Science is not merely an objective gathering of knowledge, but rather a series of practices at least partly social in nature. People who work and explore as scientists, in other words, are also parents, pedestrians, and every other conceivable social role. To be a scientist is a type of process that one undertakes, and one has many 'supporting' or ancillary processes that enable one to do scientific work. One must, for example, also eat breakfast, bathe, and travel to and from work.
Such observations are not made in an attempt to denigrate science, but to understand more precisely what it is. Its embeddedness within a social context does not mean that it is incapable of objectivity. It does mean, however, that making sense of science will always mean understanding its context, its social-political origins. The insights of science or philosophy certainly transcend this origin, but they are never entirely liberated from it.
The idea, put briefly, is that scientific process is derivative of political process. By derivative I mean that political life is prior to scientific life both temporally and logically. Temporally it is obvious from the historical record that there were animals living in communities with something like politics before there were ever communities that generated philosophical or scientific process. Logically, science or philosophy already presupposes the language of the community (which is creatively redeployed for scientific purposes i.e. a 'cell' as in a room can metaphorically become a 'cell' as in one of the fundamental concept of biology). Thus both logically and temporally science is derivative of political process.
I am interested in formulating this idea in terms culled from Gendlin's A Process Model, an astonishing book I have recently completed for the first time. Gendlin's book is meant to provide a model for developing and using concepts in a process oriented way. This stands in contradistinction to the typical type of concept that we develop and use, which is a unit or structure oriented concept. This video of George Lakoff talking about the mystery of consciousness is instructive on this point. Notice that Lakoff's attempt to talk about consciousness are all about 'aspects' of consciousness, 'structures' of the brain that 'perform' or 'do' things. Lakoff is essentially bound to unitized thinking, or acting as if though structures are genuinely explanatory. He can't regard or discuss the process as fundamental.
The problem is that structures are derivative of processes, not the other way around. The process of an embryo and a sperm meeting, for example, generates the structure of the human body. But all throughout our lives our bodies are in flux, in process. The structures are ancillary to the processes.
How do we build concepts that do not assume that causation is about the combining and re-combining of units, but rather implies process all the way down? I don't know how to answer this question 'fully' yet. But Gendlin's Process Model is one of the deepest excursions into this problem I have seen.
In the first five chapters Gendlin develops his 'basic model' of process. In those first five chapters he establishes (1) the fundamentally interactive unity of organism(body) and environment (2); the existence of functional cycles within organism-environment interaction (i.e. hunger, food, defecation, hunger, so on; plant consumption of water can also be an easier example); (3) the existence of 'objects' that can further a stopped process (i.e. water is the 'object' that a plant 'implies' when it sags, and which will carry its life process forward); (4) a primordial sense of time in which it is constituted principally by the body's implying of its own processes (i.e. my body bears the scars and marks of my past and thereby implies the past; while my body also implies the future in its ongoing needs and processes); and (5) establishes the possibility of evolutionary change within the model.
After establishing the basic model in 1-5 Gendlin begins to develop concepts that are more precisely applicable to complex animal and human situations. More specifically, Gendlin wants to show how animal behavior (6) processes could develop into more complex human symbolic processes (7), and finally, how those symbolically augmented behavior processes could turn into something like science, philosophy, or focusing (8).
At each of these levels (behavior, symbol, focusing) a new form of space and a new form of time is developed. Understanding these different forms of space and time will help us see the fundamental dependence of scientific process on political process. In deriving of scientific process from political process we can appreciate some of the most troubling aspects of our current situation, namely, anti-intellectualism, misology, racism, sexism, transphobia, and political violence broadly.
Behavior Space
We are animals and we have and live our bodies like the rest of the animals. I find this claim to be nearly axiomatic in my own thinking and I do not feel compelled to offer arguments for it. John Gray's Straw Dogs would be a jarring and maybe helpful read for someone that disagrees with this claim. Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life or Even Thompson's Mind in Life would offer more subtle and 'scientifically' grounded accounts.
To have be an animal is to have a body that can move, indeed must move, in space, generally in pursuit of sustenance of some kind. To be an animal is to be capable of behavior, and even more specifically, locomotion. Space, in its most fundamental sense, then, is behavior space. (I find myself asking if plants or fungi have a sense of space. This isn't clear to me. I can see how the plant mode of living could involving some sort of spatiality, as plants move in different directions, interact with gravity, but behavior space it seems to me is quite fundamental for us as human beings and all other animals).
