The Book of Desire: Toward a Biological Poetics (original) (raw)
Related papers
The book of desire: Towards a biological poetics
In this paper I propose to understand the current paradigm shift in biology as the origination of a biology of subjects. A description of living beings as experiencing selves has the potential to transform the current mechanistic approach of biology into an embodied-hermeneutic one, culminating in a poetics of nature. We are at the right moment for that: The findings of complex systems research, autopoiesis theory, and evolutionary developmental biology are converging into a picture where the living can not longer be described in terms of causal mechanisms (as is, e. g., the Watson-Crick “central dogma”). Instead, organisms bring forth themselves physically and thereby generate a hermeneutic standpoint, interpreting external and internal stimuli interfering with their auto-creation according to embodied values. This can be observed empirically during embryonic develoment, where genetic instructions do not act as orders, but rather as perturbations being interpreted by an auto-maintaining developmental centre. The notion of organic subjectivity opens the living realm to a hermeneutic perspective. Since any encounter has a meaning and is interpreted accordingly, it creates a perspective of innerness or self. This self experiences all external and internal stimuli as values. The innerness is coextensive with the material dimensions of biochemical processes as their other, or symbolic, side. By this process the subjective perspective of organisms is open to other’s experience. Meaning and value become visible, as they are generated in material, embodied form. Instead of being separate from nature as pure “mind” or “language”, man shares with any other being the same “conditio vitae” of experienced meaning and expressive feeling.
Self and Other enigmas or A note on bio-embodied consciousness
In an important sense this note is not about self. It does not make any claim that self does exist or it does not exist. This note questions the the very notion of self. The notion, this note argues, is misconceived and fails to make sense beyond the discursive boundary with in which it finds a problematic use. It fails to cross the boundary to talk about that is not a mere construction of the discourse. I have used in this note a few terms that are neologisms and a few others for which I have departed from conventional use. There are certain words I needed to rediscover for the presentation. In a discursive context for example deliberators arrive at a position by rational argumentation. The words agreement an consensus tell a different story. Gratis, the Latin root of 'agree', actually means to please. And 'consensus' derived from sentire meaning in Latin feeling. Originally therefore agreement and consensus are non-rational and very inter subjective in nature. The rational procedure of the discursive level hardly gets out of the vicious circle it's own ideas create. And cannot match with the agreement and consensus of the inter subjective level. Key words: Subjective plane-introspection-extra-spective-intersubjective plane-extra-spective plane-extraspectively intersubjective-introspectively intersubjective-discursive level-phenomenation-transcendental unity of apperception-selfsame ess of continuous consciousness-reflexive consciousness-lived bodies-three orders of being-sense of horizon of existence-auto-ontological-ex-ontological-facing-field-bio-embodied Consciousness-interface-instrumentation of sign system-cogito complex-spontaneous reflexivity-auto-thetic-linguistic fabrication One: spontaneous reflexivity Thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dared not use the word self as reassuringly as many of their counterparts do today. They stuck to the words 'the I' or 'ego' for referring to something which many of them thought to have an
From Nature to Being: Flesh as the Revelation of the Ontological Status of Nature
In Merleau-Ponty's lectures at the Collège de France, there is a surprizing expression about the body: "machine à vivre", or "machine à voir", that he takes up from the writings of Paul Valéry. This metaphor occurs in the first lectures, when Merleau-Ponty describes the implicit coordination of perception and motility. It is the arrangement, or what he also calls the montage, of our sentient body that defines the meaning of what we perceive, or in other word the "body schema", defined for example in the Résumés as "open to all other bodies that I see, a lexicon of corporeality in general, a system of equivalences between the inside and the outside" (p. 178). This sensing body is also a desiring body, and both these aspects intertwine to form the realm of the unconscious as "sensing itself"; the "primordial unconscious" is this machinic dimension of the body. Merleau-Ponty's approach to the unconscious can be compared and confronted to Lacan's conception under this notion: the automaton, the machine. Such a confrontation should help answering the question of the nature of the unconscious, and thus bridge the gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I will start with describing the use of the word "machine" in Merleau-Ponty's lectures; I will then show the link between this notion and his discussion of psychoanalysis; the third stage will be to present Lacan's conception of the automaton, and then Guattari's notion of the desiring machine. My conclusion will be to articulate and combine those three conceptions and show in what direction Merleau-Ponty might have gone if he had had the chance to develop his views further.
