Preface 

“The presumption that there is only one genus of actual entities constitutes an ideal of cosmological theory to which the philosophy of organism endeavors to conform. The description of the generic character of an actual entity should include God, as well as the lowliest actual occasion, though there is a specific difference between the nature of God and that of any occasion.” –Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 110

  Life, from a purely human perspective, is the most general, and therefore most metaphysical category imaginable. First we are alive, and then we come to know it. Our knowledge is always through life. The story we tell to explain our relation to the cosmos begins and ends with our account of our own living experience. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have struggled to define this term of terms adequately, as when we ask, “what is life?” the answer is found only in the experience that is already present whether we have asked for it or not. Without an actual relation between the whole and ourselves, life is unlivable; but without a conceptual relation to it, life is unthinkable. How, then, to conceive of it? 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. Life is a moving image of eternity, embodying both a finite and infinite aspect.

  We endeavor in the present essay to coherently define every actual entity as a living creature. The reason is that no scientific account of life can, without incongruence, explain its emergence in a physical universe that is otherwise devoid of purpose and feeling. Our 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 our own: to define life such that it is reducible to a “mindless, purposeless, algorithmic  process” (Dennett, p. 320). This definition will be shown to be entirely inadequate. It makes of our human experience an aberration, severing all roots whatsoever between ourselves and the evolutionary process that carried us here. If we are going to attempt a scientific account of life at all, then it must at least allow for the presence of human consciousness. The process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, as well as the systems biology of Francisco J. Varela, will aid us in our critique of mechanistic biology. Varela’s account of life in terms of autopoiesis will be compared with Whitehead’s analysis of the process of concresence in the hopes that a parallel 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, we suggest, is up to the task.

  The approach of these two thinkers represents, in our view, what cultural philosopher Jean Gebser has called the “irruption of time consciousness” (p. 380). It was not until the 20th 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 our exploration. We will began this essay, then, by laying out the cultural mood surrounding the widespread acceptance of mechanistic approaches to biology for the greater part of the last few centuries.


Part 1: 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 his epochal book, The Ever-Present Origin, Gebser describes the emergence of a new structure of human consciousness, the integral, and distinguishes it through comparison to the preceding structures uncovered in his phenomenological study of human origins. The structures he discovered include the archaic, magic, mythic, and mental, each with its own dimensionality and sensory emphasis. A detailed examination of these structures is beyond the scope of the current study. What is important for our task—that of envisioning a living cosmology—is the nature of the ongoing mutation from the mental to the integral structure, with special attention paid to the transformed awareness of time that results.

  The 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,  however, did not take place until 13th century Europe, revealed in the intensely personal poems of the Troubadours and the revival of Aristotle in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Gebser describes the mental structure as having brought forth “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. 

  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 modern, mechanistic biology. Only once the mutation into integral consciousness began did humanity come to appreciate time, not as a quantity or magnitude, but as a qualitative intensity (p. 285). Before exploring the crucial significance of time in an integral biology, we must first examine the beginnings of biology itself during the birth and development of the mental structure.


Part 2: History of Biology

A. The Ancients

“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” –Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, p. 641

  Gebser credits 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 (Lennox, p. xx). Whitehead, however, famously wrote that philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” (Process and Reality, p. 39), and indeed, Aristotle is indebted to him, even where he disagrees. Whitehead credits Aristotle with correcting Plato’s tendency to “separate a static spiritual world from a fluent world of superficial experience” (ibid., p. 209). In Timaeus, Plato lays out a cosmology that is in many ways identical to what would today be called intelligent design. Nature is described as an artifact, and its designer is a divine craftsman who orders it just so as to bring about the most beauty and goodness possible (Lennox, p. 228). Aristotle, on the other hand, tried to find a less theological middle ground between atomistic reductionism and Plato’s 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:

“For the art is source and form of what comes to be, but in another; whereas the movement of nature is in what is coming to be” (Generation of Animals, p. 735).
 
  Aristotle here distinguishes the work of an artist from the nature 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 (i.e., 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. We will revisit these causes in a later section on Whitehead, where a slight reworking of them will aid our understanding of concresence. The material cause is the potentiality necessary for motion, and the efficient cause this motion’s agent of initiation. The formal cause is movement directed toward an end, the final cause being the attainment of that end. We can see now how it is that Aristotle views the matter and form of a creature as intimately related, the former being the potential for the actualization of the latter. The difference between Aristotle’s immanent and Plato’s demiurgic understanding of teleology is extremely significant, as one or the other aspect of this distinction has influenced nearly every philosopher of biology since.


B. The Moderns

“…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.” –David Hull, The Naked Meme, p. 299

  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 (Lennox, p. 228). 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 (Dennett, p. 68). Darwin’s response to Paley is difficult to disprove by weight of empirical evidence alone,  but when one realizes the implicit assertion 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.  Plato’s demiurge had been vanquished, but his view of nature as an undirected flux remained.

  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 Plato: nature was a giant, 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” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 113). 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 corrected the imbalance of Paley’s Platonism with his evolutionary narrative, he failed to recognize that our knowledge of the laws of physics themselves must also be evolutionized, so to speak.  But because he was still firmly rooted within the mechanistic paradigm, Darwin could not understand how the tremendous degree of organization in the biosphere might arise without recourse to the arbitrarily imposed order of Newton’s laws.

  Immanuel Kant, who died more than 50 years before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species (and who 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 whose complications are beyond our present investigation. Biologist Ernst Mayr remarked that “Kant’s acceptance of teleology…greatly affected German evolutionists in the nineteenth century,” but nonetheless, Mayr felt that any use of final causation in biology was doomed to failure (What Evolution Is, p. 82). We can only assume that Mayr had other philosophical 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 (Thompson, p.136).


Part 3: The Organization of the Living

A: Teleology as a Regulative Principle

“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” (Critique of Judgment, 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 is to commit Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. One mistakes a general law about the abstraction “species” for an argument about the nature of concrete particulars. Further, because Darwin had to presuppose reproducing organisms for his theory of speciation to work, modern biology cannot look to his work for 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” (Critique of Judgment, p. 267). To understand life, according to Kant, we must employ final causality. Like Paley, Kant also thought artifacts were impossible to explain without some kind of teleological principle. Material and efficient causes were not enough to account for the design of a wheel, for instance. But unlike Paley, Kant understood organisms as “natural products,” not artifacts of divine design (Thompson, p. 133). A natural product is produced by way of a natural purpose, in contrast to an artifact, which is produced by an external, intelligent agent.  A natural purpose is found in “a thing [that is] both cause and effect of itself” (Critique of Judgment, p. 249).

  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, artifact or organism, is such that each of the parts composing it exists for the sake of the whole: 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” (ibid., p. 253).

   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” (Thompson, p. 134). The idea of an organism, in contrast, is “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 a subtle and important complication remains for us to discuss before we can move on to this more recent formulation. Kant saw the natural purposes of organisms as merely a regulative principle of our own 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 (ibid., p. 137). Kant held that we needed both mechanical and teleological modes of thought to investigate nature, but was agnostic as to their ultimate relation to things, whether mechanical or organic in form. This is a necessary result of the Kantian dualism between phenomena and noumena.

  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 aim of our current exploration. 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” (Critique of Judgment, p. 254).

 
  Kant here attempts to reconcile the possibility that organisms are intrinsically self-organizing (and therefore purposeful) with his commitment to Newtonian science. 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 our 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 18th 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 mathematical systems like Newton’s are essentially 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 we begin to investigate the process metaphysics of Whitehead, but for now we can 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” (Gebser, p. 285).

  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 was self-organizing and purposeful, but only because the human mind was unable to describe it any other way.


B. Autopoiesis: Teleology as Constitutive

“…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.” –Francisco J. Varela, et al., Life After Kant, p. 116

  The application of Aristotelian teleology in modern biology is a matter of great controversy (Nature’s Purposes, p. 1).  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 (The Blind Watchmaker). But for reasons we have mentioned above, 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. Indeed, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection is applicable only given an already self-organizing creature intentionally operating and reproducing within an 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 “it is indispensible to recognize that [teleonomy] is essential to the very definition of living beings” (Chance and Necessity, p. 9). 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 conceptual boundaries of the mechanistic paradigm. It is worth noting, however, that “no biological science has been able to express itself apart from phraseology which is meaningless unless it refers to ideals proper to the organism in question” (Process and Reality, p. 84). Whitehead goes on to credit Aristotle with having impressed this fact on the science of biology, and describes how the overstressing of final causation during the Christian medieval period resulted in the equally overstressed reliance on efficient causation in modern science.

  When Varela and Humberto 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” (Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. 86). By machine, they did not intend to confuse organisms with artifacts, but meant that the system was determined by its structure and organization (Thompson, p. 141). Any purposes attributed to it were considered projections: regulative, as opposed to constitutive features.

  In one of the last essays he authored, however, Varela proposed a revision of the understanding of purposes present in his earlier work with Maturana (who, incidentally, does not share Varela’s change of heart). He came to see that the autopoietic organization of the living implies the emergence of “an autonomous center of concern capable of providing an interior perspective” (Life After Kant, p. 97). To understand why, we must 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” (ibid., p. 115).

   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 the membrane which defines them as a unity. Though an autopoietic system is also a self-organizing, dissipative structure,  we should not reduce it to these categories. What distinguishes an autopoietic system is its “self-produced identity,” or “instauration of a point of view” (ibid., p. 116). 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 them.

“…self-production is already and inevitably a self-affirmation that shows the organism as involved in the fundamental purpose of maintaining its identity”  (ibid., p. 116).

  Varela’s analysis of the experiential component of autopoiesis involves more than just recognizing the identity arising due to the system’s circular dynamics, but also the umwelt produced by its “sense-making,” which allows it to “change the physiochemical world into an environment of significance and valance” (Thompson, p. 147) such that intentional behavior directed toward an end becomes possible. We can here recognize the attribution of both formal (the identity, or idea, actualized in the movement of the organism) and final (end-directed behavior) causal principles to the organization of the living.