Behavior space is the immediate and intuitive bodily knowledge of my surroundings and situation. I, for example, am aware that my hot tea is to my left and that it is still too hot to drink readily. I know that my water to my right and my tea are both within my immediate grasp, but that I'd have to lean over to turn on my small lamp (a gift from my friend Eric), and I know that I'll want to do that soon because the sun is going down. I know that my phone just vibrated (I could hear and feel it through the table), and I'm pretty sure it is my friend George responding about our Beach House conversation (we don't care for the recent albums). I'm aware that my interaction with my friend this afternoon went better than expected. I am aware that I'm feeling hungry, and that my trip to the gym this afternoon means I need to be sure to eat substantially. And I'm aware that nothing in my fridge is appealing. I'm aware that my kitchen is behind me, and that I won't be able to finish this writing in one sitting. I'm aware that I'll be getting up to eat pretty soon.
I don't really need to think about any of this in order to know it. I just have to use my attention and language more explicitly and I find that I already implicitly understand these things. Behavior space is constituted by my implicit bodily understanding of my situation. This includes the physical space I am in, what activities would be possible from different places, as well as a temporal sense of what I did earlier, what I'm doing now, and what I'll do later. I am demonstrating an explicit awareness of this implicit behavior space.
All animals have an experience of behavior space, and it is the most fundamental sense of space available to us. The notion of 'empty space' is not first experientially, but rather derived from our experience of behavior space. Indeed, Gendlin has a very interesting essay called "The derivation of space," that develops this idea. He also makes this claim in A Process Model. In fact, there is some strange consonance or identity between the idea of empty space and the emergence of symbolic consciousness. Somehow the emergence of human 'symbolic space' seems to imply or require some sense of empty space.
Behavior space also has its own unique, fundamental sense of time, the original rhythms of the living body. Clock time, measured time, is derivative of a more fundamental since of time that originates in the processes of living bodies. Gendlin would say that a living body 'implies' its relationship with time. The biggest difference between clock time and the body's implied time is that body time is not linear. Clock time pretends that we can cut time up into little units, and makes it seem like past, present, and future are somehow distinct or discreet. Our experience of time, however, is far less linear in that both the past and the future seem to 'function' within the present moment. That is, our sense of the present is really some complex feeling of then-becoming-now-as-I-look-forward. I agree with Gendlin that we need an understanding of time in which both the past and the future can function in the present. The distinction between clock time and body time makes it possible for us to understand our experience of time in which the past and future are both implied by the present body.
I now transition to the emergence of human symbolic space, or the symbolically augmented behavior space that constitutes most of human experience and serves as the basis of our experience as political animals.
Symbolically Augmented Behavior Space
Human situations are unique and strange in that our embodied living processes are carried forward primarily through the deployment and re-deployment of communal patterns and symbols. Everything we do has a name. We go to work or school or the gym. In those places we interact with certain kinds of people who occupy certain symbolically designated roles. Everything we 'do' in those places is accomplished or at least augmented through the use of symbols.
Lets take two highly physical activities: lifting weights and building construction. Going to a gym and lifting weights is a highly physical process. Getting there, whoever, involves many symbolic steps: using words to tell a person you want to join a gym or using a website to purchase a membership. This also involves spending money, a quintessentially symbolic activity. Then once at the gym one must have some articulate understanding of the equipment, and must use numbers while interacting with all of them. Treadmills and stair-mills all have numbers. Weights are numbered. The very act of working out, too, implies a degree of self-consciousness in which we can symbolically conceptualize our own identity. We look in mirrors while we lift to see that our posture is 'correct', i.e. aligned with an imagined (symbolic) posture that we are imitating. Thus even the most physical activity, lifting weights, is suffused with symbolic elements.
