The Importance of Evolution to Understandings of Human Nature (Value Inquiry Book Series / Cognitive Science, 388) 9004544518, 9789004544512

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The Importance of Evolution to Understandings of Human Nature

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-​in-​Chief J.D. Mininger

volume 388

Cognitive Science Edited by Francesc Forn i Argimon, University of Catalonia

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​vibs and brill.com/​cosc

The Importance of Evolution to Understandings of Human Nature By

Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Art by Katherine Gorham. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://​cata​log​.loc​.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 4451-​2 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 4453-​6 (e-​book) Copyright 2023 by Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  Foreword vii  Acknowledgements xi  Introduction 1 1  Evolutionary Realities of Animate Life 5 i  Darwin 5 ii  Insects 10 iii  Biodiversity 12 iv  Male-​Male Competition 17 v  21st-​Century Archetypal Exemplifications of Male-​Male Competition 31 vi  A Return to Darwin and His Principles of Natural Selection 35 vii  The Pan-​animate Nature of Emotions 45 viii  Vindications and Elaborations of Darwin’s Foundational Insights into Emotions 53 ix  Chapter 1 Summation 57 2  Phenomenological Realities of Animate Life 58 i  Naturalizing Phenomenology and a Proposed Neurophenomenology 58 ii  Darwin’s Evolutionary Biology and Enaction 63 iii  Pregiven and Pregivennesses: Sorting Basic Facts of Human Life from Biased Claims 68 iv  The Foundational Import of Pregivennesses 76 v  The Confluence of a Darwinian Perspective on Animate Life and Husserl’s Phenomenological Methodology 80 vi  Human Experience: the Nature and Challenges of Phenomenological Analyses 86 vii  Research Perspectives Complementary to Husserlian Phenomenology 93 viii  The Neurodynamics of Embodied Minds and Naturalizing Phenomenology vs Real-​Life Subject-​World Relationships 100

vi Contents 3  Joint Concerns and Complementarities Linking Darwinian Evolutionary Biology and Husserlian Phenomenology 115 i  On the Road to Recovery: Beginning Correlations 115 ii  The Centrality of Methodology and of Dynamics in Understandings of Human Nature 121 4  The Centrality and Critical Importance of Wonder and of an Ongoing Spiral of Inquiry in Understandings of Human Nature 128 i  Self-​Imposed Ideational Limitations in the Pursuit of Human Knowledge and the Open-​Ended “Wonderful” Nature of Darwin’s Thinking and Writings 128 ii  The Complex Experiential Nature of Wonder: Its Value, Challenges, and Importance to the Nature of Human Knowledge 134 iii  Obstacle #1: the Ongoing Decade of the Brain 138 iv  Obstacle #2: the Age of Information 147 v  Concluding Thoughts 153  References 157  Name Index 167

Foreword There are few people in the world who have a deeper understanding of movement and its fundamental role in life and all creatures living than the author of this book, Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone. Over a career spanning many decades, her writings (based on her profound knowledge of evolutionary biology and philosophy, and her life’s experience with dance) have exposed how humans and indeed the entire animal kingdom use movement to know themselves and their worlds. Animation, says Sheets-​Johnstone, is the foundational ground of life itself. To scientific fields who have largely ignored or taken for granted the significance of movement, for all forms of life that move themselves, Sheets-​ Johnstone has held a mirror up to Nature and shown us how, by making the familiar strange, a whole new science of human experience—​grounded in animation and dynamics—​becomes possible. Sheets-​Johnstone often talks of Aristotle, but she is, in effect, a kind of Newton—​not of course in a mathematical sense, but in drawing our attention to something akin to gravity that we all take for granted—​who shows, through exquisite insights and beautifully expressed writings, how central movement is to who we are. Seldom does someone come along and change the way you think. In a remarkable set of books characterized by their style and scholarship Sheets-​Johnstone has told us who we are and what we’ve become—​from the primacy of movement to the roots of thinking and the roots of morality. The impact of her work for cognitive science (where enaction and embodiment are the latest buzzwords), the brain and neurosciences, theoretical biology, and philosophy itself, is just beginning to be felt. On a practical level, we can only hope that her message gets through to a troubled educational system in which memorizing and testing seem to be favored over knowledge and intelligence, and the freedom for teachers to truly lead forth (“educere”) their learners to wonder and explore is squelched more often than not. In this, her latest treatise, Sheets-​Johnstone pulls no punches. Hers is a clarion call for humans to educate themselves about evolution and to be aware of their interconnection to the natural world and what they are doing to it. And, given their role e.g., in the case of climate change and biodiversity, what they are not doing about it. We have as she says little grasp of our true nature, and a big part of that is our ignorance of our origins. For Sheets-​Johnstone, that boils down to a human neglect of Charles Darwin. And not just his “Origins of Species” but his many other writings as well. To the extent that Nature and human nature are not in conflict but rather complementary, one might add Niels Bohr’s famous dictum “Contraria sunt complementa”: when it comes to

viii Foreword physical reality, or at least what we can say about it, contraries are complementary. Among other aspects, for Sheets-​Johnstone that includes the reality of sexual selection. There, our understanding of human nature relies on Darwin’s insights into ‘the law of battle’ and Jung’s analysis of archetypes that extends across species and individuals. It is Sheets-​Johnstone’s extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge—​a lifelong pursuit now verging on wisdom—​that enable her to so eloquently make the connections necessary to understand the very interconnectedness of animate life, ourselves included. For the “dangerous species” of course, not all of it is pleasant. Sheets-​Johnstone is not shy about relating male-​male competition and the dominant alpha male macaque to the pathological character of modern-​day autocrats. She makes it quite clear how traits such as male-​male competition are “exapted” and turn into competition for resources, power, supremacy, and war itself. Ambition is made of ugly stuff. For her, the human practice of war rests on the thus far unexamined biological reality of Darwin’s ancestral forms, in turn testifying to his proposed principles of evolution that govern the interconnectedness of animate life. And so it is with emotions and “mental powers” as well. We owe Sheets-​Johnstone a debt of gratitude for bringing to light and demonstrating the potency of Darwin’s acute observations for understanding the behavior of modern man. In line with her seminal analysis in “The primacy of movement” (1999/​2009), she again draws our attention to the intimate relation between action and perception, between emotions and movement, the foundations of animate life and our understanding of it. As she points out, just as there is no expression of emotion short of movement, no struggle for existence exists short of movement. The universality of their relation and cross-​cultural expression thereof set the scene for philosophical inquiry—​in Sheets-​Johnstone’s case, the phenomenological understanding of human nature. What this means is not the usual deep bowing reverence and lip service to the brain as the citadel of understanding ourselves. Or, for her, a step even more wayward, the misguided and slippery equation of brain and person. Sheets-​ Johnstone once again turns to Darwin’s dictum: “the mind is function of the body.” It is in this relation, not only the organ of the brain, from which a stable foundation must arise. The brain is a complex dynamical structure, part of a whole-​body nervous system that co-​evolved with its environment. What we call cognition emerges from this system’s dynamic patterns of spatiotemporal activity. One (of many) of Sheets-​Johnstone’s most inspiring messages is: animate bodies are mindful bodies. For her, to think in movement and to create synergies of meaningful movement are built-​ins, “pregivennesses” of animate life. Advocates of so-​called 4E Cognition (my term not hers, but two of the E’s have been mentioned above) and their derivatives are challenged to take note.

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Though they seldom acknowledge it, they rely on this insight, an expansion of Sheets-​Johnstone’s drawn from the works of Darwin and the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. For Sheets-​Johnstone, such pregivennesses are central to our understandings of the world, intimately tied to the so-​called “forgotten sense” of kinesthesis that is crucial to learning one’s body and learning to move oneself, and hence of foundational evolutionary significance. And not only that. Without it, there is no basis for human experience. Kinesthesis and the essential role of movement in the constitution of meaning is paramount in all of Sheets-​Johnstone’s work. Likewise, as Sheets-​Johnstone is wont to remark, even to revered (perhaps misguided?) colleagues, when it comes to the brain people do not experience cell assemblies. Large collaborations among neurons are correlates of experience. In the way one might imagine the coherent light of a laser to be the correlation among photons. As far as the mind~brain relation is concerned, at least for the neurally inclined, correlations are the best we can do. For Sheets-​ Johnstone, regions of the brain may precisely be correlated with human experiences, but they do not in any way descriptively elucidate experience, notably, its dynamics in the form of feelings and movement. And here is a key aspect that underwrites Sheets-​Johnstone’s entire philosophy: the truths of experience are as proper an aim of science as the truths of behavior. This is like Samuel Beckett (“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”) meets Albert Einstein (“On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”). With respect to realizing this philosophy, her emphasis on the importance of if/​then relationships and thinking in movement is the opening act. Sheets-​Johnstone’s stress on the significance of if/​then relationships in many walks of life—​her strictly phenomenological point of view—​has much in common with relational views of reality as expressed by contemporary theoretical physicists such as Karen Barad and Carlo Rovelli. Barad, for instance, raises the Bohr view of “phenomenon” to ontological status in her intra-​active, agential realism account of physical theory. More than that, Sheets-​Johnstone’s work connects directly to the detailed ethological studies of animate movement by scientists like the late John Fentress and the sophisticated, insightful, and time-​consuming movement analyses of natural animal behavior by Ilan Golani. Dynamics are not only at the heart of movement, but at the heart of the brain and indeed at the heart of human nature and Nature itself. But the dynamics of what? Hers is a dynamics of relationships, a dynamics of organization that transcends the things themselves, a coordination dynamics. As Sheets-​Johnstone notes, as body parts coordinate when a body runs, so brain neurons coordinate when a body runs. From the very foundational movements of approach and avoidance comes a dynamics of curiosity, inquisitiveness and consciousness itself.

x Foreword Is it any wonder that recent research shows that two-​thirds of the brain is involved with simple eye movements and half the brain gets activated during respiration? The brain doesn’t think the way you think it does, says a recent headline. As the distinguished psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has noted recently, the standard categories of cognitive psychology—​the way the field has divided the pie up into perception, attention, decision-​making, motor control, etc.—​and the brain networks that are supposed to underlie them don’t jive. It’s not just that the brain disrespects the boundaries between established mental categories. As she says, the overlap is so great that “a single brain network, has more aliases than Sherlock Holmes.” Moreover, classical signatures of memory formation in structures like the hippocampus turn out to be intimately related to metabolic regulation in the gut. This suggests on the one hand that any framework that seeks to explain the role of the brain will have to connect to human experience and all kinds of other relationships within ourselves, with the environment, with others and with the divine. Sheets-​ Johnstone’s methods, insights and inspiring writings await those who want to know. They are not for the faint-​hearted or for those who seek to build careers on established paradigms. But for those who possess as Darwin did the creative power of not yet knowing, the fruits of “making the darkness conscious,” the “familiar strange,” as revealed here by Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone and in her other works, are unimaginable. To future students, and to some old warriors, this is a gift. J.A. Scott Kelso

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements commonly focus on colleagues and persons who have actively helped and supported the author in writing the book she/​he has written. I would like to acknowledge in contrast and with deepest gratitude, researchers in three different fields whose writings, whose focus, and whose way of carrying out research are, have been, and continue to be a sustaining source of human knowledge and model of academic research: Charles Darwin, Edmund Husserl, Carl Jung. In pursuing their distinctive research and writings, each of them is untethered to a definitively and implacably pre-​set, personally espoused theory that will anchor each and every aspect of what they write; each of them is untethered to a definitively and implacably pre-​set, personal, and treasured belief that will anchor each and every aspect of what they write; each of them is untethered to a bottom-​line basic motivation in writing, a bottom-​line basic personal desire for self-​aggrandizement. Each is in other words driven by a need to understand particular experienced existential realities, whether basic realities of the world or basic realities of humans specifically and of humans in face of the world, and to do so to begin with, by directly observing these basic realities, perspicuously detailing their features—​in finer terms, perspicuously detailing what is actually there, sensuously and intelligibly present, and secondly, in follow-​up to such progressive direct observations and detailings, by consistently opening themselves to self-​questioning regarding the veracity, the completeness, the possible limitations of their observations and detailed descriptions. In effect, in their research, each is slowly discovering and uncovering an epistemological and ontological path, and possible extensions of that path forward, thus extending knowledge of the world and of human meanings bestowed upon that world, and knowledge of humans themselves. It is pertinent to point out specifically though not exclusively in the context of a researcher’s bottom-​line desire for self-​aggrandizement, that Darwin, Husserl, and Jung are the antithesis of present-​day human males named and discussed in the present text who are human archetypes of particular males in the nonhuman animate world known as “alpha males,” such males being described in detail in one instance by primate ethologists in their field studies of macaques as “dominant male macaques.” Darwin, Husserl, and Jung have indeed contributed reams of knowledge for humans to think about, ponder, and in turn wonder about themselves and the world of meanings they experience in their surrounding world. In spite of their being automatically regarded as important past colleagues and thus highly referenced from time to time in diverse contemporary research and

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xii Acknowledgements writings, Darwin, Husserl, and Jung warrant direct acknowledgement for their research and writings. That research and those writings are directly relevant, and integrally so, to a range of present-​day research and writings, and in many instances in fact, for their being the essential foundation of that range of present-​day research and writing. I would be remiss if, in addition to my immeasurable gratitude to the individuals above and their inspirational research and writings, I did not express gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of this book for their highly appreciative and highly enthusiastic judgment of the book, and for their suggestion of possibly conjoining the Chapters of the book more finely and of making its Concluding Thoughts positive as well as negative with respect to humans. I have followed through on both suggestions and add only that while the book’s Concluding Thoughts properly focus on a call to reckon with the truths of human nature, they certainly also, and in equal measure, properly focus on a call to readers and to humans generally, to think, to ponder, and in turn, to wonder. In short, I have added to the final Chapter of the book, highlighting the challenge of wondering about oneself, the challenge of wondering about the world, and the challenge of wondering about the distinctive subject-​world relationships of all animate life. In effect, ongoing present-​day challenges that continue to plague and to call into question the doubly-​vaunted intelligence of Homo sapiens sapiens will hopefully inspire humans to embark on the “never-​ ending shoreline of wonder” and to recognize “the creative poverty of not yet knowing.”

Introduction The common theme running throughout the four Chapters of this book centers on Charles Darwin. The four Chapters are divided into sections that detail various aspects of the common theme. The first section of Chapter 1 focuses on Darwin’s extensive travels, observations, and writings that detail his studies of animate life and that lead to specific evolutionary topics in the sections that follow. These following sections run all the way from insects to bio-​diversity, to male-​male-​competition—​the latter being what Darwin termed “the law of battle” on behalf of reproduction, i.e., of winning females, and what I proceed to identify and describe in Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba’s term “exaptation,” namely, the extension of biologically rooted male-​male competition in pursuit of females to 21st century archetypal exemplifications of Darwin’s “law of battle” on behalf of power and more. Further sections include the pan-​ animate nature of emotions, including Darwin’s seminal observations concerning the relation of animate life to particular habitat environments and his seminal observations on climate change. In short, each of these sections documents Darwin’s multiple insights into the interconnectedness of animate life on planet earth and the interconnection of animate lives to the natural world about them. In doing so, each offers detailed documentation of the relevance of Darwin’s writings to understandings of 21st century humans. Notable scientists such as Elizabeth Kolbert, E. O. Wilson, Iraneus Eibl-​Eibesfeldt, J. A. R. A. M. van Hooff, Carl Jung, and Stephen Jay Gould are cited and referenced throughout Chapter 1. Chapter 2 takes up the interconnectedness of living forms on planet earth and the interconnectedness of life-​world relationships by documenting how the basic realities of life that Darwin observed and described are not something apart from phenomenological studies of “animate organisms” as originally described by Edmund Husserl, nor are these basic realities transformed by such phenomenological studies. Thus, contrary to scientists and philosophers intent on transforming or even at times dismissing phenomenological studies, e.g., Francisco Varela, Jean Petitot, Evan Thompson, there is, in the first instance, no need to “naturalize” phenomenological studies, and in the second instance, no need to “ontologize” realities of life in order to treat them phenomenologically. Of central note in this context is the fact that basic kinetic aspects of animate organisms are already there, as evidenced in the beginnings of both non-​human and human animate life, namely in neonatal givens and developmental dispositions. For example, breathing is not learned, breathing is pregiven; swallowing is not learned, swallowing is pregiven;

© Maxine Sheets-​J ohnstone, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004544536_002

2 Introduction chewing is not learned, chewing is pregiven; kicking is not learned, kicking is pregiven; reaching is not learned, reaching is pregiven. The list could go on and on, and in fact with respect to humans, it includes human smiling: smiling is not learned, smiling is pregiven, precisely as Darwin originally observed in human infants. Denials of anything human being kinetically pregiven are thus of critical moment and are duly considered at length, specifically in the light of human experience and its slighting renditions by such notable neuroscience researchers as Francisco Varela, Jaak Panksepp, Francis Crick, Christof Koch, and Victorio Gallese. Gallese is in fact exemplary of a virtual dismissal of real-​life, real-​time human experience—​of perceptions, feelings, cognitions, and so on—​in his practice of making experiential ascriptions to the brain via mirror neurons and “embodied simulation.” It is furthermore significant that Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in their near classic text introducing The Embodied Mind, a text that in effect initiates the academic practice of “embodying” research topics such as language, self, emotions, and so on, rely on Merleau-​Ponty’s writings in order to conjoin The Embodied Mind with phenomenology and in doing so, essentially deny anything being pregiven. In their adulatory accreditation of Merleau-​Ponty, however, they are doubly neglectful. They fail to recognize Merleau-​Ponty’s emphasis upon what Merleau-​Ponty identifies as a problematic pregiven fact: “The problem of the world, and, to begin with, that of one’s own body, consists in the fact that it is all there” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 198; italics in original). They furthermore lack an awareness of Husserl’s detailed writings on “pregivennesses,” pregivennesses that, unfortunately, Merleau-​Ponty does not reference in his emphasis upon the problematic pregiven fact that world and body are “all there.” Neither does Merleau-​Ponty himself uncover and describe the factual realities underlying the “all thereness” of world and body, and thus explicitly elucidate pregivennesses. In contrast, Husserl describes pregivennesses as basic existential realities of human experience that indeed both substantiate and anchor what he terms a genetic phenomenology. Chapter 3 proceeds to show in beginning but deft ways how neuroscience and phenomenology can proceed together, in the most basic sense how descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral to both Darwinian evolutionary biology and Husserlian phenomenology. The centrality of methodology and of a living dynamics to understandings of human nature comes readily to the fore by way of descriptive foundations and a concern with origins. Three research perspectives, each of them from a different area of science—​that of nineteenth-​century physicist-​physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, that of 21st-​century infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel N. Stern and of infant/​child psychologist Lois Bloom, and that of 21st-​century researchers in

Introduction

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nonhuman animal studies, including the studies of biologist Bernd Heinrich on ravens, of zoologist and psychologist Andrew Whiten and evolutionary psychologist Richard Byrne on gorillas, and of primatologists Michael Tomasello and Josep Call—​document that centrality: all of them implicitly support the pivotal import of methodology and of a living dynamics to understandings of animate life. In doing so, they indirectly support the integral linkage of evolutionary biology and phenomenology and the distinct ways in which veritable first-​and third-​person accounts of the relationship of perception to cognition can be complementary, and in fact can be explicitly shown to be essentially complementary. A contemporary neurobiology that in fact elucidates this complementarity focuses on the living dynamics of animate forms of life, hence on the dynamics at the heart of movement and of Nature itself. The neurobiology is anchored in extensive research studies in coordination dynamics. These studies contrast and differ fundamentally from typical 20th and 21st century brain studies precisely in their non-​reductionist perspective and in their focus on coordination: just as body parts coordinate when a body runs, for example, so brain neurons coordinate when a body runs. The extensive research and writings of J. A. Scott Kelso, founder and director of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, show that the coordinated movement through which individuals navigate their world is grounded in complementary brain/​behavior dynamic patterns that change according to circumstance. These dynamic patterns can be analyzed scientifically. In carrying out just such scientific analyses, Kelso documents and exemplifies how dynamic patterns illuminate the real-​life, real-​time lives of animate organisms. Kelso’s work in fact fulfills Darwin’s appeal, encouragement, and open invitation to readers to find “a stable foundation” from which to show that “the mind is function of body,” for as Darwin warns, “the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself.” Chapter 4 calls attention to and details the open-​ended “wonderful” nature of Darwin’s thinking and writings. His capacity to wonder and his practice of wondering appear in multiple -​-​ways throughout his descriptions of and ruminations on animate life. Darwin is indeed neither doctrinaire nor does he claim to have the answer to all questions and queries. He asks, for example, “Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?” He writes about “the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants” and “the wonderful power of adaptation given to organization.” In describing “intellectual emotions and faculties,” he points out that “All animals feel Wonder” and writes too of how wonder infuses his “passion for collecting” and studying beetles. Wonder is indeed both epistemological and ontological. In the words of Eugen Fink, an assistant to Husserl,

4 Introduction it is “the creative poverty of not yet knowing”; in the words of Albert Einstein it is the ability “[to] stand rapt in awe.” Einstein in fact elaborates on that ability: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” In short, Darwin is continuously both full of wonder about what he observes and in turn ceaselessly finding what he observes to be wonderful. Contemporary practices and concerns that deflect from both such experiences of wonder are epitomized in the ongoing “Decade of the Brain” and in the ongoing “Age of Information”/​“Digital Age.” Both are major obstacles to wonder and to the discovery of something full of wonder. In particular, until “the brain” is properly and duly investigated as part of the living dynamics of a whole-​body nervous system, and in turn, until the relationship of the living dynamics of a whole-​body nervous system is duly investigated with respect to the constitution of experienced meanings, the human brain will continue to be enshrined in ways outside evolution, hence in ways apart from an interconnection of human animals with nonhuman animals, not to mention in ways outside understanding myriad kinds of subject-​world relationships. At the same time, until digital technology is reckoned with, educational practices that prominence testing over exploring and questioning will continue to take their toll, for so long as learners are repositories of information rather than seekers of knowledge, wonder will have no place. As noted in the end section of Chapter 4, a reckoning could not be more urgent given global crises and doctrinaire, narrow-​minded humans who never stop to explore, to question, to doubt, to critically assay their own traditional beliefs and theories, in short, who never stop to wonder either about themselves or the world, thus indeed leaving the world—​and themselves—​in the words of 16th-​century philosopher Michel de Montaigne, “pickled in stupidity and brimming over with lies.” In contrast, and on the basis of all preceding sections that document the integral importance of evolution to understandings of human nature, humans have the option of acknowledging and exploring “the never-​ending shoreline of wonder,” thus relinquishing dogmatic, long-​held beliefs, prejudicial biases, and so on, and in turn, expanding their knowledge of themselves and their knowledge of the world. They indeed have the option of acknowledging and exploring what Darwin termed an “intellectual emotion,” the foundational experience of wonder, the gateway to an ongoing spiral of inquiry about themselves and the world.

­c hapter 1

Evolutionary Realities of Animate Life i

Darwin

Animate life is part of Nature. Humans are a species of animate life. Humans are thus part of Nature. Like other animate forms of life within the natural world, they procreate, thus extending their species across generations. Like other animate forms of life within the natural world, specifically, within the Kingdom Animalia, and within that domain, within the Phylum Chordata, and within that domain, within the Subphylum Vertebrata (Vertebrates), humans are distinguished sexually: male or female. Like other animate forms of life within that subphylum, humans can and do vary individually—​for example, with respect to agility, alertness, dispositions, and temperament. Fundamental realities of human nature are thus clearly embedded in Nature itself. To grasp the significance of this anchorage is to grasp the significance of evolution, and to grasp the significance of evolution is to read extensively across the writings of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s wide-​ranging writings are anchored in world-​wide observations of animate life, observations not tethered to theory, but to real-​life, real-​time realities of life as lived by animate forms themselves. Darwin’s observations thus take into account the anatomy of animate forms of life, their environmental surrounds, their mating habits, their mental powers, their ways of sheltering themselves, their ways of procuring food and eluding or fighting off predators, their ways of caring for their young, and so on, and so on. Darwin furthermore wrote about plants, most notably but not exclusively in The Power of Movement in Plants (Darwin 1880) and in The Effects of Cross-​ and Self-​Fertilization (Darwin 1876). Indeed, Darwin wrote of plants in The Origin of Species, pointing out in one context (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 139), for example, how, through the transfer of pollen by insects from one flower to another, cross-​fertilization or “intercrossing” (ibid., e.g., pp. 148–​149) can and does result, producing what was later termed “hybrid vigor.” In fact, The Effects of Cross-​and Self-​Fertilization, published in 1876, remains seminal to understandings of hybrid vigor. As noted in Wikipedia, “This book has remained the starting point for the study of inbreeding and is cited in scientific papers to this

© Maxine Sheets-​J ohnstone, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004544536_003

6

Chapter 1

effect to this day” (https://​en​.wikipe​dia​.org​/wiki​/The​_Effects​_of​_Cross​_and​ _Self​_Fertilisati​on​_i​n​_th​e​_Ve​geta​ble​_​King​dom)​.1 In The Origin of Species, after devoting his initial chapters to “Variations Under Domestication” and “Variations Under Nature”—​variations he later terms ‘artificial selection’ and ‘natural selection’—​Darwin devotes a chapter to the “Struggle for Existence.” While the struggle may be severe between highly distinct species that depend on one another as “of a parasite on its prey,” Darwin observes that “almost invariably [the struggle for existence] will be most severe between individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers. In the case of varieties of the same species, the struggle will generally be almost equally severe” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 126). His central attention to, and detailed descriptions of the fundamental interconnectedness of animate life in the struggle for existence was in fact extensively detailed earlier in his central attention to, and detailed descriptions of the fundamental interconnectedness of all forms of life, i.e., of the interconnectedness of animals and plants in the struggle for existence. In that earlier section, he gives an example of their integral and intricate connectedness, an example he describes as “simple” but one that “has interested” him (ibid., p. 123). The example focuses on a heath and the effects of enclosures and cultivation of the heath by humans: In Staffordshire, … there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man; but several hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty-​five years previously and planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation of the planted part of the heath was quite remarkable, more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another; not only the proportional numbers of the heath-​plants were wholly changed, but twelve species of plants (not counting grasses and carices) flourished in the plantations, which could not be found on the heath. The effect on the insects must have been still greater, for six insectivorous birds were very common on the plantations, which were not to be seen on the heath; and

1 Wikipedia offers a detailed history of hybrid vigor (heterosis), giving corn hybrid vigor as an example (https://​en​.wikipe​dia​.org​/wiki​/Hetero​sis#Corn​_(maize)):​ “Hetero​sis, hyb​rid vigor, or outbreeding enhancement is the improved or increased function of any biological quality in a hybrid offspring. … Corn heterosis was famously demonstrated in the early 20th century by George H. Shull and Edward M. East after hybrid corn was invented by Dr. William James Beal of Michigan State University based on work begun in 1879 at the urging of Charles Darwin.”

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the heath was frequented by two or three distinct insectivorous birds. Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed, so that cattle could not enter. But how important an element an enclosure is, I plainly saw near Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the distant hill-​tops; within the last ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-​sown firs are now springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live. When I ascertained that these young trees had not been sown or planted, I was so much surprised at their numbers that I went to several points of view, whence I could examine hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir, except the old planted clumps. But on looking closely between the stems of the heath, I found a multitude of seedlings and little trees, which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. In one square yard, at a point some hundreds yards distant from one of the old clumps, I counted thirty-​two little trees; and one of them, judging from the rings of growth, had during twenty-​six years tried to raise its head above the stems of the heath, and had failed. No wonder that, as soon as the land was enclosed, it became thickly clothed with vigorously growing young firs. Yet the heath was so extremely barren and so extensive that no one would ever have imagined that cattle would have so closely and effectually searched it for food. ibid., pp. 123–​124

Darwin succinctly summarizes his observations regarding the relationship of cattle and trees, but goes on immediately to point out further that the lives of insects and cattle are also existentially related: “Here we see that cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir; but in several parts of the world insects determine the existence of cattle” (ibid., p. 124). He then describes relationships in Paraguay as an instance of how “insects determine the existence of cattle,” ending his observations as follows: Not that in nature the relations can ever be as simple as this. Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success; and yet in the long-​ run the forces are so nicely balanced, that the face of nature remains uniform for long periods of time, though assuredly the merest trifle would often give the victory to one organic being over another. Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see

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the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!. ibid., p. 124

Clearly, Darwin is at pains to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all forms of life on earth in the struggle for existence. He in fact goes on to confess, “I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations” (ibid., pp. 124–​125). In turn, and on the basis of his observations and experimental studies, he describes how insects—​moths, humble-​bees—​are integral to the growth of flowers and how, for instance, “[t]‌he number of humble-​bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-​ mice, which destroy their combs and nests” (ibid., p. 125). He proceeds, however, to remark once more on the centrality of competition between species of the same genus, why this intra-​species competition takes place, and thus why this struggle for existence is more severe than the struggle for existence between species belonging to a different genus. He states, “As species of the same genus have usually, though by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct genera” (ibid., p. 127). He gives as examples how, in the United States, one species of swallow has decreased the population of a different species of swallow, how, in Scotland, missel-​thrushes have decreased the number of song-​thrushes, and how, in Russia, an Asiatic cockroach species has decreased the number of cockroaches of a different species. When it comes to giving a final summation of the struggle for existence, Darwin begins with an emphatic highlighting of the distinctive bodily form of all forms of life, hence of both animate and plant forms of life as their specific bodily forms anchor their ability to compete successfully for resources or to compete for survival in predator and prey relationships. He states, A corollary of the highest importance may be deduced from the foregoing remarks, namely, that the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys. This is obvious in the structure of the teeth and talons of the tiger; and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite which clings to the hair on the tiger’s body. But in

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the beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion, and in the flattened and fringed legs of the water-​beetle, the relation seems at first confined to the elements of air and water. Yet the advantage of plumed seeds no doubt stands in the closest relation to the land being already thickly clothed by other plants; so that the seed may be widely distributed and fall on unoccupied ground. In the water-​beetle, the structure of its legs, so well adapted for diving, allows it to compete with other aquatic insects, to hunt for its own prey, and to escape serving as prey to other animals ibid., pp. 127–​128

In short, the bodily form of an animal is structured in ways integrally related to bodily forms of life in its surrounding world. An animal’s bodily form thus anchors its struggle for existence and is integral to its survival. In effect, an animal lives and makes a living in virtue of its bodily form. That form is not static or statuesque, but animate. Though Darwin does not dwell on the animate nature of bodily forms of life, the struggles for existence that he describes are by their very nature anchored in distinct forms of animation. There could indeed be no struggle for existence short of movement. The anchorage in movement holds true for plants as well: plants too struggle for existence, moving in ways that support their survival, nudging other forms in ways that make room for them to grow, for example, bending toward light, and so on. The struggle for existence is clearly endemic to life. As Darwin emphasizes over and over and thus extensively points out, the fundamental interconnection of all forms of animate life, both plant and animal, is fundamental to the struggle. The inherent biological interconnection of all forms of animate life is thus instrumental to the continued existence or death of animals, hence to species preservation and extinction. Humans are not just an integral part of this interconnection. Humans have been and continue to be a pivotal factor in whether animals and plants continue to thrive or to die, and indeed, a pivotal factor in the decimation of animate forms of life. Two scientific perspectives document the extraordinary impact of humans on other forms of life, the one from the perspective of insects, the other from the perspective of biodiversity. Both perspectives implicitly call into question the doubly-​vaunted intelligence of humans—​Homo sapiens sapiens—​humans who, in spite of their purported elevated intelligence, fail to recognize the interconnection and thereby the inter-​dependence of life on earth. They thus fail too to recognize their own existential liability, let alone their moral responsibility for the extinction of other species. In short, the two perspectives shed proper light on the deficiency of humans and warrant attention and specification.