  But can the Kantian dilemma be so easily resolved? Kant, as we said earlier, 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 forms (Thompson, p. 140; Life After Kant, p. 101). 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” (Life After Kant, p. 108)?

“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” (ibid., p. 110).
 
  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” (Life After Kant, p. 110). The mechanistic paradigm could begin only after Descartes had firmly established a fundamental separation between the thinking and extended substances. The whole Kantian difficulty over whether to apply teleology to the organisms themselves, or only to recognize it as a principle of our own judgment, can be traced back to this division between mind and matter.  Descartes decreed that the extended substance was purely mechanical, ruled by efficient causes alone. This included our own living bodies. But once we come to see that our 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 “relapse into the tacit presupposition of the mind with its private ideas which are in fact qualities without intelligible connection with the entities represented” (Process and Reality, p. 76).

  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” (Life After Kant, p. 119).

  Exploring this process of the formation of a “subject-pole” (or mental-pole) brings us closer to Whitehead, whose analysis of the general character of experience in terms of concresence provides us with the platform necessary to understand how organisms don’t need to “transcend the neutrality of pure physics” (Life After Kant, p. 118), because there never was a purely neutral physics to begin with. But before we move on to Whitehead’s analysis of cosmological process, we must examine, with Gebser, the underlying reasons for the acceptance of mechanism as a complete account of life and the necessary mutation in consciousness that must accompany any overcoming of such false limitations.


Part 4: The Immanence of Time

“Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.” –Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 228

  Gebser describes the mutation of the mental out of the mythic structure as an “earth-shaking” event: it pierces the womb of the psyche, where all was pregnant with imaginal meaning and polar congruence, and births the mind with its directed, dualistic, and discursive thought (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). Time becomes falsely spatialized, fixed as an abstraction such that it can be rationally measured (p. 360).

  The task of the integral structure is to free time from the cage the mind attempted to trap it in as it went about conquering space with measurement. This false spatialization of time allowed the towering system of Newton to stand for several centuries, “but at last the Newtonian cosmology has broken down” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 156). Erecting such a system was possible only after Descartes had “decisively [separated] ‘mind’ from ‘nature’ (ibid., p. 210). This separation lead Newton to conceive of atoms as “devoid of self-enjoyment,” as mind was present only in the human, who through conscious deliberation imposed upon a dead cosmos the clarity and distinctness of its innate ideas (ibid., p. 212).

  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 is at pains to remind us that, unless we wish to exempt humanity from the course of natural things by admitting an uneasy dualism, we must generalize our experience such that it applies to every occasion in the cosmos (Adventures of Ideas, p. 184-5). Failing to do so leads to a rigidification in which, 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” (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 vicious dualism, but that this dualism results in our attempt to make measurable every phenomenon we are faced with, even when such measurement, as in the case of a living organism, fractures its qualitative intensity of experience into abstract, particulate quantities (Gebser, p. 311, 383). “Intensities, unless we mistake them for pressure or tension, are not measureable” (Gebser, p. 310). The result is that the animate presence of life is reduced to the motions of a machine lacking feeling, empty of experience, and devoid of purpose. The materialism and mechanization still in vogue in contemporary biology are a result of a failure to assimilate the transformation occurring within physics over the past century.

  As was discussed earlier, 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” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 155). Darwin selected from among the facts appearing to him only those most prominent for his thoroughly Newtonian mind. As a result, the animate presence of the creatures he sought to understand was ignored, overlaid by the abstract rationalizations favored by the mental structure (Gebser, p. 387). 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.  This collapse of time into a spatial sequence, each snap shot externally and accidently related to the next, vanquished the concrete temporal intensity required for formal and final causes to play their role.

  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” (Nature and Life, p. 195).

  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 an explanation for the diversity of species, but not for life itself, for reasons given in a prior section (the process presupposes self-organizing creatures that reproduce); but more than that, it retards a full account of life because the formal and final causes of autopoiesis stem from “the opposed doctrine of internal relation [which is] distorted by reason of its description in terms of language adapted to the presupposition of external relations of the Newtonian type” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 157). Darwin imagined that all relations between occasions are external, but concrete time is not decomposable into the static categories of past, present, and future, each excluding the other. Teleology is not a matter of the future causing the past, but of the future (and the past) being immanent in the present experience of every occasion. Formal and final causation are relevant only for the internal relations between the parts of an organism, and between the organism and its environment, which Darwin mistakenly assumed could only be related externally.

  As Whitehead says,

“Evolution, on the materialistic theory, 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” (Science and the Modern World, p. 107).

  The doctrine of matter as merely externally related “stuff” in a continual process of change according to certain ultimate 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 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,” (The Origin of Species, p. 384).

  Darwin’s mistake is 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 the law of formation is just as fixed, having been imposed upon matter from without by God “into a few forms or into one” at the dawn of life. This is why Darwin’s theory, even though first described in a book entitled “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 does the natural shed any light on the subsequent development and diversification of the biosphere. Darwin’s attempt to account for the organization of the living fails because he has too abstract a conception of space, time, and matter, mistaking the quantities of Newtonian equations for the durations of living experience, where each event, though continuous with the last, reaches toward novelty at every turn. Newton’s conceptions of space and time were that each was a vast container indifferent as to what filled them, and even indifferent to each other. Matter shuffled through, blindly obeying arbitrarily imposed laws.  Darwin could not account for the emergence of life in such a cosmos, and so was forced to call on divine intervention.

  But contemporary physics no longer understands time and space as separate or as absolute. Each shares a common history, having grown up together through the process of cosmic expansion. Matter, similarly, is intimately related to the development of space and time, and is itself not so much a kind of “stuff” as a process of dynamic unfolding. Having gained a better handle on the potential for the emergence of thermodynamic order found throughout nature, contemporary 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” (Evolution Extended, p. 128). 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 reach. Evolution is a theory that points to the common origin of the many, not just at some distant moment in the past, but as a present reality, as every living creature owes its continued existence to its relationship with the rest. Evolution (when understood in a more expanded, 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 runs. This is also true for all equations expressing relativistic or quantum effects. Einstein himself once remarked that “time [as irreversible] is an illusion.” For Prigogine, however, the directionality of time was essential for any account of non-equilibrium systems and the creative advance that they allow. In his book, The End of Certainty, Prigogine quotes a few lines from Jorge Luis Borges’ essay entitled “A New Refutation of Time” which I think are worth reprinting here:

“After describing the doctrines that make time an illusion, [Borges] concludes: ‘And yet, and yet…denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations…Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me; but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.’”

 Whitehead’s notion of concresence, derived from the Latin verb meaning “growing together,” is an attempt to “reconcile permanence and change,” in Prigogine’s words (p. 59). Whitehead recognizes the essential role played by time in the creative unfolding of the universe, and his analysis of concresence allows us to understand what Borges was aiming at when he said that “time is the substance  [we are] made of.” As we said at the outset, life is a moving image of eternity. We cannot account for its organization in terms of the stuff of which it is made. We can only grasp its essence when it is understood as inseparably related to its entire past, as well as to the futures that remain possible for it.


Part 5: Whitehead’s Process of Concresence

A. 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.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 113

  All of the mechanistic thinkers we have thus far criticized commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness because of inherited patterns of thought dating back to the Greeks. Aristotle can be praised for recognizing the immanence of nature’s purposes, but he can be damned for having introduced the substance-quality logic that lead to the sensationalist doctrine. The sensationalist doctrine mistakes a high abstraction— universals derived from bare sense-perception—for the most primitive, concrete element in experience: “sense-reception.” This led to the unchecked spatialization of time, with all its rigidifying effects, discussed above. Whitehead adopts Bergson’s “admirable phraseology” to explain why: “Sense-reception is ‘unspatialized,’ and sense-perception is ‘spatialized’” (Process and Reality, p. 114). The sensationalist doctrine collapses the unspatialized experience of the transmission between occasions, and so entirely ignores the immanent teleology found therein. 

  This ignorance of what Whitehead calls “sense-reception” is the reason the mechanistic paradigm is unable to account for sentience of any stripe. It lead Hume to deny the soundness of induction, for with only sense-perceptions to go on, one could merely correlate sequential observations. Causation, as Kant would later declare (based on Hume’s premise), was purely a regulative principle projected on experience by the operations of our intellect. Whitehead blames this misplaced concreteness on the Greeks overreliance on visual perception (Process and Reality, p. 117), which Gebser also points to as the dominant mode of sensory experience in the mental structure. Sense-reception can be described as the temporally-ordered experience of one’s own bodily presense, such that the immediate past and the immediate future are both constitutive elements in every passing moment, giving each a concrete and meaningful place in the whole. The immanence of past and future provide us with a direct link, Whitehead argues, to the real world.

“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” (Process and Reality, p. 119).

  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. Concresence is best understood as the most general analysis of the phases of becoming of every occasion in the universe, though it should be remembered that these phases are not sequential in time, but represent an integral whole.

  The simplest way to explain the phases of concresence 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 (Process and Reality, p. 283). 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. But to emphasize the importance of process in an integral account of experience, we will begin discussing the causes involved in concresence in relation to a sailboat 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” (ibid., p. 31). In our sailboat analogy, this cause is the wind. We cannot account for the specific origin of its direction other than to recognize that it contains within it the satisfactions of all prior concresences. The efficient cause is “the transition from attained actuality to actuality in attainment,” such that the creativity of the prior phase becomes the datum for the next phase (ibid., p. 214): the sails of our boat catch the winds of creativity, feeling their potential and endeavoring, in the next phase, to make something of it. This next phase is the formal cause, wherein future possibilities help shape past actualities. The winds of creativity caught by the sails produce a contrast between what is given and what is possible. 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 our analogy begins to break down, as even our 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 concresence. We will now attempt to extend this simplified analysis of concresence to the more complex occasion produced by the human body.

