Affirming Art: Heidegger and the Sense of a Beginning 2013

Philosophy Study

Volume 3, Number 10, October 2013 (Serial Number 26)

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Publication Information: Philosophy Study is published monthly in print (ISSN 2159-5313) and online (ISSN 2159-5321) by David Publishing Company located at 16710 East Johnson Drive, City of Industry, CA 91745, USA. Aims and Scope: As a monthly peer-reviewed journal, Philosophy Study commits itself to promoting the academic communication about developments in philosophy; it includes all sorts of research into Epistemology, Ethics, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, and other relevant areas, and seeks to provide a platform for scholars worldwide. Manuscripts and correspondence are invited for publication. You can submit your papers via Web Submission system, or e-mail to [email protected] (org) or [email protected]. Submission guidelines and Web Submission system are available at http://www.davidpublishing.com. Editorial Office: Tel: 1-323-984-7526, 1-323-410-1082; Fax: 1-323-984-7374, 323-908-0457 E-mail: [email protected] (org), [email protected] Copyright©2013 by David Publishing Company and individual contributors. All rights reserved. David Publishing Company holds the exclusive copyright of all the contents of this journal. In accordance with the international convention, no part of this journal may be reproduced or transmitted by any media or publishing organs (including various websites) without the written permission of the copyright holder. Otherwise, any conduct would be considered as the violation of the copyright. The contents of this journal are available for any citation; however, all citations should be clearly indicated with the title of this journal, serial number, and the name of the author. Peer Review Policy: All research articles published in Philosophy Study have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by at least two anonymous referees. Editorial Procedures: All papers considered appropriate for this journal are reviewed anonymously by at least two outside reviewers. The review process usually takes three to four weeks. Papers are accepted for publication subject to no substantive, stylistic editing. The Editor reserves the right to make any necessary changes in the papers, or request the author to do so, or reject the submitted paper. A copy of the edited paper along with the first proofs will be sent to the author for proofreading. They should be corrected and returned to the Editor within three working days. Once the final version of the paper has been accepted, authors are requested not to make further changes to the text. Abstracted / Indexed in: Google Scholar Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) Chinese Database of CEPS, American Federal Computer Library Center (OCLC) Chinese Scientific Journals Database, VIP Corporation, Chongqing, P.R. China EBSCO Databases Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) The Philosopher’s Index ProQuest Summon Serials Solutions Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory Universe Digital Library S/B Subscription Information: $450 (print/year); $320 (online/year); $600 (print and online/year) David Publishing Company 16710 East Johnson Drive, City of Industry, CA 91745, USA Tel: 1-323-984-7526, 1-323-410-1082; Fax: 1-323-984-7374, 323-908-0457 E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

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Philosophy Study

Volume 3, Number 10, October 2013 (Serial Number 26)

Contents Philosophy of Science

What Life Is and How It Originated 895

William Day

The Spiritual Experience as Scientific Experiment: How Science Can Meet Religion 905

Dan Chițoiu

Correlations between Human Adaptation, the Earth-Cosmos Context and Aristotle’s Four Causalities 914

Cornelia Guja

Philosophy of Mathematics: Naturalism vs. Category Theory 929

Milan Tasić

Philosophy of Mind

The Fault Line in Chinese Reflective Thinking 945

Jim Platts

Aesthetics

Affirming Art: Heidegger and the Sense of a Beginning 958

Gary Peters

Philosophy of Language

Wittgenstein on the Experience of Meaning: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives 974

Michel ter Hark

Philosophy Study, ISSN 2159-5313 October 2013, Vol. 3, No. 10, 895-904

What Life Is and How It Originated

William Day

Oxford, Mississippi

This paper refutes the mechanistic interpretation of cellular dynamics and contends that the life-giving principle is

sustained growth a biological system and is uninterrupted growth balanced in a dynamic state by synthesis and

dissolution. The process began by an oxidation/reduction reaction on the surface of pyrite energized

photovoltaically by sunlight. Hydrogen sulfide was oxidized, carbon dioxide was reduced, and phosphate on the

surface of the pyrite was a reactant. The first organic compounds were sulfides and phosphoglycerates. These

organophosphates were at the center of the energy cycle of all life where the dehydration of a relatively unreactive

“low-energy” two-phosphoglycerate transforms it into the “high-energy” phosphoenolpyruvate. Life began as a

growth process and continues to grow ceaselessly out of necessity. It cannot discontinue the life-giving energy flow

without irreparable loss of the process. All forms of life past and present were and are stabilized systems in which

the growth process is contained in metabolic turnover.

Keywords: origin of life, life principle, metabolic turnover

1. Introduction

Life’s origin seems to be an extremely intractable problem because it is hard to imagine how simple

chemicals could transform themselves into the immense complexity of a biological cell. This difficulty,

however, is not in the nature of life but is simply created by the manner researchers are trying to solve the

problem.

Biology differs from chemistry and physics in the extreme complexity of its compositions. When we look

at the contemporary organisms, the human body with its trillions of cells, the quintillions of atoms and

molecules, we are staggered by the sheer numbers. Even the simplest living cells consist of billions of atoms

and molecules moving and reacting in intricate precision and order.

If we dissociate a living microbe into its nucleic acids, proteins, and polysaccharides, and these in turn in

their monomers and other simple compounds, nothing remains except lifeless chemicals. We can account for all

the chemical compounds of the organism, but what made the microbe living has been lost. If it were the

composition alone that makes something alive, then the recently dead with the same components and order

would be able to be resuscitated. But this isn’t possible. Once life is lost it cannot be recovered.

What then makes life?

There are vast amounts of a few types of organic compounds of abiotic origin existing in the universe, but

none resembling the complex molecules of life. The fact that simple organic compounds can be found in such

unlikely places as meteorites and cosmic clouds, however, does not mean they are relevant to the origin of life.

William Day, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Chemistry, retired, Oxford, Mississippi, USA; main research field: Origin of

Systems and Physical Rationalism. Email: [email protected].

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WHAT LIFE IS AND HOW IT ORIGINATED

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It means only that carbon and nitrogen gases can be activated with high energy to condense to simple organic

compounds.

The immense development of organic chemistry has created the impression that organic chemistry is a part

of the physical world and life originated from it. This simple assumption gave rise to a series of assumptions

that cascaded from it deductively.

If you believe that organic chemistry existed before the formation of biological systems, it is logical to

assume that life originated by prebiotic molecules somehow assembling into a functional cellular life. It follows

that the mechanism was able to convert nutrients and energy into cellular activities, including reproduction.

Since organisms do this, it is easy to assume that life began this way. It is a mechanistic definition of life.

Although it seems like the only reasonable way, it limits the origin of life to an impossible condition.

The problem is using the principles of physics to try to solve a chemistry problem. At issue is which

philosophy of science to follow.

The era of modern science was founded on the materialism of Descartes and the empiricism of Francis

Bacon. Descartes dismissed everything that was doubtful and deduced that physical reality is fundamentally

matter and motion. Newton consolidated Descartes’ mechanics with Galileo’s study of motion and devised

dynamics. This created the worldview that physics is the paradigm of scientific thinking.

Biochemistry, however, is not physics. The laws of physics are of motion, and the laws of chemistry are of

transformation. In physics, matter remains unchanged and objects move relative to each other; in chemistry, the

reactants are participants and electrons move in exchange between them, causing their transformation.

Descartes’ matter and motion, therefore, have different meanings in physics and chemistry. A combination of

matter moving in concert is a mechanism, but in biochemistry, it is a process where motion and transformation

are inseparable. A clock can be stopped and restarted. The parts move but do not change. Mechanism has been

used to describe cellular activities, but it is a concept from technology and is an inappropriate and misleading

metaphor for biochemistry. To describe a cell as a mechanism implies that it followed the conditions for making

a mechanism.

With the mechanism-building block assembly hypothesis probability is the problem. The idea that abiotic

compounds could have assembled in the necessary order for a proto-cell to function and evolve is too remote to

consider possible. This chemistry-first approach cannot be performed in the laboratory with the actual

compounds even under ideal conditions. That they would have been available and did it under primordial

conditions is too remote to have happened. A cell, however, achieves position and availability with remarkable

ease simply by synthesizing its components in place at the right time. No building blocks are necessary.

Researchers are trying to show life’s origin by what life does, not what life is. Life is not a mechanism, but

a process. It is like a waterfall. It starts at a beginning and creates itself in course of formation. It cannot be

stopped without destroying the on-going creation. To restore the process, it has to start all over again and

recreate itself. This describes life. It can be initiated and grown, it cannot be assembled and started. And once

life has formed, it cannot be stopped without its irrecoverable loss. The dead cannot be resuscitated.

2. Cellular Life

All living organisms—plants, animals, people, and microbes—consist of cells. They are either single cell

or multicellular. The cell must have the full complement of organic substances to be living, and nothing less can

be alive. It is life’s basic unit. A lipid bilayer membrane forms a semipermeable boundary of the cell with its


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environment, admitting nutrients and allowing the expulsion of metabolic wastes. This leaves the cell

materially and energetically open, while keeping it organizationally closed.

The success of cellular life is its self-sufficiency. The system is autocatalytic, which is to say, it synthesizes

the catalysts that control the reactions that perform the syntheses. The modern cell is catalyzed and controlled

by enzymes and forms the basis of biology.

Even on its simplest microbial level, the cell is an extremely complex biological system. It could have

come into existence only through an extended evolution. The manner in which it evolved explains what life is.

Two principal autocatalytic systems make up the cell: the metabolic and the genetic. The metabolic system

processes nutrients, extracts energy, and synthesizes constituents. The genetic system stores the information for

the synthesis of nucleic acids and proteins, including enzymes, for the entire cell.

There is a distinct demarcation between the metabolic system of the cell and the genetic system. With all

of its nucleic acids and enzymes in a test tube, a genetic system operates on its own. If supplied with amino

acids and adenosine triphosphate (ATP), it will synthesize polypeptides. It does not, however, make a biological

cell. To clone a cell it has to be placed with its enzymes in an intact cell whose deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)

has been removed or destroyed. The metabolic cell and the genetic system are in fact two separate systems.

Together they make a genetic cell, but their information sources are separate and their relationship is like that of

two symbionts that integrated their systems.

These two systems originated, not with enzymes, but by their own respective catalysts, the coenzymes and

ribozymes. Coenzymes are compounds with chemical structures that catalyze classes of reactions. They are

general catalysts, therefore, and are not specific to the individual reactants. Ribozymes are catalytic Ribonucleic

Acid (RNA) molecules.

The enzyme-catalyzed cell is so astonishingly efficient that it is hard to think of life without enzymes, but

a chemical reaction needs only that the reactants have a higher energy than the products and be in position to

react. Emerging life achieved this before enzymes and was viable at every level of its evolution.

3. The Chemical Principles

A biological system creates itself by synthesizing its own components. It does it by just a few basic

chemical principles: oxidation-reduction, activation, and autocatalysis.

Oxidation and reduction initiates organic synthesis where an electron passes from an oxidant donor to a

reductant recipient. The effect is the transfer of a hydrogen atom from one compound to another in a redox

transformation. Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. It began by

reducing carbon dioxide and nitrogen with hydrogen to organic compounds.

Converting a compound to a high-energy derivative makes a reactant energetically favored to react

spontaneously. Activated products reacting in sequence is a growth process. When a product in a series

becomes a catalyst for a reaction in its own synthesis, the series closes upon itself to become an autocatalytic

cycle. In the growth process, everything is continuous and grown together, like mold on stale bread.

It is now possible to see how the cell achieved its complex order and precision. Growth is the organizing

principle of biology. The components stay in place and pass electrons and chemical groups like a bucket

brigade. The product of each reaction becomes the reactant of the reaction that follows. The effect of this is

each compound being synthesized in place and there for the next reaction. The advance of the cycle transforms

it so that the growth process can continue without end. This is the precise order of biochemical syntheses that


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characterizes cellular dynamics. There is no problem of improbability with process that plagues the building

block/assembly hypothesis. Growth is the manner in which life developed, and conditions intrinsic with a

growth process are features that characterize a living system. Sustained growth is the life-giving principle (Day

2002).

4. The Growth Principle in Action

Seeing life as a growth process changes the way we think of its origin and evolution. In growth

composition and energy cannot be separated, they originate together. The organic compounds involved in the

beginning were not abiotic, they were synthesized by the initial redox reaction. Any organic compounds in the

environment would have been irrelevant to life’s origin.

Life is a self-creating process. It did not require design, information, templates, or building blocks. It

created everything about it as it grew. It used the organic compounds that it synthesized for the materials of its

reactions. Growth and development followed a sequence governed by life’s own chemistry. Everything that

became a part of a living cell was biogenic. The metabolic and genetic systems, the membrane, and the chirality

(a molecule not superimposable on its mirror image) were produced by the growth process.

Growth was made possible by the products being converted to high-energy derivatives. In biological

systems, these derivatives are almost entirely esters and anhydrides of phosphoric acid, and the high-energy

agent which phosphorylates them is ATP.

Activating reactants by phosporylation is fundamental to biosynthesis. An initial phosphorylating agent

could have been pyrophosphoric acid or related compounds. ATP, however, is the principal phosphate

derivative upon which biological systems have evolved, and its distinct advantages make probable that its

synthesis to replace its forerunner would have been early. For ATP to be synthesized, the purine structure had to

emerge. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the first amino acids, glycine, aspartic acid, and glutamine, along

with formate and carbon dioxide, form the component parts of the purine skeleton.

A major step in the road to biosynthesis was the conversion of three-carbon pyruvic acid to an active

derivative. Pyruvic acid is an alpha-keto acid, making it particularly labile to decarboxylation and providing an

active acetyl group which led to lipids and the membrane. The synthesis of the alpha-keto acids was important

in development of metabolism because simple amination results in amino acids.

Amino acids are usually thought of as subunits of proteins. Their role as building blocks of proteins,

however, has overshadowed their initial and primary function. Amino acids are and were the precursors of other

biochemicals, including purines, pyrimidines, coenzymes, and other amino acids.

Some amino acids appear early and were the precursors to the first coenzymes. These coenzymes made

possible the synthesis of additional amino acids, which then served as precursors for even other coenzymes. A

coenzyme is synthesized and catalyzes a reaction in the series that produced it. This turns the series into an

autocatalytic cycle and makes the system closed and independent except for starting materials and energy.

The product of a cycle can become the compound upon which other systems depend, interlocking the

autocatalytic systems into a product/reactant dependence. Each coenzyme had a star burst effect on the

potential for chemical conversions as new coenzymes widened the possible paths and directed synthesis in

many directions. The biological cell evolved from this network of interlocked systems and retains this

organization (Day 2002, 79-85).


899

Because each product is continually removed by the succeeding reaction, a series is always out of

equilibrium. It continues to flow in the direction of products as long as the starting materials and energy are

available. Each product is limited by its reaction in transforming to another product and needs a dissimilar

compound to react with to continue the process. These reactants come from other pathways synthesizing other

molecules. It was the coming together of diverse products into reaction that led to the cell’s rapid ascent to

molecular complexity and a network of metabolic pathways.

In creating the metabolic system, the sustained growth followed reproducible spontaneous reactions and

took the most accessible paths like water flowing down a rocky terrain. No prior information or design was

necessary. The paths were determined by each reaction.

The coenzymes made the metabolic system. Consisting of a mere dozen diverse chemical types, they make

up a small group of compounds with diverse chemical structures that perform basic functions of metabolism.

They became the carriers of energy, the catalysts of reactions, and the transporters of electrons and chemical

groups. With their select diversity, they were able to develop the few amino acids and elementary precursors

into a complex array of interrelated components of an autocatalytic and reproducible metabolic cell.

The cell did not invent growth and reproduction, the growth process invented the cell. The growth

pathways were energy-driven and continued to grow in the direction of least resistance. Eventually they grew

into a self-supporting mesh of pathways that became the metabolic system. Secondary conditions such as the

membrane evolved and were incorporated because they made possible for the growth process to continue. The

consequences of these developments was a living cell (Day 2002, 79-85). Once formed, the cell developed

along the lines of the activities of the growth process.

The sheer complexity of the biological cell has been confounding only because the static chemistry-first

mechanistic approach is too limited by probability to be possible. When combined with metabolic turnover a

continuous sustained and orderly growth process has no such limits imposed upon its complexity. That is how

the interlinked network of pathways of the metabolic system formed, and quite likely it is the only way it could

have formed.

5. The Energy Core

Organisms take in food and break them down chemically and stepwise to extract their energy to produce

ATP. The food degradation products are a quite restricted group of small molecules. What this tells us is that

metabolism began with just a few basic bioconversions, and all descending organisms evolved by keeping these

core reactions and adding to them peripherally. All foods are broken down to fuel these reactions, all biological

compounds, regardless of their complexity, come ultimately from these reaction products, and their synthesis

radiates out from them in looped pathways. These reactions are the remnant metabolic reactions of the ancestral

cellular life.

The biological process began with the transduction of sunlight to an electron flow. Hydrogen sulfide was

oxidized, carbon dioxide was reduced, and phosphate on a mineral surface was a reactant. The first organic

compounds were phosphoglycerates. These organophosphates are at the center of the energy cycle of all life

where the dehydration of a relatively unreactive “low energy” two-phosphoglycerate transforms it into the

“high energy” phosphoenolpyruvate (Day 2002, 79-85).

The reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2), oxidation of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and the formation of

organophosphates started the life process. It had an inexhaustible supply of starting materials and a sustaining


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energy flow, but for the growth process to continue reactants had to be activated and a lipid membrane had to

form. Like a waterfall, the process needed a chemical reaction to lift the reactants to a higher energy level to

allow the reactions to cascade down spontaneously to a thermodynamically favored position. The high-energy

agent which phosphorylates them is ATP.

At the heart of life’s creation, therefore, is the reduction of carbon dioxide to 3-carbon phosphorylates. In a

series of steps, low-energy phosphates can be kicked up to high-energy compounds that are strong phosphorylating

agents. In the developed cell, these compounds are then used to recharge ATP as the principal energy carrier.

But before ATP, they would have phosphorylated the reactants directly.

The energy core became the springboard of life. All energy from sunlight was funneled into this set of

compounds to produce high-energy phosphates to sustain the growth process. Phosphorylation elevated the

energy level of reactants and growth followed spontaneously. In evolution, development directed energy inward

to the energy core, and outward from it with energy-laden compounds to extend syntheses. Driven by a

continual flow of energy, the reduction of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, and activation by phosphorylation,

reaction series created a variety of organic compounds. A membrane formed, photosynthesis developed, and

coenzymes followed. Only then did a genetic system develop that integrated the cell into a reproducing

organism and Darwinian evolution took over.

6. The Genetic System

The coenzymes set the pattern for system formation. There are three types of biocatalysts that evolved:

coenzymes, ribozymes, and enzymes—each creating its own system, the metabolic system, the genetic system,

and the enzyme-controlled biological system.

By creating itself, there was no dependence on external processes for organic compounds. Biological

molecules have chirality because biogenic synthesis evolved to make them that way to be more efficient in

biochemical reactions. Only after the evolution of catabolism (the breakdown of compounds for their chemical

energy), and a dependence on the environment for nutrients did stereo-specific compounds become necessary

in food.

The genetic system, even on its simplest imagined level, is extremely complex. It would have required

nearly a hundred specialized compounds interacting in a precise manner to make it a functional reality. It is

unrealistic to think that such a complex system could have developed in an abiotic environment. The genetic

system needs ATP, nucleotides, and all the amino acids, none of which it produces itself. But these metabolites

used to make nucleic acids are the same four involved in the transport of energy (ADP), and the transport of

monomers used to synthesize carbohydrates (UDP), lipids (CDP), and proteins (GDP). The amino acids were

present as precursors in the synthesis of coenzymes.

What better place, therefore, for the genetic system to originate. Unlike the metabolic cell which had to

synthesize its own components, the genetic system had the nucleotides and amino acids available preformed.

The interior of the cell was a rich milieu of these starting materials protected from the environment and

dissolution. Since no new amino acids would have come into being after the proteins were synthesized this is

consistent with the origin being where all the amino acids existed.

It seems quite likely, therefore, that the genetic system began like a parasite and advanced to the level of

symbiont before being integrated into the modern type cell. This gives insight to how and why the system

evolved. If the genetic system, were a separate system it would have developed on the same principles as other


901

systems. Its development would have been primarily for reproducing itself, so the products that it first produced

were those that facilitated this reproduction. We see the system producing proteins, but there would have been

no initial advantage to making proteins for the metabolic cell. The first polypeptides would have been produced

by the ribosome for the ribosome. Only later after the genetic system was established and producing proteins

would it take on the role of symbiont and connect proteins to coenzymes to produce enzymes to catalyze the

metabolic reactions.

Life created itself and everything associated with it. It synthesized its own constituents, it grew its own

order and complexity, it accumulated the information of its composition in the structures and reactivities of its

components, and it reproduced by repeating the process that it followed in its development. Life is a

reproducible sustained growth process, and all of the properties it exhibits are intrinsic with and reflections of

that process. Closing the process or dissociating the synthesis created the stabilized condition that we recognize

as biological systems.

The idea that it would have taken a long time to originate stems from the impression that it had to

assemble and evolve its complexity. But things that are continually driven by energy to grow do not stop

growing. It was not something that had to wait for events to overcome an improbability of their happening. It

was a chemical process that commenced from the inevitability of the circumstances and continued to grow and

build until it achieved the sophistication of a biological cell. It could have happened in an astonishingly short

time.

7. How It Started

The earth was bathed in sunlight, but a means was needed to convert it to an electron flow. In

photosynthesis when electrons in chlorophyll are energized by sunlight, they leave the orbit of the excited

molecule and transfer to an acceptor. This then becomes the oxidation-reduction reaction where the oxidant

accepts electrons from a donor and is reduced by it. Life is driven by the energy flow from oxidation-reduction

reactions that originate by photons propelling electrons into a reductive force. It is the mainspring of

photosynthesis and the manner in which light is converted directly to chemical energy. Something had to have

been in the primordial environment which could capture the light of the sun and direct it to the growth of

organic compounds.

There is a group of enzymes that have at their active site an iron-sulfur cluster (Beinert, Holm, and Munck

1997, 653-659). These enzymes, such as nitrogenase which catalyzes the reduction of nitrogen to ammonia,

carbon dehydrogenase, and hydrogenase suggest that Fe-S clusters played a fundamental role in the origin of

life (Rees and Howard 2003, 929-931). Several simple Fe-S clusters assemble spontaneously in reductive

aqueous solutions from ferrous iron and sulfide, which were prevalent in the Archean environment. The two

simplest Fe-S clusters have versatile electrochemical properties with reductive potentials ranging from over 400

mV to below -400 mV. They are in electron transport proteins, such as ferredoxin, and as part of the internal

electron transfer in larger enzymes.

The photosynthesis apparatus requires a compound to accept the electron from the photosensitive

component and transfer it to a coenzyme. A universal compound that performs this role and may have existed

from the beginning of life on earth in its ancestral form is ferredoxin. Contemporary ferredoxin is an

iron-containing protein that has a reducing potential near that of molecular hydrogen, making it the most highly

reducing stable compound in a cell. It occurs in the primitive anaerobic organisms, both photosynthetic and


902

non-photosynthetic, and is basic to cell chemistry. The various roles of ferredoxin in the cell are fundamental: It

assists in the ATP formation by radiation (Arnon 1965), it participates in the reduction of CO2 to pyruvate, and

it is used in nitrogen fixation (Mortenson 1965).

The photosynthesis apparatus is far too complex to have been initial. It seems most likely that life began

with a simple form of ferredoxin and evolved the photosynthesis apparatus later as an extension from it after a

lipid membrane formed. This suggests that in the formative stage of life a primordial forerunner of ferredoxin, a

Fe-S cluster or mineral, was able to transduce sunlight directly to electromotive energy. This was then the

source of reductive energy that converted carbon dioxide and nitrogen to organic compounds and ushered in the

biological revolution.

Photovoltaic cells convert sunlight directly to electricity, and metal sulfides, notably those of cadmium and

copper, are used to produce photovoltaic cells. It seems possible that iron sulfides crystallized with or without

impurities could have acted as natural photovoltaic cells in initiating the life process by converting sunlight

directly to a continuous and reductive flow of electrons.

26 years ago Jaegermann and Tributsch (1993) proposed pyrite as a promising candidate as a photovoltaic

absorber for thin film solar cells. Pyrite has a very high absorption coefficient and a suitable band gap (Eg = 1.0

=/-0.2 eV) for photovoltaic energy conversion (Fiechter, Jaegermann, and Tributsch 1986, 97). It absorbs light

in the whole visible region, making it attractive for solar energy applications.

Pyrite, however, for the use in photovoltaic cells, never lived up to its promise. The photopotential

obtained in a single crystalline system has been low with respect to the expected theoretical value of 0.5 V. The

open circuit voltages never exceeded 200 mV at room temperature, or about 2.8 percent conversion. It has been

suggested that a sulfur deficiency or the pyrite’s surface structure might be responsible for the low photovoltage

achieved (Fiechter, Smestad, and Tributsch 1990).

There is, however, a difference between a semiconductor electrode and semiconductor particles where

both the cathodic and anodic reactions occur on the same particle (Buker, Alonso-Vante, and Tributsch 1992;

Bard 1982; Aspnes and Heller 1983). Chen and colleagues (Chen, Jyh-Myng, Fu-Ren, and Bard 1991) studied

the photoelectrochemical behavior of FeS2 particles. They ground pyrite to a powder and irradiated the particles

in a stirred electrolyte solution. Photoinduced electron/hole (e-/H+) pair separation occurred, followed by

reduction and oxidation reactions with components on the particle surface and in solution. Tartrate ions as hole

acceptors were oxidized to carbon dioxide, and electrons accumulated on the surface of the particles where they

were collected and measured by an electrode (Gerischer 1984).

There is, therefore, reason to believe that illuminated FeS2 particles suspended in a solution containing an

electron donor and carbon dioxide will behave like photoelectrochemical cells. The process would be

continuous as long as the particles are illuminated and the dissolved gases are available, with products

accumulating on the surfaces. This then would correspond to the growth dynamics that would be expected to

have occurred with cellular development.

The organic compounds of biological systems consist principally of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur,

and phosphorus compounds. In the Archean environment there were CO2, N2, H2S, and phosphoric acid.

Carbon dioxide and nitrogen had to be reduced and hydrogen sulfide had to be oxidized. They paired up in

oxidation/reduction photovoltaic reactions with pyrite transducing sunlight to energize a flow of electrons

between them. Nitrogen was reduced to ammonia or intermediate compounds, which could then be oxidized

photovoltaically with reduction of CO2 to produce amines.


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And that is how it began.

Phosphate was crucial to life’s origin (Westheimer 1987). Organophosphates have three founding roles:

they were the phospholipids for the membrane, the phosphoglycerates for the energy core, and the high-energy

activators for spontaneous transformations. Phosphoric acid would have been in the waters around volcanoes

and could have been bound to pyrite. Phosphoric acid adsorbed on the surface of pyrite would have rendered

some pyrite to hydrogen sulfide which provided the electrons for the photovoltaic reduction, while the

phosphate became the reactant for the synthesis of organophosphate compounds.

The biological process began by an oxidation/reduction reaction on the surface of pyrite energized

photovoltaically by sunlight. Hydrogen sulfide was oxidized, carbon dioxide was reduced, and phosphate on

the surface of pyrite was a reactant. The first organic compounds were phosphorglycerates. These

organophosphates are at the center of the energy cycle of all life where relatively unreactive “low-energy”

two-phosphoglycerate is transformed by dehydration into the “high-energy” phosphoenolpyruvate.

The photovoltaic origin with the growth principle is entirely consistent with the continuity principle.

Constituents grew in situ to become more diverse until the complexities of cellular life emerged. There were

escalating steps in development and evolution but no discontinuities. Growth was continuous from the

beginning with the reduction of carbon dioxide, and development evolved without any separate assembly steps.

Evolution by growth took biochemistry into different realms of activity which became a part of biological

development. The reduction of carbon dioxide led to lipids with a hydrophobicity that made the cellular

membrane possible. Reactions with ammonium compounds gave diverse chemical types of porphyrins and

coenzymes. The porphyrins made the photosynthesis apparatus possible, the coenzymes had the catalytic

activities for forming a metabolic system, which allowed the breakdown and recycling of compounds for their

nutrients and energy. Finally, the synthesis of macromolecules took biochemistry into the use of proteins as

catalysts and nucleic acids as depositories of information. The emergent system remained dynamic throughout

and has been viable from the moment it began.

8. Metabolic Turnover

The mechanistic hypothesis that life began by the assembly of prebiotic building blocks is unrealistic.

Life’s origin can be understood only by following the principle upon which life exists. Life is a sustained

growth process contained in balance with continual dissolution or transformation of its products. This is the

life-giving principle of all things biological. It would have been true from the very beginning. Life cannot be

assembled, it can only be grown. This is retained in an astonishing feature of all living organisms.

There is an impression that the composition of adult organisms is relatively stable and does not change.

The findings of Schoenheimer and coworkers (Schoenheimer 1942) in the 1930s, however, showed that the

composition of the body is by no means static. It is in a dynamic state of continually regenerating itself by

breaking down its components to their constituent fragments by lytic enzymes and resynthesizing new ones to

take their place. The turnover rate is characteristic of specific compounds. The half-life of enzyme proteins, as

an example, varies greatly and can be as brief as 19 minutes or as long as several days. Since the synthesis of a

compound and its degradation occur by different biochemical procedures, the metabolic turnover is not an

equilibrium of reactions, but rather a steady state that continually consumes energy from oxidative sources.


904

This is why an organism without energy dies. When the energy flow is disrupted the synthesis processes

cease, leaving the unbalanced degradation reactions to continue until the thermodynamically unstable structural

elements collapse and life is lost irreversibly.

Metabolic turnover allows the cell to continuously change out damaged components, but a continual total

regeneration seems far beyond what is necessary for ordinary maintenance. Why did nature select such a

process so enormously wasteful of energy that seems to have no primary function?

The metabolic turnover fits what life is and how it originated. Life is not a body in a dynamic state, life is

a dynamic state. It is a process. And as a process, composition and energy cannot be separated, nor can one

originate without the other.

This is what the discovery of metabolic turnover unveiled. A biological system is a balance between

growth and dissolution. It has to continually grow to be alive, but it has to undo the products in order to contain

and sustain growth.

Works Cited

Arnon, Daniel I. “Ferredoxin and Photosynthesis.” Science 149 (1965): 1460-70. Aspnes David E., and Adam Heller. “Photoelectrochemical Hydrogen Evolution and Water Photolyzing Semiconductor

Suspensions: Properties of Platinum Group Metal Catalyst-Semiconductor Contacts in Air and Hydrogen.” Journal of Physical Chemistry 87 (1983): 4919.

