Abstract
This article identifies already existing theoretical and methodological commonalities between evolutionary biology and phenomenology, concentrating specifically on their common pursuit of origins. It identifies in passing theoretical support from evolutionary biology for present-day concerns in philosophy, singling out Sartre’s conception of fraternity as an example. It anchors its analysis of the common pursuit of origins in Husserl’s consistent recognition of the grounding significance of Nature and in his consistent recognition of animate forms of life other than human. It enumerates and exemplifies five basic errors of continental philosophers with respect to Nature, errors testifying to a philosophical fundamentalism that distorts the intricate interconnections and relationships of Nature in favor of a preferred knowledge rooted in ontological reductionism. It shows that to discover and appreciate the common ground, one must indeed study “the things themselves.”
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Notes
An extended exemplification of descriptive foundations may be found in an article of the same name, originally presented as the Keynote Address at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Flagstaff, AZ, 2001. See Sheets-Johnstone 2002. An extended exemplification of how the separation of the sciences from the humanities is bridged by conceptual complementarities anchored in animate life is given in Sheets-Johnstone 2004, an article first presented as an invited paper at “The Perils and Promises of Interdisciplinary Research,” a conference sponsored by the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, 2002.
Given Husserl’s striking and unusual metaphor of a “comet’s tail” to describe the foundational and perduring connection of spirit and nature, and thus to describe an ontological as well as epistemological dimension of personhood, it is curious that Merleau-Ponty finds different uses for the same metaphor, taking it up for quite other purposes. He uses the comet’s tail first as a descriptive simile when he writes, “I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole of my body trails behind them like the tail of a comet” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 100), and subsequently uses it as an explanatory device to resolve his puzzlement about movement, notably about movement and objects in motion vis-‡-vis the sight of a bird in flight: “It is not I who recognize, in each of the points and instants passed through, the same bird defined by explicit characteristics, it is the bird in flight which constitutes the unity of its movement, which changes its place ... like the comet with its tail” (ibid., p. 275). (For a critique of the not uncommon notion of movement as a change of position, see Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 2003).
It bears emphasis that ‘I cans’ are not simply physical proficiencies but a confluence of physical, theoretical, and conceptual proficiencies, precisely as in judging distances and thus having formed concepts of near and far, for example, and in judging weights and thus having formed concepts of heavy and light, for example.
It is pertinent in this context to note an instance in which Husserl explicitly rejects the notion of embodiment. He writes of “an egregious error” of which “one must beware” (Husserl 1977, p. 106), namely, the error of either inductively uniting a physical body to a psyche or conceiving a physical body and a psyche to be parallel worlds. He states that the notion “is flatly absurd” on two counts: “Not only because psyches do not have a properly psychic space which would have its own psychic geometry, but also because according to this interpretation, it would be just as proper to say that bodies must be spatialized in the parallel psychic space, present themselves by expression in the psyches, etc. just as the psyches are embodied, physically incarnate and expressed in physical space” (ibid., p. 106).
In a recent article titled “Taking Inventory,” entomologist Piotr Naskrecki points out that “nobody knows exactly how many species have already been described, though the consensus seems to hover around 1.7 million.” He goes on to say that “Estimates of the total number of species vary from 3 million to more than 100 million; the truth is probably between 6 million and 12 million species” (Naskrecki 2005, p. 46).
Ted Toadvine’s detailed exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s “mythical” strategy for arriving at “the present state of separation” of “man” and “animal” (Toadvine 2005, p. 18) – whatever “the present state of separation” might represent for Merleau-Ponty in terms of a definable natural time period or for that matter a particularly Western mode of thought since he finds the masks of the Inuits to “[recall] a time ... when the separation was not yet effected” – implicitly demonstrates the sharp contrast between ontologically-driven divisions within nature and bona fide evolutionary discontinuities illuminated by close studies of nature and a natural history of the animate. (See Toadvine 2005, pp. 18–19.)
The lack of commensurate first-person readings of earlier biologists appears to be based on a naive belief in the acuity and veridicality of other philosophers’ readings of these biologists, a belief that warrants serious critical attention. In a recent conference paper in which he explores Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures vis-‡-vis the question of the “human–animal” relationship, for example, Ted Toadvine appears to take as authoritative Merleau-Ponty’s account of biologist Adolph Portmann’s analysis of the appearance of animals. Recapitulating Merleau-Ponty’s account, Toadvine states that Portmann’s analysis “resist[s] explanation ... in terms of adaptation for survival” (unpub. ms, p. 15), and later states that “Portmann’s study of the forms of animal appearance underscores the fundamentally expressive character of the animal’s relation with its milieu and the internal relation or indistinction that exists between them” (ibid., p. 16).
