Autonomy Biological and Political

Modern philosophy, like its ancient predecessor, is haunted by a central problematic.  The ancients had a great deal of trouble with the concepts of coming-to-be and change.  For something to change, it must become other than it already is; yet if it does so, how has it not been destroyed and replaced by something new?  For something to come to be, it must come to be out of what it is or out of what it is not; yet both are impossible.  It cannot come to be out of what it is, for what already is cannot come to be.  It cannot come to be out of what it is not, for there is nothing there for it to come to be out of. 

That these problems seem rather silly to us‑mere word games, as it were‑is because Plato and Aristotle largely resolved the problematic, albeit in somewhat different ways.  Plato’s Socrates resolved it by supposing a distinction between visible objects and invisible but knowable ideas.  As a tree seems to grow from small to large as we approach it from a distance, without that particular tree actually changing at all, so we recognize a variety of trees coming into being and changing because there is one knowable thing, the idea of a tree, standing behind all of them.  That or something like that, Socrates insisted, is how things are. 

Aristotle resolved by positing three things necessary for change and coming to be: a quality or formal identity, its opposite or privation, and a substratum.  Thus a cold, blue metal becomes what it is not‑hot and red‑when you heat it, and yet remains what it is‑iron‑through the process.  Likewise, a living organism comes to be from what it is not‑whatever it is eating‑and yet remains what it is because it incorporates the preexisting materials.  While Aristotle’s solution is much more palatable to modern thinkers, both he and his teacher worked essentially the same strategy: resolving an irresolvable tension by assuming that the thing to be explained exists along at least two dimensions: one of form and one of material. 

The modern problematic is perhaps best stated in its original, Cartesian form.  The human being seems to be two things at once: res extensa, a body, extended in time and space, and res cogitans, a mind, invisible, intangible, and weightless.  Cartesian dualism is pervasively taught by philosophy teachers but almost never accepted.  This is because it seems impossible to resolve the problem of interaction: if mind consists of a non-physical substance, whatever that might mean, how does it interact with matter?  Similarly, while it is easy to understand how one physical thing emerges out of another, from what and how does the non-physical mind emerge?  However, if modern thought largely rejects Cartesian dualism, it has not freed itself from the Cartesian dilemmas.  To take but one case, consider identity theory in the philosophy of mind.  According to this position, mind states are brain states.  Thus my pleasure as I eat an ice cream sundae (with my special bourbon chocolate sauce!) just is a particular pattern of neurons firing in my brain.  The more or less obvious problem is that there doesn’t seem to be anything in my brain that looks, tastes, or smells like an ice cream sundae. 

Almost all modern theories of mind remain trapped in these confines.  Just as ancient monists tried to resolve the dilemma by arguing that change and diversity were illusions, so modern eliminative materialists have argued that mental states do not actually exist.  Such theories are, I submit, symptoms of frustration. 

In this essay, I will attempt something similar to Socrates’ strategy in the Republic.  There he presents an account of justice in the soul by articulating justice in a political regime.  This is legitimate, on the supposition that justice is the same thing, the same idea, in an individual mind as in a political community.  I will focus on the idea of autonomy, proceeding under a similar supposition.  Autonomy is a vital concept both in biological and political thought.  It is the focus of some philosophers of biology who propose that it is essential to explaining what living organisms are and how they differ from non-living matter.  It is obviously important to descriptive political science and normative political theory. 

I will argue that autonomy is best understood as a Platonic idea.  Whether in a single cell, resisting the influences of its environment, or in a group of hunter gathers, resisting the influence of a bully, it is the same idea.  My Platonism will be grounded in evolutionary history.  I submit that this approach will point us toward a resolution of the modern problematic and hence toward a richer and more robust understanding both of mind and matter.  I will also suggest that it helps us towards a healthy and substantial understanding of political liberty. 

Hans Jonas

Several students and faculty members have formed mini-academy at Northern.  We have been reading and discussing an essay a week.  Last week we read Leo Strauss’ essay on liberal education.  Our meeting was an example of what Strauss was talking about. 

Next week we will discuss an essay chosen by yours truly: “Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being,” by Hans Jonas.  You can read it for free online at the link above and, if your library has Jstore, you can download it.  It’s magnificent.  I first read it in a collection of essays by Jonas‑The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology.  If I were to judge a book not only by its precision, clarity, purity, and depth, but also by its timeliness, it might be the best book I have ever read. 

In the essay, Jonas gives us a history of human thought that encompasses the most pressing matter for both philosophers and for all human beings.  He divides the history of thought into three eras. 

In the first and longest, human beings thought that everything was alive: not only people, pad feet, and plants, but also rocks, streams, and the heavenly objects.  As the oak flourishes and withers, so the moon waxes and wanes. 

In the third, human beings (or at least, the tribe of scientists and philosophers) largely agree that everything is dead.  The kosmos is full of matter in motion, colliding and transforming in purely mechanical ways.  Even living organisms are composed of molecules, which are as dead as boiling porridge. 

