Insides and Outsides

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Description

This book brings together diverse aspects of animate nature, diverse not only in terms of animate nature itself, but in terms of areas of study. Indeed, the book lives up to the word "interdisciplinary" in its title. It brings together diverse academic perspectives within each chapter and across chapters, showing in each instance that scientific understandings of animate nature are - or can be - complementary to philosophical understandings. Thus insides and outsides, typically viewed as subjective vs objective, mind vs body, and self vs other, are shown to be woven together in complex and subtle ways in the complexities and subtleties of animate life itself.There are and ever have been only two essential models of government: minority rule of all types (labelled "oligocracy") and regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual (labelled "monocracy").Vaunted democracies are in reality either oligocracies or monocracies. The present-day "democracies" of Britain and the United States are in reality composite oligocracies made up of several disparate elements. Oligocracies are by definition regimes with a high degree of inequality, but with variable levels of liberty. Oligocracy and inequality are the "default" features of human society.Equality is unattainable except by a radical monocracy like Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then only with difficulty and at the expense of liberty and probably of lives as well. Equality of opportunity must not be equated with equality. Equality of opportunity means an equal opportunity to become unequal. Paradoxically, however, for genuine equality of opportunity to exist there has to be equality - which is practically unattainable.For genuine freedom of expression to exist there also needs to be equality, because the little man standing on his soap-box and shouting his lungs out at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park cannot compete with the media moguls - which is why genuine freedom of expression is rare.Once these truths are recognised, it becomes clear that for one state to attempt regime change in a foreign country is likely to be futile.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of mind

