The Philosophy of the Organism
IF AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION are what distinguish life from nonlife, then the projects of understanding life and understanding mind are continuous. This deep continuity of life and mind holds no less for philosophy than it does for biology and mind science. As Hans Jonas wrote in the Introduction to his 1966 book, The Phenomenon of Life:
A philosophy of life comprises the philosophy of the organism and the philosophy of mind. This is itself a first proposition of the philosophy of life, in fact its hypothesis, which it must make good in the course of its execution. For the statement of scope expresses no less than the contention that the organic even in its lowest forms prefigures mind, and that mind even on its highest reaches remains part of the organic. (1966, p. 1).
In mind science, the proposition that life prefigures mind and mind belongs to life has been called the strong continuity thesis of life and mind (Godfrey-Smith 1996; Wheeler 1997), or as I prefer to call it, the deep continuity of life and mind. According to this thesis, life and mind share a set of basic organizational properties, and the organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. Mind is life-like and life is mind-like. Andy Clark describes the thesis this way: “the thesis of strong continuity would be true if, for example, the basic concepts needed to understand the organization of life turned out to be self-organization, collective dynamics, circular causal processes, autopoiesis, etc., and if those very same concepts and constructs turned out to be central to a proper scientific understanding of mind” (Clark 2001, p. 118; emphasis in original).
Jonas’s proposition about the philosophy of life, however, expresses a further thought, one that is less well explored by advocates of the deep continuity thesis. This thought is that the continuity of life and mind is not simply organizational, or functional or behavioral, but also phenomenological. In other words, the continuity includes the subjective and experiential aspects of mental life as well as the cognitive aspects. For Jonas, certain basic concepts needed to understand human experience turn out to be applicable to life itself: “The great contradictions which man discovers in himself—freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and mortality—have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life, each precariously balanced between being and not-being, and each already endowed with an internal horizon of ‘transcendence’” (1966, p. ix).
This idea of the deep continuity of life and mind is the theme of this chapter. My aim is to use the theory of autopoiesis to build a bridge between the philosophy of the organism and the philosophy of mind. Where subjectivity and experience lie along this path, and what role phenomenology must play in the philosophy of life, are matters we will need to probe along the way.
My starting point is to examine the theory of autopoiesis in relation to Kant’s classic treatment of organic nature in his Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790 (Kant 1987). Kant gave an original and visionary account of the organism as a self-organizing being, an account close in many ways to the theory of autopoiesis. Kant also thought, however, there were significant restrictions on the kind of scientific explanation we are able to give of organic nature. I intend to show that the theory of autopoiesis can resolve the difficulties he encountered.
Kant believed that we human beings cannot explain organic nature mechanistically but must explain it teleologically, that is, by using the concept of end or purpose. Kant’s model of mechanistic explanation was Newtonian physics, which has no place for teleology, and he thought it absurd to suppose we might one day be able to comprehend organisms in mechanistic terms. Thus in a famous passage he wrote: “For it is quite certain that in terms of merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible. So certain is this that we may boldly state that it is absurd for human beings even to attempt it, or to hope that perhaps some day another Newton might arise who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced” (Kant 1987, pp. 282–283).
Kant’s point was not to deny that the mechanistic explanation of nature can and will advance. Rather, it was that teleology would nonetheless remain indispensable, for the following reasons (Cornell 1986). First, to describe an entity as an organism means to conceive of it as intrinsically teleological, because an organism is a self-organizing being—an organized being that is both cause and effect of itself. Second, this teleological conception cannot be subsumed under the concept of mechanism (efficient causation in a world of inanimate matter), the two being incommensurable in principle. Finally, any extension in the understanding of efficient causes in biology would still always have to be placed within the teleological framework of the organism.
We need to ask how this reasoning fares in relation to biology today. In our time, the issue of mechanistic versus teleological explanation is more complicated. Classical mechanistic explanation has been superseded in physics (quantum theory and relativity theory) by forms of explanation that are neither strictly mechanistic in the Newtonian sense nor teleological. On the other hand, mechanistic explanation has been greatly elaborated in biology, in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, and in molecular biology, and has been transformed by the theory of complex dynamic systems. At the same time, biologists and philosophers have outlined “teleonomic” or functionalist forms of explanation that do not involve any of the traditional Platonic or Aristotelian components of teleology, namely, backward causation (from a future goal-state to the events leading up to it), anthropomorphism (referring to a conscious purpose), and vitalism (appealing to immaterial forces) (Lennox 1992).
Given these advances, one might suppose that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, advanced in 1859 some seventy years after Kant’s Critique of Judgment, did indeed “explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced,” and thus that Darwin was to be the “Newton of the blade of grass.” There is a sense in which this thought is correct, for Darwin’s theory, as originally advanced, is thoroughly Newtonian in character (Cornell 1986). As Weber and Depew (1996) observe, Darwin originally conceived natural selection within a framework derived from classical Newtonian dynamics: “adaptive natural selection is portrayed as a process in which an inertial tendency (Malthusian reproduction) is constrained by external, impinging forces (scarcity), rather than as the working out of an endogenous tendency that Darwin, following Lyell, tends prejudicially to speak of as ‘adaptation as the slow willing of animals’ (Darwin to Joseph Hooker, 11 January 1844 . . . )” (Weber and Depew 1996, p. 35).
Yet a case can be made for the view that Darwin was not the Newton of the grass blade. Kant’s concern was the definitive organization of living beings, but the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection does not provide any account of organization at the level of biological individuals. On the contrary, the theory must presuppose biologically organized individuals that reproduce. Moreover, Darwin’s Newtonian framework, in which design arises from natural selection conceived of as an external force, does not address the endogenous self-organization of the organism. This aspect of development and evolution, rooted in the organism’s autonomy, had to be rediscovered in modern biology, with tools the Darwinian tradition did not provide. For these reasons, the Kantian issues cannot be resolved by appealing to Darwin but must instead be worked out in relation to theories of biological self-organization.
Let me begin by reviewing Kant’s famous “antinomy of teleological judgment” (Kant 1987, §§70–71). Kant presents natural science as relying on two maxims or principles of investigation that apparently conflict but are reconcilable as long as they are understood strictly as principles that regulate or guide our investigation of nature, rather than principles that tell us about the constitution of objects in themselves. According to the first, mechanical principle: “All production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws” (Kant 1987, p. 267). According to the second, teleological principle: “Some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws. (Judging them requires a quite different causal law—viz., that of final causes.)” (p. 267). Mechanical laws involve only the fundamental properties of matter and efficient causality. Thus the solar system is mechanistically explicable because we can derive its existence—the formation and motions of the sun and planets—from physical processes operating according to mechanical law. But other products of nature, notably plants and animals, are “organized beings,” and we cannot explicate the organization they exhibit in their structure and workings solely in terms of mechanical law. In other words, we know no way to derive their organized character from the basic properties of unorganized matter. We are thus forced to explicate organisms teleologically, that is, as ends or purposes.
Kant defines a purpose as “the object of a concept insofar as we regard this concept as the object’s cause” (pp. 64–65). In the case of a purpose, “we think . . . of the object itself (its form, or its existence), as an effect that is possible only through a concept of that effect” (p. 65). Thus any product of design is a purpose: we think of a designed object as an effect that is possible only by virtue of a concept or idea, a design or plan. In other words, the action of the cause is based on the idea of the effect. But this concept of purpose is not limited to products of design or intentionally created artifacts. It applies to any object whose possibility we cannot understand unless we assume that the object was produced by a “causality that operates according to purposes”—that is, that arranges things according to the “representation of a certain rule” (p. 65).
Kant holds that organisms are purposes in this sense. We cannot explain their organized character by mechanical law, and we can understand their possibility only if we assume they are produced according to a teleological causality. We cannot explain organisms mechanistically because their organized forms are contingent, not necessary, with respect to the mechanical laws of inorganic nature. Hence these laws are insufficient to explain organisms, and we require a different sort of teleological principle:
For when we point, for example, to the structure of birds regarding how their bones are hollow, how their wings are positioned to produce motion and their tails to permit steering, and so on, we are saying that all of this is utterly contingent if we go by the mere nexus effectivus in nature and do not yet resort to a special kind of causality, viz., the causality of purposes (the nexus finalis); in other words, we are saying that nature, considered as mere mechanism, could have structured itself differently in a thousand ways without hitting on precisely the unity in terms of a principle of purposes, and so we cannot hope to find a priori the slightest basis for that unity unless we seek it beyond the concept of nature rather than in it. (Kant 1987, p. 236)1
This line of thought involves a parallel—but a limited one, as we will see—between organisms and artifacts. The organization of an artifact, such as a watch, is also contingent with respect to mechanical laws. To explain the formation of a watch we cannot appeal only to basic properties of matter and efficient causality; we also need to invoke design. But unlike the nineteenth-century British natural theologian, William Paley (Paley 1996), who saw in this parallel an argument for viewing organisms as divine artifacts, Kant maintained that organisms are natural products, not products of divine design. Organisms are mechanically inexplicable and must be regarded as purposes, but unlike artifacts they are natural purposes. They are caused not by any external rational agent, but by their own formative powers.