Between these two eras, dualism was dominant.  Jonas finds its origins in Gnosticism specifically and Christianity more generally.  In this view, body and soul are distinct substances.  The material world is dead while all genuinely living things are possessed of an immaterial soul.  It reaches its clearest expression in the work of Rene Descartes, who substituted mind for soul. 

Jonas argues that all three positions are inherently unstable, subject to a problematic.  The animism of the first period could not account for death.  It could only make an uncomfortable peace with it by the cult of the funeral and the tomb.  The dualism of the second period allowed materialism to expand its sway over all the kosmos outside the mind, just at the moment when our understanding of the kosmos was expanding across vast distances.  Sooner or later the prophylactic wall that dualism built around the mind was bound to be breached.  That led to the third period, which was enormously successful in modeling complex phenomena. 

However, the tables then turned.  As animism could not comfortably account for death, so materialism cannot comfortably account for life.  How is it possible that, in a dead world, there should be things that struggle and resist and care one way or another? 

Jonas thinks that two of the more important positions in ontology‑materialism and idealism‑are attempts at evasion.  Materialism simply pretends that life doesn’t exist while idealism pretends that there is nothing but mind.  Both the materialist and the idealist account of life are essentially lifeless.  They miss the most important phenomenon. 

Jonas thinks that a philosophical biology must revise our view of matter to show that it is potentially alive and our view of soul to show that it is actually material.  I am very certain that he is right. 

Cartesian long enough

Rene Descartes was, in many senses, the father of modern analytic philosophy.  While very few modern philosophers would imagine that they are dualists, almost all of them have confined themselves within the categories of Cartesian dualism.  Descartes saw the physical world as fundamentally dead: matter in motion.  Thus conscious mind could be accounted for only by supposing that it was ontologically independent of the physical body.  Physicalists and materialists have supposed that the mind was ontologically dependent on the physical body, as red paint is ontologically dependent on the stuff in the paint can.  Yet in doing so they maintain the Cartesian understanding of mind and matter as the phenomena to be explained or, in the former case, explained away.  Descartes’ mind remained something of a scandal for modern physicalist thought. 

This is one reason why Darwinism has been an open wound on the modern soul.  Apart from its supposed challenge to Biblical creation, Darwinism seemed to many to amount to an invasion of the realm of the mind by the physical sciences.  If mind is simply a Darwinian engine for survival and reproduction, then art, literature, music, are only so many scratches and cat calls produced by Cartesian machines.  This is why confirmed evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin went to war against the “ultra-Darwinists” like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Gould and Lewontin were trying to save a space for Cartesian mind to do beautiful things and care genuinely about each other.  I believe this is a dilemma easily escaped once one is liberated from the Cartesian dichotomy. 

The philosopher Hans Jonas saw early that Darwinism cuts both ways.  If it means that life is more dependent on physical processes than Descartes had supposed (and it is) it also means that physical processes are less dead than he supposed (and they are).  As mind and information are always embedded in some material, so the physical matter in the kosmos has within it the potential to produce mind.  Were it not for planet Earth, with its astonishing variety of living organisms, some ghostly visitor to this kosmos would never have guessed that stardust and light had such a potential. 

I submit that the thesis that autonomy is an essential element in the phenomenon of life is the means for finally liberating us from the Cartesian trap.  Here is a bit from the conclusion of the Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno paper I referenced in my last post:

If we understand the phenomenon of life as a complex network of processes that take shape and propagate both at an individual and a historical-collective dimension—in our terms, as the history of the proliferation of various forms of autonomous organization (from chemical to unicellular, multicellular, developmental, cognitive, and, only recently, to rational autonomy)—the radical Cartesian separation between nature and mind simply disappears. The capacity of a system to determine itself, to establish its own rules and norms of behavior, and to create meaningful environments no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of rationality. At the same time, the natural world cannot be regarded as a universe where blind forces, acting without any sense or purpose, operate: the study of the fundamental mechanisms underlying biological organization, with all their intricacies, has clearly refuted that possibility.

Once life begins on this world, it begins exploring.  Lineages extend across time but they also fork.  Organisms push into new niches as they create new niches.  Such niches are defined not only geographically, as creates crawl up the sand of the primordial beach; they are also defined in terms of complexity.  All organisms are autonomous‑resisting what is outside and other in order to preserve what is inside and the self.  As Mirazo and Moreno argue, life jumps to increasingly robust kinds of autonomy.  The eukaryotic cell, possessing a nucleus, can regulate itself in ways that prokaryotic cells cannot.  Multicellular organisms add further levels of self-regulation, including, eventually, conscious awareness. 

Human freedom and nobility are greater, I submit, than anything else in the visible kosmos.  They are greater by many magnitudes than the simple cells from which they arose.  Yet they are expressions of the potential already evident in the Ur organism.  The Cartesian dichotomy has blinded us to this for a long time.  It is time to drop it.