On the Matter of Life:

Towards an Integral Biology of Economics

 

“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?” –p. 7, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures

 

 

Preface

 

  The relative success of the human endeavor, measured in terms of population[1] and technological mastery, has been won at the cost of widespread suffering for much of the rest of the community of life on earth. Life is not just a quantitative affair, but is everywhere striving to deepen the qualitative intensity of its existence. Industrial civilization has emerged amidst this vital striving, violently shifting the biosphere into the terminal phase of the Cenozoic era by initiating the first mass extinction event in 65 million years.[2] In the deep geological past, saurian giants and cycads flourished where long stretches of highway now carry automobiles fueled by their fossilized remains. Should our species continue to ignore the psycho-spiritual wounds responsible for instituting and maintaining our ritualized techno-industrial sacrifice of future generations, we will soon find ourselves joining the dinosaurs.

 

  This essay is my attempt to reveal the metaphysical causes and energetic effects of industrial capitalism such that its inhumane and ecologically ignorant foundations are brought fully into consciousness. Consciousness is our most creative human capacity; but in its fragmented and anxiety-ridden deficient mental mode, it has become the agent of the most powerful strategy of thermodynamic gradient dissipation the planet has ever known. Should human consciousness fail to awaken in time to forestall the inevitable conclusion of the industrial process, not only will capitalist profits continue to be squeezed out of the alienated labor of workers and commoditization continue to homogenize cultural expression, but earth will become a toxic wasteland eaten alive from the inside out by the mechanical transformation of extropy[3] into the fetishized value of money and use-and-dispose consumables.

 

  The emergence of life on earth around 4 billion years ago can be understood as an expression of the same natural tendency to dissipate free energy that is driving the extractive economy of industrialism. The complex activities of living creatures on earth’s surface work to bring the extreme temperature gradient between sunlight and space toward equilibrium by radiating back more heat than would an inert planet, as per the 2^nd law of thermodynamics (p. 46, Margulis, 2002). The industrial organism has brought this process of gradient reduction to new heights by technologically freeing exergy trapped in places no other form of life could reach (like hydrocarbons and radioactive elements).[4] But as has been learned from the many identity crises to come before on this planet (i.e., five prior mass extinctions) more of the same leads eventually to extinction because conditions are always evolving: humanity must mutate or perish. Our industrial presence to the biosphere represents a deficient and so unsustainable relationship between mind and life, culture and nature, humanity and earth.

 

  Unless the as yet unrealized spirit of integration lying dormant in human consciousness can blossom, our species will continue to instinctually play by the entropic rules of thermodynamics[5] by devouring the remaining resources of the earth. Like the ever-optimistic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I am hopeful that we will learn to “give [our lives] to [being and to knowing], rather than to [possession],” because though “human vision is still diffuse in its operation, mixed up with industrial activity and war…it will not be long now before the noosphere finds its eyes” (p. 280, 1955).  Only with the full emergence of the noosphere can humanity become integral with the earth, achieving what Jean Gebser has referred to as a transparent aperspectival a-waring of human and universe together in a space-time-free presentiation of origin (p. 312, 1985). 

 

  Humans and their societies are not inherently exploitative and selfish, nor is the rest of the biosphere a pitiless struggle for existence guided only by the invisible hand of natural selection. We have not always been capitalists. As Alf Hornborg has argued, “…there are undoubtedly social metaphors that transfer meanings from relations in the human world to relations with the nonhuman one, committing societies to specific trains of thought” (p. 197, 2001).

 

  I will argue in this essay that our integral potential has been ideologically distorted by dualistic ontologies and fetishized mythologies. These forces of cultural habit have deceived us into tirelessly slaving for the alienating and spiritually empty ends of techno-industrial accumulation. This ideological distortion of our human-human relations is the psycho-social precursor that primed scientific consciousness for the reductionistic study of living systems and their evolution (which lead, consequently, to the mechanistic study of the “rational animal,” the human consumer, as scientific metaphors migrated back into economic policy).

 

  Mechanistic biology typifies deficient mental thought concerning human-earth relations. I will try to draw ideological links between mechanistic sciences of life and industrial economics to make clear that, while not the only cause of current social and ecological injustice, mainstream biology’s dismissal of soul (formal cause) and spirit (final cause) gives ideological steam to the hegemonic industrial parade noisily marching the planet’s living population to the edge of extinction. I will attempt to deconstruct the biological bulwarks guarding the economic status quo so that more integral human-human/human-earth relationships might be brought forth.

 

 

 

Introduction: What is Life?

“Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result” –p. 12, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures

 

  Life, for Sri Aurobindo, is the mutual commerce connecting matter and mind in the manifest universe, an

 

“intermediate energizing of conscious being [that] liberates into sensitive action and reaction a form of the creative force of existence which was working subconsciently or inconsciently, absorbed in its own substance; it supports and liberates into action the apprehensive consciousness of existence called mind and gives it a dynamic instrumentation so that it can work not only on its own forms but on forms of life and matter” (p. 186-187, The Life Divine).

 

  The knowing mind is always supported by embodied experience. Any scientific stories told to explain the cosmos must have some relation to our personal and inter-personal experience of living and dying on earth. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have struggled to adequately articulate this metaxic, commercial concept. The reflective human being is always already in life, thrown between matter and mind, and so cannot entirely breach the eternal realm of unchanging ideas, nor totally fathom the depths of material flux and impermanence—at least this side of death. But Aurobindo is not wrong when he writes that “the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality” (p. 176, ibid.). He urges us to become aware of a more integral life, which

 

“is nothing else than the Force that builds and maintains and destroys the forms in the world…that manifests itself in the form of earth as much as in the plant that grows upon the earth and the animals that support their existence by devouring the life-force of the plants or of each other” (p. 177, ibid.).

 

  Death is a part of life’s dynamic wholeness, a life present “everywhere, secret or manifest, organized or elemental, involved or evolved, but universal, all-pervading, imperishable; only its forms and organizings differ” (p. 179, ibid.). How are we to conceive of life’s integrality? An overly reductive definition distorts life’s cosmic import, painting too tragic and meaningless a picture of existence; an overly expansive definition obscures life’s fragile beauty, ignoring the fact of death given by the birth of every living creature. Each living creature is a moving image of eternity, embodying both temporal and eternal ingredients.

 

  I will endeavor in the following pages to coherently define every actual occasion, from atom to Eve, as a living creature. The reason is that no scientific account of the biosphere can, without incongruence, explain the emergence of life in a physical universe that is otherwise devoid of feeling, meaning, and purpose.

 

  My exploration of the issues surrounding the pursuit of an organic ontology will require a thorough critique of mechanistic biology, whose aim is the reverse of my own: to define life such that it is reducible to a “mindless, purposeless, algorithmic[6] process” (p. 320, Dennett). This definition will be shown to be entirely inadequate. It makes of our human experience an aberration, severing all roots whatsoever between our own intentionality and the evolutionary dynamics that carried us here. If we are going to attempt a scientific account of life, it must recursively include the knowing mind of the living scientist in its explanations.

 

  The process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, as well as the phenomenological biology of Francisco J. Varela, will aid my critique[7] of mechanistic biology and industrial capitalism. Varela’s account of life in terms of autopoiesis will be compared with Whitehead’s analysis of the process of concrescence in the hopes that the affinity of their ideas becomes clear. It will be argued that Varela’s science demands a new metaphysical scheme not available within the confines of mechanistic materialism. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, I suggest, is up to the task.

 

  The approach of these two thinkers represents what cultural philosopher Jean Gebser has called the “irruption of time consciousness” (p. 380). It was not until the 20^th century that life could be properly understood, as prior to this historical moment, time itself had not fully entered the consciousness of human beings. Gebser’s account of the irruption of time will aid us throughout this text.

 

 

I. The Irruption of Time

“The supersession of dualism in biology begins to occur in this science at the moment when the ‘time’ factor is taken into consideration.” –Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p. 384

 

  In The Ever-Present Origin, Gebser elegantly enacts a still nascent structure of human consciousness, the integral, and distinguishes it through comparison to the other structures uncovered in his phenomenological study of the evolution of consciousness. The structures he discovered include the archaic, magic, mythic, and mental, each with its own dimensionality and sensory emphasis. Most important for my task—that of bringing forth a living cosmology to replace the dominant mechanical, market cosmology—is the ongoing mutation from the deficient mental to the integral structure, with special attention paid to the resulting transformed awareness of time.

 

  The efficient mental structure of consciousness is described by Gebser as having been “already shaped in the Mediterranean world of late antiquity” (p. 11) by such figures as Parmenides, Plato, and especially Aristotle. The full mutation from psyche to mind[8], however, did not take place until 13^th century Europe, revealed in the intensely personal poems of the Troubadours and the revival of Aristotle in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Gebser’s account of the mental structure suggests it was responsible for producing “the visualization of and openness to time with a quantifiable, spatial character” (p. 12), and offers as an example of this new attitude toward time the erection of the first public clock in 1283 in the courtyard of Westminster Palace.[9] From this moment forward, the mind became increasingly deficient, a growing impediment to integral space-free, time-free awareness.

 

  Gebser is clear that this rising of time into consciousness is both a gain and a loss: a gain because it allowed humanity to think, to understand, to reflect, to calculate—in short, to recognize its capacity for rationality (p. 74); a loss because, with the invention of clocks, time became falsely spatialized, thereby occluding the transparency of the whole for the sake of rampant quantification of the parts.

 

As Gebser puts it,

 

“…our fathers [dominated by the mental structure] had no sensorium for the phenomenon of time. Living in a spatially frozen world, they considered the temporal world to be a disturbing factor which was repressed, either by being ignored, or by being falsified by measurement into a spatial component” (p. 284).

 

  The implications of the obsession with measurement in a world experienced as “spatially frozen” will be explored in depth below, but it suffices to say for now that such factors played a central role in the formulation and widespread acceptance, whether explicit or not, of the substance dualism that continues to plague much of mainstream mechanistic biology (whether it be the dualism between consciousness and earth, or that between genetic information and somatic realization). Only once the mutation into integral consciousness commenced could humanity begin to appreciate time, not as a quantity or magnitude, but as a qualitative intensity (p. 285). Before exploring the crucial significance of qualitative time in an integral biology of economics, I must first examine the beginnings of biology itself during the birth and development of the mental structure.

 

 

II-a. Ancient Biology

“Biologists cannot study their subject in abstraction from matter, since nature always acts for the sake of an end, which involves studying the relation of what is potentially something to its full realization” – p. 641, Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium

 

  Gebser recognizes Aristotle as among the first in antiquity to display an unquestionable tendency toward mental, as opposed to mythic, consciousness (p. 408). It is not surprising then that Aristotle is widely seen as the originator of both the science and philosophy of biology (p. xx, Lennox). Whitehead, however, famously wrote that philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” (p. 39, 1978), and indeed, Aristotle is indebted to him, even where he diverges. Whitehead credits Aristotle with correcting Plato’s tendency to “separate a static spiritual world from a fluent world of superficial experience” (p. 209, ibid.). In Timaeus, Plato lays out a cosmology that is structurally similar to what would today be called intelligent design. The universe is described as something made, though is imbued with intelligence and soul by its designer, a divine craftsman, who orders it based upon a changeless, ideal model to bring about the most beauty and goodness possible (p. 228, Lennox). Aristotle, on the other hand, tried to find a less theological middle ground between atomistic reductionism and Plato’s still mythic artifactual idealism, being careful not to scrub away nature’s purposes in the process. Though he still made use of the metaphor of the craftsman to understand organic form, Aristotle recognized an important difference between artifact and organism that was blurred by Plato’s cosmology (despite the fact that in Timaeus Plato describes the cosmos as a living thing—its soul was inserted from outside):

 

“For the artist is source and form of what comes to be, but in another; whereas the movement of nature is in what is coming to be” (p. 735, Generation of Animals).

 

  Aristotle here distinguishes the work of an artist from the form of an organism by pointing out that artists shape their crafts from the outside, while organisms form from within. The core difference between Plato’s understanding of life and Aristotle’s is that Plato finds it necessary to import purpose into nature from beyond nature (by demiurgic design), while Aristotle finds it immanent in the movement of natural things themselves.

 

  It might be helpful here to introduce Aristotle’s four αιτίες (roughly translated as causes, or reasons) for the sake of which every living organism exists. I will revisit these causes in a later section on Whitehead, where a slight reworking of them will aid our understanding of concrescence. The material cause is the potentiality necessary for formation, and the efficient cause this formative movement’s agent of initiation. The formal cause is movement directed toward an end, the final cause being the attainment of that end. Aristotle viewed the matter and form of a creature as intimately related: matter provides the potential for the actualization of form. The difference between Aristotle’s immanent and Plato’s demiurgic understanding of teleology is extremely significant, as this distinction has influenced nearly every philosopher of biology since, as well as every economist.

 

 The separation and valuation of man and his labor over and above the surrounding natural environment goes hand in hand with the separation and valuation of a divine architect allied with eternity over and above a created world that is a mere imitation, “a thing that has come to be as a shrine for the everlasting gods” (37d, Timaeus). The mythic enchantment still informing Plato’s cosmology would eventually be cleansed and anthropocentrized by more modern thinkers, who used its logical structure in support of what Donna Haraway has called “productionism”: “Productionism and its corollary, humanism, come down to the story line that ‘man makes everything, including himself, out of the world that can only be resource and potency to his project and active agency’” (p. 297, 1992). I will discuss productionism in connection with mind/matter dualism in section IV.

 

 

 

 

 

II-b. Modern Biology

“…if one accepts the evolutionary perspective, attempts to discuss science (or any other sort of conceptual activity) become much more difficult, so difficult as to produce paralysis.” – p. 299, David Hull, The Naked Meme

 

  Charles Darwin, idolized by many contemporary materialists as the slayer of teleology and champion of the mechanistic paradigm, was a student of William Paley, whose natural theology and argument from design can be traced back directly to Plato (p. 228, Lennox). Paley held that certain artifacts, including organisms, could not be explained without recourse to an intelligent artificer due to their obviously designed features. Darwin was inspired to respond to Paley, and so devised the theory of natural selection to explain how the apparent design of organisms could be the result of a purely mechanical process working over immense geological time (p. 68, Dennett). Darwin’s response to Paley is difficult to disprove by weight of empirical evidence alone,[10] but when one realizes the implicit assumptions that both make, it becomes clear they are working from within the same paradigm: both Darwin and Paley understood organisms to be nothing more than especially sophisticated machines. They differ only in the reasons given for this sophistication. Paley’s argument from design required a transcendent deity for nature to have any purposes. Once Darwin called the logical necessity of that deity into question, the biological world was left sterile and purposeless, the result of chance, necessity, and an unfathomable amount of time.[11] Plato’s demiurge and the wisdom it had ensouled the universe with had been vanquished, leaving only the undirected flux of nature in its stead.

 

  This is not the whole story, however. Darwin’s was a biology constructed to comply with and reduce to Newtonian physics. Newton conceived of the universe in a way reminiscent of (demythologized) Plato: nature was a clockwork machine constructed by God according to certain transcendent laws. Darwin was compelled to find a place for life within this framework, a framework Whitehead describes as “the doctrine of Imposed Law” (p. 113, 1967). The only way to make room for life in Newton’s universe was to erect a radical division between the contingency of biological evolution and the necessity of physical law. While Darwin correctly replaced Paley’s deist natural theology of creation with his evolutionary narrative, he failed to recognize that the laws of physics themselves also had to be evolutionized.[12] But because he was still firmly rooted within the mechanistic paradigm, Darwin could not understand how the biosphere’s miraculous beauty and harmonious organization might have arisen without recourse to the arbitrarily imposed, deterministic order of Newton’s laws.

 

  Immanuel Kant, who died more than 50 years before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species (and so also lived in the shadow of Newton), heavily criticized the view that organisms can be understood as machines/artifacts. His view is reminiscent of Aristotle, in that it affirms natural purposes without recourse to supernatural designers. Why the Anglo-American world paid so little attention to his critique of mechanistic biology is an historical curiosity worth exploring.

 

  British colonialism (and later, American capitalism) has had no better apologist than Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by variation under natural selection can be read as the animistic projection[13] (through metaphorical transfer) of the socio-economic models of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus[14] onto natural processes. England was at the height of its global empire while David Ricardo, Smith, and Malthus were writing their treatises on market economics. His own national history and enculturation no doubt presented Darwin with a sense of moral obligation to explain natural history and biological evolution in such a way that they not contradict sanctioned norms of colonial and capitalist power relations.

 

  Biologist Ernst Mayr has suggested that “Kant’s acceptance of teleology…greatly affected German evolutionists in the nineteenth century”[15] (p. 82, 2001). Nonetheless, Mayr felt that any use of final causation in biology was doomed to failure (ibid.). We can only assume that Mayr had other philosophical[16] (and perhaps ideological) commitments that prevented him from investigating Kant’s understanding of teleology in more depth. We turn now to explore Kant’s account of life, one that would almost two centuries later resurface in the scientific guise of Varela’s theory of autopoiesis (p.136, Thompson, 2007).

 

 

III-a. Teleology as a Regulative Principle of Living Organization

“An organized being is then not a mere machine, for that has merely moving power, but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind which it communicates to its materials though they have it not of themselves; it organizes them, in fact, and this cannot be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion.” –Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

 

  In The Critique of Judgment, Kant ridicules the very idea of a purely mechanical account of life:

 

 “…it is quite certain that in terms of merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible. So certain is this that we may boldly state that it is absurd for human beings even to attempt it, or to hope that perhaps some day another Newton might arise who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced” (p. 282-283).

 

  Many materialists have argued that Darwin was exactly the “Newton of the grass blade” that Kant thought would never come. But this confuses an important distinction between ontogeny and phylogeny. Darwin’s theory was exclusively an account of the phylogenic diversification of species.

 

  As Evan Thompson makes clear,

 

“Kant’s concern was the definite organization of living beings, but the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection does not provide any account of organization at the level of biological individuals. On the contrary, the theory must presuppose biologically organized individuals that reproduce” (p. 131).

 

  To suppose Darwin’s theory banished the immanent purposes of particular beings, one must commit Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness by mistaking a general law about the abstraction “species” for an account of the nature and origin of concrete individuals. Further, because Darwin had to presuppose reproducing organisms for his theory of speciation to work, modern biology cannot look to his work for anything approaching a complete account of life.

