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new science that would reverse the priorities: "
Not what something is, but how it 'appears' is the research problem
" (italics added). 16
    This means that the very shape of an animal "must be appraised as a special organ of reference in relationship to a beholding eye.... The eye and what is to be looked at form a functional unit which is fitted together according to rules as strict as those obtaining between food and digestive organs." 17 And in accordance with this reversal, Portmann distinguishes between "authentic appearances," which come to light of their own accord, and "inauthentic" ones, such as the roots of a plant or the inner organs of an animal, which become visible only through interference with and violation of the "authentic" appearance.
    Two facts of equal importance give this reversal its main plausibility. First, the impressive phenomenal difference between "authentic" and "inauthentic" appearances, between outside shapes and the inside apparatus. The outside shapes are infinitely varied and highly differentiated; among the higher animals we can usually tell one individual from another. Outside features of living things, moreover, are arranged according to the law of symmetry so that they appear in a definite and pleasing order. Inside organs, on the contrary, are never pleasing to the eye; once forced into view, they look as though they had been thrown together piecemeal and, unless deformed by disease or some peculiar abnormality, they appear alike; not even the various animal species, let alone the individuals, are easy to tell from each other by the mere inspection of their intestines. When Portmann defines life as "the appearance of an inside in an outside," 18 he seems to fall victim to the very views he criticizes; for the point of his own findings is that what appears outside is so hopelessly
different
from the inside that one can hardly say that the inside ever appears at all. The inside, the functional apparatus of the life process, is covered up by an outside which, as far as the life process is concerned, has only one function, namely, to hide and protect it, to prevent its exposure to the light of an appearing world. If this inside were to appear, we would all look alike.
    There is, second, the equally impressive evidence for the existence of an innate impulse—no less compelling than the
merely
functional instinct of preservation—which Portmann calls "the urge to self-display" (
Selbstdarstellung
). This instinct is entirely gratuitous in terms of life-preservation; it far transcends what may be deemed necessary for sexual attraction. These findings suggest that the predominance of outside appearance implies, in addition to the sheer receptivity of our senses, a spontaneous activity:
whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched.
It is indeed as though everything that is alive—in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others—has an
urge to appear,
to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its "inner self" but itself as an individual. (The word "self-display," like the German
Selbstdarstellung,
is equivocal: it can mean that I actively make my presence felt, seen, and heard, or that I display my
self
, something inside me that otherwise would not appear at all—that is, in Portmann's terminology, an "inauthentic" appearance. In the following we shall use the word in the first meaning.) It is precisely this self-display, quite prominent already in the higher forms of animal life, that reaches its climax in the human species.
    Portmann's morphological reversal of the usual priorities has far-reaching consequences, which he himself, however—perhaps for very good reasons—does not elaborate. They point to what he calls "the value of the surface," that is, to the fact that "the appearance shows a