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Insects

Elizabeth Kolbert’s article in the May 2020 issue of National Geographic is titled “Where Have All the Insects Gone?” The subtitle reads “Species are vanishing at alarming rates.” What the article documents in words and graphics are the ways in which insect populations are declining or disappearing altogether and the ways in which insects are ecologically critical to life on planet earth. As Kolbert points out, there are an estimated 5 million species of insects, of which scientists think only 20% have been identified. Moreover with respect to Insectivora (the biological name of the Order of insects), five major forms are undergoing sizable population declines, forms that include butterflies (Leipidoptera), bees (Hymenoptera), and grasshoppers (Orthoptera), for example. What may well be termed ‘the existential interconnection’ of animal and plant, of animal and animal, and of animal and earth is succinctly described and tabulated in the article, many being documented in an astonishing number of daily or yearly interconnections. For example, “A bumblebee can visit (and help pollinate) 3,000 flowers a day”; “A pair of blue tits [birds] might collect up to 100 caterpillars every day to feed a single chick”; “One termite colony can excavate a quarter ton of soil every year” (Kolbert 2020, pp. 54–​55). A graph with pictures in fact specifies “Five crucial insect jobs”: insects are “providers,” “decomposers,” “pest controllers,” “pollinators,” “soil engineers” (ibid.). Their role as providers is described as follows: “Insects are in nearly every food chain. Many larger animals—​birds, bats, amphibians, and fish—​eat insects before they in turn are eaten by predators. The dearth of insects is suspected to be a leading cause of recent declines in bird populations” (ibid., p. 54). Their role as pollinators is precisely specified: “Nearly 90 percent of flowering plant species and 75 percent of crop plant species depend on pollination by animals—​mostly insects. Overall, one out of every three bites of food humans eat relies on animal pollination in the production process” (ibid.). Their role as pest controllers is equally specified: “By feeding on crop-​threatening pests, predatory insects perform the role of pesticides without chemicals. This cuts pest-​control costs and increases yields, saving agricultural industries billions of dollars every year—​while reducing toxic pesticide residue on crops” (ibid.). In short, insects are critically significant across a range of everyday species-​specific roles, abilities, and even powers integral to environmental and ecological worlds of life beyond their own. Given that there are an estimated 5 million species of insects, it should perhaps not be surprising not only that there is an extraordinary variety of insects, but that insects are found in what Kolbert describes as “virtually every type of terrestrial habitat, including the most extreme” (ibid., p. 53). Confronting

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the question of “[w]‌hat accounts for the tremendous variety of insects” (ibid., pp. 53–​58), Kolbert specifies three possible explanations given by scientists: 1) being present and colonizing land “more than 400 million years ago,” insects have an “extended history” in which diversity can flourish; 2) being small, different insects can occupy the same environmental niche, as, for example, “a single tree can be home to hundreds of kinds, some boring into the bark, others tunneling into the leaves, still others feeding on the roots”; 3) put in historical perspective, insects have a low extinction rate, “not a single family” in “the largest suborder of beetles,” for example, has gone extinct across its entire history. All the same, insects are disappearing. As Kolbert remarks under the title of the article: “Bugs are disappearing at alarming rates. That could be disastrous for the planet” (ibid., p. 41). In fact, “a global insect die-​off” (ibid.) would be disastrous for life on earth. What part do humans play in this ominous possibility? At one point, in answer to her question of why insect populations are declining, Kolbert quotes entomologist David Wagner: “We’d expect things to be declining with seven billion people on the planet” (ibid., p. 59). Kolbert goes on to explain: “In the process of feeding, clothing, housing, and transporting themselves, people are altering the planet in fundamental ways—​mowing down forests, plowing up grasslands, planting monocultures, pouring pollutants into the air. Every one of these is a stressor for insects and other animals. Populations of just about all animal groups are dropping.” She immediately goes on to quote Wagner again: “We know we are in a biodiversity crisis … The issue right now is to figure out to what degree insects are more imperiled than other species … It’s urgent. For the first time … I think people are really worried about ecosystem services and all the things insects do to sustain the planet” (ibid.). Surely the question can be asked, ‘Are people really worried?’ In the most basic sense, do humans typically care about the natural world? Are they aware of their integral dependence on insects? Are they aware of their interconnection to myriad other forms of life? Kolbert’s article and the photographs of David Littschwager that bring much of Kolbert’s data to life cast a doubtful light on the intelligence of humans. Indeed, in the last interview Kolbert conducted on behalf of her article, this one with Scott Black, the director of the Xerces society, a society “devoted to invertebrate conservation” (ibid., p. 65), Kolbert focuses on one way in which the Xerces society counters human negligence and destruction by cultivating refuges for insects in otherwise plowed up farmland. The article ends with a quote from Black that implicitly calls into question whether humans are sufficiently intelligent to be aware of their interconnection to the natural world and of what they are doing to that natural world. In direct and certain terms, Black holds them responsible not only for

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what they have done and what they seemingly blithely continue to do to the natural world, but for what their doing does to the future of life on this planet. Black states, “Plants and insects are the fabric of this planet. We’re ripping it to shreds, and we need to knit it back together” (ibid.). A final reference is warranted concerning the interconnection of all forms of life on this planet, hence an awareness of the foundational significance of Darwin’s extensive writings on evolution, and hence, specifically, the need and even responsibility of humans to pay attention to and actually to read Darwin’s globally-​anchored, empirically documented texts. The final reference is to a review by David Quammen, a science writer who has written numerous books about evolution. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books (Quammen 2020, p. 24), Quammen reviews three new books on Darwin, each of which focuses on a different domain within Darwin’s extensive travels and writings. Quammen’s review is illuminating, but what warrants notice in the present context are several lines at the end of his review: “Sadly, not enough people read On the Origin of Species today—​even graduate students in evolutionary biology don’t all read it—​but no one escapes its meaning and its implications. It was a brilliant start toward understanding how life works, how the wonders of diversity and complexity and adaptation have come to be” (ibid.). The neglect of Darwin’s writings in today’s world that Quammen calls our attention to is in one sense worrisome and even deplorable.2 In another more positive sense, however, the neglect is a clarion call for humans to educate themselves about evolution and hence to see themselves not as apart from nature but interconnected to a diverse and complex natural world. iii

Biodiversity

Biologist E. O. Wilson’s book, The Diversity of Life, was published in 1992.3 The titles of the three sections of the book are a straightforward indication 2 A both sterling and lamentable example is in the title of a course offered by Great Courses that is titled, “What Darwin Didn’t Know: the Modern Science of Evolution.” Although the first of the 24 lectures is titled “What Darwin Knew and Why It Still Matters,” the title of the course not only clearly belittles Darwin’s knowledge with respect to “the modern science of evolution,” but fails to acknowledge the anchorage of that “modern science” in Darwin’s groundbreaking travels in which he observed and documented living realities of animate life. 3 The Diversity of Life was written well after Wilson’s critically received text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a book published in 1975 that elevated the role of genes as determinants of all animal behavior, humans included, and thus, among other ineptitudes, proclaimed biological determinism as the guiding light of life, effectively squelching any possibility of free

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of his concern: Violent Nature, Resilient Life; Biodiversity Rising; The Human Impact. Wilson writes of natural catastrophes and of sizable extinctions in the first section, of species formation, of ecosystem formations, and as it title indicates, of the advancement and evolution of biodiversity in the second section. He writes three chapters in the third section: “The Life and Death of Species,” “Biodiversity Threatened,” and “The Environmental Ethic.” The third section indeed is devoted to descriptions of how humans have decimated myriad forms of life on this planet—​through deforestation, through colonization, through agriculture, and through hunting. In short, in their singularly focused quest for food, land, and resources, humans have been the number one cause of habitat destruction, of extinctions, and more. Wilson discusses and describes climate change as well in this context, though without acknowledging fully the present-​day exculpatory role of humans in global warming. His dominant concern is with the disappearance of biodiversity at the hands of humans. He unequivocally states, Human demographic success has brought the world to this crisis of biodiversity. Human beings—​mammals of the 50-​kilogram weight class and members of a group, the primates, otherwise noted for scarcity—​have become a hundred times more numerous than any other land animal of comparable size in the history of life. By every conceivable measure, humanity is ecologically abnormal. wilson 1992, p. 272

Interestingly enough, Wilson earlier points out, “The end of the Pleistocene was a time not only of human invasion of the New World, but also of climatic will (Wilson 1975). While critically assailed by many academics across a range of disciplines, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was substantively influential among some biologists. For example, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson claimed, “If a marriage contract provided a man with a magical guarantee of paternity, the world would be a more peaceable place!” (Daly and Wilson 1983, p. 285). With respect to such a claim and as asked elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2010b/​2016b, p. 356 /​p. 125), “Does paternal uncertainty foment war, genocide, an uber alles mentality, and other forms of real male-​male competition, whether national or religious? Or does war, genocide, an uber alles mentality, and other forms of real male-​male competition rather open the door to rape, unwanted pregnancies, and fatherless children,” the latter in spite of the purported fact that as biologist R. L. Smith, writing on human sperm competition, states “The human vaginal environment is considered generally hostile toward sperm” (Smith 1984/​2006, p. 105). Smith goes on to remark, “Evidence for this is partially circumstantial in that only a very small fraction of ejaculated sperm ever reaches the uterine tubes where fertilization usually occurs. Of the hundreds of millions of sperm contained in each ejaculate, only about 2,000 arrive in the vicinity of the descending ovum” (ibid.).

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warming” (ibid., p. 248). It is here that Wilson weighs the evidence for determining whether the disappearance of biodiversity is due to the spread and actions of humans or due to the warming of the planet—​climate change. He details changes on both sides, then “lay[ing] aside impartiality” (ibid., p. 249), owns up to his own bias, siding with those he terms “the overkill theorists” (ibid.), in other words, siding with those who affirm that humans have killed off untold numbers of other species in their takeover of the planet. He later notes that he has support from geographer-​anthropologist Jared Diamond who agrees that climate change “cannot be the principal culprit” (ibid., p. 251). A paragraph later he states what he terms “a general truth and the key to the whole melancholy situation”: “Human hunters help no species” (ibid., p. 253). He elaborates as follows: From prehistory to the present time, the mindless horsemen of the environmental apocalypse have been overkill, habitat destruction, introduction of animals such as rats and goats, and diseases carried by these exotic animals. In recent centuries and to an accelerating degree during our generation, habitat destruction is foremost among the lethal forces, followed by the invasion of exotic animals. Each agent strengthens the others in a tightening net of destruction … In fishes and in all other groups of which we have sufficient knowledge, the depredations were started in prehistory and early historical times and are being pressed with a vengeance by modern generations. Early peoples exterminated most of the big animals on the spot. They also decimated less conspicuous plants and animals on islands and in isolated valleys, lakes, and river systems, where species live in small populations with their backs to the wall. Now it is our turn. Armed with chainsaws and dynamite, we are assaulting the final strongholds of biodiversity—​the continents and, to a lesser but growing extent, the seas. ibid., pp. 253–​254

Wilson’s descriptions of the devastation humans have wreaked upon untold numbers of species and continue to wreak upon untold numbers of species are bleak. When we add in what has since been documented with respect to human-​induced climate change, the responsibility and guilt of humans is undeniable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the website of nasa, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States government, states, “The current warming trend is of particular significance

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because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-​20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia” (https://​clim​ate​.nasa​ .gov​/evide​nce​/)​. The website furthermore notes that “Ninety-​seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-​warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.” While Wilson’s assessment and examples of human destruction are based on earlier and in fact lengthy historical records, they remain circumspect as well as finely detailed. With respect to species extinctions in relation to deforestation of rain forests, for example, he points out, The firmer numbers I have given are the estimates of species extinctions that will eventually occur as rain forests are cut back. How long is “eventually”? When a forest is reduced from say, 100 square kilometers to 10, some immediate extinction is likely … Some species will linger on in dangerously reduced population. Elementary mathematical models predict that the number of species in the 10-​kilometer-​square plot will decline at a steadily decelerating rate, swiftly at first, then slowing as the new and lower equilibrium is approached. The reasoning is simple: at first there are many species destined for extinction, which therefore vanish at a high overall rate; later only a few are endangered and the rate slows. ibid., p. 278–​279

Wilson furthermore sums up species extinction and the decline in biodiversity at the hands of humans by a comparison of the present with the evolutionary past: If past species have lived on the order of a million years in the absence of human interference, a common figure for some groups documented in the fossil record, it follows that the normal ‘background’ extinction rate is about one species per one million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history. ibid., p. 280

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We might sum up Wilson’s indictment of humans by pointing out that if endangered species exist, it is because a dangerous species exists (Sheets-​Johnstone 2008).4 It is notable that Wilson homes in on the self-​ignorance of humans and the source of their self-​ignorance: We have little grasp of our true nature, of what it is to be human and therefore where our descendants might someday wish we had directed Spaceship Earth … The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins. We did not arrive on this planet as aliens. Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility, and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built. ibid., p. 348

It is precisely in this context that the human neglect of Darwin is evident. Wilson does not make this connection and thus does not draw on the many insights humans can gain from Darwin’s many texts. These insights warrant specification not simply for the purpose of documentation, but for the purpose of education, namely, bringing to light the importance of evolution to understandings of human nature. What Wilson terms “ignorance of origins” is essentially rooted not only in an ignorance of The Origin of Species, but in an ignorance of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, and even of The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms. Three major insights are of particular relevance across these texts. The first—​the fundamental interconnectedness of life on earth—​was singled out and elaborated in “Darwin,” the first section of the present book. The two further insights to be gained from reading Darwin concern the pan-​animate nature of male-​male competition and the pan-​animate nature of emotions. A substantive exposition will be given of each, drawing first on Darwin’s meticulous text on each of the subjects, then elaborating the phenomenon in terms of later research and writings. In the process, it will become apparent how the interconnectedness of life on earth is a foundational thematic that underpins all understandings of human nature

4 This observation regarding human culpability appears in a chapter of the 2008 book titled “Re-​Naturing the De-​Natured Species: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.”

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and is thus indeed foundationally integral to both the pan-​animate nature of male-​male competition and the pan-​animate nature of emotions. iv

Male-​Male Competition

As its title indicates, Darwin’s book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex is divided into two sections. In their Introduction to the text, the book’s editors, John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May, point out, “The major theme of the first part of the work is simply that man descended from other animals and was not specially created” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. viii). Several pages later, they elaborate the theme: “In Part One of the Descent, Darwin argues from comparative analyses of morphology and behavior that man is basically not different from other animals, and that what differences do exist are simply a matter of degree” (ibid., p. xxi). As to Part Two, Bonner and May point out that “Darwin saw sexual selection as an important variation upon the theme of natural selection, with certain traits in the male (or, less commonly, the female) making him (or her) more successful in mating; the result is a dimorphism between the sexes” (ibid., p. ix). In their Introduction, Bonner and May concentrate on differences between males and females in terms of color, for example (ibid., p. xxix), and differences known today in terms of sex-​linked genes (ibid., pp. xxxi–​xxxii). Oddly enough, they bypass a topic that runs throughout virtually all chapters of Selection in Relation to Sex, namely, what Darwin identifies as “The Law of Battle.” Darwin specifies and describes “The Law of Battle” initially in relation to insects, namely, to beetles: “Some male beetles, which seem ill fitted for fighting, nevertheless engage in conflicts for the possession of the females” (ibid., Part ii, p. 375). He then devotes several pages to the topic and in fact provides drawings of a male and of a female beetle—​Chiasognathus grantii—​that show the difference in size of their mandibles. He describes the male as follows: “The male Chiasognathus grantii of S. Chile … has enormously-​developed mandibles; he is bold and pugnacious; when threatened on any side he faces round, opening his great jaws, and at the same time stridulating loudly” (ibid., p. 377). Drawings of other species of beetles (ibid., pp. 368–​369) that appear earlier in the text are equally remarkable with respect to bodily differences between male and female, though Darwin does not find evidence of males using those differences on behalf of winning females through the law of battle. He concludes, for example, that “the great horns” of many beetles is on behalf of “ornamentation” (ibid., pp. 370–​372).

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Darwin’s observations of the law of battle are significant and warrant detailed exemplifications, all the more so when he states at the beginning of Part Two in setting forth his “Principles of Sexual Selection” that differences extend beyond reproductive differences, differences “such as the greater size, strength, and pugnacity of the male, his weapons of offence or means of defence against his rivals, his gaudy colouring and various ornaments, his power of song, and other such characters” (ibid., p. 254). A few pages later, he states, “On the whole there can be no doubt that with almost all animals, in which the sexes are separate, there is a constantly recurrent struggle between the males for the possession of the females” (ibid., p. 260). He immediately, however, raises a difficult question for himself: “Our difficulty in regard to sexual selection lies in understanding how it is that the males which conquer other males, or those which prove the most attractive to the females, leave a greater number of offspring to inherit their superiority than the beaten and less attractive males. Unless this result followed, the characters which gave to certain males an advantage over others, could not be perfected and augmented through sexual selection” (ibid., pp. 260–​261). Darwin’s concern in what follows is not to show how this result obtains, but to detail from an evolutionary perspective the reality of sexual selection. While observations lead Darwin to describe how sexual differentiation is apparent in some species of molluscs, annelids, crustaceans, and insects, such differentiation is not necessarily a function of the law of battle. In his “Summary on Insects” in particular, he remarks, “In almost all the Orders [of insects], the males of some species, even of weak and delicate kinds, are known to be highly pugnacious; and some few are furnished with special weapons for fighting with their rivals. But the law of battle does not prevail nearly so widely with insects as with the higher animals” (ibid., p. 418). It is indeed not until his consideration of vertebrates—​fish, amphibians, and reptiles—​that Darwin writes of “Courtship and battles of the males” (ibid., Part Two—​continued, p. 1). With respect to fish, Darwin provides drawings from salmon specimens in the British Museum. The difference in the structure and size of the head of the male in comparison with the head of the female (species: Salmo salar) is notable, though as Darwin points out, the change in the structure occurs only during breeding season (ibid., pp. 4–​5). Darwin’s shorter section on Amphibians focuses on sexual differences in structure and color, and while mention is made of the attraction of the larger bodily form of the male and of his coloring to a female, the law of battle is not mentioned. In other words, male salamanders, toads, and other amphibian forms of life do not engage in competition for females. Darwin, however, also calls attention to—​including in personal terms—​the vocal organs of male amphibians:

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These animals … offer one interesting sexual difference, namely in the musical powers possessed by the males; but to speak of music, when applied to the discordant and overwhelming sounds emitted by male bull-​frogs and some other species, seems, according to our taste, a singularly inappropriate expression. Nevertheless certain frogs sing in a decidedly pleasing manner. Near Rio de Janeiro I used often to sit in the evening to listen to a number of little Hylae, which, perched on blades of grass close to the water, sent forth sweet chirping notes in harmony. The various sounds are emitted chiefly by males during the breeding-​season, as in the case of the croaking of our common frog. ibid., p. 27

In short, while there is certainly a vocal difference between male and female amphibians, Darwin finds no battling for females among male amphibians. The same is true for reptiles. In discussing tortoises, crocodiles, snakes, and lizards, Darwin reasons on the basis of observational evidence that though the bodily structure of males is different from females, and changes occur during breeding season and serve as ornaments of one kind and another, males do not engage in competition for females; their visual appearance alone anchors their possible attraction to females. For example, in discussing lizards, Darwin calls attention to the horns on two species: Chamaeleon bifurcus (Madagascar) and Chamaeleon Owenii (West Coast of Africa), calling the horns “the climax of difference between the sexes” in the genus Chamaeleon (ibid., p. 34). He states, [W]‌e can hardly doubt that they serve the same general purpose in the economy of these two animals. The first conjecture which will occur to every one [sic] is that they are used by the males for fighting together; but Dr. Günther, to whom I am indebted for the foregoing details, does not believe that such peaceable creatures would ever become pugnacious. Hence we are driven to infer that these almost monstrous deviations of structure serve as masculine ornaments. ibid., pp. 35–​36

It is indeed in his introduction to birds—​Avians—​that Darwin discusses the law of battle at length (ibid., pp. 40–​51), beginning his discussion with the following generalization: “Almost all male birds are extremely pugnacious, using their beaks, wings, and legs for fighting together. We see this every spring with our robins and sparrows. The smallest of all birds, namely the humming-​ bird, is the most quarrelsome” (ibid., p. 40). After giving descriptions of battle by various birds, Darwin focuses on the size difference between males

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and females: “The males of many birds are larger than the females, and this no doubt is an advantage to them in their battles with their rivals, and has been gained through sexual selection. The difference in size between the two sexes is carried to an extreme point in several Australian species; thus the male musk-​duck (Biziura) and the male Cincloramphus cruralis (allied to our pipits) are by measurement actually twice as large as their respective females” (ibid., p. 43). Interestingly enough, however, Darwin goes on to point out what amounts to an odd fact: “With many other birds, the females are larger than the males,” adding that “the explanation often given, namely that the females have most of the work in feeding their young, will not suffice” (ibid.). He then states, “In some few cases, as we shall hereafter see, the females apparently have acquired their greater size and strength for the sake of conquering other females and obtaining possession of the males” (ibid.). After describing male-​ male competition in gallinaceous birds and the spurs on the wings of various birds, Darwin states simply that “The season of love is that of battle,” adding that “the males of some birds … are ready to fight whenever they meet. The presence of the female is the teterrima belli causa” (ibid., p. 48). He goes on to describe more extensively “Vocal and instrumental Music” of birds, their “Love-​ Antics and Dances,” their “Decoration,” and the “Display by Male Birds of Their Plumage.” His conclusion: “From the foregoing facts we clearly see that the plumes and other ornaments of the male must be of the highest importance to him; and we further see that beauty in some cases is even more important than success in battle” (ibid., p. 98). Darwin proceeds in further chapters on birds to investigate and describe various other aspects of their behavior, beginning with courtship. He gives what amounts to a summary of what has come before in preface to this further inquiry (ibid., p.99): When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female. These qualities, as we have just seen, are evidently of high importance to the male. When they are gained for only a part of the year, this is always shortly before the breeding season. It is the male alone who elaborately displays his varied attractions, and often performs strange antics on the ground or in the air, in the presence of the female. Each male drives away or, if he can, kills all his rivals. Hence we may conclude, that it is the object of the male to induce the female to pair with him, and for this purpose he tries to excite or charm her in various ways; and this is the opinion of all those who have carefully studied the habits of living birds. But there remains a question which has an

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all-​important bearing on sexual selection, namely, does every male of the same species equally excite and attract the female? Or does she exert a choice, and prefer certain males? Darwin concludes “It is much more difficult to decide what qualities determine the choice of the females.” He then continues by examining first indirect and then direct evidence for affirming that “it is to a large extent the external attractions of the male, though no doubt his vigour, courage, and other mental qualities come into play” (ibid., p.100). Darwin’s discussion of birds in fact continues for more than 100 pages, including detailed observations that attest to the reasoning power of birds, to their “acute powers of observation” (ibid., p. 109), and to the discriminatory powers of females in their preference for particular males and hence to the evidence for female choice. In his summary of sexual selection in birds, Darwin emphasizes the pugnacity of male birds during the breeding season, but emphasizes equally the fact that males “have special means for charming the female” whether by the power of song, or “strange cries,” or “instrumental music,” or “love-​dances or antics,” or “ornaments of many kinds”: “the most brilliant tints, combs and wattles, beautiful plumes, elongated feathers, top-​ knots, and so forth, are by far the commonest means” (ibid., pp. 232–​233). Darwin’s fine-​grained exposition of sexual selection then turns to an examination of mammals, which, interestingly enough, begins as follows: “With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms” (ibid., p. 239). Indeed, the law of battle prevails in mammals, and “prevails with aquatic as with terrestrial mammals” (ibid., pp. 239–​240). Darwin’s observations at various points in his descriptive account of male mammal bodily weaponry are notable. For example, he points out, “When the males are provided with weapons which the females do not possess, there can hardly be a doubt that they are used for fighting with other males, and that they have been acquired through sexual selection” (ibid., p. 242). He later describes male bodily weaponry in greater detail: Each male animal uses his weapons in his own peculiar fashion. The common ram makes a charge and butts with such force with the bases of his horns, that I have seen a powerful man knocked over as easily as a child … The giraffe uses his short hair-​covered horns, which are rather longer in the male than in the female, in a curious manner; for with his long neck he swings his head to either side, almost upside down, with such force, that I have seen a hard plank deeply indented by a single blow. pp. 249–​250

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He furthermore emphasizes the fact that males are typically larger and stronger than females and that “male quadrupeds are also more courageous and pugnacious than the females,” these characteristics being attributable in good part through sexual selection (ibid., p. 260). In a further chapter and sections thereof, Darwin describes male mammal vocal organs, sense of smell, hair, and ornamental coloring. In this context, he points out “a striking parallelism between mammals and birds in all their secondary sexual characters, namely in their weapons for fighting with rival males, in their ornamental appendages, and in their colours” (ibid., p. 297), noting in his summary of the chapter that “The law of battle for the possession of the female appears to prevail throughout the whole great class of mammals” (p. 312). The two chapters that follow are specifically concerned with the “Secondary Sexual Characters of Man” (ibid., pp. 316–​384). Darwin begins the first of these chapters by comparing “man” and “woman”: With mankind the differences between the sexes are greater than in most species of Quadrumana, but not so great as in some, for instance, the mandrill. Man on average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-​pronounced muscles. … His body, and especially his face, is more hairy, and his voice has a different and more powerful tone. In certain tribes the women are said, whether truly I know not, to differ slightly in tint from the men; and with Europeans, the women are perhaps the more brightly coloured of the two, as may be seen when both sexes have been equally exposed to the weather. Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic, than woman, and has a more inventive genius. ibid., p. 316

In these two chapters, Darwin remarks a number of times on “the greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and pugnacity” (ibid., p. 325). In considering “Differences in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes,” he remarks, “Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness; and this holds good even with savages … Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright” (ibid., p. 326). He points out further that “when men are put into competition, or a man with a woman, who possess every mental quality in the same perfection,

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with the exception that the one has higher energy, perseverance, and courage, this one will generally become more eminent, whatever the object may be, and will gain the victory” (ibid., p. 328). In short and in sum, a man’s “delight in competition” is clearly acknowledged and highlighted, together with his bodily structure and dispositional attitudes. In what follows, Darwin discusses “musical powers” “love of ornaments,” and “beauty,” remarking on those humans who paint or tattoo their bodies (ibid., p. 342), for example, and commenting on both savage and civilized societies and on nonhuman as well as human animals. He states in conclusion that “the greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and even energy of man, in comparison with the same qualities in woman, were acquired during primeval times, and have subsequently been augmented, chiefly through the contests of rival males for the possession of the females.” Two pages later, he adds the following personal comment: “For my own part I conclude that of all the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals, sexual selection has been by far the most efficient” (ibid., p. 382, p. 384, respectively). As is apparent from the preceding summaries of Darwin’s chapters from the book’s concern with Selection in Relation to Sex, “the law of battle” is further testimonial to the fundamental interconnection of animate life. At the beginning of his final chapter titled “General Summary and Conclusion,” Darwin calls attention to “the principle of evolution,” stating, “It seemed worth while to try how far the principle of evolution would throw light on some of the more complex problems in the natural history of man” (ibid., p. 385). He then sums up his observations and the research studies of other naturalists (ibid., pp. 385–​86): The main conclusion arrived at in this work, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form. The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in innumerable points of structure and constitution, both of high and of the most trifling importance, —​the rudiments he retains, and the abnormal reversions to which he is occasionally liable, —​are facts which cannot be disputed. They have long been known, but until recently they told us nothing with respect to the origin of man. Now when viewed by the light of our knowledge of the whole organic world, their meaning is unmistakable. The great principle of evolution stands up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are considered in connection with others,

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such as the mutual affinities of the members of the same group, their geographical distribution in past and present times, and their geological succession. It is incredible that all these facts should speak falsely. In what follows, Darwin offers concluding remarks on embryological homologies between “man” and “the lower animals,” and on the “mental powers of the higher animals” that are “the same in kind” as those of humans but “different in degree.” He offers further concluding remarks on certain moral capacities, noting, for example, that “Animals endowed with the social instincts take pleasure in each other’s company, warn each other of danger, defend and aid each other in many ways” (ibid., p. 391). His comments on humans are of considerable interest in this context. After first remarking that “A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions and motives,—​of approving of some and disapproving of others,” and that “man is the one being who with certainty … makes the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals,” Darwin points out, But in our third chapter I have endeavoured to shew that the moral sense follows, firstly, from the enduring and always present nature of the social instincts, in which respect man agrees with the lower animals; and secondly, from his mental faculties being highly active and his impressions of past events extremely vivid, in which respects he differs from lower animals. Owing to this condition of mind, man cannot avoid looking backwards and comparing the impressions of past events and actions. He also continually looks forward. ibid., p. 3925

Throughout these concluding pages Darwin consistently ties human animals to nonhuman animals, differentiating in particular the workings of sexual selection in Arthropoda and Vertebrata from “lower divisions of the animal kingdom” (ibid., p. 396). He writes that “in these two great Sub-​Kingdoms, sexual selection has effected much; and it deserves notice that we here find the intellectual faculties developed, but in two very distinct lines, to the highest standard, namely in the Hymenoptera (ants, bees, etc.) amongst the Arthropoda, and in the Mammalia, including man, amongst the Vertebrata” (ibid.). He later 5 One could, of course, readily question “the moral sense,” or better, the moral integrity of many leaders, male leaders not only such as Hitler and Stalin, but more contemporary ones such as Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Kim-​Jong-​un, Assad, and Bolsonaro, for example, all heads of national governments in 2020 and earlier.

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recalls and remarks upon the two different forms of “sexual struggle”: “in the one it is between the individuals of the same sex, generally the male sex, in order to drive away or kill their rivals, the females remaining passive; whilst in the other, the struggle is likewise between the individuals of the same sex, in order to excite or charm those of the opposite sex, generally the females, which no longer remain passive, but select the more agreeable partners” (ibid., p. 398). His final words center on a recognition of the fact that notwithstanding “all his noble qualities”—​sympathy, benevolence, intellect—​“Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin” (ibid., p. 405). Later field studies and research implicitly document Darwin’s meticulously detailed insights into the law of battle and the nature of “sexual struggle” in ways particularly pertinent to understandings of human nature: one by way of fine-​grained descriptive accounts of the male who wins in male-​male competitions, thus the dominant or alpha male, one by way of what evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and zoologist and paleontologist Elizabeth Vrba (Gould and Vrba, 1982) term “exaptation.” These two further aspects of the law of battle are readily apparent in a uniquely human drama that has been played out for centuries and even millennia, namely, in the drama of war of which more later. We shall here focus first on descriptions of a dominant male and then on an explication and specific exemplification of exaptation. Primatologists Sarel Eimerl and Irven DeVore elegantly describe an alpha male: There is no mistaking a dominant male macaque. These are superbly muscled monkeys. Their hair is sleek and carefully groomed, their walk calm, assured and majestic. They move in apparent disregard of the lesser monkeys who scatter at their approach. For to obstruct the path of a dominant male or even to venture, when unwelcome, too near to him is an act of defiance, and macaques learn young that such a challenge will draw a heavy punishment. A dominant animal controls the space around it … It can invade an inferior’s space as a right, whereas no inferior would dare to venture into its space without first making a gesture of appeasement … On being threatened by a definitely dominant monkey, a subordinate is likely to display submission. Confronted with a fixed stare, it will look away. Faced with a possible charge, it is likely to crouch close to the ground, its head turned away. And if it flees and is chased, it will cringe away from the threatened bite or try to avoid punishment by presenting its hindquarters. eimerl and devore, 1965, pp. 106, 108, 109

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As noted elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017a, p. 3), “Though not identified as such, a dominant male macaque is a male archetype in the Kingdom Animalia.” Jung describes archetypes as structurally homologous to instincts, meaning that they are integral to human nature (Jung 1968). They are thus not learned forms of behavior but are intuitively played out and understood. Primatologist Frans de Waal’s description of an alpha male does not mention archetypes, yet it aptly identifies an important feature of the dominant male archetype. De Waal points out that “[the] habit of making the body look deceptively large and heavy is characteristic of the alpha male … The fact of being in a position of power makes a male physically impressive, hence the assumption that he occupies the position which fits his appearance” (de Waal 1982, p. 87). Size is indeed an archetypal biological marker of power. Notable examples of its value in the evolutionary world are readily apparent. As referenced elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2008, p. 37), “[T]‌hose who are large by nature and those who can increase their size—​by inflating themselves or a part of themselves, e.g., the common European toad, male sea elephants (Attenborough 1979, p. 140; Darwin [1871] 1981l Part Two, p. 278)—​gain an upper hand in defending themselves, in attracting a mate, or in competing with others.” Moreover “the value of size in the human world has … been evident for centuries in practices such as lip enlargement, buttock enlargement (steatopygia), tendril-​like nail elongations, and head elongations (Rudofsky 1971), all of which practices are thought to enhance one’s power in some way” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2008, p. 37). There is in fact much to be said not only about the archetypal value of size in relation to power, but about the archetypal value of power specifically in relation to the treatment of others. Darwin’s sanguine view of human morality—​ man’s “sympathy which feels for the most debased,” man’s “benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature,” and man’s “god-​like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system”—​concentrates on one end of the moral spectrum, i.e., the beneficent. A dominant male can indeed be benevolent to others, as witness the young adult male hamadryas baboon who “gives his one-​year-​old female a gestural invitation to climb on his back” and then “carries her across a difficult passage in the sleeping-​cliff” (Kummer 1968, p. 302). As remarked elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2009, p. 352), “[T]‌he gestural invitation testifies to at least three distinct awarenesses on the part of both male and female baboon: an awareness that the expanse or jaggedness of the cliff is too difficult for the young female to manage; an awareness that the male can cross the passage himself; an awareness that the male can transport the female on his back across the passage.” A dominant male’s beneficence, however, should not hide recognition of his pugnacious nature, a nature that drives him to fight off

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rivals, thereby allowing him to retain his elevated male status and win access to females. Darwin’s global studies of animate life implicitly testify not only to the authenticity of Jung’s analytic of archetypes, but to archetypes being homologous to instincts: archetypes too are instinctively played out patterns of behavior that are instinctively understood by others. Darwin’s description of an infant smiling succinctly exemplifies such an archetype: “Seeing a Baby (like Hensleigh’s) smile & frown, who can doubt these are instinctive—​child does not sneer” (Darwin 1987, Notebook M, No. 96, p. 542). Like instincts, archetypes are distinctive, qualitatively inflected dynamic patterns, patterns instinctively played out and instinctively understood by others. More generally, Darwin’s global observations of animate life are textually elucidated along the lines of archetypal themes and variations, themes in the form of morphological, intellectual, emotional features, and ways of being that are evident across animate life together with their variations across individuals and across species (Darwin, 1968 [1859]; Darwin, 1981 [1871]; Darwin, 1965 [1872]; see also Darwin, 1976 [1881]). Moreover as pointed out elsewhere, “Later studies by Irenäus Eibl-​Eibesfeldt and J. A. R. A. M. van Hooff elucidate these archetypal themes along further lines, Eibl-​Eibesfeldt (1979) in his research on basic human facial expressions across human cultures, van Hooff (1969) in his studies of specific facial expressions in monkeys and their relationship to human laughter and smiling” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2019a, p. 6). We can see from such studies that archetypal patterns or forms extend across individuals and across species, and indeed across animate life as a whole in the archetypal movements of approach and avoidance (see Schneirla 1959 on approach and avoidance). The law of battle that Darwin describes is an archetypal male disposition that, together with the morphological archetype of a dominant male that later evolutionary biologists describe, enlightens us not only about a basic feature of animate life, but gives us a springboard to enlighten ourselves about human alpha males. Moreover it enlightens us more broadly about two further basic features of animate life. The interconnectedness of animate life is indeed distinctively evident to anyone conversant with both Darwin’s global observations of animate life and his meticulous detailed writings emanating from those observations and with the field studies of evolutionary biologists who continue to document and expand on his findings. It perhaps warrants emphasis that to acknowledge the fundamental interconnectedness of animate life on earth is to acknowledge Nature as the ‘rock bottom’ of our being. That acknowledgement is hardly an outlandish recognition. Neither is the thesis that as we descend into the deeper layers of our psychical being we move away

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from our unique individuality an outlandish claim. As elaborated elsewhere along human archetypal lines (ibid.), The morphological archetypes that define us as human—​for example, upright posture, structural relationship of thumb and forefinger (for fine grasping)—​are complemented by kinetic archetypes that are themselves complemented by semantic archetypes. In finer terms, terms that at the same time take nonhuman as well as human animate forms of life into account, it is evident that morphological archetypes describe distinct bodily forms that engender archetypal affective dispositions and dynamically congruent archetypal movement dispositions and possibilities that, whether instinctively or voluntarily carried out, move through bodies and move them to move in ways that are meaningful.6 Just such interwoven archetypes—​morphological, affective-​kinetic, semantic —​are apparent in male-​male competition and in alpha males. The interwoven archetypes in fact give us a springboard to examine human nature in particular, and to enlighten ourselves in particular about human alpha males. In effect, it is pertinent at this point not just to consider but to exemplify in real-​ life, real-​time terms archetypal alpha males in present-​day human societies and cultures. Because of their far-​reaching global as well as national impact, the personages of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-​un, and others are particularly exemplary. We will preface these archetypal exemplifications by a background description, notably by Jung’s illuminating chapter on “Wotan,” “the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle,” the god who is “a superlative magician and artist in illusion … versed in all secrets of an occult nature”; a “dual nature” god: “a god of storm and a god of secret musings” (Jung 1970, pp. 182, 184, respectively). The chapter, first published as an article in 1936, is a chapter in Jung’s book Civilization in Transition. Jung connects Wotan—​“the long quiescent Wotan”—​with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s: “We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movements” (ibid., p, 180). A few sentences later he remarks, “The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-​year-​olds to veterans” (ibid.). Indeed, “the long quiescent Wotan … awake[s]‌like an extinct volcano, to new activity in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages” (ibid.). Jung was in fact present in person at a public 6 Reflexes as well as instincts and affects engage and move the body to move, as in the pan-​ animate startle reflex, a reflex that may well be thought an archetypal bodily response, precisely as Landis and Hunt’s classic research documents (Landis and Hunt, 1968).