Kant distinguishes between two kinds of purposiveness: “intrinsic purposiveness” and “relative purposiveness” (Kant 1987, §63). Intrinsic purposiveness belongs to an effect considered directly as a purpose (that is, as an effect that is possible only through the idea of that effect), whereas relative purposiveness is the usefulness or benefit an effect has as a means to some end. Kant mentions “rivers [that] carry along all sorts of soil on which plants can grow” (1987, p. 245) and snow in cold lands, which “protects crops from frost” and “makes it easier for people to get together (by means of sleighs)” (p. 247). But he completely rejects the thought that natural products are purposes because they are useful to human beings. In the case of an organism, which is a natural purpose, its purposiveness is not relative or extrinsic but intrinsic: it is based on the organism’s being an organized being, in apparent accordance with a concept or idea, but one that makes the organism an end unto itself.
Kant initially defines a natural purpose in the following way: “a thing exists as a natural purpose if it is both cause and effect of itself (although [of itself] in two different senses)” (1987, p. 249). His example is a tree. A tree reproduces over successive generations, so that each generation is an effect of the preceding one and a cause of the succeeding one. Thus the species tree is both cause and effect of itself. As an individual entity, a tree produces itself through growth and generation. Furthermore, each part of the tree is dependent on the other parts for its preservation; hence each part produces itself in mutual dependence on the others.
Kant expands his account by stating two requirements for a thing to be a natural purpose. First, “the possibility of its parts (as concerns both their existence and their form) must depend on their relation to the whole” (1987, p. 252). If a thing is a purpose, then its idea is the underlying condition for its production, and that idea must determine a priori everything in it, in particular the organization of the parts with respect to the whole. But, Kant notes, if something meets only this requirement, then it is merely an artifact and not a natural purpose. For something to be a natural purpose, a second requirement must be met: “This second requirement is that the parts of the thing combine into the unity of a whole because they are reciprocally cause and effect of their form” (1987, p. 252). He restates these requirements a paragraph later. First, every part exists for the sake of the others and the whole. But this condition is not sufficient because it holds also for artifacts: in a watch, each part is there for the sake of the others. Hence the second requirement: “we must think of each part as an organ that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other) . . . Only if a product meets that condition [as well], and only because of this, will it be both an organized and a self-organizing being, which therefore can be called a natural purpose” (1987, p. 253; emphasis in original).2
This difference between an artifact and a natural purpose is important. In the case of an artifact, each part depends on its relation to the whole because the idea or concept of the whole plays a causal role in its production. This idea or concept resides outside the entity in the mind of an intelligent designer. An organism, however, is a natural product, not an artifact, and the cause of its production resides within it. An organism is self-producing and self-organizing, for each of its parts reciprocally produces the others. It follows that we cannot take the idea or concept of the organism to be a cause of the organism itself, for that would mean taking the organism to be an artifact and not a natural product. Rather, we must take the idea of the organism as the ground of our cognition of it. That is, we must view it as the basis for our ability to cognize it as an organized being and to grasp its structure and workings in a unified way. Thus, when Kant introduces the second condition that in a natural purpose “the parts of a thing combine into the unity of a whole because they are reciprocally cause and effect of their form,” he immediately adds: “For only in this way is it possible that the idea of the whole should conversely (and reciprocally) determine the form and combination of all the parts, not as cause—for then the whole would be a product of art—but as the basis on which someone judging this whole cognizes the systematic unity in the form and combination of all the manifold contained in a given matter” (1987, p. 252).
Kant’s account of organisms as natural purposes and self-organizing beings underlies his position that we cannot explain them mechanistically. We have seen that he maintains that the structure and workings of an organism appear contingent with respect to the mechanical laws of matter. Hence we cannot explain an organism simply in terms of the laws of matter in motion. Rather, we must explain an organism teleologically, regarding it as a purpose. In a purpose, each part exists for the sake of the others, and thus the parts are related to each other reciprocally as end and means. We cannot explain this reciprocal relation as a necessary consequence of matter in motion. But this reason for a teleological account also holds for artifacts: in a watch, each part is there for the sake of the others, and the parts are thus related to each other as end and means. An organism, however, is not simply a purpose but a natural purpose. In this case, not only are the parts there for the sake of each other, but they also produce each other, repair each other, and generally exist by means of one another. We cannot comprehend this reciprocal causality of self-production in terms of our conception of mechanistic efficient causation. Hence our only alternative is to see this causation as if it were expressive of purposive design, but a purposiveness that would have to be intrinsic, not extrinsic or relative.
Thus organisms are mechanistically inexplicable not simply because they are purposes and need to be understood teleologically, but also because as natural purposes—as self-producing and self-organizing beings—they are fundamentally different from machines (1987, p. 253). A machine is a purpose, but one in which the material parts are logically independent of and temporally antecedent to the whole they determine. In an organism, however, the parts are not logically independent of and temporally antecedent to the whole. They are determined by their presence in the whole and have properties they would not have independently of the whole. Whereas a machine can be explained by analyzing it into its parts, to explain an organism we need to grasp it as a unified whole that reciprocally determines the form and combination of every one of its parts (1987, pp. 252–253).
The resemblance between Kant’s conception of self-organization and the current scientific one is striking. As Alicia Juarrero writes: “What we find anticipated in Kant is a rudimentary systems theory, the recognition of a systemic level of organization with emergent properties that cannot be reduced to an understanding of the components alone” (Juarrero-Roqué 1985, p. 111). In particular, Kant’s recognition of the distinctive self-producing character of the organism, in which each part reciprocally produces the others, prefigures the notion of autopoiesis (Weber and Varela 2002).
Yet the Kantian view is that self-organization cannot be understood naturalistically. To understand the unity of the organism we must “seek it beyond the concept of nature rather than in it” (1987, p. 236). Self-organization is ultimately not naturalistically intelligible to us. It involves a reciprocal causality of self-production that proceeds as if in accordance with design, but a design that is immanent in the organism itself and does not reside in the mind of an external designer. “Strictly speaking,” Kant writes, “the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us” (p. 254).
Kant’s position is subtle. Although both mechanism and teleology are indispensable for our investigation of nature, we cannot assume either that nature in itself is purposeful or that teleology is simply an illusory human projection upon a mechanical reality. We need to rely on both mechanistic and teleological thinking, depending on whether we are considering a part on its own in its efficient causality or in its role in the organism as a whole. As Cornell states, “We simply do not know what, if anything, is ‘behind’ life, ‘causing’ its basic purposive quality in some ultimate sense. Because of this epistemological limitation, because the principles of mechanism and teleology finally express only two modes of thought incommensurate but both necessary to conceive and investigate living nature, Kant stated repeatedly that it was ‘indubitably certain’ that no completely mechanistic explanation of life would be forthcoming” (1986, p. 408).
Kant’s distinction between “constitutive” concepts and “regulative” concepts is important here. Roughly speaking, constitutive concepts tell us what something is and thus make up our knowledge, whereas regulative concepts regulate and guide an inquiry. For Kant, the concept of a natural purpose is not constitutive but regulative. It guides our investigation of organic nature and enables us to grasp the structure and workings of organized products of nature or organisms. In other words, the concept of a natural purpose is heuristic, not explanatory. We do not take the idea of the organism or the whole organized being to be the cause of the organism itself (because then the organism would be an artifact, not a natural purpose). Rather, we rely on the idea of the whole as the ground of our ability to grasp the organism in a unified way (1987, p. 252).
Kant states that “the concept of a thing as in itself a natural purpose is not a constitutive concept either of understanding or of reason. But it can still be a regulative concept for reflective judgment, allowing us to use a remote analogy with our own causality in terms of purposes generally, to guide our investigation of organized objects and to meditate regarding their supreme basis” (1987, p. 255). On the basis of this “remote analogy,” we conceive of organisms teleologically, according to the following maxim or principle: “An organized product of nature is one in which everything is a purpose and also reciprocally a means” (1987, p. 255). From this principle Kant derives as a corollary the statement, “In such a product nothing is gratuitous, purposeless, or to be attributed to a blind natural mechanism” (p. 255). This principle and its corollary are also regulative, not constitutive. They tell us that we ought to proceed on such assumptions, given the teleological framework. In this way, “we expand natural science in terms of a different principle, that of final causes, yet without detracting from the principle of mechanism in the causality of nature” (1987, p. 259).
