SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 1

I style this essay "again" because it's not a "Part 2" to the original SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, which was simply a review of a non-fiction book based in bad pseudo-feminist ideology. It recently occurred to me that the same phrase would apply much better to the cultural "blues" that come about as a result of real and perceived issues stemming from sexual dimorphism. If anything, this post might be a loose sequel to the following statements from SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 2.                                                                                    

   

My re-interpretation of Nietzsche's "will and willingness" would not quite fall into the trap of viewing men as entirely active and women as entirely passive. Yet Nietzsche's dichotomy does apply in a more specific biological sense: male humans are biologically positioned to specialize in violence (a rough analogue to Nietzsche's "will") , and female humans are biological positioned to specialize in sexuality (an analogue to "willingness," up to a point).

I specify "humans" here since my main concern is human expression of its own propensities and limitations. Yet the biology doesn't start with human beings, but applies to the majority of humankind's nearest simian relations. With some exceptions, the so-called "great apes" follow the example set by a majority of birds and other mammals in that most male apes possess greater size, about 25 percent larger than the females. This gives the biggest ones a generally greater capacity for imposing their will, either on females or on other males. Meanwhile our nearest DNA-relations, the common chimpanzees, seem to have stolen a march on their earlier relatives by becoming experts in sexual promiscuity, in a "willingness" to indulge in sex for purposes not entirely defined by procreation.                                                     

Now, the purpose of the SACRED AND PROFANE series was to explore male and female archetypes rather than the sociological stresses of culture, but I'm still seeking to build on the dissonance created between the sexes when one of the two incarnates "will" and the other "willingness." At least this Nietzschean metaphor applies to all species in which the male is bigger and the female smaller, thus excluding outliers like the black widow spider and the blue whale. To be more specific, though, only human females, with their control of the estrus cycle, can be deemed "masters of sex" as all the big male creatures are "masters of violence." These metaphors for evolutionary abundance are, I admit, not in line with the dominant evolutionary dogma. As I am a Gene myself, I do not approve of Richard Dawkins' theory of a bunch of selfish genes that just want to keep making copies of themselves. I much prefer the Stuart Kauffman concept of coevolution.                                                 

   "...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world."-- Stuart Kauffman, INVESTIGATIONS, p. 150.                                                                                                                                                            Kauffman here is speaking only of evolutionary alterations at the cellular level, and so I do not know if he endorsed the notion I'm loosely stumping for here: that fully formed organisms might "prehend" the need to change to suit a particular physical challenge. The relevant challenge here would be the response of both males and females to females' diminishing outward signs of the estrus cycle, which in turn came about once human females needed to bond males to them for the purpose of nursing children, which in turn became more neotenous than many mammalian offspring in reaction to bipedal evolution. Males' greater propensity for body mass might have been genetically encoded by their anthropoid precursors, but said propensity may also have been reinforced once males were more regularly competing with one another for sexual opportunities.

And that's enough on sexual dimorphism theory. Part 2 gets into the "Blues" part.                                                                                             

ABUNDANT EXCHANGES

I've now finished the remainder of Stuart A. Kaufman's INVESTIGATIONS. To be sure, I had to skip most of the heavily statistical stuff, but I flatter myself that I understood most if not all of Kauffman's abstruse concepts. 

In THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1, I primarily contemplated Kauffman's response to Wittgenstein's philosophy vis-a-vis "codefinition," which parallels Kauffman's concept of "coevolution." Briefly summarized, Kauffman believes that evolution is not always, as in the popular paradigm, a matter of each individual organism blindly chancing upon whatever adaptations help that organism survive. Survival is still paramount in Kauffman's universe, but in some situations evolution may have taken place due to an exchange between two separate entities-- for instance, as may have happened when some prokaryotic cells bonded with others in order to produce eukaryotic cells. which unlike the earlier type of cell possess a nucleus and mitochondria. I note in passing that in 1967 Lynn Sagan/Margulis termed this process "endosymbiosis," but for whatever reason Kauffman does not use this term or mention Margulis in the bibliography to INVESTIGATIONS. 

Kauffman devotes most of the book to coevolution. This doctrine hinges on the concept that organisms co-evolve not by blind chance alone-- though Kauffman does not deny the chance-factor of mutations-- but out of some prehension (as Whitehead would term it) of a need for greater diversity and therefore abundance. From page 150:

...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world.

The idea of such a "knowing" is of course anathema to reductive science, which cannot imagine organisms without brains as manifesting anything like consciousness, much less a desire for abundance. I interpose that word, which is not in INVESTIGATIONS, in keeping with my one use of it in the essay ABUNDANCE AND EXPRESSIVITY, just to keep myself on track about relating Kauffman's biological theories to my cultural/literary theories.