  The first thing to remember is that the emergence of each occasion of our 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 before us. They gain objective immortality as they “[pass] over into the ‘given’ primary phase for the concresence of other actual entities,” (ibid., p. 85). This givenness is the efficient cause as experienced directly through non-sensuous perception of the immediate past. Rather than understanding efficient causes as mere mechanical effects lacking emotive concern, Whitehead reconnects mind and matter by interpreting them as affects, or feelings directly prehended through our most primitive kind of perception. As Whitehead puts it, “…sympathy…is the primary ground for the continuity of nature” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 183). Having thus felt the immediate force of the past at our backs, aptly referred to as the physical-pole of concresence, we are ready to describe 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,” (ibid., p. 194).

  Whitehead calls the formal cause the subjective form of concresence, and it represents the ingression of eternity into time as the possibilities of definiteness available for shaping the future, given the actuality of the past. Without this “intervening touch of mentality,” every actual occasion would be entirely determined, destined to passively re-enact the past without any anticipatory ability. As was mentioned earlier in our discussion of Kant, the defining characteristic of living organisms is that they are cause and effect of themselves. The importance of this becomes evident when we consider the role played by the mental-pole of concresence. The initial phase of the mental-pole is the self-formation of the organism, wherein the determined effects of its past are prehended in light of future ideals. This contrast between feelings of givenness and feelings of potential constitutes the subjective form of each occasion. The completion of each occasion is reached when the subjective comparison of affects reaches satisfaction, perishing into objective immortality and becoming the cause of subsequent occasions. This process of death and rebirth is continually taking place within what would be recognized empirically as a single organism, which explains why organisms are their own cause and their own effect. If Kant was able to analyze the organization of the living without having mistakenly assumed that sensuous perception 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.

  Varela realizes just this when he says, as was mentioned above, “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. We will now examine the close ties between Varela’s account of autopoiesis and Whitehead’s process of concresence.
 

B. The Formation of Living Matter

“[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.” –Hans Jonas, 1992, p. 21

  Whitehead contends “it belongs to the essence of all occasions of experience that they are concerned with an otherness transcending themselves” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 180). As Hosinski says of this contention, it implies that “subjectivity is derivative from objectivity,” (p. 56). In other words, the objective world, as given to us through our prehension of the past, is the soil from which subjective enjoyment sprouts.

  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,” (Life After Kant, p. 117). This relation is one of 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,” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 176).

  Varela agrees, stating that “there cannot be an individuality which is isolated and folded into itself,” (Life After Kant, p. 117). Instead, organisms have

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

  The avoidance of perishing referred to by Varela is a result of every organism’s relationship with matter, which mechanistic science tells us inevitably tends towards disorder. But as Whitehead reminds us, the notion of “dead matter…is an abstraction from the full complexity of concrete actuality,” (Hosinski, p. 62).  Life is defined by its continual self-production, maintaining its form by remaining far from thermodynamic equilibrium on a wave of negative entropy. As Varela says, “this entails that teleology is a primordial tendency of matter manifest in the form of organisms,” (Life After Kant, p. 114). The attempt to avoid perishing will not ultimately succeed, but through attempting to achieve it moment by moment, the organism experiences its subjective form, “[enjoying] its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 177), and thereby establishes itself as an object to be prehended by its next occasion 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,” (Life After Kant, p. 114).

  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,” (Process and Reality, p. 309).

  A materialist may here protest that we 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 by 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,” (Process and Reality, p. 309). 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 concresence…actuality means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is a mere non-entity,” (ibid., p. 211).

  This brings us to a further parallel between Varela’s theory of autopoiesis and Whitehead’s process of concresence. Concresence can be defined in a simplified way as “the real internal constitution of a particular existent,” (ibid., p. 210). More technically, concresence 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,’” (ibid., p. 211).

  Though it is true that “every entity in the actual world of a concresent actuality has some gradation of real relevance to that concresence” (Process and Reality, p. 41), in order to attain the unity of subjective satisfaction, the concresence must simplify the multiplicity of its feelings by way of 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 says something similar about the autopoietic process of self-realization, remarking that “stimuli from outside enter the sphere of relevance…only by their existential meaning for the keeping of the process of self-establishment,” (Life After Kant, p. 117). 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 concresence (Process and Reality, p. 41). We can summarize this point by saying, in Varela’s language, that organisms bring forth their own domain of cognitive significance; or, again, in Whitehead’s: “Each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates,” (bid., p. 210).

  Before exploring the cosmological significance of our account, we must elucidate the relation between form and matter that has been tacitly assumed above. 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 tendency toward organization present in matter from the beginning. To account for the ontological status of biological identity, for the “ever existing gap between the realization of the living and its underlying matter” (Life After Kant, p. 119), we must move 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 self-produce an identity out of a continual flow of matter and energy. The claim is that the genetic program is responsible for the whole process, but as has been pointed out numerous times already, one cannot account for the teleological organization of individual living organisms by reducing their form to that resulting from a mechanical process operating at the level of whole species. 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 [ autocatalysing reactions, for instance] whose regularities assure that it can maintain coupling through the course of its life” (Life After Kant, p. 118).

  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. The basis of subjectivity is a concern for that which transcends oneself. This concern for the other is mirrored by the desire to exist for one’s own sake, or as Varela puts it, “Subjectivity is the absolute interest the organism takes in his continued existence,” (ibid., p. 119). 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,” (ibid.).

  To understand how organized form could arise from matter, an intrinsic urge toward realization must be attributed to it. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, who was a major influence on Varela’s thought, spoke of matter as “the flesh of the world”:

“[it] is not self-sensing as is my flesh. It is sensible and not sentient. I call it flesh, nonetheless…in order to say that it is a pregnancy of possibility,” (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 250).

  Whitehead refers to “Eros” as the “the soul stirring itself to life and motion” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 66), evoking that “which endows with agency all ideal possibilities” (ibid., p. 210). We might even give a thermodynamic account of this agency or pregnancy of matter, pointing to a particular example: the tremendous temperature gradient  created by interaction between the earth and light from the sun. This far from equilibrium situation gave the molecules on the surface of the planet a tremendous amount of free energy, allowing them “to spontaneously create new patterns of order and organization by dissipating entropy” (de Quincey, p. 32). “Life,” says biologist Lynn Margulis, “is a gradient-reducing system,” (Acquiring Genomes, p. 46). Such a view allows us to see how life does not contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as was once thought. Instead, it feeds on it. 

  An individual life, however, as we said at the outset, is a process with both a beginning and an end. Because the autonomous form of an organism runs counter to the generally entropic state of matter, its eventual death is a certainty. But this death is a gift to all subsequent organisms that inherit its objective immortality as components in their own concresence.


Part 6: The Living Cosmos

“If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one…Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe." -Christian de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell

  We have attempted, in the preceding pages, to generalize the quality of life such that it might extend to every actual entity. To have any chance at succeeding, a few conceptual hurdles remain. To truly generalize life, defined as autopoiesis, to all actual entities, our analysis of the relation between autopoiesis and concresence must have revealed enough similarity that the two, as accounts of self-organization, are nearly interchangeable. Whether enough parallels have been drawn to do this remains to be seen. To fully prove that the two processes are deeply related, we would have to describe an entity usually considered inorganic, such as an atom, as an autopoietic system. We are confident that this can be done, but it would require a detailed investigation into the structure of subatomic dynamics that is beyond the scope of the current essay. We can say, however, that in light of the displacement in modern physics of matter by energy as most fundamental that atomic organization appears to satisfy the two major requirements of autopoietic organization: 1) each of its components—protons, neutrons, and electrons—participate in the continual formation of one another, and 2) in the formation of a boundary (electron probability cloud) which defines the atom as a unity.  Such an account of the atom is plausible because energy “is merely the name for the quantitative aspect of a structure of happenings; in short, it depends on the notion of the functioning of an organism,” (Science and the Modern World, p. 102).  Without some process of self-organization, whether it is deemed autopoietic or concresent, atoms could not emerge out of the flux of undifferentiated energetic happenings.

  If we grant that evolution is a “universal acid,” leaking out of biology and into all other sciences, forever altering their foundational concepts, much of the order in the cosmos comes into greater focus. As Whitehead says, the whole point of the theory is that more complex organisms arise from less complex organisms.

“The doctrine [of evolution] thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for 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,” (ibid., p. 107).

  The reigning cosmology in contemporary physics is the big bang theory. It does seem that such a model fits perfectly with an evolutionary account of cosmos, where unexpected achievements of emergent value are created at every juncture. Supposing the universe emerged from the big bang, we can recognize hydrogen and helium atoms as among the first organisms to self-organize out of the primordial cloud of potentiality. They are the parents of all other atoms, formed when these original elements are fused (Primack and Abrams, p. 94). In order for this fusion to take place, the next unit of emergent value had to evolve: stars. The first generation of stars was huge, about 100 times the mass of our sun (ibid., p. 147). After a million years or so, these stars exploded in gigantic supernovas, creating heavier elements and leaving behind massive black holes. These black holes eventually gathered enough matter to become galaxies, the next individual embodiment of emergent value. Within these galaxies, smaller stars formed, around them orbiting the next organism to arise in this cosmic evolution: planets. Upon what we can only assume is a countless number of planetary bodies, the potential for further evolution in the form of traditional organisms was made possible. From prokaryotes, to eukaryotes, to multicellular species—the same process of creative advance continues.  

  We can further cement this account of cosmic evolution by pointing to Whitehead’s claim that

“The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. Thus the expansion of the universe in respect to actual things is the first meaning of ‘process’; and the universe in any stage of its expansion is the first meaning of ‘organism,’” (Process and Reality, p. 214-15).

  The cosmos as a whole is here described as a living organism, better termed a cosmic concresence. It is incomplete in itself, and so is necessarily a process of becoming. It is the prototype for all subsequent organic forms, or as Whitehead says, “…each actual entity…repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm,” (ibid.).

