Reciprocal Accord: Seeing Microbiomes as Parts of Ourselves

Human beings and their microbiomes are interrelated. Now what is the nature of their relation? In this paper, I claim that human beings have microbiomes as parts of themselves. In other words, rather than merely being casually associated with human beings, those microbiomes that reside in/on/around people are constituent parts of human beings. I argue this by reference to organismal homeostasis as understood as a systems-level phenomenon. To support my argument, I provide a survey of contemporary scientific literature surrounding the composition, location, structure, and function of the human microbiome(s). Finally, I cash out this finding by developing the idea of the "constitutive publicity" of the human organism. By this I mean that the human organism is not a "private" entity that then finds itself in the world, but rather that it is constantly created, suffused by, and contributing to the "public" world.