The Kantian problem of teleology is closely related to the problem of the explanatory gap between consciousness and nature. To conceive of something as an organism is to conceive of it as a natural purpose, a self-organizing being. But this conception is inexplicable in naturalistic terms and is based on an analogy to our own human experience of purpose. Kant allows that teleology and mechanism might “in the inner basis of nature itself . . . be linked in one principle” (1987, p. 268), but he believes that human reason is not in a position to comprehend this hidden unity. This position is not unlike that of today’s “New Mysterians,” who believe that although consciousness is an entirely natural phenomenon, the concepts needed for a naturalistic explanation of consciousness lie beyond our human ken (McGinn 1991).
We can now return to the question of how Kant’s account fares in relation to biology today. Kant believed that human reason is unable to understand the causality of self-organization, but the scientific situation has changed dramatically since his day. We now have the beginnings of a science of complex self-organizing systems. The theory of autopoiesis is especially relevant to the Kantian account, for this theory gives a detailed scientific characterization of precisely that feature Kant made central to his conception of the organism, namely, a self-producing organization. Here two kinds of scientific advances have been decisive. The first advance is the detailed mapping of molecular systems of self-production within living cells. We are now able to comprehend many of the ways in which genetic and enzymatic systems within a cell reciprocally produce one other. The second advance is the invention of mathematical concepts and techniques for analyzing self-organization in nonlinear dynamic systems. Neither advance could have been foreseen in Kant’s time—or even Darwin’s.
The implications of these advances for the Kantian account are significant. An autopoietic system satisfies Kant’s definition of a natural purpose, namely, something whose parts reciprocally produce one another and that therefore exists as both cause and effect of itself (Juarrero-Roqué 1985, pp. 118–119; Weber and Varela 2002). In an autopoietic system, the continued existence of the membrane and internal reaction network is possible thanks to their mutual self-production. What is so startling about this self-production, from the standpoint of classical linear mechanics, is that a self-perpetuating whole emerges out of local processes while subsuming those processes so that they no longer have a merely local and independent identity. It is precisely this view of circular causation and nonlinear emergence that was unavailable to Kant.
Does this modern understanding of self-organization pull the rug out from under Kant’s view that self-organization is not a constitutive principle of nature, but only a regulative principle of our judgment? Answering this question requires care. On the one hand, Kant’s statement, “the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us” (1987, p. 254), no longer seems compelling, thanks to our growing understanding of circular causality, nonlinear dynamics, and self-organizing systems. Many scientists now believe there are necessary principles of biological self-organization.3 The advance of science seems to have rolled back the limits of reason as Kant saw them, so that there is no longer any compelling reason to regard self-organization as simply a regulative principle of our judgments about nature rather than also a constitutive principle of nature itself (Juarrero-Roqué 1985).
On the other hand, Kant’s critical, epistemological point—that we are not entitled to draw conclusions about the “inner basis of nature itself” from either mechanistic or teleological explanations—still has a certain force. But this force comes into play at a transcendental level of analysis. At this level, nature as a scientific object can no longer be naïvely taken for granted. Rather, it must be seen in relation to the subjectivities and research practices of the scientific investigators to whom it is disclosed.4
The autopoietic grounding of Kant’s notion of a natural purpose enables us to see our way clear of another major problem that puzzled Kant. Immediately before describing self-organization as foreign to any causality we know, Kant comes close to defining biological life in terms of self-organization. He backs away, however, because he cannot see how to avoid the philosophical dilemma of “hylozoism” (matter is inherently alive) versus dualism (life requires the presence of an immaterial soul):
In considering nature and the ability it displays in organized products, we say far too little if we call this an analogue of art, for in that case we think of an artist (a rational being) apart from nature. Rather, nature organizes itself . . . We might be closer if we call this inscrutable property of nature an analogue of life. But in that case we must either endow matter, as mere matter, with a [kind of] property ([viz., the property of life, as] hylozoism [does]) that conflicts with its nature . . . Or else we must supplement matter with an alien principle (a soul) conjoined to it. But [that also will not work. For] if an organized product is to be a natural product, then we cannot make this soul the artificer that constructed it, since that would remove the product from (corporeal) nature. And yet the only alternative would be to say that this soul uses as its instrument organized matter; but if we presuppose organized matter, we do not make it a whit more intelligible. Strictly speaking, therefore, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us. (1987, p. 254)
Kant sees the futility of appealing to any immaterial principle of vitality outside of nature as a way of understanding the self-organized character of life. The only other option he can envision is hylozoism, the doctrine that all matter is endowed with life. But this doctrine contradicts the very nature of matter, which according to Newtonian physics is lifelessness or inertia (1987, p. 276). Unable to get beyond this dilemma, Kant retreats to the position that self-organization can be only a regulative principle of our judgment, not a constitutive principle of nature.
This dilemma no longer seems compelling. Our conception of matter as essentially equivalent to energy and as having the potential for self-organization at numerous spatiotemporal scales is far from the classical Newtonian worldview. In particular, the physics of thermodynamically open systems combined with the chemistry and biology of self-organizing systems provides another option that is not available to Kant: life is an emergent order of nature that results from certain morphodynamical principles, specifically those of autopoiesis. According to this view, an autopoietic system is no mere analogue of life, but the minimal instance of life and the basis of every living form we know.
I have claimed that the theory of autopoiesis offers a naturalized, biological account of Kant’s notion of a natural purpose. The question we need to consider now is what place teleology has in this autopoietic account.
For Kant, as we have seen, self-organization implies intrinsic purposiveness. A natural purpose is both cause and effect of itself. Every part not only exists for the sake of the other parts, but also reciprocally produces them. The parts produce the whole, but also have their existence by means of the whole. Because of this self-organizing circularity, cause-and-effect relations are also means-end relations. A natural purpose is thus a totality of interrelated means and ends. Unlike an artifact, its purposiveness is not extrinsic (a use to which it can be put by something outside it), but intrinsic, being no other than to exist by organizing itself, by self-organizing.
In contrast, the theory of autopoiesis in its original formulation was explicitly mechanistic and antiteleological. Maturana and Varela identified living systems with autopoietic machines and denied that living systems are teleological: “Living systems, as physical autopoietic machines, are purposeless systems” (Maturana and Varela 1980, p. 86). By “machine” they did not mean an artifact; they meant any entity or system whose operation is determined by its relational organization and the way that organization is structurally realized (1980, pp. 75, 77).5 Autopoietic machines maintain their own organization constant through material change, and thus are homeostatic or homeodynamic systems of a special sort (1980, pp. 78–79). Purposes, aims, or functions are not features of the organization of any machine; they are instead descriptive notions used to characterize a system in relation to some context of use defined by an observer (1980, pp. 85–86).
There thus appears to be a conflict between Kant’s claim that organisms are not machines and are intrinsically purposive, because they produce and organize themselves, and the autopoietic thesis that organisms are physical autopoietic machines and are purposeless systems. One way to deal with this conflict is simply to point out that Kant did not know about the possibility of self-organizing machines and that his conception of a machine is obsolete (see Keller 2000, pp. 106–111). But this point leaves untouched the matter of teleology. If being self-organizing, or more precisely self-producing, is tantamount to being intrinsically purposive, then a self-producing machine would be an intrinsically purposive machine. We are thus faced with two distinct issues—the conceptual or theoretical relation between organisms and machines, and the conceptual or theoretical relation between autopoiesis and teleology.
With regard to the first issue, it will be useful to introduce another line of work in theoretical biology, the work of Robert Rosen (1991, 2000). Like Maturana and Varela, Rosen aims to give a precise account of the organization of life, and although they never mention each other in their writings, there are deep affinities between their theories (Letelier, Marín, and Mpodozis 2003). Unlike Maturana and Varela, however, Rosen presents a rigorous argument for distinguishing between organisms and machines. An intriguing feature of this argument is that it is precisely what Maturana and Varela would call the circular and self-referential organization of the living that distinguishes organisms from mechanisms and machines. The argument is also reminiscent of Kant. The organization of an organism comprises numerous circular causal loops, such that every component is definable only in terms of the total organization to which it belongs, whereas the total organization is definable only by specifying those components.
