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Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as in bomb disposal and surgery. However, outside circumstances such as these, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It is arguable whether or not primordial empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic. What is clear, nonetheless, is that empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects remain positively connected with others and the shared world. Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject – this paradox points to more than a mere conceptual tension. How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains, challenge the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? What can aesthetics reveal about inhuman gazes and perceiving otherwise?