The first statement misrepresents Portmann’s analysis. It is not that animal appearances “resist” utilitarian or adaptational explanations, but that such explanations do not exhaust the significance of the morphological features of animals; they fall short of acknowledging precisely what Portmann aims to set forth: “the intrinsic value of what is visible” (Portmann 1967, p. 35). “Intrinsic value” is tied to features that distinguish organic forms from one another (ibid., e.g., p. 13) and to meaning, interanimate meaning (ibid., e.g., pp. 213–214). It is precisely in this double sense that, as Portmann states, “the production of forms of the animal body [go] far beyond the elementary needs for preservation” (ibid., p. 201).
The second statement misrepresents Portmann’s analysis in an even more serious way. It transduces Portmann’s concept of “Form as an Expression of Inwardness” (actually the title of his tenth chapter, ibid., pp. 183–201) in a way to suggest coincidence with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm. While Portmann’s “inwardness” might be construed as the “internal relation” of animal and milieu in the sense that an animal’s moods, excitements, social exchanges and communications – all of which specify what Portmann means by ‘expressions of inwardness’ – are linked to an environing world, that construal of inwardness is most definitely not characterizable as an “indistinction” existing between an animal and its milieu.
In broad terms, Toadvine falls short of doing justice to Portmann’s actual analysis because he is seemingly unaware that Merleau-Ponty falls short of doing justice to Portmann’s actual analysis. Merleau-Ponty takes Portmann’s general term “presentation value” (ibid., p. 214) and turns it into “an existential value of manifestation,” a phrase that will resonate with his chiasmatic ontological renderings of nature, but a phrase too that is pointedly similar to Buytendijk’s earlier descriptive phrase “‘displayed existential value’,” a phrase Portmann calls attention to in the course of emphasizing the special form value of the morphological features of animals (ibid.).
In the context of morphology, it is pertinent to point to a further example in order to emphasize the need for first-hand readings. When Merleau-Ponty notes that Darwin termed morphology “the soul” of natural history (Merleau-Ponty 2003), he gives no reasons for Darwin’s doing so. On other contrary, he seems to want to infer in a brief and oddly, even subtly derisive way that Darwin was trying to give something wholly empirical – the material science of morphology – foundational metaphysical significance. In the passage referred to (non-referenced), however, Darwin was in fact recapitulating his earlier discussions of resemblance; that is, how “members of the same class, independently of their habits of life, resemble each other in the general plan of their organisation,” or in finer terms, how a “‘unity of type’” among parts and organs of different species indicates homologous rather than analogous relationships. “The whole subject [of resemblance or ‘unity of type’],” he states, “is included under the general name of Morphology.” He then observes, “This is the most interesting department of natural history, and may be said to be its very soul.” What follows is precisely a straightforward indication of what he means by soul: “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?” Homologous organs or parts, in other words, “may change to almost any extent in form and size, and yet they always remain connected together in the same order” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 415). “We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects,” Darwin observes, in “the mouths and limbs of crustaceans,” and in flowers and plants (ibid., p. 416). In effect, the soul of natural history lies in morphological invariants linking different classes of animals to one another in foundational ways.
Butterflies belong to the same biological class as bees, i.e., both belong to the Class Insecta, but butterflies are of the Order Lepidoptera within that class rather than the Order Hymenoptera.
In defense of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it should perhaps be emphasized in more explicit terms that field studies of bees, chimpanzees, lions, pronghorns, ants, gorillas, and multiple other nonhuman animals were not as extensive as they are today. Thus, Heidegger’s foray into biology in his 1929–1930 lecture course (which constitutes The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), specifically, his consultation of experimental studies of bees, predates Karl von Frisch’s classic studies of the honey bee dance in the mid-1940s (Frisch 1946; see Frisch 1950 for a full bibliography; see also Keeton and Gould 1986, pp. 585–587). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on chimpanzees in his 1942 book La Structure du Comportement (The Structure of Behavior [1967]) predates Jane Goodall’s classic studies of Pan troglodyte in her original 1968 monograph “The Behaviour of Free-Living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve.”