Rosen argues that because of these self-referential loops or “impredicativities,” organisms, unlike machines, cannot be completely “fractionated” or analytically separated into parts whose properties directly sum to equal the properties of the whole system, and organisms also cannot be adequately modeled by computational or algorithmic processes. In Rosen’s terminology, organisms are “complex,” which means they belong to the class of systems that have nonfractionable properties and Turing-incomputable models. Machines, on the other hand, are “simple,” in the sense that they belong to the class of systems that have only fractionable properties, can be completely modeled by a single dynamical description (have a single “largest model”), and have only computable models.
To understand this line of argument we need to be clear about what Rosen means by “machine” (Rosen 1991, pp. 202–243). He does not mean technological entities, for he explicitly acknowledges the possibility of nonmachine technologies of complexity, for example, biological technologies. As he puts it, “If organism is not machine, then technology need not be machine either” (Rosen 2000, p. 295). Nor does he mean, unlike Maturana and Varela, any physically instantiated relational organization, for complex systems (in his sense) have a relational organization but are not machines. For Rosen, “machines” are a subclass of “mechanisms,” where by “mechanism” he means the class of systems all of whose models are Turing-computable and that can be captured by a single dynamical description. A machine is a mechanism one of whose models is a mathematical machine, that is, a system in which one can distinguish between software (or program) and hardware (physical implementation).
Rosen maintains that there is a fundamental difference between machines so understood and organisms. In a mechanism (and hence a machine) “there can be no closed path of efficient causation” (Rosen 1991, p. 241). By this statement he means that for any function, in the mathematical sense of a mapping, in a relational model of a machine, one eventually needs to go outside the system to answer the question of what brings about or entails that function. In a relational model of an organism, however, every function or mapping is entailed by another function within the model. In an organism, but not in a machine, every efficient cause is produced from within the system. Organisms are thus “closed to efficient causation” and their relational models manifest “maximal entailment,” whereas machines are “impoverished” in their entailment structure. It is crucial to understand that “closed to efficient causation” does not mean or imply that an organism is materially or thermodynamically closed. On the contrary, a physical system cannot be closed to efficient causation unless it is materially and thermodynamically open (Rosen 2000, pp. 5–32). Rosen’s notion of being closed to efficient causation is thus analogous to Maturana and Varela’s notion of organizational closure. In addition, his differentiation between organisms and machines is analogous to Varela’s differentiation between autonomous systems with organizational-operational closure and het-eronomous systems defined by outside control (Varela 1979).
Rosen also argues that a Turing machine cannot simulate closure and maximal entailment in an organism. More precisely, he claims to prove mathematically that a certain class of relational models, called Metabolism-Repair systems or (M, R) systems, in which every function is entailed by another function inside the system, are not Turing-computable. On this basis he argues that any material realization of an (M, R) system, such as a cell, cannot be a mechanism or machine. This result raises the question of what the relation is between Rosen’s (M, R) systems and autopoietic systems. In an important article, Letelier, Marín, and Mpodozis (2003) argue that autopoietic systems are a subset of (M, R) systems: Every autopoietic system is operationally equivalent to an (M, R) system, but not conversely, because a generic (M, R) system lacks the autopoietic property of generating its own boundary and internal topology. As Letelier, Marín, and Mpodozis point out, it follows from this analysis that autopoietic systems are not Turing-computable (they have noncomputable models in addition to computable ones) and that a physical autopoietic system is not a machine (according to this abstract and powerful concept of machines).
If this argument is sound, then Rosen’s work presents an important challenge to the original placement of autopoiesis in the category of cybernetic mechanism. His work also challenges the hypothesis that autopoiesis can be captured by cellular automata models of the sort I discussed in the last chapter. The point here would not be that autopoietic systems have no mechanistic models, but rather that no mechanistic model could represent all the relevant features of these systems, and hence new sorts of models would need to be developed. At the same time, Bourgine and Stewart’s (2004) model of minimal autopoiesis as a random dynamical system (see Chapter 5) can be taken as a challenge to Rosen: what crucial feature of the living organization does this model leave out that Rosen’s (M, R) systems succeed in capturing?
We can now return to the issue of teleology and autopoietic self-organization. In calling autopoietic systems purposeless, Maturana and Varela meant that the notions of purpose, aim, goal, and function are “unnecessary for the definition of the living organization, and . . . belong to a descriptive domain distinct from and independent of the domain in which the living system’s operations are described” (Varela 1979, pp. 63–64). The position they were opposing is that living beings are essentially teleonomic in the sense set forth by Jacques Monod, namely, “objects endowed with a purpose or project, which at the same time they exhibit in their structure and carry out through their performances” (Monod 1971, p. 9, emphasis in original). Against this view that teleonomy “is essential to the very definition of living beings” (ibid.), Maturana and Varela argued as follows:
Purpose or aims . . . are not features of the organization of any machine (allo- or autopoietic); these notions belong to the domain of our discourse about our actions, that is, they belong to the domain of descriptions, and when applied to a machine, or any system independent from us, they reflect our considering the machine or system in some encompassing context. In general, the observer puts the machines either conceptually or concretely to some use, and thus defines a set of circumstances that lead the machine to change, following a certain path of variations in its output. The connection between these outputs, the corresponding inputs, and their relation with the context in which the observer includes them, determine what we call the aim or purpose of the machine; this aim necessarily lies in the domain of the observer that defines the context and establishes the nexuses. Similarly the notion of function arises in the description made by the observer of the components of a machine or system in reference to some encompassing entity, which may be the whole machine or part of it, and whose states constitute the goal that the changes in the components are to bring about. Here again, no matter how direct the causal connections may be between the changes of state of the components and the state in which they originate in the total system, the implications in terms of design alluded to by the notion of function are established by the observer and belong exclusively to his domain of description. Accordingly, since the relations implied in the notion of function are not constitutive of the organization of an autopoietic system, they cannot be used to explain its organization. (Maturana and Varela 1980, pp. 85–86)
This passage shows that the notion of purpose being criticized is a functionalist version of what Kant would call extrinsic or relative purposiveness, the idea that an entity serves an end or purpose that is external to it.6 Maturana and Varela’s main contention was that although this notion of purpose can have communicative value, it has no explanatory value in characterizing a system’s organization. A functional description of a subsystem necessarily includes a larger context to which the function makes reference, namely, that of the whole system. If, on the one hand, one already possesses a complete theory of the organization of the whole system, then the functional description is explanatorily dispensable, although it can still be useful for communicative purposes. On the other hand, the indispensability of a functional description “is symptomatic of the lack of a theory for the organization or structure of the system in which the subsystem, described in functional terms, occurs” (Varela 1979, p. 65).
What bearing does this argument have on the Kantian thought that to exist by being self-organizing is to be intrinsically purposive? Three points are important here. First, the dispensability of extrinsic functional descriptions of a system’s components is logically compatible with the whole system being intrinsically purposive. Extrinsic functions presuppose the larger context of the whole system, but intrinsic purposiveness pertains to the overall organization of the whole system itself. A system is supposed to be intrinsically purposive just in case each of its parts is both a product and producer of the other parts, so that the system is a self-organizing whole. As we have seen, an autopoietic system satisfies this requirement. In an autopoietic system, the mutually productive relations among the component processes define an operationally closed network. This closure means that individual components can be interpreted in both causal and finalistic terms in relation to other components and the whole.
Second, in laying down the conditions for the autopoietic organization, no reference is made to any ends, purposes, goals, or functions of the component processes or the whole system. Thus the theory of autopoiesis does not presuppose or appeal to intrinsic purposiveness in an unanalyzed way but rather explicates this notion naturalistically.
Finally, “intrinsic” in this naturalized account must be taken to mean constitutive and not nonrelational (and hence unanalyzable).7 Intrinsic purposiveness is a constitutive property of an autopoietic system, but it is an emergent property analyzable in terms of the relational autopoietic organization.
Given this line of reasoning, it might be better to call this sort of constitutive purposiveness immanent purposiveness. The thought here is that purposiveness is neither a nonrelational property of something internal to the system (as “intrinsic” can misleadingly suggeset) nor a property determined by something outside the system (by something that transcends the system). Rather, purposiveness is a constitutive property the whole system possesses because of the way the system is organized.