From the originary unity of the flesh to the imaginary unification of the differing body « The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two laps: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born by segregation and upon which, as seer, it remains open. 1 » We don't come into the world, indeed: we start seeing the world since that latent collaboration between such pivots, like instincts and schemes, seals an alliance among senses and perceptual influxes. The world is carved out from this alliance as we grow. Hence, the eye extends itself. Someone even said, that the eye could listen.
Minding Self: Self in the Biological Mind
Antonio Damasio's routine of writing a book every few years addressing the neuroscience of the brain's construction of mind, consciousness, emotions, and self has the fortunate effect of creating some transparency in neuroscientific research. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain is the latest presentation in the narrative that began with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Damasio, 1994), further developed in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , and was followed by Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain .
Producing an Evolutionary Self
2018
the argument I locate la m arck in a loose sense within the sensationalist discourse and the materialist discourse as understood in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Thus, I analyze Lamarck’s discussion of the human from the point of view of problems and difficulties faced by eighteenth-century attempts to establish a science that anachronistically can be called psychology. I argue that Lamarck cut through the knots of mind-body/mind-brain relations by positing an evolutionary self, which he called “sentiment d’existence / sentiment intérieur.” This construal allowed him to offer a self that by virtue of being evolutionary was hierarchically spread across the evolutionary system and had a different measure depending on its evolutionary history. Capacity for experiencing was differential and depended on bodily structures, meaning that less complex living entities had a very rudimentary sense of existence, and those with a more complex nervous system had a correspondingly exp...
ON BECOMING SAPIENS. An Essay Excerpt from 'The Trilogy of life
2018
Synopsis The Trilogy of life is a bold attempt at explaining life in its totality. It starts with the scientist's view of how the universe evolved grabbing at the strings of secular and religious views in an imaginative, if not fantastic way. It proposes an evolving path for all of existence, based on a fundamental three dimensional thread ... Creation is presented in a romantic vignette portraying how the first female primate, perhaps ARDI, became human. The author embodies Ardi to reveal her account of how it happened; her discovery of consciousness, love and happiness, as well as fear and how these became the foundation on which humanity has based its psychological evolution. The created man, the integration of the physical and the emotional/spiritual, does not stand alone as an entity bound by an impenetrable cocoon. He/she is fluid. The body floats totally immersed in an electromagnetic sea. His body distorts the EM fields and the EM fields distort his body, in the most subtle ways. The understanding of these interactions is beginning to effloresce from the rigidity of the traditional understanding of what physicality really is. In the last few decades, with the emergence of neuroscience, the advancements of the physical sciences and the invention of instrumentation such as, NMR, MRI, fMRI, EEG, PET and several others, man's cognitive processes are beginning to be understood. We cannot any longer look at ourselves and ignore the juncture of physicality and spirituality. There has been a centuries old, if not millennia old controversy between philosophers and scientists i.e. Physicalists vs. Vitalists schools of thought, which argue the mode and source of creation. Paraphrasing, "Some evidence exists which shows the two were considered one, as a natural philosophical tradition or physiology, as was called by one of the earliest Greek pre-Socrates philosophers; Thales (of Miletus)". R. Abraham, 1994 In this study we will argue that the original view Tales held was actually the correct one: both physicality and spirituality are one and the same, inseparable, although distinct in form, and together form the whole universe.