Now lets think of physical construction project. First of all, in order for something significant to be built, like a skyscraper, someone has to have some idea about it, some plan. Generally someone will have a blue print, there will be someone in charge of making sure that the actual building conforms to what the image implies or asks for. A blueprint in this case would be the supervenient symbolic element. The blueprint implies a whole slew of subservient symbolic processes: masons to lay the concrete, welders to secure iron, carpenters to handle wooden frames and walls. Each of these tasks would have their own complex symbolic processes of measurement, distinction, and procedure. Thus something like building construction is a thoroughly symbolic process: all of the behavior of construction workers and foremen is organized by hierarchically organized symbolic patterns: money, institutions, blueprints, crafts, all with their own unique symbol-worlds.
Human activity is therefore primarily symbolically augmented behavior space. Our bodies function just like the bodies of the other animals, but we have somehow become intertwined with symbolic processes that have fundamentally augmented our experience of ourselves, each other, and the world. Other animals engage in what seems to be proto-symbolic behavior, and dogs are particularly adept at engaging in our symbolically structured situations. But it seems this symbolic augmentation of behavior space is most pronounced in human beings.
There are two more important points to make about symbolically augmented behavior space (SABS). The first is that SABS is the foundation of our experience as political animals. The second pertains to the relationship between SABS and time.
SABS is the foundation of our experience as political animals because it is what it possible for us to divide and collect the world into discrete kinds. Politics is fundamentally concerned with distinguishing various things and evaluating their arrangement. For example, politics is concerned with who belongs and who does not, who constitutes a citizen of this particular community or city. There are then distinctions within those who belong, various roles, both formal and informal. Class, hierarchy, caste. In some ways this point strikes me as so obvious that I won't do much here. Politics depends upon the division of people into symbolic kinds. This symbolic order then becomes reflected in the physical structures that organize society, think of neighborhoods and geographic segregation, rooms accessible only to the wealthy or connected, so on. All of this depends upon fundamental symbolic distinctions like 'here and there', 'us and them', 'mine and yours'.
Our experience of SABS is also particularly bound up with our experience of artifacts, constructed objects. This point is especially significant and I really don't have a full handle on it. But Gendlin, for example, discusses in A Process Model how the development of SABS emerges around the same time that people started saving their tools for later use as opposed to constructing them on the spot. When chimps go 'termite fishing', for example, they grab a stick or plant from the area and begin using it to catch termites right then and there. They don't, as far as I know, save a stick for later because it was especially good. To save a tool for later use rather than to simply create one in the moment implies that something has been added to the immediate behavior space. Something has been added or developed in which 'this' can now be understood to be useful for 'that' at a later time. So somehow the experience of SABS has something to do with the emergence of what I'll call artifactual continuity. That is, the capacity to perceive the usefulness or purpose of an object beyond the immediate context of its use. I have, for example, a frisbee in my closet. The closet is not a context in which that object can achieve what it is generally used for. Therefore I have an understanding of its usefulness despite the absence of its proper context. I have a sense of other times and other places, other situations in which it will be useful. I'd like to know more about how animals relate to artifacts, because I can think of an instance of an orangutan saving a rag to clean themself or something like that.
The existence of artifactual continuity is what allows human beings to undertake intergenerational projects. There is a famous proverb, that progress happens when people plant trees that they will not live to sit in the shade of. I recently had a moment of clarity around the Greek notion that 'happiness takes a whole life' or to 'count no person happy until they are dead.' Having the capacity to think and plan over long periods of time is essential to large scale human development.
Indeed, it seems as though ancient people's produced artifacts to keep track of time: stonehenge, sun dials, the pyramids, all of these things show some kind of relationship with celestial process and cycle, the tracking of time. Calendars then become essential for how we navigate time.
In the modern world the relationship between time and artifacts has become nearly overbearing. We orient primarily towards clock time as opposed to seasonal or bodily time. We have lights that make the rhythms of the sun potentially 'obsolete'. I have been looking at Jacques le Goff's book on time, work, and culture in the middle ages. The development of measured time, clock time, was a big deal with significant cultural impacts.
One thing I am unsure of is Gendlin's claim that the advent of symbolic behavior space comes along with a sense of empty space. He makes a big deal of when hunting implements were saved for the next hunt. Apparently he thinks this has something to do with being able to conceptualize empty space as opposed to just living in behavior space. I can see this in that saving a tool implies I am aware of another situation that is not here, which means I can imagine directionality in space and time.
