LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS. BOOK FOUR
A N A L E C TA H U S S E R L I A N A THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME LXXXXI
Founder and Editor-in-Chief:
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire
For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.
LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS. BOOK FOUR The Logos of Scientific Interrogation. Participating in Nature-Life- Sharing in Life
Edited by ANNA-TER ESA T YMIE NIE C KA The World Phenomenology Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.
Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13
1-4020-3736-8 (HB) 978-1-4020-3736-8 (HB) 1-4020-3737-6 (e-book) 978-1-4020-3737-5 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THEMATIC INTRODUCTION ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / Unveiling the Logos of
Scientific Interrogation
xi
SECTION I THE INTERROGATIVE LOGOS OF DISCOVERY MARIA GOŁASZEWSKA / Scientific Knowledge and Human
Knowledge
3
LEO ZONNEVELD / Science in Mind: Exploring the Language
of the Logos
21
ARIA OMRANI / ‘‘Objective Science’’ in Husserlian Life-World
Phenomenology
39
NIKOLAY KOZHEVNIKOV / Phenomenological Aspects of the
Natural Coordinate System
45
WENDY C. HAMBLET / Alienation and Wholeness: Spinoza,
Hans Jonas, and the Human Genome Project on the ‘‘Push and Shove’’ of Mortal Being
57
ALEXANDER KUZMIN / M. Heidegger’s Project for the
Optical Interpretation of Reflexion: The Time, the Reflexion and the Logos
67
A. L. SAMIAN / ‘‘Phenomena’’ in Newton’s Mathematical
Experience
81
ELDON C. WAIT / What Computers Could Never Do: An
Existential Phenomenological Critique of the Program of Artificial Intelligence
97
ARTHUR PIPER / Sensible Models in Cognitive Neuroscience
105
ROBERTO VEROLINI and FABIO PETRELLI / Philosophical
Aspects of the New Evolutionistic Paradigms v
119
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
IGNACY S. FIUT / Phenomenology and Ecophilosophy
137
LESZEK PYRA / Men in Front of Animals
151
SECTION II SOCIETAL SHARING-IN-LIFE GARY BACKHAUS / Toward a Cultural Phenomenology
169
W. KIM ROGERS / Contexts: The Landscapes of Human Life
191
NATALIA M. SMIRNOVA / Schutz’s Conception of Relevances
and its Influence on Social Philosophy ANJANA BHATTACHARJEE / Demonstrating Mobility
203 219
AMY LOUISE MILLER / The Phenomenology of Self as Non-
Local: Theoretical Considerations and Research Report
227
SECTION III LOGOS IN EXISTENTIAL COMMUNICATION (PSYCHIATRY) SIMON DU PLOCK / An Existential–Phenomenological
Critique of Philosophical Counselling
249
´ NITTO / Logos in Psychotherapy: CAMILO SERRANO BO
The Phenomena of Encounter and Hope in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship
259
JARLATH FINTAN McKENNA / The Meaningfulness of Mental
Health as Being Within a World of Apparently Meaningless Being
269
OLGA LOUCHAKOVA / Ontopoiesis and Union in the Prayer
of the Heart: Contributions to Psychotherapy and Learning
289
´ / Das Lachen als die Kehrseite der ˇ ISˇ Tˇ OVA EVA SYR
Existenziellen not. Beitrag zur Pha¨nomenologie einer Grenzsituation des Lebens INDEX OF NAMES
313 319
APPENDIX / The Program of the Oxford Third World
Congress
325
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are now bringing to the public the fourth volume of papers from the Third World Congress of Phenomenology, ‘‘Phenomenology World-Wide: Phenomenology of the Logos and the Logos of Phenomenology,’’ held in Oxford, August 15–21, 2004. I want to thank all those who helped to prepare and to carry out this marvelous Conference. First of all it is the initiative of William J. Smith who brought us to Oxford, who with his wife Jadwiga and Gary Backhaus have also performed with expertise the task of making the local arrangements: their efforts merit our appreciation. Professor Grahame Lock of Queen’s College and Matt Landrus from Wolfson College must be thanked for their valuable contribution to the local organization. Tadeusz Czarnik, my personal helper, cannot be forgotten. I wish to express special thanks to Jeff Hurlburt, our secretary, for his assiduous and dedicated work in preparing this gathering. The enthusiasm and expertise of the authors who joined us from the entire world – forty countries – made this Congress an epoch-making phenomenology event. A-T.T.
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Wadham College.
THEMATIC INTRODUCTION
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
UNVEILING THE LOGOS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERROGATION
If we consider that humanity started on her path of civilization with the experience of marveling, its special modality, namely the marveling about nature, the world, life, merits special attention. To observe with wonderment that an apple falls off the tree, that water falls downhill and we, living beings, walk upon the earth in an upright posture and not upon our head, that stars in the skies seem fixated not to fall down and yet rotate ordinately, is not like any other marveling. It excites us to question ‘‘why?’’ and ‘‘how?’’, questions which are directed to the nature of things. It prompts the logos of interrogation to address the reality surrounding us and within us to inquire into their hidden workings, to use Leibniz’s expression, to inquire into the ‘‘hidden workings of nature’’. This prompting appears at its incipient stage and – contrary to the present day pragmatic attitude – is completely disinterested from any motivation other than this to ‘‘know’’, to ‘‘understand’’, which are the innermost motors of the human mind. Of course, it is not to be denied that the inquiry into the nature of nature, into the reasons of reality, carries along with it a practical interest. We may see how the discovery of rotation not only gave human beings an astounding insight into the stability and motion of material objects, a crucial insight into reality, allowing us to find ways and means to transform the givens of reality to our practical advantage (e.g. the will). However, this ‘‘disinterestedness’’ of the initial marveling is important to acknowledge in order to see and understand the origin of scientific inquiry. Indeed, like other modalities of marveling (e.g. aesthetic, moral, artistic, sacred), this one is the fruit of the creative human mind. However, unlike the other modes, marveling about the reality which we otherwise accept upon its surface as a matter of fact, is followed up by questioning addressed directly at prying into its nature, reasons, principles: a scientific interrogation. This interrogation, issuing from the human mind, identifies its initial marveling with the work of its intellective logos. And, the intellective logos is subordinate to its intrinsic device aloof of ‘‘subjective’’ and other biases, pragmatic concerns, etc. With this statement, we enter into the heart of the present day transition of scientific inquiry. The Cartesian ‘‘clear and distinct ideas’’ of the intellecxi A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, xi–xvi. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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tive logos of the mind, which have bedazzled the inquirer to the point of giving them an absolute priority with the advantage of yielding a stable, constant reality of Newtonian physics, dominated the view of reality in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet this view could not stand the challenges of new insights and approaches of the scientific research which followed. Incontestably, we are now witnessing a great transition in the scientific, social and cultural spheres of our world-view. It is being called ‘‘the end of the machine’’.1 It is, however, not only the abandonment of the Newtonian mechanical – strictly intellective – view of nature with its farreaching consequences, but the concurrent new appreciation of the hitherto dismissed and ignored phenomena of turbulence (instead of constancy), haziness (instead of clarity), fleetness (instead of fixedness), arbitrariness (instead of order), precisely in physics, acceptance of time in mathematics, etc., that is transforming the scientific outlook.2 One of the major consequences is that the hitherto dominating sharp demarcation between the so-called ‘‘hard sciences’’ that assume the priority of the intellective logos, and the ‘‘soft sciences’’, which like the empirical sciences, social inquiries and humanities deal with other types of rationale, fell down. All sciences and inquiries seem to tend in their methodologies and approaches toward a mutual interaction and participation in their search after the ‘‘inner workings’’ of life, profiting mutually from this interaction in their progress. I have discussed this transitory phase earlier.3 Now, I would like to draw from this transformatory breakthrough two important insights about the logos of scientific inquiry. 1.
As a matter of fact, we seem to find in this ever increasing emergence of rationalities which participate in the newly devised methodologies a revealing insight into the nature of the logos. What is it that allows the different modalities of reason, characterizing the newly emergent scientific inquiries, to come into cooperation? How is it that the interrogative quest of science which spreads in fragments, with gaps between them, let them come together while they undergo infinite transformatory moves? It seems indeed that the logos of scientific inquiry relies upon its primordial intrinsic sense going through all infinitely extensive transformations. I call it a dianoia thread running through the logos of life, which being among other modalities of the logos privy to the cognitive logoic system of the mind projects the participatory continuity of scientific inquiries. It is in virtue of this infinitely transformable, dianoia sense intrinsic to the
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logos of life, that the interrogative sense of science falls within a common network. It is as if the logos of life which is radiating all the moves of life (organic, physical, psychic, mental) carries in its very nature pertaining to life this intrinsic dianoia thread which allows the infinite transformability of the logos in its modes in their interaction, coalescence, interfusion – a constructive cooperation without losing continuity. This thread is also congenital with human cognitive modalities. It is this intrinsic thread of the scientific logos which accounts for the striking move of sciences toward cooperation. Finally, it appears that it is also in virtue of the intrinsic dianoia sense of the logos – which present day scientific inquiry reveals – that this very inquiry may operate the transition from the stiff abstractness of the intellective mode toward the fulgurating rays spread by innumerable threads of sense of the logos of life. The dianoia thread of scientific inquiry brings about this ‘‘new alliance’’ of the sciences. It accounts also for the alliance of science and the phenomenology of life to which we will come in the next section when we introduce the second recent innovation of the sciences. 2.
Scientific Inquiry in Alliance with the Phenomenology of L ife The second most significant turn in the scientific spirit of today is the almost unanimously accepted change in the conception of the inquiring agent himself.4 Until recently, the scientist, that is, inquiring agent, has been conceived in abstraction of its human characters and endowments as an impersonal neutral observer. Its neutrality was supposed to guarantee the ‘‘objectivity’’ of the scientific result to be obtained. With Kojeve came the proposal that this view of inquiry should be abandoned; that the inquirer is in fact a human subject, who gathers observations from his/her position, who obtains insights according to his/her talents, dispositions, preparation, etc. Instead of floating in the air, the inquirer and his work are situated. First of all, the inquiry itself stems from the system of the human mind. As a matter of fact, below the abstract work of the intellective logos common to all human endeavor as a final ordering, structurizing, synthesizing factor, the inquirer as subject participates in all the modalities of the mental logos (communicative, sharing in life, psychic, vital, modalities, and acts) as the directing factor of the interrogating logos and its central organizer.
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However, the subject of inquiry, as much as it represents the living agent’s sensitive potency, does not suffice in its vital capacities to account for the crucial ‘‘interrogative twist’’ of discovery – the special ‘‘intuitive move’’ to lift from observation an imaginative link of the logos to the next step, this step which should be an attainment of the expected but not known. Neither does it suffice to function as the ground from which to draw imaginative hints toward extending the discovery quest. For this ‘‘novum’’ to be attained in such inquiry the specific creative role of the logos is necessary. I have introduced this missing and, for scientific inquiry, essential factor of creativity of the inquiring subject earlier.5 Looking now at this crucial factor of scientific inquiry, we strike out in a twofold direction toward further clarification of the logos of science and philosophy. Before we enter into this argument, let us emphasize that although I have earlier described the human mind in its origin as essentially tributary to creative imagination and its functioning (being carried by the creative logos hence emergent), it has to be pointed out that this creative logos becomes also a specific instrument of the human mind. It is (as mentioned above) accountable for the specific step of the interrogative logos to advance towards something new, not pre-delineated by the previous steps of the interrogation. It is with this specific creative function of the logos of mind that we will be dealing. First of all, to have introduced the creative logos of the mind as the crucial factor of the scientific subject brings us to a further, most significant insight into the logos of science. The introduction of creativity into the inquiring logos makes indeed a radical distinction in conceiving this inquiry. That is, should we consider only the human subject as the agent from the inquiring point of view of science? This consideration assumes that it lies along the cognitive line of the mind under the intellective logos as its guide. However, as I have pointed out above, the tremendous drive of numerous new approaches and methods of scientific inquiries seeks to break out of its rigid frames. Where to? It is, in fact, centering upon the creative mind that opens the inquiry towards areas not restricted by the cognitive framework. With the creative subject, we follow its involvement into all the spheres which make out the living agent in its existential functioning:6 organic, vital, psychic, communicative, etc. of life’s unfolding. The scientific inquirer is involved and lead through life’s unfolding into the universal play of forces as the human subject situating himself with all its functional endowment in the great turmoil of the forces of life’s becoming.
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This new wave of scientific developments whose methodologies differentiate ever further and stay ever on the outlook for further and further prying into the workings of life, breaks the strictures of the constitutive framework of cognitive consciousness and allows us to distinguish clearly the ways of differentiation in the modalities of the logos occurring within the human mind itself. As I have emphasized constantly in my earlier writings, it is the entrance of the creative imagination into the evolution of the living subject that, bringing in the principles of the creative logos, accounts for the crystallization of the human mind, creative as such. Yet, as mentioned above, the creative logos of the mind is differentiated in various modalities. Of these, the basic are: the cognitive/constitutive logos with the intellective logos governing its proceedings, the moral logos of sharing in life, the logos of aesthetic creativity, and the ontopoietic logos of becoming – life. And here we are getting at the second point announced above. Indeed, the creative logos showing itself intermittently in the scientific inquiry is perhaps reached in metaphysical inquiry. It is indeed instrumental in the progressive unveiling of the ontopoietic groundwork of all-reality-inbecoming that is the gist of the philosophy/phenomenology of life.7 Is it not at this groundwork that scientific inquiries diversify in innumerable, singular proceeding sectors of reality, and, seeking a common connectedness at the ‘‘bottom of things’’, aim? Following the logos of becoming – of the ontopoiesis of life – scientific inquiry of the present day breaks with the strictures of the cognitive system dominated by intellective reason and indicates the differentiation of the creative logos in that system and of its own, promoting life, ‘‘poiein’’ within which the individualization of life takes place. T he interrogative scientific logos, following this last trail, gives us crucial insights into the diversifications of the modalities of the logos of life itself. Concurrently it yields its crowning achievements. Following the meandering of the genetic unfolding of the living being in its pivotal patterning, self-individualization to its very incipient phase of becoming, we uncover the primogenital stage upon which the logos of life launches and conducts its life project. There comes to life a dynamic, infinitely modulated and transformable ontopoietic network of the logos of life with its very own rules and regulations conjoined with the life and earth systems. In conclusion, let us emphasize the twofold insight which we have reached from discussing the great transformations of scientific inquiry. First comes the clarification of the modalities of the logos, crystallizing the functions of the human mind. Second, we have discovered that via
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the creative-poietic logos of the mind we may not only identify the reason of the emergent innumerable rationale springing forth in present day scientific inquiry – breaking the strictures of the hitherto governing intellective logos – but following it in its impetus we advance toward a common network of all the reasons for life: the ontopoietic groundwork of life’s individualization. The logos of life, holding the secrets of its scientific queries, offers a basis for the new alliance of the sciences and founds an ultimate groundwork for a phenomenological mathesis universalis. NOTES 1 Cf. introduction to: Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, Boulder, New Science Library, New York, Random House, 1984. 2 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Ontopoiesis of Life as the new Philosophical Paradigm’’, pp. 112–116, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LIX, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. 3 Cf. The study cited above as well as the ‘‘Theme’’ to the above cited volume. 4 Cf. The above cited study, pp. 16–26. 5 Ibid., pp. 16–26. 6 Cf. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Human Condition-within-the-unity-of-everythingthere-is-alive and its logoic network’’, pp. xi–xxxi, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXXIX, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005. 7 Cf. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife Strategies of Reason, Book IV of the treatise: L ogos and L ife, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXX, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.
SECTION I THE INTERROGATIVE LOGOS OF DISCOVERY
A dinner in common in the refectory of Wadham College: At left, in front, William Melaney and Conrad Rockstad; at right, Eldon Wait.
MARIA GOŁASZEWSKA
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION
In this paper the problem of the relation of scientific objectivity to human values will be approached on various levels: first, it is important to define the scope and meaning of the concepts introduced here. Secondly, a critical attitude should be assumed towards different approaches to this problem. Thirdly, we must consider what place axiology takes in the system of sciences. Finally we must perform a specific transfer from abstract thinking which assumes only pure possibilities to the attitude assuming convictions, involvement and faith. As regards the concepts introduced here, at present I can only generally and hypothetically describe how I understand them: – ‘‘Objective’’ or ‘‘objectivistic’’ means the same as ‘‘being a statement made on the basis of facts perceived through the senses, described and verbalized in accord with the principles of logically correct, discursive thinking’’. – ‘‘Value’’ will be defined as a ‘‘Humanistic coefficient of knowledge’’ (scientific knowledge included), i.e., the moment which includes the structure of a person, his/her needs and a sense of existence in human cognition. The humanistic coefficient can be described as the moment in which objects and phenomena are introduced into a man’s world – giving them a sense and importance, determining the ways of behaviour towards them and using them in action. As an example we may use the Black Stone, the most sacred object for Moslems, situated in Mecca, in the Maab Temple: for non-believers it is simply a stone with a definite chemical composition and structure, while for the faithful Moslems it is an object of devotion (F. Znaniecki). Another question is to what extent values can be accepted as ‘‘measurable’’, that is, as able to be expressed in quantitative, mathematical categories. Is it possible to measure them in any way so that the knowledge about values would be a specific counterpart to the knowledge based on experientially recognized, measurable facts? Radical approaches to this problem suggest that everything that cannot be measured should be 3 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 3–20. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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excluded from scientific knowledge. This kind of reductionist approach would assume that the external, physical world is measurable and can be described with a mathematical formula; while a man’s world, for which values are significant characteristics, is immeasurable. A closer look at this problem, however, shows that physical measures are not as exact as it might seem, and, at the same time, in the area of human affairs and values we make use of certain measures (we recognize some values as higher and others as lower; we see that values are realized to a greater or lesser extent, etc.). This allows us to assume that apart from physical metrum there exists a certain meta-physical ‘‘metrum’’. It is obvious that a reductionism in science which is too far-reaching has the effect that the phenomena characterized by the ‘‘humanistic coefficient’’ are not taken into consideration ex definitione. On the global scale the intellectual situation manifests itself as a great variety of attitudes and fundamental theses which sometimes are contradictory and opposing each other, and sometimes complementary. There also occurs a tendency towards integration, and towards one, non-contradictory and, at the same time, universal system of scientific knowledge. In this universalist trend nowadays there occurs an orientation to spirituality, caused by the fact that philosophical reductionism has proved too limited and one-sided, and incompatible with the idea of a fully human being living with high super-vital values and accepting that life on the earth has a meaning. This intellectual situation is also reflected in Poland – there too are representatives of analytical philosophy, neo-positivism as well as neo-Thomism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and recently also post-modernism. The freedom of proclaiming one’s own views and approach in philosophy, which prevails today, creates a vast arena for conflicting world outlooks, religions and philosophies. THE QUEST FOR THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE
Various branches of science have pretended to have reached the truth, understood as what is essential, or what constitutes the basis for existence. They include mathematics – which was once recognized as the ‘‘Queen of all sciences’’ – logic, physics, and the humanities. In the system of sciences mathematics performs two basic functions: it is a specific science, an autonomous deductive system of knowledge in itself. Besides this, it is an important element of numerous methods of scientific research, first of all in the natural sciences; but it also appears, though in a more limited extent, in the methodologies of the humanities
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(e.g. psychology, sociology). Traditionally, mathematics is described as the knowledge of numbers and geometrical figures – in the history of culture the functions of mathematics or of numbers and geometrical figures expanded and, e.g., became linked with magic, astrology and religion; and finally they came into being in everyday life as ‘‘lucky’’ or ‘‘unlucky’’ numbers. Modern times, on the other hand, have made mathematics ‘‘a strict science’’, isolated from current events, magic or religion. In philosophy, particularly in modern philosophy, mathematical objects became an argument in the controversy over the mode of existence of ideas. Since ‘‘mathematical objects’’, i.e., numbers, rules and notions, are not merely states of consciousness, we must also accept that ideas – concepts – have their own, specific, ‘‘for-themselves’’ mode of existence (the controversy between the phenomenologists and the neo-positivists about psychologism). It might seem that mathematics ex definitione is a ‘‘strict’’ science using only univocal and well defined notions – there are, however, descriptions of mathematics sensu largo which include the humanistic coefficient. In the work W hat Mathematics Is by two eminent mathematicians R. Coraut and H. Robbins, we read that mathematics as an expression of human thought reflects free will, a contemplative mind and a striving to aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are: logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generalization and individualization. Different traditions emphasized some or others of those opposing powers; the fight for their synthesis is decisive for the vitality, usefulness and great importance of mathematics. Mathematics in our day is characterized by the following basic tendencies: the increasing role of the most universal schema and, connected with it, the development of the methods of abstract algebra; great development in probability calculus and statistics; the expanding range of applications comprising mostly technical and natural sciences and technologies of production (e.g. automatics, space engineering, computer technologies). We must admit that the structure of mathematical science has been impressively expanded. But it is also important that mathematics should not be absolutized as abstract knowledge, but that critical discussions should point at its obvious limitations and prospects of development. From the point of view of our discussion, we are interested in logic from four aspects: what logic is sensu largo; the absolutization of logic according to Frege’s conception; the general sense and particular senses of the applications of logic; classical, mathematical and alternative logics.
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In ancient times logic was understood very broadly (logikos – in accord with reasoning) and was included in philosophy. Today logic comprises particular disciplines like logical semantics, dealing with the signifying functions of expressions, aimed at the elimination of ambiguity and tracing errors in reasoning; knowledge about the essence of truth and falsity; formal logic, i.e., a theory of logical reasoning; the methodology of the sciences; analysis and criticism of pre-scientific ways of reasoning and conducting verbal disputes; the technique of mental work regarding its formal correctness; the problem of the position of logic in the system of sciences. Broadly understood in this way, logic covers an extremely vast area of knowledge and activity. In fact, however, it does so in one aspect only, namely in the formal and structural aspect, without getting involved in the humanistic sense, e.g., the meanings of concepts, values, or evaluations. Undoubtedly, the starting point here is so-called ‘‘formal logic’’, i.e., logic sensu stricto, the theory of forms of correct reasoning and the theory of the structure of deductive systems. G. Frege constructed a strict, symbolic conceptual language, and since then the construction of symbolic languages (they are the so-called ‘‘formalized languages’’) has become the job of logicians. Pursuing the idea of formalizing all science, Frege put forward a thesis that mathematics can be reduced to logic. To put it in another way: all scientific knowledge is a system of formalized language. Maybe logic transcends itself, i.e., it is really involved in any reasoning, since it posits the postulates of ‘‘logical correctness’’, ‘‘lack of contradiction’’, ‘‘univocality’’, etc. In particular, in the aspect of human behaviour it is important that logic makes communication between people and mutual understanding easier and, sometimes, possible. Thus, it is highly useful or even necessary for creating a universal system of scientific knowledge. However, ‘‘heuristic knowledge’’, the intuitive discovering of new truths, is also an important moment. We must also take into account the fact that there exists more than one universal system of logic. I mean here the moment of ‘‘logical values’’, i.e., the property of statements which consists in their agreement or disagreement with reality. Classical logic is bivalent: each statement is either true or false. In our day bivalent logic has been recognized as insufficient, and ‘‘many-valued logic’’ has come into being. If we follow this path, we shall find traces of various ‘‘logics’’ or ‘‘paralogics’’. For instance, logics that came into being in Asia – in China and India – are different. We can also speak about the specific logic of mentally
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disturbed persons (a paranoiac lives in two worlds and each of them has a different way of reasoning). There exists extra-discursive and pre-reflective behaviour where, however, we can find logical structures applied spontaneously, intuitively, sometimes even unconsciously. Finally, there emerges the conception of ‘‘open logic’’, i.e. logic which cares not so much for the creation of a perfect abstract system as for getting a chance to fully explain phenomena and states of affairs that take place in the anthroposphere and in the physical world. For instance, it would be logic of potentialities, and its traces could be found in the art where even a masterpiece is merely one of a number of propositions, and univocality has the same rights as equivocality. Physics also started as that branch of theoretical philosophy which dealt with the general properties of material bodies and all natural phenomena. In this sense Democritus, the author of atomism, was a physicist. It was as late as at the time of Galileo and Newton that physics became a particular science, and its rapid development in the 19th and 20th centuries has the result that nowadays it has developed into an extensive domain of science with many branches including theoretical physics and chemical physics. Thus, physics obviously became knowledge about matter, but it has also attempted to move towards a general theory of being. In this way, as it were, it returned to the ancient understanding of its tasks. This was how the neo-positivists’ physicalism, proclaiming the programme in which all concepts of empirical sciences can be reduced to the language of physics, came into being. The postulate of the unity of knowledge is proclaimed. Finally, a thesis was put forward that all knowledge should use terms of an empirical, intersensual and inter-subjective character. Thus, it is the farthest-reaching programme of ‘‘objectivity’’ of cognition, rejecting the humanistic coefficient. Only these elements of reality are recognized as the object of science, which can be conceived as empirical facts and explicitly defined. The possibility of explaining all phenomena – including the anthroposphere – through their reduction to the structure and activity of the primitive energy, e.g. thinking reduced to energetic transformations of elementary particles or waves of primitive energy, became the perspective of the universal science understood in this way, and based on physics. Maybe, this far-reaching reductionism could find common points with mystical pantheism – and this is that in which the paradox of physicalism consists.
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Let us now turn to the humanities. There also the problem of ‘‘objectivism-humanism’’, i.e., respecting the humanistic coefficient in research work, manifests itself very clearly. We shall consider the domains of axiology and history. Axiology has been studied in two ways: 1) as a general theory of values, a branch of philosophy analysing the content of concepts and general ideas connected with the domain of values, or 2) as a more particular branch of knowledge investigating real phenomena that take place in the anthroposphere. And so, general axiology analyses the concept of value, attempting to define what value is (the following definitions of value are most commonly accepted: that which is valuable, that which can satisfy needs). Further, attempts at a classification of values have been made (cognitive, ethical, aesthetic, vital, personal, social, and ideological values are distinguished). Finally, axiology tries to establish a hierarchy of values (traditionally, the following three highest values are mentioned: truth, good, and beauty), and searches for the criteria for evaluation. Particular axiological disciplines include, first of all, ethics and aesthetics. My professional interests are the reason why I shall speak here mostly about aesthetics. Still, these disciplines are, in a certain respect, similar to each other. The statement that aesthetics is the study of beauty is, perhaps, correct, but it is insufficient and may lead to hypostasis of concepts, i.e., to recognizing them as real beings. We do not know what beauty is, we do not know the mode of its existence, so we should state precisely what aesthetics actually deals with. I assume that the object of this branch of knowledge is the ‘‘aesthetic situation’’. This consists of the following elements: the artist, the work of art, the recipient and the aesthetic value as the supreme factor. We must also state precisely what this ‘‘aesthetic value’’ is. I define it as the artistic ‘‘rationalization’’ of what is illogical in the human world, so that it can function in this world in accord with the laws of the existence and development of humanity. This is where the controversy between the ‘‘objectivistic’’ and the ‘‘humanized’’ appears. Namely, each of the elements of an aesthetic situation may be treated as a ‘‘thing’’. It may be ‘‘reified’’, reduced to a fact measurable in accord with a physical system, or it may be endowed with the ‘‘humanistic coefficient’’ (values, evaluations, the moment of understanding, experiencing or emotional attitude, etc.). For instance, a work of art can be described as any physical object is described, measured and evaluated. Yet, one can also search for its aesthetic value, the beauty which is actualized in the aesthetic experience. A question arises in what way the cognitive attitude that allows one to reach the value of a work
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of art can be achieved. Well, this requires suspending the objectivist distance characteristic for the ‘‘aesthetics from the outside’’ and taking the position of an ‘‘aesthetics from the inside’’, that is, inclusive of the personal aesthetic experience aimed at the recognition of a definite aesthetic value (the beauty characteristic for it – e.g. the tragic, the comic, solemnity, poetry) in the cognitive attitude. Then, speaking of aesthetic value and of the work of art, we can directly use the experiences necessary in all contacts both in the aesthetic and cognitive attitude. Aesthetics has its practical references, it helps in the formation of an ‘‘aesthetic personality’’ of the recipients of art, that is, of each of us. Ethics goes even further in the direction of life practice. The utilitarian element is the construction of norms of moral behaviour. Here we have to do, as it were, with the humanistic coefficient in actu, in action, and then the postulate of ‘‘objectivism, mathematization, the rejection of all valuations,’’ loses its sense ex definitione. Although, for methodological purity we can adopt a model of an ethically insensitive man, yet it leads to moral numbness or even pathological ‘‘moral insanity’’, just as the lack of aesthetic sensitivity, and particularly its introduction in the educational processes, would lead to the formation of a one-sided, ‘‘flat’’ personality prone to stress. History is the study searching for the truth about the past of mankind. But how is this ‘‘truth’’ and the ‘‘past’’ understood? Here we can distinguish several standpoints and several styles in which history is cultivated. Two cognitive attitudes of historians are in opposition to each other: 1) History is a set of documents and an archive of all source records – thus, it is focused not so much on the truth about the past of mankind as on the truth of the historical documents, and the ‘‘past’’ is the past of historiography; 2) History is the search for the real factors and authors of the transformations of mankind in its history – thus, it may be an image, a reconstruction or historical structuring of the more or less deeply hidden causes of changes that took place in the past and the meaning of these changes. Collecting materials, documents and relics as well as their analysis appears to the ‘‘objectivistic’’ historians as the only correct way of conducting research in their discipline and reaching the ‘‘historical truth’’. It is sometimes similar in sociology. Yet, bookcases full of documents are not enough to make a science; when the moment of the synthesis and structuring of history comes, the objectivists are helpless facing the threat of imagination, emotion, reinterpretation, intuition or, finally, the overall vision of the development and striving of individuals and societies to
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reach definite goals, which transcends all documentation. The ‘‘objectivists’’ also see a threat in the thesis that at some moments in history ideas were clearly supreme to the current life of the community. Particularly strong resistance is evoked by every attempt at searching for the sense of history, while for a man the most important issue is the question of meaning and purpose, and structuring of history so that both an individual and definite communities may find their place in the historical course of transformations. Tackling the issue of the sense and structuring of reality, we have reached the next problem that will now be considered: the styles of studying philosophy in light of the controversy between knowledge understood in an objectivist way and knowledge understood in a humanistic way. STYLES
Let us now move towards scientific or rather philosophical syntheses, to the attempts at conceiving the deepest and the most general knowledge about the world and man, which is the most difficult to conceive and which abstracts from what is fragmentary, one-sided and too primitive to explain the sense of scientific knowledge. This is done, first of all, in philosophical systems. Generally, we can say that particular sciences (or branches of science) also adopt – more or less consciously – definite assumptions of a general and theoretical character as regards the nature and mode of existence of reality. Even radically ‘‘objective’’ knowledge reaches a moment in reasoning when it must adopt its primary assumptions ‘‘on trust’’, as obvious without any arguments, unknowable, enveloped in mystery. Secondly, all structuring of the world requires a decision made not so much on the basis of logical argumentation as on the basis of the conviction that, in a given issue, an intuition is right or wrong. In this sense, for instance, the neo-positivist thesis that the only ‘‘true scientific character’’ consists in adopting a mathematical and experimental method reveals itself as a specific scientific fiction, as a myth operating in the same way as the humanities which accept the thesis about the humanistic coefficient, that is, including evaluations and specific rules of human behaviour in their investigations, analyses and interpretation. In order to understand and interpret particular philosophical approaches we must recognize the tendency to absolutize one’s own achievements which sometimes may be important, but are merely frag-
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mentary. From the point of view of the humanistic coefficient it is quite understandable, but it does not agree with the principle of consequent objectivization. And this is the way in which the attitude of aversion to other people’s views and the intentional ‘‘inability to understand them’’ (since they are not compatible with my own view, which is the only one that is right) arise. In order to understand the sense of the above-mentioned controversy more clearly, we must accept two kinds of experience: 1) sense experience, and 2) internal experience – the personal experience of values, needs, religious feelings or emotions. Finally, we must accept that we have to do with two general styles of constructing general, philosophical theories: 1) formalized quantitative knowledge; 2) knowledge open to cognitive pluralism, accepting sense cognition, mathematized approaches, and formalization of language, but transcending these and moving towards the cognition of immeasurable phenomena of the physical world and the anthroposphere, and emphasizing qualitative approaches. The current world outlook of a modern European reflects both the tradition of philosophical thinking and the most popular, contemporary currents of ‘‘public (current) philosophy’’. We can obviously also find here traces of common-sense thinking; it also happens that definite philosophical systems, as they become commonly known, accepted and fashionable (e.g. Sartre’s existentialism in the period of its greatest popularity), are included in this current world outlook. As regards world outlook, we can distinguish three types of attitudes: – persons with a primary general education are characterized by naive credulity; – persons with a secondary level of general education are characterized by naive realism as regards the mode of existence of material things, the tendency to create hypostases of concepts, the literal interpretation of the products of the imagination, myths and works of art, as well as an inclination to fideism; – the intellectuals preserve the critical distance in the sphere of cognition. The materialistic orientation (including Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism which still remains a vivid problem and is not merely theoretically, but also directly, interesting for the present generations since, in some way or another, it affected almost every European). This orientation tries to replace all spirituality with materialism transformed from a philosophical
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approach into a ‘‘scientific Weltanschauung’’. This world outlook was then removed by a political ideology which, in turn, transformed into an economical theory characterized by voluntarism. This changed into the practice of power and the atrocities of totalitarianism in the ruthless and savage struggle for power. Undoubtedly, Marxism included a large number of attractive and sometimes even right watchwords like equality, justice, faith in the future, or striving to achieve universal stabilization. Yet, it is known that abstracted fragments do not always prove to be right in the context of a system or in confrontation with social reality. Besides, when they are treated as cliche´s, they may be re-interpreted in the way opposite to the initially accepted assumptions. The ideology of national socialism seems to be the most dramatic example of the contradiction between watchwords and their true meanings. And so, Alfred Rosenberg’s book Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhundert (1st edition in 1930) is entitled Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkmpfe unserer Zeit [Valuation of the spiritual wars of our times]. The contents of the book as well as the approach to the fundamental issues of the anthroposphere can be seen even from the titles of its Parts and Chapters: Part One ‘‘Das Ringen des Werte’’ [The fight of values], Chapters ‘‘Rasse und Rasenseele’’ [The Race and the soul of the race], ‘‘Liebe und Ehre’’ [Love and honour], ‘‘Mystik und Tat’’ [Mystic and Deed]; Part Two ‘‘Das Wesen der germanischen Kunst’’ [The essence of German art], Chapters ‘‘Das rassische Schoenheitsideal’’ [The racial ideal of beauty], ‘‘Wille und Trieb’’ [Will and Instinct], ‘‘Persoenlichkeits und Sachlichkeitsstil’’ [Personal and objective style], ‘‘Der aestetische Wille’’ [Aesthetic will]. Part Three is devoted to considerations upon the organization of a ‘‘German state’’. Reductionism, started by pragmatists, is the tendency to eliminate metaphysical problems from thinking, to avoid questions aimed at the most general matters, to treat issues like value, sense, and the aim of existence as ‘‘apparent’’ questions that cannot be solved and belong not to science but to art or pure fantasy with no counterparts in reality, that is, in empirically cognized reality. W. James, the father of pragmatism, was a physician, a philosopher and a psychologist. His (pragmatic) philosophy was, at the same time, a method and theory of truth. The method consisted in the introduction of the concept of practical consequences into philosophical considerations: The essential thing is what practical consequences issue from a given theory. If there is no practical difference even between extremely different theses, then, the whole difference is
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merely verbal. Thus, there are no rigid principles, closed systems or acceptance of the absolute. As regards the theory of truth, the pragmatists’ fundamental thesis claimed that the true is what is useful. The acceptance of usefulness as the only criterion of truth signified the acceptance of the relativity of truth. And so, for instance, the question whether God exists will be answered by a pragmatist: the thesis of God’s existence is right if it brings about some practical benefits. John Dewey, who proclaimed himself in favour of instrumentalism, was one of the most radical pragmatists. He proclaimed the following theses: 1) human representations are not cognitions of being, but instruments of action; 2) the criterion of validity is reduced to common social acceptance; 3) truth and good undergo transformations depending on the situation in a given time, and the type of society; 4) metaphysics is useless, since one cannot investigate anything that is beyond sense experience; 5) religion is a personal matter and cannot be considered on the level of truth–falsity. Dewey is described as an instrumentalist, relativist and empiricist of an anti-metaphysical attitude. And such an attitude unavoidably leads to spiritual impoverishment. Reductionism includes also analytical philosophy. It raised objections against classical philosophy, claiming that instead of searching for truth it creates intellectual fictions, and that philosophical systems emerge in spite of the fact that it is possible to create a system comprising all phenomena, explaining the nature of being, cognition, and everything that is transcendent to the world. Analytical philosophy stated that a philosopher’s task consists merely in conducting an analysis of concepts without considering to what extent they regard systemic solutions – be it materialism, idealism, sensualism or agnosticism. Analytical philosophy proclaims ‘‘logical atomism’’, which is pluralistic in character. This is why, remaining within mathematical logic, it admitted activistic interpretations accepting that elementary units of the real world include events, conventionalist interpretations (the conventional character of scientific knowledge), as well as materialistic and even Platonic ones. Instead of a philosophical system there emerges a mosaic of interpretational possibilities which does not lead to cognition, but merely to a conviction that cognition is an extremely complicated thing. Anyway, the aggressive plan of analytical philosophy to eliminate all metaphysics and religion from philosophical thinking proved successful to a large extent. This orientation won great popularity, became highly influential and caused restraint in taking up humanistic problems and essential questions regarding existence and man. Its only merit was the severe criticism of many kinds of abortive
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philosophy giving too hasty solutions and accepting a priori that which required analyses. Sterilisation of metaphysical thinking caused the disappearance of broader philosophical interests, the eager limitation to fragmentary and secondary problems as well as the attitude of non-creative development of thinking and dwelling on issues that could once more be submitted to logical analysis with no cognitive involvement. Another of the reductionistic orientations is neo-positivism, sometimes called ‘‘the third positivism of the Vienna Circle’’, ‘‘logical positivism’’ or ‘‘physicalist empiricism’’. It is characterized by: 1) empiricism – sense experience is the only source of cognition; 2) positivism – only facts are the object of cognition; neither transcendent beings nor the essence of things are; 3) physicalism – physics is the most perfect system of concepts, and it is what all scientific knowledge, including analyses of a philosophical nature, should be reduced to. Thus, it has been claimed that all statements included in metaphysics are not false, uncertain and unjustified, but simply nonsensical. Questions about the general nature of being, the sense of existence, etc., are apparent. There was also an attempt at the elimination of the theory of values – both ethical and aesthetic ones. They cannot be derived from knowledge about facts, and they merely show the human need of assuming a postulative attitude. It is only the language of ethics and aesthetics, created in the course of the development of culture, which can be examined. Neo-positivism is mostly attacked for the internal contradictions inherent in it, and the lack of arguments supporting its major theses. We may also raise another objection: it is a style of thinking that leads nowhere, enclosed in formalism and not taking into consideration the humanistic coefficient in its attempts at a theoretical description of the anthroposphere. It seems that the technical mastery in posing and solving formal problems of knowledge, which has been achieved by many theoreticians, may deserve admiration. Yet, for philosophy involved in values it is insufficient. Perfection of language and linguistic analyses are not enough to make philosophy as it is understood in the tradition and the present of a thinking human. For centuries philosophy has been secularized. Nowadays it is manifested mainly in the two systems that are no longer reductionistic, but maximalistic: phenomenology and existentialism. Philosophy has been separated from theology; philosophers have simply renounced the discussion of religious subjects. Neither do they proclaim, e.g., atheistic theses. They do not tend to correct or improve theology – they have assumed the attitude of indifference as regards faith. Maybe, this tending away
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from God has its source in personal experiences: E. Husserl started to doubt the reality of the world and God’s power and justice after World War I, while Sartre proclaimed the senselessness of existence after World War II. Anyway, the extensive influence exerted by these two philosophers and the major theses of their systems upon the intellectual circles causes the now fairly common transformation of the conception of philosophy towards its secularization. Even a believer must accept that his faith is merely an act of fideism (e.g., in accord with St. John’s thesis about passive mysticism claiming that God Himself selects souls which He intends to call to faith, while human will is helpless). Obviously, approaches of this kind are not new – they have been taken up anew and presented in the attractive cloak of novelty; hence their social significance. It seems that a modern thinking man is characterized by a high level of criticism, doubts and the desire to keep on investigating. This phenomenon need not be basically negative, yet it leads to distrust in accepting universalist philosophical systems and creeds. In consequence, through ‘‘confessional pluralism’’, it may lead to complete indifference towards convictions and faith, and to the disappearance of the need for spiritual development. THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL ‘‘I’’
I wish to complete this necessarily brief review of modern philosophical approaches and conceptions regarding the model of science with a discussion abandoning the theoretical and abstract level of generalizations and potentialities for the area of individual experiences. The world is the domain of scientific research, which is accessible for many people. It is inter-subjectively given and measurable and verifiable facts operate in it. The individual self is the opposite extreme, which is what is given to an individual person and about which no one else can state anything. Between these extremes there is a vast domain of knowledge which is sometimes scientific and sometimes human. Why has human knowledge been opposed to scientific knowledge? Surely, the latter has been produced by man too. Yet, we intuitively perceive that such an opposition is justified, for science has become remote from the needs of the average man, giving him no answers to the questions about the sense and value of life, which are most important to him. Human knowledge is concerned with this very sphere – it is concerned with ourselves as well as other men. The need and search for this knowledge cause, to a certain extent, every person to be philosophically
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engaged, for it is philosophy that can bring the answer to these most important questions. It oscillates between my own self about which no one apart from me can know or say anything, and the essence of this self includes a relation to values. Human knowledge is the knowledge about values, how to preserve and multiply them. It requires definite behaviour towards the world and demands action. It does not allow unbiased observation of facts, because facts of human life are always ether positive or negative, either good or evil. Human knowledge strives to multiply the good. Value – sense – primacy of truth. The essence of values consists in a specific ‘‘rationalization’’ of that which is illogical, that which, though it exists in the physical world or in the anthroposphere, has not been cognizable so far or is not knowable for a human at all. By ‘‘rationalization’’ I mean the intellectual mastering of the situation of illogicality and introducing it into consciousness or practical life. Thus, values are not beings that exist in themselves. They exist in a complex situation comprising the world and man, his consciousness and inclinations, contradictions (oppositions) that occur in himself and in the world and which he tries to overcome with his active attitude, striving for a synthesis. One of the vital needs of a thinking man is recognizing and understanding how values operate in his life. As we achieve this, the feeling that we learn the truth – this truth which we want to learn most, and which is most worthy of being learned as the truth of life – increases. Can values be the object of scientific research? Are questions about them merely apparent? Because of their objective-subjective character, values are potentially inherent in objects, while they are actualized and realized in acts of consciousness. Their examination assumes a possibility of reaching the so-called internal experience, i.e., the deep structures of personality. It also assumes that the structures of actual reality and the structures of logical thinking are parallel. ‘‘Sense’’, in turn, is treated as a category of final thinking – ‘‘something has a sense’’, means that the real existence of this something is included within the most general structures of the whole, fills a definite function there and constitutes a necessary element of that whole. The criterion of truth is the lack of internal contradiction, i.e., the compatibility of elements in the structure of the superior whole. Spirituality – sanctity – the absolute are values which are among the highest in the hierarchy and belong to the summum bonum plane. Generally every man respects these values, reveres them and longs for them. He would like to get closer, e.g., to spirituality, to the subordination of
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instinctive life and the vital values to those highest values. Yet, he does not always work on it. Spirituality and sanctity are phenomena which occur only in the anthroposphere, while the absolute transcends both the anthroposphere and the physical world. Because of the moment of transcending, cognition of the Absolute may be treated as a Mystery or a Being attainable only through mystic intuition. Hope against all hope – this metaphorical expression signifies a certain intellectual ‘‘virtue’’ whose components are: courage in thinking (not avoiding even the most difficult questions), fortitude of thinking (not being discouraged by failures in the search for truth), perseverance in thinking (systematic mental work), and responsibility of thinking (not being satisfied with partial and uncertain results of one’s intellectual work). Doctrines – life – fulfilment are the three supports of private, personal thinking, the private philosophy of a man searching for truth. Is it right to attach much importance to philosophical systems, theories and theses? Philosophers are often asked the question how all this becomes known and from where are the truth-syntheses derived. It is not enough to say that we observe facts, because facts require analyses, interpretations, and constructing of wholes – syntheses. It is the case, however, that the structures of reality are homologous with the structures of thinking and that there is a specific parallel between the structures of phenomena and the logical structures of thinking. We have been given a definite period of time for our lives on the Earth – among people and objects, among ideas and religious yearnings. We have been given certain typical, cultural and individual properties. Finally, we have been given a definite amount of energy and abilities which allow us to use this energy in a rational way. If we are not deprived of freedom, we make a choice about how we wish to use our life energy – what to turn it into. It sometimes happens that people spend their energy on doing evil or on pessimistic considerations of the transientness and triviality of the world and of themselves. To be able to use one’s life energy in accord with the optimal plan of existence, to achieve the fulfillment of expectations worthy of man, it is necessary to assume the attitude of acceptance of life and respect for the supreme values, particularly for the Summum Bonum, the Absolute, God. When are our intellectual hopes fulfilled so that we shall personally touch the truth and participate in it? Such fulfilment is achieved only by few spiritual leaders. Epiphanic, transient fulfilment comes to a man as a
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very intensive spiritual experience that may transform his whole life. Finally, there is fulfilment that comes as a quiet grace of hope that, though we may achieve little, we still participate with all our personality in being warmed up by the warmth of the truth. There still remains the critical and distant attitude: hope versus hopelessness. A man draws a picture of the world of high values and desires to participate in it, yet he is always confronted with inhibitions, repugnance, fights, crimes, the triumph of evil. He asks himself why it is so. There are several possible answers to this question: 1) satan’s intervention is the reason for the spreading of evil; 2) like the good, evil belongs to the natural structure of the anthroposphere, it is a specific dialectical necessity; 3) evil, as an insufficient recognition of the good and a moment of trial or test of man’s good will, belongs to the necessary stage of development; 4) evil is a manifestation of human weakness, the instinct of fight, aggression and imperfection of the species; 5) manifestations of evil should be treated as cases of ordinary mistakes having no great importance in the anthroposphere. Which of these options is right? Maybe each of them is, at least to a certain extent. To cherish hope against all hope means to hold a conviction that the good is stronger than evil, that a man can cognize the truth within his own personal limits and that expectations may come true. Human knowledge is founded on the hope and expectation of fulfilment – scientific knowledge is based on calculated principles and models. There is no basic contradiction here, but a lot of intellectual effort, responsibility and courage is required to make these two opposites meet and see the light of truth in both of them. Human knowledge – knowledge about oneself, about another man, about values – is knowledge ‘‘without arguments’’, intuitive, but, at the same time, it is connected with understanding and based on ‘‘the logic of the heart’’, emotion, and even dreams. We know about another man not only when we base our knowledge on empirical proofs and experience, but also – or, maybe, first of all – when we feel his closeness, when we love him, when we trust that, even if he is the worst, he will change and become fully human. This is the hope against all hope applied in practice. A mother who does not lose faith in her son though he is a rake and a thief may serve as an example here. She is not convinced by any rational arguments that her son should be punished, deprived of a chance to spend his life on entertainment, etc. And it sometimes happens that the mother’s blind love wins: the son changes and finally becomes an honest
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man. Let us now compare the traits of scientific knowledge and human knowledge: Scientific, objective, formalized knowledge
Human, humanistic knowledge Requiring no assumed formalization
using artificially created language which is understandable only to circles of specialists
using natural, simple language with which it is easy to communicate
striving to achieve a fully discursive character
taking into account, apart from discoursive, intuition, visions, presumptions
strictly limited to experimental and logical argumentation
going beyond experimental and logical argumentation (knowledge without arguments)
striving to achieve computer-type perfection
satisfied with natural understandability and taking into account the moment of ambiguity
scientific, objective knowledge striving to cognize facts and nothing but facts and relations between them
human, humanistic knowledge drawing no limits to cognition
quantitative only that knowledge is accepted as scientific which is included in mathematical – logical – sensual conception
qualitative taking into account the humanistic coefficient and axiological problems
rejecting questions of a metaphysical nature, i.e. those problems going beyond the sphere of matter
taking up metaphysical problems
claiming primacy of methodological perfection over
striving to find an explanation of the basis phenomena of the
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the issue of whether a given science serves something
anthroposphere for the sake of perfecting of humanity
accepting sense experience only
accepting internal experience
Jagellonian University
LEO ZONNEVELD
SCIENCE IN MIND: EXPLORING THE LANGUAGE OF THE LOGOS
Towards the midst of this mystic night, in which Anaximander’s problem of Becoming was wrapped up, Heraclitus of Ephesus approached and illuminated it by a divine flash of lightning. ‘I contemplate Becoming,’ he exclaimed, ‘and nobody has so attentively watched this eternal wave-surging and rhythm of things. And what do I behold? Lawfulness, infallible certainty, ever equal paths of Justice, condemning Erinyes behind all transgressions of the laws, the whole world the spectacle of a governing justice and demoniacally omnipresent natural forces subject to justice’s sway. I do not behold the punishment of that which has become, but the justification of Becoming.’1
Heraclitus of Ephesus claims to announce the everlasting Word (Lege or Logos) according to which all things are one, making it the unifying feature of his system. It was the Logos itself that related all things, provided them with substance and form, and held all of existence together in cosmic freedom. Here, in Nietzsche’s handwritten notes, Heraclitus criticizes his predecessors and contemporaries for their failure to see the rationally structured unity of experience beyond the world of semantic and deductive complexity, if only they could but discern its shape. The world of organic and social evolution is one of change, adaptation and transformation. Organisms are goal-orientated systems, and living stuff tends to express itself towards the consummation of an innately ordained manifestation or purpose. Organic activity seems to be guided by the desire to avoid a condition of irrevocable physical equilibrium with its environment. Visible evidence from plant life reassures us that living matter continues trying to manifest itself in this way even when seriously hampered. Once a living organism feels that its access to its self-manifestation is hampered it will creatively attempt to reach for its full appearance in nature by some other route. Living matter, capable of organic growth, acquires this remarkable capacity for re-orientation and self-complexification, by greater internal restructuring. This all-embracing process of change and becoming, leading to ever increasing interiorisation and individuation, extends itself also into the life-long changes in neuron connectivity in the human brain. A most remarkable feature of the brain is its plasticity; its ability to continuously adapt to, and learn from, its experience throughout one’s life. The process 21 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 21–37. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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of learning shows measurable physiological correlates in terms of changes at individual synapses, as well as modifications of the stimulus–response properties of individual neurons. While involved in the process of perceiving, evaluating, validating, classifying and ordering a continuous stream of sensory data, the human person finds ways to reorient and express her/himself, articulating and embedding experience within the cultural context and the scientific idiom prevalent at the time. Nature, brain and mind, working as one, are mysteriously connected by an all-encompassing language which invokes the physical activities of billions of neurons to give rise to integrated subjective awareness and impersonated self-identity. That all-encompassing language is the language of the Logos, desiring to make itself known through science. This process of unification of self and world, eternally at work in the universe, is recognised in T he T ao T e Ching of Lao Tzu; in the Upanishads written by ancient Hindu philosophers, who called it Brahman, and saw it manifested in the individual as Atman. The Atman, much as the Logos, manifests itself in the human intellect or reason. Returning to today’s science, physicists also acknowledge a single, fundamental principle of the universe, and seek to articulate it as a unified theory of physics. Microbiologist Jonas Salk, founder of the Salk Institute (La Jolla) that is recognised for its brilliant scientific work, deeply considered the emergence of Mind in terms of cosmic evolution. Salk talks of internal organisations, of categories, that provided for the internal changes and accumulative ability of biological evolution. Moving beyond the design couched in biological evolution, Salk considered those factors which spur such. He emphasises that the evolutionary orientation of biological organisms is toward change. For Salk ‘‘change’’ and ‘‘cause’’ enter into an intimate relationship as ‘‘the intrinsic nature of the organism influences the range and the direction of change that can occur; the change is then added to others, all of which together seem to be ‘causes’ toward which the developing organism is drawn.’’ 2 Metamorphosis, transformational change and becoming, is the driver accelerating the complexity of our technological world, invigorating the debate on moral issues of our time. Therapeutic techniques derived from stem cells research, psycho pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs, as well as developments in genetics, neural activity and social cognition research are activating the human desire for transfiguration, change, greater self-expression and greater self-improvement. There is a delightful sense of personal exploration that accompanies progress in science. Scientific research demands the establishment of a
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point of recognition and connectivity, a point of prospective validation, still outside a given set of experiences that anticipates a hidden unity in a wild stream of nature’s secrets. From a cognitive, experiential point of view, this form of participation in science presents itself as an energetics of mind: the universe is absorbed, disentangled, co-created, sustained and brought into movement, elucidating what presents itself to be a commonly acceptable new set of parameters that supports, underpins, and throws new light upon established scientific fact. Science remakes, recreates nature by the act of discovery. It enriches scientists and non-scientists alike by rephrasing and enlarging an already sensitized, personalized, participatory universe. Words can conjure up associations to past experiences. Through words we can deliberately bring the past back to mind, independently from what is happening in the present. Let’s move back some 350 years in time to start our tour, exploring the language of the Logos, and start our exploration in the world of science, allowing our brain to generate mental imagery to conquer time and distance. Meet the father of neurology, Thomas Willis at work at Christ Church, that famous centre and cathedral of Oxford University, whose guests we are today. He played an important part in the history of the science of anatomy and was a co-founder of the world’s oldest existing Academy, the Royal Society. From 1660, until his death he was Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford. Willis was a pioneer in research into the anatomy of the brain, nervous system and muscles. The ‘Circle of Willis,’ a part of the brain, was his discovery. His anatomy of the brain and nerves, as described in his Cerebri anatome: cui accessit nervorum descriptio at usus3 of 1664 is so minute and elaborate, and abounds so much in new information, that it presents an enormous contrast with the vague and meagre efforts of his predecessors, with perhaps the sole exception of Leonardo da Vinci. Willis’ work was not the result of his own personal and unaided exertions; he acknowledged his debt to Sir Christopher Wren, the famous architect who was to design St Paul’s Cathedral in London later, for drawing the precious drawings which accompanied his work. Another of his large volume of works appeared at Elzevirium in 1668, Pathologiae cerebri, et nervosi generis specimen in quo agitur de morbis convulsivis et de scorbuto,4 in which Willis develops a new theory of the cause of epilepsy and other convulsive diseases, and in which he makes a number of contributions to psychiatry. Extending research from human anatomy to the broader concept of mind, as Willis did, confirms that Medieval and Renaissance authors
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were obsessed with questions on the nature of the mind, or if you wish, the intellectual soul. Mental phenomena and physical phenomena were mutually inclusive concepts for philosophers of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: they did not treat psychology or the philosophy of mind as separate fields of enquiry. Questions in the philosophy of mind were approached through Aristotle’s De Anima and Parva naturalia. De Anima is one of Aristotle’s natural books (libri naturalis) concerned with the most precious centre of reality namely with living bodies. How senses function was a central concern with most medieval thinkers. It continued to be a central topic in philosophy as well as in science up to the end of the seventeenth century. Cognitive science today comprises the study of the higher-level mental functions, including reasoning, intelligence and recognition. In characterizing the origins, acquisition and processing of knowledge it tries to understand how we develop into thinking, reasoning beings. Cognitive science was rooted in the work of logicians, psychologists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists. Scientists deeply engaged in the interdisciplinary quest to understand the mind included great thinkers such as Alan Turing, Kenneth Craik, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch,5 Karel Lashley and John van Neumann.6 They laid the groundwork for cognitive science, each offering contributions from their own scientific background, thrilled as they were by the prospects of blending insights in order to understand the mind. I have mentioned Leonardo da Vinci before and I would like to go back to him for a few seconds in connection with technological aspects of brain science as reflected in the methodologies of neuroimaging, which I will discuss later on. Leonardo’s pioneering research into the brain led him to discoveries in neuroanatomy. His injection of hot wax into the brain of an ox provided a cast of the ventricles, and represents the first known use of a solidifying medium to define the shape and size of the internal brain. I will quote from his writings: Make two vent-holes in the horns of the greater ventricles, and insert melted wax with a syringe, making a hole in the ventricle of memory; and through such a hole fill the three ventricles of the brain. Then when the wax has set, take apart the brain, and you will see the shape of the ventricles exactly.7,8
In T rends in Neurosciences Jonathan Pevsner asks himself ‘‘Which areas of neuroscience would interest Leonardo today, and what meanings does he hold for us? One imagines that he would have a particular interest in current neuroimaging technologies, such as structural and functional
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magnetic resonance imaging fMRI, that allows us to localise the sources of behaviors to particular brain areas.’’9 The fMRI methodology, the application of radiowaves and magnetic resonance to cross-sectional imaging of the brain is one of today’s technologies. More than thirty years ago, I was lucky enough to see the birth of its predecessor, the Computerised Axial Tomography (CAT) scanner. When in London, on a trip for the UK Government in 1972, I had the great privilege of meeting Geoffrey Hounsfield who showed me a model of his brain scanner, now considered to be the most important instrument ever developed in the history of brain imaging. Oddly enough Hounsfield, now a Nobel laureate, worked then as a research scientist at the EMI, a record company known for its label ‘‘His Masters’ Voice’’ and responsible for the recordings and for the early successes of the Beatles in the 60’s. Computerised Axial Tomography, or CAT scanning greatly enhanced the effectiveness of old two-dimensional x-ray units. Because conventional radiographs viewed the brain from one angle, shadows of bones and organs could be superimposed on one another. With CAT, radiologists could view a ‘‘slice’’ of the brain. By rotating the x-ray tubes around the brain, several sectional views could be obtained. A computer could then reconstruct the views by using mathematical formulas called algorithms to create a three-dimensional image that was easier to interpret. Cognitive neuroscience represents a major sub-component of neuroscience focusing on the neural basis of information processing by the brain. The discipline engages scientists who may be categorised broadly into three sectors: first, there are experimental scientists involved in human neuropsychology and non-invasive brain-imaging – as I described earlier – to visualise and monitor processes in the brain; then there is the second group involved in invasive animal experiments using single-unit recording; the third group are computational scientists doing modelling and theoretical work. The collective aim of this enterprise is to understand the organisational principles and associated processing activity of neurons in perception, attention, memory, language and action, by mapping these onto the regional and local-circuit networks of the brain. The medical, economic, and social implications of our insights in the functioning of the human brain are of overwhelming importance and will be overshadowing current advances in life sciences and information technology. Breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience will enable us to better understand the processes and mechanisms of storing and analyzing sensory information in the brain, will enable us to find cures for neurological
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diseases, replace parts of living brains, build artificial brains and use our brains more efficiently. Contemporary civilisation is much more complex than before and its scientific and technological requirements are incessantly growing. Although scientific description is based exclusively on the physical universe, our contact with reality is entirely through our subjective experience, whose consensus of stable representations we assemble into the physical world view. All our knowledge of the physical universe is gained through the immediate conduit of our subjective experience and our intentionality in turn has major impacts on the physical world around us. Brain mapping uses the third-person perspective in describing the subject through measurements ‘from the outside.’ Even today, the standard cognitive psychological experiment sidesteps consciousness by focussing purely on objective measurements in which the subjectivity of the subject, her or his inner life, plays no apparent role. We are both the experience of consciousness and the neurochemical and associated physical activities of our organism. We have difficulty in getting past our primary sense data. In consequence, we consider that our personal consciousness of the world is the world. The rational process of perception invokes a picture from countless raw data. Each time our brain contemplates producing an objective reality out there, which is perfectly represented by access to our experience. The immediacy of the impact of stimuli by the senses by the organic world make it difficult to disengage and allow the thought that since Werner Karl Heisenberg formulated his uncertainty principle in February 1927, we know we live in a participatory universe, a world to which we lend our process of observation to actually complete it; a quantum world, where we share discrete, personalised conscious experiences.10 While mathematical analysis in conventional scientific disciplines is both discrete and firmly unidirectional, the discipline of science itself is correlative, not cause and effect. A true science of consciousness should search to create a multi-level, transqualitative, cross-functional and interdimensional substrate of reality. In order to be objective it should seek its roots in the mystery of subjectivity. Human experience is born from metaphysical self-transcendence – building upon the depth of being that results from self-reflexive self-awareness and empowers critically reflective self-integration. Subjectivity requires such direct personal experience, and direct personal experience requires disciplined reduction of the investigator to the ultimate inclinations of the human substratum from which the unique persona has emerged.
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While looking at the very promising outcome of new technologies there will be a growing need to emphasize the importance of the further articulation of a science of consciousness, which is getting its deserved scientific status and on which eminent researchers world wide, amongst others at the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, are working.11 By validating and refining the phenomenology of cognitive science at the interface of allied and interdisciplinary developments, a transformation will take place and an increased regard for a methodological science of consciousness worldwide, will firmly emerge. Time is a perception of our brain used to organise sequential patterns of detected information from our senses. How we create time would be the key to understanding its mystery. We use time to create maps of change and to build scientific models of the universe. Quantum cosmology enables specialists to examine ‘time’ as a dimension. What we call the time direction, the direction of becoming, is a quantum relation between the registering instrument and its environment; and the statistical isotropy of the universe guarantees that this relation is the same for all such instruments, including human memory. Quantum computation was proposed in the 1980’s by Feynmann, Benioff, Deutsch and others, to take advantage of the mysterious but well-documented phenomena of superposition and entanglement. Research in dynamical chaos and bifurcation in neurodynamics has yielded an increasing volume of theoretical experimental research. There are cogent reasons for believing that quantum effects do operate in the brain, and such suggestions have been made by theorists including neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles12 and mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose.13 Insights in quantum-transactions, chaos and consciousness, still virtually unused in the physical applications domain, demand a complete reorientation of our concepts of matter and the concepts we hold to be true about ourselves. A turning point might be to find some quantum process playing a key role in a neural correlate of consciousness. A number of people are actively looking into this at the moment including the anesthesiologist and psychologist Stuart Hameroff and the philosopher Paavo Pylkka¨nen who presented papers on this topic during T owards a Science of Consciousness at the University of Tucson in April 2004. Stuart Hameroff is known for his idea of a quantum mind, supported on quantum coherence within the microtubules of neurons. His work draws upon the
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interesting parallels which can be drawn between quantum theory and mind. But there are also others: according to Chris King, Senior Lecturer at the Mathematics Department in the University of Auckland, transition from chaos to order may form a key process in perception and cognition. The quantum theory implies the presence of a new type of causal factor at the fundamental level of the universe. There has been a continuing interest in the possible link between quantum non-locality and consciousness. The fractal link between dynamical chaos and quantum uncertainty is thought to be made through overlapping non-linearities capable of chaos, running from the neurosystems level down through the neuron, synapse, to the ion channel. Chaotic systems possess sensitive dependence, and brain states also contain features of self-organised criticality. In a critically poised brain state representing uncertainty of outcome, sensitive dependence may open the brain to quantum processes.14 Reality, bridging knowledge and experience, is continuously gaining new dimensions. Through thinking we can wade through time, entertain thoughts about the future, create worlds of our own and exercise a greater influence over our future than any other creatures. Machine language, in addition to our own, enables the exploration of virtual worlds, assists in drawing architectural designs for new molecular structures, enriches science and contributes to the human intellectual legacy. Evolutionary neural algorithms are being developed to empower the cognitive abilities and behaviour of artificial models of biological organisms. Mammals exhibit the highest level of intelligence amongst biological organisms. Cognitive scientists are increasingly using them as excellent prototypes for the development of machines with high cognitive abilities. Models of the mammalian central nervous system are being developed to design intelligence in artificial systems. Vision is paramount to the brain: there is a close link between vision and our conscious sensitivity. The cascade of neural operations in the human visual system alone, requires 30% of the brain capacity. Data from neuroscience are being used to implement cortex-like maps on autonomous robots to analyse motion in the external world through machine perception. Living animals, including people, can make sense of the visual world by concentrating on the salient features, ignoring the background, cutting down the information that the brain has to process. Understanding how the brain processes sounds in order to interpret them as speech, and then working out what they mean, could show how artificial systems could be more efficient. In this respect the sciences owe a lot to philosophy.
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Phenomenology is a philosophical method that may be practised to gain insight into the structure and genesis of experience. In this vein, the discipline of phenomenology becomes a useful methodology for the full range of philosophical areas, including aesthetics, ethics, embodiment and language. The French existentialist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty was fond of language-based concepts as those of linguistic and structural philosophies, and he cited such ideas in his critiques of Sartre and his contemporaries for playing down the importance of language in relation to thought. But most of all a constructive relationship has been emerging lately between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodiment and empirical work in the sciences, especially in linguistics, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Merleau-Ponty challenged the thinking of dualisms, of subject and object, self and world, through the lived experience of the existential body.15 His work has been perceived as most inspirational in the modelling of reactivity and planning, incorporating aspects of ‘mind’ in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions in cognitive systems. Much of his philosophical methodological work has found application in the architecture of emerging intelligence of distributed interacting systems, and the way these are designed to offer artificial intelligence, i.e. decision, reaction, inference and learning, emotion and ‘‘rational’’ reasoning in perception of changes. Another example as to how philosophy has shaped the modern world is in the concept of ontologies. Ontology is a discipline of philosophy whose term dates back to 1613 and was coined independently by two philosophers, Rudolf Goeckel, in his L exicon philosophicum and Jacob Lorhard, in his T heatrum philosophicum. Its practice dates back to Aristotle. It is a science of what is, the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events processes, and relations in every area of reality. When the knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. Commitment to a common ontology is a guarantee of consistency, but not completeness with respect to queries and assertions defined in the ontology. Ontological analysis clarifies the structure of knowledge and has thus long been used in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Given a domain, its ontology forms the heart of any system of knowledge representation for that domain. Without ontologies, or the conceptualisation that underlie knowledge, there cannot be a vocabulary for representing knowledge.
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But nowadays the term ontology is also part of the technical jargon of artificial intelligence researchers and the formal definition of a body of knowledge. Computer implementations of semantic networks were first developed for artificial intelligence and machine translation. Ontologies are often able to provide an objective specification of domain information by representing a consensual agreement on the concepts and relations characterising the way knowledge in that domain is expressed. Nowadays there are unique ontological identifiers for associated sets of items in areas of formalised knowledge such as machine-learning, molecular engineering, and even quantum physics, to link and query databases. Science has brought us in a position to investigate how the human brain is built to process language and how it deals with the tasks of decoding sounds, words, grammar and meaning. Scientific investigation world-wide centres itself around the brain’s plasticity, its ability to adapt and help in the design of new computer technologies. One of the most intriguing questions which science is asking itself is: how do we build systems that can dynamically and automatically self-organise and reconfigure whilst being developed as a result of the experience of its senses? Cognitive systems – natural and artificial, as there is more and more congruence in how they are perceived in a technical environment – sense, act, think, feel communicate, learn and evolve. The natural world shows us how systems as different as a colony of ants or a human brain achieve sophisticated adaptive behaviours. Growing understanding of natural cognitive systems is now contributing to artificial cognitive systems. The fascination with ourselves, with the future of our brains and the modalities of our perception in a participating universe, require an inward reorientation towards the human phenomenon. And with it we need reorientation on the responsibilities we have as sentient observers and autonomous participants in world history. We must scientifically investigate and understand how subjective conscious experience in the participatory universe of the acting human person has become a necessary function embedded in nature’s overall strategy. It is already perceived as requiring a radical investigation down to the foundations of physics. The foundations of physics must contain a principle of space-time anticipation, taking the subject away from immediate sensory effectiveness that is not covered by any machine intelligence alone, or subjectivity would become a superfluous quality and would have never been selected for in the process of evolution. Or, reverting to words of Jonas Salk, ‘‘The natural selective pressure will now favor one who not only accepts change but welcomes it, and contributes to it.’’16
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Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus exclaimed: ‘I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited sensibility and not the fault of the essence of things if you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming and Passing. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before.’17
While the nature of subjective conscious experience remains the central unsolved problem in science, it has now become of critical importance to humanity’s future. The emergence of consciousness in organic evolution paved the way towards language, ultimately culminating in the human desire to explore and interpret the mysterious language in which the Logos expresses Itself. The Logos and words are intimately connected according to John, who used it in the prologue of his gospel, or Philo of Alexandria, who referred to the Logos more than 1,300 times in his writings. According to Philo the Logos and the Word are one: the source of order in the universe and the source of human reason and intelligence.18 The outcome of a science of consciousness will testify whether subjective awareness, as opposed to the merely computational capacity of the brain, may have become elaborated by Darwinian natural selection. While the flexibility and versatility of human thought is unparalleled, essential properties such as recognition and memory have been facilitated in systems since the last half of the previous century. In the next ten years computers will reach the capacity of the human brain. I welcome this development and I recognise it to be a great privilege to be able to work within a fascinating array of scientific disciplines that is creating a new Renaissance, a new culture with greater powers to interface with art, science. A huge fountain of knowledge will open up in semantic networks, that, thanks to ontological dynamics, will become accessible through common language. At the beginning of the 21st century emphasis is shifting from the brain to human consciousness. Many of the new directions and movements in the last half of the previous century, from cybernetics on the one hand and a science of complexity on the other, are in essence trans-disciplinary. It is quite characteristic that they all lean strongly towards mathematical abstraction. That is certainly not surprising in view of the fact that mathematics is an idealised and thus an ideal connection with which to bridge disciplines – hence in some sense, it is the ultimate consummation of a trans-disciplinary way of thinking. It should be emphasised, however, in some sense only; precisely of its abstract nature, mathematics actually distances itself from natural reality, and there is the ever-present danger of growing self-identification and comparison with robotic autonomous
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entities, the embodied mechanical constructions to which we are now, by virtue of our fantastic technology, lending our own organic, evolutionary algorithms. We thus have to find, we must find, reasons why subjectivity in our organic consciousness, rather than the infallible linear effects of computation, is of pivotal importance to our further development as human beings. Each of us is a subjective conscious observer, making autonomous decisions to carry out volitional actions. Intention is the dynamic process by which we update our perception of the world. The pressure of our increasing knowledge about our complex cosmo-evolutionary development also adds to our loneliness in the universe. First and foremost, we were born from a universe that is seeking to understand itself. Ultimately, all our experiences are subjective and conditioned – we merely agree, and constrain, their objectivity by means of common metaphor and symbol systems, which are a function of our consciousness. The many worlds of the human person converge in the brain; and its neural plasticity will obey and command the process of new neuronal connections to be made in celebration and optimization of the worldview it has gained. The altered, yet trusted brain will increasingly present itself with a guidance for life. Following on from the refinement of our knowledge of and our insights into the human phenomenon, not only the operational functionality of the brain, but also the intrinsic nature of subjective conscious experience are now becoming of critical importance for the survival of the species. The twenty-first century will continue to see the emergence and influence of at least three major technologies: the cognitive sciences, neurogenomics and advanced computer communication. The first, deeply rooted in the functionality of the brain and the way it learns and processes information, is seeking transference of intelligence to non-living systems and ultimately seeks increased cognitive enhancement through the use of autonomous silicon systems. Post-genomics and particularly neurogenomics, the second, emerges from chemistry and biology, and will be looking for the rebirth, reparation and improvement of human tissue, in particular the vulnerable organic substrate of the brain. The third, computer communication, will continue to have a support function until it embarks on the autonomous design of communication scenarios between the two and beyond. The intersection of the three, and each on its own, will have profound consequences not just on the quality of life as we know it, but on the nature of life
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itself – on its shape and form, and ultimately on what it means to be human. Some of the deepest implications of research work, that will more and more centre around brain science and genomics will become relevant to technologies that are not likely to be viable for several generations. Developments derived from experimental cognitive sciences will create a new cultural virtual domain, populated by bio-inspired organisms in silicon, mimicking central nervous systems and empowering them with cognitive abilities. Furthermore, the world of science will become especially interested in directed evolution and scenarios of the future that will allow the progressively changing shape of society in these futures, and hopefully recognise the essential robustness human nature must have against technological change at the level of individuals, groups and societies. The isolation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells and breakthroughs in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) in mammals have raised the possibility of performing human SCNT to generate potentially unlimited sources of undifferentiated cells for research, with potential applications in tissue repair and transplantation medicine. The next generations will see enormous transformation in the sense that therapeutic human cloning, such as recently achieved by W. S. Hwang and his colleagues at Seoul National University in Korea,19 will most likely be followed by others. Germ line genetic engineering and an array of reproductive technologies to supplement those we already know, will become feasible and intrinsically safe. We can reasonably expect at some early stage the processing power of a laptop computer to exceed the collective processing power of human brains while later in the period human silicon enhancements – in tandem with pharmacological products specifically designed to enhance attention or memory – will begin to emerge. There will be new approaches to the brain, amongst which the possibility of genetic manipulation to study genes in relation to behaviour. Amongst the promises in brain research, there will be genetic tests for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia. Stem cells will be used to cure neurological disease. Pharmacogenetically tailored drugs will be created, but there will also be drugs to enhance human performance. We are now entering a phase in human history where developments in molecular chemistry, biology, cognitive science and informatics will facilitate large-scale advances in co-ordinated methods of mind enhancement and the manipulation of brain function. Amongst the threats that will
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emerge at the same time, there will be drugs to control behaviour, ‘brain fingerprinting’ to identify criminals, genetic predestination, electromagnetic thought control by means of hypersound, and the general erosion of the human agency. Ethicists worry that if cognitive enhancers were used en masse, human society, and the values it cherishes, could drastically change. If we are to substantially improve our overall cognitive functioning, we may also alter aspects of our identity that are fundamental to who we are. The greatest scientific challenges, which could enrich human life beyond our wildest dreams are right in front of us, but they come accompanied with ethical issues, issues that touch the core of our human body and inner being. We don’t know where we are going, but our inquisitiveness, our zest to understand life and the nature of the human phenomenon, our desire to understand, will not stop. Being deeply involved in discussions of this nature in my job, I anticipate that such technologies will take hold. And once they do, human evolution is likely to proceed at a greatly accelerated rate; human nature as we know may change markedly, if it does not disappear altogether, and over centuries, a new intelligent species may well be created. Knowledge must forever change otherwise it withers and each discovery creates in the long run more mystery than it solves. On close introspection, we will need to state that the real meaning of the Self are voiced through the language of the Logos upon which all our experiences and memories have been transposed, and whose script we are reading. For language to be meaningful and true to its creative principle, it must very carefully sustain its intimate connection with the phenomenal universe. There is an ethical and metaphysical discourse taking place between the word and what it creates. A strange singularity is apparent in language as one observes that a limited group of phonetic elements can give birth to potentially infinite clusters of existential and imposed meaning. Language presents itself as selective absorber of passing streams of external and internal presence desiring to objectify reality through the sound of the voice, to accumulate to the majestic existence of the Word, which – as scripture would have it – one day took the shape of Man. Language binds its user into a metaphysical relationship to law, ethics and epistemology. Yet language, through which all our scientific concepts find expression, can only mimic or approximate the creative expressive principle. Ultimately, language remains metaphysical, while all natural phenomena are forms, or reflections, of the Word, of the Logos.
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The Logos keeps re-anchoring our forward-looking process of selfmetamorphosis in our tying to, evaluating and sometimes abandoning traces of earlier meaning, and is thus guiding the dynamic process of the Bergsonian e´lan in becoming a person. In the self-forwarding, self-integrative dynamic flow that crystallises in consciousness to become ultimately manifest in the encounter with action, we may find answers for today’s great challenges, but also the problems associated with it. One of the greatest problems of today is how to meet the present ills of our civilisation, most of which originate from the human mind. While the science of the brain, the mind, of consciousness may bring prospective solutions it will be important to develop scientific concepts towards preserving, subsequently improving, human evolutionary authenticity and identity. A willingness to participate in the scientific endeavour which is about to re-create the future of the human phenomenon, while accepting and respecting the gift of each one’s individuality and subjectivity as the natural growth environment of personhood, should be solidly paired to a quality of perception which allows for the unscathed yet unavoidable, perhaps desirable, transformation of humanity. Science and Innovation Section, British Embassy, T he Hague NOTES 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sa¨mtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 14, Maximillian A. Mu¨gge (trans.), Charles S. Taylor (rev.) (Berlin: Colli-Montinari, 1980), p. 108. Nietzsche’s notes on Pre-Platonic philosophy can be found in the Nachlass of Summer 1872; in April 1873, Nietzsche brought along to Bayreuth a handwritten manuscript version under the title Philosophy in the T ragic Age of the Greeks. In the beginning of 1874, Nietzsche gave it to his pupil Adolf Baumgartner to copy. Nietzsche’s corrections to the Baumgartner copy stop after the initial pages. 2 Jonas Salk, Man Unfolding (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 49. 3 Studio Thomae Willis, Cerebri anatome: cui accessit nervorum descriptio at usus. Londini, typ. J. Flesher, imp. J. Martyn & J. Allestry, 1664, 1670; Amsterdam 1664, 1665/1666, 1667, 1676, 1683, English translation by Samuel Pordage, 1681. Thomas Willis [1621–1675], T he Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves, 2 vols., ed. W. Feindel, tercentary ed. (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965). Reprint of the English translation with a complete annotated bibliography of the work. The work that coined the term neurology. This is one of the most desirable collectors’ items in medical neurology and one of the classic publications of English medicine. The illustrations are by Sir Christopher Wren, who was later to become England’s leading architect. The most complete and accurate account of the nervous system which had hitherto appeared. Willis’ classification of the cerebral nerves held until the time of Samuel Thomas Soemmering [1755–1830]. 4 Studio Thomae Willis, Pathologiae cerebri, et nervosi generis specimen in quo agitur de morbis convulsivis et de scorbuto. 338 pages. 4 pl. With portrait. Amsterdam (Amstelodami),
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apud D. Elzevirium, 1668, 1670; Leiden, 1671; Geneva, 1676; London, 1678, 1681; Lyon, 1681; Dutch translation, Middelburg, 1677; Amsterdam, 1681. Thomas Willis, An Essay on the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock; in Which Convulsive Diseases are Treated of, English trans. Samuel Pordage (London: T. Dring, 1684), pp. 69–78. 5 Warren S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). A reprint edition appeared with MIT Press on May 13, 1988. Warren McCulloch was a doctor, a philosopher, a teacher, a mathematician, and a poet who termed his work ‘‘experimental epistemology.’’ In his collection of 21 essays and lectures he pursues a physiological theory of knowledge that touches on philosophy, neurology and psychology: ‘‘There is one answer, only one, toward which I’ve groped my work for thirty years; to find out how brains work ...’’ 6 John von Neumann, T he Computer and the Brain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, June 1958 and November 2000). John von Neumann was one of the most celebrated and prolific mathematicians of the 20th century. His ‘‘The Computer and the Brain’’ is a record of a lecture series that Von Neumann delivered at Yale University in 1957. In these lectures, Von Neumann set out to explore connections between computing hardware and what he believed to be their biological counterparts: brains. Von Neumann compared neurons with physical computing elements in terms of size, speed, heat dissipation, capacity, in an attempt to discover what, if anything, could be said to unite them or to set them apart. He drew from what had been learned in designing computer instructions and memories in an attempt to glean some insight into what the brain might be doing. 7 C. D. O’Malley and J. B. de C. M. Saunders, L eonardo da V inci on the Human Body (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), p. 340. 8 Leonardo da Vinci, Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty, the Queen, at W indsor Castle, K. Keele and C. Pedretti (eds.), 104 recto (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–1980). 9 Jonathan Pevsner, Leonardo da Vinci’s contributions to neuroscience, T rends in Neurosciences, 25:4 (April 2002): 217–220. 10 Werner Heisenberg, T he Physical Principles of the Quantum T heory, originally published in German, 1930, re-issued 1950 (Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 1930). This is Heisenberg’s most important work, and contains themes of early papers amplified into a treatise. Studying the papers of Dirac and Jordan, while in frequent correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg discovered a problem in the way one could measure basic physical variables appearing in the equations. His analysis showed that uncertainties, or inaccuracies, always turned up if one tried to measure the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. (Similar uncertainties occurred when measuring the energy and the time variables of the particle simultaneously.) These uncertainties or inaccuracies in the measurements were not the fault of the experimenter, said Heisenberg, they were inherent in quantum mechanics. Heisenberg presented his discovery and its consequences in a 14-page letter to Pauli in February 1927. The letter evolved into a published paper in which Heisenberg presented to the world for the first time what became known as the uncertainty principle. 11 Proceedings of the congress T owards a Science of Consciousness (Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona, April 7–11, 2004). Over the last 10 years, the Center of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona has been contributing extra-ordinarily to the development of the study of human consciousness. It aims to bring together perspectives of philosophy, the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, the social sciences, medicine, and the physical sciences, the arts and humanities, to move toward an integrated understanding of human consciousness.
