is also aware of it as an act. but this is only in distinction from its content as other than itself. In other words, it is never its own content (visaya) and is not self cognitive or self-luminous in that sense.

   • 2007, Śaṅkaṙa-bhāratī - Volume 32, page 162:

     The self is self-luminous and so it does not need another cognition to become known.

   • 2013, Jadunath Sinha, Indian Psychology Perception, page 199:

     According to the Buddhist idealist, a cognition is self-luminous ; it apprehends itself but not an external object as there is no such object ; a cognition is not apprehended by the self because there is no self at all.

Hypernyms

(color):

• chimerical

Coordinate terms

(color):

• hyperbolic
• stygian