Kauffman devotes his next to last chapter, "The Persistently Innovative Econosphere," to a sustained comparison of biological exchange (in the "biosphere") with the human custom of trade (in the "econosphere," saying:

The advantages of trade predate the human condition among autonomous agents. Advantages of trade are found in the metabolic exchange of legume root nodule and fungi, sugar for fixed nitrogen carried in amino acids. Advantages of trade were found among the mixed microbial and algal communities along the littoral of the earth's oceans four billion years ago. The trading of the econosphere is an outgrowth of the trading of the biosphere.

Kauffman also disputes the definition of exchange as based in the scarcity of goods, and instead champions an aesthetic of diversity/abundance, saying on page 227: 

Think of the Wright Brothers' airplane. It was a recombination between an airfoil, a light gasoline engine, bicycle wheels, and a propeller. The more objects an economy has, the more novel objects can be constructed.

This statement bears on what I deem the "narratosphere"s" need for novel objects, which also depends on the recombination of elements taken from the co-defined spheres of "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint," as discussed in WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2.  This is why, throughout the history of this blog, I have disputed "Iliad critics" who interpret fictional narrative as comprising a vast series of moral or rational lectures. While the cogitations of cognitive restraint are indispensable to fiction, said cogitations cannot produce novel objects in themselves. The correlations of affective freedom are necessary to break through habitual patterns of thought. (I note in passing a possible comparison between Kant's distinctions between productive and reproductive imagination, explored in 2011's FINDING SIGMUND PART 1.)

The belief that literature can and should pursue all imaginative linkages-- even those that some may find tainted by racial or sexual chauvinism-- lies at the heart of my devotion to the practice of archetypal criticism.

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 2

 At the end of the previous essay I wrote:

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

The ancient Greek terms "perata and apeiron" appeared before in a round of essays I wrote back in January, entitled LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, starting here.

Simply put, the Greek terms connote respectively "things that have limits" and "things that are boundless." I used them thusly: 

 For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe  -- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

I went on to explore this dichotomy through the lens of Georges Bataille's distinction between "work" (productive activity, oriented upon humans dealing with the limited physical world) and "play" (unproductive activity, oriented upon humans taking a vacation from work and its attendant moralities). It should be noted that both of these dichotomies-- limited/limitless and work/play-- might be deemed as "codefinitional" in the sense seen in Kauffman's quote in the previous essay: that one concept generates the other. (Back in the 2012 essay PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION I employed Martin Buber's term "word pairs" to much the same end.)

Yet another pair of linked concepts relevant to this discussion are the opposed concepts of "verisimilitude" and "artifice" that I formulated (or re-interpreted) in the 2016 essay EFFICACY, MEET MYTH. "Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

With all that in mind, I go back to the two versions of Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed by Stuart A. Kauffman in INVESTIGATIONS. The first version of Wittgenstein was one who, in accordance with the prevalent mood of the period, valued the concept of "logical atomism." Kauffman wrote:

Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

Before going on Wittgenstein 2.0, I pose the question: does the philosophy of "logical atomism" parallel anything with the corpus of literary criticism? And, perhaps not surprisingly, the parallel I draw is to a type of criticism described by Northrop Frye:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Since Frye is the luminary from whom I partly borrowed my verisimilitude-artifice word-pair, it should be clear that I'm saying that the "high seriousness" critic is the one who values verisimilitude above everything else, and that this type of thinking parallels that of the logical atomists. 

Now for a return appearance, here's Kauffman on Wittgenstein's rejection of the atomist attitude:

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

And is there a parallel between this attitude and the opposing critical tendency described in Frye's essay? Let's see.

Reading a detective story indicates a liking for comic and romantic forms, and for the contemplation of a fiction for its own sake. We begin by shutting out or deliberately excluding our ordinary experience, for we accept, as part of the convention of the form, things that we know are not often found in actual experience, such as an ingenious murderer and an imaginative policeman. We do no want to think about the truth or likelihood of what we are reading, as long as it does not utterly outrage us; we simply want to see what is going to happen in the story.

 

Certainly Frye has ably contrasted the critic who wants "verisimilitude" as against the critic who wants "conventions." I would extend this to say that the appeal of the first is also, as stated before, the appeal of "cognitive restraint," and therefore perata, while the latter appeals in terms of "affective freedom," and therefore apeiron. I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation. And it is through being able to experience both of these proclivities that the often divided minds of humankind may potentially find at least a conditional wholeness.

 

 

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1

It's been nine years since I dove into the deep waters of a Stuart A. Kauffman book, which I examined somewhat in the NATURAL LAWBREAKING posts, all of which appeared in 2013, beginning here. That book, REINVENTING THE SACRED, came out in 2006, and the one I'm now slowly working through, INVESTIGATIONS, was written six years earlier. Both books are concerned with defining the processes by which life evolved on Earth, with Kauffman taking a less reductive (and thus more holistic) view of how a myriad of factors combine to bring about organisms capable of sexual generation. 

Not having ventured back into SACRED since that first reading, I don't remember if Kauffman had anything to say about the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, Kauffman has much to say in INVESTIGATIONS, noting that he derived the title of this 2000 book from the thinker's 1953 book PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. 