 

  Kant’s genius was to recognize that “some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws” (p. 267, CoJ). To understand life, according to Kant, final causality must be employed. Like Paley, Kant also thought artifacts were impossible to explain without the application of some teleological principle. Material and efficient causes were not enough to account for the design of a bicycle, for instance. But unlike Paley, Kant understood organisms as “natural products,” not artifacts of divine design (p. 133, Thompson). A natural product is generated immanently by a natural purpose, in contrast to an artifact, which is given its purpose by an external, intelligent agent.[17] A natural purpose is found in “a thing [that is] both cause and effect of itself” (p. 249, CoJ).

 

  It will be helpful to explore the relationship between artifacts and organisms a bit further. Both are organized in a purposeful manner, which means they are incomprehensible without an idea motivating their production. Further, the structure of any organized thing, machine or organism, is such that each of the parts composing it exists for the sake of the whole (i.e., each of the components conforms to an overall idea).

 

  But this is not enough to understand the natural purposes of organisms, as Kant explains:

 

“…we must think of each part as an organ that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other)… Only if a product meets that condition…will it be both an organized and a self-organizing being, which therefore can be called a natural purpose” (p. 253, CoJ).

 

   Again, an artifact is purposeful because it is caused by an idea, but it is an idea that “resides outside the entity in the mind of an intelligent designer” (p. 134, Thompson). The idea informing an organism is, in contrast, “both cause and effect of itself.” Kant’s coining and elucidation of the term “self-organization” is strikingly similar to Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, but an important complication remains for us to discuss before I can move on to this more recent formulation. Kant saw the natural purposes of organisms as merely a regulative principle of our own human epistemological limitations. Regulative principles, in contrast to constitutive principles, do not tell us what a thing is, but only what we can know about that thing (p. 137, ibid.). Kant held that we needed both mechanical and teleological modes of thought to investigate nature, but was agnostic as to these concepts’ ultimate relation to things. This is a necessary result of the Kantian dualism between the phenomenal realm of experience and the transcendent realm of noumena.[18]

 

  Even so, Kant comes very close to admitting that self-organization is constitutive of living organisms (and not just a regulative principle), but backs away from this position for reasons that are extremely significant considering the overarching aim of our current exploration (to reverse the disenchantment of nature that sustains the instrumentalist attitude so characteristic of techno-industrial capitalism).

 

  It is worth quoting him at length:

 

“In considering nature and the ability it displays in organized products, we say far too little if we call this an analogue of art, for in that case we think of an artist (a rational being) apart from nature. Rather, nature organizes itself… We might be closer if we call this inscrutable property of nature an analogue of life. But in that case we must either endow matter, as mere matter, with a property (hylozoism) that conflicts with its nature… Or else we must supplement matter with an alien principle (a soul) conjoined to it. But if an organized product is to be a natural product, then we cannot make this soul the artificer that constructed it, since that would remove the product from (corporeal) nature. And yet the only alternative would be to say that this soul uses as its instrument organized matter; but if we presuppose organized matter, we do not make it a whit more intelligible. Strictly speaking, therefore, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us” (p. 254, CoJ).

 

 

  Kant here attempts to reconcile the possibility that organisms are intrinsically self-organizing (and therefore purposeful) with his philosophical commitment to Newtonian science.[19] He finds that he must either endow matter with life-like properties (hylozoism), or admit a dualism whereby an intelligent soul either constructs or inhabits organized matter (vitalism). He rejects both on the grounds that they conflict with Newton’s view of nature as composed of inert and unfeeling atoms shuffled around by transcendentally imposed laws. Self-organization, therefore, is seen as an entirely irrational principle that is nonetheless indispensible for any human understanding of living creatures.

 

  Kant’s understanding of the nature and scope of science was lacking due to no fault of his own. In the time since his death, both the study of physics and the study of self-organization in biology have advanced beyond the wildest dreams of the 18^th century imagination. Kant, like most of his generation, was mesmerized by the mathematical magic displayed in Newton’s Principia.

 

  But as Gebser points out,

 

“This form of mathematics permits calculation with infinitely small variable quantities. These quantities…are merely mathematical quantities…[and]…render causal processes measureable by mathematically fragmenting intensities. These spatialized ‘quantities’ of intensity…will continue to exert a negative effect until we clearly recognize this rational falsification” (p. 311).

 

  Gebser is here attempting to explain that calculative systems like Newton’s are clumsy abstractions, basing their measurements of space and time on “so-called ‘ideal quantities’” (p. 310) that are actually falsely spatialized intensities. The significance of this will not become clear until Whitehead’s process metaphysics are unpacked, but for now I will allude once more to the tendency of the deficient mental structure of consciousness to spatialize and quantify everything, leading to

 

“an extreme dualistic form of thinking which recognized only two antithetical and irreconcilable constituents of the world: measurable, demonstrable things, the rational components of science which were valid; and the non-measureable phenomena, the irrational non-components, which were invalid” (p. 285, ibid.).

 

  Kant falls victim to this extreme form of dualism, and so is forced to understand self-organization as merely an appearance necessitated by the structures of our understanding. Life, for Kant, was self-organizing and purposeful, but only because the human mind is unable to experience and describe it any other way.[20]

 

  This deficient mental dualism between what is rational/measurable and what is irrational/non-measurable will be explored later in connection with capitalism’s tendency to wedge general-purpose money between all human-human and human-earth relations (see section IV). Such decontextualization erases the qualitative diversity of cultural meanings and natural purposes, replacing them with abstract and homogenous quantities assigned arbitrary value by the short-term whims of the market.

 

  “Like all structures,” says Hornborg,

 

“the biosphere is composed of differences. If it is humankind’s mission to devise a coded system of signals to integrate this most inclusive of living systems, our monetary system must recognize those differences or continue to annihilate them” (p. 174, 2001).  

 

  Mechanistic biology quantifies living organization by reducing its essential nature to the replication of genetic algorithms. A living organism, from the perspective of such a paradigm, is defined as “anything that can use the resources of the world to get copies of itself made” (p. 15, Ridley, 1999). It is a small step to the defacto attribution of vital existence to money itself, which feeds off the mineral and organic mass of the planet to turn a profit (i.e., make copies of itself).

 

 

III-b. Autopoiesis: Teleology as Constitutive of Living Organization

“…autopoiesis proposes an understanding of the radical transition to the existence of an individual, a relation of an organism with it-self, and the origin of ‘concern’ based on its ongoing self-produced identity.” –p. 116, Francisco J. Varela, et al., 2002

 

  The resurrection of Aristotelian teleology in modern biology is a matter of great controversy (p. 1, Colin et al., 1998).  Some biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, deride any mention of it, as natural selection is deemed to have explained away any requirement of a purpose or aim behind the purely mechanical process of reproduction.[21] This view can be easily dispensed with, as Darwin’s theory concerned phylogenic change, having nothing to say whatsoever about the self-organization and goal-directed behavior of individual organisms.[22] Indeed, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection is applicable only given an already self-organizing creature intentionally operating and reproducing within its environment.

 

  Other biologists have adopted a new term, “teleonomy,” to describe the as-if property of purposes evident in the behavior and organizational dynamics of life. Biologist Jacques Monod goes so far as to say that “it is indispensible to recognize that [teleonomy] is essential to the very definition of living beings” (p. 9, 1972). Here, he echoes Kant by pointing out that life cannot be understood without purposes, though also like Kant, he understands these purposes to be a projection of the human observer. This is as far as most biologists are willing to go, as they feel obliged to respect the epistemological dualism of the mechanistic paradigm. Hornborg points to the cognitive science of Varela and Humberto Maturana in an attempt to deconstruct this dualism, suggesting that their approach “…[downplays] the distinction between human intention and other forms of systemic directionality in living systems” (p. 179).

 

  Whitehead similarly notes that “no biological science has been able to express itself apart from phraseology [that] refers to ideals proper to the organism in question” (p. 84, 1978). Whitehead goes on to credit Aristotle with having impressed this fact on the science of biology, and relates how the overstressing of final causation during the Christian medieval period probably provoked the equally overstressed reliance on efficient causation in modern science.

 

  When Varela and Maturana originally developed the theory of autopoiesis, they were undoubtedly influenced by this scientific tendency to overstress efficient causes: “Living systems, as physical autopoietic machines, are purposeless systems” (p. 86, 1980). By machine, they did not intend to confuse organisms with artifacts, but meant that the system was determined by its structure and organization (p. 141, Thompson). Any purposes attributed to it were considered projections: regulative, as opposed to constitutive features.

 

  In one of the last essays he authored before his death, however, Varela proposed a revision of the understanding of purposes present in his earlier work with Maturana. He recognized that an autopoietic organization of the living implies the emergence of “an autonomous center of concern capable of providing an interior perspective” (p. 97, 2002). To understand why, it is necessary to explore in more detail the theory of autopoiesis: 

 

  “…an autopoietic system—the minimal living organization—is one that continuously produces the components that specify it, while at the same time realizing it (the system) as a concrete unity in space and time, which makes the network of production of components possible” (p. 115, ibid.).

 

   To understand this rather abstract definition, let us ground it in the paradigm case from which it is drawn: the cell. A living cell is engaged in a continual process of self-production and repair, wherein each of its organelles participate in the production of one another, as well as in the production of the membrane defining them as a unity. Though an autopoietic system is also a self-organizing, dissipative structure,[23] it should not be reduced to these more general categories. What distinguishes an autopoietic system is its “self-produced identity,” or “instauration of a point of view” (p. 116, ibid.). An autopoietic entity is one that can be studied empirically (from the outside), but that also requires one to appreciate the horizon of experience brought forth by its continual self-production (from the inside). It is here that an immanent teleology finds its way back into biology, not as a regulative principle of our study of organisms (teleonomy), but as constitutive of life itself.

 

“…self-production is already and inevitably a self-affirmation that shows the organism as involved in the fundamental purpose of maintaining its identity”  (ibid.).

 

  Varela’s analysis of the experiential component of autopoiesis involves more than just recognizing the identity arising due to an organism’s internal circular dynamics, but also the surrounding Umwelt[24] emerging from its “sense-making” abilities, allowing it to “change the physiochemical world into an environment of significance and valance” (p. 147, Thompson). In this way, intentional movements directed toward ends become the very basis of life. Both formal (the identity, or idea, actualized in the movement of the organism and its organs) and final (end-directed behavior) causality are here implicated in the organization of the living.

 

  But can the Kantian dilemma be so easily resolved? Kant, as was discussed earlier (p. 19), did not understand how self-organization of the autopoietic variety could be possible naturalistically. In the last century, however, our understanding of the physiochemical make-up of organisms has increased significantly. We are far better equipped than Kant to cope with organic form (p. 140, Thompson; p. 101, Varela, 2002). But how, exactly, does an autopoietic account of life establish that the activity of an organism is intrinsically purposeful? How do we know that a teleological element is behind life when it could just as well be a projection of our own “…perspective on an otherwise completely neutral behavior” (p. 108, Varela, 2002)?

 

“It is actually by experience of our teleology—our wish to exist further on as a subject, not our imputation of purposes on objects—that teleology becomes a real rather than an intellectual principle. Thus causality, as it is perceived by us as sentient beings, may be subsumed under the more general principle of life” (p. 110, ibid.).

 

  Varela here inverts the whole tradition of natural philosophy since at least Descartes by reminding us that, “before being scientists we are first living beings, and as such we have the evidence of our intrinsic teleology in us” (ibid.). The mechanistic paradigm could begin only after Descartes had firmly established a metaphysical rift between thinking and extended substances. The Kantian difficulty over whether to embed teleology in organisms themselves, or to recognize it as a heuristic principle of human judgment, can be traced back to this division between mind and matter.[25] Descartes decreed that the extended substance was purely mechanical, ruled by efficient causes alone. This included our own living bodies.

 

  Once it is understood that experience is rooted in bodily processes, and not in some invisible mental substance existing beyond it, attributing genuine interiority and teleology to other living bodies is simply a matter of generalizing our own embodiment. We need not, as Whitehead warns, “relapse into the tacit presupposition of the mind with its private ideas which are in fact qualities without intelligible connection with the entities represented” (p. 76, 1978).

 

  But how far can this generalization of our own experience be taken? Varela, while he grants that teleology is more than an artifact of the human mind, only re-establishes it as a necessary phenomenological fact about our own embodied experience. To firmly root teleology, and therefore formal and final causes, in organisms generally, Varela must establish an ontological principle, not merely a phenomenological description. It appears he is willing to do just that:

 

“To speak of [autopoiesis] thus directly links the biological sphere with a teleological account of ontology. On a material, concrete level we can observe in the organism the flip side of mechanical causality, a final causality as the basic process of life itself—the establishment of an identity. But this happens not by revising physical laws for particle-interactions in special application to organisms, nor by imposing an extra-mechanical entelechy. It is rather the ‘subject-pole’ that is the organism in its autonomy, which changes linear causality by structuring matter in the process of self-realization to maintain itself as this very process” (p. 119, 2002).

 

  Exploring this process of the formation of a “subject-pole” (or mental-pole) requires connecting Varela’s biology to Whitehead’s metaphysics, where an analysis of the general character of experience in terms of concrescence provides us with the conceptual platform necessary to understand how organisms don’t need to “transcend the neutrality of pure physics” (p. 118, Varela, 2002) because there never was a purely neutral physics to begin with.

 

 

 

III-c. Concresence and Non-sensuous Perception

“The philosophy of organism aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason. This should also supersede the remaining Critiques required in the Kantian philosophy.” – p. 113, Whitehead, 1978

 

  All of the mechanistic ways of thinking thus far critiqued habitually commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, due in large part to inherited patterns of thought dating back to the Greeks. Aristotle can be praised for ushering in the mental mutation by recognizing the immanence of nature’s purposes, but he can be damned for having introduced the substance-quality logic that entranced the European intellect for much of the medieval period, eventually leading to the deficient sensationalist doctrine of modern scientific materialism. The sensationalist doctrine mistakes a high abstraction—universals derived from bare perception of sensory data (perception in the mode of presentational immediacy)—for the most primitive, concrete element of experience: “sense-reception” (perception in the mode of causal efficacy). This confusion of the concrete with the abstract allowed for the unchecked spatialization of time, with all its rigidifying and alienating effects, discussed in the previous section (see p. 8). Whitehead adopts Bergson’s “admirable phraseology” to explain why: “Sense-reception is ‘unspatialized,’ and sense-perception is ‘spatialized’” (p. 114, 1978). The sensationalist perspective collapses the unspatialized continuum of experiential intensity connecting actual occasions through time, and so entirely ignores the immanent teleology found therein. 

 

  This ignorance of what Whitehead calls sense-reception, or causal efficacy, prevents mechanistic paradigm from accounting for sentience of any grade, whether the motile sensitivity of flagellating bacteria or the discursive consciousness of human beings. The sensationalist doctrine lead Hume to deny the soundness of induction, for with only sense-perceptions of the outer world of surfaces to go on, the best he could do was correlate sequential observations that tended to arise together into bundles of general association. Causation, as Kant would later declare (based on Hume’s empiricist premises), was merely a regulative principle projected on experience by the structure of our intellect. Whitehead blames this misplaced concreteness on the Greek overreliance on visual perception[26] (p. 117, p. 121, ibid.), which Gebser also points to as the dominant mode of sensory experience in the mental structure. Sense-reception, or causal efficacy, can be described as the temporally-ordered experience of one’s own living bodily presence, such that the past and the future are both constitutive elements in every passing moment, concretely and meaningfully making each one transparent to the whole. The immanence of past and future in a mandalic present provides us with a direct link, Whitehead argues, to the real becoming of the universe.

 

“It is the accepted doctrine in physical science that a living body is to be interpreted according to what is known of other sections of the physical universe. This is a sound axiom; but it is doubled-edged. For it carries with it the converse deduction that other sections of the universe are to be interpreted in accordance with what we know of the human body” (p. 119, ibid.).

 

  Here, Whitehead is attempting to generalize our experience as human beings, especially our non-sensuous perception of time, to all other occasions in the universe. Concrescence is best understood as the most general analysis of the phases of becoming of every actual occasion in the universe, though it should be remembered that these phases are not sequential in time, but always already growing together into an integral whole.

 

  The simplest way to explain the phases of concrescence is to begin with Aristotle’s four causes/reasons. So long as we remember “the passage from phase to phase is not in physical time,” we will avoid oversimplification due to a false spatialization of the process (p. 283, ibid.). Aristotle uses the example of a house to elucidate the meaning of the causes, which was fitting for the mental structure’s preference for static categories. It is important to emphasize process in an integral account of experience; but for simplicity’s sake, the causes involved in concrescence will be introduced in relation to another artifact, a sailboat adrift at sea.

 

  The material cause, for Whitehead, is the creative potential underlying all actuality: “It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality” (p. 31, ibid.). In my sailboat analogy, this cause is the wind and the water, as well as the very structure of the boat itself. This entire nexus of occasions emerges each moment out of the satisfactions of the actual occasions that have perished before it. The efficient cause is “the transition from attained actuality (satisfaction) to actuality in attainment,” such that the prehensive acquisition of the satisfied occasions becomes the datum for the next phase (p. 214, ibid.). This prehensive phase is represented by the sails of the boat catching the winds of prior creative expressions, feeling their potential, and endeavoring, in the next phase, to make something of its own with them. This next phase is associated with the formal cause, wherein the valuation of future possibilities informs the reshaping of past actualities. The winds of inherited expression caught by the sails form a contrast between what is already given and what might yet become. As the saying goes, “You cannot change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.” The final cause is the ideal of satisfaction luring the sailboat in the direction formed by the adjustment of its sails. It is here that the analogy begins to break down, as the sailboat, like Aristotle’s house, is an artifact. Its purposes are imposed on it from without, and so it attains no satisfaction of itself in the final phase of concrescence. This extremely simplified analysis of concrescence must be extended to the more complex occasion of the living human body.

