Agency and Appearance: Reading the Face of Life

This chapter focuses on a single but essential building block of biological organisation, namely the way living organisms establish their specific relationship between existence and appearance. Although in the following we restrict our interest to the visual dimension, one could conceive of other modalities and their interactions along similar lines. All lineages which led to complex multicellularity have either one or both of the following advanced light-handling skills: (i) light reflection and absorption to create a display of self and/or (ii) the ability to focus the light reflected from other objects on a pigmented retina so as to create an image of the external world. Inanimate objects also reflect light, but only living entities can actively influence their reflection and therefore also their display. Living bodies themselves create the exposed surfaces. Such appearances are therefore in effect an externalisation of an organised self – and that is something that does not apply to the visual aspects of inanimate things. Further, I argue that the organismal capacity of self-representation is intimately related to certain essential characteristics which differentiate life from nonlife. The more developed the self-representational ability, the higher the complexity of organisation, and the further away the organised beings are from nonlife.