  The incomplete and subsequently processual nature of the universe can again be related to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the arrow of time it establishes. Whitehead says of the future of the universe “it is merely real, without being actual,” whereas “the past is a nexus of actualities,” (ibid.). He goes on to say of the present that it “is the immediacy of teleological process whereby reality becomes actual,” (ibid.). Margulis points to the “geometry of the universe’s expansion” to account for its ever increasing creative possibilities for gradient reduction (p. 48). We might say that the past, as actual, is thermodynamically forced to become the future because of the tendency of energy to seek equilibrium by breaking down previously established gradients. The “teleological process whereby reality becomes actual” is in fact empirically observable on a cosmic scale. As Margulis says, “purposefulness is an offshoot of the thermodynamic tendency to come to equilibrium,” (p. 49). We may not go so far as to call it an offshoot, though; we must still account for the purposes of individuals, as Whitehead does, by coming to see the universe as an organism made of organisms, “a community of actual things” (Process and Reality, p. 214). Margulis’ thermodynamic reduction, though it beautifully expresses the continuity of nature, neglects its atomicity. 


Conclusion: Into the Integral

“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, which refers to “the conjoining or fitting together of parts into integrality,” (p. 310). Gebser wishes to contrast the notion of systasis with that of a system, though not to imply that they are opposites (as a thesis to its antithesis). Systematization is still a feature of a three-dimensional, predominantly spatial world composed of parts. When we refer to a system, we describe the effect of some quantitative process of addition, thereby draining that process of any intrinsic life. We may, by way of a loose analogy, say that viewing an organism as a system converts it into a static collection of objects, whereas systasis allows the parts to become transparent, such that the organism is recognized as a subject perpetually becoming whole.

  The second term, synairesis, refers to the mode of perception adapted to understanding integral realities. Gebser says that it “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.).

  Our claim is that Varela, and especially 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 concresence is precisely an attempt to come to terms with organisms as systatic, which coincidentally is Greek for “put together,” with the connotation of “forming” (Gebser, p. 292), linking it closely with the meaning of concresence.

  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,” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 157).

  The related processes of concresence 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 of the mental (through an appreciation of the statistical details of genetic inheritance), the circular polarity of the mythic (through an appreciation for the autopoietic dynamics of cellular metabolism), and the vital synchronicity of the magic (through an appreciation of the 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 20th century that time became fully apparent to our 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, making a “[reality] in which the present is all-encompassing and entire,” (Gebser, p. 7).

  As Gebser says,

“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,” (Life After Kant, p. 111). 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,” (Science in the Modern World, p. 88).


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.    Barlow, Connie (ed.). Evolution Extended: Biological Debates on the Meaning of Life. Massachusetts: MIT Press. 1994.
3.    Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Barnes and Noble. 2005.
4.    Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Touchstone. 1995.
5.    De Quicney, Christian. Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter. Vermont: Invisible Cities Press. 2002.
6.    Gebser, Jean. Transl. by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas. The Ever-Present Origin. Ohio: Ohio University Press. 1985.
7.    Hosinski, Thomas. Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Maryland: Rowmann and Littlefield Publishers. 1993.
8.    Kant, Immanuel. Transl. by W.S. Pluhar. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1987.
9.    Lennox, James. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
10.    Margulis, Lynn. Sagan, Dorian. Acquring Genomes. New York: Basic Books. 2003.
11.    Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books. 2001.
12.    Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. 1969.
13.    Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity. New York: Random House. 1972.
14.    Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: The Free Press. 1996.
15.    Primack, Joel. Abrams, Nancy. The View from the Center of the Universe. New York: Riverhead Books. 2006.
16.    Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2007.
17.    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.
18.    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.
19.    Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. 1967.
20.    Whitehead, Alfred North. Concept of Nature. New York: Cosimo Classics. 2007.
21.    Whitehead, Alfred North. Nature and Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1934.
22.    Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. 1978.
23.    Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press. 1925.









 

 
 

Preface

“Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.” –Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 30

  “To see and to make others see” (p. 31)—such is the mission of Teilhard’s masterwork, The Human Phenomenon. But what is it he wishes for us to see? Condensed to its essence, it is the “whole which unfolds,” (p.35). The whole he speaks of is the cosmos, whose unfolding is the process of evolution. Catching sight of this cosmogenesis, for Teilhard, requires facing not only its myriad surfaces—its material aspect, but also its unified interior—its spiritual  aspect.

 What kind of seeing is it, though, that reveals not only the surfaces of things, but also their within?

  This question forms the axis around which the current essay will revolve. Entangled with this question is a further one: does evolution, as we see it, have a purpose, “an absolute direction of growth” (Writings in Time of War, p. 32); or, as is commonly held by most intellectuals, is it merely the meaningless playing out of chance and necessity? These dual uncertainties—how the within is to be seen and whether evolution has an aim—are intimately related. We cannot comprehend the latter until we have gazed into the heart of the former. We must “focus our eyes correctly” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 33) so that the haze separating each reveals a harmony concealed beneath.

  “The whole of life lies in that verb,” says Teilhard of seeing (ibid., p. 31). His answers to the questions posed above are careful and deliberate, as he tries his utmost to avoid only seeing half the problem: evolution is “a consciousness gradually waking by way of countless fumblings,” (The Vision of the Past, p. 181). Teilhard admits, with the materialists, that chance has undoubtedly played a role in the unfolding of the cosmos. But this cannot be all, for “the world does not hold together ‘from below’ but from ‘above,’” (Christianity and Evolution, p. 113). The process of waking up is a movement from lesser to fuller being, from isolation to closer union (The Human Phenomenon, p. 31). “Union,” says Teilhard, “increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say in vision,” (ibid.). The trend of evolution is a growth toward awareness and richer sight, “trying everything so as to find everything” (ibid., p. 110). The end of this groping process is an embracing of each by All, and All by each.

  For Teilhard, “the most telling and profound way of describing the history of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love” (Human Energy, p. 33), defined as “the affinity of being with being” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 264). This is, of course, a mystic’s view of cosmic evolution, a story of the e-motion of spirit from initial fragmentation into ultimate communion. The typical positivist story, in contrast, concerns itself only with locomotion, with the collision of particles and their exchange of physical forces. The universe as studied by this kind of science is viewed as a machine, having everything to do with the determinisms of matter and nothing whatever to do with the spontaneities of thinking and feeling. The latter two qualities, usually only associated with human consciousness (or at most the consciousness of animals), have been deemed by materialist science “queer exceptions,” “aberrant functions,” and “an epiphenomenon” (ibid., p. 55).

  From Teilhard’s point of view, there can be no single and coherent explanation of the totality of the cosmos if human consciousness is considered “an erratic object in a disjointed world” (ibid., p. 34). “Man, in nature, is a genuine fact falling within the scope of the requirements and methods of science” (ibid.). This, for Teilhard, is the reason why the within of things, and all that it entails, must become visible to science. Nature becomes conscious in the knowing scientist, in the one who sees. The within can no longer be ignored once the scientist has reflected upon being human, on “the object of a direct intuition and the substance of all knowledge” (ibid., p. 55).

  But science, since Immanuel Kant’s critique of the organ of knowing, has become the measurement of phenomena, of the movement of matter as it appears to the mind through the senses (or their extensions). Knowledge of things themselves has been deemed impossible, as the knowing subject is experienced as an alien presence in the world, having access to reality only by way of the outward facing senses. For this reason, the scientific establishment has primarily focused only on the external, empirical aspect of nature. What goes on within things, the place where value and meaning grow, has been deemed too intangible to admit into science. Though Teilhard calls his attempt to “make others see” a purely scientific project, his phenomenology nonetheless reaches beyond mere appearances to the within of things themselves. By attempting to place human consciousness “within the framework of phenomenon and appearance” (ibid., p. 31), Teilhard is turning the mirror upon the act of knowing itself. In this way, he hopes to “break through and go beyond appearances” (Letters from a Traveler, p. 70) to the very source of our seeing.

  Teilhard’s is a science of science, an attempt to see how it is that sight is possible at all. We must explore exactly how this way of seeing differs from the empiricism of the typical scientist.


Part 1: Science and Seeing

  To fully appreciate the established meaning of empiricism for the scientific enterprise, we must briefly review the history of thought since the 17th century. Although not himself an empiricist, probably the most influential figure of this era was Rene Descartes. His dualism between the thinking and extended substances, or between mind and matter, was crucial for the further development of science and technology. Viewing matter, even organic forms, as essentially mechanical allowed science to measure, and thereby master, most of the external world. Unfortunately, hewing such an ontological rift between the mind and the body (and its senses), when taken to its logical conclusions, lead David Hume to argue that much of what we assume we immediately observe through our senses is actually a latter construction of perception.

  The world itself, according to Hume’s skeptical brand of empiricism, shows us mere patches of sensation that come to have meaning only after perception has ordered them. But even then, because our inner world is only composed of a selfless bundle of perceptions derived from barren sense data, we can never be sure that any of our beliefs about the world are true.  The value of our beliefs and actions rests purely on custom. Based on sensory experience alone, Hume could find no reason to believe in the reality of a necessary connection between any two events taken in isolation. Both the ontological status of causality and the theoretical validity of induction were thereby called into serious doubt. This left science, and the pursuit of knowledge generally, in a rather tight spot. The only option was positivism, wherein “the task of science is explained to be merely the formulation of observed identities of pattern persistent and recurrent in each stream of experience,” (Adventures of Ideas, p. 125). A science that only reveals persistent patterns of experience can still lead to technological innovation, but it fails to satisfy the human desire to understand what the patterns mean.  In other words, positivism doesn’t hinder progress in the practical realm of engineering; but by assuming a gap exists between knowledge and the thing known, it makes a deep intuitive and participatory understanding of reality impossible. Kant recognized the enormity of this problem, and his ingenious solution was to examine the mind itself, the instrument of knowledge, in order to discover the inviolable principles that ground the findings of science on something more than mere assumption. Kant argued that reality necessarily appears to us already ordered by certain a priori forms of intuition, such as space and time. Causality is similarly a necessary principle structuring our judgment. Without these structuring principles, knowledge of the world would be impossible, as the world itself is unknowable. It is here that Kant agrees with Hume. Where he differs is in his assessment of the knowing subject, which he views as more than a mere bundle of perceptions, but as a transcendental unity out of which the whole phenomenal world is projected. 