 

  The first thing to remember is that the emergence of each occasion of experience is partially conditioned by the entire past unfolding of the cosmos. The material cause, as described above, contains within it the subjective aims of countless actual entities that have come into being and perished. They gain objective immortality as they “[pass] over into the ‘given’ primary phase for the concrescence of other actual entities,” (p. 85, ibid.). This givenness is the efficient cause as experienced directly through the body’s non-sensuous perception (or causal efficacy) of the immediate past. Rather than understanding efficient causes as mere mechanical effects lacking emotive agency, Whitehead reconnects mind and matter by interpreting them as affects, or feelings directly prehended through bodily experience. As Whitehead puts it, “…sympathy…is the primary ground for the continuity of nature” (p. 183, 1967). The emotive forces of the past, aptly referred to as the physical-pole of concrescence, situate our immediate experience “…as a fact in history, derivative, actual, and effective” (p. 72, 1938).

 

  Whitehead describes the transition to the mental-pole:

 

“In the formation of each occasion…the swing over from re-enaction to anticipation is due to the intervening touch of mentality…the occasion arises as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future. In between there lies the teleology of the Universe” (p. 194, 1967).

 

 This swing from re-enaction to anticipation is the subjective form of concrescence, which, after integrating physical feelings related to actuality, opens to the ingression of eternity into time as the possibilities of definiteness available for shaping the future. Without this “intervening touch of mentality,” every actual occasion would be entirely determined, destined to passively repeat the past without any hope for novel expression or valuation of the future.

 

  As was mentioned earlier in relation to Kant (see p. 17), the defining characteristic of living organisms is that they are cause and effect of themselves. The importance of such reciprocal causality becomes evident when considering the role played by the mental-pole of concrescence. The initial phase of the mental-pole is the self-formation of the organism, wherein the determined effects of its past are evaluated in light of future ideals. This contrast between feelings of givenness (physical prehensions) and feelings of potential (conceptual prehensions) constitute the autonomous subjective form of each occasion of experience. The completion of each occasion is reached when the subjective comparison of affects reaches satisfaction, perishing into objective immortality by becoming the efficient cause of subsequent occasions. This continual process of death-life-rebirth, of “derivation from without [physical prehension],…immediate enjoyment within [conceptual prehension],…and transmission beyond [final satisfaction],” is continually taking place within what would be recognized empirically as a single living organism. The phases of concrescence should shed light on what it means for organisms to be their own cause and their own effect. If Kant was able to analyze the organization of the living without having mistakenly assumed his sensuous perception (presentational immediacy) was most primitive, he might have recognized in himself, as an instance of living matter, an analogue of the teleological process of organic formation in nature.[27]

 

  Varela realizes just this when he writes that “causality, as it is perceived by us as sentient beings, may be subsumed under the more general principle of life,” which for Varela and Whitehead is intrinsically teleological. I will now explore the close ties between Varela’s biological account of autopoiesis and Whitehead’s metaphysical account of concrescence.

 

 

III-d. Concrescence and Autopoiesis

“[The] wholeness [of an organism] is self-integrating in active realization, [its] form is not the result but the cause of the dynamic arrangements of matter, and hence the process at the same time is the form.” – p. 21, Hans Jonas, 1992

 

  “It belongs to the essence of all occasions of experience,” contends Whitehead, “that they are concerned with an otherness transcending themselves” (p. 180, 1967). As Hosinski says of this contention, it implies that “subjectivity is derivative from objectivity” (p. 56). In other words, each occasion receives from the objective world the ground of its [the occasion’s] subjective enjoyment and the motive for its own subsequent (logically, not temporally) individual expression.

 

  Similarly, Varela says of organisms that

 

“…because there is an individuality that finds itself produced by itself it is ipso facto a locus of sensation and agency, a living impulse always already in relation with its world” (p. 117, 2002).

 

  The relation of an organism to its Umwelt is one of care and concern, as Whitehead says:

 

“The occasion as subject has concern for the object. And the ‘concern’ at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it,” (p. 176, 1967).

 

  Varela is in agreement, in that “there cannot be an individuality which is isolated and folded into itself,” (p. 117, 2002). Instead, organisms have

 

“…[a] precarious existence…always menaced by concern, the need to avoid perishing, and to do this, [they are] again dependent on matter whose characteristics are the reason for [their] concern” (p. 113, ibid.).

 

  The constant threat of perishing referred to by Varela is a result of every organism’s dependence upon flows of matter and energy, which mechanistic science tells us inevitably tend towards entropy. But as Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme allows us to grasp, the notion of “dead matter…is an abstraction from the full complexity of concrete actuality” (p. 62, Hosinski, 1993).  Life is defined by its continual self-production, maintaining its form by remaining far from thermodynamic equilibrium riding atop a wave of negentropy (or extropy). As Varela says, “this entails that teleology is a primordial tendency of matter manifest in the form of organisms,” (p. 114, 2002). An organism’s material struggle to avoid death will not ultimately succeed, but in temporarily achieving its ongoing life via autopoiesis, it brings forth a subjective form, “[enjoying] its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity” (p. 177, 1967) before perishing, becoming an immortal object to be prehended by subsequent occasions of experience. 

 

  To account for the natural purposes inherent in living forms, both Varela and Whitehead are forced to reject the materialist doctrine that defines matter as inert and passive.

 

  As Varela puts it:

 

“The emergent causality of the reciprocal passages between the local elements [physical-pole] and the global emergent identity [mental-pole] are not a caprice, but inscribed and endogenous to nature itself, a tendency rather than an irregularity” (p. 114, 2002).

 

  And Whitehead:

 

“…what has vanished from the field of ultimate scientific conceptions is the notion of vacuous material existence with passive endurance, with primary individual attributes, and with accidental adventures…the concept is useless as an ultimate notion in science and in cosmology” (p. 309, 1978).

 

  A materialist may here protest that I have run roughshod over the established empirical facts concerning objective nature. But from Whitehead’s perspective, the dualism between subject and object established by Descartes is in conflict with the “organic realism” he sought to establish. Descartes dualism lead to the uneasy doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, a dualism Whitehead rejects, pointing out that “what [Descartes] described as primary attributes of physical bodies are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions, and within actual occasions” (p. 309, ibid.).

 

  For Whitehead, primary qualities, which are supposed by the materialist doctrine to be the final real things existing independently of subjective experience, are but abstractions, for

 

“…we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence…actuality means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is a mere non-entity,” (p. 211, ibid.).

 

  Both the primary and secondary qualities of the experienced world must be understood in a relational, ecological way, rather than in a Cartesian, representational way. The mind does not make an internal picture of the world based on subjective ideas and perceptions corresponding to its objective, pre-existing features, but participates through the process of concrescence in the bringing forth of intersubjective worlds.

 

  This return to the evidence of concrete experience leads to a further parallel between Varela’s theory of autopoiesis and Whitehead’s process of concrescence. Concrescence can be defined as “the real internal constitution of a particular existent” (p. 210, ibid.).

 

  More technically, concrescence is

 

“the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one,’” (p. 211, ibid.).

 

  Though it is true that “every entity in the actual world of a concresent actuality has some gradation of real relevance to that concrescence” (p. 41, 1978), in order to attain its unity of subjective satisfaction, the concrescence must simplify the multiplicity of its feelings with negative prehensions. A negative prehension is “the definite exclusion of that item from positive contribution to the subject’s own real internal constitution” (ibid.). 

 

  Varela account of the autopoietic process of self-realization is similar: “stimuli from outside enter the sphere of relevance…only by their existential meaning for…the process of self-establishment,” (p. 117, 2002). Any element of the actual world incompatible with the subjective aim of an organism is negatively prehended, such that its role becomes negligible, though still actual enough to affect the emotional complex involved in the final satisfaction of the concrescence (p. 41, 1978). In Varela’s terminology, organisms bring forth their own domain of cognitive significance; or, in Whitehead’s: “Each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates” (p. 210, ibid.).

 

  Before exploring the cosmological significance of this metaphysical account, it is necessary to elucidate the relation between form and matter that has been tacitly assumed so far. The classical materialist account is that matter has a fixed essence, cannot evolve, and has no intrinsic potential; it is determined entirely by exterior forces. The emergence of life out of such material would therefore require a miracle, as there is no way to account for individual self-formation without a yearning for organization and enjoyment present in matter from the beginning. Accounting for the ontological status of biological identity—for the “ever existing gap between the realization of the living and its underlying matter” (p. 119, 2002)—requires moving beyond the mechanistic understanding of organisms as substances informed with genetic qualities (traits) through passive selection by a pre-given environment. Not only does this ignore the reciprocal role played by organisms in the selection of their environment, it fails to fully consider an organism’s moment-to-moment task of having to produce its identity out of a continual flow of matter and energy. The neo-Darwinist claim is that genetic algorithms are responsible for the formation of the organism, but as has been pointed out numerous times already, one cannot account for the teleological organization and meaningful experience of individual living organisms (ontogeny) by reduction to a mechanical process operating at the level of whole species (phylogeny). To do so is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

 

  Accounting for the natural purposes of individual organisms does not require that we reject the reality of physiochemical constraints. On the contrary,

 

“the organism has to remain in the field of physiochemical laws to maintain a ‘coupling’ with the underlying energetical structures [i.e., entropy, autocatalyzing reactions, etc.] whose regularities assure that it can maintain coupling through the course of its life” (p. 118, 2002).

 

  In other words, “the environment gives the basis for the organism’s behavior precisely by establishing a continuous challenge to it” (ibid.). This point is similar to the one made earlier about the object-subject structure of experience (see p. 45). The basis of subjectivity is a concern for that which transcends it. This subjectively immanent concern for objective transcendence is equivalent to the desire to exist for one’s own sake, or as Varela puts it, “Subjectivity is the absolute interest the organism takes in its continued existence” (p. 119, ibid.).

 

  Varela continues:

 

“Necessary…are the material compounds of an organism, their incessant input and their unhindered supply. But this necessity…is governed by a principle of autonomy: the fact that a living system is able to become an ontological center, that it is able to organize itself into a form that is not explainable by the features of the underlying matter (the pure necessity) alone. This autonomy then is nothing other than true teleological behavior” (p. 119, ibid.).

 

  To understand how purposeful living forms could arise from matter, an evolutionary tendency toward increased intensity of autonomous experience and planetary interconnectivity must be attributed to it.

 

  “The doctrine [of evolution],” says Whitehead,

 

“cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental to nature. It also requires an underlying activity—a substantial activity—expressing itself in individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism. The organism is a unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters of eternal objects, emerging for its own sake,” (p. 107, 1925).

 

  The “substantial activity” Whitehead refers to could be called Eros. Eros is the “the soul stirring itself to life and motion” (p. 66, 1967) to “endow with agency all ideal possibilities” (p. 210, ibid.). If matter/energy is imbued with self-enjoyment and the desire to evolve (as in a Whiteheadian cosmology), it should be possible to give a thermodynamic account of the work of Eros in the universe, on earth, and in human society. The next section will unpack the implications of thermodynamics for both the biosphere and the noosphere, looking at how Gaia and the global techno-industrial economy relate materially and semiotically.

 

 

 

 

IV. Mechanized Life and Spatialized Time  

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of truth.” –Teilhard de Chardin’s Hymn to Matter

 

  The tremendous temperature gradient[28] between space, the surface of the earth, and light from the sun generates the far from equilibrium conditions necessary for organic life to emerge. The gradient produces a tremendous amount of free energy, allowing autopoietic beings “to spontaneously create new patterns of order and organization by dissipating entropy” (p. 32, de Quincey, 2002). A thermodynamic account of living organization demonstrates the planetary basis of life. It is the material earth who is in the first pregnant with the energetic possibility of life, which quickly spreads around the planet to become a biospheric phenomenon. Lovelock hypothesizes that life, should it exist on Mars today, will not exist much longer; without pervading the entire planet with their metabolic presence, isolated organisms remain unable to activate the self-regulatory effects displayed by Gaia and so quickly perish.[29]

 

  “Life,” says biologist Lynn Margulis, “is a gradient-reducing system” (p. 46). Living organization does not contradict the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, as was once thought.[30] Instead, it feeds on extropy produced by the generous sun and receptive earth in much the same way as the industrial organism[31]; though in the case of industrialism, the rate of gradient reduction via exergy extraction has become so accelerated that it threatens to upset Gaia’s ability to self-regulate climate and sustain biodiversity. 

 

  Hornborg distinguishes between “biomass” and “technomass” to make transparent the difference between Gaia’s growth/maintenance strategies and the industrial machine’s:

 

“For biomass, growth is a morally neutral reward granted by nature itself, whereas for technomass it is a reward resulting from human ideologies and generating unequal global relations of exchange” (p. 17).

 

  He goes on to remind us that technomass and biomass are currently competing for energy with one another on a planet with finite resources. Technology and economics, according to Hornborg, are not unrelated, independent levels of reality; machines do not magically create “growth,” “progress,” and “development” at the industrial centers out of nothing, but are animated by land and labor that has been exploited in the periphery (p. 147). Economics, like ecology, is a zero-sum game. Hornborg urges us to adopt wiser cultural concepts through which to engage with the rest of the community of life on earth. Mechanistic biology functions politically as a pseudo-scientific apology for contemporary industrial capitalist human-human and human-earth relations, and so my critique of its metaphysical foundations and reconstruction of biology in light of Varela and Whitehead is not a mere definitional nicety, but a political and eco-spiritual revolt. A mutually enhancing future human-earth relation will require more philosophically nuanced and spiritually mature discourses about the complexities of life and living.

 

  As was suggested earlier (p. 2-3), the tremendous (and perhaps cancerous) growth of technomass can be understood as an extension of thermodynamic law to human economic activity. But this does not imply that the total dissipation of the planet’s energy via industrial extraction is inevitable. Consciousness can and must awaken to its integral, planetary role by overcoming the deficient mechanistic thinking currently polluting the noosphere. It might be helpful here to unpack, with Gebser, the process of mutation in the evolution of consciousness.

 

  Gebser describes the mutation from the mythic to the mental structure as an “earth-shaking” event: it pierces the womb of the psyche—where all was pregnant with imaginal meaning and polar congruence—birthing the directed, dualistic, and discursive thought of the mind (p. 75).  “The ring [of his protective psychic circle] is broken, and man steps out of the two-dimensional surface into space, which he will attempt to master by his thinking” (ibid.). Gebser describes this process as “a fall from time into space,” as the sheltering cyclical temporality of the mythic structure gives way to the three-dimensional, alienating vacuum of space (p. 77). Efficient mentality, first exemplified by the thought of Aristotle (as well as Socrates and Plato before him), was a momentous achievement of the human spirit. It broke the mythic circle of temporality and aligned humanity with a purposeful, historical evolution. But after more than two millennia of increasing conceptual and colonial conquest of space, a growing sense of anxiety is alerting the mind to its deficiencies. Despite all our conceptual systematicity and technoscientific mastery, it seems the health of the earth has rarely been in so precarious a state (see p. 1).

 

  “The environmental crisis,” says Hornborg,

 

“forces upon us the insight that Descartes expelled from view, that the human subject, with its bundle of concepts, anxieties, and aspirations, is recursively interfused with the planetary landscape” (p. 160).

 

  The mutational task of integral consciousness is to free time from the spatial containers the mind has attempted to trap it in. The alienating struggle to spatialize time so characteristic of a deficient mentality turns dynamic and intentional life into static and inert material. This disembodied perspective on a disenchanted cosmos evoked the psycho-spiritual mood that allowed the towering empirco-mathematical system of Newton—not to mention the global techno-industrial system first gaining ideological steam in 18^th century England[32]—to stand for several centuries, “but at last the Newtonian cosmology has broken down” (p. 156, Whitehead, 1967). Erecting such systems was possible only after Descartes had “decisively [separated] ‘mind’ from ‘nature’ (p. 210, bid.). This separation allowed Newton to conceive of atoms as “devoid of self-enjoyment.” Mind was deemed present only in the human, who through its unique access to conscious deliberation imposed upon a dead material cosmos the clarity and distinctness of its innate ideas (p. 212, ibid.).

 

  As Gebser puts it,

 

  “In the process of consolidating space-consciousness man has precariously placed himself at the outermost reaches of all manifestations. He brought about the isolation of the human, leaving it with only matter as its valid support….” (p. 310).

 

  Whitehead recognizes that “human mentality is an extreme instance…of those happenings which constitute nature,” but refuses to exempt humanity from the course of natural events by imposing an artificial dualism. He argues that humanity must generalize its own conscious experience so that the phases of concrescence discovered therein become applicable to the descriptions of all other species of occasion in the cosmos, including God (p. 184-5, 1967; p. 110, 1978).

 

  Failing to overcome the human-nature duality leads to a rigidification of culture wherein, as Gebser says,

 

“…consciousness increasingly empties itself of the ‘time’ it has negated, which, as a result of this attitude, itself becomes a lifeless spatial component. And the quantified motoricity of the machine and its lifelessness are in turn merely another expression of the spatialized concept of time [emphasis added]” (p. 310). 

 

  The danger in falsely spatializing time, of which we have given so much attention, is not only that it replaces the transparency of our experience with a opaque dualism, but that this dualism results in the attempt to make measurable and predictable every phenomenon one is faced with, even when such measurement, as in the case of a living organism, fractures its qualitative intensities of feeling, meaning, and purpose into abstract, homogenous quantities of matter and energy[33] (p. 311, 383, ibid.).

 

  “If technology is the verification of modern scientific thought,” says Hornborg, “its social and ecological failures pose a challenge to that mode of thought” (p. 130). The global techno-industrial machine will continue to hollow out the heart of the earth until the human organism regains its own alienated labor.[34] Land (earth), too, must come to be experienced as more than a mere spatial extension of property or standing reserve of raw materials awaiting manufacture. The living earth is the primordial producer of life whose generativity is overshadowed only by the radiant generosity of the sun (p. 123, Hornborg). The humanist productionism discussed earlier (see p. 12) is a gross distortion of our species’ actual energetic relation to the biosphere.

 

  Hornborg goes on to suggest that “…a more profound understanding of the machine must rest on the recognition that ‘technology,’ ‘society,’ and ‘cosmology’ are inseparable: as a socio-technical artifact, the machine simultaneously embodies and reproduces a specific configuration of cultural categories” (p. 127).

 

  These deficient cultural categories are dominated by the notion of materiality. Hornborg argues that the word “material” is used prescriptively in modern Western discourse to refer to those aspects of life that are unquestionable (p. 130).[35] The result of this materialistic obsession is that thought begins to obediently kneel before the power of the machine (p. 116, ibid.), helpless to avert its thermodynamic trajectory toward ever more efficient conversion of exergy into entropy for the sake of disproportionate monetary accumulation.[36] The machine is “a material object of our own making which we seem to have lost control” (p. 147).