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12 Sir John Eccles, How the Self Controls Its Brain (Berlin, New York: Springer Verlag, 1994). 13 Roger Penrose, Shadow of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 1994). The book was received with considerable criticism. Penrose’s reply ‘‘Beyond the Doubting of A Shadow,’’ was published in Psyche, 2: 23 (January 1996). Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory of human consciousness in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules, which form a structural network within a neuron’s cytoplasm. 14 Chris King, ‘‘Chaos, Quantum-transactions and Consciousness: A Byophysical Model of the Intentional Mind’’ Neuroquantology 1(2003): 129–162. 15 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (trans.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 16 Jonas Salk, op. cit., p. 11. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 108. 18 Philo of Alexandria. ‘‘On the Creation’’ V; X; XLVIII; Allegorical Interpretation III XXXI T he Works of Philo, C. D. Yonge (trans.) (Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, MA, 1993). 19 W. S. Hwang et al., ‘‘Evidence of a Pluripotent Human Embryonic Stem Cell Line Derived from a Cloned Blastocyst,’’ Science, vol. 303 (2004): 1669–1674.
Leo Zonneveld.
ARIA OMRANI
‘‘OBJECTIVE SCIENCE’’ IN HUSSERLIAN LIFE-WORLD PHENOMENOLOGY
The life-world, as Husserl holds, is a realm of original self-evidences [Edmund Husserl, T he Crisis of European Sciences and T ranscendental Phenomenology; Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 127]. In Husserl’s description, that which is self-evidently given, is in perception, experienced as ‘‘the thing itself ’’, in immediate presence, or in memory, remembered as the thing itself and every other manner of intuition is a prescientification of the thing itself, every mediate cognition belonging in this sphere has the sense of an induction of something intuitable [Ibid., 128]. All conceivable verification, leads back to these modes of selfevidence because the ‘‘thing itself ’’ lies in these intuitions themselves as that which is actually intersubjectively experienceable and verifiable and is not a substructure of thought; whereas such a substructure, insofar as it makes a claim to truth, can have actual truth only by being related back to such self-evidence. To Husserl, it is itself a highly important task for the scientific opening-up of the life-world, to recognize the primal validity of these selfevidences and indeed their higher dignity in the grounding of knowledge compared to that of the objective-logical self -evidences. In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the open infinity experiences, ‘‘we measure the life-world for a well-fitting grab of ideas, that of so-called objectively scientific truths’’ [Ibid., 51]. According to Husserl, the belief that the natural sciences are based on the experience of objective nature, is true only in that sense whereby experience yields a self-evidence taking place purely in the life-world and as such is the source of self-evidence for what is objectively established in the sciences, the latter never themselves bringing experiences of the objective. Indeed, the objective, as Husserl holds, is never precisely experienceable as itself, and scientists themselves consider it in this way whenever they interpret it as something metaphysically transcendent. From this point of view, naturally ‘‘rendering ideas intuition’’ in the manner of mathematical or natural-scientific ‘‘models’’ is hardly intuition of the objective itself; but rather a matter of life-world intuitions which are suited to ease the conception of the objective ideals in question. Husserl points out that many conceptual intermediaries are often involved, especially since the 39 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 39–44. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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conception itself does not always occur immediately, and cannot always be made so self-evident in its way, as is the case in conceiving of geometrical straight lines on the basis of the life-world self -evidence of straight table-edges and the like [Ibid., 129]. The bodies familiar to us in the life-world are actual bodies, but not bodies in the sense of physics. On the basis of Husserl’s sense, the same thing is true of causality and of spatiotemporal infinity. These categorical features of the life-world have the same names but are not concerned with the theoretical idealization and hypothetical substructures of the geometrician and physicist. As Husserl maintains, ‘‘just as other projects, practical interests, and their realizations belong to the life-world presuppose it as ground, and enrich it with science, too as a human project and praxis. And this includes, everything objectively a priori, with its necessary reference back to a corresponding a priori of the life-world. T his reference-back is one of a founding of validity’’ [Ibid., 140]. To Husserl, prescientifically, the world is already a spatiotemporal world; in regard to this spatiotemporality, there is no question of ideal mathematical points of ‘‘pure’’ straight lines or planes, no question at all of mathematically infinitesimal continuity or of the ‘‘exactness’’ belonging to the sense of the geometrical a priori. The life-world ‘‘for us who walkingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical’’ [Ibid., 142]. The point that should be made here is, according to Husserl, the world does not exist as an entity, as an object, but it exists with such uniqueness that the plural make no sense when applied to it [Ibid ]. In Husserl’s view, there is a fundamental difference between the way we are conscious of the world and the way we are conscious of things or objects (though together the two make up an inseparable unity), which prescribes fundamentally different correlative types of consciousness for them. Husserl believes that things are given as being valid for us in each case but in principle only in such a way that we are conscious of them as things within the world-horizon (a horizon of possible thing-experience); ‘‘each one is something, ‘something of ’ the world of which we are constantly conscious as a horizon, on the other hand, we are conscious of this horizon only as a horizon for existing objects; without objects of consciousness it cannot be actual’’ [Ibid., 143]. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon. All natural questions, all theoretical and practical goals taken as themes have to do with something or other within the world-horizon. As Husserl says, ‘‘this is
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true even of illusion, nonactualities; since everything characterized through some modality of being is, after all related to actual being. For, in advance, ‘‘world’’ has the meaning ‘‘the universe of the ‘actually’ existing actualities’’; not the merely supposed, doubtful or questionable actualities but the actual one, which as such have actuality for us only in the constant movement of corrections and revisions of validities’’ [Ibid., 146]. One of the different manners in which we are awake to the world and to the objects in the world, is that of straightforwardly living toward whatever objects are given, thus toward the world-horizon, in normal, unbroken constancy, in a synthetic coherence running through all acts. This normal straightforward living, toward whatever objects are given, indicates that all our interests have their goals in objects; in other words, ‘‘all our theoretical and practical themes lie always within the normal coherence of the life-horizon world’’ [Ibid., 144]. Husserl defines the natural life – whether it is prescientifically or scientifically, theoretically or practically interested – as life within a universal unthematic horizon. This horizon is, in the natural attitude, precisely the world always pregiven as that which exists; rather, the pregiven world is the horizon which includes all our goals, all our ends, whether fleeting or lasting, in a flowing but constant manner, just as an intentional horizon-consciousness implicitly encompasses ‘‘everything in advance.’’ Husserl points out that it is the spatiotemporal world of things as we experience them in our preand extrascientific life and as we know them to be experienceable beyond what is actually experienced. He writes: We have a world-horizon as a horizon of possible thing-experience ... But everything here is subjective and relative, even though normally, in our experience and in the social group united with us in the community of life, we arrive at ‘secure’ facts; within a certain range this occurs of its own accord, that is, undisturbed by any noticeable disagreement; sometimes, on the other hand, when it is of practical importance, it occurs in a purposive knowing process, i.e., with the goal of finding a truth which is secure for our purposes [Ibid., 136–138].
Husserl illustrates his point by giving an example. He states that when we are thrown into an alien social sphere, i.e. that of Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally verified or verifiable, are by no means the same as ours. But if we set up the goal of a truth about the objects which is unconditionally valid for all subjects, beginning with that on which normal Europeans, normal Hindus, Chinese, etc., agree in spite of all relativity, then we are on the way to objective science. When we set up
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this objectivity as a goal (the goal of a ‘‘truth in itself ’’) we make a set of hypotheses through which the pure life-world is surpassed. The life-world, in Husserl’s sense, does have, in all its relative features, a general structure. This general structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative. We can attend to it in its generality and with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all. Husserl maintains that as life-world, the world has, even prior to science, the ‘same’ structures that the objective sciences presuppose in their substructure of a world which exists ‘in itself ’ and is determined through ‘‘truths in themselves’’. Indeed, these are the same structures that they presuppose as a priori structures and systematically unfold in a priori sciences, sciences of the logos, the universal methodical norms by which any knowledge of the world existing ‘‘in itself, objectively’’ must be bound. According to Husserl, the contrast between the subjectivity of the lifeworld and the ‘‘objective’’, the ‘‘true’’ world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical-logical substructure, the substructure of something that is in principle not perceivable, in principle not experienceable in its own proper being; whereas, the subjective, in the life-world, is distinguished in all respects precisely by its being actually experienceable. Every immediate cognition belonging to this sphere has the sense of an induction of something intuitable, something possibly perceivable as having-been-perceived [Ibid., 128]. Husserl emphasizes that all conceivable verification leads back to these modes of self -evidence. The ‘‘thing self ’’ lies in these intuitions themselves as that which is, actually intersubjectively experienceable and verifiable and is not a substructure of thought; whereas such a substructure, insofar as it makes a claim to truth, can have actual truth only by being related back to such self-evidence. To Husserl, the knowledge of objective-scientific world is ‘‘grounded’’ in the self-evidence. He writes: We have seen that the propositions, the whole edifice of doctrine in the objective sciences are structures attained through certain activities of scientists bound together in their collaborative work or attained through a continued building-up of activities, the later of which always presuppose the results of the earlier ... all these theoretical results have the character of validities for the life-world, adding themselves as such to its own composition and belonging to it even before that as a horizon of possible accomplishments for developing science. The concrete life-world, then, is grounding soil of the ‘‘scientifically true’’ world and at the same time encompasses it in its own universal concreteness [Ibid., 131].
In Husserl’s thought, the paradoxical interrelationships of ‘‘objectively true world’’ and the ‘‘life-world’’ make the manner of being both enigmatic.
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He emphasized that true world in any sense, and within our own being, becomes an enigma in respect to the sense of this being. That scientific discipline, required for the solution of such enigmas, is not mathematical, nor logical at all in the historical sense, since these are themselves objective sciences in the sense which is presently problematical and as included in the problem, cannot be presuppositions used as premises. Indeed, as Husserl says: ‘‘What appeared to be merely a problem of fundamental basis of the objective sciences or a partial problem within the universal problem of objective science has indeed proven to be the genuine and most universal problem ...’’ [Ibid., 133–134]. According to Husserl, the problem, which first appears as the question of the relation between objective-scientific thinking and intuition, concerns therefore on the one hand, logical thinking as the thinking of logical thought (e.g. the physicist’s thinking of physical theory, or purely mathematical thinking, in which mathematics has its place as a system of doctrine, as a theory), and on the other hand, the intuiting and the intuited, in the life-world prior to theory. As Husserl says: ‘‘Here arises ineradicable illusion of a pure thinking which, unconcentrated in its purity about intuition, already has its self-evidence truth, even truth about the world’’ [Ibid]. Here, one concentrates on the separateness of intuiting and thinking and generally interprets the nature of the ‘‘theory of knowledge’’ as theory of science, carried out in respect to two correlative sides, i.e., the subjective and the objective. But as soon as possible the empty and vague notion of intuition has become the problem of the life-world, as soon as the magnitude and difficulty of this investigation take on enormous proportions as one seriously penetrates it, the great transformation of the ‘theory of knowledge’ and the ‘theory of science’ occurs, whereby in the end, science as a problem and as an accomplishment loses its self sufficiency and becomes a mere partial problem [Ibid., 135].
Husserl maintains that the supposedly completely self-sufficient logic which modern mathematical logicians think they are able to develop, even calling it a truly scientific philosophy, namely, as the universal, a priori, fundamental science for all objective sciences, is nothing but naı¨vete´. Its self-evidence lacks scientific grounding in the universal life-world a priori, which it always presupposes in the form of things taken for granted, which are never scientifically, universally formulated, never put in the general form proper to a science of essence. From Husserl’s viewpoint, only when this radical fundamental science exists can such a logic itself become a science.
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Husserl points out that things are ‘‘positional’’ in two sense (according to spatial position and temporal position) – the spatiotemporal onta. To Husserl, ‘‘Here would thus be found the task of a life-world ontology, understood as a concretely general doctrine of essence for these onta’’ [Ibid., 142]. As defined by Husserl, the ‘ultimately accomplishing life’, is the life in which the self-evident givenness of life-world forever has, has attained and attains anew its prescientific ontic meaning [Ibid., 128]. Isfahan, Iran
N. KOZHEVNIKOV
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE NATURAL COORDINATE SYSTEM
1. Non-classical philosophy has absolutely refused the universal systems and approaches, having preferred individual representations based on preliminary chosen assumptions. In the second half of the last century disintegrated tendencies intensified, and the questions on disappearance of the Man, the person, the author-base values of the Age of the Enlightenment were raised within the framework of separate concepts of postmodernism. However, approximately at the same time, opposite tendencies focused on searching the new forms of universalism and the methods able to ensure its formation began to increase. In our opinion, the most effective of all the methods and approaches is the development of the conception of the natural coordinate system, which arises in the surrounding world by means of self-organization and covers all levels of hierarchy of this world. In the XXIst century, mankind will have to come more closely into contact with chaos, complexity and various forms of their organization. Let’s choose such approaches where definitions of chaos are closely connected with concrete equilibria types. On this basis, the conception of the natural coordinate system arising in the surrounding world by means of self-organization and covering all levels of hierarchy of this world, may be advanced. There should be a naturally arising coordinate system, within which the further development of Nature takes place. In spite of complexity, the surrounding world is amazingly organized, reasonable, optimal, and stable; all its levels are connected by general-cosmic rotation of matter, energy and information. Today we know of 115 periodic system elements underlying the World, but only 70 of them form Earth’s shells. There are only two nucleic acids, and four fundamental interactions in physics. Many philosophers and scientists have emphasized that linear, simple representations of the world describe it quite authentically. Thus, everyone knows the second Kant antinomy ‘‘Thesis – every composite substance is made of simple parts. Antithesis – nothing is composed of simple parts’’. E. Rutherford said ‘‘Nature is elementary. If I am an ordinary man, I shall investigate it successfully’’. The outstanding physicist R. Feynman often said that the World had an elementary organisation. 45 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 45–55. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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2. The natural coordinate system was felt and realized by various thinkers throughout the history of mankind’s development. During a long period of time, people, having the sense of such a system, looked for it in God, metaphysical Absolute, Ideas and Spirit. Thus, they created very deep religious, religious-philosophical and philosophical concepts and systems which, being very divergent, nevertheless have many attributes in common with God-Absolute as well as in the ways of the human interaction with Him. Experience of asceticism, e.g. yoga, orthodox hesychasm and apophatic divinity as well as the philosophical notions of Age are of great importance for the development of knowledge about coordinate system. During the New Age the accents are transferred to the theory of knowledge in which the sign-symbolic systems of cognitive practice have now been developed. Thinking implies active constructive functioning by processing of the initial data; it is often considered to be projected. It should be stressed that in the history of Philosophy two main tendencies periodically changed each other: development and orientation to equilibria. During the last two centuries there was a tendency in favor of change, movement and development mainly due to Hegel. However, in the 20th century thanks to the works of A. Bogdanov, L. Bertalanfy and V. Vernadsky, organization and equilibrium became of interest. 3. The most complete definition of coordinates and system of coordinates is given in Mathematics where coordinates are called numbers, magnitudes by which the position of any given member (point) in some set (set M) can be determined. The totality of coordinates one-to-one corresponding to members of set M makes up the coordinate system. In some sciences the components, systems of marking off projections are called coordinates. There are many different types of coordinates, such as linear, curvilinear, excessive (in Mathematics), galactic, eclyptical, equatorial, horizontal (in Astronomy), geographical coordinates, including the degree net. The inertial systems in mechanics, quasistatic processes in thermodynamics, etc. can be considered the coordinate systems. The coordinate system of M. Plank is an attempt of creation of the Natural coordinate system on the basis of the fundamental physical constants. At present the coordinate systems are widely used in Natural Sciences and first of all in sciences based on approaches interacting with some special methods and trends, i.e. theory of systems, Ecology, Synergetics. The formula of the natural coordinate system may be expressed as follows: ‘‘The surrounding world should be considered as consisting of two unequal parts. On the one hand, these are dynamic equilibria integ-
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rated into some systems (chains of systems); on the other hand, they are all the remaining nonequilibrial chaotic processes and phenomena.’’ The chains of systems integrate the equilibria of different types: fundamental, relative, limited, inertial, metastable, while the laws of their formation at different levels of the world organization are the same. Every process starts and ends at definite equilibrium states, directing its development and formed by means of self-organization. The destiny of Man is to take part in the process of natural coordinate system formation and provide its stability, as only Person is able to develop the spiritual components of a coordinate system. 4. The interaction of any natural formation with dynamic equilibrium is based on the fact that all natural formations gravitate towards two utmost fundamental equilibria, never reaching them. On the one hand, it is an inner identificative dynamic equilibrium corresponding to identificative limit; on the other hand, it is the equilibrium of the surroundings. Any natural system of animate, inanimate or spiritual nature aims at self-identification. Elementary particles are connected into chemical elements, gas nebulae turn into Galaxy, stars, planetary system. Animals exist as organisms, individuals, and have considerable biological potential. However, the overwhelming majority of concrete identification limits are still unachievable because of the opposite tendencies providing a certain consensus (intermediate dynamic equilibrium). The second type of utmost equilibria is a communicative one. Communication is a common condition: a person communicates by means of dialogue relations, cultures – through dialogues and relations of a higher level, etc. The communicative equilibrium of such a system makes it possible to interact with all essence spheres: from inanimated world to the spiritual sphere. The coordinate system based on fundamental equilibria is created by concrete natural systems owing to the part of energy, which can be equilibrated. As a result, dynamic equilibrium cells common for all natural processes and coordinate systems appear; i.e. all phenomena, processes, substances or structures may have ‘‘intercommunication cells’’ with the coordinate system of Nature. 5. From the aspect of ontological significance the coordinate system ranks with the concepts God, the Absolute and the Universe. The interaction of the coordinate system with each of the concepts is of great importance. During the New Age the majority of these concepts were
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completely demolished, so that under the conditions of modern comprehensive and leveled knowledge the coordinate system, having absorbed universalistic ideas, may take their place, providing the necessary transformation of world outlook universalities. The characteristics of the coordinate system are: spatial situation, time, structure. However, it hasn’t any localisation or spatial limits; it is in every part of the Universe, at all the levels of its structural organization. Obviously, time always exists, changing its forms. The development processes began within one period of time and continued within another one, that’s why the coordinate system interacts with different time structures and other types of existence. The coordinate structure is pure being, pure existence. Being a cause, it hasn’t any cause. Proceeding from pure being, all other types of the surrounding world are being formed. Representations of the coordinate system may well coincide with those variants of understanding of Being which were promoted by M. Heidegger and N. Hartmann. ‘‘Being is a special way of conversation about it. Philosophy is nostalgia: it is an eagerness to be at home everywhere. Such eagerness is Metaphysics. The philosophy is carried out in a certain fundamental mood. To tell something, I should hear and listen to that Silence in myself from which words are born’’. The aspiration to be at home everywhere (to exist), is a fundamental mood of philosophizing which is achieved through its relation with the natural coordinate system. Listening to Silence in itself – is to find a stable interrelation with the coordinate system from which the process of knowledge begins. 6. Consciousness is a specific state of Man in which the world and he himself are equally available to him. It instantly binds, relates to what Man has seen, heard, felt, thought and experienced. Consciousness is the whole complex of certain dynamic equilibria. When researching the processes of consciousness, one should base one’s considerations upon common ideas of unequal Thermodynamics, considering chaos and order ratio to be connected with equilibrium–nonequilibrium. Two equilibrium conditions may replace one another by means of the chaotic and ordered exchange of information and power. Rational thinking is a typical example of organized knowledge. Art or religious-mystical perception includes much more chaos. Stability of knowledge aquisition is provided by a combination of both types of process. The presence of an obvious prevalence of one of these tendencies destroys all this cyclic process: it is repeatedly proved during the history of Nature and mankind.
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Due to the coordinate system the sharp opposition between scientific and out-of-science cognition and thinking is eliminated. All those understanding–spiritual formations exceeding the bounds of modern knowledge and steadily cooperating with the coordinate system may be considered within the framework of this evolving epistemology. There are huge opportunities for dialogue and interhuman communications: the most regular and deepest form of dialogue is not a dialogue between individuals, but the dialogues: a man–‘‘coordinate system’’ and ‘‘coordinate system’’– another man. Value-cognitive installation becomes focused on stable interrelation with the coordinate system. Such interrelation is a necessary condition of the further personal and human development, and only in this case will mankind not destroy the biosphere and be able to develop harmoniously, optimally and unlimitedly. Consciousness conditions differ in volume of the information, their organization and types of dynamic equilibrium. Especially obviously the interaction of the ordered and chaotic types of cognition can be perceived by self-cognition and its highest manifestation – reflection. Self-cognition is an activity of a special kind, a specific type of critical creative work. It fulfils the function of reflection including the reflection of interactions, struggle and dialogue. According to our approach the self-cognition and reflection are reciprocal chaotic cognitive processes which encircle the basic ordered interaction into the united cycle that provides its stability making the whole cognitive process balanced. Thus, if there appears a chaotic reaction to rational thinking, the artistic or mystic perceptions are usually supplied with the ordered response. The fact that the religious world is to a great extent rational, can be noted as an example. The development of mystical doctrines and creeds is being carried out on the basis of logic as well as the development of all further religious concepts. 7. The coordinate system has a common dynamic equilibrium which is made up of many parts. All the natural systems, which have steady connections with it, participate in its formation. On the other hand, they can be studied in this coordinate system. The coordinate system interacts with the open systems tending to self-organization, self-development and dialogue. It is the openness of these systems that allows them to be interconnected with the coordinate system. The coordinate system creates its own general scientific notions as ‘‘bound substance’’, ‘‘bound energy’’, ‘‘bound information’’. Formally, the division of the surrounding world into the coordinate system and the remaining nature reminds one of the natura naturans and natura naturata of Spinoza, but it has quite an
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opposite sense. The most active part of Nature, which provides its selfdevelopment, is distinguished there. Here is the passive part, consisting of limits against which the processes of self-organization are carried out in the rest of Nature. Comprehensive study of the coordinate system suggests the use of certain techniques taken from certain sciences (hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, statistical physics, theories of evolution, synergetics, cybernetics, ecology) in the theory of systems. Besides, the search for the coordinate system aimed at the maintenance of stable interconnections with it is covered by itself into the method of philosophical investigation (coordinate method). The coordinate method provides unlimited opportunities. On the one hand – it should have a universal flexibility allowing it to interact practically with any natural phenomenon or processes; on the other hand – for all these processes universal criteria and methodology appear. 8. The coordinate system makes it possible to develop the original concept of interaction between being and non-being, which is still one of the deepest and most important philosophical problems. The coordinate system is based on the ontologic postulates of Parmenides ‘‘There is only being; non-being does not exist’’ and Democritus ‘‘Both being, and nonbeing exist’’. Besides, interactions between being and non-being are characterized by other postulates and concepts developing various philosophical systems on the basis of similar interaction. The coordinate system is like a boundary between being and non-being: one side of which deals with being, another one with non-being. All that chaos of a certain level of natural organization (the sum of the appropriate exchange processes), participating in the formation of the coordinate system, remains outside its basic representations. Finally, the coordinate system appears as a tabula rasa, though it actually has a complex organization. One may compare the coordinate system with a vacuum, the condition in which particles do not exist. In some cases, for example at the spontaneous infringement of symmetry, the vacuum condition appears not as the only one – there is a continuous spectrum of such conditions. Another important analogue is Void – one of the central concepts of Daoism. ‘‘The Way is like an empty vessel that yet can be drawn from without ever needing to be filled’’ (Dao-De Jing, chapter 4). ‘‘Thirty spokes meet at a nave; because of the hole we may use the wheel. Clay is moulded into a vessel; because of the hollow we may use the cup. Walls are built around a
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hearth: because of the doors we may use the house. Thus tools come from what exists, but use from what does not’’ (Dao-De Jing, chapter 11). The experience of ascetics, to which much attention is paid in practically all religions, also confirms the fundamental value of ‘‘void’’. We suppose that void is pure being, in other words: the coordinate system itself as an ideal design of all the possible limit conditions. It can’t merge with natural systems, but optimum and steady natural processes periodically cooperate with it incidentally or through certain time intervals, according to the rhythms of the natural coordinate system. 9. The coordinate system must be revealed ingenuously, and it must be accessible for everyone. Indeed, one can come to the system of interrelated dynamic equilibria developing perceptions, by using abstract and theoretical models as well as synthetically-arranged variants. The way to the coordinate system goes through world-outlook universalities, which are a synthetic formation and form the universal criteria of modern Philosophy. The world-outlook universalities accumulate historically stored social experience: within their structure a man of a definite culture estimates, interprets, experiences the World, and integrates all phenomena. The correlation and interdependence of culture universalities create a complete picture of the World, common notions about Nature, Society, Man and Consciousness. Such a picture may be considered as a social life genotype or basic cultural-genetic code. The world-outlook universalities have considerable heuristic potential, forming invariants of the further possible development of mankind; moreover, they are more accessible for those who have no special theoretical training. That’s why every person may find his own way to the coordinate system, not studying the methods of handling it. Man should know and feel that such a system exists; later it will find him living in vigil regime, turn him into its rhythms and keep close contact with him, becoming more and more open. Everyone must interact with three levels of the coordinate system: personal, on the level of his ethnos culture and planetary. Man becomes complex, including cells of all levels. His condition may be described as personal-continual-planetary. The steady interaction of Man and humanity with the natural coordinate system is a necessary condition of their further development. Only in this case will humanity not destroy the biosphere and be able to develop harmoniously, optimally and unlimitedly.
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10. Great possibilities for the development of ideas on the natural coordinate system are provided by Silver Age Philosophy, where the Absolute and Unity are the main subjects of research. With this developing concept the works of S. Frank, L. Karsavin and N. Losskiy, dealing with a close tangle of being and consciousness, correlate well. Thus, S. Frank distinguishes consciousness in the narrow sense of the word (consciousness as the stream of feeling, as self-consciousness) and consciousness in the broad sense. Something out of consciousness does not exist. Frank considers that consciousness in the broad sense is not consciousness ‘‘for I am a stream of consciousness; this stream is a part of that universal Unity which is in an absolute, primary and self-obvious form’’. But in the developing concept consciousness intensively interacts with the coordinate system, and being rises above object and subject opposition, keeping it in itself. Frank pays special attention to ‘‘incomprehensibility’’ as the synonym for being, which we do not observe because it always exists. The same synonym suits the natural coordinate system. We shall not be able to cognize the natural coordinate system completely; although the fact that it always surrounds us, it disappears at the same time. Consciousness becomes possible due to the fact that the natural coordinate system periodically appears, bewitching our mind and feelings. It is like a ‘‘gift’’ prepared by Nature for Man to fulfill special and unique functions in the world around. These ideas, deeply investigated by Russian Philosophy, have a great heuristic potential. Modern culture, education, the humanities and natural sciences need them badly. 11. The existence of the natural coordinate system intensifies the ideas of global evolutionism. Relations between the chain of dynamic equilibria, comprising the nucleus of the coordinate system and the remaining Nature, are the bases of Natural self-organization at the separate levels of its existence and between them, thus providing the total evolutionism of the Universe. More obviously the interrelation with the coordinate system is displayed in the anorthic principle according to which the Universe (and, hence, the basic parameters on which it depends) must be such that the existence of observers was assumed at some stage (a powerful anorthic principle). In other words, Man always feels the presence of fundamental bases which are beyond the limits of everyday experience. Man felt the world system of dynamic equilibria which consistently changed the basic determinant parameters of the Universe and, thus, provided the appearance of Man himself. The World evolves, forming the
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coordinate system for the optimization of its development. There must be a continuous connection with the coordinate system, and the ‘‘melody’’ of this connection in the life of contemporary Man. The synergetic paradigm correlates with the problem of the natural coordinate detection system in its surrounding environment. Synergy can be considered as a scientific trend which is very close to the problem under discussion, since the nucleus of the theory contains regulations correlating with the main principles of the natural coordinate system. The nucleus of synergetic ideas is frequently represented as follows: 1. Processes of destruction and creation, degradation and evolution in the Universe are equal. Accident appears to be somehow ‘‘built-into’’ the evolution mechanism itself. 2. Processes of creation have a united algorithm regardless of the nature of the systems in which they take place. 12. In the XXIst century, culture will take the leading place among all the spheres of mankind’s spirit. Complex, unique, historically developing systems, where the most important are the interrelation with environment (openness) and self-organization, are becoming objects of cultural scientific research. Among them special attention is paid to ‘‘man-dimensioned complexes’’, natural systems where a man actively shows his worth. The formation of such complexes furthers the integration of the humanities and the natural sciences, mutual influence between poetry and the sciences, intuition and logic, Western and Eastern thinking, rational and irrational research methods, scientific and non-scientific approaches, correlation between explanation and understanding. According to the developing conception: in present conditions all cultures must be in a state of stable synchronistical or diachronistical fluctuation. Synchronistical fluctuations appear between the nuclei of traditional cultures’ self-identification. In the case of the diachronistical ones – between the best samples of world cultural possessions and proper orientations of informational society. Finally, the specific dynamic equilibrium with possible interaction between traditional, economical, financial, technological, informational cultures is being formed. It is especially important because the majority of cultures in the history of mankind were the traditional ones. Amongst these, two great mutations happened: classical and Christian. The dynamic equilibrium described above correlates with the natural coordinate system, it allows the use of all concrete contributions (front traditional to planetary) in forming a cultural super-system.
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Culture, being adequate to modern Man’s needs, must be leveled and integrated by some nets. Traditional cultures must be elements of systems formed on their basis. Every modern man must actively interact with a number of cultures, furthering their integration into a united cycle (substantial, energetic, informational). The guarantee of stability in Nature is that the variety, humanitarian and social spheres are not excepted. The more cultures there will be on the planet the better. Of course, all of them must be tolerant, humanely oriented and unique. All cultures must be aimed at the identification of its asceticism, which may become the key element during the dialogue between cultures, furthering the establishment of general-planetary communicative reality. Asceticism is common for all religions; nowadays the most actual ascetic form is the cultural-temporal one. Asceticism can be the foundation of synthetic culture, so that all unique and specific different peoples will be superstructures. In the modern global world all cultures undergo two basic tendencies. On the one hand, all of them must be self-identified, i.e. reveal their boundaries, characteristic features, and become transparent for other culture representatives. On the other hand – they must further human integration. Thus, the eliminating of economic, political and state boundaries will harmonize the existing large cultural isolation. On the basis of the ascetic parts of traditional cultures their invariants will be formatted. 13. The system of education connected with the natural coordinate system must be supported by two principles: self-identification of a person and the ‘‘to be nearer’’ principle. The first aims at personal formation, which can be achieved only in the case of personal self-organizing. The second is the instructor’s activity to catalytic influence the pupil, as he must coordinate the pupil’s initiative: correct, amplify, recommend the right literature, analyze the obtained results, etc. Education must be uninterrupted and contain exclusive blocks (2–4 years); within each of them the complete integral world-outlook is formed. It is based on systematic, structural knowledge as well as on criteria allowing one to distinguish between true, original information and false, incomplete information, destroying the natural coordinate system. The basic task of instructors on each of the above-mentioned blocks of the educational process is to ensure the interaction between their pupils and the world coordinate system, which is possible at any age and with any quantity of information. The process of such interaction is a unique one; it is formed for every man and is one of the most effective methods of personal education.
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14. One may distinguish several basic directions of the development of subsequent ideas on the natural coordinate system: phenomenological, ontological, and synergetic. Each of them is a whole direction of scientific research. The natural coordinate system is covered by a system of mutuallycomplementary interactions within the parts of animate and inanimate Nature, the spheres of Soul and Spirit; that is why it is able to provide their synthesis, consensus between all the components of modern man as well as the social, political, cultural processes directing his development. Every nation is capable of making its unique contribution to the formation of the natural coordinate system. The more contributions, the more stable the natural coordinate system is. Nowadays there is no other alternative for mankind’s development. University of Yakutsk Russia BIBLIOGRAPHY M. Heidegger, Basic Metaphysical Conceptions: T ime and Being. Moscow, 1993, pp. 331–332. Dao-De Jing, Novosibirsk, 1995, pp. 13, 23. S. Frank, T he Subject of Knowledge: Man Soul. St. Petersburg, 1995, pp. 156–157.
WENDY C. HAMBLET
ALIENATION AND WHOLENESS Spinoza, Hans Jonas, and the Human Genome Project on the ‘‘Push and Shove’’ of Mortal Being
It is a curious paradox that the greatest gifts of man, the unique faculties of conceptual thought and verbal speech which have raised him to a level high above all other creatures and given him mastery over the globe, are not altogether blessings, or at least are blessings that have to be paid for very dearly indeed. ... There is much truth in the parable of the tree of knowledge and its fruit, though I want to make an addition to it to make it fit my own picture of Adam: that apple was thoroughly unripe!1
In Greek myth and in the writings of the early Greek philosophers, we witness that humans understood themselves as integrally a part of nature. A common logos – inner gods – connected all things and gave an intimate consistency of lawfulness from within to all diverse beings. Heraclitus called it the logos, Empedocles the overriding lawfulness of time. For Thales, the gods were ‘‘in all things’’ and spoke to humans through a rational and ethical connection. Resonances of this early conception of the wholeness of all things, the inner connectedness of nature, sound through the works of Plato, especially in the mythical tales of the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. However, in Plato, we also witness some of the first gaps in the logos, with the fissure that opens between nomos and physis, in the Gorgias and then later in the Republic. With Aristotle, the abyss between human ways and the nature of things widens still more, with Aristotle’s redefinition of humankind as the ‘‘rational animal’’ (Nichomachean Ethics I.7. 1098a7-18). What sets humans apart from the beast and the bird is the fact that humans have a higher function of soul, one that ‘‘follows or implies a rational principle’’ (N.E. I.7.1098a6-7). Since that specific ‘‘human good,’’ reason, turns out to be ‘‘virtue’’ itself, it is convenient thereafter for human beings to think themselves as elevated, by distinctive function of virtuous reason, in regard to other creatures and to the whole of nature. Christian myth continues in the way of the new truth by configuring the earth, for all its divine createdness, as an alien home to which humankind is cast as punishment for their rank disobedience to the ordinance against ‘‘eating of the tree of knowledge.’’ Clearly, a willful rationality in 57 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 57–65. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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the first human beings results, not only in the loss of a primaeval innocence, but in the disconnect between humans and other creatures, permanently fixed in God’s pronouncement to the wayward Adam that all the creatures of earth and sea are given over to him for his use and consumption. This myth connects a human rational drive that sets itself outside the lawfulness of the god to a transcendentally justified mastery over the earth and all other beings. This mythologem remains in conceptual sway, secularized but persistent, in the scientist’s non-relationship with nature as his ‘‘object’’ of inquiry. Despite the scientist’s belief that he is operating in a myth-free world, post mortem dei, the scientist’s orientation toward his ‘‘object’’ demonstrates that Christian myth still deeply infects even the allegedly ‘‘secular’’ thinking of the modern era. The scientist’s ‘‘natural attitude,’’ as it is called by Edmund Husserl,2 assumes an absolute disconnect between subject–observer and object–observed, an assumption that is simply false. There is no pure, free, unprejudiced starting point from which consciousness might take place in a purely ‘‘objective’’ – non-subjectively infected – way. The scientist’s assumption, that in his investigations the object of inquiry is cut loose from its relatedness to the subject, encapsulates the modern Western conception of subjectivity, an understanding of the self as free isolated being over against an alien world. If the world is ‘‘full of gods’’ now, these are gods that can, under the rational gaze of our applemunching heroes, be brought to their thunderbolt-tossing, plague-infecting, earth-shaking knees. Earth and its myriad creatures, objectified as alien other, can either by subjected to the appropriative processes of cognition, re-present-ation, and manipulation, or can be fixed at an appropriately safe distance to reduce its menacing otherness. Hans Jonas, eminent phenomenologist, student of Husserl and Heidegger and colleague and friend of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research in New York until his death in 1993, explains that we retreat from nature because we see in its ‘‘otherness’’ the source of our mortal fragility. Jonas explains, in Mortality and Morality: T he Search for the Good after Auschwitz, that human beings are but a link in the great chain of being, albeit a very special link since we live our mortal existence in full awareness of its ambiguity. We are the one kind of being that understands that mortal existence is itself a paradox, a ‘‘gift’’ never truly given, borrowed time that never permits its own purchase. Notbeing borders and infects every moment of our living. Death is an inescapable fact of our living that cannot be confronted nor dissuaded from its course. In our intense and anxious awareness of this fact, we project
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outside ourselves for the causes of our fragility. We feel palpably in nature, in other creatures, and indeed in our fellows, the threat of extinction posed toward us at every moment. Humans, claim Jonas, actually feel a suffocating immersion in the natural world, rather than embraced by its orderly logic, as the early Greeks held. Emmanuel Levinas captures this anxious connection by referring to the real beyond our appropriative grasp as ‘‘the elemental,’’ the realm where we experience the menace of ‘‘archaic gods.’’3 With this phrase, Levinas is marking the shift from the comfort felt in the trust in an orderly logos to the terror experienced in the face of the unknown. In the face of this terror, we retreat to the world of our own creation, the world of human artifacts. Its neon blinds us to our fears, its concrete gives solid assurance of continuance, and its manicured plasticity reminds us of our godlike power to create and transform. We retire to a ‘‘human world’’ and subdue the elemental forces – name them, understand them, bend them to our will. Where they will not be ‘‘bent,’’ we build barriers against them to hold off their destructive forces and to forget our ‘‘natural’’ – mortal – being. Jonas places humans on a great continuum of being and, although, for Jonas, alienation from other is characteristic of every link along the great chain, the rational superiority that gives the awareness of vulnerability widens the gap of alienation for humans. Hence, we position ourselves over against the chaos of things and forge our identity as other to other beings. We aggressively pursue our differences to deny our connectedness. Ironically, the disconnect between the human world and nature, so felt in the human mind, cannot be justified by reference to the latest scientific findings. One of the most fascinating – and most humbling – revelations of the Human Genome Project has been the discovery that, not only all human life, but all life per se, is, beyond all doubt, connected. Encoded in the ‘‘book of history’’ recorded in the human genome is the unequivocal fact of the integral oneness of all being. As Mart Ridley phrases this remarkable fact: ‘‘... seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives.’’4 The fact of the unity of all life places human being as a not-so-very-different chapter in an unbroken chain of life co-evolving from the primaeval soup. The human species is, by no stretch of the rationalizing, egoistic imagination, the pinnacle of evolution. In fact, the humbling truth revealed by the ‘‘book’’ of the human genome is, rather, that there is no such thing as ‘‘evolutionary progress.’’ Natural selection is simply the blind process whereby life forms mutate in response to the myriad opportunities arising in the physical environment.
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Certainly, this is not to imply that the human species, and every individual member of that species, is not utterly unique. But rather the latest genetic discoveries imply that uniqueness is a property of every species and every member within each species. Uniqueness is a commodity that is, if anything, in over-supply on the planet. Humans may consider themselves an evolutionary success, the favoured creations of a god in whose image we are carved, the pinnacle of being because the rational masters over the planet and its myriad beings, but the stunning truth is that we are just as much the result of a long line of evolutionary failures, the culmination of a massive process of trial and error between trillions of bodies constructed, tested and enabled to reproduce once they had met ever increasingly stringent criteria for survival. Ridley concludes the discussion of the ‘‘superiority’’ of the human by stating: The story of a briefly abundant hairless primate originating in Africa is but a footnote in the history of life ...5
We began at one with all things but, once we emerged onto the savannah as stupid little grass-eaters and later transformed into the thickcraniumed thugs (who probably ate the grass-eaters into extinction), we became too big for our evolutionary britches. With mastery over fire came weapons of formidable destructive potential, and our fate was cast: we would be masters of the planet, not by evolutionary success, but, ironically, by evolutionary failure! According to the groundbreaking work of Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, humans from the first moments of culture, soon, in a very important respect, fell ‘‘retarded,’’ by comparison with other creatures. They failed in the development of natural inhibitors to intraspecies aggression.6 Lorenz states: A raven can peck out the eye of another with one thrust of its beak, a wolf can rip the jugular vein of another with a single bite. There would be no more ravens and no more wolves if reliable inhibitors did not prevent such actions ... Anthropologists ... have repeatedly stressed that [Australopithecus] hunting progenitors of man have left humanity with the dangerous heritage of what they term ‘‘carnivorous mentality.’’ ... No selection pressure arose in the prehistory of mankind to breed inhibitory mechanisms preventing the killing of conspecifics until, all of a sudden, the invention of artificial weapons upset the equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions.7
Lorenz’s argument for the evolutionary failure embodied in human aggressive instincts ends ominously with the declaration: One shudders at the thought of a creature as irascible as all pre-human primates are, winging a well-sharpened hand-ax.8
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And we shudder all the more when we add to this frightening image the certain fact that the first human beings that really represented our species, Cro-Magnon, had roughly identical instincts and natural inclinations to our own.9 Thus we can say that the aggressiveness of the prehistoric hunter, inherited from those first thick-craniumed carnivores, remains with the species today, despite all our visions of grandeur built on the assumption of superior rationality. Reason, as Lorenz also demonstrates, has no means of persuading us against those natural inclinations. Lorenz explains: Reason is like a computer into which no relevant information conducive to an important answer has been fed; logically valid though all of its operations may be, it is a wonderful system of wheels within wheels, without a motor to make them go round. The motive power that makes them do so stems from instinctive behavior mechanisms much older than reason and not directly accessible to rational self-observation.10
What Ridley expresses in the language of chromosomes, Lorenz expresses in the language of the behaviourist. But the message is consistent throughout. The human beast is a genetically programmed piece of historical information encoded in materiality, riddled with barely controlled and barely controllable extensions of self-replicating genetic configurations. Human beings, like all beings, are material sites of selfish exploitation. If human beings are at the ‘‘top’’ of any great chain, it is by virtue of our superior exploitative skills. And, yes, these skills, our particular form of ‘‘rationality,’’ has served us well, and continues to serve us well, to achieve our selfish ends.11 Despite the oneness of all beings and despite their commonality in the pursuit of self-continuance through exploitation of others, human beings experience nature as something altogether different from the human. This is because nature always, to some degree, is beyond our comprehension and cannot be contained and totalized within the cognitive grasp. As much as we try to understand its ways, to subdue it to our rational powers, the organization of nature has no analogy with anything in the human world. Whatever the Greeks may have claimed about a logos linking all beings in a common lawfulness, most humans cannot read that law! We cannot understand nature. The realm of natural causality lies outside of human purposes and beyond the structure of human intelligibility. We can impose our purposes upon nature, but the result is not a humanized nature but a denaturalized human product – a human artifact.
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We cannot understand nature’s causality because we cannot comprehend a positive movement that is the very interplay between life and death. The logic of deathly existence does not compute for the selfishly exploitative, instinctively-driven rationality. A forgetting of death is how we live our mortal existences, since its remembering is paralyzing to human action and makes ludicrous human purposes. But death is how nature lives, how she recycles herself, how she maintains herself in motion. In death, nature folds back upon herself, at once midwife, mother and newborn, giving birth to herself over and over again. Womb and grave knotted in timeless loving embrace. Nature is mother in a sense in which mothers are not, in the human world. Nature gives birth from out of herself, as sacrificing medium to the newcomer, yet there is no other-ing of baby to mother, as there is in human reproduction. In nature, the mother is always sacrificed to the newborn, dies to give life, yet, incomprehensively, she remains alive to bear and die again and again. There is no analogy in the human world to the self-sacrificing motherly midwifery of the natural world. Nor can the causality of nature be grasped on the model of human making. Not on any model of techne, not the one that comprehends the manufacturing of products nor the one that fathoms the crafting of works of art, despite Enrico Coen’s exemplary efforts to link natural and human making on these models.12 These patterns of human making are understood either backwards from their ends in the products themselves, or forwards from the intention in the desires of the artist. Neither craftsmanship nor artistry comprise a making that arises from within itself, without desires or purposes and, indeed, without maker outside the making itself. Nature does not operate on the motivation of creative imagination nor according to an externally applied plan or telos. In truth, only human making can produce ‘‘finished products.’’ Nature has no ‘‘finished products.’’ Nature is always already complete (hence Spinoza’s definition of nature as the one whole substance with nothing outside itself to limit its being or provide its telos or standards of goodness) yet always in the process of completing itself. It is completion as incompletable incompletion. Whether purposeless change (for Spinoza) or having its telos inside itself (as sheer diversity and abundance), nature’s causality is not open to human comprehension, because humans cannot comprehend a purpose in deathbound existence. Nature is not a being, not a divine craftsman nor creative artist. Nature is a living totality that breaks free of all the scientist’s totalizing efforts to understand it. It is a mothering from within, a self-nurturance with no
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remainder, a bringing-forth through the self-differencing of death. All beings belong within nature, but only ever provisionally. Death is the way in which the parts belong within the whole. Nature throws its living self always again into nothingness. It is finitude as eternity, fate as freedom, perpetual completion as incompleteness, life as deathliness. This was the ingenious insight of Spinoza that led him to call nature ‘‘God.’’ The modern technological world has lost the sense of the completeness of the whole and the inner connectedness of things, lost the sense of the harmony of nature. We retreat to the safety of the world of human artifacts to hide from the truth of our mortality and to seek refuge from the threatening chaos of that which we cannot understand. But, as Ho¨lderlin saw, we feel a longing for belonging, in our absence from nature, a nostalgia for the wholeness of its embrace.13 We long for union but we know not with what or whom. Modern life is distanced, anguished, out of tune with the natural world, out of tune with the mother of whom we are a part. Jonas explains that it is the mortal lot to be separated, anxious, alienated. We can only endure haunted by death and projecting our fears and anxieties onto others. The human way of being in the technological age can only be a belonging in alienation, always distanced in our deepest connections. However, I want to propose another possibility than permanent alienation – a way to get home to the mother, a means to return to the absorbing embrace of the whole. The question of how to get back to the mother is the same, I believe, as how to heal the fragmentation effected by the objectifying techne-logos of the scientist, the craftsman and the artist. It is the same question as how to reconnect with our fellows and with other beings. Lorenz has pointed out that we cannot reconfigure our natural inclinations toward aggressive encounter by simple rational inquiry, since reason is the handmaiden of instincts and natural inclinations, and not their master. However, since he also tells us that the ways of our being are materially formed, engraved into our being by millennia of ritualized practices, it makes sense that a transformation of our practices can also work transformations in our being. We can, with time and practice, become less selfishly exploitative beings. One way we might attempt to reconnect with others, shifting the foundations of relationality beyond the technological rationality of modernity, is to relate on the basis of our shared mortality, a shared vulnerability in the flesh. Perhaps we can, with concrete bodily work, close the distance between us and our human fellows, between us and other beings, by shifting our understanding of rationality. Our ratio need
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not be seen as a functionality superior to, but only different from, the kind of bodily thinking done by other creatures. If we can reconnect with others on the basis of fragility, not mastery, we might find it possible to heal the rift between us and other beings. Connecting with others on the basis of fragility rather than mastery means acknowledging our kind of ratio, not as a ruling principle, but as an instrument for alleviating suffering, reducing fragility. We might be capable of finding ways to employ that unique rationality that is ours to help those who live their lives even closer to the fleshy cusp of existence than we. Once we are able to rediscover the other as Other, then perhaps we can find ourselves once again in the loving embrace of the m(Other). Spinoza suggests a similar solution in his Ethics when he redefines virtue as ‘‘like community’’ and reason as ‘‘good will’’ toward neighbours.14 Spinoza sees that the best life for all is the life in which all people ‘‘desire for themselves nothing, which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind and, consequently, [they] are just, faithful, and honorable in their conduct’’ (PXVIIInl). However, it could be argued that Spinoza meant ‘‘like community’’ to embrace all mortal beings, not simply human beings (who, as we have seen, share a fundamental unity in any case), since Spinoza concludes Book IV of his Ethics with the following call to harmony: ... in so far as we have a right understanding of [necessity and truth], the endeavor of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.15
However, in the final analysis, this ‘‘right understanding’’ remains far removed from the rational capabilities of many human beings, so bent upon self-serving exploitations as we are. This is why Spinoza closes the Ethics with this pessimistic declaration: If the way in which I have pointed out as leading to this [harmony] seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.16
Overcoming the push and shove of self-serving instinct and predisposition is a matter of recognizing the ‘‘necessity and truth’’ – that human beings are no grander than other mortal beings struggling against an inevitable fate. Their grandeur – their ‘‘excellence’’ – resides in their ability to employ
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their unique rationality to overcome their disposition toward radical egoism. Adelphi University NOTES 1 Konrad Lorenz. On Aggression, p. 238. 2 Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, I.1. 3 ‘‘In the horror of the radical unknown to which death leads is evinced the limit of negativity. This mode of negating while taking refuge in what one negates delineates the same or the I.’’ T otality and Infinity, p. 41. 4 Genome: T he Autobiography of a Species in 23 chapters, p. 22. 5 Ibid., p. 25. 6 On Aggression, p. 240 ff. 7 Ibid., pp. 240–241. 8 Ibid., pp. 241–242. 9 Ibid., p. 250. 10 Ibid., p. 248. 11 Ironically, genetic science has made another discovery that, not only raises questions for social science, but for ecological and social politics as well. It has been found that high rank means low aggressiveness in our cousin monkeys. Thus, if the security afforded by high rank means a calming of the fierce competitiveness and the inclinations for violence, a propensity toward reconciliation and for recruiting allies rather than enemies, a calmer demeanor, less impulsiveness, and less suspicion and misinterpretation (of play-fighting for serious aggression), then it seems that humans will have to change their ways if they wish to claim highest rank in the great chain of being. 12 Enrico Coen, T he Art of Genes. 13 See Hyperion. 14 Ethics, IV. Appendix, VII, XXVIII. 15 R. H. M. Elwes, tr. 16 Ibid.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Coen, Enrico. T he Art of Genes: How Organisms Make T hemselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz, Lawrence Vogel (ed.). Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. T otality and Infinity, Alfonso Lingis (trans.). Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression, Marjorie Kerr Wilson (ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Ridley, Matt. Genome: T he Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.
ALEXANDER KUZMIN
M. HEIDEGGER’S PROJECT FOR THE OPTICAL INTERPRETATION OF REFLEXION: THE TIME, THE REFLEXION AND THE LOGOS
In 1927 M. Heidegger published his famous work Sein und Zeit. Long before that, the classical tradition of European philosophy had expressed its ultimate conviction that the fascination of time could be dispelled by the evidence and truth of thought. Confer, e.g., Hegel’s principal thesis that ‘‘philosophy, being engaged in the true, deals with what is eternally present’’.1 When M. Heidegger correlated being, the key concept of the preceding metaphysics, with time, he apparently thought that thus he designated the prime cause which must inevitably bring us to the ascertainment of the essence and nature of the ‘‘end of metaphysics’’. So, time becomes the principal problem of philosophy. It was the problem of overcoming metaphysics as a monistic study of the being of all the real that incited M. Heidegger and his contemporaries to form the time concept as the main issue for philosophical reflection. Philosophy in the metaphysical tradition was represented by them in the image of a demurrage fashioning the eternal for the sole purpose of surpassing time and burden of terminal being. Plato’s doctrine of ideals, the basis of European metaphysics, was considered by them from a position of its aiming at the actual abolition of time and inconstancy. Aristotelianism, which breathed the soul into medieval thought, becomes the subject of analysis only as aiming at the predominance of the real over the variety of forms of its manifestation assigned to the categories of existence, space and time. Moreover, the subsequent doctrines of substance had for their basis the truth of eternal being to arrive at. Eventually, in the spirit of the metaphysical tradition, the New Age philosophy raised a question of attaining the manifestation of the positively existent. To sum up the aforesaid, we could concur that the metaphysical tradition was apprehended by M. Heidegger as emancipation of mind from the temporal and frail. At the same time, M. Heidegger realizes that his work belongs to phenomenology. However, interpretation of time in E. Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy differs essentially from M. Heidegger’s phenomeno67 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 67–80. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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logico-hermeneutic studies of temporality and time. As far as we know, E. Husserl did not enter directly into a polemic with either M. Heidegger or other philosophers on the issue of phenomenological time. Since publication of Sein und Zeit E. Husserl perceives anthropological tendencies in M. Heidegger’s philosophy – the tendencies which seemed to him not strict enough for the phenomenological conception. E. Husserl insists on the necessity of phenomenological reduction as it does not entail prerequisite knowledge necessary for basing philosophy on tradition. And so, according to Husserl, before using time as a means of revising metaphysical ontology, a strict model of phenomenological time should be formed. It means that, first of all, it is necessary to show how we can possibly experience time. Thereby, E. Husserl and M. Heidegger advance in different directions since the latter is convinced that the nature of time reveals itself in the experience of man as a result of the terminal situation of his being-in-the world. The problem of time, the way it was raised by the philosophy of the beginning of the XXth century, was broadly discussed in the works of such Russian philosophers as M. M. Bakhtin, N. A. Berdyaev, L. P. Karsavin, A. F. Losev, S. L. Frank and others. For example, M. M. Bakhtin describes a method of experiencing time in the context of his conception of the ‘‘other’’. M. M. Bakhtin’s approach to the concept of time is not fortuitous. His treatment of the problem of temporality fills up the gap made owing to the incompleteness of the experience of time as presented by E. Husserl’s phenomenology, and owing to the preexperiential nature of time as presented by M. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Proceeding from the studies of psychical processes and phenomenology of consciousness, F. Brentano, A. Bergson and, of course, E. Husserl took the lead in comprehending the concept of time. E. Husserl, within the bounds of his phenomenology of the inner consciousness of time, succeeded in overcoming the opposition of natural-philosophic notions of time to psychological ones. E. Husserl views the concept of phenomenological time in the aspect of reconstitution of primary structures of consciousness as semantic structures. To impart meaning and to form the semantic horizon of the given (die Gegenstandlichkeit) is the aim of phenomenological investigation. The peculiarity of Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology is seen in his assumption of phenomenology as a means of working out the problem of being. At the same time, his phenomenology is ‘‘hermeneutic’’ and, being such, shows that philosophical self-consciousness comes to
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light only together with understanding the other, and this is the purpose of hermeneutics. By nature, ‘‘phenomenological hermeneutics’’ is concerned with revealing a distinctive feature of such types of philosophizing which seek to exceed the bounds of classical forms of expression. M. Heidegger put forward the problem of being as the definitive one anew, but he did it in a nontraditional way.2 We are also indebted to M. M. Bakhtin for discovering nontraditional forms of analysis of time. For M. M. Bakhtin, one of the main types and levels of philosophical approach to the theme becomes considering the problem of time in connection with analysis of artistic creativity. Questions of interpenetrating the concepts of time and consciousness, as described in E. Husserl’s phenomenology, do not exhaust the completeness of confirmation of being apart from meaning’’.3 With the exception of semantic functions of consciousness, ‘‘confirmation of being’’, takes place in the creative artistic act, owing to which ‘‘naivety of available being becomes beauty’’.4 Artistic creativity, according to M. M. Bakhtin, exceeds the bounds of the semantic life content and it, aesthetic completion, in essence, is unattainable from within being as such. It is only ‘‘passive activity’’, ‘‘activity from the outside’’, conditioned by all forces and energies of the world, predetermined by all givens and availability’s of being, that comes out of the author’s artistic creativity. For all this, such activity does not change the semantic aspect of being’’,5 by any means. Refusing to recognize forms of ‘‘pure self-expression’’ as the source of artistic creativity of the author of a work, so long as they will be semantic forms, M. M. Bakhtin takes to analyzing forms of ‘‘relation to the other and his self-expression’’6 as time forms of the aesthetic realization of inner life and a directly given world. All aesthetic philosophical categories, time (temporality, rhythm) inclusive, according to M. M. Bakhtin, ‘‘shine with the reflected value light of otherness’’.7 The idea of ‘‘other’’, ‘‘otherness’’ in the humanitarian philosophy of M. M. Bakhtin deserves attention not only for its existential significance, being a breaking-off from the traditional philosophy of subject–object relations, but also for its breakthrough to an analysis of the core of time – absolute time – the time by which and in which the other lives; thus the problem of time, raised at the beginning of the XXth century, can be examined from a different angle. As is generally known, E. Husserl’s philosophy, having taken for its theme phenomenology of the inner consciousness of time, is the philosophy of phenomenological time of pure Ego. In E. Husserl’s phenomeno-
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logical philosophy the theme of phenomenological time is entitled to complete pure Ego as a stream of experiences. For E. Husserl phenomenological time, as well as pure Ego, can be perceived only in the forms of manifestations characteristic of all experiences. In phenomenology the title temporality of consciousness is given the meaning of ‘‘a necessary form linking experiences with experiences’’,8 i.e. temporality expresses by itself not only belonging of something temporal to any single experience, but also the form of linking experiences together in one infinite stream of experiences’’.9 With that, pure Ego never misses a possibility to fix its gaze on the temporal being of an experience and, doing so, it will consider ‘‘the temporal modis of givenness’’10 of experiences. Of all the mode of givenness of the temporal in an experience pure Ego chooses actual Now as ‘‘the being form for new matter’’.11 Thus, in the universal field of phenomenological time opens simultaneously the whole of pure Ego’s initial horizon which we conceive as the initial consciousness – Now. Phenomenology of the inner consciousness of time, however, is compelled to adhere to the opposite position since time-constituting consciousness cannot exist without being different from the time constituted in it, i.e. phenomenologizing last, absolute time is as if interdicted. The question how to express absolute time by means of deep structures of consciousness remains undecided. Its decision from the phenomenological position makes no sense as it leads to an infinite regress which is overcome only by return to ‘‘unperceived consciousness’’.12 For M. Heidegger, phenomenology, so long as it becomes hermeneutic, cannot be phenomenology of things and acts of consciousness, including acts of the inner consciousness of time. Hermeneutic phenomenology doubts the very possibility of correlation between noetic and noemic moments of consciousness. Moreover, Dasein cannot participate in any correlation at all because being is not a generic concept and cannot be defined by means of predicating. The hermeneutic force of M. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is to the effect that he transformed hermeneutics having introduced temporal interpretation. Time is to introduce a basic principle for distinguishing modes of being, for ‘‘interpretation of being in this or that form is connected with time’’.13 The sense of being is caught and decentralized in accordance with patterns of time, since ‘‘comprehension ... has already projected being on to time’’.14 A hermeneutic situation, such as transposing (Setzen) ‘‘the thematically present whole into project’’,15 springs from a possibility of understanding the other which had resisted recognition as long as time has been deduced from being. Time enters the scene of
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the metaphysical tradition together with the other, but it would be erroneous to treat it as an attribute of being. Time is a possibility of understanding the other, i.e. being. ‘‘The project of the sense of being in general’’, stresses M. Heidegger, ‘‘may be realized on the horizon of time’’.16 Thereby it is very difficult to ascend from E. Husserl’s understanding of phenomenological time to understanding hermeneutically phenomenological temporalities in the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger. For that it is essential to have as a medium an analysis of experience of time of the other, which we present here thanks to M. M. Bakhtin’s humanitarian philosophy. According to M. M. Bakhtin’s philosophy of artistic creativity, the time in which ‘‘the other’’ lives allows us to give an artistically formed idea of completeness of time, of its absolute character. We cannot by ourselves experience our birth anew, nor our death. They are given us as boundaries, beyond which vagueness and absence of sense are in store for us. An author can experience time in its complete integrity instead of a personage; to put it more accurately, it is a personage’s life oriented to self-realization that is the complete whole in time. ‘‘The other has a more intimate connection with time’’, says M. M. Bakhtin, ‘‘ – he is entirely in time’’.17 Semantic unity as self-experience of my unity, is opposed by M. M. Bakhtin to temporal unity, as the other’s experience of his unity. In my attitude to myself semantic unity serves as an organizing principle of my life apart from me. Brought face to face with meaning I experience temporality as not-yet-complete, ‘‘not-yet-fulfilled’’, ‘‘not-all-yet’’.18 Semantic definiteness of an experience of temporality, thereby, will not correspond to a self-experience ‘‘in the act embracing time’’.19 I embrace time being a subject constituting time, and as such, I am nontemporal. Thus, temporalization of experience of a subject constituting time is impossible in principle, devoid of sense, and it lead to regress. Semantic unity of my Ego excludes a possibility of constituting any temporality as absolute time. It is obvious to M. M. Bakhtin that temporally completed life is hopeless from the standpoint of its meaning’’.20 Only temporal unity as an organizing principle of my experiencing the inner life of the other allows one to establish a non-semantic relation between time and temporality. Temporality of time, according to M. M. Bakhtin, becomes a convincing postulate of immortality, eternity, absoluteness, ‘‘inner definiteness of the other – his inner face (memory) – loved besides meaning’’.21 So, we can maintain that temporality of experience about the other must be considered a thematically indispensable aspect of constituting
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the time of consciousness. Humanitarian philosophy in the person of M. M. Bakhtin took its own way of solving the problem of absolute time, eliminating difficulties and contradictions of phenomenological philosophy drawing us nearer to the understanding of the non-experiential temporality of hermeneutic phenomenology. By the time of publication of M. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit time had become the main theme of philosophical reflection. According to E. Husserl, a strict model of phenomenological time is to explain our aptitude for having experience of time. M. Heidegger is convinced that the nature of time reveals itself in the experience of man as a result of the terminal situation of his being-in-the world. The idea of ‘‘otherness’’ in M. M. Bakhtin’s humanitarian philosophy allows us to examine the problem of time from a different angle. There are no blazed trails from E. Husserl’s understanding of phenomenological time to the understanding of hermeneutically phenomenological temporalities in M. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Based on M. M. Bakhtin’s humanitarian philosophy we offer as a medium an analysis of experience of time of the other. Temporality of experience of the other is to be considered a thematically indispensable aspect of constituting the time of consciousness. It adds considerably to M. Heidegger’s thesis of time as a possibility of understanding the other, i.e. being. The temporalities of M. Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology become apparent as a model of phenomenological time, functioning on the basis of the temporality of experience about the other. * * * Heidegger’s thought of the Sein und Zeit period turns, among other things, to the phenomenon of the self. For this, reflexion is chosen as a modus of the self, the comprehension of which is noticeably linked with the problems of the interpretation of a subject’s life. What are the motives that induced the existential analytics of Dasein to turn to comprehending the themes of reflexion? In the course of lectures on the problems of phenomenology Heidegger, explaining the existence of Dasein, emphasizes the significance of the intentionality of the perception phenomenon. It is characterized by such definitions as intentio and intentum. Intentional relation already possesses the being’s intelligibility of the real, just of the real which is first revealed by this relation. Having stated the initial exposition of perception phenomenon intentionality,
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Heidegger puts the question of how the being’s intelligibility of the real combines with the intentional order. In correlation with the projected interpretation of a subject’s being the question resounds as follows: how is Ego determined by any intentionality? As a rule, phenomenology designates Ego as the center or the pole of all possible outflows of intentional acts. Yet, the question of the aspect of the Ego-pole’s being is left open, which, in Heidegger’s opinion, is inadmissible since this is the most important phenomenological question. ‘‘How’’, inquires Heidegger, specifying his position, ‘‘is Dasein given its Ego, its self, i.e. how is Dasein, existentializing in the strict sense of the word, itself proper, authentic it?’’.22 In all intentional relations the self is always here by itself. Heidegger deliberately expands the bounds of significance of the notion of intentionality. This notion is expanded by the introduction of both the directness of itself to something and the being’s intelligibility of the real, but not only these. Besides, ‘‘the self ’s selfdisclosure’’ will also be called an intentional relation since it is always in the position of correlativity with some other. However, the problem of the mode of the self ’s givenness is not thereby resolved. Heidegger rejects the Kantian attitude to the problem so important for the analytics of Dasein. Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, ‘‘cogito’’, accompanies all our notions and follows the acts which will be directed at the existent. It will mean a reflecting act, for it represents a cogitated connection between initial acts. Heidegger has nothing against the formal correctness of statements about the Ego being conscious of something and of itself as well. He also admits the correctness of the characterisation of res cogitance as cogito me cogitare, i.e. as self-consciousness. The foregoing formal definitions of Ego, in Hidegger’s opinion, make up the framework of the dialectics of consciousness of idealism. They are alien to the interpretation of the phenomenal existence of Dasein and do not shake the foundations of existential analytics. Attempting to construe intentionality Heidegger projects the horizon for understanding Dasein. How is this real in its factual existence exposed to him, if not confused with the epistemological notions of subject and Ego? Heidegger compares his vision of the problem to the tenets of phenomenology, in accordance with which the inner perception essentially differs from the outer perception owing to the Ego’s turning on itself. By turning on itself Ego addresses itself. Existentializing, Dasein is here for itself. According to Heidegger, we should clearly conceive such a state of things. ‘‘The self ’’, emphasizes Heidegger, ‘‘is Dasein here by itself, without reflexion and without inner perception, before any reflexion’’.23
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What then is the correlation between the self of the factual Dasein and reflexion? What allows reflexion to play the role of a medium between the self and objects? Analysing intentionality, Heidegger outlines the semantic aspects of the distinction between reflexion as turning on itself and as self-disclosing. According to the former, reflexion in the sense identical with turning on itself is the modus of self-comprehension and does not require the status or the initial mode of the self ’s self-disclosure. Yet, he assumes that under proper conditions the mode of the self ’s selfdisclosure to the factual Dasein may be called reflexion. As a rule, the notion of ‘‘reflexion’’ is understood as ‘‘a bent-over-Ego self-examining’’.24 It does not coincide with its optical, primary meaning. Therefore, Heidegger proposes to revert to the initial understanding or reflexion as correlation. Summing up his reasoning, Heidegger says: ‘‘To reflect means to be refracted into something, and radiated out of it, i.e. to discover something in reflexion’’.25 The interpretation of the optical meaning of the term ‘‘reflexion’’ undertaken in the course of his lectures Die Grundprobleme der Pha¨nomenologie essentially helped to introduce clarity into Heidegger’s conception of the self as a structure of the self-disclosure of the factual Dasein. In Sein und Zeit the phenomenon of the self is included in the sounder-understood structure of care. Here the problem of the self is raised preliminarily as the problem of a further fundamental comprehending of the integrality of the structural whole of Dasein. Unlike Sein und Zeit, the course of lectures aims at articulating the parent-phenomenon of the pre-ontological comprehension of the self by means of interpreting intentionality as having for its bases being-in-the-world. In Sein und Zeit Heidegger gives the description of ‘‘correlation’’ between care and self,26 aiming not only at clearing up a particular problem of Ego’s being, but also at the search for the ontological meaning of care. And yet the meaning of ‘‘correlation’’, i.e. reflexion, remains obscure. How is the term ‘‘meaning’’ interpreted by Heidegger? Explicating this term, so important for fundamental ontological analysis, the philosopher maintains: ‘‘Meaning is a primary on-what draft from which something as what it is can be understood in its possibility’’.27 Further specifying the initial definition he emphasizes that the term ‘‘meaning’’ acquires its strict sense after the primary on-what draft of the comprehension of being has been ascertained. Then, to say that the existent has ‘‘the meaning’’ would spell out that it is understood as the meaning’s ‘‘on-what’’: i.e. the meaning is always set by the primary draft of the comprehension of being.
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In the course of lectures on the problems of phenomenology Heidegger’s theme is the conception of reflexion on the plane of being. To describe the being’s meanings of reflexion he again turns to the human Dasein, which, experiencing no need to turn on itself, as if it were holding itself behind its own back, having, before turning, fixedly directed itself towards things, it finds itself in nothing other than things themselves (the things that daily surround Dasein).28 Thus to understand oneself and one’s existence, one can only do this through what one is interested in and cares for. Dasein finds itself in things and understands itself here by things. It is not necessary to constantly spy on and observe one’s own Ego for acquiring the self. The genuine self of Dasein is reflected out of things owing to the ingenious and passionate spending of oneself in this world. As Heidegger asserts, here is neither mysticism nor supposition of the possible animation of things. That is just the way of describing an elementary phenomenological state of Dasein which should be taken into account before any possible and witty opinions on the subject–object relation. What is this self-intelligibility the factual Dasein progresses and lives by? Here Heidegger’s main device of interpreting is the terminological fixation of the word ‘‘impersonal’’, which in the perspective of interpretation of the self-intelligibility of factual Dasein reveals its specific ‘‘reality’’. Heidegger refuses point-blank to assume such ‘‘far-fetched’’ notions as soul, individuality and Ego as a basis for his interpretation, because what is to be perceived is the self-comprehension of the factual Dasein in its dailiness. The self, herewith, is experienced and understood as our nearest and primary, clear as day, acceptancy of ourselves since we do not cudgel our brains over our destiny nor look in our soul. ‘‘Impersonal’’, as a phenomenon, approximates to our self-loss in the dailiness of existence of things and people. We cannot constantly comprehend ourselves from the inmost and utmost possibilities of our existence for we are not selfcontrolled. The ‘‘impersonal’’, interpreted as the impossibility of being by oneself, comes out as self-loss which, however, has no negative meaning. Heidegger links together the revealing of meaningfulness of the ‘‘impersonal’’ and disclosure of the positive meaning of the self ’s hermeneutic structure as ‘‘im-personal’’. The most important aspect of this structure is impersonal self-comprehension which does not at all mean inadequate self-comprehension. ‘‘On the contrary’’, Heidegger accentuates, ‘‘this daily finding of oneself within the factual passionate immersion in things can be quite adequate whereas any extravagant rummaging in one’s soul can be most inadequate or even ecstatically pathological’’.29
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So, the Dasein’s impersonal self-comprehension from things is neither inadequate nor imaginary as though it were not the self but something else that needed to be comprehended, the self being suppositional. Here Heidegger links up significantly different, as they seem, themes: impersonal self-comprehension – personal Dasein – specific ‘‘reality’’. The modus of such correlation or even correlation itself is reflexion. Proceeding from the hermeneutic task of the semantic approach to phenomenological analysis Heidegger attaches the optical meaning to the term ‘‘reflexion’’. Then, by means of a series of turns of thought he attaches the optical vestiges of reflexive rationality to the philosophical discourse which understands the foundation of intentionality as being-inthe-world. And here Heidegger’s project for the optical interpretation of reflexion finds the horizon of its comprehension in the idea of the fundamental correlation between self-comprehending, human Dasein and reality (life). The concept of a reflection, according to Heidegger, in metaphysical tradition appears invariably bifocal as specifying horizon and as instrumentally interpreted seen in the horizon. At the same time he appeals to logos which, being a self-illuminating tale, represents a word to life as a primary theme of the phenomenology of presence. Heidegger’s idea laying tracks in the direction of a definition of logos, disregards being sense of the reflection borrowing her during work above product Sein und Zeit. However, thematically discrete headings: ‘‘logos and reflection’’, arise by themselves. * * * Perhaps, it is possible to agree with Heidegger, that Le´ ceiu, lo´ coz in the Greek intrinsic definition of the person understands that attitude on the basis of which it is present as such for the first time and collects itself around the person and for him. And only as the person is, so far as it concerns reality as such, opening and hiding it, the person can and should have the ‘‘word’’, i.e. speak about real life. A word which uses speech, essentially only throws out from this word, from which the person will never find ways back to reality for it is possible only on the basis of le´ ceiu. In itself le´ ceiu has generally little to do with statement and speech. If the Greeks understood the statement as le´ ceiu, the unique interpretation of the essence of a word and the statement of which it here consists, then there are unapproachable chasms with any late ‘‘philosophy of language’’. Extremely here, and namely towards us, speech is reduced
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to the means of the message and its organization. This impression, as if the thinking which is starting with speech is only ‘‘philosophy of a word’’ and no longer reaching ‘‘the vital validity,’’ is created. However such judgement is only a recognition that there is already no more forcing one to rely on a word as the certain, intrinsic, essential principle of any communication with the real.30 The modern idea, figuratively speaking, is the captivated topology of the archaic space of a word where the optical metaphoricalness of the expression ‘‘reflection’’ can hardly help us with something which has already found a way to our conscious life. Lekton is an ancient Greek word which derives from the verb ‘‘legain’’.31 Lekton, being verbal concreteness, designates the statement which already always means something. Whereas ‘‘language to some extent designates nothing’’.32 ‘‘Language is only language’’33 which acts for us as ‘‘the archaic fact’’, i.e. the fact which ‘‘we can learn positively only by way of knowledge because the understanding here is impossible’’.34 Such facts ‘‘call us to understanding, instead of to conceptual knowledge. However, not knowing it, we try to learn them again, instead of to understand. And their representation as knowledge makes them simply unreal’’.35 In a similar situation we find ‘‘language of a reflection’’ operating, which, perhaps, in an even greater degree hides from us those senses that form a skeleton of the optical metaphoricalness of reflective rationality. As noticed by M. K. Mamardashvili and A. M. Pjatigorsky, ‘‘we are convinced of the unpredictability of thinking, unpredictability of the fact that there will be this or that idea, this or that conscious experience’’.36 If the similar unpredictability of idea is possible, then a reflection tied to statements of the Logos, will be a symbol. Being senses of a reflection forms that transversal of a modality of the logos which in lekton symbolizes newly built life. ‘‘The symbol – as is emphasized by M. K. Mamardashvili and A. M. Pjatigorsky – (unlike a sign generally) cannot rely at all on having any distinct form designated’’.37 The starting point to render the theme is a thesis that under the conditions of working out the intellectual ‘‘modern project’’ the image of reflective rationality is characterized as having two incompatible and, yet, mutually presupposing lines of the historical development of Western philosophy: the unreduced pluralism of the transversal structures of reflexion, and the theoretical integrity of reflectiveness indifferent, in principle, to the plurality of forms of reason. We distinguish three levels of the retransversal structures of reflexion: initially or simply reflective, metareflective and self-reflective. The reflective level of epistemological rationality will be determined in opposition to the unreflective one since
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the latter identifies structures of knowledge and objective structures of reality. And the reflective level of rationality relates, as a rule, to singling the subject out of the system of cognitive relations and converting it to the comprehending of its own actions and their reasons. The metareflective level of rationality deals with the nature of the cognitive relation of man to the world, determining his place and significance among other kinds and forms of activity and world-relations, and explains the principles, ways, means and methods of research in cognition processes, revealing the nature, origin and essence of objectivized knowledge and extra-scientific forms of cognition. At this level of reflective rationality much consideration is given to the problems of forming the subjects of cognitive activity in the light of the socio-cultural medium, and ascertaining the subjects’ historical nature. The self-reflective level of rationality will relate to the reconstruction and transformation of knowledge about reflexion itself. Transversal structures of reflexion, regardless of the particularity of reflective rationality, permeate all formations of reason both in the diachronic and the synchronous planes. In other words, under the influence of numerous facts of a cognitive nature, philosophy, since Descartes, has renounced the idea of ultimate reason. Conformably, the integrity of reason, in such an epistemological situation, can solely be maintained by transversal structures of reflexion, the description of which, being independent of the typical peculiarities of objective fields of knowledge, is conducive to the rehabilitation of the idea of the whole, the idea resting at present upon diversification, versatility and polysemy. For this reason the transversal structures of reflection do not assume the bases designated for themselves. They are initially symbolical and can express themselves, being senses, though in themselves they cannot be objective as are signs or things. The groundlessness of transversal structures of a reflection has already been noticed by the ancient stoics,38 the truth being, with that restriction, that they have paid steadfast attention to it. At the same time, the subsequent transversal structures of a reflection were found out only up to a level of a metareflection. And in the diachronological plan of the history of philosophy they came to light down to a self-reflection – however, with some clauses attributed to logical rationality. That logic, ratio and logos, lekton, are the peak-a-boo formations, an appreciable image that began to challenge philosophers only in the 20th century. And now we can assert that the self-reflective level transversal structures of a reflection without any restrictions and absorption
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symbolizes the life of the logos, not being any thing and not assuming something designated for itself. Most likely, with what ease the philosophy of the new time has deprived reflection of its ontological status, it is hardly possible to expect considering the radical return to a recognition behind it of a similar status. To tell the truth, the hope dies hard. Yaroslav W ise Novgorod State University Novgorod the Great NOTES 1 G. V. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen u¨ber die Philosophie der Geschichte. Saint Petersburg, 1993, p. 125. 2 See O. Poggeler, ‘‘Zeit und Hermeneutik’’ in Krisis der Metaphysik. Berlin, N.Y., 1989, pp. 364–388. 3 M. M. Bakhtin, Aesthetics of L iterary Art. Moscow, 1986, p. 127. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 28. 6 Ibid., p. 25. 7 Ibid. 8 E. Husserl, ‘‘Ideen zu einer reinen pha¨nomenologie und pha¨nomenologischen Philosophie’’. Buch 1. Allgemeine Einfu¨hrung in die reine Pha¨nomenologie. Neue, auf Grund der handschriftlichen Zusatze des Verfassers erw. Aufl. Hrsg. Von Walter Biemel. Bd. 3, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950, p. 198. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 See R. Bernet, ‘‘Einleitung’’ in E. Husserl, Texte zur Pha¨nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), herausgegeben und eingeleitet von R. Bernet, Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1985, pp. XI–LXVII. 13 M. Heidegger, ‘‘Die Grundprobleme der Pha¨nomenologie’’ in Gesamtausgabe. Abt 2. Vorlesungen 1923–1944. Bd. 24. Frankfurt am M.: Klostermann, 1975, p. 430. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, in Gesamtausgabe. Abt.1. Vero¨ffenlichte Schriften 1914–1970. Bd.2.- Frankfurt am M.: Klostermann, 1975, p. 308. 16 Ibid, p. 312. 17 Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 103. 18 Ibid., p. 3. 19 Ibid., p. 3. 20 Ibid., p. 9. 21 Ibid., p. 4. 22 Heidegger, op. cit., Bd. 24, p. 225. 23 Ibid., p. 226. 24 Ibid.
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25 Ibid. 26 Heidegger, op. cit., Bd. 2, p. 428. 27 Ibid., p. 324. 28 Heidegger, op. cit., Bd. 24, p. 226. 29 Ibid., p. 228. 30 M. Heidegger, On the Essence and Concept in Aristotle’s ‘‘Physics’’ B,1. Moscow, 1995, p. 81. 31 See: A. F. Losev, T he History of an Antique Aesthetics: T he Early Hellenism. Moscow, 1979, p. 90. 32 M. K. Mamardashvili, A. M. Pyatigorsky, T he Symbol and Consciousness: Metaphysical Reasonings on Consciousness, Symbolics and L anguage. Moscow, 1997, p. 104. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 113. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 104. 37 Ibid., p. 130. 38 See A. F. Losev, op. cit., pp. 90–178.
A. L. SAMIAN
‘‘PHENOMENA’’ IN NEWTON’S MATHEMATICAL EXPERIENCE
1. INTRODUCTION
Investigations in the foundation of mathematics, particularly with regard to mathematical experience, are based on the assumption that learning mathematics has its own mode of reasoning which is defined, inter alia, by intuition, emotion and motivation.1 There are also those who subscribe to the view that as far as mathematical experience is concerned, a person’s cognition about cognition is important. The assumption of this approach is that mathematicians form conceptions of the manner the mind works, ‘‘about their own mental states and processes’’.2 Yet, in none of these analyses are the role of the internal senses, the involvement of the soul and God as subscribed by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) considered. ‘‘The whole burden of philosophy’’, says Newton, ‘‘seems to consist in this: from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena’’.3 Accordingly mathematical problems, from Newton’s view, are problems in natural philosophy about phenomena. That God is central in his natural philosophy is also clear. His discussion about God’s Names and Attributes lead him to conclude: ‘‘And thus much concerning God, to discourse of whom from the appearances of things does certainly belong to natural philosophy’’.4 To give another example, he writes the following passage in his study of optics: And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phenomena that there is a Being, incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent ... And though every true Step made in this Philosophy brings us not immediately to the Knowledge of the first Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued.5
As a matter of fact, God is so crucial to his philosophy of mathematics that he declares ‘‘When I wrote my treatise about our system (that is the Principia), I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity’’.6 He even told Conduitt that the Principia was written ‘‘to enforce and demonstrate the power and superintendency of a supreme being’’.7 If his mathematical enterprise is overshad81 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 81–95. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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owed with discussions about God to the extent that theology and his ‘natural philosophy’ are amalgamated together, what more of his mathematical experience!