  Though each of these philosophers is quite different, a common strand of thought runs through each of them: the ultimate separation of mind from matter. For Descartes, thought and the body were entirely distinct; in Hume, a similar dualism arose as the uncertain relation between the diversity of sensory impressions and the apparent unity of perception; for Kant, it became the gap between phenomenal experience and reality itself.  The trend in this series of thinkers is toward greater isolation from the cosmos as a result of further retreat into solipsism. Although Teilhard no doubt inherits his general understanding of the scope of science from these philosophers, his own approach is quite unique.

  As Thomas King says,

“In placing man [in the framework of phenomenon and appearance] Teilhard does not mean the flat veneer of colors that strike the retinas. Rather he wants to show the meaning that haloes man when he is placed in the context of a vast cosmic movement,” (Teilhard’s Mysticism of Knowing, p. 46).
 
  Teilhard sees more than the bare sensory impressions of Hume. His vision of the cosmos is one where every body (whether atomic, molecular, cellular, etc.) has an “internal propensity to unite,” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 264). The meaning of our perceptions is in the movement of things themselves, as “the subject is unquestionably no longer the human monad, but the world,” (Toward the Future, p. 50). In other words, instead of cutting the mind off from reality, Teilhard nearly identifies the two by showing that one can come to know the world only “by being co-extensive with it,” or by “becoming to some degree one body with it,” (Christianity and Evolution, p. 61, 100).

  Though he goes to great lengths to assure the reader in The Human Phenomenon that the theory he lays out therein is not a work of metaphysics, a case can be made that Teilhard is turning the typical scientific approach on its head. In stead of bare and meaningless sensory impressions (patches of color, shapes, etc.) being the most primitive form of experience from which all our knowledge is derived, he recognizes within the human being a “Cosmic Sense,” or feeling of deep connection between what is interior and personal, and what is exterior and supposedly impersonal. The human being is “the universe…become conscious of itself” (Human Energy, p. 102). A kind of non-sensuous perception is produced by the whole history of the universe coiling up or folding in upon itself within each individual. But this is not “a solitary introspection in which things are only looked upon as being shut in upon themselves in their ‘immanent’ workings” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 53). Rather, every granule is constituted “by that which is commonly called the ‘beyond it’ rather than by its center,” (Let me Explain, p. 185). In other words, the immanence of the feeling of the within is part of a perpetual movement, or transience, which takes the granule in question beyond itself “to become part of a growing common movement of life,” (King, p. 26).

  Teilhard might be said to be correcting a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (as A.N. Whitehead called it) in the thinking of Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Instead of seeing the world only as it appears through the highly conceptualized, abstraction-prone mind of the philosopher, he returns to the concreteness of experience itself, “to the deepest recesses of the blackness within” (ibid., p. 92). He discovers there that "It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal" (Christianity and Evolution, p. 97-98).

  This is not to say that we ought to discount the sensory knowledge offered us by traditional science—quite the contrary. Teilhard recognizes the important role played by the without, as until one has “[proceeded] out of himself into the immensity and dangers of the universe, onto the ‘sacred circumference,’” one cannot really feel the awakening within of the Cosmic Sense. Though it is difficult if not impossible to visualize, one can begin to feel through the process of going out of oneself to find one’s true center by imagining a circle of infinite circumference. Because its circumferal edge would appear nearly straight, an interesting paradox takes shape: the interior and exterior of such a circle would be, for all intents and purposes, identical. In this way, it is possible to begin to see how the mind, or the within of things, is co-extensive with the without. Knowledge isn’t so much of the world as it is with the world. The assumption that true knowledge is a pure and objective model of reality lead Descartes et al. to abstract the act of knowing (the mind) out of the network of relationships constituting it (nature). Teilhard, in contrast, sees how “Object and subject marry and mutually transform each other in the act of knowledge” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 32). Teilhard’s is a participatory epistemology, while the typical scientific approach is to remain as distant from the thing known as possible. 

  This admittedly mystical way of relating mind to matter by bridging the gap between the within and the without only became possible once the theory of evolution had been articulated. Only in a universe in process—a cosmogenesis—can one can begin to see how subject and object “hold together and are complementary” (ibid., p. 63). Teilhard proposes that “all energy is psychic in nature,” though he adds that this energy has two distinct components: tangential, or mechanical energy; and radial, or spiritual energy. Rather than conflict, these two energies combine to give rise to Teilhard’s explicitly teleological evolutionary cosmology.  But before exploring his adaptation of the evolutionary paradigm, its origins must briefly be recounted.


Part 2: Transformism: Darwin and Lamarck

  Although Darwin is usually credited with having discovered the theory of evolution, he rarely if ever used the word. In fact, “evolution” never appears in The Origin of Species (until the 6th edition) or in The Descent of Man (Gilson, p. 49). Evolution, from the Latin evolvere, means “the un-rolling of the in-rolled, the de-velopment of the en-veloped,” (Gilson, p. 50). Until at least the mid 19th century, evolution was usually discussed by naturalists only in reference to what is today called ontogenesis, or the development of an individual from a preformed seed or egg (Gilson, p.51). The main problem was how to account for the development of individual living beings without violating the theological truth that God’s act of creation took place only once. This early doctrine of evolution held that every developing organism was merely the “unrolling of something already given” (Gilson, p. 50). The notion that species themselves changed in any way over time was not considered.

  The theory of evolution familiar to most 21st century students of biology, while being prefigured in the speculative writing of Descartes,  Comte de Buffon,  and Kant  did not gain widespread acceptance until Lamarck and Darwin gave it a more secure theoretical and empirical basis. Better termed “transformism,” the general theory “affirms that animal or vegetable species have changed in the course of time, no matter how these changes are explained” (Gilson, p. 41). Only the proposed mechanism underlying this change separates Darwin and Lamarck, who are otherwise in complete agreement against fixism/creationism.

  Lamarck developed his theory in a time when scientists were not concerned that presenting their work in a philosophical manner would in any way discredit them in the eyes of their audience (Gilson, p. 42). Darwin, in contrast, avoided the expansive reasoning characterizing such works, and instead focused only on what could be derived from specific facts. Nonetheless, Lamarck must be credited with having first made the idea of transformism plausible.

  In the review of chapter 6 given in the table of contents of his main work, Zoological Philosophy, Lamarck writes:

“…since all living bodies are productions of nature, she must herself have organized the simplest of such bodies, endowed them directly with life, and with the faculties peculiar to living bodies. [And] by means of these direct generations formed at the beginning both of the animal and vegetable scales, nature has ultimately conferred existence on all other living bodies in turn.”

  Lamarck, having recognized that species are not fixed essences, but constantly (even if slower than we can directly observe) changing, attempted to explain the reason for the changes in terms of a variation in the surrounding environment. Here, he and Darwin are in agreement. However, Lamarck

“…does not mean that the environment acts directly on the organism, but that it forces the organism to modify itself in order to adapt to the new surroundings” (Gilson, p. 44).

  Darwin’s theory of natural selection, in contrast, appeals only to a pre-given environment to explain the changes seen in organisms. The only quality Darwin saw as intrinsic to organisms themselves was the desire to survive and reproduce. Unlike Lamarck, who thought an organism adapted by making “more frequent use of some of its parts which it previously used less, thus greatly [developing] and [enlarging] them” (Zoological Philosophy, p. 235), Darwin attributed little if any evolutionary autonomy to organisms. A change in the form of a species was the result, for Darwin, of a series of random variations selected for by a completely externally imposed and mechanical process.

  Lamarck’s attempt to explain evolution by way of acquired characteristics, which are learned within the single lifetime of an individual due to its needs and then passed on to offspring, is without doubt a teleological view of life. It is similar to Aristotle’s understanding of organisms, which

“…working from within by their substantial form, progressively shape their matter according to the type of perfected being which they tend to become” (Gilson, p. 46-47).

  Lamarck’s is a view which, while dispensing with the idea of each species having being created ready-made by a transcendent God, instead “has caused the finality of God’s thought to descend into the interior of nature” (Gilson, p. 48-49).

  We see here an affinity between the thought of Lamarck and Teilhard, as each sees evolution as a progression motivated by some inner drive toward perfection. Darwin’s theory of natural selection left little room for progress or for an efficacious within helping guide the development of the without, though the mechanism of natural selection he discovered was in no way denied by Teilhard.

  The issue is quite simple:

“Rare are those mechanists who admit that there may be teleology in nature, but exceedingly rare—if they have ever existed—are those finalists who deny mechanism and its natural function in natural beings” (Gilson, p. 105).

  As was discussed at the end of the last section, Teilhard recognizes two forms of energy at work in nature: tangential and radial. Mechanists, like Darwin, admit only one form of energy, the tangential variety, which of itself knows no direction (other than that given it by the 2nd law of thermodynamics) and desires only to return to equilibrium. It can be explained entirely in terms of efficient causation, without any recourse to finalism. Or at least that is what mechanists suppose, even while, in biology, the adaptationist paradigm attempts to give reasons for the particular traits observed in organisms based on a kind of teleological reasoning.

“Thus it is that, contrary to what we most often imagine, the substance of finalist reasoning is exactly the same as that of mechanist reasoning,” (Gilson, p. 107).

  Mechanists, to understand how organisms have adapted purely by way of natural selection, must make use of their own conscious ability to think teleologically. They thereby fall into the trap Teilhard wants to spring them from by separating the human mind from the rest of the natural world.

