Tuesday, April 03, 2007
I recently read Jean-Luc Nancy's "Sharing Voices" (in Ormiston and Schrift, eds., Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, SUNY Press, 1990). Unfortunately I no longer have the volume in my hands, but I wanted to comment on one of the ideas he raised, namely that being may simply be its announcement. What then do we make of beings that have no voice? Are mute beings not truly beings? Do we listen to them anyway, as if they could really speak? If we do, if the question of being entails an anthropormophic hermenuetics, then one of its dimensions according to Nancy is communitarian. Does this really evade the problem of subjectivism? What would it mean to have a communitarian relationship with the river? For Nancy meaning is itself an alterity–it won't be so easy to undercut his thinking here. Is this alterity human? If it isn't human, what does that say about the connection between meaning and community. If we stretch the definition of community to encompass all sign relations, all relations between an organism and its world, between predator and prey, do we not still need another concept to cover the ordinary sense of sociality, an idea of communitas. Or is this exactly what Nancy intends? Or, and this is a distinct possibility, Nancy wouldn't be concerned with the non-human. He wouldn't be concerned with the river as such, but rather with my exposure to otherness, the community that belongs to my interpretation of the river. I don't like this sense of limitation, the feeling that my questions about the being of the inanimate don't really count for much. On the other hand, I can't deny that I have announced the question of the being of the river to you, dear reader.
Labels: anthropomorphism, community, hermeneutic circle, Nancy, ontology, panpsychism
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
For Hans Jonas the beginning of life marks an ontological revolution in the history of matter (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 81). Unlike the particle, or an event structure such as a wave that can be described mathematically, the living organism possess a form that is a function of its metabolism and cannot be explained by reducing it to its material constituents. The living organism has a world and a corresponding interiority. It is self-transcendent, spatially and temporally extending beyond its own immediacy (pp. 84-85.) Jonas sees in the organism a primary dialectic of freedom and necessity; he sees this as not merely an aspect of the human condition, but an aspect of the cosmos, an aspect of being since the ontological revolution that is life.
In Jonas' view the emergence of life rather than the emergence of consciousness represents the greatest challenge to thought. This focus creates an interepretive problem. Jonas believes that the amoeba's conation can be reasonably infered based on our own human experience of being a living body, but that to make the same inference for the particle would be unwarranted anthropomorphism (pp. 81-83). He writes that "the teleological structure and behavior of [the] organism is not just an alternative choice of description: it is, on the evidence of each one's own organic awareness, the external manifestation of the inwardness of substance. To add the implications: there is no organism without teleology; there is no teleology without inwardness; and: life can be known only by life" (p. 91). Thus while Jonas regards lifeless matter as an abstraction, as something that doesn't quite fully exist, he does yet believe in substance, a property of living, concrete being. Is there a paradox here, in that the organism, particularly the autotroph, relies on something that doesn't concretely exist? I'm not sure, though I find it telling that Jonas' preferred example of the primitive organism is the amoeba, a hetertrophic protozoan. In any case, Jonas' belief that life is only intelligible to the living requires the exercise of a judicious anthropomorphism, or zoomorphism. Once we allow for making inferences based on our own experience, what limits do we accept on our use of such inferences?
I've already touched on the possibility that Jonas is wrong with respect to protozoa and what kind of dent (if any) that might put in his panpsychism. But what if he's correct? Did consciousness emerge historically by building on what was already present, not in raw matter, but in the being of the organism? What connection is there between metabolism and consciousness? Are self, world, and temporality all prior to the existence of consciousness? How much can we really say about a vital identity without relying on shoddy inferences? We'll see if Jonas has anything to say on the topic when I turn to his next chapter, "To Move and to Feel: On the Animal Soul."
Labels: amoeba, Jonas, life, ontology, panpsychism
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
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Deleuze wraps up his discussion of the actualization of the virtual:
Actualisation takes place in three series: space, time and also consciousness. Every spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by the emergence of an elementary consciousness which itself traces directions, doubles movements and migrations, and is born on the threshold of the condensed singularities of the body or object whose consciousness it is. It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something, and everything is consciousness because it possesses a double, even if it is far off and very foreign. Repetition is everywhere, as much as in what is actualised as in its actualisation. It is in the Idea to begin with, and it runs through the varieties of relations and the distribution of singular points. It also determines the reproductions of space and time, as it does the reprises of consciousness.
(Difference and Repetition, p. 220, emphasis mine)
Sinthome recently posted a very good explanation of how Deleuze's account of individuation underlies his thinking about learning and Ideas, which I think is helpful in grasping what Deleuze means by the sentence that I've emphasized. There is yet another implication which I'd like to explore. Speaking of conceptual blockage, Deleuze asks provocatively "who blocks the concept, if not the Idea?" (p. 220, emphasis Deleuze's). I take it to be Deleuze's position that the who of the idea is not an identity. Does this make sense? What sort of who can we mean when speaking of the who of the idea?
Labels: consciousness, Deleuze, ideas, intentionality, larval subjects, panpsychism, repetition
Sunday, February 11, 2007
"Organisms awake to the sublime world of the third Ennead: all is contemplation!" (Difference and Repetition, p. 75). I have a problem acknowledging my philodendron's contemplative soul. At the same time, I wouldn't want to absolutely deny that the philodendron's life has meaning. What exactly is Deleuze asking me to believe (not without irony) with respect to the philodendron? In the first place, I would have to believe that the philodendron experiences passive synthesis, a prereflective consciousness of the living present. This living present would have to include a retention of whence it's been and an anticipation of whither it's going. Minimally, the philodendron would have to know that it's alive. This would seem to resemble a practical sort of knowledge, a knowledge based on habitus. However, Deleuze suggests that habits are acquired not through action but through contemplation (p.73). For Deleuze contemplation means "to draw something from" the contraction that is habit, the fusion of elements (tick tick) or cases (tick tock) in a contemplative soul (p.74).
In the second place–and it is not at all clear to me that Deleuze would extend this analysis to plant life, except that he would have me acknowledge the contemplative soul of the plant–Deleuze says that "[e]ach contraction, each passive synthesis, constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active synthesis" (p.73). At this point I have to balk. It is one thing to say that my philodendron has a knowledge of its own life; it's quite another to say that is capable of active synthesis, of signifying, or questioning (which is another meaning Deleuze gives for contemplation (p.78)). To be fair to Deleuze, he is offering a special definition of signs. He says, "Signs as we have defined them–as habitudes or contractions referring to one another–always belong to the present," and he distinguishes a class of natural signs, based on passive synthesis only, from artificial signs which imply active synthesis.(p.77). This is a bit confusing. What would be the role of interpretation in the case of natural signs?
Finally, what power of imagination does the philodendron possess? How are its repetitions thinkable? Deleuze says that repetition is essentially imaginary (p.76). He also says that "[t]he constitution of repetition already implies three instances: the in-itself which causes it to disappear as it appears, leaving it unthinkable; the for-itself of the passive synthesis; and, grounded upon the latter, the reflected representation of a 'for-us' in the active synthesis" (p.71). If the philodendron's repetitions are not unthinkable, then it must have a power of "spontaneous imagination" (p.77), an image of its own life. Again, this is a problem for me, because I don't want to anthropomorphize my philodendron, and yet I can't be certain that it's life doesn't mean something to it.
Labels: Deleuze, panpsychism, passive synthesis, philodendron, Plotinus