 

  Nonetheless, “intensities, unless we mistake them for pressure or tension, are not measureable” (p. 310, Gebser), and so cannot be successfully mechanized/monetized. The materialism and mechanization still in vogue in contemporary economics and biology are, in part, a result of a failure to assimilate the transformation occurring in physics over the past century.

 

  As was discussed earlier (p. 13), Darwin’s reduction of the apparent design of species to the accidental mechanism of random variation under natural selection was based on the fundamental assumption that space, time, and matter were Newtonian in nature. While his theory was undoubtedly empirically sound, it is often the case that “we have to rescue the facts as they are from the facts as they appear” (p. 155, Whitehead, 1967) by metaphysically reorienting the mind in its relation to things. Darwin selected from among the facts appearing to him only those most salient to his thoroughly Newtonian and bourgeois mind. As a result, the animate presence of the creatures he sought to understand was ignored, overlaid by the abstract rationalizations favored by the deficient mental structure of consciousness (p. 387, Gebser).

 

  Time, for Newton as for Darwin, played merely a quantitative role: it was the space, conceived as a fourth dimension of extension, that allowed one moment, a fixed instant, to pass into the next, equally as instantaneous and having no intrinsic relation to the one prior to or following it but for the exchange of forces by way of efficient causation.[37] This collapse of time into a spatial sequence, each snap shot externally and accidently related to the next, vanquished the concrete temporal intensity required to understand how formal and final causes participate in living organization.

 

  As Whitehead puts it:

 

“…the old conception  [of time] allows us to make an abstraction of change and to conceive the full reality of nature at a given moment…an abstraction is made of all temporal duration” (p. 195, 1934).

 

  From Darwin’s point of view, the admission of teleology in evolution was absurd because it implied that the future had causal influence on the past. Time, conceived as purposeless and entirely accidental renders the future a mere result of forces determining it from the past—an aggregate of instants piled one on top of the other, species gaining their form along the way from the accumulation of chance mutations surviving the differential selection of a pre-given environment. This may be a partial explanation for the diversity of species[38], but not for the origin of life itself (see p. 16: the process presupposes self-organizing creatures that reproduce). This inadequate explanation retards a full account of life by neglecting the formal and final causes of autopoiesis, which become occluded when the “opposed doctrine of internal relation [is] distorted by reason of its description in terms of language adapted to the presupposition of external [i.e., spatial] relations of the Newtonian type” (p. 157, Whitehead, 1967). It should be noted in Darwin’s defense that his theory of variation under natural selection wasn’t designed to explain anything but the origin of species. The neo-Darwinism of Dennett, Dawkins, Ridley, and others is the source of the epistemic over-extension of Darwin’s more modest proposal.

 

  Darwin imagined that all relations between occasions were external, but concrete/integral time is not decomposable into the static and exclusionary categories of past, present, and future—nor space into “here” and “there”: every point is the center.[39] Teleology is not a matter of the future causing the past, but of the future and the past being immanent in the concrescence of every occasion. Formal and final causation are relevant only for the internal relations within and between organisms and their environments, which Darwin assumed could only be related externally because of his commitment to mechanistic materialism.

 

  “Evolution for the materialistic theory,” says Whitehead,

 

“…is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms” (p. 107, 1925).

 

  The doctrine of matter as merely externally related “stuff” in a continual process of purposeless re-arrangement according to arbitrarily imposed preconditions is no longer tenable, for reasons discovered in both the biological, as well as the physical sciences. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, though its discoverer does not take it this far, was the first crack in the foundation of Newton’s cosmological edifice.

 

  The final sentence of Darwin’s Origin reads:

 

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (p. 384).

 

  Darwin’s mistake was to assume that the law of gravity is fixed. He fails to extend the formative influence of evolution far enough. But worse for the implications of his theory within his own field of biology, he assumes that living organization is just an anomaly in nature[40], having been imposed upon matter from without by a capricious God, “breathed…into a few forms or into one” at the dawn of life. Darwin’s book, “The Origin of Species” tells us nothing of scientific value about the origin of life. For natural selection to be of any use as a theory of biological form, we must presuppose the self-creation and natural purpose of individual organisms. Only given self-organizaion and Eros does Darwin’s theory shed any light on the subsequent development and diversification of the biosphere. Mechanistic attempts to account for the organization of the living fail because they employ too abstract and disembodied a conception of space, time, and matter, mistaking the quantities of Newtonian equations for the durations of lived experience, where each actual occasion, though continuous with the past, can anticipate novel futures. Newton’s conception of space and time was that each was a vast container indifferent as to what filled it, and even indifferent one to the other. Matter shuffled through, blindly obeying arbitrarily imposed laws.

 

  But contemporary physics no longer understands time and space, nor matter and energy, as separate or absolute. Each shares a common history, having co-emerged and reciprocally conditioned the other throughout the process of cosmogenesis. Matter, similarly, is intimately related to the development of space and time—not in space-time as a kind of inert “stuff,” but integrally woven with it into a physio-psycho-spiritual process of inconscient yearning gradually flowering into luminous awareness, compassion, and bliss.

 

  Emerson suggests there is “a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms” and that “The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world” (p. 25). Matter is not lifeless, but intrinsically animated by an enfolded spiritual destiny always and everywhere calling it toward higher forms and ideals. Its motion is not accidental or imposed upon it from without, but manifest by an indwelling spiritual longing for wholeness.[41]

 

  Most contemporary physicists are still unwilling to grant that spirit pervades matter because the deficient mental structure of consciousness prevents its presence from being transparently apprehended. Having gained a better handle on the potential for the emergence of thermodynamic order found throughout nature, however, physics is now in a position to supplement the “aimless, aloof, and external power of natural selection” with the “willful, self-sufficient, and internal power of self-organization” (p. 128, Barlow). Evolution really is what arch-mechanist Daniel Dennett calls a “universal acid” (p. 63). It leaks out of biology and dissolves traditional ways of thinking in every field it comes in contact with. But it cannot be understood as a “mindless, purposeless, algorithmic process” unless we somehow exempt the Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm (Gebser’s deficient mental structure of consciousness) from evolution’s transformative reach. Evolution is a theory that points to the common origin of the many forms of matter, life, and mind—not just at some distant moment in the past, but as a present reality, as every living creature owes its continued existence to its ecological (material-semiotic) relationship with others. Evolution (in a more cosmological sense than Darwin intended) is incompatible with the doctrine of external relation, which is the foundation of materialism.

 

  The progress in the field of thermodynamics over recent decades, specifically the work of Ilya Prigogine, has established that the irreversibility of time is essential to the emergence of order in nature. This is a direct break with all of the mechanistic attempts to account for time, which did not recognize anything essential whatsoever about its direction. Newton’s equations give the same results no matter which direction time flows. This is also true for all equations expressing relativistic or quantum mechanics. Einstein himself once remarked that “time [as irreversible] is an illusion.” For Prigogine, however, the directionality of time is essential for any account of non-equilibrium systems and the creative advance into novelty that they make possible.

 

 Whitehead’s notion of concrescence, derived from the Latin verb meaning “growing together,” is, according to Prigogine, an attempt to “reconcile permanence and change” (p. 59). Whitehead recognizes the essential role played by time in the creative unfolding of the universe, and his analysis of concrescence allows us to understand what was said at the outset (p. 6), that life is a moving image of eternity. Living organization cannot be accounted for in terms of the stuff of which it is made because its processual and experiential essence always transcends the mind’s attempt to decompose it into a spatially rationalized mechanism or totalized system.

 

  Life perpetually recedes from the mind’s attempts to conceive of it materially because the mind’s materiality (i.e., its life) is the very source of its limiting spatialized modes of conceptuality. Life sustains the dynamic and evolving interplay of mind in matter, liberating mentality from its material slumber by increasing the sensitivity and reactivity of its concrescence. Only integral consciousness becomes aware of life as a transparent and purposeful whole, whose autonomous individual parts naturally tend toward symbiotic mutuality. Deficient mental consciousness, disillusioned by the disembedding forces of the techno-industrial market, is forced to explain life away as the naturally selected product of accumulated genetic algorithms. This supposedly scientific story about the reduction of life to DNA only carries metaphorical weight when imbued with mythological significance in the biological guise of Dawkins’ capitalistic “selfish genes.”

 

  Logically, the neo-Darwinian mechanism is tautological: it says only that genotypes continue to survive today because they survived in the past. The only way to turn this from a meaningless non-statement into the founding principle of deficient mental biology is to mythologize it by metaphorically transferring English socio-economic ideology onto natural processes. Self-interested genes compete for resources in order to reproduce themselves indefinitely, much like middle-class industrial consumers and corporations compete for money (via sale of labor, land, products, and ideas) in order to generate the highest possible profit. Each instance ignores the concrete reality of its situation: the notion of selfish genes is a fetishized reduction of the teleology of whole organisms, just as the notion of general-purpose money and profit are fetishized reductions of the purposes of interpersonal relationship.[42]

 

  Transparently apprehending the spiritual meaning underlying nature’s evolutionary unfolding requires new modes understanding and perception. Only an integral way of seeing and being can break the ideological spell techno-industrial capitalism has cast upon the human imagination. In the next section, I will recount Gebser’s attempt to bring forth understanding as systasis and perception as synairesis, comparing these to the deficient modes caused by what Heidegger has called the “enframing” of nature.

 

 

V. Integral Thought and Perception Concerning Techno-industrialism

“Integral reality is the world’s transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of the truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both.” –Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin

 

  In the Ever-Present Origin, Gebser introduces two terms he feels exemplify the transparency and wholeness typifying the integral structure of consciousness. The first is systasis, “the conjoining or fitting together of parts into integrality” (p. 310). Gebser contrasts systasis with system, not to imply that they are opposites (as a thesis to its antithesis), but rather to make explicit the fact that systematization is still the method of a consciousness stuck in the three-dimensional, predominantly spatial world of parts. When one refers to a system, he describes the effect of some quantitative process of addition, thereby draining that process of any intrinsic life. Viewing an organism as a system converts it into a lifeless collection of objects, whereas systasis grants the parts a transparency allowing the organism to be understood as a subject perpetually becoming whole.

 

  The second term, synairesis, refers to the mode of perception adequate to the integrality of reality. Gebser says that synairesis

 

“fulfills the aperspectival, integrative perception of systasis and system…[and is] a precondition for diaphany, which is able to be realized when, in addition to systasis and system, the symbol—with its mythical effectivity—and magic symbiosis are included, that is to say, present” (ibid.).

 

  Varela and Whitehead display a clear understanding of the need for a synairetic mode of perception that breaks free of the spatial categories and systematization endemic to the mental structure. Whitehead’s analysis of concrescence is precisely an attempt to come to terms with living organization systatically. Systasis is Greek for “put together,” with the connotation of “forming” (Gebser, p. 292), linking it closely with the meaning of concrescence.

 

  As Whitehead says,

 

“We have to discover a doctrine of nature which expresses the concrete relatedness of physical functionings and mental functionings, of the past with the present, and also expresses the concrete composition of physical realities which are individually diverse” (p. 157, 1967).

 

  The related processes of concrescence and autopoiesis bring together each of the structures of consciousness in their attempt to make clear the organization of the living, uniting the systematic categorization and empirical attention to detail of the mental (through an appreciation of the dynamics of genetic inheritance), the circular polarity of the mythic (through an appreciation of cellular autopoiesis), and the vital synchronicity of the magic (through an appreciation of the concresent interpenetration of subject and object) without becoming fixated upon any in particular. The transparency of the whole is thus made evident.

 

  It was not until the 20^th century that time became fully apparent to human consciousness. Whitehead, a mathematician and a physicist, participated directly in the scientific revelation that our sensory experience of the heavenly bodies is delusory until we have an appreciation of eternity. That is, because light takes time to travel from distant stars and galaxies to our eyes, we can only appreciate them as actual occasions if time has become transparent to us. Then we presentiate them without having to see them, bringing forth a “[reality] in which the present is all-encompassing and entire” (Gebser, p. 7).

 

 Gebser continues:

 

“The synairesis which systasis makes possible integrates phenomena, freeing us in the diaphany of ‘a-waring’ or perceiving truth from space and time. Space and time are, after all, merely conditional realities and as such realities with a double relation. They are in the first place ‘objective’ as the transitory structure of our universe, and in the second, ‘subjective’ as the transitory structure and mirroring of our consciousness. This transitory character refers us to origin, which, with respect to consciousness, becomes space-and-time-free when we fulfill and complete synairesis, the aperspectival imparting-of-truth. In this are consolidated the clarity and transparency of man and universe in which origin becomes present, inasmuch as origin, which ‘lies’ before spacelessness and timelessness, manifests itself in consciousness as space-time-free present” (p. 311-12).

 

  Absent such integration, those fixated within the mental structure will continue to reduce all factors of living organization to spatial-material components, thereby negating not only the natural purposes of the organisms around them, but “denying [their] own status as sentient beings who have a right to the pursuit of an undisturbed life” (p. 111, Varela, 2002). We cannot afford to ignore what Whitehead, after Shelley and Wordsworth, refers to as the “values [arising] from the accumulation of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts” (p. 88, 1925).

 

 Thinking nature as concrescence and bios as autopoiesis prepares the conceptual alembic necessary for an integral cosmology that not only re-ensouls the world, but makes the ideas at work in the heart of the universe transparent to the human spirit. Human and universe are an anthropo-cosmogenesis, a whole in the process of intelligently forming itself; in its human mode, the universe not only forms, but performs the story of its evolution through cultural expression and civillizational ideals.

 

  “Our image-building,” says Hornborg, “actively participates in the constitution of the world…Our perception of our physical environment is inseparable from our involvement in it” (p. 10). Market cosmology conceives of the world as a fragmentary heap of raw materials awaiting technological production, a standing reserve of objects devoid of instrinsic worth or self-enjoyment. This leads to the mistaken idea that industry produces real value, when in thermodynamic fact, it operates deceptively by generating symbolic value (money) with no intrinsic relation to the actual earth processes it is degrading at evermore efficient rates (p. 32, ibid.). An integral perception and understanding of human-earth-cosmos relations grasps the inseparability of mind and nature, as “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (p. 24, Emerson). Space-time is not an objective container to which the rational human mind is subject, but the outermost reaches of the living tissue of an evolving consciousness.

 

  The systematicity so characteristic of techno-industrial capitalism drains the earth of its vitality by fragmenting its symbiotic diversity of eco-semiotic valuations into a uniform, general-use currency such that “resource nations are economically forced to trash their ecologies to promote foreign exchange” (p. 174, W. I. Thompson). “Money in itself,” says Hornborg, “is merely an idea about the interchangeability of things and about the mutability of the rates at which things are exchanged” (p. 10). Hornborg understands general-purpose money (especially fiat currency) to be an “algorithm of destruction” because it is symbolically accumulated at the industrial centers even while the actual means of production underlying its profits on the periphery systematically render useless the truly generative potential of the planet.[43] “Industrial sectors of world society,” says Hornborg, “subsist precisely on that discrepancy between the material and the symbolic” (p. 47). This exploitative techno-socio-economic situation has resulted from a dissociation of human symbolic valuation from earthly productivity, and is principally responsible for the ecological crisis. Deficient mental attempts to commodify the ecopoietic processes[44] of nature (biosphere) and culture (noosphere) are given traction by abstract, quantitative measures of energy. Such hyper-perspectivalism severs all lines of possible contact between the raw state of natural energy and the qualitative and purposive temporality of human life.[45] In the next section (VI, see p. 67), Lockean notions of labor, property, and the common state of nature will be re-imagined in an attempt to enact an integral “Gaian politique” (p. 174, W. I. Thompson, 1985).

 

  A systatic understanding of earth as a whole awakens the knower to his or her participation in a complex physio-bio-noospheric concrescence that is intrinsically purposeful and generative. Integral consciousness perceives synairetically the co-emergence of ideas and images in a living cosmos that always already involves the human being in processes beyond his or her ability to rationally dissect and control (though spending great amounts of energy “tying nature to the rack”[46] may temporarily make the mechanization of life seem possible –witness the so-called Petroleum Interval[47]).

 

  Energy has become a concept of central importance for the current ecological crisis. Cries abound for sustainable sources of energy, for technologies that extract energy for human consumption without destroying nature. But technology can never extract energy from the earth in a sustainable way, because the mechanistic conception of energy already systematically enframes nature, such that it becomes a mere standing-reserve awaiting human use, a means to our monetary ends.

 

  Nature conceived of as a source of energy enframes nature in that it “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such” (p. 320, Heidegger, 1977).  Technology seems to be the means to this end.  However, Heidegger argues that the essence of technology is not its instrumentality, but its mode of revealing by enframing. To reveal by enframing is to challenge-forth “energy” in the abstract, as something separable from the life of the earth. Heidegger contrasts this mode of revealing with that of poïesis, which brings-forth of itself. The best example of such bringing-forth is physis, “the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself,” (p. 317, ibid.). Physis reveals the way in which energy and nature are originally united as the self-generating capacity of the living earth. A conception of “energy” independent of earth, extractable from earth, is the result of an enframed way of thinking only interested in quantifying what can be challenged-forth from nature.  The danger in relating to earth in such a way—as a “calculable coherence of forces” (p. 326, ibid.)—is that, eventually (if not already), even the human being becomes the standing-reserve of industry[48], which “[drives] on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense (p. 321. Ibid.).

 

  Energy becomes, for the mechanistic attitude, the most neutral of names for the essence of nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. The earth does not originally show itself as a resource, as a standing-reserve, but becomes so only because of the technological way of being that forcibly reveals it as such. That technology nonetheless reveals is what makes it so dangerous, as all revealing (aletheia) is truthful. Energy does show itself as a quantifiable substance, but only after the earth’s poïesis has been falsely monetized and thermodynamically exploited. Both the revealing that is poïesis (or physis) and the revealing that is enframing provide a kind of truth; but enframing goes on for the most part unconsciously, because everyone assumes that the essence of technology is merely instrumental, that it is neutral but for how the human being puts it to use.