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speech given by Hitler. His description of that experience is chilling. Indeed, Jung’s character assessment of Hitler, one of whose “ranting speeches” he not only heard, but saw Hitler harangue “with my own eyes” (ibid., p. 204), is in fact applicable to at least two twenty‐first‐century national leaders, and, in part, to several more, all of whom we will presently identify and discuss in detail: A sorry lack of education, conceit that bordered on madness, a very mediocre intelligence combined with the hysteric’s cunning and the power fantasies of an adolescent, were written all over this demagogue’s face. His gesticulations were all put on, devised by an hysterical mind intent only on making an impression. He behaved in public like a man living in his own biography, in this case as the somber, daemonic “man of iron” of popular fiction, the ideal of an infantile public whose knowledge of the world is derived from the deified heroes of trashy films … For this theatrical hysteric and transparent impostor was not strutting about on a small stage, but was riding the armoured divisions of the Wehrmacht, with all the weight of German industry behind him. ibid., p. 204

What is particularly telling too is Jung’s identification, or more accurately, his psychoanalytic diagnosis of Hitler’s persona: All other pathological features—​complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-​erotic self-​admiration and self-​extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow men (how contemptuously Hitler spoke of his own people!), projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-​ crossing—​all these were united in the man who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years. ibid., p. 203

Following this psychoanalytic diagnosis, Jung immediately asks, “Is this pure chance?” but then immediately also remarks, “A more accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition would be pseudologia phantastica, that form of hysteria which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies” (ibid., pp. 203–​204). It should be noted that Jung’s psychoanalytic of Hitler as a Wotan figure is not to be misunderstood: it is Hitler who is the alpha male, not Wotan. Wotan is indeed not an alpha male. He is a God whom human alpha males follow

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in god-​like pretense. The relationship of Wotan to human alpha males was recognized and documented in an article several years ago (Sheets-​Johnstone 2010a). Since then, much more can of course be recognized and documented, but as pointed out earlier, when Jung remarks (Jung 1970, p. 185) that “the impressive thing about the German phenomenon [i.e., the period of the early and mid-​1930s in which Hitler rose to power] is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed’ has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition,” one might correlatively think of a man such as George W. Bush, his desire to be a “war president,” his subsequent “war on terror,” his subsequent Presidential memo that established torture programs at Guantánamo and elsewhere, and so on. Jung’s point, however, is not simply to recognize “the man,” but the effect of “the man.” In this context, Jung astutely distinguishes the Ergreifer—​the one who seizes—​from the Ergriffener—​the one who is seized. He indeed lucidly shows how there are two sides to the “general phenomenon” of Ergriffenheit, “a state of being seized or possessed” (ibid., p. 184): on the one side, the one who seizes, on the other side the one who is seized. However “[t]‌he one who is seized is not in fact a single person, but a whole society, a whole society that is in the thrall of a political mass movement” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017a, p. 2). At such a time, as Jung later remarks, [T]‌he life of nations rolls on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of where it is going, like a rock crashing down the side of a hill, until it is stopped by an obstacle stronger than itself. Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks, and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. jung 1970, p. 189

Comments are pertinent here that specify and document how “the life of nations” can “roll on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of where it is going …” in one’s own lifetime. Herewith an example (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017a, p. 3): [T]‌he mass movement that followed the terrorist attack of 9 September 2001 [in the United States] was that of a single nation that ran counter to the commitment by the United Nations to an ongoing assessment of whether weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. Those in executive power in that single nation—​the consolidated Ergreifer—​inculcated fear, a psychic fear of the enemy, a personage or nation that could come from

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anywhere and which required appropriate measures by citizens, such as duct-​taping windows. As noted elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2016a, p. 173, note 6), “Fear of terrorism was willfully injected into public life … to secure trust in the federal government, which trust, of course, kept fear of terrorism at bay” Such trust engendered obeisance to those in power. Trust and obeisance were thus politically cemented by the social manipulation and control of fear. Fear of the unknown, of the uncertain, of ‘what may come if I do or do not do such and such’ is both a fundamental emotion and a ubiquitous emotion, fundamental and ubiquitous in the sense of extending across domains of animate life. Such fear was indeed formerly recognized and studied as such in the biologically anchored movements of approach and avoidance. see schneirla 1959 on approach and avoidance

v

21st-​Century Archetypal Exemplifications of Male-​Male Competition

We might well begin by noting that the earlier description of a dominant male macaque strikingly exemplifies the relationship between the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. Moreover there is a further striking exemplification intimately connected with the Ergreifer and Ergriffener relationship. In particular, given Jung’s description of an Ergreifer, “the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle” (Jung 1970, p. 182), Wotan’s presence is clearly discernible in today’s twenty-​first century human world: his statuesque and behavioral affinities to Hitler and to dominant males in nonhuman animal species extend to certain twenty-​first century national leaders. As pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017a, p. 3), the affinities extend to “highly visible human males who, in general, are cut of the same archetypal cloth. While all are not ‘superbly muscled,’ all are ‘assured’ and ‘majestic’ and ‘control the space’ about them (Eimerl and DeVore, 1965, pp. 106, 108, 109), taking no back talk or countermoves from anyone. Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-​ un, and Bashar al-​Assad, [and, we could add, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, and Jair Bolsonaro] strut their twenty-​first-​century hour upon the stage in individual ways,” all of them coincident in one way and another with a dominant male macaque as described earlier—​some, be it noted like Hitler, in far more deadly ways than a dominant male macaque, but all being coincident with the Ergreifer. There is yet an even further coincidence. Jung’s portrayal of Hitler as a Wotan archetype and his psychoanalytic characterization of Hitler as a

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hysteric enlighten us psychologically about the mindset of twenty-​first century human male incarnations. As pinpointed elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017a, p. 4), Jung’s remarks provide a succinct prologue to a documentation of twenty-​first-​century leaders plagued by the pathological condition that Jung duly identifies: pseudologia phantastica. In particular, prior to remarking that “A more accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition would be pseudologia phantastica, that form of hysteria which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies” (Jung 1970, pp. 203–​204), Jung earlier comments, “[T]‌he hysteric always complains of being surrounded by people who are incapable of appreciating him and who are activated only by bad motives; by inferior mischief‐makers, a crowd of submen who should be exterminated neck and crop so that the Superman can live on his high level of perfection” (ibid., p. 203). Jung later points out that “For a short spell, such people usually meet with astounding success, and for that reason are socially dangerous. Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one invents and believes oneself.” (ibid., p. 204) Clearly, the archetypal human male hysteric whom Jung describes is recognizable in today’s socio-​political world. Striking resemblances indeed obtain between the pseudologia phantastica condition of the hysteric and the pseudologia phantastica condition of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-​un, Assad, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, and Bolsonaro. Whatever nefarious and deceitful means are needed and in turn employed, these present-​day Wotan archetypes plump up their stature by denigrating and even exterminating those who fail to recognize the Superman authority over them. They thereby solidify themselves as implacable leaders, opposable by no one. Consider each of the following documentations: In a cnn website article titled “An agitated Trump encourages governors to use aggressive tactics on protesters” (https://​www​.cnn​.com​/2020​/06​/01​ /polit​ics​/don​ald​-trump​-race​-pol​ice​/index​.html), journalists Kevin Liptak, Ryan Nobles, and Sarah Westwood document Trump’s reaction to the national protests in the U.S. over the horrific and senseless killing of George Floyd, protests that spread globally. They quote Trump directly in detailing his reactionary response: “‘You have to dominate’, he said. ‘If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.’” An article in the Philadelphia Tribune on Trump’s town hall (https://​www​.phi​llyt​rib​.com​/com​ment​ary​/edi​tori​als​/trump​-lies​-at​-town​ -hall​-in​-phila​delp​hia​/artic​le​_8​28f1​c07​-80d9​-57df​-b464​-6fd09​251d​2ee​.html) states, “Trump contradicted his admission to journalist Bob Woodward that he was deliberately ‘playing it down’ when discussing the threat of covid-​19 to Americans earlier this year. Despite audio of his comments being released, Trump said: ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t downplay it. I actually, in many ways, I up-​played

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it, in terms of action’.” A comment at the end of the article reads: “In the town hall, Trump spread the usual lies, distortions and exaggerations that he makes during campaign rallies.” In a New York Times article titled “The Towering Lies of President Trump”(https://​www​.nyti​mes​.com​/2020​/09​/11​/opin​ion​/sun​ day​/trump​-woodw​ard​-coro​navi​rus​-vacc​ine​.html), political scientist and former aide to Senator John Kerry, Greg Weiner subsumes Trump’s “towering lies” in three sentences: “It’s simple. Everything that benefits Mr. Trump is true and everything that inconveniences him is false … Systematic skepticism axiomatically questions the truth or relevance of anything that does not serve Mr. Trump’s personal ambition.” In an article in the UK Spectator titled “Vladimir Putin’s empire of lies” and subtitled “His answer to the destruction of Flight mh17 has been more propaganda. In Russia, at least, it seems to be working,” journalist Owen Matthew writes, [T]‌he Kremlin-​controlled media seem capable of any baseness in their rush to deflect blame and scramble the minds of their audience with conspiracy theories. Russia’s official media have been bending the truth to order for decades—​apart from a brief and chaotic respite in the 1990s. But in recent months Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has gone to a new level of credibility—​defying cynicism. The kind of stories it is prepared to create to obscure the truth of what happened to mh17—​and what’s going on in Ukraine in general—​have left the realm of spin and entered the fantastical. https://​www​.specta​tor​.co​.uk​/arti​cle​/vladi​mir​-putin​-s​-emp​ire​-of​-lies

In a travel blog titled “North Korea /​The Lies and Truth of Kim Jong Un /​ How People Live (2019),” the blog appearing on a YouTube website titled “The People” (https://​www​.yout​ube​.com​/chan​nel​/UCStG​slso​c9pr​89Xn​mwns​ YWw), journalist Anton Anton Lyadov details his journey to North Korea. Among other revelations, he points out, This is the country where newspapers write that their Supreme Leader Kim Jong-​un can predict the weather. This is the country where you will get a life imprisonment for removing ideology slogans from house walls. In the first episode eou [sic] will see what is North Korea like, how people live in North Korea, first impressions of North Korea, and what difficulties you will face while North Korea travel [sic]. https://​www​.yout​ube​.com​/chan​nel​/UCStG​slso​c9pr​89Xn​mwns​YWw

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An article appearing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and written by journalist Ravit Hecht (https://​www​.haar​etz​.com​/opin​ion​/​.prem​ium​-netany​ahu​-has​ -perfec​ted​-lying​-1​.8353​484) is titled “Netanyahu Is an Unbridled Liar, but His Supporters Don’t Mind.” It begins as follows: Benjamin Netanyahu’s lying performances could cause anyone with minimal sensitivity to the value of truth to grow dizzy. It’s hard to ignore the steep slope we have descended, from “There will be nothing because there was nothing,” through “What? What are you talking about?” when asked if he would seek immunity from prosecution, to “Immunity is the cornerstone of democracy.” In a Time magazine article titled “Brute, Naked Fear. How Bashar Assad Is Using His Family’s Old Tactics to Regain His Grip on Syria” (https://​time​.com​ /5595​411​/syria​-bas​har​-assad​-sam​-dag​her​/), journalist Joseph Hincks identifies and details what amounts to a chilling family habit: Under the pretext of fighting terrorism Hafez [Bashar’s father] massacred civilians in Hama in 1982 and later Bashar used the same excuse to go after those who were defying him. Both went after the peaceful activists first, vilifying them and putting them all together in the same category as terrorists, then there was the collective punishment. It’s the same playbook. Even the torture methods were similar. In an article in The Atlantic (https://​www​.thea​tlan​tic​.com​/polit​ics​/arch​ ive​/2020​/03​/bolson​aro​-coro​navi​rus​-den​ial​-bra​zil​-trump​/608​926​/), journalist Uri Friedman writes that “Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has lashed out against local officials who have implemented severe lockdowns, accusing them of destroying the country,” and goes on to specify the response of Bolsonaro to the coronavirus: He’s described the illness as a “little flu,” a trifling “cold.” He’s accused the media of manufacturing “hysteria”—​even as confirmed cases of the coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-​19, soar to well over half a million and deaths to roughly 25,000 worldwide. The coronavirus-​ denial movement officially has a leader, and it’s Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

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All of the above quotes and descriptions speak for themselves. They leave no doubt that each of these national leaders is—​or was as per Trump and Bolsonaro—​a devious tyrant who wants nothing and no one to interrupt, intrude, or in any way block his power. Each is indeed an archetypal dominant human alpha male, a Wotanesque male. vi

A Return to Darwin and His Principles of Natural Selection

It is important to emphasize the significance of variation, the first biological reality of life that Darwin sets forth and discusses at length in successive chapters, specifically, the first two chapters, in The Origin of Species: “Variation Under Domestication” and “Variation Under Nature.” The chapters are followed by a chapter devoted to “The Struggle for Existence.” What Darwin is at pains to point out and document with respect to variation is precisely the reality of variation and the fact that while artificial selection produces more variation than natural selection—​“cultivated plants and animals … generally differ much more from each other, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 71)—​variation is an inherent biological reality of animate life. He states, “No one supposes that all the individuals of the same species are cast in the very same mould,” and goes on to explain, “These individual differences are highly important for us, as they afford materials for natural selection to accumulate” (ibid., p. 102). He definitively connects variation with natural selection, specifically, with the struggle for life and generational inheritance when he writes, “[I]‌f variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection” (ibid., pp. 169–​170). As is apparent, Darwin’s concern in this context is to document and validate realities of natural selection and his thesis of “descent with modification.” In this text, he does so mainly through variations in bodily structure (ibid., pp. 205–​233). In later books and writings, Darwin details affective and cognitive individual differences. For example, he remarks that every one [sic] who has had any experience in setting traps knows that young animals can be caught much more easily than old ones; and they can be much more easily approached by an enemy. Even with respect to old animals, it is impossible to catch many in the same place and in the

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same kind of trap, or to destroy them by the same kind of poison; yet it is improbable that all should have partaken of the poison, and impossible that all should have been caught in the trap. They must learn caution by seeing their brethren caught or poisoned. darwin 1981 [1871], p. 49

Earlier, he has quoted South American muleteers who state, “I will not give you the mule whose step is easiest, but la mas racional,—​the one that reasons best” (ibid., p. 48). Darwin furthermore observes and describes affective differences. For example, he writes, Of all the above-​named complex emotions [he has previously detailed Jealousy, Envy, Avarice, Revenge, Suspicion, Deceit, Slyness, Guilt, Vanity, Conceit, Ambition, Pride, Humility, etc.], Pride, perhaps, is the most plainly expressed. A proud man exhibits his sense of superiority over others by holding his head and body erect. He is haughty (haut), or high, and makes himself appear as large as possible; so that he is said to be swollen or puffed up with pride … The arrogant man looks down on others, and with lowered eyelids hardly condescends to see them; or he may show his contempt by slight movements, such as those before described, about the nostrils or lips. darwin 1965 [1872], p. 263

He later adds, “The whole expression of pride stands in direct antithesis to that of humility” (ibid.). Elsewhere, in a discussion of “Helplessness” and in particular, of shrugging shoulders, a movement he describes in great detail (ibid., pp. 263–​264; see also further this text), Darwin remarks, “Englishmen are much less demonstrative than the men of most other European nations, and they shrug their shoulders far less frequently and energetically than Frenchmen or Italians do.” He furthermore observes, “The gesture varies in all degrees from the complex movement, just described, to only a momentary and scarcely perceptible raising of both shoulders; or, as I have noticed in a lady sitting in an arm-​chair, to the mere turning slightly outwards of the open hands with separated fingers. I have never seen very young English children shrug their shoulders” (ibid., p. 264). He goes on, however, to document an observation “by a medical professor and excellent observer,” an observation of young children of French and Scottish parents shrugging their shoulders (ibid.). The first pan-​animate empirical fact underlying Darwin’s principle of natural selection is precisely variation among individuals (Darwin 1968 [1859]). In the following section, we shall see that principle recognized and described

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phenomenologically. In preface to that recognition and description, it is critical to understandings of human nature to recognize the two further principles of natural selection that Darwin identifies and describes, principles that indeed directly anchor fundamental aspects of human nature. As will become evident, the three principles are not just biologically inter-​related; they are existentially inter-​related. Variations in large part determine who will win the “struggle for life,” the second principle of natural selection. The animal that is more alert, more agile, stronger, la mas racional, and so on, will likely survive whatever challenges and hardships arise and thus prevail in the “struggle for life.” Darwin describes these two inter-​related principles in general but edifying terms, his concern being how life has evolved, thus how variations “become ultimately converted into good and distinct species” (ibid., p. 115). He states that such results “follow inevitably from the struggle for life,” immediately adding the following lucid observation: “Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring” (ibid.). Without specifying it as such, Darwin thus adds the third principle, inheritance, to the two already named and under discussion. He in fact continues his focus on inheritance, stating: “The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive” (ibid.). It should be remembered that Darwin traveled the world and did all of his research and writing a good fifty years before Gregor Johann Mendel discovered genes and thus laid the groundwork for a genetic biology that explains how traits and characters get passed on from generation to generation, for what is known as “Mendelian inheritance.” A critical relationship of Darwin’s first and both second and third principles warrants extended clarification and emphasis, namely, variations in relation to “the law of battle.” Not all males are competitive or competitive to the same degree or in the same ways. Variation means variation: male individuals do indeed differ from one another in aggression, in strength, in temperament, and so on. In his chapters on insects in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin directly observes, “Size and strength would be an advantage to the males, which fight for the possession of the female” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 347). In an earlier discussion of sexual selection, he points out further and more generally,

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It has been shewn that the largest number of vigorous offspring will be reared from the pairing of the strongest and best-​armed males, which have conquered other males, with the most vigorous and best-​nourished females, which are the first to breed in the spring. Such females, if they select the more attractive, and at the same time vigorous males, will rear a larger number of offspring than the retarded females, which must pair with the less vigorous and less attractive males. So it will be if the more vigorous males select the more attractive and at the same time health and vigorous females. ibid., p. 271

In short, and to begin with, all males are neither fit nor motivated to be “the dominant male macaque.” Moreover all males are not equally fit or motivated to compete for any particular status or cause, at the very least without considering and weighing the value of the status or cause and what is at stake. Finally, all males are not equally fit or motivated to fight in actual armed combat with others, at the very least without considering and weighing the reasons for the conflict and what is at stake. Of particular significance with respect to armed combat is the fact that “the law of battle” has been exapted by humans into endless wars that precisely elevate male-​male competition into a prestigious competitive warriorhood. This extension of male-​male competition is of moment to consider, beginning with a specification of the term “exaptation.” Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba (Gould and Vrba 1982) coined the verb “exapt”—​a derivation from the fundamental biological term “adaptation”—​to describe how a particular character or trait that evolved through natural selection is co-​opted to serve a new or different role. What was originally male-​ male competition for females turns into male-​male competition for land, for resources, for power, for supremacy, the latter competition definitively fitting what Darwin describes as “ambition” and “selfishness,” both of them “unfortunate” qualities of human males: “Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 326). The co-​optation not only remains unrecognized, but typically sidelines women and children, who are commonly supposed to be protected from the onslaught and violence of war. That this elevated human reality of male-​male competition remains unexamined by socio-​political biologists and biological socio-​political scholars obviously means that the struggle for existence, specifically as it has “evolved” in strictly human terms, i.e., in human cultural terms, remains unrecognized, as do the variations that undergird the struggle, variations in ambition, for example, and in aggression. With

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respect to the latter, we may remember George W. Bush who, counter to United Nations inspectors, insisted that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” who ordered the invasion of Iraq and killing of Saddam Hussein, and who then not only paraded himself in his “Mission Accomplished” photo on an aircraft carrier, but satisfied his apparent ambition to be a war president. It is notable that Donald Trump tweeted his “victory” in Syria in 2018 as a “mission accomplished” victory also: “On April 14, 2018, President Donald Trump tweeted “Mission Accomplished!” following a U.S-​led airstrike on Syria in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Critics were quick to point out the similarities to Bush’s speech” (https://​en​.wikipe​dia​.org​/wiki​ /Miss​ion Accomplished speech). The lapse in recognition of male-​male competition and its exaptation by humans into the pursuit and practice of war may certainly be due furthermore to the fact that a Darwin readership is lacking. Science writer David Quammen, referenced earlier in Section ii, notes that some of Darwin’s books “are easily ignored or forgotten,” and then remarks, “One of them flows briskly and changed the world,” immediately adding, as quoted earlier, “Sadly, not enough people read The Origin of Species today—​even graduate students in evolutionary biology don’t all read it” (Quammen, April 23, 2020, p. 24). The lapse notwithstanding, the unexamined underlying biological reality that undergirds the human pursuit and practice of war warrants documentation, beginning with a description of the basic relationship that obtains between leks and the human practice of war, the latter as set forth by cultural historian Johann Huizinga (Huizinga 1955). In his discussion of courtship (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 100), Darwin describes the return of some species of birds year after year to a particular place—​a “lek”—​where males compete to win females. The word “lek” is a Swedish term that names the special grounds on which non-​human male-​male competition takes place, males enacting what is justly termed their ritual competitive practice. Leks are not peculiar to avian males, but to species of insects, flies, lizards, butterflies, antelope, wildebeest, deer, fish, frogs, and bats (Attenborough 1990; Höglund and Alatalo 1995). The connection between leks and cultural historian Johann Huizinga’s historical descriptions of war (Huizinga 1955) exemplifies in a subtle but clear way Darwin’s fundamental theme and thesis of the interconnection of animate life. It does so by calling attention to the unexamined underlying biological reality that undergirds the human pursuit and practice of war. As described in detail elsewhere (Sheets-​ Johnstone 2010b, p. 350), Though he is definitely concerned neither with leks nor with writing about leks, just such ‘prepared places’ enter into cultural historian Johan

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Huizinga’s description and discussion of war in a chapter of his book Homo ludens. Huizinga provides examples of how in the Middle Ages, for example, and in early Greece, battles in the form of duels, community clashes, and national conflicts were fought according to certain rules, including where the battle was to take place and how long it was to last. He writes of the difference between such true or civilized contests—​agons, where combatants are equals—​and uncivilized contests—​non-​agonistic forms of fighting as in ‘the surprise, the ambush, the raid, the punitive expedition and wholesale extermination’, virtually decrying such forms of fighting as outside culture and, interestingly enough, waged by ‘lesser breeds without the law’ (Huizinga 1955: 90, 89–​90, respectively). The point is not that the formal, rule-​governed human male-​male competitions that Huizinga describes qualify as leks but that they are of the same character as leks; that is, they are archetypal examples of ritual male-​male competition, derivative from the ancestral form. In finer terms, when culturally co-​opted by humans, agonistic male-​male competition no longer serves its original sexual purpose, i.e. it is no longer a matter of winning fights with other males in order to win females. It is, as Huizinga describes it, a matter of upholding one’s honor or of administering justice, for example. Indeed, abilities (and perhaps even weaponry) that evolved originally and specifically for the purpose of sexual pursuit and conquest are utilized to a different end, a cultural end serving psycho-​social, socio-​political, or socio-​economic supremacy of one male or group of males over another. From a Darwinian biological perspective, the basic similarity between leks and the cultural human pursuit and practice of war testifies to the interconnectedness of animate life, “the law of battle” being clearly the anchoring point of the interconnection. Darwin’s succinct description of human males—​“Man is the rival of other men …” is in fact the point of departure for understanding what is played out culturally by humans in myriad ways, not only in the fundamental, seemingly indelible, and ever-​present human pursuit and practice of war, but as pointed out elsewhere, “in the radically non-​agonistic practices of genocidal massacres, territorial takeovers, resource plunderings, and more, including the ever-​present wholesale raping of women and even children” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2010b, p. 351/​2016b, p. 119). Moreover it is worth noting and citing at some length the fact that Darwin’s description can be elaborated along psychologically inflected cultural lines (Sheets-​Johnstone 2010b, p. 351/​ 2016b, pp. 119–​120):

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Rivalry and competition leading to ambition and selfishness can be played out in the form of ideas, ultimately, in life and death psychological struggles over ideas. In his masterful critique of psychology and its abandonment of a concern with psyche—​with soul—​psychoanalyst Otto Rank shows how soul-​belief was first attached to woman, who through procreation brought to life the souls of the dead, and how it was later attached to the hero whose courageous conquests were heralded in mythic tales, thus how, in the beginning, soul-​belief was tied to notions of immortality. Rank proceeds then to show how soul-​belief and attendant notions of immortality eventually lost all relationship to animate life and became attached instead to ‘scientific intellectualism’, an intellectualism embodied in the ‘new god’ of truth. Every conflict over truth, he remarks, ‘is in the end the old struggle for the soul’s existence and its immortality’. rank 1998, pp. 59, 60, respectively

Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker takes up Rank’s theme of truth-​seeking and both vividly and strikingly elaborates it: If anyone doubts [that the conflict over truth is a struggle over immortality], let him try to explain in any other way the life-​and-​death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-​perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief. If your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History, then, can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for death. becker 1975, p. 64

Ample evidence documents the fact that the existential significance of “the law of battle” and of Darwin’s three principles of natural selection is not just of moment but of enduring importance to human and nonhuman animate life on this planet. In this context, a further Darwin insight is pertinent, an insight that indeed resonates with particular urgency in today’s global world, namely, in the realities of climate change. Darwin in fact discusses the effect of climate in his chapter “The Struggle for Existence.” He begins by calling attention to the relationship between climate change and the average number of individuals comprising a species: “Climate change plays an important part in determining the average numbers of a species, and periodical seasons of extreme cold or drought, I believe to be the

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most effective of all checks” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 121). He immediately gives an example to document his belief: “I estimated that the winter of 1854–​55 destroyed four-​fifths of the birds in my own grounds; and this is a tremendous destruction, when we remember that ten per cent. (sic) is an extraordinarily severe mortality from epidemics with man” (ibid.). He notes that “The action of climate seems at first sight to be quite independent of the struggle for existence,” but immediately points out that “in so far as climate chiefly acts in reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between the individuals, whether of the same or of distinct species, which subsist on the same kind of food” (ibid.). In short, climate plays a definitive role in the struggle for existence, a fact that indeed resonates—​or should resonate—​with particular urgency in today’s global world in which the increase of carbon emissions is akin to, if not another real-​time, real-​life instance of, a global pandemic. Climate clearly and understandably plays a decisive role in the lives of all species. It is part of the fundamental interconnection of all forms of animate life, an interconnectedness that is basic to the continued existence or extinction of animals and plants, hence to species preservation and extinction. One of the most intricate and duly awakening examples Darwin gives was cited earlier: the interconnection of trees, insects, and cattle. In fact, many examples could be given, for as Darwin notes, “Many cases are on record showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings, which have to struggle together in the same country” (ibid., p. 123). In his discussion of “The Races of Man,” Darwin furthermore remarks on the fact that climate “appear[s]‌ to have had but little effect in the extinction of races,” giving as examples the fact that humans live in “extreme regions of the North,” in “the pestilential shores of tropical Africa,” and so on (ibid., p. 237). Interestingly enough from the point of view of today’s racial and religious violence that pits one set of humans against another set of humans, he points out that it is thus not “[u]nfavorable physical conditions” that lead to “the extinction of races”: “Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race” (ibid., p. 238). In short, in one competitive form or another—​whether straightforward killing, calculated oppression, territorial takeover, corrupt government actions, bigoted intolerance, veiled suppression—​the violence of one group of humans against another group of humans aims toward destroying the livelihood of other humans if not their extinction. Examples are readily apparent: Netanyahu’s original annexation of Palestinian West Bank land for Israeli “settlers”; Putin’s takeover of the Crimea and his ongoing attempt to conquer Ukraine; Trump’s executive order banning certain persons from entering the United States, an order euphemistically titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry,” but known more specifically as the Muslim ban; Bolsonaro’s refusal

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to mandate national lockdowns or any other safety or health-​preserving responses to the coronavirus; Trump’s similar refusal to act on behalf of the safety and health of U.S. citizens; and so on, and so on, including the killing in the United States of George Floyd by police, a killing that not incidentally awakened the world globally to violence by whites against blacks and other non-​whites. To be specifically noted too is the relevance of Darwin’s observation quoted above regarding extinction and tribe-​on-​tribe competition to George W. Bush’s “Us against Them” proclamation (http://​www​.voan​ews​.com​ /cont​ent​/a​-13​-a​-2001​-09​-21​-14​-bush​-66411​197​/549​664​.html) that followed the 9/​ 11 attack on the United States, a proclamation that was mirrored for four years in Trump’s divisive politics and rhetoric. As journalist Jill Colvin wrote in an ap news article in August 2019 titled “Trump’s divisive words collide with his call for unity,” Trump is “a president who thrives on division and who, his aides say, views discord and unease about cultural, economic and demographic changes as key to his reelection” (https://​apn​ews​.com​/e4249​70a5​fd84​8cd9​5894​dca2​ 38ee​f58)​. His divisive rhetoric has hardly changed over these succeeding years nor has his ever-​fervid, self-​addicted desire for reelection. Particularly in this context of “the struggle for existence,” it might furthermore be noted that Darwin’s consistent and extensive field studies contrast with much of today’s biological research that centers on laboratory experimental studies. The meticulousness and extensiveness of his observations of life on this planet—​animal life and plant-​life—​are not just remarkable but inspiring and worthy of emulating. They indeed run counter to the tendency toward a reductionist science and a preeminently tunneled science of the brain, notably the human one. A noteworthy comment by Darwin may in fact be cited with respect to the latter: It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are generally known, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head. Under this latter point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more marvellous than the brain of man. darwin 1981 [1871], p. 145

The comment indeed precedes Darwin’s subsequent observations regarding “the brain of man” where he remarks to begin with on man-​made divisions of the natural world: “Some naturalists, from being deeply impressed with the mental and spiritual powers of man, have divided the whole organic world

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into three kingdoms, the Human, the Animal, and the Vegetable, thus giving to man a separate kingdom” (ibid., p. 186). In this context, he highlights the importance of recognizing differences in degree from differences in kind and proceeds to exemplify why “the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree,” but how “[a]‌difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom” (ibid.). A page later he remarks that “Professor Owen, relying chiefly on the structure of the brain, has divided the mammalian series into four sub-​classes. One of these he devotes to man,” and in effect makes man “distinct from all other mammals” (ibid., pp. 187–​188). Darwin then points out, “This view has not been accepted, as far as I am aware, by any naturalist capable of forming an independent judgment, and therefore need not here be considered further” (ibid. p.188). Darwin’s subsequent observation is significant: “We can understand why a classification founded on any single character or organ—​even an organ so wonderfully complex and important as the brain—​or on the high development of the mental faculties, is almost sure to prove unsatisfactory” (ibid.). As is—​or should be—​apparent, Darwin’s concern is with genealogy. Later, in support of genealogy, Darwin cites the “sagacity” of Linnaeus, who “placed man in the same Order with the Quadrumana, under the title of the Primates” (ibid., p. 190). He immediately points out, The justice for this conclusion will be admitted if, in the first place, we bear in mind the remarks just made on the comparatively small importance for classification of the great development of the brain in man; … [and] remember that nearly all the other and more important differences between man and the Quadrumana are manifestly adaptive in their nature, and relate chiefly to the erect position of man; such as the structure of his hand, foot, and pelvis, the curvature of his spine, and the position of his head. ibid.

Later still, Darwin recognizes the challenge of tracing a genealogy: “In attempting to trace the genealogy of the Mammalia, and therefore of man, lower down in the series we become involved in greater and greater obscurity” (ibid., p. 203). Moreover although he remarks, “Every evolutionist will admit that the five great vertebrate classes, namely, mammals, birds, reptile, amphibians, and fishes, are all descended from some one prototype; for they have much in common, especially during their embryonic state” (ibid.), he also observes, “The belief that animals so distinct as a monkey or elephant and a humming-​ bird, a snake, frog, and fish, etc., could all have sprung from the same parents,

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will appear monstrous to those who have not attended to the recent progress of natural history. For this belief implies the former existence of links closely binding together all these forms, now so utterly unlike” (ibid.). In view of “the recent progress of natural history” (ibid.), Darwin goes on to point out that observations lately made by M. Kowalevsky, since confirmed by Prof. Kuppfer, will form a discovery of extraordinary interest … The discovery is that the larvae of Ascidians are related to the Vertebrata, in their manner of development, in the relative position of the nervous system, and in possessing a structure closely like the chorda dorsalis of vertebrate animals. It thus appears, if we may rely on embryology, which has always proved the safest guide in classification, that we have at last gained a clue to the source whence the Vertebrata have been derived. ibid., pp. 205–​206.7

In sum, Darwin in clear and exacting documentation recognizes humans as part of the animate world, specifically documenting that the nature of humans evolved on the basis of animate nature, descending with modification from animate forms of life. To acknowledge Darwin’s global field studies and his subsequent writings on evolution is thus to open the door to foundational understandings of humans in which the interconnectedness of life becomes apparent, precisely as evidenced in pan-​animate male-​male competition as detailed above. vii

The Pan-​animate Nature of Emotions

Like male-​male competition, emotions too are integral to animate life, hence to human life. Recognition of the pan-​animate nature of emotions is thus critical to understanding the nature of human emotions. Darwin’s book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals documents graphically as well as textually the interconnectedness of emotions across animate life. His earlier book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, is replete with equally perspicuous comments and descriptions of emotion, all of them based on real-​life, real-​time observations. They occur in the context of his descriptions of mental powers such as curiosity, imitation, and attention. He

7 Ascidians are species within the subphylum Tunicata of Phylum Chordata. For more information, see: en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Ascidiacea and en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Tunicate

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points out to begin with, “As man possesses the same senses with the lower animals, his fundamental intuitions must be the same. Man has also some few instincts in common, as that of self-​preservation, sexual love, the love of the mother for her new-​born offspring, the power possessed by the latter of sucking, and so forth” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 36).8 A few pages later, he describes the pan-​animate nature of emotions, beginning with the fact that “the lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery.” He observes in particular notable facts about happiness and terror: “Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, etc., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together, as has been described by that excellent observer, P. Huber, who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies” (ibid., p. 39). Darwin begins his description of terror by specifically noting, “The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details.” He then immediately calls attention to the fact that “Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end” (ibid.). He points out that “Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals” and that “Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species” (ibid., p. 40). Moreover, he calls attention to the pan-​animate nature of “maternal affection,” citing the research of “Rengger [who] observed an American monkey (a Cebus) carefully driving away the flies which plagued her infant; and Duvaucel [who] saw a Hylobates washing the faces of her young ones in a stream” (ibid.). He also mentions in passing “the grief of female monkeys for the loss of their young” (ibid.). It might be noted that Jane van-​Lawick Goodall’s later field studies of chimpanzees give eloquent testimony to the grief of females in the loss of their young. At one point, Goodall compares two observations: “I had watched a young and inexperienced mother carrying her dead baby, and even the day after its death she had held the body as though it were still alive, cradling it 8 It is of interest and even edifying to note in this context of mental powers that Darwin distinguishes the mental power of imitation in man from that of the lower animals in the following way: “No doubt, as Mr. Wallace has argued, much of the intelligent work done by man is due to imitation and not to reason; but there is this great difference between his actions and many of those performed by the lower animals, namely, that man cannot, on his first trial, make, for instance, a stone hatchet or a canoe, through his power of imitation. He has to learn his work by practice; a beaver, on the other hand, can make its dam or canal, and a bird its nest, as well, or nearly as well, the first time it tries, as when old and experienced” (ibid., p. 39).