Bard, Allen J. “Design of Semiconductor Photoelectrochemcal Systems for Solar Energy Conversion.” Journal of Physical Chemistry 86 (1982): 172.

Beinert, Helmut, Richard H. Holm, and Eckard Munck. “Iron-Sulfur Clusters: Nature’s Modular Multipurpose Structures.” Science 277 (1997): 653-59.

Buker, Klaus, Nicolas Alonso-Vante, and Helmut Tributsch. “Photovoltaic Output Limitation of n-FeS2 (pyrite), Schottky Barriers: A Temperature-Dependent Characterization.” Journal of Applied Physics 72.12 (1992): 5721-28.

Chen, Guancheng, Jyh-Myng Zen, Fu-Ren, F. Fan, and Allen J. Bard. “Electrochemical Investigation of Energetics of Irradiated FeS2 (pyrite) Particles.” Journal of Physical Chemistry 95 (1991): 3682-87.

Day, William. How Life Began. Cambridge, MA: Foundation For New Directions, 2002. Fiechter, Sebastian, Ahmed Ennaoui, Greg P. Smestad, and Helmut Tributsch. Proceedings of the 1st World Renewable Energy

Congress Reading. UK: Pergamon Press, City, 1990. 458. Fiechter Sebastian, Ahmed Ennaoui, Wolfram Jaegermann, and Helmut Tributsch. “Photoelectrochemistry of Highly Quantum

Efficient Single Crystalline n-FeS2 (pyrite).” Journal of the Electrochemical Society 133 (1986): 97. Gerischer,Heinz. “A Mechanism of Electron Hole Pair Separation in Illuminated Semiconductor Particles.” Journal of Physical

Chemistry 88 (1984): 6096. Jaegermann, Wolfram, and Helmut Tributsch. “Photoelectrochemical Reactions of FeS2 (pyrite) with H2O and Reducing Agents.”

Journal of Applied Electrochemistry 13 (1993): 743. Mortenson, Leonard E. “Ferredoxin and ATP, Requirements for Nitrogen Fixation in Cell-Free Extracts of Clostridium

Pasteurianum.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 552 (1965): 2772-90.

Rees, Douglas C., and James B. Howard. “The Interface Between the Biological and Inorganic Worlds: Iron-Sulfur Metalclusters.” Science 300 (2003): 929-31.

Schoenheimer, Rudolf. The Dynamic State of Body Constituents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1942. Westheimer, Frank Henry. “Why Nature Chose Phosphates.” Science 235 (1987): 1173-78.


The Spiritual Experience as Scientific Experiment:

How Science Can Meet Religion

Dan Chițoiu

Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași

My paper aims to discuss the approach between the mystic’s experience and the experiment of the scientist. The

mystic experience is closer to what is proper to the scientific experiment: both are, finally, ways of tryout. This also

means that both are ways to come closer to a deeper understanding of Reality. Raising the problem of the relation

between religion and science requires a series of precautions, especially related to the underlying meanings of what

we call “religion” or “science”. What is meant by religion and religious? The terms are too vague, and on the other

hand, the differences among religions are so important that it is almost impossible to use the term religion without

an abstract meaning. Even the overall invocation of Christianity is improper, as the report of Eastern Christianity to

the Western, one reveals different perspectives on some issues that determine the relationship with science. There

must be also taken into account the history of the religious doctrines after Enlightenment, as they underwent secular

influences that sometimes left tracks in their discourse, the most aggressive factor being the ideological one. And

when speaking about the possibility of religion getting open to science it is necessary to specify what type of

religious discourse is concerned. Since a generic report of religion to science is slippery, we should rather count on

the identification of those types of religious experience and of those religious horizons that can offer a real

openness to science. These statements are also true for science: for such a dialogue, there is need of identifying

those aspects of science that are not contaminated by ideology or by assumptions alien to its experimental nature.

Keywords: religion and science, tryout, experience and experiment

1. Science and Religion: the Background of a Dialog

Today becomes more and more visible the tendency of a mutual openness of the discourses that both

religion and nowadays science have. There has been a lot written on the justifications of this change. Among

the aspects that have been considered to provide such a need of mutual reconsideration between the theologian

and the scientist, the most significant proves to be the explanatory insufficiency that has started to cross the

border research, a situation that is so striking in quantum physics. As John Brooke (1991) states based on some

obvious and solid historical arguments, along the European history both the role of science and religion and

their relationship has been in a continuous modification, the perception of the two as being opposed or in

Acknowledgements: This paper was made within The Knowledge Based Society Project supported by the Sectorial

Operational Program Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed by the European Social Fund, and by the Romanian Government under the contract no. POSDRU ID 56815.

Dan Chițoiu, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania; main research fields: Byzantine Philosophy and Spirituality, Christian Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics. Email: [email protected].

DAVID PUBLISHING

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conflict coming into view in the context of the scientific revolution of the 17th century. The present need of

dialogue between science and religion must be understood as a manifestation of the need of overcoming some

paradigms brought by that period (Brooke 1991, 56). It is precisely the reason why the need of dialogue has

been perceived more by the scientist than by the theologian. This has become possible also due to the new

scientific concepts that have challenged the traditional models of determinism (Sappington 1991, 117). So, the

need of dialog has become imperative in physics, cosmology, and also in life sciences, but especially where

science has evolved enough for to become evident that the traditional explanatory models are insufficient. This

openness of science to religion took the appearance of a common trend, but was primarily a need felt by the

forefront of the research in sciences (being enough opinions that do not see any need from science to appeal to

explanatory models different from its instruments). This does not mean that it is less symptomatic or less

important to the evolutions in scientific explanation. According to John Haught (1995, 9), the current relation

between science and religion is found in four instances. A first situation would be the one where science is in

full opposition to religion or where science invalidates religion―the situation called by the American

researcher of conflict. A second situation would be characterized by the perspective according to which science

and religion are so different, that the conflict between them is logically impossible, a perspective that is

described as being of contrast. A third type of argumentation supposes that though science and religion are

distinct, science has always implications on religion and the other way round: science and religion inevitably

interact so that religion and theology cannot ignore the developments in science. Haught identifies this

perspective as being of contact. Finally, a fourth perspective, though not logically different from the third one,

insists on the subtle but significant ways through which religion positively supports the adventure of science in

exploring reality. Thus, it is considered that religion, without interfering in any way with science, paves the way

for expressing some of its ideas, and even gives some kind of blessing, which Haught called certification, a

validation of the science search for truth. Georgetown University professor considers that the first two

perspectives on the science-religion relationship find their origin in the improper overlap and confusion of the

specific role of each of them (Haught 1995, 3-4).

But raising the problem of the relation between religion and science requires a series of precautions,

especially related to the underlying meanings of what we call religion or science. Several authors that evaluated

this relation drew attention on the ambiguity that lies under the two terms. When religion is invoked within this

relation, it is not clear what is meant by religion and religious: the term is too vague and, on the other hand, the

differences among religions are so important that it is almost impossible to use the term religion with an

abstract meaning. Even the overall invocation of Christianity is risky, as especially the report of Eastern

Christianity to the Western one reveals different perspectives on some issues that determine the relationship

with science. There must be also taken into account the history of the religious doctrines after Renaissance, as

they underwent secular influences that sometimes left tracks in their discourse, the most aggressive factor being

the ideological one. When speaking about the possibility of religion getting open to science, it is necessary to

specify what type of religious discourse is concerned. Since a generic report of religion to science is slippery,

we should rather count on the identification of those types of religious experience and of those religious

horizons that can offer a real openness to science. These statements are also true for science: for such a

dialogue there is a need of identifying those aspects of science that are not contaminated by ideology or by

presuppositions alien to its experimental nature (as it is the loan from certain philosophical doctrines, a loan

performed without an internal justification of the experimental approaches).


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The background on which the dialog between science and religion is possible to prove to be a first decisive

aspect, for a cultural model directly or indirectly influences the shapes taken by the human experience in a

certain religious horizon and the way science is made. The current possibility of some consistent openings with

significant results between the religion and the fundamental scientific research depends on the situation of the

present cultural context, and on the modifications it has been through in the last period. In order to find the

justification for the current picture of the present cultural landscape and especially of its tendencies, we must

point out the cultural marks that had influenced the historic period called modernity. What we call “Modernity”

had as its main mark the privilege given to a human capacity, precisely to the rational capacity. This option is

visible in the founding of the modern concept of science. The type of science initiated by Galileo Galilei, the

one which will dominate the scientific perception has as its founding act the reduction of the sensitive and

living qualities of the discredited bodies as appearance and illusion and their replacement with the mathematic

knowledge of their abstract forms and relations. These forms and their relations could be known only through

mathematics, meaning that the most authentic sense of reason must be bound to this way of knowledge.

Galilei’s paradigm was considered for a very long time the only valid fundament for the scientific research, as

well as for the valid explanation in science. Modern philosophical approach received also the influence of this

vision about reality, so that Galilei’s doctrine proves to be one of the key sources of modernity. But at the end

of the 19th century, Wilhelm Dilthey insisted on the distinction between two ways of investigation, the “natural”

sciences and the “spiritual” ones. If explanation is characteristic to the natural sciences, understanding is

specific to the spiritual sciences. The object of the spiritual sciences is the “living” and the only way to

understand this is the “reliving” (Dilthey 1999, 73). Later, Martin Heidegger (2008) writes a study on the

modern view on technique, in which he describes the incorrectness of the technical attitude towards nature, as

far as it regards an insistent delivery request which man addresses to nature. The Enlightenment’s rationalism

considered that it cannot exist but only one perspective of truth and therefore, according to its own definition of

what is veridical and real, it judged and classified the entire cultural production of mankind. But the recent

evolutions in science brought as a consequence of a serious crisis in explanation (especially in quantum physics,

also in cosmology or life sciences), as well as the recognition of nonscientific approaches’ value, like religion

or philosophy, so opening a much broader discussion about validity in scientific explanation. One aspect of this

major change was a broader understanding of what means “exactness,” and “precision,” important classical

model criteria in science experiment validation. In the next section, I will discuss this broader meaning of

precision and its signification for a different description of experiment, as a form of tryout (as a form of a

fundamental human experiențial act).

2. From the Need of Rigor to the Need of Authenticity

The involvement of mathematics into physics modified the understanding of the world, eliminated the

sensible, the concrete, in favors only of the characteristics considered essential of an object, those

characteristics which are describable from a mathematical point of view. The reality described by the classical

physics is an independent one, that is: the measurements do not interfere with the phenomena (the meaning

given to objectivity). This thesis became the central thesis of any kind of modern science and this was also. But

certain levels of reality, specifically the quantum levels, cannot be subjected to the classical explanation given

by the science founded by logical formalism, so that arose the need to resort to alternative explanatory models.

In the 30’s of the last century appeared a serious breech in the paradigm of the physical realism. Nowadays, in


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quantum physics arises the question of the real nature, of what is called “Something” in a rather negative

language. The role assigned to that “something” suggests the presence of an integrity, of a whole, a thesis

totally unknown to the classical physics. The theory of the quantum field refutes the perspective of the classical

physics, mainly because the particles no longer play the role of constitutive material of the universe. Our senses

do not reveal the real constituency of the universe. There appear dramatic differences from the classical vision

over the world, it is now required a different vision, as well as the necessity to renounce to the objectivist

language.

On the other hand, in the 20th century took shape of a movement of returning to the authentic meanings of

Patristic Fathers writings, named neo-patristic (authors like Dumitru Stăniloae, Justin Popovič or George

Florovsky). This movement at aimed the restoration of some profound meanings stated in the patristic period

regarding the Evangelical message which corresponded to the true spirit of Christianity. These authors

described a dimension of the Patristic doctrine having a distinct way of describing reality and Ultimate Reality.

Here was a meeting point with the phenomenology, intended to be a radical investigation of what we could

name phenomenon, in the situation that speech about the essence of being it is declared as a kind of fiction of

metaphysics, or at least an unjustified claim. The radical of this kind of investigation not of the phenomenon

but of its apparition led to a rather unexpected approach to the Evangelic affirmations. For today’s French

phenomenology, reaching the Christian message authenticity implies the analysis of meanings and implications

of the Incarnation act as a phenomenal manifestation of the Absolute in temporality, in the world (as it is shown

in the works of Michel Henry or Jean-Ives Lacoste). The conscience under which the present phenomenological

speech takes shape is a sigh of cultural context for the first time favorable to a mutual opening between the

Eastern Christian spirituality of patristic origin and the fundamental research of today sciences.

The reaction to the danger came from the interference of some cultural constructions, which often took the

shape of ideology and misled the spiritual exercise and also the scientific investigation from their true purpose,

brought out a conscience which modernity did not possess until recently. It is a horizon with an unprecedented

possibility which does not necessary represent the guarantee for a productive dialog between the Eastern way of

understanding the Christian experience and the scientific investigation. We may easily have the impression of a

forced proximity between two dimensions of the human experience that aim different reality levels. The recent

mutations in understanding the nature of reality made possible accepting the validity of religious experience

and the value of the discourse of spiritual tradition as specific ways of investigating the inner levels of reality.

The crucial question is if these alternative ways to evaluate can somehow meet the current need for rigor, and

preciseness. Therefore, we can argue that it is important to prove that the spirituality discourse provides rigor in

the description of reality, that in this case, there is also a certain understanding of precision and exactness,

which is totally functional at a practical level as well.

But, science and spirituality are, on their specific paths, somehow similar ways for approaching what we

call reality? The mystic’s experience and the scientist’s experiment are both ways of tryout? Is the mystic’s

experience, somehow, closer to what is proper to the scientific experiment? I will try to argue that such affirmations

are sustainable.

3. The Spiritual Experience as Experiment?

As a starting point, I will present some of the remarks of André Scrima. He provide a number of reasons

for that considering spiritual experience may as a research topic. Firstly, the spiritual experience is the


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manifestation and the sign of a possibility, of a fundamental aspect for human condition. The human being is a

being of experience. As Scrima (2008) indicates, the term “experience” comes from Greek, peira, meaning

tryout (its root seemed to be identical to the one of the term pyr, fire), and the Latin added prefix ex (starting

from). Experience would be then what comes out of tryout, knowledge by tryout. Scrima states that the spiritual

experience must also represent a study object because any experience of this kind is creative, founding values,

bearing a vision of the world, therefore a way of founding a cultural tradition. Eventually, to approach spiritual

experience means to approach a different actuality than the current one (“actuality” derives from act, from

transposing into act, from what is being done: spiritual experience comprises a prophetic dimension as it

actualizes what is our nearest into our furthest―it allows us to understand the actuality of humanity) (Scrima

2008, 198-199). Among the aspects that are considered relevant by Scrima, in order to support the necessity of

the study on spiritual experience, the one that interests us most is the significance given to the term experience.

It turns out that experience, understood as tryout, represents the central aspect of any spirituality. But at the

same time experience, in its valence of experiment, is the essential component of science. One cannot speak

about science as long as there is not an experimental frame, without unfolding some experiments. But precisely,

in this double reference to a form of tryout, I consider that there exists an area of a real rapprochement between

the one who performs a spiritual experience and the scientist. They both put the reality to tryout, on one way or

another. But in fact, this rapprochement is more difficult and represents a commonplace, due to the reasons

mentioned above and these reasons may be, from a point of view, subsumed to language difficulties.

This is why, those who reached the intuition of the common ground that this tryout of reality takes place

on (in a full acceptation of what we call reality, including the one that is called ultimate reality) were those who

could understand the limitations that human language introduces inevitably in a certain historical period. They

were exceptional people because they did not fall in the traps of a more or less specialized language that a

period or historical moment may impose: being able to understand the authentic ways in which such a complex

reality may be experienced and passing over the imaginary and the ideology of their time.

I will invoke a situation of overcoming a language context and of the way in which reality was understood

in a certain period, a situation that can illustrate best what I want to demonstrate. This situation belongs to the

spiritual experience that is proper to the Christian East that belongs to Saint Symeon the New Theologian, a

Byzantine author from the turn of the first millennium. I think here we can find a sample of the role of

experience as tryout in the mystical writings. Symeon was indeed exceptional because he putted this

experiential self-tryout in a poetical expressing. The way Symeon spoke about God and man’s experience of

God can be fully called a-typical if we relate his writings to the discursive canons from the beginning of the

second millennium. That because Symeon wanted to transmit to his contemporaries that they could also reach

in their times something what they considered possible only in the time of the Fathers: a sudden transforming

experience that does not come as a result of one’s expectation, and whose result is a deep inner change (Bouyer

1968, 568). What characterizes Symeon’s experience is an exceptional “exposure” to an unexpected Presence, a

sudden discover of a deep and very powerful reality, which was for him the Personal Reality. If we are to

follow Scrima, telling that experience means knowledge by tryout, the type of tryout was a double one for

Symeon, because the tryout from the extraordinary presence of a totally different Reality from what means

daily experience was doubled by a tryout of himself, by the need of leaving aside everything that could

represent an inner obstacle in exposing oneself to this experience.


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As a matter of fact, Simeon’s experience as knowledge by tryout was not really new for the Eastern

Christian Tradition, what he really succeed to do in his writings was to warn about the difference between an

authentic experiential life and a mislead one. But we can mention a number of texts describing this path in

knowledge, and probably the most famous for setting the hallmarks of a true experiential knowledge was Isaac

of Nineveh, from the 7th century after Christ. He described the state of rapture as the decisive moment in

experiencing a different reality level, beyond space and time. It is hard to understand his affirmations about the

state of rapture if we are not aware about his use of words like mind, intelligence, and soul. He often used the

expressions like “the movements of mind” or “the movements of intelligence”: these expressions cannot be

understood as descriptions of the mind’s functions. They are not descriptions of psychological processes, but of

a dynamical access to different levels of reality, and more than that, to different levels of being (Isaaco de

Ninive 1985, 55). The state of rapture cannot be understood as a kind of autosuggestion, but as an effective

moment of radical discontinuity with time and space (the discoveries made in the quantum physics gave a

scientific support for this possibility). So all Isaac’s affirmations about what precedes and what characterizes

the state of rapture are made from an ontological perspective. In this way we can explain distinctions among the

different states of mind or more precisely, among the movements of mind. Here is the ultimate tryout—the

experience of what is beyond the normal limits of the human capacity of knowledge. Isaac’s description of

attaining this ultimate experience of tryout clearly indicates the stages of an experiment: there are precise

requirement in every stage, warnings about the risks of failure and there are criteria provided for verifying the

correctness of an experience. The tryout is the way of preparing yourself for the state of rapture, when you

receive by gracing the state of supra-knowledge. This is the fulfillment of the experiential road, and the

attaining of this experience changing everything in the understanding of the subject after. This is not just an

exceptional discovery or an ultimate knowledge, is more than that: as the Patristic literature after Isaac

repeatedly indicates, the consequences are changes in the ontological status of man and world.

Again, in the Isaac’s text we encounter the difficulties in expressing this kind of experimental tryout, we

can see this also in Symeon’s mystical poems, but the Byzantine 13th century was the time when this difficulty

was so acute that it was necessary for the building of a language to provide a proper expression of mystical

experience as tryout. This happened in Constantinople, in a famous debate, opposing Balaam, a sustainer of an

intellectualist description of the role of philosophical exercise, and Gregory Palamas, defender of philosophy as

an existential inquiry and as a form of tryout. Gregory Palamas affirmed that the ultimate knowledge (and the

knowledge of any kind) involves the whole man and not just his intellect, and the act of knowledge has the

shape of a relationship, expressing an anti-essentialism corresponding to anti-realist position of actual physics.

Palamas developed a realistic doctrine of supernatural knowledge, one given to the whole man not only to his

mind; on this way offering a justification to the method of prayer. Balaam’s criticism was that Palamas

identified supernatural with the immateriality. This kind of criticism is even now assumed by many interprets.

But the “return to self” of the hesychast method was understood not just in the spiritual sense, but also bodily.

Palamas rehabilitate the mater, which spiritualist tendencies of Hellenism had always inclination to despise. He

does not preclude spiritual to material but supernatural to created world. Palamas opposes a supra-rational

knowledge to the Balaam’s rationalism (Meyendorff 1998, 204). Knowing God does not require certain

exteriorization between subject of knowledge and the object known, but a union in the uncreated light; man has

no faculty able to see God; to have a vision of God becomes possible because God unites with man, sharing the

knowledge that he has about himself. All these affirmations constitute the ground of the hesychast


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understanding of tryout as the privileged form of experiential knowledge. A decisive term in explaining the

non-essentialism of the hesychast doctrine was energeia, which Gregory Palamas takes over from Aristotle. The

doctrine of the immanent energies implies an intensely dynamic vision of the relationship between God and the

world. Palamas’ description of Light is not the one which make use of rational concepts to express abstract

realities, but is, on the contrary, the apophatic expression of an experience culminating in the beholding of God.

If energeia or the divine light has this meaning, then what we call a natural (or physical) reality has a much

enlarged signification. The physical reality is not a static, inert one, but matter plus energy: it is something that

can be described as an active alive process where we find the presence and the intentionality of a person and

that as a natural dimension. On the other hand, we can state that in this description the reality is constituted by

the experience in the most radical way: the ultimate reality is the human experience of the uncreated energies.

In the hesychast, controversy was disputed the hypothesis that the access to the ultimate reality is an act

mediated by the hierarchy of the beings or not. That is why there appears the syntagm “uncreated energies.”

The experimentalism is decisive, the truth criterion being provided by the “appeal to experience.” This is for

sure, the palamite expression for tryout, and this appeal was in a number of times invoked as the decisive

criterion in answering to the Balaam’s understanding of knowledge’s nature. The hesychasm is different from

other spiritual practices, at least from the Christian area, by the fact that it emphasizes the experience in the

shape of the experiment: it is supposed to be existence of a method, of a verifiability criterion, and

validation―henceforth the interest for the ultimate reality or, in the hesychast language, for the uncreated

energies. We can find an evident analogy between science and hesychasm regarding some discussions about the

nature of ultimate reality.

We can see, in these three examples of experiential or mystical tryout (a tryout in the front of an

unexpectedly revealed reality, as well as a self-tryout as a result of this tremendous experience) that one of the

most difficult tasks was the finding of a proper expression of this radical experience. But the same difficulties

appeared once with the discoveries made in quantum physics at the beginning of the last century. The modern

science began to have a similar question: how to find a proper language in expressing reality at the quantum

level, or at the Universe’s enormous scale?

4. The Problem of Language

As a matter of fact, in the first decades of the last century, the physicists found themselves in a very

difficult situation: the experimental facts were in contradiction with any existent scientific explanation. More

than that, it began to be very clear that the subject (scientist) influence the experiments made on the

microphysical level. The conflict with the classical explanatory model of physics with the discoveries in

quantum physics led to a situation somehow comparable with the context when Symeon wrote in a millennium

before. But this time, the explanatory difficulty was felt by a scientific community, more precisely by those

scientists who tried to formulate a coherent explanation regarding what goes on at a microphysical level. There

was a collision between two explanatory models, one named the “matrix mechanics” and the other called

“wave mechanics”. Without getting into details related to the formalisms that backed these two explanatory

versions, what made the debate so vivid was the common belief that there should be a single correct

interpretation of quantum physics. There was also the desire of finding linking bridges and an explanatory

coherence with the model that dominated the macro-physics. This conflict took the shape of a tension between

an older version of the world’s description, rather classical, supported by Einstein, Schrödinger, and Broglie,


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and a totally different conception, indeterminist, supported by a younger generation of scientists like

Heisenberg, Pauli, and Dirac. These two sides confronted at the Solvay Congress in 1927. With this occasion,

finally imposed what was called the “Copenhagen interpretation,” the solution given by the researchers

gathered around the matrix physics perspective. But acceptation of the Copenhagen interpretation, as a

consistent and complete one, was not the result of a demonstrable superiority, but the subjective

epistemological to describe the results of the measurements and the indivisibility of the fundamental atomic

phenomena using the classical concepts (1998, 302). So, the physics of the 20th century was rather under a

crisis in explanation. This explanatory crisis meant a conflict of the explanatory models that intended to be

complete and truthful. In imposing an epistemological model, there prevailed rather a pragmatically need that

proves that researchers’ experience in investigating the microphysical reality is complex and bewildering, and

only some rather contextual needs imposed the use of a certain language. It is a gain when it comes about

communicating among researchers, but at the same time a loss, because the investigated reality is more

complex than a formalization or an epistemological model. The risk is that an explanatory model will limit the

way research can investigate reality. The fact is that the period invoked above meant a new opening to an

unanticipated reality, towards a reality evidence that proved a challenge to formalism and the epistemological

model at stake.

5. Conclusion

Even if the historical contexts and the solutions were different in Symeon’s or Palamas’ case and in the

one of the debate around the epistemological model explaining the quantum reality, they have in common an

exceptional opening towards reality that goes up to putting in brackets the language in use and suspend the

common and accredited explanation. The mystic and the physicist may meet each other here, their common

place being the one of “tryout” of reality, even if the way of approaching it is different. Even indirectly, the

border science senses the difference of “something” beyond the natural laws. And the mystic’s experience is

rather close to what is proper to the scientific experiment: both are, finally, ways of coming closer to what is

deeper understanding of what we call reality. The scope of mutual opening between science and religion is not

a simple dialog, but the stake is much more important: the developing of a further and deeper understand of

human and world. Today, more than ever, there is a need of overpassing the fragmentarily knowledge caused by

the disciplinary approach, and to integrate the information came from different research perspectives. Without

including the spiritual experience as a radical form of tryout between these perspectives, undoubtedly we will

not be able to have a proper understanding of reality. But the achieving of such goal implies a very difficult task:

to find a common language between scientifically experiment and the spiritual experience. Past history prove

how serious is this provocation, but the study of this history can give us the clues in finding the right approach.

Works Cited

Alfeyev, Hilarion. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Bouyer, Louis. “Byzantine Spirituality.” A History of Christian Spirituality. Vol. II. Ed. Louis Bouyer. NY: The Seabury Press,

1968. Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion. Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Cushing, James Thomas. Philosophical Concepts in Physics: The Historical Relation between Philosophy and Scientific Theories.

Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1998.


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D’Espagnat, Bernard. On Physics and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. ---. Veiled Reality: An Analysis of Present-Day Quantum Mechanical Concepts. Boulder: Westview Press, 2003. Dilthey, Wilhelm. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Trans. Virgil Drăghici. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia,

1999. (Construcția lumii istorice în științele spiritului) Isacco di Ninive. Discorsi Spirituali. Trans. P. Bettiolo. Bose: Qiqajon, 1985. Haught, John F. Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to

“The Task of Thinking” (1964). rev. ed. Ed. David Farrell Krell. Harper: San Francisco, 2008. Jiménez, Fernández Francisco María. El Humanismo Bizantino En San Simeón El Nuevo Teólogo: La Renovación De La Mística

Bizantina. Toledo: Estudio Teológico San Ildefonso de Toledo, 2000. Fanning, Steven. Mystics of the Christian Tradition. NY: Routledge, 2006. McGuckin, John Anthony. “Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Eros: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Christian

Mystical Tradition.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 5.2 (2005): 182-202. Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998. Sappington, A. A. “The Religion/Science Conflict.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30.1 (1991): 114-20.

Scrima, André. The Apophatic Anthropology. București: Humanitas, 2005. (Antropologia Apofatică. București: Humanitas, 2005.)

---. The Spiritual Experience and its Languages. Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing House, 2008. (Experiența Spirituală Și

Limbajele Ei. București: Humanitas, 2008.)


Correlations between Human Adaptation, the Earth-Cosmos

Context and Aristotle’s Four Causalities

Cornelia Guja

Romanian Academy

The Earth, which is a planet of the Solar system, was formed and evolved as part of the WHOLE, in close

connection with the evolution of the Universe. The awareness, knowledge, and understanding of our coexistence

with the Universe may clarify a series of obscure problems of our existence, and, at the same time, may bring

solutions for other acute problems which our modern society has to face, such as energy, nature preservation, the

origin, evolution and adaptation of the living and especially of man to the environment, etc.. This paper is trying to

theoretically break up the concept of “environment” into four fundamental contexts: terrestrial, lunar, solar-planetary, and

cosmic context. We intend to approach the four contexts that distinctly and simultaneously influence life on the

Earth using the interface theory which we developed in Informational Anthropology, Integronics and

Biocosmological Anthropology. We consider that the living adapted and developed in a differentiated way

according to the impact of these contexts. They may be the source for the four causalities Aristotle intuited, as well

as the cause of many still unknown phenomena that diversified man’s evolution and variability (Ackrill 1997;

Falcon 2008).

Keywords: system/interface, context, coexistence, differentiated adaptation to fundamental contexts

1. Introduction

Our paper has in view to describe in detail the part played by the influence of the cosmic context upon our

life on Earth and the adaptive value this part has for man’s evolution. The fact that we became aware of our

being an integrated part of the Universe has always been present with human society. It has taken various

shapes, from mythology to modern sciences and has been a difficult process, full of enigmas (Boncinelli 2006;

Carneiro 2005; Capra 2002, 1982). The present study continues to develop the problems approached in our

works on Informational Anthropology, Biocosmological Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and the

Individual’s Anthropology, mainly in “Elements of Biocosmological Anthropology. Informational

Communication by Archetypal Forms” (see Figs. 1 and 2) (Guja 2008; 2010, 78-79; 2011, 407-426; 2012a;

2012c; 2012b; 2013). The motivation of these researches consisted in our attempt to interpret, from an

interdisciplinary anthropological perspective, the results of our studies on the great variability of

characteristics and the adaptive capacity of the human being, especially the particular aspects studied—the

Cornelia Guja, Ph.D. in anthropology, full member of the Academy of Romanian Scientists, Scientific advisor at “Francisc J.

Rainer” Institute of Anthropology, Romanian Academy, Bucharest; main research fields: Medical Anthropology, Individual Anthropology, Informational Anthropology, Electrographic Investigation, and Biocosmological Anthropology. Email: cguja@ yahoo. com.

DAVID PUBLISHING

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HUMAN ADAPTATION, EARTH-COSMOS CONTEXT, ARISTOTLE’S FOUR CAUSALITIES

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bioelectromagnetic characteristics of the human body (see Fig. 3) (Guja and Iliescu 2001; Guja et al. 1994,

67-74; 2002; 2004, 95-109; 2008b).

Fig. 1. Schematic Representation of the “Terrestrial Environment” Taking into Account the Cosmic Context with Which It Coexists (Guja 2012a; 2012c).