Now, my only direct contact with Wittgenstein was an unfavorable one, as I remarked in the 2014 essay WITLESS IN VIENNA-- in which, by an odd coincidence, I critiqued Edward Skidelsky's preference for Wittgenstein over Ernst Cassirer by comparing Cassirer's perspective to that of... Stuart A, Kauffman! The following quotes from the WITLESS essay accurately represents all I knew then about Wittgenstein as well as everything up until beginning Kauffman's 2000 tome--

It's been at least ten years since I plowed my way through Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS.  I found it thoroughly uninteresting and couldn't understand why this logic-chopper had become such a major voice in modern philosophy.

And--

I cannot speak to the veracity of Skidelsky's findings on Wittgenstein's motives.  I will note that my principal response to the TRACTATUS was that I too assumed that the author shared the purpose of the positivists: to devalue "sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience." 

And finally--

I cannot deny that Wittgenstein, even today, is viewed with more approval than Cassirer.  Yet I must ask: how many persons interested in philosophy are even aware of Wittgenstein's "mystical vision," or his critique of scientism, and how many have made the same assumptions that the Vienna Circle did, translating pure logic into empiricist epistemology?  Cassirer may not be understood by the average readers of philosophy today; he may well be regarded as "old hat." But do these readers understand that Wittgenstein opposed empiricist scientism?

I tend to doubt it, and I'm tempted to make a survey of philosophy blogs to determine how many people today write of "Wittgenstein, anti-empiricist."  Wittgenstein's focus upon a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content is at base allied to the language used by science

Now, without double checking I assume that everything Skidelsky wrote was based upon his admiration for the 1921 TRACTATUS, which bored the hell out of me. I don't think Skidelsky has much if anything to say about the closing works of Wittengenstein's life, which are the very works that Kauffman champions over the early ones.

In Chapter 3, Kauffman wrote:

In his early TRACTATUS, Wittgenstein had brought to conclusion the mandate of logical atomism from Russell. Logical atomism sought a firm epistemological foundation for all knowledge in terms of privileged "atomic statements" about "sense data"... One might be mistaken in saying that a chair is in the room, but one could hardly be mistaken in reporting bits and pieces of one's own awareness... Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

So this is the only Wittgenstein I knew, the one I remarked as having favored "a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content"-- by which I did NOT mean "sense data," but the content of the perceiver's personal reaction to the data. Kauffman, having outlined the position of 1921 Wittgenstein, then says:

It was Wittgenstein himself who, twenty years later, junked the entire enterprise. PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS was his later-life revolution. His revolution has done much to destroy the concept of a privilege level of description and paved the way to an understanding that concepts at any level typically are formed in codefinitional circles.

What's "codefinitional?"

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

These concepts are meant to serve Kauffman's long-range purpose of envisioning a biology not defined simply by mindless reproduction of templates, but holistic interaction of systems-- and that's all that I can say about Kauffman's biological agenda, having not finished the book yet. 

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

 

CLINAMEN BEGIN AGAIN

While Lucretius is fresh in my mind, I'll make a few observations regarding his Epicurus-derived doctrine of the *clinamen,* sometimes referred to as the "Epicurean swerve."  Rather than quoting from Lucretius' verse, which may prove difficult to follow in the course of an essay, I'll quote this prose-ified version from the Wikipedia essay "Free Will in Antiquity:"

Again, if all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first-beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause from infinity, whence comes this freedom (libera) in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will (voluntas) wrested from the fates by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us? For undoubtedly it is his own will in each that begins these things, and from the will movements go rippling through the limbs.

The essay quotes numerous modern commentators regarding the fact that both Lucretius and his philosophical mentor Epicurus refuted Democritus' idea that the doctrine of atomism implied absolute determinism. Particularly puzzling to modern minds is the idea that the ultimate source of "voluntas," Lucretius' word for free will, is to be located in the movements of infinitesimal atoms. Both men, in trying to explain what physical forces caused atoms to combine with one another, spoke of a "swerve" (Latin clinamen) that had to take place for such combinatory action.

I'm not enough of a classicist to judge the complexities of archaic Greco-Roman culture; I can only say that of the comments cited in the Wikipedia essay, those of Don Paul Fowler seem most accurate in representing the way philosophers of this period framed their conceptual conundrums.

Lucretius is arguing from the existence of voluntas to the existence of the clinamen; nothing comes to be out of nothing, therefore voluntas must have a cause at the atomic level, viz. the clinamen. The most natural interpretation of this is that every act of voluntasis caused by a swerve in the atoms of the animal's mind....There is a close causal, physical relationship between the macroscopic and the atomic. 