 

  Humanity seems afraid to recognize that its technological presence on the earth has the potential, not only to forever forestall self-generating capacity of nature, but to forever alter human nature, as well. Ours is a crisis not only of the environment, but of the human souls dwelling within it. If the essence of technology remains hidden, and nature continues to be used up as mere energy, human beings will become batteries bio-powering the machines that have enslaved us, homeless upon a dying earth.

 

  Heidegger warns not only of the dangers of technology, but after Hölderlin (“…where danger is, grows/the saving power also…” -p. 340, ibid.), heralds also its potential to re-establish our being-on-the-earth, though in sublated form. This saving power is realized only if the essence of technology is understood. For Heidegger, scientific materialism owes its existence to the technological method of enframing. This reverses the commonsense idea that science brought forth technology. The great success of the empirico-rational disciplines is not the result of their metaphysical truth or correspondence to reality, but rather of the practical, economic value of their methods. These methods, made possible by the enframing of the earth as mere energy for instrumental use, have depleted its body of the life-giving qualities that created and provide for humanity’s, and all life’s, continued existence. It is the shock of this near suicide, however, that has given our species the opportunity to truly stand watch over the earth as the only home we’ll ever have.

 

  The mythical fall from grace and eviction from the Garden of Eden can only be overcome by taking to an extreme the alienating way of inhabiting the earth that caused the fall to begin with. Humanity cannot turn back—we cannot put humpty dumpty back together again. Our destiny has had to be lived out—our process of maturation cannot be reversed. In a typical enantiodromic reversal, our rush to remake the planet technologically has lead to an opening that, if seen synairetically, will allow us to remember our original identity as earthlings, now capable of saving the earth from the techno-industrial monster that has been strangling it. For the first time, the noosphere can truly become aware of and responsible for the ground beneath its feet.

 

            As Heidegger says, being-on-the-earth already means being beneath the sky (p. 351, ibid.). And to be beneath the sky means to behold the stars and the sun, whose diviner energies grant life to we mere earthly mortals. But instead of energy, we may find “something waiting inside [the things themselves], like an unplayed melody in a flute” (p. 167, Rilke). Only a way of thinking/dwelling upon the earth that grants such melodies their say (i.e., systasis and synairesis), and that safeguards their becoming, can save us from the total annihilation of ourselves and the rest of the community of life upon this planet.

 

 

VI. Integral Enaction of a Gaian Polity

“The revolution cannot come in time for us to quit out jobs or cancel our debts, and the end of the world cannot come in time to eliminate the mess we have made of history; nothing smaller than the earth is large enough to express the revelation, and nothing smaller than this instant is vast enough to contain all the future that we need” -p. 182, W. I. Thompson

 

  John Locke articulated the social foundations of market cosmology by defining property as anything human labor has taken out of “the state nature leaves it in” (p. 330, 1965). Human labor is said to produce property and value, the first of its proclaimed properties being itself. Once I have monetized my own ability to do work, the reduction of nature to a standing reserve of raw materials to be exploited is an afterthought (see pgs. 12, 44, 48, and 57).

  “In our informational society,” says William Irwin Thompson, “property is no longer simply land; it is consciousness” (p. 177). Thompson suggests we think with Gregory Bateson by understanding matter, not as a “state of nature” awaiting human production, but as “unconscious Mind, or Gaia” raised to consciousness by the labors of the soul (ibid.). Such a shift in economic ethos reverses the relationship between mind and matter currently informing industrialism: the former is epiphenomenal to the latter. In a Gaian polity, Mind is understood to be united with the living earth, whose value is determined by the intensity of consciousness associated with the particular product in question (179, ibid.).

 

  Thompson continues:

 

“If autonomy is the fundamental recognition of the distinction of life, and if autopoiesis is the fundamental narrative process of life, then the biological politics that derive from these descriptions are radically different from sociobiology or scientific socialism. This is what I see as the Gaia Politique, a politics that is radical in the sense that it is deeply rooted in the understanding of life [and] is truly…ecological and not simply the old industrial Marxist critique newly decorated with sun-flowers and green paint” (p. 180, ibid.). 

 

  Thompson goes on to suggest that, autonomy being essential to life and consciousness, the evil of market cosmology consists in its “failure to recognize the [distinct] living [performances] of autonomous unities” in their “narrative process of self-description” (p. 179). A Gaian polity would evoke the “counterdrive to total commoditization” that Hornborg identifies as culture (p. 172). Culture’s main resistances to the homogenizing tendencies of market exchange are the processes of singularization and sacralization that reverse money’s “tendency to render social [and human-earth] relations increasingly abstract” (p. 166, ibid.). Sacred or spiritual forms of culture are also abstract, but still rooted in narratives of “local resonance,” unlike the disembedded abstractions of science and money (p. 171, ibid.).

 

  “The ecological crisis of modern society,” says Hornborg,

 

“has two connected aspects: one objective and generated by the general-purpose market and its axiom of universal inter-changeability, the other subjective and founded in the alienation of the disembedded, modern individual” (p. 160).

 

   The challenge of enacting an integral cosmology hinges upon a transformed sense of narrative and the construction of meaning, which, according to Hornborg (p. 120) and Thompson (p. 101), is motivated by a fear of chaos and the desire to establish order through the ritualized performance of myth. Even the culture-eating techno-industrial worldview is made to function ideologically by way of deficient mythic narratives depicting the march of progress toward total control and rationalization of life.

 

  Thompson defines narrative as a uniquely human way of responding to time, “an attempt to escape the infinity of the present as duration by reifying time into a past” (p. 100). Our narratives bring forth the worlds we inhabit, and enacting worlds of ecological resilience and diverse cultural expression requires respecting the autonomy of both Gaia and her many children. While only humans seem capable of knowing they tell stories, all creatures unconsciously bring forth their own cognitive domains of significance. The reduction of human consciousness to wage labor (measured by falsely spatialized clock-time) is a symptom of modern technology’s tendency to dissociate formerly integrated facets of reality, “namely tool/body, physical work/mental work, means/ends, work/agency, use/meaning, production/art, and work/life” (p. 130, Hornborg). Techno-industrial life leads to meaninglessness and existential anxiety precisely because money (and the social relations it establishes) alienates consciousness from its own powers of creative response to the overflowing meaning of each and every moment. Money is understood by Hornborg to be a “communicative disorder”; empty signs of arbitrary value are shown to be the very heart of market cosmology (p. 170-171). While general-purpose money can reinforce power relations, it cannot itself convey meaning, which depends on difference (p. 167, ibid.).

 

  Thompson sees “the recognition of differences as the consciousness of the unique that contributes to the understanding of the universal” (p. 163), which is to say that cultural diversity is paramount to the establishment of resilient forms of meaning capable of providing spiritual nourishment for the whole human family. “Regional devolution,” says Thompson, “is part of planetary evolution; so it is the larger entity that nourishes the emergence of the smaller identity” (p. 166). Hornborg recognizes the need for a similar return to local valuation to “domesticate the market,” calling for the creation of dual currencies “so as to render local subsistence and global communication two parallel but distinct and incommensurable domains” (p. 34).

 

  The living earth is the new stage upon which all human interaction must take place, but not in the decontextualized fashion typical of global capitalism. The move to a Gaian Politique deconstructs the Western division between person and thing, human and nature (p. 195, Hornborg).[49] Hornborg points out that, the more tied up with global networks of exchange we become, the less “outreaching” we become as persons. A return to local material and cultural subsistence would involve taking up forms of reciprocity that have been increasingly marginalized by market forces. Marshall Sahlins (1972) has articulated three forms of reciprocity, including generalized reciprocity (a “pure gift” with no expectation of return), balanced reciprocity (a fair trade), and negative reciprocity (an impersonal exchange where each party seeks to get something for nothing via symbolic persuasion) (p. 201, Hornborg). 

 

  An integral cosmology functions on “the basic intuition [of a] shift from industrial work, abstraction, and materialism to play [and] sensual consciousness” (p. 161, Thompson). Enjoyment of subjective community becomes the primary value of life, replacing the market cosmology of atomistic competition of each against all to accumulate quantities of money whose value is appraised based upon how successfully it can disembed meaning and material from its local, inter-personal and inter-bodily instantiation. A return to the experiential depth of the places where we live and the faces who we live with is the only way to reverse industry’s destruction of earth and money’s inversion of the Sacred (p. 171, Hornborg). The disenchantment and alienation resulting from the monetized mechanization of life are rectified only through a renewed authenticity capable of bringing forth the specificity and non-interchangeability of individual expression and inter-personal relation that resists being appropriated by the abstract and impersonal values of the market.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion: On the Soul and Spirit of Life

“The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself [and with woman and humanity]. He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.” –p. 47, Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

  Aurobindo lists death and mutual devouring, hunger and conscious desire, and the struggle to increase, expand, conquer, and possess as the basic truths of Darwin’s theory of natural selection (p. 199). But this theory defines life only by its relation to the mechanisms of matter, forgetting the arc of evolution extends also toward mind and spirit. As mind emerges to overtake the vital striving of life, the “law of love” replaces that of death, and the fittest become those “who harmonize most successfully survival and mutual self-giving” (p. 203).

 

  Mind, according to Aurobindo, “does not need to devour in order to…grow; rather, the more it gives, the more it receives and grows” (p. 204). The global economy has thus far been guided by Darwin’s overemphasis on the aggressive principle of life, devouring the very vitality of the planet it depends upon for its continued existence. Humanity is struggling to give birth to the higher principle of mind, to the love of conscious joining and interchange that might forestall our entropic rush to convert the common earth into private property.

 

  The biosphere is experiencing the pains of labor as it struggles to give birth to its enfolded destiny, the noosphere. “We can hope for no progress on earth,” says Teilhard, “without the primacy and triumph of the personal at the summit of mind” (p. 297). Teilhard reminds us that even an interiorized and involuted universe labors, sins, and suffers (p. 313). Such are the demands of the spirit working through this anthropo-cosmogenesis, which, as Teilhard says, even from the perspective of a biologist, “resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross” (ibid.). 

 

  “Eros (love) does not occur only in the human soul,” says Eryximachus in Plato’s Symposium,

 

“It is a significantly broader phenomenon. It certainly occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact, it occurs everywhere in the universe. Eros is a deity of the greatest importance: he directs everything that occurs, not only in the human domain, but also in that of the gods” (186b).

 

  The personalization of earth and the cosmos is essential to any renewed engagement of humanity with its ecological context, as “persons and landscapes are mutually constitutive [and] co-evolve” (p. 3, Hornborg, 1998). The deficient mental separation of mind from nature has shattered the wholeness of the biosphere and of human society by translating the living intensity and particularity of the relationships holding each together into quantities of money and raw materials.

 

  “Driven by the forces of love,” says Teilhard, “the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being” (p. 264-265). Teilhard urges humanity to overcome the “anti-personalist” complex paralyzing our techno-industrial civilization, and to at least grant the possibility, under the heightened pressure of our infolding world, that the earth has a face and a heart (p. 267). Life is not a machine, nor the human being a consumer. A human being, like all creatures, is alive because a great cosmic creativity stirs its very atoms into autopoietic e-motion.

 

  “Whatever happens on the earth,” says Gebser,

 

“man [who is the consciousness of earth] must share the responsibility…On its great journey across the millennia it hastens through the changing landscapes of ‘heaven,’ transforming its own countenance and man’s” (p. 541).

 

  An integral biology of economics brings to light the wholeness of life and makes transparent the law of love luring even the materiality of the earth toward its center. The mutation of consciousness into its integral mode requires enduring a violent birth, as the industrial process has made quite evident. But the end of consciousness’ unfolding is not the annihilation of earth—rather, it is to participate with earth in the regeneration of its heavenly gardens and families of interdependent beings by learning to face the cosmos with an open heart and a mind transluced by the spirit of origin.

 

 

Works Cited

 

1.     Allen, Colin (ed.). Bekoff, March (ed.). George Lauder (ed.). Nature’s Purposes: Analysis of Function and Design in Biology. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1998.

2.     Aurobindo. The Life Divine. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. 1970.

3.     Bacon, Francis. The Great Instauration and New Atlantis. Arlington Heights. Illinois: Harlan Davidson. 1980

4.     Barlow, Connie (ed.). Evolution Extended: Biological Debates on the Meaning of Life. Massachusetts: MIT Press. 1994.

5.     Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Barnes and Noble. 2005.

6.     Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Touchstone. 1995.

7.     De Quicney, Christian. Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter. Vermont: Invisible Cities Press. 2002.

8.     Gebser, Jean. Transl. by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas. The Ever-Present Origin. Ohio: Ohio University Press. 1985.

9.     Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_

OncoMouse™. New York: Routledge. 1997.

10.  Haraway, Donna J. The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. p. 295-337. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. 1992.

11.  Heidegger, Martin. Krell, David Farrel (ed.). Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Harper: San Francisco. 1977.

12.  Hopkins, Rob. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. Vermont: Chelsea Green. 2008.

13.  Hornborg, Alf. Ecological Embeddedness and Personhood. Anthropology Today, Vol. 14 No. 2, April, 1998.

14.  Hornborg, Alf. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequities of Economy, Technology, and Environment. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. 2001.

15.  Hosinski, Thomas. Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Maryland: Rowmann and Littlefield Publishers. 1993.

16.  Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 2001.

17.  Kant, Immanuel. Transl. by W.S. Pluhar. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1987.

18.  Lennox, James. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001.

19.  Locke, John. Laslett, Peter (ed.). Two Treatise of Government. New York: New American Library. 1965.

20.  Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia. New York: Norton. 1988.

21.  Macy, Joanna and Barrows, Anita. Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. New York: Penguin Group. 1996.

22.  Margulis, Lynn. Sagan, Dorian. Acquring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Speices. New York: Basic Books. 2003.

23.  Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books. 2001.

24.  McEvoy, Paul. Niels Bohr: Reflections on Subject and Object. New York: MicroAnalytix. 2001.

25.  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. 1969.

26.  Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity. New York: Random House. 1972.

27.  Plato. Complete Works. Cooper, John M. (ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett. 1997.

28.  Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: The Free Press. 1996.

29.  Primack, Joel. Abrams, Nancy. The View from the Center of the Universe. New York: Riverhead Books. 2006.

30.  Steiner, Rudolf. Nature’s Open Secret: Introductions to Goethe’s Scientific Writings. Anthroposophic Press. 2000.

31.  Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. Harper Collins. 1999.

32.  Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Human Phenomenon. New York: Harper Collins. 1959.

33.  Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2007.

34.  Thompson, William Irwin. Pacific Shift. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco. 1985.

35.  Varela, Francisco J. Weber, Andreas. Life After Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. Published in Vol. 1 of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2002.

36.  Varela, Francisco J. Maturana, Humberto. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Published in Vol. 42 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 1980.

37.  Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. 1967.

38.  Whitehead, Alfred North. Concept of Nature. New York: Cosimo Classics. 2007

39.  Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press. 1938. 

40.  Whitehead, Alfred North. Nature and Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1934.

41.  Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. 1978.

42.  Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press. 1925.

 

 

Logos of the Living Earth: Towards a Gaian Praxecology

 

 

By Matthew Segall

Science, Ecology, and Contested Knowledge(s)

Prof. Elizabeth Allison

 

 

 

“No More” by Josephine Wall – (from http://www.josephinewall.co.uk/josephine.html): "Progress" - Man's word to excuse the disgraceful abuse of our precious world. "Gaia" has watched from afar, hoping that the trustees of this world would come to their senses, and finally unable to bear the destruction any more, the "Earth Goddess" returns to force back the advancing darkness. Some animals flee in terror whilst others shelter beneath her life-giving mantel. The battle to restore beauty is joined. "No more" will she allow mans blindness, greed and intolerance to pervade this planet. As she strides purposefully forward, nature's beauty is once again restored.

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

  The word “praxeology” has been employed with various meanings in 20^th century French and Austrian discourse.[1] Praxecology is a distinct, though in the end not entirely unrelated neologism invented for the purposes of this essay. A new word is not without a history, nor a text without context—praxecology is the mutated kin of its discursive ancestors; I cannot deny its semiotic relation to them. But my neologism is not just a sign; it is also a materially inscribed event emerging in my life and, having been read and understood, in the lives each of you, my audience. Words have real effects in the world of material-semiotic cyborgs[2] like us.  

 

  Praxecology is the embodied practice of a living planetary systems theory, the enacting of a Gaian way of life. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, developed in the 60s while working for NASA to detect life on other planets, has played an important psycho-spiritual role in the environmental movement, but half a century later has not been fully realized as an eco-cultural revolt against the modern industrial habitus of alienation, fetishization, and commodification of self, society, and nature. The results of this Enlightenment project of disembedded rationality are well known: loss of place, self-alienation, social injustice and ecological devastation chief among them. A scientific theory of Earth as a self-regulating system is not enough in itself to overturn any of these aspects of our post-industrial malaise. But the knowledge of a living Earth is compelling enough, I believe, to inspire both the aesthetic skill and religious will of humanity into a renewed relationship with the Earth.

 

  In this essay, I will try to lay down a path in walking toward a Gaian praxecology by offering a more integral, or at least nonmodern (Latour, 1993) narrative concerning human-earth relations. A planetary (and so seemingly universal) mythos will be sought, though careful attention will be paid to nature as place, or topos (commonplace). As Donna Haraway has written (1992, p. 296), “We turn to this topic [nature] to order our discourse, to compose our memory …[because] nature is the place to rebuild public culture...[and] is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the Earth.” 

 

  The choice of titles, “Gaia,” has been criticized for its gender essentialism and mythic connotations. I will try to convey why Gaia, the ancient Greek goddess, is among the most appropriate of names for the living Earth. Her theogonic origins in the poetry of Hesiod, Ovid, and others is an apt reminder that disentanglement of science from myth, or knowledge from narrative, while logically possible, is vacuous in practice.[3] Praxecology is not theory or praxis alone, but human understanding-as-participation in the meaningful cycles and evolutions of the Earth community and Cosmos.

 

  The protagonists in my story include Haraway, who reminds us that biology is not life itself, but a cultural discourse about life; Thomas Berry, who offers an original relationship to the universe; Bruno Latour, who demystifies science in action by unveiling the networks of relationships supporting its facts; William Irwin Thompson, whose vision of a Gaian politique helps us re-imagine the world; Francisco Varela, whose enactive cognitive science shows how worlds are brought forth through autopoietic structural coupling; and Gaia, our common ground, producer of all bodies and muse of every mind.  Others, too, will lend a helping hand along the way of this logos of the living Earth.