Fig. 2 schematic representation of the complex trajectory of nonliving and living objects, of man (human

oscillating vector), existing on the Earth owing to its rotation around its own axis and, at the same time, to the

annual rotation on the solar elliptical orbit (the axis of the Earth being tilted compared to the elliptical plane)

which determines the existence of seasons. During one’s life, the individual diurnal trajectory is made up of the

two types of rotations. The Earth yearly makes planes that are approximately paralel, successively equal as

number “with the age” in years of the moving object (Guja 2012a; 2012c). This dynamics is common to all the

Cosmic dynamic context

Solar cyclic context

Lunar phases context

Human oscillant-ing

vector

Terrestrial cyclic context

The Sun

Planetary Orbit

Cosmic dynamic context

Now we are here


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terrestrial objects, phenomena, micro and macroscopic structures. The evolution of terrestrial phenomena

should simultaneously observe the laws specific of the various contexts with which they coexist and the

common universal laws. The human being could be conceived like a cell (atom) in a huge organism (Guja and

Baciu 2008a, 164; Sorokin 1947). The resultant is a complex cyclic-helical trajectory. In addition to the

rotational speed of the earth spinning on its axis, the earth is also speeding at about 66,660 miles per hour

(107278.87 km/h) in its revolution around the sun once ever 365.2425 days.

Fig. 2. Schematic Representation of the Complex Trajectory of Nonliving and Living Objects,

of Man, Existing on the Earth.

Our objective was to find modalities to study and consider these aspects from an anthropological,

integralist point of view, more systematically and thoroughly. We tried to refine the analysis of the causes lying

at the basis of man’s development and adaptation to the “terrestrial environment” within the context of the

Universe. For this purpose, we started from the hypothesis that the cosmic context of the Earth may be

conceived as being theoretically divided (explained) into four components, divisions, sub-contexts with distinct

identities, but in close organic interdependence—coexistence. It is important to mention that these contexts

included one into the other and therefore one should study their common as well as specific laws acting inside,

similar to the component parts of an organism (see Figs. 1, 2 and 6). The differentiated as well as integral

analysis of these contexts and the interpretation of the influences (causes) upon the terrestrial systems and

phenomena suggested the idea that they could be associated with Aristotle’s four causalities (see Tables 1 and

2). We consider that the aspects under discussion make it possible to solve many critical problems in our

modern society, such as the problem of power, conservation of nature, the origin, evolution, and adaptation of

the living in general and of man in particular to the environment (Boncinelli 2006; Bertalanffy 1976; Capra


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2002; 1982; Guja 2013, 1-12). It could also find answers to questions such as: How was deoxyribonucleic acid

(DNA) formed? Why is it like that? (double helix like a spiral); where does the human individual’s uniqueness

come from in comparison with the unity of the species? Why are the functions of the vital systems of organisms

cyclic and how can we correct the disturbance of this cyclicity? (Turnbull 1985; Carneiro 2005; Khroutski 2011,

144-146; Guja 2012c, 130-145); it could also help us to better understand and interpret the forms of the

evolutive process such as diversification, convergence/divergence, multiple adaptation, discontinuity,

innovation, progress, etc. (Boncinelli 2006). It may help us understand why consciousness appeared as a means

of communication with the cosmos. We will further try to develop all these ideas.

2. Proposed Materials and Methods for Study and Consideration

For a more detailed, anthropological, scientific, systematic approach of the specific, and non specific

contextual influences upon the variability of characteristics that describe the living beings, man, and the group

he belongs to, we considered “the environment” in which we live as a coexistence, an overlapping of four

relatively independent contexts which operate simultaneously on the existence on the Earth: the geophysical

context, the lunar context, the solar context, and the cosmic context (see Figs. 1 and 2). The geophysical

context includes the System Earth together with the multitude of adjacent interfaces, specific areas of

interaction such as the hydrosphere and the atmosphere. At the same time, it specifically interacts with the lunar

sphere, with the planetary, solar sphere, and with the Cosmosphere (The Encyclopedia of Earth

<http://www.eoearth.org/>). In order to avoid any ambiguities in interpreting the present paper, we consider it

useful to define the main terms of the discourse. We did our best to use the most general meaning of the terms

accepted by the scientific language and gave certain details and specifications developed in our previous works

(Guja 1980, 205-220; 1985, 187-199; 1993, 190; 2000, 256; 2008a, 450; Guja and colab. 1997a; Guja et al.

1997b; 1998; Guja and Baciu 2008a, 164).

System—Any object or phenomenon in nature characterized by stability over a certain period of time

owing to the existence of an assembly of constant relations of its component parts (Bertalanffy 1976; Guja and

Baciu 2008a, 164).

Interface—Any process, phenomenon, or spontaneous relation status which is due to the interaction of two

or more systems (Guja 1993, 190; Guja and Iliescu 2001; Guja and Baciu 2008a, 164). The interface may cover

an area, a surface, or a point which forms the common border of the adjacent regions, objects, substances, or

stages by means of which the systems interact both at hardware and software levels. According to the degree of

complexity, they can be placed in order hierarchically: interface 0, I, II ... n. They are in permanent dynamics

and instability, because in reality, there are no totally closed systems. They communicate by means of substance,

energy, or information (by shapes—archetypal, fractal, etc.). For example: the electronic layers and levels of the

atomic nucleus, the cell membrane, the human tegument, atmosphere, cromosphere, etc. (Guja and colab 1997a;

Guja et al. 1997b).

System/interface—The couple of concepts which describes a system with its interfaces that are due to the

states of interdependence with other systems (Guja 1993, 190; 2008a, 450). Any kind of objects have, at the

same time, the quality of system and interface having in view that there are no completely closed systems (Guja

1993, 190; Guja et al. 1994, 67-74; Guja and Baciu 2008, 164).

Information—Fundamental property of matter to communicate in an encoded manner by means of shapes

in the same way mass defines the quality of matter to be attracted by gravitation and energy the quality to


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remotely influence by its field (Guja 2008b). Information is the form of communication specific of the interface.

Coexistence—Steady state of interaction (a limited time interval) of a system with another system or other

systems. The significance of the concept is roughly similar to that of compatibility. For example: coexistence of

atoms in molecules, functioning of organs in the body, the evolution of the Earth and the Moon with the solar

system, etc. (Guja 1993, 190).

Non-coexistence—The state of the interface referring to the existence of incompatible relations for two or

several systems, which leads to disturbances, conflict, and disappearance of interfaces (Guja 1993, 190).

Context—All surrounding systems and interfaces in which a process exists and is developing (Guja 2012b,

19; 2012c, 130-145; Guja 2013, 1-12).

Cyclicity of context—Specific cycle induced by a certain context. For example: the day/night cycle owing

to the rotation of the Earth around its axis, within solar context, the phases of the Moon, seasonal cycles

induced by the (tilted) rotation on the ecliptic, cosmic evolutive cyclicity (Guja 2012b, 19; 2012c, 130-145;

2013, 1-12; Sorokin 1947; The Encyclopedia of Earth <http://www.eoearth.org/>).

Adaptation—Transformation process in the structure and functioning of an organism (system) that is due

to the variation of the interaction with another system (or other systems) for coexisting with them. For example:

wings to fly, fins to swim, bipedal posture and verticalization for a better control of the environment,

cerebralization for diversifying the forms of control, regulation and communication (Bertalanffy 1976; Bejan

2000; Boncinelli 2006; Guja 2013, 1-12).

Process—In philosophy, science and systems theory the concept of process has a unifying part which

operates in different systems and contexts, being a characteristic of the dynamic systems.

Aristotle’s causes—Four causes that refer to four types of fundamental answers to the question “Why?” is

one thing as it is. They characterize the principles of Aristotle’s thinking regarding the cause of change and

movement of things: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause (Ackrill 1997;

Falcon 2008).

Archetypal code—Primary, fundamental communication code: the periodic table of elements, the

electromagnetic spectrum, the genetic code, cultural symbols (Jung 1969; Guja and colab 1997a; Guja et al. 1997b;

Bejan 2000; Guja 2013). They lie at the basis of archetypal informational evolutive adaptation by cognitive leaps.

Informational archetypal communication—A phenomenon characteristic of an interface which ensures and

maintains communication between two or more coexisting systems which is due to the similar archetypal

shapes present in them (Guja and Iliescu 2001; Guja 2008a 450; 2011, 407-426). Inter-systemic communication

by interface is made by means of archetypal shapes (codes). It is possible special cycles imposed by the

dynamics of fundamental contexts lie at the basis of archetypal codes, for example: the Periodical System of

Elements, DNA spiral, etc..

Integration—The process resulting from coexistence of certain systems that are due to interface

interaction. The duration in time of the mutual interactions of the complex process of multiple coexistence

confirms the existence, persistence, and evolution of the process (Guja 1985, 187-199; 1993, 190; 2012b, 19).

Cosmic cyclic eco-bio-socio-cultural interface—The sum total of processes and events taking place during

an astronomic year (in space and time) in the whole human society on the Earth which are resumed and

evolutively taken over the next year and depend on the cyclic variation of the contexts Earth-Cosmos (diurnal,

monthly, seasonal) (The Encyclopedia of Earth <http://www.eoearth.org/>).

Integronics—It is a generic name proposed for the study field of the phenomena of coexistence and no


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coexistence of systems by means of interfaces. The theory of integronics mainly deals with revealing the laws

governing the coexistence phenomena of the systems via communication at interface level. The phenomenon of

integration by interface is complementary and contradictory to that of homeostasis (Guja 1980, 205-220; 1985,

187-199; 1993, 190).

3. Results and Discussions

We have used these concepts to describe in detail the concept of environment with the help of the four

subdivisions of the cosmic global context (see Figs. 3, 4 and 5), and a possible cosmic model of this was

suggested (see Figs. 6 and 7). We also put in a table possible correlation of the characteristics of these contexts,

selective adaptation to them and Aristotle’s causalities—Tables 1 and 2. In this structure, we could perceive the

presence of a more substantial cosmic organization of our terrestrial environment, which, like the internal

medium of the living organism, is an integrated part of the whole cosmic organism.

(1) (2)

(3) (4)

Fig. 3. Types of Electric Discharges Recorded on Photosensitive Film (Guja 1993).

Fig. 3 shows types of electric discharges recorded on photosensitive film (Guja and Iliescu 2001),

dominant, generic, and representative, selected from our researches, which are correlated with the applied

experimental electrical voltage steps: (1) Linear shapes for reduced voltages; (2) Ramified (branched) for a

higher level; (3) Circular-radial corresponding to a superior level; and (4) Complex, radial-helical for

maximum voltages over which electrical perforations occur (Guja and Iliescu 2001; Mandelbrot 1983).

The motivation for the selection of these signal types originates in the results of a long time personal

research using an original method (Guja 1980; 1985; 1993; 2000; 2008a; 2008b; Guja et al. 1994, 67-74; 1997b;


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1998; 2002, 39; 2004, 95-109; 2008b; Guja and colab 1997a; Guja and Iliescu 2001; Guja and Baciu 2008a,

164) regarding the interaction of the living systems with the environment via the natural electromagnetic field

existing around us. They highlighted the presence of the same signal shapes (electrical discharges) with all the

living and non-living bodies. These shapes are well known, very familiar to us as they are “materialized’’ in the

shapes of the objects existing in the environment. The shapes are: linear, ramified, floral, and helical practically

having an infinite number of manifestation modalities (fractal phenomena). The presence of these dynamic types of

shapes may be determined by the specific action of the four interdependent fundamental contexts, i.e.: (1)

Terrestrial gravitational context, (2) Terrestrial-moon gravitational context; (3) Solar-terrestrial-moon

electromagnetic gravitational context; and (4) Electromagnetic gravitational global context: specifically cosmic

radiative background.

(1) (2) (3)

(4) (5) (6)

Fig. 4. Vegetal Shapes Characteristic of Various Development Stages.

Fig. 4 shows vegetal shapes characteristic of various development stages: (1) Vertical linear sprouts; (2)

Ubiquitous arborescent ramifications for the “vegetal skeleton” (the tree of life); (3) Annual growing circles as

a consequence of a complex adaptation (dominantly gravitational?); (4) Radial foliation orientation on the stalk;

(5) Flowers in concentric-radiative orientation, also ubiquitous shapes in vegetal development; and (6)

Radial-helical orientation on the vegetal growing axis (Bejan 2000; Mandelbrot 1983).

Could these shapes be the consequence of the coexistence of the millenary dynamics of the four contexts

which structured themselves as information in the genetic code and in the genome, which took, in its turn, a

linear, concentric-radial, spiral-helical shape and is stored in the living cell nucleus—the DNA molecule?

In Fig. 5, Archetypal, primary, generic shapes present all over the living world, which may be associated

with the electric discharge shapes we identified to play the part of a code of signal shapes for the interface


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between the living systems and the electromagnetic field in the environment: (1) Simple linear shape (the place

vertical—the direction of the gravitational force); (2) Arborescent shape, facilitated by the presence of the

moon gravitational force? (3) Circular-radiative shape (floral) facilitated by the specific radial-radiation

propagation of the solar electromagnetic waves?; and (4) Spiral-helical shape facilitated by the dynamics

specific of the Cosmos? (Jung 1969; Guja 2008b).

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Fig. 5. Archetypal, Primary, Generic Shapes Present all over the Living World.

These ubiquitous shapes in the living and nonliving world are to be found as symbolic shapes in human

culture. They are disclosed to the mind and used as archetypal signs of communication common to the human

species as well as to the entire living and nonliving world. This fact may entitle us to assign them the part of

informational communication codes (Guja 2008b) for the fundamental contexts which imposed them.

Fig. 6. Schematic Representation of Our Eco-bio-psycho-socio-cultural Life “Environment” With the Four Divisions.

-Terrestrial cyclic context -Physical adaptation

-Material cause

The Earth and atmosphere interface

Moon and Earth interface

The Cosmic Interface with Solar System

-Universe cyclic context -Spiritual adaptation

-Final cause

The Sun and planetary interfaces

-Solar cyclic context -Functional adaptation

-Efficient cause

-Moon cyclic context -Ecological adaptation

-Formal cause


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In Fig. 6, Schematic representation of our eco-bio-psycho-socio-cultural life “environment” with the four divisions—contexts making up the Cosmic Context. We mentioned possible correlations among these fundamental contexts and the differentiated adaptation of living systems to them as well as Aristotle’s four causalities. The premise for a cosmic archetypal model of man similar to that of the model of the atom. (Guja 1997a; Guja et al. 1997b).

We can notice that the structuring of the four contexts reminds of the theoretical model of the atom in

which the part of the atom is played by the Earth (see Figs. 6, 7).

We, people, living components with conscience, “statistically and probabilistically” populating the Earth

tend to assault the superior contexts (energetic and informational levels) in order to communicate and contact

other “cosmic entities” to survive in the apparently unlimited future (Hawking 2001, 224; Smolin 2000). All the

assertions are, undoubtedly, only hypotheses at the moment! (Do not kill the writer!)

Fig. 7. Integrom (Guja and colab, 1997a; Guja et al. 1997b). Fundamental Structural Archetype (Guja 1997).

Starting from the organization similarity of the Universe entities, we have built a fundamental structural

archetype, called INTEGROM, following two phenomenological principles:

(1) The communication between the integrom components is made at the level of their interfaces;

(2) The communication at the level of interfaces is made through archetypal codes, specific to each structure level.

It is worth reminding here that we started from the idea that all the objects and phenomena on the Earth are,

at the same time, under the influence of the gravitational force, of the systems in its natural environment, the

gravitational force of the Moon, the gravitational force and electronic field emitted by the Sun as well as in the

radiating and corpuscular fields coming from the Cosmos (see Fig. 3). They all vary periodically, cyclically

according to laws specific of each system/interface which is fundamental for our existence. They are distinct,

permanent and simultaneous causes that led to the birth and evolution of “Our Home—The Earth.” All the

phenomena in Nature, the living and nonliving bodies and the people coexist in these environmental conditions,

which mean that we are compatible with them, we have developed together and, in time, adapted to them. The

Communication phenomena 1. The NUCLEOID—a distinct component of the nucleus, with important functions in its activity, some of them unknown yet. 1’ The NUCLEOID INTERFACE—an intermediary zone between the “nucleoid” and the nucleus. 2. The NUCLEUS—a source, radiating center, considered from immemorial times the archetype of “the one”, a symbol of the center (heavy, substantial part—the hard). 2’ The NUCLEUS INTERFACE—a zone with a mediating position and function between nucleus and the system body. 3 The BODY—a structure around the nucleus with specific structure and complexity determined by the composition and structure of the nucleus (functional part - the soft). 3’ The BODY INTERFACE—an intermediary zone between the internal and external media—between the body and its aura. 4 The AURA—the proper interaction zone around the body, with specific structure and complexity, complementing the body, proper external medium.

1’

4

3’

2’

3

21


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ones that could not coexist, which proved incompatible with these complex conditions failed to adapt and

disappeared. We should also keep in mind that our whole bio-psycho-socio-cultural life bears the print and

functions within a calendaristic framework determined by coordinates of the context of our planet within the

context of the Universe (The Encyclopedia of Earth <http://www.eoearth.org/>).

We have organized our life and adapted biologically and socio-culturally to the multiple, complex

influence of cosmic structures, which, after knowledge accumulation, have become more and more familiar

from the scientific and psycho-spiritual point of view. The complexity of all these influences, which are

permanently cyclic and on the move in space and time, is expected to be found in the great variability of human

individualities and uniqueness in each of us, in our own genetic formula. Being part of our everyday life, the

Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the “canopy of heaven” are part of our biopsychosociocultural life. We have

rhythms and biorhythms inscribed in the species genome: carbon cycle during photosynthesis, cell cycle

occurring in a reproducing cell population, etc.. and the organism systems have functions depending on the

periods: day/night (fundamental metabolic cycles), monthly (endocrine cycles), seasonal (reproductive cycles),

and annual (stages of ontogenesis).

From the Earth, we took over the materials which make us up and the atmospheric and lunar environment

shaped us into a great variety range. From the Sun, we got the energy required for efficient survival and from

the Cosmos we have the faith and hope that it is there where the mysteries of our spiritual life hide. We have

never stopped believing and attempting to get to it, more and more conscious of its existence.

It is very difficult to identify and explain these characteristics of the integrating phenomenon by

coexistence in its complexity, as a whole. It is also difficult to “bring” it into the laboratory to be tested. It is

difficult to correctly reveal the mutually coexisting couples as, in real cases, they look like a resultant, a unique

coexistence phenomenon. It is important to point out the fact that with the complexification of the process of

matter evolution, the range of couples has considerably diversified and differentiated. Therefore only their

resultants and effects are accessible to reality. They objectivize and validate the coexistence of real system

variants which interact, demonstrating non-coexistence or perhaps the impossibility to coexist of other variants

experimented in time and eliminated.

4. Preliminary Conclusions

The paper was meant to highlight the correlation of certain distinct shapes and directions of adaptation of

the living determined by the four fundamental (sub)contexts in which life on Earth evolved. In the same way, in

the paper we suggest correlations with Aristotle’s method of thinking, which refers to four fundamental causes

that determine the change and evolution of things and phenomena on our Earth. Taking into account the

originality of our point of view and the novelty of the field of study, we consider that a problem is better solved

when the working hypotheses are clearly expressed. That is why the objective of our paper is to make up four

hypotheses which we place at the basis of Biocosmological Anthropology (Guja 2008b; Khroutski 2011,

144-146), which is, in our opinion, the field of the present paper (Guja 2008b). We appealed to interdisciplinary

knowledge in biology, ecology, anthropology, philosophy, astronomy etc..

(1) Our life environment mainly belongs to the context Earth-atmosphere whence the materials building us

are taken, context-interface in which we were born, in which we developed and evolved in a specific way (like

energetic level 1 and interface 0) (see Table 1). On other planets the specific parameters are different. In order

to discern the fundamental effect of the Earth upon the living terrestrial matter, we have formulated the


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following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: Is the Earth the specific material source that supplied the substances characteristic of all

the bodies, systems and processes in our Nature? At the same time we wondered if the source of the intuition of

Aristotle’s thinking method on the “material cause” was this very aspect put forth above.

Phylogenetically the living matter has acquied a steady and balanced structure and has evolved by

adapting to the gravitational force specific of the surface of the Earth. This was possible by a verticalization

process of the living structures (plant stalks, animals’ specialized organs for equilibrium and finally homo

sapiens sapiens species verticality meant to cast an admiring and inquisitive look upon the mysteries of the

remote terrestrial contexts, etc.). “Vertical” and “horizontal” positions may have much more profound phylo

and ontogenetic implications than the ones considered so far—such as the horizontal position meant to recover

one’s forces by resting and sleeping. We also underline the position of maximun stability to which water flow in

the natural circuits tends. We could call this type of adaptation terrestrial-gravitational adaptation—adapted to

the immediately surrounding nature, mainly to the lithospheric and hydrospheric factors.

(2) The existence of the lunar salellite (only one, not several) forms the terrestrial—atmospheric—lunar

context (as energetic level 2 and interface 1, see Table 1) which determines the periodical, cyclic, permanent

variation of the resulting gravitational force. In this way life developed, evolved, was shaped and adapted as

such in a variable force field. One may say that the verticality of the living is preserved up to a certain height

characteristic of each vegetable species. A certain “relaxation” may occur, generating ramifications all around

the vertical axis. In connection with this aspect we elaborated the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: Is the cause of the deviation from the vertical axis of the stalks while growing by developing

ramifications originated in the cyclic and oscillating variation of the gravitational force resulting from adding

the terrestrial with the lunar force of opposite sense?

We feel directly the tide as an effect of the Moon and we accept it as commonplace, but its determining

factor has permanently and systematically acted upon the evolution of the living. I wonder if it has printed its

effect on the genetic support of each species in time. Could the ramified shape in the symbol of the “tree of life”

be the effect of cyclic swinging determined by our saltellite? We further wonder if “the formal cause” of

Aristotle’s principles may have its origin in the action Earth-Moon context. We could call this type of

adaptation ecological adaptation (Geophysical), adaptation to the conditions created by the complex interaction

Earth-Moon.

Table 1

Characteristics of the Fundamental Interfaces of the Earth Structured in the Cosmic Context (Guja 1993, 190; 2000, 256)

Fundamental interfaces

Characteristics

INTERFACE 0 (Interface of the System Earth) Atmosphere

INTERFACE I (Earth-Moon) Lunar

INTERFACE II (Earth-Moon-Sun) Planetary

INTERFACE III (Earth-Solar System-Universe) Universal

CONTEXT TYPE Earth Moon Sun Universe

TYPE OF LAW Specific Physics-chemical Physical-Relativist Quantum-relativist Chaotic determinist TYPE OF COMMUNICATION

Substantial-energetic-informational-quantum

Energetically- informational

Info-energetic Symbolical-conscious-mental

TYPE OF ADAPTATION

Integrally “natural” Ecological-DarwinianPhysiological seasonal

Evolutive-cosmic

TYPE OF CAUSALITY MATERIAL FORMAL EFFICIENT FINAL


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Table 2

The Synthesis of the Correlations Between the Adaptation Processes, Fundamental Contexts and Aristotle’s Causalities

Suggested in the Hypotheses of the Paper

(3) The dominating action of the solar context upon the terrestrial existence is mediated (interfaced) by the

energy of its electromagnetic field which it sends incessantly and we receive it variably, cyclicly, daily, and in

seasons (the effect of the Sun upon the Earth being practically constant). As the source of life and the whole

existence on the Earth the solar context has practically led the infinite diversity and variability oriented towards

the efficiency of survival. For these conditions we elaborated the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3: Do the efficient survival modalities of flourishing and seasonal reproduction and of

adaptation by the great variability of multiplying processes bear the print of the radial radiative qualities of the

way the electromagnetic field radiated by the solar context propagates?

The efficient radial-radiative shape at the basis of the floral structure in the vegetal world appears like an

DISTINCT COSMIC ENTITIES

CONTEXT KIND KIND OF CAUSALITY

(Aristotelian)

The Universe-Cosmos

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png>)

COSMIC CONTEXT -Total adaptation: universal -Specific archetypal code: elementary particles

Complex electrographic image (EG)—spiral-helical

FINAL CAUSES ACTION

The Solar and planetary interface (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

File: Solar_System_size_to_scale.svg>)

SOLAR CONTEXT - Specific adaptation: seasonal - Specific archetypal code: electromagnetic spectrum

- Radial-radiative-floral electrographic image

EFFICIENT CAUSES ACTION

The Moon interface

(<http://www.epa.gov/eogapti1/ course422/ap1.html>)

LUNAR CONTEXT - Specific ecological adaptation(a.): gravitationally variable - Specific archetypal code: common ramification of living and nonliving shapes (fractal)

Electrographic image common to all discharges-ramified

FORMAL CAUSES ACTION

The Earth

(<http://www.omerique.net/polavide/ 5medio_uni7_tierra/central3.html>)

TERRESTRIAL CONTEXT—Specific adaptation: gravitational day/night adaptation - Specific code: vertical and horizontal (+)

Electrographic image (EG) of a metallic sphere attracted by a magnet

MATERIAL CAUSES ACTION


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archetypal shape on the one hand, characteristic, on the other variable from one species to another. The

“efficient cause” of Aristotle’s principles may have been intuited thousands of years ago. We could call this

adaptation type: informational electromagnetic adaptation (solar) (Guja 2008b)—adaptation to the day/night

and season variation of the electromagnetic radiation resulting from the double rotation of the earth around its

axis and around the Sun. These adaptations are due to the interactions with the electromagnetic field of the Sun.

(4) The permanent and dominating presence of the cosmic context, unknown and intangible as a luminous

cyclic interface by dailight and a dark interface at night (lacking luminous radiations) may have been the main

source of the appearance and development of existential conscience, of the seeking of our enigmatic origin. It is

a response to a permanent requirement, an adaptation to the most extended living context in which imagination

could develop without limits at the same time with objective, scientific knowledge.

Hypothesis 4: Human conscience is an entity seeking meanings and knowldge. Is not it also an adaptation

form of the living matter to the permament requirements of whatever surrounds us and to the cosmic context in

order to find out “the final cause” of our enigmatic existence?

The belief and hope in the cosmic context that should hide the mysteries of our spiritual life has never

ceased and we continued to persevere, to believe and attempt to know them, in this way becoming more and

more aware of the necessity of a beginning and intelligible end that may be known. Continuing our correlations

of the influence of the fundamental contexts brought to discussion with Aristotle’s causalities, we consider that

the final cause of things, at least at present, knowing and making aware of our cosmic existence intuited from

the beginning (Penrose 1989; Marta 2013, 70-75). We could call this adaptation type: cosmic (universal)

adaptation—the requirement of the universal cosmic field.

The final preliminary conclusion would be that, based on the contextual thinking principles outlined in our

paper we could note specific sequential laws: material, formal, efficient, essential for everyday life as well as

more general, final laws of the entire Universe known so far, which could not be noticed without an adequate

partial analysis.

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---. “Biocosmology and Informational Anthropology: Some Common Aspects.” E-Logos Electronic Journal for Philosophy. 2008b. ISSN 1211-0442. <http://nb.vse.cz/kfil/elogos/biocosmology/guja08.pdf>

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---. “Elements of Biocosmological Anthropology: Informational Communication by Archetypal Forms.” Electronic Journal “Biocosmology―neo-Aristotelism” 2.4. Autumn, 2012a. <http://en.biocosmology.ru/electronic-journal-biocosmology---neo -aristotelism>

---. Elements of Biocosmological Anthropology: Informational Integration by Archetypal Forms. Book of Abstracts, 2012b. 19: 3rd International Seminar on Biocosmology and 1st International Witten Seminar on Philosophy and Medicine (June 30th and July 1st 2012, Witten/Herdecke University)

---. “Human Evolution through Informational Adaptations to the Solar Context. Problems of Biocosmological Anthropology.” Annals Series on Biological Sciences 2.1 (2013): 53-72. <http://www.aos.ro/site_mod/site_mod_eng/bibl_annals_sectia4. html>

---. “Proprietes Bio-Electriques De L’envelope Cutanee Humaine. Rezultats De Quelques Recherches Experimentales.” [Bioelectrical proprieties of the human tegument. Experimental resultants]. Bull. et Mem. de la Soc. D’Anthrop. de Paris, serie XIII, No. 3 (1980): 205-20.

---. “The Individual’s Anthropology and Biocosmology. Prerequisites of a Common Informational Methodology.” Vol. Abstract Book, First International Seminar on Biocosmology, July 22-25, 2010. Russia: Novgorod State University after Yaroslav-the-Wise, 2010. 78-79. <http://en.biocosmology.ru/home/first-international-seminar-on-biocosmology/abstract -book-of- the-seminar- 1>

---. “The Informational Anthropological Biocosmological Cultural Model.” Electronic Journal “Biocosmology―neo-Aristotelism” 1.4 Autumn (2011): 407-26. <http://en.biocosmology.ru/electronic-journal-biocosmology---neo-aristotelism/issues-of-the- journal/volume-1-number-4-autumn-2011>

---. “Model of Cosmic Cyclicity of Terrestrial Human Activities.” Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists (A.R.S).—Series on Biological Sciences. Vol. 1, No.1, Vol. 1. Nr 1. 2012c. 1-12, 130-145. printed ISSN 2285-4169, on-line ISSN 2285-4177. <http://www.aos.ro/site_mod/Editura/2012/ Analenr1pe2012Biologieonline. pdf>

Guja, Cornelia, and Adina Baciu. General Anthropology. Guide Interfaces Theory Vision. Bucharest: Universitară, “Carol Davila”, 2008a. 164. ISBN 978-973-708-282-4. Edit.

Guja, Cornelia and colab. The Human Being—A Biointerface between Microcosm and Macrocosm. Nr. 1, Edit. Bucharest: Prospect Anthropos, 1997a.

Guja, Cornelia, and Elena Iliescu. Informational Complexity and Diversity in Electrographic Images. Bucharest: Charme-Scott Printing House, 2001.

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Guja, Cornelia, Diana Daroczi, and Cristina Boanţă. “Methodology for Longitudinal Study of Human Being.” Annuaire Roumain D’Anthropologie. Bucharest. Edit. 1998. 35. ISBN: 973-683-394-1.

Guja, Cornelia, Ioan Oprescu, and Elena Iliescu et al. The Human Being—A Biointerface of Archetypal Communication. Nr.2, Edit. Bucharest: Prospect-Anthropos, 1997b.

Guja Cornelia, Roşianu Adriana, and Nica Adriana ş.a. “Bioelectrical Types With Patiens in Acute States (II).” Annuaire Roumain Anthropologie, Bucarest. 2002. 39.

