The Structure of Animality and the Formation of Novel Sense: From Portmann and Arendt to Merleau-Ponty

This article considers the zoologist Adolf Portmann’s claim that the outward form of the organism first has a presentation value ( Darstellungswert ) that is prior to and more basic than its adaptive value. Portmann maintains as a consequence that living beings are fundamentally driven by the urge to self-display ( Selbstdarstellung ). This drive toward self-presentation is directed, above all, to conspecifics because conspecifics can most fully meet this desire to be seen, touched, and heard, that is, to appear. Merleau-Ponty and Arendt show from different directions that this relation “gives an ontological value back to the notion of species. What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality” (Merleau-Ponty). The conception of the living being that emerges from these considerations suggests a novel way of understanding sociality as ontologically primordial. It also discloses a new conception of what is at stake in environmental devastation: the irrecoverable loss of presentation value.