{"id":11454,"date":"2025-08-31T18:10:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T22:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/embodiment-and-the-reinvention-of-emoji-from-the-aztecs-to-humboldt-and-darwin-to-ai-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T18:10:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T22:10:08","slug":"embodiment-and-the-reinvention-of-emoji-from-the-aztecs-to-humboldt-and-darwin-to-ai-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/embodiment-and-the-reinvention-of-emoji-from-the-aztecs-to-humboldt-and-darwin-to-ai-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By the time he published Vues des Cordill\u00e8res, et monumens des peuples indig\u00e8nes de l\u2019Am\u00e9rique<\/em><\/a>, Alexander von Humboldt<\/strong> (September 14, 1769\u2013May 6, 1859), barely in his forties, was the world\u2019s most eminent and polymathic naturalist (the word scientist was yet to be coined<\/a>). Napoleon hated him for his impassioned anticolonial and abolitionist views. Goethe cherished him as his greatest thinking partner, whose briefest company and conversation felt like \u201chaving lived several years.\u201d Thoreau thought his very eyes \u201cnatural telescopes & microscopes.\u201d Whitman declared himself a \u201ckosmos\u201d<\/a> after the title of Humboldt\u2019s epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily acknowledged that without Humboldt\u2019s inspiring memoir-travelogue, entire passages of which he could recite by heart, he never would have boarded the Beagle<\/em>, never would have written On the Origin of Species<\/em>, never would have had his most transcendent experience<\/a> while ascending the Andes in Humboldt\u2019s footsteps. <\/p>\n

\"Alexander<\/a>
Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unlike his contemporaries, Humboldt saw nature not as an obstacle for \u201cMan\u201d to conquer but as the magnificent superorganism of which human nature is a fractal. <\/p>\n

Unlike other naturalists, who collected isolated specimens and sought to classify the living world into neat taxonomies, he was collecting and connecting ideas to \u201cestablish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,\u201d in which \u201cno single fact can be considered in isolation\u201d \u2014 a view of nature as a system that paved the way for everything from the Gaia hypothesis of biology to the unified field theory of physics to the concept of ecology. <\/p>\n

Unlike other explorers, he disdained the view of non-European peoples as savages who needed to be civilized and saw them rather as sages with much older cultural and folkloric traditions, complex, fascinating, and full of lore about the natural world. <\/p>\n

Published in French in 1810, Vues des Cordill\u00e8res<\/em> \u2014 a record of his time in the Cordilleras, the extensive mountain ranges of Latin America where he had invented the modern concept of nature as a web of relations<\/a> \u2014 was Humboldt\u2019s most lavish book. Amid the scrumptious engravings of mountains, volcanos, and archeological artifacts is a series of strange, scintillating fragments from ancient Incan and Aztec pictorial hieroglyphics, full of faces and bodies, affect and action. <\/p>\n

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The alphabets of most writing systems begin as pictograms. Europeans had certainly seen other ancient hieroglyphics \u2014 particularly the Egyptian, though the Rosetta Stone was yet to be decoded \u2014 but they were languages of symbolic logic composed of unfeeling graphic elements. Here was an entirely different visual alphabet of emotion and interaction \u2014 the OG emoji. <\/p>\n

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Detail from Aztec hieroglyphic manuscript<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Humboldt, who believed that we must \u201ctrace the mysterious course of ideas\u201d across history in order to apprehend the world we live in, must have recognized the significance of this visual language for he devoted nearly half of the book\u2019s expensive engravings to it, effectively introducing the ancient invention of emoji into the modern world. <\/p>\n

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Vues des Cordill\u00e8res<\/em> was so popular that its English translation was published by London\u2019s trendiest publisher, who had brought Lord Byron to the world. <\/p>\n

Darwin was fifteen when he acquired his copy. <\/p>\n

No one can trace perfectly the golden threads of influence that link minds across generations and disciplines, or measure the unconscious quickenings of inspiration in the mind of another, or know the germination period of an idea. We only know that, as a young man, Darwin paged with a passionate curiosity through his scientific hero\u2019s record of ancient emoji and, as an old man, he created a pioneering visual dictionary of human emotion. <\/p>\n

Although he had intended it as a chapter in The Descent of Man<\/em>, he recognized the singular importance of the subject and published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals<\/em><\/a> as a stand-alone book a year later \u2014 one of the first scientific books illustrated with photography, a practice Anna Atkins had pioneered a generation earlier with her self-published study of sea algae<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Depicting basic emotions like fear, anger, joy, sorrow, and disgust as \u201cmovements of the features and gestures,\u201d Darwin\u2019s dictionary of affect shares one crucial aspect with the Incan pictograms \u2014 both portray emotion as a phenomenon of the total human being, head to toe. <\/p>\n

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\u201cA purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,\u201d William James would write a decade after Expression<\/em> in his landmark investigation of the physiology beneath the psychology of feeling<\/a>. The paradox of our time is that although we now know that consciousness itself is a full-body phenomenon<\/a>, we have continued our campaign of denying the animal nature of the human animal by negating the significance, the relevance, the very fact of the body. Encountering each other as faces on screens, scaling startups rather than mountains, outsourcing our experience of the world to the disembodied pseudo-minds of AI, we have become disembodied ourselves. Our emoji reflect this willing amputation of the body, this cult of the head. \u201cBy its predilection for symbols,\u201d Humboldt had written in Kosmos<\/em> contemplating ancient cultures, \u201c[the imagination] influences ideas and language.\u201d Our symbols influence our ideas about what it means to be human and shape our imagination in turn. If we are to reclaim our creaturely aliveness, it may be time to reimagine our visual language and invent a new alphabet of embodied emoji. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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By the time he published Vues des Cordill\u00e8res, et monumens des peuples indig\u00e8nes de l\u2019Am\u00e9rique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769\u2013May 6, 1859), barely in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}