Guja Cornelia, Voicu Boşcaiu, and Adina Baciu et al. “Types of Adaptative Variability in Certain Intracranial Calcification Processes (Pineal Gland-Coroid Plexus).” Annuaire Roumain D’anthropologie. 41. Editura. Academiei Române. 2004. 95-109.

Guja Cornelia, Voinea Vasile, and Baciu Adina. et al. “Fractal Analysis of Palms Electrographic Images. Medical anthropological perspectives.” Journal of Medicine and Life 1.4. October-December 2008b. <www.medandlife.ro/ medandlife194.html>

Hawking, Stephen. The Universe in a Nutshell. Cambridge: Cambridge University, DAMTP, 2001. 224. Khroutski, Simeon Konstantin. “Triadic Biocosmological Approach in Modern Science and Philosophy.” Electronic Journal

“Biocosmology―neo-Aristotelism” 1. 2-3. Spring/Summer (2011): 144-146. <http://en.biocosmology.ru/electronic-journal- biocosmology---neo-aristotelism>

Jung, Carl Gustav. Man and His Symbols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday&Company, Inc., 1969.


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Mandelbrot, Benoit. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. NY: Henry Holt and Company,1983. ISBN 978-0-7167-1186-5. Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. NY: Oxford UP, 1989. Sananes, Marta. “Conscious Entities in Superluminal Parallel Universe.” Philosophy Study 3.1 (2013): 70-75. ISSN 2159-5313. Smolin, Lee. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000. Sorokin, Pitirim. “Society, Culture, and Personality: Their Structure and Dynamics, A System of General Sociology.” Harper’s

Social Science Series. NY& London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947. Turnbull, Colin. The Human Cycle. London: Triad/Paladin Books, 1985. The Encyclopedia of Earth. <http://www.eoearth.org/>


Philosophy of Mathematics: Naturalism vs. Category Theory

Milan Tasić

University of Niš

Although P. Maddy (1997) says on naturalism: “This is not, in itself, a philosophy of mathematics [...]” (161),

already by its name, or by those whose interest has called on it (Quine, Putnam et al.) ... it anyhow reveals desire to

be it. Insofar as otherwise, the semantic potential of thе word leaves far behind it (after all scarce) results it

achieved from the relation of an exact (mathematical) expression and (overly rich) intuitive reality of Being. We

plead here already from the perspective of the slogan “One and All” of the first philosopher: Tales, when by the

number (which one forebodes) one could go to such an extent into areas of reality (Pythagoras), or when (especially

in the human sphere) is being over again actual final cause of Aristotle, ... the philosophy and the mathematics tо

accomplish far more fruitful encounter with the Being. Alain Badiou (1988) has already pointed that: “Mathematics

is ontology,” and the category theory in mathematics, having covered by itself other fields of this science, continues

to find applications in a series of “non-traditional” domains of reality. In that correlation the philosophy can express

its (primary) needs for truth, justice, beauty, ... as well as for the overall development in the sense of purpose—also

because of an undreamed power of the technological development (of hardwares and softwares) today. Namely, the

naturalism in mathematics, which developed an abundant reflection on the place (importance of) the mathematical

idiom in sciences—in the balance of criticism—has come rather to meager provisions, such as: “preestablished

harmony of thinking,” “ontic commitment,” (Quine 1960) “the hygiene of mind,” (Maddy 1996) “success

argument,” (Putnam 1975) “pragmatic argument,” (Resnik 1981) etc., which only are few places from the

encounter of an exact expression such as is mathematical one and the reality of natuural sciences. Instead of

philosophy of mathematics to radicalize its claims from the perspective of that (powerful) mathematical idiom and

the excessive reality of Being and man’s place in it—this time, in the spirit of biocosmology (neo-Aristotelism).

Keywords: naturalism, indispensability argument, ontology, mathematics, category, final cause, biocosmology

1. On Naturalism in Sciences

Today， the naturalism is somewhat an unhappy name for a methodological (ontological, epistemological)

standpoint in the philosophy of sciences, which paradoxically “leaves” the science to itself (to its subject,

method), distracting it from every remote and “primary” philosophy—to the principles of which ultimately

would owe the reliability (or meaning) it quests about. According to Penelope Maddy (2005), it would

“undoubtedly be the most influential version [of this concept] in the contemporary philosophy of logic and

mathematics, which comes to us from Quine” (437)1—and, otherwise, as a trend, the naturalism goes against

Plato, Descartes, Kant, ... who were preoccupied with “every knowledge” (with knowledge in general) and its

certainty. Plato when he assigns to geometric forms to be a “bridge” between the earthly world of sensible

Milan Tasić, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia; main research fields: Mathematical

Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Email: [email protected].

DAVID PUBLISHING

D

PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS: NATURALISM VS. CATEGORY THEORY

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things and thoughtful and unchanging essences (ideas), or Descartes (1996) arguing in the Discourse on

Method for a “method of rightly conducting the reason and seaking truth in sciences,”2 or, as Kant finds, a

crucial role in (any) knowledge, in its completed form, have “pure intuitions of space and time” and twelve

categories of mind. So given just as the once and for all etc..

Thus for a naturalist every science will be: “inquiry into reality, fallible, and corrigible but not answerable

to any supra-scientific tribunal, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and hypothetico-deductive

method” (Quine 1975a, 72).

Who therefore will express: “readeness to see [as well as] philosophy as natural science trained upon itself

and permitted free use of scientific findings” (Quine 1981, 85).

Likewise, according to Neurath—who is paraphrased by Quine (1960, 3)—philosopher and scientist share,

basically, the same fate by it while sailing in a ship, they made repairs on it according to what happens along

the way, and not until it is anchored. Both science and philosophy then, by naturalism, generate anew―along

the way―the path they will follow, according to circumstances occurring during the development itself. Quine

has here in mind each of sciences: from physics to economy and history (Quine 1995, 19), although the exact

terms in the first of them differ from the mostly “descriptive ones” in the latest. For what he finds to belong to

all of them as the same is the assertions they bring agree with the facts of experience, since they deal with

predictions (Quine 1990, 20). According to that, scientific theories are accepted, corrected, and rejected

basically denying each role of aprioristic elements in the knowledge.

There is equally a question in naturalism how propositions in the empirical sciences acquire the necessity

and general meaning, since the so called “observation sentences” are as a rule contingent, unlike is the case in

the exact sciences. Here Quine (1995) introduces some “observation categorical” as a hypothetical statement

connecting two experiential propositions, first of which relates to conditions, and second to what necessarily

arises from conditions. Just in the sense of the statement: “if it is a day, one sees.” Or in the words of Quine

(2000b): “[t]he scientist deduces from hypothesis that a certain observable situation should bring about another

observable situation; then he realizes the one situation and watches for the other” (411).

By adding: “[w]here I do find the justification of science and evidence of truth is … in succful predication

of observations …” (Quine 2000b, 412).

Even then, some categorical assertions, taken separately, may favor a theory, but along with others, be able

to confirm a number of other theories. What is on the side of Quine’s holistic understanding of all theories, as

well as of a special “translation” of predicates of a theory in the predicates of the other one and so on.

Afterwards what by Quine goes in favor of a scientific theory is often―more or less―“external” and

subjective in nature, such as in the case of corpuscular theory are principles: “simplicity and fertility of

hypotheses, their familiarity, possible areas of application, …” (Quine 1955, 247), bearing in mind that: “the

benefits conferred by the molecular doctrine give the physicist good reason to prize it, but afford no evidence of

its truth …” (Quine 1955, 248).

2. About Naturalism in Philosophy

Now turned towards science, by Quine, the philosophy too seeks the strict demands it puts before it to

fallow alone in its “naturalistic version,” and they are for clarity, plausability, and coherency. It brings him to a

particular revision of an usual vocabulary of cognitive theory, when the words such as “external world,”

“experience,” and “sense data,” he replace by its own terms, building up gradually in that way, a certain genetic


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theory of so-called “cognitive language.” This language would most closely (generically) follow the arguing in

the scientific theory (Quine 1975b, 75-76), in constant “collusion” with sensory certainty of empirical facts.

This is where we talk about our disparate subjective reflections in the experience, but what completes so the

same words to be attributed to the same things. To what is owed such a harmony? Quine’s (1996) answer is: “to

the preestablished harmony of standards of perceptual similarity”(160), which in the course of evolution of

living beings took an innate character, as it has helped their “natural selection.” “Natural selection, then, has

favored similarity standards that mesh relatively well with the succssion of natural events…. It … explains the

preestablished harmony: the standards are largely fixed in the genes of the race, of the species” (Quine 2000a, 2).

The critics have objected to Quine “purely descriptive, causal-nomological” (Kim 1993, 224) character of

his epistemological insights, as well as deficiency of deeper and more reliable arguments in order to fill “the

inferential gap” on the road from sense impressions to scientific statements. According to Kim, Quine’s theory

of knowledge while properly describes the genesis of our expectations and beliefs, does not point to rational

elements on which they are based, or to which of them should point more, and to which less confidence. So that

this theory deprives itself of normative demands what traditionally are put in front of it―beyond the

experimental context that, this time, tries to describe.

3. On Naturalism in Logic and Mathematics

Quine’s view on logic and mathematics is that they are “part of our web of belief, part of our best

scientific theorizing about the world” (Maddy 2005, 442), because it “includes … not only its various

theoretical hypothesis of so-called natural science but also such portions of logic and mathematics as it makes

it” (Quine 1954, 121). Otherwise, since as a rule, both the empirical settings and rational hypotheses are subject

of change, it would be the case with the very laws of logic too: “revision even of the logical law of the excluded

middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanik; and what difference is there in

principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler supersided Ptolomy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin

Aristotle?” (Quine 1951, 43).

As to the mathematical objects, Quine brings their certainty in the same rank with that of atoms and

molecules, for they help in the same way the organization of the experiential world―in the spirit of “the best of

our scientific theories.” Inasmuch as the science of nature did not succeed to create a picture of the world

without (any) mathematical idiom, which, otherwise, greatly helps our understanding of what exists and how

does it. But parts of mathematics which cannot be put in relation to reality (higher ordinals etc.) deserve equally

the attention of a naturalist, being “cached in the same grammar and vocabulary that generate the applied parts

of mathematics” (Quine 1990, 94). Even if would find no place here any evidence based in experience, what in

ultima linea would give right, or deny the assertions formulated in these terms. When on that place, instead,

would hold criteria of simplicity or economy of thought, that does Quine himself to accept Gödel’s axiom of

constructibility V = L, and not large cardinal axioms. “but this concession, say Maddy, cannot mask the fact

that Quine’s preference for V = L contradicts the near-unanimous opinion of practicing set theorists” (Maddy

2005, 445).

4. Tracing Quine: Penelope Maddy

Therefore, in general, the naturalist in the science will be on two of its ends: at the beginning of it as well

as when he has to gain the widest legitimacy of his assertions. Naturalism is a particular “hygiene of thinking,”


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which tends “universally” and in an inmost way to explain the initial assumptions in the science, as they are set

and selected, what is their reliability and how much credence and truthfulness of assertions about reality do

they possible and so on. The standpoint of a naturalist is meta-theoretical, one who would uphold various

scientific reasons from the relation of an object-theory to other areas of reality, to which it serves as a deepest

assumption the unity of world and the versatility of human needs. By that the character of a naturalist is double

one: that of a scientist and of a philosopher, who would this time bring to a highest harmony two groups of

suppositions, on both sides. The naturalists, in general, share such an opinion, along with differences, and

speaking of Quine, for example, Penelope Maddy (2005) says: “for Quine, the naturalistic study of science

examines the methods of science with an eye to understanding how and why they are effective. Shoulder to

shoulder with scientists, the naturalist strives to appreciate the reasons behind their design of experiments, their

evaluation of evidence, and their preference for one theoretical elaboration over another” (446).

As for differences between naturalism-philosophy-science they are, in our opinion, rather subtle and by it

various. Whether, for example, the naturalistic démarche in an area (logic, mathematics, and philosophy) be

descriptive in nature, or one should strive to put it in the normative clothes, that is, whether the philosopher

“should become a citizen of the scientific community ... should become naturalized” (Burgess 1990, 5), or is he,

like Quine’s “busy sailor” already native here? Therefore, if we said that for Quine the scientific character has

only the part of mathematics that can be verified in the experience, Maddy’s naturalist does not discern the

principal difference between any two of its parts, leaving this science to itself and to its methods. By following

the same slogan of Quine that science “is not answerable to any extra-mathematical tribunal, and not in need of

any justification beyond observation and the hypothetico-deductive method” (Quine 1975a, 72), she expresses a

paraphrase of this view in the case of this science: “the mathematical naturalist adds that mathematics is not

answerable to any extra-mathematical tribunal and not in need of any justification beyond proof and the

axiomatic method” (Maddy 1997, 184).

It remains the central issue for the mathematical naturalist to be: if mathematics and its methods are

autonomous to the end, how it comes “some of our best scientific theories” to be essentially based on a

mathematical expression and how to rise then to a higher degree of clarity the “Janus-face” of mathematical

idiom?

Maddy (1997) tries to carry out the contours of an original mathematical ontology, by following the way

of very practice of authors in this science, in order to be found on the trail of some deepest answer to this

question. So the picture she makes on that road in grosso modo would be the following one. Our common sense,

first, gets busy with matters of sensory experience, in a point of space and at some moment of time, for which it

finds to be independent from the subject who perceives and reflects them, together with the properties

belonging to them. By that, he acquires the habit of asking the same of everything that exists, although there are

different ways in which it does so, as the question of “nature” of abstract objects often is irrelevant for theories

dealing with them. We have here in mind, Maddy (1997) says, “infinitely many primes, a one-to-one

correspondence between the natural numbers and the rationals, a Hilbert space, a group, a probability metric

etc.” (186), which are in the basis of fertile mathematical theories, while the question of their

spacio-temporality does not sets.

But common-sense reasoning—when transferred from a finite to an infinite domain—(usually) falls into

troubles, that leads us to make questionable the image which we depart from about the reality, as well as our

thought processes before it. In that place, some “mathematical ontology” would be conceived which, as a rule,


933

would be supported by philosophical arguments, but nothing less be accepted by mathematicians it would

concern. It is illustrated, for example, by the attitudes of Kurt Gödel in the case of vicious circles principle and

Russell-Whitehead Principia, or (in)admissibility of the continuum hypothesis (CH) in the standard axiomatization

of set theory (ZFC). Namely, before the fact that the formalization of classical mathematics, which brought this

work, conflicts with the vicious circle principle (since it contains nonpredicative definitions of real numbers),

Gödel finds that this principle should be brought into question, and not to reject the formalization itself. Similar

to the case of continuum hypothesis, which, according to him, is either true or false, since “set theoretical

concepts describe some well-determined reality,” and that “ ... undecidability from the axioms assumed today

can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of that reality. (Gödel 1990, 260). Gödel

would rather, therefore, to support the work of mathematicians–creators in that circumstance, finding sufficient

reasons for it in a man’s psychological sphere too, when he says that intuition alone is sufficient to attach truth

or falsity of assertions derived from the axioms of set theory, including the continuum hypothesis.

So that the initial commonsense reasoning do not completes here in a sophisticated idiom when we have,

say, to construct mathematical objects in mind (intuitionism), or when Zermelo’s proof that every set can be

well ordered does not give a way to achieve it. One should, therefore, to defer to a philosophical standpoint and

from the perspective of its settings to draw conclusions in the science of mathematics―such standpoints are

here, with mentioned intuitionism (Heyting and Brower), also platonism (Gödel 1995), constructivism (Kitcher

1983), formalism (Hilbert 1923), etc.. However, there is still the “problem of delimitation” of two scientific

fields or, in the words of Penelope Maddy (1997): “we must determine whether or not these philosophical

debates are integral parts of the practice, whether or not they are ‘continuous with mathematics,’ whether or not

they are external, extra-mathematical, what Wittgenstein would call ‘mere prose’” (188).

Einstein would say that his own conviction about the “harmony of the universe” enabled him to create the

theory of relativity, being stimulated, in addition, with philosophical writings of David Hume and Ernst Mach

too. The science is less convincing without theoretical thoughtfulness, as theoretical assumptions without their

subject are empty. In a creative act, otherwise, after Einstein, can be recognized the elements both realistic,

when one tries to describe the reality independently of perception and idealistic, when it does with thought

constructs (concepts) independent of the facts of experience, both positivist, if these last express logical

relationships of facts, and those of platonism, or pitagoreism (Einstein 1949, 683-84). All of them do possible

to draw conclusions from certain assumptions, as no other than “scientific discoveries,” gaining by it a certain

heuristic value they have, but what is their logical validity, especially verifiability in practice, is what we are

interested in the philosophy of science.

These questions are, as we said, in the philosophy of mathematics, like: do objects in this science exist

“per se” (in real terms), or we create (construct) them in our mind, that is, to permit non-predicative definitions

and accept the axiom of choice, or to accept the proof of existence of an object when it lacks a way of its

construction? Moreover: is it legitimate to express the continuum hypothesis, despite its independence of the

axioms of set theory? But, equally, a special “inversion” of these questions too which cast doubt upon each of

these ideas as “bad,” since they contradict non-mathematical postulates, which are an important part of the

creative practice.

5. The Indispensability Argument

What is making us to believe the assertions of science of mathematics, although the objects it deals with


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are devoid of any sensuality? For the number, the form, the set are our abstraction in mind, and not the objects

of real world, one has somewhat to explain our belief (criterion) when of two theories, we assign an advantage

to one over the other. This is the “indispensability problem” of a theory, i.e., the indispensability argument

associated with it, being, from author to author, differently found and formulated. The rational approach at this

point is the understanding that our rational power, by itself, is able to grasp mathematical truths, while the

logical approach would be that they all can be derived from (a few) number of statements such as p ≡ p, p ~ p

and the like. Finally, nominalists, or functionalists deny any existence of mathematical objects, etc..

Quine, in different occasions, has differently formulated indinspensability arguments, and they were

mainly about beliefs that: (1) mathematical objects exist; (2) they can be quantified, and (3) the theory

containing them best describes the reality of human sensory experience, too. The belief in the existence of

mathematical objects he marks by the words “ontic commitment,” by noting special procedure as well to

formulate such a theory, which would proceed with such objects. It would be, according to him, “the best

theory,” based precisely on the first order logic, being characterized he finds by the extensionality, efficiency,

elegance, convenience, simplicity, and beauty (Quine 1986, 79, 87). As such too, “it goes to meet” to the

highest degree of the reality, and Quine shows, for example, that the existential quantifier is a natural formal

equivalent of the expression “there is,” while “to exist” woud mean “to be a value of some variable” etc..

However, the intuitive reality of possible objects is always richer than possible names for each of them

(Cantor), so it can (more and more) be included (formalizid) by using logics of second, third and so on order.

However, again, as the first order logic is a complete theory, it is not the case with those of higher order. As the

canonical basis of all these formalisms would serve precisely the axiomatic set theory (ZFC), which rules with

a jagged conceptual apparatus to express in this way an element, an attribute, a relationship, and a number.

What is the case, say, with real numbers (used in all measurements), with Hilbert’s spaces (they find use in

quantum mechanics), with the geometry of Lobachevsky (theory of relativity), with analytic functions

(economy) and so on.

Hilary Putnam has proposed his indispensability argument that essentially relies on realism in sciences, as

this and only this view, according to him, explains the success they know, and to what again the science of

mathematics owes its success too. He says: “I believe that the positive argument for realism [in science] has an

analogue in the case of mathematical realism. Here too, I believe, realism is the only philosophy that does not

make the success of the science a miracle” (Putnam 1975, 73).

Sciences, therefore, express their statements in the language of mathematics, because it seems that the

nature itself (is really) “written out in that language” (Bacon 1964) and it is sufficient for this author—and not

the construction and interpretation (Quine)—to build his own “success argument.” Otherwise, the realism itself

in mathematics is there either sentential, in which statements are either true or false, or objective one when the

matter is some mathematical object to exist or do not exist. It should also be added that the “questionable” is

the truth of science itself, as such that brings undeniable truths given for evermore, so that our commitment to

the results it achieves can often be justified by a benefit one has of it, rather than by its veracity. Sometime we

find (even) the extreme viewpoints that the sciences are false (Cartwright 1983; van Fraassen 1980), and

certainly no doubt is in what comes to us from the history of science itself: we see that they are anew corrected

in their development, so that (possibly) only “asymptotically” tend to some “final” truths inherent to them.

Roughly speaking, with different particularities (in terms of greater or less generality, possible criteria of

commitment to a theory and the like), the naturalism in the philosophy of mathematics, in terms of its


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prominent representatives—Quine, Burges, Maddy, Putnam, ... is characterized by: (1) the dependence of

mathematical practice of that in the natural sciences; (2) necessary existence of mathematical objects in the best

of those sciences; (3) constructing theories about the physical world, we are—more or less—bound to be

attached to the propositions they make; and (4) we do all of this so that the reality of the phenomenal world

become “a part of ourselves”—this time as explained and understood in the mind.

In her book, Naturalism in Mathematics, P. Maddy (1997) will say that: “[t]his is not, in itself, a

philosophy of mathematics; rather, it is a position on the proper relations between the philosophy of

mathematics and the practice of mathematics” (161).3 In fact, she says: “if our philosophical account of

mathematics comes into conflict with successful mathematical practice, it is the philosophy that must give”

(1997, 161).

Bearing here in mind primarily so called “questions of independence” of statements in a theory of axioms,

such as the continuum hypothesis or the axiom of choice in the standard axiomatization of set theory of

Zermelo-Fraenkel. For this well-concieved (consistent) theory is not it still “to the end,” since it is found for

example, that there is questions in it being—although true—unprovable (incompletness) (Gödel 1992). What to

do in that case? To reject undecidable assertions as illegitimate, or resort to the election of new axioms in the

theory—in order to more complete express the reality—what (possibly) would meet the removal of the

aforementioned dificulties? Gödel is inclined to the second choice, when he introduces, say, the axiom of

constructibility V = L,4 but while it is either true or false for him, the naturalist of Maddy (1997) will prefer to

explore the benefits of this statement “as means toward particular mathematical goals” (233).

6. Some Critical Remarks

The last said suggests that the efforts of naturalists in the area of undecidable assertions in a

theory—although founded—are particular themselves, bringing, rather, means for a possible philosophical and

mathematical “hygiene of reasoning,” although there is an abundance of terms both on the side of nature, of

empirics, ... and of mathematical thinking, in general, that should be trusted to be foreseen within some deeper

and naturalistic key. Neither indispensability arguments nor those of commitment of different authors, we have

seen, do not offer a perspective of a deeper and jagged opinion on both sides, because they are based upon

“belief” in mathematical objects, on the confirmation in practice, the “use” one has of the theory and the like.

Inasmuch as it does not go in favor of the basic solution naturalism arrive, namely, that the study of sciences is

“not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal” (Quine 1975a, 72), but in principle moves away two spheres in

their entirety: natural-scientific and mathematical opinions, leaving the sciences of nature to themselves.

The view that may insofar be justified for to what is unknown, we cannot access in the knowledge a priori,

and because the reality of what exists is always more complex and richer than any idea could be made on it. To

what formally gave the right Gödel’s incompleteness proof in formal systems, whose a derivation is that any

other countably multitude of elements too—being realized by the axioms and theorems—as a rule, “frees” true

assertions which do not belong to this multitude (Cantor’s diagonal method). But that always new complexity

of world without end has never been a despair and chaos for man, as he also anew succeeded the parts of reality

(phenomena, processes), at least schematically to see in a certain key. Do not depriving himself of those daring

demands for universal theories, “theories of everything,” of unification and the like. That is already a

philosophical point of view in relation to the widest parts of reality and to it as a whole, as were the earliest

slogans of the first philosophers about the world and man. We have in mind the very first philosopher Thales,


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who had said: “one and all,” or else Pythagoras afterwards and his: “all is arranged by number” until, say, the

Marxist concept of dialectical laws of development of nature applied to history. These slogans were, therefore,

carried out in the mind a priori and extended to the existing reality, so that the later development of science, in

the abundance of results will come, just would more or less give right to them.

It would be the case here with the naturalism as a direction in the philosophy of mathematics. Why both

times this philosophical standpoint has been essentially determined, once by the place of mathematics in the

natural sciences, and the second time by the practice itself in the science of mathematics, when the promoters of

this direction under really grateful title: “naturalism” could do it primarily on the basis of practice (results) of

very mathematical sciences by now and then by their relation to the whole “nature”? Not only to an outside,

inanimate nature, when one tries to explain (know) it, but to an internal one, in its various aspects: the need for

creativity, for comprehensiveness of knowledge, for beauty, ... for there is no doubt that the elements of both

realities are recognizable on two sides and that rightfully one should try to bring them under a “common

denominator”.

The arguments in favor of (such) possible “bold”—as largest—demands before the mathematical theory

we find in many scientific disciplines such as theories: of evolution, of information, of chaos, of fractals ... or

else: meteorology, epidemiology, population growth, etc., which—all—allow certain more or less repeatable

patterns of “autoformation,” even when it seems that the very myriad of factors underlying those phenomena

generates them. In the chaos theory these are attractors, in the theory of fractals replicators, and in

evolution—the laws of evolution etc.. Or, physicist Richard Feynman will put forward the idea of an universal

(quantum) computer which would be powerful enough to emulate—all physical phenomena and processes of

nature (Feynman 1982). Which syntax and semantics would be found in the basis of such an endeavor and just

which share would be of mathematical idiom in it—is one eminently naturalistic attitude? If it is, however,

significant or even crucial, to the philosophy of mathematics would belong the questions as: how it comes

about that the internal raison d’être, which is in the basis of mathematical creations “meets” phenomena and

processes in the nature to such an extent and the nature is not it fine finaliter written out indeed in a

mathematical language—what otherwise have said, Plato, Galileo, or Bacon? Equally philosophical in nature

would be the view that the power gained by such an individual and community of people, on a micro and macro

level, can find ways to realize—so far (often) utopian—ideals of human life on the planet, deprived of potential

threats of global cataclysms. In the sense of Aristotelian final cause, exactly, that everything tends toward a

goal.

7. Mathematics as Ontology

The original (Aristotelian) definition of science of ontology is that it is a science of “being as such and the

properties that belong to it” (Aristotle 1984), as well as the ancient (Pythagoras, Plato, ...) looked at Being as to

a whole of “one and many. But if we mention Cantor’s definition of set (1871-1884) we see that it was derived

in sufficiently general-mathematical, but gnoseological (philosophical) terms too—what does possible the

conclusions on the Being and knowledge to be equally performed in terms of this mathematical theory. This

definition is, namely: “a set is gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception

[Anschauung] and of our thought … ” (Cantor 1895), which was extended in this century, for example, to the

attitude of Alain Badiou: “mathematics is ontology.” Certainly not in the sense the world is populated by

mathematical beings, but that “during its entire history mathematics expressed what is sayable (dicible) of


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being-as-such.” (Badiou 1988, 11). Inasmuch as in the mathematical branch of topology—which in its name

has the word “topos” (place)—plenty of results it achieves can “immediately” be translated into the language of

ontology and be made through it the very expression of Being.

Namelly, we have first that in the way of set theory are interpreted classical parts of mathematics: algebra,

analysis, geometry, ... so that—with some difficulties—the “Cantorian paradise” (Hilbert), on the line of

generalization, led to the concept of “category” in the last century, which by name, would refer to the

importance of this word in Aristotle’s doctrine of being. In fact, when proceeding from that both classical and

non-classical theories are based (only) on the elements (sets) and relationships between them (functions)—as

well as some relations that accompany them—the words “element,” “set” are replaced (better: generalized) by

the words “object,” and the word “function”—by the word “morfism.” The two mentioned relations were

identity and associativity, and so this meager variety of concepts is found in the definition of the “category,” to

be shown afterwards that category theory is a sufficiently identical (common) universe of reasoning in a series

of mathematical branches. And not only in them. Thus, for instance, in the topology the objects are topological

spaces, and morphisms continuous mappings between them, in linear algebra the vector spaces are the former

and lenear mappings—the second one and so on. In this way, now set, multitude are not determined by

properties of elements that make them, but by their overall relations with other sets, the wholes.

In ontological terms, the case is also with each individual: it becomes essentially determined by its

relationship with other individuals from the “category” they belong together—as in the evolutionary sense it is

a product of the environment. The word is about, says F. Jedrzejewski (2011): “not to develop an ontology in

terms of the logic of worlds, but a topology of the universe, of space whose texture is so diverse to give more

consistent meaning than the one done possible by a logical shell” (6).

Thus, the topological concepts gain here a precedence over logical ones—the notion of environment over

the concept of implication—and so on the Being and the One it is spoken out this time from the depths of

topological objects and their morfisms, as the belonging logic they should to order. Later, the concept of topos

has received an exclusive place in their organization and classification of category-worlds, as well as their

universal importance facilitated the understanding of identity and diversity, of duality of Being and the One, of

their functionality, univocity ... It would be a particular way back to Heideggerian “forgetting of Being,” other

than addressing the idea (Plato), the substance (Aristotle), the monad (Leibniz)....

The notion of topos. By the notion of topos is formalized a strong intuition in mathematics, in so far as we

can test so the properties of objects themselves, not only those from their relations with other objects. Just as it

is in the set theory, it is a particular (cartesian closed) category, with a special morfism (arrow)—the so-called.

“subobject classifier”—making possible for each set to establish whether it is a subset of a given set or not. Its

discovery (about) 1960, apart that contributed to solving problems in algebraic geometry, and elsewhere, has

confirmed a highly synthetic power of this concept in the “unification” of mathematical knowledge, but it

turned out to be a powerful tool for the interpretation of Being too, in the methodological-gnoseological terms.

We have after that the topos structure determines its belonging logic, and it is, in general, intuitionistic one

(here do not hold the principle of the excluded middle). But one finds that if the axiom of choice is valid on the

topos and its logic becomes classical (Diaconescu 1975). That is a far-reaching significance of this proposition

(theorem), since it affirms that the texture of a topos acquires its supremacy over its logic. And when the axiom

of choice applies on it, then all infinite subsets have the structure of the One and Many, etc.. So that

Grotendieck showed equally that in topological spaces, open sets provide more informations than the points


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they contain, or the environment to be “more important” of the belonging elements.

Alain Badiou will develop an ample reflection on the Being and truth in his works Being and Event and

Logics of worlds, in the closest connection with set (topological) terms, just on the trail of thesis that back to

Greeks the truth of Being is bringing rather by matheme than by Heideggerian poieme.