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against her breast,” an observation strikingly different from her observation of “Olly,” a female chimpanzee who had carried and ministered to her sick infant for days and who now “climbed down the tree with her infant carelessly in one hand, and when she reached the ground she flung the limp body over her shoulder. It was as though she knew he was dead. Perhaps it was because he no longer moved or cried that her maternal instincts were no longer roused” (van-​Lawick Goodall 1974, p. 215). Within the context of “mental powers,” Darwin gives examples of “the more intellectual emotions and faculties,” which, he states, “are very important, as forming the basis for the development of the higher mental powers” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 42). Among these “intellectual emotions,” are wonder and curiosity. Darwin gives an extended account of curiosity by way of a two-​stage experiment that he conducted in “the monkey house at the Zoological Gardens” (ibid., pp. 42–​43). He introduced “a stuffed and coiled-​up snake” into the monkey house, and later a live snake that was placed in a bag into the house, and described the alarm the snake aroused in the first instance and the unabated curiosity the snake aroused in the second instance. With respect to alarm, Darwin states that three species of Cercopithecus “were most alarmed; they dashed about their cages and uttered sharp signal-​cries of danger, which were understood by the other monkeys” (ibid., p. 43). With respect to unabated curiosity, Darwin notes, “One of the monkeys immediately approached, cautiously opened the bag a little, peeped in, and instantly dashed away.” He continues, “Then I witnessed what Brehm has described, for monkey after monkey, with head raised high and turned on one side, could not resist taking momentary peeps into the upright bag, at the dreadful object lying quiet at the bottom” (ibid.). In his subsequent chapter, Darwin continues to compare “The Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals,” discussing and describing mental powers in terms of “the moral sense.” He considers sympathy and again documents instances of an accordance between man and animals, observing, for example, that “Many animals … certainly sympathise with each other’s distress or danger” (ibid., p. 77). Such experiences as distress and danger are indeed not just individually experienced but socially observable in others. As Darwin earlier notes, “The most common service which the higher animals perform for each other, is the warning each other of danger by means of the united senses of all” (ibid., p. 74), later noting more broadly the fact that “Social animals mutually defend each other” (ibid., p. 75). What might otherwise be regarded simply as claims Darwin is making are, on the contrary, facts based on observations, Darwin’s own observations and the observations of others, multiple others whom Darwin cites and references.

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What is indeed not just notable but impressive throughout these chapters on mental powers and the moral sense in The Descent of Man are observations that follow one after another before any generalization is made. In effect, Darwin does not strictly follow the scientific method, specifically the sequential method espoused and followed in 20th-​21st century science. He begins with observations, but does not form hypotheses and test hypotheses. When he runs an experiment, he does so to see what happens, thus to observe and to describe what he sees, precisely as with the snake and monkeys experiments described above. In a sense, then, his experimental work begins with observations and ends with observations. The observations certainly bolster his basic thesis of the interconnectedness of animate life and the nature of that interconnectedness, but that thesis is not a hypothesis he is putting forth and testing: it is an observable and observed reality. In effect, it is a fact of animate life discovered by way of observing animate life. That Darwin himself learns from his observations is of signal importance. He implicitly calls attention to this learning at the very beginning of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: “I will begin by giving the three Principles, which appear to me to account for most of the expressions and gestures involuntarily used by man and the lower animals, under the influence of various emotions and sensations. I arrived, however, at these three Principles only at the close of my observations” (Darwin 1965 [1872], p. 27). Darwin’s procedure in setting forth the three Principles of Expression and his warning concerning observations of man is of further relevance. After first stating that the three Principles will be set forth and discussed successively and “in a general manner” in the first three chapters, he states, “Facts observed both with man and the lower animals will here be made use of; but the latter facts are preferable, as less likely to deceive us” (ibid.). He thus begins by describing “the special expressions of some of the lower animals,” and then proceeds to describe “those of man.” He states, “Everyone will thus be able to judge for himself, how far my three principles throw light on the theory of the subject” [i.e., on “the expression of the emotions in man and animals”] (ibid., pp. 27–​28). The three principles are: “The principle of serviceable associated Habits”; “The principle of Antithesis”; and “The principle of actions due to the constitution of the Nervous System, independently from the first of the Will [independently of earlier voluntary action], and independently to a certain extent of Habit.” (ibid., pp. 28–​29).9

9 All principles as quoted are in italics in Darwin’s text.

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In succeeding chapters, Darwin details each principle in turn, specifying, for example, how “serviceable associated Habits” enter into daily life—​for instance, “Many carnivorous animals, as they crawl toward their prey and prepare to rush or spring on it, lower their heads and crouch, partly, as it would appear, to hide themselves, and partly to get ready for their rush” (ibid., p. 43) —​ and how reflexes, many of which “are highly expressive” (ibid., p. 35), differ from voluntary movement. He gives a somewhat comical example too of how “[t]‌he conscious wish to perform a reflex action sometimes stops or interrupts its performance,” recounting how “many years ago I laid a small wager with a dozen young men that they would not sneeze if they took snuff, although they all declared that they invariably did so; accordingly they all took a pinch, but from wishing much to succeed, not one sneezed, though their eyes watered, and all, without exception, had to pay me the wager” (ibid., p. 37). After a number of descriptions, he states, “From the foregoing remarks it seems probable that some actions, which were at first performed consciously, have become through habit and association converted into reflex actions, and are now so firmly fixed and inherited, that they are performed, even when not of the least use” (ibid., p. 40). In this context, he comments, It is probable that sneezing and coughing were originally acquired by the habit of expelling, as violently as possible, any irritating particle from the sensitive air passages. As far as time is concerned, there has been more than enough for these habits to have become innate or converted into reflex actions; for they are common to most or all of the higher quadrupeds, and must therefore have been first acquired at a very remote period. Why the act of clearing the throat is not a reflex action, and has to be learnt by our children, I cannot pretend to say; but we can see why blowing the nose on a handkerchief has to be learnt. ibid.

Darwin ends his detailed account of “serviceable associated Habits” with the general remark that “when movements, associated through habit with certain states of the mind, are partially repressed by the will, the strictly involuntary muscles, as well as those which are least under the separate control of the will, are liable still to act; and their action is often highly expressive. Conversely, when the will is temporarily or permanently weakened, the voluntary muscles fail before the involuntary” (ibid., p. 49). In short, Darwin meticulously describes observations that document “serviceable associated Habits” and in the process specifies how, as he notes in the beginning, “when there exists an inherited or instinctive tendency to the performance of an action, or an

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inherited taste for certain kinds of food, some degree of habit in the individual is often or generally requisite” (p. 30). He goes on to link observations of the first principle with that of the second, the Principle of Antithesis. He states, “Certain states of the mind lead, as we have seen in the last chapter, to certain habitual movements which were primarily, or may still be, of service; and we shall find that when a directly opposite state of mind is induced, there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of a directly opposite nature, though these have never been of any service” (ibid., p. 50). He warns that since with respect to man, “we are particularly liable to confound conventional or artificial gestures and expressions with those which are innate or universal, and which alone deserve to rank as true expressions,” he will “in the present chapter almost confine myself to lower animals” (ibid.). It is surprising and even odd to find that examples of the lower animals are “confined” to dogs and cats, animals of artificial rather than natural selection, and that a particularly informative example—​one that Darwin in fact labels “the best instance of a gesture standing in direct opposition to other movements, naturally assumed under an opposite frame of mind”—​is an example he gives of man: that of shrugging the shoulders. He writes, “This expresses impotence or an apology, —​something which cannot be done, or cannot be avoided” (ibid., pp. 62–​63). He goes on to point out, The gesture is sometimes used consciously and voluntarily, but it is extremely improbable that it was at first deliberately invented, and afterwards fixed by habit; for not only do young children sometimes shrug their shoulders under the above states of mind, but the movement is accompanied, as will be shown in a future chapter, by various subordinate movements, which not one man in a thousand is aware of, unless he has specially attended to the subject. ibid., p. 63

Darwin does not in this context identify the movement of which shrugging the shoulders is the antithesis, but he does so at length in a later chapter in which he examines feelings of helplessness and impotence. In that chapter, he contrasts the man who shrugs his shoulders with the indignant man (ibid., pp. 262–​272), thus highlighting the principle of “unconscious antithesis” (ibid., p. 271) by way of the man who “resents, and will not submit to some injury, holds his head erect, squares his shoulders, and expands his chest” (ibid.). As Darwin immediately goes on to point out, that man “often clenches his fists, and puts one or both arms in the proper position for attack or defence, with

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the muscles of his limbs rigid. He frowns—​that is, he contracts and lowers his brows—​and, being determined, closes his mouth” (ibid., p. 271). Darwin in fact continues his description, calling specific attention to the fact that [t]‌he actions and attitude of a helpless man are, in every one of these respects, exactly the reverse … The helpless man unconsciously contracts the muscles of his forehead which are antagonistic to those that cause a frown, and thus raises his eyebrows; at the same time he relaxes the muscles about the mouth, so that the lower jaw drops. The antithesis is complete in every detail, not only in the movement of the features, but in the position of the limbs and in the attitude of the whole body. ibid.

What may already be remarkable in Darwin’s descriptions and exemplifications of the first two principles is the dynamic congruity of emotions and movement, a foundational relationship that is in fact foundational to animate life (Sheets-​Johnstone 1999b/​2009). A detailed account of this foundational relationship will be set forth in a later section. What warrants attention at this point is a consideration of the third principle, “the principle of direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independently of the will and in part of habit” (Darwin 1965 [1872], p.66). At the very beginning, Darwin warns the reader as follows: “Our present subject is very obscure, but, from its importance, must be discussed at some little length; and it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance” (ibid., pp. 66–​67). Darwin’s examples, however, are quite illuminating. They center first on trembling, which is “of no service, often of much disservice,” and which “cannot have been at first acquired through the will, and then rendered habitual in association with any emotion” (ibid., p. 67). Darwin points out that “Of all emotions, fear notoriously is the most apt to induce trembling; but so do occasionally great anger and joy.” He proceeds to give examples of joy (ibid., pp. 67–​68), and then continues by examining experiences in which “nerve-​ force” combines with serviceable associated habits. In this context, he first considers the experience of pain: “When animals suffer from an agony of pain, they generally writhe about with frightful contortions; and those which habitually use their voices utter piercing cries or groans. Almost every muscle of the body is brought into strong action” (ibid., p. 70). He later amplifies his observation that “the whole nervous system may be affected” by noting first that “This involuntary transmission of nerve-​force may or may not be accompanied by consciousness” (ibid.), and then elaborates on the possibility:

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Why the irritation of a nerve-​cell should generate or liberate nerve-​force is not known; but that this is the case seems to be the conclusion arrived at by all the greatest physiologists, such as Müller, Virchow, Bernard, etc. As Mr. Herbert Spencer remarks, it may be received as an ‘unquestionable truth that, at any moment, the existing quantity of liberated nerve-​ force, which in an inscrutable way produces in us the state we call feeling, must expend itself in some direction—​must generate an equivalent manifestation of force somewhere’. ibid., p. 71

A page later, Darwin remarks, “Great pain urges all animals, and has urged them during endless generations, to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering … thus a habit of exerting with the utmost force all the muscles will have been established, whenever great suffering is experienced” (ibid., p. 72). He later gives an excellent example of suffering in which “nothing can be done,” and where “despair or deep sorrow takes the place of frantic grief”: “The sufferer sits motionless, or gently rocks to and fro; the circulation becomes languid; respiration is almost forgotten, and deep sighs are drawn … associated habit no longer prompts the sufferer to action” (ibid., pp. 80–​81). Darwin also considers rage with respect to the direct action of an excited nervous system, noting, for example, that “A man when moderately angry, or even when enraged, may command the movements of his body, but he cannot prevent his heart from beating rapidly. His chest will perhaps give a few heaves, and his nostrils just quiver, for the movements of respiration are only in part voluntary” (ibid., p. 75). Furthermore, he considers “a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure,” experiences in which “there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds.” He notes, “We see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and jumping for joy … and in the frisking of a horse when turned out into an open field” (ibid., p. 76). In addition, he points out with respect to pleasure that “with animals of all kinds, the acquirement of almost all their pleasures, with the exception of those of warmth and rest, are associated, and have long been associated with active movements, as in the hunting or search for food, and in their courtship. Moreover, the mere exertion of the muscles after long rest or confinement is in itself a pleasure, as we ourselves feel, and as we see in the play of young animals” (ibid., p. 77). In sum, Darwin’s three principles constitute a formidable introduction to succeeding chapters that detail what Darwin terms “low spirits”—​e.g., anxiety, despair—​and “high spirits”—​e.g., joy, devotion—​and proceeds from there

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in five further chapters to describe a range of emotions, from sulkiness, for example, to hatred, to patience, to surprise, to horror, to shame, and more. As noted earlier, he includes photographs that other researchers have taken, thus offering graphic documentation of the descriptions of emotions given in his text. Clearly, the thought and study that Darwin devotes to the expression of emotions is as deep as it is extensive. The back cover of his book implicitly recognizes the range of his thoughtfulness and study and thus the seminal importance of his writings in a statement about the book: “Darwin’s work of 1872 still provides the point of departure for research in the theory of emotion and expression.” Konrad Lorenz’s remarks at the end of his Preface to the book are equally notable: “In my opinion, it is in the field of behavior study that the undeniable truths contained in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals develop their most far-​reaching consequences, theoretically, practically, and even politically … I believe that even today we do not quite realize how much Charles Darwin knew” (Lorenz 1965 [1872], p. xiii).10 viii

Vindications and Elaborations of Darwin’s Foundational Insights into Emotions

Darwin’s deep and extensive descriptions and analyses of emotion are vindicated by, and can be elaborated along three lines of later research: research that details cross-​cultural studies of emotion; research that details insights into psychoanalytic aspects of emotion; research that details the dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. As may be apparent from quotes in the above sections, Darwin centers attention on movement in relation to emotions. He implicitly underscores the fact that “expression” is movement through and through; whether the emotion is joy, fear, rage, or sadness, its expression unfolds in movement. Clearly, not only would or could there be no struggle for existence short of movement, but there would or could be no expression of emotions short of movement. Moreover there could be no formation of habits to begin with and no movements antithetical to habits. Neither could there be any nerve-​force short of movement, not only because force is necessarily kinetic, but because being kinetic, it has definitive spatial and temporal aspects: force is spatially directed—​it has a linear quality—​and flows forth both with a particular amplitude or range of 10

See footnote #2 for a significant contrast between Lorenz’s positive estimation of Darwin’s knowledge vis-​à-​vis present-​day behavioral science and Great Courses’s negative judgement of Darwin’s knowledge vis-​à-​vis the “modern science of evolution.”

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movement and in a definitive temporal manner.11 What warrants further consideration and indeed delineation is the nature of the relationship between emotions and movement. Rather than being taken for granted simply as natural to animate forms of life or even brushed aside as a simple matter of fact not needing study, the relationship can be examined, analyzed, and set forth in ways that illuminate foundational aspects of animate life. A description of play—​the play of a badger by Austrian ethologist Irenäus Eibl-​Eibesfeldt—​ succinctly edifies us in this respect and constitutes a solid point of departure for further inquiry: In the badger, the joy in play was very strongly expressed and was particularly so in locomotor, fight, escape, and hunting play … During locomotor play, the badger frolics around, runs in curves, suddenly changes direction and rolls over … I consider the extremely favored rolling around on his back to be pure locomotor play. Here the badger showed a peculiar preference for real ‘somersaults’ (rolling forward), the origin of which I was able to follow … In the evening of July 10, I observed that the badger had invented a new game. In my room, he forced himself between wall and desk, put his head between his forelegs, curled himself up and made a real somersault. eibl-​e ibesfeldt 1978, p. 142

Eibl-​Eibesfeldt’s research on human expressions such as frowning, smiling, eyebrow lifting, and much more, shows that there are universal expressions across cultures. Precisely because anthropologists were insisting that “culture-​ independent invariables” were “negligible” (Eibl-​ Eibesfeldt 1972, p. 297), Eibl-​Eibesfeldt and colleague Hans Haas engaged in research studies documenting in film human expressions that were in fact universal, as evidenced in the South Pacific, in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Their “Human Ecology Film Archive” houses a record of their studies, some of which studies, as the website states, spanned several decades (http://​www​.humane​tho​.de​/en​/ein​dex​.html):​ In five societies in Southern Africa, South America and Southeast Asia/​ Oceania the researchers regularly visited the same families and neighborhoods over and over for several decades. The result of this work is a unique record of the course of life of individuals from infancy to adulthood and

11

For a detailed description of the space, time, and force qualities of movement that constitute the dynamics of movement, see Sheets-​Johnstone 1966/​2015, 1999a/​2011c.

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to the next generation, as well as of the history of their societies, and of the changes in their conditions of life. Shorter studies were conducted in several other societies, altogether with more than 50 groups worldwide. An informative example of what Eibl-​Eibesfeldt terms “phylogenetic adaptation” together with variations in adaptation that evolve in relation to circumstance is the feeling of surprise and its basic expression in a raising of the eyebrows. Eibl-​Eibesfeldt states (Eibl-​Eibesfeldt 1972, p. 301), I would propose that the eyebrow lift of surprise—​originally part of the opening of the eye—​was the starting point for the ritualization of several ‘attention’ signals. Some of these can be grouped together as the friendly attention signals, as represented by the eyebrow flash, and are mostly given in combination with nodding and smiling. Further evidence that the starting point for the evolution of these friendly attention signals was the surprise reaction is the fact that surprise is often involved in meeting somebody: the utterance ‘Ah, it’s you’ when meeting in Central Europe is regularly accompanied by an eyebrow flash. He goes on to point out that brow-​lifting which accompanies indignation can also be derived from the surprise reaction. It can be interpreted as surprise concerning a misbehaving group member. It obviously signals to the group member that he has attracted attention, that he is being looked at but not in a friendly way. There is also a continuous stare emphasized by the eyebrows being held up, which is quite distinct from the eyebrow flash, for in the latter the impression of staring is avoided by the rapid lowering of the eyebrows following their raising. The expressions of disapproval and arrogance are related to indignation, but here the contact is rejected. The brows are kept raised, but in addition intention movements of withdrawal are added. The head is lifted in a backward movement and the eyelid is lowered, thus cutting off contact. In some cultures this pattern is used to express a factual ‘no’—​for example in the Greek. ibid., p. 301

The above lengthy quotes from Eibl-​Eibesfeldt’s text are not only informative; they provide ample evidence of the integral and indeed inherent relationship of emotion and movement. His focal interest in, and dedicated research on “expressive movement” documents universal patterns of expressive

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movements, even in those humans who are born deaf and blind (ibid., p. 299, see also pp. 304, 305–​306). It is notable too that his research documents cultural differences as well, cultural differences that, as he states, “may involve not only minor details, but sometimes also the basic patterns” (ibid., p. 303). As an example, he notes cultural differences in head movements with respect to responding “yes” and “no” (ibid.). His fine-​grained global studies and analysis of expressive movement are observationally-​based and are thus structured in ways akin to those of Darwin. He in fact references Darwin at various points in his texts. For example, he notes that “The origin of headshaking and nodding was discussed by Darwin, who suggested that shaking originated from food refusal. When the baby is satiated it refuses the breast by turning its head away” (ibid., p. 304; see also p. 305). His two following comments testify to his thoughtfulness and to the range of his observational knowledge: “It could indeed be that this refusal gesture becomes ritualized into a ‘no’ by emphasis and rhythmic repetition of the movement. It could, however, also be derived from a shaking-​off movement, which is part of the behavioral repertoire of birds and fur-​bearing mammals.” In this context, he furthermore notes that “Deaf-​and blind-​born children also refuse by headshaking” and that “we nod regularly during conversation as a gesture of reassurance, so to speak, submitting to the ideas of the speaker” (ibid., p. 304). It should not go without notice that Eibl-​Eibesfeldt’s research is far broader, i.e., it is not limited to facial expressions. Indeed, his global studies spanning nonhuman as well as human animate life include “male genital display.” In writing of “the phallic display of many infra-​human primates,” Eibl-​Eibesfeldt describes those males who “sit at the periphery of the group ‘on guard’ … with their backs to the group they display their genitals.” He explains that their display “is addressed to members of other groups and serves to aid in spacing. If a member of another group approaches, erections occur in the guards,” the guards thus serving as “territorial markers” (ibid., pp. 306–​307). He furthermore provides examples of phallic sculpture in France, Germany, Greece, Bali, Nias (an island off the western coast of Sumatra), and Papua that document territorial markings by humans, noting too that “In modern Japan phallic amulets are used for protection and as good luck charms” (ibid., pp. 307–​310). Both earlier and later research authenticates a further anchor point of “male genital display,” an anchor point that testifies to the dual role of penile display: that of sex as well as aggression. The earlier research begins with Darwin and psychologist Havelock Ellis who elaborates on Darwin’s description of male avian “Love-​Antics and Dances” (Darwin 1981[1871], pp. 68–​71; Ellis 1976 [1929]); the later research focuses on what Jane Goodall describes as a male chimpanzee’s “bipedal swagger” that functions as both a courtship and threat display

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(Goodall 1968) and what primatologist C. R. Rogers describes as a male chimpanzee’s “short dance” (Rogers 1973). (For a full description and discussion of “male genital display” and “penile display,” see Sheets-​Johnstone 1994). In sum, the pan-​animate nature of emotions and their phylogenetic origin are amply documented in the global studies of Darwin and in the finely-​ detailed elaborations by Eibl-​Eibesfeldt and other researchers in their field studies of nonhuman animals. ix

Chapter 1 Summation

The interconnectedness of living forms on planet earth underscores the importance of evolution to understandings of human nature. So also does the law of battle, the dual nature of male-​male competition, and the pan-​animate nature of emotions. These foundational realities of life undercut the idea that humans are basically different from other forms of animate life and that, in effect, they somehow arose deus ex machina. There is in fact a further domain that testifies to the foundational significance of interconnectedness, namely, evolution itself. Interconnectedness is at the heart of descent with modification, all the way from species to species as in Galapagos finches and from Class to Class as in lobe-​finned fish to amphibians and reptiles to avians—​all forms being within Phylum Chordata. Moreover within Orders, there is descent with modification, precisely as in the Order Primates, e.g., from apes to humans. In short, the interconnectedness of animate life is distinctively evident to anyone conversant with Darwin’s global observations of animate life and his meticulous detailed writings emanating from those observations, and, in turn, with the observations and field studies of those who, following Darwin, provide further fundamental insights into the interconnected nature of animate life. The above summation is not just a historical or genealogical reference point. It constitutes a distinctively empirical point of departure for philosophical inquiries into human nature. It is thus an essential basis for inquiries into phenomenological expositions of human nature. Basic realities of life are not something apart from phenomenology and neither are they something to be transformed by phenomenology: in the first instance, there is no need to “naturalize” phenomenology, and in the second instance, there is no need to “ontologize” realities of life in order to treat them “phenomenologically.” These negative declarations warrant detailed attention and examination, for both naturalizing and ontologizing pose challenges to veridical phenomenological understandings of human nature. We thus turn to Chapter 2 of the importance of evolution to understandings of human nature.

­c hapter 2

Phenomenological Realities of Animate Life i

Naturalizing Phenomenology and a Proposed Neurophenomenology

It is important to emphasize that what follows does not diminish nor does it intend implicitly to diminish the fantastic intricacy of the brain and its essential functions and role in the lives of animate forms of life. It is rather to temper the excesses of neuroscientists in their studies of the brain and even in what might possibly amount to their pride in face of their findings. We begin by considering “naturalizing phenomenology” as a proposed approach to a phenomenology of Nature, an approach that, as we will presently see, sets forth views on human nature, and particularly cognition, in ways counter to Darwin’s meticulous and astute observations. The major text to be used is the well-​known volume Naturalizing Phenomenology, all of whose four editors contribute chapters as well as an introduction to the book. To be noted, however, and as will be documented, is the fact that not all contributors to the book are tethered to a reductionist view that runs counter to Darwin. An unusual but telling place to draw attention to and to cite at the start is the book’s back cover on which surprisingly contradictory remarks appear along with a description of the book. The description first states, The book’s primary goal is not to present a new interpretation of Husserl’s writings, although it does not dismiss the importance of such critical work. Rather, the contributors asses to what extent the kind of phenomenological investigation initiated by Husserl supports the development of scientific theories of cognition. In particular, they consider how Husserlian phenomenology might contribute to specific contemporary theories, either by complementing or by questioning them. The back-​cover description immediately continues, however, with the following remarks: “What clearly emerges is that Husserlian phenomenology cannot become instrumental to cognitive science without undergoing a substantial transformation. Therefore, the book’s central concern is not only the progress of contemporary theories of cognition but also the reorientation of Husserlian phenomenology.” Moreover the description ends with the following summary statement: “Naturalizing Phenomenology is thus a collective reflection on the

© Maxine Sheets-​J ohnstone, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004544536_004

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possibility of bringing a naturalized Husserlian phenomenology to bear on a scientific theory of cognition that fills the explanatory gap between the phenomenological mind and brain.” Clearly, the goal of naturalizing Husserlian phenomenology is not a matter of exploring ways in which Husserl’s phenomenology might “support,” “complement,” or “question” scientific theories of cognition. It is rather a matter of “transforming” and “reorienting” Husserl’s phenomenology, in effect, of “present[ing] a new interpretation of Husserl’s writings,” so that the writings conform to scientific theories of cognition, notably theories anchored in studies of the brain, perhaps nowhere more notably than in Francisco Varela’s texts on neurophenomenology. The topic of Varela’s chapter in Naturalizing Phenomenology, for example, is titled “The Specious Present: The Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness” (Varela 1999a, pp. 266–​314; see also Varela 1996, 1999b, 1999c). Varela is in fact elsewhere explicit about his attempt to naturalize Husserl’s phenomenology, as when he writes that his aim is to institute a program of “reconciliation” by way of “pragmatically build[ing] the bridges between third-​and first-​person” (Varela 1999c, p. 273), tersely urging, “Keep the insights from the founding father [Husserl] and then move on,” then forthrightly commenting, “neurophenomenology might make the grand old man [Husserl] turn in his grave” (ibid.; see Sheets-​Johnstone 2004 on this topic). It is of critical moment to recognize to begin with that a brain-​anchored neurophenomenology is not and cannot be a “third-​person” account of knowledge or of experience. A brain is not a person and can only be erroneously personalized. Such erroneous personalizations are unfortunately readily evident in experiential ascriptions to the brain, ascriptions that appear across a range of scientific writings. For example, “If you see the back of a person’s head, the brain infers that there is a face on the front of it” (Crick and Koch 1992, p. 153); “Nonhuman primates have brains capable of cooperative hunting” (Harding1975, p. 255); “An object’s image varies with distance, yet the brain can ascertain its true size” (Zeki 1992: 69); “F5 neurons code actions. Any [one] of them, therefore, when [it] fires, asserts that an object is graspable … Some of F5 neurons assert that an object is graspable with two fingers, others with the whole hand” (Rizzolatti and Gallese 1997, p. 222; italics in original); “In my view, emotional feelings represent only one category of affects that brains experience” (Panksepp 2005, p. 162; see also Damasio and Damasio 1992). Given the readiness and ease of such ascriptions, it is hardly surprising that an advertisement for a teaching course on the brain waxes endlessly on what a brain does and can do (See Science News 2009, p. 3). The course, titled “How Your Brain Works” and taught by a neuroscience professor at Vanderbilt University,

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is described as follows: “Everything you hear, feel, see, and think is controlled by your brain. It allows you to cope masterfully with your everyday environment and is capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights. But its most amazing achievement may be that it can understand itself.” Clearly, the brain is raised to the power of an oracle, a cognitive power that is actually extended even further in an article headlined on the front cover of an issue of Science News as “Pursuit of Pleasure: How your brain knows what you want” (Science News 2011). Given such lionizing awesome powers, the brain’s knowledge and experience incontestably know no bounds. Thus well-​known, prominent scientists have no qualms in making experiential ascriptions to the brain and in ascribing knowledge to the brain. In effect, and however wayward, they readily conceive and identify the brain as a person or animate being. Darwin’s succinct comment regarding mind and body warrants citation in this context, for it highlights precisely a full awareness of the nature of animate life. In one of his Notebooks, Darwin writes that a “stable foundation” is needed to show that “mind is function of body”: “Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself—​the mind is function of body—​we must bring some stable foundation to argue from” (Darwin 1987 [1838], p. 564; italics in original). As pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2010a, p. 159; see also Sheets-​Johnstone 2010b), what Darwin meant by the words “experience shows” may be interpreted in two possible ways: He may have been referring to philosophers who attempt to show the nature of mind “by attacking the citadel itself” [an interpretation that may of course be extended to present-​day scientists, many of whose “attacks on the citadel itself” include experiential ascriptions to “the brain,” as exemplified above]. But Darwin may also very well have been referring to his own extensive, highly detailed first-​person experiences of animate life, experiences that showed him in person that the mind was not something distinct from the body but precisely, as he states, a function of body. In effect, animate bodies are mindful bodies. In summarizing his study of worms, his last book being devoted to his research on worms, for example, Darwin considers both chance and instinct before concluding that worms have “some degree of intelligence” (Darwin 1976 [1881], p. 100): To sum up, as chance does not determine the manner in which objects are drawn into the burrows, and as the existence of specialized instincts

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for each particular case cannot be admitted, the first and most natural position is that worms try all methods until they at least succeed; but many appearances are opposed to such a supposition. One alternative alone is left, namely, that worms, although standing low in the scale of organization, possess some degree of intelligence. This will strike every one as very improbable; but it may be doubted whether we know enough about the nervous system of the lower animals to justify our natural distrust of such a conclusion. With respect to the small size of the cerebral ganglia, we should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge, with some power of adapting means to an end, is crowded into the minute brain of a worker-​ant. Darwin actually wrote much earlier of the fact that brain size is not a measure of intelligence. As noted earlier, on the basis of his world-​wide observations, he concluded “It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are generally known, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head. Under this latter point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more marvellous than the brain of man” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 145). Given Darwin’s extensive observationally-​ based knowledge of animate nature, it is biologically evident that mindful bodies exist across the Kingdom Animalia. Indeed, however varied in form those bodies might be, they all attest to the fact that to think in movement and to create synergies of meaningful movement are built-​ins of animate life. Moreover Darwin’s study of emotions, as described earlier, lends additional credence to the “stable foundation,” that is, to the reality of mindful bodies, bodies that move in life-​sustaining ways, thus on behalf of their own survival and in certain circumstances, the survival of others such as those of an infant, a child, and broader kin. As noted earlier too, while no outright recognition of the dynamic congruity of movement and emotion appears in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin’s descriptions richly authenticate the congruity: expressive movement is thematic throughout, as in inflating the body to threaten an enemy, for example, and as in erecting dermal appendages (Darwin 1965 [1872], pp. 104–​110). Darwin in fact provides extended examples and an extended discussion of the latter phenomenon, beginning with the following observation: Hardly any expressive movement is so general as the involuntary erection of the hairs, feathers and other dermal appendages; for it is common

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throughout three of the great vertebrate classes [mammals, birds, and reptiles]. These appendages are erected under the excitement of anger or terror; more especially when these emotions are combined, or quickly succeed each other. Their action serves to make the animal appear larger and more frightful to its enemies or rivals, and is generally accompanied by various voluntary movements adapted for the same purpose, and by the utterance of savage sounds. ibid., pp. 94–​95

As Darwin later notes in his beginning consideration of hatred and rage, “Most of our emotions are so closely connected with their expression, that they hardly exist if the body remains passive—​the nature of the expression depending in chief part on the nature of the actions which have been habitually performed under this particular state of the mind” (ibid., pp. 237–​238). He has earlier discussed and exemplified anger in monkeys and higher primates (ibid., pp. 136–​142) and earlier discussed and described rage in detailing his third principle grounding expression, namely, “The Direct Action of the Nervous System” (ibid., pp. 74–​76). The discussion and examples Darwin gives of hatred and rage in humans (ibid., pp. 237–​252) include observations of researchers across the globe—​in Asia, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand—​as well as references to Shakespeare and Dickens. Taken together, all serve as an example of the observationally-​based global studies that ground Darwin’s meticulous and extensive discussions and conclusions regarding expressive movement. As elaborated elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2019a, p. 6), it is clear from his text that human nature is not only integrally tied to animate nature, but is archetypal distinguishable at a range of levels, including the affective-​kinetic level: [T]‌he idea that Nature is the “rock-​bottom” of our being and the thesis that as we descend into the deeper layers of our psychical being we move away from our unique individuality are neither outlandish claims nor outright crazy notions. The morphological archetypes that define us as human—​for example, upright posture, structural relationship of thumb and forefinger (for fine grasping)—​are complemented by kinetic archetypes that are themselves complemented by semantic archetypes. In finer terms, and terms that at the same time take nonhuman as well as human animate forms of life into account, it is evident that morphological archetypes describe distinct bodily forms that engender archetypal affective dispositions and dynamically congruent archetypal movement dispositions and possibilities that, whether instinctively or voluntarily

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carried out, move through bodies and move them to move in ways that are meaningful. In sum, evolutionary considerations point us toward a renewed awareness of Darwin’s writings and insights into animate nature. In doing so, they lead us toward basic aspects of human nature and away from a narrow focus on “the brain,” hence away from a neurophenomenology and from a naturalizing phenomenology to begin with. The “explanatory gap” that is claimed to exist between “the phenomenological mind and brain” and the “naturalized Husserlian phenomenology” that is brought in to fill the gap is a transmogrification of Husserlian phenomenology. Husserlian phenomenology is a phenomenology of animate organisms, notably and foundationally a phenomenology of the lived experiential realities of animate organisms. The brain is a highly complex structure that is part of a whole body nervous system; it is neither an animate organism nor a person. Darwin’s writings are a testimonial to this fact. Moreover Darwin’s writings constitute critical counterpoints to enaction as a theoretical model for understanding human cognition, the neologism “enaction” being defined “as the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991, p. 9). Enaction is actually no longer a neologism but a common and near staple term in cognitive science and in what might be called “cognitive philosophy.” The neologism was introduced by neuroscientist Francisco Varela, philosopher Evan Thompson, and psychologist Eleanor Rosch in their book The Embodied Mind, the subtitle of which is Cognitive Science and Human Experience, and the second chapter of which is titled “What Do We Mean ‘Human Experience’?” Their analyses of human experience and their definitions and renditions of enaction, together with their specification of Darwin’s evolutionary biology by way of “neo-​Darwinism,” warrant extended consideration. ii

Darwin’s Evolutionary Biology and Enaction

In the process of defining and elaborating enaction, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch devote a chapter and more to evolution. They do not cite or reference Darwin’s writings directly, but give a quite brief synopsis of his evolutionary biology, directing their full and extended attention instead to neo-​Darwinism. In doing so, they straightaway transform Darwin into neo-​Darwinism and in turn take Darwin in the form of “neo-​Darwinism” to task. While their aim to

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counter information processing and representational theories of perception is laudable, their abbreviated rendition of Darwin’s evolutionary biology is questionable, one might even say misinformed, all the more so in light of their attempt, and in Varela’s later solo attempt, to prominence enaction and to enlist phenomenology in the process. In particular, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch summarize Darwin’s evolutionary biology into “three basic points” (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991, p. 185): 1. Evolution occurs as a gradual modification of organisms by descent; that is, there is reproduction with heredity. 2. This hereditary material constantly undergoes diversification (mutation, recombination). 3. There is a central mechanism to explain how these modifications occur: the mechanism of natural selection. This mechanism operates by picking the designs (phenotypes) that cope with the current environment most efficiently. They state, “This classical Darwinism become [sic] neo-​Darwinism during the 1930s as a result of the so-​called modern synthesis between the Darwinian ideas based on zoology, botany, and systematics on the one hand and the rising knowledge in cellular and population genetics on the other” (ibid.). Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s summary of Darwin’s evolutionary biology into “three basic points” of “classical Darwinism” is particularly disturbing, even ironically so since Darwin anchored his theory of natural selection in three basic realities of animate life, realities that, as we have earlier seen, Darwin describes across numerous species observed globally and in detail. He details these realities at length in his first book The Origin of Species in terms of variation, of co-​adaptation, i.e., of the inter-​dependency of organisms, organisms and environment, environment/​competition and the struggle for existence, and reproduction. What Varela, Thompson, and Rosch offer in place of these realities when they critically assail the “orthodox neo-​Darwinian theory of evolution” (ibid., p. 187) and its basis in what they term “the adaptationist program” (ibid., p. 191), i.e., its basis in Darwin’s evolutionary biology, a biology or “program” they define as “studying evolution as trait fitness optimization” (ibid., p. 189), is, oddly and ironically enough, a doubly partial—​in the sense of being only a part of and in the sense of being definitively biased—​account, and at the same time, a veiled and putatively “logical” vindication of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and its basis in the three basic realities of animate life. In particular, in explaining their move away from the “orthodox neo-​ Darwinian theory of evolution,” Varela, Thompson, and Rosch state that they are moving from a “prescriptive logic” to a “proscriptive logic”:

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[W]‌e remove selection as a prescriptive process that guides and instructs in the task of improving fitness. In contrast, in a proscriptive context natural selection can be seen to operate, but in a modified sense: selection discards what is not compatible with survival and reproduction. Organisms and the population offer variety; natural selection guarantees only that what ensues satisfies the two basic constraints of survival and reproduction. ibid., p. 195

In effect, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s “proscriptive” reformulation of natural selection substantiates even as it rejects Darwin’s original theory of natural selection: it substantiates variation, survival in the struggle for existence, and reproduction, the exact basic components of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In other words, natural selection, understood as eventuating in “the survival of the fittest,” is precisely what Darwin shows in detailing the struggle for existence and the preservation of beneficial traits into the next generation (see Darwin 1968 [1859], pp. 202–​204).1 But furthermore, and to begin with, Darwin never identifies variation either as a product of natural selection or as part of a biologically-​ordained “trait fitness optimization” program, nor does he ever make such claims. Indeed, Darwin’s primary concern in much of his focus on variation in the context of The Origin of Species is the relationship between variation and species. He states, for example, “From looking at species as only strongly-​marked and well-​defined varieties, I was led to anticipate that the species of the larger genera in each country would oftener present varieties, than the species of the smaller genera; for whenever many closely related species (i.e., species of the same genus) have been formed, many varieties or incipient species ought, as a general rule, to be now forming” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 110). A few sentences later, he adds, “On the other hand, if we look at each species as a special act of creation, there is no apparent reason why more varieties should occur in a group having many species, than in one having few” (ibid.). Indeed, 1 As referenced and quoted earlier, Darwin’s specifies quite precisely the relationship of variations to natural selection: “[I]‌f variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection” (ibid., pp. 169–​170). We might add that in its most basic biological sense, variation is the chance meeting of this particular sperm with this particular egg, and further, that given both parental and environmental variation, the resulting living individual is differentially nurtured parentally and environmentally, or in many species, differentially nurtured purely environmentally.