 

  “Ecology,” according to Thomas Berry (p. 84, 1999), “is functional cosmology.” This suggests that an adequate understanding of the universe as a whole is not at all separate from knowing how to live sustainably within one’s particular community of life. The whole and the part are mutually implicated in any  “functional cosmology.” Any truly universal knowledge should also be applicable and adaptable to life at home. Such a relational approach to cognition-as-living will guide us along our journey through various philosophical holzwege, or wood paths (German: wegen- “to make a way,” wagen- “to risk”), with the hope that we emerge at a clearing revealing new, perhaps unexpected, ways forward. Neither representational, nor constructionist epistemologies will suffice for such thoughtful and heartfelt wanderings, as I am concerned here with concrete matters of life and death, not decontextualized ideas of transcendent truth or the moral resignation of unmoored relativism. This discourse concerning the Earth is an attempt to refigure the way words relate to worlds, in part because “humans are not the ones who arbitrarily add the ‘symbolic dimension’ to pure material forces. These forces are as transcendent, active, agitated, spiritual, as we are” (p. 128, Latour, 1995). The following pages will record the traces of my struggle to enact a story, not about Earth, but of, as, and for an Earth personified: Gaia. 

 

  The clearing I hope will be discovered at the end of my praxecologic textual way-making is but the beginning of our long overdue transformation from disembedded techno-industrial consumers into symbiotic participants in a flourishing Gaian-polity. “The urgent task of ecological culture,” says Rosemary Radford Ruether, “is to convert human consciousness to the Earth, so that we can use our minds to understand the web of life and to live in that web of life as sustainers, rather than destroyers, of it” (p. 250, 1992). It is my hope that my words may participate in the Great Work of weaving Western consciousness back into the tapestry of life from which it sprang.

 

Gaian Mythos

  Humanity is unique, in the double sense of being both one with (Latin: unus) the Earth/Cosmos and undeniably alone. What it is, exactly, that makes our species so special is a matter of contention. The risk one takes in defining the difference between human and nonhuman is that some group be marginalized by not being included in the favored category. History makes it quite apparent that societies become more willing to commit atrocities when they employ antagonistic linguistic classifications (race, class, gender, species, etc.). But even to deny the difference is already to have marked the topic as a forbidden fruit. I cannot avoid this risk if I wish to begin my story (cross-cultural communication depends inevitably, or at least etymologically, on munitions, an opening shot), but can only provisionally offer that what makes us human is our being always already embedded participants in evolving worlds of meaning, and knowing so. Knowledge is what distinguishes humanity, but all knowing is situated within the promiscuous meanings and romantic-comedic-tragic narratives of embodied life among others, both human and non.

 

  Our human capacity for knowledge also clues us into our ignorance, the fact that we lack, perhaps indefinitely, a complete understanding of how we came to be and how best to live. Nonetheless, as Wendell Berry has written, “…we have to act on the basis of what we know, [even if] what we know is incomplete” (p. 10, 2000). Our cultures must provide us with a flexible way to navigate the unmappable complexities of the terrain of life on this evolving planet. Mythic narrative is one way to keep our balance while walking upon such uncertain ground. 

 

  Even modern technosciences of life have deep mythological roots, and so to properly contextualize matters of fact I must invoke the poetic images of the ancient past (of at least our Western, alphabetic tradition).

 

  Hesiod, Ovid, Homer and other Greek orators have given poetic, divinatory, or dramatic tribute to Gaia, the “mother of all [and] eldest of all beings” (Homeric hymn XXX). She is imagined to have emerged at the beginning of the world from the undifferentiated, lifeless mass of Chaos. Once her earthly foundation was in place, she birthed the sky, the mountains, and the sea, along with countless other beings, mortal and immortal. She was, for ancient humanity (on all continents, though by other names), personified as Grandmother, revered for her creative generativity and life-sustaining soils.  

 

  For us, despite living thousands of years later in an age of “Reason,” it remains wise to remember with William Irwin Thompson that a Gaian evolutionary theory “requires not simply training and data collection, but imagination” (p. 252, 1991). Imagination, for Thompson, is what integrates perception and enacts coherent worlds of situated meaning:

 

  “What brings forth a world is the human body as a field of metaphoric extension of the known into the unknown… [Imagination’s] ability to stabilize a world derives from…preverbal geometries of behavior we have come to cognize as the way things happen,” (p. 253, ibid).

 

  These preverbal geometries of behavior archetypally structure our unconscious experience of the Earth. In those “mythic times called the ‘Scientific Revolution’” (p. 1, Haraway, 1997), the Cartesian coordinate plane emerged to refigure the human body-mind, constructing a flattened background upon which the Western imagination could perform its world-making magic at relative distance from the local complexities and particular faces of Earth.

 

  The re-imagining of the world I am after requires locating the supposedly universal scientific truths responsible for disenchanting the Earth and sky. “[The scientific tribe], says Latour, “like earlier ones, projects its own special categories onto Nature; what is new is that it pretends it has not done so,” (p. 102, 1993). This pretense to objectivity, ironically, is what allowed Lovelock to publish his first hypotheses (p. 568-570, Nature, 1965) concerning how best to detect extraterrestrial life (by searching for “order” and “non-equilibrium”). The ambiguous boundaries between life and non-life, much like those between human and nonhuman, are fraught with controversy.[4] Lovelock’s generalizations, however, seem to offer at least relatively universal characteristics applicable even to alien worlds. As far as Lovelock is concerned, life is a planetary affair, involving even rocks in the metabolic processes of growth and evolution.

 

  Our living planet has produced not only complex eco-semiotic webs of organic community, but also a special primate who can know the difference between sign and thing (and who surfs the mystery in between with myth). This differential knowing raises the specter of minds separate from bodies, of a noosphere over and above the biosphere using it as a means for its own elevated ends. But we need not reproduce the Sacred Image of the Same by reifying our differences; we can instead, through a self-critical and diffractive consciousness, bring forth histories of entangled meaning where reality and idea, science and story, Nature and Culture mutually constitute one another (Haraway, 1997). The cosmogenesis of Earth is as much mental, cultural, and transcendent as it is physical, natural, and immanent. There is no one true and ideal copy of the world that might be reproduced culturally or technologically. Reality is not a reflected image in the human mind, but co-emerges out of the interference patterns generated by the varied material-semiotic activities of countless earthlings, most of whom are not human (p. 299, Haraway, 1992).  A Gaian praxecology attempts to make this radically inter-species realization explicit in both our ecological practices and our discourse.

 

  Imagine a world where Lovelock’s scientific narratives about the “Ages of Gaia” are tied together in a distributed and layered way (p. 121, Haraway, 1997.) with the ancient myths and mysterious organic origins of so many other human and nonhuman natures-cultures. Gaian praxecology requires not hegemonic universalism or globalization, but a shared discourse of common origins always open to interpellation (p. 49-50, ibid.). Humanity does not yet share a sacred story of creation, but our global economic activities have already inextricably linked our biological destinies. The future of our species depends upon a more integral relation between economic theory and ecological practice, myth and science, and imagination and knowledge. A Gaian praxecology is at least an opening gesture toward a more appropriate relation between these dualisms.

 

  Earth recognized and lived with as what Ian Hacking (p. 31-32, 1999) has called an “interactive kind,” a person, would bring our species even closer to what a Gaian praxecology implies. Reconnecting on a personal level with the Earth makes evident the real ways that our ideas are actualized in the bringing forth of worlds. For too long, Gaia has been conceived of as a dead rock mutely bearing oil drills and explosives, a mere standing reserve of resources fed into the human market, and only then made valuable. The result is that much of her body (including the parts of her that we are) has become toxic and infertile. The time has come to pay respect again to the Grandmother of all who eat and breathe beneath the sun. I call for a polyphonic Gaian mythos sung by humans and nonhumans alike, “…for things [quasi-objects] too have to be elevated to the dignity of narrative” (p. 90, Latour, 1993).

 

Enactive Science

  The particular discourse of biology is one that I, like Haraway, “value, want to participate in and make better…and believe to be culturally, politically, and epistemologically important” (p. 218, ibid.). The biology of the late Francisco Varela, more recently carried forward by Evan Thompson, strikes me as especially important because it arises out of an awareness of the “unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing” (p. 25, Maturana & Varela, 1988). In other words, deep inquiry into biology can reveal that our ontology, praxis, and epistemology are knotted together such that “…every act of knowing brings forth a world” (p. 26, ibid.).  

 

  Varela’s central conceptual contribution (along with Humberto Maturana) to the study of life is the theory of autopoiesis.[5] The theory is part of a larger move away from current orthodoxy in biology that understands organisms as “heteronomous units operating by a logic of correspondence”; instead, Varela offers a new biology that sees organisms as “autonomous units operating by a logic of coherence” (p. 50, ed. by William Irwin Thompson, 1987). The standard, gene-centric perspective of neo-Darwinist biology maintains that individual organisms are the puppets of their DNA, struggling to achieve fitness by way of natural selection into pre-given niches. They are “other-determined” (heteronomous) because the forms of their bodies and behaviors are imposed extrasomatically by a supposedly objective world[6] and endosomatically by supposedly objective genetic algorithms. Evolutionary success is retroactively explained as the result of a correspondence between an organism’s body, instincts, and thoughts (all reducible to genetic coding) and the external world. Varela’s autopoietic view, in contrast, allows us to see organisms as autonomous and purposeful beings whose success is explained not by correct representation of a pre-given, objective reality, but by adequate structural coupling[7] with others allowing for the enaction of coherent and durable material-semiotic worlds.

 

  Varela’s penchant for transdisciplinarity lead him to link his autopoietic biology to cognitive science, and his enactive theory of cognition to sociology. Varela has described enaction by borrowing the words of the poet Antonio Machado: “Wanderer the road is your footsteps, nothing else; you lay down a path in walking” (p. 63, 1987).

 

  Evan Thompson has highlighted five features central to the theory of enactive cognition (p. 13, 2007):

 

1.     1. “…living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain themselves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own cognitive domains.”

2.     2. “…the nervous system is an autonomous dynamic system [that] actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity according to its operation as a circular and reentrant network of interacting neurons.”

3.     3. “…cognition is the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action.”

a.     “Cognitive structures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action.”

b.     Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of endogenous, dynamic patterns of neural activity, which in turn inform sensorimotor coupling.”

4.    4. “…a cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment.”

5.     5. “…experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated in a careful phenomenological manner.”

 

  One consequence of the enactive approach is that the Cartesian quest for epistemological certainty becomes but the expression of a particular “cognitive domain” (see # 1) made possible by the abstract languages of mathematics, precise measurements of machine technologies, and controlled laboratory environment. If the nervous system is operationally closed (see # 2), its function cannot be to modestly mirror an external, objective reality, even if the modest witnesses are highly trained scientists allied with powerful instruments that extend their sensory reach. The operational closure of the nervous system forestalls a representational account of its activity; its role must be maintaining coherence, rather than correspondence, between organism and environment. New techniques may open up previously hidden worlds, as when Galileo first turned a telescope to the sky and revealed the moons of Jupiter in 1610, or Hooke first recognized cells through a microscope in 1665, but one cannot speak of finally discovering the real as if it existed independently of our bodily and inter-bodily experience of its meaning.

 

  As Haraway has suggested (p. 199, 1997), “…objectivity is less about realism than about intersubjectivity.” She yearns for us to come to see objectivity as a way of “forming ties across wide distances” (ibid.), instead of as the privileged and modest perspective of self-invisible European men who remain somehow unpolluted by their ambiguously situated bodies (p. 23-32, ibid.). If science can claim relative epistemological privilege, it is not the result of transcending culture, but of the ever-accelerating, ever-expanding mobility and combinability of the traces scientists and their cyborg surrogates have constructed within their networks. Outside of these special networks of labs, machines, and shared languages, scientific facts have little relevance.[8]

 

  Referring to technoscience, as opposed to just science, emphasizes the extent to which knowledge emerges out of skillful action in embodied situations (see #’s 3 and 4). Science has always been dependent upon technological sensorimotor extensions to deepen its understanding of that commonplace called by its peculiar culture “nature.” Artifacts and their articulations, including alphabetic technologies, shape the kinds of worlds scientists are capable of enacting. Even mathematics is a figurative language (p.11, ibid.), constructing analogies between otherwise unrelated domains of experience.[9]

 

  Varela’s biology has implications not only for scientific epistemology, but also for society and human-earth relations. Echoing the sentiments of Haraway, Varela writes that:

 

“…biology is the source of most metaphors in current thinking…and expresses the possibility of a worldview beyond the split between us and it…what we do is what we know, and ours is but one of many possible worlds. [Enactive cognition] is…the laying down of a world, with no warfare between self and other” (p. 62, ed. by William Irwin Thompson, 1987).

 

  It is our shared biological lineage that secures the basic structure of the worlds we can bring forth together via linguistic and empathic structural coupling. But culture is not bound by nature, or rather human nature is sufficiently malleable that diverse cultural expressions can emerge within isolated social groups. It is often only through inter-cultural confrontation and misunderstanding that members of one society come to recognize the unthought background of their enacted worlds. Varela is at pains to convey to us the message of his biology, that “…as human beings, we have only the world which we create with others” (p. 246, 1988). Unless I can encounter the differences between my (or my culture’s) cognitive domain and another’s with the willingness to make room for their meanings besides my own, I undermine the biological process of structural coupling that produces livable worlds.

 

  Varela calls this willingness to forego self-certainty for the sake of enacting inclusive worlds with others love. Love, says Varela (and Maturana), “is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us, there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness” (ibid.). Most scientists would dismiss such claims because they overshoot the objective scope of the scientific enterprise. But Varela’s biology is an attempt to break down the Cartesian divide between rationality and emotion, between what is and what ought to be. Biology is the study of life, but in the context of the recursive logic of enactivism, it becomes the self-study of our own living. Perhaps some physicists can study the mathematical regularities of measurable matter without too much personal investment, but to study the processes that birth and sustain our very being inevitably calls for profound personal and interpersonal involvement. And because of the identity between knowing and doing, the stories we tell about how life came to be and what it is doing here will determine what sorts of future worlds we bring forth together.

 

“Whatever we do in every domain, whether concrete (walking) or abstract (philosophical reflection), involves us totally in the body, for it takes place through our structural dynamics and through our structural interactions. Everything we do is a structural dance in the choreography of coexistence” (p. 248, ibid.).

  Varela’s autopoietic biology is a critical response to the mechanistic trends of mainstream studies of living organization. He emphasizes the autonomy of individual organisms while also situating them within the eco-social environments that sustain them materially and semiotically. Varela also engages the philosophical implications of biology in a more penetrating way than most other scientists when he recognizes the dynamic unity of mind and body. Thought, perception, and action are knotted together in the process of living, and life is by its very nature a co-creative, world-making affair. Acknowledging this, a Gaian praxecology strives, not to disembed local cultures (whether scientific or indigenous) from their specific histories of structural coupling, but to expand their cognitive domains such that they begin to comport themselves appropriately in light of the knowledge of the whole Earth as a single living system that all beings, no matter our cultural or even biological differences, depend upon for survival.

 

Discursive Earth

  Language is the primary instrument of human knowing, the tool of tools that opens up worlds of meaning more flexible (and reflexive) than the bio-semiotic endowments granted to most other organisms. But the virtue of human language is also its tragic flaw, as the creative power of words enable the imagination to almost entirely detach from the actuality of the body and the Earth. One result of such disengagement is what A. N. Whitehead has called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”: abstract worlds of words and images can restructure not only thought, but perception and action, such that the concrete lived experience of the uniqueness of individual persons, to take one example, becomes obscured by pre-conceived notions of culture, race, and class (etc.), leading to an objectification of others that short-circuits the process of linguistic and empathic structural coupling.

 

  Varela suggests that human language evolved as a result of increased socialization and loving cooperation between our hominid ancestors (p. 220, 1988). The female shift from estral cycles to nonseasonal sexuality and the frontal coitus resulting from upright posture are mentioned as possible reasons for the development of such a complex and expressive behavior as speech (p. 219, ibid.). Evan Thompson also singles out “…the evolution of a new stage of development, namely, childhood,” which provides developing human beings with an incredible plasticity, so much in fact that “…individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, a result of the communally handed down norms, conventions, symbolic artifacts, and cultural traditions in which the individual is always already embedded” (p. 409-411, 2007). Writing may have arisen later (around the 4^th millennium BCE) for economic reasons (p. 13, Jean, 1987), but the spoken word appears to have emerged originally as a result of the desire for increased interpersonal intimacy.

 

  A Gaian praxecology requires a novel way of relating to language as primarily communicative, rather than descriptive or representational. The meaning of our words comes not from a correspondence between them, our brains, and objects or events in the world, but from the consensual coordination of our bodies and their linguistic intentions. Social coherence, rather than representational correspondence, produces meaningful intersubjective linguistic domains.

 

  The communicative origins of language should make it clear that claims to establish a pure observer language free of cultural idiosyncrasy (and so capable of objective description of phenomena) are more political than scientific. Human beings speak with one another in order to share emotion and direct attention, and so any notion of descriptive or explanatory truth must include at least the potential agreement between structurally coupled agents. If one person’s emically verified description contradicts another’s, there has not been a factual conflict but a failure to communicate.

 

  The move away from representational accounts of language is the first step toward “…[placing] the human within the dynamics of the planet rather than [placing] the planet within the dynamics of the human” (p. 160, T. Berry, 1999). Only by recognizing language as a poetic product of the Earth’s own desire to know itself through autobiography can the psychological alienation and spiritual disenchantment so characteristic of our historical moment be overcome.[10] According to Berry, “this awakening is our human participation in the dream of the Earth” (p. 165, ibid.). As I shared above, our language and the imaginative capacities it facilitates evolved because humans grew more capable of empathic structural coupling. As the cultural and symbolic systems that emerged became more complex, they began to reify differences between one another and, at least in the Western world, between humanity and nature. In effect, Western consciousness detached from the dream of the Earth and fell into its own dream of endless economic growth fueled by technological progress.

  A flourishing Gaian-polity will require rooting human imagination and language back in the body of the Earth and Cosmos, such that our evolutionary journey from protozoa to speaking primates becomes an expression of the planet’s own joie de vivre.