On the universal. As a notion, the “universal” is also subordinate to the concept of “categorical,” since it

can be derived from it. “category of all categories” it is both “local” and “global,” identical for all objects and

morphisms. According to Jedrzejewski: “the universal comes from the categories and is not a form from outside,

which would be materialized in particularities” (Jedrzejewski 2011, 116). As a logical concept, its negation are

not individual, particular, but by topological properties that possesses, it is rather recognizable on both sides:

from natural to social sciences, as well as in everything surrounding us.

On duality. The principle of duality is posted in the basis of this world—both in what exists and in what

becomes an expression on it.... According to Jedrzejewski (2011), “to understand the origin of dual forms

represents an important stake for the science and philosophy too” (88), because the dual concepts in the science

of being are One and Many, actual and virtual (they do real), the identity and differentiation.... It seems that this

trait the Being has carried off on it since the Big Bang5—which, among others, makes (easier) understanding of

one member of the dyad when we know the other one. In so far is being more truthful Badiou’s slogan that

mathematics is ontology, for if mathematical and physical sciences bring the truth about the One and the One is

dual with many, as Being,6 the science of Being (ontology) would realize the relation of identity with them.

There are numerous examples of these concepts in physics, such as particles and waves, electric and

magnetic fields, matter and antimatter ... or of Faraday and Amphere laws et al. In logic those concepts are: and

and or, some and for every, or DeMorgan’s laws, and in geometry—point and right line (“If a right line passess

through two points,” then “two lines intersect at the same point”), sides and angles. Of solids tetrahedron is

dual to itself, the cube is that to an octahedron, a dodecahedron—to the icosahedron, as are theorems of Pascal

and Brianchon in projective geometry. And that is the case with many examples of mathematical objects,

operations, assertions, and theorems. Or the objects have their co-objects, properties co-properties, diagrams

co-diagrams and the like—so that that is just a way, for example, the objects of a theory to be classified by the

objects of the other one.

The concept is of an exclusive importance in a number of theories and problems in mathematics (groups of

Grotendieck-Galois et al.), in the string theory in physics, and so on. Let us say, finally, that this Janus’ face of

things and beings is recognized in gnoseology too. Here the truth reveals a double character: it is aletheia as

truth of becoming and adequatio (Heidegger 1972), as truth of the One etc.. As to the categories, in the

category theory, if you keep objects and change the direction of the arrows (morphisms sense), it is obtained a

category dual to the given one. The same may be said that for every graph there is a graph dual with it.

It should be said that many of couples of terms that “come together” (opposite, contradictory) are not

mutually dual. The case is with the concepts of discrete and continuous, analytic and synthetic, necessary and

contingent.... “what distinguishes the opposition from duality is that the latter is rather an identity, than a

difference,” says Jedrzejewski (2011). So it belongs to dualities an agreed and “natural” existence—by example

particles and waves, electric and magnetic fields....

On the factoriality. If the Aristotelian notion of relation finds its analogue in the notion of morphism in

category theory, it becomes generalized to the notion of functor, which brings the connection between objects


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of different categories—by transferring the properties of one of them in another category. A functor, then,

corresponds to the “analogy” in the intuitive area that is as a methodological approach, otherwise, widely used

in all domains of mind: from science, through religion, to literature (the concept of metaphor). Because when

the parts of Being confirm by it their “identical” structure, or an “analogous” functionality, it only testifies on

the unity of Being and our increased power to know it. So we talk about the supernatural world “according to

the figure” of the world down, as four types of statements in logic Apuleius represents with spatial (planar)

figure—by “logical square”. “Porphyry’s tree” too during the Antiquity and the Middle Ages served to easier

understanding, as Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, say, the moral terms will compare with categories of mind

in the same sense, and so on.

In physics, Feynman pointed out how “the same equations turn up in the study of several other phenomena:

heat flow, distortions of stretched membrane, diffusion of neutrons, irrotational fluid flow, and uniform

illumination of a plane” (Maddy 1996, 335), in order to conclude “that this is due to the unity of nature”

(Maddy 1996). Or to give the example of Newton’s law of gravity (attracting the masses) and Coulomb’s law

(the attraction-rejection of electric charge) with the same expression and so on.

Finally, the whole Being, and otherwise, can be interpreted in terms of the One and Many—as those of

farthest strongholds, or the common ground of all that arises and disappears in the world.

8. Category Theory as a Philosophy of Mathematics

And more than it: the category theory finds the way, in the same language, to transfer informations about

the objects making it, and about our perceptions of them—as no other than a particular unity of subject and

object. Because—the latest ones do a category as well. That is a consequence of Yoneda’s lemma, according to

which each category C is isomorphic to the category of all functors from C to the category of sets. Then two

objects are isomorphic too, if functors associated to them are isomorphic, so that between objects and

“viewpoints” to them occurs a relation of equivalence. Subject and object, therefore, are never separated in the

knowledge and this mathematical result gives only right to it. And some object will be known from many

aspects, if it should be observed in more categories, and more functors are attributed to it, and so on.

We can continue to follow the language and principles of the category theory and try to bring them into a

close relation with truths of Being—which, in a philosophical key, do, say, Alain Badiou and Gilles

Deleuze—by expressing rightly the hope that its “synthetic power” in mathematics will be increasingly

extended (applied) to other scientific disciplines, as to the Being alone. Moreover, especially the notion of topos

favors the creation of “new matematical worlds” with special properties, which equally does possible different

categories and different applications too.

For every scientific theory has its “semantic core,” linguistically presented in different ways, and

determining classifying topos of the theory. Then, the theories are Morita-equivalent if they have the same

classifying topoi—a term Olivia Caramello says, in different occasions, “formalizes in many situations the

feeling of ‘looking at the same thing in different ways’” (Caramello <www.oliviacaramello.com>). Finally, the

properties of classifying topoi remaining invariant in the case of relation of equivalence are those being used to

“transfer” the features of one topos-theory into another.

And that some great parts of Being, after the way they are ordered, yield indeed to a possible interpretation

in terms of the mathematical theory, suggests O. Caramello’s (2010) article under the title: The Unification of


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Mathematics via Topos Theory. Some of these parts are, according to her: astronomy, genetics, psychology,

linguistics, music....

Namely, to the figure (albeit simplified) of the universe, in the first case, belongs it is made by stars,

around which rotate (finally) many planets. If we compare the latest ones with theories, their classifying topos

would be the star, and they alone do an analogue of Morita-equivalent theories, established by the same topos.

The fact that all planets perform the same type (of elliptical) orbits, is an invariant feature of star, to which

correspond various examples of Morita-equivalent theories expressing the same property of clasifying topos, in

the topos theory. Here, for example, Kepler’s third law is invariant feature of the star-Sun, and it alone is a

“bridge” to transfer informations between two planets—because what is true in the case of some of them,

would have an counterpart in any other (as well as Kepler’s law).

In the case of translation of a text from one language to another, afterwards, what has (to remain) invariant

is a set of some of its abstract properties P which should be preserved (such as context, meaning, and poeticity),

taking into account the syntactic particularities of two languages as well. So in the case, say, of an expression e

in the original language, we find first its value Pe in the context P, and then the corresponding value Pe’ of the

expression in the context of language to which we translate. Here as a “bridge” appears the set P of properties

to which we have alluded.

Or in genetics, the human DNA plays a role of clasifying topos in the topos theory. Because it does not

depend on the human constitution, or age, as the classifying object is invariant too with respect to the manner in

which the theory is expressed (axiomatization, etc.). In addition, they both have a role to point out the

similarities and differences, transfering the knowledge from one area to another.

The category theory, therefore, testifies that an intuitive reality—ranging from the nature to human

mind—in their various places, yields to an interpretation in its terms, and that the “knowledge” of one of them

is transferrable to another category, suggests the possibility of systematic recognition of these circumstances

and their studies, would not the solutions in one field to contribute solving problems in another one. On the way

of construction of models etc., while the technological development, computer sciences and so on, would again

and again contribute to the possibility of “intrusion” in events, phenomena and processes, both in the external

nature and in the human sphere, in order to express human needs in relation to them. Equally, therefore, at the

macro and micro level, the man succeeds to predict phenomena, even if they almost chaotically take place (in

meteorology, epidemiology, and economics), as well as when they allow a very algorithmic solvability. So if a

singular category-monad brings, for example, a category-model of preferably educated individuals, and be here

foreseen the classifying topos, we would have the basis for the diffusion of patterns of an exemplary education

in the case of an arbitrary number of (other) individuals in the same category.

Here is important fact that in the human sphere to the subjective character of human values and acts (moral,

aesthetic and other norms), we can attribute different “weights” (as quantities), and then replace them by

numbers. Thus, the reasoning in this domain receives, in addition, on the exactness, and it may be done, for

example, on the way of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. For a fuzzy set of a set sum up in itself the very qualitative

labels of its elements, like the values of (fractions) between 0 and 1—of 0 when it is absent, to 1—when it

occurs to the highest degree. Acknowledging the fact that all in the nature occurs in a way either of

juxtaposition, or integration (Chapouthier 2009, 3) of elements-parts—for example, stones in a mosaic, in the

first case, i.e., the hydrogen atoms and oxygen atom in a molecule of water in the other—we have the

possibility, using set operations, to express what is new, as a whole of elements-parts, as well as to make


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choices desirable from some standpoint. Both in material and in spiritual realm—doing all of it still in terms of

category theory.

Otherwise, we have already that subjective in nature is the acquiring of concepts about objects and beings

as well, again, no more than as a “set of its essential marks.”7 For if someone utters the words: table, house,

tree ... each of us will build (at least somewhat) different picture on it, and what would be confirmed if we put

forward our own descriptions of these images. However, on the other hand, sentences are sets of words, and to

statements equally will belong some (subjective) value between 0 and 1. Therefore, we are able, in the choices

we do in freedom to estimate the chance to realize them, in a sufficiently exact way—the way of mathematical

models, counts. This would support the fulfilment of that ideal of Leibniz expressed by words: Calculemus!, in

a case of disputes between the ideas, when it is not known which of them is more likely to succeed. Each record,

account, ... keeps human memory—instead of a permanent return to the beginning—and do not find room for

(otherwise, testified) power of hardwares and softwares today, in the vicinity of what is the core of our being,

and that is freedom—would be anachronous.

If he really has to choose, say, the moral values for himself “unconditionally” and “alone” in freedom,

would not be desirable for him to know that search engine Google states (in May 2013, in English) 7.2 billion

units for “good” and 0.7 billion for “evil” or 2.5 million for “atheism” and 22 million for “theism” etc.? And to

such a large number of samples—with all the relativity in interpretation—“traditionally” so far, no experiment

could not count. It also says that people ten times more “mention” good, but evil—while, otherwise, the

number of which is measured in billions—and nine times more theism, but atheism, and so on. Finally, while

we plead here for an eminent place that should belong to the philosophy in an overall development of sciences

and the society as a whole—just as thoughtful ones—the test shows again that the index of Philosophy is 304

millions here, while it is for Mathematics 258, for Physics 303, Chemistry 305, or Biology 204 millions. It tells

about the place of philosophy itself among the sciences and so on.

9. Biocosmological View

In the holistic (organicistic) standpoint of K. Khroutski (2008), denoted by the word “bio-Cosmology

(neo-Aristotelism),” one looks to the world as a bio-cosmos—just like Aristotle—“in which every (living)

entity has its inherent place and destination in the one whole organic self-evoling cosmic world” (98). These

features are already of traditional Chinese medicine and that of Hippocrates, so that many objections referred to

modern methods of treatment today are because of disregard of that fact. In biology, from the same standpoint

departs G. Chapouthier (2010) when he says: “if the general laws of the universe ... apply for living beings” we

ask “what do the living beings teach us as universal rules or principles, which are likely to be found in the

universe?” (93). As we recognize the words of Cornelia Guja (2008) in anthropology: “the human being as a

system/interface may be considered a fundamental component of her/his human society and the nature/cosmos

system as well, just like a hydrogen atom is the elementary constituent of matter under the material form” (5).

At the same time, Pitirim Sorokin will be, say, for a new sociology “will come” and unite so far disparate

theories etc.—as, in general, holistic points of views in the philosophy and culture throughout history are so

many, what just tells about the abundance of arguments supporting that endeavor. Denoted as cosmism,

universalism, organicism ... at the ontological level, i.e., intuitivism (Losky), lifecognition (zhivoznanie, Vl.

Solovyev), at the epistemological one, or anthropomorphism (N. Kholodny), in the axiological sense of the

word, on the different (variants) of these teachings will be found—in the Russian spiritual space—Tolstoy,


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Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, ... as many other names as well.

The bio-cosmologies assume that in every life process (in appearing and disappearing) are identified—in

the words of Piterim Sorokin (1937-1941, 18)—“two polar opposite spheres of reality, and the third

(fundamental) between them.” For Sorokin, those are super-systems he finds in the socio-cultural sphere:

sensate, ideational and integral (the third, basic). Indeed, all that comes to be marks its beginning in some idea,

followed by the very way in which it is realized, and then by what it has to serve. On the other hand, if to the

structure of Being belongs to be a whole of One and Many, they are precisely opposites, while inter-reality

would do, again, the acts in which elements-parts enter into complex composites. Triadity is the hallmark of the

deductive systems too-with the axioms on one side and theorems on the other one, i.e., with the proof

proceedings “linking them.”

As for mathematics, the label of triadity is recognizable from one to another end of it and, as such,

characterizing it to a highest degree, since, otherwise, it is said that the “whole mathematics is a theory of

mapping.” And a mapping is a whole of any two (independent) sets and of a defined relation between them.

Just what essentially is repeated in the case of category theory, which also is based on objects and morphisms as

relations inter them.

Another mainstay of bio-cosmology is a fourfold causality of all things, phenomena and processes in the

nature-precisely those coming to us from Aristotle. These are four kinds of causes, according to him: material,

formal, efficient and final-as a furthest schematic “frame” through which passes the overall development in

animate and inanimate nature. Once it was (in antiquity) determined by four proto-elements: earth, water, fire

and air, as four natural forces are underlying in the universe: gravitational force, electromagnetic force, strong

and weak nuclear forces etc., and here, however, the matter is that everything is from something, that it is

created by a form (model), through something and is intended to serve some purpose. The final cause in plants

and animals is in urge to preserve their own being, but also in striving to reproduce them, to repeat themselves.

As the rational power in man is a kind of final causes in the nature, if it is taken that during the evolution the

inorganic matter “rose” to such a level of complexity, which is called “sense” and “consciousness.”

The biological composite, chemical compounds, mathematical structures also follow quadruple

Aristotelian causality. For example, in the case of expression x2 + 1 = 0, the final cause is that for which the

equations do exist in mathematics, while the other three types of causality are easily recognizable, and so on.

Therefore, the triadity of all events and fourfold causality appear as a largest (possible) frame where we

could really invest our belief mathematical theories (like category theory) will succeed to incarnate in

themselves our philosophical interest towards Being and man’s place in it. It would be a (possible) task of the

philosophy of mathematics.

Notes

1. As “the recognition that it is within science itself [...] that reality is to be identified and described” (Quine 1981, 21).

2. Words from the title.

3. Maddy wth this term gives some respects to Quine, finding that it could be replaced by words “philosophical modesty,” as an other name too “second philosophy” she largely uses in the same work (Maddy 2003).

4. It requires that any well-defined set can be constructed. 5. Plato’s dialogue Timaeus brings the myth of origins of the world from the ratio of the Same and Many. 6. For Badiou the member dual with the Being is “event” (événement), and for Sartre—“nothing.”


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7. Differently, therefore, from Socrates’ belief that the world can be thought only in necessary and general terms.

Works Cited

Aristotle. “Metaphysics.” The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2. Ed. Johnatan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Bacon, Roger. Opus Maius. 3 Vols. Ed. John Henry Bridges. Vols. 1 & 2, Oxford, 1897; Vol. 3 with corrections, Edinburgh, 1900;

reprinted in Frankfurt: Minerva, 1964. Badiou, Alain. L’être Et L’événement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988. Burgess, J. Peter. “Epistemology and Nominalism.” Physicalism in Mathematics. Ed. Andrew David. Irvine. Dodrecht: Kluwer

Academic Publishers, 1990. 1-15. Cantor, Georg. “Beiträge Zur Begründung Der Transfiniten Mengenlehre.” Mathematishen Annalen 4 (1895): 46. Caramello, Olivia. “Unifying Theory. Toposes as ‘Bridges’.” General Overview. <www.oliviacaramello.com/Unification/Toposes

Bridges.html> ---. The Unification of Mathematics Via Topos Theory. arXiv: math. CT/1006. 3930, 2010. Cartwright, Nancy. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1983. Chapouthier, Georges. “Mosaic Structures—A Working Hypothesis for the Complexity of Living Organisms.” E–logos:

Electronoc Journal for Philosophy. XVII (2009): 1-11. ---. “Reflections on the Consequences of Biocosmology in Modern Biology.” Biocosmology—Neo-Aristotelism 1.1 (Winter 2010):

92-98. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Einstein, Albert. “Reply to Criticism.” Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. vol. 2. Ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. La Salle, IL: Open

Court Press, 1949. 663-688. Diaconescu, Razvan. “Axiom of Choice and Complementation,” Proceedings of the Mathematical Society 51 (1975):176-78. Feynman, Richard. “Simulating Physics with Computers.” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21. 6-7 (1982): 467-68. Gödel, Kurt. “What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?” Collected Works. vol. II. Eds. Robert S. Feferman et al. NY: Oxford UP,

1990. ---. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Trans. Bernard Meltzer. Basic Books,

1962. Reprint in 1992. ---. The Present Situation in the Foundations of Mathematics. Collected Works, Vol. III. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Guja, Cornelia. “BioCosmology and Informational Anthropology: Some Common Aspects.” E-logos: Electronic Journal for

Philosophy. XVI (2008): 1-12. Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. NY: Harper and Row, 1972. 69. Hilbert, David. “Die logischen Grundlagen der Mathematik.” Mathematische Annalen 88 (1923): 151-65. Jedrzejewski, Franck. Ontologie Des Catégories. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. 1-142. Khroutski, Konstantin Stanislavovich. “Biocosmology—Rehabiliting Aristotle’s Realistic Organicism and Recommending

Russian Universal Cosmism: Response to Arthur Saniotis.” Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 18 (July 2008): 98-105.

Kim, Jaegwon. “What is Naturalized Epistemology?” Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Kitcher, Philip. The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. Maddy, Penelope. “Ontological Commitment: Between Quine and Duhem.” Philosophical Perspectives 10 (1996): 317-41. ---. Naturalism in Mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. ---. “Second Philosophy.” Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 20: 3 (2003): 73-106. ---. “Three forms of naturalism.” Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. Ed. Stewart Shapiro. 2005. Putnam, Hilary. What is Mathematical Truth? 1975, reprinted in 1979, 60-78. ---. “Mathematics, Matter and Method.” Philosophical Papers. Vol. I. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Quine, Willard Van Orman. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1951, reprinted in his 1980a. 20-46. ---. Carnap and Logical Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1954, reprinted in his 1976. 107-32. ---. Posits and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1955, reprinted in 1976. 246-54. ---. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. ---. Five Milestones of Empiricism. 1975a, reprinted in his 1981c. 67-72. ---. “The Nature of Natural Knowledge.” Mind and Language. Ed. Samuel Guttenplan. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1975b.


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---. The Ways of Paradox. Rev.ed . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976. ---. From a Logical Point of View. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980b. ---. Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. ---. Philosophy of Logic. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. ---. Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. ---. From Stimulus to Science. Cambridge: Harward UP, 1995. ---. “Progress on Two Fronts.” The Journal of Philosophy 93 (1996): 159-63. Reprinted in Quine 2008b. ---. “I, You and It. An Epistemological Triangle.” Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine. Eds. Alex Orenstein and

Petr Kotatko, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000a. ---. “Response to Lehrer.” Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine. Eds. Alex Orenstein and Petr Kotatko.

Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000b. Resnik, Michael David. “Mathematics as a Science of Patterns: Ontology and Reference.” Special Issue on Philosophy of

Mathematics Noûs 15.4. (1981): 529-50. Sorokin, Pitirim Alexandrovich. Social cultural dynamics. Vols. 1-4. NY: American Book Company, 1937-41. Van Fraaswsen, Bas. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.


The Fault Line in Chinese Reflective Thinking

Jim Platts

University of Cambridge

Behind what is called “Needham’s Grand Question” (why was China overshot by the West in science and

technology?) lies a deeper question of how China came to lose the capacity of deeply reflective thought clearly

present in the ancient Chinese philosophers. This is a loss felt by all Chinese as a psychological sense of hollowness,

a loss of identity, made worse by the seeming inaccessibility of the ancient Chinese wisdom to the modern Chinese

mind. It is clear that at some historical point China suffered an extreme psychological blow sufficient to traumatise

it at the threshold of reflective thought, unable to look inwards any more. The paper identifies that point as the utter

devastation wrought by Kublai Khan and the Mongols 750 years ago. What devastates reflective thought is

wilfulness, the insistent focusing of all attention and energy on external, material things, and Kublai Khan was

wilful in the extreme. What confirms this as the crippling point is that, in response to Kublai Khan’s Mongol

invasion the Chinese, over time, not only completely altered the geography of China itself, moving their capital to

the North (Beijing), but have ever since fought to establish as “China” all the territory over which Kublai Khan

ruled. China is clearly not free of Kublai Khan’s shadow. But even more precisely, in the process of doing

this—and showing their own wilfulness—in building the Forbidden City in Beijing they built it in the shape of the

Chinese metaphysical model of the universe, the Chinese version of the Tree of Life metaphysical glyph… … But

it has an error in it. And the error is precisely that in where it places things, it makes what would have been the

attributes of reflective thought subservient to wilfulness. The model itself thus shows the hollowness of the Chinese

mind from that moment on. The outer form—the “appearance”—of the ancient wisdom was still there. But the

content—the “substance”—of it was not. And with no reflective thought, true creativity disappears.

Keywords: Needham’s grand question, Kublai Khan, the Forbidden City, the Tree of Life, reflective thinking,

wilfulness, psychological block

1. Introduction

Sometimes it is beneficial to be an outsider. This is doubly true concerning not only accessing ancient

Chinese philosophical teaching, but more than that, understanding it and being able to bring it back to life.

There are two reasons, both of which can be explained by two different discussions of the same example.

If we take as the example the I Ching—The Book of Changes—developed as a reflection tool in ancient

China and drawn together in a tidy form by Confucius (Wilhelm 1979), it is a “book” of ancient wisdom (and it

is a book full of wisdom) that comes with instructions as to how to “read” it. To benefit from it, we need to

understand the material in it, but we also need to understand how to read it, and neither of these things is

Jim Platts, MA, Senior Teaching Associate, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, UK; main research fields:

Skill-Based Manufacturing, Moral Leadership, and the Philosophical Teachings of the Major Civilisations. email: mjp@ eng.cam.ac.uk.

DAVID PUBLISHING

D

THE FAULT LINE IN CHINESE REFLECTIVE THINKING

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obvious. To the modern Chinese person, the written “Chinese” is now an ancient form of Chinese, not in

current use, and you have to learn, even to read the words. But that does not get you anywhere near interpreting

the meaning of the words and you get no help with that. Similarly, the mental approach for which the I Ching

was written and which it assumes the reader will be able to adopt, is no longer developed in modern Chinese

people. The education system expressly avoids developing it. And so the method of access is not available to

the modern Chinese person either. They are twice crippled.

Concerning the first aspect, it is always the practice of good translators, that as well as translating the

words, they will frequently donate as much time, effort and writing to explaining the background meaning of

particular words or images, setting them in their cultural context, as they spend on the word-for-word

“translation.” But more than this is needed when the subject matter is deeply philosophical and is about “the

meaning of life itself” and “how to live a meaningful life.” All the great civilisations have within their teaching,

deeply developed and deeply reflective material concerning life itself, and this has two characteristics. The

word the modern world uses for our shared descriptions of how the physical world works, is the word

“physics.” The correct word for describing these deeper descriptions of how, at a higher “meta” level, we

describe our understanding of how we experience existence itself, is the word “metaphysics.” Every civilisation

has within it a deep description of how existence works, and it is from this deep metaphysical description that

the underlying philosophy of that culture is developed (Platts 1994).

That is the taproot of that civilisation’s collective psyche and when their access to it is broken, that people

feel hollow and “lost.” This is the “content” of the writing. However, the intent of deeply philosophical material

is not to excite you intellectually, but to bring you into a state of mind—a state of awareness—a state of

“being”—where you can experience directly yourself the “truth” to which the words are pointing. Real

understanding of life is experiential, not simply intellectual. So how you approach the material is itself

important, because it is about developing an approach within your own being that enables you to “recognise”

the truth, “face-on,” with no intellectual intermediaries. Then you are able to “live” the truth. And that is what

gives your life meaning. But it also gives us the key to unlocking the door. Because, whilst the language of

description developed in each civilisation is different, the underlying truth is the same. And when you have

experienced the meaning, whichever tradition you yourself “grew up in,” it does not matter. You have the

understanding, and can see it, and also express it in ANY language, because you can introduce people to the

experience.

Returning to the I Ching, what is hugely helpful for western people is, Richard Wilhelm’s translation of

the I Ching came from a lifetime of not only “studying it” in an academic sense, but practising its teaching. So

he had the deep understanding that experience brings. And this he brought into his translation, so that, for

instance, in describing the first two hexagrams in Book 1 of the I Ching, the two hexagrams of Ch’ien (The

Creative) and K’un (The Receptive), he sets out the root metaphysics on which the whole of Chinese

philosophy is built, of the interaction of these two primordial energies, and spends pages on each giving a

detailed description of their essential character, the nature of their essence. This detailed descriptiveness

pervades the whole translation and makes the material accessible to one who already knows. To one who

already knows, his description of these two primordial energies is very close indeed to the description of the

two primordial energies given at the beginning of the descriptive metaphysical description used in the Western

tradition and set out, for instance, in Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi’s book Kabbalah Tradition of Hidden Knowledge

(1979, 5-8), and to one schooled and experienced in this tradition, it gives the key. The key is not at this


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primordial level of description, but lies at the next level down, of how the—exactly parallel—descriptions of

how these two energies interact at detailed, functional level are developed.

This more functional description of how life works is called, in all traditions, “The Tree of Life.” There are

highly developed descriptive models of it, essentially using floral, organic imagery, in both Hindu and Buddhist

traditions, and a more abstract geometric model that was Jewish in its development but underlies the three

western monotheistic religions. The modern Western model is very helpful, as the modern subject of

psychology was developed directly from it—Freud, Jung, and Adler were all Jews—and the language of

modern psychology, particularly Jung’s terminology, fits directly onto the Tree of Life (see for instance

Halevi’s book “Kabbalah and Psychology” (1986)), making it very accessible. But what is particularly helpful

is, the plan of the Forbidden City, in Beijing, is this diagram constructed in stone. It gives a direct “reading” of

the Chinese psyche at the time it was built. And it contains an error. And that error exactly identifies why the

current Chinese population feels hollow and “lost.” It is an error that blocks access to the deeper teaching and

starves China of its inner heritage.

Let us lay out the elements of the teaching, and then we will be able to see both the roots of the error and

its nature, and thereby, its cure.

2. The Tree of Life

In English, there are a few words that do not have a vowel in them. These words derive from Greek and

have particular meaning. Rhythm, is one and myth another. A myth is a story that is not directly true in an

outward sense, but is deeply true in an inward sense, carrying in story form “truth” about life itself. A glyph is a

diagram that has this same characteristic, of carrying deep truth about life itself. The Tree of Life is perhaps the

glyph of all glyphs, a teaching tool that will repay a whole lifetime’s contemplative study and still be delivering

new insights at the end of that time (Platts 2003). Before describing the essential structure and elements of the

Tree of Life diagram (see Fig. 1), it is necessary to understand the backdrop (see Fig. 2). Here, we have three

overlapping circles. The fundamental vertical characteristics of the Tree as a diagram need noting. Firstly, it

represents a ladder of progression upwards (i.e., “you climb it”), but it has the characteristic that what is above

controls what is below (so it is said that it grows downwards—“the roots are in heaven and the fruits are on

earth”). The three circles represent three completely different levels of consciousness. Modern science has

given us the ability to “see” these different modes of operation of the brain and so they can be described

functionally, but of course the key thing is how to engage them operationally.

Functionally, the lowest circle denotes the beta rhythm functioning of the brain. This is what we might call

everyday consciousness—mental “busy-ness.” It involves the left side of the brain and does one thing at a time.

It is very focused and follows strictly linear logic. It can be thought of as effort, rather than “thought,” in that it

is entirely about rules and learning them and following them in a “this is how it is” sense, and not about

thinking about them or questioning their rightness in any way, and nor, in that sense, in actually understanding

them, i.e., realising what they mean.

The second circle denotes reflective thought, and this immediately indicates a different orientation of

attention, in that the attention is “inwards” (reflective), not “outwards.” So it is a different way of “looking” as

well as a different way of thinking. This is the brain functioning at alpha rhythm level, and the alpha rhythms

are half the frequency of the beta rhythms, but carry twice the power. The alpha rhythms energise the right hand

half of the brain, and instead of shooting round in a linear sequence as the beta rhythms do in the left side of the


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brain, the alpha rhythms trigger whole patterns of response holistically and in rhythm. In eyesight, the alpha

rhythms relate to our peripheral vision, which notices things, recognises patterns, shape, rhythm etc., and can

co-ordinate things into a whole, instead of just seeing one spot, which is what the focal vision does, driven by

the beta rhythms.

Fig. 1. The Tree of Life Diagram

Fig. 2. Backdrop to the Tree of Life Showing Levels of Wisdom


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The beta rhythms can never put that spot in its context and give it meaning. The alpha rhythms do that, and

thus it is the alpha rhythms that give everything meaning (“meaning” is a statement about something’s

relationship to everything else, and in particular, to the totality that is Life). It is perhaps clear from this

description, that seeing patterns—seeing wholeness—understanding the meaning of things—is not everyday

thinking done faster, or done harder, it is thinking in a different way. This is why it is called “the personal

unconscious.” People can be conscious in this way, but usually they are not. It has to be learnt. And you cannot

learn it from books. You have to “learn it” from someone who can do it. And “learning it” is in quotations in the

last sentence, because you don’t so much “learn” it in an academic “repeat after me” sense. You “pick it up.”

One of the things that is true for all resonant systems—and the brain is a resonant system—is that when they

are in proximity they will resonate together. Thus two people together in the normal sense will resonate

together at beta rhythm level and talk continuously, about nothing in particular. But if you spend time with

someone who is awake and functional at alpha rhythm level, you will not talk, but the alpha rhythm activity in

their brain will slowly “switch on” the alpha rhythm activity in your brain, and you will find yourself reflecting

about things, in the deep way they do. The ability is thus not so much taught as given. There is a deep

wholesomeness in working at this level.