Our basic experience is that of SABS. This is the most essential and immediate reality for human beings. This is another way of saying that the human being is by nature a political animal.
It is against this backdrop of SABS that scientific process emerges.
Indeed, I would claim that philosophy or science is precisely a transcending, a moving beyond, the limitations of SABS.
Philosophy as Inner Space, Beyond the Capture of SABS
Philosophy or science is a special development of our activity within SABS. SABS does not necessarily generate philosophical or scientific process. SABS is always in a certain sense rational, as in it is structured in terms of language and 'reasons' for doing things (however contradictory or shallow the reasons may be, culture or nomos or SABS has a 'rationality' to it. Philosophy or science begins when we begin to engage rationality as such as opposed to the rationality implicit in SABS. It is in this sense of being a political animal, an animal always in SABS, that we must understand scientific or philosophical process as emergent or derivative of political process.
The transcendental character of philosophical process can be understood my examining the alternative: simply being 'captured' by SABS. Most people I know are aware of the possibility of being 'trapped' in their cultural perspective. We may fear that we lack the resources necessary to confront our unconscious biases. It is no doubt true that our cultures inevitably imbue us with certain prejudices and distortions. The symbols of any society are inherently normative. Language is always implicitly evaluative, never simply neutral. So how do we get outside of the assumptions of our culture, our time and place? Is such a thing even possible, or is something like philosophy or science ultimately just another contingent cultural 'world view'?
The reality of philosophy or science depends on the possibility of not simply being captured by the normative character of language. Philosophy depends, instead, on being able to use symbols developed in practical life to be deployed in new theoretical ways. I have recently been interested in the way that scientific language is ordinary language that has been repurposed. I noted above that the word 'cell' in biology comes from 'cell' in the sense of a room or chamber.
How is it possible that familiar words can be made to mean new things? This is a complex question that gets straight at the nature of language. What must be the nature of language that words can be made to mean new things? Some conceptions of language will obviously not work, such as formal understandings of language whereby symbols function as fixed units. This is reminiscent of the early Wittgenstein (from what I understand). This could be called the 'picture' theory of language in which a word is like an image of a corresponding thing in the world. Sometimes language works this way, like a little label we put on something. But the picture theory of language won't explain how old words can mean new things.
The later Wittgenstein's 'use' theory of language will get us closer to answering our question. Wittgenstein noted how the same word ('slab!') could mean many different things depending on the context and way in which it was uttered. So language is something that acquires meaning in its use in situations. Gendlin has developed this use theory of language far beyond Wittgenstein, more than anyone else I'm aware of, in fact. So now I say something like: philosophy is possible because the nature of words is not to be fixed units, but to acquire meaning in their use in situations. If a situation is different then the words will do different things.
Philosophy is possible due to the fact that words acquire new meaning when used in new situations. The human situation is peculiar in that we are always already in a symbolically structured situation, SABS. Our lives begin within a situation that language has created for itself. To be in SABS means that 'words have us' just as much as we have words.
Because the situation is linguistically structured from the outset it follows that the use of language can change the situation. This follows from the whole analysis above of SABS. Walk into a cafe, make the situation change by using words, it'll be ordinary and fascinating.
So how do philosophical situations arise? How could there be a linguistically structured situation in which someone begins to raise fundamental questions?
There are two questions that I have, two concepts that concern me: the felt sense and the good. These two questions, I suspect, will prove to be one question.
The emergence of science would have something to do with the ability to sense more holistically into the implicit intricacies of SABS. This follows from the claim that science begins to make explicit the rational structure implicit in SABS (implicit, in fact, in all animal bodies).
The order of SABS is the orderliness of the living body with the addition of symbols that structure and augment it The living body, in turn, is part of the larger order of nature. In the chapter "The Intertwining / The Chiasm" Merleau-Ponty shows that the body's presence within the visual field can be taken as evidence of its fundamental continuity with the rest of being. The body is continuous with the other things in the visual field and therefore can't be totally foreign to them, must be akin in some way.
Science or philosophy thus has something to do with the order that is present in the whole visible world and experienced most directly in our living bodies.
Science or philosophy thus begins from a type of orderliness that seems to be identical with the world itself. Science or philosophy assumes the intelligibility of nature, the orderliness of nature, and our access to this orderliness.