 

  As Rick Tarnas has written:

 

“The human spirit does not merely prescribe nature's phenomenal order; rather, the spirit of nature brings forth its own order through the human mind when that mind is employing its full complement of faculties--intellectual, volitional, emotional, sensory, imaginative, aesthetic, epiphanic…human language itself can be recognized as rooted in a deeper reality, as reflecting the universe's unfolding meaning…Human thought does not and cannot mirror a ready-made objective truth in the world; rather, the world's truth achieves its existence when it comes to birth in the human mind” (p. 435, 1991).

 

  A participatory approach like Tarnas’ is exactly the kind of relationship to language and culture that praxecology seeks. Humanity, rather than the alienated dominator of Earth, can become Gaia’s most articulate storyteller and most potent dream weaver. Logos did not arrive in the universe from beyond at some point in history, but has been a part of cosmogenesis since the beginning.[11]

 

 

Conclusion 

The spiritual import of a logos of the living earth cannot be underestimated. Unless the human spirit can begin to feel at home again upon the planet of its birth, it will surely soon become the planet of its death. “As physical resources become less available,” says Berry,

 

“psychic [or spiritual] energy must support the human project in a special manner. This situation brings us to a new reliance on powers within the universe and also to experience of the deeper self. The universe must be experienced as the Great Self. Each is fulfilled in the other: the Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self, and the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self. Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this surge of energy from the source that has brought the universe through the centuries. New fields of energy become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration.” (p. 170, 1999).

 

  The ongoing celebration of the cosmos and Earth community, indeed, provides us with a mythos worth performing and participating in. Indigenous peoples have ritually participated in Gaia’s seasonal rhythms for thousands of generations, recognizing the celebratory significance of all life’s activities. A similar re-sacralization of life must go hand in hand with a Gaian praxecology. Ritual is the concrete foundation of culture, the source of our most fundamental habits and dispositions. Renewing our connection with the “mother of all things” can bring an end to the fragmented Chaos of post-industrial civilization, giving us the inspiration to tell the meaningful stories of creation and regeneration going on around, between, and within us. It is through such scientifically-informed, mythically-imbued narratives and rituals that a Gaian praxecology can be brought forth. All of our cultural institutions must seek their guidance from the roles granted them by such numinous, celebratory stories such that they perform their world-making work for the glory of Gaia, rather than for the profit of a few human persons.

 

  My story has now reached its end, but hopefully the holzwege I have laid down in walking has provided an opening for fellow earthly explorers to follow in my footsteps. Our ultimate destination cannot be prematurely known, as the mythic landscapes we must travel are dense and full of mystery. We can only hope to understand the current planetary moment by wholeheartedly participating in the multibillion-year cosmic performance of powers that produced and continues to nourish us. Science and spirituality must mutually aid us in our struggle to enact a Gaian praxecology, because only a more integral relation between intelligence and imagination will allow the human being to dream with the Earth once more. 

  

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

1)     Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth. 1988. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.

2)     Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. 1999. Bell Tower: New York.

3)     Berry, Wendell. Life is a Miracle: Essays Against Modern Superstition. 2000. Counterpoint: Washington D.C.

4)     Haraway, J. Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Science. 1997. Routledge: New York.

5)     Hesiod. Theogony. 1953. Bobbs-Merrill: New York.

6)     Jean, Georges. Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts. 1992. Abrams: New York.

7)     Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. 1987. Harvard: Cambridge.

8)     Maturana, Humberto and Varela, J. Francisco. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. 1988. Shambala: Boston.

9)     Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. 1989. Harper: San Francisco.

10)    Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View. 1991. Ballantine Books: New York.

11)    Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. 2007. Harvard: Cambridge.

12)    Thompson, William Irwin (editor). Gaia: A Way of Knowing, Political Implications of the New Biology. 1987. Lindisfarne: New York.

13)    Thompson, William Irwin (editor). Gaia 2: Emergence, The New Science of Becoming. 1991. Lindisfarne: New York.

 

 

 

The following is a series of emails exchanged between Mat Wilson and I over the course of the last several months (my messages will be in bold, Mr. Wilson's not):

---------------------------------

Mat,

First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that just yesterday I watched a video where an objectivist read something Rand said about the encounter between European colonists and the many indigenous populations who originally inhabited North America. Basically, she tried to justify the genocide by saying the natives had no concept of individuality, rights, or property, and so it was somehow moral for the colonists to just take the land and kill them all in the process. I find this absolutely appalling, both because of how she seems to ethnocentrically apply the idea of non-aggression, but also because of how she conceives of the earth as something to be "owned" and only valuable when produced and sold by humans. This kind of anthropocentric attitude has lead to the largest extinction event in 65 million years (approx. 20,000 species are going extinct every year; the background rate is about 1 a year) and caused a forthcoming change in climate that could very well spell the end of civilization as we know it. So even though I am rather unsettled about her perspective, I will try to approach Rand's philosophy "objectively", as they say.

I just read Rand's epistemology on Wikipedia. I know, not the best source, but its good enough for an introduction, eh? I have a few issues:

1) While I reject the extreme relativism of post-modernism, I think there are some very important insights it has provided that any serious philosophy today needs to take into consideration.

a) there is the issue of logic. There are many kinds of logic aside from the Aristotelian. There is no one absolute and correct Logic, as philosophers once thought. Logic is normative, in other words. So long as all involved agree on the kind of logic to be employed, it is 'objectively' true. In a similar sense, there is no longer one kind of geometry. Euclid's geometry is now only one possible form of geometry, next to Riemannian, projective, etc. geometries. This is important considering how Rand dismisses the necessary/contingent distinction. We can say that there are many possible space-time manifolds because we know there are many possible geometries. So our particular space-time manifold is not necessary, it could have been otherwise.

b) there is the issue of multicultural sensitivity, which obviously Rand does not understand, as her opinion on the colonization of NA shows. Her "rationality" is not Absolute. It arose out of a particular cultural and historical context and is not necessarily objective for all people. There are many ways of knowing, each valid in its own sphere. Again, I'm not a relativist, but nor am I an absolutist or objectivist. I think there is truth, but we must always be careful to remember that truth can be approached from a whole variety of perspectives.

2) I think Rand's epistemology neglects the importance of emotion for cognition. fMRI scans of the brain in action show the limbic system (associated with emotion) and the prefrontal cortex (associated with rational thought) are always active together, mutually dependent one on the other. This is true even when subjects are evaluating the truth of statements such as 2+2=4. This is true for us not only because it is logically correct, but because it is somehow pleasurable for us emotionally.

I could go on but I'll stop now and wait for your response. Thanks for your interest in engaging me in all this, by the way!

take care,
Matt

--------------------------------


------------------------------

Matt,


Mat,

The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has helped me conceive of how animals are thinking and conceptualizing beings despite the fact that they do not speak. Whitehead writes (in "Process and Reality") that propositional thought does not require language. Dogs, for example, DO think spatially about object relations. Otherwise they would not be able to catch a frisbee. The pervasive Cartesianism that separates mind from body in our modern culture prevents us from understanding how bodily motility (human or not) is already a form of cognitive articulation. Language is simply a further development of the silent propositional logic of the body; it allows us to reflect upon our own meanings, to reframe situations and so define more appropriate and complex behaviors in a way not accessible to non-speaking animals. Obviously, as you go backwards down the chain of complexity, organisms become less conscious and more instinctual. But there is no sharp line separating humans from animals. Dogs are conscious, in my opinion. Insects are not, though certainly they are still experientially-aware in some limited sense (not blind machines or mere automatons).

We like to think of ourselves as the rational animal, but I think this is largely a future aspiration and not a current reality. Our current global socio-economic situation is about as inefficient and irrational, not to mention morally egregious, as I could imagine. Inefficient because it (industrialism) is thermodynamically unsustainable, morally egregious because it (capitalism) is feeding off the poor periphery (global South) to accumulate wealth and resources at the industrialized, "developed" centers/cities (in the West). One of the things Hornborg discusses at length in his book is how money/wealth is never "created," but is rather part of a zero-sum game in which any gain for one party comes at the loss of another. Capitalism is inherently exploitative and based in unjust social relations. Money is fetishized (as Marx recognized) and obscures inequitable personal relations by raising a veil of abstract exchange value between us. We think some invisible hand, or intrinsic goodness of "the market" maintains fairness, but this is just ideological medicine for a deeply rooted psychological sickness alienating us from one another and the earth which birthed and sustains us. Human beings and their economy do not produce anything but new symbolic/cultural relations--the only true producer is the Sun, or perhaps plant life, which converts light into food and air for the rest of the biosphere to eat and breath. Until we recognize that ecological relations trump any contrived "economic law," we will continue to pillage the planet and exploit the labor and resources of "undeveloped" people. The logic of capitalism requires that there be a class of poor people and cheap resources to be exploited by a class of rich owners. We will never live in a just and equitable world until we totally re-think our economic relations.

Another thing that needs critiquing (in my humble opinion) is the Anglo-American (since at least Locke) tendency to abstract the "individual" from the society/culture in which they are embedded. Individuality does not come before society. Everything you as an individual know and do is provided for you by a cultural matrix of relations. Your "individual rights" arise from and are protected by "collective responsibilities." Your identity is at least partially constructed by those you interact with on a day to day basis, as well as by the language you happened to be born into. Don't get me wrong, individuality is a wonderful thing. But it is not an end-in-itself. We cherish individuality because of the expression it affords us, and expression is a communal value. We individualize because we want to share our authentic selves with everyone else. Autonomy is always in communion.

-------------------------------------

Great point on the dog.. how could it calculate the proper steps to catch a frisbee? I was actually thinking of the dog when writing that there is evidence that it does have a 'ghost' in its 'shell'.

"We like to think of ourselves as the rational animal, but I think this is largely a future aspiration and not a current reality."

Yes, the unique part of of being rational does imply volition. And each person must choose out of their own volition to operate through reason (i.e. concept formulating and hypothesizing and testing). It seems the average person, though, lives in ignorance and happily lives passively never pondering on philosophy and just hoping good luck or fate will continue to provide them of their wants and needs. They don't care about history, or what makes things works.

"Inefficient because it (industrialism) is thermodynamically unsustainable"

What is your definition of, "industrialism"? And I hope it's not something to do with factories or cars.. that is technology. (including the waste it may produce. All organisms produce waste of some sort. Humans just happen to have ugly smoke come out of their cars. But cows fart grass and deteriorate the ozone.. or so I've heard!)

"morally egregious because it (capitalism) is feeding off the poor periphery (global South) to accumulate wealth and resources at the industrialized, "developed" centers/cities (in the West)."

Capitalism doesn't do anything. Capitalism doesn't even exist. It is only a word to describe the interpersonal interactions among people as traders (not just monetary trade either.. but any sort of relationship where each party has the intent to make a mutual-benefit that will further enhance and/or sustain his life.. including love, conversation, etc...).

So, if we break it down: I take what you're saying as, 'It is morally egregious to use one's mind and live as a human being through free, rational thought and trade amongst one's self and others.'

You must be more specific. Who is committing a crime against whom? In a politics that recognizes and upholds the individual.. it is only the individual that is prosecuted and not his neighbor that had no part in it.

"Money is fetishized (as Marx recognized) and obscures inequitable personal relations by raising a veil of abstract exchange value between us."

Money is a unit of credit remunerated to a person for his contribution to a society's economy and livlihood. We cannot eliminate money and say, "You scratch my back, and I'll scracth yours."

If we relied on that bromide.. it may be that simple in certain cases but it's just like arithmetic v.s. algebra. We can deal with simple, direct addition and multiplication of known, simple numbers but when several other 'factors' (pun intended.. think polynomials ;) comes into play and exponents and unknown exponents, etc.... No one can control what is beyond their mind's direct, perceptual capacity so we must resort to "abstract exchange value between us" because properly-formed concepts are valid pointers of what exists in actual reality. It all has to do with 'unit-economy' or what Ayn Rand called, "crow epistemology".

"We think some invisible hand, or intrinsic goodness of "the market" maintains fairness, but this is just ideological medicine for a deeply rooted psychological sickness alienating us from one another and the earth which birthed and sustains us."

That "invisible hand" is your mind's [volitional] power of abstract reasoning and ability to form concepts. You cannot know everything.. no one can know 'everything' (at least directly/perceptually ;). The market does maintain fairness as long as a gun (or any form of force or fraud) is NOT involved to acquire value. We are far from that though and politicians are currently trying to take over the medical industry in America.

The Earth, as a planet, is an unconscious piece of rock (if I may be so crude ;). The sun has no consciousness either. It is true that they have given us our existence, but they are not dieties and did not volitionally intend to create us. We cannot 'thank' them.

"Human beings and their economy do not produce anything but new symbolic/cultural relations--the only true producer is the Sun, or perhaps plant life, which converts light into food and air for the rest of the biosphere to eat and breath."

Yes, but aren't those "symbolic/cultural" (and material formations, too! ;) wonderful and grand!? And like I said, the Sun has no volition and is not some kind of diety. It is not a producer.. it's just a great resource that happened to be put in the right spot. ;P

(Some people like to get nice tans, too, with it. Others think about how they'll make a solar panel out of it to power their entire city. But we don't give it thanks or money.. it demands none.)

"Until we recognize that ecological relations trump any contrived "economic law," we will continue to pillage the planet and exploit the labor and resources of "undeveloped" people."

These "underdeveloped people" are humans, right?? Or are you referring to plants and bugs? There are no "underdeveloped" humans (unless the person has down-syndrome or similar.. then you're missing a chromosome or whatever and really missing out on major qualities of life). There is really only irrational cultures that have psycho dictators or politicians leading them.(actually.. 'forcing' would be a better word)

"The logic of capitalism requires that there be a class of poor people and cheap resources to be exploited by a class of rich owners."

I hear that argument all the time. It always lacks the context of volition and current reality. The latter, reality, argument: The poorest people in America today, are farrrr richer than some of the richest kings and tribesmen in history... Those bossy monarchs sure as hell didn't have internet, tv, heating and air, running water, grocery stores, sugary goods, microwave and fast foods, etc. etc. etc.. even a couple hundred years ago!)

And volition: Success is not an accident. Anyone that is willing and determined to, can become rich beyond what they dreamed possible. It doesn't mean everyone will make several hundred million dollars.. but pretty much anyone willing to refine their studies, work, and discoveries and maintain it.. will do something tremendous (or even small!) that will reward them justly.

But when politicians start pointing the guns for pursuing one's own interests.. that's when jobs and poverty start pouring down.

"We will never live in a just and equitable world until we totally re-think our economic relations. "

I absolutely agree! (just not in the same way you do ;)

Alright, this will probably be my last letter for the night. Write me a short reply on whether or not you still disagree and if I cleared up anything or confused you...

I still have yet to respond to your last paragraph. I will do so tomorrow but I do agree that identity and autonomy is largely inherited and "is provided for you by a cultural matrix of relations."

I think that statement is written eloquently! (namely, "cultural matrix of relations")

Btw, I think we could get away with some animal rights. I think it's absolutely horrific when these weirdos scrape fur off of *living* animals and leave them in pure agony... I also don't like when people allow their dogs to get in dog fights and bet on the dogs....

--------------------------------------

Well, I wouldn't want to say the dog "calculates" the proper steps to catch the frisbee, as if it projected a Cartesian grid onto the world in order to decipher its coordinates and direction. Rather, the dog's knowledge of the frisbee's spatio-temporal arc is implicit and embodied: a "know-how" rather than a "know-what." It is much the same for you and I when we, say, encounter a flight of stairs. We don't need to logically analyze each movement of our legs in advance in order to walk up the steps; instead, our legs do the "thinking" for us in real time.

I should point out that even this formulation ("our legs do our thinking for us") seems to suggest a dualism between "you" and "your" legs, as if there were some metaphysical chasm separating one from the other. It is more ontologically honest to say "I am a body" than "I have a body," for who is this "I" apart from the body-as-lived? You are the active attunement of your body to others and the world. Your volition is a function of your biological constitution: animation-from-within, will, purpose, etc. are not exclusively human possessions. Rather, they are part and parcel of being alive. Every organism is in this sense ensouled. Even the biosphere as a whole constitutes a living system with its own intrinsic telos. In fact, human purposes are best described as derivative of the primary directionality of the cosmos at large (which are diverse, ranging from creativity to cataclysm). The human being is quite unique, I wouldn't want to deny that. We are the leading edge of a 13.7 billion year cosmogenesis, leading because we are the first species, not only to know (to be self-conscious) in the general sense, but specifically to know transcendent love. Ironically, self-consciousness is only possible if we have internalized otherness. Internalizing otherness is synonymous with loving another selflessly, giving oneself to an other for the sake of something greater than either of you as individuals.

All this is directly precisely against the Randian ethos of enlightened selfishness. To my mind (as they say), such a doctrine ignores the discoveries of modern depth psychology (Nietzsche, Freud, Adler, Jung, Lacan, Hillman, Tarnas, Rozak...) concerning the various reasons and ways in which the ego is not the master of its house (the psyche). The notion of acting out of rational self-interest is a tautological platitude. It's meaning is always self-referentially defined, and so the ego can perpetually convince itself that it is in control, even if in actual fact its life remains largely unpredictable and mysterious. The philosophical or reflective life is not the norm, not by any stretch of the imagination. It involves what I mentioned above, an incorporation of what initially appears foreign or other (in the case of philosophy, this is Wisdom/Sophia) by way of loving cognition. Philosophy is quite literally the love of wisdom.

Industrialism is the use of machines (both technological and social) to transfer extropy (negentropy) from the global periphery to "developed" centers of capital accumulation. In the process of thus transferring highly ordered energy and materials (i.e., extropy) from resource rich localities to technologically sophisticated cities, industrial machines produce tremendous amounts of entropy (waste, pollution, etc.). The net gain in "productivity" and "profit" for those at the center is at the expense of the ecosystems, peoples, and cultures surrounding them (for example, the US imports Ecuadorian oil in exchange for the exported weapons their government needs to secure the resource from rebellious peasants). Economics is a zero-sum game. There is no growth in one sector without the destruction of another. This is the main lesson we learn by applying thermodynamics to the global marketplace.