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Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s reasoning and argumentation, or what they themselves term “theoretical reflections,” defies logic. What Varela, Thompson, and Rosch reject is the “prescriptive logic” that natural selection “guides and instructs in the task of improving fitness” in contrast to the “proscriptive logic” that natural selection simply “discard[s]‌what is incompatible with survival and reproduction.” But logic, like Nature, is impersonal and is thus neither prescriptive nor proscriptive. In fact, “improving fitness” and “discarding what is incompatible with survival and reproduction” are integrally intertwined evolutionary realities; they are two sides of the same coin. What improves fitness involves discarding what is incompatible with survival and reproduction, and what is discarded because incompatible with survival and reproduction improves fitness. In sum, Darwin’s so-​called “prescriptive logic” is in no way prescriptive nor is it “logic” to begin with. On the contrary, unlike Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s “theoretical” point of departure and “theoretical reflections” therefrom (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, e.g., pp. 27, 28, 189), Darwin’s writings on variation, the struggle for existence, and reproduction are rooted in observed realities of living forms, and living forms not only on his home ground, but globally, across vast regions of planet earth. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch proceed on the basis of their theoretical reflections on Darwin’s evolutionary biology to elucidate “enaction.” What they identify as “the enactive approach” to evolution is based on “embodied action.” They state, “[T]‌he enactive approach” is based on the need “to situate cognition in embodied action” and that the need to do so is geared to showing that “cognition in its most encompassing sense consists in the enactment or bringing forth of a world by a viable history of structural coupling” (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991, p. 205). Varela, Thompson, and Rosch give rather vague definitions of structural coupling, seemingly content to identify it as an organism-​environment coupling in which “sensorimotor patterns … enable action to be perceptually guided” (ibid., p. 204). In virtue of these “sensorimotor patterns” that enable perceptually guided action, they claim they are able to “build up the theory of perception from the structural coupling of the animal” (ibid.). Of signal importance is their emphasis on the fact that structural coupling is with an environment that is not “given, fixed, and unique” (ibid., p. 198). Oddly enough, though quite in passing, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch credit Darwin with acknowledging the basic fact that environments change. They write (ibid.): According to traditional wisdom, the environment in which organisms evolve and that they come to know is given, fixed, and unique. Here again

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we find the idea that organisms are basically parachuted into a pregiven environment. This simplistic view undergoes refinement when we allow for changes in the environment, an allowance that was already empirically familiar to Darwin. To write that this “allowance” was “already empirically familiar to Darwin” is an understatement to say the least, all the more so given Darwin’s global observations of environments, observations that amount not to “empirical familiarity” but to empirical knowledge, i.e., to Darwin’s first-​hand extensive knowledge of the global world and its diverse forms of animate life. It is indeed surprising that Varela, Thompson, and Rosch fail to cite or even quote Darwin in this context, especially when they go on immediately to credit neo-​Darwinian evolutionary theory with the view that environments change: “Such a moving environment provides the selective pressures that form the backbone of neo-​Darwinian evolutionary theory” (ibid.). They in turn, however, define their own enactive approach as different from neo-​Darwinism: “[W]‌e recast selective pressures as broad constraints to be satisfied,” the “crucial point” of their enactive approach being that “we do not retain the notion of an independent, pregiven environment but let it fade into the background in favor of so-​called intrinsic factors. Instead, we emphasize that the very notion of what an environment is cannot be separated from what organisms are and what they do … The environment is not a structure imposed on living beings from the outside but is in fact a creation of those beings” (ibid.). While it is surely true that “what an environment is cannot be separated from what organisms are and what they do,” the environment is not “in fact a creation of those beings” but is itself a reality in its own right, a reality that indeed changes by way of Nature itself. Those natural environmental changes influence the way in which organisms habitually live. Darwin in fact describes in detail how changes in both climate and geography can and most certainly do affect living beings. He emphasizes this truth when, in recapitulating and concluding his text on the origin of species, he recalls his earlier discussions and an earlier example: “I have attempted to show how potent has been the influence of the Glacial period on the distribution both of the same and of representative species throughout the world” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 437). He has indeed earlier devoted two whole chapters to “Geographical Distribution,” describing a host of geographical differences on planet earth. In a section of the first of these two chapters, he discusses and exemplifies climate change and its effect on animate life, pointing out, for example, that a change of climate influences geographical migration, making some areas that were passable, now impassable (ibid., p. 352). He later details specifics of such changes

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in the Glacial period, devoting fourteen pages to “Dispersal during the Glacial period” (ibid., pp. 359–​373). In short, and in light of our own twenty-​first century challenge of human-​ made climate change, which not incidentally directly validates the claim that “the very notion of what an environment is cannot be separated from what organisms are and what they do,” Darwin’s observations are of pivotal significance. They warrant extensive recognition and extended study, perhaps particularly, given human-​made climate change in the 21st century world, his observation that “periodical seasons of extreme cold or drought, I believe to be the most effective of all checks [“in determining the average numbers of a species”]” (ibid., p. 121). Clearly, Darwin subscribed neither to a pregiven environment that is “fixed and unique” nor did he subscribe to “fixed and unique,” pregiven organisms. In their rebuttal of the idea that the environment is fixed, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch could in fact have added that an organism that “basically parachuted into a pregiven environment” had itself to be pregiven in order to survive in that pregiven environment. In light of Darwin’s evolutionary grounding of, and perspective on environmental and organic change and their mutual influence on each other, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s considerable concern to counter the notion of a pregiven environment is itself of considerable concern, and indeed, all the more so in light of their adulatory citations of Merleau-​Ponty on their own behalf and their neglect of Husserl’s extensive concern with, and writings on what Husserl terms and describes as “pregivennesses.” As will become apparent in the following section, pregivennesses are integral to constituting the world, to learning the ways of the world, and to learning to navigate it. In effect, they are integral to understanding subject-​world relationships, what Varela, Thompson, and Rosch identify as evolutionary facts, namely, 1) that “organisms and environments” are “mutually unfolded and enfolded structures” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p. 199), and 2) that “organism and environment cannot be separated but are in fact codetermined in evolution as natural drift” (ibid., p. 201). iii

Pregiven and Pregivennesses: Sorting Basic Facts of Human Life from Biased Claims

Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s reliance on and adulatory accreditation of Merleau-​Ponty’s writings and their less than accurate recognition and rendition of Husserl’s writings are troubling and even confounding. While Varela, Thompson, and Rosch are at pains to show the faultiness of thinking and

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characterizing the world as “pregiven” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, pp. 133–​140, 173–​174, 200–​201) and cite Merleau-​Ponty as being substantively in accord with their criticism, they fail to come to grips with antithetical, categorical, and even emphatic claims that Merleau-​Ponty makes. For example: The problem of the world, and, to begin with, that of one’s own body, consists in the fact that it is all there. merleau-​p onty 1962, p. 198; italics in original

The world remains the same world throughout my life, because it is that permanent being within which I make all corrections to my knowledge, a world which in its unity remains unaffected by those corrections, and the self-​evidence of which attracts my activity towards the truth through appearance and error. ibid., pp. 327–​328

Moreover Varela, Thompson, and Rosch are totally lacking an awareness of Husserl’s detailed writings on “pregivennesses” that describe basic existential realities of human experience and that indeed both substantiate and anchor what Husserl terms a genetic phenomenology. In fact, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch fail to recognize and differentiate between what Husserl terms a “genetic” and “static” phenomenology,2 “genetic” in precisely the basic sense of the word: tracing back to origins (see Husserl 2001). How things come to have the meaning and value they do, how sense-​making is generated and ongoing—​ all such investigations are rooted in a genetic phenomenology. The world is indeed not “all there”—​a pregiven ready-​made—​but cognitively and affectively constituted on the basis of human experience. Given Husserl’s recognition of, and investigations into a genetic phenomenology, it is indeed not surprising that commonalities exist between his phenomenology and Darwin’s evolutionary biology. As pointed out and detailed elsewhere, “Descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral to both Husserlian phenomenology

2 Varela differentiates static phenomenology from genetic phenomenology by appealing to, and revising Husserl’s distinction between transversal and longitudinal temporality. He states that transversal temporality “is retentional dynamics, the static constitution” and that “[l]‌ongitudinal temporality, in contrast, is the genetic constitution of the temporalization of experiences themselves, their self-​manifestation” (Varela 1999b, p. 129). Varela’s notion of retention as static constitution unfortunately brings to a standstill the dynamic flow of internal time consciousness, its inherent continuity (see Husserl 1966; see also Bernet, Kern, and Marbach 1993, Chapter 7).

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and Darwinian evolutionary biology. These complementary aspects are rooted in the lifeworld as it is experienced” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017b, p. 19). It is thus pertinent and even imperative to turn to the relevance of Husserl’s descriptive analyses of pregivennesses, and correlatively, to an assessment of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s strenuous criticism of the idea that anything is “pregiven,” returning later to their stalwart attempts to naturalize phenomenology and to further critical concerns and critical assessments of enaction and neurophenomenology. To begin with, Husserl writes of pregivenness in elucidating progressive sense-​makings: [E]‌verything constituted in the spontaneous acts of the Ego becomes, as constituted, a “possession” of the Ego and a pregivenness for new acts of the Ego. For example, the ‘sense-​things’ of various levels become pregivenness for the relevant higher syntheses; and so do the fully constituted intuitive Objects of nature for theoretical-​scientific activity, for valuing and practical behavior, etc.. husserl 1989, p. 226

Husserl furthermore writes of pregivenness when he details how we understand other persons: how we are individually affected and how we individually move constitute “a typical character and properties of character” (ibid., p. 283). Affectivity and movement are indeed at the forefront of our recognition of other persons, of what Husserl describes as their individual affective-​ kinetic style. Since an individual’s affective-​kinetic style is both habitual for the individual and familiar to others, “pregivennesses” are basic to affective-​ kinetic styles (ibid., pp. 282–​286). Husserl in fact consistently describes “animate organisms” in terms of “affect and action,” dimensions of animate nature that are essential to his central focus on cognition (ibid., pp. 282, 284, 291–​92, Supplement xi, pp. 340–​43). He gives singular attention to the dimensions in his analysis of volition, for example, i.e., an animate organism being an “organ of motion” (Husserl 1980, 106–​7). Note that the term “pregivennesses” is plural, not singular. Husserl observes, for example, “Everything a person lives through enlarges the framework of his pregivennesses” (Husserl 1989, p. 283), later pointing out that “For certain periods, this typicality remains identical, even if the ‘experiences’ (the realm of the experiential apperceptions constantly being newly formed) of the person grow, and the domain of his pregivennesses changes as a consequence” (ibid., p. 284; italics in original). As indicated above, he continues describing pregivennesses in recognizing others:

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The Ego, the subject of affections and actions, is thereby related to its pregivennesses and is not merely taken as subject of individual affections and actions. Indeed, here the universal human (or personal) apperception collaborates essentially. The universal typicality of Corporeality is a presupposition for empathy, and by empathy an Ego-​analogon is apprehended … I enter into relationships with various Ego-​subjects and come to know the typical moments of their pregivennesses, of their actions, etc. ibid., pp. 284–​285; italics in original

As should be evident, pregivenness is plural precisely because what is being described has a genetic rather than static frame of reference: pregivennesses are concerned not with elucidating the essential character of a phenomenon—​ the essential character of a chair or a tree, for example, or the essential character of movement or of time—​but with elucidating how meaning and value are built up, thus with developmental and changing life experiences, and, in effect, with historical derivations. Husserl’s essay on “The Origin of Geometry” is exemplary in this respect. Husserl points out the significance of historical derivations when he states (Husserl 1970 , p. 353), We must focus our gaze not merely upon the ready-​made, handed-​down geometry … we must also inquire back into the original meaning of the handed-​down geometry, which continued to be valid with this very same meaning—​continued and at the same time was developed further, remaining simply “geometry” in all its new forms. Our considerations will necessarily lead to the deepest problems of meaning, problems of science and of the history of science in general, and indeed in the end to problems of a universal history in general; so that our problems and expositions concerning Galilean geometry take on an exemplary significance. A genetic phenomenology is incontrovertibly central to Husserl’s phenomenology. While Varela, Thompson, and Rosch are certainly right to inveigh against the representational theory of perception and an information-​ processing account of cognition, their enthusiasm for “the brain” warps their understanding and appreciation of Husserlian phenomenology at the same time that it allows them to commend, substantiate, and acclaim in its place their “enactive approach.” This liability is clearly evident when we consider the phenomenological reality of what is pregiven and the phenomenological reality of pregivennesses. Indeed, though the world is already there (Husserl 1973a, pp. 30–​31), it is precisely not already “all there,” as Merleau-​Ponty claims

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it is (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 198). Moreover as pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-​ Johnstone 2020, p. 14), [T]‌hough the world is pregiven in the sense of being already there, it is not already there through active judgment, but passively already there (Husserl 1973a, p. 31). The exact same truths hold with respect to bodies: they too are already there, but are neither “all there” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 198) nor already there through active judgment: they are passively already there. Bodies indeed have an open-​ended horizon of experiential possibilities. The same obviously holds for persons. As Husserl observes, “Everything a person lives through enlarges the framework of his pregivennesses … The person is formed through ‘experience’.” husserl 1989, p. 283

Pregivennesses of the body subject can be phenomenologically elucidated in fine detail. They are constituted in developmental progressions in infancy and in ongoing progressions that Husserl describes in terms of “I move–​I do–​I can,” (Husserl 1989, p. 273). Such progressions originate in movement and culminate in the formation of habits, hence in the formation of familiar dynamics that inhere in kinesthetic memory and that run off as themes with variations depending on circumstance. The familiar dynamics are basic kinesthetic realities of everyday experience. They are indeed constituted in the “two-​fold articulation” of perception and movement (Husserl 1989, pp. 61–​63) and in the formation of if/​then relationships (Husserl 1989, p. 63; Husserl 1970, pp. 106, 161–​162, 217). With respect to the two-​fold articulation of perception and movement, Husserl emphasizes the fact that “[t]‌he Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception” (Husserl 1989, p. 61; italics in original). Perception is thus neither reducible to a brain event nor a purely psychic event: “Perception is without exception a unitary accomplishment which arises essentially out of the playing together of two correlatively related functions” (ibid., p. 63; italics in original). As pointed out and documented elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2020, pp. 7–​8), Husserl in fact continues to underscore the centrality of the body in perception when he writes of the body as “the zero-​point of orientation,” the “absolute ‘here’ of any and all perceptions” (Husserl 1989, pp. 135, 165–​66, 224) … [and when he describes] the motivating kinestheses in perception precisely as a freely moving body: “The Ego has the ‘faculty’ (the ‘I can’) to

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freely move this body—​i.e., the organ in which it is articulated—​and to perceive the external world by means of it. ibid., 159–​60

As phenomenologically delineated, the “zero-​point of orientation” and the “freely moving body” are basically the body Husserl describes as the body of “affect and action” (Husserl 1989, e.g., pp. 282, 284), the body that experiences interest in something and turns toward (Husserl 1973b, pp. 76–​86; see also Husserl 1973b on receptivity, e.g., pp. 79, 233), and the body that is instrumental in the awareness and formation of if/​then relationships: “if I do such and such,” certain happenings will follow. As Husserl notes with respect to the latter, “The actual kinestheses here lie within the system of kinesthetic capacity, which is correlated with the system of possible following events harmoniously belonging to it” (Husserl 1970, 162). Husserl describes many instances of the relationship. For example: [T]‌here resides the possibility of letting the perception disperse into “possible” series of perceptions, all of which are of the following type: if the eye turns in a certain way, then so does the “image;” if it turns differently in some definite fashion, then so does the image alter differently, in correspondence. We constantly find here this two-​fold articulation: kinesthetic sensations on the one side, the motivating; and the sensations of features on the other, the motivated. husserl 1989, p. 63; italics in original. [see also, for example, husserl 2001, pp. 50–​52]

‘[E]‌xhibitings of’ are related back to correlative multiplicities of kinesthetic processes having the peculiar character of the ‘I do’, ‘I move’ (to which even the ‘I hold still’ must be added) … [A] hidden intentional ‘if-​ then’ relation is at work here … [I]t is in this way that [the exhibitings] are indicated in advance, in expectation, in the course of a harmonious perception. The actual kinestheses here lie within the system of kinesthetic capacity, which is correlated with the system of possible following events harmoniously belonging to it. husserl 1970, pp. 161–​162

If/​then relationships are in fact foundational to learning one’s body and learning to move oneself, thus foundational to building a repertoire of movement capabilities in everyday life. Furthermore, they are essential in the formation

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of certain expectations, that is, in realizing and consequently expecting that “if I do such and such,” certain happenings will follow. When we begin with undeniable basic facts of life, we discover the fact that movement is basic to being alive, that it comes with being alive, and that feelings come with movement in the form of tactile-​kinesthetic-​affective bodies, qualitatively dynamic bodies, bodies whose “I move” is experientially alive to those qualitative dynamics, hence mindful bodies. In effect, “embodied minds” are not simply wide of the mark; they are outside basic facts of animate life. An infant coming into the world is not an embodied mind. An infant coming into the world is a mindful body, a body experientially pregiven in its tactile-​ kinesthetic aliveness to its own animation. Husserl describes such bodies as “animate organisms.” As should be evident from earlier references, Husserl writes consistently and extensively of animate organisms (Husserl 1980, 1983, 1989), a sufficient clue as to where to begin a science of cognition. We might indeed profitably recall Darwin’s astute conclusion based on his years of observation: “Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself—​the mind is function of body—​we must bring some stable foundation to argue from” (Darwin 1987 [1838], p. 564; italics in original). In sum, basic kinetic aspects of animate organisms are already there; they are already there in infancy and in developmental dispositions. Breathing is not learned, breathing is pregiven; swallowing is not learned, swallowing is pregiven; crying is not learned; crying is pregiven; chewing is not learned, chewing is developmentally pregiven; reaching is not learned, reaching is developmentally pregiven; kicking is not learned, kicking is pregiven. The list could go on and on, and in fact includes smiling: smiling is not learned, smiling is pregiven. Darwin’s description of an infant smiling is striking, edifying, and worth recalling: “Seeing a Baby (like Hensleigh’s) smile & frown, who can doubt these are instinctive—​child does not sneer” (Darwin 1987, Notebook M, No. 96, p. 542). What Darwin describes as instinctive comes not with having a body, but with being a body, a tactile-​kinesthetic-​affective body, and with being alive to that body. What is basically pregiven is spontaneous movement, movement that comes with being not stillborn, but being animate. Just such spontaneous movement is present in fetal movements, movements of mouth and hand, for example, as when a fetus puts its thumb in its mouth (Furuhjelm, Ingelman-​ Sundbert, Wirsén 1976). Moreover the basic animate dynamics of approach and avoidance are just such spontaneous movements: they are not learned but pregiven. They are indeed integral to animate life. They are biologic kinetic staples that might even be regarded the foundation of a life-​sustaining logos, a ‘kinetic bodily logos’ (see Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a/​exp. 2nd ed. 2011c on the latter term). Evolutionary biologist T. C. Schneirla in fact describes “approach and

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withdrawal” as both evolutionary and developmental realities (Schneirla 1959). Their distinct animate dynamics are indeed clearly evident in “lower forms” of animate life and attest to thinking in movement, thinking by which an animal moves away from what is noxious or possibly dangerous and moves toward what is advantageous or possibly nutritious. Zoologist John Paul Scott and invertebrate zoologist Martin Wells give finely detailed examples that implicitly document such basic thinking in movement, Scott in terms of paramecia, clams, turtles, and opossums, for example (Scott 1963), Wells in terms of fan worms (Wells 1968; see also Wells 1976). The spontaneous movement dynamics of approach and withdrawal and of thinking in movement are readily evident in social interactions as well. Consider again the following description of a dominant male macaque:3 There is no mistaking a dominant male macaque. These are superbly muscled monkeys. Their hair is sleek and carefully groomed, their walk calm, assured and majestic. They move in apparent disregard of the lesser monkeys who scatter at their approach. For to obstruct the path of a dominant male or even to venture, when unwelcome, too near to him is an act of defiance, and macaques learn young that such a challenge will draw a heavy punishment … A dominant animal controls the space around it … It can invade an inferior’s space as a right, whereas no inferior would dare to venture into its space without first making a gesture of appeasement … On being threatened by a definitely dominant monkey, a subordinate is likely to display submission. Confronted with a fixed stare, it will look away. Faced with a possible charge, it is likely to crouch close to the ground, its head turned away. And if it flees and is chased, it will cringe away from the threatened bite or try to avoid punishment by presenting its hindquarters. eimerl and de vore 1965, pp. 106, 108, 109

3 Though not identified as such, a dominant male macaque is a male archetype in the Kingdom Animalia. The archetype is readily apparent in primatologists’ descriptions of the “silverback,” for example, the “undisputed leader” of a social group of gorillas (Fossey 1983. p. 10), and in descriptions of “the leader” of a group of chimpanzees, a leader who exercises control over others and who is found as well “in many species of primates” (de Waal 1982, pp. 23, 124–​125, respectively). One might, of course, readily include human male leaders, dominant males who are autocratically disposed to suppress and even eradicate any who challenge their power and authority. Such males are readily apparent across the global 21st century human world.

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A natural and wholly spontaneous dynamic congruency of emotions and movement is clearly apparent in the above description. Emotions move through mindful bodies and move them to move. The dynamic congruency is not learned, but pregiven (for more on dynamic congruency, see Sheets-​ Johnstone 1999b/​2009). Emotions themselves are indeed not learned, but pregiven, as are particular expressive movements. Thus the “lesser monkeys who scatter” at the approach of a dominant male do not have to translate their fear into an appropriate movement response. Their thinking in movement is not either a matter of pondering options, but an immediate and keen kinetic awareness of if/​then relationships: if in this particular spatial relationship to the dominant male, then crouch; if in this particular spatial relationship, then run; if in this particular spatial relationship, then look away; and so on. In sum, what is pregiven are foundational dynamic patterns that may be and are developmentally built upon in multiple ways, precisely as Husserl describes in his lucid discussion and examples of pregivennesses. Thus the oversight of Husserl’s phenomenological investigations and detailed descriptions is a significant and even gross lapse in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s negation of anything being “pregiven,” and further, in their emphatic criticisms of those who claim anything pregiven, whether a matter of a “ready-​made world” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p. 144) or of a “solid, really existing self” (ibid., p. 80; see also p. 130), the latter being indeed not a “solid, really existing self,” but in foundational phenomenological terms, a “solid, really existing” tactile-​kinesthetic-​affective mindful body, a real-​life, real-​time animate organism. Since the import of Husserl’s exacting specifications of pregivennesses is centrally relevant to their criticisms and to their consequent neglect of foundational realities of human experience, we turn to an extended inquiry that will delineate further the bodily nature of pregivennesses and thereby testify to its evolutionary foundations. iv

The Foundational Import of Pregivennesses

To whatever degree they may be marginalized along a gradient of awareness in relation to an object of focus, an individual’s kinesthetic dynamics are indeed experienced. As neuro-​biologist Marc Jeannerod’s empirical research shows, they are insuppressible: “There are no reliable methods for suppressing kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a movement” (Jeannerod 2006, p.56). Information terminology aside, Jeannerod’s finding speaks reams about the foundational experiential reality and significance of kinesthesia.

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In fact, as pointedly asked and answered elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2014b, p. 106): How indeed is it that reaching for a glass or throwing a ball, or walking or skipping, or moving in all the myriad habitual ways we move in our everyday lives, run off as what famed neurologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luria termed “kinesthetic melodies” (Luria 1966, 1973)? How is it that these melodies, with all their variations in accord with particular situations and circumstances, become engrained in kinesthetic memory? How indeed—​except on the basis of familiar qualitative dynamic patterns, particularly inflected patterns of movement that run off in a way not dissimilar from the way that Husserl describes internal time consciousness “running off”? Movement, like time, is a “temporal Object,” and temporal Objects “appear” … in a wholly different way from “appearing objects”: they are precisely “running-​off phenomena” (Husserl 1966, p. 48). Familiar qualitative dynamic patterns are just such phenomena. Clearly, if all such familiarity were erased and strangeness were ever-​present, everything would be new at each turn and life as we know it would be impossible. It is surprising, even astonishing, that Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, co-​ authors of The Phenomenological Mind, a book that incidentally might readily seem programmed to answer to The Embodied Mind, are unaware of this relationship, in essence, unaware of the formation of pregivennesses as Husserl describes them. Husserl writes not only that how we are individually affected and how we individually move constitute “a typical character and properties of character” (Husserl 1989, p. 283), but, as we have seen, that “the ‘sense-​things’ of various levels become pregivenness for the relevant higher syntheses; and so do the fully constituted intuitive Objects of nature for theoretical-​scientific activity, for valuing and practical behavior, etc.” (ibid., p. 226). In effect, pregivennesses are central to our understandings of the world, in phenomenological terms, to our constitution of the world. Thus, if indeed “I do not attend to my experiential life” because “I am absorbed by and preoccupied with projects and objects in the world” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, p. 61), it is because I have learned my body and learned to move myself, and in the process, acquired habits, dynamic patterns of movement that inhere in kinesthetic memory and that are integral to my knowledgeable ways of navigating the world (see Sheets-​ Johnstone 1999a/​2011c, 2003, 2011a on these topics). I have thus acquired pregivennesses and it is these pregivennesses that allow me to be “absorbed by and preoccupied with projects and objects.” Moreover to claim “The body tries to stay out of our way so that we can get on with our task” (Gallagher and Zahavi

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2012, p. 163) does no more than confound matters further. In other words, more questions readily arise. For example (Sheets-​Johnstone 2020, p. 15; see also Sheets-​Johnstone 2014b/​2016b), One might ask, of course, whether it is “the body” that “tries to stay out of our way,” or “we” who try to keep the body out of our way, or what “our way” would be had we not learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves and in the process forged those myriad familiar dynamic patterns that inform our everyday lives and that run off so effectively without our having to monitor them. Gallagher and Zahavi’s distanced adultist stance and attitude are not unrelated to the distanced adultist stance and attitude of Merleau-​Ponty … [N]‌either is their position-​tethered anchorage of the body unrelated to Merleau-​Ponty’s succinctly stated claim that “the normal subject has his body not only as a system of present positions, but besides, and thereby, as an open system of an infinite number of equivalent positions directed to other ends” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 141) … In short, an adultist stance readily accommodates a positional anchorage of the body that bypasses movement … In doing so, it bypasses the sensory modality of kinesthesia, the learning of one’s body and learning to move oneself, the consequent development of a kinesthetic repertoire, and an elucidation of kinesthetic memory. Pregivennesses are originally constituted in the formation of what Husserl terms “I cans” and in discoveries that extend into expectations grounded in a recognition of if/​then relationships. Pregivennesses of the body subject are thus not “unthematic” in the sense of unexperienced. As indicated above, a kinesthetically-​felt dynamics is sensuously present along a focal to marginal gradient of consciousness. In fact, [I]‌f as Merleau-​Ponty writes, the background “is immanent in the movement inspiring and sustaining it at every moment” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 110), then a certain kinetic dynamics is undeniably underway that is familiar as well as self-​propelling, a dynamics that is there not only if we notice it focally, but a dynamic that is present as a familiar, ongoing, and particular kinesthetic melody. How otherwise might one legitimately speak of a “consciousness of movement” as Merleau-​Ponty does when he affirms at one point but without further explication (ibid.), “for the normal person every movement is, indissolubly, movement and consciousness of movement”? sheets-​j ohnstone 2019b, p. 161/​2020, p. 16

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What is furthermore notable in Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology of movement, particularly in light of his affirming that “for the normal person every movement is, indissolubly, movement and consciousness of movement,” is the absence of kinesthesia. Earlier in his text, Merleau-​Ponty simply and efficiently devalues kinesthesia, stating forthrightly that “[a]‌s a mass of tactile, labyrinthine and kinaesthetic data, the body has no more definite orientation than the other contents of experience.” In other words, the body gives us no special spatial orientation whatsoever (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 249). Moreover in this context, he insists that verticality is simply one “spatial level” among all other possible ones (ibid., pp. 248ff.). In effect, and as pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-​ Johnstone, forthcoming), [N]‌ot only is bipedality not formally distinguished as a distinctively human mode of locomotion, but kinesthesia is not epistemologically relevant or privileged in any way: As a sensory function or content, Merleau-​ Ponty declares, it gives us no definitive ups, downs, tilts, horizontals, or whatever. In a word, it offers us nothing in the way of knowledge or kinetic meanings: “Our bodily experience of movement,” Merleau-​Ponty says, “is not a particular case of knowledge” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 140). Its only office, he continues, is to “[provide] us with a way of access to the world and the object” (ibid.), and is thus no more than a purely practical kind of knowing. In light of this funneled understanding of movement, and particularly too in light of the reliance on, and citations of Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology of the body in both The Embodied Mind and The Phenomenological Mind, a further critical comment concerning Merleau-​Ponty’s understanding and renditions of movement is warranted: Though Merleau-​Ponty states that this “praktognosia” [our “bodily experience of movement” simply providing “a way of access to the world and the object”] “has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 140), and though he goes on to quote neuropsychologist A. A. Grünbaum’s specification of “motility” [Grünbaum 1930, p. 396], specifically that “Already motility, in its pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning,” and that “Motility is the primary sphere in which initially the meaning of all significances is engendered in the domain of represented space” (ibid., p. 142), he neither stops to reflect upon the conjunction of meaning and our bodily experience of movement nor to account for the foundational significance of the latter. In

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effect, kinesthetic consciousness is, save for practical purposes [i.e., “access to the world and the object”], a still-​born consciousness, and moreover one that, while acknowledged “as original and perhaps as primary,” is nowhere seriously thought of as ever having been [or as ever being] vitally present. sheets-​j ohnstone 1999, p. 243/​2011c, p. 210 [see also Sheets-​Johnstone forthcoming]

Clearly, the ready-​made mesh of body and world that is “all there,” as Merleau-​ Ponty describes it (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 198), institutes an impassable barrier to knowledge of how our everyday dynamic patterns or coordination dynamics (Kelso 1995, 2009, 2014) come to have the meaning and value they do, hence to veritable phenomenological investigations and insights that are basic to veritable understandings of human nature. In doing so, the ready-​made mesh makes movement merely a bridge between body and world, merely “a way of access” by which we reach “the world and the object,” omitting completely the pregivennesses of animate life that are present from the beginning of life and those formed on the basis of successfully navigating the world and living in it knowledgeably. Moreover while at one point Merleau-​Ponty straightforwardly concludes, “Motion is nothing without a body in motion which describes and provides it with unity” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 272), he earlier confesses, “And yet I walk, I have the experience of movement in spite of the demands and dilemmas of clear thought, which means, in defiance of all reason, that I perceive movements without any identical moving object, without any external landmark and without any relativity” (ibid., p. 269; italics added). In short, in admitting that he walks without there being an experienced “object in motion”(Merleau-​Ponty 1962, p. 269), Merleau-​Ponty leaves us in an essentially confused maundering about the realities of movement, the foundational modus operandi of all animate creatures in the world, hence of foundational evolutionary significance. He fails basically, and especially as a phenomenologist, to realize the difference between visually-​kinetically perceiving movement and kinesthetically feeling movement, a distinction crucial to veritable understandings and hence knowledge of animate life. v

The Confluence of a Darwinian Perspective on Animate Life and Husserl’s Phenomenological Methodology

A genuine Darwinian perspective extends across worldwide observations and writings about animate life. It basically documents the fact that animate

