Thursday, June 25, 2009
Montiglio turns briefly from the study of Greek tragedy to the study of medical texts:
[T]he Hippocratics insistently note the appearance of aphôniê as a most significant symptom. The meanings of this term range from speech difficulties, to a partial or total inhibition of the vocal organs, to aphasia, to the inability to speak on account of a physical lesion. Such an extended semantic field fits within the Greek pattern of calling "silence" not only a total absence of words or sounds, but also their partial presence. Just as the dative sigêi and the adverb siga (in silence) can apply to a bad speaker, that is, to someone who does use his language even though inadequately, the term aphôniê equates all kinds and degrees of speech disturbances with a "nonvoice." In the view of the Hippocratic doctor, patients who fail to communicate as he hopes are simply "voiceless."
The symptom of aphôniê is all the more disquieting for the doctor because he urgently needs his patients' words in order to understand the nature of their illnesses. Ancient Medicine stresses the importance of entertaining a dialogue with one's patient on a theoretical level. A concrete application of this principle, the Prognosis relies on the possibility of a regular communication with the sick, which alone enables the doctor to describe the symptoms of the disease in the most accurate way possible and to formulate a prognosis along with its evolution.
The troublesome character of aphôniê may explain why its emergence is repeatedly marked as "sudden" (exaiphnês). For it is unlikely that the onset of aphôniê was always so sudden in reality, considering the wide range of meanings of this term. As Danielle Gourevitch remarks, here "the observation is somehow replacing its object." To the doctor's eyes, a loss of speech and voice is apparently so fatal a symptom that it seems to manifest itself unexpectedly, abruptly, with no progression or warning: "When she was given a fragrant application of ground meal and myrrh, suddenly she lost her voice and died," writes the author of Epidemics 4 (30). Not surprisingly, this sudden loss of the voice is followed by an equally sudden death.
(Silence, pp. 228-229, my bold)
The disappearance of the voice more than the disappearance of language disquiets. Are all animal species endowed with a voice? To what extent might the voice be "given" through experience, developed rather than merely genetically endowed? Some species we know are able to learn vocalizations—but do they learn the voice itself? Biologist Stephanie Watwood, who studies how social interactions affect vocal development in animals, notes that the signature whistle of the male bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) assimilates to the signature whistles of other males whom they ally with as they fully mature. For females the signature whistle does not change over the lifespan. (See the video labeled "Whistles of Bottlenose Dolphins" here.) Does the juvenile male dolphin lose its voice as it enters adulthood? Is the autocognominal call an indication that dolphins are recognizable to each other by their voices, or does it signal some need for an additional unique identifier because the dolphin's voice alone isn't in fact unique? Does voicelessness represent the loss of the cognomen, the loss of any and all identity? Did the ancient Greeks conceive of disappearances of the voice that didn't symptomize dying, or is it perhaps the nature of conceptualization to remain loosely bound by a constellation of established usages and pregiven meanings, or to move within the ambit of affiliations, to assimilate? No, I rather imagine—assimilation means this much as much as it means an implicitly thoughtless con-formity— humans conceptualize more freely than that, at least as freely as dolphins and a few other types of animals create vocalizations in response to their acoustic milieu.
Labels: dolphins, environment, Montiglio, silence, voice, Watwood
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The name Georges Canguilhem popped up over at Wildly's. The Oxford University Centre for the Environment School of Geography Technological Natures Research Cluster has made public Graham Burchell's rough translation of The Living Being and its Environment from La connaissance de la vie by Georges Canguilhem. In this essay Canguilhem reviews the history of the word milieu and the concept of the milieu or environment of a living being.
But there is still a lesson to be drawn from the absolute and unqualified use of the word milieu definitively established by Comte. In Lamarck, the equivalent of what the word will henceforth designate was circumstances; Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in his 1831 report to the Academy of Sciences said: the surrounding environment (le milieu ambiant). The terms circumstances and ambiance or surroundings suggest a particular intuition of a centered or focused formation. In the success of the word milieu the representation of the straight line or indefinitely extendable plane, both continuous and homogenous, lacking definite shape or privileged position, prevails over the representation of the circle or sphere, forms which are still qualitatively defined and, if one may say so, hitched to a fixed center of reference. Circumstances and surroundings still preserve a symbolic value, but milieu forgoes reference to any other relation than that of a position forever denied by exteriority. Now refers to before, here to its beyond, and so on without cease. The environment is truly a pure system of relations without supports.