All organisms produce waste, it is true. But unlike global industrial capitalism (GIC), nature reproduces itself differentially, in myriads of forms and niches. This provides for long-term stability (evolutionary stability, no doubt... stability is here defined not as static conservation, but as the continuous movement toward diversity and mutuality).  GIC reproduces homogenously, turning the whole planet into English speaking, McDonalds eating consumers because it is built atop a logic of general-purpose money whose value is so abstract that it can substitute for almost any cultural meaning. Hence the rapid commodification of EVERYTHING, from food to friendship, so typical of the waning years of the industrial system. Marx was right about at least one thing: capitalism is invincible to outside ideologies, but inevitably tends toward its own self-destruction (because of ecological inefficiency leading to biospheric crisis and moral egregiousness leading to class revolt).

I have nothing against mutually-enhancing relationships between people. In fact, I think they are our only hope! I'm arguing that GIC requires a general-purpose monetary system, and that such a system necessarily trends toward the commodification of all facets of life. If you define capitalism differently, that's fine. But as I (and the economists I have read) use the word, it means a specific social arrangement predicated upon the use of abstract, general-purpose money not tied to any concrete social or material reality other than what neoclassical economists call "use value." The result is alienation from oneself and one another, as the only valid way of relating to the world becomes instrumentalism (i.e., how am I to best use other people and nature to get what I want?).

We do have perceptual capacities limiting our interaction with others and the world, but such limits are also possible gateways. Relating to others (and even ourselves) via abstract use-value closes the door to the many other ways of being-towards-others and being-in-the-world. We should be careful not to naturalize the ideology implicit in GIC, that which turns the human subject into a disembedded consumer.

The earth is best seen as a dynamic whole, but for the purposes of analytical understanding we can divide it into a core with several spheres. The core is (to the best of our scientific knowledge) liquid iron. It is spinning rather quickly and produces an electromagnetic field that protects the earth from solar radiation. Without the electromagnetic membrane produce by the activity of the core, life would not be possible on the surface. The lithosphere could be described as rock, but it is not of a single piece but 12 major plates. I don't need to bore you with a lesson on plate tectonics, I'm sure you're familiar. It suffices to say that the movement of these plates represents a sort of self-healing wound. The lithosphere is constantly remaking itself, keeping its surface fresh. The process occurs at speeds so slow relative to human life that it is no wonder we have trouble recognizing it for what it is. The biosphere is the thin film of organic life surviving between lithosphere and atmosphere, an atmosphere whose composition the biosphere created and maintains. The noosphere is hard to describe exactly (because it provides the very possibility of description), but most certainly includes the conceptual meaning you and I are exchanging here as language-speaking humans. All of these spheres of activity unite to birth a single living earth. The sun, of course, is the source of it all. We are basically inside the sun, surrounded on all sides by its heliosphere. Its multi-billion year process of dying supplies earth with the energy it needs to live. Perhaps you do not feel a sense of awe and reverence for these heavenly bodies. I can't help it. Even if I understand rationally/scientifically how it all works, the mystery as to why it should be at all leaves me spellbound and mystified. The only authentic reaction I can muster is of a spiritual sort.

Sorry I have written so much, but I wonder if you'd mind if I posted our conversation on my blog? It is too interesting and poignant not to share!

Yours,
Matthew

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Actually, I was planning on publishing this elsewhere later on and asking you that... (why rewrite the same stuff over and over.. and why have to re-await another opportunity to express and consolidate ideas??) But not as soon you probably will.

I give you explicit permission to post whatever and ALL of what I e-mail you unless I explicitly note otherwise.

I will definitely say you did get very close to the source of your beliefs. I.e. I now understand much more your underlying cognitions and beliefs.

I will respond more tomorrow or this weekend. (including that last paragraph of your last e-mail)

For now, I want to make one comment: If the entire world was 'Americanized'.. i.e. industrialized and materialized and everyone was motivated to find work, keep moving, and motivated to have material wealth.. we would not have such poverty and exploitation that exists all elsewhere in the world. And there would not be soo much of a gap of 'socio-economic classes'. For instance, 15%-18% of the world's wealth (possibly a bit more.. I can show you how I figured this out if you are interested.. just a quick calculation) are from people that are millionaires and above!

The global GDP per capita is $8,100 (directly from Wikipedia ;) ). While $8,100 per person is pretty damn good.... I'm sure hundreds of million make only a few hundred a year at most. Is this because they are so worthless? I think not. It's because their oppressive nation that they have no choice but to stand around idly wondering what to do with themselves. Also they were not born into a culture like you or I where there are so many ideas and fields to explore. Many have no concept of individual liberty like the wackos in North Korea... Many of them love their leader despite what a bastard and psycho he is!

And you totally refuted me (which I was prepared for as hinted in last letter) that the Earth is far more than a 'rock'! I would have to agree. Also, it is quite bizarre that how old and BIG this universe is most of us still seem to think we are the center.

And how many thousands of galaxies exist without any evidence of sentience or consciousness beyond Earth.

More later.

- Mat

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This is a presentation my good friend Chris Becker and I lead at our Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness graduate program's retreat to Esalen in Big Sur, California. Thinkers mentioned include Rudolf Steiner, Walter Ong, Hans Jonas, Plato, Jean Gebser...

"Biology... shows us that we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought forth through reasoning, through the encounter with a stranger, or, more directly, through an expression of a biological interpersonal congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence beside us. This act is called love, or, if we prefer a milder expression, the acceptance of the other person beside us in our daily living. This is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness. Anything that undermines the acceptance of others, from competency to the possession of truth and on to ideologic certainty, undermines the social process because it undermines the biologic process that generates it."

-The Tree of Knowledge: Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Maturana and Varela, 1992, p. 246

The following was posted on PZ's blog, Pharyngula, in response to this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/10/nicholas_wade_flails_at_the_ph.php

Evolution. Theory, fact, or both? I don't think answering these questions is as simple as PZ or Wade make it seem. It involves more than science and philosophy, and forces us to deconstruct notions of a pure science uncontaminated by politics, culture, industry, and the happenstance of history.

"Fact" comes from the Latin, "facere," meaning "to do," or "to make." In this sense, technoscientific facts are constructed not only by what scientific heroes do in the laboratory, but by the larger socioeconomic context determining which questions are worth asking and which research programs provide the best opportunity for investment returns to shareholders. The production and protection of facts costs money. If someone wishes to contest a fact, it also costs money to set up a counter-laboratory. Take a look at Bruno Latour's book, "Science in Action" if you're interested in how scientists and their networks of human and nonhuman allies construct facts.

As for theory, it is difficult to know where to start. Perhaps with PZ's statement that theories "integrate a collection of facts into a useful model in our brains." It is difficult to articulate how mysterious the work of theory is precisely because we must already have assumed a theoretical background to say anything at all about the world. Contrary to PZ's assumption that facts pre-exist theories, I'd argue that the theory (or paradigm) within which one operates determines what counts as a fact. This is only partially true of course, because scientists inevitably begin to notice after a while the unexplained "noise" which builds up around a once favored theory. Given enough world-class scientific experimentation, the history of science clearly shows that revolutions occur and theories collapse, leading to gestalt shifts in the way scientists perceive the world (see Kuhn, 1962). What was once the highest and most authoritative scientific fact can come to seem in a single generation to be the silliest sort of pseudoscientific superstition. Theories change everything, even facts.

This is not a metaphysical claim about reality. I'm not saying human theoretical frameworks literally create nature. I am making phenomenological claim by saying that in every attempt to know the world, the world changes us as we change it. Knowing is not passive observation, but active participation.

So... evolution. Fact, theory, or both? I'd say both. But there is a history behind the word "evolution" which makes it a problematic choice in this context. As much as I'd like to get into the various reasons Darwin refused to use the word anywhere in "Origin of Species" (until he entered it once in the 6th edition), for lack of time I'll just sum up: There are many evolutionary facts (like the genetic unity of all life), just as there are many evolutionary paradigms (neo-Darwinian, DST, Teilhard, Aurobindo, etc).

It’s probably not news to most people that philosophers have a tendency to get stuck in their heads. This is especially true in the field of cognitive science, where for several decades the dominant paradigm has lead philosophers (and scientists) to look in the brain for evidence of thought and consciousness. The core metaphor guiding this paradigm is that human cognition is computational—in other words, that the brain is a computer.

While it may still be mainstream, this disciplinary matrix has a growing number of critics. Those philosophers, like David Chalmers, who take consciousness seriously point out that even a complete computational account of brain activity (which is itself still far from feasible) would fail to explain why said activity should be accompanied by experience. If the brain is merely a computer processor—if it is capable of performing all its tasks in a mechanical, algorithmic fashion—why should a world have to show up for it at all?

Proponents of computationalism, like Daniel Dennett, claim that we have too inflated a view of conscious experience. Dennett points to certain visual inadequacies like change and inattentional blindness as proof that our consciousness of the world is far less complete than we are lead to believe. In fact, Dennett goes so far as to argue that our first-person experience of a richly textured environment is largely an illusion. We don’t see what is there; rather, we see the choppy, low-resolution fantasy the brain clumsily constructs for us.

One might begin by criticizing Dennett for his reduction of consciousness first to perception, and then to visual perception specifically, but even supposing he was right about the over-inflation of consciousness more generally (an insight of Jungian depth psychology as well as contemporary mind science), the claim that conscious experience is a phantom still hasn’t even begun to explain why we (the brain) should experience such appearances at all. Why can’t the brain perform its functions without “our” having to be aware of the illusion of a world? The computationalist theory of cognition would be true even on an earth populated entirely by zombies or robots. It therefore fails to adequately account for the world we actually live in, that of purposeful projects and meaningful, moral relationships with others.

Dennett’s is one of a family of greedily reductionistic views criticized by Alva Noë in his new book. The book is made not merely of ink, glue, and paper—at least if what he argues for in it is true. If he is right, and consciousness is not lodged in the skull, then his book is literally a piece of his mind. “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness” presents Noë’s case that the dominant paradigm within the cognitive sciences is off the mark.

Rather than looking for consciousness within the confines of the skull by supposing the brain’s job is to internally represent a world it has access to only through the filters of five fallible senses, Noë reminds the forgetful philosopher and scientist alike that thought and perception are tied to action, and that the mind is embodied and embedded in the world. The senses are not windows through which a pre-existing world is mentally reconstructed. Rather, sensory perception is always already motor activity, always already participating in the appearance and subsequent course of worldly events. We see the horizon not because of "information" encoded by neurons in our visual cortex, but because we are living bodies that can stand upon the earth, turn our heads, and look.

Noë does not believe that Chalmers’ so-called “hard problem” of consciousness is a problem at all. He and Dennett are in agreement about this much, but for entirely different reasons. Dennett believes the word “consciousness” is nothing but a cultural idol that continued neuroscience will soon call down off its pedestal. Eventually, he assures us, the “hard problem” will go away because we simply won’t recognize our conscious experience as anything other than an illusion generated by unconscious neural activity.

Noë is of the opinion that though the brain is necessary for consciousness, it is not sufficient for it. He dismisses the “hard problem” as the product of misplaced concreteness: it asks how brain matter might be in the possession of mind and experience, when really these emerge through the dynamic relationships between brain, body, and world and are never “possessed” (or simply located) in the first place.

I am conscious not merely because my brain is doing something special, but because it is coupled to others and the world via language, various levels of emotive intentionality, and a series of sensorimotor (or perception-action) loops. From Noë’s point of view, a brain in a vat would not be conscious. Only contact with and access to an actual world is sufficient for conscious experience. Being conscious is something we must do, something we constantly achieve together with others and the help of the world itself. Organisms and their environments can only be studied in the abstract as separate systems. To fully understand the evolutionary process of phylogenic adaptation, or the ontogenic process of skillful coping (learning), one must develop a sense for the dynamics of whole organism-environment systems [my essay, “Unearthing the Earth” investigates what the implications of this approach are for our being-on-the-earth].

Noë writes:

We are, to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, empty heads turned to the world. The world is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it. The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience. (p. 142).

The computational approach to consciousness assumes that consciousness is equal and reducible to intra-cranial neurochemical processes. Noë’s rejoinder is a refreshing reminder that such solipsistic misplaced concreteness is, ironically, a product of the same Cartesian tradition most mainstream theorists rail against. That consciousness is located in the brain, that it has no direct access to the real world but through some internal language of ideas (or mental representations)… these are thoroughly Cartesian presuppositions. Noë suggests we begin not with the abstract thought experiments of lonely philosophers, but with the lived body and its everyday being-in-the-world among others (life-world).

http://www.youtube.com/user/Professoranton

Several weeks ago, I posted a blog about my entry to Discover Magazine's "Evolution in Two Minutes" contest. Developmental biologist and outspoken atheist PZ Myers is judging the entries (still no word on the winner), and out of curiousity, I decided to visit his blog Pharyngula. Though it is supposedly a science blog, Myers posts little about his field of study: evolutionary development. The few posts he did make over the past month about biology were fascinating, and I learned quite a bit. Evo-Devo is a research program attempting to fill in the gaps in neo-Darwinism, which originally assumed the development of organisms had little to do with the evolutionary process. I'm quite interested in Evo-Devo, as it calls neo-Darwinism out on its greedy reductionism. Organisms cannot be understood based only on the differential survival of genes. But Evo-Devo isn't in any way in opposition to the basic approach of the Modern Synthesis, unlike Developmental Systems Theory, which aims to totally overthrow the neo-Darwinian paradigm in favor of a more holistic account. Not genes or isolated organisms, but whole organism-environment systems become the focus. All this takes us far afield from the point of this blog, but suffice it to say that Myers' biological work fascinates and excites me.

The point of this blog, however, is about Myers' (and the watchdogs policing his blog's) militant brand of atheistic materialism. I can understand the frustration many scientifically-educated people express concerning the widespread denial of the common descent of species among fundamentalist Christians in America. But accepting evolution, and all of contemporary science for that matter, does not necessarily religate all forms of spirituality to a superstitous past. For me and a growing number of others, the scientific cosmological story provides a more numinous background to earthly existence than any ancient religious cosmogony to come before it. Matter, energy, space, and time have been on a 14 billion year adventure that has inexplicably lead to the creation of an intelligent species of ape capable of knowing so. It's quite astounding.

The most pressing challenge of the 21st century is to develop a planetary mythos, a global spiritual worldview that allows all human beings to become integral with the ongoing process of creative expression that brought us into existence. Science must play a central role in any such development. Myers and his cheerleaders seem to go wrong not in their enthusiasm for science, but in their dogmatic insistance that the observations of science must be interpreted in a materialistic fashion. There are many complex arguments for a materialistic or physicalist interpretation of scientific facts, but none that I am aware of can coherently account for human consciousness. There is plenty of hand-waving, plenty of "just-so" stories pretending to explain how an entirely mechanical process could lead to sentience and volition, but so far as I know, no convincing solutions to the hard problem of consciousness have yet been devised. If anyone disputes this, please comment below and fill me in!

Many materialistic atheists would dispute the idea that our species still needs myth in a scientific age. This amounts to saying that consciousness can exist entirely independent of the unconscious. There is no hubris greater than this conceit, and none more dangerous. As William Irwin Thompson writes, "That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth," (The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, p. 87). Science is an epistemic activity, a way of knowing. All our human attempts to rationally know the full extent of our cosmic existence are limited for the simple reason that we are that which we are attempting to know.

Alfred North Whitehead expressed a similar sentiment: "Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning." No amount of scientific progress will ever change this basic fact about human psychology. Knowing is not a disembodied, purely rational activity. What we know is always already shaped by our imaginative and intuitive faculties.

The danger of supposing science can totally rationalize our society is already apparent. The mechanistic model of nature has made possible the current global religion (at least in the West): capitalist consumerism. It's a myth that has grown out of the assumption that the only truly real, truly powerful thing in the world is money, and that the non-human earth community is ours to exploit as we see fit (since it is nothing but blind matter in motion, anyways). There can be no solution to the current ecological crisis until this self-destructive mythos is totally re-imagined.

But the mechanistic/materialistic myth is not only dangerous because of its ecological implications; it also degrades human life. Prior to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, humanity had a system of values based on more than a merely horizontal scale. As E. F. Schumacher explains in his wonderful little book A Guide for the Perplexed, this flattening of value reverses the vertical conception humanity has held for the vast majority of its existence. The result is moral relativism and/or utilitarianism. The Good is measured solely upon what feels good at the time for me, so long as it doesn't prevent others from getting their cheap pleasures, as well. Schumacher outlines the Great Chain of Being, which begins with matter and progresses through the plant kingdom, the animal, the human, and continues to God, the ideal Person. Natural science focuses only upon the material level, and so long as it doesn't overstep its legitimate bounds by claiming to explain all other levels by reduction to matter, it remains a tool of utmost value to the human endeavor. Science is an empirical enterprise, and so fittingly studies only that aspect of nature that is visible. As Schumacher makes plainly evident, however, all of reality above the material level is invisible. To know anything about these higher levels, we must become internally adequate to them. This is where the vertical chain of being becomes so important. If you want to know what life is, or what consciousness is, or what self-consciousness is, you've got to develop your instrument of knowledge. The reason science is so successful and produces so many incontrovertable theories about the physical world is that any normal adult with fully functioning senses is adequate to understand it. When it comes to truths about higher levels of being, something more than simple logic and sense perception becomes necessary: namely, wisdom.

Schumacher writes:

"There is nothing more difficult than to be aware of one's thought. Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see. Every thought can be scrutinised directly except the thought by which we scrutinise. A special effort, an effort of self-awareness is needed - that almost impossible feat of thought recoiling upon itself: almost impossible but not quite. In fact, this is the power that makes man human and also capable of transcending his humanity," (p. 54).

Science is one of the most valuable tools the human spirit has ever developed, but if all human knowledge is reduced to the empirically verifiable sort, most of reality is placed entirely beyond our reach. Further, a reductionistically naturalistic picture of the universe puts the cart before the horse by forgetting that all knowledge of the cosmos comes through experience (therefore, attempting to derive experience from nature conceived of as entirely physical is incoherent from the get go; read my essay Unearthing the Earth for a more developed explanation as to why). There is no conflict between faith and reason, nor between science and religion. The only conflicts arise when science is adopted as a religion, thereby becoming scientism, or when religion begins making scientific claims, thereby becoming creationism.

As Galileo put it: "The Bible [<---insert your spiritual tradition of choice] shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go."

And Kant: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

Let us not obscure the difference.