I don't believe any reputable philosopher today would subscribe to the idea that non-sentient atoms can display "will" of any kind. However, the Epicurean swerve may still be a useful metaphor for the nature of human agency, and it does resemble one of the models constructed by theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman. I examined Kauffman's concept of "quantum coherence" in my essay LET FREEDOM RIDE PT. 1: 

There is a possible objection to Kauffman's philosophy.  In REINVENTING THE SACRED he does not manage to show in what way his principal of "quantum coherence"-- proposed as a principle that may have contributed to the formation of the "open thermodynamic systems" of living organisms -- makes the subject's will an "uncaused mental cause."  In the view of most reductivists, if quantum-energy factors did influence the formation of life on our planet, those factors would just be another set of contingent influences, as much as the sun's radiation or the presence of oxygen. Kauffman repeatedly explains his title by saying that humans do not need supernatural forces to explain life any more, but that humans should regard their own "agency" as sacred.

Kauffman's insistence on validating the "sacred" human world of culture strongly resembles the attitude of the Epicureans, though he doesn't cite any of them in REINVENTING THE SACRED. Persons of a reductive viewpoint will of course dismiss "quantum coherence" as quickly as they will dismiss the "Epicurean swerve," but as I've stated many times on this blog, I don't believe philosophy should be determined by the data of experimental science. Metaphors for the way the human mind works-- or even discrete parts of the mind, such as "the heart" or "the imagination"-- will always be not only necessary, but entirely preferable to reams of dubious data.

In closing I'll note that because Lucretius shares the Epicurean belief that "nothing can come from nothing," he takes a rather "atomistic" approach to the human imagination as well. He asserts that although there is no hell, humans have extrapolated their experiences of earthly pain into the torments of Avernus. Similarly, though centaurs and "the spectres of people who are dead" have never existed, these are imaginary composites formed from humans' tendencies to combine the forms of nature, be it hybridizing humans and horses to produce centaurs, or simply imagining formerly-living people taking on a quasi-physical existence in the form of ghosts. I gave some thought to the possibility that I might view Lucretius as early advocate of that form of sublimity I've named the "combinatory-sublime."  But though Lucretius may be writing about roughly the same creative process that Tolkien described as a "refracted light" that is "endlessly combined in many shapes that move from mind to mind," Lucretius doesn't share Tolkien's fascination with the process. Lucretius is a poet in the tradition described by Chesterton: "one who is in love with the finite." ON NATURE is full of colorful descriptions of erupting volcanos and burgeoning fields of grain, but all of these images are for Lucretius mere evidence of the world's conformity to physical law. For Burke and Kant, a volcano might be something that evoked in human beings the feeling of the sublime-- but I suspect such a volcanic emotion would have run contrary to the equanimity endorsed by Lucretius and his fellow Epicureans. 

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 2

Will and Willingness. —Some one brought a
youth to a wise man, and said, " See, this is one
who is being corrupted by women!" The wise
man shook his head and smiled. " It is men," he
called out, "who corrupt women; and everything
that women lack should be atoned for and improved
in men,— for man creates for himself the ideal of
woman, and woman moulds herself according to
this ideal."—" You are too tender-hearted towards
women," said one of the bystanders, " you do not
know them ! " The wise man answered : " Man's
attribute is will, woman's attribute is willingness,—
such is the law of the sexes, verily 1 a hard law for
woman ! All human beings are innocent of their
existence, women, however, are doubly innocent;
who could have enough of salve and gentleness for
them ! "—"What about salve ! What about gentle-
ness ! " called out another person in the crowd, " we
must educate women better ! "— " We must educate
men better," said the wise man, and made a sign
to the youth to follow him.— The youth, however,
did not follow him. -- Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE.

My re-interpretation of Nietzsche's "will and willingness" would not quite fall into the trap of viewing men as entirely active and women as entirely passive. Yet Nietzsche's dichotomy does apply in a more specific biological sense: male humans are biologically positioned to specialize in violence (a rough analogue to Nietzsche's "will") , and female humans are biological positioned to specialize in sexuality (an analogue to "willingness," up to a point).

I specify "humans" here since my main concern is human expression of its own propensities and limitations. Yet the biology doesn't start with human beings, but applies to the majority of humankind's nearest simian relations. With some exceptions, the so-called "great apes" follow the example set by a majority of birds and other mammals in that most male apes possess greater size, about 25 percent larger than the females. This gives the biggest ones a generally greater capacity for imposing their will, either on females or on other males. Meanwhile our nearest DNA-relations, the common chimpanzees, seem to have stolen a march on their earlier relatives by becoming experts in sexual promiscuity, in a "willingness" to indulge in sex for purposes not entirely defined by procreation. (Their relatives, the so-called "bonobo" or "pygmy chimps," go even farther, as noted here.)

Classical evolution's explanation for such modifications is that they just happened, either by random gene selection or equally random mutation, and were then preserved because they proved useful, or at least not a hindrance, either to immediate survival of the organism or general survival of its species. I've touched on the evolutionary theories of Stuart A. Kauffman in a four-part essay series, beginning here, which suggest that there may an element of "choice" in such modifications, perhaps one rooted in the quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. On this basis I would suggest that some modifications may not be entirely random: that they are prompted by a species' need for that modification, even though the species cannot cognitively know how to articulate that need before it is fulfilled, nor can they keep the modification from having all manner of unanticipated consequences.