  The biggest problem for Neo-Darwinists is accounting for the presence of consciousness in nature. If evolution can be explained purely in mechanical terms, not only is there no role for consciousness to play, but there is no way to account for how it could have arisen in the first place! This is why Teilhard says, given consciousness is present in human beings, “therefore, half-seen in this one flash of light, it has a cosmic extension, and as such is surrounded by an aura of indefinite spatial and temporal extensions” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 56). If we do not assume that the within of things has such cosmic extension, we are left wondering how a trait such as consciousness (which only deserves the name if it is, in varying degrees, capable of spontaneity) could have been selected for in a biosphere determined entirely by mechanical law. One can of course always resort to saying that consciousness and free will do not exist even in human beings, but such a suggestion is patently absurd unless one has fallen into the most egregious kind of “misplaced concreteness,” putting the abstractions of one’s logic prior to the directly experienced reality of life.

  Indeed, what “would the mechanical energies themselves be without some within to feed them?” (ibid., p. 149). Teilhard is at a loss to understand, even from a purely scientific perspective, how the trajectory of evolution, whether cosmic or biological, could progress without accepting some kind of “fundamental impetus” driving it forward from within (ibid.). But again, Teilhard does not deny Darwin’s mechanisms; he merely finds that they alone are incapable of explaining the plain facts.

  Teilhard explains:

“In various quarters I shall be accused of showing too Lamarckian a bent in the explanations which follow, of giving an exaggerated influence to the within in the organic arrangement of bodies. But be pleased to remember that, in the ‘morphogenetic’ action of instinct as here understood, an essential part is left to the Darwinian play of external forces and to chance. It is only really through strokes of chance that life proceeds, but strokes of chance which are recognized and grasped—that is to say, psychically selected. Properly understood the ‘anti-chance’ of the Neo-Lemarckian is not the mere negation of Darwinian chance. On the contrary it appears as its utilization. There is a functional complementariness between the two factors; we could call it ‘symbiosis’” (ibid.).

  As was discussed at the outset, Teilhard’s evolutionary cosmology is explicitly teleological. He sees that the within of things acts as the impetus driving matter toward greater forms of complexity, which in turn deepens the within and leads to a snowballing of progressively more complexity and consciousness. The impetus from within toward complexity is “driven by the forces of love,” such that “the fragments of the world seek each other, [joined] by what is deepest in themselves” (ibid., p.265). The only remaining question to ask is where this urge toward union is leading. Teilhard, by extrapolating upon what he has seen in the past, foresees a future where the “object of love” is made clear by “… [assuming] a face and a heart, and so to speak [personifying] itself” (ibid., p. 267). What exactly can be said, short of an explicitly theological revelation, about the nature of such an Omega Point?


Part 3: Synchronicity and The Omega Point

  As we have seen, consciousness is the very center of Teilhard’s cosmology. “It is impossible to deny,” he says, “that deep within ourselves, an ‘interior’ appears at the heart of beings, as it were seen through a rent” (ibid., p. 56). It was not until the 20th century that our species began to gain the level of self-reflection necessary to truly begin a study of the psyche. The development of depth psychology, beginning with Freud and brought to new heights by Jung, opened up a hitherto unknown world for thought to explore: its own within. In order to better see what Teilhard means by the Omega Point, that “absolutely original center in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way” (ibid., p. 261), we will try to relate his thought to that of Jung’s, specifically concerning the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

  Teilhard writes of the many “fibers” of instinct “coming up from far below,” each with its own “story to tell of the whole course of evolution” (ibid., p. 180). He sees the human being as having “the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within,” and calls this within the “the inner face of the world” (ibid., p. 95). This “inner face of the world,” we believe, is akin to Jung’s collective unconscious, which could be described as that reservoir of instincts, archetypes, and experiences built up over the entire past evolution of life (and indeed, pre-life ). Teilhard argues that the fibers of this living past also extend into the future, “stretching beyond and above us” (ibid., p. 179) to the goal and summit of the evolutionary journey. Evolution, as Teilhard sees it, is realizing its potential in humanity through greater personalization, not just of the individual, but of the collective. In The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, Jung writes that “in some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single ‘greatest man’” (p. 175). We see here the similarity of these two men’s intuitions. But the connections run deeper.

  Traditional science, as we discussed above, has not troubled itself with the within of things, as it considered this dimension of reality to be a rare and improbable exception to the natural rule. Teilhard, in contrast, sees consciousness and nature as so interrelated that he wonders if biologists really discovered evolution by studying the outside world, “or quite simply and unconsciously…recognized and expressed themselves in it?” (The Vision of the Past, p. 69). The typical scientist studies nature by way of analysis, which we might identify with the conscious ego’s attempt to colonize the unconscious. Teilhard praises the method, calling it a “marvelous instrument…to which we owe all our advances,” but points out how in “breaking down synthesis after synthesis… [it leaves] us confronted with a pile of dismantled machinery and evanescent particles” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 258). “Modern man,” says Teilhard, “is obsessed by the need to depersonalize all that he most admires” (ibid.). He does this because of the discovery of the “sidereal world, so vast that it seems to do away with all proportion between our own being and the dimensions of the cosmos around us” (ibid.). But rather than feel oneself an isolated ego, trapped in “a prison from which we must try to escape” (ibid.), Teilhard invites us “to discover the universal hidden beneath the exceptional” (ibid., p. 56). By this he means that human consciousness, rather than a fluke, is actually the leading edge of a billion year process rushing toward its final consummation. This is a view of humanity as “the key of the universe” (Christianity and Evolution, p. 105).

  It is here that the connection between the Omega Point and synchronicity becomes apparent, as Teilhard appears to be pointing to some kind of acausal coincidence of the within and the without, the human psyche and the cosmos. But before exploring this connection, we must see that when Teilhard refers to “something greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our midst” (Activation of Energy, p. 392), he is speaking of what Jung would call the archetype of the Self, guiding us from within toward the full realization of our cosmic personhood. The entire groping process of evolution, from simpler to more complex granulations, is guided by the same archetypal energy, as each granule represents a further achievement of wholeness secured by the Self. Of all the archetypes Jung discusses, the Self seems unique in that it emerges not only from the accumulation of past experiences, but appears also to pull the psyche forward into the future, “all the time urging us to overcome unconsciousness” (Aziz, p. 21). Jung writes that the Self “cannot be distinguished empirically from a God-image” (On Synchronicity, pg. 531), which, for Teilhard, is experienced as the image of Christ, the “principle of universal vitality… [directing and superanimating] the general ascent of consciousness” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 294).

  We may return now to the question of the connection between Teilhard’s Omega Point and Jung’s principle of synchronicity.

  Teilhard asks:

“..what happens when chance directs [our] steps to a point of vantage (a cross-roads, or intersecting valleys) from which, not only in [our] vision, but things themselves radiate?” (ibid., p. 32).

  Teilhard is here trying to show us the significance of the current moment of evolution, as human beings begin to become conscious of evolution’s trajectory. This process of waking up—of coming to see—represents the moment when the within and the without cross paths to produce a point of infinite radiance. Once we have come to see the “inner face of the world” by feeling the “presence of the Absolute (the Self),” the synchronistic Omega Point is upon us.

“In that event the subjective viewpoint coincides with the way things are distributed objectively, and perception reaches its apogee. The landscape lights up and yields its secrets. [We] see.” (ibid.).

  Jung himself could not have defined synchronicity better himself. But trying to describe what the Omega Point might actually look and feel like is difficult. Luckily, Jung provides us with a wonderful picture of this sense:

“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ch.8). 

  This Omega Point represents, for Teilhard, “the momentary summit of an anthropogenesis which is itself the crown of a cosmogenesis” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 34). As we have seen throughout, the human being, rather than an anomaly, represents the pinnacle and purpose of evolution itself. This realization is a radical shift away from the “science of man as marginal to the universe” (The Vision of the Past, p. 162), where “the scientist himself stands apart from the objects of science” (Human Energy, p. 20). Instead, the scientific gropings of humanity are seen to link up directly as part of a single evolutionary continuum with the gropings of life itself. “Thus man is not seen as alien to the universe; he is seen as integral to it” (King, p. 48).

   Teilhard believes that science and religion are “two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge—the only one which can embrace the past and the future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfill them” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 285). Teilhard’s mysticism is scientific, and his science is mystical. Only with such a union of reason and heart is a full appreciation of our cosmos possible, as “the same life animates both” (ibid., p. 284).

  “In short,” says Teilhard:

“as soon as science outgrows the analytic investigations which constitute its lower and preliminary stages, and passes on to synthesis—synthesis which naturally culminates in the realization of some superior state of humanity—it is at once led to foresee and place its stakes on the future and on the all” (ibid.).



Works Cited

•    Aziz, Robert. C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity. New York: State University of New York Press. 1990.
•    Gilson, Etienne. Transl. by John Lyon. From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1984.
•    Jung, C. G.
o    Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage. 1989.
o    The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man. C.W. Vol. 10.
o    On Synchronicity. C.W. Vol. 8.
•    King, Thomas. Teilhard’s Mysticism of Knowing. New York: The Seabury Press. 1981.
•    Lamarck, J.B. Transl. by Hugh Elliot. Zoological Philosophy. New York: Bill Huth Publishing. 2006.
•    Teilhard de Chardin.
o    Activation of Energy. London: Collins.1978. 
o    Christianity and Evolution. New York: Harvest. 1974.
o    Human Energy. London: Collins. 1969.
o    The [Human] Phenomenon. New York: Harper Perennial. 1975. 
o    Let Me Explain. New York: Harper and Row. 1966
o    Letters from a Traveler. New York: Harper. 1962.
o    Man’s Place in Nature. New York: Harper and Row. 1956.
o    Toward the Future. New York: Harcourt. 1975.
o    The Vision of the Past. New York: Harper and Row. 1966.
o    Writings in Time of War. London: Collins. 1968.
•    Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. 1967.