On the other hand, but precisely in light of the above defense, it should perhaps be emphasized in more explicit terms that both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show a serious and astonishing naiveté with respect to science, accepting laboratory experiments as reliable records of the actual lives of bees and of chimpanzees, respectively, and more generally, accepting not only current findings of science but, particularly with respect to Merleau-Ponty, current theories generated by contemporary scientists of his day – notably, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan – as unquestionable fact. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s project of carrying out “a psychoanalysis of Nature” (Merleau Ponty 1968, p. 267) appears less a matter of giving Nature her natural, i.e., dynamic and evolutionary, due than of transmogrifying her into a reductionist psycho-metaphysical mold. Most lamentably, it appears that neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty read Darwin’s The Origin of Species, much less The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, all of which are based on first-hand observations and studies of Nature, that is, on first-hand observations and studies of animate life as it is actually lived. Indeed, while he writes of “Darwinian thinking” and “Darwinian-type thinking” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, e.g., p. 175), Merleau-Ponty in actuality displays a gross ignorance of the writings of Darwin, mentioning Darwin specifically and directly only twice in his course notes on Nature. He writes that “For Darwin, life is endlessly menaced by death” (ibid., p. 171), and that in contrast to Lamarck, “with Darwin there is the idea according to which the milieu discriminates that which allows or does not allow the surivial of the organism” (ibid., p. 151). In the first instance, he gives no notice of the “entangled bank,” for example, or of the “forms most beautiful and most wonderful [that] have been, and are being, evolved” of which Darwin writes (Darwin 1968 [1859], pp. 459, 460), and in the second instance, he fails completely to understand the complex ecological relations underlying all forms of life that Darwin takes pains to describe, as when he describes “how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations (ibid., pp. 124–125) or when he remarks how ”interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaboratedly constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us“ (ibid., p. 459). In sum, an appallingly deficient and egregiously stunted notion of Darwin and of evolution is evident. In its stead, we have an evolutionary doctrine that denies outright any form of ”filiation“(Merleau-Ponty 2003, p. 258) and any “theory of descent” (ibid., p. 271) – the evolution of birds from reptiles, for example (ibid., p. 260) – and in turn simply a Nature according to ‘Merleau-Ponty dans son cabinet’.
Some primatologists prefer to distinguish between imitation and what they term “emulation learning”: see Tomasello and Call 1997.
A BBC News electronic article reported the field observations as follows: “Gorillas have been seen for the first time using simple tools to perform tasks in the wild.... Scientists observed gorillas in a remote Congolese forest using sticks to test the depth of muddy water and to cross swampy areas.... ‘In the first case, we had a female crossing a pool; and this female has crossed this pool by using a detached stick and testing the water depth, and trying to use it as a walking stick.... The second case saw another female gorilla pick up the trunk of a dead shrub and use it to lean on while dredging for food in a swamp. She then placed the trunk down on the swampy ground and used it as a bridge. What’s fascinating about these observations is the similarity between what these creatures have done, and what we do in the context of crossing a pond’, observed Dr [Thomas] Breuer. ‘The most astonishing thing is that we have observed them using tools not for obtaining food, but for postural support’” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4296606.stm). (Note: Dr. Thomas Breuer leads the study team in Nouabal-Ndoki National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is associated with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany).
The term ‘appalling’ – a term obviously used here to mean something inspiring a revolting dismay, repugnance, or horror – and the descriptive phrase “scarcely conceivable” are significant. They signal a strong affective response to the notion of human animality. Thus Frank Capuzzi, in his translation of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” renders Heidegger’s distanced view of the “kinship” of human and beast in highly qualitative terms. (Capuzzi’s translation was done in collaboration with J. Glenn Gray and was edited by David Krell.) An oddly different translation occurs in William McNeill and Nicholas Walker’s “Translators’ Foreword” to Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. McNeill and Walker call attention to the fact that Heidegger’s “engagement with experimental biology occurs in the course of the possibility of an ontology of ‘life’, the term referring primarily to the ‘natural’ life of plants and animals, but also encroaching uncannily, no doubt, on what Heidegger, in the 1946 ”Letter on Humanism,“ would call our ”scarcely fathomable, abyssal bodily kinship with the animal.“ The strong affective response to the notion of human animality in Capuzzi’s translation does more than simply affirm the relationship of humans to animals to be intellectually challenging – ”scarcely fathomable“ – and the distance between the two to be immeasurable – ”abyssal.“ Indeed, it indicates that the relationship of human to beast is something rivetingly shocking and virtually unthinkable for Heidegger.”
