If you are interested in modern western conceptions of faciality, Sloterdijk has a chapter on faciality in Bubbles which might be worth a read. I don’t have the book on hand, but it traces from evolutionary snout —> face emergence into the Christian facial iconography which dominated western art. I believe he then goes on to show how when Christ’s hegemony of the face started falling apart, everyone, through their face, in a sense, became Christ. This tracks Moldbug’s universalist protestantism as hyperchrist-manifest-image right into Sellars, and I will reread it in this light.

There’s even a slight parallel to the “over-attribution of agency to regularities” of nature, in that an especially symmetrical plant can accidentally set off the “orienting response” (basically an all-brains-on-deck alert). Dennet writes that false alarms are the price to be paid for “a fast cheap, portable mechanism”, and one that “organisms, in their narcissism, pay willingly”.

Personally, I’m an aesthetician, and think grammatical persons are a beautiful lie, the face a mask that gives too much away, and how much does gesture betray? Ultimately, our most intimate thoughts are never shared by any but the faces closest to ours, and ‘face’ is too distant a word.