2. MATHEMATIZATION OF THE PHENOMENA OF NATURE
Newton states that mathematization of nature is not a new form of scientific inquiry. The idea of mathematization can be traced back to antiquity whereby the flowering of mathematics was closely related to the development of mechanics. He claims that mathematics evolved as a reaction to the intrusion of ‘‘substantial forms and accult qualities’’. Thus: Since the ancients (as we are told by Pappus) esteemed the science of mechanics of greatest importance in the investigation of natural things, and the moderns, rejecting substantial forms and occult qualities, have endeavoured to subject the phaenomena of nature to the law of mathematics.8
In so far as dealing with quantities, Newton maintains that mathematics is that branch of knowledge with which the mathematician ‘‘investigates the quantities of forces with their proportions consequent upon any conditions supposed’’.9 In mentioning ‘‘quantities’’, Newton does not give any philosophical treatment on numbers as the foundation of mathematics. Yet in his letter containing suggestions as how to improve the curriculum of Christ’s Hospital, he accepts arithmetic as the foundation of mathematics. Writes Newton, Arithematicks is set down preposterously in the 12th Article after almost all the rest of Mathematicks. For a man may understand and teach Arithmetick without any other skill in Mathematicks, as writing Masters usually doe, but without Arithmetick he can be skilled in non other parte of Mathematicks, & therefore Arithematick ought to have been set downe in the very first place as the foundation of all the rest.10
Newton further claims that both geometry and mechanics are equally important. He reminds Hawes of their significance: ‘‘If you admit this learning, your school will certainly grow into greater reputation, ... for the scheme of learning ... is an entire thing which cannot well want any of it’s members, for ‘its nothing but a combination of Arithmetick, Geometry, Perspective and Mechanicks, ...’ ’’11
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Mechanics is an important part of geometry. He draws the conclusion that mechanics is that part of geometry which is less ‘‘perfectly accurate’’ by furnishing the following argument: The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect: as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration, and practical. To practical mechanics all manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name. But as artificers do not work with perfect accuracy, it comes to pass that mechanics is so distinguished from geometry that what is perfectly accurate is called geometrical; what is less so is called mechanical.12
Newton argues that geometry is the foundation of mechanics. In order for a mathematician to be a mechanic par excellence, he should master geometry. In the mathematician’s quest for studying nature, he should work like a mechanic by uniting both his head and hand and not simply deducing ‘using his head’. Says Newton concerning the significance of mechanics and geometry: He that works with less accuracy is an imperfect mechanic; and if any could work with perfect accuracy, he would be the most perfect mechanic of all; for the description of right lines and circles upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics.13
According to Newton, geometry includes the art of inferring from hypotheses, that is, from proven phaenomena. The root of mechanical practise lies in geometry. Mechanics is that subject of geometry concerning the art of measuring. For example. Newton claims that describing ‘figures’ are not geometrical problems but mechanical. He writes: Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn; for it requires that the learners should first be taught to describe these accurately before he enters upon geometry, then it shows how by these operations problems may be solved. To describe right lines and circles are problems, but not geometrical problems. The solution of these problems is required from mechanics, and by geometry the use of them, when so solved, is shown; and it is the glory of geometry that from those few principles, brought from without, it is able to produce so many things. Therefore geometry is founded in mechanical practice and is nothing but that part of universal mechanics which accurately proposes and demonstrates the art of measuring.14
From the above passage, we can trace the general schema of Newton’s conception of reducing ‘‘the phaenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics’’. Beginning with phaenomena, the mathematician applies geometrical principles to the phaenomena, yielding some axioms. Mechanical principles are then applied to these axioms in order to explain other phaenomena. If the resulting mathematical formulae are successful in
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explaining and predicting those phaenomena, they are elevated to the status of mathematical laws. Thus: Phaenomena of nature geometrical principles mechanical Principles other phaenomena mathematical laws Dia. 5.2. Newton’s conception of the importance of mechanics and geometry in mathematics.
So far we have not discussed Newton’s conception of the place of numbers in his mathematics. Newton does not treat numbers per se in any comprehensive or very qualitative way. When he mentions numbers in the Principia, it is usually in terms of ‘‘geometric measures’’ in the sense that everything in the external world is theoretically measurable. Yet to undermine the importance of numbers in his philosophy of mathematics would be misleading because he believes that it his through ‘‘sensible measures’’ that we can study extra sensible objects. For example, his discussion on space leads him to write: ‘‘But because the parts of space cannot be seen or distinguished from one another by our senses, therefore in their stead we use sensible measures of them’’,15 and elsewhere; ‘‘And if the meaning of words is to be determined by their use, then by the names ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘motion’, their [sensible] measures are properly understood ...’’16 The significance of geometry and mechanics in shaping Newton’s philosophy of mathematics is also evident from his comments concerning the conventional use of those terms. Newton argues that although geometry is ‘‘that part of universal mechanics which accurately proposes and demonstrates the art of measuring’’, geometry is not customarily perceived that way. He writes: But since the manual arts are chiefly employed in the moving of bodies, it happens that geometry is commonly referred to their magnitude, and mechanics to their motion.17
Bearing in mind the ‘‘vulgar’’ aspect in the usage of the words ‘‘geometry’’ and ‘‘mechanics’’, he gives a definition for his ‘‘rational mechanics’’: In this sense rational mechanics will be the science of motions resulting from any forces whatsoever and of the forces required to produce any motions, accurately proposed and demonstrated.18
In view of the above passage, Newton’s ‘‘rational mechanics’’ includes geometry and arithmetic as well because it is evident that the study of both ‘‘motions’’ and ‘‘forces’’ definitely involves ‘‘measures’’. As a matter of fact in his letter to Hawes, he states:
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Geometry is the foundation of Mechanicks, & Mechanicks the accomplishment & Crown of Geometry, & both are assisted by Arithmetick for computing and perspective for drawing figures: So that any part of this Systeme being taken away the rest remaines imperfect.’19
Since arithmetic, geometry and mechanics or to use his terms ‘‘rational mechanics’’, is fundamental to his mathematical experience, accordingly in Newton’s view the foundation of his program of mathematization is his ‘‘rational mechanics’’. We come to this conclusion because in his discussion on ‘‘rational mechanics,’’ he states: This part of mechanics, as far as it extended to the five powers which relates to manual arts, was cultivated by the ancients, who considered gravity (it not being a manual power) not otherwise than in moving weights by those powers. But I consider philosophy rather than arts, and write not concerning manual but natural powers, and consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore I offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy, for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this: from the phaenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phaenomena ...20
That the foundation of his programme of mathematization rests upon ‘‘rational mechanics’’ can also be discerned from the continuation of the above passage found in the third section of the Principia wherein Newton describes the ‘‘geometrical aspects’’ in order to derive other mathematical laws. Newton writes: In the Third Book, I give an example of this in the explication of the System of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the former books, in the third I derive from the celestial phaenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. Then from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, I deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon and the sea. I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles.21’
If we take into account what Newton meant by ‘‘rational mechanics’’, mathematics that is built upon it is surely axiomatic but not purely theoretical. It is mathematics resulting from the unity of hand and head, a marriage between the world of sensibles and to some aspects related to the world of intelligibles. 3. GOD: THE PHENOMENON
In this section, we will examine in greater detail the place of God in Newton’s scheme of reducing the phaenomena of nature to that of mathe-
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matics since God is so central in his mathematical experience. Newton says: Is not the Sensory of Animals that place to which the sensitive Substance is present, and into which the sensible Species of Things are carried through the Nerves and Brain, that there may be perceived by their immediate presence to that Substance? And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from the Penomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself; ... 22
We claim that it is this concept of God, as a geometer and a mechanic par excellence, who is the sole creator of this world which functions as the underlying raison d’eˆtre for Newton to reduce the phaenomena of nature to mathematical laws.23 In order to arrive at this conclusion, we will elaborate on Newton’s position towards idolatry and consequently his attempt to de-deify nature by mathematizing it. Newton views idolatry as the greatest evil of mankind. Idolatry to him is the manifestation of Atheism. Idolatry, says Newton, is ‘‘against the principal part of religion, is in scripture condemned and detested above all other crimes.24 It is the greatest evil for no other reason but because of what is brought forth; mediators between men and God. The major problem with idolatry is that it is diametrically opposed to the Qualities of God. In Newton’s terminology, God ‘‘forms and reforms’’ exclusively by Himself. There is no other being besides Him who shares His power. The idolaters, however, ascribe powers to other than God. In his discussion concerning the sin of idolatry, Newton writes: ... in serving false or feigned Gods, that is, Ghosts or Spirits of dead men, or such like beings which you make your Gods, by feigning that they can hear your prayers, do you good or hurt, and praying to them for protection and blessings and trust in them for the same, and which are false gods because they have not the powers which you ascribe to them, and on which you trust.25
From Newton’s perspective in studying nature, ‘‘forces’’ are merely mathematical notions irrespective of the powers associated with it. ‘‘Forces’’ are ‘‘God’s instruments’’, and as ‘‘God’s instruments,’’ they are not equivalent to God; anymore than a mechanic’s instrument is equivalent to the mechanic himself. Whatever power these instruments may have, they are incomparable to that of God. Newton drives home the point not to ascribe equal powers to them. In his scheme of mathematizing nature, forces could never end up as idols bearing in mind that idols can subsume
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different names. The only mechanic and geometer ‘‘forming and reforming’’ the universe is God and not ‘‘forces’’. An example that we have in mind is his concept of gravity. Although Newton uses the phrase ‘‘the power of gravity’’, it is not the case that power is inherent in gravity such that gravity has an equal power to God. He even insists that gravity is not ‘‘essential and inherent to matter’’.26 To believe that it is so is ‘‘so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it’’,27 according to Newton. Newton ventures on explaining the operation of gravity. Like any other hypotheses on natural causes, gravity has to be understood mathematically and used ‘‘in so far as they may furnish experiments’’.28 This is Newton’s position with respect to the natural causes in his scheme of reducing natural phaenomena to mathematical laws. More than anything else, gravity is a mathematical notion, a mathematical entity which can be ‘‘deduced from the phaenomena’’ and ‘‘rendered general by induction’’. It is sufficient for Newton that a mathematical entity such as gravity ‘‘does really exist and act according to the laws ... and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea’’.29 Just as ‘‘force’’ should never be perceived as God or His equal, so gravity. Gravity is merely a mathematical notion used to describe the mathematical relationship between mathematical objects in nature. In addition to his concept of gravity, Newton’s distinction between what counts as relative and absolute, apparent and true, common and mathematical, likewise reflects his position on the need for the de-deification of nature. It is worth noting that, by and large, Newton equates that which is absolute to that which is true and mathematical; and that which is apparent as equal to that which is relative and common. The mathematical experience of the mathematician is a passage to understanding some aspects of the world of intelligibles. Newton’s concept of time is an example to illustrate the distinction between the sensibles and the intelligibles and his belief that mathematics function as a bridge connecting them. Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation of anything external, and by another name is called ‘duration’; relative, apparent, and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or equable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time, such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.30
The de-deification of nature in Newton’s mathematical experience, which is achieved by minimizing any powers associated with natural causes,
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ends up with its mathematization. It is a consequence of his staunch belief that God is the geometer and mechanic who keeps on ‘‘forming and reforming’’ the world. That God is the mechanic and geometer is a fact and not an opinion for Newton whereas the amount of power His creations have is of the status of opinion, and hypothesis and by his account of it can only be included cautiously in his philosophy of mathematics. Thus: It is not the Business of Experimental Philosophy to teach the causes of things further than they can be proven by Experiments. We are not to fill this Philosophy with Opinions which cannot be proved by Phaenomena.31
The mathematization of nature should result in greater knowledge about God and his glorification. ‘‘And though every true Step made in this Philosophy brings us not immediately to the Knowledge of the First Cause’’, says Newton, ‘‘yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued’’.32 Thus the de-deification of nature by mathematization and the total internalization of God who is the perfect mechanic and geometer, the sole creator and the only Lord of the Worlds33 in his mathematical experience.
4. STAGES OF MATHEMATIZATION
In this section we want to study the process of abstraction imbedded in his method of reducing natural phaenomena into mathematical laws. Phaenomena is the most basic concept forming his mathematical experience. In a nutshell, Newton states that ‘‘Experimental philosophy proceeds only upon Phaenomena and deduces general propositions from them only by Induction’’.34 We have explicated Newton’s conception of phaenomena in the previous section. We wish only to mention here that by ‘‘phaenomena’’ Newton includes ‘‘whatever things are perceived, whether they be external things which become known to us through the five senses, or internal which we contemplate in our minds when thinking’’.35 Therefore, mathematical objects of the external world and their corresponding mathematical images form parts of phaenomena. What remains to be studied are the detailed processes that link phaenomena to the mathematical laws, the so called ‘‘general proposition’’. From our point of view, one of Newton’s most important passages concerning his mode of mathematization could be found in one of his MSS. He writes:
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As Mathematicians have two Methods of doing things which they call Composition and Resolution and in all difficulties have recourse to their method of resolution before they compound so in explaining the Phaenomena of nature the like methods are to be used and he that expects success must resolve before he compounds, for the explications of Phaenomena are Problems much harder than those in Mathematics. The method of resolution consists in trying experiments and considering all the Phaenomena of nature relating to the subject in hand and drawing conclusions from them and examining the truth of those conclusions from those experiments and so proceeding from experiments to conclusions and from conclusions to experiments until you come to the general properties of things. Then assuming those properties as Principles of Philosophy you may by them explain the causes of those Phaenomena as follow from them which is the method of Composition ...36
On reading the above passage, one is tempted to conclude that experiments are central to Newton’s method of Composition and Resolution. While performing experiments is definitely an important ‘external’ aspect of his pattern of mathematical inquiry, there is yet another more fundamental aspect than experimentation in so far as mathematical experience is concerned. It is none other than observation. In both experiments and observations he believes that the senses play an integral role. ‘‘We in no other way know the extension of bodies than by our senses’’, says Newton.37 According to Newton, there are two aspects of observation: the external and the internal. The external aspect is that carried out by the five external senses.38 Their main purpose is to convey raw data of the phenomena to the sensorium. Speaking of the external senses, Newton writes: ‘‘The organs of senses are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things in it sensorium, but only for conveying them thither’’.39 The internal aspect of observation concerns the soul, the sensorium and the mind. His discussion about the divisibility of particles leads him to write: Moreover, that the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds [not our external senses] are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.40
According to Newton, the sensorium is the place into which data of the phenomena passes. It is the place of sensation. ‘‘The right side of the sensorium come from the right side of both eyes ... the left side of the sensorium come in like manner from the left side ...’’41 claims Newton. In his discussion of God, Newton hints that images of the phenomena, are transferred into the sensorium by means of the organs of sense, ‘‘... of which things the images only carried through the organs of sense into
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our little sensorium are these seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks ...’’42 As important as the sensorium and the external senses may be, it is not from them that the mathematician perceives. Rather it is the soul that perceives the mathematical meanings of the mathematical images. We posit that Newton also expounds on the perceptive aspect of the soul when he states that: ‘‘Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person.’’43 As a point of fact, Newton alludes that it is the soul which holds the place of primacy in the act of perception, mathematical or otherwise; for that matter in the existence of man. Let us consider the following statement with respect to the preceding quotation which is given almost as its continuation in the same scholium. ‘‘Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense’’.44 We can still investigate Newton’s mathematical experience even further by questioning the way of the arrival of mathematical meaning at the soul from God. That God who is the creator of every phenomena has all mathematical knowledge is clear to Newton. In Art. 4 of the Twelve Articles, Newton states: ‘‘The Father is omniscient, and hath all knowledge originally in his own breast, ...’’45 and elsewhere, God ‘‘governs all things and knows all things that are or can be done’’.46 In other words, mathematical knowledge originates from Him. Moreover Newton believes that the external world which is the world of phenomena is not a result of ‘‘unguided’’ necessity. ‘‘Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things’’47 says Newton. According to Newton, the world of phenomena come into being only through God. God creates phenomena from His divine Ideas and Will. It is worth re-emphasizing that Newton states: ‘‘All that diversity of natural thing which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing’’.48 In light of this statement, from Newton’s point of view God is pure existence because only He is necessarily existing. Following Newton, what sense are we to make of God’s existence and the mathematician’s perception of phenomena? Newton gives an enlightening remark with respect to this question. In his discussion of God and motion, he tells us: He is omnipresent not virtually but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him are all things contained and moved, yet neither affects the other; God
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suffers nothing from the motion of bodies, bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God.49
By the phrase ‘‘In him are all things contained and moved’’, we maintain that what is meant by Newton is the knowledge of the pervasive Divine Immanence and Divine Transcendence. It also points to his admission that mathematical perception and consequently the attainment of mathematical knowledge is only possible in so much as it is sanctioned by God; God grants mathematical knowledge particularly by means of His Divine Presence. Also, if we were to take into account his position on God’s Essence, His Qualities and that God ‘‘may give his angles charge over us’’,50 as well as the subtility of gravity and the world of phenomena, the phrase ‘‘In him all things contained and moved’’ bears a hierarchy of reality with Divine Essence at the outermost layer. The next inner layer will be Divine Qualities, followed consequently by ‘‘angelic,’’ ‘‘subtle,’’ and the innermost layer, the world of phenomena. God maintains phenomena like the mechanic who plays a very creative role only in the first act of invention (creation). Elsewhere Newton refers to the initial creative role of God in his discussion about ether whereby he says that: ‘‘... and after condensation wrought into various forms, at first by the immediate hand of the Creator, and ever since by the power of nature, ...’’51 Once mathematical images of phenomena are sent to the brain, the memory of the perceiver which is the retentive faculty retain the images in the absence of the mathematical objects from any of the external senses. The mathematical images also function as mathematical symbols. The imaginative faculty, which is yet another kind of internal sense, manages the mathematical symbols and formulates them for the soul. This is the level whereby mathematical symbols are stripped from their corresponding phenomena, and the process of mathematical reasoning which at this stage consists of ‘‘resolving’’, is carried out.52 There are extensive use of geometric figures which are consonant with his belief that God is the perfect geometer. At this level, the mathematician intermittently checks the conclusion of the interpolation by conducting experiments,53 that is by ‘‘proceeding alternately from experiments to conclusions from conclusions to experiments’’. So far we have addressed the process of mathematical observation understood within the schema of Newton’s mathematical experience. In sum, mathematical images from the phenomena are sent via the senses into the brain when sensation is excited, and thereafter is analysed and
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synthesized by way of the imaginative faculty and the retentive faculty, and judged by the soul who attains mathematical knowledge which ultimately issued forth from God who is the source of all knowledge.
5. CONCLUSION
Newton begins his mathematical experience by contemplating the phenomena. Mathematics according to Newton is an essential tool in deciphering nature and in solving problems manifested in the phenomena. Man can unravel the abstract aspect of the phenomena and thereafter knows more about himself, nature and God by way of mathematics. More than anything else, mathematics according to Newton provides a valuable linkage between the study of phenomena and God. Fundamental to Newton’s conception of mathematical experience is his understanding of the ontological status of mathematical objects. At the level of sense experience, they are said to be relative, apparent and common. These features correspond to the outward aspect of nature. From the inner aspect of nature in the dimension of the abstract world, mathematical objects are associated with the concepts of truth and the absolute. In the ultimate analysis, mathematical objects are manifestations of some aspects of Being. The arrival at mathematical knowledge by the soul in Newton’s mathematical experience is an offshoot of his cosmology. In retrospect, we can name the outermost layer of his cosmology ‘World 1’. World 1 is the world of metamathematics. It contains the metaphysical principles determining the nature of the mathematics produced. These metaphysical principles are not assumptions or axioms or conventionalists’ claims. They function as the foundations of mathematics and its overall guiding principle. Circumscribed and underdetermined by World 1 is World 2. It consists of assumptions, premises and axioms. World 3 is the world of mathematical models. It is a world overshadowed by both World 1 and World 2. The contents of World 3, are results from Newton’s mathematization of the phenomena of nature. In conclusion, in Newton’s mathematical experience of phenomena, World 1 provides the overriding regulative principles for the other Worlds, based upon his staunch belief that all there is has its roots in the Divine; with God as The Phenomenon. National University of Malaysia
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NOTES 1 For example, see Philip J. Davis, Reuben Hersh, Elena Anne Marchisotto. T he Mathematical Experience (New Jersey: Birkhauser, 1995), Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics, M. B. DeBevoise (ed. and trans.) (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), Mathematics and Mind, Alexander George (ed.) (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994). 2 See H. Wellman, ‘‘The Origins of Metacognition’’, in Metacognition, Cognition, and Human Performance, D. L. Forrest-Pressley, G. E. MacKinnon and T. G. Wailer (eds.) (London: Academic Press, 1985). 3 See Newton’s preface to the first edition of the Principia, 8th May 1686, Principia, MotteCajori, pp. xvii–xviii. 4 See his General Scholium in Principia, Motte-Cajori. 5 See Opticks, p. 370. 6 See the first paragraph in his first letter to Richard Bentley in Opera Omnia IV, p. 429. 7 Keynes MS. 130 (6). University of Cambridge, King’s College Library. 8 See his preface to the first edition of the Principia. Principia, Motto-Cajori, p. xvii. 9 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. 192. 10 See Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, L. L. Laudan and J. Edleston (eds.) (London; Frank Cass Co. Ltd., 1969), p. 280. 11 Ibid., p. 286. 12 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. xvii. 13 Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. xvii. 14 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. xvii. 15 See Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his writings, H. S. Thayer (ed.), J. H. Randall (intr.) (New York, 1951), p. 20. 16 Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. 11. 17 Ibid., p. xvii. 18 Ibid., p. xvii. 19 See J. Eddleston, op. cit., p. 286. 20 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. xvii. 21 See ibid., p. xviii. 22 See Opticks, p. 370. 23 It is worth noting that in Bentley’s lecture sanctioned by Newton, the former states: Now that all this Distances and Motions and Quantities of Matter should be so accurately and harmoniusly adjusted in this great Variety of our System, is above the fortuitous Hits of Blind Material Causes, and must certainly flow from that eternal Fountain of Wisdom, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, who always acts Geometrically, by just and adequate numbers and weights and measures. See R. Bentley, ‘‘A Confutation of Atheism (III),’’ in Isaac Newton’s Papers and L etters on Natural Philosophy and Related Documents, I. Bernard Cohen and Robert F. Schofield (eds.) (Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 364. 24 Ibid., p. 49. 25 Ibid. 26 See Newton’s second letter to Bentley. See also Correspondence III, p. 240. 27 See Newton’s third letter to R. Bentley. 28 See Newton’s letter to Oldenburg in Opera Omnia, IV, p. 314. 29 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. 5477.
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30 Ibid., p. 6. 31 See Sir Isaac Newton: T he Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton. A Selection from the Portsmouth Collection in the University L ibrary, A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), p. 312. 32 Opticks, p. 370. 33 That Newton believes in the plurality of the world, see Brewster, Memoirs, ... Vol. II, p. 353. Concerning the glorification of God as the desired product of Newton’s natural philosophy, it is interesting to note that in Roger Cotes’ introduction to the Principia which received Newton’s commendation, he writes: Therefore we may now more nearly behold the beauties of Nature and entertain ourselves with the delightflul contemplation, and which is the best and most valuable fruit of philosophy, be thence incited the more profoundly to reverence and adore the great Maker and Lord of all. He must be blind who, from the most wise and excellent contrivances of things, cannot see the infinite wisdom and goodness of their Almighty Creator, and he must be mad and senseless who refuses to acknowledge them. [underlined mine] (See Principia, Motte-Cajori, pp. xxxii–xxxiii). 34 See Isaac Newton’s letter dated 31 March 1713 to Roger Cotes in Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, L. L. Laudan and J. Edleston (eds.) (London; Frank Cass Co. Ltd., 1969), p. 156. 35 Quoted in I. B. Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia, op. cit., p. 30. See also ibid., Issac Newton, T he Creative Scientific Mind at Work; W iles L ecture (Belfast; 1966), p. 128. 36 Ibid., pp. 98–99. 37 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. 399. 38 Newton also uses the phrase ‘‘five powers’’ to denote the five external senses. For example in commenting on mechanics, he says: ‘‘This part of mechanics, as far as it extended to the five powers which relate to manual arts, was cultivated by the ancients, ...’’. (See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. xvii). 39 See Opticks, p. 403. 40 Ibid., p. 399. 41 See Query 15 in Opticks, p. 346. 42 See Opticks, p. 370. 43 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. 545. 44 Ibid., p. 545. 45 See T heological Manuscripts, p. 56. 46 See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. 545. 47 Ibid., p. 546. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 545. 50 See T heological Manuscripts, p. 51. 51 See Brewster, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 390–393. 52 An example of Newton’s mathematical reasoning is given by Roger Cotes in his preface to the second edition of Principia. Writes Cotes: Now it is evident from mathematical reasoning, and rigorously demonstrated, that all bodies that move in any curved line described in a plane and which, by a radius drawn to any point, whether at rest or moved in any manner, describe areas about that point proportional to the times are urged by forces directed toward that point. (See Principia, Motte-Cajori, p. xxii).
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53 For some examples on the variety of experiments performed in the Principia, see Principia, Motte-Cajori, pp. 22–5 wherein he describes experiments with pendulums to verify the conservation of momentum; ibid., pp. 316–26 (to detect ‘the resistance of mediums by pendulums oscillating therein’); and ibid., pp. 337–45 (‘to find the motion of water running out of cyclindrical vessel through a hole’). For other experiments, see ibid., pp. 353–5, 355–66 and 382–4.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Brewster, David. Memoirs of the L ife, W ritings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co., 1855. Cohen, I. Bernard. Introduction to Newton’s ‘Principia’. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Manuel, Frank. E. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1968. Newton, Isaac. T he Correspondence of Isaac Newton, H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall and Laura Tilling (eds.), 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–1975. ——. ‘‘Four letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley: containing some arguments in proof of a deity’’, in T he Works of Richard Bentley, Rev. Alexander Dyce (ed.). London, 1838. ——. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Translated into English by Andrew Matte in 1729. The translations revised, and supplied with an historical appendix, by Florian Cajori. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934. ——. Sir Isaac Newton’s T heological Manuscripts, selected and edited with an introduction by H. McLachlan. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1950. ——. Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. ——. Correspondence of Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes with an appendix containing other unpublished letters and papers by Newton, L. L. Laudan and J. Edleston (eds.). London: Frank Cass Co. Ltd., 1969. ——. Isaac Newton’s Papers and L etters on Natural Philosophy and Related Documents, I. Bernard Cohen and Robert E. Schofield (eds.). Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958. ——. Newton’s Philosophy of Natural Selection from His W ritings, H. S. Thayer (ed.), John Herman Randall (intr.). New York, 1951. ——. Opticks, or a T reatise of the Reflections, Inflections and Colours of L ight. Albert Einstein (Foreword), Sir Edmund Whittaker (Introduction), I. Bernard Cohen (Preface), Duane H. D. Roller (Analytical table). New York: Dover Publications, 1952. ——. Isaac Newtoni Opera quae Exstant Omnia, Samuel Horsley (ed.), 5 vols. London, 1779–85.
ELDON C. WAIT
WHAT COMPUTERS COULD NEVER DO An Existential Phenomenological Critique of the Program of Artificial Intelligence
Searle’s ‘Chinese Room Experiment’ has attracted considerable attention, as an important argument against the claims of Strong Artificial Intelligence. In Searle’s thought experiment I am required to imagine being in a room where the only contact I have with the outside world is through a window which allows me to receive and send sheets of paper on which are scribbled Chinese characters. I have no idea what these characters mean, but I do have a book of rules. For each set of characters I receive, the rules prescribe which set of characters I must return. From the outside it may look as if I understand the notes given to me, because my ‘responses’ are appropriate. The truth is however that I have no idea what I am reading or what I am writing. If in my responses I have, for example, conveyed to my reader my warmest greetings, I have not done so ‘intentionally’. Searle’s point is that all that computers can do is carry out instructions or follow rules, and understanding and speaking a language is more than just following rules, because it involves, expressing ideas ‘intentionally’. From a phenomenological perspective Searle has asked the right question, namely, ‘‘What is it like to speak a language and what is it like to follow rules?’’. However, his ‘Chinese room experiment’ has been rejected by various authors who have claimed that he relies too heavily on intuitions. In his argument against the ‘Chinese Room Experiment’, Ned Block for example, suggests that the impression we have of being intentional as opposed to following rules, is merely an intuition which like the intuition that the stars move around the earth needs to be scrapped in the face of counter evidence (Searle; 1980: 425). In order to meet this challenge I have chosen to reflect on another experience, this time the experience of deducing a conclusion from its premises. The question I will ask is, ‘‘What is it like to deduce a conclusion from premises?’’, and ‘‘What is it like, to be caused to believe that a certain statement is the conclusion of certain premises?’’. Like Searle, I will argue that there is nothing in my experience which suggests that my cognitions or my beliefs have been caused. I will argue however that the experience of drawing a conclusion from its premises is one of those 97 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 97–104. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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experiences which I cannot consider to be a mere intuition without placing myself in a vicious circle. The central claim of Strong Artificial Intelligence is that the brain is, to all intents and purposes, a complex computer which would imply that all my thoughts are ultimately the effects of causes. This would mean that when I am given the premises, ‘‘All men are rational’’ and ‘‘Socrates is a man’’ I do not ‘draw’ the conclusion ‘‘Socrates is rational’’ from the premises, I do not ‘discover’ in the premises that which is implied, but rather, as I think about the premises, I am caused to think about the conclusion, by a set of largely unconscious contingent neurological or psychological events. I do not believe that ‘‘Socrates is rational’’ because I have found it to be necessarily implied by premises which I do believe, my belief, and my assurance have been caused by the contingent properties of my neuro-psychological make up. There is however nothing in my experience of ‘drawing’ the conclusion which would corroborate the thesis of Strong A.I. It is not as if under certain conditions, for example, that of thinking about the premises, that the conclusion simply ‘comes to mind’, leaving me wondering why this ‘conclusion’ came to mind and not another, leaving me wondering whether the neuro-psychological events have, this time, brought about in me a belief in a conclusion which corresponds to ‘the’ actual conclusion of the premises (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 15). I do not appear to myself to be a passive recipient of conclusions ‘ushered’ into consciousness through unconscious causal processes. On the contrary, when I draw a conclusion, I actively and self-consciously pursue ‘the’ conclusion, I direct myself to that which is actually implied by the premises. Rather than being passive to whatever ‘conclusion’ my neuropsychological make up ‘brings to mind’, I seem to be able to prevail over any tendency or habit of thinking one way or another, in order to direct myself to ‘the’ conclusion, that conclusion actually implied by the premises quite independently of any contribution from me. There is nothing in the experience of inferring a conclusion which leaves me having to hope that my neuro-psychological make up will lead to a valid conclusion, because it is an experience of self-consciously directing myself to the conclusion of the premises, an experience of overcoming any neuro-psychological makeup. I have no impression of being limited to discovering ‘my’ conclusion of the premises, the conclusion in accordance with ‘my’ ideas, images or knowledge. In my pursuit of the conclusion I am not guided by an image or representation of the goal. Since invoking or recalling images could
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not be a random act, it would be as difficult to explain how I invoke ‘the’ appropriate images, as it would be to explain how I pursue ‘the’ conclusion. Nor of course could my thought be guided by my knowledge. I do not think ‘Socrates is rational’ because I know that given the premises, Socrates must be rational. I think in order to know. My knowledge of the conclusion cannot play any role in my thinking because although in actual fact the conclusion is implied by the premises it is not yet the conclusion of these premises for me. Nor is my pursuit of the conclusion for me, reducible to following rules such as the rules of logic. If I am caused to follow rules, how would I know that I have been caused to follow the correct rules and caused to follow them correctly? If on the other hand I self consciously choose the appropriate rules, the question will be how do I ‘bring to mind’ or ‘visualize’ the correct rules? Do I need rules for visualizing rules, and rules for visualizing the visualizing rules? Clearly we would have an infinite regress.1 To avoid the infinite regress it will have to be possible to pursue the conclusion of the premises without images, rules, or representations, and in those instances where I do follow rules it will have to be possible to follow rules without rules for following rules. It will have to be possible to strive to accomplish an act of following rules without images, rules, or representations. My experience therefore is not merely one of being able to ‘‘prevail over’’ my own neuro-psychological make up, but it is an experience of being able to direct myself to the ‘actual’ conclusion of the premises. From my perspective, I am not limited to directing myself to something determined by my knowledge, or my ideas, nor am I limited to following rules. The act in which I recognize that given the premises, ‘‘Socrates must be rational’’, does not appear to be explicable in terms of any conscious or unconscious causes, in terms of any ‘contents’ of consciousness, or the effect of applying rules, but, appears to be explicable in terms of the ‘fact’ that given the premises, Socrates would necessarily be rational, and by the power of this act to be ‘open’ to this ‘fact’, in order to represent it to myself in an act of recognition. Although it is I who think, my thoughts are experienced as being under the constraints of that which I am trying to deduce, namely ‘the’ actual conclusion of the premises. Whatever thinking is necessary for ‘the’ conclusion to become an object of thought for me, will be ‘elicited’ by ‘the’ conclusion. Thought is experienced as intentional because it is experienced as being ‘elicited’ by its goal, rather than being determined by its neuro-psychological substrate (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 212).
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Everything about my experience, obliges me to give up any ‘representative’ idea of consciousness, because in my ‘pursuit’ of the conclusion I direct myself to that which is not present to me in any form, which I do not represent to myself. At the moment that I understand the premises, the conclusion, as ‘that which actually follows’, is no more than something ‘to be grasped in thought’, ‘to be represented’, or something ‘to become conscious of ’.2 Unless I could be directed towards something, which I do not yet represent to myself, how could I ever strive to prevail over my subjectivity, how could I ever get beyond a mere internal consistency, or a mere truth ‘for me’?3 This intentionality of thought, and the unmediated contact which I have with it is taken for granted by many thinkers who have tried to reflect on their own thinking. In his Meditations, Descartes, for example, accepts that his thinking is intentional without subjecting his experience of his thinking to methodic doubt. When he arrives at his Cogito Ergo Sum, he never considers the possibility that he has done no more than reveal some peculiarity of his mind, some subjective tendency of his thinking, such that whenever he thinks about the fact that he is thinking, the thought that he exists always ‘comes to mind’. He never considers the possibility that even though his thought ‘‘Sum’’ always follows his thought ‘‘Cogito’’, the fact that he thinks, might not actually imply that he exists. Nor does he claim that ‘‘Sum’’ always follows ‘‘Cogito’’ according to the rules of thought, for then he would have to concede that ‘‘Cogito Ergo Sum’’ would be true only if the rules of thought were reliable. If for Descartes, his own thinking could be non-random only if it were guided by rules, he would not have claimed that the cogito was indubitable and could serve as his Archimedean point. The truth of the cogito would itself depend on the reliability of the rules for thinking, and his assurance of the reliability of the rules, would in turn rest on an assurance that his thinking was reliable and so on ad infinitum. Descartes is never troubled by the fear of an infinite regress, because it is for him beyond question that his thinking is, as he experiences it, non-random because it is intentional. He has no hesitation in accepting that he is able to conclude ‘‘Sum’’ without being caused to do so or without following rules or being guided by images. For Descartes there could be no other explanation for his concluding ‘‘Sum’’ than the fact that his existence is actually implied by the fact that he thinks, and that he is directly ‘open’ to this implication. In T he Critique of Pure Reason Kant asks whether the a priori categories could have been implanted in us by our Creator. He considers the possibility that they are so ordered by our Creator that their employment
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is in complete harmony with the laws of nature ... (1964: 174). But he immediately points out that if this were the case, the categories would be no more than subjective dispositions of thought and their necessity would have been sacrificed. The concept of cause, for instance, which expresses the necessity of an event under a presupposed condition, would be false if it rested only on an arbitrary subjective necessity, implanted in us, of connecting certain empirical representations according to the rule of causal relation. I would not then be able to say that the effect is connected with the cause in the object, that is to say necessarily, but only that I am so constituted that I cannot think this representation otherwise than as thus connected. (1964:175)
There are passages in Frege in which he appears to recognise the paradox in the fact that a psychological entity, the mind, can grasp a thought, without the thought having to be duplicated or represented as an idea. [The grasping of a thought] cannot be completely understood from a purely psychological standpoint. For in grasping [the thought] something comes into view whose nature is no longer mental in the proper sense, namely the thought; and this process is perhaps the most mysterious of all (Frege, 1979: 145).
Computers are not able to prevail over their hardware or their programming, they cannot be directed to something which lies beyond them or to something which is not represented in their system in any way. If I am to think of myself as a computer I would have to accept that the experience I have of my own thinking whenever I deduce a conclusion from its premises, is an illusory experience, that what my thinking is for me is numerically distinct from what it is in itself, that although I may have the impression of pursuing ‘the’ conclusion of the syllogism, I am actually doing nothing of the sort, that I am actually passive to a causal process, which triggers beliefs in me. This would mean that any assurance I may have that a conclusion follows its premises is based on an illusory experience. What reasons can there be to reject as illusory my experience of thinking whenever I deduce a conclusion from its premises? Perhaps the most obvious argument would be the argument from past irrational behaviour. I have at times been assured that I pursued ‘the’ conclusion and prevailed over my subjectivity, only to find that the conclusion I drew was not ‘the’ conclusion of the premises, that I had not prevailed over my neuro-psychological make up, but rather, that the conclusion I ended up with was explicable as an effect of that neuropsychological make-up, and that the experience of being intentional was an illusion. This means that we have to introduce a numerical distinction
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between what my thinking is in itself and what it is for me. Once that distinction has been established, I will be free to ignore my experience and then I will be open to the argument that all my cognitions could be the effects of causes. But this argument from past irrational behaviour is itself an argument, and I can be assured of its validity only if I can be assured that its conclusion is actually implied by its premises. If the argument from my irrational behaviour in the past could force me to draw a distinction between what my thinking is for me and what it is in itself, it would place me in a vicious circle. If there were such a distinction how could I ever establish that the experience I have of pursuing in thought the conclusion of the syllogism, provides me with a reliable representation of what I am actually doing? I would have to test my representation and I could only have confidence in the reliability of my test, if I knew that my actual thinking was, during these tests, as I experience it to be, namely ‘intentional’. I could never prove to myself that my experience of thinking provides me with a reliable representation of what I was doing, since every proof that I could carry out could only be accepted by me as compelling in itself, if I already knew without any tests, that my act of proving was intentional. To accept the argument would be to accept that I could never ‘know’ whether it was valid or not. I would be able to accept the argument only in an act of blind faith.4 Perhaps the reply will be that although I could never know whether the argument was valid or not, I could still have good reasons for trusting the conclusions which my neuro-psychological substrate ‘brings to mind’, because if it did not ‘bring to mind’ the correct conclusions I would not have survived. But the argument from survival is itself an argument, which I should accept only if I can recognize that its conclusion is implied by its premises. Once I accept that there is a numerical distinction between what my thinking is for me and what it is in itself, I can have no assurance that the argument from survival is valid. Nor can I take comfort in the knowledge that my thinking is like that of everyone else, for here too, this knowledge can only be based on my interpretation of empirical evidence, and without the assurance that I am rational, I could never trust my powers of interpretation. If I reflect on the experience of drawing a conclusion from its premises, I find that my thoughts, rather than being the effects of causes, prevail over their neuropsychological substrate such that through these thoughts I can direct myself to the goal of my thinking. Any argument which dispels my naive assurance that in my thinking I am able to prevail over
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my neuro-psychological substrate, would at the same time undermine any assurance I may have that the argument is valid, that its conclusion is actually implied by its premises. At the very moment that A.I. puts forward its argument that we are all computers, and that every act of thought can be explained in terms of its neuro-psychological substrate, A.I. requires of its audience certain powers which its thesis holds are merely illusory powers. University of Zululand NOTES 1 ‘‘But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle’’ (Ryle, 1962: 31). 2 ‘‘Whoever tries to limit the spiritual light to what is at present before the mind always runs up against the Socratic problem. How will you set about looking for that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Which, among the things you do not know, is the one which you propose to look for? And if by chance you should stumble upon it, how will you know that it is indeed that thing, since you are in ignorance of it? (Meno, 80D) ... We must define thought in terms of that strange power which it possesses of being ahead of itself ...’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 371). 3 ‘‘My awareness of constructing an objective truth would never provide me with anything more than an objective truth for me, and my greatest attempt at impartiality would never enable me to prevail over my subjectivity (as Descartes so well expresses it by the hypothesis of the malignant demon), if I had not, underlying my judgements, the primordial certainty of being in contact with being itself [if, before any voluntary adoption of a position I were not already in an intersubjective world, and if science too were not upheld by this basic doxa]’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 355). 4 There will have to be other ways of accounting for the fact that I have often been mistaken about drawing ‘the’ conclusion from its premises, ways which do not introduce a numerical distinction between what my thinking is for me and what it is in itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Frege, G. Posthumous W ritings, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel and F. Kaulback (eds.), P. Long and R. White (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. Quotation taken from ‘‘The Metaphysic of Concepts’’ by Christopher Peacock, Mind, vol. c, 4 October 1991. Hume, D. A T reatise of Human Nature. London: Everyman, 1911. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith (trans.). London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1964. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. ——. T he Structure of Behaviour, A. L. Fisher (trans.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Ryle, G. T he Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
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Searle, J. R. ‘‘Minds, Brains and Progams’’. T he Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417–457. Wait, E. C. ‘‘A Phenomenological Rejection of the Empiricist Argument from Illusions’’. T he South African Journal of Philosophy, May, 14(3) (1995): 83–89. ––. ‘‘Dissipating Illusions’’. Human Studies, April, 20(2): 221–242.
ARTHUR PIPER
SENSIBLE MODELS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
The artwork has often been treated as a privileged object in phenomenology because of its special place in human endeavour as a truth-giving cultural accomplishment with pleasurable and aesthetic facets. Yet while the paintings of Van Gogh, Ce´zanne and even abstract artists have inspired some of the finest essays in the tradition, images comprising graphs, charts, diagrams, autoradiographs and brain scans have largely passed without comment. Even though these poor cousins comprise by far the greater proportion of images produced today, particularly given the profusion of images in mass media outlets, they are barely touched upon in phenomenology outside of the narrow confines of the philosophy of technology. But if they too are products of cultural accomplishment, if they illicit aesthetic and emotional responses, why privilege the traditional artwork as a research topic over these other forms of image? After all, those of us who live in Western culture engage daily with a wide range of digitally constructed and produced images that have their origins in art and science constantly conflated and recontextualized. Is it enough simply to consider the essence of such images as arising out of the fixed context of the gallery or the science laboratory to which they originally belonged, or do we also need new ways of thinking about them when they are set loose from those settings? In short, how might we begin to think differently about those non-art images that have traditionally been accorded such low status in phenomenological research? To begin answering this question, it may be helpful to focus primarily on an image set that crosses both the technical and public domains. While I will not discuss specific images in this paper, most readers will be aware of the images arising out of cognitive neuroscience, within which brain scanning pictures have become a central tool for speculating on the assumed correlation between mind and brain. Since these images straddle the scientific and public domains, they touch on the two problem areas that I intend to discuss in this essay: how scientists come to understand various charts, and brain scans in an apparently transparent manner; and, how science images get to mean at all outside of the research context when this transparent way of looking is not available. My central assumption is that if we can see how supposedly simple images acquire meaning in complex ways, we might begin to think about them differently. 105 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 105–118. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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In addition, my second question should help us consider how far those outside of science research might be able to appropriate science images for their own ends, particularly in light of recent attempts to discuss them using art historical methods by the Chicago art theorists James Elkins1 and Barbara Maria Stafford.2 We might even begin to think with such images, using them as sensible tools, in ways that do not need to be reduced to a logos that is defined solely in terms of language. Edmund Husserl’s analyses of images in science and art offer one way of addressing these issues. His first analysis attempts to give an account of the scientific image in its research context and looks at how the ‘‘lifeworld’’, or ‘‘external horizon’’3 of the science enterprise – comprising the laboratory with its equipment and practices, and the institution and culture within which it operates – helps constitute meaning. Yet while this approach has been mirrored by recent work in science studies, it also leaves the question of the non-expert engagement with such images largely unresolved. An understanding of this issue is important in explaining how the scientist achieves her right of passage to expert viewer and how images mean outside of the scientific context. Husserl’s account of image-consciousness, which he reserved for the discussion of art images, is a useful way of negotiating those difficulties and enriching the phenomenological understanding of science images.
Sensible Models Given Husserl’s lifelong interest and intellectual engagement in developing phenomenology as a critique of natural science, it is perhaps not surprising that he had devoted some thought to the issue of its images. In particular, in his discussion of geometry in T he Crisis of European Sciences and T ranscendental Phenomenology (1970) he introduces the idea of geometry as being an ‘‘ideal praxis of ‘pure thinking’ ’’.4 This thinking is externalized onto paper and into books in the form of images and equations that become objectively available for further communal activity. During this practice new forms and shapes are produced by geometers using methods that have been handed down historically to those who are now engaged in developing this branch of science. In other words, the thinking embodied in geometry has become a technique, or a technology, which is taken up unreflectively by those engaged in the production of new ideas in this field. It is worth quoting Husserl’s short analysis at length:
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Like all cultural acquisitions which arise out of human accomplishment, they [the existing images, shapes and methods] remain objectively knowable and available without requiring that the formulation of their meaning be repeatedly and explicitly renewed. On the basis of sensible embodiment, e.g., in speech and writing, they are simply apperceptively grasped and dealt with in our operations. Sensible ‘models’ function in a similar way, including especially the drawings on paper which are constantly used during work, printed drawings in textbooks for those who learn by reading, and the like. It is similar to the way in which certain cultural objects (tongs, drills, etc.) are understood, simply ‘seen’, with their specifically cultural properties, without any renewed process of making intuitive what gave such properties their true meaning. Serving in the methodological praxis of mathematicians, in this form of long-understood acquisitions, are significations which are, so to speak, sedimented in their embodiments.5
Part of Husserl’s project in the Crisis was to recover the original meaning of geometry as a human accomplishment by peeling away the layers of sedimentation that had accrued over time and that had served to fossilize living ideas into physical facts that took on the quality of objects – ‘‘sensible models’’. For Husserl, the scientists in their everyday dealing with such models are very much like the carpenter in Heidegger’s workshop.6 They simply use the tools that are ‘‘ready-to-hand’’ in their concerned theoretical activity without having to reappropriate them through intellectual intuition. This is normal praxis in the science setting. But in doing so, however, they fail to grasp the truth that geometry, which is taken by Husserl as exemplary of science in general, when properly understood, contains within itself a possibility and a way of understanding the world. Therefore the meaning of natural science for Husserl, like all meaning, is a human accomplishment and is discoverable through transcendental analysis. In Husserl’s view, then, ‘‘sensible models’’ such as graphs, charts and brain scans embody the network of presuppositions (or thinking that has become objectified during historical praxis) underlying the scientific enterprise. When the natural attitude of the scientist is bracketed off by the phenomenological reduction, the models can be seen for what they are: ‘‘purely subjective phenomena throughout, but not merely facts involving psychological processes of sense-data; rather, they are mental [geistige] processes which, as such, exercise with essential necessity the function of constituting forms of meaning’’.7 But the scientist, in the heat of everyday laboratory work, misses the significance of the tools she is using. She sees them perceptually as things, which is why they are classified by Husserl as ‘‘sensible’’ and, for the purposes of our interpretation, she passes over their imagistic properties in favour of the practical business of working with handed-down thinking. The images are only meaningful in relation
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to the physical world wherever they represent its mathematical properties. In other words, they are subsumed by numbers within the general iconophobic attitude of the scientists. However, the sensible aspect of these models has another unattended ‘‘internal’’ dimension to which I shall return shortly. Husserl’s account of the communal, institutional, historical and practice-driven nature of scientific enterprise could be read as an early precursor to the approach taken to natural science in the more recent academic field of science studies. Science studies, which is heavily influenced by ethnographic and sociological accounts of science practice, has sought to challenge the supposedly logical basis of the meaning of science research by focusing on just the sort of life-world issues that Husserl incorporates into his phenomenology. For example, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar,8 Karin Knorr-Cetina,9 and Michael Lynch10 each conducted fieldwork studies of science laboratories in the late 1970s, much of which focused on what scientists said and did during their everyday research activities. Research in science studies can shed light upon our first question: how do scientists come to read images in such a transparent manner that they take on tool-like qualities? Or more fundamentally, is Husserl’s assumption that scientists engage with their image domain in the laboratory as though they were ready-made and pre-understood tools a valid analysis? It is an insight that has been repeated in ethnographic research conducted in science studies. For example, Michael Lynch in his study of a cognitive neuroscience laboratory notes: Photographs which are ‘used’ in lab research, provide materials which members explore, and ‘work with’ in delimiting neural events. The documentary character of such photographs is not that of illustrating an already completed text, but is itself a ‘text’ which is used as discriminable grounds for claims, arguments, measurement, and statistical accounting work by the parties to the lab’s research.11
Or, to put it differently, it is treated as another piece of equipment at the scientists’ disposal, but one that is, if anything, text-based – although in an essentially mathematical manner – and not image-based. It is ‘‘read’’ transparently, rather than as requiring specific visual interpretation. While Husserl focuses his account on the fully trained scientist, the Canadian cognitive scientist Wolff-Michael Roth has recently attempted to investigate how scientists come to be so skilled that they can perform the ideal praxis demanded of them in science research. His work, which is heavily informed by phenomenology, has focused on the practice of reading graphs and how that changes in and between groups with different
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levels of reading ability. In their paper ‘From Thing to Sign and ‘‘Natural Object’’: Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Graph Interpretation’ (2002), Roth, G. Michael Bowen and Domenico Masciotra start with the assumption that cognitive neuroscientists and others presuppose that the graphs already say something about the natural world. The authors’ method of understanding how graphs are read is essentially semiotic, within which the process of reading has two distinct phases. The first is ‘‘structuring’’,12 where things become signs; the second is ‘‘grounding’’,13 where signs refer to world. During their fieldwork, they noted that with experienced scientists ‘‘reading leapt beyond the material aspects of the text to the natural objects it is said to be about. Map (text) and territory (nature, world) are no longer separate but become fused in the process of transparent reading’’.14 The same could not be said of inexperienced readers, or for those scientists who were unfamiliar with the data sets and pictures with which they were confronted. Those readers often struggled to form signs from the material, or to relate their unstable signs to the world. This suggests that the ‘‘sensible’’ aspect of the model has become opaque and problematic. It had ceased simply to be the necessary background material of the tool and had erupted as an unstable visual element into consciousness. That should alert us to the fact that more needs to be said about the sensible nature of the science image if we are to achieve a richer understanding of how they come to mean what they do to scientists and non-scientists.
Image-Consciousness It would seem that the transparent reading ability associated with this tool-use aspect of science images breaks down as soon as the object is dislodged from its original context. Does it then become an image pure and simple, or is it a thing, but just not the type of thing that can be used as a tool? Is it during the scientist’s training that the object ceases to be either a thing or an image and becomes a tool, as Husserl implies? Husserl’s concept of image-consciousness from his writings on art can shed light on these questions. For this purpose, I draw on recent work by John Brough,15 who has looked at Husserl’s understanding of imageconsciousness in Husserliana 23 from an art historical perspective, but I modify his account slightly so that we can deal with issues posed by Roth and his colleagues about how non-art images become transparent to scientists.
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Husserl describes the pictorial image as having three component layers to its structure: the physical base, the image-object and the image-subject. First, the material substructure of the image comprises physical material that exists in space and time. For example, digital display consoles with their back-lit interfaces, printed matter of paper and ink and holographic plates and films with their highly distributed recorded information. The picture has a fundamentally thingly nature. Husserl refers to this substructure as the ‘‘physical image’’, although ‘‘strictly speaking, it is not an image at all but founds and supports an image, exciting it and offering it to image consciousness’’.16 Because this material substructure in science is itself already the product of a wide variety of often complex technological skills and representational techniques, in another context it could be treated as the finished product of scientific activity and subject to the sort of phenomenological investigation that Don Ihde and others are attempting in the philosophy of technology.17 However, for the purposes of this article, I will treat it naively as the primary ground on which the image structure rests. In fact, Husserl treats both the actual markings on the paper, screen, or display that eventually cohere into an overall image as being part of the physical aspect of the structure of art images. But with science images, at least, I believe a further distinction is needed at this stage of analysis. Such marks are also conceivable as unstable semiotic marks, the cultural units that lend themselves to interpretation within image-consciousness. It is only during the perceptual investigation of these elements that the overall image is construed – what Husserl refers to as an ‘‘image-object’’, or ‘‘image’’18 – at which stage the image takes on the form of an overall gestalt and appears to consciousness as a definite sort of object. This gestalt, or overall effect of the image, is the third element of the structure. The benefit of making a distinction between the marks and the imageobject is that it enables us to suggest a dynamic relation between the elements of the image and its overall gestalt. We can ask questions such as, what happens when an image fails to mean anything, or appears to mean in a way that is purely random? How do viewers attempt to work out the overall image when the semiotic elements do not cohere into a whole? Husserl, on the other hand, is more concerned with explaining how the physical basis of the image disappears as soon as the imageobject is discernible. He has, as it were, his eye on the finished art image and its ability to function representationally, when clearly the image is not what it represents. Brough sums up Husserl’s distinction succinctly:
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Pigment and canvas, as actually existing material things, simply are; they do not represent. An actual person, the subject of a portrait, does not represent or depict either; it simply is what it is. But the image in its nullity, in its interplay and conflict with its physical support and its subject, is what it is not and is not what it is, to borrow a formulation from JeanPaul Sartre. And thus it can represent without being what it depicts.19
The forth aspect, in our revised account of Husserl, is the ‘‘image-subject’’, or that which is represented in the image itself. Given the complex relationships in science imaging between the imaged and its representation, particularly since much of it is non-isomorphic – or is constructed by the imaging technology – we will set this issue aside for the purposes of this article. This completes our analysis of the ‘‘internal horizon’’ of the science image. If we now return to Roth’s model of ‘‘structuring’’ and ‘‘grounding’’ we can see that scientists trained in their specific fields have no problem jumping to stages three and four in our account of image-consciousness. Questions that they may have relate to the interplay between imageobject and image-subject, to issues of representation and reality. This suggests that the nature of the image as an image has not become a perceptual problem because it does not stand out from the background in which it appears. Just like the chairs and tables, brain scanning equipment and the electric lighting in the neuroscience lab, the images are available as equipment for use. If the image is judged to be poor it is generally because it fails to function well enough within that context. By contrast, the inexperienced reader can get confused about the image at any stage. As well as being perplexed by the issues that confront the practiced reader, further questions may arise about what kind of sign it is that is being viewed and about whether the individual elements of the sign amount to an overall image-object. Are the signs themselves meaningful, or as the authors suggest, quoting Umberto Eco, ‘‘extremely ambiguous texts akin to aesthetic ones’’.20 For the novice viewer, the image has emerged as a thing, unruly and resistant to interpretation. In fact, as far as she is concerned, it is precisely an object in need of interpretation because its elements constantly fall back into its unstable semiotic marks and, therefore, fails to function transparently as a tool. By combining Husserl’s two accounts of understanding images, we can see that the ‘‘sensible’’ aspect of the science image is, therefore, twofold. Viewed within its context – or from the perspective of its ‘‘external horizon’’, comprising the life-world of the science enterprise – it is seen as a tool. This horizon dominates during everyday practice where the image is transparent and is, often quite literally, seen through. But it can
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become opaquely sensible when the visualization practices are not available to the viewer because he or she is a novice in science, or a scientist presented with unknown imagery. In this case the image is seen perceptually – or from the perspective of the ‘‘internal horizon’’21 of the observer. Both accounts of the image are needed if we are to understand how this difference arises. Perhaps the former perspective provides us with the basis for an analysis for understanding images ‘‘in’’ science, and the latter with a basis for understanding images ‘‘of ’’ science.
Seeing in Practice Roth and his colleagues have emphasized, in agreement with Husserl, that the reading of sensible models by experienced scientists is not a purely cognitive achievement, but relies on ‘‘conventionalization practices’’.22 In the article that we discussed earlier, he and his colleagues conclude: ‘‘Transparency is something that is achieved through specific forms of participation and experience both within the community and with its epistemological objects’’.23 Scientists are trained to ‘‘see’’ tools and not pictures. In fact, this observation has been supported by science studies research on the public use of science images, which should help us deepen our discussion of how images acquire meaning for scientists at the same time as beginning to explore how people understand images outside of science at all. Earlier in the essay, we saw how Lynch described cognitive neuroscientists as ‘‘users’’ of lab photography depicting the cellular structure of brain regions in their everyday work. However, Lynch also detected a more aesthetic attitude among the scientists making images for publication in peer-reviewed journals, or for wider public consumption, which led them to regard the pictorial facets of the artefacts as having greater significance. Lynch says: The documentary use of a photograph in a research article differs considerably from that of a photograph used by lab members as the material visibility of topical events and structures ... In those instances in which photographs were presented in research publications, however, it was not simply the case that they illustrated the naturalistic account made in the papers. They were also available as exhibits of a lab’s practical competence with electron microscopy ... The extreme concern with finding ‘‘perfect’’ pictures free of exhibits of artefact (however incidental they might be to a paper’s claims) addressed the availability of the photographs to a ‘‘practitioner’s reading’’ that could assess the competence of the lab’s program in the ‘‘aesthetics’’ of its photography.24
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Lynch’s subjects remark on the ‘‘beauty’’25 of the pictures that are free from error and joke among themselves about being able to capture the type of high-quality images that they find in certain journal articles. In fact, I will return to this process of image-making for public consumption later, but note that in as much as such images are manipulated by digital image-processing tools in the work of perfecting them for display, the scientists are engaged on an aesthetic enterprise that is almost indistinguishable from the artist’s.26 This activity suggests that they are looking at the ‘‘image-object’’ and its constituent semiotic elements as an image apart from whatever use it may serve in the laboratory. It appears that the scientist is capable of becoming aware of these pictorial elements, but suppresses this awareness in favour of the underlying model. So we can perhaps conclude that as the context of use for the scientist changes, so too does the type of seeing associated with the image, which suggests further that defining the essence of the science image solely with regard to its properties as a sensible model in tool use is too restrictive if we are to understand such images in the full range of contexts within which they arise. Among those who do not have access to the highly technical way of seeing science images that prevails in the science laboratory, the aesthetic aspect of the sensible model comes to the fore and dominates understanding. In her study of public ways of perceiving images created by electron micrographs, Emily Martin says: ‘‘As well as a sense of drama, there is certainly a lively aesthetic involved when scientists produce, choose and display these images. After many a lecture, I heard people commenting to each other about the ‘beautiful’, ‘incredible’, ‘stunning’, ‘technically perfect’ micrographs that were shown’’.27 Electron micrographs are used primarily to image microscopic elements in nature, such as brain cells, usually prepared for the purpose by staining techniques. Martin argues that the primary purpose in deploying these pictures in teaching is to ‘‘clinch an argument by revealing visual evidence of what one is claiming’’.28 For Martin, this method of teaching prevents students from developing anything other than the standard interpretation of the significance of the image-set held by science practitioners and those who lecture on the subject. In the study, however, not all of the students accepted the standard interpretations presented to them in the lectures where the images were displayed, which is perhaps not too surprising given their range of backgrounds and ability level. What is more remarkable is that when she presented similar images to people with non-science backgrounds, they related to them in a wide variety of emotional and concep-
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tual ways. Often an image received multiple interpretations from the same viewer. As Martin says: ‘‘Taken as a whole, the things people said can only be described as a profusion, an extravagance, an excess of images. Sometimes they tumble out one on top of another’’.29 Electron micrographs depicting immune cells became space satellites, deep sea scenes, food stuffs, strange deserts, populated cities and alien beings. Images constantly made and unmade themselves, jumping to a sudden gestalt and then falling back into their unstable semiotic elements as viewers grappled to make the images signify. As far as they pointed to a world, it was not the world of mathematical, natural science, but the world of nature understood through cultural acquisition; through the TV documentary, the news programme and the blockbuster film. Images L et L oose In our everyday lives, science images acquire significance for us. When there is no specific context for understanding, when there are no specialised visualization practices, the personal domain steps in via everyday ways of seeing image-objects. They become pretty pictures, objects of reverie, more like art objects than scientific evidence. It would appear that the meaning of these images only becomes narrower and specific to the scientific enterprise during training – a process that helps develop the necessary visualization techniques. Yet as the scientist’s knowledge increases, so the meaning of the image is reduced to the model upon which it is based. Its sensible aspect, while still objectively available, recedes into the background of the laboratory. Those elements only tend to take on aesthetic qualities when the context alters, for example, when the images are produced with public or peer display in mind. A different way of seeing them, essentially aesthetic in nature, comes to the fore. The scientific training that produces ‘‘sensible models’’ seen one-sidedly as tools denigrates the status of images as images among many science practitioners. But why might this be the case? Anne Beaulieu, who has conducted anthropological work on scientists’ attitudes to imaging work in cognitive neuroscience, has concluded that ‘‘researchers reject the visual yet maintain its use in their work’’30 for largely professional reasons. In fact, it would be a fair assumption that most would disagree with my application of Husserl’s notion of image-consciousness to the perception of their technological products. Brain scans are not images and any definition of them as visual is seen as a ‘‘sort of radiological misnomer’’.31 Yet while the tools that brain imagers use – Positron Emission
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Tomography in this study – provide a quantitative measurement of the brain, it is based on spatial differentials and, therefore, needs to be represented pictorially. Those pictorial elements are an important part of how the meaning of the image comes about. In her insightful study, Beaulieu writes that the image makers maintain an ‘‘iconoclastic stance’’32 to their representations, while at the same time relying on the representational qualities of their artefacts to both engage with the public and enable the use of the images by clinicians working in brain surgery and related fields. They fear that the images, once let loose out of the confines of the laboratory, will be randomly interpreted as images rather than as mathematical 4-D geometrical constructs. This fear takes us right back to the iconophobic tendencies inherent in Plato’s description of the viewers trapped in the cave of false images. In fact, the neuroscientists believe that should a non-mathematical interpretation of their studies become predominant, they would not be considered scientists by their peers. But if, as Beaulieu notes, the ‘‘insistence on the quantitative is one of the strategies that prevents the ‘proliferation of meaning’ prized by artists and not by scientists’’,33 the scientists appear to be attributing their own fears about the misrepresentation of meaning to the to power of images themselves – without understanding that taming images through ‘‘proper’’ reading is not primarily a cognitive ability, but rests on the practical achievement of specific visualizing skills. The denigration of images occurs because they cannot be tamed in the way that scientists would prefer. Their sensible, physical and semiotic qualities constantly threaten to overwhelm the models upon which they are based. They can simply be images, as much as they can simply be tools. Each way of seeing is a reduction of one facet of the sensible model, just as much as it is an extension of the other. A full understanding of science images in their various contexts requires that both aspects of the sensible model be fully understood. Perhaps from this perspective, Husserl’s account of the sensible model as a tool shares too much in common with the iconoclastic science view of images to stand on its own in accounting for the nature of the science image. Even as a pure descriptive analysis, it requires the supplementation of a phenomenological account of image-consciousness to do full justice to the dual nature of the sensible element of those models. In fact, if brain images are constructed using traditions of representation, as Beaulieu suggests, then art historical ways of seeing from which these traditions are derived – again arising out of a set of technical practices – should not simply be possible, but perhaps positively required. That would make
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sense of calls from visual theorists such as Stafford and Elkins to apply art historical practices to science images, both as a way of investigating how far the theoretical concerns and confusions of scientists are embodied in the pictorial representation of those artefacts and as a way of understanding the traditions to which they belong and to which they might come to belong in the future. That would be one way of beginning to think differently about these images. James Elkins has argued that the cleaning and manipulating of images that have been photographed for scientific research is a form of aesthetics that lends itself to art historical traditions of analysis. In fact, he notes that this type of care with pictures ‘‘is the original, pre-Kantian sense of aesthetics as the ‘perfecting of reality’ – the very doctrine that governed Renaissance painting ... What happens in non-art images can be just as full of aesthetic choices, just as deeply engaged with the visual, and just as resourceful and visually reflective as in painting’’.34 Notions of perspective and the translation of 3-D reality onto two dimensional surfaces have been among the stock-in-trade themes of art theory since it began. An informed appreciation of the particular representational strategies deployed in cognitive neuroscience in depicting the brain would enable scientists to improve on the representational aspects of their work. In addition, art theorists can offer valuable insights into how well images of mixed representational styles point to the intended model beneath. For example, cognitive neuroscience deals with the marriage of cognitive psychology and neurobiology. Its textbook images are sometimes composed of apparently realistic elements of anatomy drawn from biological studies and flow diagrams representing neural networks drawn from theories of mind in psychology. The connections and dissonances between the two fields that make up the inter-discipline of cognitive neuroscience are embodied within such images. Art theoretical analysis can serve to make them visible. In fact, phenomenology itself is well equipped for the task of deciphering the complexity of non-art images – whether they arise within a science context, or within the context of more mundane life. It may be that the status of the artwork over more prosaic images has to be re-examined and seen in its broader historical context. It may even be that new forms of sensible models become available to phenomenologists as these boundaries are challenged in ways that enable us to think with images as well as about them. The intelligence and thoughtfulness of images could be allowed to co-exist within a conception of the logos that is not construed in a predominantly linguistic way.
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Acknowledgements I thank Sujatha Raman for introducing me to science studies work in this area and Jon Simons and Andy Hamilton for reading an earlier draft of this essay. I also thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK for their continuing financial support. Department of Critical T heory and Cultural Studies University of Nottingham, UK
NOTES 1 James Elkins, T he Domain of Images (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999) and V isual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 2 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1993) and Good L ooking: Essays on the V irtue of Images (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1996). 3 Edmund Husserl, T he Crisis of European Sciences and T ranscendental Phenomenology, David Carr (trans.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 162. 4 Ibid., p. 26. 5 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 6 Martin Heidegger, Being and T ime, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.) (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, US: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 95–102. 7 Husserl, op. cit., p. 112. 8 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, L aboratory L ife: T he Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979). 9 Karin Knorr-Cetina, T he Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981). 10 Michael Lynch, Art and Artefact in L aboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop T alk in a Research L aboratory (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 11 Lynch, op. cit., p. 95. 12 Wolff-Michael Roth, G. Michael Bowen and Domenico Masciotra, ‘‘From Thing to Sign and ‘Natural Object’: Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Graph Interpretation,’’ in Science, T echnology and Human Values 27: 3 (Summer 2002): 333. 13 Roth et al., op. cit., p. 333. 14 Roth et al., op. cit., p. 335. 15 John Brough, ‘‘Art and Non-art: A Millennial Puzzle’’, in T he Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century, Steven Crowell, Lester Embree and Samuel J. Julian (eds.). Electronically published by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Inc at www.electronpress.com, 2001, pp. 1–16. 16 Ibid., p. 9. 17 See, for example, Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: V isualism in Science (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 18 Brough, op. cit., p. 9. 19 Ibid., p. 10.
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20 Roth et al., op. cit., p. 334, quoting Umberto Eco, A T heory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 176. 21 Husserl, op. cit., p. 162, what Brough calls the ‘‘internal structure’’, op. cit., p. 9. 22 Roth et al., op. cit., p. 351. 23 Ibid. 24 Lynch, op. cit., pp. 95–96. 25 Ibid., p. 94. 26 See Elkins, op. cit., 1999, pp. 10–12. 27 Emily Martin, ‘‘Interpreting Electron Micrographs’’, in T he Future of Anthropological Knowledge, Henrietta L. Moore (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 18. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 23. 30 Anne Beaulieu, ‘‘Images are Not the (Only) Truth: Brain Mapping, Visual Knowledge, and Iconoclasm’’, in Science, T echnology & Human Values 27: 1 (Winter 2002): 56. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 78. 33 Beaulieu, op. cit., p. 61. 34 Elkins, op. cit., 1999, p. 11.
ROBERTO VEROLINI and FABIO PETRELLI
PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE NEW EVOLUTIONISTIC PARADIGMS
In the 150 years which separate us from Darwin, the evolutionistic paradigm has had a strong extension and improvement, becoming the conceptual frame of reference of modern biology and other subjects such as geology, paleontology, ecology, neurosciences and last but not least modern cosmology. The peculiarity of the evolutionistic idea is given by the evident indetermination1 of the evolutive processes – a character that comes out especially from a ‘‘coarse grained’’ analysis of such phenomena. This indeterminateness is due to the chaos and the intrinsic complexity of the ‘‘subtle’’,2 very detailed, chemical biological phenomena, which originate from subatomic ones where quantum indeterminateness3 is in force. To this basic indetermination is added, in higher levels, a further source of chaos due to the non-linear and stochastic nature of the biological processes as for example the genetic, ethologic and ecologic transmission modalities in living beings. The experimental data concerning the complex systems dynamics, known as ‘‘sensible to the initial conditions’’, all convey towards this universal quality of human nature, living and inorganic. In particular the bio-evolutive processes are related to such a wide number of factors that they show complex and univocal dynamics intrinsically unforeseeable a priori and irreproducible. This intrinsic indetermination leads to the theme of the feasible ‘‘teleology’’ of the evolutive dynamics, that is to the eventuality that evolutive processes let naturally develop can tend more or less to the realization of a well defined natural reality, a foreseeable a priori last goal. It must be said that the analysis of the available data and theoretic basis of the evolutive mechanism don’t permit any teleonomy, that is no finalism similar to the one invoked by the most part of philosophical analyses so far carried out, especially those connected with important theological ideas. These facts have concurred to increase the philosophical diatribe between the upholders of evolutionistic thought and those who, on the contrary, have vigorously opposed the evolutive paradigms in favour of cosmological visions where a firm natural finalism is asserted. A necessary reference must be made to the contrast faith/science developed decades 119 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 119–136. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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ago between the advocates of cosmological religious concepts (creationism) and those, usually from a laical background, who assert the natural evolution. The analysis of this last aspect is of great importance to us and to the philosophical themes that are the object of our interests. We are proposing a merely philosophic interpretation of the theme assuming an ‘‘agnostic’’ position. We will try to demonstrate how it is possible to arrive at new conclusions avoiding, first of all, to put the evolutionistic paradigm inside preexistent and inadequate metaphysical ideas; after that, new metaphysical models will be developed, urged on us by some important aspects of the evolutive paradigm. In fact we can conceive the evolutive processes inside a logic and a finality completely different from those sustained by the classic philosophical positions, particularly those which have fought against the establishment of evolutionistic thought. First of all we will avoid relying on the casuality of the evolutive process and its inability to sustain certain finalistic needs; it is a dangerous and unacceptable hypothesis compared to philosophical models already implicitly assumed. We in fact think it wiser and more rational to abandon ‘‘our’’ philosophical assumptions to test the existence of different interpretations where this finalistic thesis is compromised, re-seen or substituted by a completely different model, without abandoning all the ‘‘metaphysical frame’’ in which the same is usually inscribed and conceived. It should be noticed that such goals, in spite of being legitimate and correct from a philosophical point of view, meet resistance. This is easily explicable if we consider that certain preconceptions come from the habits of an inadequate philosophical tradition. Such attempts have only reaffirmed worn-out schemes and answers more and more incompatible with the interpretations proper to science, which results in a deeper discrepancy between the two different ideas. Let’s consider as an example the evolutionistic theory of knowledge (hence indicated by ‘‘ETK’’), derived directly from the evolutionistic paradigm. The ETK represents one of the most interesting theories about the origin and nature of man and his awareness. In these last years the ETK has corroborated many studies and researches by neurosciences that thanks to refined investigation techniques have taken us to an unprecedented level of knowledge about the functioning and qualities of the human brain, of its origin and its phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence.
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The ETK’s object is the origin and nature of the ontological, biological and physical being: the modern man, the Homo sapiens sapiens. Still it refers also, and above all, to the origin and nature of the philosophical agent’s rational/logical capabilities par excellence: the Self, the sentient subject, the ontological fundament of the res cogitans. From that theory some considerations emerge inherent to the theme of conscience and the ‘‘conflict about world existence’’, deeply interconnected subjects, proper to an ancient philosophical research still actual as shown by the in fieri skirmishes between the advocates of realism and idealism. Phenomenology also develops an analysis concerning this subject: it seems to be detached from the other currents of thought proposing, above all, an atypical approach based on a suspended judgement about world existence (epoche´). However, as shown by the studies of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology also tends to direct one, after a wide parabola, to the same ontological themes as shown by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Which new developments can derive from the ETK, as regards these philosophical currents? A first and most important ETK consequence is represented by the solution it provides to the a priori and the ‘‘transcendental idealism’’ of Kant.4 The analysis of these problems is not our aim but it represents an important basis to move our reasoning from. The ETK answers Kant’s problem intrinsic to our potential knowledge of the ‘‘noumenal’’ world, of the ‘‘world out-there’’ as regards the sentient Self and connected with the noumenal correspondence of ‘‘phenomenal’’ perceptions. The logical and ontogenetic definition of the Self by ETK involves the necessity of a strong correspondence between noumenal reality and phenomenal perception which are necessarily consistent one with the other. This conclusion implies a classification of the meaning of our perceptions different from what Kant postulated and from what has been considered by all the philosophical currents that followed him. To put it briefly, the ‘‘grades of freedom’’ (that is the possible ‘‘noncorrespondence’’ between two beings or realities) between the phenomenal reality perceived by us and the noumenal subjacent one must be necessarily very tiny. It is impossible to conceive the first as ontologically distinct and logically incoherent from the second unless we want to incur phenomena never seen before. Phenomenal reality has to express a considerable ‘‘clue’’ to the content of noumenal reality. This content must be understood as ‘‘probative’’ of the intrinsic ontological characteristics of
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the former. In other words whatever will be the ‘‘comprehensive’’ ontological reality of the noumenal’s sphere, it must express complex and deep connections with the phenomenal one. For example, our ‘‘phenomenal’’ perceptions – direct or indirect ones (mediated by scientifical instruments) – of the Sun (position, mass, temperature, etc.) give a phenomenal complex frame of reference that, thanks to this complexity, cannot be meaningfully different from the authentic intrinsic noumenal reality. Every important variation would imply the immediate realization of very evident and imposing phenomena, often fatal phenomena ... actually inexplicable and never seen before. It should in fact be explained how the phenomenal reality, as complex as it is, could emerge and exist without any causality or relation with the noumenal reality, a fact that is not seriously philosophically proposable without the introduction of redundant and self-proclaimed metaphysical conjecture. This conclusion doesn’t emerge from a speculative aspect but from the scientific evidence that all the cerebral sensory modules at the base of our phenomenal perceptions (origin and basis of the a priori representations) are in fact originated by intrinsic ontological characteristics of the noumenal reality. The characteristics which have emerged have been expressed and fixed in an ‘‘impersonal way’’, ‘‘not subjective’’ in the course of a ‘‘pre-conscious’’ evolutive process preceding the presence of the sentient subject itself: man, our Self. An important aspect proposed by the ETK in the discussion about the philosophical aspects of the being concerns the sentient being’s ‘‘ontological origin’’, a theme that past philosophy has always read on the basis of metaphysical assumptions, contrasting today with modern epistemology, as well as firmly confirmed in various contemporary philosophical considerations. Philosophical speculation normally considers the sentient being through his intellective characteristics, his perceptions, his ontological condition, assuming it as ‘‘pre-existing’’ or anyway not investigating his nature and ontogenesis but by so doing, any analysis implicit in his ontological, real, biological ‘‘genesis’’ is ignored, taking into account only the ‘‘ontogenesis’’, the ‘‘autopoiesis’’ of his philosophical requests, of his role as a philosophical agent. The EKT remedies this serious error directing modern scientific knowledge towards philosophical themes in order to connect the two analytic phases, the philosophical and the scientific naturalistic. From here comes out a new ‘‘operative and interpretative’’ framework where both the maker – the conscious Self – and the philosophical interpretation of the fact
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itself can be caught. For example, the study of the brain’s nature and origin, of its activities and intellectual potentialities, demonstrates how all this is a ‘‘direct and active’’ expression of an evolutive genesis carried out by the natural noumenal reality over a million years. As Konrad Lorenz demonstrated, such an organ is a real ‘‘cast’’ of the ‘‘external’’ reality, of its intrinsic and objective qualities that through the same perceptive modalities arrive in the end at our conscience and awareness.5 During the millennia, the evolutive process has led to a severe selection of the bio-evolutive structures that continuously emerged, rewarding the perceptive modalities (and the subsequent phenomenal compositions) intrinsically coherent with the noumenal reality with a bigger survival/reproduction level and cancelling all the perceptive modalities incoherent with such reality, through the physical elimination of the organisms which manifested them. From this incessant and repeated process emerges the significant epistemic overlapping of the phenomenological perception that we bring about with the authentic noumenal reality whatever it is. Obviously, this epistemic overlapping is not absolute and perfect as is clearly shown when considering, for example, Einstein’s relativity. The noumenal reality of gravitational and space-time status different from those of our planet, is basically incompatible with that which we perceive on the Earth’s surface. (N.B. a similar example is given by quantum mechanics which has shown us the logic and ontological oddity underway at an atomic phenomena level). In spite of everything, our epistemic overlapping is ‘‘evolutively adaptive’’, so ‘‘necessarily’’ and essentially efficacious, and gives us at a logical and perceptive level, objective ‘‘evolutive noumenal signs’’. Furthermore it constitutes an ‘‘extended epistemic overlapping’’ in the sense that being epistemologically present in the logic of modern scientific method, it historically results as a continuously explicative extension of the ‘‘last noumenal essence’’ precisely thanks to such cognitive means. To be sure, we can turn to the common philosophical themes from a new perspective from where it is possible to perceive an important ‘‘indicative’’ validity of the ‘‘noumenally connected’’ reality where we are placed and where we express our intellectual abilities: in other words our being ‘‘philosophers who philosophize’’. An important request for our discourse is the following: taken for granted that evolutive dynamics cannot be intended as expressions of the universal finalism concerning fixed cosmologic philosophic positions, shall we deny ‘‘any teleology’’ in the evolutive phenomena? Can we analyse it
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using new interpretative means? Why not formalize a new teleology revaluating, differently, the assumptions that we usually set in the teleological idea in itself ? Some authors, for example, have tried to see a basic teleology in the cosmological evolutive dynamics recurring to ideas such as an ‘‘Anthropic Principle’’, analysing the fundamental constants of nature etc. in order to find signs that could endorse teleologic concepts more adherent to the interpretative results of modern science.6 For example, the concept of ‘‘intelligent design’’ has been enhanced in face of the complexity and structure of living beings, or when considering the continuous altering of geometrical structural schemes, growing processes and spontaneous organization between the biological and inorganic world. According to us, these authors have only reformulated the same finalistic ideas, using new words, and a genuine analysis of the possible prospects of the evolutive paradigm as first conceived is lacking. It can suggest to us very simply a series of assumptions from which to extrapolate an alternative teleologic value.7 The aspects to cover are various and meaningful, and it is interesting to observe how they all converge in a univocal conceptual scene previously ignored. For example, we can examine the genomes’ peculiar architecture and functional complexity, the long DNA chains, carriers of the genetic information of any living species. These genomes present a structure and a functionality which is completely irrational and not optimized, instead of how a project, intended to develop products or efficacious functions, should be. Or we can also emphasise the recurrent presence of real ‘‘planning imperfections’’ and proper ‘‘faults’’ that thwart any attempt to see nature as a ‘‘creative instrument’’ in the context of a predetermined project fulfilled with competence and foresight. On the contrary, it is evident that the pedantic recurrence to the ‘‘trial and error’’ mechanism of ‘‘blind’’ evolutive logic, a character that completely explains the singular indeterminateness and contingency of the evolutive courses and forms which can be observed in nature. An undeniable and irreducible value exemplifying the logic set out by nature in opposition to our reductive and anthropomorphic teleological suppositions. Humiliating though our inability to comprehend and understand these phenomena may be, this contingency increases and efficaciously organises, though with logic and time unusual to our human reference, the evolutive progress of the living species along the so-called ‘‘fitness surfaces’’. The latter are real virtual mathematical ‘‘landscapes’’ with ‘‘ravines’’, ‘‘valleys’’,
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‘‘tablelands and mountains’’ which would represent the blind alleys, the links, the ways and the balances of the evolutive processes. They describe the structures and the functions of the feasible ‘‘building and functioning levels’’ of living forms’ organs and bodies as for example the sensorial apparatus in the anthropoids, the mammal’s ear, the chordate ‘‘sagittal’’ body’s structure or the plane morphology of Ediacara’s fauna etc. Through the ‘‘topology’’ of these landscapes we can follow the evolution that the morphologic phenotypic structures of living forms have undergone for millions of years: these would represent the status of major functional efficaciousness and structural complexity accessible to the evolutive dynamics. This imponderability, this deep indeterminateness is then expressed at meta-individual and interspecies level when defining the complex ecologic/biochemical equilibrium among the forms of life on the Earth – a phenomenon that we can imagine taking place in planetary systems similar to our solar one. The dynamic unity and the natural phenomena of the recurrent realization modalities are so understood up to the widest cosmological context and this gives an overall account of the ‘‘noumenal reality’’, expressed in our ‘‘extensive epistemic overlapping’’, completely alien to the traditional goals of teleologies. Now, refused every reference to any intentional planning towards the biological context where well-defined forms of life emerged and where it was impossible to predetermine single historical/evolutive facts, what could we conclude? Which contents could we turn to if we wanted to outline the features of the authentic teleology of nature? The answer could be an original inversion of perspective. Let’s try to define in a ‘‘complementary’’ way the same idea of teleology. The traditional teleologies turn, without relevant exceptions, to the realization of specific ontological realities of particular historical facts that, through their manifestation, would represent the last goal of the natural being. For an example of a typical teleologic finality, take the emergence of the human species on the face of the Earth after events such as the extinction that 65 million years ago allowed mammals to take the place of dinosaurs. Moreover we could mention the adaptive developments that led to Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens and so on. More specifically such facts and events would theologically connect the appearance and destiny of humanity to the creative plan ascribed to the God of the biblical tradition. In the cosmology and eschatology of this theological tradition, the appearance of the human species on the
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Earth, the events that mark the plot of the biblical narration, from the Genesis to the Gospels, would represent facts and historical events to be intended as phases and fundamental moments of the entire divine plan. It is obvious that these facts, these ontological contexts are not able to represent finalities accessible to a bio-evolutive one, so much so that in the attempt to relate the evolutive processes interpretation to these goals, it has been postulated, with no exception, that there is direct though improbable ‘‘guide and supervision’’ of the natural phenomena on the part of divinity. As already shown,8 these in itinere supervision interventions, necessarily circumscribed, can’t overcome the theoretical and interpretative difficulties raised by the ideas and theories of modern physics to be finally accepted in natural dynamics. The natural reality, as pervaded as it is by ‘‘non-linear’’ influences, by the becoming of intrinsically chaotic phenomena and dynamics ‘‘sensible to the initial conditions’’, can in no way be canalized and guided by isolated interventions with the efficaciousness implicitly attributed to them in those ideas. And apart from any other considerations such purposes are inadequate at an epistemological level. So how can we do this? We can overcome this empasse by changing our perspective. Instead of looking for more improbable methods to force evolutive processes into the ‘‘already known teleological framework’’, try to consider as the ‘‘consistent teleological framework’’ the evolutive dynamics themselves, taken as they are: indeterministic and historic, contingent, casual, ‘‘blind’’. Without any other strained interpretation, especially of a metaphysical nature. What changes can we expect? First of all a new teleological scene, absolutely legitimate, appears where all the previous epistemological difficulties are avoided. The evolutive dynamics are not forced or channelled inside artificial banks, in unnatural beds imposed by metaphysical interference. As a result, the natural evolutive processes, as shown by the evolutionary theories, can be interpreted without restriction or exception as having completely new contents. If we observe the development of the cerebral modules and neural anatomic definition during the learning process, the affective and cultural experiences of a subject, we can find that the histological configuration on which their cognitive and perceptive cognitions will be based, emerges very unexpectedly.