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creatures are morphologies-​ in-​ motion creating synergies of meaningful movement on behalf of their well-​being and survival. Further still, those morphologies-​in-​motion are distinctive but homologous: each is different from, but also similar to other morphologies-​in-​motion. At one point in his final chapter, Chapter 14 of The Origin of Species titled “Recapitulation and Conclusion,” Darwin calls attention both to that fact and to its import: “The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse—​the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant—​and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 451). It is thus not morphology pure and simple that is of foundational import, but morphology and variations in morphology that is of foundational import: morphological homologies within those variations attest to descent with modification, hence to phylogenesis. When Merleau-​Ponty writes in notes for his course on nature—​the course is titled “The Concept of Nature, 1959–​1960: Nature and Logos: The Human Body”—​that phylogenesis is problematic, that there are “Problems of genesis” and that “We indicate them because they put the very fabric of being in question,” he embarks on his mission to make “the problem of Being” the problem of phylogenesis (Merleau-​Ponty 2003, pp. 243–​244). Merleau-​Ponty in fact straightforwardly states that his concern is “[p]‌articularly phylogenesis: because it emerges as a problem with Darwin, in the presence of the ideal kinship of animals” (ibid., p. 243). Merleau-​Ponty clearly opposes Darwin’s “ideal kinship of animals.” His opposition is putatively substantiated in the summary rendition of Darwin that immediately follows his claim that phylogenesis is “a problem with Darwin,” and is furthermore apparent when he immediately follows this claim with a summary rendition of Darwin, a rendition that, given his claim, is not surprising but nonetheless questionable. He writes, Morphology is for him [Darwin] the “soul” of biology (see The Origin of Species, Chapter 14 on morphology). Extraordinary fact of identity (articles and articulations) between the hand, the clawed animal foot, the horse’s hoof, the turtle’s flipper, the bat’s wing. ibid., p. 244

Quite apart from the fact that Chapter 14 of The Origin of Species is not a chapter on morphology nor does it have a section devoted to morphology and the fact that Chapter 14 is actually titled “Recapitulation and Conclusion” and is devoted to “the leading facts and inferences” detailed in the book (Darwin

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1968 [1859], p. 435), Merleau-​Ponty’s transmogrification of Darwin’s descriptive account of morphology, and in turn, his understanding of evolution are severely deficient. There is definitively not an “[e]‌xtraordinary fact of identity” between “the hand,” and “the clawed animal foot,” nor between “the hand” and “the horse’s hoof.” Darwin quite clearly points out and describes how specific morphological variations exist across species and how such variations are homologous; that is, how such morphological variations are formally related in a particular way, precisely as in a particular “framework of bones” being the same across several species and in “the same number of vertebrae forming the neck” being the same across several species. In doing so, Darwin documents evolutionary relationships, i.e., descent with modification. In Chapter 13 of The Origin of Species in a section titled “Morphology,” Darwin in fact observes, describes, and exemplifies just such homologous variations in the broader terms of “resemblance.” He points out that members of the same class, independently of their habits of life, resemble each other in the general plan of their organization. This resemblance is often expressed by the term ‘unity of type;’ or by saying that the several parts and organs in the different species of the class are homologous. The whole subject is included under the general name of Morphology. This is the most interesting department of natural history, and may be said to be its very soul. What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?. darwin 1968 [1859], p. 415

Clearly, “the hand” and “the wing of the bat” are homologous, not identical, just as “the hand” and “the turtle’s flipper” are homologous, not identical. Moreover “the hand” and “the clawed animal foot” are not identical—​animal claws are akin to human nails—​nor are “the hand” and “the horse’s hoof” identical—​a horse’s hoof is in fact akin to a human fingertip. One might excuse such errors as being part of simply “sketches” on Nature, hence “Preliminary Studies” not finished texts (Merleau-​Ponty 2003,, pp. 229–​251). One cannot, however, on this basis excuse errors in renditions of the “soul” of biology, nor on this basis excuse Merleau-​Ponty’s penchant for judging humans exclusive beings, beings that indeed are uber alles in the sense of being both totally apart from and totally superior to animals. In short, Merleau-​Ponty appears strongly against recognizing a kinship, even an “ideal kinship” of humans and animals. Hence

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he can claim Darwin’s “problem of phylogenesis.” Merleau-​Ponty’s renderings of Darwin’s text, however, transform that text and are in absolute error. The errors attest to an unfortunately slim and highly abbreviated reading of The Origin of Species. Merleau-​Ponty’s reading of Darwin is in fact basically wayward in addition to being inaccurate. We can see this to begin with in the fact that what Darwin writes in terms of “resemblance” is not “identity.” Moreover the morphological homologies that Darwin describes attest to historical derivations, hence incontrovertibly to phylogenesis. However much one desires to show and somehow document the “A priori of ontogenesis” (ibid., p. 229) and thus answer to “the problem of Being,” corporeal matters of fact sustaining evolutionary variations across species and descent with modification cannot be denied. More broadly put, theoretical deductions on the order of a priori claims cannot negate much less falsify world-​wide observations of animate life, including human life that document the origin of species. It warrants recognition furthermore that since Merleau-​Ponty dismisses the kinesthetic sensory foundations of the experience of movement, he completely bypasses the integral qualitative dynamic structure of movement, its spatial, temporal, and energic qualities, and hence, not only the integral kinesthetically-​felt qualitative dynamic realities of his own movement, but the visually-​kinetically perceived qualitative dynamic realities he perceives of animate creatures in his surrounding world, and more extensively, of the often visually-​kinetically, affectively-​charged qualitative dynamic realities he perceives in the movement of others.4 It nowhere seems to occur to Merleau-​ Ponty that there is an experiential difference between kinesthetically feeling movement and visually-​kinetically perceiving movement. He indeed appears stuck in a perception and conception of movement that originated with Zeno, namely, a perception and conception of movement as a series of instant “nows” such that there is no movement, only separate moments or points in space and time, and in turn, a strictly positional notion of movement. He thus conforms to the common dictionary definition of movement: movement is a “change of position” and this even though he affirms that he “perceives” movement. Indeed, Merleau-​Ponty writes, “if I watch workmen unloading a lorry and throwing bricks from one to another, I see the man’s arm in its initial and then in its final position, yet, although I do not see it in any intermediate position, I have a vivid perception of its movement” (ibid., p. 269). He furthermore writes of his own movement: “If I quickly move a pencil across a sheet of paper 4 For a phenomenological account of the qualitative structure of movement, see Sheets-​ Johnstone 1966/​2015, 1999a/​2011c. For an empirical-​phenomenological account of the relationship of movement and emotion, see Sheets-​Johnstone 1999b/​2009.

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on which I have marked a point at no instant am I conscious of the pencil’s being over the point; I see none of the intermediate positions and yet I am aware of movement. Conversely, if I slow down the movement and succeed in not losing sight of the pencil, at that very moment the impression of motion disappears.” In short, in order that there be movement, there must be “intermediate positions” and thus, movement “must be related to some one identical thing which moves” (ibid.), p. 270). In effect, movement is tied to a sequential positionality, and hence to an object in motion. As noted, what we arrive at by way of such thinking is the dictionary definition of movement: movement is a change of position. The definition fails utterly and incontestably to recognize much less specify the dynamic nature of movement. It is hardly surprising that in substantiating that definition, Merleau-​Ponty fails utterly and incontestably to practice phenomenology, delving into the nature of human experience by first of all bracketing judgements, reactions, perspectives, and more, all of which are or can be present in the natural attitude, and thereby make the familiar strange (see further below). Summing up his thoughts on the experience of movement, he unequivocally affirms his stance in the natural attitude, “Perception of movement can be perception of movement and recognition of it as such, only if it is apprehension of it with its significance as movement, and with all the instants which constitute it, and in particular with the identity of the object in motion” (ibid., p. 271).5 5 It is notable though not surprising given consistent adulatory references to Merleau-​Ponty that Gallagher and Zahavi uphold a positional notion of movement as when they write, “I have a proprioceptive sense of whether I am sitting or standing, stretching or contracting my muscles” and claim that ‘‘these postural and positional senses of where and how the body is … are what phenomenologists call a ‘pre-​reflective sense of myself as embodied’’’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, p. 155). As commented elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2014a, p. 256/​2015, p. 11), “While we may certainly ‘sense ourselves’ stretching, for example, and contracting, we do not have a ‘sense of ourselves’ stretching or contracting muscles, at least not in the everyday sense Gallagher and Zahavi describe. We have direct and immediate experiences not of muscles but of movement, and in particular, of distinctively different kinesthetically-​felt spatial dynamics in stretching and contracting. In fact, we have distinctively different overall dynamics in stretching and contracting that include temporal and intensity differences as well, precisely as Luria’s description of movement and ‘complex sequential activity’ as kinesthetic melodies so perfectly captures (Luria 1966, 1973).” Moreover as noted elsewhere with respect to Husserl’s consistent writings of animate organisms (Sheets-​Johnstone 2015, p. 6): “A preeminently posturally-​tethered body is a dynamically emaciated body, one that falls short of being recognized as an animate organism. Of fundamental epistemological moment too is the fact that Gallagher and Zahavi specifically define ‘proprioceptive sense’ as ‘the innate and intrinsic position sense that I have with respect to my limbs and overall posture’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, p. 162; italics added). In short, their emphasis throughout is on two claims: the claim that ‘our attention is not on our bodily movement’ (ibid., p. 164) and the claim that ‘[the]

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Merleau-​Ponty’s understanding of movement is clearly tethered to Zeno’s, but far more significantly and more surprisingly, his understanding of movement is off the mark phenomenologically. Merleau-​Ponty is not a practicing phenomenologist, one who begins by bracketing beliefs, assumptions, opinions, and so on, about the phenomenon under investigation and in turn greets the phenomenon as if for the first time. Making the familiar strange in this way discloses aspects of the phenomenon that are otherwise taken for granted, presupposed, and so on. Thus, in dismissing the sensory foundation of the experience of movement—​kinesthesia—​Merleau-​Ponty bypasses the very qualitative dynamics that distinguish everyday movement—​biting from chewing, pushing forward from pulling back, walking from skipping, and so on—​not to mention the qualitative dynamics that distinguish artistic movement—​attenuated brush strokes from pointillist dabs, blowing into a French horn from blowing into a flute, and so on.6 Veritable phenomenological inquiries that begin with bracketing allow elucidations of human experience in which foundational realities of animate movement and human nature come to the fore. We saw this earlier in exemplifications of pregivennesses and in a consequent refutation of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s denial of anything being

pre-​reflective experience or sense that I am the subject of the movement (e.g., the kinaesthetic experience of movement)’ is a matter of ‘ownership’ (ibid. p. 180).” Their lack of recognition of the experienced qualitative dynamics of the sensory faculty of kinesthesia is regrettable from the viewpoint of science as well as from the viewpoint of phenomenology. 6 As detailed at length elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2020, p. 4), “It is indeed startling that kinesthesia is totally bypassed, especially given the history of the discovery and naming of ‘the muscle sense’ (Engel [1802] 1844), and of various further research validations of the ‘muscle sense’ (Bastian 1890, Sir Charles Bell 1844, Maine de Biran [1807] 1963, Condillac [1754] 1982; see Scheerer 1987 for an excellent historical account). Even the experience of ‘the limb’ in a particular posture, i.e., the limb at rest, is a kinesthetic experience. We kinesthetically experience an arm as it rests bent at the elbow or outstretched at the elbow, for example, just as we kinesthetically experience legs bent at hips, knees, and ankles in sitting or extended at hips and knees and bent at ankles in standing.” As pointed out above, well-​known neurophysiologist Marc Jeannerod’s research conclusion following extensive experiments on moving subjects is of central moment: “There are no reliable methods for suppressing kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a movement” (Jeannerod 2006, 56). Furthermore, as noted elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2020, p. 4), There are no reliable methods either for ‘suppressing kinesthetic information’ with respect to posture. Kinesthesia does not turn on with movement and off with posture. If that were true, one would have no awareness of the beginning or end of any movement. Indeed, one would have no idea where any ‘limb’ was to begin with, much less where it was at the end, or even how, when, and where to begin or end, thus making the accomplishment of any task impossible. In short, and as shown elsewhere, Jeannerod’s declarative finding speaks reams about the foundational ongoing reality and significance of kinesthesia (see Sheets-​Johnstone 2011c, p. 520).”

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pregiven. What is of further concern are additional ways in which Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s rendition of human experience similarly fail to do justice to foundational realities of animate life, thus making their rendition less than illuminating and in fact wayward. Their lack of recognition of Darwin’s consistent emphasis on, and descriptions of the interconnection of organisms and environment—​what they term “structural coupling”—​and their related dismissal of natural selection in favor of “natural drift” are critical oversights in the context of their exposition of human experience since the living realities of human experience are necessarily anchored in concrete, real-​life, real-​time subject-​world relationships. vi

Human Experience: the Nature and Challenges of Phenomenological Analyses

Notwithstanding Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s seeming focus on human experience, especially by way of the sub-​title of The Embodied Mind, i.e., Cognitive Science and Human Experience, one finds consistent references to “sensorimotor mechanisms” and repeated claims of the importance of “action” with respect to perception, in effect little delineation and actual detailing of the real-​life, real-​time kinesthetic/​kinetic dynamics of human experience. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch instead quite specifically tie the meaning of human experience in their chapter “What Do We Mean ‘Human Experience’?” to “Buddhist mindfulness/​awareness practice.” They describe the purpose of the practice unequivocally: “Its purpose is to become mindful, to experience what one’s mind is doing as it does it, to be present with one’s mind” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p. 23). They point out initially that “The first great discovery of mindfulness meditation tends to be not some encompassing insight into the nature of mind but the piercing realization of just how disconnected humans normally are from their very experience” (ibid., p. 25). They then point out that in and through the practice, “there is a gradual taming of the mind’s restlessness” (ibid., p. 26). Though they note that breathing is typically “the focus of alert attention” in the practice (ibid., p. 24), Varela, Thompson, and Rosch do not actually describe the experience of breathing. They are seemingly content to say that “Breathing is one of the most simple, basic, ever-​present bodily activities” and that “beginning meditators are generally astonished at how difficult it is to be mindful of even so uncomplex an object” (ibid., p. 25). Their continuing text on “What Do We Mean ‘Human Experience’?” is concentrated on describing how “the mind” wanders, how it is “seized constantly by thoughts, feelings, inner conversations, daydreams,

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fantasies, sleepiness, opinions, theories, judgments about thoughts and feelings, judgments about judgments—​a never-​ending torrent of disconnected mental events that the meditators do not even realize are occurring except at those brief instants when they remember what they are doing” (ibid., p. 25). Several odd aspects are apparent in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s rendition of the human experience of breathing. In the first instance, breathing is not an activity, hence not “one of the most simple, basic, ever-​present bodily activities.” Breathing is an involuntary sequence of bodily movements intricately and integrally linked to one’s surrounding world: an involuntary flow of air in, and an involuntary flow of air out. But breathing can also be voluntary as when, before undertaking a difficult task, one takes a deep breath and might even be encouraged to do so by a mentor or someone nearby. It may also be voluntary when, after completing a difficult task, one exhales forcefully and says something like “Phew!” Moreover breath is integrally tied to how one is feeling and hence dynamically variable: the flow of air in and out changes according to whether one is calm and relaxed or agitated and restive, whether one is angry or joyful, and so on, and so on. The dynamics of breathing are furthermore variable in relation to one’s cognitive attitude, whether one is riveted on a problem and its solution, tightening up in concentrating energies on its resolution, or whether one is planning a vacation in open-​ended, inquisitive explorations. In effect, breathing is not an “uncomplex object” any more than it is an “activity.” In addition to these facts about breathing, it may well be added that it is precisely because breathing is involuntary that, in meditating, the mind can wander and be “restless.” In other words, in the everyday run of life, one does not have to attend to breathing: one does not have to sit or stand at the helm, monitoring and controlling one’s breath; one does not have to choose to breathe or have a responsibility to breathe; one does not have to forego sleep to allay fears that breathing might otherwise stop. In effect, breathing is a bodily dynamic that commonly goes on by itself. This highly significant existential fact of animate life has sizeable explanatory import with respect to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s account of human experience, notably, the vagaries of the mind of meditators in trying to meditate. Indeed, the challenge of meditating as described by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch may be seen to lie precisely in the breath’s autonomy. To be mindful of breath, to use breath as “the focus of alert attention,” is to concentrate experientially on something that might well be described as having a mind of its own. The experience of breathing thus poses a challenge to minds that commonly take breathing for granted, that thereby implicitly regard breathing outside of their direct awareness, let alone their jurisdiction, and that in turn

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sally forth in meditating, dallying in their own interests, interests that involve them in “a never-​ending torrent of disconnected mental events that the meditators do not even realize are occurring except at those brief instants when they remember what they are doing” (ibid., p. 25). The challenge of meditating is indeed to bring to awareness something that is commonly if not habitually taken for granted and something that is accordingly commonly if not habitually in the background of experience. From a phenomenological point of view, and in particular, from the viewpoint of phenomenological methodology, an elucidation of the human experience of breathing is a matter of uncovering the relationship between the familiar and the strange. On the one hand, the challenge of making breath “the focus of alert attention” is a matter of bringing what is commonly present in the background into the foreground, hence making strange what has been familiar but only peripherally. At the same time, it is a matter of bringing what has been commonly taken for granted into direct awareness, thus making the strange familiar. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s enactive attempt to enlist phenomenology in their move away from information-​processing and representational accounts of perception is unsuccessful, not least because the practice of phenomenology entails bracketing, a first step by which a human experience is no longer peripherally familiar but strange, and no longer commonly strange as a direct object of awareness but familiar. In effect, what their enlistment of phenomenology lacks are detailed descriptions of, and veritable insights into human experience. Varela’s proposed neurophenomenology is similarly deficient. Not only is the proposed neurophenomenology not a third-​person perspective as shown earlier since the brain is not a person, but more specifically still, a third-​ person perspective can hardly be a matter of cell assemblies, “ca s” being what Varela identifies as “large-​scale collaborations between neurons at many different places in the visual cortex and elsewhere in the brain” that have “perceptual and phenomenal correlates” (Varela 1999b, p. 125). Cell assemblies are not experienced. Cell assemblies are precisely “correlates” of experience. Indeed, people do not experience “large-​scale collaborations between neurons.” Given this purely correlational truth, both an enactive approach and neurophenomenology are antithetical to real-​life, real-​time descriptions of experience, particularly real-​life, real-​time descriptions of movement, that is, both felt kinesthetic experiences of movement and perceived sensory-​kinetic experiences of movement, whether the latter be tactile, auditory, or visual. In fact, the major real-​life experience Varela, Thompson, and Rosch describe in The Embodied Mind is a visual experience pure and simple: the experience of color (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, see pp. 157–​171, 181–​183), an experience they term “the best example, one which we intend to explore in some depth

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here”(ibid., p. 157). Indeed, while a lengthy index reference is given to vision and a modest index reference is given to both “action” and “embodied action,” there is no index reference to either movement or kinesthesia. Moreover we find notable, even egregious misrepresentations of Husserl’s phenomenology, most prominently in the following declarations: Husserl had “no method other than his own philosophical introspection” (ibid., p. 16); Husserl “was actually ignoring … the direct embodied aspect of experience” (ibid., p. 17); “the failure of the Husserlian project … [was in the fact that] Husserl’s turn toward experience and ‘the things themselves’ was entirely theoretical” (ibid., p. 19; italics in original). Anyone conversant with Husserl texts is aware of detailed descriptions of phenomenological methodology to begin with, a methodology that is not coincident with introspection. Anyone conversant with Husserl texts is, in addition, aware of the fact that Husserl describes perceptual experience at length and in different contexts, detailing specifically the “two-​fold articulation” of perception and “the kinestheses,” as we have seen earlier, and “the two-​fold articulation” in relation to if/​then relationships as we have seen earlier. Moreover anyone conversant with Husserl texts is aware of the basis of cognition in the progression “I move,” “I do,” “I can,” a progression that begins with being an animate organism: I know through experience that the parts of my Body move in the special way which distinguishes them from all other things and motions of things … they have the character of subjective movement, of the “I move.” husserl 1989, p. 271

Originally, the “I move,” “I do,” precedes the “I can do.” ibid., p. 273

With respect to methodology, it should be noted that Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s approach to experience is actually threefold: it includes not just science and an attempted inclusion of phenomenology, but the Buddhist practice of meditation. In particular, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch highlight “mindfulness/​awareness meditation” as a “natural bridge between cognitive science and human experience” (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991, p. 33). It is important to draw attention in this context to the substantive links that exist between Vipassana Buddhist meditation and phenomenology. These links document confluences in methodology that go unrecognized in Varela, Thompson, Rosch’s account and this because of a seeming lack of awareness of the disciplined structure of phenomenological methodology and thus the process of a

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veritable phenomenological inquiry and veritable phenomenological account of experience. A text documenting the integral relationship between the two methodologies begins with the following observation: Notable methodological and experiential similarities exist between Husserl’s phenomenology and Vipassana (Buddhist) meditation7 that have sizable import in themselves and sizable import for divining the nature of the self, divining not in the sense of prophesizing or conjecturing—​or of endowing with a divine spirit—​but in the sense of experiencing outside the natural attitude, hence in the methodologically nuanced sense of following along lines of the “supernatural.” Divining rods are thus in this instance empirically-​proven rods, i.e., bona fide methodologies. sheets-​j ohnstone 2011b, p. 198

The text proceeds with a general comparison of phenomenological and Buddhist understandings of mind and an examination of four features common to both phenomenological and Vipassana Buddhist practice: the reduction, the attentive onlooker, content, and stream of experience. In doing so, it documents fundamental similarities and thus an inherent interrelationship between the two practices (ibid., pp. 198–​219). Of further methodological concern is Varela’s odd critique on behalf of his neurophenomenology, specifically, his odd critique of Husserl’s use of a melody as the experiential ground of his analysis of internal time-​consciousness. Varela’s critique hinges on the fact that “Husserl is characteristically sparse with examples,” that “when Husserl brings his example to hand, it is, strangely enough, as an un-​situated subject in an abstract mode: we don’t know in what circumstances the music is being listened to … whether it is background listening or an intense emotional concentration,” and that “All this is not merely peripheral, since without these particularities the mode of access to the experience is lost” (Varela 1999b, pp. 114–​115/​Varela 1999b, pp. 270–​271). Varela replaces the experience of a melody with what he identifies in one instance as “a specific experience of multi-​stable visual perception” (Varela 1999b, p. 115) and in another instance as “specific tasks of multistable visual perception” (Varela 1999a, p. 270), but in any event as a multi-​stable perception that he terms an “ambiguous perception” (Varela 1999b., p. 114/​Varela 1999a, p. 271),

7 Vipassana (insight) is the oldest form of Theravada Buddhism, “the Buddhist heart of the Theravada meditational discipline” (King 1992, p. 82).

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notably an image that can be seen in more than one way. In perceiving the ambiguous image, Varela states, “most western subjects see either a ‘pyramid’ or a ‘hallway.’” Varela takes this fact as a basis for his own analysis of “temporality as a neurocognitive process” (Varela 1999a, p. 116). In other words, that the image can be seen in more than one way, hence that variations in the perception of the same object is possible, is the basis of his analytic “strategy.” As he proceeds to explain, “These variations can be practiced by the following strategy: 1. Fixate on the centre of the figure; 2. Blink your eyes. 3. ‘Aim’ at its alternative” (Varela 1999b, p. 114, italics in original/​Varela 1999a, p. 271, italics in original). Husserl’s analysis of an inherently temporal object, a melody, thus becomes for Varela an experimental study of a static visual object, the experience of which varies according to “The neurodynamics of temporal appearance,” a neurodynamics that Varela explains according to “sensori-​motor activities” and to “endogenous configurations (or self-​organizing patterns) of neural activity” (ibid., p. 116; italics in original/​ibid., p. 272). The “activities” and “configurations” constitute an approach to cognition that “is based on situated, embodied agents” and to which the name “enactive” is given (ibid.; italics in original/​ibid.; italics in original). With respect to the prominence given to vision in his analysis of cognition and to a deficiency in understanding the foundational significance of animation, hence of movement, further references to Husserl texts are warranted: The study of intentionality in which things come to perceptual givenness is not to be carried through without a study of the corresponding intentionality of one’s own body in its perceiving function … in which the kinesthetic systems of hand movements, head movements, movements of walking, etc., are constituted intentionally and are joined together in the unity of one total system. husserl 1977, p. 151

Every series of kinaestheses proceeds in its own way, in a manner totally different from the series of sensible data. It runs its course in such a way as to be freely at my disposal, free to inhibit, free to orchestrate once again, as an originally subjective realization. Thus, the system of lived-​ body movements is in fact characterized with respect to consciousness in a special way as a subjectively free system. husserl 2001, p. 51

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We constantly find here this two-​fold articulation: kinesthetic sensations on the one side, the motivating; and the sensations of features on the other, the motivated … Perception is without exception a unitary accomplishment which arises essentially out of the playing together of two correlatively related functions. husserl 1989, p. 63

It is of foundational interest—​“foundational” indeed in a Husserlian sense—​to document how Husserl’s consistent references to, and exemplifications of ‘if/​ then’ relationships would have phenomenologically grounded Varela’s “strategy.” As shown in Chapter 2, Section iii (Pregiven and Pregivennesses: Sorting Basic Facts of Human Life from Biased Claims), if/​then relationships are kinesthetically orchestrated variations that are part and parcel of perceptions and cognitions. Further references can in fact be shown to substantiate the experiential nature and reality of what Husserl identifies and describes as if/​ then relationships. In particular, three research perspectives, each of them from a different area of science, corroborate Husserl’s account. In doing so, they signal distinct ways in which veritable first-​and third-​person accounts of the perception-​cognition relationship are and can be shown to be essentially complementary, and this without “transforming” phenomenology into something it is not and without “present[ing] a new interpretation of Husserl’s writings.” Each research perspective will be described below. It is instructive, however, as well as relevant to note in advance of those research perspectives that the complementarity of scientific and phenomenological investigations as documented below testifies to the integrity of phenomenology, i.e., neither “transformations” nor “new interpretations” are necessary. The various efforts put forth by Varela to make phenomenology conform to science may thus be questioned. Varela writes, “From an enactive viewpoint, any mental act is characterized by the concurrent participation of several functionally distinct and topographically distributed regions of the brain and their sensori-​motor embodiment. It is the complex task of relating and integrating these different components that is at the root of temporality from the point of view of the neuroscientist” (Varela 1999b, p. 116/​1999a, p. 272). While there is surely no problem in claiming that the brain as part of the whole body nervous system is critically and definitively involved in “any mental act,” there is most surely a problem, insofar as real-​life, real-​time human experience is concerned, with the claim that “functionally distinct and topographically distributed regions of the brain” have a “sensori-​motor embodiment.” The brain, to begin with, is indeed part of a whole body nervous system and is thus itself “embodied.” It is not a stand-​alone entity. But furthermore, and of even greater significance in an

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experiential sense is the fact that however much “sensori-​motor” components are brought in to account for human experience, they cannot in any way illuminate human experience. “Sensori-​motor” regions of the brain may precisely be correlated with human experiences, but they do not in any way descriptively elucidate experience, notably, its lived dynamics in the form of feelings and movement. One reason for their descriptive inadequacy is attributable to the fact that “motors” can in no way do justice to describing the real-​life, real-​time realities of feelings and movement, hence to experiences of same. Veritable recognition of these realities would necessitate “sensory-​kinetic” awarenesses to begin with. In particular, they would necessitate recognition of the sensory faculty of kinesthesia, hence the direct experience of movement. In effect, to arrive at a complementarity of scientific and phenomenological investigations into human experience requires educating oneself about objective and subjective approaches to movement, i.e., to differing methodologies, and in turn about objective and subjective experiences of movement. As will be apparent, such complementarity is implicit in the research perspectives on if/​then relationships described below. vii

Research Perspectives Complementary to Husserlian Phenomenology

Nineteenth-​ century physicist-​ physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz made observations and carried out experiments that document if/​then movement-​ perception relationships in ways confluent with phenomenological methodology. For example, after describing aspects of infant-​child behaviors beginning with hand-​play, von Helmholtz concludes that “the child learns to recognize the different views which the same object can afford in correlation with the movements which he is constantly giving it” ( von Helmholtz 1971b, p. 214). He remarks, “Once we have acquired an accurate conception of the form of any object, we can deduce from it … the various movements we should have to impress upon it in order to obtain … successive images” (ibid.). He later comments, “As soon as we have gained a correct notion of the shape of an object, we have the rule for the movements of the eyes which are necessary for seeing it. In carrying out these movements and thus receiving the visual impressions we expect, we retranslate the notion we have formed into reality; and finding that this retranslation agrees with the original, we become convinced of the accuracy of our conception” (ibid., p. 215). Elsewhere, von Helmholtz offers a fine-​grained summary of the integral relationship of movement and perception: “[O]‌ur body’s movement sets us in varying spatial relations to the objects

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we perceive, so that the impressions which these objects make upon us change as we move” (von Helmholtz: 1971a, p. 373). Clearly, and as detailed and exemplified elsewhere (Sheets-​ Johnstone 1999a, pp. xxiv–​xxv, 179–​222/​2011c. pp. xxiv, 155–​192), though Husserl’s and von Helmholtz’s points of departure are far removed from one another, their accounts of perception overlap and validate each another: both underscore the central role of self-​movement in perception and the importance of self-​evidence. Moreover the methodological practice of free variation—​ imagining the possible, an essential step within Husserl’s phenomenological methodology—​is a practice consistently evident in von Helmholtz’s writings, including the axioms of geometry. A striking example is von Helmholtz’s personal experiment conducted on behalf of what he terms “judgment[s]‌of relief in the floor-​plane.” He states, This [judgment] can be tested by standing in a level meadow and first observing the relief of the ground in the ordinary way. There may be little irregularities here and there, but still the surface appears to be distinctly horizontal for a long way off. Then bend the head over and look at it from underneath the arm; or stand on a stump or a little elevation in the ground, and stoop down and look between the legs, without changing much the vertical distance of the head above the level ground. The farther portions of the meadow will then cease to appear level and will look more like a wall painted on the sky. I have frequently made observations of this kind as I was walking along the road between Heidelberg and Mannheim. von helmholtz 1962, pp. 433–​34

In sum, that movement in a quite literal sense informs perception is a fact von Helmholtz clearly recognizes. Moreover as is evident, he furthermore recognizes the fact that sensory-​kinetic relationships can be brought to self-​ evidence any time one cares to turn attention to them, hence to the sensory-​ kinetic dynamic realities of experience.8 In effect, experience is not discounted

8 It might be noted as elsewhere specified and documented that “the concept of self-​evidence surfaces in an extended and critically important sense when von Helmholtz ponders the question of whether the axioms of geometry derive from experience or not, that is, whether as, according to Kant, the axioms are a form of transcendental intuition or not. Von Helmholtz’s concern is to weigh—​or perhaps better, re-​weigh—​the place of experience in the provenience of our mathematical spatial intuitions and thus to question Kant’s claim.” (See Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a, pp. 184–​186/​2011c, pp. 159–​161).