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845409104
• Langue: English

Extrait

Insides and Outsides
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Animate Nature
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
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Copyright © Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, 2016
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Prologue
[T]here belongs within my psychic being the whole constitution of the world existing for me and... the differentiation of that constitution into the systems that constitute what is included in my peculiar ownness and the systems that constitute what is other... If perchance it could be shown that everything constituted as part of my peculiar ownness... belonged to the concrete essence of the constituting subject as an inseparable internal determination, then, in the Ego’s self-explication, his peculiarly own world would be found as “inside” and, on the other hand, when running through that world straightforwardly, the Ego would find himself as a member among its “externalities” and would distinguish between himself and “the external world.”
-Husserl (1973, pp. 98–9)
How might ideas, processes, and things that seem entirely different and separate actually be reconciled as inextricable complementary aspects of complementary pairs... To see how, first appreciate that very little in life, even at the most elementary molecular level, happens unless two or more individual things come together... But things don’t just come together, do they? They must also be able to move apart again. This is the complementary nature at perhaps its most basic.
-Kelso and Engstrøm (2006, p. 85)
This Prologue sets the stage for the chapters that follow. It situates the chapters in the most basic aspects of insides and outsides, aspects having to do with both our subject–world relationship and our personal relationship with others as those relationships are present from the beginning. It identifies these most basic aspects of inside and outside in terms of Husserl’s phenomenology of the “Ego,” the “I” who is the subject of any and all subject–world relationships, including relationships with other animate beings, and of Kelso and Engstrøm’s complementarity thesis that shows how, rather than being polar opposites, inside and outside are complementary. The chapters that follow are from this perspective widely varying and highly detailed interdisciplinary elaborations of the real-life, real-time aspects of inside and outside set forth in the Prologue.
I: Husserl’s Abstractive Epoché and Kelso and Engstrøm’s “Complementary Nature”
In the first epigraph above, Husserl is describing what is present in the “abstractive epoché” by which he distinguishes what is “I” from “Other.” This distinguished “I” is not a matter of “I ‘alone’ remain” (Husserl 1973, p. 93), but a matter of “I” in relation to all that is alien . What Husserl finds in this methodologically abstracted “I” is an “animate organism” that is “ uniquely singled out,” that “is not just a body but precisely an animate organism: the sole Object... to which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe fields of sensation ... the only Object ‘in’ which I ‘ rule and govern’ immediately ” (ibid., p. 97). Husserl goes on to specify three further dimensions of this “sole Object” that is an animate organism, namely, doings and “I cans” and thus the ability, by way of “the kinesthesias, ” to “‘ act’ somatically” ; a reflexive relationship between organs of sense and objects of sense, as in one hand touching the other; and “ psycho-physical unity ” (ibid.). In his further methodological abstraction, Husserl proceeds to a descriptive analysis of “externalities,” of what is in fact alien and hence Other. In this analysis there is recognition of both subject–world relationships and corporeal–intercorporeal relationships. In effect, Husserl is essentially distinguishing between insides and outsides.
It is important to realize that though Husserl specifies the realm of the abstractive epoché as “the sphere of ownness,” and speaks over and over of “ownness,” of “my” and “mine” (ibid., pp. 92 ff.), he is not claiming ownership of “my animate organism” as a possession. He is delineating basic I/Other ontological distinctions, elucidating to begin with essential features of the “I,” and on that basis and in turn, concerning himself with how that “I” “ wholly transcends his own being ” (ibid., p. 105) in the constitution of the world. “Ownness” is thus indeed not a matter of possession; it is a matter of ontology, what one might designate a primordial ontology (see ibid., pp. 103–06), and of an epistemology on the basis of that ontology. In light of this terminological-semantic clarification, the following comparison can in fact be made.
Just as Husserl describes the Body as the “ zero point ” of orientation with respect to all appearances in the world (1989, p. 166) - to the nearness or farness of things, to their being above or below, to the right or left, and so on - and thus describes subject–world relationships, so the “sphere of ownness” - fields of sensation, “I govern,” “I can,” and so on - describes the zero point of the subject tout court , the zero point of purely “ personal ” happenings, abilities, and relationships (Husserl 1973, p. 97). The zero point of the subject tout court is indeed the “ uniquely singled out” animate organism within the abstractive epoché, the Body that, as Husserl states with respect to the zero point of orientation, is “always here” (Husserl 1989, p. 166). Thus, precisely as with the zero point of orientation, what is specified in the zero point of the subject tout court is a hereness, an “ultimate central here” of the subject in relation to any “there,” a hereness that is “not just a body but precisely an animate organism: the sole Object within my abstract world-stratum to which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe fields of sensation... ” (ibid.). In short, whatever the happenings, abilities, and relationships, they are ontological dimensions of the “ uniquely singled out” animate organism that constitute the experiential ground on which the Objective world is constituted and thus the ground of a veridical epistemology. Hence clearly, Husserl’s use of the term “ownership,” “my,” and “mine” is properly understood not in the vernacular or colloquial sense of possession , but in the sense of the subject tout court , the subject divorced as it were from the world, from all that is alien. Being a question of the subject tout court , and in turn, of the subject in relation to the world, it is a question of how, as animate organisms, we are individually gifted with sense modalities and capacities, and how on the basis of these modalities and capacities we progressively make sense of “externalities”: the Objective world, both the world of things and the world of other animate beings.
In The Complementary Nature , Kelso and Engstrøm cite researchers from many different fields of study, all of whom in one way and another view their own research and findings as encompassing complementarities rather than contraries - “both/and” rather than “either/or.” Kelso and Engstrøm quote William James, for example, who describes the stream of consciousness in terms of a bird’s “perchings and flight” (Kelso and Engstrøm 2006, pp. 175–6). They quote Isaac Newton’s description of nature as “generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile and volatile out of fixed, subtle out of gross and gross out of subtle, some things to ascend and make terrestrial juices, Rivers and Atmosphere; and consequence others to descend. ...” (ibid., p. 72). They quote Niels Bohr whose coat of arms reads “Contraries are complementary” and who wrote with respect to the dual wave and particle nature of light, “The quantum postulate forces us to adopt a new mode of description designated as complementary” (ibid., p. 62). Kelso and Engstrøm point out that “In the last few hundred years ... the complementary nature has become increasingly important to human beings, as they have developed more and more sophisticated methods to study and manipulate nature in order to understand it” (ibid., p. 252). They give as examples James Maxwell’s discovery of the “inextricable complementarity” of electricity and magnetism in the phenomenon of electromagnetism and Einstein’s astrophysical discoveries showing that time and space are “inextricably connected as complementary aspects” (ibid.).
Kelso and Engstrøm introduce a semantically rich diacritical mark to designate this inextricable complementarity. They term this mark “~” a “squiggle” or tilde (ibid., p. xiv), a mark placed between two words and indicating a “complementary pair” (ibid., p. 7). The mark will be used at times in the Prologue text that follows. Kelso and Engstrøm give as an example “body” and “mind,” which are “complementary aspects of the complementary pair “body~mind.” They pointedly explain, “We use the tilde ~ not to concatenate words or as an iconic bridge between polarized aspects, but to signify that we are discussing complementary pairs. Equally if not more important, the tilde symbolizes the dynamic nature of complementary pairs” (ibid.). As they later state, “complementary pairs move ” (ibid., p. 8), and as they later quote Sheets-Johnstone, “In coordination dynamics, the real-life coordination of neurons in the brain and the real-life coordinated actions of animals are cut, fundamentally, from the same dynamic cloth. Integrity is in turn preserved because it is never threatened. Psychophysical unity is undergirded at all levels by coordination dynamics” (ibid., p. 9).