Varela eventually came to believe that this notion of immanent purposiveness is not simply descriptive but explanatory, because it makes visible a dynamic pattern of activity proper to life that would otherwise be missed. He calls this pattern the twofold pattern of identity and sense-making (Varela 1991, 1997a). Although for many years he had rejected the idea that autopoiesis involves anything teleological, in one of his last essays he revised his view. This essay, written with Andreas Weber, concerns the relations among autopoiesis, Kant’s conception of a natural purpose, and Jonas’s philosophy of the organism (Weber and Varela 2002). Weber and Varela argue that autopoiesis entails immanent purposiveness in two complementary modes. The first mode of purposiveness is identity: autopoiesis entails the production and maintenance of a dynamic identity in the face of material change. The second mode of purposiveness is sense-making: an autopoietic system always has to make sense of the world so as to remain viable. Sense-making changes the physicochemical world into an environment of significance and valence, creating an Umwelt for the system. Sense-making, Varela maintains, is none other than intentionality in its minimal and original biological form (Thompson 2004; Varela 1997a).8
Varela (1997a) links identity and sense-making in the following way:
1. An organism is fundamentally a self-affirming, identity-producing process based on autopoiesis.
2. A self-affirming identity establishes logically and operationally the reference point or perspective for sense-making and a domain of interactions.
These two propositions are meant to be complementary; they are supposed to describe two sides of one emergent process (see Figure 3.3).
In a recent and important article on autopoiesis, Ezequiel Di Paolo (2005) challenges certain aspects of this framework. He argues convincingly that although Maturana and Varela’s original definition of autopoiesis is sufficient for the intrinsic teleology of self-production, it is not sufficient for the projective teleology of sense-making (for related considerations see also Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno 2004). Minimal autopoiesis entails only the general case of conservation of identity through internal material turnover and external perturbations to the system, and not the special case of active monitoring and regulation of the autopoietic network by internal homeostatic or homeodynamic mechanisms. It is this special case that sense-making requires. Sense-making is normative, but the only norm that autopoiesis can provide is the all-or-nothing norm of self-continuance, not the graded norm implied by an organism actively seeking to improve its conditions of self-production (as when a bacterium swims up a sucrose gradient).
This point recalls Merleau-Ponty’s idea that vital structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms, whereas physical structures are comprehensible in relation to laws: “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,” and each organism “modifies its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity” (1963, pp. 148, 154). Unlike Maturana (1975, 1980a), who refuses to countenance such normative language and insists that autopoiesis is simply the conservation of organization, Varela implicitly endorses the normative conception when he describes sense-making as arising from the constant and necessary need to supplement the autopoietic process with what it lacks to keep on going (Varela 1991, 1997a). Di Paolo agrees that a normative conception is needed; otherwise there is no way to account for such biological phenomena as stress, illness, fatigue, and health, as well as plasticity and adaptation more generally. But he makes the valid and important point that the original and canonical formulation of autopoiesis is not sufficient to ground this normative conception. Rather, a distinct capacity for “adaptivity” needs to be added to the minimal autopoietic organization so that the system can actively regulate itself with respect to its conditions of viability and thereby modify its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity.9 In sum, although autopoiesis is necessary for sense-making, it is not sufficient, but autopoiesis and adaptivity are jointly necessary and sufficient.
This issue about normativity is closely related to the issue of whether autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient for life, or merely necessary. As we saw at the end of the last chapter, Bitbol and Luisi (2005), and Bourgine and Stewart (2004), argue that living systems are cognitive systems, but autopoiesis does not entail cognition because a minimal autopoietic system is not a cognitive system. A minimal autopoietic system lacks an internal metabolic network that makes possible flexible and adaptive responses to the environment. Such a system is robust—it conserves its identity through material change—but not flexible or adaptive because it has no way to assimilate and accommodate to the environment. Similarly, Di Paolo argues that sense-making requires adaptivity, but minimal autopoiesis is not sufficient for adaptivity and hence is insufficient for sense-making. Adaptivity is a special way of being tolerant to challenges by actively monitoring perturbations and compensating for them in relation to the autopoietic identity taken as an internal norm. Adaptivity needs to be established on the basis of autopoiesis; otherwise sense-making is not original to the system but merely attributed from outside. But minimal autopoiesis is not sufficient for adaptivity and sense-making.
The upshot of this discussion is that living beings embody an immanent purposiveness and this purposiveness manifests itself in the two complementary modes of autopoiesis (the intrinsic teleology of self-production) and sense-making (the projective teleology of adaptivity and cognition). Minimal autopoiesis is necessary but not sufficient for sense-making (or cognition), but an enlarged conception of autopoiesis that includes adaptivity is necessary and sufficient.
We have now come a long way toward setting forth the basis for the deep continuity of life and mind. But yet another important step needs to be taken: we need to address the phenomenological side of teleology, namely, purposiveness as a feature of lived experience. Unless we take this step, we will not have confronted a core part of the Kantian problem of teleology, which is essentially a version of the explanatory gap between mind and nature. As a result of phenomenological philosophy after Kant, particularly the writings of Hans Jonas, we now have a philosophical account that can bridge the gap between autopoietic biology and phenomenology. Although Jonas’s writings predate the theory of autopoiesis, he nevertheless advances a conception of the organism that philosophically complements and phenomenologically enriches this theory. Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.
Living beings affirm their own identities by differentiating themselves from their surroundings and thus demand to be seen from an autonomy perspective. Autopoiesis is basic autonomy in its minimal cellular form: a living cell stands out from a chemical background as a closed network of self-producing processes that actively regulates its encounters with its environment. What Kant recognized as a distinguishing characteristic of organic beings—that they are unities rather than mere aggregates—finds its minimal expression in a living cell. A cell, not merely a persisting material aggregate, is a self-sustaining unity, a unity that dynamically produces and maintains its own identity in the face of what is other. Jonas has this distinctive mark of life in mind when he writes: “The introduction of the term ‘self,’ unavoidable in any description of the most elementary instance of life, indicates the emergence, with life as such, of internal identity—and so, as one with that emergence, its self-isolation too from all the rest of reality” (1966, pp. 82–83).
Yet self-isolation cannot mean outright independence from the world. Nor can the emergence of internal identity with life as such mean that identity is a given. The organism is in and of the world, and its identity has to be enacted in the very process of living, which is to say in the assimilation of and accommodation to the world. Autonomy, far from being exempt from the causes and conditions of the world, is an achievement dependent on those very causes and conditions. In Jonas’s evocative phrase, the predicament of the organism is one of needful freedom:
In this process of self-sustained being, the relation of the organism to its material substance is of a double nature: the materials are essential to it specifically, accidental individually; it coincides with their actual collection at the instant, but is not bound to any one collection in the succession of instants, “riding” their change like the crest of a wave and bound only to their form of collection which endures as its own feat. Dependent on their availability as materials, it is independent of their sameness as these; its own, functional identity, passingly incorporating theirs, is of a different order. In a word, the organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter. (1966, p. 80)
A dialectical relation, as we have seen, is one whose terms evolve as a result of their mutual interdependence and thereby come to constitute a new unity. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, in their book The Dialectical Biologist, describe dialectical relations in the following way: “These are the properties of things we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, p. 3). The relationship between organism and environment is dialectical in this sense. The organism cannot exist without the environment, it acquires its properties from its relation to the environment, and both it and the environment evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration.
The organism’s needful freedom is one aspect of this relation. An organism is a material being, and its reality at any given moment coincides completely with its material constitution. Yet its identity cannot be based on the constancy of matter because its material composition is constantly renewed: “Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body are replaced. This nonstop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life” (Margulis and Sagan 1995, p. 23). Only at the level of form or pattern can we find constancy in the flux.