(pp. 4-5)
I should pause a moment to take note of Canguilhem's rather semiotic view of the environment. He says, "[Kurt] Goldstein says that 'the meaning of an organism is its being'; we can say that the being of the organism is its meaning. . . . Biology must therefore consider the living being first of all as a meaningful being, and individuality not as an object but as a characteristic in the realm of values. To live is to spread out, to organize the environment from a center of reference which cannot itself be referred elsewhere without losing its original meaning" (p. 13). Then, in a discussion of Pascal's "Disproportion of the Human Being," Canguilhem lays out three senses of the word milieu: median position, sustaining fluid (a sense inherited from Newtonian mechanics), and vital environment:
We know what became of the idea of the Cosmos with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and how dramatic the conflict was between the organic conception of the world and the conception of a universe decentered in relation to the Earth of living beings and man, the privileged center of reference of the ancient world. Starting with Galileo, and also Descartes, we had to choose between two theories of the environment, that is to say, basically of space: a centered, qualitative space in which the mi-lieu is a center; a decentered, homogenous space in which the mi-lieu is an intermediary field. Pascal's famous text, Disproportion of [M]an [§72], clearly reveals the ambiguity of the term in a mind which cannot or does not want to choose between its need for existential security and the requirements of scientific knowledge. Pascal knows full well that the universe has fallen apart, but the "eternal silence" fills him with dread. Man is no longer in the middle (au milieu), but he is a "mid-point" [un milieu]) (a mid-point between [milieu entre] two infinities, between nothing and everything, between two extremes); the "middle station" (milieu) is the condition in which nature has placed us; we drift over a vast milieu ["we are floating in a medium of vast extent"]; man bears a proportion with some parts of the world, he has a relationship with all that he knows: "He needs a place to contain him, time to exist (durer) in, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food for nourishment, air to breathe . . . everything in short is related to him." We can see therefore three senses of the term milieu interfering with each other here: median situation, sustaining fluid, and vital environment. In developing this last sense Pascal sets out his organic conception of the world in a return to Stoicism beyond and against Descartes: "Thus, since all things are both caused or causing, assisting and assisting [sic], mediate and immediate, providing mutual support in a chain linking together naturally and imperceptibly the most distant and different things, I consider it as impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole as to know the whole without knowing the individual parts." And when he defines the universe as "an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere," Pascal paradoxically tries, through the use of an image taken from the theosophical tradition, to reconcile the new scientific conception, which makes the universe an unlimited and undifferentiated milieu, and the ancient cosmological vision, which makes the world a finite totality that refers back to its center. It has been established that the image Pascal uses here is a permanent myth of originally Neo-Platonist mystical thought in which the intuition of the spherical world centered on and by the living being is combined with the already heliocentric cosmology of the Pythagoreans.
(pp.15-16)
Labels: Canguilhem, environment, Pascal
Monday, March 19, 2007
Jonas claims that motility, perception and emotion distinguish animals from plants (p. 99). The problem as I see it, however, is how to distinguish animals from other motile, hetertrophic, eukaryotic organisms. I have no clue as to what the actual taxonomy of eukaryotes should look like, but it seems clear that motility and hetertrophy are more primitive than perception and emotion which are clearly evident in only one lineage. Since Jonas has made such an example of the amoeba, I'm dissapointed that he ignores the amoeba when he ties the emotional life of animals directly to motility and hetertrophy, as if all of these characteristics emerged at once in a single lineage. If I'm going to have any use for Jonas' thinking on this topic, I'm going to have to revise and restructure his argument to account for the protozoa.
The autotrophic organism, according to Jonas, doesn't quite have a world. (p. 100). Its environment is directly contiguous with it.
From this original fact of life's having commerce with an environment we should exclude all premature suggestion of the duality of subject and object. The original condition is an environment contiguous with the organism: in this stage environment is nothing but the immedieate surroundings with which the chemical interchanges of metabolism take place. This situtation of material contiguity means also continuity in the process of exchange and thus immediacy of satisfaction concurrent with the permanent organic need. In this condition of continuous feeding there is no room for desire
(p. 102)
So the sunflower, in Jonas' view, doesn't know desire, doesn't relate to things as objects, and, although it has a vital identity, it doesn't have a reflective self and concomittantly it doesn't really relate to a world. If Jonas is right that only animals have a passionate existence (p. 106), or, to be exact, "passionate being," it can't be for the reasons he adumbrates, because by his reasoning the protozoa would also have to be thought of as passionate, even though they lack the ability to percieve or the mechanical means of transmitting feelings.