The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance
This is a book about the self, self-consciousness, and subjectivity. Clearly we are animal creatures, with animal bodies and animal desires and appetites. Equally clearly, we are conscious beings with interiority, able to think of ourselves as ourselves. Two influential depictions of our humanity have increasingly come to seem unworkable: the scientistic picture, that we are nothing but especially complex networks of neural firings; and the Abrahamic picture, that we are immaterial souls associated with but separable from our animal bodies. Do the Indians, who thought long and hard about the question of what it is to be a human being, have any alternative advice? I believe so. The answer I will offer arises out of my reflection upon their discussion, but is not the view of any single participant within it. My proposal will draw from Buddhist analyses of subjectivity and self-consciousness, and on other Indian theories of emergence, subconscious mechanisms, embodiment, and the emotions. What will gradually emerge from this exercise in conceptual retrieval from historical sources is a philosophical explanation of the compatibility of naturalism with the first-person stance, within the parameters of a new conception of self. Selves, embodied subjects of consciousness, come into view from the standpoint of a liberal naturalism. "Ganeri's book is truly impressive in its scope and sophistication. Even if one is not enamored of the idea of selves that are distinct from persons—as I am not—one will flnd this book a creative contribution to the discussion of persons. Although I lack the competence to judge Ganeri's interpretation of Indian texts, I highly recommend this book for its rich discussion as well as its complex account of the self. Ganeri's holistic, nonscientistic, and nonreductive approach to our mental lives will be highly congenial to those who appreciate the richness of mental life, including its flrst-personal aspects." —Lynne Rudder Baker, Review of Metaphysics 2013 "Ganeri manages the amazing feat of writing for two different audiences at once. One is Western-trained philosophers looking for answers to the puzzling questions the various properties of the self. They will find a thorough and sophisticated discussion that at the same time introduces them to a stunning set of intellectual gems from India's philosophical history. The second audience consists of scholars working on Ancient Indian materials dealing with the relation of body, mind, and self. Even though the discussion is going to be considerably more hard-going for this audience, they will find new insights into ways of thinking about the Ancient Indian discussion and the interrelation between various philosophical traditions on almost every page. The ease with which Ganeri manages to keep both audiences on board without sacrificing either philosophical sophistication, or distorting the nuances of the historical discussion by broad- brush generalizations found in less accomplished works on cross-cultural philosophical debates is nothing less than astonishing. It is no exaggeration to say that this book marks the beginning of a completely new phase in the study of Indian philosophy, one in which a firm grasp of the historical material forms the basis for going beyond pure exegesis, opening up the way for doing philosophy with ancient sources." —Jan Westerhoff, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2013 "Emergence is but one of the many important issues tackled in a book whose scope extends over a large range of philosophical puzzles about the self. There are intriguing taxonomies of theories of the mind, ancient and modern, and an abundance of critical discus- sion, including an acute critique of the Buddhist view of the self. Both because of the clarity of its grasp of the contemporary landscape in analytic philosophy of mind, and because of the special slant given by the author’s knowledge of Indian philosophy, the work has a lot to offer. While it would be unrealistic to expect from this (or perhaps any) book definitive solutions to the intractable problems of mind and body, Ganeri’s understanding of what it means to ap- proach these problems from a broadly naturalist perspective seems to me to be a good deal more nuanced, and more philosophically in- teresting, than much of the contemporary literature in the philosophy of mind." —John Cottingham, Philosophy, 2013
Bounded in a nutshell and a king of infinite space: the embodied self and its intentional world
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2015
This paper explores the implications of developments in phenomenological biology for a reconsideration of synchronicity and the self. The enactive approach of Maturana and Varela aims to reformulate the relation between biological organisms and the world in a non-Cartesian way, breaking down the conceptual division between mind and world so that meaning can be seen as a function of the species-specific way in which an organism engages with its environment. This leads to a view of the self as inherently embodied and engaged with the particularities of its material, cultural and social worlds, while being infinitely extended through the power of imagination; this enables humans to adapt to many different social and material environments. In order to understand these differences, we need to 'enter into the world of the other'. Where understanding of other animals requires immersion in their environmental milieux, understanding other humans requires us also to recognize that differences in socio-cultural milieux create significantly different worlds of meaning and experience.