Born in the heyday of the denial of the human animal’s animality, in a world where nature was considered an ember of wildness to extinguish with civilization, its partitioned mystery dissected by various sciences walled off from one another, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859) set out to “establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation,” giving us the modern understanding of nature as a system. 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.

Humboldt understood that a different way of seeing demands a different way of articulating the seen. Because nature is all there is, he insisted, writing about it demands prose “worthy of bearing witness to the majesty and greatness of the creation” — in other words, almost poetry. (A century and half after him, Rachel Carson would catalyze our ecological imagination with books emanating her conviction that because nature is inherently poetic, “no one could write truthfully about [it] and leave out the poetry.”) Such worthiness only comes form a perspective that recognizes interdependence as the source of that majesty.

Humboldt writes:

In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of humankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments.

Such a “glimmering perception” of nature’s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called “primitive” societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of “long and laborious observation.” His intimation, two centuries before physicist Richard Feynman made a kindred case in his superb ode to a flower, is that a scientific understanding of nature’s processes and phenomena doesn’t diminish but deepens our sense of their majesty and of our bright participation in this “great chain of cause and effect.”

And yet for all “the pleasure of finding things out,” in Feynman’s lovely phrase, Humboldt located the beating heart of this transcendent enjoyment not in the mind but in our animal sensorium. He was able to see nature as a system because he — unlike his contemporaries, unlike most of us — refused to forget that we are nature too, that we ourselves are systems in which thought and feeling, sensation and perception, impression and imagination are intertwined, that we can only apprehend the rest of nature not as disembodied intellects analyzing it from above but as embodied animals feeling it from within. In the Cartesian era of “I think, therefore I am,” Humboldt seems to be saying: “I feel, therefore I understand.”

Epochs before that process of “long and laborious observation” we call science discovered the transcendent state of “soft fascination” that stills the brain’s Default Mode Network — the turbine of overthinking — to lens the world through embodied feeling, Humboldt describes it perfectly in this prose poem of a passage from the preface to the first volume of his Cosmos:

In reflecting upon the different degrees of enjoyment presented to us in the contemplation of nature, we find that the first place must be assigned to a sensation, which is wholly independent of an intimate acquaintance with the physical phenomena presented to our view, or of the peculiar character of the region surrounding us. In the uniform plain bounded only by a distant horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waving grasses, deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves, softly rippling over the beach, leave a track, green with the weeds of the sea; every where, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths. Every where, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intellectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouchsafed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side, whether we look upward to the starry vault of heaven, scan the far-stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon across the vast expanse of ocean.

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.

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.

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.