Does the amoeba after all have a world? Does it relate to objects in its environment even though it lacks the means to percieve them? Is the subject-object duality contingent upon motility, heterotrophy, or upon perception? Jonas views mediacy as the key attainment of the animals, but in the record of life there appear to be different kinds or stages of mediacy–Jonas is not altogether consistent; he recognizes that mineral relations are even less mediate than a plants' relations to its environment (p.107), so in the end it appears to be a question of degrees, and this is a problem for the analysis of mediacy, self-transendence and the notion of activity, an organism's capacity for action over and above basal metabolism, which is in a sense an emotional capacity that Jonas ascribes to animals but not to plants.. What then can we really make of the emergence of mediacies in the history of life, since there has apparently been more than one evolutionary event leading to the kind of impassioned mediacy that Jonas asks us to observe in animal life? Can biology tell us whether an amoeba has a world? If a world is a phenomenon of life, is it the sort of phenomenon that exists prior to and in some cases independently of perception or sentience? If we allow that the amoeba relates to a world rather than simply being in contact with its environment, does this open the door to considering that the sunflower also has a world? On what grounds do we say that the sunflower's movements don't add up to motility? We could adopt a special definition of motility that applies only to animals but not to protozoa, but this doesn't really solve the problem that Jonas creates by linking worldhood directly to motility. Alternatively we could say that Jonas is simply wrong about perception and emotion being coeval with motility, and wrong about the origins of worldhood. However, it does make sense to see worldhood as a elaboration of motility. So either the amoeba has a world, or the elaboration of motility that leads to worldhood happened only once. This puzzles me. How do we imagine nature such that freak occurrences and phylogenetic trends equally belong to nature? (I'm completely ambivalent about the whole issue of teleology. So it goes.)
Labels: amoeba, environment, Jonas, motility, world
Friday, March 09, 2007
Jonas' review of the ontological implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory leads him to the position, hedged but clearly proposed, that inwardness is coexstensive with life (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 58). This notion that subjectivity begins with the membrane again raises the question of whether my philodendron in any way experiences its life, whether it has a soul or whether only animals have something that can be called be a soul. In either case, it appears that life on earth has generated a wide variety of forms of psychophysical unity, and the belief that subjectivity is something that belongs to humanity alone cannot be sustained.
If inwardness is merely coexstensive with Animalia, what's the difference between inwardness and fins, or opposable thumbs? We'll for one thing in inwardness we're looking at something far more primitive. The flagellates, more primitive than Animalia, are heterotrophic and motile–but how could a flagellate possibly feel its own motility? And yet how could it not know where it is going? This is puzzling. Only animals, with the exception of Phylum Porifera, have nerve tissues, giving them a means to feel that we can clearly understand. I don't know how much this matters to Jonas. If it were true that only "higher" mammals had subjective experiences of living, I think he would still argue that inwardness is a reality that belongs to life. Given the huge variety of eukaryotes that never evolved into animals, I'm hesitant to see things that way. Perhaps inwardness truly is freakish, the flowering of a single improbable mutation. Once inwardness exists, though, can it be understood mechanistically? Jonas thinks not, and this is for him is an essential difference between inwardness and other, anatomical features that have evolved over the aeons.
If inwardness cannot be understood mechanistically, it may still be understood evolutionarily, or in a way that's at least consistent with evolutionary theory. Jonas calls evolutionism the "apocryphal ancestor" of modern existentialism (p. 47) because it did away with the notion of the immutable species and introduced the idea that the condition is constituitive of the existent. Life doesn't occur simply within the boundaries of the organism, but in its habitat, in the organism's specific relations to its environment (p. 46). Inwardness was in no way forseen by the amoeba, Jonas argues, but it was elicited over the aeons in the flux of the vital situation (pp. 46-47). In other words, natural selection is the agency responsible for the emergence of inwardness, and inasmuchas natural selection belongs to the whole of life and not to the internal dynamics of particular organisms, which merely produces variations but does not select which will thrive, the outcomes of natural selection belong to the whole of life. If I've understood Jonas correctly, the vital situation is not simply something that bears on how an organism makes a living, to use the popular metaphor, but rather how it comes to exist at all in nature.
Labels: environment, evolution, Jonas, natural selection, panpsychism, philodendron, psyche
Monday, February 26, 2007
The Neurophilosopher reports that lizards modify their displays in response to visual noise. Two issues strike me from reading the paper by Ord et al: (a) the plasticity of anole lizard display behaviour, which the authors will not confirm though they believe it deserves further study, and (b) the richness of an environment that includes noise. The response to acoustic noise is well documented in a variety of other species. Does the response to noise imply an idea of noise? Does it imply a cogitation?
Labels: display, environment, lizards, noise, zoosemiosis