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We do not observe a new formation of the perceptive system that is previous to the experienced moment as the result of genetic instructions, coming from an inner constituting plan and very genetically defined. The sensorial and cerebral system that governs sight, for example, is anatomically structured as a synchronised and comprehensive expression (gestalt) of genetic instructions that work only at vast cellular population level, while the connections among the single neurons are determined by the visual and kinaesthetic experiences of the individual during their life. The ‘‘fine’’ definition of these modules is due to the subjective experiences of the individual since the genetic material is inadequate, as regards quantity, to give all the necessary information. Our perceptual modules and consequently our perceptions come from the interaction of cellular growing processes only generically addressed by genetic mechanisms and the profound ‘‘constitutive’’ action of the intrinsic physical, chemical, geometrical and spatial characteristics, in other words ontological, of the external context (the noumenal reality ‘‘out there’’) which will ‘‘then’’ represent the object of our own perceptions and intellectual speculations – moreover of philosophical scepticism as regards our existence and our comprehension and knowledge! These facts radically alter the philosophical context that brought Kant to his transcendental idealism, to his concepts of the a priori, and apart from the latter, they have demonstrated historically how difficult it is to proceed towards further philosophical solutions. What can these facts let us perceive? How can we use them to give a new and effective interpretation of the philosophical themes we are interested in? In past teleological ideas, the basic investigations have been of the formation and the determination of the apparatus which reiterates, in this way, the same teleological basis, an unaltered metaphysics where the natural reality was the result of a far-seeing and very detailed finalism. A powerful finalism that could express itself in spite of strong interminable chains of causal events. But nature suggests something different to us: a teleological structure where we can philosophically get richer, more complex and dignified contents. A reality where the ‘‘proper teleology’’ is constituted by the ‘‘free and absolutely a priori indeterminate’’ expression – particularly at a detailed, ‘‘fine-grained’’ level of natural realities and dynamics. This idea represents a teleological concept as legitimate as efficacious that is immediately deducible from the natural dynamics analysis. Nature shows realizations, phenomena and beings not coming out from a farseeing finalism where every natural object is generated and then given
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precise and determinate basic roles. To explain it better, not one evolutive cosmological process allowed spontaneously to develop can lead to a natural specific reality as the one indicated by the following sentence: ‘‘Formation of a rocky planet around a G2 star type where a conscious animal species emerges and is indicated as being human’’. This purely contingent scenario cannot be intended as the final and predetermined goal of any evolutive process left to itself. As Stephen J. Gould used to say, ‘‘rewinding’’ an evolutive process and then letting it ‘‘play’’ from the same point, we would never see again the same process, the same evolutive sequence, the same facts and living beings, even if we had cosmological times. Against this possibility, against such ideas, stands (ignoring evolutive dynamics) a huge quantity of phenomena (from the queen of the hard science, the physics), that go from the universally accredited non-linear dynamic roles of natural phenomena to quantum indeterminateness. Last but not least, ‘‘Mach’s principle’’ according to which any being or physical process, though tiny, has spacetime in an absolutely unique position and definition in the universe; every event must be physically intended as absolutely unrepeatable and it will never be physically replicated in the universe, owing to the uniqueness, and irreproducibility of the infinite factors from which those beings and phenomena originated. Given this disconcerting uniqueness but above all the uncertainty and contingency of natural dynamics, it is impossible to exclude the common teleological ideas – as they regard, without any exception, a metaphysical location that goes deeply into theological concepts which become of great significance in this context. This is a very important connection which cannot be ignored even in this eminently philosophical analysis. The teleological paradigm that philosophical attention and speculation have been concentrated on for centuries, postulates an uncreated being (God) who, by means of a powerful divine finalism, creates ex nihilo a created being (the natural reality). Through this act, the natural historic reality is originated, where facts and dynamics typical of the eschatological and soteriological ambit will take place. References to Christian/Catholic theology, from which a rich osmosis of content has been derived in western philosophy, are obvious. This archetype lay on one side a first cause that expresses an ‘‘imperative’’ will in a ‘‘passive’’ created being which should manifest in his intrinsic characters ‘‘the imprint’’ of the original intention. This is the archetype to which all the attempts to lead against the evolutionary conceptions into teleological interpretations are referred. But this is only one arche-
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type. A ‘‘particular’’ and ‘‘contingent’’ archetype is not at all exhaustive of the essence, of the formal and logic canon of such conceptions, nor the complete scheme of the probable alternative notions. The question is the following: ‘‘But can this archetype support what comes out from the evolutionistic paradigm, its essence?’’ The answer is ‘‘No’’. Only a different model could, where a very weak finalism should be taken into account, where the ‘‘created’’ reality is not the scene where eschatological and soteriological dynamics take place, but where the reality is ‘‘allowed to become free from any superior supervision and interference, according to its own auto-organization emerging capacities’’. A scene where the uncreated being actively expresses a remission of total authority, shrinks from any finalistic imposition on a reality that is intrinsically capable of originating ‘‘autonomously and freely, absolutely not preordained’’, complex structures and phenomena which only statistically guarantees the possibility of the emergence of sentient and complex beings, whatever their location, structure, ethologic context, anatomic peculiarity etc. Paraphrasing Einstein we could say: ‘‘Yes, God plays dice ... and expects to win without cheating’’. No supervision is intended, no boundaries, no interference in the determination of the bioevolutive scenarios, no further intrusion, no subtle determinism. An effective nature can ‘‘stand alone’’, its peculiarities do not come from far-seeing and power-fulfilled finalism, but from the continuous manifesting of the self-emergence of the strong characteristics of natural reality. It is the free play of the physical and chemical laws, particularly the integration of a series of causal factors spread at any level, from the sub microscopic to the overall cosmological one, that concurs to the ‘‘sufficient’’ final determination of the various ‘‘realizations’’. A teleological indeterministic account is outlined where the emergence of singular realizations is due to an ‘‘autonomous creative determination’’ not ‘‘imperative’’ but ‘‘democratic’’. A process where every being is at the same time causal factor and emergent reality through complex natural transformations. Not a character, nor a single event is foreseeable and predeterminate before such dynamics. Only generic directions of an overall development can be preventively traced in this idea.9 The fundamental aspect of this new interpretation is that this indeterminateness has not to be seen as an ‘‘epistemic’’ aspect, connected to the knowledge of intelligent forms of life as man, but as a natural reality’s ‘‘intrinsic’’ trait so ‘‘not epistemic’’.
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In other words, this new idea presents a vague finalism, only statistically perceivable, since the objects and dynamics of a certain space-time context are always connected to the manifestation of many different factors, endogenous and exogenous to that context, so full of a deep unpredictability and contingency. The analogy with the example of tissue formation in the nervous system should be noticed! The second important aspect that comes out from a different analysis of evolutionary dynamics is the absence of the absolute ‘‘logical-ontological break’’, particularly in the genesis of the natural reality where we are located, to which anyway we apply at a cognitive level, logic aspects connected to the nature of our language, to our semantic dispositions. Our intrinsic and logical perceptive capacities allow us to distinguish beings and phenomena, to bring about an essential semantic classification when composing and interpreting logically the cognitive and perceptive experiences: for example when we distinguish an inanimate object from a living organism, a bird from a man. As the ETK shows such cognitive ability expresses an intrinsic categorization and classification of natural reality, not a mere speculative fact: it represents an irreplaceable instrument of our physical existence, of our experiences, which is the basis for building our rationality and our capability to philosophize. The point is that if we applied this ‘‘sound and objective’’ capacity to discriminate to the realisation of the evolutionary processes, we would immediately face evident contradictions. This happens because in an evolutionary ambit these ‘‘discrete’’ categorizations are completely inapplicable. So our ‘‘intuitive’’ recourse to such logical cognitive perspectives leads immediately to serious interpretative mistakes: this is what has happened as regards the accurate evaluation of the evolutionistic paradigm. For example, modern biology carries out a detailed classification of the current forms of documented fossils. Examining the process on a chronological and evolutionary basis we observe that any taxonomic classification softens in a continuum, a never ending becoming where we witness an uninterrupted as well as imperceptible and widely scientifically documented transformation of the various forms. Every taxonomic classification represents a ‘‘snapshot’’ of a continuously becoming process where the evident and undeniable simultaneously perceived divisions, at a synchronous level, irreparably dissolve. It is obvious that to maintain the usual logical interpretative categorizations in front of this reality creates paradoxes such as the one referred to by Daniel C. Dennett about the
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mammals existence or better non-existence (the paradox is valid for any form of life):10 1) Every mammal has had a mother mammal.11 2) If mammals had really existed, there would have been a finite number. 3) But if only a mammal had existed, then according to 1) there would have been an infinite number of mammals, this contrasts 2): so not a single mammal can have existed. It is a contradiction in terms. The evolutionary phenomena present a total lack of ‘‘break’’: here it is an important aspect which neatly distinguishes the evolutionistic paradigm from the others, in particular the fixist one, the implicit foundation of various philosophical currents. Now compared to such alterity of the evolutionistic paradigm the fixist conceptions are immediately understood only as historical, contingent and anachronistic expressions of that anthropomorphic distortion always present in human categorizations and conceptualizations, often an obstacle to the correct interpretation of reality. So the absence of absolute and clear categories together with the lack of any imperative–finalistic dynamic, characterize the evolutionistic paradigm. As we want to avoid every possible interpretative distortion, we will assume such characterstics as the basis of the evolutionary ‘‘distinct logic’’ – adjusting then the metaphysical frame in which such a paradigm is attributed to ‘‘this value’’. Let us consider the aspects which arise from this proposal in a cosmological, anthropological and philosophical ambit, to mention, in the end, some ideas of a theological type. This conception brings about without any need of revision or metaphysical additions the indeterministic value of the evolutionistic paradigm, and exalts it through a deep analysis of the evolutionary modalities we find at cosmological and biological level. At every analysis level it is verifiable how such a paradigm continuously increases a logical interpretation of nature where the indeterminateness and the prodigious capacity of spontaneous emergence of highly-complex structures weave an extraordinarily richer natural scheme. The universe’s physical and chemical evolution shows the development of more and more complex and regular structures (galaxies, stars systems ...) starting from a less rich and variegated former reality due to the ‘‘becoming’’ of only basic and physical and chemical phenomena. Nowadays, for example, the study of the processes that must have taken place soon after the Big Bang, is done using what has been developed in the study ambit of the microscopic world. So we are aware of
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our prodigious capacity of rebuilding the whole universe’s history down to infinitesimal fractions of a second after the Big Bang (in the order of 10−40 sec.), appealing to the most sophisticated sub microscopic world centred physical theories (quantum mechanics).12 The extraordinary fact is that the natural developing of the physical chemical phenomena, though not ‘‘addressed’’ to any specific realization, can ‘‘spontaneously’’ originate states of matter progressively more regular and differentiated as ‘‘self-organization intrinsic capacity’’. Another example is given by the study of the dissipative structures.13 In these physical systems, in contrast with what the second principle of Thermodynamic implies, peculiar thermodynamic states lead to the emergence of regular and complex structures starting from former disordered and chaotic ones. We are aware of a sort of spontaneous ‘‘bootstrap’’ of complex and orderly structures from a chaotic status: a ‘‘miraculous absurdity’’ for a quantity of previously metaphysical notions, but completely natural! This silent and spontaneous, almost inevitable, climbing of nature towards more regular structures, or negative entropy, re-echoes in the kinetics with which the multiform star structures originated, starting from interstellar clouds, homogeneous in their chemical composition (mostly H and He). From these structures the forming of all the atomic configurations of the table of elements is observed. In the million years soon after the Big Bang, the chemistry of the universe was extremely simple if compared to the present one: at the beginning of the formation of the stars there were only few elements, at a low atomic number, of the first two periods of Mendeleev’s system. Only after the thermonuclear reactions in the stars and the explosions of the Supernovas, all the other elements of the periodic table were formed and the creation of life was due to them. All these processes are kept finely in balance, on the one hand by the most surprising characteristics of the quantum world – to notice for example the ‘‘tunnel effect’’ in the ‘‘proton proton’’14 economy of the reaction (p-p) that happens in the nucleus or the Beryllium–Carbon ‘‘resonance’’15 – on the other by equally crucial physical conditions. The anthropological–philosophical implications of this new interpretation are particularly interesting. The considerations regarding these two ambits are in fact strictly connected, especially in the kind of approach such as the ETK, that perfectly sums up the singular contents we are pointing to here. We have already commented on the ETK perspective as regards the sentient being, the ‘‘self ’’ and the debate on the world’s existence. What we now point
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out is that classifying the sentient being as a gestalt expression, as a cast of equipollent factors combination, coming both from the inner genetic fraction and from external reality – latu sensu – the idea of our ‘‘self ’’ emerges completely differently from the one implicit in different philosophical formulations, both realistic and idealistic. According to them the conscious being archetype is still ‘‘fixist’’; and the ontological scheme of the cognitive expressions and characters suffers from the applicative limits of Aristotelian logic. A logic that is undoubtedly valid when analysing single experiences and perceptive facts or ontological aspects inherent to self-perception, but inadequate with its absolute categories and caesuras when directed to the comprehension of the origin, nature and ontological characteristics of the sentient being, the ‘‘Self ’’. Unless these philosophies take into account the ontological cognitive nature of man, that is his ‘‘ontopoiesis’’, they will never be able to express its contents in some way coherent with modern scientific ideas. The comprehensive account is characterized by the following points: 1) The man, the conscious being, is understood as a holistic expression of natural phenomena intrinsically indeterministic, completely alien to any realization of finalistic purposes – particularly the ones centred on his biological emergence. 2) Perceptions, the neurocerebral supply and consequently the cognitive and sensorial experiences, constitute a cognitive perceptive basis – that brings us back to the Kantian a-priori – phylogenetically formed as an expression of the intrinsic characteristics of the noumenal reality. 3) This cognitive perceptive basis expresses an ‘‘evolutively efficacious ontological correspondence’’ between the ‘‘phenomenological’’ sphere and an extensive portion of the ‘‘noumenal’’ reality – so the latter is unknowable on the whole. 4) The evolutive dynamics express an explicit ‘‘anti-teleology’’ in the sense that the natural evolutive processes show an absence of specific teleologies. It is possible only to propose an ‘‘indeterministic’’ teleology, of general and probabilistic value, completely extraneous to any finalism tending to the emergence of the specific natural realities. 5) The evolutive dynamics allow the emergence of complex and regular beings and phenomena only as a consequence of the spontaneous fulfilment of the natural being’s ‘‘free self-organization and self-determination’’. An intrinsic natural manifestation, ‘‘free and spontaneous’’, in all alien to interventions and events of an ‘‘imperative supervision’’ – an important aspect to consider above all where supernatural
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entities are contemplated (theologically). Furthermore, in this manifestation a sort of ‘‘democratic nature’’ can be seen in the causal action of various causal factors, all equally significant in the last definition of single beings, thanks to the diffusion in the natural ambit of nonlinear dynamics, phenomena of emergent complexity and exponential dependence on the starting conditions. 6) The ontogenesis of the conscious being is conceived of in a framework extraneous to absolute distinctions imputable to the typical categories of Aristotelian logic: the genesis of the Self, of the conscious Self, is intended in a continuum, in an evolutive ontological emergence process that does not provide for breaks. These points define the foundation of a new ‘‘evolutionistic’’ metaphysic, coherent with the intrinsic characteristic of the evolutionistic paradigm, that we can oppose to the usual metaphysics which looks in vain for the composition of an idea of natural reality through fixist–finalistic oriented philosophies. The total alterity of this position as to such philosophies and particularly to their teleological formulations, is clearly deducible also from the great difference of the ontological theistic profile claimed by our proposal. According to us, the contrasts and misinterpretations that have conditioned the development of a correct philosophical interpretation of the evolutive concept, come from the erroneous evaluation of these peculiar characters of the evolutive paradigm. From the present analysis, we can derive applications that strongly agree with the classification between ‘‘religions’’ and ‘‘theo-etho-tomies’’ debated at another time,16 where a metaphysical profile of a non-moral divinity17 was formulated, not linked to a fixist finalistic teleology, completely exploitable in the interpretative framework here proposed. We can mediate a philosophical theological formulation that agrees with this theoretical account of themes such as the emergence of consciousness, the authentic nature of our personal and intellectual experiences, expressed through contents that are coherent with modern scientific facts. An osmosis that, with new content and modalities, could go beyond any dualistic contrast between science and faith. A framework capable of exceeding the nature/culture, intellect/body antithesis at this point confuted by modern neuroscience as well as implicitly reasserted by a greater part of present philosophical thought.18 To conclude, these new ‘‘natural’’ archetypes of conscious being, of humanity, find expression in the ‘‘genesis’’ of a new, alternative, evolutive-
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shaped philosophical idea, however ‘‘also’’ open to other similarly new and interesting theological/teleological applications. The reversal of a trend and producing a new trend in which the foundations of evolutive theory and modern scientific evidence are subsumed completely intact to make a synthesis of new, original philosophical models. University of Camerino Italy
NOTES 1 Terms like ‘‘indeterministic’’, ‘‘indeterminateness’’ etc. refer to causal phenomena where there is no univocity in the events sequences E E E E . In them the knowledge of the 1 2 3 n E event does not allow us to go back univocally (or computationally) to a specific causal K event E . Besides, such events are understood in comprehensive contexts whose ‘‘subtle’’ (k-z) characters do not come from total original determination, but constantly emerge from physical situations not synchronically determined – especially because of quantum and relativistic phenomena. 2 Verolini Roberto, ‘‘Scenari teleonomici nei paradigmi scientifici moderni,’’ in Nuova civilta` delle macchine, XV, n° 1. 4 (57–60) (January/December 1997), (ed. RAI-ERI, Rome 1998), pp. 297–319. 3 Roberto Verolini and Fabio Petrelli ‘‘A new creative paradigm: chaos and freedom’’, in Analecta Husserliana LIX, Book 1 (Ed. A-T. Tymieniecka: Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1999), pp. 83–114. 4 Von Ditfurt Hoiman, Non siamo solo di questo mondo (Ed. Longanesi & C., Milan, September 1982), pp. 137–171. 5 Konrad Lorenz, L ’altra faccia dello specchio. Per una storia naturale della conoscenza (Ed. Adelphi, Milan, 1974), pp. 196–280. 6 John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, Il principio Antropico (Ed. Adelphi, Milan, May 2002), pp. 131–274. 7 We are perfectly aware that the research and formulation of a probable teleologic value can be intended as an expression of an intentionality to be understood as anthropomorphism more or less weak. Undoubtedly man is inclined to such behaviour. The philosophical analysis of the evolutionistic paradigm’s distinctive interpretative perspectives, implies such a risk that we are aware of, but at the same time, we are determined to maintain it, in order to show the foundations of an alternative idea. 8 Verolini and Petrelli, op. cit., pp. 102–104. 9 Only at this level can the hypothesis of ‘‘intelligent design’’ be inferred. This attribution should be understood only at a level of the general structural definition of reality, in particular referring to universes in evolution that can make possible the emergence of specific levels of complexity and self-organization. The eventual attribution of a ‘‘creative’’ function is limited at a weak, probabilistic level. 10 Daniel C. Dennett, L ’evoluzione della liberta` (Ed. Raffaello Cortina, Milan, 2004), p. 169. 11 This point comes from the definition of the fundamental assumption about natural species.
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12 Also this value is significant for the freedom grades epistemological evaluation between the phenomenological and the noumenal sphere, which we mentioned before when referring to the ETK. 13 I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, L a nuova alleanza. Metamorfosi della scienza (Ed. Einaudi Turin, 1993). 14 The ‘‘tunnel effect’’ represents an application of Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. The dualistic nature of subatomic particles is described by a function which determines the probability that a particle is in a space region of a given width. When the distance between two protons becomes less than that width, both have the possibility of ‘‘overlapping’’ in the same area. As if the protons pierced the barrier which separate them, by means of a tunnel – hence the process name – becoming an atomic nucleus formed by a proton and a neuron. This disconcerting fact, experimentally verified, allows the reaction p-p also at temperatures present in the Sun’s nucleus of about 1.5×107K, inadequate for the reaction according to classical physics. 15 The resonance phenomenon is of the utmost importance in the chemical evolution of the universe: only thanks to it can a sufficient quantity of Carbon be formed in the appropriate mass of stars. Carbon is a basic element of life, starting from the fusion of a beryllium atom with helium (He). 16 Verolini Roberto and Fabio Petrelli, Metamorfosi della Ragione. Esegesi evoluzionistico psicosociologica di Gn 1,3 ed implicazioni bioetiche. Hygiene and Health-Environmental Sciences Department (University of Camerino: Interdepartmental Audiovisual and Press Center, September 1994), pp. 55–84. 17 Roberto Verolini, Il Dio L aico: caos e liberta` (Ed. Armando Armando, Rome, 1999), pp. 51–84. www.diolaico.it. 18 Roberto Verolini, Fabio Petrelli and Larissa Venturi, ‘‘Psychopathologies and cultural factors: some neoevolutionist perspectives’’, in Analecta Husserliana LXXIX (Ed. A-T. Tymieniecka: Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 2004), pp. 799–807.
IGNACY S. FIUT
PHENOMENOLOGY AND ECOPHILOSOPHY
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
The subject of this chapter is the search for a common realm for philosophical studies: a realm which stems from man’s direct experience of the world and which arises on the borderline of phenomenological and ecophilosophical studies. The results of analyses conducted so far, both phenomenological and ecophilosophical, which focus on man’s approach to the world, provide a basis for the following thesis: the realm in question is the space of man’s direct and pre-reflective experience, which comes into being in acts of his transcending towards the world. It is grounded on the intentional property of consciousness, which enables one to have a direct insight into the contents of experience. This insight, followed by noesis, or research proceeding, which aims at discovering the primary sense of objects given in that experience, seem to be the very thing the new realm of philosophy, inspired by ecological studies and a sense of crisis in man–nature relations, needs. INTENTIONALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS A COMMON GROUND FOR PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND ECOPHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
Phenomenological philosophy, created by Edmund Husserl, underwent several stages of development, whose only unchangeable element was the research method of man’s external reality. The outcomes of Husserl’s work are already historical and the present ideas connected with phenomenological studies have different aims from the ones pursued by the author of Cartesian Meditations. The followers and supporters of this tradition have introduced considerable changes into it, both in respect to the way the goals of phenomenology are understood and the way the subject of phenomenological investigations is perceived. It does not mean, however, that the present studies in this fold do not aim at the search for the essence of phenomenal representations of the world in man’s mind; the world, which appears directly in the scope of man’s visual perception. Such an attitude has now become extremely desirable or even necessary, since rapid changes that are taking place in the world undergoing globalisation call for constant attention to this world and for insight into its forms and modes of existence. We witness the rise of subsequent genera137 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 137–150. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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tions of new modes of existence, which are the products of man’s creative efforts. They are often inadequately understood and many of their characteristics do not fit into traditional categories, which used to be helpful in perceiving and valuing them. The world is becoming a continuous process of change. Hence the continuous need for searching for and attaching to it certain sets of meaning, which give sense to individual objects, entirities of objects, and man’s activities. The main problem the followers of phenomenological studies objected to were definitely Husserl’s categories of the ‘‘transcendental I’’ and ‘‘pure consciousness’’, which express his idealistic orientation. Among the ones who have pointed to it are Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roman Ingarden and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The main line of criticism was levelled at Husserl’s categories of philosophical reflection on the world, which had been mentioned earlier. The followers of the phenomenological tradition regarded these categories as a form of idealistic solution and location of the problems of sense and essence, which decisively limited the sensegenerating and creative possibilities of human subjects, thus limiting responsible anticipation of man’s future in the world. Husserl’s ideas and constructs were even more radically approached by neophenomenologically oriented philosophers, generally referred to as postmodernists and deconstructionists, for example Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard or Niklas Luhmann.1 They claimed that Husserl’s system contains elements of the logo-phonocentric system, with no foundation totalising the sphere of essence, which originated in Western culture and civilisation. Despite being criticised, Husserl’s phenomenological research has also revealed the mechanisms that lead to the totalisation of the Western knowledge. This knowledge in the shape of technology rules man and the world – a fact which was pointed to by Martin Heidegger. Wolfgang Welsch says that In his Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften Husserl shows how a completely new idea arises in Descartes’ philosophy: ‘the endless totality of being in general is a rational totality in itself and can be utterly controlled correlatively by means of universal knowledge.’ Husserl has bridged the gap between that new impulse and the present time by presenting the modern crisis as a consequence of the contemporary conception of science. Heidegger, in turn, explained that modern technology is not a side-effect of the breakdown of knowledge, but is internally related to it, that – in short – technology is the very essence of knowledge.2
Similar conclusions concerning the connection between science and technology have also been reached by philosophers of a differerent background, e.g. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their Dialectic
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of Enlightenment. Just like Husserl and Heidegger, they held that as Cartesian thought emerged and spread, the rule of the basic type of Western rationality began: the rule of instrumental reason. It justifies the mechanistic approach to the material world, the contemporary times and their crises resulting from this kind of rule applied on a global scale.3 The sources of the ecological crisis have also been viewed in the light of the domination of instrumental reason and technology in man’s way of thinking and actions. These factors are moreover accompanied by the socio-economic and psychosocial consequences of life in industrial and consumerist society, which augment the negative outcomes of implementing technology-dominated rationality on a global scale.4 Alongside the science and technology expansion guided by instrumental reason one can observe the emergence of new philosophical conceptions characterised by a critical attitude towards the present state of the world. They gave rise to a specific philosophical reflection, whose starting point was an attempt to change man’s ethical and moral attitude towards nature. Gradually, it has managed to come up with an alternative style in philosophical thinking, which is intentionally focused on man’s place in his natural living environment. This type of systematic philosophical reflection is known as ecophilosophy. Nowadays it has two basic forms: the so-called ‘‘shallow ecology’’ and ‘‘deep ecology’’. ‘‘Shallow ecology’’ is a set of loose ideologies aiming at the struggle for man’s harmonious coexistence with nature, which lacks more profound epistemological and metaphysical-ontological reflection. ‘‘Deep ecology’’, in turn, usually associated with Arne Neass as its creator, aims at developing an autonomous and systematic philosophical thinking of an ecophilosophical nature, which would have its own epistemology, ontology, axiology, metaphysics and even theology, providing a substantial philosophical and axiological basis.5 Its purpose is to provide men with essential premises for philosophical and existential reflection, or arguments in favour of the way of thinking, evaluating, and acting that foster man’s dynamic and harmonious coexistence with other men, other species, both animals and plants, in their natural environments, which, together with man’s environment, constitute a biosphere, or the natural world of nature. According to this thought, such a world is man’s existential basis, the basis of his world, which is bound to coexist side by side with the worlds of other living creatures. Many researchers dealing with the man–nature relation argue that the divergence between those two parts of the fundamental existential relation is a result of Descartes’ dualism, which caused separation of man’s two
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parallel existential components: res cogitans and res extensa. This, in turn, resulted in the rise of the so-called question of ‘‘the Cartesian bridge’’, which separated man’s physical from his rational and spiritual domains. In practical terms, this dichotomy led in the sphere of science into a mechanistic and reductionist view of nature and then into the separation of man’s rational sphere from his will and emotions.6 The negative consequences of Cartesian dualism were pointed out earlier by such philosophers as Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, while Franz Brentano’s7 psychological research and the idea of intentionality proposed by him has decisively diminished the separating influence of ‘‘the Cartesian bridge’’, which reached its apogee in classical German philosophy. The negative consequences of Cartesian dualism led – like in the case of Georg W. F. Hegel’s idealism – to the absorption of nature by Absolute Reason. Brentano’s psychological research had a key influence on the development of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, to which his Cartesian Meditations testify. In this work Husserl adopts Brentano’s conception of intentionality, which enriches the phenomenological method of analysis of phenomena given in natural experience, obtained by the human subject in his direct, natural contact with the world, in coexistence with Other man, that is in acts of transcending towards their common existential basis, which seems to be the world of nature – the physical world,8 ‘‘Philosophy’’ – according to Husserl calls for explanations, which are based on ultimate and the most concrete vital necessities; these, in turn, are the ones that comply with the truth that the whole objective world is inherently rooted in transcendental subjectivity; the ones that necessarily explain the world as constituted sense. Only they allow one to see [still other] the most vital and ultimate questions, which can be posed at the world even if it has already been interpreted in this way.9
The research on intentionality carried out by Brentano, Husserl and Roman Ingarden inspired the subsequent generations of thinkers working in the fields of both natural sciences and the studies of consciousness and spirit to diminish the role of ‘‘the Cartesian bridge’’ separating nature and consciousness, which used to dominate philosophical reflection. Alongside this shift scholars and philosophers launched research into such a naturalised model of mind and consciousness that would be interwoven with its natural background. The ideas of evolutionism, formulated by Charles Darwin, became helpful in this search, since they allowed scholars to analyse psychological phenomena as interwoven with physical processes and having their existential basis in them.10 It did not mean, however, that mind and consciousness had to be reduced to body’s physiological processes; researches and analyses of this kind do not aim
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at depriving them of either their existential specificity or relative existential autonomy. On the contrary, they let us grasp in a more profound way the sense of the contents of consciousness, the sense of human and animal instinctive behaviours, as well as close connections existing between intentional and mental states in human minds with emotional states of men, who are regarded as subjects capable of cognition and action. By observing the emotional states of other living creatures, men can also presume their mental senses and intentions resulting from them and even effectively cooperate with these creatures in nature, as evidenced by the domestication of plants and animals. This creates a chance of a better understanding of axiological preferences of values among men and other living creatures. It allows one to understand their choices of pursued directions and aims in their thinking and actions, corresponding to certain intentions. These intentions are expressions, however simplified and limited, of the basic characteristic of transcending consciousness, that is its intentionality. Ecophilosophy, on the other hand, aims at altering the axiological relations between man and nature that are nowadays binding and pervasive. Even on the common-sense level these relations are determined by a mental doctrine that almost automatically attributes positive values to instrumental reason and technology, which, in practical terms, endorses an unlimited consumerist lifestyle. People of this orientation are actually blind to the values rooted in nature; and nature itself seems to them to be merely an inexhaustible source of various consumer goods. Such an attitude results in unrestrained degradation and commercialisation of nature and consequently in the degradation of man’s existential basis – his human condition, which, after all, is determined by nature. In the field of ecophilosophy this creates a need for basic research into the intentional nature of consciousness, that is into how intentional processes come into being and how they operate. Intentional processes impart dynamism to the transcending towards the world structures of consciousness. These structures provide a framework, within which man perceives in nature value-generating points, recognises them and constitutes as valuable. Thus in a direct experience based on primal modes of transcending towards nature man can discover values, or even whole systems of values rooted in himself. Then he can recognise, constitute, and even create them anew. I think that at this point the realms of phenomenological and ecophilosophical studies converge, the key issue of the latter being the intentional nature of consciousness, which is a source of its axiological contents and which provides the foundation for all axiological changes in human mentality.
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In acts of direct experience of the world intentionality itself enables man to discover, recognise, and constitute values as outcomes of earlier visualisation of their direct existential points. Within the limits of intentionality values can guide man’s actions on the existential level, that is in the sphere of both individual and collective choices of sensible modes of human existence. The evolutionistic orientation in ecophilosophical thought also allows one to view human intentionality as a form of evolutionary development of other, pre-human forms of intentionality, which can be observed and experienced in other living creatures, both in the animal and vegetable kingdom.11 That would imply that living creatures are not only to some extent intentionally directed towards values, but that they themselves, like men, can be depositories of values and subjects of axiological choices. We can even to some degree experience, recognise, and constitute the world according to the norms arising from their natural preferences. The situation becomes the most critical when human axiosphere poses a mortal danger to the ‘‘values’’, or rather ‘‘valencies’’ which are preferred by other living creatures and which in the course of historical development and adaptation have been evolutionarily incorporated in a harmonious way into ecosystems and biosphere – a common ground for men and other living creatures. After all, however, it is only men that can be aware of their choices and the values guiding these choices and therefore it is men that are actually responsible for what happens to nature – their existential basis. That is why ecophilosophical studies and reflection place a great emphasis on man’s rule as ‘‘the shepherd of being’’ of all beings in the real order of existence, which in phenomenological existential analytics was pointed to by Martin Heidegger and which was further developed by Hans Jonas in his ethics of responsibility for the future. Like Heidegger, Jonas metaphysically places the duty of man’s ethical responsibility for the future in the horizon of ‘‘the being of beings’’ – das Sein des Seiende, which transcends our present time and their time (Zeit) in the process of the timing of being (Sein). Responsibility viewed in this way is not connected with any particular being, but with the being of all possible beings in general. Man is endowed with being in the primal and fundamental experience of the world as a whole in the intentional layer of his consciousness when he transcends towards it. This transcendence and the experience of being are the sources of duty, which is a concept deeply rooted in existential experience and which Jonas, following the example of Heidegger, calls ‘‘the care for being.’’12 The care for being is nothing other than a sense of ‘‘duty’’ which entrusts man with responsibility for the future. This responsibility is
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expressed in the awareness that there must be someone in the past who would bear the burden of responsibility for the future, or take care of ‘‘the being of beings’’ in order to ensure the continuity of human species on earth; someone who would safeguard something which originally grants the right of existence, i.e. is to every man, as well as other living creatures and their common living environment. Thus the first principle of this ecophenomenological conception is the claim that mankind should not be allowed to question the imperative which obliges man to maintain human existence in general. ‘‘The imperative which says that mankind must exist is – as long as only man is concerned – the first imperative.’’13 It is neither a categorical nor a hypothetical imperative in Kantian terms: it is founded on a new understanding of metaphysics, which does not sanction the impossibility of moving from being to duty, but which assumes the absolute priority of being over nothingness. According to Jonas, being is a value in itself, because it grants the right of existence to all beings, whereas it cannot be predicated that nothingness grants a similar value to annihilation processes.14 This situation can only be true if the concept of value is rooted in objects and not merely in thoughts. On the ground of ecophilosophy it must be assumed, then, that the existence of values is objective in character, because such an assumption allows one to derive duty from being, whose horizon can be experienced in primal acts of intentional transcending of consciousness towards the world.15 SPECIFICITY OF THE RATIONALITY OF PROECOLOGICAL AWARENESS
Being a separate entity in the world of competing discourses, the rationality of ecological awareness has its specific properties, which stem from the notions accepted in its field, their hierarchies, and systems of values that accompany them. The aim of these values is to form in men certain attitudes and behaviours towards living creatures and their natural living environments, generally referred to as biotic and abiotic nature respectively. This awareness presumes implicite that, despite their numerous declarations, the patterns of conduct widespread among people threaten the proper existence of the natural living environment and consequently lead to its degradation. What is at stake here is not only the present existence of men and their coexistence with other living creatures, but also their existence in both the past and the future. Another presumption providing foundations for the development and dissemination of proecological awareness are the assertions of its authors
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and activists. They claim that nature has been recently damaged by man’s anthropocentric and consumerist activity to such a great degree that its autonomous being is seriously endangered, which means that the existence of man and other living creatures is also at stake. This situation is all the more critical for the self-regulation mechanisms operating in nature having been badly affected. Nature cannot restore itself to the state of harmonious existence, which would ensure natural being to all living creatures, including man. According to many researchers and enthusiasts of proecological ideas the cause of the degeneration process in the man–nature relation lies in the structure and functioning of the traditional awareness and in systems of hierarchies and values favoured within this awareness. This necessitates a prompt and radical influence on the contents of man’s traditional awareness, altering it in such a way that would result in friendly coexistence with man’s natural environment and nature as a whole, understood in a global sense. In short, on the moral ground not only members of his own species, but many living creatures must become man’s neighhbours. Biotic and abiotic nature itself ought to be regarded by men as a depository of all values and not only utilitarian and vital ones. Nature should be understood and experienced as a sanctuary of higher forms of values, e.g. ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, and even ‘‘systemic values’’, including sacral values. It cannot be treated by men merely instrumentally, like an object, but instead it should become a creative partner in the development of man’s generic essence which stems from a long and evolutionary coexistence with and within nature. Thus the primary concern of proecological awareness are actions directed towards constructing a new ecological order, which would sanction a new ecological equity. This equity would be expressed by a new social contract between man and nature, which would grant rights to our ‘‘little brethren’’ and the interests of their species. To use Jean J. Rousseau’s terms, the matter in question is a new renaturalisation of man, although it is obvious that there are no more areas of nature unaffected by man’s activity which makes his return to ‘‘the primal wildness’’ utterly impossible.16 The adopted theses, which determine man’s friendly and responsible relations with nature on a global scale at the beginning of the 21st century, find expression in the so-called balanced development project – planning development on both local and global scale. The development would also constitute a political project, which would provide a programme of activities for local communities, states, and the international community.
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Environmental awareness and its intentional inclinations expressed in the ecological outlook can be characterised by the following features, which indicate the problems and objects of the intentionality of this outlook and which can accurately guide the actions of a person adopting it: – ecocentrism or biocentrism, which see man as an integral part of nature, distinguished, if at all, only because of his intellectual and moral capacities. Other living creatures and whole ecosystems, like men, have their intrinsic values and values of a systemic nature, as well as the right to live, hence one is obliged to adopt a respectful and sympathetic attitude towards them and respect their living preferences in their natural environments: – treating nature as a mother, which should be expressed in adopting an attitude of co-operation and altruistically oriented symbiosis, which prefers friendship and reverence over inherently egoistic strife and competition; – holistic cosmology, accepting a thesis that the Universe is more than the sum total of its elements and that together with the Earth it constitutes an evolutionarily developing life, which originated from evolving matter and which is an organic whole open to the still unknown future; – the awareness of the need to foster balanced development (ecodevelopment) – an economic doctrine seeking such ideas that would effectively serve the vital, spiritual, and cultural values. This doctrine would aim at preserving a specific quality of life for all living creatures and their offspring, which would ensure their good health. Work as a source of wealth should be viewed in the light of self-fulfilment prevailing over efficiency; – seeking for adequate technologies submitted to the mural culture, which demands that what had been damaged must be repaired and that ‘‘hard’’ industrial technologies should be replaced by ‘‘soft’’ technologies, which preserve harmony in nature; – aiming at the model of decentralised politics, which favours the rights of bioregional communities, self-organisation responsibility and economic initiative proceeding from ordinary citizens rather than the ruling elite and, as far as possible, local self-containment, that is aiming at autopoetic politics which remains in accordance with the L ogos of the world of living creatures; – fostering the balance of sexes in the socio-political life, which would reinforce the priority of compromise, kindness, and the preference for
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the family values over the economic and political ones, as well as using intuition in aid of thinking, which is directed towards the importance of life in its present moment and which allows the intentionality of human consciousness to develop naturally; a strong sense of transcendence, which assumes almost a divine dimension of man, nature, and all living creatures, to whom we owe respect and due regard in the light of our transcendental attitude towards the world as the existential basis of man;17 a clear distinction between spirituality and religiousness, since spirituality and its new global form is now becoming the aim of the entire biosphere as yet another stage in its evolution, realised by means of the spread of the Internet and its social counterpart – a society of information technology, which is a new socio-economic structure originating at the beginning of the third millennium. Assuming that spirituality is the goal of the whole biosphere, pursued also by ecological man, his mode of religiousness is only one of the means by which this spirituality is achieved, provided that in spiritual practice this mode of religiousness implies conscious renunciation of consumerist desires in favour of transcendence;18 respecting the NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) principle, which instead of the fierce struggle for supremacy between science and religion recommends actions based on dialogue, debates characterised by mutual respect, and non-interference between the ‘‘magisterium of religion’’ and the ‘‘magisterium of science’’;19 creating and cultivating language and forms of interpersonal communication, both on the verbal and non-verbal level, which would exploit the semantic and syntactic capacities of language in order to develop and consolidate man’s social interactions friendly to their living environment.20 ECOPHILOSOPHICAL PREMISES OF PROECOLOGICAL AXIOLOGY
Seen against the background of ecophilosophical studies and research into values, whose aim is to do away with the controversies and misunderstandings concerning naturalised axiology promoted in this field, the conception of values perceived in nature by Holmes Rolston III is worth paying attention to. It was formulated in his Value in Nature and the Nature of Value published in 1994.21 The author’s starting point is a wellknown thesis claiming that only men are able to value (valeo) and think (cogito). This thesis is well-established in philosophy thanks to the philo-
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sophical reflection inspired by Descartes’ solutions. This point of view, predominant in philosophy and axiology, is questioned by Rolston III, who refers to the claims of Aldo Leopold and J. Baird Callicott. He takes into account the way non-human valuing and choosing subjects perceive values existing in the world and use them in situations that involve making a choice. These subjects include living creatures of higher order and even complex systems of biological life, the most important of them being ecosystem. First, Rolston III questions the prevalent opinion that instrumental values belong to natural and non-human beings, whereas other values are routed in man, who has the exclusive right to perceive, experience and constitute them. The author wonders then whether intrinsic values man perceives in nature are discovered or bestowed by him on the objects he perceives.22 Rolston III says: Tourists in the Yosemite National Park do not value a sequoia as potential wood, but as a natural masterpiece; they value its age, strength, persistence, majesty. It is this view that establishes the value of the tree, the value being not independent of man’s valuation. It follows that subjectivity needs value to place it in the world, but objectively it had been placed in the world earlier. Hence the value in question is neither a value because of man, although he constitutes it, nor a value in itself.23
Intrinsic values in this case are not to be considered metaphors. These values are inherent in existing natural objects before man – a subject experiencing and valuing them – appears in the neighbourhood. Objects incite receptivity in the subject transcending towards them, which becomes stimulated by sensory data. Then the subject re-evaluates his attitude and the nature of the aims of his intentionality, translating them into values. This process makes the object appear to man as a carrier of given values, in which he perceived their value-generating moments. Contrary to the common belief originating from the language practice which suggests that the source of values are men, who then place values in natural objects, Rolston III claims that men do not place there any values, but merely perceive, recognise, and constitute them. Thus values must be existentially rooted outside the subject that perceives them. The subject, in turn, must possess in his intentionally oriented consciousness appropriate structures to grasp these values. An important problem put forward by Rolston III concerns the question of the axiological and axio-generating quality of ecosystem. He argues that this living system, which tunes (orchestrates) creatures with their living environments into a uniform, relatively isolated system generated
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in the course of evolution also follows a certain choice pattern. It contributes to the continuous innovation of living conditions in itself, creates opportunities for new species to come into being and eliminates others, therefore it has its own intrinsic value and in the general sense can be regarded as a valuing subject. It prefers certain choices of values for creatures living within its own limits and refuses to realise values which are important to creatures living in other ecosystems.24 Its development and functioning are inseparable from the pressure of selection and incessant changes in adaptable abilities of individual organisms which live in the ecosystem and which are connected by a network of feedback. Products of evolution appearing in an ecosystem can be valuable or invaluable to it. Simultaneously, they can be valuable or invaluable to men, whose valuation does not have to concur with the ecosystem’s valuation. It can be agreed that evolutionary processes that take place within an ecosystem are able to produce values (new axiological qualities) and to value innovations by both man and the ecosystem itself.25 The world of values according to Rolston III, is not limited to human or non-human intrinsic values, in relation to which other values play a subsidiary role. Instead, in nature organised into ecosystems and constituting a biosphere there exist intrinsic values, extrinsic ones, which can be both instrumental and purely axiological in character, and systemic values. All these values permeate one another and none of their types is absolutely more important than other types. Systemic values play the fundamental rule in these axiological systems. They determine the character and enable the existence of other values, that is intrinsic, instrumental, and even purely axiological values, to which man claims to have exclusive right. According to Rolston III, by analogy to man’s axiological preferences, it can be stated that the ecosystem, too, is a ‘‘valuing subject’’, which within the framework of the system chooses particular values and their character and rejects others.26 Considering the whole Earth as a collection of hundreds of ecosystems, Roston III rejects the idealistic-subjective approach towards the existence of values, which claims that values exist so far as they are perceived, experienced, and constituted. He does not question, however, the fact that the perception and choice of values are typically subjective, based on the intentional nature of experience, which is connected with man’s transcending towards the world of nature. He argues that such ‘‘subjectivity’’ can be characteristic not only of men, but also other living creatures, as well as whole ecosystems, which constitute valuing subjects of various ranks. In this sense the Earth, too, is a kind of value-creating and at the
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same time valuing subjectivity. In the real order it is the most fundamental subject of all. It gives existence to not only ecosystems, living creatures, and their environments, but also man himself; and therefore his valuation must take account of other systems of values that are transcendental in relation to him and which belong to other living creatures and their living environments, which constitute ecosystems. In such an axiologically arranged world the question becomes vital of other than traditional perception of man’s place in this world and his role in nature. Hence the need for creating a new ecological order, new ecological justice, and, consequently, the programme for the policy of balanced development. These postulates must relate to the remodelled and reverentially disposed towards the world intentional layer of man’s consciousness. Within its limits the imperative formulated by Hans Jonas should be binding, since it points to the fundamental value of existence given in man’s direct relation to the world of nature. CLOSING NOTES
The considerations presented here indicate that if the search for man’s harmonious existence with transcendence, which is examined by researchers into both psychophysical and psychosocial phenomena, is to follow in the right direction, it will have to take into account the essential moments of the philosophical analysis of man’s relation to nature. They also justify a thesis that modern patterns of ecophilosophical thinking cannot do without a method developed in phenomenology and based on the analysis of phenomenological insight and visualisation of phenomena connected with man’s transcendence towards nature, which is based on the intentional property of consciousness. The modern world is undergoing rapid changes on a global scale; it is becoming a process and man’s perpetually uncertain position in it obliges him to incessantly define the sense and meaning of his relation with all forms of transcendence. Directing attention to the axiological contents of acts of man’s intentional relating to the transcendent world seems now to be the core problem of ecologically-oriented thinking both in the sphere of nature and spirit. These axiological contents, which are expressed in Jonas’ imperative of man’s responsibility for the future, should include a duty to give priority to the value of existence over nonexistence. Cracow, Poland
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1 H. Hesse, Zagadkowa przemoc – o pytaniu o sprawiedliwos´c´ praw, w szczego´lnos´ci u L uhmanna i Derridy, in J. Brejdak, W. Stegmeier, and I. Ziemin´ski (eds.), Polityka i etyka w uje˛ciu filozoficznym i systemowym (Szczein: AMP Studio Paweł Majewski, 2003), pp. 145–166. 2 W. Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyzna moderna (Unsere postmoderne Moderne) (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 1998), pp. 97–98. 3 M. Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 4 E. F. Schumacher, Małe jest pie˛kne. Spojrzenie na gospodarke˛ s´wiatowa˛ z załoz˙eniem, z˙e człowiek cos´ znaczy (Warsaw: PIW, 1981), pp. 272–278. 5 A. Naess, ‘‘Deep Ecology and Ultimate Promises’’, in T he Ecologist, 1988, pp. 130–131. 6 A. R. Damasio, Bła˛d Kartezjusza. T ajemnica s´wiadomos´ci (Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) (Poznan´: Dom Wydawniczy REBIS, 2002, pp. 33–35. 7 F. Brentano, Psychologia z empirycznego punktu widzenia (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN S.A., 1999), pp. 126–127 and 266–268. 8 E. Husserl, Medytacje kartezjan´skie (Cartesinianische Meditationen) (Warsaw: PWN, 1982), pp. 157–212. 9 Ibid., p. 206. 10 D. C. Dennett, Natura umysło´w (Kinds of Minds. T owards an Understanding of Consciousness) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo CIS, 1997), pp. 99–112. 11 Ibid., pp. 31–97. 12 H. Jonas, Zasada odpowiedzialno´sci Etyka dla cywilizacji technologicznej (Cracow: Wydawnictwo, PLATAN, 1996), pp. 79–84. 13 Ibid., p. 90. 14 Ibid., pp. 96–100. 15 Ibid., pp. 110–111. 16 L. Ferry, Nowy ład ekologiczny. Drzewo zwierze˛, człowiek (Warsaw: PIW, 1995), pp. 17–19. 17 K. Waloszczyk, Wola z˙ycia. Mys´l Pierre ’a T eilharda de Chardin (Warsaw: PIW, 1986), pp. 228–235. 18 K. Waloszczyk, Planeta nie tylko dla ludzi (Warsaw: PIW, 1997), pp. 283–287. 19 S. J. Gould, Skały wieko´w. Nauka i religia w pełni z˙ycia (Rocks of Ages. Science and Religion in the Fullness of L ife) (Poznan´: PIW, 2002), pp. 10–11, 124–125. 20 J. Aitchison, Ssak, kto´ry mo´wi. W ste˛p do psycholingwistyki (T he Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistic) (Warsaw: PWN, 1991), pp. 13–16 and J. Aitchison, Ziarna mowy. Pocza˛tki i rozwo´j je˛zyka (T he Seeds of Speech, L anguagae Origin and Evolution) (Warsaw: PIW, 2002), pp. 30–42 and 126–149. 21 H. Rolston III, Value in Nature and the Nature of Value, in R. Attfield and A. Basly (eds.), Philosophy and the Natural Environment (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 13 and L. Pyra, Environment and Values. Holmes Rolston III’s Environmental Philosophy (Cracow: Wydawnictwo AR w Karkowie, 2004), pp. 67–76. 22 Ibid., p. 13. 23 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 24 Ibid., pp. 18–25. 25 Ibid., p. 25. 26 Ibid., pp. 26–30 and I. S. Fiut, ECOetyki. Kierunki rozwoju aksjologii wspo´łczesnej przyjaznej s´rodowisku (Cracow: Wydawnictwo ABRYS, 1999), pp. 64–68.
LESZEK PYRA
MEN IN FRONT OF ANIMALS
Traditional ethics did not pay much attention to animals. It was usually assumed that man could treat animals instrumentally and use them for different purposes but should not cause unnecessary suffering to them. Some attention, although not much, has been devoted to the problem within the history of philosophy. Already Aristotle, two and a half thousand years ago, stated that Plants exist to give food to animals, and animals to give food to men – domestic animals for their use and food, wild ones, in most cases, if not at all, furnish food and other conveniences, such as clothing and various tools. Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men.1
As is well known, it was assumed that nature, sometimes identified with God, simply created plants for animals and animals for men to supply food. In the 18th century Jeremy Bentham, the co-author of utilitarianism, examining the relation under discussion, suggested that we should not ask whether animals could reason or talk, but whether they could suffer. Bentham wrote as follows: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?2
The kind of answer given to such a question determines the kind of behaviour in relation to animals. 151 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 151–165. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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According to Holmes Rolston III, and he seems to be mistaken in this respect, Bentham ‘‘pinpointed half of a long-standing ethic toward animals.’’3 The American author obviously thinks that the ethicists defending animals – because of their ability to suffer – constituted half of all ethicists, whereas I am deeply convinced that they were definitely in the minority. I think that the great majority of philosophers approved of the instrumental treatment of animals treating it as a ruling paradigm according to which animals were only means and not aims. It should be remembered in this context, however, that, for example, St. Thomas stressed that animals should not be treated badly by men, which meant not causing needless suffering, because such treatment could eventually be imitated by men (especially children) in regard to other men; it clearly shows that pedagogical purposes dominated in such situations. Perhaps such purposes are best seen in the words of John Locke who wrote: One thing I have frequently observed in Children, that when they have got possession of any poor Creature, they are apt to use it ill: They often torment, and treat very roughly, young Birds, Butterflies, and such other poor Animals, which fall into their Hands, and that with a seeming kind of Pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such Cruelty, they should be taught the contrary Usage. For the Custom of Tormenting and Killing Beasts, will, by Degrees, harden their Minds even towards Men; and they who delight in the Suffering and Destruction of Inferior Creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate, or benign to those of their kind.4
One should notice that the problems of animals, in comparison to some other problems of environmental ethics, e.g. non-biodegradable pollutants, extinction of species, have a comparatively long tradition because they were discussed already in classical philosophy. The other problems mentioned above had no chance to appear so early, and for obvious reasons so. It seems that our forefathers lived in much closer contact with animals than we nowadays do, and this opinion refers both to wild and domesticated animals. It is probably true but they did not have our knowledge of the world, of the theory of evolution and ecology, they did not develop the psychology of animals and therefore were unable to construct suitable environmental ethics, which are being developed nowadays. Everything that contemporary man knows about animals, claims Holmes Rolston III, about their perception and behaviour, shows clearly that man is a close relative of – especially higher – animals.5 The problem of animals has become more and more pressing, especially in the light of some alarming reports about misuse of animals in manufacturing industries, scientific experiments, etc. Holmes Rolston III remarks that he will use the notion ‘‘nonhuman animals’’ when referring to sentient animals. It is a very clever move
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because then it is easy to introduce the notion ‘‘human animals’’ (which may sound like an abuse for at least some of the readers) and which was de facto invented by Peter Singer.6 Holmes Rolston III asks whether it is reasonable to use the notion of rights in regard to animals and gives examples of theoreticians who used to do that, thinking it to be quite natural, such as Tom Regan. But Holmes Rolston III does not seem to be convinced that such a position is reasonable, so let us follow his argument in this respect. Arne Naess, referring to animals, writes: ‘‘In principle each of them have the same right to live and blossom as we and our children have.’’7 But then he notices, and rightly so, I think, that the notion of rights is certainly characteristic of the West: it does not appear clearly either in the East or in ancient cultures; for example, there is not much about rights in the writings of Plato or in the Bible. As we know, rights may be divided into ascribed (to somebody) and natural. The ascribed rights are established by a public agreement, whereas the natural ones are attached to values found in persons and, as some environmental philosophers claim, in higher animals. Of course, all rights are the product of culture as such; in nature there are apparently no such rights. I wholly agree with Holmes Rolston III who claims that any theory of rights, if accepted, could only be applicable to animals remaining in the sphere of culture, and not to those living in the wilderness. Only in culture such a theory seems reasonable, even if only partly. In addition to this Holmes Rolston III states that rights should refer to animals that are conscious in a high degree. This seems to be arbitrary but, after all, the whole of law is arbitrary, too. Thinkers like Peter Singer, introducing the concept of ‘‘sentience’’ and ‘‘the principle of equal consideration of interests’’, seem to extend the range of animals, including also, after Bentham, into the universum of those possessing rights all animals which are sentient and therefore can suffer or feel pleasure. Singer writes: If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient, if not strictly accurate, shorthand for the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others.8
According to me, Singer once more, at least partly so, comes back to the so-called Schweitzer’s dilemma which puts so many restrictions on man’s behaviour towards animals that hardly anything can be done in this
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respect. Ultimately, Holmes Rolston III comes to a reasonable conclusion, I think, that in regard to animals it is unnecessary to use the concept of rights at all. Although in wild nature we find no rights, we can discover values there and also animals’ interests and needs that can be satisfied and which exist without man being either present or absent. Therefore, claims Holmes Rolston III, it is much better to assume that what should be taken into consideration is the welfare of animals – that they have certain goods to promote. At last, it seems, Holmes Rolston III tries to reformulate Singer’s neoutilitarian views and states that man, in the case of beings able to suffer, should minimise pain whenever it is possible. It is worthy of notice that a similar idea was expressed by the Polish philosopher, Tadeusz Kotarbin´ski, who insisted in his writings that man should first minimise sufferings and only then maximise pleasures.9 Referring to the interhuman activity Kotarbin´ski insists that man should, for example, first build hospitals, thus minimising sufferings, and only then erect concert halls, in order to maximise pleasures. THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN SUPERIORITY OVER ANIMALS
The paradigm of human dominion over animals has a long-lasting tradition. It prevails in the human consciousness almost from the very beginning of humankind. And such a mode of thinking is not lacking some sense. Holmes Rolston III notices that the supremacy is supported both by the Bible and by the greatest philosophical authorities of the past and of present times. Among others, he recalls in this context the opinion of the philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, according to whom ‘‘It is the height of intellectual perversion to renounce, in the name of scientific objectivity, our position as the highest form of life on earth, and our own advent by a process of evolution as the most important problem of evolution.’’10 There are many more such opinions but one can find easily also some opposite views, too. For example, Albert Schweitzer, propagating his moral theory, writes: ‘‘We like to imagine that man is nature’s goal; but the facts do not support that belief.’’11 More radical, and therefore perhaps less acceptable, are the formulations of Paul Taylor who, developing his theory of respect for nature, claims: ‘‘It seems quite clear that in the contemporary world the extinction of the species Homo Sapiens would be beneficial to the Earth’s Community of Life as a whole.’’12 Analysing the problem of how to treat animals Holmes Rolston III presents the list of twenty six characteristic traits of humans distinguishing
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them from animals. He calls it ‘‘a trial list of human uniqueness and superiority claims’’.13 They are not always very important, however, which can be seen at the very first glance; the author himself turns the attention of the readers to this unimportance. I personally would add that the list was prepared, perhaps intentionally, in such a way as to mix up primary with secondary and even tertiary characteristics. For example, the characterisation of humans as being creative hardly compares with the opinion that humans see better than animals (which is certainly not always true).14 Perhaps the intention of the author was to present man as not such an extraordinary creature, after all; according to me, however, he definitely failed in this respect. There is no doubt that different species should be treated differently, claims Holmes Rolston III. Therefore, one cannot introduce total equality into environmental ethics as, for example, Schweitzer tried to do. In this context the American author suggests a differential treatment of different species. Undoubtedly, in the course of evolution, each species adapted itself perfectly to its own ecological niche, and its representatives seem to be especially efficient in just this, and not the other, niche. Man best accomodated himself to his own niche, to the culture in which he lives, and which is being constantly created and recreated by him; thus he also follows a certain specific path of development. According to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Culture is what gives continuity to the pulsating life of the individual as well as the human group or society. It is transmitted as inheritance from generation to generation; however, this inheritance is transmitted only when individuals are capable of retrieving ideals and corroborate their meaning with their own living stream of existence.15
In view of the above definition, it seems obvious that animals cannot retrieve ideals and corroborate their meaning in their life. But if one considers the similarities and the differences between men and animals it is very difficult to show that men are better than animals, claims Holmes Rolston III, because men and animals function in two different spheres, animals in nature and men in culture. Holmes Rolston III is right to notice that nature and culture are hardly comparable, however, he seems to forget that both men and animals sometimes appear in one sphere, and although they certainly are quite different creatures, they nevertheless can be compared, at least in some respects. When morality is taken into consideration, one must notice that animals in their behaviour are not immoral, they are amoral, which means that they remain outside of morality. Ultimately, one sighs with relief when Holmes Rolston III states clearly and unequivocally that man’s
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advantage over animals is not a fictitious prejudice. He is inclined to admit that the best representatives of men (for instance Albert Einstein), realise certainly a much greater spectrum of values than even the bestdeveloped representatives of animals. Men should not forget, however, that higher animals are conscious, sometimes even self-conscious. Holmes Rolston III recalls two examples the first of which refers to chimpanzees. They recognise themselves in mirrors. And if a red tag is put on a chimp’s ear while he is asleep, he will after waking and accidentally passing a mirror remove it from his ear. The second example refers to a gorilla named Koko. She was taught a sign language by Stanford University researchers and she was able to use several hundred signs to construct simple but reasonable sentences perfectly adequate to the contexts in which they were produced. Such examples show at least that there is also consciousness in the world of animals. Writes Tom Regan: ‘‘Perception, memory, desire, self-consciousness, intention, a sense of future – these are among the leading attributes of the mental life of normal mammalian animals aged one or more.’’16 But it should be noticed that men are able, for example, to create metaphysics, which animals are not capable of doing. I think there is much truth in Holmes Rolston III’s opinion concerning men: ‘‘they have a distinct metaphysical status just because they alone can do metaphysics.’’17 Animals can only centre on food and defend their own life, whereas humans can transcend their anthropocentric position and look at everything as one whole. According to Holmes Rolston III humans play a minor biological role in their ecosystems, they are not very important as predators or prey, they play an insignificant role in food chains and in regulating life cycles; the last opinion can rather easily be questioned. The author also writes about humans: ‘‘They are a late add-on to the system’’, but then he adds immediately: ‘‘The human role is ethical, metaphysical, scientific, religious, and in this sense humans are unique and superior, but their superiority is linked in a feedback loop with the whole.’’18 Concluding, the author, somewhat unexpectedly, especially in the light of his previous analyses, stresses the unique and very important role of man in the world and human superiority over all other creatures. Possessing the capacity to know the world still better and better, man should try to understand nature and then to imitate her in a certain sense. The problem is, however, that from the rules holding in the world a purely biocentric ethical theory does not come out. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that because of his superior position man has not only privileges, he also bears responsibility
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for what is around him, especially for everything which is alive. The opinion of Kenneth E. Goodpaster sounds very convincing and seems to be very promising in this respect: Neither rationalism nor the capacity to experience pleasure and pain seem to me necessary (even though they may be sufficient) conditions on moral considerability. And only our hedonistic and concentric forms of ethical reflection keeps us from acknowledging this fact. Nothing short of the condition of being alive seems to me to be a plausible and nonarbitrary criterion.19
WILD ANIMALS
According to Holmes Rolston III the obligation to show universal benevolence in regard to animals, especially wild ones, is too strongly formulated. Within the area of environmental ethic we can put forward some postulates that oblige man to treat animals, living in the sphere of culture, not worse than they would have been treated if they had lived in wilderness, under the pressure of the forces of natural selection. Environmental ethic does not impose upon man the duty to improve nature, therefore he is not obliged to prevent pain and death in wilderness. It seems to be quite natural that in the trophic pyramids the omnivorous and carnivorous animals inflict pain on others in order to survive. Concluding, Holmes Rolston III claims that it is not necessary to intervene in wild nature where natural evolutionary processes appear and are active; intervention seems to be necessary where man acts in the way, e.g. industrial, which threatens the existence of animals; in such a case man should certainly be responsible for animals. As a result it appears that Holmes Rolston III modifies Bentham’s question, asking not whether animals are able to suffer but rather whether they have enough free place in an ecosystem. Because the American author’s views are holistic in character, he insists that a satisfactory situation must be ‘‘distributed’’, so to say, equally among particular animals in a given ecosystem; some of them will be losers but some certainly winners, and the latter will survive and multiply. Pain and death in ecosystems are their natural components and that is why people who would like to limit animals’ pain are either sentimental or unnecessarily anthropomorphise the world of animals. In the case of a predator, for example, a satisfactory situation means a sufficient hunting area for a given species (e.g. tiger, lion, bear).
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Holmes Rolston III is fully aware of the importance of the role played by animals in the process of forming culture. Therefore he writes: Consider beasts of burden. It is difficult to think that civilization could have developed to its advanced state without beasts of burden. Humans would not have figured out how to build motor cars and trucs without ever having built buggies and wagons, if no humans have ever ridden a beast nor laid a load on its back.20
Discussing the problem of animals living in the sphere of culture, Holmes Rolston III formulates two principles which should govern man’s behaviour in regard to them. According to the first, the so-called strong ethical principle, man should not cause excessive suffering in comparison to the one appearing in nature. According to the second, the so-called weak ethical principle, man should minimise pain, especially when it is pointless. Formulating such principles the author tries to base his theory on ecology, and not on the categories characteristic of human social life, such as charity or justice. In the case of domesticated animals, those ‘‘dragged’’ by man into the sphere of culture, much attention should be paid, Holmes Rolston III keeps repeating, not to inflict more suffering upon them than they would have experienced, if they had lived in the wilderness. It should be remembered that even partly domesticated animals have no chance to come back and live in the wild conditions in which evolutionary processes operate. Men were shaped both as herbivorous and carnivorous, and as a result as omnivorous beings, and there is no need to change it. Formulating such an opinion the author rejects the idea of universal vegetarianism so much propagated, for example, by Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Of course, in nature it often happens that the representatives of given predators eat the representatives of their own species; such a situation must not happen in the human world and it is one of the situations in which what is should not change itself into ought to be. Such an example points to a certain departure from Holmes Rolston III’s general line of reasoning on the nature of is and ought. The author’s reason for cannibalism not to happen is that it destroys interhuman relations. His reasoning here is not sound enough; one could ask a very reasonable question: ‘Do not wars, for example, or acts of terrorism destroy interhuman relations and still, unfortunately, happen here and there all the time?’ One example of following nature is that humans eat meat and such activity is a natural component of ecosystems. Animals are set in the trophic pyramid, therefore eating them is consistent with the laws of
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ecology. Sometimes it happens, however, that people inflict too much suffering on domesticated animals. Holmes Rolston III considers, for example, the case of Muslims and Jews in Britain. Modern abattoirs stun animals, either by a strong blow or an electric shock, before butchering them. But the situation is different in the case of the religious practice of slaughter. Muslims, after a month of fasting (Ramadan), and usually when a child is born, sacrifice an animal to Allah, without previously stunning it. Jews require their meat to be kosher, which means that they sever the major blood vessels of an alive animal; such a method involves certainly much additional pain. The laws of ecology do not justify such methods; one may only hope that Muslims and Jews will change their religious convictions in the future. When wildlife commerce is considered Holmes Rolston III pays attention to the fact that man uses animals not only for meat – he has learnt to use them in numerous ways, unknown in nature but characteristic of culture (and especially of science). He accepts such uses of animals as, e.g., leather for shoes, wool for sweaters, insulin for diabetics. Such usage is unknown in nature, but culture has its own, specific requirements and needs. At this point I would like to notice that Holmes Rolston III is usually ready to accept the human attitudes that have a long-lasting tradition, and he does it sometimes only semi-consciously. He accepts wearing furs, but not in all cases. Fur is natural when worn as a means of protection against cold, which means that Eskimos have the right to wear it, but wearing furs is unjustified when it serves only as a symbol of status. And here ecology, once again, comes to help: Holmes Rolston III concludes that the ethical attitudes towards animal suffering should be consistent with ecology and not distorted by economics. It seems that a good test for such human behaviours should be whether they tend to respect animal life, even if such life must be sacrificed. Writes Holmes Rolston III: ‘‘Legitimate human demands for culture cannot be satisfied without the sacrifice of nature. That is a sad truth.’’21 HUNTING
Hunting certainly is one of the oldest human activities, especially hunting for food. However, it became much less important when so many animals became domesticated and could supply meat, leather, etc. Man nowadays hunts first of all for sport (with few exceptions). Not infrequently it is said that such a kind of activity is the greatest evil. This is the context for the complaint voiced by Joseph Wood Krutch:
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Killing ‘for sport’ is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself. The liar lies to gain some end (...). Even the murderer may be removing an impediment to normal desire or gaining possession of something which his victim keeps from him. None of these usually does evil for evil’s sake (...). The killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, ‘Something which wanted to live is dead’.22
No further comments are presumably needed on this point. Holmes Rolston III only notices that meat must not be wasted when one hunts; otherwise hunting is morally wrong. In some cases, however, hunting can be justified. If predators (e.g. wolves) are gone for some reason, certain animals may overpopulate. It usually happens that herbivores, for instance deer, overpopulate and in such a case people replace predators thus performing a positive role in a given ecosystem: if they did not shoot deer, many of the animals would die of painful, long-lasting starvation. As it appears, Holmes Rolston III is inclined to adopt a somewhat utilitarian mode of thinking, at least in this context. But he soon comes back to purely holistic grounds and continues: ‘‘The ecological ethic, which kills in place, is really more advanced, more harmonious with nature, than the animal rights ethic, which, in utter disharmony with the way the world is made, kills no animals at all.’’23 According to Holmes Rolston III it happens quite often that the hunter does not feel ‘‘perfect evil’’ when hunting but rather perfect identification with the world around, with the drama of creation which is full of suffering. In such a way the hunter himself submits to ecology. For example, the American author writes: ‘‘The authentic hunter knows suffering as sacrament of the way the world is made.’’24 The last opinion certainly remains in direct contradiction to what he wrote on hunting only two pages earlier, calling it ‘‘a machismo killing for thrills, covering up inferiority complexes.’’25 As we see, Holmes Rolston III has most obviously not elaborated a full, coherent theory of hunting, there are too many contradictory statements and unclear formulations in his writings on this topic; according to me the problem of hunting only shows how difficult it is sometimes to pass from is to ought to be. DUTIES: ESTABLISHING THE BOUNDARY LINE
The next problem in environmental ethics concerns man’s duties to organic life in general. There are some theoreticians who deny the exis-
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tence of any such duties. On the other hand, there are some views demanding respect for any forms of life. They are especially characteristic of the East. Let us have a look, for example, at Jainism, which treats the duties to all life extremely seriously. On the basis of ahimsa, which means not inflicting suffering on anything alive and able to feel pain, Jain monks condemn agriculture, especially using ploughs, because it may kill animals living in the soil; they brush aside insects when they slowly walk along a field or a forest path, etc. But Western culture does not go that far. For example, Peter Singer notices that man’s duties to animals disappear ‘‘somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster’’,26 and the sphere of morality does not include lower forms of life, such as insects and plants. As it is well known, Lynn White charged Christian tradition for the environmental crisis. He wrote: Modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology (...) modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntary realisation of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature (...). Over a century ago science and technology joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.27
In contrast with this negative opinion expressed in the context of the environmental crisis, Holmes Rolston III points out that Christian tradition issued the first act concerning endangered species. According to the Genesis book God created all things and then pronounced them good, and after Noah’s ark helped to rescue so many species, God reestablished his covenant ‘‘with every living creature (...) the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth.’’28 Therefore the covenant refers not only to men but to every living creature as well. One of the most important problems in environmental ethic concerns the question where the boundary line should be drawn, deciding to which beings we still have duties and to which already not. Some claim that our duties extend also to vegetative organisms (e.g. sequoias). But does man have duties to endangered species or ecosystems? The positive answer to this question unequivocally suggests, claims Holmes Rolston III, that one has to do with environmental philosophy in the primary, and not only secondary sense. It also undoubtedly means that one notices certain values in different forms of organic life but also in some greater entities like species and ecosystems. At the same time Holmes Rolston III when referring to different organic forms (this sets him much apart from Bentham), does not ask whether they can suffer, but rather whether they are alive. Disregarding the problem of consciousness threshold the American theoretician is inclined to ask whether different forms of organic
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life are value carriers, and if so, whether it is somehow reflected in ethical theory? In connection with this one should stress, however, that in such cases one talks only about moral objects but not about moral subjects (moral agents), ‘‘for there are no moral agents in nature apart from persons’’.29 In courts one often uses the notion of ‘‘legal standing’’ in reference to companies, societies, etc. Holmes Rolston III suggests that the notion should be transferred into the sphere of morality and used in regard to some collective entities, namely, endangered species, ecosystems, etc.; then they would be thought of as having ‘‘moral standing’’. A given entity may only be considered as having moral standing when it has value; in other words, having value is a necessary condition of having moral standing. Possessing values always implies certain obligations on the part of people, claims Holmes Rolston III. And one of them, probably even the most important, is not to destroy values. Sometimes it is quite difficult, according to Holmes Rolston III, to decide what differentiates living organisms from the artifacts created by man, for example computers. Biologists always tried to find entelechy in living organisms, a kind of spirit animating them, and of course they never succeeded. Though living organisms consist of chemicals commonly appearing in nature, they do not constitute common, simple collections but rather structures organised at biological level. Their most characteristic trait is that they resist entropy outside. The phenomenon of life can be most briefly expressed by saying that life is a negation of entropy. Life as such must maintain a negentropy in organisms, taking energy from an environment, in which entropy prevails. Life’s mystery is hidden in genetic sets and carried by DNA. An organism exploits its environment, and this differentiates it definitely from any artifacts. Holmes Rolston III writes about an organism: But the living thing cannot exist alone. It must claim the environment as source and sink, from which to abstract energy and materials and into which to excrete them. It takes advantage of its environment. Life thus arises out of earthen sources (as do rocks), but life turns back on its sources to make resources out of them (unlike rocks), which is done because life is a propositional and motivational set.30
And in some other book we find the following formulation: Organisms are self-maintaining systems; they grow, and are irritable in response to stimuli. They resist dying. They reproduce. They can be healthy or diseased. They gain and maintain internal order against the disordering tendencies of external nature. They keep rewinding, recomposing themselves, while inanimate objects run down, erode, and decompose. Life is a countercurrent to entropy, an energetic fight uphill in a world that overall moves thermodynamically downhill. Organisms suck order out of their environment; they pump out disorder.31
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At the same time in the evolutionary processes, during the adaptation to a given environment, there often appear some mutants, usually some badly adapted organisms, which are unable to compete with other organisms of their kind and most often do not survive. They also play a certain positive role in the adaptation of given species to a given ecosystem, to the life in a concrete ecological niche. Holmes Rolston III emphasises that although he does not accept the theory of theodicy, and Earth is perhaps not the best of possible worlds, nevertheless it is the only known place in the universe which has produced life, and life as such is generally something good and valuable. Also the role of death should be reconsidered, claims Holmes Rolston III. From the point of view of both biology and philosophy, death, as such, has ultimately a positive role as far as species and ecosystems are concerned. Death is usually very painful from the point of view of an individual, but it is obvious that without it there would be no life. Particularly when one looks at death from a longer perspective, it appears to be a precondition of life. In comparison to artifacts produced by man, such as cars or computers, organisms have their own telos. The values attached by man to artifacts are purely instrumental and somehow existing only when given things are being used, otherwise they are non-existent, or only potentially existent. The values of organisms come not from man, and because of this organisms are independent, autonomous entities. But, artifacts aside, there are also some differences among various kinds of life itself, namely subjective and objective life. In this context a very well known theoretician of morality, William K. Frankena, writes: ‘‘I can see no reason, from the moral point of view, why we should respect something that is alive but has no conscious sentiency and so can experience no pleasure or pain, joy or suffering.’’32 Singer’s views are very similar in this respect. But Holmes Rolston III supports a quite different opinion. He recalls the views of panpsychists according to whom small amounts of consciousness characterise even microbes and plants. It is really very difficult to prove such a theoretical standpoint but contemporary examinations of plants, for example, prove that they certainly are capable of feeling, and as a result of this they react to a changing environment in their own, unique way. Therefore Holmes Rolston III may be right when assuming that sentience in nature emerges not rapidly and unexpectedly but rather in an evolutionary way, gradually and, what is really important, probably steadily. It appears therefore that environmental ethic should respect all life in general, and not sentient life exclusively.33 In the light of such considerations it is clear that Holmes Rolston III tries to defend objective
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morality which refers to objectively existing life; he also tries to show that environmental ethic is not the question of feelings, of psychology, but rather of biology and – as I myself would complement his opinion – of ecology. He adds also, and quite rightly so, that Frankena and Singer base their beliefs on a hedonistic theory of values as though in nature pain was only antivalue and pleasure the only value. He claims that environmental ethic should be also holistic in character, which means that it should understand pain and pleasure in a much wider context than, for example, utilitarianism. Holmes Rolston III claims that below the threshold of consciousness, which decides whether one can talk about pain or pleasure, there appear biological interests and needs which should be satisfied. For example, a tree, although not sentient, tends to fulfill its needs when it spreads roots down deeper searching for water without which it cannot live. As we see, below the threshold of sentience there is still life, the life which deserves at least some respect from human beings. A most simple organism is usually driven by genes and instincts, and although remaining below the threshold of subjectivity, it nevertheless seems to possess some value. And values as such deserve some respect from humans, keeps repeating the American philosopher. Agricultural University Cracow NOTES 1 Aristotle, Politics, 1256b, W. Ellis (trans.). London 1912, book 1, chapter 8. 2 Jeremy Bentham, T he Principles of Morals and L egislation. New York: Hafner, 1948, pp. 311–312. 3 Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics. Philadelphia 1988, p. 45. 4 John Locke, Some T houghts Concerning Education, 5th ed. London 1905. Compare also: James Axfell (ed.), T he Educational W ritings of John L ocke. Cambridge, 1968, pp. 225–226. 5 The similarities and relationships between men and animals are pinpointed again and again by Tomas Regan, especially in his book T he Case for Animal Rights, London – New York 1988. See also the Polish publication which is contributed to the relation men–animals, Etyka 18, Warszawa 1980. 6 Such an expression, it seems, came originally from Peter Singer. Consult his book Animal L iberation. T owards an End to Man’s Inhumanity to Animals, London 1977. 7 Arne Naess, ‘‘A Defense of the Deep Ecology Movement’’, Environmental Ethics 6 (1984): 266. 8 Peter Singer, ‘‘All Animals Are Equal’’, in: Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.). New York 1976, p. 154. 9 Tadeusz Kotarbin´ski, compare: Utylitaryzm w etyce. Analiza i krytyka teorii, in: Pisma etyczne, Paweł J. Smoczyn´ski (ed.), Wrocław 1987, pp. 25–88. See also Kotarbin´ski’s analysis
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of the relation men–animals in his book: Medytacje o z˙yciu godziwym, Warszawa 1976, pp. 111–120. See also my discussion of the problem of animals, O pewnym poszerzeniu zakresu moralnos´ci, in: Czy jest moz˙liwa etyka uniwersalna?, Janusz Sekłua (ed.), Wydawnictwa Uczelniane Wyz˙szej Szkoły Rolniczo-Pedagogicznej w Siedlcach, Siedlce 1994, pp. 345–355. 10 Michael Polanyi, T he T acit Dimension. New York 1967, p. 67. 11 Albert Schweitzer, An Anthology, Charles R. Joy (ed.). Boston 1947, p. 252. 12 Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature. New Jersey 1986, p. 114. Compare also the whole subsection of that book, contributing to the same issues, under the characteristic title: T he Denial of Human Superiority, pp. 129–156. 13 Holmes Rolston III, Environmental ... , p. 65. 14 Compare also the importance of the meaning of the following statements: ‘‘Humans run faster, they copulate face to face’’, and ‘‘Humans are self-conscious, they form cultures,’’ etc. 15 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, L ogos and L ife: T he Passions of the Soul, the Elements in the Onto-Poiesis of Culture, Dordrecht – Boston – London 1990, p. 41. 16 Tom Regan, T he Case for Animal ... , p. 81. 17 Holmes Rolston III, Environmental ... , p. 71. 18 Ibidem, p. 72. 19 Kenneth E. Goodpaster, ‘‘On Being Morally Considerable’’, T he Journal of Philosophy LXXV, no. 6 (1978): 308. 20 Holmes Rolston III, T heory Meets Practice, the paper presented at ‘‘The Second International Conference on Ethics and Environmental Policies’’, April 5–7, 1992, Athens, Georgia, USA, pp. 18–19. 21 Ibidem, p. 20. 22 Joseph Wood Krutch, T he Best Nature W riting of Joseph Wood Krutch, New York 1969, p. 148. 23 Holmes Rolston III, Environmental ... , p. 91. 24 Ibidem, p. 92. 25 Ibidem, p. 90. 26 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics. Cambridge 1979, p. 92. 27 Lynn White, ‘‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’’, Science 155 (March 1967): 1206. 28 Holmes Rolston III, Environmental ... , p. 94; Mark 5, 10–20. 29 Ibidem, p. 99. 30 Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion. A Critical Survey. New York 1987, p. 125. 31 Holmes Rolston III, Conserving Natural Value. New York 1994, pp. 168–169. 32 William K. Frankena, ‘‘Ethics and the Environment’’, in: Ethics and the Problems of the 21st Century, K. E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre (eds.), Notre Dame – London 1979, p. 11. See also chapters V and VI in: Włodzimierz Tyburski, Etyka i ekologia, Polski Klub Ekologiczny, Torun´ 1995, pp. 73–108. 33 Compare: Leszek Pyra, ‘‘Suffering and the Rights of Animals’’, in: SuVering as Human Experience, Jan Pawlica (ed.). Jagiellonian University – Institute of Philosophy, Cracow 1994, pp. 125–132.
