Symbolism and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI – The Marginalian

When he published Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), before he turned forty, was a world-renowned naturalist (the word scientist was yet to be invented). Napoleon hated him for his anti-colonial and abolitionist views. Goethe valued him as the greatest thinking companion of all, his company and brief conversation as if he had “lived for several years.” Thoreau thought of his own eyes as “natural telescopes and microscopes.” Whitman called himself “kosmos” after the title of Humboldt's epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, quickly admitted that without Humboldt's inspirational memoir-travelogue, every episode of which he could recite by heart, he would not have climbed. The BeagleI would never have written On the Origin of Specieshe would not have had his most extreme experience while climbing the Andes in Humboldt's footsteps.

Unlike his contemporaries, Humboldt did not see nature as an obstacle for “Man” to conquer but as a wonderful entity with human nature dispersed.

Unlike other naturalists, who collected isolated examples and wanted to divide the living world into pure taxa, he collected and connected ideas to “establish the unity and harmony of this great mass of energy and matter,” where “no single fact can be considered in isolation” – the idea of ​​nature as a system that paved the way for everything from the field of biology to the biological concept of the unified hypothesis. the environment.

Unlike other explorers, he looked down on the idea of ​​non-Europeans as savages who needed to be civilized and saw them as scholars with very old cultures and traditions, complex, interesting, and full of natural stories.

Published in French in 1810, Songs of the Cordillères – a record of his time in the Cordilleras, the high mountains of Latin America where he developed the modern concept of nature as the center of relationships – was Humboldt's most extravagant book. Among the intricate carvings of mountains, volcanoes, and archeological artifacts are a series of strange, glittering pieces from ancient Incan and Aztec hieroglyphics, filled with faces and bodies, touch and action.

The alphabets of many writing systems began as pictograms. Europeans had indeed seen some ancient hieroglyphics – especially Egyptian, although the Rosetta Stone had yet to be determined – but they were symbolic languages ​​made up of inaudible pictorial elements. Here's a completely different visual alphabet for emotion and interaction — the OG emoji.

Humboldt, who believed that we must “trace the course of abstract ideas” throughout history to grasp the world we live in, must have seen the importance of this visual language because he devoted almost half of the expensive engravings of the book to it, effectively introducing the ancient invention of emoji to the modern world.

Songs of the Cordillères it was so popular that an English translation was published by a modern London publisher, who had brought Lord Byron to the world.

Darwin was fifteen when he received his copy.

No one can trace perfectly the threads of golden influence that link minds through generations and studies, or measure the unconscious rapidity of inspiration in another's mind, or know the time of the germination of an idea. We only know that, as a young man, Darwin used his scientific hero's ancient emoji record and, as an old man, created the first visual dictionary of human emotions.

Although he intended it as a chapter on The Descent of Manhe saw the importance of the unity of the subject and was published Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals as a stand-alone book a year later – one of the first illustrated science books, a practice pioneered by Anna Atkins a generation earlier with her study of seaweed printing.

Depicting basic emotions such as fear, anger, joy, sadness, and disgust as “movements of the features and touch,” Darwin's lexicon of touch shares one key feature with the Inca pictograms — both of which depict emotions as something common to all humans, head to toe.

“A completely different human emotion is nothing,” William James wrote ten years later Speech in his landmark investigation of physiology under the psychology of feeling. The irony of our time is that although we now know that consciousness itself is an all-pervading practice, we have continued our campaign to deny the animal nature of the human animal by ignoring the importance, the relationality, the reality of the body. Meeting each other as faces on screens, growing startups instead of mountains, outsourcing our knowledge of the world to artificial AI concepts, we have alienated ourselves. Our emoji shows this voluntary cutting of the body, this cult of the head. “For its projection of signs,” Humboldt wrote The Cosmos thinking about ancient cultures, “[the imagination] it influences ideas and language.” Our identities influence our ideas about what it means to be human and shape our thinking in turn. If we are to reclaim our lives from creation, it may be time to rethink our visual language and invent a new alphabet of integrated emojis.