If there is any truth to the idea of a "non-conscious modification," then male animals' acquisition of greater size and physical strength is a direct consequence of the males' desire to achieve dominance, both over other males and over females. This would be the logical counterpart of a theory that is taken much more seriously by evolutionary biologists: that "woman made herself." To be sure this theory is only applied to human females: to my knowledge there is no consensus that female primates were responsible for the intensification of their species' sexual nature. However, as far as I know all biologists credence the notion that at some point the human female perfected what Lynn Margulies called an "anatomy of deception"-- banishing outward signs of estrus, which in my opinion would have preceded the actual cessation of estrus. There is no universally accepted theory as to how or why this occurred, though the most popular idea seems to be that the human female gained power by making herself more unpredictable-- that any male desirous of fathering progeny might have to devote more time and attention to a given female in order to be sure of producing said progeny.

While no one can prove, with the data beloved by empiricists, that "men are the masters of violence, and women the mistresses of sex." the dichotomy nevertheless informs the basis of much human culture, even if one need not quite view woman's "willingness" as being something as passive and "moulded according to an ideal" as Nietzsche does. Additionally, the dichotomy, while biologically and culturally dominant, is not determinative of the full range of male and female capacities. I have suggested the potential for a *bouleversment* of gender-roles in WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 3, where I spoke of these reversed roles as "the Compassionate Man and the Barbarous Woman." While I don't renounce anything I said in that essay, for the purpose of further examining the role of sexuality and violence in fiction, I'll come at the same topic from a slightly different angle in Part 3.

LET FREEDOM RIDE, PT. 1

In NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 4 I reflected on the topic of "free will."  At times Stuart Kauffmann uses this concept accurately, as a way of expressing a subject's "agency."  However, his argument takes on some confused aspects thanks to his quotation of Aristotle.

If every event, mental or physical, has sufficient antecedent causes, then as Aristotle said, there can be no "unmoved mover." But free will is supposed to be just such an unmoved mover, free to do what it chooses, hence an "uncaused mental cause" of our actions. This led the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza, and others since him, to conclude that free will is an illusion.

For the time being I'll presume that Kauffman's summation of Aristotle is accurate on this point, but the use of the phrase "unmoved mover"-- usually employed as a description for a God who creates the universe out of nothing-- confuses the issue as to what would be involved in an "uncaused mental cause."

Following the logic of Kant expressed at the begining of CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, it should always be a given that even if there is a core of "agency" within a given subject, that subject is always vulnerable to the influences of the contingent world in which he exists.  It goes without saying that this "mover" can never be "unmoved."


What I believe Kauffman means to say is that the "free will" expressed by a subject's given choice of his actions is not ENTIRELY caused by contingent factors.  This would be the attitude expressed by psuedo-scientists like Mickey Marx (the subject's will to choose is a manifestation of his society) and Ziggy Freud (the subject's will to choose is a manifestation of his familial upbringing).  This attempt to reduce the will of the subject to an epiphenomenon spawned by a greater phenomenon would not have been possible until the birth of Western science, which as noted here took on greater cultural significance than ever before once science began to deliver to humankind an increasing control over the physical world.

Kant was as aware as anyone as to the influence of contigent physical factors, but he still believed that free will-- and by extension, the general concept of freedom-- was a factor in its own right, one subsumed by his categorial imperative.

Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.

Kant is problematic for moderns in part because of his rigidity about the nature of his proposed "universal law."  Still, Kant emphasizes, as Marx and Freud do not, that it is possible to exercise free will in spite of compulsion.  Marx and Freud, being pseudo-scientists, want to presume the primacy of compulsion, in order to promote their theoretical constructs.

One need not speak of being "unmoved," since this is tantamount to an imputation of omnipotence.  Kauffman is on surer ground to speak of an "uncaused mental cause," for in this view the subject's exercise of "free will" is an expression of its inner nature.  This nature, by Kauffman's own logic, is not something bestowed upon the subject by a creator-god, but is rather a concatenation of all those factors-- causal and acausal-- that have made the subject of an individual, willing creature.  One may say that a given choice has been "caused" by the nature of the subject, but it is "uncaused" in the sense of reductive science; i.e., it has not been produced by forces/phenomena outside the subject's compass. 

There is a possible objection to Kauffman's philosophy.  In REINVENTING THE SACRED he does not manage to show in what way his principal of "quantum coherence"-- proposed as a principle that may have contributed to the formation of the "open thermodynamic systems" of living organisms -- makes the subject's will an "uncaused mental cause."  In the view of most reductivists, if quantum-energy factors did influence the formation of life on our planet, those factors would just be another set of contingent influences, as much as the sun's radiation or the presence of oxygen.