The highest circle represents an even deeper way of working in the brain, at theta rhythm frequency. This

is half the frequency of the alpha rhythms and again involves a doubling of the power. This level of functioning

is only reached in a deep meditation, which is a long way past normal consciousness, well beyond words and

way beyond mere physicality. It is “pure” consciousness, a direct “seeing” of the principles of things, the level

of divine sages, who bring really deep truths about life through in a way that makes it possible for ordinary

mortals to grasp and understand them. This is whole-brain resonant activity and is the highest of human

achievements, and—returning to our diagram and placing these things in the physical world, that is what the

Emperor was supposed to do in his meditation hall in the centre of the third courtyard in the Forbidden City

(see Fig. 3). We now have the tools to understand the significance of the diagram, so let us return to it.

3. The Column of Consciousness

The left-right dimension of the diagram first needs explaining. The diagram in Fig. 1 has two outer

columns, and these represent functional abilities. The right hand column represents the ability to energise things

and the left hand column represents the ability to give things structure. The centre column, up which it is

mankind’s task to ascend, is sometimes called “The Column of Equilibrium,” because the two outer columns

have to be consciously balanced and brought into relationship for them to work together and be fruitful. Energy

out of control is fatally explosive, but equally, continuous repression without any freedom is death-in-life. But

it is more fully known as “The Column of Consciousness,” in that the balancing mentioned in the previous

sentence has to be done consciously. But more than that, recalling the earlier detail concerning the structure of

the Tree, that “what is above controls what is below,” we can see that, to control the outer columns at a certain

level, you need to be able to work from a higher level of consciousness than the functional abilities you are

wanting to bring in to use. Thus “climbing the tree” is the task. The road to maturity, understanding of life itself,

and, thus, personal fulfilment, is straight up the central column of this diagram. Once we can see what human

growth involves, we can then also see how you block it. You simply prevent progress up that central column.

And that is what has happened in China. The “diagram” as depicted in the layout of the Forbidden City (see Fig.

3) has a fatal error in it, and that exact psychological “error”—block—is exactly visible in the Chinese people.


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Let us examine this error.

Fig 3. The Forbidden City as a Tree of Life Diagram

It will be noted that at each point on the diagram (see Fig. 1) where one of the backdrop circles crosses the

central column, there is a node. In ascending sequence, the bottom node represents the body, our direct

engagement with physical reality. The next node up represents—to use Jungian psychological terminology―the

ego, our ordinary everyday awareness of our selves. We will return to a deeper analysis of what matters at this

node, shortly. The next node up, again using Jungian terminology, represents the self. Sometimes referred to as

“the watcher within,” the self is the real you, whereas the ego is the “front” that you present to the outside

world, and in an undeveloped person, it will differ from situation to situation.

A second word for the ego is “personality,” and the word derives from the Greek word “persona,” which

refers to the mask that a Greek actor put on to portray a particular character. To say that it is the “front” that we

put on, the “mask” we create to portray a certain kind of person that we believe we ought to be in a particular

situation, identifies that it is a created thing, that you can—and we all do—create many different masks for

many different situations, and that all of them are hollow and none of them is the real you. This then also

depicts the relationship between the ego and the self. The self is the real you behind the mask. A

psychologically mature person does not need to wear a mask. You get them as they are, and they are

“themselves”—they are the same—in all situations. They do not need to hide—and this tells us the other aspect

of the “masks” and the “personas” that the ego continuously creates, maintains and wears. They are protection.

They keep what is within hidden and ensure all attention is kept out there. What drives the ego is the fear of


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being found out to be hollow—of having nothing inside—and so it uses every stratagem it can to prevent

anyone looking inside (whatever you do, you must not ask questions) and to avoid looking inside itself (on no

account must you reflect. Keep busy. Keep busy!). Note that this is the wrong reaction. It is a reaction that

avoids, indeed prevents, self-development, i.e., it is a mistake. It is the wrong reaction to fear. Fear is an

emotion that tells us something matters, so we need to pay close attention to it and do it carefully and

thoroughly. It is a wrong reaction to respond to fear by avoiding what it points to.

We will return to this in a moment, but if we note where these nodes are in relation to the circles of the

backdrop, the ego is at the centre of beta rhythm outwardly focused “busy thinking,” whereas that deeper node,

that is the self—the real you—is at the centre of inwardly focused alpha rhythm “reflective thinking,” so,

between the two, there has to be a change in the way of thinking—a shift in orientation of attention from

outward to inward. In the Forbidden City, the lower node is a gate (the Gate of Supreme Harmony), and thus

correctly signals that it is both a checkpoint (you have to have the right characteristics to be able to pass

through) and at the same time, it is not a place where you reside. You reside in the Hall of Supreme Harmony

(the higher node), which is the self. If you cannot reach that higher node, in a deep sense you do not know who

you are.

To develop that understanding a little more, it is helpful to look at the next node up, the one above the

“self,” because it has the interesting characteristic of being both there and not there, and is usually denoted by a

dotted circle when it is portrayed, and it is often not portrayed at all. In the diagram-in-stone that is the

Forbidden City, this node is the node where divine sages reside and where the Emperor meditates (the Hall of

Central Harmony). It is at the centre of the theta rhythm whole-brain “thinking” that is usually described as

being in deep meditation, and whose characteristic is deep inward reflection—deep “listening.” It is thus quite

correct that, in the Forbidden City, this node is the small hall used by the Emperor for meditation. The essential

detail at this level is that in deep meditation a person is listening directly to Truth—to the primordial essence of

things—and the requirement for this is the giving up of preconceived ideas of what “the truth” might be. On the

diagram, this node is and is not, precisely because what is above controls and what is below, and thus this node

has the character of what is above, not what is below and it only works if you adopt that higher orientation in

your own being at that point.

The final node at the top (the Hall of Preserving Harmony), which is at the centre of an undrawn circle that

represents Truth itself, represents direct psychological awareness of Truth and the transmitting of it through

oneself. This top node is often depicted as a clear circle, not a filled-in circle, depicting the notion of a lens

through which light passes, and often an eye is depicted above it looking downwards: -the “eye” of Truth.

This helps us see the problem that can occur at the node of the ego, which is the central node on the lower

face of the Tree. For growth to be possible at this node, the necessary orientation is inwards, i.e. to adopt the

characteristic way of thinking of the zone above. But the tendency of the node is to create masks and to keep

the attention focused outwards, and to resist this change in orientation of attention. The characteristic of the ego

is wilfulness, and the attribute of wilfulness is power. The focus of attention is “me” and “what I want” and

since the reference point is also me, “what I say is true because I say so,” i.e., the source of truth is in the will.

There is no deference to “truth” as being something beyond me and correct in its own right.

This is exactly where the error comes in the diagram-in-stone that is the Forbidden City. Within the

diagram proper, the path of development leading from the ego to the self is called “The Path of Honesty” (see

Fig. 4), precisely because it concerns this change in orientation and is characterised by the development of a


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relationship with and an understanding of Truth. Traditionally, within the correct Tree of Life diagram, this is

also “where you cross the water”—after having passed the ego. It signifies the point of turning inwards and

leaving the outer world behind. “Honesty” is an “inner” skill. It is a skill of reflection—seeing the truth.

Fig 4. The Path of Honesty

Fig 5. The Sequence of Ascending Virtues


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“Honesty”—seeing what is there—seeing the truth—is one of the virtues (psychological competencies) that

is developed (by inward reflection) in a psychologically mature person. In the correct understanding of The

Tree of Life, it is one of a whole sequence of successive virtues, each of which is the necessary foundation for

the following one, that follow in sequence up the central column of the diagram (see Figs. 5 and 6). The difficulty

of turning inwards, crossing the emotional threshold and beginning to think reflectively is well known (see Fig.

7). In psychological terms, it is the key transition made in the seventh stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of human

needs (1970) (see Fig. 8), here shown placed on the lower face of the Tree of Life using Macnulty’s descriptive

terminology for the seven progressive developmental stages of self control required to reach maturity (1985).

In the Forbidden City, the virtue of Honesty is incorrectly placed outside the Gate of Supreme Harmony

(see Fig. 3), and so is the water. Not only are it and the other four Confucian virtues placed in parallel, not in

sequence, as if they were options not sequential necessities, the virtue of Honesty is placed below the node of

the ego, not above it as it should be. The five bridges over the Golden River are below the Gate of Harmony. So

it does not suggest leaving the ego behind, at all. It suggests that in China, “honesty” is subservient to the

Emperor’s will, not to The Truth, and indeed, that it is the appearance of honesty that matters, not actual

honesty. That this is evidently so is clearly visible throughout Chinese behaviour. But it is a crippling

psychological and philosophical error. How does one identify the root cause and cure this disability? What is

helpful is, its presence in the psychological “map” given by the Forbidden City makes it is easy to detect when

and how it came about.

Fig 6. The Virtues Defined as Competencies


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Fig 7. The Emotional Threshold to Reflective Thinking

Fig 8. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs Placed on the Tree of Life


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4. The Cause of the Problem

A piece of teaching that deserves more attention than it gets is encapsulated in the Cambridge academic

Lord Acton’s letter to Bishop Creighton, April 5, 1887.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men….

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

It corrupts in exactly this way, that it replaces insights about the truth with wilfulness.

What it pays to remember is that China was once on the receiving end of a ferociously destructive

wilfulness that has left its mark. Apparently, everybody in Mongolia is tremendously proud of being associated

with Genghis Khan. Reputedly in his lifetime, he killed more than 10% of the population of the whole planet

and is way ahead of any other claimant to the crown of being the most destructively cruel man ever. For people

to be proud of this legacy is itself a demonstration of how power corrupts. It corrupts the mind. He was turning

in China’s direction, but he died before he invaded China (Man 2004). However, his grandson Kublai Khan did

the job just as destructively as he would have done, and the utter devastation of the Chinese people that he

caused is the source of our problem (Man 2006). Real devastation is not merely physical it is psychological.

You destroy a person’s ability to recover from the psychological devastation you have wrought on them. It is

not simply that they are unable to overcome your wilfulness. You impose it so fiercely that they become totally

unable to see past “wilfulness.” It becomes the pivotal element in everything that matters. Ever since being

conquered by Kublai Khan, the Chinese have been trying to emulate that conquest and make it theirs. What is

now called China is the wider area that he subdued. But in more detail, after the Mongol invasion had been

finally routed, China moved its capital to the North—to Beijing—the better to face the continuing Mongol

threat (i.e., the Mongol invasion changed the geography of China), and they built the Forbidden City,

encapsulating in its shape what was then the shape of the Chinese mentality. And in that, wilfulness overrode

(had overridden, and continued to override) truth.

What a legacy!

This terrible and crippling psychological legacy is also identified in the difference between the world-renowned

teaching story “The King’s New Clothes” and the equally well-known but uniquely Chinese negative version of

the story, which goes under the title of “The Emperor’s New Horse.”

The first story contains many levels of teaching within it. It carefully points out the trap that power creates,

of the king—and therefore many other people wanting it to be true that he was “special” (Note how closely this

represents the Chinese mentality after being devastated by the Mongols). However, the supposed “value” of this

magical cloth that the king’s new clothes were made of, is unreal. It is an intangible benefit—a “magical”

benefit—that only those you can trust will be able to see it.

Note, here, that it actually distorts the real meaning of the word “trust.” The person you can really trust is

the person who tells you the truth, i.e., helps you build a direct relationship yourself with truth. What this story

points out is, many people will steal the language of truth, and of trust, to deceive you. It tells you not to listen

to your senses, but to listen to your emotions. It plays on an innate worry—a fear—that people might tell you

things you do not want to hear, and at the same time it encourages you to dream about something which makes

you special and able to control what people tell you. It feeds wilfulness.


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The point is then beautifully made, by making it a child who states the obvious, that the king has no

clothes on. The core detail here is that what the child says is true because it is true. It does not matter who says

it, “the truth” is a property of “it itself” and is not dependent on who says it. Insight takes precedence over

power and what is important is it. The behavioural teaching the story gives is to listen to your senses, explore

the outlying data points and find out why they are there. The story instructs you to find and understand reality.

And it places reality—truth—“out there,” and makes it of greater importance than you. Just to make the point,

the child could have reasoned that, “even if cloth does not have brilliant colours, all cloth has the property that

you cannot see through it, but I can see the king’s backside, so there is no cloth there.” The issue is not what

someone wants you to see, it is what you do see. Interestingly, the whole development of western society since

“the enlightenment” has been driven by this characteristic of “letting the outsider speak the truth.”

Chinese development has not had this characteristic. “The Emperor’s New Horse” has all the opposite

teaching elements in it. The Emperor is standing in a garden and people who wish to work for him are brought

in for interview. There is a deer standing a little way away on the grass, and at some point in the conversation

the Emperor points at it and says “what do you think of my new horse?” Anyone who says it is a deer is taken

away and has their head cut off.

Here, it is the meaning of the word “truth” that is distorted. You are being tested to see if you will literally

switch off your senses and ignore what they tell you and agree with what I say, because I want you to. This

makes something “true” because a powerful person says that it is, i.e., what is “true” depends on who says it.

What is important is me. You do not listen to your senses and find and understand reality. If you want to stay

alive you must make the whole of your thinking subservient to me. It is about creating and protecting

“face”—appearance, rather than reality. Nothing has any meaning. You carefully do not notice/see anything.

And “theory” does not inform practice.

In his behaviour, Mao clearly taught “the Emperor’s New Horse.” Interestingly, as megalomaniacs

frequently do, he insisted that people learnt the lesson of “The king’s New Clothes. It is common that corrupt

people explicitly hijack and corrupt the language that would expose and make visible what they are doing, thus

preventing articulate criticism. The story of The King’s New Clothes is now useless in China.

5. Zhen and Ren

It is illuminating simply to quote directly what is said on the website “Mysterious Chinese Characters”

concerning the meaning of Chinese characters. Below are the quoted meanings of “Zhen” and “Ren” (The

Epoch Times 2011a; 2011b). What is interesting to note in relation to “Zhen” in parallel with the Tree of Life is

the presence of the all-seeing eye, and the number 10. On the Tree of Life diagram, the meditation node “is and

is not” so that it is said that, on the Tree, “there are 10 not 9, 10 not 11 nodes.” And it is interesting that it

suggests that lies and falsehood have their origin in the human psyche. Quite so.

The Chinese character “zhen” consists of two ideograms, “shi” and “mu.” “Shi” is the number 10 and

symbolises the 10-directional universe in Buddhist thought, and the perfection of gods, while “mu” represents

the eye. “Shi mu” therefore corresponds to the heavenly eye, also called the “all-seeing eye.”

This character is derived from the Chinese belief that only supernatural beings, such as deities, have the

ability to recognise the truth and reality. It is said that deities are unfettered and not limited by any constraints.

In contrast, humans are limited to subjective points of view and restricted to sensory perception originating in

the human body.


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“Zhen” plays a central role in the Taoist belief system. In Taoism, man strives to transcend the material

world through spiritual practice. In striving toward truthfulness, the Taoist attempts to return to their origin in

the universe.

The objective of Taoism is to achieve “真人” (zhen ren)—“true man,” which means a truly complete being.

The theory of “zhen ren” states that when one has achieved the truth, one exists in harmony with the universe.

The state is synonymous with the Buddhist notion of enlightenment.

The truthful person is free of any notion, concept, perception or limitation, because he/she represents

absolute freedom and emptiness, the state that is called Tao.

In contrast to the character “真” (zhen), the characters “伪” (wei) and “假” (jia) represent falsehood or

falsification. Both characters show the ideogram “亻” on the left, which is the character for “man” or

“humanity.” Lies and falsehood, according to Chinese mythology, originate from the human psyche.

“Ren” represents the Chinese character for goodness of heart, compassion, and wanting the best for others.

It consists of two components—the left side “亻” represents man, and is a radical appearing in many Chinese

characters. In contrast, the right side “二” (er) is not just a component of Ren, but is also a character in its own

right. The character symbolises on the one hand dignity and ethics, and on the other hand earthly things. In its

entirety, the symbol relates to the idea of a man, along with his earthly connections.

“Ren” represents the Confucian teachings which permeated classical Chinese culture. These teachings

exhort people to conduct themselves virtuously and to practice habits, such as compassion, kindness of heart,

propriety, upright conduct, wisdom, faith, and learning.

People in pre-modern times saw compassion on par with morality, and saw compassion and wanting the

best for others as typical attributes of noble men. Not merely should the citizenry raise their standards based on

these attributes, but the teachings also enable politics to be carried out in the most humane manner.

Confucian philosophy teaches that only a morally upright, and at the same time compassionate, human

being deserves to and is capable of governing.

It is not surprising that wilfulness—a block at the first important step towards self-development—should

figure as a denial of access to “the truth” in the distorted Chinese model of the Tree of Life depicted by the

Forbidden City. What is interesting is that, traditionally, the approach to the Forbidden City used to be straight

across Tiananmen Square. Now even that is not possible, because Mao’s tomb blocks the way.

Works Cited

Halevi, Z’ev ben Shimon. Kabbalah Tradition of Hidden Knowledge. London: Thames & Hudson, 1979. ---. Kabbalah and Psychology. London: Gateway Books, 1986. Macnulty, W. Kirk. “UK Social Change through a Wide-Angle Lens.” Futures (August 1985): 331-47. Man, John. Genghis Khan Life, Death and Resurrection. London: Transworld, 2004. ---. Kublai Khan From Xanadu to Superpower. London: Transworld, 2006. Maslow, Abraham H. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Platts, M. Jim. “Confucius on Leadership.” Journal of Strategic Change 3.5 (1994): 249-60. ---. Meaningful Manufacturing. York: Sessions of York, 2003. The Epoch Times. Mysterious Chinese Characters. 2011a. < http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/1447/> ---. Mysterious Chinese Characters. 2011b. < http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/11936/> Wilhelm, Richard. I Ching or Book of Changes. London: Arkana, 1989.


Affirming Art: Heidegger and the Sense of a Beginning

Gary Peters

York St John University

This essay offers a philosophical perspective that, in breaking with both the open and surreptitious dialectical

method still so prominent in academic discourse, follows Heidegger in trying to conceive of a radically

non-dialectical manner of approaching affirmation, negation, and neutrality. As with Heidegger, this is attempted

through a turn towards art and the “emancipated contingency” that characterizes much creative production. In

contrast to action and production within the knowledge economy, the creation of the artwork concerns a knowing of

unknowingness (described by Maurice Blanchot as the neutral) that demands a rethink of action in relation to truth

and errancy. Indeed, the very working of the work of art is conceived here as a truth that is precisely “set to work”

(Heidegger) by errancy. Through a consideration of the essential difference between choice and decision and the

different “beginning” of art that this suggests, the essay concludes with some reflections of the theme of art’s

fascination and the and the affirmation of the unknown.

Keywords: yes, no, don’t know, contingency, beginning, erasure, choice, decision, fascination

1. The Power of No

I am the one who has to decide what they should ultimately look like (the making of pictures consists of a

large number of yes and no decisions and a yes decision at the end) (Gerhard Richter 1992, 1047).

But we know the beginning, the other one, we know it by questioning, we stay in the leap ahead of any yes

or no (Heidegger 2006, 5).

There is a virility attached to the negative: “the power of no.” Because it is hard to say “no,” hardness

itself, a certain musculation of the mind, becomes associated with the ability to resist, deny, and negate the

affirmatory trajectory of another: And the life of mind, in its very remoteness from the physical, is one

constantly on the lookout for equivalents to the physicality it so singularly lacks.

The “power of no” is double, not only does it stop the “yes” in its tracks but at the same time it

surreptitiously creates the very desire that fuels the affirmative spirit it is so keen to derail. In other words, the

“no” itself creates the “yes” that it must say “no” to, thereby augmenting its negative potency in a dialectical

escalation that forever ties the affirmative to its own denial.

Of course, this negative dialectics can itself be negated by the affirmation of affirmation seen at work in

the numerous guises of post-structuralist thinking, the classic example being Deleuze’s famous anti-Hegelian

version of Nietzsche. But, to say “no” to no (even in the name of affirmation) is still to say “no,” is still to play

(or be played by) the Hegelian game. This undoubtedly gives affirmation a certain physicality too, but at what

Gary Peters, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, the Faculty of Arts, York St John University, UK; main research fields:

Improvisation, Continental Philosophy and Aesthetics, Country Music, Temporality, and Memory and Death. Email: [email protected].

DAVID PUBLISHING

D

AFFIRMING ART: HEIDEGGER AND THE SENSE OF A BEGINNING

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price? The gross misappropriation of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch would be just one example, as would the

confusion of his will-to-power with power itself and the virility that would supposedly come with that. Deleuze

(1994) recognizes this when he writes: “those whom Nietzsche calls masters are certainly powerful men, but

not men of power, since power is in the gift of the values of the day” (54).

Would it be possible to prise affirmation away from the values of the day, not only from the virility of the

negative, but also, by implication, from the reflected virility of the positive too? The truly affirmative power

necessary to “re-evaluate all values” cannot itself be valued as a positive or negative force within the existing

value system without collapsing back into the very dialectic it seeks to overcome. For this reason we must be

constantly wary of collapsing the affirmative and the positive: they are different. Just as Nietzsche’s task is to

think the will-to-power outside of existing power relations, so the challenge here is to try and say “yes” not

only to “yes,” and not only to “no,” but also to “yes,” “no,” and “don’t know” as well; a triple affirmation that

unlike the speculative substantiation that is associated with the Hegelian negation of negation, constantly

throws us back to a beginning or origin that is “ahead of” the secondary “yes/no” of dialectics.

2. The Power of Yes

When the artist Gerhard Richter describes the production of the artwork as “a large number of yes and no

decisions and a yes decision at the end,” he is neither confirming, agreeing nor accepting, and he is certainly

not expressing anything. The final “yes” simply says, following the farmer in the movie Babe: “That’ll do pig;”

“There you are;” “So be it;” and “Voila!”

Richter’s final affirmation—the artist’s “yes”––is not about the placing of an aesthetic object in space, but,

rather, the enactment of what Derrida describes as a process of “espacement” (Derrida 1978, 237) the opening

of, or spacing of space. The final “yes” does not negate all the “nos” that preceded it, on the contrary they are

all held in abeyance, present as the prior work of erasure that marks the space that is affirmed. But this does not

constitute an ultimate affirmation of negation because erasure and negation are not synonymous terms. As brute

negativity, negation produces absence; as speculative dialectics, negation produces presence; erasure produces

neither absence nor presence, but, rather, the presence of absence.

Like deletion on a computer where, prior to defragmentation (a fascistic act), discarded information

remains present as an absence that interrupts, opens up and slows down the closed uninterrupted space that

processors crave, so erasure articulates rather than negates spaces, forms, structures, and articulation is neither

negative nor positive, it is neutral. Indeed, it is the affirmation of neutrality, a “yes” beyond the “yes-no” of

positivism and dialectics respectively. It is for this reason that the aesthetic chiasmus Richter (1992) describes,

the criss-crossing between “yes” and “no,” is in reality a double affirmation––a “yes”––that brings the work

into being. That is to say, the “no” of aesthetic judgement as it is exercised within the creative process is really

a “yes” in that each mark erased, every possibility rejected, is not thereby destroyed but put to one side for

future reference, ready to tempt the artist again. And there is temptation here, not least because so much of what

is rejected is, in truth, extraordinarily attractive to the artist, often to the detriment of the artwork if the all

important “no” cannot be uttered. As such then, the “no” of aesthetic judgement should not be understood in

terms of negation but, rather as the necessary renunciation required to produce a work. Indeed, and this is the

predicament, so much of what the artist wants has to be renounced before the artwork can be produced, and it is

this desire for and attraction to the very things that would damage the work that should remind us that for every

“no” there exists a prior “yes” that needs to be cast aside before it is too late. Notwithstanding his famous


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critique, it was this, the power of renunciation that Adorno (1973) considered to be Stravinsky’s great artistic

strength. “Stravinsky’s imitators remained far behind their model, because they did not possess his power of

renunciation, that perverse joy in self-denial” (Adorno 1973, 153).

Every act of renunciation leaves a space in the work that, to repeat, takes on presence as an absence that

continues to have force both as the trace of aesthetic judgement and creative erring, and as an intensity

associated with the severity necessary to delete that which is so desirable. Referring to Valéry, Derrida

describes this present absence as a “crinkling” of the page. He writes in Margins of Philosophy:

But—I mark(s) the division—by taking a different turn, by observing from an excentric place the logic of Valéry’s aversion, why not ask ourselves about another outside, about the sources set aside, the sources that Valéry could get a glimpse of only on the bias, as in a brief, or rather foreshortened, mirroring, just the time to recognise or reflect himself and immediately to turn away—quickly, decidedly, furtively too, like an about-face to be described according to the gesture of Narcissus. We will analyse this turning away only where it has left marks within Valéry’s textual system, as a regular crinkling of every page. (Derrida 1982, 275)

In truth, the artist’s “nos” are secretly “yeses” because the errancy of the creative process (the false paths,

the wrong turns, the dead ends) is neither false nor wrong, and it is certainly not dead. Indeed, the very

lifeblood of the artwork flows through the detours and diversions that, even though they are erased,

nevertheless remain responsible for making the work become what it becomes.

Niklas Luhmann (2000) observes that “rejection ‘potentializes’ by reproducing the rejected as possibility”

(33), and it is the fact that every “no” is potentially a “yes” which allows possibility to incessantly interrupt the

premature foreclosure of the artwork. But this is more than just an aesthetic version of “versioning,” to stay

with the language of computers and hypertext; it is not a question of simply retaining earlier iterations of the

same work in a virtual archive of variations where the theme remains intact, but of acknowledging that the

artwork always has the potential to be other than it is. In other words, possibility here refers not to the versions

but the archive itself and the (neutral) space between one potential archive and another. Nor is it a question of

going back to all those “nos” in order to re-read them as potential “yeses” so as to endlessly augment and enrich

the artist’s oeuvre through a feverish obsession with every preliminary sketch, every discarded fragment, every

erased inscription, all of which are forced to speak of a lost origin, a beckoning têlos, and the overpowering

desire for absolute knowledge. On the contrary, as Kafka’s Diaries illustrate so eloquently, every “yes” and

subsequent “no,” all of the beginnings and endings that mark out this fragmentary space of the work, are

nothing but detours; not versions but diversions that could never offer a meaningful contextualisation for a

“final” work (the last “yes”). Instead one is witness to a process of infinite re-textualisation where,

Deleuzian-fashion, it is precisely the repetition of the “yes”/“no” infinite that produces difference, not different

versions of the same work (mere “diversity”) (Deleuze 1994, 222). But the same difference that is irreducible to

one work or another.

But, to be clear, while art (perhaps uniquely) allows the emancipation of contingency and the consequent

affirmation of errancy, erring itself is not accorded any positive or negative value. In art, erring is completely

neutral as is the desire for the errancy and the act of erasure that removes its trace, if only temporarily. It is the

affirmation of this neutrality that positions the “yes” of productive aesthetic judgement outside of the “yes-no”

nexus to be found in the twin (and entwined) hegemonies of the knowledge economy and the politico-ethical

community; something that the almost all-pervasive attempt within critical theory to politicise the aesthetic

fights hard against, not necessarily without reason: the neutrality of art is dubious.


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3. The Neutral

Neutrality refuses all affiliation. If, as one might say with Walter Benjamin, friendship does not reduce

distance but, rather, brings that distance to life (Josopovici 1987, 62); then the neutral—friend to none—offers

no such easy access to the spaces between one point and another. In a world of entrenchments, of positions,

camps, beliefs, and conviction, where even the most unfriendly acts still assume and contribute to the

live-liness of an unrealised filiation, neutrality occupies an outside that—neither friendly nor unfriendly—is

easy to eye with suspicion. A-filiation (to coin a term) rather than non-affiliation (which still assumes a

dialectic of resistance) is, perhaps, one way of describing this alterity. Without attraction or revulsion, such

neutrality introduces into the production of an artwork the exigency that at each and every moment the

expanding or contracting possibilities that present themselves are each given full and equal attention regardless

of the consequences for the swift and smooth integration necessary for achievement of a “work.” It is this, the

radical equality of neutrality, which is responsible for errancy, the introduction of a logic or method of erasure

and, as with the fragmentation of a computer hard drive, the slowing down of the work of the work of art.

Maurice Blanchot (1982) identifies this delay at the heart of Kafka’s work, where the very desire for continuity

creates endless discontinuity and eternal transformation.

For if patience, exactitude, and cold mastery are qualities indispensible for not getting lost when nothing subsists that one could hold onto, patience, exactitude, and cold mastery are also faults which, dividing difficulties and stretching them out indefinitely, may well retard the shipwreck, but surely retard deliverance, by ceaselessly transforming the infinite into the indefinite. In the same way it is measure which, in the work, prevents the limitless from ever being achieved. (Maurice Blanchot 1982, 82)

To say “yes” (or at least the temptation to say “yes”) to every possibility before either erasing it with a

subsequent “no,” or, alternatively, allowing it to stand is the movement of a particular delay that separates art so

radically from all of the extra-aesthetic contexts and contextualisations that would so like to speed the artwork

to the goals of their choosing. Emmanuel Levinas (1989) captures something of this in his review of Michel

Leiris’s Biffures when he reminds us of the proximity of biffure (erasure) and bifur (bifurcation).

Bifurcations—since sensations, words and memories continually turn a train of thought from the path it seemed to be taking towards some unexpected direction; erasures—since the univocal meaning of each element is continually corrected and altered. But in these bifurcations and erasures Leiris is less concerned to go down the new paths opened up or to latch onto the corrected meaning than he is to capture thought at that special moment when it turns into something other than itself….The primordial status of the notion of erasure affirms the simultaneity of multiplicity… [this] the ambiguity of erasures forms a space. (Levinas 1989, 145-146)

“Forms a space,” this is the point: the logic of erasure both opens a space and gives it form—to repeat, a

mode of articulation. This articulation is the product of a series of “yeses” and “nos” that are multiplicitous not

only as a continuum of possibilities but also as a simultaneity that pluralises (or potentializes) the artwork at

every moment, with all of the contingency each moment brings. If, as Levi nas claims here, “thought is

originally erasure” (Levinas 1989, 146), this is not only because, as he suggests, always concealed within such

thought is the “presence of one idea in another” (Levinas 1989, 146), but also the fact that the contingency of

what is concealed and what is not at such moments of bifurcation vanishes into each univocal meaning: but the

question remains—why this rather than that?