Our access to this orderliness seems to be fundamentally mysterious. Einstein, at the end of his life, wrote that science and religion meet in the fundamentally orderly quality of the world, and the strange fact that our language seems to be capable of revealing or explicating that orderliness.
The experience of encountering the world's orderliness in our own bodies could be called having a 'felt sense'. A felt sense is the essential concept of Gendlin's whole philosophy and its emergence is identical with the emergence of science from SABS. SABS is inherently a limited domain, one that implies capture and obfuscation of the deeper order of nature. A felt sense, by contrast, is capable of grasping holistically the partial reality created by our enmeshment in SABS. Wholeness, somehow, is what Gendlin points to as the defining character of a felt sense.
When engaging with a felt sense one accesses directly one's living relationship with the orderly-body-emergent-from-orderly-nature. A felt sense allows us to see that our body is engaged with the situation in a way that transcends and reconfigures the generic social categories of SABS. It is this capacity to engage with the symbols of SABS in a way that is not simply social, not simply intelligible within the SABS situation, but implying the larger situation of nature or cosmos from which SABS is emergent and contained.
Thus a felt sense, or the ability to sense holistically beyond the domains of SABS, is a prerequisite of the emergence of science.
The emergence of a felt sense would also be the explicit emergence of awareness of 'the good' or 'goodness as such'. All living activity is implicitly directed at the good. Living things think it is good to be alive and all of their activity is aimed at preserving and elaborating this implicit goodness.
To become aware of a felt sense is to become explicitly aware of one's living relationship with goodness. SABS has an unreflective relationship with goodness, just like behavior space. Put differently, the beautiful and the good are taken to be identical within behavior space and SABS. The emergence of science, philosophy, or a felt sense, however, would be to become aware of a diremption between the beautiful and the good, what seems to be good and what is really good.
The felt sense has a unique form of implying, and this implying is always towards some form of rightness or goodness. Gendlin talks about the felt sense as a 'zone of rightness' where steps will always emerge that have some 'life forward' energy to them.
This concept of life forward energy is the most mysterious and difficult in this whole set of questions. Behavior space and SABS are clearly ways that more complex forms of life carved out to carry their life energy forward. Science or philosophy is also a way of carrying life forward energy further.
The problem is that some human beings are carried forward by philosophical activity and some are not. Some people live good lives strictly within SABS. I would think this is most common in sound SABS, or good governmental situations. But for some reason, perhaps when individuals are harmed rather than nurtured by the SABS, philosophy emerges as a way to carry forward energy that cannot be carried forward in the political situation as such.
It seems that the existence of the felt sense and the existence of goodness must simply be assumed. So much can then be made intelligible. But if one begins from units, from a pre-human developmental story, there will be a gap. Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature is evidence of this massive gap that exist between first and third person accounts. Deacon never makes a phenomenological turn, concludes the book instead by talking about the 'morphodynamic' processes of the brain and how we could see them correlated in the experience of consciousness. He downplays the rift between first and third person perspectives.
I conclude with an observation on the felt sense and the tension between nature and nomos. The tension between nature and nomos, a staple of Leo Strauss' thought, is well reflected in the relationship between SABS and a felt sense.
Felt sensing is an ascent that is also a return. It is a return in two senses. First, in a simpler sense in which we return to the concepts our community delivered to us, we return to them, we return to our lives within the 7 symbolic matrix. But is also a 'return' in a stranger sense in which we are getting access to something that 'was' there all along; a potential or possibility, never actualized. This is where the dimension of eternity shows itself: this was in principle always possible for a human being once they become a human being. This is in fact what we mean by human being. A being that can begin to make explicit for the first time the implicit intricacy that is nature, that was present in behavior space and SABS. Aha, openness to nature. Solitary historians of the cosmos.
Conclusion : First person science means the ascent from politics... we have to feel 'back' developmentally to understand behavior space, we have to reach out forward and beyond for inner space, holistic space. We are most naturally in symbolically augmented behavior space - rational, mimetic, political... not philosophical... To begin felt sensing is to make explicit what was implicit in behavior space and SABS. It is to invite a new experience of time. It is to invite a new experience of inner space.
I've accomplished something in this explication, but I can do no more.
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