Jonas proposes that the sheer fact of metabolism brings with it a dialectical relation of freedom and necessity peculiar to living beings. Following in Kant’s footsteps, Jonas takes the organism’s self-organizing being as his starting point, but by asserting that freedom is coeval and coextensive with life itself, he takes a bold step beyond his illustrious German predecessor. For Kant, although organisms are natural purposes because they are self-organizing beings, they are not free inasmuch as they self-organize according to a predetermined pattern (inscrutable to us). Therefore, we human beings, considered as products of nature, are not free; only as rational and moral agents who transcend nature are we free. Freedom belongs to the sphere of practical reason in which reason must presuppose its own freedom in order for morality to be possible. We belong to this sphere not by virtue of our organic being but by virtue of our rational being, which transcends nature. Jonas, however, rejects this dualism:
One expects to encounter the term [“freedom”] in the areas of mind and will, and not before: but if mind is prefigured in the organic from the beginning, then freedom is. And indeed our contention is that even metabolism, the basic level of all organic existence, exhibits it: that it is itself the first form of freedom. These must sound strange words to most readers, and I do not expect it otherwise. For what could be further from freedom, further from will and choice which are required for it by any normal understanding of the word, than the blind automatism of the chemistry carried on in the depths of our bodies? Yet it will be the burden of one part of our discourse to show that it is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe—a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms. Obviously, all consciously “mental” connotations must at first be kept away from the concept when used for so comprehensive a principle: “Freedom” must denote an objectively discernible mode of being, i.e., a manner of executing existence, distinctive of the organic per se and thus shared by all members but by no nonmembers of the class: an ontologically descriptive term which can apply to mere physical evidence at first. Yet, even as such it must not be unrelated to the meaning it has in the human sphere whence it is borrowed, else its extended use would be frivolous. (1966, p. 3)
It is the individuality or selfhood of the organism that links freedom as an “objectively discernible mode of being” in the living world and freedom in the sense of human liberty. Precisely as Maturana and Varela take the term autonomy from the human realm to describe the self-generating and self-maintaining organization of living systems, so Jonas takes the term freedom to describe “a certain independence of form with respect to its own matter” (1966, p. 81), achieved in and through metabolism. A lifeless thing does not metabolize; hence “its duration is mere remaining, not reaffirmation” (1966, p. 81). Without metabolism, there can be no “lifeline” (Rose 1997), no developmental continuity of the individual through material change. Every organism enacts a lifeline and thus is marked by a kind of freedom in relation to the materiality of the world. An organism’s identity is not bound to its material constitution, for this constitution is constantly renewed; its identity is accomplished dynamically at a formal level. Yet with this freedom comes a correlative necessity: the organism has to change; stasis is impossible. The organism must eat and excrete; otherwise it dies. Without incessant metabolic exchange with the world there can be no emancipation of dynamic selfhood from mere material persistence. The organism’s condition is thus one of needful freedom: “This is the antinomy of freedom at the roots of life and in its most elementary form, that of metabolism” (1966, p. 84).
In the needful freedom of metabolism, according to Jonas, we find the immanent purposiveness of life. Metabolism is the constant regeneration of an island of form amidst a sea of matter and energy. Metabolism establishes a self with an internal identity marked off from the outside world and whose being is its own doing. Metabolism operates according to internal norms that determine whether otherwise neutral events are good or bad for the continuation of the organism. In these ways, metabolism is immanently teleological. An organism must subordinate every change it undergoes to the maintenance of its identity and regulate itself and its interactions according to the internal norms of its activity. Life is thus a self-affirming process that brings forth or enacts its own identity and makes sense of the world from the perspective of that identity. The organism’s “concern,” its “natural purpose,” is to keep on going, to continue living, to affirm and reaffirm itself in the face of imminent not-being. Incessant material turnover and exchange with the environment is both a reason for this concern and the only way to meet it. Such is the immanent teleology of life: “Organic individuality is achieved in the face of otherness, as its own ever challenged goal, and is thus teleological” (Jonas 1968, p. 243).
The theory of autopoiesis can be called upon to complement this account. According to this theory, immanent purposiveness, the organism’s “concern,” is not any extrinsic and heteronomous purpose or adaptive function, as in neo-Darwinism, nor any special vital force or entelechy, as in vitalism. Rather, as we have seen, it is the twofold purposiveness of identity (self-production) and sense-making (adaptivity and cognition), based on autopoiesis.
This twofold purposiveness turns an indifferent physicochemical world into an environment of biological significance: “The environment (Umwelt) emerges from the world through the actualization or the being of the organism—[granted that] an organism can exist only if it succeeds in finding in the world an adequate environment” (Merleau-Ponty 1963, p. 13, quoting Goldstein).
In establishing a pole of internal identity in relation to the environment, the autopoietic process brings forth, in the same stroke, what counts as other, the organism’s world. To exist as an individual means not simply to be numerically distinct from other things but to be a self-pole in a dynamic relationship with alterity, with what is other, with the world. This kind of relationship is not possible for nonautonomous entities. Without organizational and operational closure—without, in other words, any circular and self-referential process whose primary effect is its own production—there is no identity-producing mechanism. Hence there is no dynamic co-emergence of an individual and environment.
An environment, in von Uexküll’s (1957) sense of an Umwelt, has meaning and value (see Merleau-Ponty, 2003, pp. 167–178). An organism’s environment is not equivalent to the world seen simply through the lenses of physics and chemistry. Physical and chemical phenomena, in and of themselves, have no particular significance or meaning; they are not “for” anyone.10 Living beings shape the world into meaningful domains of interaction and thereby bring forth their own environments of significance and valence (see Figure 3.3).
From our perspective as observers, we can constantly switch back and forth between the physics and chemistry of the world and the environments of living beings. We can manipulate physical and chemical parameters, and then describe the significance these manipulations have for the organism. For example, if we wish to analyze a bacterium swimming in a sucrose gradient, we can point to the local effects of sucrose on membrane permeability, the viscosity of the medium, the hydromechanics of flagellar beat, and so forth. We point to these particular features of the physicochemical world, however, only because the bacterium as an autopoietic unity singles them out as relevant to its identity; their biological meaning depends on the bacterium. If we ignore the perspective of the bacterium as an autopoietic individual, then all correlations between sucrose gradients and hydromechanics become mere chemical regularities devoid of any biological significance (Varela 1991).
Varela (1991, 1997a) describes this difference between the organism’s environment and the physicochemical world as one of a “surplus of significance.” There is no food significance in sucrose except when bacteria migrate up-gradient and metabolize sucrose molecules, thereby enhancing their autopoiesis. The food significance of sucrose is certainly not unrelated to the physics and chemistry of the situation; it depends on sucrose being able to form a gradient, traverse a cell membrane, and so on. But physics and chemistry alone do not suffice to reveal this significance. For that the perspective of the autopoietic cell is needed. For this reason, Varela states that the structural coupling of organism and environment always involves a “surplus of significance” provided by the organism. Whatever the organism encounters it must evaluate from the vantage point established by its self-affirming identity. At its simplest, this evaluation takes the form of the dual valence of attractive or repulsive and the correlative behaviors of approach or escape. In this way, sense-making “lays a new grid over the world: a ubiquitous scale of value” (Weber and Varela 2002, p. 118).
Jonas traces the immanent purposiveness of life back to what he calls the self-transcendence of the organism: “By the ‘transcendence’ of life we mean its entertaining a horizon, or horizons, beyond its point-identity” (1966, p. 85). Identity or self-production can be achieved only “by way of a continuous moving beyond the given condition” (1968, p. 243). If the organism must change its matter in order to maintain its identity, then the organism must aim beyond itself, beyond its present condition or point-identity in the here and now.
In his essay “Biological Foundations of Individuality,” Jonas (1968) links these ideas to Spinoza. The constant regenerative activity of metabolism endows life with a minimal “concern” to carry on being. Spinoza called this concern conatus, the effort and power of life to preserve itself, to stay in existence. “But Spinoza,” Jonas writes, “with the knowledge of his time, did not realize that the conatus to persevere in being can only operate as a movement that goes constantly beyond the given state of things” (1968, p. 243). We can add that Jonas, with the knowledge of his time, did not realize that this movement is a natural consequence of autopoiesis and sense-making. Metabolism is not only the simplest form of this movement of going beyond the given state of things, but also the biochemical realization or instantiation of a crucial portion of the autopoietic organization. That organization must be homeodynamically maintained, and it can be maintained only through the incessant material flux of metabolism. In this way, the operational closure of autopoiesis necessitates that the organism be a thermodynamically open system. This dual condition of closure and openness is yet another facet of the organism’s needful freedom. An organism is never bound to its material composition at any given instant, but by the same token it has to change because stasis means death.
This necessity propels the organism both forward and outward. An organism must project beyond itself, opening into the temporal horizon of its own life cycle or lifeline and the spatial horizon of the outer world. In this way, autopoiesis and sense-making enact or bring forth biological time and space: “The internal direction toward the next impending phase of a being that has to continue itself constitutes biological time; the external direction toward the co-present not-itself constitutes biological space. As the here expands into the there, so the now expands into the future” (Jonas 1966, p. 86).