SECTION II SOCIETAL SHARING-IN-LIFE
Kim Rogers, lecturing; sitting: Jorge Garcı´a Gomez, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Mauro Carbone, Maria Gołe˛biowska, Ignacy Fiut.
GARY BACKHAUS
TOWARD A CULTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
In my preliminary reflection upon the problematic of grounding cultural phenomenology, I have been led to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s doctrine of ontopoiesis.1 What attracts me to this doctrine in terms of this specific exploration is her description of the emergence of the societal and cultural stations of ontopoiesis on the basis of human sense bestowal capacities, and the recognition of culture as a progressively differentiated station in life’s organization. The ontopoietic process of life offers a genetic framework for tracing the essential structurizational dynamics establishing social and cultural organizations as stations of life’s activities. Ontopoiesis is the constitutive process of life, the open dynamic system of ‘‘first makings,’’ from and to which all meanings accrue. Life itself is inherently meaningful and its evolutionary process involves the progressive emergence of logoic principles that establish interrelated hierarchical levels of constitutive activity and formational constructions. Ontopoiesis evolves through the progression of hierarchical processes whereby each autochthonous level of organization allows for an exfoliation based upon individuating principles, which establishes self-organizing, relatively stable entities. The basic stations of life are physis, bios-vital/psychic, society, and culture. The word ‘station’ is apropo because ontopoietic evolution creates relatively stabilizing logoic parameters that function as meaningnexuses for the generation of individuated life forms. At each one of these organizational levels/stations, the logoic principles specifying gestalt/ organismic limits are maintained in life’s progressive Becoming through allowing for the perdurance of relatively stable individual self-organizing systems, which are brought into existence by the very principles that they sustain.2 To illustrate, ontopoietic evolution allows for the emergence of logoic principles that are capable of organizing life on the basis of sentience. Through the principle of individuation being limited by parameters set by a nexus of logoic principles, taxonomies of individual, self-organizing, sentient beings emerge that maintain these parameters in Becoming, comprising the substation of sentience in the biotic organization of life’s ontopoiesis. And in turn their individuated forms carry virtualities that provide the opportunity for the further, progressive evolutionary 169 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 169–190. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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re-organization of life. Only by examining the morphologies, behaviors, and mental capacities of the individuated forms that function as their carriers can these virtualities (and the nascent re-organizational catalysts) be discovered.3 Substantive ontologies take the perduring individuals to be the carriers of real substances. By contrast, ontopoiesis focusses on the processes of life’s unfurling, which means that life’s inherent meanings involve a dynamic development of non-substantive patterns by which entities are the outcomes, yet the sustaining carriers of progressive processes. Becoming is concretized through perduring individuals that do not carry the templates of Being, but rather are evolutionary outcomes subject to the dynamics of life’s autochthonous Becoming. Their forms are chance (but not arbitrary) exfoliations made possible through junctures (knots) in life’s logoic dynamism.4 This point is important for it means that individual beings are examined, not to discover their substance, but to grasp the organizing principles that are the meanings forming the basis of their life, and to grasp the emergent virtualities functioning to bring about progressive re-organizations that will transcend them. With ontopoiesis the question concerns how life erupts in new stations (open dynamic systems-levels) of meaning through sustaining patterns of life’s activity, which are made real by establishing perduring relatively stable self-organizing systems – individuals.5 Tymieniecka prefers the word ‘Beingness,’ in place of ‘Being,’ for beyond the surface ontology of entities (which suggests either substances of traditional metaphysics or non-substantive essences of classical phenomenology) is the evolutionary process to which they owe their meaning. Thus, according to the ontopoietic doctrine, it is not consciousness that ultimately constitutes meanings at the human station. Rather, it is life that is organized at a certain systemslevel by which human beings perdure, and the concrete, individuated form of human being serves as the carrier for life to constitute meanings that transcend the levels of organization that make the human station possible. Humanity is granted constitutive agency through life’s ontopoiesis: humans are the occasions by which life progresses to its societal and cultural stations. As transcendent to the individuated beings, these stations of life are co-constitutive in organizing life at the human level. This demonstrates the thesis of ontopoiesis that individuated forms are carriers for constitutive activities of life, but also shows how at the human level, life grants humanity new, creative constitutive powers. Individuated life forms are sustained through the inner/outer exchanges, the self-organizing systems in their interrelations with the milieux.
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Individuation is only possible through interrelation, which manifests in many ways – the interrelation of self-organization across all levels of life, physis, bios, society and culture, and with all forms of self-organizing systems. Ontopoiesis involves a differentiating/differentiated unity-ofeverything-that-is-alive, an open dynamic system of life’s interrelational, creatively emergent, systems-progressive organizations, which concretely manifests through the living entities establishing spacings – interrelational exchanges with their milieux.6 New levels of Beingness manifest as new forms of interrelations. At the organizational level of human life, three sense bestowing functions emerge: the objective, the aesthetic and the moral senses.7 These senses are moments; it is only by abstraction that it is possible to discuss them separately. They function as the virtualities that prefigure the higher emergent levels of interrelational organization called society and culture, which are stations of life brought about on the basis of the interrelations of the individuated human form. Society is the condition for culture, but it is also an aspect of culture. Society cannot but carry the virtual conditions for culture that emerge at the level of the social. This progressive relationship, in which cultural organization forms on the basis of the social-level, needs analysis. A significant clue concerning analysis, nevertheless, is that there are no perduring individuals beyond the human, and so these organizational levels of ontopoietic significance occur through the self-organization of perduring individual human beings in interrelations with their milieux. My specific strategy, then, is to return to the perduring human individuals, the carriers of the virtualities, through which social and cultural organizational levels of life’s significances manifest. It must be clarified that ‘individual’ has nothing to do with individualism, atomism, or the hypostatization of personhood. The principle of individuation refers to the evolutionary factual existence of the single perduring self-organizing system, the concretized outcome of life’s processes, the carrier of the virtualities, or the potentialities for the continued progressive reorganization of life. For the human virtualities to function, they need a catalyst (efficient cause) to induce the autochthonic emergence of essential logoic principles inherent to the societal and cultural stations. But all open dynamic systems, which include self-organizing systems, are complexities of contextualized and contextualizing parts and wholes that involve webs of interrelations. All individuals, as self-organizing systems, are parts in the differentiated/differentiating dynamic processes that unfold as life’s interrelational progressively tiered web. Thus, both vertical
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and horizontal (stations and entities) interrelations are maintained throughout ontopoiesis. Therefore, the catalyst must also exhibit vertical and horizontal efficacy (ontopoietic progression and interrelational dialectics with the milieu). The concrete, individual human carries the three emergent human senses. The genetic source for the systems-levels of society and culture can only be understood by examining the re-organization of sense concretized through the human individual. It is a mistake to consider this starting point a reduction, for no transcendental bracketing is taking place and it is appropriate to examine individuated manifestations of life in order to apprehend the genetic principles sustaining life stations, in this case made possible through the human individuated form of life. According to Tymieniecka, the Imaginatio Creatrix, the source of human significance, allows for the transposition of organic-vital-sentient significances (bios) into these three moments of human significance. This particular process of ontopoiesis will not be treated in my present analysis, for it concerns re-organizing the organic/vital and the vital/sentient parameters as they are transposed into the psychic/conscious phase of life (vertical interrelations). But, as a later evolutionary development in ontopoiesis, through the establishment of the objective, aesthetic, and moral senses within the Beingness of the perduring individual self-organizing system – a human being – the basis is formed for the creation of society and culture. These two subsequent open dynamic stations organize human life beyond the biotic stationing of other sentient beings whose transcendent capacities are quite limited. Yet, the specifically human levels of societal and cultural organization manifest in concrete forms of life, meaning-contexts, that would be hypostatized and reified, if it were not possible for human beings to ‘‘dig under’’ their own meaning sedimentations. Creative expression is possible only by returning to the Imaginatio Creatrix, which ‘‘transcends from below’’ the already deposited, constituted, and sedimented existent forms in the fabulation of newly emergent meanings. This requires an organismic return of consciousness to its pre-human levels in order to re-organize creatively at the human level. Creative openness allows for the myriad of differences found at the societal and cultural levels of human life, not found in the more bounded and limited forms of other sentient life. Before proceeding to my analysis, it is worthwhile to also recall what Tymieniecka has stated about the origins of the social world.8 It is upon the moral sense that the social world emerges, which reverses the view that morality is constructed on the basis of society and which also
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critically challenges the view that morality is possible only on the basis of apprehending a priori absolute values. Morality is not merely a social construction, nor is it founded on a relative-natural, conditioned apprehension of preexisting absolute values; it is at the foundation for society. ‘Morality’ involves the ongoing process of moral negotiation, which is always just that – a continual process of valuation. The moral sense is a non-objectivating generator of meanings; the valuational process is an interrogational process that must negotiate between the propensities of self-interests and Other-interests, which brings morality into Beingness; valuation is inherently dynamic. The deliberating process results in transactions. This word, ‘trans-action,’ is hyphenated to signify and emphasize that it transcends and does not synthesize the incommensurable centers of interest, and it is this transcendence that forms the moral basis and source for the emergence of society. It is a grave mistake to read this as social contract theory, for human individuals are already in society and they cannot help but exercise the moral sense. But, it is how they exercise that moral sense (along with the other senses) that processually determines the continually changing quality of society in its moral structurings. The vital/sentient significance of animals only results in gregariousness (the orientation to survival), whereas human significance involves the benevolent sentiment that sustains social life. A phenomenology of ontopoiesis must start from human experience, and it is thus to the human being, to consciousness, that I now turn. If ontopoiesis is the process of life’s constitutivity, the ‘‘sites’’ of constitution need to be examined – those sites are forms of individuation. It is in the investigation of the primordial structure of human consciousness (site) that the catalyst for social and cultural meaning-constitution is to be apprehended. The primordial structure is the I-me and the catalytic principle is dehiscence.
THE I-ME: PROTO-FORMS FOR THE SOCIETAL AND CULTURAL LEVELS OF THE ONTOPOIESIS OF LIFE
T he Proto-Societal L evel The inquiry starts from the experiences of the empirical individual human being, because by examining the individuated human form that exhibits life’s unfurlings of meanings at its station, it is possible to intuit their logoic principles. Through description of the stream of consciousness within human individuation, I propose that the I-me structural process
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is the primordial structure of consciousness and that it houses the fundamental catalyst of dehiscence for establishing proto-societal and protocultural principles of organization. It is clear that the We-us is equiprimordial with the I-me, yet for heuristic purposes I abstract from it. The strategy here is to ground a fundamental distinction within the individuated stream, and the stream, not its contents, is always individuated. The I-me, as it structures experience, engenders the above-mentioned proto-forms by establishing dehiscence in the unity of consciousness. Thus the initial investigation of the I-me is to be phenomenological in the traditional sense of describing the a priori structures and processes of appearances, in this case in terms of reflection on consciousness itself. I have proposed that the three emergent sense-bestowing capacities at the human level function as the virtualities for the progressive organization of life at the societal and cultural levels. According to Tymieniecka these senses are brought into Beingness through the Imaginatio Creatrix. But the primordial structure inherent to the individuated human consciousness that transposes these senses into societal and cultural stations is the I-me. In other words, the Otherness of other human beings and the otherness of objectivations (products of expression-cultural entities) must already be anticipated within the very structure of human consciousness. Rather than a pure unity of consciousness, the I-me manifests as a proto-otherness within its own Beingness. So, in order to demonstrate this, the workings of the three human senses in the I-me structure must be explicitly correlated with how such workings entail proto-forms for societal and cultural organizational-levels of life. By emphasizing the I-me, it may seem as though I am returning to transcendental subjectivity, but this is not the case. Husserl already failed to adequately account for the societal and cultural levels through a reduction to transcendental consciousness. Nevertheless, it is only possible to apprehend the virtualities that prepare for the societal and cultural levels through the way in which the individuated carrier participates in meaning-constitution. Without the structurization of meaning through the dehiscent catalytic principle, the human carriers could not sustain the societal and cultural stations, which means humanity entails societal and cultural levels of ontopoiesis through the I-me structurization in each of its individuated carriers. Human consciousness exists as a stream by which its past exhibits presence within the present as the horizon of its experience. Specific aspects of its past are a moment in the thematic field of every now present experience and the rest of its past functions as horizonal (along with the
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margins of present consciousness),9 but segments of the past also can be made the thematic core, i.e. remembering. The total context of ‘‘individual life’’ does not act; activity is the sole function of the spontaneous consciousness emergent within every now moment. The active moment of consciousness entails the non-active moment, which is necessarily the case for there to be a stream that exhibits historicity. And so, the I-me structure inserts a primordial differentiation in the unity of consciousness on the basis of the active/non-active functions of total consciousness. The only active I, the spontaneous I of the now phase, is always in relation to the me, which consists of all previous I-phases that can no longer act, but synthetically form the historico-continuum of an individuated life from which the now-I emerges and from which the now-phase acts. As soon as an individual articulates in judgment or even thinks the ‘‘I’’ attributing it to him/herself, he or she conspicuously forms a ‘‘protosocial relation’’ with him or herself. I-activity is possible only through dehiscence: human freedom emerges on the basis of this otherness of consciousness to itself. The I acts from the basis of that moment of its Beingness that is partitioned from acting but not from the act, its nonacting me. The I-me cannot be broken apart into independent parts, and it comprises the continually emergent dehiscent process of human conscious life. A ‘proto-social relation’ is formed on the basis of the I-me structure of the empirical self-experience (self is not substantive – it is a self-organizing process). In its temporal running-off modality the I of the now-phase positions itself in relation to its me (the carrier of previous experiences that can be formed into meaning-contexts in an infinity of ways) in the exercise of its momentarily free spontaneous activity. By doing so, consciousness positions itself in light of itself, which is the self-presence of self-consciousness, for the me is the I’s own facticity, inherent to it. The I-me is already implicit in consciousness, which is then articulated in the ‘‘I think’’ of consciously intended self-awareness or reflective self-consciousness. Intentionality, as conceived by Husserl – consciousness is always consciousness of some object or other, is similar to what Tymieniecka means by the Objective sense. What I am proposing here is that the spontaneous activity of the I in the now-phase of experience exercises its freedom on the basis of its no longer free horizon of experience – the me-moment of its self-organizing process, which as non-activity is the self -objectivation of consciousness. It is not that the spontaneous I constructs its identity qua object by projecting a self, rather the temporal structure of consciousness involves the alienation of the me from its free
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activity, partitioning the objectivated experience of the no longer active me from the present expressive activity. By ‘‘partitioning,’’ I mean the impossibility for a past spontaneous I to act presently, yet it is always present, at least horizonally. Thus, identity is an open horizon limited on the basis of this me-matrix that in-forms the spontaneous I. The fundamental character of the unitary stream of consciousness involves this dehiscence in which the I-active subject emerges out of, and exercises its freedom from and against, its objectivated me-ness. And so Tymieniecka’s Objective sense emerges in the perduring individual’s self-objectivating process and this objective sense as self-relational functions as a protosocial form. Specifically, the I-me manifests as a proto-Other-orientation through the Objective Sense, for the non-acting me is objectivated as Other to the acting I, yet a moment of its Beingness – there is no acting I without the me. This is because the now-conscious activity is only a continual objectivating process of consciousness othering itself and this other is not mere form but is visible as objectivated contents – the process of human historicity, resulting in its own positive history. This dehiscent relation of oneself (spontaneous activity, expressive process) to oneself (no longer spontaneous activity, objectivated process) gives rise to conscience, by which the moral sense accompanies the objectivated sense inherent to the I-me relation. Conscience is the negotiating process by which the I animates its me-ness, which is what is meant by talking to oneself – the call of conscience. The I gauges its actions by a proto-face-to-face in which the me calls the I’s activity into question in the negotiation of the morality of the I’s action. This is the basis for selfresponsibility. The I must take the me into consideration, for conscience (the moral moment of the dehiscent catalyst) accompanies the I and ‘‘reminds’’ it of the me – its former self-negotiating spontaneities. An aspect of the call of conscience concerns the a priori principle that the expressivities of the spontaneous I will also succumb to objectivation. The I yields to the demand of conscience to animate the me as if it is due a valuational account, for there are consequences concerning the who the me shall become – what are you doing to yourself ? The me’s moral function is to set the moral limits for the I’s spontaneous freedom. This I-me interrogational dehiscence in self-valuational negotiation (who you have been versus who you shall become on the basis of spontaneous activity) is the proto-structure for moral trans-actions concerning Others. The freedom of the spontaneous I must be imbued with benevolent/malevolent feeling toward its non-acting self, for it is capable of ‘‘tearing down its own self ’’ or, on the other hand, ‘‘rejuvenating its self.’’ And so, the Moral Sense
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emerges in the perduring individual’s self-valuational negotiations of its activities, and this is a proto-social form. Specifically the I-me manifests as this proto-face-to-face interaction through the Moral Sense. The Aesthetic Sense is the immediate experience of self-enjoyment.10 Self-feeling ‘‘just happens’’; the individual cannot help but undergo aesthesis. Self-enjoyment (feeling alive) accompanies all our acts in every moment of the specious present. Self-enjoyment is non-objectivating; it is self-consuming. Nevertheless, the feeling waxes and wanes (quantitative) and vacillates between enthusiasm and indifference (qualitative) alongside our cultivations. It would appear then that the aesthetic sense only belongs to the active, spontaneous I and not to the me. But this is not true, for self-feeling emerges on the basis of the me. It is the me that delivers over this feeling to the I, for the contents comprising the feeling passively manifest in the me-horizon. Self-feeling is not the activity of consciousness but what it feels like to be consciously active during this phase of activity. The I necessarily feels itself within its momentary phase, and self-feeling, which as the experience of self-awareness, requires the conjuring of the me. The me is required because self-feeling is not the activity of freedom and so cannot be the spontaneous I; nevertheless, it is the spontaneous I that enjoys self-feeling. In fact the I finds its selffeeling qualified in some way or another through the reflection on the me and on the basis of its interpretation seeks to provide forms of experience that cultivate some quality or other of self-feeling. The I states, ‘‘I feel tired,’’ but this really means, ‘‘The me informs me that I feel tired, and now I have to decide what to do concerning this.’’ The Aesthetic Sense emerges on the basis of the perduring individual’s parodoxical nonobjectivating feeling of itself. But this means that the I feels itself without being the source for the meaning of this feeling. The eye sees without seeing itself; but the I does experience itself experiencing, without itself being an object of experience – the non-objectivating Aesthetic Sense. The Aesthetic Sense is fostered only through this proto-social form in which the I finds out from the me how it is faring. Specifically, the I-me manifests as a proto-social mirroring giving the self back to itself. In sum, the Objective Sense emerging in the dehiscent catalyst of the I-me primordial structure forms a proto-Other-orientation. The emergence of the Moral Sense in the I-me forms a proto-face-to-face interaction, and the emergence of the Aesthetic Sense manifests as a protosocial mirroring. These are not all of the proto-social forms that arise: others arise, such as the they-relationship, but these others only can be
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adequately examined along with the investigation of the proto-cultural aspects of the I-me. At this juncture, I contrast this doctrine of I-me primordiality with Sartre’s neo-Cartesian existentialism. Sartre maintains that consciousness is nothing (no-thing) and that the spontaneous consciousness in the passing present moments comprises pure freedom. But Sartre’s anthropology only makes sense on the mistaken premise of Cartesianism that consciousness is absolutely partitioned from Being. Sartre maintains that consciousness is what it is not (it only can be its own facticity, what it allegedly is not – its me). And, it is not what it is (the pure act or spontaneous nothing, is not the I that the pure act constructs/projects on the basis of its me – what it is). Interpreting this doctrine on the basis of the I-me primordial relation means that the I is what it is not because it necessarily sinks back into the non-active me, yet the I that is now is not contained by the me against which it takes a stand. I argue that there is neither a pure (nothingness) nor an empirical I (substantive ground of states), but always an I-me dynamic relation even when consciousness appears to be sunk merely into the aesthesis of the moment. Sartre makes consciousness, which for him is always momentary, a pure nothingness, which in my language partitions the I from the me as impenetrable facticity; I put forth that the I-me is primordial and it is asymmetrically, dialectically interrelational. The forming of a position against itself involves active/non-active differentiation, negotiation, and self-reflection – not pure negation. If an individual states, ‘‘I like steamed vegetables,’’ that I appresents (albeit naively) the I-me dehiscent processes of having: differentiated itself as active against the non-active me; negotiated a judgment about the me on the basis of its sedimented moral and nonmoral valuations; and mirrored itself on the basis of its self-feeling, its faring. It is not the me that is speaking and it is not a purely free I, but the I whose meanings are necessarily contextualized by the me. And this I on the basis of the freedom granted to it in its living phase of the specious present is taking the stance of articulating/presenting the me under this aspect. Free/spontaneous activity does not begin at ground zero; it is always shrouded in a totality from which it arranges its freedom. It does so from its momentary position in relation to its own Beingness. If consciousness meant pure freedom, there could be no falsities/truths enduring beyond the moment and no authenticity/inauthenticity. The point of this contrast with Sartre is to show that spontaneous activity involves a primordial relation that foils pure act. Consciousness always entails this relation within its Beingness, which is objectivated a
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priori and so is not a constructed a posteriori objectivation as Sartre claims. Sartre states that there is no I in the running-after-a-streetcar, which is to say that the I emerges as an object, after an interpretive reflection, which means that it functions as an empirical construct. But, I argue that it is not pure consciousness that objectivates itself through a posteriori projection, rather it passes into the me moment of the I-me primordiality, which as already objectivated continually births a spontaneous I in order for consciousness to continually act. The I’s act becomes objectivated through concretization, while the me can receive it because the me, which is the sum total of previous freedom, is objectivated a priori to the I-act as the horizonal moment of it. Importantly, the objectivated me is accounted for by the I, and the spontaneous activity of running-after-the-streetcar is the I interpreting its me. There would be no activity at all on the basis of pure freedom; there is activity on the basis of freedom that takes into account its own Beingness – the I accounting for the contextualization of the me that births the I of this and each moment. So, objectivation is already a moment of consciousness, not an a posteriori construct. Again, Sartre assumes a Cartesian view, but instead of God calling each instance into existence, it is nothing. Yet, it is ridiculous to think that activity is anonymous at the level of consciousness, because the act that emerges in the stream of consciousness cannot be disconnected from its objectivated moment, its me. And, the me, which is pregnant with experiential contents, is necessarily a moment of the present consciousness in the birthing of the I, even though it is of the past and cannot act in the present, which is another way of saying that the I-me interrelation is the primordial structure. The I is who it is on the basis of the me – it acts from experience. The I knows that when it states, ‘‘I love you,’’ it articulates this on the basis of the me, which is not momentary, but that which gives over to the I its Beingness, its processual life. The I can actively say, ‘‘I love you,’’ because the I knows its beingin-love from its me, or on the basis of it opens itself to be involved in love. The activity/non-activity of the stream of consciousness is an asymmetrical dialectical relationship. A caveat that can be raised against the primordiality of the I-me might come from the structure of creative acts and such phenomena as the ahaerlebnis, but these are only complications in the process. There is only space for clues here: these phenomena call on a deeper form of the I-me relation in which both poles function at primitive organizational levels in order to bring about constitutional transpositions for the emergence of novel sense.
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T he Proto-Cultural L evel It is now possible to examine the proto-form of culture on the basis of the I-me. Culture is defined as the sum of objectivations that are the concretizations of human expressions, which forms a complex system of interrelated parts and wholes – various sub-systems. These objectivations form their own structurizations that then in-form human life. And so by investigating self-objectivation, the proto-form of culture can be elucidated. I have stated that an I phase sinks into the past, which concretizes spontaneous activity in a way that it is sedimented in the stream as the me. This is the process of the objectivation of self. The spontaneous activity becomes a deposit in the stream of consciousness, an objectivated act – the I finishes drinking ‘‘a few pints,’’ which is no longer spontaneous action, but a completed act that now stands against the I, the standpoint from which it now must act. The objectivation is alienated from the spontaneous activity of the I, yet internalized into the me and thus informs the context of experience from which the continually emerging spontaneity of the I now must act. This aspect of historicity in which objectivated contents exhibit a different structure than when expressed is an essential moment of consciousness and is only so on the basis of the I-me. The I actively expresses meanings that become objectivated – carrying their own processual structurizations – and these are in turn internalized into the me, which forms the context of the I’s experience. So this contextualized I must act from the ramifications/reverberations of internalized objectivations. The I is ‘‘condemned to’’ those contextualized sedimentations as its horizonal facticity. Moreover, since objectivations have their own Beingness, the Beingness-of -objectivations mediates the acts of the I. This mediation, through the in-forming from transcendent objectivated structurizing systems, constitutes the self-enculturation of the I. Through this systems-interrelational dialectic, spontaneity adds to its own enculturation. Culture, in its proto-form, is this mediating aspect within the I-me structural process. All meaning expressions of human beings become objectivated, and all objectivations exhibit their own Beingness. In the process, the me does not merely internalize the contents of the transcendent structures experienced by the I. This more-than-theinternalization-of-its-own-acts occurs because what has been expressed through the I’s activity becomes an objectivation of some type that engenders its own organizational constitutivity. Qua its objectivated structurizational agency, objectivations filter subsequent expressivities and subsequent internalizations. The I drinks the pints, which as an
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objectivation, exhibits its own constituting agency that is internalized and then exhibited in the tipsy I’s expressive activities. Objectivated structurizations, thus, mediate the I’s own expressions, because even though the I spontaneously acts, it does so on the basis of the me, which always carries the mediating structures with their inherent potencies, within it. To further illustrate, the acquisition of a language is sedimented in the me, and for the I to speak, it is condemned to how language structures thought. This means that the Beingness of human language, the particular empirical language, and the idiosyncratic mastery of it – as interrelated open dynamic systems exhibiting their own peculiar dynamic processes – mediate the I’s expressive acts and filter the I’s experience. And so mediation is the very function of culture – the essence of culture is its role as Worldly-Horizon comprising objectivated systems as the mediating structures in-forming human expression – the transcendent, but internalized wedge within the intentional structure of consciousness. It is worth noting Husserl’s genetic phenomenology in which he explores the genealogy of the meanings constitutive of the transcendental ego.11 Although a genetic study of a logically constructed development of contexts of significances is a major breakthrough in phenomenology,12 its usefulness can be misleading. The fact that it does not correlate to the meanings as lived by the concrete empirical individual serves to indicate that its ‘‘purity’’ is only gained by abstraction. Primarily, the transcendental genealogy abstracts from the me – the carrier of mediations, and merely poses the activity of the spontaneous I thought to be transcendentally pure. But there is no pure genesis of transcendental meaning because of mediational contextualization – the I’s experiences are always filtered experiences by ontological/empirical systems that cannot be eliminated. The reduction to the pure transcendental ego is impossible, for there is no way to purify the objectivations that are necessarily a moment of consciousness. Meanings are always co-constituted by transcendent mediational structurizations. To conclude briefly, the I-me structural process advances proto-forms for the societal level and the mediating filters with their independent structurizations comprise proto-forms for the cultural level forming a co-constitutive Worldly-Horizon. But societal forms are culturally inscribed and so they too are objectivated forms mediating experience. Mediation is an a priori structurization of expression, yet due to the continual potency of expressions, mediational factors are forever being changed themselves. Culture and society are continually changing phenomena.
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It would be a complete misunderstanding to interpret this I-me process as ‘‘internally pure’’ in terms of its interrelations. There is neither pure I-ness nor pure me-ness; the I-me is a primordial relation that is always filtered by mediations that are transcendent structurizations. These transcendent structurizations are co-constitutive. Elsewhere I have called the co-constitutive regions the Worldly-Horizon and the EarthBody – the Worldly-Horizon is constitutive of the cultural world and the EarthBody is the constitutivity of natural morphology correlative of the lived-body.13 The interpretation of the empirical perduring individual’s experience involves the I’s spontaneity, which is based on the internalized me-experiences from which the I acts. So, the objects that appear to the I now, only can do so against the sedimented meanings carried by the me. The problem is to trace these sedimented meanings. It is to the societal level of internalized transcendent meanings to which I return. The individual human being is born to and already finds him/herself amongst other human beings. Biological necessities and openness for human forms of significance impose the need for societal interrelations and so human Beingness necessarily must reorganize at the social level. In moral negotiations with Others, structures of trans-actions are formed. The species of expression, which is explicitly social on the empirical level (objectivated as behaviors and products), involves the we-relation or theyrelation, but all social meanings are ultimately derived from the face-toface in which the we is established. As the I is primordially related to the me, the we is primordially related to the us. It is the us-together that is taken into account, directly or indirectly. In the explicit sociality of the We-us relation, we express ourselves and this expression is objectivated. The objectivated expression forms contents that function to develop into the structures of the social world – institutionalization, roles, tradition, legitimation, universe-maintenance, primary and secondary socialization, etc.14 Once formed these objectivations become transcendent structurizations, which are then internalized through transmission, i.e., retrojected back into us. Social structures function as cultural mediations from which the I or the we acts. So, here is another way that the me is not a pure me, because already it is filled with content that is the us. The I positioned in life by the me, which is filled with the content of the us, acts from the contexts provided by the me/us. This is the explication for socialization by which the I’s expressions are not monadic, but also a function of sociality, a we. Nevertheless the spontaneity of the I/we provides possi-
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bilities for the dynamic transformation of the content that becomes retrojected back into the me/us. It is now possible to revise our primordial structure from the I-me to the I/we–me/us, for the perduring individual is at once an enculturated social being. Nevertheless, this Beingness necessarily is enacted through the self-organizing perduring individuals. This statement merely indicates the obvious point: there is no social or cultural world without individual human beings as their carriers, but individual human beings are at once dialectically united through processes of mediation, in the sense discussed above – social mediation. However, all of the expressions of the we that then become objectivations carry their own Beingness. For example, an aspect of societal construction through the negotiations between us involves power relations-politics. When power relations are objectivated, they take on different forms, e.g., those of father-son, those of feudalism, those of mercantile capitalism. Regardless of our subjective intentions these forms inform us, which is to say they are co-constitutive, for they then mediate the I/we–me/us relations. These forms filter our intentions co-constituting their significances. This mediational aspect, again, is the cultural level of life. Thus, the sociological level of moral negotiation with others becomes objectivated and power-relations are one aspect of internalization of a form that carries its own systems-organization. Even though moral transactions are always a continual valuational process, these take place on the basis of the institutionalized power-relations that mediate such transactions. As objectivated and as mediated the multitude of objectivations within a society constitutes the level of meanings called culture. Once the level of culture is reached, and with human beings, it is always already reached, human expression is condemned to socio-cultural mediation. The we of a particular society creates its own structurization that acts back on it in-forming the us. Products of that society, objectivations that carry their own Beingness, are the objective moment of the culture and this in-forms the expressions of the we, which are the subjective moment of culture. It is the subjective moment of culture for its expressions are not merely formed on the basis of its own objectivations. As creative, human subjects engage in changing culture over time through on-going expressivities. SUBJECTIVE CULTURE–OBJECTIVE CULTURE
To understand culture properly, it must also be understood as a relation just as I-me is a primordial relation and so is the we-us, or together, the
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I/we–me/us. Since culture fills the Worldly-Horizon with contents that in turn mediates human experience, I employ the subject/object vocabulary already appropriated by others who have worked on this problematic. The primordial cultural relation is subjective culture–objective culture. Georg Simmel most effectively explored this relation with several theses.15 One thesis concerns the tragedy of twentieth century culture: the domination of subjective culture by objective culture. It can be claimed that the effects of this tragedy involve twentieth-century alienation, disorientation, and uprootedness, and also the emergence of simulacra in the sense given it by Baudrillard.16 Relating this phenomenon to my present thesis, mediation dominates constitution. The co-constitutivity of subjective expression and of the Beingness of objectivation is unbalanced, and the hegemony of objectivations oppresses expressions. I think that Simmel’s thesis offers great insight here, but I have mentioned his work only as a way to display the relationship. Subjective culture involves the gestalt and sum total of subjective expressions that are always expressed in interrelations with the already expressed. These subjective expressions of meanings are objectivated and their objectivations mark their transition into objective culture. Subjective cultural expressions are indeed already cultural, for the objective cultural horizon mediates them. This function parallels the mediation by the me as the I expresses itself. Objective culture constitutes the gestalt that exhibits the overall style of a culture and the sum total of objectivated meanings, each exhibiting its own changing form of Beingness. Now, to relate this to Baudrillard’s thesis, it seems that objective culture has reached a point in its development by which it can reproduce itself (simulacra) and this reproductive feature overwhelms subjective culture with a myriad of signs that reference only other signs. I am rushing ahead of my inquiry, but these crises in contemporary culture point out the importance of understanding mediation and the objectivational process of culture. It is the endless stream of subjective cultural expressions that are dynamically injected into objective culture, which entering into an objectivated matrix constitutive of its own Beingness, changes the Beingness of subjective culture. But these changes in subjective culture occur on the basis of their function as mediators, which indirectly structure subjective expressivity. For Hegel, objective culture mirrors the development of subjective culture, but this would be true only if objectivations did not carry their own Beingness. Through their own self-organization, objectivations foil the possibility of any such correlation and any such progressive historical
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development. This is a major reason why it is so important to understand the Beingness of culture. For example, Hegel sees language reflecting the logical workings of mind, but what he does not see is the self-organizing principles of language itself that transcend mind and are co-constitutive through structures that mind did not birth and are unable to control. Even if the march of an Absolute Spirit does occur, its concretization is foiled by the structurizations of its own objectivations. These objectivations carry a Beingness that entails objectivation across every level of ontopoiesis. MEDIATION AND THE BEINGNESS OF CULTURE
The essence of culture involves the principle that all human expressions result in objectivations and that these objectivations manifest their own Beingness. These objectivations form a context – not merely an assemblage, a nexus of relations that form a dynamic whole that we call a culture. Thus, an emergent level of ontopoiesis is a cultural world brought into its own Beingness through the ever-active human sense bestowing capacities. The objectivations at this level of organization transcend the human constitutive acts that brought them into Beingness and the emergent Beingness of a culture informs its human source, fashioning humanity in its image. Humans express their culture (subjective culture), which adds objectivations to their culture. The human openness that we call freedom means that culture is in many ways highly plastic, which dynamically changes as cultural objectivations mold human expressivity and as human expressivity molds cultural objectivations. There is a predilective naivete´ about this process. For example, human beings express themselves by creating machines, but the machines exhibit their own Beingness, which in turn informs humanity. So, what happens is that in operating machinery human beings are made to be machinelike, a cog in the machinery. Or to say this another way, humans create machines to release them from the bondage of work, yet machines exhibit their own meaning structures, their own Beingness, which do not correlate with human intentions. This transcendence of culture puts us into a position of having to study the cultural forces in order to understand how they are molding us. This notion of cultural forces is quite obvious, but its obviousness has been hitherto left up to positivistic science. Cultural forces must be studied in terms of sense-bestowal and that is why elsewhere I have proffered an indirect phenomenological methodology in order to study them in terms of their mediational function.17
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Human expressions can be innovative, or creative, but never novel in an absolute sense. Creative objectivations are brought into the already objectivated context of culture. Creative objectivations have their own Beingness, which allows them to modify the Beingness of culture. And so creative expressions bring about new objectivations, but such objectivations become contextualized in the already sedimented culture and at the same time carry with them their own structurizations that will change culture in unforeseen ways. The Beingness of culture, although emergent at the human station of life, nevertheless is never partitioned from the other levels of ontopoiesis. This is obvious, just think of the cultural phenomenon of industrialization or the creation of an auto-culture and the impact of such for every level: physis, bios, society, culture. In terms of ontopoiesis, it is important to understand the emergent principles at the level of culture, but it is also as important to see how culture reorganizes and is supported by the various levels of ontopoiesis. Culture affects and is affected by all levels of ontopoiesis. Culture includes knowledge of the various levels of ontopoiesis, which are objectivations of human expression in the form of judgments. The product-contents of culture entail the levels of physis and bios in terms of reorganization, not changing the principles that are emergent at those levels, but the nexus of organization. Cultural practices reorganize biotic conditions in ways that can be therapeutic and in ways that bring about dis-ease. Industrialized culture did not plan to create disturbances in physis that have led to acid rain or global warming, but cultural practices carry with them these mutual transpositional repercussions with other levels of ontopoiesis. Smoking tobacco was not institutionalized in order to create lung disease and other health problems. But, on the other hand, while culture does not escape into pure spirit, it does enculturate physis and bios. For example, food is immediately a cultural entity, which is enculturation of the biotic level. The biotic level is interpreted from the basis of culture and not vice versa. One may drink mercury thinking that it makes him/her a god/dess and it surely does in terms of cultural meanings. And so what another culture may call a poisoning effect does not carry that meaning even though certain biotic changes, like vomiting or death, cannot be denied. MEDIATION AND INTENTIONALITY
Since ontopoiesis entails the phenomenology of life – meanings as they are a function of life’s dynamic evolution – it is important to understand
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the effects of cultural mediation at the level of the constitutive powers of human agency. The phenomenological battlecry of Husserl, back to the things themselves, provided Husserl with a lifelong problematic. Elsewhere I have shown how mediation problematizes the phenomenological project and I argued for an indirect phenomenology that takes into consideration the transcendent mediational aspects of constitution that can not be brought into reduction.18 Briefly, I enlist the widely known criticisms of Jacques Derrida and of Ludwig Wittgenstein, both of whom discuss paradigmatic cases – language and forms of life, in order to show that their objectivated structures exhibit their own Beingness and function as mediators within intentionality. The structures of their Beingness cannot be reduced to the intentional relation. And so, the constitution of sense entails a co-constitutive agency other than consciousness and one that resists transcendental reduction. Husserl was beginning to work out this problematic when he put forth the idea of the co-constitutivity of what I label as the Worldly-Horizon. But Husserl’s phenomenology is equipped only to grasp those aspects of mediation that can manifest within surface ontology. With ontopoietic phenomenology, we can apprehend co-constitutivities at all levels of ontopoiesis, which is a necessary turn, if indeed phenomenology is going to be a science not limited to surface ontology. I shall briefly describe the structure of mediation, for the study of mediation is the key to understanding the ontopoiesis (the inner workings) of the cultural station of life. Human consciousness intends some object through an act. Consciousness has already been enculturated and the subjective history of that enculturation provides consciousness with meaning-contexts from which it can constitute an object. These meaningcontexts provide consciousness with ways to express itself. But, these ways exhibit structures that are not subject to the object focus of the phenomenological reduction, because they are not the explicit object of consciousness, but horizonal mediators of sense-constitution. This means that the horizon of the natural attitude remains present and operable through the fact that consciousness necessarily assumes transcendent mediational structures even in the ‘‘transcendentally reduced sphere’’. These mediations are cultural objectivations, which by essence carry their own Beingness even in the reduced sphere because they transcend that which is given as evidence to direct phenomenological seeing. Whether consciousness is aware of it or not (in the everyday mode either unaware or naively aware) cultural objectivations inform his/her own constitutive agency from the standpoint of enculturation sedimented within the historicity of consciousness. Every intention of sense carries with it an otherness
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that cannot be reduced to pure intentionality. It must be remembered that in Husserlian phenomenology the ego splits and the transcendental ego accompanies the mundane ego whose experiential contents are left intact. And, the mundane ego carries with it its enculturation with all the co-constitutive systems in-forming it. Merleau-Ponty’s claim is that the reduction cannot be complete, because the being of the lived-body is ambiguous – not purely subject, not purely object. My claim here is that within the very Being of enculturated consciousness the purity of its intentions already are ‘‘corrupted’’ by a Beingness that it cannot help but exhibit. The mediation of intentions the non-phenomenologically reducible horizon unintended by consciousness is co-constitutive of its I-acts and pregnant within the me. And so, the constitution of the object includes the co-constitutivity of the mediator that transcends the intentionality of consciousness. This is the most important essential principle of culture concerning phenomenological inquiry. What phenomenological inquiry can do is to clarify the mediational aspect and engage in a dialogue with empirical science in order to ascertain the Beingness of the mediations that foil phenomenological purity. Human beings create a level of ontopoiesis that transcends its societal relations and one that then maintains a partnership with human expression in constitution. It does so in a twofold way. First, cultural products express laws of their own of which humans must apprehend, e.g., economic laws, laws of traffic congestion. Second, human expression is mediated by the objective principles in the process of expression. Thus, the study of mediation is an ambiguous enterprise that entails both positivistic and phenomenological moments. The positivistic aspect apprehends transcendent structures, but is not appropriate for the description of the mediational function. The study needs to apprehend empirical reality from positivism, which it can treat eidetically, but from the non-transcendental standpoint. This provides phenomenology with the transcendent structures by which through an indirect methodology of uncovering the co-constitutive agency, the structure of mediation is phenomenologically clarified. Still the effects of mediation are too complex to be made transparent. Yet, without the study of mediation from the standpoint of ontopoiesis, phenomenological inquiry remains a surface ontology, no matter how radical its study of meanings. CONCLUSIONS
Cultural phenomenology is to be a study founded on ontopoiesis. Individuation at the human station of life entails structurization that are
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proto-social and proto-cultural. These proto-forms allow for the human to engage in the social and cultural re-organizations of life’s meanings. Human beings create these levels through their sense-bestowing capacities. The cultural level is reached through the fact that human expression creates objectivations that entail their own Beingness. These objectivations form the Worldly-Horizon of the cultural world. These objectivations are apprehended as meanings, and they entail interrelative meanings at every station of ontopoiesis. Objectivations serve as mediators in the intentional structure of consciousness and provide it with a transcendent non-reducible moment that is co-constitutive. This means that cultural phenomenology is the form of phenomenological inquiry that takes into account cultural mediation – meaningful transcendent objectivations that bring systems-level structures to the process of constitution. This transcendent moment foils the reduction to the transcendental and thus requires an indirect approach that relies on the positivist moment in order to supply the inquiry with the empirical facts concerning the mediational factors. These facts are reinterpreted on the basis of ontopoiesis, which evaluates trans-stational reverberations of meaning throughout the ontopoietic hierarchy. Thus, cultural phenomenology must always be informed of the other stations of ontopoietic dynamics to know the extent of the re-organization of life being produced through the activities occurring at the cultural level. Morgan State University NOTES 1 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm,’’ in Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 28 (October 1998). 2 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Measure and the Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of Life,’’ in Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 19, pp. 26–51. See, especially, ‘‘First and foremost, the self-individualizing character of life whether it be at the organic, vital, psychic, or cultural level will serve as our measuring stick in the vast expanse,’’ p. 35. 3 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of Being: In Search of the Foothold of Change, Becoming and Transformation,’’ in Analecta Husserliana LX (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999), pp. 3–20. 4 Tymieniecka, Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 19, ‘‘The Human Condition establishes the human living being in a most particular situation with respect to the total life expanse, the entire existential schema of living beingness. Simultaneously it gives the human being an outstanding position – a knot position – with respect to the spheres within which living being is suspended’’, p. 45. 5 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, W hy is T here Something Rather than Nothing? Prolegomena to the Phenomenology of Cosmic Creation (The Netherlands: Van Gorcum,
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1966), p. 42. ‘‘The individual being distinguishes himself as the only self-sustaining factor within the flux of change. ... The individual autonomous being defines himself on the one hand as the factor holding the strings of the world context in process, and on the other hand, as a transformer of the spontaneity which sustains the world process.’’ 6 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka ‘‘The Human Condition within the Unity-of-Everythingthat-is-Alive,’’ in Analecta Husserliana XXXI (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 3–17. 7 Tymieniecka, Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 19, p. 45, ‘‘The Human Condition is a station in life’s dynamic stream due to the virtualities that the progress of life deposited as its foothold on life: the creative virtuality with three absolutely novel valuative factors of sense, the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral senses.’’ 8 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Moral Sense in the Origin and Progress of the Social World,’’ in Analecta Husserliana XV (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), pp. 5–43. 9 See Aron Gurwitsch, Marginal Consciousness, Lester Embree (ed.) (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1985). 10 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Aesthetic Enjoyment and Poetic Sense,’’ in Analecta Husserliana XVIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 3–21. 11 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Dorion Cairns (trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960). 12 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of L ogic, James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (trans.) (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 13 See Gary Backhaus, ‘‘Introduction: Earth Ways: The Primordial Relation Between the Ways of Knowing and the Ways of Earthly Phenomena’’ and Chapter 4: ‘‘Toward a Phenomenology of Cognitive Mapping,’’ in Earth Ways: Framing Geographical Meanings, Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (eds.) (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004). 14 See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, T he Social Construction of Reality: A T reatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). 15 See for example, ‘‘The Conflict in Modern Culture,’’ in Georg Simmel: On Indivdiuality and Social Forms, Donald N. Levine (ed.) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 375–393. 16 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Glaser (trans.) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 17 See Gary Backhaus, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in L ived-Images: Meditations in Experience, L ifeWorld and I-hood, Matti Itkonen and Gary Backhaus (eds.) (Jyva¨skyla¨, Finland: University of Jyva¨skyla¨ Press, 2003). 18 Ibid.
W. KIM ROGERS
CONTEXTS: THE LANDSCAPES OF HUMAN LIFE
INTRODUCTION
An appeal to context in order to understand human behavior is very often made by both philosophical authors and those in the Human Sciences. It seems obvious to those who study human actions that these are context-sensitive and governed by rules that are context-dependent. Furthermore, the landscapes in which human beings act are contextualized, that is, composed of significant and connected affairs supporting specific actions. Consider what Sinologist Roger Ames and philosopher David Hall have to say in their joint interpretation of the Confucian and Taoist traditions. ‘‘It is the ‘art of contextualization,’ ’’ they wrote, ‘‘that is most characteristic of Chinese intellectual endeavors’’ (1998, 40). In Ames and Hall’s view a particular affair or person ‘‘is a determining focus of the field that contextualizes it’’ (Ibid., 39). A particular person ‘‘is a realized perspective upon things which at one and the same time centers the individual and focuses his or her context’’ (Ibid., 248). There is an appropriate direction for a particular person to pursue ‘‘negotiated between its own agency and the flux of its context’’ (Ibid., 39). Persons are radically situated as persons-in-context, interacting as they do with a world defined by specific social, cultural, and natural conditions. The result is what Ames and Hall call an aesthetic order which is a consequence of the contribution to a given context of a particular which both determines and is determined by the context (1987, 16). Everyone can understand most of what is said in these statements concerning context, but only because the meaning of that term is vague. Even though contextuality is a common feature of human life and research, and its meaning in fact usually taken for granted, that does not mean it is unproblematic. CONTEXTUALITY
Benny Shanon writes that ‘‘as a factor that affects behavior context has, of course, been the subject of extensive investigation.’’ Nevertheless, ‘‘a perusal of the literature reveals, frequently as the term ‘context’ is employed, it is seldom defined’’ (1990, 157). For the concept of context 191 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 191–202. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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to become really useful, a further examination needs to be made of what is meant by context. Shanon concludes that ‘‘context should be defined by means of a terminology which, by its very nature, is interactional’’ (Ibid., 163). However, inexplicably, he does not then go on to offer such a definition or description of context and contextualizing. This, using an ecological approach, is now my goal. The term ‘‘ecological’’ here draws its meaning from the provenance of its original use by biologists and behavioral scientists: ‘‘Ecology ... expresses in a single word, the idea of all components of a milieu in reciprocal interaction with each other’’ (Bennett 1976, 163). An approach that takes the reciprocity between living beings and their environment, the polarity and mutuality in their interaction, as the basic framework for all of one’s studies, I call an ecological approach. In taking this approach, I reject the modern dualism between an internal mental world and an external physical one, their implied separation, and the various theories of mental representations that are supposed to mediate between these two worlds. In seeking to understand living beings in interaction with their environment, one must also avoid interpreting these in terms of their self-same identity, of their independence and the passivity of one or the other. Every particular form of life is a vital system of interactions jointly produced by living beings and their environing affairs. To put it in simple – certainly overly simple – terms we make the kind of life we have as we respond to the environing affairs addressing us and responding to our addresses and responses. The contexting by human beings of some environing affairs occurs when these are accorded significance and connected in terms of human activities and in turn these contexts help shape the activities of living beings with respect to their environing affairs. In Tymieniecka’s view ‘‘the human individual essentially is the being who invents and creates’’ (1983, 39). The creative act of human beings is a shaping both of human forms of life and of the conditions in which they live. The conditions in which human beings live change as human beings change, or, more accurately, as they change their actions in response to their life condition. New forms of human action call up specific new types of life conditions and vice versa. By this creative activity of human beings and the thus also changing face of their life conditions, is inaugurated what she terms the ‘‘Human Condition’’ (1997, 12). The ‘‘Human Condition’’ is a humanly made setting for human life in which the latter creatively establishes particular contexts of actions, invents
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networks of actions that outlast the life-cycle of any one human being (cf. 1996, 15). We speak of contexts of actions and contexts for interpreting the products of actions; for example, the contexts of ritual, work, play, the contexts of a painting, an artwork or a musical piece, and so on. However, one should be careful not to reify these contexts of actions as though they were some kind of affair existing in the environment. Rather, as connected landscapes of significant affairs they have suggestive and supportive roles in the human-environment conversation. Different kinds of interactions between human beings and environing affairs arise from different kinds of contexts of actions and vice versa. As one initiates specific forms of acting, specific types of contexts of actions will be sometimes created, sometimes given, sometimes sought for, sometimes already present. Human beings’ actions are contextualized as selected affairs in their environment are connected and given significance in terms of meaning and fit, that is, by what they afford for present and anticipated interactions of living beings and their environment. In other words, as Tymieniecka put it, ‘‘entering life’s constructive progress as a creator, the human being assumes a crucial position with respect to its course: he introduces the human significance of life’’ (1984, viii). ‘‘By inventively unfolding the virtualities of the Human Condition the living being transforms the primary avenues of life by bringing in new factors of sense. With these new factors he expands his circumambient conditions into a socio-cultural world, his very own universe within which he seeks his unique selfrealization’’ (1983, 68). For example, let us consider the significance of the round white candle which sits upon my desk. When the power goes off (as it does all too frequently) it is a source of illumination as soon as I light the wick. I often look at it as an affair I appreciate for its simple beauty, but at the present moment it is something I placed there to hold some papers down on my desk so they won’t get blown away. My little terrier rushes into my study chasing the cat again and I consider throwing something at him. Now I see how well that round white affair on my desk would serve as a projectile. The classical belief that this candle has a single meaning in itself is clearly belied by the variety of my possible actions and experiences. The meanings or affordances of this affair will correlate with my interactions with my environment. But one affair’s significance cannot be determined independently of its connection also to the fittingness and meaning of
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other significant affairs for the actions of human beings, that is, outside of contexts of actions. Contexts of actions are never fully determinate, significant affairs composing them being added or subtracted, nor are they changeless. Just as much as the kinds of interactions engaged in persist or change, so also vary the contexts of actions related to them. As a variety of contexts of actions may follow other contexts of actions, so too there may be a variable sequence of shifting contexts of actions both up and down the scales of size and duration. Each context of action may be connected with others and may contain or be nested in yet other contexts. No context of action, whether superordinate or subordinate to others, is a cause of (explains) another context. However, progressively inter-supportive layers of contexts of actions within varying hierarchies of scale will promote the creating of new forms of interaction and the creating of appropriate new contexts of actions. The contextuality of actions in one’s environment is not just sometimes there. Rather, none of one’s actions is context-free. The contextuality of human activity is still present in the recognition of the absence of an expected context of activity. Even when dreaming or daydreaming or in the case of hallucinations such as those produced by human actors in an artificially constructed stimulus-free environment, there are still affairs to be given meaning in terms of what they afford for fantasied actions. Contextualization occurs primarily but not exclusively in community life. Community life is a social reality jointly made in and through the interactions of human beings, in which the action of each comes to be complemented and completed by the actions of the others. According to Tymieniecka ‘‘the pristine nature, source, and significance of human experience [i.e., the Human Condition] has to be elucidated and grasped in its modalities in which man’s self-interpretation in existence blends into the intersubjective existential network of the common life-world and its natural milieu’’ (1983, 28). One’s social activity involves reciprocity, that is, the mutual anticipation of each other’s actions and experiences, a reciprocity that is actualized in the following of commonly preferred patterns of acting or usages. Reciprocity in turn involves familiarity with the affairs that are to be regularly reckoned with in following such usages. In nearly all cases one therefore does not need to invent meanings for the affairs met in one’s environment. Rather, the affairs one encounters already have meanings, have been made into ‘things’ through the interpretations of affairs inculcated by a community’s usages. One comes to know these ‘things’ through
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one’s following the commonly preferred patterns of acting or usages of a community. The usages specific to particular communities as well as various forms of human groupings within communities, for example, churches, schools, sports, and so on, provide us with the basis for sharing common contexts of actions. The activities of other human beings will not be understood by us unless we share the contexts of their actions. As the Native American proverb puts it, to step into the world of another human being, one must ‘‘walk a day in their moccasins.’’ The distinction between ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us’’ is based to a considerable degree on unshared contexts of actions. However, networks of actions can transcend the boundaries of ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us,’’ especially between communities in which capitalist economies are strongly developed. The particular kind of common life which members of a community essay in their environment is found in their culture. Their culture is actualized in and through the distinctive organization of their commonly preferred patterns of action or usages into a workable, comprehensible, communicable and transgenerational program of life. This common life program includes the acquiring of a commonly held set of beliefs, that is, a repertory of acquired convictions about the nature of the world and oneself, one’s fellow human beings, about the hierarchy of affairs and values supportive of one’s continuation of preferred patterns of actions. The particular contexts of actions belonging to a community are correlated with the particular culture of that community. To act in common with other human beings requires relying on (trusting) the others to perform or to have performed certain acts in which recognition is given ourselves as accountable, able to be treated or dealt with on common grounds, which in turn enables our actions to be more effective. These common grounds are to be found in shared or presumably shared contexts of actions. A certain amount of trustworthiness must be attributable to oneself and one’s co-actors in social interactions within one’s community (including those activities intended to bring about social change, e.g., protest marches, hunger strikes, etc.). Such trust, of course, can be disappointed when the contexts of one’s actions are not shared by others in one’s community or when one finds oneself encountering unknown contexts of actions in new and unfamiliar social surroundings. Note that a context of action which others are not able to share belongs to the life of those we describe as insane, and is to be found also in the ‘‘spirit journeys’’ of shamans.
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So far so good, but we must go still further if we are to better understand what is meant by context. We have spoken above of contexting and creating contexts of actions through giving significance to environing affairs in terms of some human activity. Significance, that is, the meaning of some affair, is contextually determined. However, contexting, the creating of contexts of actions, is also the flexible knitting together or connecting of significant affairs in landscapes, each affair helping to determine, in its interrelations with other affairs, the sort of connectedness of a landscape. Simply put, contexts of actions are neither more nor less than contexted landscapes. The term ‘‘landscape,’’ having its origins in painting, would seem to refer to something merely observed, but as J. B. Jackson writes: ‘‘The idea of landscape is anchored upon human life; ‘‘the true and lasting meaning of the word landscape: not something to look at but to live in; and not alone but with other people’’ (Meinig 1979, 228). According to Jackson, ‘‘A landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, ... a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infra-structure or background for our collective existence’’ (1984, 8). Can we then meaningfully speak of natural vs. artificial landscapes? We at least can still distinguish those landscapes that contain more affairs which are the products of human artifice and imagination from those which contain less and describe the former as being less and the latter as more natural. Looking at this situation from Tymieniecka’s point of view, a human life is one with Nature but surpasses Nature’s rules by expanding its own (1986, 18). True, but we need to take this issue even further. In one sense we now live in an environment largely of our own making but in a deeper sense we do not. We recognize that there has occurred in recent millennia a progressive introduction of humanly made changes and artifacts into our environment. Today human beings are everywhere surrounded by their own works, yet this has not diminished our integration into the ecosystem (Nature) in the least. We may live in built environments, but we have built upon Nature. Landscapes can vary from the sensorily given to the imaginary, from the material to the mathematical. A landscape can be described in terms of content and organization, significance and connection, but not always as something spatially extended in two or three dimensions, nor as necessarily sensorily experienceable. Even when a landscape contains only
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those affairs which are sensorily experienceable, it has no physical edges as such. In considering where landscapes begin and end we should speak always only of liminality and passages. Landscapes suggest and support particular ranges of activities for the communities which live in them and so act as controls upon their actions and experiences. Landscapes provide a certain set of opportunities and barriers, settings which enable but also constrain the range of possible activities. Landscapes objectify their skills, values and beliefs and support distinctive roles and usages for those who share these organized settings. In Peirce Lewis’ view, we can see ourselves in our landscapes, ‘‘our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears ..’’ (Meinig 1979, 12). A landscape can be related to still other landscapes depending on the kind and interrelationship of specific social roles, social knowledge, normative requirements and groups of people involved. The determination of appropriate ways of acting depends therefore not on any one particular landscape alone but also on the related and nested character of landscapes. A landscape is ordered perspectivally in terms of relevance through one’s centering attention upon a significant affair or affairs, other significant affairs being nearer and farther from this center. In relation to the other affairs, oneself and this affair exist together at the center. The ordering of the landscape by relevance is independent of the spatial organization of one’s environment in terms of proximity and distance. Through their perspectival ordering landscapes become organized as scenes for one’s actions, and these scenes shift as one’s centering attention is moved to another significant affair or affairs. These perspectivally ordered landscapes become contexts of actions when the significant affairs comprising them are linked in terms of one’s ‘plans’, that is, in terms of individually and commonly preferred patterns of acting connectable in advance through anticipations of one’s being able to do ‘‘thusly’’ followed by one’s doing next ‘‘so and so’’ and so forth in the course which one takes in one’s negotiations with one’s environment (Rogers 2003, 157). Let us not forget, however, that one can also change one’s plans, revising the contexted landscape in which one acts, or exchange it for another or even inventing a new one. Interlocking ‘plans’ compose fields of actions which prefigure the connectedness of significant affairs within each contexted landscape and so provide the unity of the arena in which one acts. Furthermore, each field of action has the potentialities of being storied, that is, having time-
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factored or sequential ways of patterning actions and experiences, within which field specific types of stories are then enactable. One’s field of action may, however, come apart when one encounters an unexpected layout in one’s environment and one no longer knows how to proceed with one’s story. One loses one’s sense of direction as the familiar landscape vanishes. To be lost is to be in a landscape where the wisdom of one’s continuing with what one was doing is put into doubt. It is experiencing the breaking of one’s ties to the sphere of everyday activities, being where one could not have anticipated living and for which forethought could not have prepared one. It is where one cannot find in their present experience any openings leading to familiar places, the road to any goal cut off by the absence of recognizable landmarks in the landscape, where an area of safe and reasonable movement is undetectable in the vastness of the possibilities which surround one. To have an adventure is to be in a landscape where one is doing and experiencing something out of the ordinary. It is the shattering of the inert, insistent and unreflective sphere of everyday life that imprisons the leaps of the imagination as if it were a bowl of glass. Each adventure is a dropping out of the continuity of life, the incorporating into the familiar round of our days of the unforseen, unthought of, the new. It is seeing the world in the light of its possibilities. The obscurity of the future is not less for adventurers than for others, but they proceed as if they were, daring to risk traveling an unknown road as if it were familiar and the end of it certain. The diversity of these two sorts of landscapes lies not in their constituent significant affairs (which in each case could be exactly the same affairs) but in their contexting, and rests, first of all, on whether it is in one’s character to or not to creatively entertain a new context in response to an unexpected layout in one’s environment. Differences of context make the difference for one between knowing or not knowing where one is, being oriented or being lost. And it is different again when one explores, when one is in landscapes where one can have adventures. The environment does not change, only our contexting of it as one goes from being lost to being engaged in discovery. In brief: On the one hand, we can speak of a contexted landscape as a scene for us to act in where affairs, given significance in terms of meaning and fit in relation to our actions, are perspectively ordered by relevance. On the other hand, we can speak of a contexted landscape as the arena where these significant affairs are connectable in advance
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through the interlocking of ‘plans,’ our anticipating being able to actualize in sequence particular patterns of actions.
PLACES
Places are especially deserving of attention in a discussion of landscapes and contextuality. The significance of particular places was recognized millennia ago by the Romans with their experiences of a Genius loci, the latter being the manifestation in Cobb’s words of ‘‘a living ecological relationship between ... a person and a place’’ (1977, 46). But the characteristics of a place were and still are especially important for the ancient Chinese practice of Feng Shui. Feng Shui considers the many contexts in which a particular person, family, or business dwells to be integral elements in the art of living well. It has no other purpose than to interpret the significance of a place in favorable or unfavorable terms. Contexted landscapes may include places of varying size, from a spot beneath a tree to a garden to villages and neighborhoods to cities. Though they may differ in size, places are always on the scale of everyday experience, and thus they are to be distinguished from such areas as geographical or political units or tribal territories. There are places which may be distinguished from other places in terms of social status roles as well as by their physical localities. Also there are private places which have significance only for me, or for you and me. While for some individuals or groups there may exist such and such a place, for others it may be only a tract of land. Some places may not be identified or understood, yet that they are some kind of place can still be recognized by others. Places may be relatively stable or dynamic or transitory. Places may be, but are not necessarily, rooted in one location as is the case when one’s place travels as one travels, a situation of which a sailor on a ship or someone flying from New York to London is clearly aware. Places are identified by their connection with the activities of specific persons and groups or communities. We speak of empty places only when human beings and their activities are not present there. ‘‘Place is socially produced and constructed and, moreover, ... imagination plays a crucial role in that construction’’ (Adams et al., 2001, xxi). If that description is accurate, then place is different from physical space. A place is more than where or where-when we are, although it is always that, too. A place belongs to someone or some group, or rather, its connection to the
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activities of these human beings give character and focus to a place and confers upon it a quality of uniqueness. A place is unique – in this it is like persons, though we should not make too much of this analogy. I do not deny there may be similarities between places, but each place has its unique role within the life of individuals and communities. Our connections to these unique places can serve to unite or divide individuals and communities. We can talk about local and foreign places precisely because we can move from place to place. Note that paths, sidewalks, squares or plazas, roads and highways are special examples of landscapes as they are for going through or to places in other landscapes. We also talk about being ‘‘in our place’’ or being ‘‘at home’’ and their opposites, because we have feelings of fitting in or not, of being in accord or discord with our environment. The experience of displacement occurs when one is removed from one’s place. Today homogeneity is becoming a form of displacement which current globalization processes are imposing ever more rapidly and ubiquitously through our environments. It is important here to distinguish the meanings ‘‘our place’’ takes on when we relate it to movement or emotions, from the meaning of ‘‘our living space’’, colloquially referred to today as ‘‘our home ground,’’ which is to be for us an enabling and limiting locus of a distinctive form of life. We should not overlook here the use of the term ‘‘living spaces’’ also by Stan Rowe where it means the ‘‘vital surrounding systems which sustain us’’ (1990, 45). That is quite different from my use since I understand our living spaces to have historical and biographical and not just biologically sustaining properties. This living space (one’s home ground) is a common place not chosen, not sought, where we find ourselves already dwelling. It has stability, it endures, it supports, is a haven of values. The importance of understanding one’s home ground is well expressed by Scott Russell Sanders, Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University: For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.1
To Sander’s list, be it noted, Confucius would surely have wanted us to add ritual, that is, traditional patternings of action appropriate to the different relationships existing between those who share the same living space.
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One’s living space is the most basic context of action, the place first in importance in the lives of human beings. This place, one’s living space, is the primary and common setting for the actions and experiences of the members of a community. The distinguishing features of this, our primary and most intimate contexted landscape, comprise the prototype for how we order our experiential, intellective, and imaginary environments. The most distinctive feature of our places, of our contemporary living spaces, be is noted, is openness, and next is decentralization or polycentric processes. By way of summary and conclusion, let us briefly listen again to what Ames and Hall had to say at the beginning of this paper about the contextuality of particulars and persons, and then consider what we have added to that in our explication of the meaning of contexts. According to Ames and Hall, a particular affair or person ‘‘is a determining focus of the field that contextualizes it.’’ We can now say of this contextualizing field that it is composed of affairs afforded significance in terms of their meaning and fit in relation to the actions of an individual, that is, by what they afford for the interactions of the individual and his or her environment. A particular person, they said, ‘‘is a realized perspective upon things which at one and the same time centers the individual and focuses his or her context.’’ We can now say that a context of action, a contexted landscape, is ordered perspectivally in terms of relevance through the individual’s centering attention upon a significant affair or affairs, oneself and the affair(s) existing together at the center, and other affairs nearer and farther from this center. They said there is an appropriate direction for a particular person to pursue ‘‘negotiated between its own agency and the flux of its context.’’ We can now say that these perspectivally ordered affairs within a landscape become connected in terms of one’s ‘plans,’ that is, individual and commonly preferred patterns of acting connectable through anticipations of one’s being able to do ‘‘thusly’’ followed by one’s doing next ‘‘so and so’’ and so forth in the course one takes in one’s negotiations with one’s environment. And being connectable in this way these landscapes of significant affairs have become the contexts of our actions. While Ames and Hall only relate particular persons to contexts, we can now say that contextualization occurs primarily in community life. The commonly preferred patterns of acting or the usages of a community provide the basis for sharing common contexts of actions. The distinctive kind of common life actualized in and through the organization of a
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community’s usages into a common program of life we call a community’s culture. The particular contexts of action belonging to a community are correlated with the particular culture of that community. Besides the preceding elaborations upon the characteristics of contexts of action, our attention has been drawn to places as contexted landscapes of great importance, and in particular to the common place I have called our living space or home ground. This latter, in relation to all other landscapes has the distinction of being the basic, the primary and most intimate context of action. East T ennessee State University NOTE 1 I have not been able to identify the source of this quote. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, P., Hoelscher, S. and Till, K. T extures of Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Ames, R. and Hall, D. T hinking through Confucius. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. ——. T hinking from the Han. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Bennett, J. T he Ecological T ransition. New York: Pergamon Press, 1976. Cobb, E. T he Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Jackson, J. B. ‘‘Reading the Landscape,’’ in T he Interpretation of Ordinary L andscapes, D. W. Meinig (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. ——. Discovering the Vernacular L andscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Lewis, P. ‘‘Axioms for Reading the Landscape,’’ in T he Interpretation of Ordinary L andscapes, D. W. Meinig (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Rogers, W. K. Reason and L ife. Lanham: University Press of America, 2003. Rowe, S. Home Place: Essays in Ecology. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1990. Shanon, B. ‘‘What is Context?’’ in Journal for the T heory of Social Behavior 20 (1990): 157–166 Tymieniecka, A.-T. ‘‘The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, XIV. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983. ——. ‘‘The Theme: Phenomenlogy of Man and of the Human Condition,’’ in Analecta Husserliana XXI. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984. ——. ‘‘First Principles of the Metaphysics of Life: Charting the Human Condition,’’ in Analecta Husserliana XXI. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986. ——. ‘‘The Golden Measure: Self-Individualization of Life Bringing to Fruition the Ideal for a New Epoch,’’ in Analecta Husserliana XLIX. Dordrecht: Reidel Press, 1996. ——. ‘‘The Theme: Phenomenology of Life (Integral and ‘‘Scientific’’) as the Starting Point of Philosophy,’’ in Analecta Husserliana L. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.
NATALIA M. SMIRNOVA
SCHUTZ’S CONCEPTION OF RELEVANCES AND ITS INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
In contemporary European culture human beings find themselves in postmodern condition. Postmodernism manifests itself by the ‘‘decline of the major narratives’’ (J. F. Lyotard) and the far-ranging cultural incompatibility. Furthermore, we are facing the process of widening an unbridgeable gap between different cultural communities within the same society. Human reason seems to have fallen into an anemic syndrome of resigned weakness, and Homo sapiens is rapidly transforming into Homo ludens. A game (or gamble) becomes a key metaphor of contemporary culture. It leads not only to the impoverishment of thought and soul, but also threatens to make meaningless both human life and contemporary culture in general. Moreover, it threatens the very essence of humanity due to the fact that it challenges the most significant human values, which constitute human beings as such. It implies that when dealing with social and human problems, it seems reasonable to pay due attention to the discourse of social thinking, which focuses on the meaningful structure of the social universe. It acquires crucial significance for social theory which seeks to find out how people act, think and understand each other in everyday life. This is the question pertaining to all social sciences to which each of them has to contribute. A. Schutz’s conception of the life-world is just the case in point. His papers, taken together, create a new paradigm in social thinking aimed at the study of the meaning sedimentation process, which constitutes the framework of human thought and activity, and eventually the meaningful structure of the social world. It therefore lays the deepest foundation for human understanding in social life. The works of A. Schutz have become increasingly known since the publication of his Collected Papers in the Netherlands. Its first volume, entitled ‘‘The Problem of Social Reality’’ appeared in 1962.1 The paper ‘‘Reflections on the Problem of Relevance’’, on which we will focus our attention in this paper, was not published during his lifetime. Its handwritten version was discovered among his manuscripts only after the author’s death. Written between August 1947 and August 1951, it is supposed to be (according to R. Zaner) the first part of his five-part study, preliminarily entitled ‘‘T he World as T aken for Granted: T oward a Phenomenology of 203 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 203–217. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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the Natural Attitude’’. Part 1 bore the title ‘‘Preliminary Notes on the Problem of Relevance’’. Although A. Schutz did not intend to publish this separate portion of his study as significant in its own right (but only as a part of a wider context), Prof. R. Zaner brought this piece of the study, left in a very rough form, into linguistically acceptable shape. Thus, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, edited, annotated and with an introduction of R. Zaner, successfully appeared in 1970. A few months ago it became available to Russian-language readers. In the year 2004 it was published together with the other selected papers and my concluding remarks in the huge volume of the Russian edition of A. Schutz’s Selected Papers.2 This Russian edition of the book bears a subtitle ‘‘The world luminous by meaning’’ (which originates from M. Natanson’s work). As the editor, I have divided the whole text into 6 parts: ‘‘Methodology of the Social Sciences’’, ‘‘Phenomenology and the Social Sciences’’, ‘‘Reflections on the Problem of Relevance’’, ‘‘The Problems of Social Reality’’, ‘‘Applied Theory’’ and ‘‘The Meaning Structure of the Social World’’. Since then A. Schutz’s studies, including his Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, became available not only to the narrow range of professionals, but also to a wider Russian audience. The growing interest in A. Schutz’s social philosophy in Russia originated from his first publications in Russian, which rapidly attracted sober attention of the social theorists. His ‘‘Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences’’ appeared in Russian as early as 1962 (transl. by S. Shorohova), ‘‘The Homecomer’’ (1997, transl. by N. Smirnova), ‘‘The Stranger’’ (1998, transl. by Nikolaev), ‘‘Mozart and Philosophers’’ (2002, transl. by N. Smirnova) which appeared (as can be clearly seen from the dates) before the fundamental Russian edition of his 1050-paged Selected Papers. Now let me briefly outline the context of the study. Inspired by unceasing passion to understand what human being is, A. Schutz refers to (and subsequently adhered to) the phenomenological tradition in philosophy which takes its clues from E. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. According to E. Husserl, philosophy is essentially a strict science. Investigation of the deepest presuppositions of human reason, he believes, should be the main thematic concern of transcendental phenomenology. But in contrast to E. Husserl, who brackets (or suspends of ) the natural attitude in the process of the so-called phenomenologically transcendental reduction, A. Schutz, facing the problems of the social world (rather then the problems of epistemology or the methodology of pure science) makes the word as it is given in its natural sense the main subject of his research.
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In respect of the social world it turns out to be the question of the constitutive phenomenology of the social world, that is, the study of the meaningful structure of the social world, which is the only one able to throw light on the question of what allows people to understand each other, or simply ‘‘what makes the social world tick’’. The attack on this problem is based upon two presuppositions, derived from the phenomenology of natural attitude. They imply that: – our commonsense knowledge of everyday life consists of the system of constructs in its typicality, which form the life-world accepted beyond doubts; – life-world is shared with the other individuals, living and acting in mutually interlocking activities. The above-mentioned system of typical constructs is largely taken for granted without questions (although they may be brought into question under certain circumstances). Nevertheless, it implies that ‘‘taken-forgrantedness’’ remains out of question (‘‘unthematized’’) within the framework of our ‘‘natural attitude’’. In order to put them into questions we have to make this natural attitude itself thematic. Only in this way are we able to make explicit what is initially implicit (or taken for granted) – the foundations of social reality. This is a particular phenomenological perspective of studying the question of what it means to be ‘‘social’’ and what it means to be ‘‘a world’’. In this sense A. Schutz’s project is at the same time an effort to discover the deepest presuppositions of empirical social sciences. ‘‘The foundational analysis and explications of the ‘‘social’’, ‘‘behavior’’ and the ‘‘human’’, states R. Zaner, is necessarily fundamental to the determination of which methods and concepts are appropriate and justifiable’’.3 It implies that the phenomenology of the social world is the phenomenology of the social sciences at the same time. A. Schutz’s study of relevance partly follows the mainstream of his daily life structure investigations. His conception of relevance refers to the concept of so-called multiple realities, derived from W. James’ work as it has been presented in chapter 21 of his well-known Principles of Psychology.4 Accordingly, multiple realities turns out to be the key notion and the basic principle of the life-world stratification. The term ‘‘reality’’, W. James insists, could hardly refer to the objective world as it exists beyond our consciousness, experienced and conceived. It rather designates our meaning of reality. He maintains that reality is nothing but the set of our sensual, emotional, life and activity. Whatever attracts our interest becomes real: W. James bestows upon it ‘‘the accent of reality’’. To call something real means to assert that it captures our
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interest in this or that way. There are an infinite number of reality strata, each of them having its own particular style of existence, way of presentation and degree of attention to life. In other words, they are all real in their own fashion. W. James calls them ‘‘sub-universes’’. These sub-universes embrace the meanings of physical things, scientific ideal types and their relationships, religion, madness, the realm of dreams, fantasy and so on. Living in one of them, we tend to obscure or even forget the others, so there is no smooth traffic between the sub-worlds. And precisely because of their relative autonomy and discrete existence E. Husserl designates them as ‘‘the units of sense’’.5 W. James consciously restricted his analysis only to psychological aspects of ‘‘multiple realities’’, investigating them in terms of beliefs and disbeliefs (in his T he Fixation of Belief.) Nevertheless the father-founder of phenomenology E. Husserl highly appreciated W. James’ idea of multiple realities, because it paved the way to further investigations of the structure of human consciousness. But in contrast to W. James’ approach, he frees them from psychological implications. E. Husserl tries to contemplate the question not in terms of beliefs and disbeliefs, but rather in a transcendentally phenomenological way, i.e. in terms of pure consciousness structure. He uses it as a means for further elaboration of the concept of the field of consciousness itself, i.e. relationship between the theme and horizon, that is its thematic kernel and its surrounding horizon as it is given at any moment of our inner time. A. Schutz goes far beyond both W. James’ psychological approach (‘‘orders of reality’’, ‘‘sub-universes’’) and even E. Husserl’s pure constitutive phenomenology (‘‘sense-units’’). But following Husserlian tradition to explore the ultimate presuppositions of each mental insight, he recognizes it as one of the most important philosophical questions. He also releases the concept ‘‘sub-universe’’ from its psychological implications as well as bestows upon them the accent of reality by the name of ‘‘the finite provinces of meaning’’. He prefers to speak about meanings rather then sub-universes in order to stress that what he actually has in his mind is not the ontological structure of the objects of outer space but rather the meaningful structure of the social world. The latter is essentially pluralistic, constituted by different kinds of human experiences. A. Schutz ascribes each of them its particular cognitive style, which has its specific degree of awakeness, tension of consciousness or attention to life, each of them being the highest in the province of everyday life. There is no paved way between the meaning provinces; the shift from one to another is subjectively experienced as a shock or a leap. It is produced by the radical
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change of the way in which each of them presents itself in inner time consciousness. It was precisely that point of view he adhered to in On Multiple Realities. In his further consideration the problem of multiple realities A. Schutz finds himself facing the following problems: – cognitive borders of the finite provinces of meaning; – interrelations among the different provinces; – which of them can be considered as ‘‘paramount’’ reality? All these questions he inherited from W. James. But here are some new questions he raises: – the type of constitutive activity which brings them about; – the typical way in which they maintain themselves; – what gives them the accent of reality or what makes them ‘‘real’’ at any particular moment. While the former three questions he scrutinizes in his daily life investigations, the latter turn out to be the subject of his Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. It is this study which will be the focus of my further reflections. In his previous works A. Schutz concentrated his major attention upon the ‘‘province of working’’, which he declared to be ‘‘the paramount reality’’. Using E. Husserl’s terms, it is this particular realm of reality, which becomes thematic for the whole study. Thus, the structurization of multiple realities that is putting forward the world of working and ascribing it its privileged position among the others, has been substantiated by the references to the basic structure of human consciousness. The study on the world of working as governed by the system of relevance allows him not only to shed important light on the essence of theme–horizon relationship in general, but also on the structure of human actions in the social world. These actions are supposed to have the center of space– temporal continuum, namely, my actual ‘‘Here’’ and ‘‘Now’’, which compose my field of actions. The latter appears hierarchically organized in zones of actual, potential and restorable reach, the so-called ‘‘manipulatory sphere’’ being the center. Each zone has its own spatial and temporal horizons and structures, typically conceived. These interrelated zones of actual, potential and restorable experience form an unquestioned but always questionable ‘‘world taken for granted’’. It may also be seen as a cultural matrix of the world of working. Its initial presuppositions are: ‘‘I can do it again’’ as well as ‘‘And so forth and so on’’. The second basic assumption of A. Schutz’s conception of relevance is that at any moment I find myself in a biographically determined situation.