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or “transformed” into neurophysiology but meticulously examined and just as meticulously varied with the result that experience is the source of scientific discoveries. Furthermore, von Helmholtz’s research shows that scientific and phenomenological research can complement one another, not only because a phenomenological methodology entails practices familiar to scientists, but because the truths of experience are as proper an aim of science as the “truths of behavior” (see Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a, p. xxiii/​2011c, p. xxiv). A particular and at the same time general observation of von Helmholtz is significant to note in this context, namely that “The laws of thought, after all, are the same for the scientist as for the philosopher” (von Helmholtz 1971a, p. 369). A second research perspective actually bears out von Helmholtz’s observation by way of a direct correspondence between scientific and phenomenological experiential descriptions and specifications. Infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel Stern and infant/​child psychologist Lois Bloom highlight the epistemological importance of if/​then relationships in infant and child development, Stern in what he calls an awareness of consequential relationships—​e.g., “when your eyes close, the world goes dark” (Stern 1985, p. 80)—​Bloom in what she calls relational concepts that develop outside of language—​e.g., slapping bath water causes a splash (Bloom 1993, p. 50). However the relationship is termed, it is notable that in all instances, the relationship articulates a subject-​world relationship and is the result of moving and of being perceptually attuned to how movement makes things happen and can make things happen. In effect, if/​then relationships are substantively tied to thinking in movement: if I move in such and such a way, then I will experience such and such happening as in closing my eyes; if I move in such and such a way, then I will find such and such happening as in slapping bath water. The importance of if/​then relationships and of thinking in movement can hardly be denied. Moreover expectations are built up on the basis of experienced if/​ then relationships and of thinking in movement, precisely as von Helmholtz describes in terms of “deducing” on the basis of “an accurate conception of the form of any object.” From a strictly phenomenological point of view, the world is constituted in large part on the basis of just such relationships and thinking; that is, one makes sense of the world by discovering integral relationships between moving and perceiving. Discovering the relationships allows a degree of certainty as to the nature of Nature itself as well as to the intent, attitude, feelings, and thinking of individuals in one’s surrounding world. It thus allows a degree of ease in navigating the everyday world in which one lives. Further still, in an extended sense, if/​then relationships are central to economics, to business decisions and doings of all kind; they are central to medical practice, including prescriptive decisions and surgical decisions and doings of

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all kind, and to patient practices as well; they are central to political decision-​ making and implementation. In short, what is learned in the course of learning one’s body and learning to move oneself in infant and child development is not simply “kid stuff”—​“something befitting or appropriate only to children” or “something extremely simple or easy” (https://​www​.merr​iam​-webs​ter​.com​ /dic​tion​ary​/kid%20st​uff)​. In becoming aware of if/​then relationships, infants and children do indeed become aware of the fact that how they move has consequences and of the fact that their movement can and does make things happen, precisely as Stern and Bloom show. These developmental awarenesses feed into both the sense of oneself as an agent and the sense of oneself as a thinking subject, thus the sense of oneself as capable of considering possible modes of moving and doing and to what those possible modes of moving and doing might lead, hence one capable of reasoning as to the best course of moving and doing, and in turn, capable of making rational decisions. With respect to this latter point, a postscript might well be added that validates further the basic correspondence between scientific findings on developmental awarenesses and Husserl’s phenomenological findings on if/​then relationships. The postscript comes from Darwin and actually leads to the third perspective. As described elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017b, p. 24), Darwin does not attempt to differentiate instinct and intelligence by way of a hard and fast distinction, but provides illuminating examples of each. In his lengthy discussion of “mental powers,” for example, he points out that “Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 46), and furthermore goes on to observe, “It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts” (ibid.). He later quotes muleteers in South America who state, “‘I will not give you the mule whose step is easiest, but la mas racional’.” [“the most rational”], and then quotes Humboldt who adds the following observation concerning la mas racional: “[T]‌his popular expression, dictated by long experience, combats the system of animated machines, better perhaps than all the arguments of speculative philosophy.” ibid., p. 48

The third perspective comes from nonhuman animal studies of which several examples will be given. They too show remarkable scientific corroborations of if/​then awarenesses and thinking in movement. To begin with, we might of course recall Darwin’s study of worms referenced earlier (Chapter 2, Section i: Naturalizing Phenomenology and a Proposed Neurophenomenology) in

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which his reasoning and conclusion concerning the intelligence of worms were described. We might also recall earlier examples of hunting animals, of beavers building dams, and of bees’ Tanzsprache, all of them attesting to the ability to think in movement and to create synergies of meaningful movement. Three further examples give additional detailed specifics lending credence to the value and importance of an evolutionary perspective. Bernd Heinrich’s experimental research on ravens (Heinrich 1999) substantively vindicates if/​then relationships and thinking in movement. In one particular experiment, ravens faced the challenge of accessing a piece of food dangling at the end of a suspended string. Their response illustrates the intimate bond between “I move, I do, I can” and if/​then relationships, that is, between ‘if I do such and such, then such and such will happen’. Moreover it illustrates further the intimate relationship between what Husserl terms “I cans” and agency (for further commentary, see Sheets-Johnstone 2017b). The separate movements of the ravens in fact warrant specification for they are each highly distinctive. They include “reaching down, gripping a string, pulling up a loop of the string, setting the loop on the perch, stepping down on the loop, releasing the string from beak, reaching further down on the string to make a second pull,” and so on. As commentators on Heinrich’s study go on to point out, “The ravens might have already known each individual action … but orchestrating the individual moves into a profitable sequence that obtained the prize was entirely new” (Marzluff and Angell 2012, p. 91; see also Heinrich 1999, p. 314). In effect, by way of thinking in movement, the ravens integrate a sequence of meaningful movements. It warrants specific mention too that thinking in movement and the synergies of meaningful movement that result are the work not of embodied minds but of mindful bodies. The conceptual understandings of mindful bodies encompass in this instance concepts of near and far, of pulling, of stepping—​thus of weight and resistance—​all in the process of figuring out what must be done in order to access the food. We might finally note too that what Daniel Stern describes as consequential relationships and infant/​child psychologist Lois Bloom describes as relational concepts that develop outside of language are relationships evident in the raven’s sequence of movements and attest to the pan-​animate reality of if/​then relationships. A second example substantiating an evolutionary perspective comes from observations of zoologist and psychologist Andrew Whiten and evolutionary psychologist Richard Byrne in the course of describing their field studies of tactical deception in primates. These studies include a description of a female gorilla who was walking with others in a relatively straight line along a narrow trail. Whiten and Byrne note the following facts: the female spied a choice vine that was partly hidden; she sat down by the side of the trail and began to groom

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herself; when the others were out of sight, she stopped grooming herself, rapidly climbed into the tree, broke off the clump of vine, descended with it, ate it, then ran to catch up with the group (Whiten and Byrne 1988, p. 237). One might well conclude that the female gorilla exemplifies what South American muleteers describe as the animal that is “la mas racional.” A third example comes from a book titled Primate Cognition by primatologists Michael Tomasello and Josep Call, a book in which Tomasello and Call describe a particular chimpanzee’s variation on the standard initiation of play. They write, The initiation of play often takes place in chimpanzees by one juvenile raising its arm above its head and then descending on another, play-​hitting in the process. This then becomes ritualized ontogenetically into an ‘arm-​raise’ gesture in which the initiator simply raises its arm and, rather than actually following through with the hitting, stays back and waits for the other to initiate the play, monitoring its response all the while … If the desired response is not forthcoming, sometimes the gesture will be repeated, but quite often another gesture will be used. In other situations a juvenile was observed to actually alternate its gaze between the recipient of the gestural signal and one of its own body parts; for example, one individual learned to initiate play by presenting a limp leg to another individual as it passed by (an invitation to grab it and so initiate a game of chase), looking back and forth between the recipient and its leg in the process. tomasello and call 1997, p. 244

Significant similarities are apparent in the female gorilla’s distractive movement and in the juvenile chimpanzee’s invitation to play. Both the gorilla and the chimpanzee are aware of socio-​cultural practices: grooming is a social practice; play is a social practice. Gorilla and chimpanzee are thus aware respectively of the response they can expect from sitting and grooming and from inviting play. A significant difference, however, is also apparent. The juvenile chimpanzee’s gestural invitation is creative in a way different from the clever and resourceful grooming of the gorilla. As Tomasello and Call point out, the juvenile chimpanzee departs from moving through the ritual raised arm gesture and play-​hitting, the chimpanzee instead raising a limp leg and looking back and forth between a passing chimpanzee and its raised leg. Such creativity is clearly anchored not just in movement, but in thinking afresh in movement, and further, in thinking afresh in movement in relation to others in one’s surrounding world. As such, it is a further instance of cognitive

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awarenesses in animate life and even a further instance of “la mas racional” insofar as reasoning is involved: if I move in this new creative way, the other will understand and respond accordingly, for my movements are analogous both to ritual invitation play movements and to the actual bodily movements of play, i.e., to chasing and being chased by another. With respect to creativity, we might note that insofar as the raven’s movements to access the food dangling at the end of a string are a complex sequence of individual movements, they too are creative in the sense of putting together a new kinetic dynamic, one that constitutes an “I can,” a synergy of meaningful movements that can be and likely is retained in kinesthetic memory. The raven is reasoning along if/​then lines that allow it to succeed not in interacting with others but in reaching its goal, namely, reaching an object in its surrounding world. In contrast, the gorilla and a chimpanzee are engaged with others, reasoning along if/​then lines that are grounded in socio-​cultural awarenesses of how others will respond. Their differences notwithstanding, all exemplify how thinking in movement is foundational to if-​then relationships, to the formation of synergies of meaningful movement, and more broadly still, to animate life. Prior to a return to ‘embodied minds’, it is pertinent to call attention to ethological studies of animate movement—​e.g., John Fentress’s studies of mice (Fentress 1989), Ilan Golani’s studies of golden jackals and Tasmanian devils (Golani 1976), and Moran, Fentress, and Golani’s studies of ritualized fighting in wolves (Moran, Fentress, Golani 1981). As detailed elsewhere, these studies “readily demonstrate the far richer significance of analyzing and understanding the kinetic dynamics of animal movement over standard reports of animal ‘behavior’ because they distinguish and specify the spatial, temporal, and energic complexities of everyday animate life” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2012, p. 46/​ 2019, pp. 241–​242).9 A further dimension of this richer significance is evident in experimental studies of automatons by biologist and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Gerald Edelman, particularly Edelman’s experimental study titled “Darwin iii” that demonstrates how cognitive determinations of an object are based on freely varied movement (Edelman 1992, p. 93). His studies implicitly attest to the fact that animation is first and foremost a subject–​world relationship, and that being such, it is naturally an integrated affective–​kinetic–​cognitive phenomenon. In other words, “animate beings are 9 The cited ethological studies use the Eshkol-​Wachmann system of movement notation (Eshkol and Wachmann 1958). For sources on Labanotation, see, for example, Laban (1975) and Hutchinson (1970). For sources on Effort/​Shape notation, see, for example, Bartenieff and Lewis (1980) and Bartenieff et al. (1970). For sources on Benesh notation, see Benesh and Benesh (1969).

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impelled to move on the basis of their interest in, or aversion to, what they perceive, what they recognize, and so on, and in turn, to move in ways semantically congruent with their experience” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2012, p. 46/​2019, p. 242). viii

The Neurodynamics of Embodied Minds and Naturalizing Phenomenology vs Real-​Life Subject-​World Relationships

We may first ask whether, and if so how, the above examples of if/​then relationships illuminate what Varela describes as his “strategy” in his analysis of “temporality as a neurocognitive process” (Varela 1999a, p. 116), and by extension, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s “strategy.” Varela’s strategy is clearly designated in steps specified as “A Task in Visual Perception”: “Fixate,” then “Blink,” then “‘Aim’” (Varela 1999b, p. 114, 1999a, p. 271). The steps constitute a methodology that if followed brings about a certain result. What interests and determines Varela’s methodology, however, is not the experiential relationship of moving or doing something and finding out what happens, but “the neurodynamics of temporal appearance,” which is why neuronal cell assemblies figure centrally and prominently in his methodology and in his account of what Husserl experientially describes as “internal time consciousness.” Varela offers hypotheses substantiating his claim that “relevant brain processes for ongoing cognitive activity are distributed not only in space but also over an expanse of time” (Varela 1999a, p. 274; see also Varela 1999b, p. 116). The first two hypotheses he gives in support of his claim are: 1) “For every cognitive act, there is a singular, specific cell assembly that underlies its emergence and operation and 2) “A specific ca is selected through the fast, transient phase-​locking of activated neurons belonging to the sub-​threshold, competing ca s” (Varela 1999a, pp. 274, 275, respectively; see also Varela 1999b, pp. 117–​118). Varela is indeed grounding his analysis of “temporal appearance” in the brain: “From an enactive viewpoint, any mental act is characterized by the concurrent participation of several functionally distinct and topographically distributed regions of the brain and their sensorimotor embodiment,” immediately adding, “From the point of view of the neuroscientist, it is the complex task of relating and integrating these different components that is at the root of temporality” (Varela 1999a, p. 272)/​1999b, p. 116). What is odd is the fact that in wrapping up his criticism of Husserl’s analysis of internal time consciousness that “falls short of such a standard,” Varela states, “This criticism merely highlights the fact that it is quite essential to have in mind a particular experiential grounding to advance any analysis” (Varela

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1999a, p. 270, note 8, respectively (see p. 578 for note 8)). Curiously enough, Varela’s criticism verges on the vindictive since anyone substantively conversant with Husserl texts is quite aware of his grounding phenomenology in what is sensuously present and in how meaning and value—​sense-​makings—​ accrue from what is sensuously present, i.e., from progressive experiences—​ what Husserl terms progressive experienced “profiles”—​of what is sensuously present. Husserl’s analyses are thus indeed experientially grounded. Consider the following preliminary summary that Husserl gives of objects, that is, the summary of the process of making sense of objects: We can formulate a principle here that will become much clearer in our future analyses. Whenever we speak of objects, no matter what category of objects they may be, the sense of this manner of speaking about objects originally stems from perceptions as lived-​experiences originally constituting sense, and therefore an objectlike formation. But the constitution of an object as sense is an accomplishment of consciousness that is in principle unique for every basic type of object. Perception does not consist in staring blankly at something lodged in consciousness, inserted there by some strange wonder as if something were first there and then consciousness would somehow embrace it. Rather, for every imaginable ego-​subject, every objectlike existence with a specific content of sense is an accomplishment of consciousness. It is an accomplishment that must be new for every novel object. Every basic type of object in principle requires a different intentional structure. husserl 2001, p. 57

What even this initial summary shows and shows clearly is that Husserl’s rendition of perception as a “lived experience” that constitutes sense is experientially grounded from beginning to end. Though Varela emphasizes the seminal importance of experiential grounding—​“it is quite essential to have in mind a particular experiential grounding to advance any analysis”—​his analysis is concentrated on “sensorimotor activities” and “neuronal activities” that he in fact describes under the heading of “enaction” and “the neurodynamics of temporal appearance.” In short, his analyses are lacking in immediate and direct experiential grounding. Though in a thoroughly passing way, i.e., in parentheses, “head-​turning” is given as an example of a “cognitive activity” (Varela 1999a, p. 276), Varela’s analyses are, as noted earlier, stringently concentrated not on experience but on ca s—​cell assemblies—​that are defined in three progressive hypotheses, two of which were quoted above and the third of which reads: “The integration-​relaxation processes at the 1 scale are strict

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correlates of present-​time consciousness” (Varela 1999a, pp. 274–​277; see also Varela 1999b, pp. 117–​119). What is of singular significance and warrants pivotal attention and emphasis is that Varela is not describing experience: by his own very word, he is describing correlates of experience, sensori-​motor neuronal correlates of experience. Correlates are precisely correlates (neuronal correlates of “head turning,” for example); they are neither equivalent to experience nor do they ground experience. In finer terms, living subjects, animate forms of life, do not experience neuronal firings, sensori-​motor couplings, and the like. They do not experience their brains—​or ganglia. They experience themselves and their surrounding world and experience them directly. It is precisely that direct experience that Husserlian phenomenology illuminates and in which if/​ then relationships are of paramount cognitive significance. One further critical point that concerns evolution warrants mention. When Varela, Thompson, and Rosch write that their aim is to correct the notion of a pregiven environment to which “organisms are basically parachuted” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p. 198), they are arguing against what they identify as a neo-​Darwinian account of evolution, proposing instead the idea of evolution as “natural drift” (ibid., pp. 200–​205). As noted earlier too, they cite Merleau-​Ponty as supporting them in countering the notion of the environment as “given, fixed, and unique” (ibid.), commenting in particular that in Merleau-​Ponty’s approach, “perception is not simply embedded within and constrained by the surrounding world; it also contributes to the enactment of this surrounding world” (ibid., p. 174). They conclude, “Thus as Merleau-​Ponty notes, the organism both initiates and is shaped by the environment.” They proceed to argue that “perception consists in perceptually guided action and that cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided.” They give a summary of this view “by saying that cognition is not representation but embodied action and that the world we cognize is not pregiven but enacted through our history of structural coupling” (ibid., p. 200). What they term the “coupling” of organisms with the environment is indeed a lead thesis. As they earlier state, “[W]‌e emphasize that the very notion of what an environment is cannot be separated from what organisms are and what they do” (ibid., p. 198). The critical point turns on what Varela, Thompson, and Rosch term “structural coupling,” namely, “the sensorimotor structure of the perceiver,” which they define as “the way in which the nervous system links sensory and motor surfaces” (ibid., p. 173). They specify further that “the sensorimotor structure of the perceiver” defines “the manner in which the perceiver is embodied” and that this structure “rather than some pregiven world determines how the perceiver can act and be modulated by environmental events” (ibid.). In short, their “enactive approach”

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is anchored in their thesis of “perceptually guided action.” In effect, and as they state, the enactive approach “is not to determine how some perceiver-​ independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather, to determine the common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems that explain how action can be perceptually guided in a perceiver-​dependent world” (ibid.). What warrants recognition in this context are precisely Darwin’s observations of, and writings on the integral relationship of organism and environment, a relationship that is dynamic rather than static, i.e., the environment is neither “pregiven” nor “separated from what organisms are and what they do.” We saw this earlier in Darwin’s description of heaths where, among other notable changes, Darwin notes the effect of the introduction of a single tree and the relationship of cattle and trees, and of insects and cattle with respect to the environment. As shown earlier too, Darwin points out the relationship of cattle to Scotch fir, all in the context of showing how “plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations” (Darwin 1968 [1859], pp. 124–​125). Indeed, as was shown and documented from the beginning of this text, the interconnection of organism and environment is a central and abiding theme in Darwin’s writings, a theme that warrants definite acknowledgment and dedicated attention by all humans regardless of their professional occupations, preoccupations, and “theoretical reflections.” Given that to naturalize phenomenology would require that it conform to scientific accounts of nature that are by and large reductive to the brain, an awareness of, and familiarity with Darwin’s texts are equally essential. No such awareness and familiarity are evident in Naturalizing Phenomenology. The disparagement of Husserl’s phenomenology is a major theme. In fact, remarks of psychologist Bernard Pachoud, one of the four editors of the book, might similarly make “the grand old man [Husserl] turn in his grave,” thus adding a further voice to Varela’s grossly rude remark. Pachoud, contributes one of the three chapters to the book’s section on “Movement.” The topic of movement is of course prominent throughout Husserl’s writings, particularly his focus on what he initially termed “the two-​fold articulation” of movement and perception (Husserl 1989, p. 63) and on the “kinestheses” with respect to the living body (Husserl 1970, pp. 106–​107, 161–​162, 331–​332). Pachoud fails to recognize these seminal relationships when he critically dismisses Husserl’s account of “kinesthetic sensations.” He wraps up his idiosyncratically abbreviated and even deviant critique with the following statement: “So it seems that Husserl means by ‘kinesthetic sensations’ the sensations derived from active movements without his ever specifying exactly, at least in Ding und Raum [Thing and Space], to what these kinesthetic sensations correspond” (Pachoud1999, p. 208). He

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follows up this summary judgment with the following remarks: “Husserl’s own descriptions of kinesthetic sensations appear all the more unsatisfactory today in the light of the fact that they can be more precisely described thanks to the development of the neurosciences” (ibid., p. 209), and in his more specifically exacting words, thanks to being able now to specify “the mechanisms upon which they [kinesthetic sensations] depend” (ibid.). The reduction of “kinesthetic sensations” to “mechanisms” is, to begin with, a travesty of phenomenology, the aim of which may well be described as ‘to be true to the truths of experience’ (for more on this topic, see Sheets-​Johnstone 2020). The reduction replaces a study of real-​life, real-​time experience with a study of neuro-​mechanisms, “mechanisms” that may certainly be correlated with experience but that are in no way descriptive of experience. What is furthermore disturbing is that even prior to his actual disquisition on movement, Pachoud informs readers that the “naturalist contributions” to phenomenology that he will make in the form of neurophysiology will not just “be employed to complete the Husserlian positions or to render them more precise,” but will, “[a]‌s a result,” make apparent “the inadequacies of phenomenological analysis” at the same time that they will succeed in authenticating phenomenological analysis: “its fundamental positions will be justified” (Pachoud 1999, p. 212). What might be termed Pachoud’s ‘epidemiological shortcomings with respect to phenomenology’, i.e., shortcomings that presumably identify and address the risk factors of practicing phenomenology and of phenomenology itself, testify to inadequate and even skewed understandings and knowledge of phenomenology. It is indeed notable that Pachoud’s citings of Husserlian texts lean heavily on Ding und Raum, a book published in 1907 and a quite early text in Husserl’s writings (see further below). For example, after quoting a passage from Ding und Raum in which there is no mention of “kinesthetic sensations,” but only “kinesthetic motivation,” Pachoud declares with reference to the cited passage, “So it seems that Husserl means by ‘kinesthetic sensations’ the sensations derived from active movements without his ever specifying exactly, at least in Ding und Raum, to what these kinesthetic sensations correspond.” Pachoud indeed bypasses Husserl’s progressive formulation of phenomenology and phenomenological methodology, and his progressive phenomenological analyses, a fact that might explain Pachoud’s seeming unacquaintance with Husserl’s extensive descriptions of the “two-​fold articulation” of perception and movement and Husserl’s extensive descriptions of if/​then relationships (see also further below). Such an articulation and such relationships are basic to all animate life: animate beings move toward and away from objects in their environment, their movement being geared to a certain end. Approach and avoidance are in fact fundamental topics in the life sciences that, as we saw

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earlier, were documented years ago by T. C. Schneirla in his seminal 1959 article “An Evolutionary and Developmental Theory of Biphasic Processes Underlying Approach and Withdrawal.” Similar as well as further ineptitudes obtrude upon genuine understandings of animate life and animate experience in co-​editor Jean Petitot’s contribution to Naturalizing Phenomenology. Both Petitot and Pachoud veer away from real-​ life, real-​time understandings of animate movement when they attribute the experience of movement not to kinesthesia—​an odd oversight for scientists—​ but to proprioception and to vision. Petitot as well as Pachoud anchors his critical appraisals of phenomenological analysis of movement in his reading of Ding und Raum. A further exposition of each of their chapters in Naturalizing Phenomenology is warranted. In the section of his chapter titled “Phenomenological Analysis of the Role of Movement in the Spatial Perception of Objects” (Pachoud 1999, pp. 206–​ 209), Pachoud quotes extensively from Ding und Raum and bases his following section titled “Neurophysiological Contributions to the Specification of Kinesthetic Data” on “kinesthetic sensations … in conformity with the Husserlian definition,” i.e., in conformity with “sensations relative to the movements of the perceiver’s own body” (ibid., p. 212). He immediately proceeds, however to define “kinesthetic sensations” as a matter of vision, vestibular information, and proprioception (ibid.). The neurophysiological and experiential realities of kinesthesia are in fact attributed specifically to proprioception. Pachoud states (ibid.), If one retains the nomenclature of ”kinesthetic sensations” to refer to sensations relative to the movements of the perceiver’s own body, this in conformity with the Husserlian definition, then the following can be claimed quite properly to belong to kinesthetic sensations: (1) vision, and especially the phenomena of vection [“those phenomena involved in the transformation of the visual scene which inform us of such movements,” i.e., “inform us” of the “displacement of the perceiver’s own body in space”]; (2) vestibular information; and (3) proprioception, which provides us with knowledge of the relative position of our limbs in space and of their movements, thanks to a system of articular, muscular, and tendinous receptors. Petitot offers similarly inept understandings of kinesthesia and the experience of animate movement. After quoting from Ding und Raum and observing therefrom that kinesthetic sensations “make possible the presentation of external objects without being themselves presentational,” he states, “Besides

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their ‘objectivizing’ function, kinesthetic sensations share a ‘subjectivizing’ function that lets the lived body appear as a proprioceptive embodiment of pure experiences, and the adumbrations as subjective events” (Petitot 1999, p. 354). Again, kinesthesia is specified and described not as the sensory faculty of movement, hence as the source of directly experienced movement and its kinetic dynamics, hence as a felt, not perceived experience of movement and its dynamics; it is specified and described as the means by which “the lived body appear[s]‌as a proprioceptive embodiment of pure experience”—​whatever a “pure experience” of “proprioceptive embodiment” might mean, or for that matter, what “a proprioceptive embodiment” might mean. In any event, Petitot proceeds to prioritize his geometric descriptive analysis of perception, declaring at the end of his analysis that “the naturalization of phenomenology can be reduced to the problem of implementing effective algorithms” and that “For that very reason we are convinced that morphodynamical functionalism is the key to naturalizing phenomenology” (Petitot 1999, p. 371).10 10

An article on Ding und Raum by highly revered scholar of phenomenology John Scanlon illuminates the background and significance of Husserl’s early book and at the same time highlights the inadequacy of a total reliance on Ding und Raum for a grounded and genuine understanding of phenomenology, let alone phenomenological methodology. An extended quote from Scanlon’s article (Scanlon 1974, pp. 131–​132) is informative with respect to both Pachoud’s and Petitot’s deficient knowledge: “Things appear. How does it come about that things appear? What sorts of subjective processes are necessary in order for things to appear? Husserl’s response to limited aspects of this question fills almost 300 pages of detailed intentional analyses, admirable for their disciplined restraint, careful scrutiny, and orderly progression. Beginning with the fiction of the appearance of a completely unchanging thing in an unchanging environment as it appears to one-​eyed vision from a completely stable orientation, the analyses gradually progress to situations closer to ordinary experience in an attempt to discover all that enters, as necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, into two-​eyed vision of things which appear either to move or to be at rest, either to change of things which appear either to move or to be at rest, either to change qualitatively or to remain unchanged, while the viewer’s perspective either changes or is stable, and finally into the concrete experience of three dimensional spatiality. Tactile appearances of spatial things are not thoroughly explored. And no attempt is made to analyze the integration of tactile with visual appearances into the experience of one identical space. The analyses do not get that far (p. 156). The detailed analyses merit close attention on their own account. They are presented in Husserl’s typically orderly, methodic style which gives the reader the opportunity to confirm, challenge, or modify results claimed at every step along the way. But, to be a reader, one must be willing and able to enter this strange realm explored by Husserl: the pre-​empirical domain of the synthetic processes by which phenomenally unified spatial appearances of things as perceptual objects are constituted, prior to any active contribution from the perceiver. Some philosophical interests are doomed to disappointment here. Those who seek an account of the relations of appearance and reality will find nothing in this work. It deals exclusively with appearances and appearing objects

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Two highly significant phenomenological facts warrant specification with respect to both Pachoud’s and Petitot’s attempts to naturalize phenomenology. First, as noted above, Ding und Raum was published in 1907. The three books comprising Husserl’s Ideas, books integral to his developing phenomenology, were published later and over a number of years. The original publication date of Husserl’s Ideas i (Tübingen: Niemeyer) was 1913. Translators R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer of Ideas ii point out that “the composition of Ideas ii begins with the ‘pencil manuscript’ of 1912” and that the manuscript “is the ultimate textual source for both Ideas ii and Ideas iii,” texts in which Husserl made annotations and revisions until 1928 (Rojcewicz and Schuwer 1989, pp. xi–​xiii). In effect, it is not just unfortunate but astounding to find Pachoud and Petitot essentially passing over these later publications in which Husserl’s phenomenology of perception was being scrutinized and reformed by Husserl himself, most especially and in fine and painstaking ways in Ideas ii and Ideas iii. Moreover a further seminal resource for writing knowledgeably about Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of perception in which the fine-​grained relationship of perception and movement is finely detailed, a further seminal resource perhaps especially pertinent to psychologists and social scientists who care to write knowledgeably about the topic, is Husserl’s Phenomenological Psychology, a book of his lectures given in the summer of 1925. In that book, Husserl sets forth and analyzes with a certain excitement and energy “Perception with Regard to the Perceiver Himself” (Husserl 1977, pp. 150–​153). He begins that investigation by taking a backward look at what he has written so far of perception, declaring (ibid., p. 150), But now it is necessary to bring to light a colossal and, I might also say, monstrous, one-​sidedness of all these considerations. What we studied were perceptions in a determined precise sense, namely as the processes of the appearances of what is objective and, eventually in supplementary remarks, in its relation to other objective elements … But we have perceptions not as if they had fallen down from heaven; we have them by

and the subjective contents and processes which account for them, whether essentially or functionally. Though Husserl refers to this study both as ontology and as phenomenololgy, he hits once upon a most precise characterization of what he is up to: “Onto-​ Phänomenologie” (p. 140)—​not an account of real beings, nor an account of the being of things, but an account of the appearing of beings. Those who look for Husserl to answer such epistemological questions as, “How can we know that things perceived really exist and really are as they appear? How can we tell the difference between veridical perception and hallucinations?” will be equally disappointed.”

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perceiving; and this perceiving, whether it is in the form of a doing, set into work voluntarily by the I, or whether it happens involuntarily, has its own properties which admit of being studied in their function which is necessary for the having of appearances of a thing. There is no empty having of appearances. In carrying out his mission to amplify and thereby correct what he has written, i.e., correct his one-​sided rendition of perception, he points out a number of important phenomenological realities of the body and movement in relation to perception: He writes (ibid., p. 151), The study of the intentionality in which things come to perceptual givenness is not to be carried through without a study of the corresponding intentionality of one’s own body in its perceiving function … Thus, there would be needed a novel intentional analysis, namely the sort in which the kinesthetic systems of hand movements, head movements, movements of walking, etc., are constituted intentionally and are joined together in the unity of one total system. Of course, the exact clarification of the peculiarity of kinesthetic processes as the subjective ‘I move’ belongs here, the clarification of the two-​sidedness of every bodily organ with regard to its movement as objective spatial movement and as kinesthetic, and finally, of course, the universal intentional clarification of the total uniqueness of the body, which is simultaneously a spatial externality and a subjective internality … In this way, a vast dimension of analyses is drawn into the thematic area of subjective research, one which becomes intertwined with the intentional analysis of the sphere of external perception in the previous sense, and which enriches its results with essentially new results, which are quite indispensable for a phenomenology of the givenness of the spatial world. The foundational importance of analyzing and of clarifying the integral role of the body in perception and of analyzing and clarifying the dual objective/​ subjective nature of movement and of the body itself are clearly underscored by Husserl: neither the integral role of the body nor the dual objective/​subjective nature of movement and body can be passed over without compromising a thorough and exacting phenomenology. As we will see, they cannot either be passed over without compromising a thorough and exacting understanding of the evolution of animate nature. The foundational importance of clarifying Husserl’s rendition of “kinesthetic processes” as “kinesthetic sensations” is in fact of equal importance with respect to both phenomenological and

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evolutionary understandings of animate nature. In particular and in brief, sensations are not equal to dynamics. As detailed elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2019c, p. 246; see also as detailed in other contexts: Sheets-​Johnstone 2003, 2006, 2010c, 2011c, 2012), sensations are spatially pointillist and temporally punctual, as a flash of light, an itch, a screech, a shove, a jolt, a whiff, and so on, attest. Such experiences are not basically kinetic phenomena; they do not evolve, waxing and waning, for example, or expanding and contracting in a qualitative dynamic. While they certainly have a qualitative character and can certainly carry an affective charge of one kind or another, and while they can most certainly move us to move, they are spatially localized and temporally confined. In a word, they do not flow forth or unfold.11 Movement precisely flows forth: it unfolds and kinesthesia is precisely the sense modality that gives us the qualitatively dynamic experience of that unfolding. sheets-​j ohnstone 2019c, pp. 239–259

The qualitative dynamics of animate movement are of quintessential significance in the lives of both human and nonhuman animals. They are the basis of synergies of meaningful movement, that is, the basis of habitual patterns of movement that exist as themes with variations depending upon circumstance and that can indeed be analyzed phenomenologically (Sheets-​Johnstone 2020, 2019d, 2019c, 2014b). They are basic to what neuroscientist J. A. Scott Kelso terms “coordination dynamics,” that is, coordinated patterns that underlie forms of behavior through which individuals navigate their world, patterns that can change according to circumstance, that thus anchor the real-​life lives of animate organisms and that can be analyzed scientifically (Kelso 1995, 2009, 2014). The qualitative dynamics of movement and their anchorage in the sensory faculty of kinesthesia were mentioned earlier in the context of emphasizing the importance of phenomenological methodology to veritable phenomenological analyses and of phenomenologists’ neglect of kinesthesia, notably the neglect by Merleau-​Ponty, Gallagher, and Zahavi. While Husserl’s 11

As pointed out elsewhere, sensations may in some instances coalesce “to form either a kinetic perception or an affective feeling, as when, for example, in experiencing throbbing sensations, we attend not to each sensation tout court, but to the ongoing steady pulse of the throbbing and perceive a recurrent rhythm, a temporal continuity, or to the ongoing agony and distress of the throbbing and feel a relentless and unremitting pain, an affective continuity” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2006, p. 366).

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specification and indeed transformation of the qualitative dynamics of movement into sensations of movement might be attributable to his concentrating on a single abrupt movement—​a quick upward or sideward movement of the eyes, for example—​the specification and transformation bypass recognition of the inherent spatio-​temporal-​energic dynamics of movement, movement as it is experienced, even in a quick upward or sideward movement of the eyes. The spatio-​temporal-​energic dynamics of the movement of the eyes might be calm rather than tense, for example, minimal rather than maximal in terms of spatial expanse, and even slow rather than quick. The transformation is certainly traceable to Husserl, but it is just as certainly in need of acknowledgment and correction, all the more so given that Husserl in at least one instance recognizes “the muscle sense.” He does so in the context of describing how movement is integral to touch, pointing out to begin with that it is not “by pure and simple touch that pressure, pull, and resistance are to be perceived. One has to ‘exert the muscles,’ ‘brace oneself against,’ etc.” (Husserl 1989, p. 42). He then points out that in seeing one body press on another, one sees that it can have an impact on that body, for example, “pushing it aside,” and that the motion of that body, “owing to an impact, is accelerating or decelerating, accordingly.” He goes on to observe “something similar” to that seeing: “I grasp something similar, even if it is not so easy, by means of touch and the muscle sense” (ibid.).12 Veridical experiential understandings of kinesthesia require understandings of the qualitative dynamics of “the muscle sense” and its distinction from proprioception. Proprioception is not a human sensory faculty; kinesthesia is. The distinction is of seminal importance and in fact basic to understandings of the evolution of the sensory faculty of movement. As will be evident in the detailed references below, proprioception is specifically a sensory faculty of invertebrate organisms that began in surface recognition sensitivity, a sensitivity subserving movement through decompressions and deformations of outer sensory organs. As spelled out elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2019c, pp. 249–​250),

12

As noted elsewhere with respect to this passage (Sheets-​Johnstone 2020, pp. 24–​25), “That Husserl uses the term “the muscle sense” is exceptional, but it is relevant too in this context to call attention to Husserlian scholar Robert Sokolowski’s observations on the intimate relationship of touch and movement. His observation of the relationship begins as follows: ‘The process of touching, furthermore, is a spatial motion, as one part of the body moves to another, and thus kinesthesia and touch are essentially related.’ He ends his observation of the relationship by pointing out that ‘the lived body is an identity within complex manifolds, tactile and kinesthetic, actualized and potential; it is the field where sensations, moods and feelings take place’ (Sokolowski 1974, 94–​95).”

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[B]‌ iologists studying invertebrate proprioception meticulously document “a diversity of possible proprioceptive acuities commensurate with the diversity of life itself” (Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a, p.66/​2011c, p. 58), each possible acuity being not a postural sense but a form of surface recognition sensitivity subserving movement (ibid., p. 67/​ibid., p. 59). The cilia of a polyp, for example, are sensitive to vibrations in the surrounding water, which vibrations prompt the polyp to bend its tentacles toward a food source. A locust is proprioceptively sensitive in a similar way: its facial hairs are sensitive to air currents. Displacement of its facial hairs facilitates its orientation in flying and its lift during flight. In short, water and air move, and such movement “agitates, deforms, or otherwise impinges” on animal bodies, not only moving them to move, but influencing how they move (ibid., p. 63/​ibid., p. 55). These biologists (Lissman 1950, Laverack 1976) furthermore suggest that external forms of proprioception in invertebrates evolved into internal forms in vertebrates. They thus implicitly suggest that an essentially tactile form of corporeal consciousness subserving movement—​proprioception—​evolved into a directly kinetic form of corporeal consciousness—​kinesthesia. It is thus evident to begin with that proprioception is not a sensory organ of humans or for that matter a sensory organ of mammals, avians, or any other vertebrate form of animate life: Proprioception is a biologically recognized sensory organ of animals with an external skeleton, animals such as spiders and ants (Lissman 1950, Laverack 1976, Mill 1976). The slit sensilla of spiders and the campaniform sensilla of insects are prime examples of just such sensory organs. Proprioception provides such animals with surface recognition sensitivity, a tactilely-​grounded awareness of themselves in relation to their immediate environment. Invertebrate biologist H. W. Lissman describes such sensitivity as an awareness of bodily “deformations” and “decompressions” (Lissman 1950, 35; quoted in Mill 1976, xvi) … Moreover as another invertebrate biologist points out after noting that the hunting spider Cupiennius salei has over three thousand slit organs on its walking legs (Wright 1976, 351), “the quantity of proprioceptive information … from an appendage at a particular time (e.g., during walking) may be considerable” (354). In light of its precise evolutionary specification, it is surely time that human proprioception be recognized as the myth that it is. sheets-​j ohnstone 2020, pp. 2–​3

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Proprioception is, from this evolutionary perspective, a differentiated faculty that, as indicated, began in surface recognition sensitivity, a sensitivity subserving movement through decompressions and deformations of external sensory organs such as cilia, and that evolved over time into internal sensory organs such as the chordotonal organs of Crustacea, organs that are sensitive directly to stresses within the body itself (Laverack 1976; see also Lissman 1950, Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a/​2011c). Just such internal sensory organs are found in jointed creatures and are the evolutionary antecedents of kinesthesia proper. In other words, the internal sensory organs found in muscles, tendons, and joints are ‘descendants with modification’ (Darwin 1968 [1859]) of the external and internal sensory organs of proprioception. They are kinesthetically rather than tactilely rooted, and being kinesthetically rooted, constitute a faculty that, unlike proprioception, is directly attuned to the movement of a creature’s body, subtending its direct experience of the qualitative dynamics of movement. In effect, from this evolutionary vantage point, the external-​to-​internal evolutionary modification of proprioception was the gateway to the evolution of a directly movement-​sensitive consciousness. Kinesthesia, the faculty that in the 19th century was originally called “the muscle sense” (Scheerer 1987; see also Bastian 1890), endows animate beings direct experience of the qualitative dynamics of their movement. Proprioception has been popularized to mean something quite different since its introduction by Sir Charles Sherrington, who, in his attempt to unify mind and body in his chapter titled “Two Ways of One Mind,” and in his earlier chapter titled “A Whole Presupposed of Its Parts,” unfortunately misleads readers in his appropriation of the word to signify the position of the limbs of the body and its posture: “The important thing is my proprioceptive perception of where the limb is, experience which because it is provided by the limb itself is called ‘proprioceptive’” (Sherrington 1953, p. 249). Though Sherrington includes movement at times within the span of “proprioceptive experience,” proprioception is mainly identified as a “where” experience—​a locational or postural experience—​not a movement experience. For example, after noting that “The main sensual basis of the awareness of the limb and its posture rests, as disease and experiments show, on the sensory nerves of the motor structures in the limb,” and how “nerve-​fibres … collectively register the tension at thousands of points they sample in the muscles, tendons, and ligaments of the limb,” Sherrington states (ibid., p. 248), In my awareness of the limb and its posture, and similarly in my awareness of its movement when it moves, I perceive no trace of all this. In “experiencing” the limb I find no hint of this multiplex origin of the

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percept, no additive character in it, no tale of tensions within the limb, or of its possessing muscles or tendons. I am simply aware of where the limb is, and when it moves—​or is moved, for my moving it myself hardly helps my perception of it further. The percept is a not very vivid one. What Sherrington is focused on is precisely “two ways of one mind,” those ways being identified with what he earlier describes singularly as “the motor individual”: “What arises in the mind concurs with what is provoked from the motor individual. Sometimes, however, in the experience of most of us a sudden situation of urgency is met by our individual doing the right thing before its mind has grasped the situation.” He then goes on to specify in more exacting way the nature of “the motor individual.” He states (ibid., p. 158), The motor individual is driven from two sources. The world around it and its own lesser world within. It can be regarded as a system which in virtue of its arrangement does a number of things and is so constructed that the world outside touches triggers for their doing. But its own internal condition has a say as to which of those things within limits it will do, and how it will do them. Its own internal condition is also initiator of some of its acts. Sherrington in fact calls specific attention to the motor individual’s “internal condition” initiating acts when he explicitly references blinking and breathing: “The movements of the eyelids commonly take place unwilled and pass commonly even unremarked. We breathe in sleep and neither will the movement nor sense it. Thus certain of our motor acts are not traceable to or accompanied by mind at all” (ibid., p.159). When he later expands upon “two ways of one mind,” anchoring his analysis in “proprioceptive perception of where the limb is,” he points out that that perception bears no trace of being composed of a thousand and one sensory elements such as psycho-​physiological analysis of the sensory apparatus of the limb would have me believe it must be. The proprioceptive percept of the limb seems a mental product derived from elements which are not experienced as such and yet are mental in the sense that the mind uses them in producing the percept. Such mental products are an intimate accompaniment of our motor acts. We may suppose therefore there obtains something like them in our animal kith and kin as accompaniment of their intentional motor acts. ibid., p. 249

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We humans do indeed have no neurophysiological experiences of our limbs or our posture, or of our movement. We experience our bodies and our body movement not neurophysiologically or by “proprioceptive percept,” but kinesthetically, which means directly in bodily felt ways that are alive to its qualitative dynamics. Neurophysiological processes are essential to those bodily felt ways. Moreover, and most importantly too as Sherrington suggests with respect to those processes, “something like them” is present in nonhuman animals. In effect, animate movement—​what Sherrington terms “motor acts”—​ does indeed have “two sources”: neurophysiological and experiential. Given an experiential “source” of animate movement, proprioception as well as kinesthesia automatically and properly enter the picture. As detailed above, proprioception is a recognized biological faculty that originally anchored an animal’s awareness of its own movement. Clarifying its evolutionary significance is in fact critical to an understanding of the evolutionary nature of the experience of invertebrate animals to their own movement. Sherrington’s application of proprioception to humans deflects us from this documented evolutionary history and thus from genuine understandings of human nature and from biologically and experientially grounded recognitions of kinesthesia. Pachoud’s and Petitot’s lack of awareness of that history similarly distorts their understanding of animate life. In addition, it discredits their rendition of phenomenology, with the result that the real-​life, real-​time kinesthetic realities of human experience are nowhere recognized.

