“Humanity is another corporeity”: The evolution of human bodily appearance and sociality

Abstract Some accounts of human distinctiveness focus on anatomical features, such as bipedalism and brain size. Others focus on cognitive abilities, such as tool use and manufacture, language, and social cognition. Embodied approaches to cognition highlight the internal relations between these two groups of characteristics, arguing that cognition is rooted in and shaped by embodiment. This paper complements existing embodied approaches by focusing on an underappreciated aspect of embodiment: the appearance of the human body as condition of human sociality and cognition. I approach this issue through Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the animate body as an intertwining of perceiving and perceivable aspects. The eye is both an animal’s embodied, perceptual openness onto the world, and the means by which that experiential openness can be perceived by others. The morphology and appearance of its embodiment condition how an animal comes to understand others and itself as animate subjects. I interpret the perceivable appearance of the human eye and skin in comparison with those of other animals. An underappreciated dimension of human distinctiveness, I argue, is the way the human sense organs render human perceiving comparatively more perceivable to conspecifics.