6/20/24 — SOCIETY | ESSAY

I have always had a deep seated aversion to company branding. Early in my self-expression, it became clear to me that I prefer a more universal aesthetic: one which, as I understand now, tends to transcend interpersonal understanding.

The premise of this idea came to me whilst reminiscing on a walk through a college campus I had made the decision to attend for, among sundry pragmatisms, a similar reason: UT Tyler had a

“natural expression.”

So much so that it’s plethora of trees created interesting visual intersections of the campus that shifted like a kaleidoscope depending on your perspective. In hindsight, the plane which exists at the cross section of tree branch and sky is, in fact, a universal identifier. It is among the most natural thing that any human, perhaps any living species, can recognize. Its mere description, in fact, likely brings the image to your mind.

Brands, on the other hand, always fail the litmus test for universal identification. They are not an expression of nature and so not a natural intuition. Their recognition is not an instinct shared among humans, much less species. It is always produced by a human-personhood and taught to other human-persons.

I think we are all aware of this motif (it is fundamental to our condition, after all): that there is a dissonance which exists between natural and human invention. My earliest demonstration of this awarness just happened to express itself in the rejection of a fashion inundated with personalized logos (Nike, Adidas, you name it). Patterns/prints, even, made me somewhat uncomfortable and still do. I even dared to wonder, at one point, whether the concept of clothing itself was a type of branding — to cover a divine invention with an interpersonal one. I just hadn’t yet the conceptual understanding to describe it with the vocabulary I use now.

I won’t feign uniqueness in this, just a distinctness; as I assume, speaking contemporaneously, that humans fall into two camps: either perceiving themselves in relation to natural creation or to their interpersonal ones¹.

As a friend of mine once wisely remarked, all things, really, are natural. What one means to communicate via misnomer, therefore, is that some things are just farther removed from the original source of ontology than others: we consider highly processed food or urbanization to be “unnatural” in this light.

But what has this to do with the logos and company branding that introduced this writing?

Creativity is an expression of personhood. As such, there must be two distinct personhoods at work when we review the aforementioned motif of our condition. The first, the original, expresses Itself in the creation of nature. The second, the human variation, expresses itself in the manipulation of nature. Both create; One, however, out of nothing and the other out of the former’s natural substance: be it mind or clay.

I prefer “anthropersonal” awareness to the interpersonal variety. The latter forgets that, if creativity is a significant expression of personhood, and we ourselves are a creation, that would make us secondary instead of primary persons. The ultimate personhood, is ultimately creative, and as creations, that we are ultimately not.

To go about life, without this humility: that you are a human, is where I believe I have intuited my issue with company branding. Intuition, as I think C.S. Lewis would likely agree, is the product of original creation: morality is a type of natural logo with this in mind². Marketing, on the other hand, is an attempt at creating an artificial universal identification among people — one that cannot uniquely re-emerge in another condition, but as previously mentioned, requires teaching.

We forget ourselves in perceiving this type of universal identification as legitimate. It is limited to the people who understand it, and will be gone as soon as they are. We are human. To think we are person (as in creative) enough to defy this metric, of course, is naive considering the more omniscient perspective, just as antiquity’s concept of civil and savage is to contemporaries. Both examples, fail to recognize the futility of rejecting (or perhaps just fundamentally misunderstand) their condition; of which, personhood (creativity) is only half and being a creation, the other³.

Interpersonal awareness then is, really, an oblivion. It is a pride. It assumes personhood is independent to humans; it obsesses over a human’s distinct relationship to other humans instead of their distinct relationship to God.

It is a kind of linguistic determinism which can only be combated via the invention of new linguistic signage. It otherwise limits our understanding of personhood and prevents us, from conceiving personhood as anything but internal to the human species. In truth, we are merely of the human variety, a subset of a far more original personhood. What the concept of “anthropersonalism” does is remind us of this by combining the aspects of our incompatible nature into one lexeme as “human-persons “or “created-creatives”.

The effect is a newfound ability to witness yourself as art — a humility, but also a relief — when you had thought life was about being the artist (or the actor, the entrepreneur, or whatever social niche⁴ you happen to take up). It is to become fascinated by an all encompassing and more divine creation, when you thought life was about what you could personally create in your own uniqueness.

We can’t create anything more unique than ourselves (which we, of course, did not). As “anthropersons”, instead of interpersons, we understand this: we become far too awestruck by our very creation to forget ourselves in the pride of participation; to understate the breadth of human experience; or the value of quiet witness.

Society rejects this natural intuition. It is, of course, a society built for people and not humans. At this point you can probably infer the moral implication I am discerning between the two, but in an effort to draw conclusion:

I am of the opinion that human intuition is of more ontological significance than human institution. It is, hopelessly glaring, after all, that one is of our own futile creativity and the other, natural creation.

Summer Arukwer-Strother

1. among the few useful applications of interpersonal awareness ↩︎
2. C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity” ↩︎
3. My Essay, “I Wanna be Human (Human Nature for Social Organizations)” ↩︎
4. Joe Hollis’ Paradise Gardening ↩︎