It is of interest in this context to note that in attempting to reconcile the relation of ‘man’ and ‘animal’, Merleau-Ponty characterizes their “kinship” as “strange” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, pp. 214, 271). If “kinship” is “strange,” however – or if it is “appalling and scarcely conceivable,” or “scarcely fathomable [and] abyssal” – it is not only because an evolutionary history, and one that includes humans, goes unrecognized, but because an implicit ontological belief holds that “mind” could not possibly evolve part and parcel of Nature. Reading Darwin readily dispels the ignorance and groundless belief. It is indeed ironic that Darwin himself, by consulting experience, long ago realized the methodological challenge and pointed to the methodology proper to the challenge, a methodology continentalists, including Merleau-Ponty, began to adopt more than a hundred years later. Darwin wrote: “Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – the mind is function of body. – we must bring some stable foundation to argue from. – ” (Darwin 1987 [1836–1844], p. 564).
The book is printed under the title Man’s Place in Nature, but in his introduction to the University of Michigan 1959 publication, Ashley Montagu points out that the full title of the book, originally published in January 1863, was Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.
Epistemologists and cognitivists generally may also be at great pains to prominence humans, specifically with respect to rationality, intelligence, and consciousness. (See, for example, Bennett 1964, Carruthers 1986, Flanagan 1992, Dennett 1991, Povinelli 2000.) As I pointed out in an earlier work, however, “One is easily led to think, at least with respect to some of the creatures they write about – lobsters and scallops, for example – that their only encounter with them has been on a plate” (Sheets-Johnstone 1998, p. 291; 1999, pp. 77–78).
How can there be an evolution without filiation? Without filiation, there are no relationships. There is only an original overall creation of species or intermittent special creations of each species, which creation or creations are by some kind of decree said to constitute a history that is “evolutionary.” On the contrary, a veritable evolutionary history cannot be devoid of homologous relationships among animals.
Concepts engendered by these developing capacities make a human ontology possible in the first place. The concept of death, of drawing and painting, and of oneself as a sound-maker, for example, are clearly not just intimately tied to various extant phenomenological ontologies, but conceptually structure them.
Though Barbaras writes of Nature being “potential and, to some extent, unfinished,” and speaks of Nature’s “infinity” (Barbaras 1999, p. 538), thus suggesting a temporality of Nature, the temporality is not an inherent dimension of Nature herself and thereby lacks historical continuity, in addition, one might add, to a recognized past to begin with. In short, any sense of a natural history of Nature herself, precisely such as that adumbrated in James Hutton’s famous observation, “no vestige of a beginning,-no prospect of an end” (Hutton 1960 [1795], Vol. 1, p. 200), is nowhere in sight.
One might further comment in this context on a puzzling line of thought. Barbaras writes that “Nature ... provides us a sense of Being that overcomes the difference between physical world and Life.” Why the physical world and Life are or should be taken as oppositional in the first place, however, is nowhere explained. Depth understandings of ecology would indeed seem to be far from inimical to ontology. “Being-in-the-world,” for example, means precisely “Being-in-the-world,” hyphens and all.
Apart from wondering whether the charge of “irrational reductionism” might be made in light of “irrational roots,” one might wonder and in fact find it near impossible to understand how a person appointed to teach child psychology at the Sorbonne could write so unknowingly and even arrogantly about children. It is as if Merleau-Ponty never held much less interacted with an infant or played with a child. Particularly insofar as a bona fide study of evolution includes embryology and developmental biology, a study of evolution requires careful study of ontogeny as well as phylogeny. Whatever is otherwise offered in the way of evolution risks being adultist as well as specieist.
One might proceed along this line of questioning by asking, What is the nature of this being who in fact has developed the technological power to destroy the very earth on which all life exists? Alternatively, proceeding along a different line, one might ask, What is the nature of this being who, at times appearing morally disabled, appears challenged to behave ethically and who fabricates gods and forms of a higher power to help him abide in a moral mortal life and at the same time procure him life everlasting? The ontology of this being in relation to Nature appears indeed complex and in want of examination.
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Sheets-Johnstone, M. Finding common ground between evolutionary biology and continental philosophy. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 327–348 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9053-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9053-3