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It is only partly defined by my actual experience. A. Schutz insists that my biographically determined situation is necessarily historical, due to the fact that it has to a large extent been formed by my previous sedimented experiences which I preserved in my memory. It is the outcome of my personal history. They constitute my ‘‘stock of knowledge at hand’’ on which I rely at any moment in my acts and thoughts. At the same time it is socially derived knowledge, which necessarily refers to the experience of others. A. Schutz agrees with W. James, that we are never equally interested in all strata of the world of working at the same time. It is just my pragmatic interest, which organizes and structures the world we live in, into the different spheres of importance. In other words, ‘‘the selective power of our interest’’ defines the spheres of major or minor intimacy and anonymity within my world of working. How I define the situation to which I pay attention, depends on my pragmatic interest, which guides man within his natural attitude in daily life. It constitutes my ‘‘plan of action’’ or ‘‘project at hand’’, prevailing on my ‘‘life plan’’ at any particular moment. And each project he stresses is determined by my pragmatic interest. A. Schutz highly appreciated W. James’ idea of the human mind’s selectivity, which guides man within his natural attitude in daily life. But in contrast to the author of Principles of Psychology he does not tend to root the selective function of the human mind exclusively in pragmatic motives. The concept ‘‘selective function of our interest’’ used by H. Bergson and W. James seems too ambiguous to designate the main idea that A. Schutz actually has in his mind. Being derived from the psychology of individuals, it is unable to describe the life-world which is essentially intersubjective. Trying to release the notion ‘‘interest’’ from its psychological implications, he changes it to relevance – just as he changed James’ ‘‘sub-world’’ to the ‘‘province of meaning’’. Moreover, he takes into account James’ idea of pragmatic justification with reference to his particular philosophical background, namely, to the philosophy of pragmatism. According to its basic assumptions, practical ratification of thought by events in the outer world should be regarded as the only criterion of truth. Accordingly, our physiological states are taking as explaining our feelings, and even the question legitimately arises, whether consciousness exists at all. But within the framework of phenomenology the various provinces of meaning or realms of reality are interconnected by the unity of our consciousness. Closer inspection reveals, however, that although being is a psychological unity, I live in several of these realms simulta-
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neously. Thus, when writing this text, I am involved at least in three different activities at the same time, namely, in thinking about A. Schutz’s contemplation on the problem of relevance, in using my PC program and in typing the text. Moreover, I am trying to put my thoughts in a language which is obviously foreign to me, namely English. Taken together, all these activities (theoretical contemplation, writing in a foreign language, typing, using PC) are subjectively experienced as a single complex activity undivided into the parts of different attention to life. But although experienced as a unity of actions, my present doing is not a single activity. To put it phenomenologically, I am actually involved in at least two meaning provinces simultaneously, that is in the world of working (pressing the buttons of my PC keyboard, looking through a Russian-English dictionary, etc.) and in the world of theoretical contemplation, each with its own attention to life, dimension of time and particular articulation into its thematic kernel and horizonal surrounding. This is precisely the point where A. Schutz deviates from W. James’ view, taking a step further in Reflections. He insists, that ‘‘the theory concerning the mind’s selective activity is simply the title for a set of problems more complicated even than those of field, theme and horizon – namely, a title for the basic phenomenon we suggest calling relevance’’.6 To think that living in one province of meaning we may at any time change it for another (and its selection defines what is thematic in the field of consciousness) leads to oversimplification of the real state of affairs. It is very important to realize, he suggests in Reflections, that the levels of my personality are involved in several realms of reality simultaneously and to select one of them can merely mean that we are making it our system of reference, the prevailing theme. In the example given, the simultaneously performed activities are of different degrees of intimacy in respect to nearness or distance of my personality. This heterogeneous set of activities is also structured into its own theme and horizon. Typing the text and looking through the dictionary are to a great extent automatized. But making up the text by putting down my thoughts in words is much closer to the kernel of my personality. Thus, only superficial levels of my personality are involved in such performances as habitual, routine and even quasi-automatic typing, while the deeper levels of my personality are involved in theoretical contemplation. In other words my paper preparation is certainly thematic, while the other activities, also important, seem to have turned away to the horizon. But actually all these activities have never been ‘‘released from my grip’’. A. Schutz insists that two different levels of our personality (both
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the superficial and the deeper) are simultaneously involved, the theme of the activity of one of them being reciprocally the horizon of the other; so the actualized theme receives the specific tinge from the other, which remains the hidden ground of the former. A. Schutz illustrates the point by a comparison to the structure of music. Imagine two independent themes which are simultaneously going on in the flux of music. We may pursue one of them, taking it as the main theme, and the other as the subordinate one, or vice versa: one theme is leading the other which has never been released from our grip. And our consciousness, A. Schutz insists, is just the same. In the light of this study, it essentially acquires contrapuntal structure, which manifests the artificial split of our personality. It also implies that theme, field, horizon and relevance are different when viewed subjectively (i.e. from the subject’s point of view) and objectively, that is from the observer’s point of view. Putting into play different levels of our personality (different tensions of consciousness and modes of attention to life, dimensions of time, degrees of anonymity and intimacy) ‘‘the contrapuntal articulation of the themes and horizons pertaining to each of such levels (including finally the schizophrenic patterns of the ego) are all expressions of the single basic phenomenon: the interplay of relevance structures’’.7 Hence, it is just the system of relevance that turns out to be one of the most significant of A. Schutz’s concepts in his highly sophisticated theory of the life-world. Now let me briefly outline the basic system of relevance, used in Reflections. There are three basic kinds of relevance he described in Reflections: topical, imposed/intrinsic and interpretative relevance. Topical relevance seems to be the most important for the whole theory. By virtue of this relevance something is constituted as problematic in the unstructured field of unproblematic familiarity. It organizes the field into theme and horizon and segregates the former from its unquestionable background which is simply taken for granted. Even though topical relevance is closely connected with the so-called ‘‘actual interest’’, they must not be confused: while actual interest presupposes existence of the problem, topical relevance constitutes the problem itself. As far as unfamiliar experiences are concerned, A. Schutz suggests that we should distinguish imposed relevance from intrinsic relevance. If we do not thematize unfamiliar experience by means of the will (a voluntary act), we call this kind of relevance ‘‘imposed relevance’’. For example, you find an unfamiliar object in the middle of your room. You have no intention to study it, but the object attracts your attention by its very unfamiliarity. There are
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many other kinds of imposed topical relevance. The experience of shock, which is peculiar to any shift of attention from one province of meaning to another imposes new topical relevance; any nonvolitional change in the level of our personality, any change of relative intimacy to relative anonymity; any change in time-dimensions in which we live simultaneously imposes another topical relevance. In general, any interruption in the smooth running of the basic life-world idealizations of ‘‘and so forth, and so on’’ and ‘‘I can do it again’’ creates imposed topical relevance. As usual topical relevance is imposed in the course of social interaction. But there exists some topical relevance which appears entirely different from those which are imposed. If we voluntarily structure a field of perception into thematic kernel and horizon, we put into play intrinsic relevance. It has two subdivisions: the first one consists in enlarging or deepening the prevailing theme. The second implies the voluntary shifting of attention from one topic to another, both of them being separate, i.e. without any connection between them. In the first case the original theme has been retained, and the original thematic kernel remains more or less related to the changed one. As E. Husserl reveals, each theme may be viewed as an unlimited field for further thematizations. It is the locus of an infinite number of topical relevances which may be developed by further thematization of the intrinsic content. Closer inspection reveals, however, that we put into play another level of our personality or change the interplay of time-dimensions in which we live simultaneously. Concerning the given example of nonimposed relevance, it means that what was previously horizontal has become thematic, but the new theme has not been created. Rather, the original theme has been modified in such a way that previously horizontal and now thematic elements have become intrinsic to the theme. In the second case, i.e. in shifting to a completely different theme, the original theme has been abandoned. It is the case when I have completed my work or temporarily put it off till next time; in such a case the original theme is no longer in my grip. Turning back to the first case, we may see that the original theme remains constant as a determining factor of all further subthematizations. For this reason we may call it the paramount theme (by analogy with paramount reality as the world of daily life). Thus we may say that topical relevance is intrinsic to the paramount theme. The paramount theme is maintained as the home base, and all the referential structures of topical relevance derive their meaning from the intrinsic meaning of the maintained paramount theme. A. Schutz calls this particular system the intrinsic topical relevance in contrast to the imposed topical relevance. As we have seen
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earlier, it is characteristic of the imposed topical relevance, that the articulation into the theme and horizon is imposed by the emergence of an unfamiliar experience, by the shift of the attentional ray from one province of meaning to another, while in the system of intrinsic topical relevance we may or may not pay attention to the indications implicit in the paramount theme – that is we may or may not transform the horizontal surrounding into a thematic kernel. An unfamiliar experience is thematically given to the interpretation. The latter may be seen as the process by means of which we grasp the meaning of what is now in the thematic kernel of the field. We have to subsume it under the various typical prior experiences which constitute our stock of knowledge at hand. But not all sedimented experiences are used as a scheme of interpretation. There are a few coherent types of previous experiences with which the present object may be compared, interrelated by sameness, likeness, similarity. We may say they are relevant to interpreting the new set of experiences. This kind of relevance is obviously different from topical relevance. A. Schutz calls it interpretative relevance. I can by comparison interpret, A. Schutz believes, typical moments of the percept by typical moments of my previous experiences. But what is relevant to the interpretation depends on both the objective and the subjective context. Supposing I find a strange thing in the dark corner of the house. It is equally similar to both a pile of rope and a snake. The guess ‘‘a pile of rope’’ is more plausible in a sailor’s rather than in my own house. But if I find this object in my own house, A. Schutz suggests, I tend to interpret it as ‘‘a snake’’. If the object does not move, it enhances the plausibility that it is lifeless. But hibernating snakes do not move either; so I do not succeed in trying to identify the unfamiliar object, since interpretatively relevant elements remain ambiguous and both interpretations of the same thematic object are obviously still plausible. Many authors, including E. Husserl, were inclined to treat the hesitation between doubtful interpretations as an oscillation between two themes. In contrast to this, A. Schutz suggests that only one theme prevails throughout the whole process as paramount. What is thematic is always the percept of the same strange object in the corner of the room – an object of such-and-such shape, color and size. He insists that ‘‘the noema8 of this percept remains unchanged, despite all possible noetical variations’’.9 But it is true, he argues, that in order to collect new interpretatively relevant elements intrinsic to the same thematic object, I must shift my attentional focus in such a way, that data, formerly horizontal, are drawn into the thematic kernel. Nevertheless, in spite of all these
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variations, the percept of the same object remains my home base, my paramount theme which is never out of my grip.10 Interpretative relevance may be both imposed and intrinsic. The ambiguous guess which originates in the passive synthesis of recognition (in which the object is perceived as ‘‘similar’’, ‘‘like’’, ‘‘of the type’’) is certainly imposed. It lacks any volitional character. But as soon as problematic possibilities (as E. Husserl calls them) have been established as equally plausible interpretations of the same object, the additional interpretative relevance will be obtained by a volitional turning to the intrinsic elements of the paramount theme. In general, the interpretative relevance of my first guess is experienced as imposed, while examination of the plausibility of such an interpretation originates in voluntary activities. These activities transform the imposed relevant moments of the perceptual theme into intrinsic interpretative relevances. The ‘‘weight’’ of the outcome of the interpretation, that is the degree of certainty which will satisfy me, depends upon the situation. If I hesitate to interpret the unfamiliar object as a pile of rope or a snake I need a higher degree of certainty than if I am in doubt whether it is a pile of rope or a pile of clothes. But any interpretations remain tentative, subject to verification or falsification by supervening interpretatively relevant material. Motivational relevance is neither topical nor interpretational. It does not presuppose the articulation of the field of consciousness into theme and horizon, because this field has remained unchanged. Nor does it refer to the interpretatively relevant material at hand. This kind of relevance refers to ‘‘in-order-to’’ and ‘‘because’’ motives. The dictionary defines motive as any idea, need, etc., that impels one to act. But this definition covers two different situations, which have to be separated. On the one hand, it is an idea of the state of affairs to be brought about by the actions. The projected goal is phantasized before we start our action. It is the motive which inspires us ‘‘let’s go!’’ We act in order to bring about the projected state of affaires. A. Schutz calls this kind of motive ‘‘inorder-to-motive’’ of action. But if I place myself at the moment after my action has already begun, I may express the same situation by means of ‘‘because’’ sentences. In other words, the paramount project is motivationally relevant for the projection of single steps of action – the single steps to be performed are ‘‘causally relevant’’ for bringing about the desired result. In the example given I want to investigate the unfamiliar object because I fear that it is a snake. My fear of snakes is genuine because the motive of my project is to make a decision. Whereas ‘‘the in-order-to’’ relevance motivationally originates from the already established para-
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mount project, ‘‘the because-of ’’ relevance deals with the motivation for the establishment of the paramount project itself. Motivational relevance may also be imposed or intrinsic. Choosing the paramount project seems intrinsically motivationally relevant. It originates in voluntary act. All motivational relevances derived from the paramount project are experienced as being imposed. All the above-mentioned relevances are interconnected with one another in many respects. Thus, the system of interpretational relevance may be motivationally relevant for the building up of the new intrinsic topically relevant systems, while my motivational relevances are nothing but sedimentations of my previous experiences once topically or interpretationally relevant. It is very important to understand, A. Schutz suggests, how the system of interpretational relevance functionally depends on the system of topical relevance. It is clear that there are no interpretational relevances as such, but only interpretational relevances referring to the given topic. They are experienced as taken together. E. Husserl points out that, it is the act of reflection which brings the performed activity into view: it is a necessarily artificial act, by means of which the flux of experiences can be grasped as such. The same is true for the systems of relevance. As A. Schutz maintains, in our mental activities (or in a wider context ‘‘working’’ activity as well) we are directed exclusively toward the theme of the field of consciousness, that is toward the problem we are concerned with, the object of our interest or attention, in short, toward what is topically relevant. Everything else is in the margin, in the horizon; the motives of our actions are also in the margin of the field, whether the motives are of the ‘‘in-order-to’’ type or ‘‘becauseof ’’ type. And implicit in the inner and outer horizons of the topic are those elements which become interpretatively relevant to the ongoing activity of our mind as regards the topically relevant thematic kernel.11 I may obviously turn to what is implicit in these horizons and bring such elements into the thematic kernel. And this is very important for A. Schutz’s conception of relevance (in contrast to Husserl’s): I may shift my attentional focus without letting what is formerly topically relevant out of my grip. If I do keep it in my grip, it continues to subsist as the main topic in relation to which the formerly horizontal elements now brought into the thematic kernel, are constituted as subtopics or subthemes having manifold relations (foundedness, contiguity, modification and modalization) to the main theme. On the other hand, it is the prevailing system of motivational relevance (my ‘‘evoked interest’’), which may lead to constitution of the new topical relevance: namely to investigate the atypi-
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cal, the strange event, which interrupts the smooth running of the daily life idealizations ‘‘And so forth, and so on’’ as well as ‘‘I can do it again’’. If any counterproof invalidates the hitherto unquestioned course of experience, things cannot be taken for granted any longer. Finally, the newly created topical relevance may be the origin and starting point for a set of new motivational relevances: a formerly irrelevant topic may become interesting and constitute a new topic or at least a subtopic. Though unfamiliar and hitherto irrelevant to me, it becomes motivationally relevant and worth investigating. In order to transform the horizontal implications of the main topic into subtopics, I must modify my system of interpretational relevance. And the shift in the system of interpretational relevance becomes a starting point for a set of new motivational or topical relevances. A. Schutz’s study of the interdependence of the three systems of relevance clearly reveals that none of them can occupy a privileged position. Furthermore, interrelationships among the types of relevance are not at all chronological in the sense that one of them is ‘‘the first’’, and the other – ‘‘the second’’ etc. All three types are obviously experienced as inseparable, as an undivided unity, and their dissection into three types is the result of an analysis of their constitutive origin. Any one of them may become the starting point for bringing about changes in the other two. Nevertheless, the distinction between the three may essentially contribute to the various problems of social philosophy and epistemology. A. Schutz faithfully believes, that: – the theory of topical relevance will contribute to the concept of value and our freedom in selecting the values by which we want to be guided in our practical and theoretical life; – the theory of interpretational relevance will throw fresh light on the function and meaning of methodology and furnish the foundation of the theory of rationalization, and especially of the problem of verification, invalidation and falsification of propositions in relation to the empirical facts; it will also contribute to the constitutive problems of typicality. – the theory of motivational relevance will be helpful for the analysis of problems relating to personality structure and especially for the theory of intersubjective understanding. A. Schutz himself did not obtain these results. But it seems very important that the conception of relevances which he sophisticatedly developed can not be viewed as complete and significant as such, but in its reference to further problems. The author of Reflections himself clearly saw the obvi-
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ous shortcomings of his theory of relevances. Thus he acknowledged that he did not pay due attention to the problem concerning the emergent novel experience, i.e. the experience of the absolutely unknown, which could not be grasped in its typicality. It is just the kind of experience which can become known only by radical modification of the whole system of relevances prevailing for the time being. However, it is always the meaning-context that has been taken for granted which constitutes the framework of all possible future questions which might be interpretatively relevant to the topic and which becomes motivationally relevant for looking at the situation hitherto taken for granted.12 The novel experience, he suggests, has to fill a vacancy in our stock of knowledge at hand. The unfinished analysis of the problem of vacancies or enclaves (Leerstelle)13 seems to be through breaking, which leads to new dimensions in the theory of knowledge, or rather the theory of the unknown. Schutz intended to develop a systematic theory of the vacancy and conceive the unknown by means of typicality of the vacancies.14 It was thought to be phenomenological epistemology in the proper sense of the word. Is not the concept of vacancy and contour connected with the structurization of the theme and horizon? It may be supposed that the shifting ray of attention is directed through the contours of the vacancies. Turning again to the example of the hesitation between two possible interpretations (snake or pile of rope?), he raises the question: when are the given elements sufficient for interpretation? Or, using the newly introduced term: to what extent do the given elements predelineate the vacancies which remain undefined? Is there a kind of typicality which can be fitted to these vacancies? In this respect the process of knowledge can be conceived as filling-in vacancies of what is still not known, but these vacancies themselves are already typically predelineated through the contour-lines of what is already known. This is possibly a definition of the meaning-context which is the clue to the study of the social world phenomenologically interpreted. But hic egregie progressum sum. Institute of Philosophy Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow, Russia NOTES 1 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. Vol. 1, 1962: The Problem of Social Reality; Vol. 2, 1964: Studies in Social Theory; Vol. 3, 1966: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy.
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2 Russian translation: A. Wou, Pazmsıwlehnr o npovleme pelebme pelebahmhocmu (pep. H. M. Cmnphoboi). B kh.: Alsfped Wzvpahhoe: mnp, cbetrwnicr cmsıclom. Mockba, Poccpqh, 2004, C. 235–398. 3 Richard M. Zaner. Editor’s introduction to: Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1970, p. XIII. 4 W. James. Principles of Psychology. New York, 1890. Vol. 2. Ch. 21, pp. 283–322. 5 See: Husserliana. New York, Macmillan, 1931. Sec. 55. 6 Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1970, p. 13. 7 Ibid., p. 15. 8 Following E. Husserl, A. Schutz uses the terms ‘‘noema’’ and ‘‘noesis’’, which refer to ‘‘object-as-experienced’’ (noema) and the process of ‘‘experiencing-of-the-object’’ (noesis). 9 Alfred Schutz. Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, p. 41. 10 Ibid., p. 42. 11 Ibid., p. 67. 12 Ibid., p. 157. 13 This piece of the original manuscript concerning the brief sketch of a theory of ‘‘vacancy’’ was written in German and entitled ‘‘Philosophie der Leerstelle’’. 14 The term ‘‘knowledge’’ has to be conceived in the broadest possible sense: not only in the sense of clarified and distinct knowledge, but as including all kinds of beliefs, from unfounded blind beliefs to well-founded convictions.
ANJANA BHATTACHARJEE
DEMONSTRATING MOBILITY
This chapter derives from a demonstration given under the auspices of the World Phenomenological Congress 2004 during a session on phenomenology and the human sciences, within the broader theme of the logos of phenomenology and the phenomenology of logos. In an attempt to render a faithful textual account of the demonstration as presented in person, this paper is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the phenomenological approach taken in putting together this current textual rendition. Part 2 presents a transcript of the original demonstration, as given during the Congress, which had been prepared in advance of the session itself. Part 3 allows for some reflection on the demonstration in hindsight, as at the time of writing this piece. An earlier and alternative version of a textual rendering of the experiential phenomena here being described can be found in Bhattacharjee (2004) in the context of ‘‘interpretive’’ approaches to information systems and computing research. 1.
I find that I am in the process of turning now to structuring my writing for reading. Both for reading that which is staring back at me on the printed page as I type, and for your reading of that which I am hoping to be demonstrating. It would not have been long ago when I would not have known where or how to start. But I can now, and I think I may already have. My state is a state of surrender to my task (Wolff, 2002a, 2002b), and I attempt to follow in Wolff ’s footsteps by placing my trust in the ineluctable wording of the first time through. At least, at this stage, I write what seems to come to me in peace and tranquility, so that this point of zero might be placed between us as a form of beginning – just here, just so. A stillness, a calm, in equipoise.
219 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 219–226. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Monday August 16, Staircase 9 – Room 1, Wadham College, Oxford, England: Demonstrating Mobility The mobility of a researcher has been distinguished on a number of levels, from the geographical location of a researcher to the economic/political position of a researcher, to the access of a researcher to ubiquitous information environments. Platforms of one form or another are available for development to support such movement, whether it be on a physical geospatial plane or via a virtual computer supported protocol. However, there is one aspect of a researcher’s mobility that has yet to be made explicit for potential development – a researcher’s capacity for ‘‘interpretive’’ mobility. There are a number of ‘‘interpretive’’ approaches and methods in use for information systems and computing research. Each has its own way of advising the researcher to bracket their engagement with the world in order to come to an understanding of their various investigations. This coming to an understanding is a movement in and of itself, and hence can be a relevant aspect of a researcher’s capacity for mobility. In particular, this capacity can be relevant for being an effective researcher within different cultural environments and/or across disciplines. As we move towards cross-cultural research and trans-disciplinary investigations, it may be helpful to have some way of facilitating the capacity for this kind of researcher mobility, within and across research teams. Let us begin therefore with a mobius strip as a first platform for exploring such mobility – as an ‘‘aid to the sluggish imagination’’, Herbert Speigelberg might say.1 If you don’t have one to hand, I have a few here that I prepared earlier that we can distribute shortly. But first, let me show and tell a little (Rose, 1992), and invite you to follow my present instructions as to how this thing is made. $ $
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I take one end of this strip and twist it away from me so that I can only see about half of the horizontal red line, with the other parts facing away from me. (Note that at this stage I may decide that I would like to start again with a modified strip of paper as it may not be long enough, or is too wide in proportion to itself, to be flexible enough to twist without perhaps forcing the paper to tear). Now, having twisted my strip, I maintain that twist, and start to bring the two ends towards each other so that I am able to place one end directly on top of the other. I hold the ends together so that the red line is meeting itself by facing itself. I secure the join with a few staples. I am now holding a mobius strip. [Please now feel free to each take a single mobius from this box as an aid to the remainder of this presentation]. Let’s consider for a moment the red line we have drawn. Now, I invite you to take a pen, if you have one, and place it at the join where the staples are. Without lifting the pen off the surface of your mobius strip, please proceed to draw a continuous new line along the centre of the two edges that present themselves to you as you move the pen along the strip. Have a go – I’ll repeat this instruction. ‘‘Without lifting the pen off the surface of your mobius strip, please proceed to draw a continuous new line along the centre of the two edges that present themselves to you as you move the pen along the strip’’. Stop when you have arrived back where you started drawing this new line. Please take a moment to consider how this completed new line compares to the completed red line. [Pause].
Now, having completed this exercise, we are armed with some form of tangible tool to aid our intended analytical movement between the perhaps subtly different perspectives and orientations that may come under a possible phenomenology of Logos – and Logos of phenomenology. In the interests of time, I will skip a detailed discussion of what we have just here demonstrated, but if you would like to discuss this further,
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please feel free to speak to me afterwards, or correspond by email. Either way, I will include a fuller exposition in the paper to be published in the Analecta Husserliana in due course. For the time being, therefore, let’s just say that this has been our first exercise in ‘‘interpretive’’ mobility. It raises the issue of careful description and of relevance. For example, we might admit that there are simpler ways of describing how to make a mobius strip, but we may be wanting to achieve something more than just the making of a mobius strip – we may be wanting to make reference to some of the details of the process itself. Describing how to make a mobius strip in one sentence might gloss over some details that we would want to suggest as relevant for our research objectives. I asked that you attempt to draw a continuous new line. Perhaps impossible, but hopefully this encouraged your best efforts – noting that perhaps the size of the drawing hand is a factor in accomplishing this task, perhaps not, if we were to have used a rather longer strip of paper, or a different shaped pen.
Returning to our mobius Now, with our mobius in view, we may appreciate that at first glance, and perhaps from some distance, there appears to be a space inside and a space outside of our strip. If we were to plot some of these points on a two-dimensional graph, we may find that we have what looks like a closed loop becoming apparent. Joining the dots together with a line of best fit, we may then decide that there is a space inside the loop and a space outside the loop from which we can research the things of the world that our two-dimensional dot-to-dot looping theorises. Further, here could arise a divisioning between our perceived angles of approach to this theoretical boundary that is dividing our perceived research domain-space. Divisions such as micro and macro, subjective and objective, internal and external, psychological and social. However, this does not quite shed light on possible divisions between a Logos of phenomenology and a phenomenology of Logos. So, we return again to our mobius in view. This time we add an extra dimension in order to hold the mobius in 2+1 dimensions. Our physical representation of the mobius can be held in the air to facilitate our handling of its form and demonstrate that, actually, from this view, there is no division between space inside and outside the loop. We can notice
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that the loop has one continuous surface only. [For example, you can try tracing this surface with the pad of a finger tip all the way around.] Now, although each surface at any one moment may have opposing approaches to it, the surface as a whole does not division the domainspace of research approach. The dualities of our previous two-dimensional approximation to our loop are thus appearing to dissolve. In particular, with regards to this session on phenomenology and the social sciences, we notice that the relationship between phenomenology and ethnomethodology becomes apparent – one as a 1st person phenomenology the other as a 3rd person phenomenology of Logos. Ethnomethodology here is described as a distinctly phenomenological approach to the social sciences following Anderson, Sharrock and Hughes (1985). Immersion in vivo So, one more exercise in tracing our analysis therefore. Let’s imagine what would happen if you were to place your hand-made mobius in some water and wait for the paper to become translucent. Perhaps you would notice some mixing of the red and the new line that you yourself drew. We know that the line you drew went all the way along our surface in a single loop, but it had previously appeared that the red line had only spanned half the distance. Now, in immersion, we find that actually, the red line had existed all the way around all along, it had only had appeared to disappear. Having said this, however, we might note that both would arguably be appearing as a rather different kind of a colour, with it’s own inherent relationships. In short, this immersion explicates the in vivo experience of an ‘‘interpretive’’ researcher – the Lebenswelt pair of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological reduction and the epoche of the ethnomethodologist at the surface of our interactional interface with the lifeworld. From closed world to infinite universe One final experiential demonstration therefore. If I may invite you to enter into a state of phenomenological reduction, or epoche – whichever you tend to use when doing your own phenomenology. Now, imagine a perfect circle in front of you, just out of arms’ reach. If you could point to that circle with the tip of your finger and trace its outline in the air. Follow your finger tip, as you observe the circle being
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drawn. That circle is ‘‘over there’’ – I would suggest that its finite boundary over there is an ideal. What do I mean? Okay, now imagine that there is a circle in front of you within arms’ reach. Try tracing the boundary of this circle with your fingertip, but this time, trace the outside of the boundary with the pad of your finger tip as if feeling your way along its surface. Feel the boundary all of the way around, observing the movement of your finger pad, your hand, your wrist, and your arm. Are you not, in actuality, tracing a mobius form? Does your movement not involve a twist in an experientially embodied dimension in order to accomplish this task? A twist in 2+1 dimensional space? This is the difference between Husserl’s (1936: 1970) origins of geometry and the mathematicization of our Logos. This 2+1 dimension as compared to a two-dimensional depiction. It is in this extra in vivo dimension – in this experiential sense – that both the Logos of phenomenology and phenomenology of Logos can be recovered as Lebenswelt pairs. Livingston (1986) in his detailed study of the ethnomethodological foundations of mathematics, describes how the early Greeks were ‘‘both amazed and perplexed by mathematical proofs. On the one hand, the objects of geometry were made available and described, and their properties were established, through the use of drawn figures. Yet the Greeks recognised that the geometric objects themselves had a curious, unexplicated relationship to their depiction.’’ I hope the demonstrations we have stepped through today have gone some way towards explicating this ‘‘unexplicated relationship’’ – that is, the relationship between the Logos of phenomenology and the phenomenology of Logos.
3.
I re-read the paragraphs above. I find no words yet to say any more than I had done that day, and yet the transcript had no doubt then been supplemented with gesture and co-presence and the doing of phenomenology, together, as a gathering of persons familiar with the said mode at the time. Had this then achieved a successful demonstration? Some sort of phenomenological ‘‘proof ’’? Some way of demonstrating the gestaltcoherence of that which we were practicing (Gurwitsch, 1964)? And what of your reading of it at this time? Is this a first time?
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I recently came across two studies that helped in my articulation of this paper, in addition to Wolff ’s (2002a, 2002b) explication of surrenderand-catch. The first study is that of Livingston (1995) on the idiosyncratic specificity of the methods of physical experimentation. I find that where Livingston speaks of experimental demonstration, we here are speaking of experiential demonstration. Hence the requirement for ‘‘interpretive’’ mobility which I hope to be able to develop further in good stead. The second study is that of Ashmore and Reed (2000), where the ‘‘innocent’’ apprehension of objects in the ‘‘first time through’’ is contrasted with the ‘‘nostalgic’’ revisiting of previously produced objects as work done in the ‘‘next time through’’. I thus hope we can return to precisely this point of beginning in due course. Brunel University
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to all those who participated in the original demonstration, especially W. Kim Rogers for telling me immediately afterwards – ‘‘Now, it’s obvious’’. NOTE 1 Herbert Speigelberg has been attributed with this phrase in H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967), p. 38. Although I would argue that the context of this phrase as used within ethnomethodological studies may differ from Speigelberg’s actual intent, I have not been able to locate its original source. Here, the ‘‘quote’’ is used within the body of this demonstration by way of attempting to introduce an explicit point of both possible departure and possible entry into perhaps taken-for-granted dimensions of imagining as potential dimensions for exercising ‘‘interpretive’’ mobility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, R. J., Hughes, J. A., and Sharrock, W. W. ‘The Relationship Between Ethnomethodology and Phenomenology’, in Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology 16(3) (1985): 221–235. Ashmore, M. and Reed, D. ‘Innocence and Nostalgia in Conversation Analysis: The Dynamic Relations of Tape and Transcript’, in Forum: Qualitative Social Research 1(3) (2000) at http://qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm accessed on-line at 28 October 2004.
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Bhattacharjee, A. ‘ ‘‘Interpretive Mobility’’, IS and Computing’, in European Journal of Information Systems 13(3) (2004): 167–172. Gurwitsch, A. ‘The Field of Consciousness’. Pittsburgh, P.A.: Duquesne University Press, 1964, pp. 87–153. Husserl, E. ‘The Origin of Geometry’, D. Carr (trans.), in T he Crisis of European Sciences and T ranscendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1936: 1970, pp. 353–378. Livingston, E. ‘The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics’. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Livingston, E. ‘The Idiosyncratic Specificity of the Methods of Physical Experimentation’, in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 31(3) (1995): 1–21. Rose, E. ‘The Werald’. Boulder, C.O.: The Waiting Room Press, 1992, pp. 323. Wolff, K. ‘A Whole, A Fragment’. Lanham, M.A.: Lexington Books, 2002a. ——. ‘What It Contains’. Lanham, M.A.: Lexington Books, 2002b.
AMY LOUISE MILLER
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SELF AS NON-LOCAL: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND RESEARCH REPORT
INTRODUCTION
In our post-industrial Western culture, we grow up with the prevailing understanding of the parameters of our individual self. In that system, ‘‘I’’ am a separate individual who exists locally within the boundary of my skin. My thoughts take place in my mind, the wiring for which is in my brain, inside my head. There is an assumed one-to-one relationship between my mind and my body. The reality of self is constructed as being local and unified, to some extent, in all cultures, but, in Western cultures in particular, unity is the sole allowably ‘normal’ state. I will call this the ‘local’ view of self, i.e., self as ‘attached’ to and bounded by the body in space and time. In my private practice as a Psychologist, I have worked with what is called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), commonly called ‘multiple personality.’ The central diagnostic feature of Dissociative Identity Disorder is defined as, ‘‘... the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states ... that recurrently take control of behaviour ...’’ (American Psychological Assoc., 1994, p. 84). I was particularly interested to note the frequent occurrence in these clients of anomalous experiences, experiences that appear to present exceptions to the commonly accepted rules governing the properties of time, space and materiality. In fact, the system of alter personalities itself seems to function according to assumptions of non-locality. As Braude comments: ... multiple personality appears to challenge various familiar assumptions about the nature of personhood. Most notably ... we tend to assume that a person has no more than one mind, or that there is a one:one correlation between persons and bodies (Braude, 1995, p. 66).
I became interested in exploring the phenomenon of non-locality of self in general and the non-locality of self in dissociative identity, in particular. The relationship between early trauma, dissociative identity and anomalous experiences is well supported by research. Severe early repetitive physical and/or sexual abuse is prominent in the histories of 85–97% of 227 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 227–245. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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persons with DID (Putnam, Guroff, Silberman, and Barban, 1986; Kluft, 1987). Traditionally, theorists in this area have assumed that the overwhelming nature of the trauma causes the psyche, which is in the brain, to create a dissociative system of separate personalities. Several studies have found a strong relationship between anomalous experiences/beliefs and early traumas as well as dissociation or dissociative identity (Irwin, 1994; Pekala, Kumar, and Marcano, 1995; Ross, 1997; Ross and Joshi, 1992). Michelle Bennet, after a review of the literature, concluded that the emergence of DID and the prevalence of anomalous experiences might be part of the same phenomenon. She states, ‘‘When childhood or adult experiences of trauma lead to certain types of dissociative experiences, these biological states may open access to altered states of consciousness in which paranormal events are experienced’’ (Bennet, 1999, p. 155). The psychological awareness of dissociation in general and dissociative identity in particular traces its roots back more than one hundred years to the work of Pierre Janet (1859–1947). Freud, influenced by Janet, ‘‘... considered the core of pathology to be the internal impression of a traumatic experience that, because of its unbearable nature, was sealed off from the rest of the personality ...’’ (van der Kolk and van der Hart, 1989, p. 3). We later abandoned this position. Janet delineated the syndrome that he called ‘hysteria’ which he saw as an adaptation through narrowing of consciousness paired with dissociation in the face of memories related to frightening experiences. Bessel van der Kolk comments that, Janet believed that ... [This led to] the formation of new spheres of consciousness around memories of intensely arousing experiences which [Janet] called ‘subconscious fixed ideas’ ... the most extreme example of this is multiple personality disorder, where fixed ideas develop into entirely separate identities (van der Hart & Friedman, 1989, p. 6).
Janet found that these ‘successive existences,’ as he called them, could develop their own life histories. William James, one of the fathers of psychology, concluded that Janet’s formulations were valid. Though James, as Eugene Taylor comments, had determined to, ‘‘... keep to the rational, the acceptable, and the strictly scientific,’’ in his interpretations though he seemed compelled to go beyond this boundary. James alludes to the condition of multiple personality as a possible opening to the ‘supernormal powers’ or ‘spirit influences.’ He indicates that, ‘‘If they can occur, it may be that there is a ‘chink’ ... The tendency for the self to break up may, if there be spirit
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influences, yield them their opportunity’’ (Taylor, 1984, pp. 86–87; 91–92). It appears that James was recognizing that there might be a connection between the mechanism of dissociative identity and the prevalence of anomalous experiences, indicating an opening to an alternate reality. Ruth Blizard, in reviewing the literature mentions two comprehensive studies which demonstrate that disorganized attachment combined with trauma has been found to be a statistically significant predictor of a complex dissociative disorder in adulthood (Carlson, 1998; Ogawa, 1997, as cited in Blizard, 2003). Both trauma and disrupted attachment in early childhood point to a disruption in safety and predictability of the environment, leading to panic and systemic overload. Complexes of dissociated characteristics coalesce in dissociated entities/ personalities. It is the primary characteristic of dissociative identity, the apparent multiplicity of selves somehow attached to one body, which provides an intriguing introduction to considerations of non-locality of self in this phenomenon. Recently, the relationship between the ‘‘normal’’ developmental trajectory of self and that which results in complex dissociative conditions is being reviewed. Daniel Brown contrasts the integrative/continuity perspective with the multiplicity/discontinuity perspective. In the former case, ‘‘... conscious experience is relatively continuous, and ... the ordinary sense of self is relatively unitary or cohesive ...’’ (Brown, 2003, p. 1). In the case of the latter, ‘‘... conscious experience is relatively discontinuous, and ... the ordinary sense of self is more a multiplicity of various discrete self or ego states.’’ This view of consciousness as discontinuous allows for the normalizing of dissociative identity, potentially reframing it as an extreme case of the ‘ordinary’ arrangement of self. The notion of self as multiple becomes more of a creative reality and less of an aberration. Antonio Damasio comments that, ‘‘In some respects it is astonishing that most of us have only one character’’ (Damasio, 1999, p. 225). To underscore the distinct discontinuity between alter personalities, there is a significant body of literature reporting changing physiological indicators between separate alter personalities. Inter-alter physiological differences suggest that a switch from one personality to another may instigate a change all the way down to the cellular level. In sum, current as well as classical views point to a number of factors which could be construed as contributing to a non-local mechanism for dissociative identity. Repetitive systemic overload accompanied by a narrowing of focus, significant physiological changes, and the necessity of eliminating traumatic material from conscious awareness could, in an immature and discontinuous system of sub-personas/states of conscious-
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ness, provide an opening into non-local aspects of consciousness as expressed through the dissociative identity system and accompanying anomalous experiences. The resulting system of dissociative identities may be considered to be made up of discontinuous entities which exist outside the local understanding of self. The purpose of my research project is to identify information, which could support this interpretation. Proving the bona fide ‘‘existence’’ of non-locality of self would be a problematic endeavour. Any body of evidence in this area is always open to contention depending upon the implicit view of reality of the interpreter. Further, the self is not available for direct observation. Therefore, rather than look at locality of self from the ‘outside,’ I have decided to look at it from the ‘inside’ as a lived experience. I have explored the experiences of self of dissociative identity research participants, what could be called their ‘‘perceived locality of self.’’ That is, I have investigated the ideas that the participants have about the nature of their self/selves with respect to non-local phenomena and function. My primary research question is: How do persons with dissociative identity understand the nature of their self with respect to the quality/dimension of locality? In approaching this research, it is necessary to define terms. The term ‘‘self,’’ on its face a very simple, innocuous word, could easily become a very slippery fish. The self is that which is aware. Further, it is the subjective origination point of awareness usually referred to as ‘‘I.’’ Transpersonal psychologist, William Braud, suggests that the self is defined by ‘‘knowing, being, and doing’’ (Braud, 1999, p. 13). Identification with what Swami Dayananda Saraswati calls the ‘body-mind-sense complex’ is the conventional type of self-identity (Dayananda, 1994). In this case, the individual perceives herself to be mentally and physically separate from others and limited to forms of knowing, being and doing governed by a conventional understanding of time, space and causality. This type of understanding of self is implicit in everyday ‘operations.’ Taken from the third person perspective, Cook-Greuter’s definition of self from the ego development tradition in psychology: ‘‘that faculty which synthesizes experience from all sources into a coherent whole,’’ is useful in its succinctness (Cook-Greuter, 2000, p. 90). Self can be viewed from the ‘outside’ or third person perspective a la Cook-Greuter. It can also be viewed from the first person or phenomenological perspective. This latter has to do with the subjective sense of self and the nature of the self-identity which characterizes this subjective sense. In some fundamental sense, this research, in its operational aspect,
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taking the first person perspective, will take ‘self ’ to mean whatever the individual participants project its meaning to be. The term ‘‘non-local’’ which I defined briefly above originated in the field of physics As Amit Goswami notes, Einstein commented that, ‘‘The assumption of locality – that all interactions between material objects are mediated via local signals – is crucial to the materialistic view that objects [including humans] exist essentially independent and separate from one another’’ (Goswami, 1995, p. 46). Conversely, Goswami defines non-locality as ‘‘communication or propagation of influence without local signals’’ (op. cit., p. 204). Braud, defines the term ‘non-local’ from a third person perspective as, ‘‘human potentials or abilities beyond those that are mediated by conventional sensori-motor processes or conventional energetic and informational exchanges’’ (Anderson, Braud and Valle, 1996 p. 4). Neither of the above definitions considers the specific case of self. They are concerned with the other-than-local aspects of objects, energy, and information. Self is looked upon (actually, implicated) to be local in two ways. First, self is seen as local when it is embedded in a thoroughly local understanding of reality, i.e., an understanding in which ‘mind’ emerges from ‘brain.’ Second as an extension of the aforementioned local understanding, self is seen as local to the body, indissolubly linked to a material entity. Any understanding of self as non-local will involve phenomena which break down the boundaries of these premises of locality. Paradoxically, upon closer examination, we find that the locality of self is tenuous at best. Self as a concept has an indeterminate connection to material existence. Self cannot be pointed to, i.e., objectified. It is ultimately, in any system, subjective. The question of its locality has plenty of leeway for interpretation from any perspective. Christian De Quincey, when discussing non-local consciousness, suggests that the proper term should be ‘nonlocated’ to indicate that consciousness is, ‘‘... not located anywhere in space at all. It is nonspatial’’ (de Quincey, 1999, p. 30). De Quincey’s distinction underscores the premise of this research that self may be viewed as outside of the spatiotemporal grid. The validity of de Quincey’s point notwithstanding, I will stay with the term ‘non-local.’ METHODOLOGY
What are the implications of the research question in terms of appropriate methodology? First, this research question is about a phenomenon that
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is an emerging topic of research. The method used should cast a fairly wide net. Second, the research question is about a phenomenon that is implicit for the participants. Douglas MacDonald mentions the measurement issue of ‘‘ineffability’’ (MacDonald, LeClair, Holland, Alter, and Friedman, 1995, p. 174). William Braud, cites James on the ineVability of the mystical experience, ‘‘that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words (James, 1985[1902] as cited in Braud, 2002b, p. 142). The methodology employed must guide the participant in the direction which encourages introspection and allows for the implicit to become explicit. Third, the research question is a question which asks about a phenomenon which is intrapsychic. This is research which deals with the nonobservable. The data derived from this research will indicate characteristics of the map and, from the map, the territory will be inferred. Fourth, it is a question that asks how something is understood. There are two aspects of that question. The first is, ‘‘what is experienced about the nature of the self.’’ The second is, ‘‘what implicit understandings are drawn from that experience.’’ Both of these questions require an answer by means of a method that elicits rich, descriptive data. Finally, it is a question which implies a process, i.e. the process of experiencing and then forming a sense of something related to those experiences. This research will investigate a ‘‘slice of life,’’ a moment suspended in time. The research question demands a method which dips into the ongoing stream of a process and extracts a reflection of that process with as great a degree of verisimilitude as possible. It is incumbent on the researcher to minimally disturb the process by examining the phenomenon, as much as is possible, ‘‘in situ’’ in order to avoid causing distortion of the data which emerges. To summarize, we are looking for a research methodology which casts a wide net while uncovering and encouraging descriptive expression of an implicit process with as little disturbance as possible of that process. Further, a methodology which embraces the nonobjectifiable is needed in support of this research. A post-modern approach which moves from an objective to a socially constructed world is appropriate for this problem. This approach, says Kenneth Gergen, ‘‘proposes that arguments about what is really real are futile’’ (Gergen, 2001, p. 806). In such a world, as Patti Lather comments, identities are always in flux and, ‘‘the self becomes an empirical contingency’’ (Lather, 1990, as cited in, Rappoport, 1993, p. 133). The postmodern view allows one to explore the inner experience of the locality of self in the empirical context, the ‘‘culture,’’ of dissociative identity. More specifically, this project is concerned with transcendent aspects of self.
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Leon Rappoport notes that, ‘‘postmodern thought undermines the modern ego-mind barrier to transcendence’’ (Rappoport, 1993, p. 135). Steve Baumgardner sees the postmodern in terms of ‘‘postmodern science’’ which, ‘‘... embraces ... ‘reality’ as a cognitive construction’’ (Baumgardner and Rappoport, 1996, p. 122). He suggests that postmodernism, ‘‘carries important implications for restructuring conventional theoretical assumptions regarding the self and identity’’ (op. cit., p. 133). He sees the self as, ‘‘... a relatively decentralized, flexible, horizontal system ...’’ as opposed to the modern view of a ‘‘... centrally organized hierarchical system.’’ Baumgardner he states that postmodernism challenges, ‘‘... the idea of a single sense of identity’’ (ibid.). He posits a theory of ‘‘possible selves’’ in which, ‘‘... the self would appear multifaceted and pluralistic’’ (ibid.). Both Baumgardner states that, ‘‘Postmodern views suggest that conceptions of self should be opened to a broader range of multiple and simultaneous possibilities’’ (ibid.). The dimension of decentralization and that of plurality are better able to encompass and normalize dissociative identity than modern conceptions of self. In light of this comment, dissociative identity could almost be construed as an instructive example of the postmodern self. The phenomenological approach, in particular, seems to have significant applicability to this project. Maurice Natanson notes that, ‘‘The first step in phenomenological philosophy is reflection on the meaning or essence of the experience of consciousness’’ (Natanson, 1973, p. 57, excerpted in Robbins, 2003, p. 2). Phenomenological methods in the social sciences have emerged from classic phenomenology as seen initially in the works of Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s phenomenological approach was greatly influenced by William James and his ‘‘radical empiricism.’’ C. Jason Throop remarks that James’ view was that, ‘‘no element or phenomena that are directly experienced can be excluded from reality’’ (Throop, 2000, p. 36). James commented that, ‘‘... a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced ... in the final philosophic arrangement’’ (James, 1904, p. 534). He insisted on the legitimization of altered states of consciousness and transcendent experiences. Parelleling James, Husserl wanted philosophy to turn to a, ‘‘pure description of what is’’ (Robbins, 2003). As Merleau-Ponty wrote, the phenomenologist returns ‘‘to the world which precedes (scientific description) ... in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract, as is geography in relation to the countryside’’ (op. cit., pp. 3–4). Husserl’s
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concern with the essential experience of consciousness, shares its subject matter with this project. Husserl’s phenomenology bears on the methodology of my particular research in an interesting if somewhat oblique way. Hanna points out that, for Husserl, the unbuilding [sic] or deconstruction of the conceptually constructed world was an intrinsic aspect of the approach ... The final phase of the method – the transcendental reduction – was the sphere of pure consciousness in which Husserl’s transpersonal insights came to fruition ... Consistent with many transpersonal mystical themes, Husserl ... distinguished between the transcendental ego and the psychological ego (Hanna, 1993, p. 183).
Husserl’s research strategy was to use himself as subject, employing the method of epoche, which Piet Hut describes as follows: ... a switch to an attitude in which all that appears is seen and acknowledged as it appears, in its own structure of appearing without tying it down immediately to the usual external explanatory framework (of a physical world ...). (Hut, 1996, p. 11)
Hut comments that, for Husserl, the epoche was not just a ‘metaphorical device,’ it was, ‘‘a deeply personal change in the way he related to life ...’’ (ibid.). Hut goes on to emphasize the transpersonal aspect of Husserl’s experience: ... his [Husserl’s] description, in those rare passages where he tells us something about his more personal engagement with the epoche is very much akin to that of a mystic trying to find words to describe an experience that cannot be conveyed in words (ibid.).
Thus, we see that phenomenology is a method which leaves room for the transpersonal and mystical ways of experiencing and understanding the ego/self. Phenomenological psychologist, Amedeo Giorgi, interviewed by Christopher Aanstoos, discusses Husserl, transpersonal psychology, and transcendental subjectivity of classical phenomenology. Giorgi comments that, ‘‘there may be a way in which what the transpersonalists are pointing to [is] the same thing that Husserl is pointing to ... our personal subjectivity can access a field of subjectivity’’ (Aanstoos, 1996, p. 11). He goes on to delineate the transcendental reduction as, ‘intense receptivity,’ which requires that we, ‘still all that ego stuff ’ (Aanstoos, 1996, p. 13). Giorgi concludes that, ‘‘... if you could develop the reduction that would be one way of exploring transcendental subjectivity’’ (loc. cit.). He describes several levels of reduction, concluding with the deepest level, ‘‘... the
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transcendental phenomenological reduction, which brackets the empirical subject as well as the world’’ (Giorgi, 1997, p. 240). Husserl’s method, developed in conjunction with the exploration of transpersonal experience, could be said to be particularly appropriate to illuminate a phenomenon of a transpersonal nature such as a non-local understanding of self. While Husserl believed that objective interpretation of experience was possible using the epoche, or bracketing (separating out), the subjectivity inhering in the interpreter’s life-world, L ebenswelt, the world of personal experience and desires, Heidegger, in the tradition of existential phenomenology, denied that bracketing is possible. [He contended] that as a necessary part of human ‘‘being-in-the-world’’ (Dasein) things are perceived according to how they are encountered and used ... Perception and apprehension thus move from fore-knowledge to an existential understanding, a largely unreflective ... grasp of a situation ... (Mallery, 1994, p. 1)
Rolf von Eckartsberg comments that, Dasein: ... ‘‘bridges the subjectobject split,’’ a bridging which is necessary when examining the self (Von Eckartsberg, 1998, p. 14). The philosophy of existential phenomenology seems to provide the foundation for an ideal set of premises leading to a methodology appropriate for exploring sense of self. Ronald Valle observes that, ‘‘Existentialism as the philosophy of being became intimately paired with phenomenology as the philosophy of experience because it is our experience alone that serves as a means or way to inquire about the nature of existence (i.e. what it means to be)’’ (Valle and Mohs, 1998, p. 96). Valle notes that phenomenological methods in social science are the ‘‘manifest, practical form of this inquiry’’ (ibid.). Though the phenomenological method used to gather this data might be thought to be ‘‘non-scientific,’’ Jenny Wade’s comment on this is of note: Traditional scientific methods are ill equipped, any prejudice aside, to understand NonNewtonian states. ... Phenomenology and other forms of qualitative experimental research may provide better methodologies for studying levels of consciousness outside the Newtonian range [i.e., non-local aspects of consciousness] (Wade, 1996, p. 269).
Von Eckartsberg comments that, ‘‘the existential-phenomenological approach in psychology does qualitative research, that is, meaning analysis and explication of descriptions of real-life experiences’’ (von Eckartsberg, 1998, p. 17). Bennet notes that phenomenology [in psychology] is a form which seeks to, ‘‘describe and contextualize knowledge within the meaning
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frame of the knower’’ (Bennet, 1999 p. 161). James Barrell comments that, ‘‘Phenomenological research aims to understand the meaningfulness of human experience as it is actually lived’’ (Barrell, Aanstoos, Richards, and Arons, 1987, p. 446). One of the important aspects of the existential phenomenological approach in the social sciences, as derived from classical phenomenology is the concept of the pre-reflective, Valle explains that the purpose of such research is, ‘‘... to articulate the underlying lived structure of any meaningful experience on the level of conceptual awareness’’ (Valle and Mohs, 1998, p. 98). Further, he comments that, ‘‘... each individual’s life-world emerges at the level of reflective awareness as meaning,’’ and that meaning is the, ‘‘manifestation in conscious, reflective awareness of the underlying prereflective structure of the particular experience being addressed’’ (ibid.). He expands on this concept by noting that, ‘‘Reflective conceptual experience is ... a preconceptual, and, therefore, prelanguaged, foundational, bodily knowing that exists ‘as lived’ before or prior to any cognitive manifestation of this purely felt-sense’’ (Anderson et al., 1996, p. 24). Of note is the resemblance to James’ concept of, ‘‘pure experience which formed the foundation of radical empiricism and is summarized by Jason Throop as follows: According to James, in its most ‘pure’ state, ‘experience is prior to distinction between subject and object ... no differentiation between ... self and world, since the identical ‘bit’ of pure experience once reflected upon functions as both the qualities of the objects in experience and the various states of consciousness in which those qualities inhere (James 1996 [1912], pp. 7, 13, & 37 as cited in Throop, 2003, p. 229).
The current research project seeks to bring the meaning of the prereflective into conscious awareness. Ferrence Marton, the originator of the phenomenographic application phenomenology to social science comments that, ‘‘a way of experiencing something is an internal relationship between the experiencer and the experienced’’ (Marton, 1997, p. 115). Marton comments that experiences, ‘‘being located neither in the subject nor in the world, being neither mind nor matter. ... An experience is of its essence nondualistic’’ (op. cit., p. 122). Thus, using phenomenographical type of approach to explore participant’s direct, non-dualistic, gestalt of the experience of the self is appropriate for the project at hand. Braud, when exploring research methods for transpersonal studies, identified the phenomenological approach as among the most qualitative of approaches and placed it at the ‘‘ideographic’’ end of a posited contin-
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uum of conventional disciplined inquiry methods (Anderson et al., 1996, p. 2). At this end of the continuum, the research provides, ‘‘the greatest appreciation of experiences themselves and of the ways in which the actual experients perceive and interpret their experiences ...’’ Further, he defined transpersonal psychology as that which, ‘‘studies experiences and processes that extend or go beyond ... the usual limits of ego and personality. It concerns itself with consciousness and unusual states of consciousness ...’’ (op. cit., p. 3). Then, in a discussion of transcendent awareness, Valle goes beyond the concept of prereflective structures. He comments: ... these types of awareness are not really ‘‘experience’’ in the way we normally use the word, nor are they the same as our prereflective sensibilities ... Transcendent awareness seems somehow prior to this reflective-prereflective realm, presenting itself as more of a space or ground from which our more common experience and felt-sense emerge ... which appears to be inclusive of the intentional nature of mind but not of it (op. cit., p. 25).
Valle notes that this ‘‘ground’’ can be described as, ‘‘... a reality not of (or in some way beyond) time, space and causality as we normally know them’’ (op. cit., p. 26). Finally, Valle contends that, ‘‘This, for me, is the bridge between existential/humanistic and transpersonal! transcendent approaches in psychology ...’’ and suggests that phenomenological research which addresses issues of this sort be called ‘‘transpersonal phenomenological psychology’’ (ibid.). It is clear that an exploration of non-local aspects of one’s sense of self falls within this area. In conclusion, this methodology section has identified the importance of a phenomenological approach for this project, tracing this approach from its classical Husserlian roots through existential phenomenology in its contemporary applications, to the, very current, transpersonal phenomenological approach.
RESEARCH METHODS
There are two semi-projective methods which I have designed specifically for this project. The impetus for their development was consideration of the implicit nature of the sense of self which does not lend itself to direct questioning. The ‘‘semi-projective’’ exercise provides some structure which guides the participant towards the research target area while, at the same time, allowing the participant to ‘‘dream into’’ the target area while completing the exercise in a relatively free-form way.
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I have called the first of these methods the Personal Construct Exercise. The inspiration for this Exercise came from George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955). As Valerie Stewart comments: Kelly’s theory rests on the assumption that people are actively engaged in making sense of, and extending, their experience. ... The personal constructs in Kelly’s theory refers to the set of models, or hypotheses, or representations, which each person has made about their world (Stewart, 2004).
I explore the participant’s personal construct of ‘‘self ’’ using small individual cards each of which has a single word. The word list mixes terms from the material realm with those derived from discussions of expanded sense of self in the spiritual and psychological literature. I ask the participant to sort and lay out the word cards in a way that represents how they are perceived as relating to the central card labeled ‘‘SELF.’’ The Personal Construct Exercise (PCE) bypasses the verbal modality entirely while still remaining in the comfortable arena of words. The second semi-projective method combines Tony Buzan’s ‘‘mindmap’’ and Joseph Novak’s ‘‘concept map’’ (Buzan and Buzan, 1993; Novak and Gowing, 1984). Both of these very similar modalities involve drawing spatial diagrams of concepts. Again, verbal instructions are minimal. The participant is shown two model maps using concepts unrelated to this project. The instructions involve putting the word ‘self within a circle at the starting point with several lines going out from the term ‘‘self ’’ and, from there, related concepts are added. As this process is elaborated, a spider web type diagram is developed. Instructions include permission to build on or modify the basic format in whatever way makes sense to the participants. I am calling this exercise MAP. For both the Personal Construct Exercise and the Mapping Exercise, an informal conversation that begins with an open-ended question such as, ‘‘Tell me about what you’ve done here’’ follows the exercise, resulting in a conversation probing the material that emerges.
SELECTED DATA
The body of data to be described herein is selected from the larger project in which dissociative identity participants and long-time meditators receive a protocol which combines exploratory questionnaires, semi-projective exercises and taped interview/discussion. Here we will focus almost entirely the semi-projective exercises and ensuing discussions from two
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dissociative identity participants. Examples will be given from two areas: (1) The participant’s sense of themselves as non-local, and (2) The participant’s narratives about the role of non-locality in their dissociative identity. The data to be presented is selected for its particular content. Not all participants in the dissociative identity group had a clear sense of nonlocal aspects of self. Some of those who perceived non-local aspects of self were ambivalent about recognizing and accepting them. In general, it appeared that an unambivalent understanding of non-locality of self may tend to coincide with later stages of healing/recovery from the dissociative identity condition. The participants presented here, from Trudy and Sammi, both consider their alter personalities to be integrated (a recent event for Sammi). Though there is often a tendency to return to previous dissociative patterns in times of stress, neither Trudy nor Sammi would receive the diagnosis of dissociative identity at this time. However, the dissociative identity experience is very much ‘alive’ for them. The first question to be considered is: what is shown in the data about perceived locality of self in dissociative identity participants? Trudy, a woman in her early 60’s, is a survivor of severe early sexual abuse as well as programmed mind control. Her PCE demonstrates how non-locality is an integral part of her life’s journey [Appendix #1]. Trudy lays out her cards in her PCE in a progression with the SELF card in the lower left moving up to the GOD card in the upper right. She states: To me, it’s starting with self and moving through all those other things up to, in this particular case, the top, which is God. In that cluster, I’ve included the whole concept of eternity, spirit and consciousness because to me that’s where universal consciousness lies ... Self [lower left] begins with a death from one reality into another ... The birth process is a dying process ... this whole process is trying to get back here [upper right] ... Back to God and the universal aspects of mind ... self is a starting point and the objective is to move self from here to there [lower left to upper right], still be self, but be part of something much, much bigger. To be part of something so interconnected that there is no separation and yet there is a mind.., at the same time. Before implantation in the womb, there’s a preexisting self and it’s here [upper right]. It’s a fight to get back there ...
Sammi, a woman in her early 50’s connects to an expanded sense of self through ‘Edmund’ an inner guide figure who emerged for her long before she became aware of her multiplicity. In her MAP, Edmund is represented by the term SOUL. Sammi draws a ‘‘cycle’’ in which SELF connects to SOUL which connects back to SELF [Appendix #2]. In the center of this cycle are KNOWLEDGE and WISDOM. All of these
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appear to be related to the non-local in terms of Sammi’s meaning system. She states: ... there’s a cycle here [center-top] that keeps the self and the soul [connected] ... and the emotions are kind of pulled together now ... this inner wisdom is connected to this universal thing. I feel like this knowledge comes from out there somewhere ... [the] central thing is still feeling this connection to the knowledge and the wisdom ... through me. Like there is a cycle there, that I can pull from ... when I need strength ... I think that’s [SOUL] that connection ... that I feel connected to that support and guidance ... there’s a sense of love there that’s not from an external other ... I don’t connect that part of me to God, or I don’t see it in religious terms. It just feels like a very strong connection. To know that the way this part of me manifested himself, and that I actually have this image of my soul if you will ... he represents that love and the knowledge and the wisdom, but I also know that he’s connected to this to this total unknown that I just accept and trust ... it feels like he has one foot in me, and one foot in this universal thing. He’s always tapped into that. He guides what I’m tapped into. It’s like he’s a filter for whatever’s out there and what I need to know ...
Sammi comments about some remote viewing experiments she has been doing (for amusement with a friend) with some success: It was, like, how can your brain do that? I think it’s that part of you being in the universal consciousness ... The mind has this capacity ... I think the mind goes beyond realms of what most people think. I see the mind as not being this thing that’s just contained in your head ... that it goes through this part of me that I know of as my inner wisdom. [He’s the intermediary]
Here Sammi states unequivocally that she sees mind as expanded and non-local. Her inner-guide figure, Edmund, connects her to non-local realms. Next, let us explore some narratives which reveal views about the mechanism of DI. Data about the DI participant’s sense of the locality of their own alter system is less abundant than in some other areas. Participant’s varied widely in their ability to reflect in this area. Trudy seemed to have the most un-conflicted sense of her dissociative system being non-local in nature. She states that, [the trauma she survived led her]: ... To live in a subconscious realm. To have selves that live there, not here ... They live in a whole different reality ... They are embodied in an entirely different universe ... It’s not here, it’s there. Then it was as real as this is to me now? [and] The sub-conscious reality has nothing to do with any of this [material reality] ... It’s almost alien to it ... it connects into the alternate realities ...
Trudy goes on to describe an EMDR therapy session in which she had insight into the creation of her alters.
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I got to witness my organic brain, looking into my own brain, to see this split ... to recognize the self that literally left the body ... a strand of self that was born ... the original self, the self that was born. When I integrated, I move myself back into my head.
Sammi’s following comment on the relevance of her trauma history indicates that, like Trudy, she saw her history as integral to her accessing non-local realms. I still experience this wisdom and guidance as a part of me ... Now that I’m whole again, that would have been my inner wisdom no matter what ... I also kind of have a theory, which has been validated in at least one book that I’ve read. That people with DID, maybe it’s not DID but trauma at least, some trauma, in childhood, kind of get a jump start on that wisdom coming to the forefront because the child needs a survival mechanism. So, there’s sort of an internal care system that’s happening. That’s the sense that I get.
In this brief presentation of data, it is clear that dissociative identity may be perceived as having decidedly non-local aspects which are integral to the individual’s sense of self as non-local and their sense of the role of their trauma history/dissociative identity in their personal development. CONCLUSION
This paper has endeavored to introduce a conceptualization of nonlocality of self, particularly as it applies to the condition of dissociative identity. Several considerations, including the issue of discontinuity of self, relevant to the view that the nature of self in dissociative identity can be seen as having a non-local aspect were explored. The application of phenomenology, particularly existential transpersonal phenomenology to research in this area was discussed. In a partial report of ongoing research, two semi-projective exercises designed specifically to elicit sense of self and to aid participants in expressing their implicit understanding of the nature of their self were described. Finally, some examples were presented of dissociative identity participant’s responses to these exercises illustrating perceptions of self as non-local. The material which emerged from the research sessions is vivid and rich in detail as well as illustrative of the focal dimension of this enquiry. Though this is a preliminary foray into a totally new area of investigation, it appears that an appropriate choice of methodology has been translated into a useful research method. St. Martin’s College L ancaster University UK
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aanstoos, C. M. Reflections and visions: An interview with Amedeo Giorgi. Humanistic Psychologist 24(1) (1996): 3–27. Anderson, R., Braud, W. and Valle, R. (1996). Disciplined inquiry for transpersonal studies: old and new approaches to research. Working Paper 1996–1. W illiam James Center for Consciousness Studies, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, CA. American Psychological Association (1994). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Barrell, J. J., Aanstoos, C., Richards, A. C. and Arons, M. Human science research methods. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 27(4) (1987): 424–457. Baumgardner, S. R. and Rappoport, L. Culture and self in postmodern perspective. Humanistic Psychologist 24(1) (1996): 116–139. Bennet, M. (1999). Religious, spiritual, and exceptional experiences in trauma treatment. Psy. D. Thesis. Antioch New England Graduate School, Keene, NH. Blizard, R. A. Disorganized attachment, development of dissociated self states, and a rational approach to treatment. Journal of T rauma and Dissociation 4(3) (2003): 27–48. Braud, W. On Varieties of Dissociation: An Essay Review of Krippner and Powers’ Broken Images, Broken Selves: Dissociative Narratives in Clinical Practice [online]. Available from: http://www.integral-inquiry.com/cybrary.html#varieties [Accessed: 06/26/2004] Also published in Journal of the American Society for Psychcal Research 93(1) (1999): 116–140. Braud, W. Thoughts on the ineffability of the mystical experience. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 12(3) (2002b): 141–160. Braude, S. E. (1995). First Person Plural: Multipk Personality and the Philosophy of Mind Revised Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Brown, D. P. (2003). The many faces of dissociation and their implications for treatment. New England Society for the T reatment of T rauma and Dissociation – 2003 Calendar of Events. Buzan, T. and Buzan, B. (1993). T he Mind Map Book. (Ed.) London: BBC Worldwide Ltd. Cook-Greuter, S. R. (2000). Post-autonomous ego development: A study of its nature and measurement. PhD Thesis. Harvard, Cambridge, MA. Damasio, A. (1999). T he Feeling of W hat Happens. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Dayananda-Saraswati, Sw. (1994). Three-Month Course on Advaita Vedanta [tape]. Arsha V idya Gurukalam, Saylorsburg, PA. de Quincey, C. Nonlocal or nonlocated. Noetic Sciences Review 49 (1999): 30–31. Gergen, K. J. Psychological science in a postmodern context. American Psychologist 56(10) (2001): 803–813. Giorgi, A. The theory, practice, and evaluation of the phenomenological method as a qualitative research procedure. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 28(2) (1997): 235–260. Goswami, A. (1995). T he Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Hanna, F. J. Rigorous intuition: Consciousness, being, and the phenomenological method. Journal of T ranspersonal Psychology 25(2) (1993): 181–197. Hut, P. (1996). Confronting Reality [online] from: http://www.ids.ias.edu/~piet/publ/ sendai/sendai.1.html [Accessed 05/02/04] (Original paper presented at the 5th JapaneseAmerican Phenomenology Conference, Sendai, Japan, September, 1996.)
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Irwin, H. J. Paranormal belief and proneness to dissociation. Psychological Reports 75(3) (1994): 1344–1346. James, W. A world of pure experience. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 533–543, 561–570. Kelly, G. (1955). T he Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton. Kluft, R. P. An update on multiple personality disorder. Hospital & Community Psychiatry 38(4) (1987): 363–373. MacDonald, D. A., LeClair, L., Holland, C. J., Alter, A., and Friedman, H. A survey of measures of transpersonal constructs. Journal of T ranspersonal Psychology 27(2) (1995): 171–235. Mallery, J. C. (1994). Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics [online]. From:http:/ /www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcmalpapers/1 986-ai-memo-871/subsection3_4_1.html [Accessed 01/28/04] Marton, F. and Booth, S. (1997). L earning and Awareness. Malwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Novak, J. D. and Gowing, D. B. (1984). L earning How to L earn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pekala, R. J., Kumar, V. K. and Marcano, G. Anomalous/paranormal experiences, hypnotic susceptibility, and dissociation. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89(4) (1995): 313–332. Putnam, F. W., Guroff, J. J., Silberman, E. K., Barban, L. et al. The clinical phenomenology of multiple personality disorder: Review of 100 recent cases. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 47(6) (1986): 285–293. Rappoport, L. Ego transcendence in postmodern perspective. Humanistic Psychologist 21(2) (1993): 130–137. Robbins, B. D. (2003). What is Existential Phenomenology [online]. from: www.mythosandlogos.coni/whatep.html [Acessed 4/21/03] Ross, C. A. and Joshi, S. Paranormal experiences in the general population. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease 180(6) (1992): 357–361. Ross, C. A. Dissociative Identity Disorder: Diagnosis, Clinical Features, and T reatment of Multiple Personality (2nd ed). New York: Wiley, 1997. Stewart, V. and Mayes, J. (2004). Enquire Within: Background and Theory [online]. from: http://www.enquirewithin.co.nz/backgrou.htm [Accessed 03/08/2004] Taylor, E. W illiam James on Exceptional Mental States: T he 1896 L owell L ectures. Amherst, Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Throop, C. J. Shifting from a constructivist to an experiential approach to the anthropology of self and emotion: An investigation ‘within and beyond’ the boundaries of culture. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(3) (2000): 27–52. ——. Articulating Experience. Anthropological T heory 3(2) (2003): 219–241. Valle, R. and Mohs, M. Transpersonal awareness in phenomenological inquiry: Philosophy, reflections, and recent research. In: W. Braud and R. Anderson (eds.), T ranspersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences: Honoring Human Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998, pp. 95–113. van der Hart, O. and Friedman, B. (1989). Reader’s Guide to Pierre Janet: A Neglected Intellectual Heritage [online], from: http://www.trauma-pages.com/vdhart-89.htm [Acessed04/10/04]. Also published in Dissociation 2(1) (1989): 3–16. van der Kolk, B. A. and van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet and the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma [online], from: http://www.traumapages.com/
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vdkvdh-89.htm [Accessed 2/5/2004]. Also published in: American Journal of Psychiatry 146(12): 1530–1540. von Eckartsberg, R. Introducing existential-phenomenological psychology. In: R. Valle (ed.), Phenomenological Inquiry in Psychology: Existential and T ranspersonal Dimensions 1998, pp. 3–20. Wade, J. Changes of Mind: A Holonomic T heory of the Evolution of Consciousness. Albany: State University of New York, 1996.
SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY Carlson, E. A. A prospective longitudinal study of attachment disorganization/disorientation. Child Development 69(4) (1998): 1107–1128 (cited in Blizard, 2003). James, W. T he Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985 [1902] (cited in Braud, 2002b). ——. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1912] (cited in Throop, 2003). Lather, P. Postmodernism and the human sciences. T he Humanistic Psychologist (Special issue ‘‘Psychology and Postmodernity’) 18(1) (1990): 64–84 (cited in Rappoport, 1993). Natanson, M. Phenomenology and the social sciences. In: M. Natanson (ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, Vol. I. Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 (cited in Robbins, 2003). Ogawa, J. R., Sroufe, L. A., Weinfield, N. S., Carlson, E. A. and Egeland, B. Development and the fragmented self: Longitudinal study of dissociative symptomatology in a nonclinical sample. Development & Psychopathology 9(4) (1997): 855–879 (cited in Blizard, 2003).
SECTION III LOGOS IN EXISTENTIAL COMMUNICATION ( PSYCHIATRY )
SIMON DU PLOCK
AN EXISTENTIAL –PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHICAL COUNSELLING
The aim of this paper is to discuss commonalities and differences between the theoretical stance and clinical practice of existential-phenomenological psychotherapy and the currently-developing profession of philosophical counselling, with the aim of identifying whether a dialogue between the two might be possible and productive. I come to the emerging profession of philosophical counselling with a naive, curious attitude – just as I come to a client – and I am eager to know what philosophical counselling is about and whether it offers some useful insights which I need to be aware of in my practice as a therapist. I also come with the recognition of an opportunity – to take a look at a new area of theory and practice. This questioning attitude is of a part with my way of being a therapist: I question myself constantly – am I an existentialist; am I phenomenological; am I integrative ... what am I doing/why am I doing it? For whom? At the core of my practice is a wish not to become sedimented. When I meet with my clients I can be certain of very little – I am sure I am not meeting them as an expert, I know I do not have the answers to their problems. Something may emerge in the relationship between the two of us, but it still may well not be an answer, though it may be a different perspective. I also know that I do not want to be defined by the rules of a club; I have fought hard for my freedom and autonomy and I have no wish to give it up or pretend to myself that I have fewer choices in return for security, status, power or money. I am glad that my ties of fellowship with other existential psychotherapists are informative rather than prescriptive. Indeed I often feel more different from than similar to those with whom I associate. I am attracted to questioning minds rather than closed systems, and at the same time I know I have to be constantly vigilant so as not to give in to a deep-seated wish to belong, to have approval, to be a member of Heidegger’s ‘they’ (das Man). Roger L. Shinn expressed the dilemma well when he wrote: Almost any self-respecting existentialist refuses to call himself an existentialist. To say, ‘‘I am an existentialist’’, is to say ‘‘I am one of that classification of people known as existential-
249 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 249–258. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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ists’’; whereas the existentialist wants to say, ‘‘I am myself – and I don’t like your effort to fit me into your classification’’. (1968: 13)
So starting from this place I am not attempting to argue for one system over another, or to espouse the merits of existential psychotherapy. All I can do in good faith is use what I know up to now of philosophical counselling to shed some light on my own way of working from an existential-phenomenological perspective. If I find useful things in the philosophical counselling approach I will want to try to incorporate them into my current evolving way of being with clients and maybe try to alert other existential psychotherapists to these insights. I think that there needs to be two way traffic between academics and practitioners in mental health as in other fields. Closed communities are not advantageous for us or for our clients. It may be that the existential psychotherapy approach can also inform philosophical counselling. It probably is not possible to avoid boundary disputes, but I do not really find them very interesting. In my journey to date into the territory of philosophical counselling I first read the papers by Shlomit C. Schuster and Ran Lahav which appeared in the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis which I jointly edit. Over the past few months I have also discovered Perspectives in Philosophical Counselling and the papers published there. When I first suggested a paper for this conference the poem by the 1940s English poet Herbert Reed came to mind, in which a conscript describes his growing familiarity with his rifle. At that point I wanted to be able to fire the philosophical counselling gun, but I was still familiarizing myself with it. Like the blind man and the elephant I may have the tail of philosophical counselling, thinking I have the trunk. I am sure philosophical counselling is not a monolith (indeed the more I read, the wider the spectrum of views represented by it become), though you may not be fortunate or unfortunate enough to have 300 distinct approaches yet as is the case for psychotherapy and counselling. To take a last bite with these zoological metaphors, even if I have some ammunition I am relying on you to tell me if I am shooting at paper tigers. With these provisos, I found Ran Lahav’s paper ‘On the Possibility of a Dialogue Between Philosophical Counselling and Existential Psychotherapy’ particularly apposite, since it seemed to be addressing the question uppermost in my mind – namely how each of these approaches might inform and enrich the practice of the other. Initially I was more stuck by the shared ground than by differences. Both emphasize the
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client’s world view; both view client’s difficulties as expressions of their struggle with what it means to be human, rather than as symptoms of some underlying psychopathology. Both are committed to the project of de-psychologizing client work. In part, the differences between existential psychotherapy and philosophical counselling which I discover in Lahav’s paper are differences in attitude. So it is that Lahav, in outlining the historical inheritance of philosophical counselling, comes to claim ‘‘The 2500 years of the history of philosophy’’ (1998: 130) as the preserve of philosophical counsellors. To some extent I resonate with his view that ‘‘most types of psychotherapy are largely severed from philosophy’’ (ibid: 13 1), but philosophy – loosely defined – is present at the core of all forms of therapy. Most of the debate between practitioners of the different approaches is about this but existential psychotherapists have long argued that, while every form of therapy has its own philosophy (even to reject philosophy is in some sense to espouse a philosophy), few engage in a rigorous manner with the insights of academic philosophy. Maybe I should come right out at this point and say they are right not to – where they are self-avowedly mechanical they have as much use for academic philosophy as does a car mechanic. The crux of the argument here seems to be our understanding of ‘philosophical dialogue’. Lahav appears to define ‘philosophical dialogue’ in a manner which excludes existential therapists. I am not sure on what basis he does this. He states that Importing ready-made ideas or theories from particular philosophers is not the same as doing philosophy; in the sense of an open and critical philosophical inquiry ... existential psychotherapy ... is an approach inspired by a specific philosophy, but it does not represent a type of philosophising. (ibid: 131)
I am grateful to Lahav for what I deduce is the distinction he is making here between subscribing to dogma on the one hand and engaging in a relationship with a client to consider the art of life on the other. I believe the two positions are antithetical. I do not meet with my clients to persuade them of a particular way of living. The view that existential psychotherapy is in some sense the slave of existential philosophy is naive. Rather existential psychotherapy takes a particular attitude towards being human and in the world from existential philosophy. It is also informed by phenomenology and attempts to adopt a phenomenological approach in working with clients. I would suggest that the insights of existentialism and phenomenology combined offer a way of philosophising. I find it exceedingly difficult, if
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not impossible, to imagine a way of doing existential psychotherapy which does not represent a type of philosophising. Perhaps it is helpful to clarify what Lahav means when he employs this term ‘philosophising’. One of the intriguing aspects for me of Lahav’s paper is that in general his statements about the characteristics of philosophical counselling might equally well describe existential psychotherapy. This is not to suggest that there are no differences, but rather to wonder whether the image of existential psychotherapy is in fact based on the writings of existential psychotherapists, or on a reading of Heidegger or Sartre – who were not, of course, practising therapists. I for one would be grateful for some clarity on this point. I say this from my understanding, for instance, that clients quite often act in bad faith and that in the course of our work together they have the opportunity if they wish to continue to be in bad faith, but to be in this place in a different way. Let me explain: it might be that a woman comes to me saying that she is unhappy in her marriage, but cannot leave her husband. What is she to do? Clearly I could be dogmatic about this, attempt to bring her to an acceptance that she is choosing to stay in the marriage, and is in bad faith when she tells herself (and me) that she cannot leave. I do not see the point of this, on a number of counts: psychotherapy is rarely effective when the therapist has to rely on pressure to prevail over the world view of the client. Even if it could be demonstrated that it is effective, to behave in this manner raises numerous ethical issues, and may in any case produce only a temporary change in behaviour rather than a fundamental shift in the client’s self-construct. Secondly, I do not know, I cannot know, what is best for the client, and it is grandiose and absurd to suggest that I do. I may well have a different perspective, even a broader or more balanced perspective, but I certainly do not have answers. The existential tradition offers an alternative way for the therapist to engage with the client: the therapist can model a curiosity about the client’s worldview which, should they find it useful, will help them gain greater clarity about the way they live their life. In the course of obtaining this greater self-awareness my imaginary client may get more of an understanding of why she both wants to leave her husband, and feels that she cannot. What actions she takes, or rejects, are of little concern to me as a therapist. The point is that she acts or does not act from a position of greater awareness. She may well elect to stay in a relationship she dislikes in the knowledge that she does so because she is terrified of being alone. This truth about her situation offers a firmer place from
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which to go out into the world than do self-deceptions and received wisdom. What I think is happening here is that clients have the opportunity to stop being dogmatic with themselves. I think, incidentally, that this is quite different from the hectoring tone of much Hellenistic philosophy in which the philosopher is hell-bent on persuading their disciples that they alone know the path to eudaimonia, or the flourishing life. As Hadot has stated ‘‘In this period, to philosophise is to choose a school, convert to its way of life, and accept its dogmas’’ (1995: 60). I have argued at some length against the view that existential psychotherapy does not offer a type of philosophising. Essentially my point is that existential psychotherapy is not about indoctrinating the client to become an existentialist, but is about encouraging the client to engage with their way of living, informed by a philosophical attitude. I strongly resonate with Gerd Achenbach when he says that ‘‘Philosophical practice is ... the culture of questions, not of desired solutions and recruited decisions’’ (1987: 51). What alternative does philosophical counselling have to offer? I frankly find my reading of the philosophical counselling stance worrying on two counts – first that it seems to suggest a way of working which owes more to the lecturer-student or sage-pupil model than anything which draws on the considerable literature on the therapeutic alliance which therapists have built up over the years. Lahav raises the idea that existential psychotherapy and philosophical counselling can inform each other. I think that if philosophical counsellors are to work with people who feel vulnerable, depressed or mad they may find this literature invaluable. This point alone could be expanded into a paper – given time constraints I would only want to say research has indicated the crucial variable in therapeutic work is the quality of the relationship. Effective therapy is about the meeting of two human beings who together struggle with the issues raised by the one who we have decided to call the client. Teaching, even wise tutoring, is not necessarily therapy. I also doubt whether I could ever aspire – if I wanted to – to the wisdom Lahav speaks of, nor could I hope to draw on the whole philosophical tradition. Surely no philosopher, in reality, does do this? Some will know more than others about some areas, they will have their own enthusiasms and un-thought-through biases. There are also problems with philosophical trainings. Lahav opines that most existential psychotherapists ‘‘are not skilled in philosophical investigations. After all, they are usually not trained in philosophy departments’’. Few university students – at least in the British and American systems – will be fully versed
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in continental philosophy. My own training involved almost no consideration of European philosophy in this century: I had to wait until training as a psychotherapist for this. As Lipman observes For the most part, these students in the upper echelons of education have been expected to learn philosophy rather than to do it. Often they study the history of systems of philosophy ... in preparation for final examinations, or they prepare extended philosophical arguments, on obscure but respected topics to qualify for academic degrees (1988: 11).