Kauffman repeatedly explains his title by saying that humans do not need supernatural forces to explain life any more, but that humans should regard their own "agency" as sacred.  He repeats, again and again, that human systems of value are not irrelevant epiphenomena, that they do not lose their meaning simply because all humans are composed of subatomic particles.  But Kauffman is not able to say just how a given system of value remains significant.  If one society forbids any form of incestual marriage, and another society permits certain forms, surely both of these societies have assigned value to their cultural practices; both are results of "willing" and "agency."  By Kant's "universal law," one of these must be right and the other wrong. Kauffman does not say this, and in fact refutes Kant on this point.  But he does not solve the knotty problem as to how systems of value can contend with each other, and yet remain individually significant.

For a possible de-knotting, stay tuned for Part 2.

ADDENDUM: The de-knotting actually appears in the discussion of taste and intersubjectivity in KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 4

At the end of Part 3 I wrote:

When I finish the book, it may be interesting to mount a comparison between Kauffman's two models, "classical" and "quantum," and Kant's two species of imagination, "productive" and "reproductive." We-- or maybe just I-- shall see.

Now that I've finished Kauffman's REINVEINTING THE SACRED, I'm still only able to offer such a comparison in theory, though I won't do so here.  Kauffman offers some general models for his "classic/quantum" synthesis, but he admits that his theory at present remains in a speculative phase:

...well-known facts about cells and recent quantum chemical theory raise the possibility that vast webs of quantum coherent or partially coherent degrees of freedom may span large volumes of a cell... What I describe now is partially known, and partially my own scientific speculation. (p. 216)

Though Kauffman cautions the reader to remember that as yet there has not been adequate experimental proof to support his speculation, he asserts that the reductionist paradigms have already proven fallacious: not only in respect to the early paradigm I mentioned-- Weinberg's idea that all biology reduces down to particle physics--  but also to the paradigm of the "mind-brain identity theory, in which first person experiences are identical with specific brain states."  Chapter 13 is devoted to demonstrating the problems with this "classical" reductionist schema, and suggesting, in keeping with his earlier remarks on "partial causality," that the human mind may mirror the nature of biological creativity as a whole:

The idea that the human mind is non-algorithmic raises the possibility that it might be acausal, rather than a causal "machine," and the only acausal theory we have is quantum mechanics. Therefore the mind may be partially quantum mechanical.

I remarked in Part 2 that I observed parallels between the attitudes of reductionists in physics with those in literary criticism.  By way of supporting this observation, I'll focus on just one of the philosophical problems Kauffman analyzes in the book; that of "free will."

If every event, mental or physical, has sufficient antecedent causes, then as Aristotle said, there can be no "unmoved mover."  But free will is supposed to be just such an unmoved mover, free to do what it chooses, hence an "uncaused mental cause" of our actions. This led the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza, and others since him, to conclude that free will is an illusion.

Obviously a history of the concept of "free will" is impossible on this blog, but I have found this online essay, CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON FREE WILL.  Among the essay's many capsule descriptions of philosophical stances, I found this one most representative of the attitude I myself see in literary reductionism:

Harriet Martineau, translator of the works of Auguste Comte and herself a founder of sociology, was another who struggled mightily with the free will meme. In the end, in spite of the alternatives provided by the philosophers of her time, she rejected the notion altogether. "In a practical sense," she wrote, "all the world is determined. All human action proceeds on the supposition that the workings of nature are governed by laws that cannot be broken by human will... The very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational person to see that the constitution and action of the human faculty of Will are determined by influences beyond the control of that faculty".#10 She referred to the notion of free will as "that monstrous remnant of old superstition". Here Martineau was expressing the logical implications of a Newtonian causality as applied to the type of radical monistic philosophical stance then being developed by Ernst Haeckel #11. In so doing, she was repudiating the dualistic Kantian world view which had prevailed for almost a century.

 I draw attention to Martineau's remark that "the very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational person" to see that everything is "determined" by contingent causes and that therefore free will is a "monstrous remnant of old superstition."  I find this language to be highly elitist in that it posits a radical difference between "rational persons" and those who lack such rationality-- a division no less absolute that the division made by one such "old superstition" between "the sheep and the goats." 

The Christian religion, though it may have formulated the basic outlines of the debate on free will, certainly did not originate its dynamic.  Most if not all religions are grounded in some sense of causal consequence.  Choose X and you are saved or illuminated; choose Y and you are damned or condemned to meaninglessness.  The idea that "free will" was not a gift given to mortals to guide them on their path was tantamount to saying that it did not matter what men chose; their choices were determined by the factors of their experiences and their fundamental natures.

How did this anti-will position translate into literary criticism?  A literary critic, as much as a religious pundit or a philosopher, wants to have some way to convince others of the rightness of his path.  I propose that for many critics the validation  they sought was that of a perceived greater rationality.  One might know, intellectually, that one's rationality was as predetermined by contingent circumstances as another man's irrationality.  I submit, however, that just as religious proselytizers insisted that the "right choice" reflected adherence to some higher supersensual reality, literary and philosophical proselytizers insisted that people who "saw the light" with regard to the contingency of human existence were a cut above those who did not. 

