The Sphere of the Human

“Centric positionality” is a form of organism-environment relation exhibited by animal forms of life. Human life is characterized not only by centric but also by excentric positionality—that is, the ability to take a position beyond the boundary of one’s own body. Excentric positionality is manifest in: the inner, psychological experience of human beings; the outer, physical being of their bodies and behavior; and the shared, intersubjective world that includes other human beings and is the basis of culture. In each of these three worlds, there is a duality symptomatic of excentric positionality. Three laws characterize excentric positionality: natural artificiality, or the natural need of humans for artificial supplements; mediated immediacy, or the way that contact with the world in human activity, experience, and expression is both transcendent and immanent, both putting humans directly in touch with things and keeping them at a distance; and the utopian standpoint, according to which humans can always take a critical or “negative” position regarding the contents of their experience or their life.

The Thesis

This chapter presents the thesis that living things and nonliving things have distinct forms of phenomenological appearance, particularly regarding their boundaries: relations between inside and outside, core and property, body and surroundings. The distinction between “inner” core and “outer” properties characterizes both living and nonliving things, but living things exhibit a special relation between these aspects, such that the boundary between them is a property of the living thing itself. This position resolves a dispute between Hans Driesch and Wolfgang Köhler about the characteristic gestalt or form of living things in comparison with the nonliving. The properties that are taken to define living things have both empirical and a priori components and may be examined for both natural-scientific and explanatory and for phenomenological and philosophical purposes. The inquiry that will occupy the remainder of the book is an attempt to test and develop the thesis of the distinctive boundary structure of living things by deriving properties that are traditionally considered essential characteristics of life, such as metabolism, heredity, and aging—the “organic modals”—from the proposed boundary structure and linking the derived results to what is known about living things.

The Sphere of the Animal

This chapter analyzes the phenomenological structure of body-environment relations (“positionality”) characteristic of animals, noting the ways this differs from plants. The phenomenon of frontality (that is, an orientation toward the future) is a characteristic of animal positionality. Animals live both as physical bodies and as lived bodies. Relatively decentralized forms of animal positionality are described, as well as more centralized ones. This distinction corresponds to that between “lower” and “higher” animals and is symptomized by gradations in the complexity of animal nervous systems. Capacities for response to the world as objective, as well as for consciousness, intelligence, and memory, are linked to an animal’s degree of centralization. The chapter integrates phenomenology and biology in a study of the animal mode of being.

The Cartesian Objection and the Nature of the Problem

Since Descartes it has been customary to divide reality into res extensa (the extended, the physical, the body) and res cogitans (the mental, the mind). This assumption is now recognized to have extremely problematic effects, yet no satisfactory substitute is available. Among the problems generated by the Cartesian dichotomy between the mental and the physical is the association of nature with the quantitative and measurable and the association of qualities with the “subjective.” Likewise, the dichotomy entails an unbridgeable gap between the “inner” (mental, experiential) and the “outer” (physical). Even other subjects (other I’s) are inaccessible to a single subject’s knowledge according to the Cartesian view. Finally, the Cartesian assumption restricts the theory-generating resources of biological research—for instance, comparative psychological research—too narrowly: namely, to behavior construed as entirely extensional. In the interest of preserving and explaining the possibility of forms of knowledge and objects of knowledge characteristic of biology, the study of nature in general, and human and animal activity in everyday experience, we must find a substitute set of ontological assumptions to those in the Cartesian dichotomy. This substitute set must nonetheless still explain the appearance of a dual aspect in ourselves and other living things.

The Organizational Modes of Living Being: Plants and Animals

This chapter derives and elucidates certain fundamental features of life (the “organic modals”) from the structure of “positionality” (basically, the phenomenological form of organism-environment relations). The derived features include the circuit of matter and energy exchanges with an environment (the “circle of life”); the processes of assimilation and dissimilation in metabolism; the phenomenon of adaptation and adaptedness; and processes of reproduction, heredity, and selection. An analysis of positionality further supports a series of distinctions between types of forms of life, such as between plants and animals. The “open form” of organization characteristic of plants involves a more direct and unreflective relation between body and environments than the “closed form” characteristic of animals. The chapter integrates phenomenology and biology in a study of living things.

The Modes of Being of Vitality

This chapter analyzes the phenomenological structure of organism-environment relations characteristic of living things, or “positionality,” to draw out and explain a set of features exhibited wherever there is organic life. These features, called the “organic modals,” include the fact that living things exist as a process; are necessarily of a certain “type,” yet are individuals; and exhibit development, aging, and death; the seeming balance of each living being; the systematic interrelations of a lifeform’s parts and its behaviors; the phenomenon of organs; and the applicability of spatial and temporal concepts in the description of organisms and their activities. Each of these modals is described and analyzed through the concept of positionality. The analysis relies on characteristics of the boundary, as well as relations between the body and its surroundings. This chapter integrates phenomenology and biology in a study of living things.

Aim and Scope of the Study

By the end of the nineteenth century, both materialist-empiricist and idealist-apriorist efforts to interpret the relation between nature and spirit (including physical and mental existence and nature and culture) had been exhausted. This was the context for the emergence of Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy). Bergson’s life-philosophy resolved contradictions in empiricist approaches such as Spencer’s. Yet Bergson’s view rested on an intuitionism that couldn’t adequately evaluate rationality and structured cultural phenomena. The same was true for Spengler’s approach to history. The neo-Kantians attempted to resolve the split between nature and spirit through expansion of the resources of logic to cover the humanities. Dilthey, however, saw that logic was insufficient as a paradigm for the humanities, which led to his own version of hermeneutics. Dilthey recognized the relevance of a theory of the human to hermeneutics, as well as the backdrop in nature that this implied, but wasn’t able to carry his inquiries far in these domains. This book attempts to complete this task: to lay out a philosophy of nature supporting a philosophical anthropology, in turn supporting a hermeneutics.