The horizons of biological space and time have been greatly expanded over the course of evolution, particularly in metazoan organisms with nervous systems. Later in this book I will discuss phenomenological analyses of time-consciousness, as well as the relation between time and affect. Jonas finds an adumbration of this relation already at the cellular level of metabolism:
self-concern, actuated by want, throws open as well a horizon of time that embraces, not outer presence, but inner imminence: the imminence of that future into which organic continuity is each moment about to extend by the satisfaction of that moment’s want. Thus life is facing forward as well as outward and extends “beyond” its own immediacy in both directions at once. In fact, it faces outward only because, by the necessity of its freedom, it faces forward: so that spatial presence is lighted up as it were by temporal imminence and both merge into past fulfillment (or its negative, disappointment). (1966, p. 85)
Metabolism propels life outward and forward, beyond its present condition in space and time. Life must be oriented in this way because its primary condition is one of concern and want, a condition that in animal life manifests itself as appetition or desire. Concern, want, need, appetition, desire—these are essentially affective and protentional or forward-looking. The organism opens outward into space because its metabolism propels it forward in time, and this forward trajectory is fueled by want, concern, and need. As Jonas argues (1966, p. 86), if concern is the organism’s primary condition, then what phenomenologists call the protention of the immediate future has a certain primacy over the retention of the just-past in the temporality of life.
Later in this book I examine phenomenological analyses of time-consciousness that stress its affective receptivity and protentional openness to the future. Jonas’s relevance for these analyses lies in his observation that the forward trajectory of the organism at the cellular level of metabolism is the vital source of the protentional openness of time-consciousness.
This forward trajectory is another expression of life’s immanent purposiveness. Whereas teleology for Kant was only a regulative principle for our judgments about organized nature, Jonas identifies purposiveness with “a dynamic character of a certain mode of existence, coincident with the freedom and identity of form in relation to matter” (1966, p. 86). This mode of existence is equivalent to what Merleau-Ponty calls vital structures. Vital structures modify their milieus according to the internal norms of their activities. For Jonas, such modification is an expression of the dynamic character of this type of structure, a dynamic character he calls transcendence. Here Jonas draws on his mentor Heidegger’s concept of transcendence as the always-already-surpassing or being-projected-beyond-oneself in the world that is proper to human existence (Dasein). Heidegger held that transcendence in this existential sense is presupposed by (and thus more fundamental than) the phenomenonological notion of intentionality as mental directedness (Heidegger 1982, pp. 161–162). Jonas, in a radical move, takes this insight of existential phenomenology down to the very roots of mind in life and the incessant self-transcendence of metabolism.11 This move brings us back to the idea, announced at the beginning of this chapter, of the deep continuity of mind and life.
The usual way to express this idea is that the organizational properties of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life (Godfrey-Smith 1996; Wheeler 1997). Jonas, as we have seen, goes further. He uses phenomenological philosophy to argue that certain existential structures of human life are an enriched version of those constitutive of all life. Varela also has in mind such existential continuity when he reformulates Maturana’s (1970) proposition, “living is a process of cognition,” as the proposition, “living is sense-making” (Varela 1991, 1997a; Weber and Varela 2002).
For an example of what Varela means by sense-making we can revisit the now familiar example of motile bacteria swimming uphill in a food gradient of sugar. The cells tumble about until they hit upon an orientation that increases their exposure to sugar, at which point they swim forward, up-gradient, toward the zone of greatest sugar concentration. This behavior occurs because the bacteria are able to sense chemically the concentration of sugar in their local environment through molecular receptors in their membranes. They are able to move forward by rotating their flagella in coordination like a propeller. These bacteria are, of course, autopoietic. They also embody a dynamic sensorimotor loop: the way they move (tumbling or swimming forward) depends on what they sense, and what they sense depends on how they move. This sensorimotor loop both expresses and is subordinated to the system’s autonomy, to the maintenance of its autopoiesis. Consequently, every sensorimotor interaction and every discriminable feature of the environment embodies or reflects the bacterial perspective.
To repeat a point made earlier in this book (see Chapter 4), although sucrose is a real and present condition of the physicochemical environment, its status as food is not. That sucrose is a nutrient is not intrinsic to the status of the sucrose molecule; it is, rather, a relational feature, linked to the bacterium’s metabolism. Sucrose has significance or value as food, but only in the milieu that the organism itself brings into existence. Varela, as we have seen, summarizes this idea by saying that thanks to the organism’s autonomy, its environment or niche has a “surplus of significance” compared with the physicochemical world.12 Living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth significance and value. In this way, the environment becomes a place of valence, of attraction and repulsion, approach or escape.
We can elaborate Varela’s proposition, “living is sense-making,” as follows.
1. Life = autopoiesis and cognition. Any living system is both an autopoietic and a cognitive system. (Henceforth, I will use “autopoiesis” widely to include cognition and adaptivity.)
2. Autopoiesis entails the emergence of a bodily self. A physical autopoietic system, by virtue of its operational closure (autonomy), produces and realizes an individual or self in the form of a living body, an organism.
3. Emergence of a self entails emergence of a world. The emergence of a self is also by necessity the co-emergence of a domain of interactions proper to that self, an environment or Umwelt.
4. Emergence of a self and world = sense-making. The organism’s environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.
5. Sense-making = enaction. Sense-making is viable conduct. Such conduct is oriented toward and subject to the environment’s significance and valence. Significance and valence do not preexist “out there,” but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted by living beings. Living entails sense-making, which equals enaction.
At this point one might object that the propositions “living is a process of cognition” and “living is sense-making” conflate cognition with adaptation. Margaret Boden (2000) makes this charge. She thinks it would be better to use the term cognition more strictly to avoid the implication that autopoiesis necessarily involves cognition.
To decide this matter, we need to attend to what we mean in using the words “adaptation” and “cognition.” Adaptation is a condition, but cognition is an activity. For neo-Darwinians, evolution involves the optimization of adaptation through natural selection. From an autopoietic perspective, however, adaptation is an invariant background condition of all life (Maturana and Varela 1987, pp. 94–117), whereas cognition, in the present context, means the activity of sense-making. Cognition is behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy. We have seen that sense-making requires more than minimal autopoiesis; it requires autopoiesis enhanced with a capacity for adaptivity or assimilation and accommodation. Adaptivity in this context means flexibility, the capacity to change in relation to changing conditions in a viable (and not necessarily optimal) way. According to the view I have been proposing, autopoiesis plus adaptivity entails sense-making, which is cognition in its minimal biological form.
This usage of “cognition” is admittedly a broad one,13 and I certainly do not intend for it to obscure the distinctive characteristics of animal and human cognition. Nevertheless, this usage is not merely a way of speaking because it rests on an explicit hypothesis about the natural roots of intentionality: Intentionality arises from the operational closure and interactive dynamics of autopoiesis. Recall the proposal, presented in Chapter 2, that intentionality, understood broadly to mean the constitution or disclosure of the world, corresponds to a type of self-organization. We are now in position to see that the minimal form this type of self-organization can take is autopoiesis (understood to include adaptivity). Below the level of complexity of autopoiesis—for example, the level of self-organizing, physical dissipative structures—we find no analogue of the phenomenological notion of the disclosure of the world. Once we arrive at autopoiesis, however, we find the first instance of precisely this kind of analogue, namely, a system whose activity brings forth or constitutes a world.14 In sum, intentionality first emerges in nature in the form of autopoiesis and sense-making.
In putting forward this proposal, I thus agree with Dennett when he states: “intentionality doesn’t come from on high; it percolates up from below” (Dennett 1995a, p. 205). Elaborating this idea, he writes:
When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behavior that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings with it into the world its “good.” That is to say, it creates a point of view from which the world’s events can be roughly partitioned into the favorable, the unfavorable, and the neutral. And its own innate proclivities to seek the first, shun the second, and ignore the third contribute essentially to the definition of the three classes. As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and its events begin creating reasons for it—whether or not the creature can fully recognize them . . . The first reasons preexisted their own recognition. (Dennett 1991a, p. 174)
This passage could easily stand as a gloss on what I have been calling sense-making. Nevertheless, there is an important difference between Dennett’s proposal and the one I am offering here. Whereas mine is based on the theory of autopoiesis, Dennett’s is based on the selfish-gene theory championed by Dawkins (1989). (I criticize this theory in Chapter 7.) For Dennett, agency and meaning are born when replicating molecules arrive on the scene: “Through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ This is not florid agency—echt intentional action, with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious decision—but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional action could grow” (1995a, p. 202).
The problem with this view is that a replicating macromolecule is not a basic autonomous system. It does not produce itself from within itself, and it does not regulate its external boundary conditions. DNA and RNA are not self-replicating (and certainly not in the way a basic autonomous system is self-producing): They do not replicate themselves; they get replicated as a result of their participation in a complex network that they do not produce (though of course they play a crucial role in its self-production) (see Chapter 7). Agency and meaning require autonomy; minimal agency and meaning require minimal autonomy. Minimal autonomy depends on macromolecules but requires that those macromolecules be organized in a particular way, namely, in the autopoietic way. It is this autopoietic organization that is the ground from which the seeds of intentional action grow, not macromolecules as such.