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4. The Emancipation of Contingency

So, it would seem that the reason for art’s resistance to the teleological logic of instrumentalism in all of its

different forms is not, contrary to the now deeply unfashionable thrust of late modernism, due to an

aestheticism intent upon protecting the pure essence of the work from anything outside of its own “truth,” but,

rather, a product of the contingency that, as Luhmann (2000) expresses it, is emancipated by art.

The art system realizes society in its own realm as an exemplary case. It shows things as they are […] fies a situation in which the future, no longer guaranteed by the past, has become unpredictable. Operative closure, the emancipation of contingency, self-organization, poly-contexturality, the hyper complexity of self-descriptions, or, simpler and less accurately formulated, pluralism, relativism, historicism—all these trends offer no more than different cross sections of the

structural fate of modernity. By suffering its own condition, art shows that’s just how it is. (Luhmann 2000, 309)

But, quite apart from how things are, art’s “suffering” of its own contingency needs to be viewed in a more

affirmative light––the intention here––which, if we continue with Blanchot, begins to suggest that the affirmative

dimension of art might be understood as an affirmation of the unknown, a “yes” to the “don’t know.”

The unknown is neutral, a neuter […] let us propose that in research—where poetry and thought affirm themselves in the space that is proper to them, separable, inseparable—the unknown is at stake; on condition, however, that it be explicitly stated that this research relates to the unknown as unknown [….] In other words, we are supposing a relation in which the unknown would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed—and under what aspect?—precisely in that which keeps it unknown. (Blanchot 1991, 300).

As described here, art becomes a form of research, albeit one completely uncoupled from the

will-to-knowledge. But the crucial question raised by this passage is the following: if neutrality can be affirmed

and, more to the point, if this affirmation is of the order of manifestation, exhibition, and disclosure as Blanchot

suggests, then what form or forms does this affirmation take artistically and, more importantly, how are these

forms arrived at?

First of all, it is clear that the affirmation of the unknown as unknown can only take place within the

known, as a gap, space or erasure; anything else would be wantonly obscure or nonsensical. Thus, the neutral

does not by any means inhabit an exclusive and refined aesthetic metaphysically beyond the familiar forms of

art practice; on the contrary, its real force can be felt within artworks across the board, from the most original to

the most predictable (even clichéd) examples of creative practice. The unknown is not beneath, behind or

secreted within the work, the unknown is the work to the extent that it turned out like this rather than

that—why? It is this, the contingency of aesthetic judgements when confronted by the indefinite, but also the

equalised space of possibility presented by the neutral that introduces the unknown into the known. We know

the work—there it is—but we don’t know how or why the artist came to say the final “yes” to this rather than a

different work. And not only do we know that we don’t know, but we know that we cannot know because the

contingency of each affirmation or renunciation renders the productive process incomprehensible, the artist’s

claims of an immanent necessity notwithstanding. But, to say again, this incomprehensibility is not a

mystification but, rather, the very articulation of the work itself as it emerges out of the logic of erasure that

holds the alterity of the “this rather than that” in place or in the space between one possibility and another. And

it is because erasure is always a contingent aesthetic act that this space between the “yes” and the “no,” what’s

in or out, is always shifting and thus impossible to predict or reduce to the known.

The aesthetic affirmation described here, the affirmation required for a work to emerge, is not, then,


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simply a “yes.” As an inceptual rather than a confirmational or expressive enunciation, such a “yes” is, in

reality, compound: a “yes,” “no,” “don’t know,” and the affirmation of all three elements. The co-presence of

the positive, negative and the neutral (the marked, the unmarked/erased and the contingent space between them)

and the affirmation of this concatenation is what distinguishes art from its contexts, where the dialectics of

“yes-no” reign supreme. In a sense, art goes beyond dialectics, as long as this is understood in the Nietzschean

sense as a going back before (genealogically) and/or beneath (archaeologically) the post-tragic introduction of

the dialectic by Socrates. Indeed, to go further, Heidegger would want to press on beyond the existential

tragedy of the pre-dialectical into an ontological space that, in its inhuman neutrality, eventually brings him

back to art. To be sure, Heidegger describes what he calls this “other beginning” (the beginning beyond the

initiation of dialectical thinking) in terms of negation, but he has a characteristically complex grasp on this term,

one that brings it much closer to the affirmation of the neutral being considered here. What is more, as will

become apparent, the movement of his thought within the “yes,” “no,” and the neutral ultimately affirms all

three in its desire to resist what he considers to be the ontological superficiality of the dialectic.

So, in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Heidegger (1999) gives priority to the “no,” but this

is a long way away from any familiar sense of disapproval or rejection, let alone the more speculative “no” of

dialectical thinking proper. But, interestingly, his defence of the “no” is also accompanied by an implicit

re-evaluation of the “yes,” one that likewise prises it away from the dialectic of approval and disapproval.

How few understand––and how rarely those who understand grasp––“negation”. One immediately sees in it only rejection, putting aside, degrading, and even destroying. Not only are these forms of negation often pretentious, they also most immediately encourage the common idea of “no”. Thus the thought of the possibility that negation could perhaps have a still deeper being than “yes” is left out––especially since one quickly also takes “yes”, in the sense of any kind of approval, as superficially as the “no”. But is approving and rejecting in the domain of representing and of representing “evaluation” the only form of yes and no? Is that domain after all the only and essential domain, or is it rather like correctness, derived from a more originary truth? And in the end is not the “yes and no” an essential possession of being itself––and the “no” even more originarily than the “yes”? (Heidegger 1999, 125).

More originary than the “yes” perhaps, but the Heideggerian “no” is, nonetheless, itself fundamentally

affirmative––a “no” that’s really a “yes”––(like the artist’s). As he continues: “the ‘no’ is the great leap-off by

which the t/here in Da-sein is leaped into: the leap-off that […] ‘affirms’ that from which it leaps off […]”

(Heidegger 1999, 125).

5. The Two Beginnings

Transposing this way of thinking into the domain of aesthetic production rather than (with Heidegger) the

unconcealing of Being resonates well with much of the above. What is most useful is the way in which

Heidegger works with the idea of two beginnings: the “first beginning” and the “other beginning.” Artworks,

like everything else, begin but, unlike everything else, artworks problematise the beginning. So, yes, they begin

but they might not, or if they do, why like this rather than that? But not only does art problematise the

beginning, it also dramatises it. Look! Something from nothing! Look! The marking of an unmarked space! But

the problem (and the drama) for the artist is not just the beginning but the continuation of the artwork. And, in a

sense, the dominant perception of (and attraction to) art revolves around the oft-celebrated struggle with

continuation. But this raises another problem: how to continue without obscuring or, indeed, negating the

beginning; how to keep the work beginning.


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For Heidegger, origination does not simply occur at the beginning of the artwork but throughout its

continuation understood as a perpetual origination––the eternal recurrence of the beginning. This is an idea

Heidegger shares with Walter Benjamin (1985) who describes the origin thus: “the term origin is not intended

to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from

the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it

swallows the material involved in the process of its genesis” (45).

It is within this context––the becoming of aesthetic prduction––that Heidegger’s notion of two beginnings

begins to make sense, one that also helps clarify the intrmingling of the “yes,” “no,” and “don’t know” in art

practice.

Gerhard Richter speaks of a series of “yes” and “no” judgements familiar to any artist, but if we place this

process within the Heideggerian frame proposed here then the “no’s” take on a different significance. The “no”

at issue here is does not negate but, as Heidegger puts it, “repels” the “first beginning” which, once begun,

constitutes the past of the work as a “still-going-along-with” that needs to be interrupted. Put another way, the

“first beginning” of the work, its origin [Ursprung], demands a continuation that is forever in danger of

concealing, what Heidegger would see as, the originary unconcealment of the creative act. Nevertheless, it is

still absolutely essential that this “first beginning” be affirmed otherwise there would be no work at all, even if

this affirmation is articulated as a “leaping-off” that repels or is repelled by the descent of the beginning into its

continuation. Saying “no” to the “first beginning” of the work then is necessary for the work to become a work:

it is the working of the work understood as its becoming. Benjamin (1985) understands this in rhythmic terms,

continuing the above passage: “that which is original is never revealed in the naked and the manifest existence

of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight” (45).

It is precisely that, the “dual insight” required to bring into view the “first” and the “other” beginning, that

characterises Heidegger’s way of thinking and which requires that negation and affirmation are thought

together as the pulse of unconcealment/concealment that represents (for him) the working of the work.

Thought thus, and to reiterate, the negativity of the originary “no” is not conceived in terms of negation

but, rather, as the affirmation of repulsion—a form or erasure that repels rather than destroys: renunciation.

Again to reiterate, placing something under erasure should not be confused with the expression of disapproval

any more than affirmation should be indicative of approval. For Heidegger, the “yes” and “no” have nothing to

do with either, a fact that might usefully be recalled when considering Richter’s remarks. As Heidegger (2006)

explains in his Mindfulness:

Affirming and approving are not the same…. Affirming refers to decisions that are not yet-fulfilled, and have to be created for the first time. Approvals are easy to bear and there is a multitude of what is to be approved. Given their actual futurity, the affirming ones remain necessarily unrecognized and strange even among the likes of themselves…. The approving ones lie because first they must lie to themselves, insofar as their approving is passed off as affirming, passed off as the freeness unto being-free, which is simply what they must evade. Affirming means “saying yes” to the nihilating of the ab-ground; it means taking over a decision. (99-100)

Like the famous song––“Yes, We Have No Bananas”––the co-presence of affirmation and negation is not

dialectically resolved but announced as an affirmation of negation that, in Heidegger’s sense, allows the work

to leap into its own becoming. The question remains however, if the originary “no” of the “first beginning”

leaps away from that which is affirmed and repelled at the same time, then who or what decides on the


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direction of this leap into openness of the “other beginning”? If affirming does refer to “decisions that are not

yet-fulfilled, and have to be created for the first time,” then how are these decisions arrived at, how and why is

one leap preferred above another? Why does Richter, like the rest of us, sometimes say “yes” and sometimes

say “no”? Uncoupled from right and wrong, the aesthetic decisions that keep the artwork working are difficult

to ground. As already suggested, if artworks represent the “emancipation of contingency,” then the choice of

one mark rather than another, as a move within the indefinite detour of errancy, will always be subject to

revision. Richter claims that he ultimately decides, but is the exercise of choice the same thing as making a

decision? Put another way; are the “yeses” and/or “nos” of the work’s becoming, choices or decisions?

Heidegger (1999) is in no doubt: “What is decision at all? Not choice. Choosing always involves only what is

pregiven and can be taken or rejected. Decision here means grounding and creating, disposing in advance and

beyond oneself or giving up and losing” (69).

6. Choice and Decision

Clearly, making an artwork involves a series of choices. While the “unmarked space” might indeed be

unmarked by the artist at the beginning of the work. The first mark and the subsequent marks of the work’s

continuation are arrived at (whether “spontaneously” or after much deliberation) through a series of choices

that inevitably draw upon the available patterns of marking that silently/invisibly inhabit the unmarked as an

insistent possibility. In theory, the work could be anything, but in practice it usually turns out pretty much as

one would expect––which, of course, includes the expectation of the unexpected. To this extent then, the

“yeses” and “nos” of the work’s production can indeed be conceived as the operation of choice, the

criss-crossing of aesthetic judgement within the parameters of the “pregiven.” Decision, on the other hand, as

the word suggests (de-cision), describes a cutting, a cutting away from what is there as the initiation of a task to

create another beginning and another time-space “ahead of yes and no.” “The decision must create that

time-space, the site for the essential moments, where the most serious mindfulness, along with the most joyful

mission, grows into a will to found and build” (Heidegger 1999, 68).

Does decision cut itself free from choice, or does it cut into it, thereby creating another space-time within

or between the “yes” and “no”, or, as Heidegger describes it Kierkegaardian-fashion: the either-or? It is this

possibility that raises the issue of neutrality again or “indifference” to use Heidegger’s (1999) language below:

What is own most to decision can only be determined from within and out of its essential swaying. Decision is decision between either-or. But that already forestalls what has the character of decision. From where [comes] the either-or? Where does this come from, only this or only that? From where [comes] the unavoidability of thus or thus? Is there not a third, indifference? (70)

If the artwork is the product of a “yes” or “no,” where it is the emancipated contingency of art that always

results in aesthetic choices being characterised by what might be described as conviction without knowledge,

then the betweenness of de-cision suggests a way of outstripping the arbitrariness of a conviction-aesthetics,

based upon baseless choice, by rooting the unknowingness of art not in the constantly erased space between the

“yes” and “no”—earlier described as the “rather than”—but, more essentially, in the space erased by the space

of erasure itself, the space “ahead of” the mutual erasure of “yes” and “no.”

The indifference of decision is double; it is indifferent to the “pregiven” choices that are all-too-ready-to-hand,

and it is also in-difference, in a different space-time that decision is, if Heidegger is to be followed, able to

“found and build.” To the extent that the indifference of decision points towards the more essential in-difference


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where the “other beginning” can begin, then it throws off its merely aesthetic garb and acquires ontological

significance as the necessary break not only with the either-or of choice but also with the no less contingent

binarity of the artist and the artwork.

For the artist, the emancipated contingency evident in the production of the artwork makes it the perfect

vehicle for both the articulation and the suffering of the “incomprehensibility” of Being. This results in the

existential predicament of the artist faced with the task of producing an artwork without the requisite

knowledge of just how (or even why) to begin. There is a certain ironic knowingness of the unknowingness of

art that allows the artist to nevertheless affirm a beginning without an originary and founding origin to

“unconceal.” The fact that the artwork began like this rather than that can be explained, no doubt, at the level of

choice (some artists are very good at explaining their intentions) but as the continuation of the work so often

demonstrates, without the decisiveness Heidegger speaks of, this continuation either finds itself incapable of

leaping away from this “first beginning,” or, alternatively, becomes trapped in a proliferation of “first

beginnings” that shatters the unity of the work and its continuity. The former uses the beginning of the work as

an arbitrary arbiter in the “yes/no” choices that are secreted within the reassuring integrity of the final “yes.”

The latter swears no allegiance to the contingency of originary moment, engaging instead in a process of

potentially infinite re-origination that celebrates the incessant “deterritorialization” opened up by the “yeses”

and “nos” as they play across the surface of the work as flagrant indifference and infidelity. To say again: both

affirm the “yes,” “no,” and “don’t know” of the artwork––the first secretly, the second openly, but, from a

Heideggerian perspective, the merely aesthetic or ironic affirmation of indifference is inessential because it is

only ever exercised within the neutral space between the “yes” and “no” rather than, as Heidegger demands,

“ahead of any yes or no.” But what would it mean to “leap ahead of any yes and no”?

When Heidegger speaks of inbetweenness, as he often does, he is speaking not of the space between

affirmation and negation or, as we have seen, between approval and disapproval, but of a space-time that is

situated outside rather than within such binaries. Put another way, for him it is not a question of either “yes” or

“no”, but of a “no” that (in reality) says “yes” to a space-time that has outstripped the oscillatory play of the

dialectician. As such, the affirmative dimension of Heidegger’s thought is not related to the choice of this or

that aspect of the given but, rather, to the prior givenness of the given and the giving of that: incessant

origination.

While it might be true that Heidegger’s famous anti-aesthetic “turn” towards art is largely indifferent to

both the artist and the artwork, the fact remains that the issue for us here is the impact of such thinking on the

task of the artist producing actual artworks. Heidegger, in common with the majority of philosophers, always

speaks as a receiver of art, the issue here is the production of art within the context of his thought. What would

aesthetic de-cision look like? How does ontological errancy differ from ironic/aesthetic errancy for the erring

artist? What exactly is this “other beginning” and can the actual work of the artist realise its inception? In other

words, can “inceptual thinking” be translated into inceptual action and inceptual production?

Perhaps the best place to begin considering this is alongside Heidegger and his particular mode of

reception. As already seen, for him, saying “no” to the “first beginning” as the means by which the leaping-off

into the “other beginning” is affirmed, is the way in which a fascination with the artist and the artwork is

repelled. The leaping-off––from the existential to the ontological––amounts, then, to an essential affirmation of

art. Just as Maurice Blanchot (close to Heidegger here) describes the act of reading a text as a silent “yes,” an

affirmation prior to (or “ahead of”) any critical approval or disapproval, so the act of writing a text, of


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producing an artwork, is itself already an affirmation of art. But what does it mean to affirm art? Indeed, what

is art if not the artist and his/her work? Stripped of personalities and aesthetic objects, art, in Heidegger’s view,

represents a particular “style” of inceptual thinking, one that “enacts” the truth by offering it a particular form

of “shelter.” “Style is the law of enactment of truth in the sense of sheltering in beings. Because art, for example,

is setting-into-work of truth and because in the work the sheltering comes in itself to stand unto itself, therefore

style is visible, although hardly understood––especially in the field of art” (Heidegger 1999, 48).

7. Truth and the Work of Art

For Heidegger art is work, not the artwork but the work of art, one might say the working of the work. Nor

should this work be confused with the labor of the artist whose personal style and private “truths” are secondary

issues of interest only to art historians, biographers, connoisseurs, and “fans” and themselves. No, the work of

art is, in truth, something essentially unaesthetic in nature, indeed, something in truth. But truth is not that

which can simply be known as true. Truth is not known but enacted, is set to work neither as the content of the

artwork nor the intentions of the artist but, rather, as the inception of another space-time––an “other

beginning”––where, as the notion of “shelter” implies, truth is protected and preserved but also concealed. As

Heidegger thinks it, “style” does not refer to the surface variety of aesthetic forms but to the more essential

visibility of the work of sheltering itself (visibility being understood as that which outstrips visuality: the poetic

word, the musical phrase can similarly render the work of truth’s sheltering visible). In this regard, it is not a

question of identifying different aesthetic styles, but of identifying art as that unique style which renders visible

truth’s invisibility alongside those other styles (philosophy, science, and religion) that do not. This clearly owes

a great deal to Hegel’s aesthetics where art represents the phenomenological moment of Spirit’s self-recognition

as appearance but, surface similarities notwithstanding, it is here that one also witnesses the fundamental divide

between Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit and Heidegger’s ontology of Being. The former offers up a teleological

narrative that plots the historical course of misrecognition and unknowing from the viewpoint of an absolute

knowledge that is arrived at through the work of the negative; the latter, on the contrary, presents us with an

ecstatic non-narratable, non-dialectical, and non-teleological encounter with historicity that places truth outside

of knowledge (absolute or not) in a “zone” of knowing unknowingness (unconcealing/concealment) that is

affirmed. Everything in Hegel points towards the end of history, where the work of negation ceases. Everything

in Heidegger points towards the beginning (both “first” and “other”) and the work of affirmation that, as the

motor of origination/re-origination, never ceases.

8. Why Art?

So, to ask the question again, an illegitimate question no doubt given its merely existential perspective:

what impact does or could such thinking have on the nature of art practice and our understanding of its more

essential significance? Perhaps one way of answering this is to suggest that it changes the register of the earlier

question: why this rather than that? At the level of choice and the “yes/no” of the artist, the answer merely

confirms the emancipated contingency of the aesthetic process and the unknown space between this “yes” and

“no,” but at the ontological level the question might be rephrased as: why art rather than philosophy or religion

or politics or science? To this might then be added the subsidiary questions: why be an artist rather than a

philosopher or a priest? Why make artworks rather than invent concepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 5ff) or

preach sermons? And, if we want to follow Heidegger further, we will very quickly have to ask: why “why?”


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rather than “how?” or “what?”? “And yet it is necessary to know that although in the course of that history the

‘why-question’ has taken on the appearance of the deepest and most extreme question, the ‘why-question’ is not

an originary question at all, but rather remains trapped in the domain of explaining beings” (Heidegger 243).

Why art? Prior to committing to this or that musical or literary phrase, this or bodily gesture, and this or

that aesthetic intervention, the artist has already committed to art, the decisive “yes” prior to the contingent

“yes” and “nos” of aesthetic choice. Heidegger is right, once the why-question is posed it becomes immediately

apparent that the “what?” and the “how?” must follow close behind. Knowing why something exists too easily

distracts us from the more essential questions by diverting attention away from ontological errancy towards the

ontic domain of explanation and explication: the “Why?... Because…” encounter known to every parent. As

Jacques Rancière (1991, 13) has argued so eloquently in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, it is precisely the

“stultification”. He associates with the pedagogical process of explication that, in so confidently invading the

space of ignorance, effectively destroys not only unknowingness but, more crucially, the affirmation of the

knowing unknowingness under consideration here. Perhaps the worst parental answer is the best: “Why?”…

“Just because, that’s it, get over it.” The artist is “thrown” into art, the why-question is largely irrelevant and

uninteresting, it has happened, what now? In this regard, the shift from the why? to the what? should not refer

to the shift from “why art?” to “what is art?” (the so-called ontological question that clogs up so many pages of

so many remarkably un-ontological books on aesthetics), but to the shift from “why art?” to “what does it do?”

“how?” These questions do not require explanations but descriptions.

What does art do? And prior to the artist choosing to do this or that, what decides the artist to do art? As

shown, Heidegger does not offer an explanation of art (or of the artist’s commitment) but describes it as the

“setting-into-work-of-truth.” But, to be clear, it is not the work of the artist that sets the truth to work, but the

work of art prior to artist and artwork. Ask an artist why they are artists and they will offer you any number of

explanations, some convincing, some not. Ask an artist what they do and they will most likely describe in great

detail and with considerable precision the nature of their work and how they go about it. The question being

asked here however does not at all fit into this neat duality. “What decided you to become an artist?” does not

require, as a response, the description of an artwork but, rather, a description of a space that must be entered

into, the space-time of art itself. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989, 109), very much under the wing of Heidegger,

describes this space-time as “in-between” and relates it to a notion of “play” that overlaps significantly with the

latter’s grasp of the work of art. Whatever the merits of this terminological shift from “work” to “play” (it

serves Gadamer as a means of critiquing what he sees as “subjectivist” aesthetics) the different manner of

describing the player’s attachment and commitment to the game does offer some insights into how artists

decide to become artists. Although Gadamer sticks to the concept of choice, it is clear in the following that a

distinction can be made between choice as de-cision and choice as choice. He writes in Truth and Method:

It seems to me characteristic of human play that it plays something. That means that the structure of movement to which it submits has a definite quality which the player “chooses.” First, he expressly separates his playing behaviour from his other behaviour by wanting to play. But even within his readiness to play he makes a choice. He chooses this game rather than that. (Gadamer 1989, 107)

Clearly, choosing to play, and choosing which game to play are not the same thing. The first “choice” is

the essential one in that, as de-cision, it both cuts the player away from what Gadamer describes as “his other

behaviour,” while also cutting open a space within the game thus ensuring that the player is held in place within


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the subsequent structure of play. It is not, then, just a question of playing the game but, as Gadamer recognises,

of wanting to play the game, it is this that is de-cisive. But how is this desire to play explained? Like Heidegger,

Gadamer offers no such explanations but, rather, describes the manner in which the game casts a “spell” over

the player.

The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters the players…. The real subject of the game (this is shown in precisely those experiences in which there is only a single player) is not the player but instead the game itself. What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself. (Gadamer 1989, 106)

In order now to import these ideas back into our discussion of the what? and the how? of art, let us just

remind ourselves that play is only significant for Gadamer to the extent that it relates to the ontology of art.

“[w]hen we speak of play in reference to the experience of art, this means neither the orientation nor even the

state of mind of the creator or of those enjoying the work of art, nor the freedom of a subjectivity engaged in

play, but the mode of being of the work of art itself” (Gadamer 1989, 101).

As with the player, the de-cision to become an artist is not really a choice at all; wanting to do art, its

attraction, the fascination it exerts, and the spell it casts describe a situation and encounter that leaves little

room for choice. But how does this enchantment or intoxication come about? What is the fascination of art?

9. Fascination

Perhaps, it is here that we really begin to confront the unknown in art, not at the level of the mark or the

genre or the form or the ever-expanding possibilities of aesthetic choice that occupy the artist within the

contingency of any one situation, but at the fundamental level of art itself—why art? But to say again, this is

not really a why-question but a what-question. It is not a matter of explaining why one might choose art above

anything else but, rather, of describing what it is about art that is so fascinating. Interestingly, although perhaps

symptomatic of the philosophical mind and mode, Heidegger is very good at describing what is so fascinating

about art while, at the same time, not being very good at (or interested in) describing how this fascination

impacts on the fascinated artist and the artwork. In other words, he is very good at describing a space outside of

the existential, ontic, and the aesthetic, one that is opened by and demands for its continuance a particular

“task” of thinking and a particular deployment of language, but he does not devote any time to describing

exactly how this space is “leapt into”; it remains for artists themselves to describe this. What this signifies is

that, while the thinker (whether philosopher or artist) can think outside of the aesthetic, the artist, (as the maker

of work) remains within the aesthetic, albeit a domain now radically transformed by such thinking. It is this

transformation, the importation of ontological “mindfulness” into the existential, ontic and the aesthetic that is

ignored in Heidegger’s account, thus leaving us with a way of interpreting art (an ontological hermeneutics)

rather than of making it. For Heidegger, thinking allows us to re-read art as an opening onto Being; for him the

encounter with the artwork is always a means to that (endless) end. For the artist, no matter how thought-full,

the work never vanishes into the task of thinking but always remains, if not as an end, then as a brute reality

that is transformed by having another space (an “other beginning”) opened-up within it rather than outside it. It

will take an artist such as Blanchot to recognise the manner in which the “thought from the outside” (Foucault

1986) is very much on the inside of the artwork and the subsequent aesthetic experience of the artist. The

unknowingness of art, then, is both outside of it and within it. This will be returned to, but first let us return to

the “what-question”: what is it about art that decides the artists to become an artist? What is so fascinating?


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As Gadamer describes it, while the player chooses which game to play, the de-cision to play is not

something chosen but is, rather, something that is played-out by what Heidegger would call as the very Being

of the game. In this way of thinking, it is the game that plays the player rather than the player who plays the

game, and it is precisely this playfulness of play that casts its “spell” and draws the player into game. In spite of

Heideggers much-used metaphor of the “leap” into the unknown, it is this more processual notion of being

“drawn” into the unknown that characterises his understanding of the task of thinking (and playing), and it is

this, the allure of Being, that helps explain the fascination of art.

Heidegger thinks about art, but like Kant before him, his primary preoccupation is with thinking about

thinking, art being an essential occasion for such thinking. Thinking is here not rooted in a given body of

thought, ready and waiting to be thought again, but is understood as a “calling” that both demands commitment

and, more essentially, a “heeding” to that which withdraws from the largely un-fascinating domain of

knowledge and the known. Just as the player is drawn into the game not as a player but as the played, so

Heidegger’s thinker is not drawn to thought by the knowledge of what has been thought and is, thus, thinkable,

but, rather, drawn into thinking by that which is thought provoking, an event of the unknown rather than the

known.

What must be thought about turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name?... What withdraws from us draws us along by its withdrawal…Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are somewhat like migratory birds … caught in the pull of what withdraws, attracts us by its withdrawal. And once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what draws us, our essential being already bears the stamp of that “pull.” (Heidegger 1968, 9)

But the question remains: what is it that “pulls” the thinker into the event of thinking? To learn to think,

for Heidegger (1968, 4), is to learn to give heed to “what there is to think about”, but what is there to think

about? Needless to say, Heidegger’s own thinking is “pulled” by the (forgotten) question of the Being of beings,

so why does he think about art?

In “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger (1971) thinks about art, that is to say, he is called or pulled

by art into the space of an “other beginning” where the Being of beings begins to be illuminated: he is

fascinated. But the spell cast on him by art has nothing to do with the appreciation of aesthetic objects––he is

not a connoisseur––nor is he interested in the foibles of the suffering or inspired artist played out in the endless

psychodramas staged for the art-lover’s delectation. No, art is the place or space where “truth sets itself to

work,” a statement that should be interpreted carefully. Heidegger is not saying that art is the truth or that art, or

some art (authentic art), is true. Nor is he saying that the work of art is the work of truth: truth does not need art,

it sets itself to work. What he is saying is that the work of truth is disclosed by art, not through the

representation of aesthetic forms, but rather as a way of seeing the “setting to work,” where seeing really means

“heeding” or “hearkening”: a particular form of knowing encapsulated by the word technē.

The word technē denotes … a mode of knowing. To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend what is present, as such. For Greek thought the essence of knowing consists in alētheia, that is, in the revealing of beings … Technē, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings it that it brings forth what is present as such out of concealedness and specifically into the unconcealedness of their appearance. (Heidegger 1971, 59)

So, to begin to answer the question as to what it is about art that so fascinates, clearly there is a “call” here

into a mode of knowing that is exotic to the extent that it represents a break with the hegemonic


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will-to-knowledge which, as Nietzsche had already spotted, increasingly dogs and perverts the thinker’s task.

But why should the unconcealment of Being be any more fascinating that the scientific verification of truth? It

is here that one must recognise and understand the place and function of work within Heidegger’s concept of

truth: truth is not just there, but given (Es gibt) again and again through the infinite becoming of work. It is the

revelation of this work in and by art that draws the thinker in; not as a way of approaching the truth but, rather,

as a way of tracking and tracing its withdrawal. Being drawn to what withdraws is the essence of fascination.

Within the economy of knowledge truth is truth. Within the knowingness of technē “truth, in its essence, is

untruth” (Heidegger 1971, 54). It is this irresolvable duality that demands not the familiar dialectical work that

would seek to overcome contradiction and actualise absolute knowledge, but the work of “dissembling”

(Heidegger 1971, 54) that, as Blanchot describes it, incessantly reveals and re-veils. “The poem is thus the veil

which makes the fire visible, which reveals it precisely by veiling it and concealing it. The poem shows, then; it

discloses, but by concealing, because it detains in the dark that which can only be revealed in the light of

darkness and keeps this mystery dark even in the light which the dark makes the first dawn of all” (Blanchot

1982, 230).

What does knowingness know? It knows of its own unknowingness. Misunderstanding this––described by

Heidegger as the “denial” or “refusal” of truth by truth itself––results in a subsequent misunderstanding of the

latter’s encounter with art, one that is evident in many (mis)interpretations of his notorious discussion of Van

Gogh. Heidegger’s dubious politics notwithstanding, the famous passage in “The Origin of the Work of Art”

suffers a radical distortion when it is taken merely as a proto-Nazi glorification of the blood and soil, not least

because the very work of truth as described here precisely unravels the very certainties that make for the

(admittedly unsavoury) political convictions attributed to Heidegger. This is the key passage: “[t]his equipment

[the shoes] belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this

protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself …. But perhaps it is only in the picture

that we notice all this about the shoes. The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them” (Heidegger

1971, 34).

