Category: Research Articles

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.

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Kee, Hayden. 2024. “‘Humanity Is Another Corporeity’: The Evolution of Human Bodily Appearance and Sociality.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04581-4.

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality.

To get this sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty, for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity.” Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality.

Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis. Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each.

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Kee, Hayden. 2024. “Between Social Cognition and Material Engagement: The Cooperative Body Hypothesis.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09985-8.

In a late lecture course, Merleau-Ponty proposes a novel and original framework for investigating the evolution of homo sapiens. Prior to becoming the rational or linguistic animal, human being is “another way of being a body.” Of course, the study of the evolution of human anatomy – bipedalism, the fully opposable thumb, increased cranial capacity – had long been established already in Merleau-Ponty’s time. His distinctive contribution, however, is his emphasis on the appearance of the human body as a social body that both senses and is sensed by others. He calls for an “esthesiology,” a study of how the human body has evolved as an “organ of the for-other.” It is a body for being perceived and being acted-upon and -with, as much as a body for perceiving and acting. I apply this esthesiological framework to interpret the evolution of the distinctive morphology and expressivity of the human eye.

In this paper I primarily offer an exegesis and reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology and a discussion of the historical sources (especially Portmann and Husserl) that shaped his view. This work will prepare the way for more systematic applications of the esthesiological framework in future publications. The esthesiological approach will allow us to appreciate the bodily, sensory, and social aspects of human evolution and their foundational role in the cultural and linguistic form of life characteristic of human beings.

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Kee, Hayden. 2023. “Evolution and Esthesiology: Seeing the Eye through Merleau-Ponty’s Nature and Logos Lectures.” HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (43): 297–322.

Title: “In Search of Lost Speech: From Language to Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France Courses.” Humana.Mente.

Abstract: This paper tracks the development of Merleau-Ponty’s inquiries into language through the themes of institution, symbolism, and nature in his Collège de France lectures of 1953-1960. It seeks to show the continuity of Merleau-Ponty’s inquiries over this period. The Problem of Speech course (1953-1954) constitutes his last extended treatment of speech, language, and expression, and it leaves many questions unanswered. Nonetheless, a careful study of the course reveals that the inquiries that follow into institution and symbolism, and later into nature, do not mark a sharp rupture with his earlier thought. Rather, the later investigations are required by those into language and expression to clarify the underlying functions that support them. Ultimately, the themes of language and nature will be deeply interwoven in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought, with institution and symbolism serving as important mediating concepts.

This paper was published open access. You can download it for free at the publisher’s site (here).

Though this paper is very narrow in scope and will be of interest primarily to Merleau-Ponty scholars, it is part of a broader ongoing project to connect the meaning we find in nature with the meaning we make in culture and language. Stay tuned for more – including a book! – soon.

When we think of the Parisian existentialism and phenomenology of the mid-twentieth century, images of Camus, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty writing and conversing in smoky Left Bank cafes and jazz bars come to mind. Unfortunately, few will include the Vietnamese phenomenologist Trần Đức Thảo in that milieu, though he was an important contributor to both popular and academic philosophical and political discussions in late-40s and early-50s France. The reasons for Thảo’s erasure from the mainstream histories of the time are many: he fell out with Sartre, the most influential figure in those circles at the time, after the pair’s attempt to collaborate on a book ended acrimoniously; he chose to return to Vietnam in 1951 to support Vietnamese independence during the height of France’s colonial war in Indochina; and while Sartre delivered “Existentialism Is a Humanism” to a packed audience eager to pick up on the latest intellectual fashion, Thao sat in a Paris jail cell where he was being held as a “threat to the security of the French state.”

It was from that jail cell in 1945 that Thảo penned “On Indochina.” It was published in the February 1946 edition of Merleau-Ponty’s and Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes. In “On Indochina,” Thao carefully applies the tools of Husserlian phenomenology, adapted for a non-specialist audience, to help elucidate the misunderstanding between French and Vietnamese in Indochina and to critique the injustices perpetrated there by French colonialism. The essay was a plea to the French government and people to leave Vietnam in peace – a plea that tragically fell on deaf ears. Later in 1946, shortly after the publication of “On Indochina, French troops arrived in Vietnam to begin the First Indochina War and set off three decades of brutal warfare in the region.

“On Indochina” and Thảo’s other writings in Les Temps Modernes influenced later, more famous decolonial thinkers such as Fanon and Césaire. It is one of the first examples of what is now termed critical phenomenology. This is the first English translation of any of Thảo’s political writings.

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“On Indochina.” 2021. Études Phénoménologiques. DOI: 10.2143/EPH.5.0.3288747