The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI

By Maria Popova

By the time he published Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), barely in his forties, was the world’s most eminent and polymathic naturalist (the word scientist was yet to be coined). 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 “having lived several years.” Thoreau thought his very eyes “natural telescopes & microscopes.” Whitman declared himself a “kosmos” after the title of Humboldt’s epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily acknowledged that without Humboldt’s inspiring memoir-travelogue, entire passages of which he could recite by heart, he never would have boarded the Beagle, never would have written On the Origin of Species, never would have had his most transcendent experience while ascending the Andes in Humboldt’s footsteps.

Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806
Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806

Unlike his contemporaries, Humboldt saw nature not as an obstacle for “Man” to conquer but as the magnificent superorganism of which human nature is a fractal.

Unlike other naturalists, who collected isolated specimens and sought to classify the living world into neat taxonomies, he was collecting and connecting ideas to “establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation” — 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.

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.

Published in French in 1810, Vues des Cordillères — 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 — was Humboldt’s 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.

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

Detail from Aztec hieroglyphic manuscript

Humboldt, who believed that we must “trace the mysterious course of ideas” 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’s expensive engravings to it, effectively introducing the ancient invention of emoji into the modern world.

Vues des Cordillères was so popular that its English translation was published by London’s trendiest publisher, who had brought Lord Byron to the world.

Darwin was fifteen when he acquired his copy.

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’s record of ancient emoji and, as an old man, he created a pioneering visual dictionary of human emotion.

Although he had intended it as a chapter in The Descent of Man, he recognized the singular importance of the subject and published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals as a stand-alone book a year later — 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.

Depicting basic emotions like fear, anger, joy, sorrow, and disgust as “movements of the features and gestures,” Darwin’s dictionary of affect shares one crucial aspect with the Incan pictograms — both portray emotion as a phenomenon of the total human being, head to toe.

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James would write a decade after Expression in his landmark investigation of the physiology beneath the psychology of feeling. The paradox of our time is that although we now know that consciousness itself is a full-body phenomenon, 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. “By its predilection for symbols,” Humboldt had written in Kosmos contemplating ancient cultures, “[the imagination] influences ideas and language.” 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.

BP

Viktor Frankl on Success

By Maria Popova

In 1945, shortly after his release from the concentration camps where his mother and brother had been murdered in the gas chambers, not yet knowing the love of his life was ailing with the typhus that would soon kill her, Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) sat down at his desk to compose what would become the epochal classic Man’s Search for Meaning.

As it poured out of him over the course of just nine consecutive days, he wrote with “the firm determination” to publish it anonymously. It was only on his friends’ ardent insistence that he conceded at the last minute to have his name at least appear on the title page, though he refused to have it printed on the cover.

Viktor Frankl

By the end of his life, the book had been published in twenty-two languages, with 100 printings in English alone.

In the preface to the 1992 edition, the eight-seven-year-old Frankl looks back on the paradox of having attained such staggering success with something that had begun so unconcerned with personal acclaim, so passionately purposed with a fundamental human yearning.

In a sentiment emanating the ancient Chinese philosophy of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — he writes:

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by — product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a solo print.

He adds a mighty antidote to our modern pathology of instant gratification:

Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Complement with artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent, writing a generation before Frankl, on how not to be a victim of success, and Arundhati Roy, writing a generation after him, on its deepest measure, then revisit Frankl’s lost lectures on how to say “yes” to life in spite of everything.

BP

Virginia Woolf on Finding Beauty in the Uncertainty of Time, Space, and Being

By Maria Popova

Virginia Woolf on Finding Beauty in the Uncertainty of Time, Space, and Being

“How should we like it were stars to burn with a passion for us we could not return?” asked W.H. Auden in one of the greatest poems ever written — a subtle, playful, poignant meditation on what it takes to go on living — to go on making poems and symphonies and equations, to go on loving — when faced with something so much vaster than we are, so beyond our control and so rife with uncertainty, be it the chance-governed universe enfolding us or the sovereign cosmos of another heart.

A generation before him, Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) — another subtle illuminator of the human spirit in its cosmic dimensions — shone a sidewise gleam on the blunt edge of that eternal question of how to live with, and perhaps even find beauty, in the elemental uncertainty of time, space, and being — a question suddenly sharpened at times of especial uncertainty.

Art by Nina Cosford from the illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf

In one of the most ravishing passages from her 1927 masterwork To the Lighthouse (public library | free ebook) — the most autobiographical of her novels — Woolf writes:

What after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollows of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flesh of tattered flags kindling in the doom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

Art by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

In the breaking waves, Woolf finds a staggering emblem of our struggle to hold the larger wholeness in view, in faith, when our worlds come momentarily disworlded:

It seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth.

Radiating from Woolf’s gorgeous words is the reminder that all states of mind, all territories of feeling, even those that feel most unsurvivable — perhaps especially those that feel most unsurvivable — are merely moments in time, and yet they are not islanded in the river of being but belong with the rest of the current, the current that springs from the selfsame source as our capacity for beauty, for transcendence, for experiencing ourselves as “the thing itself”:

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

Art by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)

If you have survived your life so far without reading To the Lighthouse, and suddenly find yourself with new orders of time, space, and being on your hands, this might be the moment to savor Woolf’s timeless treasure — the kind of book that leaves you feeling nothing less than reborn. Complement this particular fragment with an antidote to helplessness and disorientation from the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm, then revisit Woolf on being ill, why we read, what it means to be an artist, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, and her transcendent account of a total solar eclipse.

BP

Kierkegaard on How to Channel Anxiety into Creativity

By Maria Popova

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin famously wrote. But what, exactly, is anxiety, that pervasive affliction the nature of which remains as drowning yet as elusive as the substance of a shadow? In his 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety (public library), Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explains anxiety as the dizzying effect of freedom, of paralyzing possibility, of the boundlessness of one’s own existence — a kind of existential paradox of choice. He writes:

Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. [Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.

[…]

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

He captures the invariable acuteness of anxiety’s varied expressions:

Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.

Kierkegaard argues that, to paraphrase Henry Miller, on how we orient ourselves to anxiety depends the failure or fruitfulness of life:

In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. But he who sank in possibility — his eye became dizzy, his eye became confused… Whoever is educated by possibility is exposed to danger, not that of getting into bad company and going astray in various ways as are those educated by the finite, but in danger of a fall, namely, suicide. If at the beginning of education he misunderstands the anxiety, so that it does not lead him to faith but away from faith, then he is lost. On the other hand, whoever is educated [by possibility] remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsification and accurately remembers the past. Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go.

Core to this premise is the conception of anxiety as a dual force that can be both destructive and generative, depending on how we approach it. Like Nin herself observed in her reflection of why emotional excess is necessary for writing, Kierkegaard argues that anxiety is essential for creativity. Perhaps the most enduring and thoughtful interpretation of his treatment of the relationship between creativity and anxiety comes from legendary existential psychologist Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (public library), originally published in 1950:

We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

Both The Concept of Anxiety and The Meaning of Anxiety endure as excellent reads in their entirety, timeless and increasingly timely in our age of anxious wonder.

BP

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