It should be easy to find any number of critics, professional or amateur, who support this elitist "sheep and goats" attitude.  I know that I can find, and have found, this attitude in many of my favored targets-- Gary Groth, Noah Berlatsky, Chicken Colin.  But I hate to keep falling back on these "old reliables."  Ideally I would like to find and refute some critic, whether in the comics-game or not, who evinces this specific blend of reductive pessimism and covert self-glorification.

If all else fails, I suppose I could always go back to kicking at Theodor Adorno.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 3

I'll have to put off further analysis of modern critics for now, but want to touch on Chapter 12 of Kauffman's book, in which Kauffman engages with the concepts of cognitive science.

Given Kauffman's opposition to reductionist paradigms, it's a given that he opposes the paradigm of cognitive science, though not without admitting that it has had some successes in the experimental realm.  In my few meditations on the paradigm, I've also admitted that cognitive science-- the science that investigates the human brain on the model of a "problem-solving computer"-- has had some limited applicability.  In LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS I said:

Ideological critics, by their nature, must depend on the narrow reductionism of Marxist aesthetics or of so-called "cognitive science." These tools are not without proper use within the total sphere of literary criticism, but they are useful only in limited sociohistorical circumstances, and are useless for understanding what Jung called the constructive or amplificative abilities of the human mind.

My distrust for cognitive science comes down to a simple philosophical disagreement rather than from an experimental stance.  To me, though there may be limited insights that may be gained from the brain-as-computer model, one cannot get around the fact that the brain is not a computer.  Any attempt to treat this paradigm as reality rather than as a limited model are based in the ideology surrounding materialism/positivism.

As one might expect, Kauffman's objections to cognitive science are more technically complex than this.  Again, I must admit that I do not have the expertise to accept or reject Kauffman's arguments, but I'll record some of them here for future comparison.

According to Kauffman, there are two "strands" of cognitive theory that have developed since Alan Turing's invention of the "Turing machine" in 1936.  One strand involves "attempts to understand symbol processing by the human mind" in terms of algorithms, while the second-- distantly derived from the 19th-century movement "associationism"-- is called "connectionism" and deals with the idea the "trajectories of states that flow through one another in sequence"-- that is, the progression of information along the body's neural paths-- are governed by "basins of attraction and attractors."  Kauffman then asserts that while both of these hypotheses are vital to cognitive science, they do not mesh:

The symbol-processing first strand... does not readily carry out the pattern recognition... that is natural to the connectionist view.  Conversely, the connectionist picture of basins of attraction and attractors has a difficult time accomodating the symbolc processing properties of the first computational strand.

It's possible that these competing paradigms are, as the saying goes, just different parts of the same elephant, whose entirety is difficult to descry through the dark glasses of reductionism.  In any case Kauffman's main purpose is to defend the complexity of the human mind, less in the terms of Jung-- whom I invoke above-- than of Wittgenstein. 

The end of this chapter looks forward to a new schema meant to incorporate quantum theory, as opposed to a schema based in the reductionist physics of Galileo and Company:

But must conscious mind be classical [i.e., "related only to classical physics"], rather than quantum or a mixture of classical and quantum?

When I finish the book, it may be interesting to mount a comparison between Kauffman's two models, "classical" and "quantum," and Kant's two species of imagination, "productive" and "reproductive." We-- or maybe just I-- shall see.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 2

First, though it has nothing to do with the main point of this essay, I want to acknowledge that the site NEWFRONTIERSNERD has recapitulated my DEAD-ALIVE HAND essays for readers of Portuguese.  My thanks for the acknowledgment.

Back to Stuart A. Kauffman's concept of a biology which is "partially beyond natural law," first addressed here.  Kauffman says:

How could the physicist 'deduce' the evolution of the biosphere?  One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them.  This cannot be done.  We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere.  Thus  we do not know what variables-- lungs, wings, etc.-- to put into our equations.  The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere.  You may wish to consider this an epistemological problem, i.e., if only we had a sufficiently powerful computer and the right terms to enter into the right equations, we could make such predictions.  Later, when we get to Darwinian preadaptations, I will show that the problem is much more than epistemological; it is ontological emergence, partially lawless, and ceaselessly creative.  This shall be the heart of the new scientific worldview I wish to discuss.

I confess that though I've now finished the first eleven chapters of REINVENTING THE SACRED, quite a lot of Kauffman's arguments are technically over my head.  That is to say, I can grasp easily enough the rudiments of his arguments about the role of "autocatalytic processes" in the advancement of evolution, and why that seems to him a better explanation for evolutionary progress than, say, microbiology's search for "information genes."  However, I'm not qualified to judge the highly technical subject matter, so I have no idea as to what a microbiologist would say in defense of the information gene-search.  I will say that Kauffman's tone in debating is one of moderation; that he ceaselessly praises the extent to which reductionist science has uncovered valid scientific data, but always qualifies that praise by urging that he feels that there is relevant data that has been passed over due to the limitations of the reductionist viewpoint.  Kauffman's simple reasonableness is certainly to be preferred over the militant reductionism of a Richard Dawkins or a Karl Popper (and I was quite pleased to see Kauffman state his non-enthusiasm for Popper after I felt both Dawkins and Popper got off a little too easily in Michael Ruse's MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES, examined here.)