Certainly Heidegger’s fascination does on occasions result in some ill-judged prose, more deserving of

ridicule than serious political opposition––“the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the

surrounding menace of death” (Heidegger 1971, 34)––but in essence his intention is clearly the affirmation of

art rather than the fascistic glorification of the peasant (with or without the dreaded shoes). It is, in other words,

the knowing unknowingness of art, rather than the unadulterated ignorance of the peasant that brings our

attention to what Heidegger describes as the “strife” of “earth” and “world,” and it is this, the co-presence of

the open and the closed, that is at the heart of the truth-event. To properly understand this it is necessary first of

all to strip “earth” and “world” of their fascistic connotations and grasp their philosophical purpose within the

above passage and Heidegger’s ontological project as a whole. To repeat: the real issue here is the play of

unconcealment and concealment and the withdrawing of truth into itself.

The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated…The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there….The opposition of world and earth is strife. (Heidegger 1971, 48-49)


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If, as Heidegger suggests, we only “notice” this strife in the artwork, this is not because the artist has

arrived at an aesthetic form capable of representing and communicating the work of truth but, rather the

contrary, that art itself withdraws into a solitude that in a sense absents it from the world of human

communication and knowledge exchange. And, paradoxically, the more the work opens up an illuminated space,

the more solitary it becomes: the overpowering presence of an untouchable absence. “The more this thrust

comes into the open, the stronger and more solitary the work becomes…. The more solitary the work, fixed in

the figure, stands on its own and the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does

the thrust come into the Open” (Heidegger 1971, 66).

Judged by the contemporary standards of “knowledge transfer” and the communicative community that

legitimates it (and is in turn legitimated by it) neither the thinker nor the artist knows the work in any sense that

would be socially or academically useful. The former looks on from the outside and describes the fascinating

spectacle of the known folding into the unknown, while the latter speaks from within the essential solitude, not

as one “in the know” but, rather, as one cast aside by the work as it dis-closes its incomprehensible truth-event.

For both the thinker and the artist, in fact both cast aside by the work, the fascination with art can only be an

affirmative experience: fascination cannot negate. But the peculiarity of fascination––its fascinating quality––is

that, although devoid of negativity, it is only “pulled” into or towards art through the necessary affirmation of

the “no” and the “don’t know.” It is this double affirmation that promotes the work to its essential solitude and

its consequent unknowability.

10. Conclusion

The affirmation of the “no” that itself affirms the ground of the “first beginning” as it is repulsed,

represents an affirmation of “world,” the opening of a beginning that originates the work of unconcealment

even as that worldly beginning is leapt away from. To leap away from “world” is to leap away from knowledge

or, to be more accurate, is the incessant repulsion of knowledge. To affirm the “other beginning” is in effect to

say “yes” to the “don’t know,” to make the de-cision that cuts art away from knowledge and thrusts the work

back into its sheltering concealment: “earth.” But it is not simply a question of affirming one or the

other––“world” or “earth”––with “yeses” that bowdlerise or mystify art respectively, nor is there any

suggestion here that both should be affirmed with a great big “yes” that obliterates the irreducibility of “world”

and “earth” as well as the restlessness that keeps the work of truth (and the work of art) working. Anyway,

fascination and choice are contradictory concepts, the fascinated do not choose to be fascinated, they are chosen

and must decide if they wish to succumb not to “world” or “earth” but to the eternal “strife” between them.

Clearly, Heidegger is fascinated but, as a thinker, his task is to describe what it is that fascinates. In

particular, it is the solitude of the work and its break with the human (thanks to the “don’t know”) that draws

him towards art as it withdraws. This break with the human, so typical of Heidegger, also draws him away from

humanism and the existential which, on the level of philosophical thought is its real strength and value.

However, as we have seen, this results in an obliviousness to the actuality of art practice and the experience of

the practitioner that, while refreshing as a necessary antidote to the multitude of ghastly humanistic texts on

“the Artist”, does nevertheless deny us any insight into the existential/aesthetic confrontation with anti-humanism.

So it is not a question of returning to a discredited and somewhat embarrassing humanism obsessed with the

tragedy of the subject, but, rather, of considering just how that subject/artist continues to make work not about

solitude as with Heidegger, but from within the solitude that is art.


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Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. The Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Bloomster. London: Sheed and Ward, 1973. 153.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. ---. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Stock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982. Deleuze, Gilles. Repetition and Difference. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 275. ---. Writing and Difference. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 237. Foucault, Michel. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside.” Foucault/Blanchot. Trans. Brian Massumi. NY: Zone Books,

1986. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. London: Sheed and Ward, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana

UP, 1999. 125. ---. Mindfulness. Trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum, 2006. ---. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Truth. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. NY: Harper Row, 1971. ---. What is Called Thinking? Trans. Jesse Glenn Gray. NY: Harper Row, 1968. Josopovici, Gabriel. The Lessons of Modernism. London: Macmillan, 1987. 62. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Transcendence of Words.” The Levinas Reader. Trans. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 145-146. Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 1991. 13. Richter, Gerhard. “Notes.” Art in Theory: 1900-1990. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 1047.


Wittgenstein on the Experience of Meaning:

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Michel ter Hark

VU University

This paper discusses a neglected theme in Wittgenstein’s writings on meaning and psychology from the early 1930s

until 1949. Throughout this period Wittgenstein deals with aspects of meaning of words and pictures that cannot be

accounted for in dispositional terms but have to be related to experience and perception. Wittgenstein’s reading of

William James, I argue, has sharpened his eye for the many pitfalls in coming to terms with this experiential notion

of meaning. James’s treatment of experiences of meaning succumbs to the temptation to postulate

“meaning-bodies,” bearers of meaning apart from the way and context in which we use the particular words. I argue

that the conflation of what Wittgenstein calls the transitive and intransitive use of words is at the root of postulating

meaning-bodies. I also argue that contemporary treatments of experiences of meaning are similarly vulnerable to

James’s confusion.

Keywords: Wittgenstein, William James, meaning-body, experience of meaning, transitive and intransitive use of

words

1. Introduction

Toward the end of his famous discussion of aspect-seeing (or seeing-as) in the Philosophical

Investigations, Wittgenstein (1953) introduces the notion of “experiencing the meaning” or “the experience of

meaning”. Instead of defining the term, Wittgenstein lists a range of striking phenomena of experiencing the

meaning of words, syllables, sentences, pictures and even mental states. His first example concerns the request

to pronounce the word “till” (sondern) and to mean it as a verb (“to separate”). The second example concerns

the quite familiar fact that the meaning of a word may seem to be slipping away when repeated several times.

Then, in five pages, Wittgenstein (1953) discusses a series of other examples more extensively:

[H]ow lines in a poem may have a different ring when read with feeling; how on a walk in the environs of a city we may have the feeling that the city lies to the right although it actually lies to the left, or that the name of famous people, e.g. “Schubert”, may fit their face and work; synaesthetic-like experiences like being inclined to call Wednesday “fat” and Tuesday “lean”, or to see the black-printed vowel e as yellow (§§261-300).1

In the secondary literature on Wittgenstein surprisingly little has been said about the experience of

meaning. Indeed, often commentators have regarded this topic as a sort of anomaly. Given the fact that in the

first part of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein (1953) has dispelled associations, feelings and

Michel ter Hark, Professor of Philosophy of Language, Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Philosophy, VU University,

Netherlands; main research fields: Philosophy of Language and Mind, and History of Analytical Philosophy. Email: m.r.m.ter. [email protected].

DAVID PUBLISHING

D

WITTGENSTEIN ON THE EXPERIENCE OF MEANING

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related mental phenomena from the realm of meaning and has driven the point home that the meaning of a

word is its use in the language, why does he turn to aspects of “meaning” that seem not to be incorporated in

the rule-guided use of language but are experienced or felt at a single stroke? Indeed, can we speak of “meaning”

here at all?

My aim in this article is to show that the discussion of the feeling of words, or perhaps broader, the feeling

of meaningfulness, is not an anomaly but fits into Wittgenstein’s overall methodology of investigating the use

of language in order not to be trapped by our prejudices about what the meaning of a word ought to be. The

feeling of meaningfulness, whether in a linguistic or perceptual context, tempts us to hypostatize feelings or

experiences and to see them as being added to the “bare” hearing or reading of words or the lines and shapes

we see on a display. On Wittgenstein’s view, such hypostatizing leads to an account of the phenomena which

are entirely disconnected from the language games in which we make use of words expressing various forms of

meaningfulness.

A subsidiary aim of this paper is to show the relevance of the discussion of meaningfulness. I will do by

comparing Wittgenstein with both a historical and a contemporary author on the subject, respectively, William

James and Ray Jackendoff. What Augustine has been to Wittgenstein’s treatment of language, I argue, James is

to his treatment of psychology and consciousness. The way James deals with a variety of phenomena of

meaningfulness seems not so much the product of his particular theory of the mind but more a “grammatical

delusion” (James 1890) which is rooted in the forms of speech we use in this area of our language. Indeed, a

brief discussion of the recent work on meaningfulness by Jackendoff (2012), a prominent cognitive

psychologist, will show his vulnerability to the same traps posed by language as James has been prey to.

2. Wittgenstein and James

Wittgenstein’s earliest references to James occur in manuscripts from the early 1930s. There he mentions

and discusses the feeling aroused by particular words, such as the word “if,” “or,” and “not” as well as the

feeling of familiarity with one’s own language. Wittgenstein will turn again to a discussion of James in his

writings after having finished the first part of the Ph0ilosophical Investigations, in 1946. His discussion then is

much more extensive, culminating in the four volumes Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, from which

PPF has been composed.

The earliest reference to James’s discussion of experiences of meaning occurs in Philosophical Grammar:

A man who reads a sentence in a familiar language experiences the different parts of speech in quite definite ways. (Think of the comparison with meaning-bodies). We quite forget that the written and spoken words for “not”, “table” and “green” are similar to each other. It is only in a foreign language that we see clearly the uniformity of words. (Compare William James on the feelings that correspond to words like “not”, “but” and so on). (Wittgenstein 1958, 58)

This passage clearly echoes James’s rumination about word-feelings in his chapter on the stream of thought.

Thus, James (1890) notes:

When we read ... is it true that there is nothing more in our minds than the words themselves as they pass? What then is the meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read? What makes that meaning different in one phrase from what it is in the other? “Who?” “When?” “Where?” Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogatives nothing more than their differences of sound? And is it not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though so impalpable to direct examination? (vol. 1, 252).

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling


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of blue or a feeling of cold. (vol. 1, 245-246)

Wittgenstein’s reference to James has been read by some commentators as merely involving a rejection of

psychological explanations of meaning (Hilmy 1987). On this view, the above passage would apply as much to

e.g., Odgen, Richards and Russell, who all propounded a psychological explanation of meaning invoking

mental images and sensations, as to James.2 As Goodman (2002) noted, however, Wittgenstein’s stance to

James is different, here and elsewhere. In this passage Wittgenstein clearly sympathises with James’s focus on

the phenomenology of language. Indeed, rather than relegating experiences of meaning to the realm of mere

side-effects irrelevant to a logical view of language Wittgenstein does the very opposite: he reminds us of the

sense of familiarity with our home language. What the passage as a whole conveys is that written language is

deeply familiar―as familiar as the sound of our native language. Even though words do not differ essentially

from each other―and this is what the foreign language case shows―we consume them as items having a

unique physiognomy.

Yet, the passage also implies a critique of James.3 This is evident from Wittgenstein’s use of the term

“meaning-body.” Again, there is a tendency in the literature to associate “meaning-body” with mental items in a

more general sense of the term. Wittgenstein’s use of the term, however, is more nuanced than serving as a

synonym for sensations and images. If one looks carefully at the various places in which Wittgenstein uses the

term it is almost always cases of semantic and perceptual ambiguity that are at issue. For instance, Wittgenstein

develops the metaphor of meaning-bodies in his discussion of the meaning of “is” in the sentences “The rose is

red” and “2 x 2 = 4”. He asks “What does it mean to say that the ‘is’ in ‘The rose is red’ has a different meaning

from the ‘is’ in ‘Twice two is four’?” (Wittgenstein 1953, §558; 1958, 53). Wittgenstein now suggests, that we

are here easily under the spell of the picture that the rule which says that we cannot replace the “is-predicate”

by the “is-identity” in “the rose is red” follows from different meanings; as if meanings are different shapes that

stand in each other’s way and in this way explain how the rule for the use of “is” emerges.

The metaphor of the meaning-body, then, comes into play only in cases which are marked by a special

phenomenology. In the case of the semantic ambiguity of the word “is,” we cannot make the required

grammatical distinctions merely on the basis of the phonology or orthography of “is,” or so it seems. This

readily invites the idea that there has to be something in addition to the phonology or the orthography, which

enables us to make the required distinction between the double usage of “is.” This something is the meaning of

the word which plays its role in fixing the actual use of the word at backstage (in the unconscious mind?).

Now the idea that the physical sound or appearance does not suffice to capture the differences in meaning

is also at work in the examples discussed by James. The difference of the felt meaning of words in one’s native

language, of “if,” “or,” and “but,” in processes of reasoning, is more than their differences in sound, James

contends. Given the state of psychology at the time, James vaguely appeals to contents of consciousness other

than mental images and sensations. As a consequence, his proposal would meet with more sympathy in literary

circles than in the subsequent behaviouristic development of psychology. The cognitive paradigm in

psychology, however, has led to a re-appraisal of James.

In a recent study by Ray Jackendoff (2012), for instance, James’s schema of explanation of word feelings

and feelings of familiarity, is taken over. What varies is the view of the mental processes involved. On

Jackendoff’s cognitive approach, the mental processes involved in meaning are largely unconscious.


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Jackendoff calls his theory the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis. The main tenets of the theory are as

follows. What we ordinarily call a conscious thought (or meaning), actually consists of three components, two

of which are conscious and a third one of which is unconscious. Meanings or thoughts are linked to a spoken

(and/or written) form of language. To use Jackendoff’s example, the form “this” has a meaning attached to “it,”

while the form “thit” does not. What makes a word a word is that it is a pairing between a pronounceable piece

of sound and a meaning (Jackendoff 2012, 43). So the first part of what we call a conscious thought is a chunk

of pronunciation. The second part is the feeling of meaningfulness that often accompanies the pronunciation.

This feeling is absent when we hear a chunk of pronunciation like “thit.” Jackendoff’s main point now is that

the pronunciation plus the feeling of meaningfulness is a sort of handle for thought or meaning; it is not the

meaning itself. On the contrary, the meaning itself stays backstage.

Let me discuss two examples which Jackendoff cites as evidence for his hypothesis, both of which have

their roots in James’s work on the stream of consciousness.

Jackendoff’s first example concerns the tip-of-the-tongue experience. When you have a word or a name on

the tip of your tongue you know exactly what you mean, and you can try out possibilities and reject them. What

happens in such cases, Jackendoff explains, is that you are failing to connect a piece of meaning with a piece of

pronunciation. “the result is that you have the conviction of meaningfulness, but it appears in your experience

with only a vaguely perceivable form, or with a sense of a yawning gap―the absence of a perceivable form”

(Jackendoff 2012, 89). Without a linked pronunciation, all that is left in awareness is the conviction of

meaningfulness.4

A second example comes from his chapter on perception, and more in particular perceptual ambiguity, like

cases of aspect-seeing. Referring to Wittgenstein’s figure of the duck-rabbit Jackendoff distinguishes between

the visual surface and the visual surface plus the interpretation. The figure of the duck-rabbit without any

interpretation is the visual surface. In fact, Jackendoff treats the visual surface as analogous to a chunk of

pronunciation. When we see the visual surface as a duck, however, we see it as linked to one meaning: the

“duck-rabbit as duck”. We can also see it as linked to another meaning. ‘‘The fact that the same visual surface

can be linked to two ways of understanding it shows that the mind is adding something to what the eyes alone

provide” (Jackendoff 2012, 115).

As a linguistic parallel to aspect-seeing, Jackendoff mentions a striking example which originally is in

James (1890, vol. 1. 442, vol. 2. 80). The mock-French expression:

“Pas de lieue Rhone que nous” is made of real French words that make no sense together. When you read it out loud, however, the sentence “pops” into English, “Paddle your own canoe”. Initially the sentence “comes with the ‘aspect’ of meaninglessness, and then suddenly, when it ‘pops’, it becomes linked to a meaning that makes the experience altogether different”. (Jackendoff 2012, 119)

Jackendoff’s scheme of phenomena of perceptual and linguistic ambiguity is strikingly analogous to

James’, despite the differing views of mental processes involved. They both seek to explain the

phenomenological facts of ambiguity by invoking meanings (or thoughts) as separate entities that have to

account for the different perceptual views or the different linguistic experiences. In particular, they seem to be

victims to the following three traps posed by the language in which we describe perceptual and linguistic

ambiguities. In the case of aspect seeing and the parallel case of the mock French sentence, both James and

Jackendoff are tempted to suppose that we really are capable of switching between two meanings, which are


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hidden from view, and which share only an outer facet, respectively a visual surface and a string of written or

spoken words.

Thus conceived, meanings are like puzzle pieces which can be combined in various ways and with

different, outer, results, i.e., forms of word use. This is precisely what Wittgenstein means with a

meaning-body.

Two, to lend credence to the claim that two meanings are involved, both authors are tempted to say that it

is as if the visual surface changes, or that the (same) sentence sounds different; so that it is really a different

picture, a different word.

Three, both authors seem tempted to suppose that when we suddenly see the duck aspect, or suddenly hear

the English sentence, we also must have experienced an aspect before that change occurred. Thus, before the

perceptual change occurs we must have experienced the aspect of the duck, and before the English meaning

pops up we must have experienced the meaninglessness of the mock French sentence. In this way meanings get

proliferated endlessly.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to elaborate Wittgenstein’s discussion of the preceding traps posed by

language. For our purposes, however, it suffices to have established that the schema of explanation by both

James and Jackendoff relies on what Wittgenstein calls an explanation in terms of meaning bodies. I next

proceed to discuss his early critical and therapeutic approach to this kind of explanation in The Blue and Brown

Book (Wittgenstein 1957).

3. Transitive and Intransitive Use of Words

Let me begin by quoting a later passage from Wittgenstein written around 1947, but highly relevant to the

preceding discussion and the temptation to postulate meaning-bodies: “‘if you did not experience the meaning

of the words, then how could you laugh at puns?’―We do laugh at such puns: and to that extent we could say

(for instance) that we experience their meaning” (Wittgenstein 1982, §711).

When we suddenly understand a word pun we have the same experience as when we suddenly notice a

change of aspect or a change of meaning (in the case of word ambiguity). Moreover, the experience is very

striking; we laugh at it. The “how can” in the first sentence of the passage alludes to the temptation at

explaining this difference of experience by invoking meaning-bodies which somehow are the bearers of the

respective experiences and which justify our laughing.

In the second sentence, Wittgenstein follows a familiar strategy by bringing the use of words back home to

their original language game, in this case the game of word puns and the laughing responses. His point here is

that the notion of “experience of meaning” should be seen in this (specialized) context.

What this suggests is that the use of the expression “experience of meaning” is different from the use of

“experience” in other, more paradigmatic cases, such as sense perception. In the paradigmatic (perceptual) case,

it is common to speak of having an experience before one puts the experience into words. Should we apply this

model to the case of word puns and related phenomena, however, we are baffled when asked what this

experience is. Indeed, James’s attempt to “identify” such experiences testifies to this.

I now proceed to discuss his therapeutic approach to the writings of James and per implication of

Jackendoff. The question here is, why are they tempted to postulate meaning-bodies in the first place?

Wittgenstein’s (1957) extensive discussion of the transitive and intransitive use of words in part 2 of The Blue

and Brown Book may throw significant light on this question.


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Wittgenstein begins his discussion of the transitive and intransitive use of words by focusing on the use of

the word “particular,” when we want to convey, e.g., that what we see is familiar to us. The expression “particular,”

he says, is vulnerable to a confusion of the transitive and intransitive use. In the first case, the word “particular”

is used preliminary to a further specification. To the question “In what way particular” an answer can be given

which explains this way in different words. For instance, I may describe the peculiar smell of a cup of coffee by

saying that it has “a smooth mellow brightness with hints of dark chocolate, berries and a touch of citrus.” In

the second case, however, the word “particular” is used without any further specification or comparison.

Wittgenstein also introduces a third term which is related to the preceding distinction of the transitive and

the intransitive use of words. This is what he calls the reflexive use of words (Wittgenstein 1957, 159-161). The

use of words in a reflexive construction is intransitive yet appears to be a special case of a transitive use

(namely, the reflexive constructions appear to be comparing something with itself or describing something by

appealing to the thing itself) (Hausen and ter Hark 2013). The important feature of reflexive constructions is

that the sentences can be, as Wittgenstein says, “straightened out”. What he means by this is that the sentences

seem to involve a comparison or description that loops from an object back to itself. But when the sentences are

“straightened out,” we see that there is no loop. Rather, the sentences involve only an intransitive use; that is,

they involve emphasis, not comparison or description.5 Back to the use of the word “particular.” Consider the

following example:

“Each of these written words has a peculiar character”.

How may this sentence be meant, or used? One can imagine a situation in which William James says this

to himself when he receives a handwritten letter from his brother Henry. In that case he may mean by the

sentence:

(1) “Each of these handwritten words has a particular character that differs from the same words in print.”

The use of “particular” here is clearly transitive. The word “particular” is used preliminary to a further

specification. To the question “In what way particular” an answer is given which explains this way in different

words, by comparing them with the impression of the same words in print and by referring to a specific time.

For the implication of “has” is that the words now make such and such an impression and hence that at other

times they may fail to do so.6

Imagine now James writing the chapter on the stream of consciousness, what would the sentence then

mean? It is crucially important to note that in the discussion about the experience of meaning the various

concepts, e.g., “comes” or “particular way,” are not supposed to distinguish or to describe a particular

experience compared with other simultaneous experiences or with earlier experiences. Indeed, if it were, it

would be contrary to the purposes of the discussion. For if it were, e.g., a reading experience at time t one

referred to, one would thereby concede that this experience need not occur every time one reads the word. But

at the heart of James’s discussion about phenomenal consciousness is that any experience is invested with a

subjective character (James 1890, 472). The interrogatives must be accompanied by feelings and experiences of

meaning for otherwise, James fears, they would be mere sounds. Accordingly, the sentence means:

(2) “Each of these written words has its own particular character”.

But now “particular” is not used in a transitive way. Yet it appears to be used that way, for James maintains

that an act of comparison or recognition is involved, one which matches the word with a meaning-body. Or, in

the case of visual pictures, one which matches a familiar face with a template in the mind; or, in the case of the

tip-of-the-tongue-experience, one which matches the word with a mould in the mind. Wittgenstein (1957)


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talked this: “But no such mould or comparison enters into our experience, there is only this shape, not any other

to compare it with” (166).

What we are dealing with here, therefore, is a reflexive construction which appears to be comparing

something with itself or describing something by appealing to the thing itself.

The predicament James finds himself in is aptly described by Wittgenstein (1957) in the following remark:

“[i]t is as though we could say: ‘this face has a particular expression: namely this’ (pointing to something). But

if I had to point to anything in this place it would have to be the drawing I am looking at” (162).

The point rather is that in our psychological condition we think that we make use of samples (what

Wittgenstein means by “pointing to something”). In mixing the transitive and intransitive use of the word

“particular,” however, we end up in giving what I call, an additive representation of the notion of “particular” in

sentence (2). As this term conveys, an additive representation represents the notion of “particular” as if it is like

any other description of an expression―only “particular”. That is, sentence (2) is as much about a feature of

the written words as sentence (1). The handwriting may be elegant, bad or illegible and besides all this it may

also be particular. But this would require giving an explanation of the word which we have not prepared to give:

we do not mean to say by “particular,” “bad,” or “elegant,” or whatever.

Hence, we are in the predicament that we want to give a further explanation or specification of our

experience but without being prepared to attach a description of something other than the experience. What we

say therefore when we say e.g., “this handwriting looks familiar to me” amounts to no more than “The familiar

look of this handwriting,” thereby pointing at the handwriting, “is this,” pointing again at the handwriting.

Towards the end of his discussion of the transitive and the intransitive use of words, Wittgenstein says that

we are using the object “at the same time as the sample and that which the sample is compared with” (1957,

174). This means: we say the handwriting that it looks familiar to us and, at the same time, explain what we

mean by “familiar” by referring to the handwriting. In the reflexive case of the transitive use, therefore,

perceiving the handwriting is treated simultaneously as a sample of the experience and as an instance of having

the experience.

4. Conclusion

Contrary to what is often supposed, Wittgenstein’s extensive discussions of elusive experiences of

meaning in his later writings are not an anomaly. I have argued that these discussions show that Wittgenstein

engaged in laying bare the traps that language poses when we reflect upon the experience of meaning. As the

recent work of Jackendoff has shown, the experience of meaning is much less a marginal phenomenon

discussed only in philosophy. Wittgenstein’s discussion therefore is very actual. Philosophical misconceptions

still prevail in “empirical” accounts, as the example of Jackendoff has shown. For Wittgenstein the experience

of meaning is internally related to the actual use of a word. Furthermore, the actual use at hand turns out to be a

very complicated or specialized use. In the course of using language words absorb their use, hence only when

one is in command of a certain area of language it makes sense to speak of experiencing language. It is this

specialised use which has gone unnoticed in the older and newer literature on the experiential dimension of the

meaning of language. We could say, one has failed to describe the relevant language game and to position it

properly as regards other language games.


981

Notes

1. My reference is to the revised 4th edition of the Philosophical Investigations by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. What

was formerly called Part II of the book is now “Philosophy of Psychology―a fragment” (PPF). 2 . Odgen and Richards (1923), Russell (1921), and Hilmy (1987) offer an excellent historical reconstruction of

Wittgenstein’s response to the “causal” theories of meaning emerging from the work of Odgen and Russell. According to this causal theory, meaning is explained in terms of the psychological effects that signs have on the mind. Wittgenstein refers to this theory as the ‘magical’ theory of meaning (cf. Hilmy 1987, 108), as well as the “psychologistic” theory (Hilmy 1987, 121).

3. And this critique is missed by Goodman, who fails to discuss the notion of “meaning body” in the quote above. 4. In a footnote Jackendoff acknowledges that his account owes to James’s discussion of trying to recall a forgotten name.

See James (1890, vol. 1, 251). 5. For instance, Wittgenstein says that “that’s that” is a reflexive expression. Although “that’s that” appears to compare a

thing to itself, it can be straightened out as “That’s settled” and in fact is used to emphasize the finality of the situation (Wittgenstein 1957, 161).

6. I implicitly refer here to what Wittgenstein, throughout his writings on the mind as well as mathematics, calls the “temporal” use of a word and the “non-temporal” use. See for instance Wittgenstein’s Lectures Cambridge 1932-1935 (Wittgenstein 1979, 172-174).

Works Cited

Baker, Gordon and Peter Hacker. Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations. Vol. 1. Blackwell: Oxford, 1980. Goodman, Russell. Wittgenstein and William James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Hausen, Nicole, and Michel ter Hark. “Aspect Seeing in Wittgenstein.” The Role and Use of Conceptual Analysis in Psychology.

Ed. Timothy Racine and Kathleen Slaney. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. 87-110. Hilmy, Stephen. The Later Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Jackendoff, Ray. A User’s Guide to Meaning and Thought. Oxford UP, 2012. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vols. 1-2. NY: Dover Publications, 1890. Odgen, Charles Kay, and Richards, I. A. The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul, 1923. Russell, Bertrand. The Analysis of Mind. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Book. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957. ---. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. ---. Philosophical Grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. ---. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953. ---. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. 2 Vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. ---. Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge 1932-1935. Eds. Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979.

Chief Editor:

Geoffrey George Karabin (Neumann University, USA)

Editorial Board Members (alphabetically):

Abraham Olivier (University of Fort Hare, South Africa) Amir Horowitz (Open University, Israel) António Pedro Mesquita (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal) Arto Mutanen (Finnish National Defence University, Finland) Babu Thaliath (Humboldt Univ ersity Berlin, Germany) Charley Ejede Mejame (Michigan Technological University, USA) Christopher Pynes (Western Illinois University, USA) Cullan Joyce (Melbourne College of Divinity University, Australia) David J. Yount (Mesa Community College, USA) Dimitria Electra Gatzia (The University of Akron Wayne College, USA) Dirk-Martin Grube (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) Donald V. Poochigian (Unive rsity of North Dakota, USA) Francesco Fronterotta (Sapienza – Università di Roma, Italy) Geoffrey B. Frasz (College of Southern Nevada, USA) Georgia Warnke (University of California, USA) James Jeffrey Tillman (Wayland Baptist University, USA) Jari Palomäki (Tampere University of Technology, Finland) Jennifer Ang Mei Sze (Singapore Institute of Management University, Singapore) John Koolage (Eastern Michigan University, USA) John Ryan (Edith Cowan University, Australia) Jorge de Almeida Goncalves (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) Kathleen Wilburn (St. Edward’s University, USA) Konstantin G. Korotkov (Saint-Petersburg Federal University of Physical Culture and Sport, Russia) Kurt Röttgers (Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln, Germany) Luís António Umbelino (University of Coimbra, Portugal) Lydia B. Amir (The College of Management Academic Studies, Israel) Mahmoud Masaeli (Saint Paul University, Canada) Makoto Usami (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) Marco Segala (ITEM-CNRS/ENS, France) Marie Santiago (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) Mevlüt Uyanik (Hitit University, Turkey) Michael Alexander Cerullo (University of Cincinnati, USA) Michael David Dahnke (Drexel University, USA) Michael Davis (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA) Michael Schulz (Universität Bonn, Germany) Mischa Beckett (Simmons College, USA) Mohammed S. Wattad (The International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Science, Italy) Nevad Kahteran (University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina) Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, USA) Panos Eliopoulos (National Kapodistriakon University of Athens, Greece) Raffaela Giovagnoli (Pontifical Lateran University, Italy) Raquel Anna Sapunaru (UFVJM, Brazil) Raúl Eduardo Zegarra (Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Perú) Richard A. S. Hall (Fayetteville State University, USA) Ronny Miron (Bar Ilan University, Israel) Salahaddin Khalilov (Azerbaijan University, Azerbaijan) Stephen C. Dilley (St Edward’s University, USA) Susan Gordon (National University, USA) Timothy Alexander David Hyde (Stony Brook University, USA) Tomas Kačerauskas (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania) Veton Latifi (South-East European University, Republic of Macedonia) Wendy Elgersma Helleman (University of Jos, West Africa)

Affirming Art: Heidegger and the Sense of a Beginning 2013

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