We have been considering issues raised by Boden’s charge that autopoiesis should be sharply distinguished from cognition. At the other end of the spectrum from Boden, biologist Lynn Margulis (2001) writes about “microbial consciousness” and the “conscious cell.” She and Dorion Sagan believe that consciousness is coeval and coextensive with life itself:
Not just animals are conscious, but every organic being, every autopoietic cell is conscious. In the simplest sense, consciousness is an awareness of the outside world. And this world need not be the world outside one’s mammalian fur. It may also be the world outside one’s cell membrane. Certainly some level of awareness, of responsiveness owing to that awareness, is implied in all autopoietic systems. (Margulis and Sagan 1995, p. 122)
Another author who upholds this view is philosopher and phenomenologist Maxine Sheets Johnstone, who argues that motile bacteria embody a rudimentary form of corporeal or proprioceptive consciousness (Sheets-Johnstone 1999a, pp. 52, 73).
In assessing this idea of cellular consciousness, we need to think about what consciousness is supposed to mean in this context. Margulis and Sagan describe consciousness as “awareness of the outside world,” but a familiar idea from mind science is that not all forms of awareness imply consciousness in the sense of subjective experience. There are a number of different concepts of consciousness, but the one most relevant here is probably sentience, the feeling of being alive and exercising effort in movement. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824) wrote of the “feeling of existence” (le sentiment de l’existence). Neuroscientists Damasio (1999) and Panksepp (1998b) write about a primitive feeling of self. Thus one might describe consciousness in the sense of sentience as a kind of primitively self-aware liveliness or animation of the body. Does sentience emerge with life itself, with the first living bodies, namely, bacteria? Jonas also poses this problem in his writings:
At which point . . . in the enormous spectrum of life are we justified in drawing a line, attributing a “zero” of inwardness to the far side and an initial “one” to the side nearer to us? Where else but at the very beginning of life can the beginning of inwardness be located? (1996, p. 63)
Whether we give this inwardness the name of feeling, receptiveness or response to stimuli, volition, or something else—it harbors, in some degree of “awareness,” the absolute interest of the organism in its own being and continuation. (1996, p. 69)
This “absolute interest of the organism in its own being and continuation,” as we noted earlier, is what Spinoza called conatus, life’s concern to exist or to carry on being. From the perspective of the theory of autopoiesis, we can think of this concern as the twofold purposiveness of identity and sense-making. The point we need to make now is that this immanent purposiveness does not entail consciousness.15 In support of this view are the following considerations. First, although this point is controversial, it is reasonable to suppose that being “phenomenally conscious” of something entails being able to form intentions to act in relation to it (Hurley 1998, pp. 149–150). It is hard to make sense of the idea of being conscious of something, in the sense of subjectively experiencing it, while having no possibility of intentional access to it whatsoever. There is no good reason, however, for thinking that autopoietic selfhood of the minimal cellular sort involves any kind of intentional access on the part of the organism to its sense-making. Second, it seems unlikely that minimal autopoietic selfhood involves phenomenal selfhood or subjectivity, in the sense of a prereflective self-awareness constitutive of a phenomenal first-person perspective (see Chapter 9). Rather, this sort of awareness would seem to require (in ways we do not yet fully understand) the reflexive elaboration and interpretation of life processes provided by the nervous system. Finally, it is important to situate consciousness in relation to dynamic, unconscious processes of life regulation. This effort becomes difficult, perhaps impossible, if one projects consciousness down to the cellular level.
In this last section, let us turn our gaze back on ourselves and ask the following question: What is that enables us, as scientists and philosophers, to cognize or grasp the phenomenon of autopoietic selfhood? What are the conditions of possibility for our recognition and comprehension of this form of existence? Would autopoietic selfhood be disclosable from some disembodied, objective standpoint? Or, rather, are we able to cognize this form of existence because it resembles the form of our own bodily selfhood and subjectivity, which we know firsthand?
We have seen how autopoiesis gives rise, in one stroke, to inwardness and outwardness, to the self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related. I submit that this inwardness or interiority is disclosable to us because we ourselves are living beings who experience our own bodily selfhood firsthand. Let us suppose, following Jonas (1966, pp. 64–98), that we were looking at an organism from the perspective of a disembodied and purely analytical, mathematical intellect. Would we be able to recognize the organism’s inwardness and purposiveness? From the disembodied, analytical standpoint, the organism would be resolved into a collection of fleeting, objective physicochemical events, “and all features of a self-related autonomous unity would, in the end, appear as purely . . . fictitious” (1996, p. 78, emphasis added).16 Yet we are bodily beings ourselves, and we experience inwardness and purposiveness in our dealings with the world.17 Thus, “we are able to say what no disembodied onlooker would have a cause for saying: that the mathematical God in his homogeneous analytical view misses the decisive point—the point of life itself: its being self-centered individuality, being for itself and in contraposition to all the rest of the world, with an essential boundary dividing ‘inside’ and ‘outside’” (p. 79).
Jonas summarizes this line of thought in the proposition that “life can be known only by life” (p. 91). This proposition is a quintessential phenomenological one: before being scientists we are first and foremost living beings, and we thus possess within ourselves evidence of purposiveness (Weber and Varela 2002, p. 110). As Jonas puts it, “being living bodies ourselves, we happen to have inside knowledge” (1966, p. 79). In observing other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, through the evidence of our own experience and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness as proper to living being.
It is true that this view of life has a retrospective element. We retrospectively recast our biological descriptions in terms commensurable with a phenomenological analysis of our own experience. Legitimizing this procedure are the ongoing and inescapable, pragmatic circulation and mutually constraining relation between science and experience (Gallagher 1997; Varela 1996; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991). Thus, in the present context, the theory of autopoiesis provides a naturalistic interpretation of the teleological conception of life originating in experience, but our experience of our own bodily being is a condition of possibility for our comprehension of autopoietic selfhood.
The proposition that life can be known only by life is also a transcendental one in the phenomenological sense. It is about the conditions for the possibility of knowing life, given that we do actually have biological knowledge. One way to articulate this transcendental line of thought is as follows: (1) To account for certain observable phenomena, we need the concepts of organism (in the Kantian sense of a self-organizing and immanently purposive whole) and autopoiesis. (2) The source for the meaning of these concepts is the lived body, our original experience of our own bodily existence. (3) These concepts and the biological accounts in which they figure are not derivable from some observer-independent, nonindexical, objective, physicochemical description, as the physicalist myth of science would have us believe. To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology, we needs concepts such as organism and autopoiesis, but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with firsthand experience of its own bodily life. In Merleau-Ponty’s words: “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises toward the world” (1962, p. 75).
This transcendental perspective overturns the uncritical standpoint of objectivist philosophy and science. Objectivism takes things for granted, without asking how they are disclosable to human experience and knowledge, or how they come to be disclosed with the meaning or significance they have. Objectivism in biology, for example, takes the organism for granted as a ready-made object out there in the world. No concern is shown for how the category “organism” is constituted for us in scientific experience. In contrast, phenomenology traces this category back to its cognitive source, which is the lived experience of our bodily being. Objectivism refuses to take this sort of reflexive step. In this way, it consigns itself not merely to ignorance and the unexamined life, but also to a form of false consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty states in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception: “The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression” (1962, p. viii). A critical and reflective science can embrace this phenomenological perspective because it sees that by clarifying scientific experience in this way, science itself is properly situated in relation to the rest of human life and is thereby secured on a sounder footing.
In this chapter and the previous one, we have focused on scientific knowledge of the vital order, the phenomenon of life. The point at which we have now arrived, though familiar to phenomenologists, may be less so to biologists, or at least they speak of it less readily. This point is that empathy is a precondition of our comprehension of the vital order, in particular of the organism as a sense-making being inhabiting an environment. In using the term empathy in this context, I anticipate the last chapter of this book. There we will see that empathy is a multifaceted experience rooted in the spontaneous and involuntary resonance of two living bodies with each other. It is this sort of bodily empathy I am invoking now, but widened beyond the human sphere to ground our comprehension of the organism and our recognition of the purposiveness of life (Husserl 1980, pp. 94–98; 1989, pp. 170–180). Empathy in this sense encompasses the coupling of our human lived bodies with the bodies of other beings we recognize as living, whether these be human, animal, or even—particularly for biologists with a “feeling for the organism” (Keller 1984)—bacteria.