  The philosopher Gregory Bateson has written that the “false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves.”  The rise of Western civilization, whether intentionally or not, has fostered the development of a false identity. Many have come to experience themselves as an abstraction, a disembodied ego whose only contact with the outside world is mediated by frozen, lifeless ideas. This situation, we believe, is the result of a hypermasculinized psyche. In such a psychological climate, feminine proclivities toward relationship and regeneration (rebirth through death), embodiment and compassion are repressed and become atrophied. In their stead, a pathologically individualist, anthropocentric, and life-denying ethos has been adopted, bringing both civilization and the biosphere to the brink of collapse.

  This modern crisis, though more painfully obvious to anyone currently living in late industrial society, has deeper roots. Our aim in this essay is not to solve the problem, but to shed light on the direction a solution might take.

  The entire history of human religious, philosophical and scientific pursuits, from at least the time of Socrates up to and including most of the 20th century, could be summed up as a quest to know and elevate the rational, unaffected, and pure ideals of spirit above the fragile, erotic, and fleshly nature of life. Put more simply, history is the story of the increasing domination of the feminine by the masculine.

  This story is not complete, though. It neglects indigenous and pre-historical humanity, whose aims were not to transcend and control terrestrial life, but to celebrate by participating in its endless seasons of regeneration. But in the West, with the influence of Greek and Hebraic thought, the discovery of the rational intellect/immortal soul has usurped any prior pact with the Great Mother, leading to the rejection of the capricious and frightening unconsciousness of nature in favor of the supposedly ordered and controllable consciousness of culture. This mutation in psychological orientation has today spread across almost the entire planet, evidence of it now radiating out even beyond the edge of the solar system.

  This desire for knowledge and spiritual immortality need not be at the expense of life, but in historical fact it has indeed turned out to be. Why this imbalance exists is not clear, but it may stem from an even more primordial source than mentioned above. Perhaps it dates back many thousands of years before the Axial Age to the transition into the Neolithic.

  As Erich Neumann reminds us, “[it is] impossible…to understand the early history of mankind from the patriarchal standpoint,” (p. 135). The nascent struggles of the ego toward separation from the uroboric womb arose while humanity was still a matriarchal, goddess worshiping people (Neumann, p. 46-47). The transition from absorption in nature to knowledge of self can be seen playing itself out in Genesis. Adam’s shocking confrontation with his sin represented by the fruit offered he by Eve transformed him from a child into a Man. Before he disobeyed YHWH, he had no conscience, no sense of conflicting with his naked presence in the maternal world.  Adam invented history and became

“…the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence—without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end,”  (Jung, p. 49).

   It might be hoped for Eve’s sake that history is already reaching its terminus. Only now that her story has been remembered is it possible to begin to heal the split between the World Parents.  Unfortunately, thousands of years of Man’s dominion over nature have lead to the above-mentioned impending collapse of climate stability and ecological diversity, potentially forcibly retarding the growth of human civilization and all life on earth. Any attempt to make peace between the ego and unconscious will be partially overshadowed by this violent confrontation with a chaotic planet. There may still be an opportunity to avoid the worst of this violence, but as with most psychological mutations, full inner transformation cannot come to pass unaccompanied by a corresponding shift in the outer world.  

  Complete disaster may not be required to reverse the Fall severing the human species from the planet and the mind from nature.   Peering into the depths of the uneasy relationship between civilization and Gaia helps to reveal the subtle archetypal tensions between masculinity and femininity lying beneath. Recognizing the conflict may allow the psyche to begin the process of arbitration necessary to avoid continued fragmentation and complete catastrophe. The modern self has been forged by a fear of the feminine, compelling it to seek total control over everything and to repress and ignore anything it cannot. Until this fear is overcome, ego and unconscious will remain fundamentally at odds.

  It is important to fully appreciate the degree to which the spiritual and scientific tendencies introduced above (desire to transcend impurities of body, etc.) are not simply human. This obscures the fact that they are primarily the obsession of an elite class of scholarly men. Man’s pursuit of pure, disembodied knowledge seems to have changed his relationship with women and the natural world. The current ecological crisis appears to be the result of a repressed psychosexual conflict within and between men and women, and simultaneously a spiritual sickness, an unsteady confrontation of unnecessarily opposed evolutionary ideals.

  Human beings are both wounded animals and fledgling angels. Without healing ourselves, it will not be possible for Gaia to nurse herself back to health, nor will it be possible for our species to gain its wings and fulfill its cosmic role. It is important, however, not to view health as a return to a prior state of comfort. The apparently conflicting aims of masculine and feminine energy are the catalysts urging the evolution of the human psyche, and by proxy the mind of Gaia, toward greater glories. As with all crises, this noogenesis  is filled with both peril and potential. Retreat into some past state of harmony is impossible, having already gained a conscious knowledge of the future. What has happened cannot be undone—the only option is to move forward.

  But before such an evolution is possible, the wound that has been inflicted must be healed through an understanding of its cause.

  In her book, Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm, Robin May Schott summarizes the provocative opening lines of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

“Supposing that truth is a woman, philosophers have been bumbling and inept in their courtship of truth. If they seek to court truth in a more convincing manner, the opposition they draw between pure truth and sensuous existence, between reason and desire, and between masculinity and femininity, must be transformed” (p. 41-42).

  Nietzsche goes on to criticize the “most grievous, protracted, and dangerous” error of philosophy, which he believes is the “invention,” by Plato,  of “pure spirit and transcendental goodness” (The Nietzsche Reader, p. 312). Nietzsche puts forth this criticism of Plato for his denial of perspectivity, which Nietzsche sees as “that fundamental condition of all life” (ibid.). Each of us is situated, not only in particular a body, but also in a particular time and place. The ideas we have about the world are very often “foreground evaluations, temporary perspectives, viewed from out of a corner perhaps, or up from underneath, a perspective from below…” (ibid., p. 313).

  This lack of appreciation for perspectivity led Plato to assume that the relations between men and women holding sway in Athens during his lifetime were universal, going so far as to describe, in Timaeus, the creation of woman as a secondary accident arising because a few members of the original “superior race” of men, after having their souls implanted in their bodies, became cowardly and unrighteous. As a result, their impure bodies having gotten the best of them, they became female (Schott, p. 5).

  This kind of blatant sexual prejudice comes out not only through the denigration of women, but in distaste for the body. Plato, in the Symposium, has Diotima tell Socrates that philosophical love is pure, “unsullied, unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint that haunts the frailer…flesh and blood” (p. 211e).

  Schott makes clearer the tie between women and the body in Greek thought:

“…women represented the pollution associated with the body and sexuality because of their role in giving birth to life, which brings with it the threat of death” (p. 43).

  This connection between the body, women, and reproduction has played a crucial role in the psychological and spiritual motives underlying man’s denial of mortality and desire to transcend the natural context of his conscious existence. The conscious ego is in the precarious situation of knowing both the potential of immortality and the actuality of death, which becomes inevitable the moment it is born from the womb of a woman as a body. The body itself, for the un-integrated ego, is experienced more as a tomb than as a vessel of life.

  We cannot simply demonize this desire to rebel against the natural way, however. As Jung reminds us: “It is just man’s turning away from instinct—his opposing himself to instinct—that creates consciousness,” (p. 72-73). There is a value to consciousness, and the culture that comes with it, which cannot be denied. Our task is more complex than simply washing away the emotional sedimentation acquired through thousands of years of patriarchal domination of the psyche. Questioning some of the philosophical assumptions we have inherited is of vital importance, but our goal is to make room for both culture and nature, not merely to return to an instinctual and unconscious absorption in the natural course of events. To do so would only reverse the imbalance of our current situation.

  The problem is not whether to embrace a wholly feminine or masculine psychic make-up, but to marry the two such that each enlivens and stimulates the best in the other. Our species has thus far failed to balance the dynamic relationship between these archetypes: early pre-historical goddess worshipping societies practiced human sacrifice, thereby overemphasizing our debt to the earth (Radical Ecology, p. 127), while our modern scientific worldview, shaped at an archetypal level by the patriarchal assumptions of monotheistic religion and Greek philosophy, has lead to isolation from and objectification of the planet and even our own bodies. Scientific materialism gives us the impression that we are not of this universe, but are some kind of freak statistical anomaly, strangers in a strange land.

  Where did this imbalance come from, and how did it ever become so extreme? Perhaps a short exploration of the origins of consciousness will help us gain our bearings.

  The rise of the conscious ego can be traced back to the discovery (by men or by women, we cannot say) of the link between sex and birth. Prior to this realization, “it is not the man who is father to the child,” but rather, “the miracle of procreation springs from God,” who was seen as closely related to the numinous quality of the wind, or of ancestral spirits (Neumann, p. 134). Even earlier to this association between the numinous and pregnancy, the fertility of the Great Mother was seen as fully her own. Indeed, contrary to the later patriarchal creation myths, such as are found in the Timeaus and Genesis, from an archetypal perspective:

“The feminine has priority, while masculine creativity only appears afterwards as a secondary phenomenon… The prime datum is the earth, the basic maternal substance. Visible creation proceeds from her womb, and it is only then that the sexes are divided into two, only then does the masculine form come into being,” (Bachofen, p. 356). 

  The origination of the masculine out of the feminine is true not only on an archetypal level, but is evidenced even in biology, both phylogenically and ontogenically. Nearly 2 billion years prior to the morphological differentiation that arose with the invention of sexual reproduction in animals, prokaryotic bacteria freely exchanged genetic material between membranes, functioning as a single planetary organism enclosed in an oceanic womb (Margulis, p. 85-98). The uroboric quality of this situation is symbolic of the self-creativity that pre-patriarchal peoples associated with the feminine power of the Great Mother.  Similarly, while developing in the womb, the mammalian zygote begins as female, and absent the genetic and hormonal agents associated with the Y chromosome, will not go through the metamorphosis required to become male (Fausto-Sterling, p. 80).

  The primacy of the feminine, both in an archetypal and biological sense, is significant for any attempt to harmonize it with the masculine. There is a sense in which it is the feminine that possesses eternal life, while the masculine is temporally bound, fated to continually rise and fall. Here we see the ambiguous character of the archetypes, the two being shifting reflections of one another, rather than static and essentially opposed. The male philosopher’s desire to transcend the finitude of bodily life could be understood as a form of worship of the feminine quality of regeneration, or rebirth through death. 