My university lecturers would probably have concurred with Roger Scruton’s view of Heidegger’s Being and T ime as ‘‘one of the most notorious of all works of philosophy’’ (1994:154), or his comment apropos nothingness, that ‘‘entering Les Deaux Magots to find Sartre is not there is one of life’s blessings’’ (1994: 459). Even assuming none of these problems it seems to me, and this is my second concern, that there is a considerable art in knowing when and how to introduce philosophical ideas. A number of texts have been published recently which suggest that the therapist should introduce the client to a particular book or film. Often study of these looks like the sort of homework which cognitive-behavioural therapists give their clients. (I have worked as a cognitive-behavioural therapist in the British state health service and am familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of such task-setting). The British psychoanalyst Roger Casement, in a text called On L earning From the Patient draws attention to the importance of offering an interpretation at the point where the patient is able to make use of it. Now the crucial thing, perhaps, is how these competing or complementary approaches get operationalised. I can only compare them briefly here, but nevertheless I want to see just how similar or different they are. Lahav provides an example of his work with a visitor. I am going to draw on my work with a client. We might expect that Lahav will engage in a philosophical dialogue, while I will be importing ready-made existential theories, and will not be ‘doing philosophy’. In Lahav’s case study his visitor feels imprisoned in a meaningless relationship with her husband and constrained in her time-schedule as a mother and wife. He raises their conversation from the biographical to the philosophical level by pointing out the difference between two conceptions of freedom: ‘‘negative freedom or freedom-from’’, and ‘‘positive freedom, or freedom-for’’. Negative freedom, the visitor learns, is the absence of limitations. Positive freedom means being free to commit to doing what we find meaningful and significant. Lahav states that as his visitor
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gained a deeper self-understanding of the various freedoms that may be relevant to her life, she felt more and more capable of dealing with her predicament. Eventually she decided to preserve her married life in its previous form, while working on changing her own attitude towards the meaning of freedom (1998: 143).
Now this ‘freedom from’/’freedom to’ distinction, which apparently provides the vehicle for moving from a biographical to a philosophical level, is not at all absent in existential psychotherapy, though it is true that an existential psychotherapist is more likely to concentrate on ‘self as agent’ rather than the ‘self as subject’ which has been a theme of much Western philosophy since Descartes. I wrote up my own work with a client I called Louise as a chapter in a book I edited in 1997 called Case Studies in Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling. On referring back to it when thinking about this conference I find I draw a distinction which in terms of its function seems to me somewhat similar. From 1991 to 1994 I held a post which included responsibility for co-ordinating the student counselling service of a college in Central London. Alongside home students, the college recruited widely in Europe and North America and specialised in offering 1-year or 1-semester experience abroad for liberal arts students. Louise was one such, spending a semester in London taking courses including psychology before returning to the States for her final year of a BA degree. She had initially seemed to her lecturers to be a model student but her performance had, in their opinion, deteriorated rapidly over a period of a few weeks, during which she had regularly missed classes or been silent and withdrawn. She had finally confided to her tutor that she could no longer cope and was terrified of failing her final exams. Louise’s presenting problem in therapy was that she felt she had been swindled out of the deposit which she had made at the beginning of the semester on a house share. She felt cheated and wanted a remedy. It would have been quite easy to have stayed at this level and had a philosophical discussion about, say, fair play or the rules different people observe. I was curious: there seemed to be a discrepancy between this problem, and the major life events – leaving the parental home, travelling abroad, constructing her own life – which had precipitated our meeting. As we talked, and in fact I said very little at first but listened attentively and tried to tune in to her way of being-in-the-world, Louise presented herself in the guise of a victim who had been tricked and lied to by strangers. She had suddenly found herself alone in a world of which she could make no sense, since her usual ways of operating now failed to
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provide her with the social acceptance she was accustomed to. Worse, what she thought of as her customary openness and friendliness made her an object of derision for her housemates. What she thought of as her generosity simply served to reinforce their perception of her as foreign, wealthy and privileged. No meeting of real people had taken place, only a confirmation of a stereotype on the side of her housemates and a sense of being rejected and used on hers. The distinction I want to highlight here, though, is around the concept of education. Having discussed her situation she would, she said, ‘‘rise above it’’. ‘‘And maybe also learn from it?’’ I ventured. She still clung to the somewhat sedimented idea that it had almost been a ‘‘disaster’’ and that she had nearly been a ‘‘victim’’. I sensed, though, that this uncomfortable experience was one which, whilst she might not fully realise it, she had actively sought. She had chosen to place an advert for a house share rather than live on campus, she had chosen the wording of this advert and, in due course, had chosen to move into the house where she had the experience she had recounted to me, even though her initial feelings about her decision to move there had been mixed. One way into this might be to go to the reason for her time in London. She had said that she came to London to improve her education: what, I asked her, did she understand by the word ‘education’? Posed this question, she began immediately to talk about a process of certification, a fairly obvious route with a number of hurdles along the way in the shape of written examinations – a steady conveyor belt, in other words, to a well-paid professional career. But this, I pointed out, was a conveyor belt with bumps and jumps which were there for her to experience and which were sometimes unpredictable and could not be planned for. So, I asked, how about the idea of education as experience, what could she learn from her experience, what could she choose to take from it? Once her agency in events became clearer, Louise was able to take a certain amount of pride in her adventurousness. She began to appreciate that what she had been describing in wholly negative terms had, in fact, constituted a tremendously important rite of passage for her from ‘dependent child’ to capable ‘angry adult’. At the time she also saw that her lack of care in making arrangements about accommodation had ‘‘set her up’’ for this experience – she had thrown herself into an experience of which she felt a lack, but had done so incautiously. In appreciating more fully the reasons for events in which she had been an agent, the feelings of depression which had accompanied her muddled thinking abated.
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I might formulate Louise’s view as a utilitarian view of education – education as a means to an end – as against education as a process, as a possible outcome of experience. For me the crucial point is what we do with experience – do we really experience our experience – in which case it becomes fully available to us – or do we incorporate parts of it into our sedimented self-construct, and disregard those aspects of it which challenge this. It might be objected that my distinction between education as experience and education to achieve an end, and Lahav’s distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom for’ are not of the same order since Lahav enquires about the nature of freedom in general while I select a particular perspective on education which is not grounded in academic philosophy. I would counter this by saying that the ‘freedom from’/ ‘freedom for’ distinction is only one of very many observations which could be made by a philosopher. My observation about education arose, not out of intuition or fancy, but as a result of inviting the client to describe the meaning she gave to education, and noticing the attitude which she held. A philosophical counsellor objected to me that I failed to engage with the extensive literature on the philosophy of education, and said that I might do one of three things: a) attend to the client’s meaning of the term education, b) read up on the philosophy of education and introduce the subject at the next session, c) lend the client a book on the philosophy of education. In the case of b) and c) there seems to be an assumption here that the client would benefit from knowing about the philosophy of education and I frankly doubt this to be true. I think that these two options also throw up a number of serious issues regarding the dynamics of therapeutic relationships. Further, they assume that there will be future sessions. Lahav perhaps engages with a more standard concern of philosophy – the nature of freedom – but I believe that clarification of the meanings embedded in the client’s language is a fundamental activity for any philosophical work. Moreover, the meaning of education seems to me to be at the core of the relationship between philosophical counselling and existential psychotherapy. It seems, as I have said, the former involves a relationship between wisdom and confusion, the latter a co-operative exploration of what it means to be human. I would like to end by suggesting that this distinction might also be useful for the relationship between philosophical counselling and existen-
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tial psychotherapy. Neither, I am sure, has the monopoly on wisdom; both take as their focus the clarification of the human condition. Lahav states that ‘‘the process of philosophical self-examination does not at all contradict the existential approach to therapy and counselling’’. I agree, in fact it should already be there as an integral part of it. For me, at the moment, the value of philosophical counselling is that it reminds me that this process should be vital and rigorous, and not taken for granted. I hope I have also been able to suggest some ways in which existential psychotherapy might in turn inform philosophical counselling. By chance, the second part of Reed’s poem T oday We Have Naming of Parts is called Finding Direction: I will be interested to see to what extent existential psychotherapy and philosophical counselling can do this together. Regent’s College L ondon, UK BIBLIOGRAPHY Achenbach, G. Philosophische Praxis. Cologne: Jurgen Dinter, 1987. Casement, R. On L earning From the Patient. London: Tavistock Publications, 1985. Hadot, P. Philosophy as a Way of L ife. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Lahav, R. On the possibility of dialogue between philosophical counselling and existential psychotherapy. Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 9.1 (1998): 129–144. Lipman, M. Philosophy Goes to School. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Macquarrie, J. Existentialism. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972. Plock, S. du. ‘An Innocent Abroad? An Example of Brief Student Counselling’, in S. du Plock (ed.), Case Studies in Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1997. Scruton, R. Modern Philosophy. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994. Shinn, R. L. (ed.) Restless Adventure: Essays in Contemporary Expressions of Existentialism. New York, 1968. Shuster, S. Philosophical narratives and philosophical counselling. Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 8.2 (1997): 108–127.
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LOGOS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: THE PHENOMENA OF ENCOUNTER AND HOPE IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP
How to approach the problem of the Logos in our psychotherapeutic work? It is important to establish from the beginning that this points to the necessity of contemplating a great number of typical elements of psychotherapeutic work, from its sources to its most diverse destinies. Pretending to describe in a brief study all and each of these elements, would mean an excessive enterprise, and without doubt, Utopian. That is why this paper pretends to establish a space of reflection that, starting from the base of our daily psychotherapeutic experience, allows us to generate some questions and statements about its essence. Thus, and guided successively by three formulations, all of them belonging to eminent humanists (Husserl, Heraclitus and Celan), we will show how the phenomena of Encounter and Hope constitute the basis of the Logos implicated in the work of psychotherapy. This path, one of many possible paths, will permit us to build bridges between different constitutive aspects of this Logos. I. ‘‘GO BACK TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES!’’
This short formulation is conceived by Husserl in L ogical Investigations (1901–1902) as the directrix of the eidetic reduction, a rigorous description that permits us to perceive the essence of similar individual facts in order to reach their invariable common nucleus. In its deep simplicity and with the typical vigor of the great truths that strengthen with the course of time, it reveals to us the first step that, in its spreading out, becomes the last one to take the circularity of our course. Now, let’s emphasize some of the implications of this fact in our work. To know the importance of psychotherapy for the comprehension of the human being, to do so through its history, in its art and in its work, in its signification of preoccupation or succor, of encouragement or accompaniment, and first of all, in its noble purpose of lessening suffering, invites us to explore carefully its origins and its roots, within those universes created by word. By that word that designates and defines 259 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 259–268. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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through knowledge, of course. And by that other one that proposes and prescribes. But first of all, by that word which connects us in the verb and in silence, which welcomes with surprise and with trust the word of the Other, which becomes alive thanks to it in order to encounter it, in what they have in common and in their differences. That word, always the same and always changing. That one which, sometimes because of its imprecision, and sometimes because of its exactitude, generates spaces that connect us and contain us. The word that is at the same time spring and reflection of an unconditional tolerance. Thanks to this word, the spaces are constituted and spread out. And, in turn, they guarantee the existence of the word as a meaning and as a link, as the truth of the soul, of that originating soul of every human thought, thus, as Logos. Therefore, conceiving a relation in a great dialectic way between the word and the human spaces generated in and through it, it is necessary to describe briefly some elements inherent to the psychotherapeutic spaces which may allow us to foretell a foundation and an atmosphere of hope in such spaces. Initially we must indicate that the psychotherapeutic spaces basically represent universes in which two or more persons coincide, some suffering to a greater or lesser extent, others with diverse resources to help them. In other words, the described spaces constitute, essentially, spaces of encounter. Which elements typical of these spaces permit us to understand the Encounter occurred as a phenomenon, and not as the corollary of some philosophic, psychological or other kind of thesis? It is necessary to collect at this point some of the multiple meanings within the word encounter. The basis of our quotations corresponds to the group of meanings of the Diccionario de Uso del Espan˜ol (Moliner, p. 1109). We will mention in this paper a literal translation of those terms which are pertinent for the clarification or magnification of the required meaning of the word encounter: the totality of the meanings can be consulted in the original text. The ‘‘action of encountering’’, or the encounter (ibid.), implies a coincidence in the time and in the space of one or more objects or beings, even if they are previously provided with vitality (subjects, animals, etc.) or if they get such thanks precisely to the encounter. The attributes of these objects permit us to compare them and to differentiate them simultaneously, in variable proportions, in one or sev-
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eral of their dimensions (nature, constitution, direction). This fact defines a first attribute of the psychotherapeutic encounter: the asymmetry. This asymmetry confers on encounter the meaning of event, of a phenomenon with a particular vitality thanks to the synergies and resistance typical of it, and to the balance points existing even within instability, just as is shown in the following definitions: ‘‘action of bumping the sheep or other animals’’, and ‘‘piece of timber that used to be placed in the handloom to secure it and to prevent it from bending’’ (ibid.). But besides, the reflexive form of the verb to encounter (let’s remember that the first meaning tells us that the encounter is the action of encountering – oneself ), implies that we encounter the Other, approaching the encounter with ourselves. We approach and show ourselves to the Other and to ourselves: co-incident gestation of the suffering – being and of the therapeutic – being. The distance outlined by these movements places us in front of the Other and in front of ourselves as defined beings or beings in stanza, and as projected or potential beings. This means, as beings in the presence of something or other. Let’s stop for a minute in this inter-subjective constitution of the Encounter: its study implies, as highlighted by Blankenburg, to start from the very experience between the therapist and the patient in order to emphasize its attributes (Blankenburg, pp. 164 ff.). This experience teaches us that the development of our singularity is based on a subtle but constant oscillation between the affirmation of oneself and the abandonment of oneself, based on the perception of the Other. The flexibility inherent in this oscillatory movement is determinant when allowing that the Other elapses in a natural way. Thus, the Other appears, in the first instance, as a natural integrant of our ‘‘world of living’’, with particularities which are relevant for our perception, and at the same time as a being with an identity common to ours. To that ‘‘natural’’ Otherness we must add the ‘‘fundamental’’ Otherness of the same ‘‘world of living’’, so the evidence of the inter-subjectivity is already constituted in a common world. This double aspect of the Otherness is able, thanks to the formation of a natural common ante-predicative world, to create the sense of familiarity, which development strengthens, on the one hand, the relation with the Others in general (Others provided to a lesser or to a greater extent of particularities), and on the other hand, the relation with the anonymous or primordial Other.
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From this double strengthening emerge the concept of Confidence as an individual and voluntary relationship, as well as a general and involuntary relationship. Every psychotherapeutic relationship includes, therefore, the specific establishment of confidence in the ‘‘particular’’ Other and the establishment of trust in the ‘‘general’’ Other. If now we focus on the constitutive forces of the Encounter (synergy, resistance, communion, opposition, familiarity) we can observe how they determine an interchange, from the outlined principle and always in a gradual formation, that configures a second fundamental aspect of the Encounter: reciprocity. Foundational elements of asymmetry and reciprocity, or even better of what we will call in this paper the asymmetric reciprocity, are the Presence and the Interchange. Presence and Interchange: two essential aspects in every psychotherapeutic encounter. The nature of the relation between these two elements is the basis for every psychotherapeutic space. As a matter of fact, just as we can appreciate that there is no interchange without presence, we must suppose that an excessive presence annuls every possibility of it. Therefore, an interchange which does not give dignity and tolerance to the presence, inexorably takes away vitality from it. The presence and the interchange emerge initially as reflections of a tonality and a rhythm pre-established in the primordial confidence of every inter-subjectivity, in the originating Urdoxa (Urglaube in Husserl), the germ of the foundational reception of our world. Tonality and rhythm constitute the movement of a deep basal function, which, connecting the hyletic elements of a world structured through its internal coherence, impedes any discordant autonomy of these elements. Consequently, the melodic link that is conceived between them consolidates the identity of the own body of every psychotherapeutic space. Thus, the encounter as pathic phenomenon of every psychotherapeutic space, welcomes the individuals ‘‘united in its universe’’ (universe always singular; uni-verse: thrown towards unity). And its global configuration presupposes, both in the therapist and in the patient, a disposition that revives in the intimate union of feeling and moving ourselves within it. The kind of contact established there, according to the theory of E. Straus, allows the constituents of this body to establish an intuitive and sensitive communication with the hyletic elements, at the side of every reference to any perceived object (Chre´tien, pp. 37 ff.).
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This esthesiologic property attributes to the Encounter the possibility of developing the ‘‘pathic categories’’ of power (to have the possibility of, to have the right of ) and of duty (to be impelled to), esthesiologic principles according to Viktor von Weizsa¨cker (ibid.). These categories represent at one and the same time the intimate communion between the sensation and the individual or collective destiny, as well as the basis for the anticipatory spreading out generated in every encounter. The Encounter constituted in that way is revealed as the organ of the phenomenological experience in the art of psychotherapy, and the implicit asymmetric reciprocity existing between the therapist and the patient, makes it a body in continuous formation, eternal stroke, commotion and opening. Body intervened by L ogos. This is how we define the meaning of transcendence in gestation typical of the Encounter, that when established, advises us about the possible re-encounters to come. And this potential fact of encountering and re-encountering, opens the psychotherapeutic spaces, once again, to the revelation of the inter-subjective ante-predicative world. Being able to encounter the suffering Other requires us to ‘‘go back to the things themselves’’, a step without which it seems impossible to advance in our therapeutic process. Once having established the psychotherapeutic encounter as the essential topos of a relationship between patient and therapist (a present relation, vital and endowed with multiple meanings thanks to its asymmetry and to its reciprocity) and, guided by the following paradoxical maxim by Heraclitus, let us describe some aspects of its atmospheric constitution and let us detail how its destiny is imbued with the phenomenon of Hope. II. ‘‘THE THUNDERBOLT STEERS ALL THINGS’’ 1
Let us recall, initially, how the asymmetric reciprocity establishes and reflects, simultaneously, the possibility of any Encounter. The meaning of encounter as: ‘‘the circumstance of two cards or two equal points encountering together in the deck of cards or dice’’ (Moliner, op. cit., p. 1109), refers to a mutual support of the elements that coincide in place and time, indicating the natural presence of a correspondence without which we could not develop the potentialities of a world with certain qualities. In every psychotherapeutic relationship, as well as in every human relationship, this development requires an esthesiological trust shared between the patient and the therapist, consisting on penetrating
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into the Other being penetrated by the Other, a convergence of two or more beings with autonomous vitality, and therefore, with singular scopes. The atmospheric nature of this trust determines the unitary and immediate form of the existence of an inter-subjective ante-predicative world. How can we specify the constitution of the Encounter as pathic body? How can we perceive the vitality of that esthesiologic moment? Tellenbach reminds us in his great work Gouˆt et Atmosphe`re, that the universe of the Encounter presupposes the establishment of a foundational atmosphere that unites the emanations of its constituents, conferring on the relationship an indivisible and untransferable identity; this atmosphere, a convergence of personal halos, penetrates each and every one of the components in formation. Thanks to the act of perceiving and being perceived by the Other, we are able to mold jointly our particular world. Although the quality of the therapeutic Encounter of being a connecting world is common to every encounter, the particular way in which this link is created gives it singularity: familiarity between all of them and specificity of each one. Thus, every Encounter is unique, every therapeutic relationship resulting from the multiplicity of it too. There is also another specific atmospheric element that prefigures the constitution of the Encounter. This element, a substrate of sensible intuition, contains from its beginning, as a first stroke, all the possible futures of the Encounter. This phenomenon is Hope. This hope, like a flowering bud, precedes everything that in current gestation becomes constitutive of the Encounter as time goes by, and also precedes that which never appears within it. The therapeutic Hope always precedes the therapeutic Encounter. How is this psychotherapeutic Hope able to generate the Encounter? And how does it strengthen in its development in order to finally transcend it? Although Hope constantly guides us towards the future, it does so perceiving its richness and its wideness, or, in other words, inviting it to be part of our present, every single minute and without ceasing. Thanks to this fact, our present becomes vast. Hope impregnates our actual world with what is to come within it. In this way, when liberating the future from the particular anguish of expectation, the way is free for the establishment of the originating trust. And this Hope is nothing more than a first Encounter, full of sense, between the future and the present. Why can we make such a statement? Is it really Hope an Encounter between these two instances? We do believe so. As E. Minkowski affirms in such a decisive way, in the hope generative of trust, we can predict everything that can exist in
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the world beyond the immediate contact that establishes the expectation between the future and the self (Minkowski, pp. 87 ff.). This precept is valid both for our contact with the environment and for the contact with our own inner world. Then, in every psychotherapeutic relationship the horizons of introspection and extroversion of the therapist and the patient become wider, gaining intensity. Thus, the future that moves towards the present favors the creation of an individual space in its contact with the future, which, on the other hand, develops itself from the distance. In the psychotherapeutic field this confidence becomes alive in an atmosphere of unpredictable acceptation that presupposes an asymmetric reciprocity to come – in order to originate an Encounter. The atmosphere described here, conceived as the support of the Encounter, irradiation of the originating Hope, allows us to understand why the pathic topos is established as a communion of feeling and moving ourselves. This esthesiologic movement is the first step in every Encounter, a step without which there cannot be a possible development of any psychotherapeutic project: to be touched in order to touch the ‘‘world of living’’. Up to this point we have described how Hope represents the basis of the inter-subjective world, generating the appropriate atmosphere for the right correspondence between the power of the suffering-being and the power of the therapeutic-being. Also supported on the primordial tonality and on the rhythm, Hope is the precursor phenomenon of a horizon without a possibility previously established. Gadamer highlights this fact, referring to Heraclitus’ thinking. Indeed, fragment 18 teaches us that if we don’t expect, we will not find the unexpected either (Gadamer, p. 67). The instant in which this horizon bursts into our life, generates, on the one hand, a rupture regarding our possible projections previously established and regarding what could have happened to us in a universe already configured; and on the other hand, an opening from Nothingness to the unpredictable. This receptivity to the advent which transforms us through the Encounter, is what Henri Maldiney understands as transpassibility (Bouderlique, pp. 56 ff.), transpassibility that implicates an atmosphere of hopeful revelation in our therapeutic work; the dynamism that is generated in our projected self transformation, which, thanks to it, constitutes the transpossibility for this same author (ibid.). To encounter the suffering Other is to be in the presence of that Other that cannot be reduced to the form of psychotherapeutic projects pre-
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viously established. The Other, that ‘‘face of the Other’’ as Levinas knows it, calls us from its uniqueness, to the alterity and to its extreme vulnerability, awaking our consciousness (Levinas, pp. 201 ff.). As a matter of fact, the Encounter as co-advent of two beings, generates a crisis of ‘‘feeling oneself united with the world’’. The previous union of the therapeutic-being and of the suffering-being with their worlds, has a transformation at a pathic level, thanks to the irruption of the Encounter. And this transformation permits the integration of the event in order to solve the crisis: to touch the world of living in order to be touched. In the psychotherapeutic field, the natural and progressive development of the transpossibility determines our always unfinished assignation as psychiatrists or as psychologists. Assignation given by life itself, of course, and the invaluable importance of which is dignified by our deep wish to be therapists. In this way, the Heraclitean sentence cannot be clearly understood if we do not add to the sudden presence of clarity, that other presence, implicit, of the opacity which tends to devour that which is fulgurant, as soon as it begins to grow. As a matter of fact, feeling and moving ourselves requires the capacity to partially separate what is immediately accessible to us, thus opening a wider world, or more precisely, a deeper spatial– temporal solidarity. In this way, the transpassibility and the transpossibility permit us to remember that the psychotherapeutic Encounter, like a thunderbolt, surprises us and makes us tremble thanks to the clarity of its sparkle and to the commotion inferred from its opacity. Phenomenon and guignomenon. L ogos in movement. III. ‘‘. . . A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE . . . SENT OUT IN THE BELIEF . . .’’ 2
Paul Celan, ‘‘poet of hope’’, like very few others has been able to crystallize the whole meaning of the words contained in a poem or in a phrase, invites us to observe the importance of the opacity as a constitutive atmosphere of the spreading out of Hope. Let’s recall once again that the truly representative aspect of the atmosphere of every psychotherapeutic relationship is what unites us and contains us simultaneously. We must not forget that some aspects of this opacity typical of the phenomena of Encounter and Hope in the psychotherapeutic spaces such as simultaneity, familiarity, reciprocity, asymmetry, uniqueness and many others, clearly establish that the universe always intuitively and sensibly, many times ineffably, unites and contains the therapeutic-being and the suffering-being. The opacity establishes the den-
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sities and the profoundness of the nascent interchange of the Encounter, as well as those it guides. The meaning of Encounter as: ‘‘clear spaces of the ones that you leave when imprinting, to fulfil them later with letters in a different color’’ (Moliner, op. cit., p. 1109), illustrates how the psychotherapeutic Encounter becomes alive in the confluence between the fulgurant co-advent of the power of suffering-being and the power of the therapeutic-being, on the one hand, and its projections outlined by Hope, on the other. Unstable and invisible harmony between the suddenness of the self coincides with the movement and leading opacity of the possible destinies of the established relationship. The singular opacity of partial incomprehension of the patient’s suffering, the one contained in the optimism or in the pessimism generated in a determined psychotherapeutic action, or the one that establishes the trust or distrust that the patient can feel for his or her therapist, confirms the starting point so that transpassibility and transpossibility progress as therapeutic virtues. In this way, opacity is constructed as a connecting point between the substantiality of the Encounter and the natural growing of Hope, as form and essence where it becomes present, before the first Encounter, and beyond its elapse. Hope in its more sublime giving outlines the originating embrace, full of the sense of every psychotherapeutic relationship. When we allow ourselves as therapists, to confront the dimensions of the unfinished, of the incomprehensible and of the unknown of the Other’s suffering, Hope takes the form of a continuous questioning, the pure opacity of the L ogos, full of dignity and projection for our daily work. Conferring honor on Encounter and Hope in every psychotherapeutic relationship as well as on the opacity of every intersubjective convergence, allows us to conceive of the meaning of our daily work as: ‘‘... a message in a bottle ... sent out in the belief ...’’. Phenomenology L atin American Circle NOTES 1 Heraclitus. Quoted in: Early Greek Philosophy. London: John Burnet, 1920. 2 Bremen Prize of German Literature Discourse. Quoted in: J. Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Yale University, 1995.
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Blankenburg, W. L a perte de l’e´vidence naturelle (French translation of der Verlust der naturlichen Selbstverstandlichkeit. Stuttgart, 1971.). Presses Universitaires de France. Paris, 1991. 237 pp. Bouderlique, J. ‘‘Transpassibilite´ et Transpossibilite´’’, in: Pringuey D. and Samy Kohl F. (eds.), Phe´nome´nologie de l’identite´ humaine et schizophre´nie. Association Le Cercle Herme´neutique. Puteaux, 2001, pp. 56–62. Chretien, J. L. ‘‘Lumiere d’e´preuve’’, in: Meitinger S., Henri Maldiney. Une Phe´nome´nologie a` l’impossible. Association Le Cercle Herme´neutique. Puteaux, 2002, pp. 37–46. Gadamer, H. G. El inicio de la sabidurı´a (Spanish translation of: Der Anfang des W issens. Stuttgart, 1999). Paido´s Ibe´rica, Barcelona, 2001, 150 pp. Husserl, E. L ogical Investigations (English translation of: L ogische Untersuchungen, Halle, 1900, 1901). Translated by J. N. Findlay. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Levinas, E. T otalidad e Infinito (Spanish translation of: T otalite´ et infini. Paris, 1971). Ediciones Sı´gueme, Salamanca, 2002, 311 pp. Minkowski, E. El tiempo vivido (Spanish translation of: L e temps ve´cu. Neuchatel, 1968). Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica. Mexico City, 1982, 403 pp. Moliner, M. Diccionario de Uso del Espan˜ol. Segunda edicio´n. Tomo I. Editorial Gredos, S.A. Madrid, 1998, 1597 pp. Tellenbach, H. Gouˆt et atmosphe´re (French translation of: Geschmack und Atmosphare. Otto Muller Verlag, Salzburg, 1968). Presses Universitaires de France. Paris, 1983, 139 pp.
JARLATH FINTAN McKENNA
THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MENTAL HEALTH AS BEING WITHIN A WORLD OF APPARENTLY MEANINGLESS BEING
PREFACE
I present this essay for you to criticise and debate within the notion of being too bold rather than too timid. For it is a well-known facet of Irish society that if one is too daring and bold such persons may be cut above the knee to bring them ‘back to size’. I firmly believe that it is better to dare to rock the conventional and accepted, by questioning the difficulties of our time that seem unsolvable – for the betterment, in this context, of those human beings that are entrusted to our care.
SUMMARY
Four hundred and fifty million people suffer from a mental or behavioral disorder, yet only a small minority of them receive even the most basic treatment according to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2001). 1,000,000 people die as a result of the act of suicide each year, and every year across the world (Goldsmith et al., 2003). This problem permeates all aspects and levels of our world civilizations despite the increased interconnectedness of our peoples and the evolution of mans’ knowledge and abilities over the last century. Such evidence directs a number of key phenomenological questions within the seventh moment. Within the quest of humanity to be, how do humans survive, exist and be within a mental or behavioural disorder? Within the act of looking outwards to the modern world for possible answers and explanations, that very global world seeps inwards and captures our being. But within that duality, interpretation and understanding, the evidence suggests that many humans find aspects to that answer that may indicate an apparent meaningless being. This question prompts the phenomenological question, What is the nature and meaning of mental health and mental distress in the world of today? And I ask whether philosophers have abandoned this search to the detriment of humanity and therein neglected to question the boundaries and limits of the actuality and potentiality of being? Answering these questions is the key vocation and responsibility of philos269 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 269–287. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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ophy and the core of the project of phenomenology and in particular phenomenology in the health sciences. Looking and reflecting inwards on being, requires us to examine how the world of the seventh moment impacts upon being. This paper examines these questions through phenomenological methods by returning to the roots of being, and questions Hegel’s (1990) theory of being, through an alternative integration or convolution (Meleis, 1997) of ontological and teleological schema, the Trialectic. INTRODUCTION
The 1990’s witnessed a new methodological approach to analysing illness and disease as the World Health Organisation (WHO) addressed the global causes and effects of disease and its burden and economic cost. This heralded the development of the Global Burden of Disease Project (1990) by the World Health Organisation. This project provided new data that addressed all diseases but also illuminated the problem of mental health in global terms. WHO (2001, 2003) and HSPH (2004) suggest that mental illness represents four of the ten leading causes of disability worldwide. This increasing burden amounts to a huge cost in terms of human unhappiness, disability and economic loss. WHO (2001) projections also suggest that by 2020 depression will have the distinction of becoming the second cause of the global disease burden. The findings of the Global Burden of Disease Project (WHO, 1990, 2001) indicate that there are significant changes within the overall health needs of the world’s populations. It is a broadly held assumption that communicable diseases are the main problem in developing regions of the world. This trend is now changing and depression and mental health disease are replacing these diseases as the leading cause of disability and premature death. Murray and Lopez (1996) and Murray et al. (2001) indicate that psychiatric illness accounts for five of the ten leading causes of disability (using the measurement: years of life lived with a disability). Psychiatric disorders are also accountable for over 1% of all deaths. Jenkins et al. (2002) indicates that suicide is officially the tenth leading cause of death, comparable to death by road traffic accidents. 450 million people suffer from a mental or behavioral disorder, yet only a small minority of them receives even the most basic types of treatments or services (WHO, 2001). The World Health Organisation (WHO, 2002) also reports that acts of suicide across the world cause more deaths every year than homicide or war. Goldsmith et al. (2003) indicate that 90% of suicides in the United States
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are associated with mental illness. However, the data from China indicates that less than half of the suicides have such a correlation. Furthermore, in China more women than men carry out the act of suicide. The evidence also suggests that within Eastern European countries, the suicide rate is four to six times higher than in the United States. Hungarians sadly hold the distinction of having the highest rate of suicide, however the rate in some of the former Soviet Union states remains unclear (Goldsmith et al., 2003). This foreground of evidence uncovers a reality that demands phenomenological examination. Many worldviews and orientations colour and distil the perspectives of the human sciences, the aesthetic, the ethical and the cognitive. It is acknowledged that each of these perspectives provides further and alternative arguments to the meaningfulness of mental health in being. However, for the purposes of this paper the central focus of examination will explore the possible relationships between the ontological and teleological potentiality and actuality of mental health and distress in being. MEANINGFULNESS
Much philosophical thought attempts to understand and construct a constitution of meaning (Brentano, 1975; Buber, 1993; Taylor, 1985; Heidegger, 1996; Husserl, 1997; Schwandt, 2001) and the meaningfulness of the person in space and time. Taylor (1985) comments that where words are used as instruments of meaning the elements that they are attached to, within the ‘‘way of ideas’’ must provide clarity in terms of that which such words designate. Hence, meaning is therefore designation. It is contended that this approach enshrines an empirical overture. Husserl (1997) in his critique of reason demonstrates this in his 1907 lectures, T hing and Space, and argues that ‘‘meaningful’’ is a result of the unification of things and space. Space for Husserl (1997) ‘‘applies to the lowest constitutive stratum of the thing. ... Space is a necessary form of things and not a form of lived experience’’ (p. xiii). I disagree with Husserl’s (1997) position and argue that space does contain the substance of the lived experience. Frege disagrees with the designative paradigm of meaning and argues that both the sense and reference of the word provide a route to understanding. Lincoln and Guba (1985), discussing Habermas’s arguments for and against the empirical and natural sciences interpretation of the human sciences, suggests ‘‘that meanings are determined by theory and understood by theoretical coherence rather than by correspondence with the facts’’ (pp. 29–30).
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Schwandt (2001) suggests that there is an assumption held within qualitative investigation that examines ‘‘meaningful social action’’. However, what is the meaning of this assumption? Schwandt (2001) suggests that from one perspective the action of humans are interpreted from many different views, and are more than the simple physical act; and the meaning of such an action may have many interpretations. The interpretivist school presents two differing views of the approach to meaning, first in the context of the consciousness of the actor and secondly, meaning may be constructed not from the intention of the actor but from the fact that such an action plays a greater or lesser part in social systems. Schwandt (2001) comments that in each of these cases, meaning is fixed and determined. Within the alternative hermeneutic school, the constitution of meaning lies not in the intentions of the actor within the environment or the action itself, but meaning is ‘‘undecidable’’ in a fluid state. For Gadamer (1997), meaning exists but is never complete within the arbitration or dialogue of the action. The worldview and horizon of the interpreter forms new meaning, which is created every time the interpreter attempts to understand. Hermeneutics, in its variety of forms, is the act, model and philosophy of the interpretation of meaning. However, what is it of these things that are unified today in space and what is the nature of this space? Is it not the case that humans today are more directed to question what is and what is not meaningful. What is a meaningful world, and how necessary is this meaningful world? Is it possible that through the influence of global connectedness that the theories of meaning require revision since that which is depicted or represented changes in sense and reference rendering it ‘meaningless’. Simmel (1971) argues that a tension is created between the individual who wishes to maintain an independent and individual existence from the socially created, historical and liberation from the self. Taylor (1985) asks, ‘‘what is it we have to understand in order to understand meaning’’ (p. 253)? I ask, what is it that we must understand if we are to understand the framing and representation of ‘‘meaningless’’ and its relationship, if any, to mental distress in being? Is it possible that there is increasing lack of clarity in terms of the signals that represent symbols, hence the misinterpretation of the observers’ position? Taylor (1985) provides analysis of the Triple H Theory of meaning (Herder, Humbolt and Hamann) and suggests that communication is transmitted in public space. Such communication is reconstructed by the individual to give meaning and rapport, hence being together. However, within the new global
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interconnectedness, are we as different civilisations truly in rapport, providing an ‘‘us’’ or ‘I–thou’ (Buber, 1970) or is such rapport today superficial, meaningless and increasing the potential of mental distress? To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. He perceives what exists round about him – simply things, and beings as things; and what happens round about him – simply events, and actions as events; things consisting of qualities, events or moments; things entered in the graph of place, events in that of time; things and events bounded by other things and events, measured by them, comparable with them: he perceives an ordered and detached world. ... Or on the other hand, man meets what exists and becomes as what is over against him, always simply a single being and each thing simply as being. What exists is opened to him in happenings, and what happens affects him as what is. Nothing is present for him except this one being, but it implicates the whole world. Buber (1970) (pp. 31–32)
Furthermore, that which is ‘meaningful’ is constantly menaced by ‘meaninglessness’ in the same way that sense is menaced by non-sense. Does phenomenological neglect exist in terms of understanding the meaning of meaninglessness? What is the substance of meaninglessness and what is it that generates or produces this substance. Within the fragile human being and in privation what are the forms of meaninglessness and what if any is the relationship of this concept to potentiality, actuality (Brentano, 1975) and mental distress? In the same way that the world is a fact, meaninglessness is an ever-increasing inhabitant of our world and it is necessary to understand the anatomy of meaninglessness and the experience of meaninglessness, as it is an aspect of the world of natural experiences. Attempts to solve the problems that meaninglessness brings in terms of mental distress may enable solutions to enhance the potential of human mental wellbeing. This prompts the question of the meaningfulness of mental wellbeing. Many academics argue within the literature today that there is a positive relationship between the concepts ‘mental’, ‘health’, ‘well’ and ‘being’. However, this may be a misnomer and I am uncomfortable with the common acceptance of the use of these terms together, which presumes that mental wellbeing is a positive place within human space and that it is not as a result, neutral or negative. What therefore is the substance of the meaning of mental wellbeing? However, before attempting to answer this question, what is being? THE ROOTS OF BEING
Brentano’s (1975) doctoral thesis on the Aristotelian corpus on the senses of being provides four dimensions of being, accidental (on kata symbe-
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bekos), being in the sense of being true (on hos alethes), non-being in the way of falseness (me on hos pseudos) being of the categories and potential and actual being (dynamei kai energeia). The allusions to being seek to understand the determination of being. Aristotle in Metaphysics IV.2.1003b6 states one thing is said to be because it is substance, another because it is an attribute of a substance, still another because it is a process toward substance, or privation of substantial forms or quality of substance, or because it produces or generates substance or that which is predicated of substance, or because it is negation of such a thing or of substance itself.
Hence for this reason it is argued that non-being is. Within the Lebenswelt of today, world and life interact in a way that leaves many humans in a place of mental distress and increasingly in the place of ‘‘non-being within being’’. Non-being in this context does not refer to falseness as suggested by Aristotle (Brentano, 1975) but an alternative interpretation of place and substance where being and non-being co-exist more frequently, the ultimate result, non-existence in the world ‘‘another being accidentally co-exists with it in the same subject’’ (p. 14). Brentano (1975) also comments that truth is found in affirmative judgements and falsity in the negative. It is the case that mental health is judged by humans in society as the affirmative and mental distress within negative connotations and judgements. However, is this appropriate within the nature (Wesen) of things? Despite the many advances of science relating to mankind and the uncovering of our microscopic world, humans have also begun to rediscover and be reawakened to the true realities, meanings and natures of mental distress created by man. In terms of our global reality, humans increasingly encounter daily the sense of true being in terms of war, global terror, oppression, famine, natural disaster and disease all of which result in mental distress for those civilisations. I contend that these macro occurrences confuse and hide the micro, the new silent holocaust of the seventh moment wherein humans live and construct a meaningless world in terms of their being. Many monumental atrocities of being are created and demonstrated through the deliverance of man’s means upon man, the genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the attack upon the World Trade Centre, The Afghanistan war, The Iraq war as examples. However, none of these examples are new departures for man, since the history of human civilisation is dotted with similar examples of greater proportions. Therefore, in the phenomenological, what is the significance of the ‘‘globality of being’’ and how does this concept
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relate to categories, potential and actual being (Brentano, 1975) as mental health?
THE SUBSTANCE OF MENTAL HEALTH
The concept of mental health may be traced back to early Greek civilisation. Since that period, the empirical, theoretical and philosophical literatures regarding the concept of mental health have expanded in a variety of directions in the quest to understand its meaning (Jahoda, 1958; Trent, 1992; McDonald and O’Hara, 1998) and its relationship with the concepts psychological wellbeing (Bradburn, 1969; Cherlin and Reeder, 1975; Brant and Veroff, 1982; Diener, 1984; Ryff, 1989, 1995), positive mental health (Jahoda, 1958; Szasz, 1961; Bradburn, 1969; Beiser, 1974), positive psychological functioning (Jung, 1933; Erikson, 1959; Allport, 1961; Rogers, 1961; Buhler and Massarik, 1968; Maslow, 1968), subjective wellbeing (Gurin et al., 1960; Neugarten, Havighurst, and Tobin, 1961; Cantril, 1965; Wilson, 1967; Bradburn, 1969; Wood, Wylie, and Sheafor, 1969; Lawton, 1975; Morris and Sherwood, 1975; Andrews and Withey, 1976; Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers, 1976; Larsen, 1978; Underwood and Froming, 1980; Kammann and Flet, 1983; Diener and Lucas, 2000) and more recently happiness (Myers and Diener, 1995; Argyle, 1997; Myers and Diener, 1997; Lewis and Glennerster, 2000). Phenomenology’s quest, similar to the central thread of questioning in health sciences, asks, what of the attitudes of the individual toward himself and community? What is the degree to which a person realizes his potentialities through action? What of the functionality of the individual’s persona? What level of independence of social influences has the human today? How does the human interpret and seek meaning in the world around him (Jahoda, 1958)? And can humans take life as it comes and master it in a way that allows potentiality rather than actuality, resulting in mental health, mental distress or non-being within our realities. Humans exist daily in the world to meet the potential of their being rather than the actuality of their being. What are the phenomena that the intention of mental health and mental distress are accidental to each other? Brentano (1975) indicates that in terms of ‘accidental being’ ‘‘the two do not necessarily belong together; one property is not a consequence of the other and the two do not stem from a common cause; the one has the other kata symbebekos’’ (p. 8). However, within the mode of existence for the human, each state may belong to the person and not as argued
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by Brentano (1975) that ‘‘to say that one thing is another means the same as that the second thing accidentally belongs to the first’’ (p. 9).
MENTAL WELLBEING
Beiser (1974) examines the components and correlates of mental wellbeing and comments that in the decade 1964–74 the subject of mental wellbeing became a construct for serious health science analysis. He argues that the complex feeling state of wellbeing involves a number of psychological processes and he presents evidence from a study of residents in Stirling County. Besier presents research findings that: demonstrate the conceptual and methodological importance of studying the affective components of wellbeing separately and as they interact, rather than assuming that wellbeing can and should be considered as an unidimensional, global construct (p. 320).
In a longitudinal five-year study from 1963 to 1968, the researchers interviewed adults living in twelve separate rural communities utilising a schedule constructed to capture a wide range of psychophysiological and psychological symptoms. Beiser’s (1974) findings suggest that each of these factors has a significant correlation with general wellbeing and that: ‘‘wellbeing is the resultant effect of a subject’s complex intrapsychic process in which a person’s level of satisfaction with life interacts with more short-lived and fluctuating affective states’’ (p. 325). Beiser (1974) in discussing the conceptual and methodological implications of this study points out that the advantages of knowing the components of general wellbeing provide a ‘‘more reliable index of that phenomenona being studied than a single item’’, and from a conceptual perspective ‘‘the absence of factors promoting negative affect does not automatically ensure the emergence of positive state feelings or vice versa’’ (p. 325). Beiser (1974) also comments that there is a mixed pattern of associations among the socio-demographic variables and the affect items and suggests that the sampling techniques utilised may account for the variations in comparison to the study of Bradburn and Caplovitz (1965, 1969). Beiser (1974) in his sampling method, weighted the variables regarding people suffering from emotional problems/health problems more so than in a random sample from the rural community. He also comments that this sample reflects a rural population in contrast to the urban population used in Bradburn’s study and that ‘‘the distribution of educational levels is more limited here than in an urban setting’’ and that
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these findings are the result of a six year longitudinal study (Beiser, 1974, p. 1326). WELLBEING
Bryant and Veroff (1982) provide a socio-historical analysis of the structure of psychological wellbeing. In their study they compared the data from two national studies (1957, 1976) regarding Americans’ reactions to life experiences and their mental health. They constructed eighteen indices of wellbeing from items common to both studies. These items analysed general happiness, self-perception, symptoms of stress, adjustment to marriage, work and parenthood and feelings attached to these roles. The focal point of both surveys was how people evaluate their own perception of their wellbeing or distress, ‘‘as phenomena to be studied in their own right’’ (p. 654). Their results suggest that there are three separate dimensions of self-evaluation that underlie men’s and women’s responses in both studies regarding the topic of subjective mental health. These structures are: (a) positive affective evaluation (positively anchored unhappiness items), (b) negative affective evaluation (negatively anchored strain items) and (c) the evaluation of personal competence (Bryant and Veroff, 1982). Each of these items, although related are separate from one another. They found stability of structures in each of these four groups (men, 1957; women, 1957; men, 1976; women, 1976), which suggest that the structure is reliable in underpinning a theory of self-evaluation and they utilise this structure to analyse sex and year differences in elements of the structure. Bryant and Veroff (1982) comment that their finding relating to personal competence reflects competence in relation to dealing with life stressors rather than ‘‘enacting positive experience’’ (p. 672). In sum, they found that people in the different time scales 1957 and 1976 used different role sets for evaluating their personal adequacy, the structural importance for work; and parenting changed for both men and women during this time period as did the meaning of future morale on people’s affective evaluations. This item had less impact in the 1976 study. Bryant and Veroff (1982) state that: ‘‘... People in general become more uncertain, the expression of uncertainty about one’s life becomes less diagnostic of one’s own wellbeing’’ (p. 672). Ryff (1989) identifies the most important literature that addressed positive psychological functioning: self-actualisation (Jung, 1933; Allport, 1961; Rogers, 1961), life span/life cycle (Erikson, 1959; Buhler and Massarik, 1968; Maslow, 1968) and positive mental health (Jahoda, 1958;
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Szasz, 1961; Bradburn, 1969; Beiser, 1974). Ryff (1989) in her critique of these theoretical positions presents five key points for consideration: (1) these perspectives have little empirical underpinning due to an absence of valid, reliable and credible assessment tools; (2) the criteria of wellbeing generated by these positions are diverse and extensive; (3) there is no clear criteria which illustrate the features of positive psychological functioning; (4) the literature is ‘‘value laden’’ in how people should perform if they have positive psychological functioning; (5) many of the above theorists have deliberated over similar features of the same phenomenon. Ryff (1989, 1995) argues that much of the literature up until this point is based upon formulations of the concept wellbeing, with little theoretical or empirical exploration of its links to positive functioning. Ryff (1989) presents a new dimension where she attempts to consolidate a number of alternative theoretical positions and explores the relationships between indicators of ‘‘wellbeing’’ and new links to ‘‘positive functioning’’ from previous empirical research in this area. The major aim of Ryff ’s (1989) research was to provide operational definitions and measures of the following attributes: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth. This approach integrated the theoretical domains of mental health, clinical and life span as ‘‘multiple converging aspects of positive psychological functioning.’’ Ryff (1989) states that: The empirical challenge therefore, is to operationalize these theory guided dimensions so that they may be examined vis-a`-vis the reigning indexes of positive functioning. Such comparisons will clarify whether the alternative approach affords criteria of psychological wellbeing that are theoretically and empirically distinct from existing formulations (p. 1071).
Ryff (1989) comments that the educational levels of the respondents were high. Regarding health ratings the older respondents had significantly lower self-rating scales than the middle or younger groups and the financial state of the majority of subjects was within the range good– excellent. Regarding sex differences, women rated their financial position more negatively than men; most of the younger sample were single; the majority of the middle-aged sample were married; and half of the older group were married. One third of the older group were widowed; and regarding religion, most of the sample were Catholic in belief. Ryff (1989) constructed new measurement scales to reflect previous tools and the theoretical literature and administered the new instrument alongside other previously used scales to measure psychological wellbeing.
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Ryff (1989) utilised a ‘‘construct-oriented approach to personality assessment’’ in the development of the new measure. Each of the theoretical constructs (self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth) as differing traits in positive functioning were included as constructs within the self-report instrument. The findings of Ryff ’s (1989) study supported the claim that ‘‘key aspects of positive psychological functioning emphasized in theory have not been represented in the empirical arena’’ (p. 1077). The findings also suggest that recent debates in the literature constitute a narrow view of psychological functioning. Much of the key debate surrounds ‘‘short term affective wellbeing (happiness)’’ where further questions require exploration regarding continuing life challenges in terms of purpose and direction and how subjects achieve long term relationships with others and achieve a sense of self-actualisation or true potential. Ryff (1989) also comments that life satisfaction has been used to measure wellbeing but has neglected to measure constructs such as autonomy, positive relations with others and personal growth. Ryff (1989) suggests that the focus of empirical research is now in the direction of the behaviours that people try to achieve on a daily basis regarding their personal goals (Emmons, 1986); and the focus in gerontological research is upon meaning and purpose in life (Reker, Peacock and Wong, 1987). Ryff (1989) argues that these constructs of goals and directions in life are in themselves central to the understanding of psychological wellbeing and not simply the ‘‘antecedents’’. In conclusion Ryff (1989) comments that future empirical studies should examine the fit between the theoretical concepts and the values and ideals of those to whom they are to be applied and investigate the conditions under which particular ideals of wellbeing are obstructed or realised and probe the long term consequences (individual and societal) of following one rather than another conception of positive psychological functioning (p. 1080).
Ryff (1995) in discussing psychological wellbeing in adult life comments that one key area that is absent within the scientific debate on mental health is the identification of what is absent in peoples’ lives that provide them with psychological wellbeing. Much research has been carried out on those who have considerable psychological disorders and those who have psychological wellbeing. However, ‘‘individuals who are not troubled by psychological dysfunction, but who, nonetheless, lack many of the positive psychological goods of life’’ (p. 103) have been neglected by scientific research.
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Jahoda (1958) following a literature search of the subject positive mental health constructed six categories regarding the concept. Thirty years later, Ryff (1989, 1995) explored the same concepts and constructed six dimensions from her research. Ryff (1989, 1995) argues that the earlier work carried out by researchers like Jahoda (1958) offered explanations as to what constituted positive mental health but such perspectives held little empirical foundation as such assumptions were arrived at without the use of ‘‘credible assessment measures’’ and the lack of valid and reliable measurement tools. Jahoda (1958) in her discussion regarding the six categories states: ‘‘... it could be argued that there exists an empirical or theoretical relationship between these groups’’ (p. 24). Whereas these positions provide research-based criteria for positive mental health, the answer to the question of the psychological meaning of positive mental health remains unanswered. Jahoda (1958) argues that since there are alternative views of what defines health, it is therefore, inappropriate to take a reductionist position regarding what constitutes mental health: ‘‘people vary so much in terms of their native equipment that it is unreasonable to assume they could all be measured by the same yardstick’’ (p. 68). Therefore, this argument suggests that there are different constellations of mental health to be extrapolated from the six categories of concepts as outlined above. Conrad (1952) cited by Jahoda (1958) in an analysis of the health continuum, suggests that it may be appropriate to separate out and provide clarity to the following concepts: positive health, non-health and negative health. It is also possible to argue that each of these concepts exists to some degree in each individual dependent upon their circumstance. Building on the ideas of Conrad (1952) cited by Jahoda (1958), mental illness would equate with negative mental health within that continuum.
Table 1 Jahoda (1958) Attitudes of an individual toward his own self Growth, development or self-actualisation Integration Autonomy Perception of reality Environmental Mastery
Ryff (1989, 1995) Self-acceptance Personal growth Positive relations with others Autonomy Purpose in life Environmental Mastery
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Jahoda (1958) deals with the problematic area of ‘‘values’’ as her final question. Values provide another level of analysis to each of these categories especially when ‘‘one calls these psychological phenomena ‘mental health’ ’’ (p. 76). Jahoda (1958) suggests that empirical indicators to measure mental health require development. However, such a method (quantitative approaches) may be fundamentally flawed as a scientific method to fully understand mental health. Jahoda (1958) also argues that whereas there are many interpretations of physical health the concept mental health may be interpreted from a number of alternative viewpoints. Hartmann (1951) cited by Jahoda (1958) states: ‘‘theoretical standards of health are usually too narrow insofar as they underestimate the great diversity of types which in practice pass as healthy.’’ Does this type of research finding enable us to clarify the meaningfulness of mental distress? The philosophical schema of the Trialectic is tentatively presented as a new paradigm for viewing the relationships between potentiality, actuality, mental wellbeing and mental distress, through the ontological and the teleological.
THE TRIALECTIC
This schema is presented as an alternative beginning to the examination of the ontological and teleological relationships between that which is meaningful and that which is meaningless and their relationships to potentiality, actuality and mental being, hence what I refer to as the ‘‘Trialectic place within space’’. Each and every one of us encounters self and others at some point in the world and the ‘‘Trialectic’’ is in constant movement to adjust to that which is perceived. What of the sameness and difference in this temporal space? The Trialectic is presented as a point or advance in the development of being. It is not only a mode of thought, action and way but together they have consequences for that individual. Hence the teleological position must be questioned. The ‘‘act’’ decided upon by the individual, has many implications for the individual and is more difficult to clarify in terms of the implications within the world of today. For although many people today still make decisions, some of which are based upon the utilitarian principle of the categorical imperative, is it the case that the boundaries of the individual and societal ethic are confusing both for the individual and the society since both the individual and society are changing within their global connectedness, leading to greater consequence for mental distress and ultimate non-
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being? It is contended that the teleological for the individual may be meaningless within the meaning of the societal ethic. Simmel (1971) argues the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of modern life (p. 324).
Hegel (1990) argues that in the beginning, pure being constitutes pure thought and immediacy, hence ‘‘the absolute is being’’ or ‘‘absolute indifference’’ (p. 69). This, Hegel (1990) argues, emerges through a substratum. Brentano (1975) argues that Aristotle suggests that ‘actual being (on energeia) is either pure form or is actualised by form’ (p. 27). There are close similarities in the explanations by both authors to this form of pure being. Alternatively, Brentano (1975) argues that being may be ‘in various ways’ (p. 13), and there are similarities between the ideas of substratum and categories as presented by Brentano. I argue that each of the components of the Trialectic exist within the curvature of the same plane of being and are not substrata or alternative categories, but one (see Figure 1). The Trialectic is that position where the ‘I’ begins and the ‘Thou’ confronts, the thou as ‘other’ and the ‘world.’ The schemata of the Trialectic rejects the assumption made by Hegel (1990) that ‘‘God is the sum total of all realities ... and that God is the being in all existence’’
Figure 1.
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(p. 68). This place is in a state of constant flux, reinterpreted, re-understood, where each interpretation and horizon enables a new ontology through teleological development. Hegel’s (1990) dialectic is also both ontological in thought and teleological in terms of ‘act’ as potential and actual (Brentano, 1975). The dialectic, as a pathway is also searching outwards to the world for questions and answers in order to arrive at self-determination and self-actualisation. Hegel (1990) also discusses the notion of dialectic as the synergy of negativity. This suggests a tension between that which is and the opposite, or, its other. Here Hegel (1990) suggests that such negativity has specificity or unique attributes. This concept is referred to by Hegel (1990) on many occasions in his writings as captured by Spinoza as Omnis determinatio est negatio or that every determination gives rise to a contradiction. Therefore, for Hegel (1990), as a person evolves, during these experiences of transition from aspects of potentiality and actuality new beginning dawns in the cycle of selfreconstruction. However, I argue that Hegel’s (1990) theory, although referring originally to the spiritual requires a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1996) to a new plateau of interpretation, that of the Trialectic. This dimension of change involves the evolution of the integration or convolution process (Meleis, 1997) of the ontological and teleological to the potentiality and actuality of being. Here, I question again what it is that is the simple essence or substance of being and how does the external world now affect consciousness, experience and self-realisation in terms of the substance of being in mental health and the other or its contradictory, that of mental distress? Does that which appears meaningless in the world of substance enter a cycle of development resulting in mental distress with the potential for ultimate non-being within being? And in ontological terms, what is the nature of that which becomes other to itself as meaningless? The anatomy of the Trialectic is presented as the substance of the continuum between mental wellbeing and distress, the relationship between the ontological and teleological self and the possibility of selfexpression and self-actualisation through potentiality and actuality (Brentano, 1975). Within this pathway lies the horizon of consciousness, the place in space of Trialectic (see Figure 1). Each of these three dimensions together illuminate the momentum of the space of thought where, as for Hegel (1990), harmony and discord exist in a tension for supremacy within the horizon. However, the Trialectic exposes the fact that the human condition of understanding of being is not a fixed position but the interplay between each of the elements of the Trialectic, which provides
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meaning. When this space of thought has neither understanding nor meaning, the potential for mental distress increases towards actualisation. CONCLUSION
This paper examined the possible nature and meaning of mental health and mental distress in the world of today. Analysis of ‘being’, examining how the world of the seventh moment impacts upon ‘being’ as interpretation of meaning, becomes a greater quest in our global world. This quest also brings with it the opportunity for misunderstanding and the existence of meaninglessness. An examination of these questions through phenomenological methods by returning to the roots of being, questions Hegel’s (1990) theory of being through the convoluted pathway of paradigm change (Meleis, 1997) and presents an alternative ontological and teleological schema, the Trialectic. The concept and experience of meaninglessness exists for many humans in our modern world in opposition to that of meaningfulness, as does the increasing rate of mental distress. It is contended that the importance of ‘the meaningfulness of mental health as being’ is now one of the key philosophical questions for an understanding within the seventh moment, as global interconnectiveness opens up a new world of apparent meaningless being. Philosophers and health science professionals, in particular mental health practitioners, must question the possible implications of this dimension for human care through the relationships between clinical practice, theory and research. Waterford Institute of T echnology NOTE I wish to acknowledge the advice of my mentor Dr. Oliver D’Alton Slevin, Senior Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Ulster in the development of this paper.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Allport, G. W. Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Andrews, F. M. and Withey, S. B. Social Indicators of Well-being: America’s Perception of L ife Quality. New York: Plenum Press, 1976. Argyle, M. ‘‘Is happiness a cause for health?’’ Psychology and Health, 12(6) (1997): 769–781. Beiser, M. ‘‘Components and correlates of mental well-being.’’ Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, 15 (1974): 320–327.
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OLGA LOUCHAKOVA
ONTOPOIESIS AND UNION IN THE PRAYER OF THE HEART: CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOTHERAPY AND LEARNING
This article was inspired by the effects of phenomenological approach observed in our practice of transformative education and spiritually oriented psychotherapy. Phenomenology based education or healing methods engage the whole person rather than the separate human faculties. When the deep faculties such as the direct intuition, or the foundational processes such as ontopoiesis, become actively and consciously involved in the individual developmental process, education and healing effectiveness skyrocket. The two central claims of Husserl’s program, the gnoseological value of direct intuition, and the possibility to obtain knowledge by explication of the interior contents of consciousness, are indispensable to psychological research. For transformative and emancipating goals of psychology, even of greater value is the idea to positively articulate the ineffable. Phenomenology finds language for the experiences of ‘‘unsaying’’ (Sells, 1994), such as the high degrees of spiritual insight. Those who practice spirituality-oriented psychotherapy know that the truly spiritual experiences can be more transforming, developmental, and more healing for the client than the years of conventional therapy. Powerful transformation happens when people articulate spiritual experiences. In the ineffability of spiritual experience, something always remains incomplete, closed, intentionality devoid of final fulfillment. In this paper, I make a modest attempt to articulate the experience beyond the ego, happening in the practice of the Hesychast Prayer of the Heart. Explication of the dynamics of the direct intuition, Union, and ontopoiesis leads to a better understanding of the psychological system generally called self, and suggests a number of methodological approaches based on the enhancement of the essential elements of self-structure. The term ontopoiesis, coined by AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka, is used in this article to address the self-creative activity of consciousness manifesting for practitioners of the Prayer of the Heart. It will be shown in the article that this activity unfolds in a series of predictably organized experiences, leading from domains of the ego and individual will to the domains of Union. These experiences unfold 289 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 289–311. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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a layered gradient structure, organized as an ontological hierarchy. Actualization of every ontologically situated domain of experience may have specific influences on the process of individual psychological development, whence the term ‘‘ontopoiesis’’ is chosen over the more customary term ‘‘autopoiesis’’. In its emphasis on direct intuition, Husserl’s Method finds powerful predecessors in systems of thought concerned by the maxim gnothi seauton (Greek), ‘‘know thyself ’’. Islamic philosophy of illumination (al-Suhrawardi, 1999; Walbridge, 2000; Yazdi, 1992), Tantra (Louchakova and Warner, 2003), Advaita Vedanta (Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, 1996; Rambachan, 1991) are all based on the phenomenological selfenquiry via knowledge by presence, i.e. direct intuition. The vision of God in the early Christian mystics (Kirk, 1931), or in revelations of Jewish Merkabah (Scholem, 1946), depends on the presence of direct intuition. The Islamic spiritual philosopher al-Junayd qualifies direct intuition as the only valid means of self-knowledge (Abdel-Kader, 1967). The pervasiveness of the direct intuition-based phenomenological method in the human endeavor of self-knowledge leads one to examine the modes of ontological givenness of direct intuition among the contents of life. What are the mental workings of the mind actualizing direct intuition? For such a mind are relations with life permeated by the ongoing gestalt of the interiority of consciousness. To begin with, direct intuition is differentiated from noesis, the immediate apperception of noemata by awareness. Direct intuition is optional, it develops, rises and subsides, and some people report it more than others do. Noesis, on the contrary, is a constant, rooted in the innate sentiency of consciousness. As Husserl says in Ideas I, the noetic ‘‘grasping’’ of noemata is an essential activity of consciousness foundational to all cognition. By noesis, the phenomena of mental life appear sentient, conscious: Every intentive mental process is precisely noetic ... It is of its essence to include in itself something such as a ‘‘sense’’, and possibly a manifold sense on the basis of the sense bestowal and, in unity with that, to effect further productions which become ‘‘senseful’’ precisely by this sense bestowal (Husserl, 1999).
Noesis is always there, always in the background, as a known-ness of things within a unified set of cognitions ‘‘awareness is’’ and ‘‘awareness of something’’. The relationship within the noesis–noemata duo is paradoxical: while noemata are in constant flux, the awareness of them is unchanging. However, mentally differentiated from one another, they present no ‘‘gap’’ between the two. Their existence is indivisible, and they
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are distinguished only for the sake of analysis. This unity of phenomenal and pure awareness is implicit in consciousness. On the contrary, direct intuition is not within this constancy of consciousness. It applies selectively to the particular meanings or activities of consciousness. It is intentional, as a direct intuition of something. The common denominator of all instances of direct intuition is that it makes the noetic activity of consciousness transparent to itself. People differ in regard to direct intuition, i.e. in their awareness of the particular noesis. The rise of direct intuition manifests in widening of internal vistas and deepening of internal landscapes, in the emergence of foundational understandings, in the ability to see directly the essential structures and activities of consciousness. While awareness that is grasping its own phenomenal contents is always an ongoing background of phenomena in man’s natural attitude, direct intuition, as the conscious perception of these activities, presupposes reduction. It would be true to say that no one knows exactly what internal process brought to life direct intuition such as in the genius of Husserl. One can only speculate whether it happened in an instance, or developed over the course of time. However, in spiritual traditions and texts such as early Christian Philokalia, there is evidence that people can arrive at ‘‘seeing’’ the interior workings of consciousness via a gradual training of the mind. ‘‘Seeing’’ the interior operations and contents of consciousness is profoundly transforming to all significant aspects of a person (Louchakova, 2004a). For example, it affects the ways people die. Schmitz-Perrin in his study of theological influences on Husserl’s thought, indicates that during the last hours of his life, Husserl stated: ‘‘God has welcomed me graciously and has allowed me to die ... God is good, yes, God is good, but really ununderstandable, it is a very hard time now for us ... I want him to be with me. But I do not feel that He is close to me ... Pray for me’’ (as quoted in Schmitz-Perrin, 1996, p. 488, footnotes 29 and 30). Later, the minutes before he died, he said: ‘‘I have seen something wonderful. Hurry up, and write!’’ But when the nurse came back, he had already passed away. What did Edmund Husserl ‘‘see’’, and what did he want to describe in the last moment when his speech still obeyed his self-transparent consciousness? Evidently, this last ‘‘seeing’’ switched his mood from the prior angst to joy. Theophanis the Monk, the Hesychast ascetic of the 8th century, indirectly points to the connection between the rise of direct intuition of the structures of the self through Prayer of the heart and the removal of the fear of death. Theophanis says that this is precisely the fear of death that
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motivates people to practice the Prayer of the Heart. This esoteric practice comprises complicated mental exercises, leading to the complete restructuring of the intentional consciousness towards the state that the early Desert Fathers knew as Union, Theosis (Chirban, 1986; Theophanis the Monk, 1984). Apophegmata leave us exalted descriptions of the internal steps in the Prayer of the Heart, opening direct intuition by which contemplatives will ‘‘see God’’ (St. Hesychios the Priest, 1979; Theophanis the Monk, 1984). Spiritual Exercises of the Prayer of the Heart Prayer of the Heart was transmitted from the early Desert Fathers to Byzantine monks, and was preserved until our days by Russian, Romanian and Greek hermits and pilgrims. Separate contemplatives practice this Prayer in England, the United States and France. The practice is traditionally ascribed to Hesychasm, the esoteric tradition of early Christianity, later absorbed by the Orthodox Church. In Catholicism, it seems to be an individual enterprise of particular monks. The history of Hesychasm contains many disputes concerning the safety and validity of this practice (Pelikan, 1974). As a rule, Prayer of the Heart is considered among the spiritual exercises that are esoteric, complex, and need caution. For the dedicated practitioner, over years Prayer of the Heart turns into a journey of profound inner transformation, affecting all the levels of the self – from perception, to character structure, to the affective sphere and foundational identity (Louchakova and Warner, 2003; T he Way of a Pilgrim, 1952; Ware, 1974). Prayer of the Heart opens the interior structure-contents of the self (Ware, 1974). This form of internal contemplation is not unique to Christianity, but is common to all wisdom traditions that posit the ontological value of personhood. Corresponding forms of contemplative worshipful self-enquiry exist in Islam (as dhikr of Divine names), in Shakta-Vedanta and Advaita Vedanta (as bodily forms of atma-vichara, or self-enquiry). In Christianity, the Prayer of the Heart takes the form of the Jesus Prayer, and is described largely in the collections of Apophthegmata. Indications to the various form of the Prayer of the Heart can be traced through the history of all religions of the Mediterranean. Formally, Prayer of the Heart consists of an uninterrupted repetition of the name of the deity paced with the breath, and accompanied by focusing attention on the sense of self in the chest. As practice matures
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over the years, there are shifts of interior states such as a) progression from the verbal prayer to the internal silent prayer, b) movement of the focus of the internal prayer from the head to the chest, c) progression from the volitional repetition of the name to the state where the name is spontaneously emerging from within the very being of the practitioner, – as Kallistos Ware (1974) says, God prays to Himself, d) dissolution of the name into wordless prayer of sustained presence, e) degrees of Union (Dionisius the Areopagite, 1965). Within these roughly defined steps, this is a structured phenomenological introspection into the human person. Introspection happens as the deepening of the reversed flow of attention via the embodied sense of self, taken back to its phenomenological origins in pure subjectivity. A series of spontaneously rising reductions leads to explication of the essential structures of the self. The esoteric, interior part of practice consist of these spontaneously rising reductions. Eventually, attention is reduced into the focus in Spiritual Heart, a psychospiritual center of embodied consciousness in the interior space of the chest (Louchakova and Warner, 2003; Spidlı´k, 1986). The Spiritual Heart is generally associated with the mystical experience of I–Thou, and transcendence of the individual I, followed by Union. In this process, the hidden and latent content of the psyche becomes available to awareness. This may include the traces of past trauma, early forms of psychological self and adaptive mechanisms. The difficulties of facing the content of subconscious and unconscious make the Prayer into a psychologically challenging process. Due to this transformative encounter with the psyche, Prayer of the Heart is considered as being among the spiritual disciplines that are difficult to practice (T he Way of a Pilgrim, 1952; Ware, 1974). In our study of the effects of spiritual practices (Louchakova, 2004b) Prayer of the Heart stands out for its capacity to advance direct intuition. Consequently, in psychology Prayer of the Heart and similar practices can serve as models for studying and articulating direct intuition, the essential structures of consciousness co-emerging with it, and the overall psychological effects of this process. There is no full description of the practice of the Prayer available in known literature, and it is a part of the oral tradition. To learn this method one needs a living teacher (T he Way of a Pilgrim, 1952). Mastering the Prayer takes many years. To capture the internal processes happening in the practice of the Prayer, the author phenomenologically analyzed accounts of people who practiced Prayer of the Heart, which allowed describing the longitudinal maturing of the practice of the Prayer of the Heart, and explicating the
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essential structures of consciousness associated with the rise of direct intuition. Phenomenological Method in the Study of Prayer of the Heart The author uses the comparative historical and the psychological phenomenological methods. The details of this approach to the analysis of the self are available directly from the author (Louchakova, 2005). The historical accounts were obtained from Philokalia, an extremely complex Hesychast text consisting of first person reports of introspection and spiritual experiences, comments on the experiences of others, reflections on Christian doctrine, personal letters, allusions to Scripture and interpretations of passages from Christian texts. Because of this diversity, it is hard to ascribe a literary genre to Philokalia. It is a multidimensional representation of the life world of a mystic, a ‘‘snapshot’’ of a lived reality of the early Christian contemplative in the pursuit of self-knowledge. Within this complex textual fabric, one can observe how the live intentional consciousness seamlessly shifts the modes of reduction and planes of reality. Modalities of experience flow into one another, movements towards apophasis are immediately complemented by sweeping cataphatic expressions. In the phenomenological analysis of Philokalia, one flows within the Escher-like worlds of infinitely unfolding meanings, navigating consciousness in its dazzling never-ending interiority. The author analysed the texts and the descriptions provided by others, using his/her own mind as a tool to perform reductions and imaginative variations on the contents of descriptions. Since in this method the researcher analysed somebody else’s account, to obtaining the accurate data there was a need to control the interpretive, hermeneutic part of the analysis. This was controlled by extensive bracketing of researcher’s presuppositions. Within this framework, some areas of text in Philokalia came through as the general structures of experience, or even essences seminal to the whole class of experiences. In addition, the author used the interviews, instructions and commentaries provided by living experts in the tradition, as well as field observations, self-observations, and interviews with active practitioners. The longitudinal part of the study included the analysis of the experience of people in the guided Prayer of the Heart groups, as well as focus groups of people interested in self-inquiry. In working with groups of people, the explication of the essential structures of experience frequently happened in a specially developed dialogical procedure, sometimes during, and
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sometimes after the process of introspection. Practitioners provided the in-depth descriptions of their introspective experiences, sometimes selfidentifying the essential structures. Dialogue aimed at explication of both the psychological (meaningful, content-related) and perceptual (cognitive, precognitive, structures of awareness related) elements of experience. As the understanding of the essential structures emerged, it sponsored the new hermeneutic cycles of guidance of the Prayer practice, which in turn served the more precise explication to follow. This article presents observations based on the dialogical interviewing of practitioners over the period of 10 years, with the total number of people exceeding 300. Research also included the self-study using the traditional Husserl’s method. Prayer and Ontopoiesis The principal initial movement of attention in Prayer of the Heart consists in focusing attention on the embodied sense of self in the chest. Attention is established in (not ‘‘on’’) the current of the ‘‘I-sense’’. A majority of people identify it as situated slightly to the right side of the chest bone. More rarely, it is in the center of the chest or on the left. The oral tradition suggests focusing initially on the right side. Experientially, when the focus is on the right side, it is easier to distinguish the essential structures of experience, and to integrate the insights of the interior contents of consciousness with everyday life. One begins by associating the repetition of the Divine Name (the name of Jesus in the Jesus prayer which is a subtype of Prayer of the Heart) with the somatic sense of self in the chest. In the older, traditional forms of Prayer, when the practitioner develops the practice over the course of decades, the connection between the invocation and the self-sense arises spontaneously due to connotations of ‘‘human subject’’, ‘‘son of God’’, ‘‘God within’’ and the like, associated with the Name. In the contemporary grass-root, ‘‘accelerated’’ forms of Prayer, from the very beginning attention is fixed in the chest, in order to access the Gnostic ‘‘mind of the heart’’ (Louchakova, 2004a; Louchakova and Warner, 2003; Ware, 1974). Whence, the phenomenological analysis of the Prayer of the Heart uncovers the interior structures of consciousness within this ‘‘mind of the Heart’’, as opposed to ‘‘mind of the head’’. Data from the focus groups show that intentional consciousness associated with the head usually consists of self-reflective, analytic/synthetic, logic based constructs, as opposed to the immediacy of the lived experience in the chest. The processes leading to
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the rise of direct intuition of the primal lived experience of intentional consciousness happen only in association with the focus of attention in the chest. The focus in the felt sense of self in the chest corresponds to the rise of egological, self-referencing experience. As attention becomes more focused, this sense of self strengthens and turns into an uninterrupted current. Following Edith Stein, De Monticelly emphasizes the importance of discrimination between the ‘‘egological’’ and ‘‘non-egological’’ lived experiences as the entrance into the ‘‘inner being’’ and a tool to serious epistemology of personal knowledge (De Monticelli, 2002). Our analysis of the accounts of the participants of the focus groups shows that the egological experience always involves the spontaneous focus in the body. In Prayer of the Heart, or in the similar practice of self-enquiry of the Indian saint Sri Ramana Maharshi (Ramana, 1996), focusing on the right side of the chest aids sorting the sense-thought of self out of the general flow of intentional consciousness. The structure of egological experience associated with the chest is different from the one associated with the head and other areas of the body: in the chest the sustained self-sense becomes subject to spontaneously rising reduction. In that sense, one may speak about the ontologically primary and secondary egological experience, primary being associated with the focus in the chest, and secondary being associated with the focus in the head and possibly other body zones. Different from the perspective of De Monticelli (2002), the reports of the participants in self-enquiry focus groups show that egological experiences, rather than being purely affective or volitional, have a more complicated structure including cognition. The notion of the self within this experience can be either inferential, associated with the focus in the head, or immediate, lived, associated with the focus in the chest. The cognitive element common to both experiences will be the ‘‘I am’’ thought, which creates the clusters with other cognitions in the process of constructing identity. Self-referencing may happen within both modes, resulting in the different understandings of human consciousness. However, the direct intuition of ontopoiesis rises through the ‘‘mind of the Heart’’, not so through the ‘‘mind of the head’’. The self-experience within the ‘‘mind of the head’’ always remains within the delimiter ‘‘I am an individual’’. As shown below, the transcendence of individual identity, necessary for the rise of the direct intuition of ontopoiesis (see below), happens only via reduction of the egological experience associated with the focus of attention in the chest. Consequently, the instructions of the 10th century
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Hesychast St. Simeon the New Theologian for the practice of the Prayer say, ‘‘Search inside yourself with your intellect so as to find the place of the heart ...’’ (St. Simeon the New T heologian, 1995, p. 73). More precisely, the egological experience which rises in fixing attention on the sense of self on the right side of the chest contains the blend of fields of meaning such as ‘‘I am’’, ‘‘I am the person, the self ’’, ‘‘I am the body’’ and the narrative connotations of one’s history. Experience also involves sensing the specific tactility of ‘‘personhood’’, a sort of warm effulgence of personal sentiency, which can be associated with affect, interpretation, image and thought. St. Simeon the New Theologian possibly refers to this experience as finding ‘‘the place where all the powers of the soul reside’’ (St. Simeon the New T heologian, 1995, p. 73), while the Indian saint Sri Ramana Maharshi calls it aham-sphurana (Sanskrit), the radiance of the ‘‘I’’. This thought/sense experience of personhood can be navigated inwards to its phenomenological origins. Ibn al’-Arabi, the Andalusian philosopher of the XII century, calls the current of this body-related self-awareness back to its source ‘‘the river of Jesus’’. The practitioner locates the Divine Name, paced with breath, within flow of this reversed intentionality. The current is spatially represented in the introspective space inside the chest, and goes back to the subtle center of the embodied awareness called the Spiritual Heart. The Spiritual Heart is the spatial bodily correspondent to the innermost core of both self-sense and cognitive self (Ibn al-Arabi, 1978). It is known in Hesychasm as a junction of self-transcendence (Spidlı´k, 1986), where the individual I–Thou eternally falls into and emerges from the I–I, the Union. As the concentration deepens, the flow of intentionality attempting to grasp its own origin, effortful initially, becomes spontaneous, as though it were ‘‘pulled’’ from within. In Indian Tantra, the power providing the possibility of the reverse flow of awareness is personified as Goddess Kundalini. Simultaneously with being viewed as a power of awareness to grasp its origins, Kundalini is viewed as an evolutionary power of consciousness, bringing to life the multiplicity of phenomena (Louchakova, 2004c). This keen conclusion regarding the double agency of Kundalini captures the phenomenological observation that in deep meditation the full collapse of awareness onto itself is preceded by the increase of the internal flow of phenomena. In this simultaneity, the inward return of awareness to its source and the outward deployment of the latent content of consciousness, are in fact two sides of one process. As will be shown
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later, this manifests as the increase of ontopoiesis under the presence of direct intuition in the Prayer of the Heart. The ‘‘pull’’ inward is personified as Goddess Uma. In different Tantric systems, both Kundalini and Uma are the consorts to the Lord Shiva, the personification of the principle of pure consciousness. In the beginning, navigation towards the source of self-awareness is volitional, but at the time of the actualization of the ‘‘pull’’, the impetus for this flow is recognized as coming from beyond the individual will. Sufism accommodates for this fact by a common statement that the rise of intuition of God happens ‘‘by invitation [from within, from Deity] only’’. There is the invariability of these specific details across traditions. As the stable factors in this process, they are the part of the essential structure of the body-based introspection into the self. What provides this shift from the individual effort to the effortlessness of the inward flow of attention? The mere reduction of the meditating I to transcendental ego by a phenomenological epoche´ does not show this effect. The process of Prayer differs from the Cartesian reduction or existential self-enquiry not only by the bodily focus, but also by the overall relational setting containing the introspective process. The worshipful repetition of the Divine Name in the spatial interiority of the sense of self supports the polarity of I–Thou. The practitioner of the Prayer intends, invites, and opens to the presence of the Other, the great prototype of all others. Reduction within the self is accompanied by the sense of the open unknown potentiality, the possibility of the encounter with the sacred. One releases any claim to ownership of consciousness, assuming that the source of the givenness of awareness-existence maybe beyond individual reach. Having this as an operating assumption opens the awareness for receiving of the disowned intentionality. In contrast to the existential self-inquiry, which locks the person into the infinitely regressive monolog of self-transcending me–I, Prayer of the Heart is implicitly a dialog. The epoche´ happens in the contexts of increasing intimacy, in between the two affectively animated principles, ascending (known, owned, individual) and descending (transcendental, unknown, disowned, inferred, Divine). As De Monticelli (2002, p. 72) notices, our loves are what get us closer to ourselves. Prayer of the Heart encourages the practitioner to love beyond the object, to conceive an open-ended intentionality with the affect directed into the Unknown, and to cultivate opening into pure potentiality. The systematic reduction of cognitions associated with the embodied sense of self, and the absorption of awareness towards its origin, is paralleled by
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worshipful receptivity to the Unknown. The inward motion continues in the direction of an increasing sense of intimacy. In that, the gradual changes of perception begin. As awareness comes closer and closer to turning onto itself, the rise of direct intuition opens the inward fecundity of consciousness and transcendence into the greater Self, to which the egological experience is but the door. As the inner space opens, one ... will find there darkness and an impenetrable density. Later ... you will find, as though miraculously, an unceasing joy. For as soon as intellect attains the place of the heart, at once [notice the characteristic suddenness of this transition – the interior space is quantum structured] it sees things of which it previously knew nothing. It sees the open space within the heart and it beholds it entirely luminous and full of discrimination. From then on, from whatever side a distractive thought may appear, before it has come to a completion and assumed a form, the intellect immediately drives it away and destroys it with the invocation of Jesus Christ ... the rest you will learn for yourself (St. Simeon, 1995, p. 73).
Examination of this phenomenon of interior darkness and the sense of impenetrable density is relevant to the analysis of the rise of direct intuition. Metaphorically, this is the first encounter with the ‘‘veil’’ that obscures the interiority of consciousness. The vector of intentionality is turned in a direction that it never explored before, and the faculty of seeing is initially unavailable. Psychologically speaking, the interior cognitive schemas, which provide for the discernment of a particular phenomenal world, are not developed. In turning onto itself, awareness ‘‘clashes’’ with the outward vector of its own intentionality, resulting in the temporary ‘‘arrest’’ of intentional processes. Yet, if the focus is sustained, before long the concentration is established in the Spiritual Heart. This leads to activation of the new type of intentionality. Consciousness begins to intensely deploy its own contents. Upon the touch of awareness, the initially dark space of introspection breaks open with meanings and images, analogous to the dark fertile ground sprouting under water and sunlight. In that, awareness both manifests as a noesis/noemata duo, and as a catalyst of the discharge of its own latent interior contents. The repetition of the Name removes distracting thoughts and assumptions that could construct the experience, and keeps the focus on the reverse flow of self-sense. The practitioner enters the observatory of the inner workings of the Logos, and sees how from within itself it produces phenomena that engage in the activity of the temporal weaving of the intentional networks.