But even without my being a wizard of (mathematical) odds, I can state that one way in which Kauffman's "new scientific worldview" impacts on my literary project is that many if not all elitist critics show some degree of investment in the old reductionist schemas.

Indeed, all of the critics I surveyed in the DEAD-ALIVE series-- one of whom is admittedly not alive to defend himself-- show a reductionist orientation in the ways they relate to the creativity they find in popular fiction.  Noah Berlatsky likes WONDER WOMAN for its lesbian wingdings and its kanga-riding Amazons, but he sneers at mere pulp adventure.  Julian Darius likes thoughtful superhero sagas but turns up his nose at "simple escapism."  At base they still view the world of escapism, as Tolkien famously noted, as an avoidance of social and/or intellectual responsibilities.  This, I believe, is rooted in the idea that devotees of popular fiction are indulging in a simple "instant gratification" process, one that implies a reductionist view of the very experience of literary narrative.

More to come in Part 3.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING

In the physicist Murray Gell-Mann's definition, a "natural law" is a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process.  But if we cannot even prestate the possibilities then no compact descriptions of these processes beforehand can exist.  These phenomena, then, appear to be partially beyond law itself.-- Stuart A. Kauffman, REINVENTING THE SACRED, p. 5.

I've only finished the first four chapters of Kauffman's book, but already I see some felicitious overlap between his school of theoretical (and philosophically elaborated) biology with (1) Ernst Cassirer's concept of separate "forms" that are not reducible to one another, and (2) my own literary theories regarding (a) the interstitital category of "the uncanny" and (b) the idea of "super-functionality," which in my system aligns with Philip Wheelwright's concept of "plurisignative" language.

One of Kauffman's theme statements, expressed in the introduction, deals with his refutation of the over-reductive tendencies of most modern scientists, which Kauffman represents through a frequently referenced quote from Nobel prizewining physicist Stephen Weinberg:

All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.  

Kauffman dissents:

I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their own right... Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe.  With agency came values, meaning and doing; all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. 

Since I have not finished the book, I won't recount Kauffman's logical proofs as to why the processes of biology, principally though not exclusively evolution, are not reducible to physics.  A quick summation would be that physics, stressing the randomness of particle motion, is incapable of explaining the development of what Kauffman calls "nonequilibrium physical chemical systems," that is, systems that maintain themselves in an active "doing" manner by taking in matter to function and grow.  Though this may sound to some readers like an endorsement of "intelligent design," Kauffman consistently denies the need for a supernatural creative force and advocates the concept of emergence, all elaborated through concepts of hard science. When the author starts explaining an obscure-to-non-scientists scientific principle like "chirality," I think it's a given that he doesn't belong in the New Age book section.

I won't dwell on the comparisons to Cassirer, except to say that Cassirer is noteworthy for having insisted that a form such as "myth" could not be reduced down to the concepts of theoretical, discursive knowledge.  What I find interesting is the phrase from the first quote, to the effect that the phenomena he describes-- by which he means a phenomenon like "natural selection," which "cannot be reduced to any necessary and sufficient set of statements about this or that set of atoms or molecules." 

In my essays on the NUM formula I've stressed the inadequacy of Tzvetan Todorov's system, which in effect recognizes only the world of "the real" and the world of "the marvelous," which is an imaginary offshoot/subset of "the real," in that the marvelous sets aside causality. Though Todorov uses the term "uncanny" to signify merely those works in which one does not know for a time whether marvels are real or not, I asserted that it should be used rather to denote those works that bend, rather than break, the rules of causality.  Works of "the marvelous" break with causality and works of "the naturalistic" remain within the causal domain, but "the uncanny" is a category "partially beyond law itself," in which "the law" regardling "the regularities of a process" is covalent with the laws of causality that impart a sense of regular phenomena to a reader.

The phrase "beyond law" does not connote for Kauffman-- any more than it does for me-- an escape from physical law, but rather from overly reductive concepts of physical law.  In a roughly similar manner, I find myself constantly defending the presence of "mythic" or "plurisignative" elements in popular fiction because the alternative philosophy -- that creativity matters only when it comes from the Right Side of the Tracks, i.e., Canonical-- or Would-Be Canonical-- Literature-- is a philosophy that seeks to reduce literature to a unitary set of formulas.  The self-serving viewpoint of a Clement Greenberg is a model that too many comics-critics choose to follow as a means of creating their own cloistered canons.  For myself, reading the work of Northrop Frye approximates the vision of a biologist like Kauffman, who is clearly fascinated the illimitable plenitude of biological possibilities; a plenitude that also compares well with Rudolf Otto's understanding of religion as containing an "overplus" that goes beyond emotions of fear and animal desire.

It's possible that as I read further in the book, Kauffman may disappoint me on some level.  However, I believe that my appreciation for the first four chapters will not be easily dimmed.