  There are plenty of other examples of opposites coinciding. When the link between sex and birth was recognized, the still weak ego also realized that the orgasm associated with intercourse, though intensely pleasurable, was simultaneously a kind of death. This was not a bodily death, but merely the death of the conscious mind, which cannot maintain its independence in the midst of such primal sexual urges. As the ego gained more and more sway over the psychic processes of men, these urges, and the female body that was associated with them, came to be seen as somehow unclean and lacking full humanity. The development of patriarchal society and the hypermasculinized psyche we have inherited from it arose, we believe, as the conscious ego, in order to secure its autonomy from the unconscious desires of the body, began a process of differentiation—one which unfortunately went too far into complete disassociation, as transpersonal symbols were projected onto concrete persons through secondary personalization.

  As has been said already, we must be careful not to flip this imbalanced situation into its equally imbalanced reversal, whereby we forgo consciousness and return to a complete identification with all things “natural.” Neumann reminds us “the supersession of the stage of the Great Mother…by a new mythological stage is not a fortuitous historical occurrence, but a necessary psychological one” (p. 82). The rising of consciousness out of the unconscious is not an accident, but an evolutionary moment of cosmic significance.

  As Paula Gunn Allen has said,

“Our planet is in crisis…[but] for the most part, we do not recognize that the reason for her state is that she is entering upon a great initiation—she is becoming someone else…giving birth to her new consciousness of herself and her relationship to the other vast intelligences, other holy beings in her universe,” (Ecology, p. 328-329).

  Human civilization, as a manifestation of Gaia, is the earth become conscious of itself. But this consciousness has gone too far, leading to its near total disassociation from nature and the unconscious. As was pointed out above, it has been a mainstay in the Western philosophical tradition for more than two millennia to conceive of the mind as independent of the body. Knowledge has been understood as objective, free of the vagueness of emotion and the situatedness of the body. These ideas arose along side the denigration of women, whose minds were seen as incapable of the nobler, intellectual pursuits of men. It seems that the energy associated with the masculine archetype seized the psyches of men, compelling them to reject all things mutable, sensual, and fleshly, and instead to strive for the eternal, abstract, and transcendental. This drive to understand and become divine by rising above the natural course of earthly events has produced modern science and technology, and liberated consciousness from the habits and reflexes of instinctual behavior, but so too has it laid waste to countless ecosystems and destroyed all other ways of knowing which stood in its path. The reason for this hubris, says Jung, is a “loss of roots.”

“[The] development [of consciousness thus far] has made it emancipated enough to forget its dependence on the unconscious psyche. It is not a little proud of this emancipation, but it overlooks the fact that although it has apparently got rid of the unconscious it has become the victim of its own verbal concepts…One can be—and is—just as dependent on words as on the unconscious. Man’s advance toward the Logos was a great achievement, but he must pay for it with a loss of instinct and loss of reality to the degree that he remains in primitive dependence on mere words…” (The Earth Has a Soul, p. 72).  

  Philosophy, broken down etymologically, reveals that its origins were love and worship of Sophia, the divine wisdom of the feminine. By the time of Plato, things had already begun to change, but we can still see the influence of the feminine in his choice of the female Diotima to teach Socrates the essence of Eros. Plato was conflicted about what the role of the feminine should be in his ideal society, but his rejection of poetry gives us a clue as to the deeper conflict at work. Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy, points out that Plato’s work marks the transition from oral to literate culture, and all that this shift entails  (p. 27).

  Writing, originally a privilege only granted to highly education men,  was the ladder upon which the conscious mind climbed out of the unconscious cave of dimly lit shadows and unrestrained instincts. But it soon changed, in a classic example of enantiodromia, from an empowering gift to a destructive vice. Before writing was mastered, speech held sway over experience, and so words were more like events than static images. Ong makes this clear with an example by pointing out “the Hebrew term dabar means ‘word’ and ‘event’” (p. 32). This means that words for oral cultures are not simply “a countersign of thought,” but “a mode of action” (ibid.). Such humans lacked the ability to abstract enough to engage truly private ideas, and so any notion of an invisible soul existing separate from the visible body would have seemed absurd. Further, the creative power of the spoken word was not just in human beings, but was the inspiration with whose help everything in nature moved and was made.  But when man became more skilled in the art of writing, the dynamic dance of the vocal word became a frozen visual image, codified into conceptual abstractions, mere letters on a page cut off from their former living presence as the voice of nature herself. A few lines from Walt Whitman’s “A Song of the Rolling Earth” express this perfectly:

“A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
    those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
    ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you…
Air, soil, water, fire—those are the words,
I myself a word with them—my qualities interpenetrate with
    theirs…
The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d
    either,
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly,
Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter and utter,
I speak not, yet if you hear me not of what avail am I to you?”

  The literate mind deemed the unconscious whimpers of the earth to be entirely under the spell of the pleasure principle. The immanent gods and goddesses of Homeric Greece, whose presence was felt in the wind upon one’s cheek, the waves rocking one’s ship out at sea, and the clouds blocking the sun from one’s eyes, were trapped and bled to death upon the pages of Plato’s scrolls, only half reborn as eternal forms forever removed from the earthly world of embodied experience. Plato was compelled to inscribe and confine these natural powers to the private, mental world of his pages because their full sensual reality seemed to him diluted by base desires of carnal attraction wrapped up in the finite and illusory thrills of time. But as Neumann says, this depreciation of the truthfulness of unconscious feelings is merely “proof of a depreciating tendency and corresponds to a conscious defense mechanism,” (p. 285). Our impulses and instincts, says Neumann, are far more adapted to reality than the still young, fantasy-obsessed ego (ibid.). When the conscious mind becomes entirely severed from its instincts, the result, says Jung, is “exaggerated self-esteem or an inferiority complex,” (p. 73). This leads to an imbalanced situation ripe for psychic injury, and indeed, our modern civilization is proof of its disastrous results.

  “For it is the body, the feelings, the instincts, which connect us with the soil,” says Jung (ibid.). Having lost this connection, we have become vagrants on the earth, aware of the potential for peace but not knowing where to turn to actualize it.

  We might, taking Nietzsche’s advice, “become friends of the immediate things” once more (quoted in Jung, p. 86).

  As Jung remarks,

“…the immediate things are this earth, this life. For quite long enough…we…have been taught that this life is not the real thing, that it is provisional, and that we only live for heaven. Our morality is based upon the negation of the flesh, and so our unconscious often tries to convince us of the importance of living here and now,” (ibid.).

  The Sufi mystics have a concept that opens the door to a form of spirituality that, rather than deny the sensory world, finds the divine within our immediate experience of it. The term, in Arabic, is “ta’wil,” which David Ulansey has said is “based upon the idea that the physical world is a manifestation of the divine” (p. 1). Rather than abstract the eternal forms of objects from their actual, living embodiment, the Sufi’s recognize, with a special mode of perception, the subtle way in which eternity expresses itself within time.

  We must come again to find spirit in nature, to love the body, and to cherish our planet: rising out of its depths at birth, sharing our Eros-inspired energy with the world, and then allowing our forms to pass away again to be reborn anew. Such is the way of Gaia. But how are we to respect this natural cycle even while retaining the intricacies of interior experience and public expression offered us by consciousness? How to return to the vibratory eroticism sustained by oral culture without first burning the volumes of paper insights cherished by even the greenest among us?
 
  As we have repeated throughout, what we seek is a sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine, a reconciliation of the conscious and unconscious forces that need not pull in opposite directions. It seems that truth, if she is still open to being courted, will not respond solely to the written word and the pure essences they reveal to our disembodied minds. We must balance this objectivity with an appreciation for our natural instincts and the emotions they evoke. Without such balance, the beauty of the planet is wasted: its magical matter turned into mere bricks in the economic empires built in praise of a phantom, of salvation through total technological control of life and living. The only result of such relentless attempts to cleanse nature of the natural is disassociation and death. It must be admitted that without the aid of our pens, the importance of truth, of the Logos, would never have struck us. But we cannot allow our admiration for the light to blind us to the soil that feeds us and keeps us whole.

  As William Irwin Thompson says,

“To effect reconciliation with her, man must not seek to rape the feminine and keep it down under him. If he seeks to continue his domination of nature through genetic engineering and the repression of the spiritual, he will ensure that the only release from his delusions can come from destruction,” (p. 251).

  Instead, man and woman, conscious light and unconscious depth, cultural order and natural creativity can become dance partners, recognizing their sacred union as Shiva and Shakti swirling around the Axis Mundi toward ultimate enlightenment. Like all opposites, the psychic polarization of masculine and feminine is but a shifting appearance. Beneath the outward opposition is an inward coincidence.

As Whitman says (and we concur):

“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall
    be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who
    remains jagged and broken.”

 










Works Cited

•    Bachofen, Johann Jakob. Das Mutterrecht. Basel. 1948.
•    Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York: Harper. 1988.
•    Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Men and Women. New York: Basic Books. 1985.
•    Jung, C. G. Answer to Job. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1958.
•    Jung, C. G. Ed. By Meredith Sabini. The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writing of C. G. Jung. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. 2002.
•    Margulis, Lynn. Sagan, Dorian. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1986.
•    Merchant, Carolyn (editor). Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology. New York: Humanity Books. 1994.
•    Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge. 2005.
•    Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1954.
•    Nietzsche, Friedrich. Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large. The Nietzsche Reader. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 2006.
•    Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge. 1982.
•    Schott, Robin May. Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm. Boston: Beacon Press. 1988.
•    Thompson, William Irwin. The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1981.
•    Ulansey, David. The Theophanic Significance of Mary Magdalene. Senior Thesis, Religion Department, Princeton University.
•    Whitman, Walt. Edited by Karen Karbiener. Leaves of Grass: First and “Death Bed” Editions. New York: Barnes and Noble. 2004.

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