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Gradually, the interior space of consciousness opens up as luminous (fully available to awareness) and full of discrimination. The very process of the rising of the meaning is witnessed, initially as thoughts and images deployed by impenetrable darkness, and in its mature form – immediately, as the rising of phenomena from pure consciousness on the divide between subject and object. Metaphorically, it is akin to the removal of the overcast and the rise of the sun. Awareness perceives its own self-luminous nature. The relationship between pure and phenomenal consciousness is observed as a triad ‘‘awareness is – awareness is aware of itself – awareness is aware of the meanings arising from awareness’’. This opens the intuition of the origins of intentionality itself, beyond the contents of meaning, as a sheer dynamic creative force, simultaneously the same and yet different from the unchanging substratum that it deploys. This deployment of the interior content of consciousness, and the beginning of ontopoietic intuition initially happens in the context of the individual self. Maturing ontopoietic intuition loses the qualifier of the individual ‘‘I’’, and opens up the vistas of trans-spatial and trans-temporal meanings emerging from the ‘‘field’’ of the unqualified and indescribable potentiality of pure reason. The meanings, rising from within, are woven into cognitive schemas, logical chains and the inner tapestry of discursive thinking. Two processes, identified by Tymieniecka (2002) as the horizontal and vertical lines of the unfolding of the intentional constructive system in its manifestation of objectivity, complement each other in the construction of the self. Direct intuition, which is the awareness of these happenings, and the deployment of latent meaning, are mutually enhancing. In fact, this is one continuum of logoic expression, described from the two different vistas, interior and external, or those of releasing and receiving, taken together. The process unfolds in stages gradually progressing from the bodily impressions to full logoic expression. Theophanis the Monk, who practiced Prayer of the Heart in the 8th century, described the process of Jesus Prayer in the following verses: ... The first step is that of purest prayer, From this there comes warmth of heart, And then a strange, a holy energy, Then tears wrung from the heart, God-given. Then peace from thoughts of every kind. From this arises purging of the intellect, And next the vision of heavenly mysteries. Unheard of light is born from this ineffably,
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And thence, beyond all telling, the hearts illumination. Last comes – a step that has no limit Though compassed in a single line – Perfection that is endless ... (Theophanis the Monk, 1994, p. 67)
These experiences, like beads, are ‘‘sitting on’’ the thread of central cognition, which is the reverse flow of the sense of personhood. This is an essential structure as explicated by Theophanis. Remarkably, the same structure emerges over a period of several decades, as well as within a single set of introspection. The self-initiated practitioners, who never received instructions, also arrive at this internal order due to the actualization of direct intuition. Indeed, the latter remains the ‘‘gift of the gods’’ (Tymieniechka, 2002, p. 8). The explication of this structure happens repeatedly in self-enquiry focus groups, and groups that practice the Prayer of the Heart. In a single act of introspection, these are states, and over decades of practice, these are stations. It is a stable phenomenon, pertinent to the internal architecture of self-awareness in the Spiritual Heart. The analogous structures are reported in phenomenological philosophy of Shakta-Vedanta as ‘‘coverings of the Self ’’ (Siddharameshwar, 1998). The invariability of this structure points to the ontological nature of it. When the introspective process constructs this experience, then the construction invariably resolves into the hierarchies of being. The layers are discretely perceived by the practitioner as ontologically ‘‘prior’’ and ‘‘posterior’’. The innermost layers of this interior architecture of self-awareness carry the sense of deep intimacy, immediacy and primacy. They also carry the sense of deeper authenticity and independence than the outer layers. The outer layers are experienced as more ‘‘inert’’, and less ‘‘real’’ than the inner. Spatiality and layers (spheres, domains) then are the primary structural principles of the self, pervasive to the whole internal organization. The components of the self are organized in the ‘‘internal space’’ of introspection as layers around the central experience of the ‘‘I am’’ – consciousness. ‘‘I am’’ in association with sensations, emotions and feelings, images, verbal thoughts, deeper non-verbal understandings, mental states such as torpor or confusion, and ‘‘nothing’’, forms the easily identifiable phenomenological clusters within the egological experience. The interior switching of the direct intuition from layer to layer is discrete, quantum. In that, two aspects can be distinguished – spontaneous reduction by perception (structure) versus reduction by image/meaning (contents). Both become actualized in the Prayer of the Heart, and com-
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plement each other; however, they open up two different vistas in regards to the ontopoiesis and Union. Reduction by perception, bouncing back to the subjectivity of pure awareness against the observed objects, leads one to regress into the I abstracted from the world, spatial forms and temporal flow. There is nothing concrete left, except for pure sentiency, slightly conditioned by the ‘‘I’’-thought. The negation, leading to this absorption, happens in the context of the natural attitude (Bello, 2002). The thought moves on the level of the pregiven world rather than within the area prescribed by Prayer of the Heart. This process allows the insights into simultaneity and sameness of awareness and being, and can show that selfhood extends beyond the existence of the body. However, the mere reduction into the subject does not open the fullness of ontopoiesis or the understanding of Union. This is the existential ‘‘cul-de-sac’’ – the practitioner will either finish in the ‘‘nothing’’ or will be caught in the process of infinite regression. The unceasing repetition of the Name, recommended in the process of Prayer, initiates a reduction by meaning. The focusing on the Name neutralizes the ‘‘horizontal’’ (Tymieniecka, 2002) networks of consciousness, and brackets the assumptions of multiplicity of existences implicit to ordinary thinking. This continuous bracketing, accompanied by the affective flow in the direction of inwardness and intimacy with the unknown Other, intends on the origins of things. The essential ethical moment in this ascent consists in ‘‘giving greetings’’. In Prayer of the Heart, greetings are implicit to the repetition of the name. Instructions to meditation on the self in both Ibn al’-Arabi’s (1978) written teaching, and in the oral tradition of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta that the author was exposed to, suggest that one should pause and give internal greetings. This engagement with the unknown Other is a pivotal moment. In giving greetings, consciousness, fluctuating into and out of self-absorption, opens into the direct intuition of limitless presence. The affect of love loses its vector and instead becomes a continuum, a field. In this epiphany of the I–Thou, the shift of identification happens. The otherness disappears, and the former Other becomes the only One that Is. Awareness/am-ness drops the qualifier of the individual I, and is recognized as the attribute of the previously unknown Other. This shift ends the egological experience. The incoming experience can be described as ‘‘I am not, but He is, and in that somehow I am’’ (Sri Ranjit Maharaj, personal communication, Encinitas, California, 1997). The transition from the ego to the larger Self, also known as Union, happens not by reduction
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or unification, but by a quantum shift of identity. Without this shift, the experience remains locked within the individual I, acquires the feeling of inertness and is prompted to return to the corporeal otherness. Egological experience, and the experience of dissolution of the ego into the larger Self, differ in regard to the affect of fear. ‘‘Existential dread’’ is pertinent to the condition of the individual, while fearlessness of death is characteristic of the condition of the Other, Union, state of annihilation of individual. It opens in the Prayer of the Heart (Theophanis the Monk, 1984), or properly conducted Vedantic self-inquiry (Avadahu: ta Gı:ta: , 1981). This shift of identification is also captured in the descriptions given by other contemplatives such as Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, or our contemporary Kallistos Ware (1986). Practitioners of the Prayer of the Heart reported at least two variants of Union, different in regard to the transformation of the mode of identification. One mode results in the opening of the ontopoietic expression with the direct intuition of the fecundity of the Self; the other – in a rather indescribable sense of the static transcendentality of the Self encompassing all the present, past and future phenomena. The latter mode is more effective in reducing fear; the former seems to be more effective in sponsoring individuation. It seems that the process of Prayer of the Heart described by Theophanis the Monk also relates more to the second, static variant of Union. In our research of the contemporary practitioners of Prayer, the first mode seems to be prevalent. The educational outcomes described at the end of this article are connected with the ontopoietic mode. To summarize, the explication of self-experience in the Prayer of the Heart happens in several steps: first, singling out the egological experience out of the mixture of egological/non-egological experience corresponding to the natural attitude. Then, continuous bracketing of non-egological cognitions and reduction of egological experience to the stream selfawareness directed at the internal Other. As the reduction deepens, the shift of identification switches the egological experience to the non-egological, but with a quality that is radically different from the non-egological experiences in the natural attitude. In the natural attitude, non-egologically ‘‘I’’ does not exist, and things just happen. There is no center, consciousness itself is not the psychic reality of the individual (De Monticelli, 2002). The experience is unified by a narrative ‘‘horizontal’’ meaning making, and by the implicit identification with the body. In the Prayer of the Heart, when the individual I stops to exist, consciousness itself is the psychic reality of the individual. The whole fullness of life,
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previously veiled and constricted within the domain of the individual I, gets augmented, expanded and absorbed into the prior Other. As John the Baptist says, ‘‘He must increase, but I must decrease’’ (John 3:30). The awareness and existence, liberated from the constraint of the individual I, attain limitlessness within the larger transcendental identity. The individual I turns into an empty shadow of the prior egological identity, annihilated in the transcendental Self. It is reduced to being a mere locator, the locus of Self-Encounter in which Transcendental Self directly intuits its own meaning and meanings. The display of this encounter is not blank or homogenous; phenomena are present; the perception continues to function; direct intuition applied to the source of phenomenal consciousness continues its fertilizing effect on ontopoietic expression; intentionality continues – and the practitioner becomes aware of the innermost mystery of the ontopoietic process. The prayed-to, inferred unknown possibility is actualized as the ontopoietic fullness of the Transcendental Ego. The interior meanings of things become available and dynamically unfold, things are seen ‘‘as they are’’ – the practitioner witnesses the ‘‘lights’’ or presences of things emerging from the ‘‘darkness’’ of the sacred indescribable field of One presence. The specifics of ontopoietic intuition, then, consists in positioning the awareness so that it can simultaneously receive the undifferentiated ‘‘womb’’ of consciousness, the great divide between the manifest and unmanifest, and the completely manifested cascades of meaning. An even subtler perception allows immersion into the functioning of the creative force itself, which conceives phenomena and endows them with existence. There lies the origin of intentionality, will, desire, knowledge and the like. Within the deployed ontopoietic structures, available to the direct intuition in the process of Prayer, one can also differentiate several domains, such as the domain of essential relations, or the domain of accidental thoughts. Our preliminary data show that the actualization of a particular ontopoietic domain provides different effects on psychological life. Understanding the specifics of these influences in future research may provide keys to understanding the interior mechanisms of human transformation. Meanwhile, the current data lead to the conclusion that the overall opening of the ontopoietic intuition at large causes the general characterological transformation. Ontopoiesis and Individual Development As longitudinal observations show, the rise of the direct ontopoietic intuition has profound effects on perception, identity, motivational sphere,
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i.e. all significant psychological aspects of one’s being (Louchakova, 2004a). They contribute to one’s characterological transformation, which seems to be a specific psychological outcome of the direct intuition of the ontopoiesis. In the practitioners of the Prayer of the Heart, characterological transformation happens roughly in two consecutive stages: a) acquiring of a healthy character structure, b) changing the character structure towards an increase of positive traits. While the possibility of character change is still disputed by psychology, this effect is clearly indicated in the writings of Christian (Behr-Sigel, 1992), Islamic (Murata, 1992) and Hindu saints (Bader, 1992; Louchakova and Warner, 2003, Louchakova, 2004a), and observed in our participants. The above-mentioned phenomenon of the deployment of the latent content of consciousness upon the application of the reverse flow of awareness speeds up the evolutionary unfolding of one’s own latencies. Fluctuations of the states of separateness, and the states of intimacy, proximity and Union, actualize the deployment of positive characterological traits such as virtues. In fact, the practitioner of the Prayer finds him/herself to be on the fast developmental track, rapidly confronting the contents of subconscious and opening up of the unconscious. Repetition of the Name brackets the negative contents, and the reverse intentionality within the flow of the self-sense brings more wholesome alternatives to the negative or destructive aspects of the psyche. Affects such as fear or anger in their fully manifested form belong to the psychological boundary setting mechanism. However, in the ontopoietic field of the Logos, the internal polarities of these affects manifest themselves as soteriological sentiments, such as bliss or compassion. Intuition of the interior essences of emotions leads to the transmutation of the emotional sphere, where anger, sadness, loneliness, fear and desperation gets transmuted into their wholesome counterparts such as compassion, tranquility, fullness, joy, and hope. Sovatsky (1998) suggests that the experience of these feelings has a healing effect on prior psychological trauma. Then, the psyche of the practitioner of the Prayer over the course of years finds the resource of healing within itself. The powerful source of character change consists in the transformation of the spectrum of the Divine Names, the foundational attributes of deity (Dionisius the Areopagite, 1965), functioning in the individual psyche. The choice of the name, such as the nouns Good, Love, or Beauty, personal names such as Jesus, nouns such as Guide or Protector, is usually reflective of the archetypal constituency of the individual psyche. Jungian psychology views the dynamics of the archetypal contents as a
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defining factor in one’s individuation. Prayer of the Heart brings up the awareness of the archetypal contents of the psyche, and transformation within the archetype towards its positive polarity. In the process of the Prayer of the Heart, the archetypal level is actively engaged. The unfolding of the archetypes happens in the direction of actualization of the inner meanings. For example, the archetype of Betrayal may be transmuted into the understanding of the illusory nature of phenomena, or the metaphor of veils concealing the true nature of things. When the archetypal contents of one field is fully actualized or exhausted, the ontopoietic process may provide the ‘‘descent’’ of a different, new archetype, accompanied by the emergence of the new qualities in the psyche. Interestingly, characterological change seems to be connected to the dynamics of the focus in the body. As our prior research has shown, the domains of intentional consciousness are tied to the particular areas of the body-schema (Louchakova and Warner, 2003). In spiritual traditions, this phenomenon corresponds to the concept of chakras or centers of embodied consciousness. The focus of awareness in certain areas of the body is associated with the necessary arousal of particular groups of meaning. In our research, the change of archetypal contents was predominant if the practitioner over the years spontaneously gravitated to the focus on the left side of the chest. The psychodynamic change (reframing and healing of the individual’s history) was more associated with the focus on the right. The overall opening up of the ontopoietic intuition happens initially with the activation of the core center of Spiritual Heart, and in its developed forms transcends any connection with the spatiality of the body. As compared to the direct intuition of ontopoiesis, absorption in pure subjectivity also changes the qualities of the mind in the direction of explication of the latencies and dealings with the subconscious. Contrary to the full practice of Prayer, the consequences of this process can be very dramatic and difficult to integrate, due to the actualization of archaic emotions such as rage or terror associated with the early developmental stages of the self. In the full practice of the Prayer of the Heart, the integration of the subconscious and the transformation of the psyche are more harmonious and faster acting. Indeed, things are different if consciousness is seen as alive and the creative Logos as supporting its own evolutionary process, rather than as a mere depository. The internal transformation frequently corresponds to the tangible change of life circumstances, making a full circle integrating the ontopoietic and the life
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world networks, and supporting the ancient alchemical dictum ‘‘as above, so below’’. Applications to T herapy and L earning Once marginalized in the wake of a limited empiricism, the notion of self now enters the center of psychological discourse (Benson, 2001; Misra, 2001; Schweder, 1991).The current typology of the self does not accommodate all the evidence (Matsumoto, 1999), and needs more research. The depth-phenomenological knowledge of the structure of the self, acquired in the study of the Prayer of the Heart, served to develop the techniques for learning and psychotherapy, based on enhancement of the essential elements of self-structure. The psychological focus of phenomenological analysis uncovers the inner, essential structural groupings, such as self-concept/self-sense, interiority/exteriority, constancy/changeability (subjectivity/objectivity), selfhood/transcendentality, and body-schema relatedness/unrelatedness. Selfconcept/self-sense axis includes the polarity of self-related concepts versus the body-based, spatial sense of one’s own self. Interiority/exteriority includes the polarity of meaning and verbal expression, constancy–changeability relates to the subject (constancy)–object (changeability) relationship within the introspective field. Transcendentality accommodates the transpersonal psychological dimensions of experience such as ‘‘largerthan-self ’’ or ‘‘no self ’’, and body schema relatedness refers to the psychological phenomena that emerge in connection with particular locations within the body schema. These modalities were used as the avenues of self-explorations and guided meditation for people diagnosed as having a ‘‘religious or spiritual problem’’ (DSM-IV category V-code 62.89), also known as a spiritual emergency (Grof and Grof, 1989). This condition can imitate psychosis, depression, existential crisis and therefore occasionally gets misdiagnosed and medicated. The structured, guided phenomenological self-exploration, based on the analysis of the Prayer of the Heart, helps clients to understand the interior structure of their condition, and establish the more congruent sense of self. The ‘‘I am’’-sense, a persistent subjective component of self-awareness, can be easily differentiated from its changing objectifiable components in guided open-eyed introspection. After some initial training, the ‘‘I am’’sense becomes available for the continuous fixing of voluntary attention. This brings about a sense of well-being and an increase in reflection about the self. The increase of these secondary reflective thoughts corresponds
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to the human experience of becoming more conscious. Focusing on the ‘‘I am’’-sense was also used in therapy with clients diagnosed as having a ‘‘religious or spiritual problem’’ (DSM-IV category V-code 62.89) (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). This technique helped to neutralize depersonalization by reestablishing the normal structure of selfexperience. A spiritual, non-denominational body-based self-enquiry, leading to the rise of direct intuition, was used in the training of phenomenological researchers in psychology (Louchakova, 2004a). In psychological phenomenological research, the researcher’s mind is the only ‘‘tool’’ used by the researcher. Consequently, the quality of this tool defines the effectiveness of the research. Training of the mind to make it into a good tool for phenomenological research was based on practices opening up direct intuition, such as the Prayer of the Heart. It was applied in teaching phenomenological research to four teams (40 students) of graduate students at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. As a result, students felt more at ease with the method and started using it in their dissertation research. Training of direct intuition was also used in teaching Culture and Consciousness and Diversity Research in transpersonal psychology to seven teams (about 190 students) of graduate and one cohort (total of 12) of undergraduate students. Frequently, associations of the topics with personal cultural traumas would slow down the absorption of the material and adversely affect the educational outcome. The direct intuition training provides for better assimilation of complexity and fuller integration of trauma traces, and increases educational effectiveness. Since knowledge about the self is typically remembered better than other types of semantic information (Kelley et al., 2002), the focusing on the ‘‘I am’’–sense was used as an educational mnemonic technique with graduate students (n>100) in psychology seminars. Students reported that the voluntary focus of attention on the constant aspect of the self in the process of learning decreases performance anxiety and enhances learning. The phenomenological map of the spatial components of the self resonates with the in situ distribution of neuromediators and neuropeptides, challenging the belief in the exclusive neurocentricity of consciousness (Louchakova and Warner, 2003). Research suggests that the positive effects of focusing on the ‘‘I am’’-sense may have a biological basis connected with changes in the chemistry of the body. The phenomenological explication of the self in the Prayer of the Heart allowed a glimpse of the interior workings of the direct intuition of
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ontopoiesis. The transformative impacts of the rise of direct intuition, applied to ontopoiesis and Union, improve the human constitution and assist self-understanding. Identifying the deployment of the interiority of consciousness as an ontopoietic process provides a cognitive paradigmatic shift, which may have powerful consequences in terms of understanding and of further research into human transformation and development. While the multiple applications of this knowledge in all areas of human activity are yet to be explored, it is certain that direct intuition of ontopoiesis rejuvenates one’s life and appreciation of what it means to be human. I would like to acknowledge with deep gratitude my teachers, Carol Radha Whitfield, Ph.D., Sri Ranjit Maharaj, and Amedeo Giorgi, Ph.D., who creatively adapted the phenomenological method to psychological studies. Institute of T ranspersonal Psychology Palo Alto, California www.itp.edu/E-mail:
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´ ˘ IS˘ T˘ OVA EVA SYR
DAS LACHEN ALS DIE KEHRSEITE DER EXISTENZIELLEN NOT Beitrag zur Pha¨nomenologie einer Grenzsituation des L ebens
Aus dem Schlaf weckte mich ein lautes, schreckliches Lachen. Es war in ihm etwas unmenschliches – niemals vorher – bis zu meinem noch nicht vollendeten neunten Lebensjahr – habe ich etwas a¨hnliches nicht geho¨rt. Kaum da¨mmerte es. Ich lief an offenes Fenster meiner Kinderstube zu, ganz verworren von der Frechheit dieses unu¨berta¨ubten Lachens, welches mich von allen Seiten u¨berfiel, um festzustellen, woher es eigentlich kommt. Es kam von allen Seiten, oder von Nirgends – es war u¨berall anwesend. Es fiel mich die Angst u¨ber und zugleich ein Protestgefu¨hl. Wie ko¨nnte jemand so laut und grob lachen? Dieses Lachen erschrak und folterte und drosselte meine Kehle, ha¨ngte sich u¨berall fast spo¨ttisch und grauenhaft u¨ber alles umher: es war unmo¨glich ihm zu entweichen, ihn nicht zu ho¨ren, seinem Gewalt und Ansturm sich zu wehren. Schreckliches, allgegenwa¨rtiges Lachen kam dabei von weiter Ferne oder Tiefe, es schallte mehr und mehr und entsprang in wilden Kaskaden weit hinter den Grenzen unseres scho¨nen Gartens, die morgens immer mit sanfter Stille gesa¨ttigt war. Voll von schwarzroten Rosen, blu¨henden Stra¨uchen und Ba¨umen geho¨rte er unteilbar zu meinem Heime. Das reissende Lachen bohrte mich wie ein Marterwerkzeug durch. Ich fu¨hlte dabei seine Gleichgu¨ltigkeit und Leere. Ich konnte mich nicht des allverzehrenden La¨rmes los werden. Er schluckte mich und wu¨rgte wie eine Lawine. Dabei fu¨hlte ich mich wie gesperrt und gela¨hmt in eine wehrlose Regungslosigkeit in meiner Einsamkeit und tiefer Angst. Ich war nicht im Stande ein Wort zu sagen, wenn ich es auch so viel brauchte und wollte das unbarmherzige Lachen zu Schweigen bringen. ‘‘Bitte sehr, schreien Sie nicht so viel, nur einen Augenblick, ho¨ren Sie auf. Ho¨ren Sie mit dem schrecklichen Lachen, Sie erweckten doch meinen kleinen, kranken Bruder!’’ Er hatte sicher wieder eine schwere Nachtdachte ich- er mo¨chte vielleicht auf eine Weile von Erscho¨ppfung und Mu¨digkeit einschlalfen. Er ka¨mpft ja Tag und Nacht nur um die Mo¨glichkeit ein Atem zu holen. Er kann nicht schlafen, er stu¨tzt sich halbsitzend im Bette an seinen Vater, durch Ersticken und Hustenanfa¨lle gefoltert. 313 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCI, 313–317. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Zum letztenmal sah ich meinen Bruder, wenn er aus dem Krankenhaus heimkehrte: sie trugen ihn auf der Tragbare in das Zimmer im Erdgeschoss unseres Elternhauses. Weisse Ha¨nde auf der weissen Decke, weisses, zartes Gesicht eines Kindes, eines Engels. Weiss am Weiss. Wie im Traumbild. Nur die Augen, noch wirkliche, dunkle, pra¨chtige, beredsame im Leiden – mehr denn je. Zarte, fast kaum bemerkbare Linie der schweigenden weissen Lippen. Ich konnte ihn noch an die Stirn ku¨ssen. Dann durfte ich ihn nicht mehr besuchen. Miliartuberculosis – hiess die Diagnose. Oft wartete ich vor dem Zimmer meines Bruders. Ich hatte keine Angst vor der Infektion. Ich dachte nicht daran. Den Eltern wollte ich aber keine weiteren Sorgen zufu¨gen. Wenn ich eines Abends an der Tu¨rschwelle sass, ho¨rte ich, wie mein dreizehnja¨hriger Bruder meinem Vater abgebrochen sagt: ‘‘Papi, bitte, lass mich nicht sterben, ich habe doch noch nicht gelebt!’’ Die Tra¨nen sprangen mir hervor. Fieberhaft u¨berlegte ich, was dem allma¨chtigen Gott, von dem mir damals in der Kindheit erza¨hlten, anzubieten, um meinen Bruder zu retten. ‘‘Mein Gott’’, sagte ich dringend,’’ du weisst gut, dass es mir an meinem Leben nicht zuviel liegt. Bitte, nimm mich statt meines Bruders. Ho¨rst du, mein Gott, er sehnt sich so viel nach dem Leben. Erfu¨lle ihm diesen Wunsch, bitte, nimm sich mein Leben als Geschenk statt des seinen. Du weisst doch, dass ich die Wahrheit sage, dass er glu¨cklich sein wird und mich wirst du damit nicht verletzen. Ich bin gesund, ich werde nur im Paradies meines lieben Gartens einschlafen. Keine Sorge ... Ich Werde nicht leiden. Ich nehme mit mir mein bisheriges Glu¨ck, welches du mir gegeben hast. Im Falle, dass ich verbleibe, werde ich nie Ruhe finden. Ta¨glich wiederholte ich meine Bitte. Ich wartete entspannt eine Verbesserung des Gesundheitszustandes meines Bruders. * * * Ich lief aus meinem Zimmer, um dem unertra¨glichen Lachen, welches mich morgens fru¨h erweckte, zu entfliehen. So ein seltsames, schrilles Lachen -u¨berall und dabei ausser Alles, als ob es keinen Mund ha¨tte, als ob etwas unermessliches lachte und dabei bedrohlich leeres. So ein rieseiges lachendes Nichts. Der Gang war kalt, die Fliesen frierten blosse Fu¨sse. Ich wollte die Treppe hinablaufen, zu meinem Bruder, zu meinen Eltern, ich brauchte eine Stu¨tze finden.
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‘‘Ich muss hinablaufen’’ – sagte ich zu mir – ‘‘an der Tu¨r warten – vielleicht werde ich die Stimme des Bruders ho¨ren, mag sein, dass er mich wieder rufe. Nein, heute darf mich nichts zuru¨ckhalten! Mein Gott, wende doch von meinem Bruder mingestens das ru¨cksichtslose Lachen ab, bitte, er soll es nicht ho¨ren; er leidet so viel, du hast sicher auch geho¨rt, wie er um Hilf ’e flehet!’’ Ich lief zu dem Zimmer meines Bruders. Da hielt mich etwas an. Als ob ich versteinerte. Und wieder schallte das Lachen. Ich fu¨hlte aber, als ob es auf seinem Gipfel zersprang. Als ob ein Riss in ihm entstu¨nde, eine unu¨bertretende Pause. Auf einmal innerhalb des unbarmherzigen, allgegenwa¨rtigen Lachens tauchte etwas fu¨r mich tief versta¨ndliches. Ich ho¨rte gespannt zu. Aus seinem Massiv stiegen leise menschliche Worte, nahe, mitfu¨hlende, barmherzige. Sie hatten keine Gestalt, aber sprachen sie zu mir. Es war das Weinen der wehrlosen menschlichen Liebe, die das Kind vor dem unbegreiflichen Leid und schmerlichen Sterben nicht retten konnte: das Weinen meiner Mutter, welches das unmenschliche absolute Lachen beta¨ubte. An diesem Morgen, wenn mich auf einmal das laute Lachen erweckte, mein Bruder starb. ‘‘Ho¨re, mein Gott, ho¨rst du mich? Wo bist du?’’ – rief ich. Zum erstenmal stand ich vor einer so lebendigen Wirklichkeit des Todes des geliebten Menschen.‘‘Wo bist du, Gott, wenn ich deiner so viel brauche?’’ Ich fu¨hlte, dass meine Kra¨fte nicht genu¨gen, dass meine Bitten nicht erho¨rt bleiben, dass mein angebotenes Geschenk fu¨r die Rettung meines Bruders nicht angenommen wurde. Ich konnte das nicht begreifen, ich konnte auch nicht verstehen, dass hier etwas fu¨r immer zerbrach. ‘‘Zu wem soll jetzt, mein Gott, mein kleiner Bruder gehen? Welche Arme bietest du ihm an? Bist du so fern, Allgegenwa¨rtiger, dass du mich nicht ho¨ren ko¨nntest? Bist du vielleicht auch todeskrank und wirst sterben, oder bist du mit seinem Tode auch gestorben? Und wenn du, Gott, auferstehen wirst und geheilt wirst, ko¨nntest du auch ihm wiederbeleben und heilen? Werden alle Wunden, alle Kinderleiden in dir geheilt? Begreifst du einmal alle Verzweiflungen und Sehnsucht der Menschenseele? Ist das nicht auch deine Verzweiflung, deine Hoffnung, deine Sehnsucht? Welchen Trost wirst du meiner Mutter geben, der die Krankheit den Sohn zum Tode gemartert hat? Welchen Schutz wu¨rdest du den Unschludigen in unertra¨glichen und unbegreiflichen Schmerzen leisten? Mein Gott, du wohnst doch in uns, in uns bist du geboren, in uns lebst du und stirbst. Mit uns leidest du doch auch. Warum bist du jetzt nicht mit mir? Wo bist du? Du lebst in uns eingewohnt, doch auch in unserem Sterben und
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in unserer verga¨nglichen Zeit. Oder verschlingst du jeden menschlichen Tod und jedes Leben, alles Sterben und Jubeln, Schicksale und Streiten mit deinem teilnahmslosen Lachen? Schau mal her! Meine Ha¨nde sind leer. Sie ko¨nnen jetzt nicht die verschwitzte Stirn meines Bruders und sein durch Fieber verbranntes Gesicht herzen. Wohin soll ich jetzt mit meinem to¨dlich verletzten Geda¨chtnis gehen? Mein Gott, Allma¨chtiges Lachen, du Nichts, voll und leer, in Allem eingewohnt, ich kann in dir kein Heim finden.’’ Heute bin ich fast am Ende des Weges. Damals, zum erstenmal in der Kindheit, im Angesicht des Todes des geliebten Menschen bin ich alt geworden bis zu dem heutigen tiefen Herbst. Schon damals, auf der Kante der todbringenden Zeit, die oft zu den Menschen nicht in die ‘‘richtige Zeit’’ kommt. Ich denke an Rilkes Worte: Denn dieses macht das Sterben fremd und schwer, dass es nicht unser Tod ist: einer, der uns endlich nimmt, nur weil wir keinen reifen ... O Herr, gib jeden seinen eignen Tod Das Sterben, das aus jenem Leben geht, darin er Liebe hatte, Sinn und Not.1
Ich kann nicht las entsetzliche Lachen vergessen, welches mich von vielen Jahren aus dem Schlaf erweckte – das Lachen der absoluten Macht, welche teilnahmslos vorbeigeht und verschlingt das Schicksal des Menschen. Mundloses Lachen, welches kein Dialog gestattet. Allma¨chtiges Lachen der absoluten Wahrheit mit unendlich vielen Gesichter, zugleich gesichtslos. Leer und gleichzeitig voll. Alles vereinigend In-Sich und AusserSich. Stets anwesend und abwesend. Die Wahrheit, die immer in die Zeit eintritt und lebt vom Tode. Sie lauft unendlich in einem Punkt vorn und zugleich zuru¨ck. Unaussprechlich und unansprechlich, sie ta¨uscht uns in allen Sprachen, die auftauchen und wieder zuru¨ckkehren in das keimvolle Nichts des ewigen Schweigens. Die absolute Wahrheit, ma¨chtig, aber entgleist durch die Krankheit der menschlichen Unerfu¨llung, Verga¨nglichkeit und das ewige Suchen. Wahnsinnige Wahrheit, die im inneren Exil der menschlichen Angst und im blinden Tappen der Freibeit beruht, und ohne diesen ihren eigenen Sinn und Spiegel verliert. Das absolute Lachen, das mich vor Jahren enweckte und beta¨ubte an der Kante eines schmerzlichen Todes, war offensichtlich der Scho¨pfer und zugleich Opfer seines eigenen Szenarium.
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Damals, zum erstenmal in der Kindheit begriff ich ganz klar, dass ich nichts anderes tun kann – wenn ich weiter leben soll und das Vertrauen in den Sinn meines eigenen Weges nicht verlieren – als in Grenzen meiner Mo¨glichkeiten das Menschenleiden zu mildern. In der menschlichen Solidarita¨t, teilnahmsvollen Miteinander-Sein suchte ich die Antwort auf die philosophischen Fragen, so dringend geo¨ffneten, in der vorzeitigen Konfrontation mit Menschenleid und Sterben. Ich suchte eine Antwort auf das unbegreifliches Lachen der absoluten Macht, welche den Namen den ho¨chsten Wahrbeit tra¨gt. Mit Erstaunen stehe ich vor der Genialita¨t des Universum und seiner Ordnung, welche aber tief verletzt und offen bleibt durch das Irren und die immanente Transzendenz der menschlichen Freiheit. Die Philosophie ist fu¨r mich ein inneres Imperativ sich an dem Menschenschicksal teilnehmen und die Wege aus seiner geistigen und physischen Not finden. Sie ist fu¨r mich die innerste Mo¨glichkeit, wie sich gegen Uebel, Menschenunglu¨ck und Katastrophen wehren.2 Charles University Prague ANMERKUNGEN 1 R. M. Rilke: Werke in zwei Ba¨nden, Bd.1.S 93,94, Insel Verlag, Lepzig, 1958. 2 Dieser Artikel knu¨pft an die vorhergehende Publikationen des Autors: E. Syr˘is˘˘tova´: Die gespaltene Zeit, Osveta, Martin, 1988. E. Syr˘is˘t˘ova´: Der Mensch in der kritischen Lebenssituationen, Karolinum, Prague, 1994. E. Syr˘is˘˘tova´: Die imagina¨re Welt, MF, Prague, 1973. E. Syr˘is˘t˘ova´: Die kreative Explosion der Tra¨ume in den Grenzsituationen des Lebens, Profil, nr. 24, Bratislava, 1992.
INDEX OF NAMES
Aanstoos: 234, 236 Abdel-Kader: 290 Achenbach, G.: 253 Adams: 199 Adorno, T.: 139 al’-Arabi, I.: 297, 302 al-Junayd: 290 Allport, G. W.: 275, 278 al-Suhrawardi: 290 Alter: 232 Ames, R.: 191, 201 Anaximander: 21, 30 Anderson: 223, 231, 236 Andrews, F.W.: 275 Aquinas, T.: 152 Arendt, H.: 58 Argyle, M.: 275 Aristotle: 24, 29, 57, 151, 274, 282 Arons: 236 Ashmore: 225 Bader: 305 Bakhtin, M.M.: 68–9, 71–2 Barban: 228 Barrell, J.: 235 Baudrillard: 184 Baumgardner, S.: 233 Beaulieu, A.: 114–15 Behr-Sigel: 305 Beiser: 275–8 Bello, A.A.: 302 Benioff: 27 Bennet, M.: 228, 235 Bennett: 192 Benson: 307 Bentham, J.: 151–3, 157, 161 Berdyaev, N.A.: 68 Bergson, H.: 68, 208 Bertalanfy, L.: 46 Bhagavan, S.R.M.: 290 Bhattacharjee: 219
Blankemburg: 261 Blizard, R.: 229 Block, N.: 97 Bogdanov, A.: 46 Bouderlique: 265 Bowen, G. M.: 109 Bradburn, N.M.: 275–8 Braud, W.: 230–2, 236 Braude: 227 Brentano, F.: 68, 140, 271, 273–6, 282–3 Brough, J.: 109–10 Brown, D.: 229 Bryant, F.B.: 275, 277 Buber: 271, 273 Buhler, C.: 275, 278 Buzan, T.: 238 Callicott, J.B.: 147 Campbell, A.: 275 Camus, A.: 138 Cantril, H.: 275 Caplovitz, D.: 276 Carlson: 229 Casement, R.: 254 Celan, P.: 259, 266 Cezanne: 105 Cherlin, A.: 275 Chre´tien: 263 Cobb: 199 Coen, E.: 62 Conduitt: 81 Confucius: 200 Conrad: 280–1 Converse, D.E.: 275 Cook-Greuter: 230 Coraut, R.: 5 Craik, K.: 24 Da Vinci, L.: 23–4 Damasio, a.: 229 Darwin, C.: 119, 140
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Dayananda: 230 De Quincey, C.: 231 Democritus: 50 Dennett, D.: 131 Derrida, J.: 138, 187 Descartes, R.: 78, 100, 138, 140, 147, 255 Deutsch: 27 Dewey, J.: 13 Diener, E.: 275 Dionisius: 293, 305 Eccles, J.: 27 Eckhart: 303 Eco, U.: 111 Einstein, A.: 123, 129, 156, 231 Elkins, J.: 106, 116 Emmons, R.A.: 279 Empedocles: 57 Erikson, E.: 275, 278 Feynmann, R.: 27, 45 Flet, R.: 275 Frank, S.: 52, 68 Frankena, W.: 163–4 Frege, G.: 5–6, 101, 271 Friedman: 232 Froming, W.J.: 275 Gadamer, H-G.: 265, 272 Galileo: 7 Gergen, K.: 232 Giorgi, A.: 234 Glennerster, H.: 275 Goeckel, R.: 29 Goldsmith: 269–71 Goodpaster, K.E.: 157 Goswami, A.: 231 Gould, S.J.: 128 Grof: 307 Guba, E.G.: 271 Gurin, G.: 275 Guroff: 228 Gurwitsch: 224 Habermas: 271 Hadot: 253 Hall, D.: 191, 201 Hamann: 272
Hameroff, S.: 27 Hanna: 234 Hartmann, N.: 48, 281 Hauighurst, R.J.: 275 Hawes: 82, 84 Hegel, G.W.F.: 46, 67, 140, 184–5, 270, 282–4 Heidegger, M.: 48, 58, 67–76, 107, 121, 138–9, 142, 235, 249, 252, 254, 271 Heisenberg, W.: 26 Heraclitus: 21, 30, 57, 259, 263. 265–6 Herder: 272 Hesychios: 292, 294 Ho¨lderlin: 63 Holland: 232 Horkheimer, M.: 139 Hounsfield, G.: 25 Hughes: 223 Humboldt: 272 Husserl, E.: 14, 39–44, 58, 67–72, 106–12, 114, 121, 137–40, 174–5, 181, 187, 204, 206–7, 211–14, 224, 233–5, 259, 262, 271, 289–91, 294–5 Hut, P.: 234 Hwang, W. S.: 33 Ihde, D.: 110 Ingarden, R.: 138, 140 Irwin: 228 Jackson, J.B.: 196 Jahoda, M.: 275, 278, 280–1 James, W.: 12, 205–8, 228–9, 232–3, 236 Janet, P.: 228 Jenkins, R.: 270 Jonas, H.: 58–9, 63, 142–3, 149 Joshi: 228 Jung, C.G.: 275, 278 Kammann, R.: 275 Kant, I.: 45, 100, 121, 133 Karsavin, L.: 52, 68 Kelley: 308 Kelly, G.: 237–8 King, C.: 28 Kirk: 290 Kluft: 228 Knorr-Cetina, K.: 108
INDEX OF NAMES Kojeve: xiii Kotarbinski, T.: 154 Krutch, J.W.: 159 Kuhn, T.: 283 Kumar: 228 Lahav, R.: 250–4, 257 Lao Tzu: 22 Larsen, R.: 275 Lashley, K.: 24 Lather, P.: 232 Latour, B.: 108 Lawton, M.P.: 275 LeClair: 232 Leerstelle: 216 Leibniz, G.: xi, 140 Leopold, A.: 147 Levinas, E.: 59, 266 Lewis, J.: 275 Lincoln, Y.S.: 271 Livingston: 224 Locke, J.: 152 Lopez, A.D.: 270 Lorenz, K.: 60–1, 63, 123 Lorhard, J.: 29 Losev, A. F.: 68 Losskiy, N.: 52 Louchakova: 290–3, 295, 297, 305–6, 308 Lucas, R.E.: 275 Luhmann, N.: 138 Lynch, M.: 108, 112–3 Lyotard, J-F.: 138, 203 MacDonald, D.: 232 Maldiney, H.: 265 Mallery: 235 Mamardashvili, M.K.: 77 Marcano: 228 Martin, E.: 113–14 Marton, F.: 236 Masciotra, D.: 109 Maslow, A.H.: 275, 278 Massarik, F.: 275, 278 Matsumoto: 307 McCulloch, W.: 24 McDonald, G.: 275 Meinig: 196–7 Meleis, A.I.: 270, 283–4
Mendeleev: 132 Merleau-Ponty, M.: 29, 98–9, 121, 138, 188, 233 Minkowski, E.: 265 Misra: 307 Mohs: 235 Moliner: 260, 266 Morris, J.N.: 275 Murata: 305 Murray, C.J.L.: 270 Myers, D.G.: 275 Naess, A.: 139, 153 Natanson, M.: 204, 233 Neugarten, B.L.: 275 Newton, I.: 7, 81–92 Nietzsche, F.: 21 Nikolaev: 204 Novak, T.: 238 O’Hara, A.: 275 Ogowa: 229 Pappus: 82 Parmenides: 50 Peacock, E.J.: 279 Pekala: 228 Pelikan: 292 Penrose, R.: 27 Pevsner, J.: 24 Philo: 31 Piets, W.: 24 Pjatigorsky, A.M.: 77 Plank, M.: 46 Plato: 57, 67, 115, 153 Polyani, M.: 154 Porete, M.: 303 Putnam: 228 Pylkka¨nen, P.: 27 Raman, S.: 117 Rambachan: 290 Ranjit: 302, 309 Rappoport, L.: 232–3 Reed, H.: 250, 258 Reed: 225 Reeder, L.G.: 275 Regan, T.: 153, 156, 158
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Reker, G.T.: 279 Richards: 236 Ridley, M.: 59–61 Robbins, H.: 5 Robbins: 233 Rodgers, W.L.: 275 Rogers, C.R.: 275, 278 Rogers, W. K.: 225 Rogers: 197 Rolston, H.: 146–8, 152–64 Rose: 220 Rosenberg, A.: 12 Rousseau, J-J.: 144 Rowe, S.: 200 Russ: 228 Ruth, W-M.: 108–9, 111–12 Rutherford, E.: 45 Ryff, C.: 275, 278–80 Salk, J.: 22, 30 Sammi: 239–41 Sanders, S.R.: 200 Sartre, J.-P.: 11, 15, 29, 111, 121, 138, 178–9, 252, 254 Scheler, M.: 138 Schmitz-Perrin: 291 Scholem: 290 Schuster, S.C.: 250 Schutz, A.: 203–15 Schwandt, T.A.: 271–2 Schweder: 307 Schweitzer, A.: 154–5 Scruton, R.: 254 Searle, J.: 97 Shannon, C.: 24 Shanon, B.: 191–2 Sharrock: 223 Sheafor, B.: 275 Sherwood, S.: 275 Shinn, R. I.: 249 Shorohova, S.: 204 Siddharameshwar: 301 Silberman: 228 Simeon: 294, 296–7, 299 Simmel, G.: 272, 282 Simons, J.: 117 Singer, P.: 153–4, 158, 161, 163–4 Smirnova, N.: 204
Socrates: 98–9 Sovatsky: 305 Speigelberg, H.: 220 Spidik: 293, 297 Spinoza, B..: 49, 62–4, 140, 282 Stafford, B.M.: 106, 116 Stewart, V.: 237 Straus, E.: 262 Szasz: 275, 278 Taylor, C.: 271–2 Taylor, E.: 228 Taylor, P.: 154 Tellenbach: 264 Theophanis: 291–2, 294, 300–1, 303 Throop, C.J.: 233, 236 Tobin, S.S.: 275 Trent, D.R.: 275 Trudy: 239–41 Turing, A.: 24 Tymieniecka, A-T.: 138, 155, 169–70, 172, 174–6, 192–4, 196, 289, 300–2 Underwood, B.: 275 Valle, R.: 231, 235, 237 van der Hart: 228 van der Kolk: 228 Van Gogh: 105 Van Neumann, J.: 24 Vernadsky, V.: 46 Veroff, J.: 275, 277 Von Eckartsberg: 235 von Weizsa¨cker, V.: 263 Wade, J.: 235 Walbridge: 290 Ware, K.: 292–3, 303 Warner: 290, 292–3, 295, 305–6 Welsch, W.: 138 White, L.: 161 Whitfield, C.R.: 309 Wiener, N.: 24 Willis, T: 23–4 Wilson, W.: 275 Withey, S.B.: 275 Wittgenstein: 187 Wolff: 219, 224
INDEX OF NAMES Wong, P.T.P.: 279 Wood, V.: 275 Woolgar, S.: 108 Wren, C.: 23 Wylie, M.L.: 275
Yazdi: 290 Zaner, R.: 203–5 Znaniecki, F.: 3
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APPENDIX T he T hird World Congress of Phenomenology PHENOMENOLOGY WORLD-WIDE Organized by: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning (1 Ivy Pointe Way, Hanover, NH 03755, United States) its centers and affiliated societies, as well as other phenomenology groups and societies. T heme LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS Historical Research; Great Phenomenological Issues; Present Day Developments
Wadham College, University of Oxford, England August 15–21, 2004 The Congress begins at 4:00 p.m., Sunday, August 15, 2004, with an Opening Reception and Registration on site, in the Cloister Garden, near the Cloister, which is located behind the College Hall. Registration on site will continue at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, August 16, in the Auditorium. Plenary sessions will run from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 PM. Lunch will run from 1:00 p.m. until 2:30 p.m.. The afternoon sessions will run from 2:30 p.m. until 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. (with a coffee break in the afternoon). Coffee may be taken in your room or in the King’s Arms (a pub).
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PROGRAM Monday, August 16 8:30 a.m. The Auditorium, Registration 9:00 a.m.
INAUGURAL LECTURE Presided by: Brian McGuinness, Siena, Italy
THE LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, United States PLENARY SESSION I Chair: Grahame Lock, Oxford University, Great Britain PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE HERMENEUTIC OF TRADITIONS Mafalda Blanc, Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, Portugal ONTOLOGICAL INTENTIONS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM Anatoly Zotov, Russia SCIENCE IN MIND. EXPLORING THE LANGUAGE OF THE LOGOS Leo Zonneveld, The Netherlands HEIDEGGER’S TAUTOLOGICAL THINKING AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE END OF PHILOSOPHY Tze-wan Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SESSION I: PHENOMENOLOGY OF HISTORY Organized and Presided by: Mark E. Blum, University of Louisville, United States PHENOMENOLOGICAL HISTORY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Mark E. Blum, University of Louisville, United States
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PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States PHENOMENOLOGY, HISTORY AND HISTORICITY IN KARL JASPER’S PHILOSOPHY Filiz Peach, City University, Great Britain THE TASK OF A HUSSERLIAN PHENOMENOLOGY OF HISTORY Osborne Wiggins, University of Louisville, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break ‘‘PHENOMENOLOGICAL HISTORY: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION’’ W ith the following participants: Mark E. Blum, University of Louisville, United States Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States Filiz Peach, City University, Great Britain Osborne Wiggins, University of Louisville, United States Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION II: FREEDOM, NECESSITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION Chair: Maija Kule, University of Latvia, Latvia OUTLINE OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF VIOLENCE. PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS Michael Staudigl, Institute for Human Sciences, Austria THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RESISTANCE Kadria Ismail, Ein-Shams University, Egypt PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE’S OPENING TO THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY – THE VIRTUE’S ISSUE Carmen Cozma, ‘‘Al.I.Cuza’’ University, Romania 4:30 – 5:00 p.m. Coffee Break
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PATOCKA AND DERRIDA ON RESPONSIBILITY Eddo Evink, Groningen University, The Netherlands SARTRE’S METHOD, THE DIALECTIC OF FREEDOM AND NECESSITY Raymond Langley, Manhattanville College, United States ‘‘PERFECT HEALTH’’ AND THE DISEMBODIMENT OF THE SELF. AN APPROACH TO MICHAEL HENRY’S THOUGHT Stella Zita De Azevedo, Universidade do Porto, Portugal Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION III: LIVING TOGETHER IN THE PSYCHIATRIC PERSPECTIVE Presided by: Simon Du Plock, Regents College, Great Britain PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY Simon Du Plock, Regents College, Great Britain LOGOS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: PHENOMENON OF ENCOUNTER AND HOPE IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP Camilo Serrano Bonitto, Latinoamerican Circle of Phenomenology, Colombia THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MENTAL HEALTH AS BEING WITHIN A WORLD OF APPARENT MEANINGLESS BEING Jarlath McKenna, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland FUNCTION AND MEANING OF DESIRE IN DEPTHPSYCHOLOGY Mina Sehdev, Italy 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break ONTOPOIESIS AND UNION IN THE PRAYER OF THE HEART: CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOTHERAPY AND LEARNING Olga Louchakova, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, United States DIE VERWANDLUNG DES SCHIZOPHRENNEN IN-DER-WELTSEINS Eva Syristova, University of Prague, Czech Republic
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Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 SESSION IV: PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Organized and Presided by: Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States TOWARD A CULTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States A SCHUTZ’S CONCEPTION OF RELEVANCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY Natalia Smirnova, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia DEMONSTRATING MOBILITY Anjana Bhattacharjee, Brunel University, Great Britain 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY AND THE CHOICE TO CHOOSE Marianne Sawicki, United States THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SELF AS NON-LOCAL: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND RESEARCH REPORT Amy Louise Miller, United States USER-FRIENDLY MARKET AS A PROJECT OF MODERN SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEM Maria Bielawka, Krakow, Poland GENERAL DISCUSSION Tuesday, August 17 8:30 a.m., The Auditorium, Registration 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION II: CROSSING BRIDGES Chair: Angela Ales Bello, Lateran University, Italy SOME COMMENTS ON ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY Grahame Lock, Oxford University, Great Britain
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‘‘THE TEMPTATIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY ARE VERY GREAT HERE’’: ON THE CURIOUS (ABSENCE OF) DIALOGUE BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY Richard Paul Hamilton, Saitama University, Japan LESSONS FROM SARTRE FOR THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Manuel Bremer, Heinrich-Heine-Universita¨t Du¨sseldorf, Germany PROBLEM OF THE ‘‘IDEA’’ IN DERRIDA’S ‘‘THE PROBLEM OF GENESIS’’ Dasuke Kamei, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan NON-INTENTIONALITY OF THE LIVED-BODY Andreas Brenner, University of Basel, Switzerland 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SESSION V: PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION Presided by: Thomas Ryba, Notre Dame University, United States BEFORE THE GENESIS: LEVINAS, MARION AND TYMIENIECKA ON CONSTITUTION, GIVENNESS AND TRANSCENDENCE Thomas Ryba, St. Thomas Aquinas Center at Purdue, United States MATER-NATALITY: AUGUSTINE, ARENDT, AND LEVINAS Ann Astell, Purdue University, United States LEVINAS AND THE NIGHT OF PHENOMENOLOGY Sandor Goodhart, St. Thomas Aquinas Center at Purdue, United States THE POTENTIALITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ISLAM Aziz Esmail, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Great Britain
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4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break AL-SUHRAWARDI’S DOCTRINE AND PHENOMENOLOGY Salahaddin Khalilov, Azerbaijan Universiteti, Azerbaijan RELIGION WITHOUT WHY: EDITH STEIN AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER ON THE OVERCOMING OF METAPHYSICS Michael F. Andrews, Seattle University, United States HERMENEUTICS OF THE MYSTICAL PHENOMENON IN EDITH STEIN Carmen Balzer, Universidad Cato´lica Argentina, Argentina Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 2 SESSION VI: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ORCHESTRATION OF THE ARTS Presided by: Mao Chen, Skidmore College, United States PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE WORK OF ART: R. INGARDEN, M. DUFFREN, P. RICOEUR Elga Freiberga, University of Latvia, Latvia NATURAL BEAUTY AND LANDSCAPE PAINTING David Brubaker, University of New Haven, United States TOWARDS PHENOMENOLOGY OF NATURAL – ARCHITECTURAL MEMORIAL Ljudmila Molodkina, State University of Land Use Planning, Russia PATINA – ATMOSPHERE – AROMA, TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF FINE DIFFERENCES Madalina Diaconu, Academy of Fine Arts, Austria 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break THE PERSISTENCE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL TIME: REFLECTIONS OF RECENT CHINESE CINEMA Mao Chen, Skidmore College, United States THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING (LEVINAS) AND THE TRUTH CRYSTALLIZED IN THE WORK OF ART (GADAMER) Aleksandra Pawliszyn, Uniwersytet Gdanski, Poland
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Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 3 SESSION VII: ‘‘THE MOST DIFFICULT POINT’’: ‘‘THE BOND BETWEEN THE FLESH AND THE IDEA’’ IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S LAST THOUGHT Organized and presided by: Mauro Carbone, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy LET IT BE Mauro Carbone, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy THE INVISIBLE AND THE FLESH. QUESTIONING CHIASM. Patrick Burke, Seattle University, United States MERLEAU-PONTY ON THE RELATION BETWEEN LOGOS PROPHORIKOS AND LOGOS ENDIATHETOS Wayne Froman, George Mason University, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break UN ECART INFIME (A MINUSCULE HIATUS): THE CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF LIVED-EXPERIENCE (VECU) IN FOUCAULT Leonard Lawlor, University of Memphis, United States THE INVISIBLE AND THE UNPRESENTABLE Luca Vanzago, Universita degli Studi Pavia, Italy GENERAL DISCUSSION Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 ROUNDTABLE ON A-T. TYMIENIECKA’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Presided by: Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States THE LOGOS OF LIFE AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Agnes B. Curry, Saint Joseph College, United States Lawrence Kimmel, Trinity University, United States
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ONTOPOIESIS AS THE FIRST ONTOLOGY OF BEINGNESS-INBECOMING Peter Abumhenre Egbe, Lateran University of Rome/Nigeria 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break ECOLOGY Zaiga Ikere, Daugavpils Pedagogical University, Latvia HUMAN CONDITION-IN-THE-UNITY-OF-EVERYTHING-ALIVE AS A NEW CONCEPTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Gdansk, Poland THE MEASURE Carmen Cozma, University ‘‘Al.I.Cuza’’, Romania THE NEW CRITIQUE OF REASON Nancy Mardas, Saint Joseph College, United States GENERAL DISCUSSION Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION VIII: DISCLOSURE AND DIFFERENTIATION: THE GENESIS OF BEAUVOIR’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL VOICE Presided by: Laura Hengehold, Case Western Reserve University, United States, and Shoichi Matsuba, Kobe City College of Nursing, Japan BEAUVOIRIAN EXISTENTIALISM: AN ETHIC OF INDIVIDUALISM OR INDIVIDUATION? Laura Hengehold, Case Western Reserve University, United States BEAUVOIR’S CONCEPT OF DISCLOSURE: ORIGINS AND INFLUENCES Kristana Arp, Long Island University, United States THE ORIGINS OF BEAUVOIR’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD Edward Fullbrook, Case Western Reserve University, United States
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5:00 – 5:30 p.m. Coffee Break GENERAL DISCUSSION Wednesday, August 18 8:30 a.m., The Auditorium, Registration 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION III: LIFE IN NUMEROUS PERSPECTIVES Presided by: Kadria Ismail, Ein-Shams University, Egypt THE LANGUAGE OF OUR LIVING BODY Angela Ales Bello, Lateran University, Italy PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE NEW EVOLUTIONISTIC PARADIGMS Roberto Verolini, Italy, and Fabio Petrelli, Universita degli Studi de Camerino, Italy HUMAN BEING IN BEINGNESS: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA’S VISION Zaiga Ikere, Daugavpils Pedagogical University, Latvia WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE EMBODIED, NATURALIZING BODILY SELF-AWARENESS Peter Reynaert, University of Antwerp, Belgium SENSIBLE MODELS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Arthur Piper, University of Nottingham, Great Britain 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SYMPOSIUM Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue Around the Perennial Issue: MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM Organized and Presided by: Nader El-Bizri, University of Cambridge, Great Britain BEING AND NECESSITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL
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INVESTIGATION OF AVICENNA’S METAPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY Nader El-Bizri, University of Cambridge, Great Britain THE ILLUMINATIVE NOTION OF MAN IN PERSIAN THOUGHT: A RESPONSE TO AN ORIGINAL QUEST Mahmoud Khatami, University of Tehran, Iran THE MICROCOSM/MACROCOSM ANALOGY IN IBN SINA AND HUSSERL Marina Banchetti-Robino, Florida Atlantic University, United States MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM IN LOTZE Nikolay Milkov, Universita¨t Bielefeld, Germany 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM IN MAX SCHELER IN RELATION TO ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Gdansk, Poland AL-GHAZALIAN INTERPRETATION OF AN ARISTOTELIAN TEXT USED BY HEIDEGGER Abu Yaareb Marzouki, International Islamic University of Malaysia, Malaysia MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND OMAR KHAYYAM ON THE QUESTION OF ‘‘THERENESS’’ Mehdi Aminrazavi, Mary Washington College, United States CONCLUDING REMARKS Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Phenomenology Institute, United States Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 SESSION IX: CLASSIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN THEIR TRANSFORMATION Presided by: Carmen Cozma, University ‘‘Al.I.Cuza’’, Romania THE FORMAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING: HUSSERL’S THEORY OF MANIFOLDS Nikolay Milkov, Universita¨t Bielefeld, Germany
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ON THE MODE OF EXISTENCE OF THE REAL NUMBERS Piotr Blaszczyk, Pedagogical University, Poland ON THE ONTO-LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF HUSSERL’S PERCEPTUAL NOEMA David Grunberg, Middle East Technical University, Turkey 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break HERMENEUTISCHE VERSUS TRANZENDENTALE PHANOMENOLOGIE Jesus Adrian Escudero, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain PHE´NOMENOLOGIE TRANSCENDENTALE ET CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON THE´OLOGIQUE Arion Kelkel, La Terrase, France Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 2 ROUNDTABLE: EPOCHE` AND REDUCTION TODAY Organized and Presided by: Michael Staudigl, Institute for Human Sciences, Austria INTRODUCTION: EPOCHE` AND REDUCTION AFTER HUSSERL Michael Staudigl, Institute for Human Sciences, Austria CONCEPTION OF TIME IN HUSSERL’S SOCIAL WORLDS – MODERN PERSPECTIVE OF ‘‘METAXU’’ Cezary J. Olbromski, University Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej, Poland ON SCHUTZ CONCERNING THE TRANSCENDENTAL REDUCTION Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break BODY OR FLESH (FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY Luca Vanzago, Italy
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BEYOND THE EPOCHE: INTUITION AND CREATIVE IMAGINATION (ON TYMIENIECKA) Nancy Mardas, Saint Joseph College, United States
GENERAL DISCUSSION Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 3 SESSION X: TIME, ALTERITY, AND SUBJECTIVITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS Organized and Presided by: Richard Sugarman, University of Vermont, United States EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND THE DEFORMALIZATION OF TIME Richard Sugarman, University of Vermont, United States THE JUSTIFICATION AND JUSTICE OF PHENOMENOLOGY Richard A. Cohen, University of Vermont, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break EMMANUEL LEVINAS: NON-INTENTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE STATUS OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT Roger Duncan, Promisek Center, United States THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME IN PHILOSOPHY OF LEVINAS: TEMPORALITY AND OTHERNESS IN THE HEBRAIC TRADITION Shmuel Wygoda, Israel
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Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION XI: Chair: Francesco Totaro, University Degli Studi di Macerata, Italy and Ignacy Fiut, Krakow, Poland LES FIGURES DE L’INTERSUBJECTIVITE´ CHEZ HUSSERL Maria Manuela Brito Martins, Universidade do Porto, Portugal ESSENTIAL INDIVIDUALITY: ON THE NATURE OF A PERSON Roberta de Monticelli, University of Geneva, Switzerland EGO-MAKING PRINCIPLE IN CLASSICAL INDIAN METAPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY Marzenna Jakubczak, Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break THE EMPIRICAL EGO AND THE PROBLEM OF NARCISSISM: PREAMBLES TO A READING OF ‘‘IDEEN I’’ 27–32 Jeffrey Bloechl, College of the Holy Cross, United States PHENOMENOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY OF THE BEING-WITH: THE NOTION OF CO-EXISTENCE IN MAURICE MERLEAUPONTY AND JAN-LUC NANCY Rinalds Zembahs, University of Latvia, Latvia Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION XII: TIME, CONSCIOUSNESS AND HISTORICITY Presided by: Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICITY IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Maija Kule, University of Latvia, Latvia TIME AND HISTORY IN P. RICOEUR’S THOUGHT Marı´a Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain
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HUSSERL AND BERGSON ON CONSCIOUSNESS AND TIME Rafael Winkler, University of Warwick, Great Britain THE HISTORICITY OF NATURE Konrad Rokstad, University of Bergen, Norway 5:00 – 5:30 p.m. Coffee Break THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND EARLY ROMANTIC CONCEPTS OF NATURE AND THE SELF Oliver W. Holmes, Wesleyan University, United States ANXIETY AND TIME IN THE HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF HEIDEGGER Marta Figueras I Badia, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Thursday, August 19 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION IV: THE LIVING SPACE Presided by: Jorge Garcia-Gomez, Southampton College, United States LIVING SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF HUMAN LIFE W. Kim Rogers, East State Tennessee State University, United States DISCUSSION ON THE NOTIONS OF ‘‘LIFE’’ AND ‘‘EXISTENTIA’’ IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS OF HEIDEGGER AND MERLEAU-PONTY Maria Golebiewska, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland VARIATIONS OF THE SENSIBLE, TRUTH OF IDEAS AND IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY MOVING FROM THE LATER MERLEAUPONTY Mauro Carbone, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE OF ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA IN RELATION TO HER ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPTION Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Gdansk, Poland PHENOMENOLOGY AND ECOPHILOSOPHY Ignacy Fiut, Krakow, Poland
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MEN IN FRONT OF ANIMALS Leszek Pyra, Poland 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium Roundtable (and lectures) GREAT CLASSICAL QUESTIONS REVISITED Presided by: Andreas Brenner, University of Basel, Switzerland STRUCTURE AND THE CRITIQUE OF EVIDENCE Helena De Preester, Ghent University, Belgium, and Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Ghent University, Belgium DESCARTES AND ORTEGA ON THE FATE OF INDUBITABLE KNOWLEDGE Jorge Garcia-Gomez, Southampton College, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE QUESTION IN HUSSERL AND FINK WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ‘‘SIXTH CARTESIAN MEDITATION Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, University of Southampton, Great Britain AN INTERPRETATION OF HUSSERL’S CONCEPT OF CONSTITUTION IN TERMS OF SYMMETRY Filip Kolen, Ghent University, Belgium Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION XIII: Presided by: Carmen Balzer, Universidad Cato´lica Argentina, Argentina PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODOLOGOS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION Rimma Kurenkova, Vladimir Pedagogical Institute, Russia Y. A. Plekhanov, Vladimir Pedagogical Institute, Russia Elena Rogacheva, Vladimir Pedagogical Institute, Russia
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HOW ARE WE STUDYING PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY IN MONGOLIA? Danzankhorloo Dashpurev, The Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Political Science, Mongolia PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFELONG LEARNING Klymet Selvi, Anadolu University, Turkey 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break FROM THE STATION TO THE LYCEUM Matti Itkonen, University of Jyva¨skyla¨, Finland THE FRUITS OF THE LABOR: TYMIENIECKA’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF HUMAN CREATIVITY Nancy Mardas, St. Joseph College, United States CREATIVITY AS A CHANCE FOR MAN Monika Kowalczyk-Boruch, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, Poland Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION XIV: PHENOMENOLOGY AND LITERATURE Presided by: Jadwiga Smith, Bridgewater State College, United States LOGOS, THE AESTHETIC IMAGINATION, AND SPONTANEITY Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The University of Maine, United States AN HISTORICAL LOOK AT GENRE WITHIN PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS Donald F. Castro, Mesa Community College, United States EXPLORING AESTHETIC PERCEPTION OF THE REAL IN IRIS MURDOCH’S ‘‘THE BLACK PRINCE’’ Calley Hornbuckle, University of South Carolina, United States 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break
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PHENOMENOLOGY OF EMOTIONS: AUREL KOLNAI’S ON DISGUST AND JACOBEAN DRAMA Jadwiga Smith, Bridgewater State College, United States A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF LITERARY CREATIVITY: RICOEUR AND JOYCE Raymond J. Wilson III, Loras College, United States Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 Presentation of our ‘‘Encyclopedia of Learning’’: PHENOMENOLOGY WORLD-WIDE Foundations – Expanding dynamics – Life-engagements A Guide for Research and Study Robert D. Sweeney, John Carroll University, United States Jadwiga Smith, Bridgewater State College, United States Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 2 SESSION XV: Presided by: Robert D. Sweeney, John Carroll University, United States UNDERSTANDING OF CULTURE IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Rihards Kulis, University of Latvia, Latvia LIFE WORLD BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL EXPERIENCE: ON ‘‘EUROPEAN CRISIS’’ Andrina Tonkli Komel, Slovenia TIME, SPACE AND BEING IN THE WORLD THROUGH THE LIFE COURSE Judith A. Glonek, Somerton, Australia COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONCEPTION IN THE WORKS OF A-T. TYMIENIECKA WITH SOME ISSUES OF CONTEMPORARY GEORGIAN PHENOMENOLOGY Mamuka G. Dolidze, Institute of Philosophy, Tblisi, Georgia
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4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break THE PHILOSOPHICAL SENSE IS THE MATURE SENSE – HUSSERL’S REFLECTION ON THE MEASURE OF PHILOSOPHY Włodzimierz Pawliszyn, University of Gdan´sk, Poland LANGUAGE, TIME AND OTHERNESS Julia Ponzio, University of Bari, Italy VIRTUAL DECADENCE Martin Holt, City University, Great Britain Friday, August 20 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION V: WORLD OF LIFE, CULTURE, COMMUNICATION Presided by: Tze-wan Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong IMAGINARY WORLD AND WORLD OF LIFE. MASS COMMUNICATION AS NEW ‘‘IDEENKLEID’’ AND IMPLICATIONS OF SENSE Francesco Totaro, University Degli Studi di Macerata, Italy THE INTERFACING OF LANGUAGE AND WORLD ¨ niversitese (I˙.K.U ¨ .) & I˙stanbul Teknik Erkut Sezgin, I˙stanbul Ku¨ltu¨r U ¨ niversitesi, Turkey U LES DEPENDANCES INTER-SUBJECTIVES OU LE LANGUAGE ET LA COMMUNICATION JOUENT UN ROLE IMPORTANT Jozef Siva´k, Filozoficky Ustav Sav, Slovakia LIFEWORLD: MEANING OF SIGNS AND COMMUNICATION Ella Buceniece, University of Latvia, Latvia PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS OF INTERMEDIACY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF INTERCULTURAL SENSE Dean Komel, Slovenia ARENDT’S REVISION OF PRAXIS: ON PLURALITY AND NARRATIVE EXPERIENCE William D. Melaney, American University in Cairo, Egypt
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1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SESSION XVI: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AS A NEW EXCAVATION INTO THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELD Presided by: Angela Ales Bello, Lateran University, Italy HISTORY AS THE UNVEILING OF THE T EL OS. THE HUSSERLIAN CRITIQUE OF THE WELTANSCHAUUNGEN. Nicoletta Ghigi, University of Perugia, Italy THE ‘‘PERSON’’ AND THE ‘‘OTHER’’ IN MARI´A ZAMBRANO’S PHILOSOPHIC ANTHROPOLOGY Maria Mercede Ligozzi, Ministry of Culture, Italy THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHICS Mobeen Shahid, Pontifical Lateran University, Vatican City VITOLOGY: THE AFRICAN VISION OF THE HUMAN PERSON Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia, Lateran University, Vatican City 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break WHOSE LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE? Victor Gerald Rivas, Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico PLATO’S TEACHING ABOUT ‘‘LIVING CREATURE’’ AND PHENOMENOLOGY Olena Shkubulyani, Ukraine DISPOSITION TO PHENOMENOLOGY IN W. JAMES’S CONCEPTION OF PURE EXPERIENCE Velga Vevere, University of Latvia, Latvia
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Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 3 SESSION XVII: THE MORAL SENSE OF LIFE Presided by: Marı´a Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain MORAL ASPECTS OF LIFE Tadeusz Czarnik, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Poland THE PRINCIPLE OF GRATEFULNESS: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIVING AS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF ONE’S OWN IDENTITY AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF GLOBALIZATION Shannon Driscoll, Pontifical Georgian University, Rome, Italy THE CREATIONISM OF LEONARDO COIMBRA AND THE SAUDADE AS A MORAL GIFT Maria Teresa de Noronha, Universidade Aberta, Portugal 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break FICTION AND THE GROWTH OF MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS: ATTENTION AND EVIL Rebecca M. Painter, Marymount Manhattan College, United States THE SOCIAL, AFFECTIVE AND TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSIONS OF BEING IN DOSTOIEVSKY’S, PROUST’S AND WOOLF’S NOVELS Michel Dion, Universite´ de Sherbrooke, Canada PHENOMENOLOGY FOR WORLD RECONSTRUCTION Chiedozie Okoro, University of Lagos, Nigeria Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION XVIII: EXPERIENCE AND LOGOS IN FINE ARTS Presided by: Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Siena College, United States
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LEONARDO DA VINCI’S WORKING METHOD, IN LIGHT OF A-T. TYMIENIECKA’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Siena College, United States PRINCIPIOS DE OBJECTIVIDAD POETICA Antonio Dominguez Rey, Universidad Nacional de Educacion Distancia, Spain ESSENTIAL ‘‘POIESIS’’ J.C. Couceiro-Bueno, Univ. de la Coruna, Campus Elvina s/n, Spain PHENOMENOLOGY OF COUNTENANCE. PORTRAITING THE SOUL, REPRESENTING A LIVED EXPERIENCE Piero Trupia, UPS University, Italy 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break MUSICAL PROGENY: THE CASE OF MUSIC AND PHENOMENOLOGY Ellen J. Burns, State University of New York, Albany, United States ART, ALTERITY AND LOGOS: IN THE SPACES OF SEPARATION Brian Grassom, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Great Britain Topic to be Announced Maha Salah Taha, Misr International University, Egypt LOGOS, RATIONAL AND DESIRE IN CONVERGENT ART PRACTICES James Werner, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Great Britain Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION XIX: PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE DIALOGUE WITH THE SCIENCES Presided by: Leszek Pyra, Poland ‘‘OBJECTIVE SCIENCE’’ IN HUSSERLIAN LIFE-WORLD PHENOMENOLOGY Aria Omrani, Isfahan, Iran
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PHENOMENOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF NATURAL COORDINATE SYSTEM Nikolay Kozhevnikov, Yakut State University, Russia ALIENATION AND WHOLENESS: SPINOZA, HANS JONAS, AND THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT ON THE ‘‘PUSH AND SHOVE’’ OF MORTAL BEING Wendy C. Hamblet, Aldelphi University, United States M. HEIDEGGER’S PROJECT FOR THE OPTICAL INTERPRETATION OF REFLEXION AND THE LOGOS Alexandr Kouzmin, Yaroslav Wise Novgorod State University, Russia 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break ‘‘PHENOMENA’’ IN NEWTON’S MATHEMATICAL EXPERIENCE A.L. Samian, National University of Malaysia, Malaysia WHAT COMPUTERS COULD NEVER DO: AN EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE PROGRAM OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Eldon C. Wait, University of Zululand, South Africa INHABITED TIME: COUPERIN’S PASSACAIL L E Jessica Wiskus, Duquesne University, Australia Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 SESSION XX: HEIDEGGERIAN PHENOMENOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Organized and Presided by: Mark Wrathall, Brigham Young University, United States HEIDEGGER ON LANGUAGE AND ESSENCES Mark Wrathall, Brigham Young University, United States HEIDEGGER’S PERFECTIONIST PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, OR: BILDUNG IN BEING AND T IME Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, United States
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4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break HEIDEGGEREAN, TAOIST AND THE BOOK OF CHANGES Xianglong Zhang, Peking University, China 7:00 p.m., Friday, August 20: Farewell dinner at Wadham College, tickets to be ordered at registration (18.50 pounds). Organization Committee: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Gary Banham, Ullrich Haase, Matthew Landrus, Grahame Lock (Great Britain); William Smith, Chair. Program Director: Professor Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Hanover, NH, USA. Assisted by: Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States; Tadeusz Czarnik, Jagiellonian University, Poland The Congress begins with the Opening Reception on August 15 at 4:00 p.m. and ends by a Farewell Banquet on the night of August 20.
Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Editor-in-Chief
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1. 2. 3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Volume 1 of Analecta Husserliana. 1971 ISBN 90-277-0171-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism – Realism, Historicity and Nature. 1972 ISBN 90-277-0223-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds. The “A Priori’, Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenology and Nature. 1974 ISBN 90-277-0426-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing the Field of Research. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0628-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Crisis of Culture. Steps to Reopen the Phenomenological Investigation of Man. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0632-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Self and the Other. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part I. 1977 ISBN 90-277-0759-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Human Being in Action. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part II. 1978 ISBN 90-277-0884-3 Nitta, Y. and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology. Phenomenology as the Trans-cultural Philosophical Approach. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0924-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part III. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0981-5 Wojtyła, K., The Acting Person. Translated from Polish by A. Potocki. 1979 ISBN Hb 90-277-0969-6; Pb 90-277-0985-8 Ales Bello, A. (ed.), The Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1071-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. Selected Papers from Several Conferences held by the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Includes the essay by A-T. Tymieniecka, Poetica Nova. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1312-X Kaelin, E. F., The Unhappy Consciousness. The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett. An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1313-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Individualisation of Nature and the Human Being. (Part I:) Plotting the Territory for Interdisciplinary Communication. 1983 Part II see below under Volume 21. ISBN 90-277-1447-9
Analecta Husserliana 15.
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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
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Tymieniecka, A-T. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Foundations of Morality, Human Rights, and the Human Sciences. Phenomenology in a Foundational Dialogue with Human Sciences. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1453-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology. Man and Nature. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1518-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1620-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic – Epic – Tragic. The Literary Genre. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1702-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. (Part 1:) The Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and Life-Significance in Literary Interpretation and Theory. 1985 For Part 2 and 3 see below under Volumes 23 and 28. ISBN 90-277-1906-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense in the Communal Significance of Life. Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology: Psychiatric Therapeutics, Medical Ethics and Social Praxis within the Life- and Communal World. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2085-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Part II: The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2185-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Morality within the Life- and Social World. Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of the Authentic Life in the “Moral Sense’. 1987 Sequel to Volumes 15 and 20. ISBN 90-277-2411-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. Part 2: The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination. Breath, Breeze, Wind, Tempest, Thunder, Snow, Flame, Fire, Volcano . . . 1988 ISBN 90-277-2569-1 Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book I: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2539-X; Pb 90-277-2540-3 Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book II: The Three Movements of the Soul. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2556-X; Pb 90-277-2557-8 Kaelin, E. F. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), American Phenomenology. Origins and Developments. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2690-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man within his Life-World. Contributions to Phenomenology by Scholars from East-Central Europe. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2767-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Passions of the Soul. Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0180-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man’s Self-Interpretation-in-Existence. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Life. – Introducing the Spanish Perspective. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0324-5 Rudnick, H. H. (ed.), Ingardeniana II. New Studies in the Philosophy of Roman Ingarden. With a New International Ingarden Bibliography. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0627-9
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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense and Its Foundational Significance: Self, Person, Historicity, Community. Phenomenological Praxeology and Psychiatry. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0678-3 Kronegger, M. (ed.), Phenomenology and Aesthetics. Approaches to Comparative Literature and Other Arts. Homages to A-T. Tymieniecka. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0738-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana III. Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics in a New Key and the Independent Approaches of Others: The Performing Arts, the Fine Arts, and Literature. 1991 Sequel to Volumes 4 and 30 ISBN 0-7923-1014-4 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological Era. Husserl Research – Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1134-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserlian Phenomenology in a New Key. Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1146-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserl’s Legacy in Phenomenological Philosophies. New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1178-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1195-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness. The Passions of the Soul in the Onto-Poiesis of Life. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1601-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Reason, Life, Culture, Part I. Phenomenology in the Baltics. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1902-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Manifestations of Reason: Life, Historicity, Culture. Reason, Life, Culture, Part II. Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2215-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Allegory Revisited. Ideals of Mankind. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2312-2 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.), Allegory Old and New. In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2348-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): From the Sacred to the Divine. A New Phenomenological Approach. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2690-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Passions of the Soul in the Imaginatio Creatrix. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2749-7 Zhai, Z.: The Radical Choice and Moral Theory. Through Communicative Argumentation to Phenomenological Subjectivity. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2891-4 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Logic of the Living Present. Experience, Ordering, Onto-Poiesis of Culture. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2930-9
Analecta Husserliana 47.
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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Heaven, Earth, and In-Between in the Harmony of Life. Phenomenology in the Continuing Oriental/Occidental Dialogue. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3373-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life. In the Glory of its Radiating Manifestations. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book I. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3825-1 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life. The Human Quest for an Ideal. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book II. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3826-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life. Phenomenology of Life as the Starting Point of Philosophy. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4126-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passion for Place. Part II. Between the Vital Spacing and the Creative Horizons of Fulfilment. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4146-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Laying Down the Cornerstones of the Field. Book I. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4445-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Harmonisations and Attunement in Cognition, the Fine Arts, Literature. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book II. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4461-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Ontopoietic Expansion in Human Self-Interpretationin-Existence. The I and the Other in their Creative Spacing of the Societal Circuits of Life. Phenomenology of Life and the Creative Condition. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4462-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Virtualities in Human Self-Interpretation-inCulture. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book IV. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4545-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Enjoyment. From Laughter to Delight in Philosophy, Literature, the Fine Arts and Aesthetics. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4677-7 Kronegger M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life. Differentiation and Harmony... Vegetal, Animal, Human. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4887-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. and Matsuba, S. (eds.): Immersing in the Concrete. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Japanese Perspective. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5093-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life - Scientific Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Ontopoiesis of Life and the Human Creative Condition. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5141-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life - The Outburst of Life in the Human Sphere. Scientific Philosophy / Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Book II. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5142-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Breaking the Barriers. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6006-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Mimesis of Emotion. From Sorrow to Elation; Elegiac Virtuosity in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6007-9
Analecta Husserliana 63.
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Kronegger, M. (ed).: The Orchestration of The Arts – A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers. The Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6008-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. and Z. Zalewski (eds.): Life - The Human Being Between Life and Death. A Dialogue Between Medicine and Philosophy, Recurrent Issues and New Approaches. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5962-3 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6183-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Origins of Life, Volume I: The Primogenital Matrix of Life and Its Context. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6246-2; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Origins of Life, Volume II: The Origins of the Existential Sharing-in-Life. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6276-4; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): PAIDEIA. Philosophy / Phenomenology of Life Inspiring Education of our Times. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6319-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Poetry of Life in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6408-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason. Logos and Life, volume 4. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6731-6; HB 0-7923-6730-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and Literature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6675-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. and E. Agazzi (eds.): Life – Interpretation and the Sense of Illness within the Human Condition. Medicine and Philosophy in a Dialogue. 2001 ISBN Hb 0-7923-6983-1; Pb 0-7923-6984-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life – The Play of Life on the Stage of the World in Fine Arts, Stage-Play, and Literature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7032-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life-Energies, Forces and the Shaping of Life: Vital, Existential. Book I. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0627-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0070-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life – Truth in its Various Perspectives. Cognition, Self-Knowledge, Creativity, Scientific Research, Sharing-in-Life, Economics...... 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0071-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Creative Matrix of the Origins. Dynamisms, Forces and the Shaping of Life. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0789-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0858-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Does the World Exist? Plurisignificant Ciphering of Reality. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1517-8
Analecta Husserliana 80.
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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology World-Wide. Foundations - Expanding Dynamics - Life-Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0066-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Metamorphosis. Creative Imagination in Fine Arts Between Life-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1709-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Mystery in its Passions. Literary Explorations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1705-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Imaginatio Creatrix. The Pivotal Force of the Genesis/ Ontopoiesis of Human Life and Reality. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-2244-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of Life Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-2463-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3575-6 To be published. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3577-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book One. Phenomenology as the Critique of Reason in Contemporary Criticism and Interpretation. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3678-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Two. The Human Condition in-the-unity-of-everything-there-isalive. Individuation, Self, Person, Self-determination, Freedom, Necessity. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-3706-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Three. Logos of History – Logos of Life. Historicity, Time, Nature, Communication, Consciousness, Alterity, Culture. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-3717-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Four. The Logos of Scientific Interrogation. Participating in NatureLife- Sharing in Life. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-3736-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Five. The Creative Logos. Aesthetic Ciphering in Fine Arts, Literature and Aesthetics. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-3743-0
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