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Joint Concerns and Complementarities Linking Darwinian Evolutionary Biology and Husserlian Phenomenology i

On the Road to Recovery: Beginning Correlations

Several contributors to Naturalizing Phenomenology, including philosopher Jean-​Luc Petit, lead the way toward understandings of animate life that recognize the centrality of experience and of sense-​making—​the centrality of meaning—​to the recognition of foundational realities of animate life, all in striking contrast to those contributors critically referenced above. Petit in fact comes close to identifying the qualitative dynamics of movement in his chapter titled “Constitution by Movement: Husserl in Light of Recent Neurobiological Findings.”1 His chapter is the third and final chapter in the book’s section titled Movement. It is pertinent to note from the start that Petit’s research and writings span empirical studies and phenomenological philosophy and that his references and quotes from Husserl’s texts are not pivotally dependent on Ding und Raum but extend across Husserl’s texts on intersubjectivity, internal time consciousness, and logical investigations. In the course of his chapter, Petit offers in depth examinations and discussions of the relationship of perception and movement, focusing explicit attention on kinesthesia. His concern, as he states in the beginning, is with meaning, meaning “as sustained by acts that radiate out from some subjective center, namely, that of the 1 To be noted in this context is an important lapse in Petit’s account of “Constitution by Movement.” Though Petit emphasizes dynamics over static constitution and what he terms the “dynamic integration” of perception and movement (see below this text), he describes kinesthetic experience as “kinesthetic sensations.” He may be simply taking Husserl’s terminology without question, but as pointed out above, sensations are not equal to dynamics. Thus, in writing consistently of kinesthetic sensations, Petit fails to heed his own recognition of kinesthesia as a continuous, temporal unfolding of movement: “[A]‌ll my movements unfold in a continual adjustment such that in learning that ‘the same thing’ seen this way from this angle, is seen that way from that, I at the same time learn that its identity manifests itself in the fact that it ‘stands out against’ this entire series of modifications. I derive therefrom the feeling of a continuous and harmonious transition from one modification to another, accompanied henceforward by kinesthetic sensations, sensations that I am even able to anticipate by way of a movement that is itself continuous and harmonious” (Petit 1999, p. 229).

© Maxine Sheets-​J ohnstone, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004544536_005

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organism itself” (Petit 1999, p. 221). In turn, he calls attention to the intimate bond between affect and action, but even more primarily, to the foundational ground of movement: “[W]‌hat prevails before action in the more primordial strata of the organism’s constitution, what precedes the active intervention of the I, is movement, the ability to move itself experienced internally by that very organism” (ibid., p. 222). It is particularly notable too that Petit, quoting from Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity (Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjecktivität), points out Husserl’s concern to trace kinesthetic experience back to infancy and prenatal life: “Husserl even goes so far as to outline a phenomenology of fetal experience, claiming that the ‘child in its mother’s womb already has kinestheses and through this kinesthetic mobility, its things’. So that, at birth, the child ‘is already an I with a high level of experience (since) such an experience has already been acquired in its intrauterine existence’” (ibid., p.223). Petit’s further comments on these experiential beginnings and their developmental import are significant. He notes to begin with that “A ‘genetic’ sequence leads the organism from primitive activities motivated solely by the instinct of self-​ preservation to activities by means of which the organism works toward its own being-​constitution” (ibid.), and then proceeds to credit Husserl’s analysis: [C]‌ontinuing with his intentional analysis, he [Husserl] takes note of an important new stage in the process of constitution. Starting out as a simple instinctual vector, the movement in question becomes an object of enjoyment for its own sake … Husserl sees in it an attempt to actively integrate the kinesthetic systems of different organs of motion with a view to bringing them under control. It is as if the child does not so much agitate its limbs by chance but in order to explore the extent of its freedom of articulation or to bring different forms of movement under its control through repetition … Thus, from its ontogenetic origins, and in the most obvious way, movement is what makes the organism self-​constituting. ibid., pp. 223–​224

The primary, foundational salience of movement in prenatal and developmental life is an undeniable if not commonly recognized fact of animate life, much less a fact commonly given its due, and even less a fact commonly examined phenomenologically. To take ontogenetic origins into account, as Petit does in following Husserl, furthermore ties in with an evolutionary biology that takes phylogenetic origins into account. As noted earlier, a definitive connection exists between Darwin’s evolutionary biology and Husserl’s genetic phenomenology: “Descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral

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to both Husserlian phenomenology and Darwinian evolutionary biology” (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017b, p. 19). Further still, Petit’s reference to a “genetic’ sequence” is of considerable moment. A genetic phenomenology of developmental acuities and abilities, of the formation of habits, and so on, is critical to full-​blown understandings and renditions of human nature. Petit realizes the centrality of a genetic phenomenology not only in the context of ontogenetic origins and his focus on the foundational import of movement, but in attempting to make good on his initial claim that “The primacy of movement in constitution is confirmed when we turn from the transcendental viewpoint of phenomenology to the naturalistic viewpoint of the neurosciences” (Petit 1999, p. 220). He later explains the significance of the dual “primacy of movement” by pointing out the importance of a genetic phenomenology: A genetic phenomenology “follows up the process which, on the basis of the regularly stratified a priori constraints inherent in multiple fields of appearance, the spatial thing, in the normal sense of that word, gets constituted.” Petit terms this process of constitution a “dynamic integration.”2 Such a process of constitution, Petit states (ibid., p. 227), requires the activity of an I that has to intervene in perception not only as the unique pole form which all points of view on a thing radiate out but as an organism capable of bringing about the necessary coordination between this multiplicity of perceptual appearances and another equally powerful multiplicity which is also dependent upon the I in order to be put in action, and which consists in the system of kinestheses based on the motor or sensori-​motor organs of the I, a system that has to be integrated in parallel with the former. In sum, Petit attempts to show a confluence between phenomenology and “recent neurobiological findings” by way of a recognition of kinesthesia as a sixth sense: “Muscles have been raised to the rank of full-​fledged sense organs, the seat of both kinesthetic reception and the emission of sensorimotor messages directed toward the brain by way of the afferent (not the efferent, motor) nervous system. Kinesthetic and tactile sensations have been pronounced just as essential to the sense of the body as to its orientation in the surrounding world” (ibid., p. 235). But he also affirms the confluence by way of “neural correlates of the understanding of actions,” i.e., by way of neurophysiological

2 We might note that what Petit terms “multiple fields of appearance” by which spatial objects are constituted are what Husserl terms multiple “profiles.”

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experimental studies such as those centering on mirror neurons (ibid., pp. 237–​ 241). In his concluding thoughts, he straightforwardly specifies the path to proper “naturalization” of phenomenology. He affirms, The living being which we are cannot exist without feeling something at some level no matter how ‘elementary’ … To examine these conditions (mirror-​neurons, etc.), whether they be ontogenetically acquired or phylogenetically written into the organism, to examine the ‘living experience of meaning’, which may help to explain the meaning-​giving activity of the subjective and intersubjective being which this organism is, … this, it seems to me, opens up a legitimate way of understanding ‘naturalization’… Phenomenologists should not need to be reminded that this program of naturalization presupposes an intentional and phenomenological psychology, not a behaviorist psychology, still less that of cognitivists who mistakenly suppose that they have moved beyond behaviorism. ibid., pp. 243–​244

Petit’s in-​passing mention of phylogenetic origins with respect to given neurological “conditions” and his specification of a phenomenological psychology with respect to his naturalization program point in distinct but complementary ways to the importance of evolution to understandings of human nature, and incidentally thereby to a phenomenologically sound route to “naturalization.” Phylogenetic origins obviously take us back to Darwin’s evolutionary biology. So also does Husserl’s Phenomenological Psychology. Not only is there a correspondence between Darwin’s evolutionary biology and Husserl’s genetic phenomenology with respect to a fundamental concern with origins (see Sheets-​Johnstone 2017b), but a basic correspondence is evident between “descent with modification” and constitutional development, the latter with respect to both fundamental movement themes with modifications according to circumstance and to fundamental movement themes that are developmentally modified over time and that result in an expanding repertoire of synergies of meaningful movement. Climbing and descending stairs, and riding a tricycle and riding a bicycle, for example, have a common thematic origin in the specific alternation of leg movements in walking, a coordinated movement pattern that originates in infancy. It is pertinent at this point to specify Husserl’s insights into animate life in Phenomenological Psychology in preface to further specifications of the relevance and soundness of Petit’s “naturalization” of phenomenology, and in fact of further such “naturalizations.” In his analyses and descriptions in Phenomenological Psychology, Husserl is at pains to underscore the sensory-​kinetic nature of animate life. He begins

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by observing, “Real things break down into living things, in the everyday sense of the word, into animatedly, psychically living and acting things, and on the other side into things lacking psychic life. Of course human beings and animals present an example of the first” (Husserl 1977, p. 78). He describes “psychically living things” that is, “things which are subjects and live as subjects” “as sensing, perceiving, feeling, striving, in the manner of psychic subjects, psychically affected or psychically active” (ibid.). He goes on to recapitulate observations from a previous lecture that involved “the analysis of the experience of concrete real things like people or animals” (ibid., p. 80), an analysis which showed among other facts that “Every animal being can be reduced to a mere body, which, when it originates in this way, is called a dead body, a corpse. Every animal being is also apperceived in experience with this change even foreseeably coming” (ibid.). He points out that “Human corporeality and the corporeality of each kind of animal is restricted to its specific style” (ibid.) and proceeds to elaborate his earlier analysis, calling attention to the fact that “wherever the psychic is experienced or should be experienceable, there an organic body must be the substratum; in possible experience, its animate body presupposes such a substratum” (ibid., p. 81). In short, an animate body, not just a living body but a moving body, is of critical import, i.e., of critical import with respect both to being not “a mere body” and to being a body of a “specific style.” As to psychic experience, Husserl observes, “My psychic life is for me quite directly and in the strictest sense of the word perceived, and directly perceived not alongside my body as animating it. Here alone I experience in an originally perceptual manner this unity of body and psyche, this intermingling of bodily and animating happening. Therefore, this is for me the most original source of the sense of body and psyche and animating” (ibid.). In a later chapter, Husserl explicitly calls attention to the two-​sidedness of the body: “its physical externality” as seen and its “animating internality” as felt (ibid., p. 100). Animate bodies are indeed at the heart of life: “Animation designates the way in which mind acquires a locality in the spatial world, its spatialization as it were, and together with its corporeal support, acquires reality” (ibid., p. 101; italics in original). It is hardly a wonder that, as shown earlier as well as above, Husserl consistently describes living beings as animate organisms. Husserl in fact “uses the phrase ‘animate organism’ not only many times over but with a progressively greater and greater range of meaning in referring to living beings” (see Sheets-​ Johnstone 1999a, p. 133/​2011c, p. 115). He mentions the experience of horses along with the experience of human beings (Husserl 1977, p. 80), for example, and the experience of a cat—​“I see it as a physical organism but also as a sensing and animate Body, i.e., I see it precisely as a cat” (Husserl 1989, p. 185).

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In remarkable contrast to Pachoud and Petitot, Petit presents a harmonizing rather than a transformative and even exterminating treatment of phenomenology with respect to the neurosciences. While Petit does not elaborate on why or just how the system of motor or sensori-​motor organs of the I is a system that has to be integrated in parallel with the system of kinestheses in any way beyond Husserl’s insight into “the dual articulation” of perception and the kinestheses, he clearly does not sacrifice phenomenological realities of perception and movement to neuroscience, but rather attempts to anchor their confluence in a passing avowal of “neural correlates,” in experimental studies centering on “kinesthetic illusions,” and in studies of empathy, that is, in intersubjective understanding of others, relying in the latter instance on the experimental work of Rizzolatti and colleagues that highlight “mirror neurons” (Petit 1999, pp. 238–​240). Such an avowal and such studies nevertheless fall short of substantiating Petit’s concluding observations that emphasize the necessity of a harmonizing biology, a biology he looks forward to when he writes (ibid., p. 244), Phenomenologists should not need to be reminded that this program of naturalization presupposes an intentional and phenomenological psychology, not a behaviorist psychology, still less that of cognitivists who mistakenly suppose that they have moved beyond behaviorism. More particularly, it demands a biology capable of surmounting the obstacles represented by the objectivism and the mechanism of the ‘model-​builders’, all of which [all of his above specifications of a proper naturalized phenomenology] takes us in the direction of that hermeneutical anthropology of the life-​world of human communities which has been sketched out in Husserl’s manuscripts since the 1930s. Needless to say, the “program of naturalization” that Petit envisions that “demands a biology capable of surmounting the obstacles represented by the objectivism and the mechanism of ‘the ‘model-​builders’” is readily found in Darwin’s writings. As shown consistently from the beginning of this text, Darwin’s writings illuminate both the interconnectedness of all forms of animate life and the interconnectedness of all forms of animate life with specific environments, all such interconnections being grounded in real-​life, real-​time global observations of a scientist who, rather than being a “model-​builder” or someone aspiring to be a “model-​builder,” was a genuinely inquisitive and exceptionally capable human being, someone who not only was open to considering complementary and opposing views, but was able to reason and think

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about his observations without skewing them to some preferenced or predetermined interpretation or conclusion. Petit’s eloquently descriptive writings of Husserl’s basic method and methodological aim distance him and the discipline of phenomenology in further ways from “objectivism.” In contrast to an objectifying stand, Petit writes, Husserl’s “method is to dive right into the lived experience of meaning, even into the flux, not, of course, to risk drowning but to try to draw out of it the meaning, to orient himself with regard to it, to identify its origins (‘archai’) and its goal (‘telos’) without any other ambition than to ceaselessly uphold the tension between these two poles of the meaning field” (ibid., p. 242). In fact, the task and challenge of elucidating what Petit describes as “the lived experience of meaning” makes methodology—​phenomenological methodology—​of foundational importance. Moreover Petit’s central concern with the kinestheses and the essential role of movement in the constitution of meaning is similarly of foundational importance. A further perspective can be taken on methodology and on the central role of movement in Husserl’s phenomenology of constitution. The first further perspective comes from a trenchant observation along with detailed documenting evidence regarding the methodological grounding and focus of Husserl’s extensive studies of experience and the constitution of meaning, specifically his shift from a static to a genetic phenomenology, a shift that ties in with the earlier likening of descent with modification to genetic phenomenology. The second further perspective is based on an ongoing research program that effectively answers to the need of a neurobiology that focuses on the living dynamics of animate forms of life, specifically on the “neurobiological findings” that studies in coordination dynamics illuminate in their foundational grounding in dynamics, studies that, in contrast to a reductive neuroscience of the brain describes “how patterns of coordination form, adapt, persist and change in living things” (Kelso 2009, p. 1537), hence how dynamics are not only at the heart of movement, but at the heart of the nature of the brain and indeed at the heart of human nature and Nature itself. We will consider each further perspective in turn. ii

The Centrality of Methodology and of Dynamics in Understandings of Human Nature

The foundational importance of methodology is underscored in philosopher Juan-​José Botero’s contribution to Naturalizing Phenomenology that focuses on the “immediately given.” In particular, Botero sets forth in detail aspects

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of phenomenological methodology that are basic to understandings of the immediately given and to its constitution. Following Husserl, he distinguishes the hyle—​sensory features of the object—​from the Sinn—​the object as constituted, the intentional object (Botero 1999, pp. 447–​448), and goes on to observe, “Husserl invested much of his efforts in trying to describe the complexities involved in the process of constitution, especially the role played in it by kinesthesis and the lived body. This is doubtless an important qualification of the early doctrine of the hyle” (ibid., p. 449). In this context, Botero points out that “Husserl came more and more intently to grips with conscious experience, not knowledge, as the subject matter of phenomenology. Unlike knowledge, direct experience is beyond all possibility of further proof or epistemic evaluation” (ibid.). What Botero ultimately elucidates clearly and succinctly is the foundational experiential relationship of what Husserl terms ‘the natural attitude’ and the transcendental attitude, that is, the foundational relationship of empirical and phenomenological consciousness: “The thesis of the natural attitude is ‘bracketed’ only to be subsequently recovered endowed with its full meaning … Transcendental reflection ‘frees’ empirical consciousness from its dogmatic, naturalistic involvement and thus makes it fully aware of its meaning-​constituting functions” (ibid., p. 455). Botero thus implicitly shows that phenomenology is already naturalized in its methodology and in its findings. Constitution is indeed a process as Botero affirms: “[T]‌he experience of meaning is just the everyday experience of living”; naturalizing meanings does indeed “consist simply in coming back from the transcendental, self-​conscious subjectivity to the natural, everyday world and clarifying its meaning” (ibid., p. 463). Such clarification of meaning conforms to a genetic rather than static phenomenology. Botero recognizes this conformity when he earlier points out that “Husserl closely relates ‘constitution’ and ‘genesis’, and thus ‘genetic constitution’ comes to the forefront, taking the place of the alleged constitution based on ‘essences’” (ibid., p. 450). In effect, and as Botero concludes, “Genetic phenomenology … refers back to the analysis of original evidences as the primordial synthesis of consciousness of things themselves” (ibid.). In sum, Botero’s analysis of “the immediately given” details in specific constitutional ways what Petit terms “the lived experience of meaning,” ways that explicitly describe how meaning is naturally naturalized from its experienced beginning moment in the “immediately given” onward. Hence, and as the title of his chapter actually indicates—​“The Immediately Given as Ground and Background”—​the immediately given is foundational to the constitution of meaning. In addition, Botero’s clarification of meaning shows that naturalizing phenomenology neither needs nor does it require a recognition of brains and

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neuronal activity. It shows that what is required is a recognition of lived experiences that are basic to animate nature, precisely as in the beginning lived experience of the immediately given and its progressively constituted meaning, and further, in the recognition and practice of the methodology that elucidates that progressive constitution of meaning, namely, a genetic phenomenology. The importance of such recognitions is implicitly apparent at the very beginning of Husserl’s exposition of ‘nature’ in Ideas ii, Husserl’s second book on Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, a book that is precisely devoted to “Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution.” The very first sentence of the book reads, “We begin our new discussions with nature—​specifically, with nature as the object of natural science” (Husserl 1989, p. 3). In launching these new discussions of nature, Husserl turns attention first to the “theoretical attitude” of natural scientists (ibid., pp. 4–​5). He shows that the theoretical attitude of natural scientists is rooted in pre-​theoretical experiences, experiences in which an object is present prior to its becoming an object of scientific investigation, in effect, an object rooted in pregivennesses as described and documented earlier (Chapter 2, Sections iii and iv). In the context of his new discussions, Husserl explains (Husserl 1989, p. 8), [O]‌ne must make clear to oneself that it belongs to the peculiar character of the theoretical attitude and its theoretical acts … that, in them, objects which for the first time will become theoretical, are already, in a certain manner, laid out there in advance. Thus objects are already constituted pre-​theoretically; it is only that they are not appropriated theoretically and are not Objects intended in the pre-​eminent sense, and much less are they Objects of theoretically determining acts. What a veritable phenomenology of meaning shows is that the immediately given and what is progressively constituted experientially on behalf of sense-​ making is not theoretical but pre-​theoretical. The distinction underscores the import of phenomenological methodology, a methodology that elucidates how meaning is constituted. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s criticism quoted earlier with respect to Husserl’s “entirely theoretical” methodology is thus ironic. Their claim that “Husserl had “no method other than his own philosophical introspection” (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991, p. 16), that Husserl “was actually ignoring … the direct embodied aspect of experience” (ibid., p. 17), and that “the failure of the Husserlian project … [rests in the fact that] Husserl’s turn toward experience and ‘the things themselves’ was entirely theoretical” (ibid., p. 19; italics in original), shows a complete lack of acquaintance with, much

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less an understanding of, phenomenological methodology. The irony furthermore rests on “entirely theoretical” claims and acts of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch themselves. In particular, their own theoretical attitude, “reflections,” and acts on behalf of “the embodied mind,” not to mention their alternative theoretical view of evolution by way of “natural drift” and Varela’s theoretical attitude and acts on behalf of his neurophenomenology, are putatively an attempt to correct “the failure of the Husserlian project,” a failure due to what they claim to be the “entirely theoretical” nature of Husserl’s project. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in fact repeat their “entirely theoretical” claim when, in considering what they term “basic element analysis” (ibid., p. 117), they state, “This idea that experience, or what the phenomenologist would call the life-​ world, can be analyzed into a more fundamental set of constituents was also a central element in Husserl’s phenomenological project. This project broke down because it was, among other things, purely abstract and theoretical.” In short, phenomenological methodology is neither abstract nor theoretical. On the contrary, it is tethered to an elucidation of lived experiences, real-​ time, real-​life experiences that begin, as Husserl points out, in prenatal life and infancy, hence with learning one’s body and learning to move oneself, learning that, following Botero’s exposition, emanates from what may well be termed the primordial immediately given, namely, a body that is an animate form of life, that in turn develops sense-​makings that anchor its ability to navigate the world effectively and efficiently, and thereby ground its subject-​world relationships. Its primal animation is indeed foundational to its progressive and ongoing constitution of meanings and to its animate life. The second further perspective—​on the need for a neurobiology that focuses on the living dynamics of animate forms of life, hence on the dynamics at the heart of movement and of Nature itself—​comes from studies in coordination dynamics that contrast fundamentally from typical 20th and 21st century brain studies precisely by their focus on coordination, which means a focus on the fact that, as body parts coordinate when a body runs, for example, so brain neurons coordinate when a body runs. Their coordination is in each instance dynamic: it evolves spatially and temporally. What is achieved in each instance through such coordination is a particular movement form—​ running, for example—​and a particular interactional pattern—​a particular neuronal orchestration. In his article “Cognitive Coordination Dynamics,” Kelso describes neuronal orchestration within the brain in detail, beginning with the following observation: Specific cognitive functions require coordination within and between specialized regions of the brain. The dual nature of this coordination, how

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the numerous parts of the brain retain their local individualized functions while interacting to form global context-​dependent spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity may be understood through coordination dynamics, especially, as we shall see, in its metastable regime. kelso 2003, p. 46

By “metastable,” Kelso directs attention to the fact that individual parts have the ability to function in ways that are both independent and integrated with others, in effect, that “the tendency of individual component parts and processes to function independently (sometimes called segregation) coexists with the tendency to coordinate together (sometimes called integration)” (ibid.). Kelso and colleagues’ studies are particularly edifying in this respect, offering detailed testimonial to the human brain’s astounding structural and functional complexity (see Kelso 1995, 2009, 2014; Kelso and Engstrøm 2006, forthcoming work in progress;3 Zhang et al. 2019). In this context as well as elsewhere, for example, Kelso calls attention to the fact that complementarities are basic to coordination dynamics, that is, that “[c]‌omplementary pairing is fundamental to coordination dynamics”: Conceptual distinctions such as “programs” versus “self-​organization” evaporate due to the dual nature of coordination dynamics, very much in the same way as the wave/​particle duality in quantum mechanics. Within coordination dynamics itself, basic dynamical concepts like attractor and repellor, stability and instability, etc., go together like bread and cheese: one does not make any sense without the other. kelso 2003, pp. 46–​47

Kelso discovered basic dynamic characteristics of the coordination dynamics of brains in following through on a directive printed on the Yellow Pages phone directory: “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking.” In the course of wondering how to demonstrate spontaneously self-​organizing dynamic patternings, Kelso discovered spontaneous phase transitions. His account warrants full quotation, for

3 The title of Kelso and Engstrøm’s forthcoming work in progress is The Squiggle Sense: The Complementary Code (Kelso and Engstrøm, forthcoming work in progress). The squiggle sense is represented in their texts by a tilde (~). What the tilde specifies is a complementarity, a “both~and” attitude and thinking, as in individual~collective, ideal~real, part~whole, yin~yang, body~mind, and so on. Such complementarity contrasts fundamentally with binary oppositions, especially dogmatic ones anchored in either/​or attitudes and thinking, attitudes and thinking that can and do readily block awarenesses of complementarities.

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his discovery actually reveals two different but intertwined spontaneous phase transitions: It is the winter of 1980 and I’m sitting at my desk in my solitary cubicle late at night. Suddenly from the dark recesses of the mind an image from an ad for the Yellow Pages crops up: ‘Let your fingers do the walking’. To my amazement I was able to create a ‘quadruped’ composed of the index and middle fingers of each hand. By alternating the fingers of my hands and synchronizing the middle and index fingers between my hands, I was able to generate a ‘gait’ that shifted involuntarily to another ‘gait’ when the overall motion was speeded up … On hindsight, the emergence of this idea was itself a kind of phase transition. kelso 1995, p. 46

The idea of letting his fingers do the walking was a spontaneous breakthrough into a new mode of thinking about spontaneously self-​organized movement. It was, in other words, an ideational phase transition that aptly and finely exemplifies thinking in movement (Sheets-​Johnstone 1981, 2011c; see also Sheets-​ Johnstone 2004, 2010d). The result of such thinking eventuated for Kelso in a sophisticated cognitive achievement. At the most fundamental level, cognitive achievements are most commonly the result of thinking in movement, that is, the result of what Husserl and von Helmholtz describe in relation to the integral connection of movement and perception and what Edelman’s Darwin iii experiments exemplify. Synergies of meaningful movement are thus experienced not only in everyday animate life, but in ideational pursuits, in highly sophisticated cognitive ventures and achievements. Moreover synergies of movement are affectively motivated and remain affectively charged. They are thus affectively informed from beginning to end. In short, the dynamics of cognition and affectivity involve us in the world, which means they animate us and are foundational to our being the animate forms we are, leading us to explore, to doubt, to fear, to come to know, to wonder, to delight, and so on, precisely as when, for instance, we “let our fingers do the walking.”4

4 Affectivity and cognition are dynamic phenomena in a historical sense as well. We mature affectively over the course of our lives—​or at least have the possibility of maturing affectively over the course of our lives—​and we mature cognitively, most significantly in learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves to begin with (Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a/​2011c). That affectivity and cognition are naturally developing and evolving phenomena in animate forms of life is not commonly acknowledged. Evidence presented in support of the fundamental and all-​embracing reality of animation, however, shows clearly that the realities of

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Kelso’s pivotal and extensive work in coordination dynamics readily exemplifies not only the foundational import of dynamics, but the foundational import of complementarity, the latter having to do with agency (Kelso 2002, Kelso and Fuchs 2016, Sheets-​Johnstone 1999c, 2017c), with a non-​reductive brain science (Kelso 1995, 2009, 2014), and with complementarities across the lifeworld that include a complementarity between scientific and phenomenological investigations (Kelso and Engstrøm 2006). That complementarity is paradigmatically exemplified in, and might even properly begin with, a recognition of the basic and essential joint concern of both Darwin and Husserl in their research and writings (Sheets-​Johnstone 2017b), namely, recognition of their joint concern with origins and with direct experiences of the lifeworld.

morphology and dynamics exist not in a privileged human vacuum but across animate life generally.

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The Centrality and Critical Importance of Wonder and of an Ongoing Spiral of Inquiry in Understandings of Human Nature i

Self-​Imposed Ideational Limitations in the Pursuit of Human Knowledge and the Open-​Ended “Wonderful” Nature of Darwin’s Thinking and Writings

Wonder is a gateway to knowledge, an inquisitive attitude toward the world untethered to theoretical allegiances or sacred beliefs. It anchors the joint concern of both Darwin and Husserl with origins and with direct experiences of the lifeworld. In the words of Eugen Fink, a Husserlian scholar in his own right, “Wonder dislodges man from the prejudice of everyday, publicly pregiven, traditional and worn out familiarity … drives him from the already authorized and expressly explicated interpretation of the sense of the world and into the creative poverty of not yet knowing” (Fink 1981, p. 24). Wonder is indeed “the creative poverty of not yet knowing.” As will become apparent throughout Chapter 4, Darwin’s consistent wonder about the natural world is consistently tied to experiencing something that is not yet fully known and explicated, hence something that warrants both ontological and epistemological illumination. Thus, until “the citadel” is duly recognized as “a function of the body” and investigated as part of the body’s morphology and as part of the living dynamics of a whole-​body nervous system, and consequently and in turn, makes possible the illumination of the integral relationship of both body morphology and whole-​body dynamics to the constitution of meaning, Darwin’s implicit warning—​“the mind is a function of body”—​will be ignored; the brain, particularly the human one, will continue to be enshrined as a separate cognitive organ not only outside any interconnection with bodies, but outside any interconnection with nonhuman animals, hence in ways outside evolution and, in effect, outside any interconnection with myriad kinds of actual living subject-​world relationships. Indeed, to position humans outside any such natural connections makes the elevation of humans a ready-​made, even in some instances a literal deus ex machina creation. Such an above-​it-​all position aligns Darwin’s actual evolutionary perspective with what historian of life sciences John C. Greene terms “static creationism;” (Greene 1959, non-​paginated), that is, with religionists

© Maxine Sheets-​J ohnstone, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004544536_006

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who see the Word of God as absolute and God himself as the creator of being. Greene quotes a judgment Darwin wrote in one of his letters (ibid., p. 283; see also Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 458): “For my own part i could no more admit that the planets move in their courses, and that a stone falls to the ground, not through the intervention of the secondary and appointed law of gravity, but from the direct volition of the Creator.” Anthropologist Loren Eiseley traces out the religiously and investigatively tempered history and hurdles to be met in an acknowledgement of “‘what is regarded as ‘the foreordained design of the Creator’.” He does so in a chapter titled “Progressionism and Evolution” in his book Darwin’s Century (Eiseley 1961, p. 95). Darwin’s evolutionary perspective is indeed at odds with religionists, in good part because Darwin specifically wondered about the earthly world and the animate forms within it. Finally, we might note that zoologist Michael Ghiselin pinpoints not only Darwin’s capacity to wonder but Darwin’s practice of wondering when, in his detailed examination and discussion of Darwin’s methodology, Ghiselin pointedly states, “Darwin was a great scientist because he asked great questions … Science advances because real human beings speculate, observe, doubt, and wonder” (Ghiselin 1969, pp. 141–​142). What Darwin was proposing in The Origin of Species, the full title being The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, was “uniformitarianism.” The term was coined by William Whewell in 1832 in direct opposition to the term “catastrophism,” that is, to the idea that supernatural happenings such as the Biblical flood explain happenings on Earth and the Earth itself. Darwin was thus excoriated by clergy and by Christians more generally for his disregard of the Bible. Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s account of Darwin’s five-​year-​ long voyage on the Beagle, of Darwin’s diary during that time, and of Darwin’s notebooks and studies prior to the publication of The Origin of Species is full of insights and thoughtful comments about the origin of Darwin’s awakening notion of evolution and Darwin’s reasons for his 20-​year delay in publishing the book (Gould 1977). Those insights and comments are relevant to understandings of evolution and to understandings of the difficulty people have—​ and have had—​in accepting evolutionary facts of life, not to mention the relevancy of those insights and comments to an acknowledgment of the extensive and intensive studies of flora and fauna that Darwin undertook in the course of formulating the theory of natural selection. In his Prologue to Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History, Gould succinctly and straightforwardly recognizes those difficulties, asking “Why has Darwin been so hard to grasp?” (ibid., p. 11). He states that while Darwin “convinced the thinking world that evolution had occurred,” Darwin’s “theory of natural selection never achieved

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much popularity during his lifetime.” He goes on to ponder why the theory was not endorsed (ibid.):



It did not prevail until the 1940s, and even today, though it forms the core of our evolutionary theory, it is widely misunderstood, misquoted, and misapplied. The difficulty cannot lie in complexity of logical structure, for the basis of natural selection is simplicity itself—​two undeniable facts and an inescapable conclusion: 1. Organisms vary, and these variations are inherited (at least in part) by their offspring. 2. Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive. 3. On average, offspring that vary most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable variation will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection.

Gould sums up the difficulty by way of three observations: first, that “evolution has no purpose”; second, that “evolution has no direction”; and third, that evolution is thoroughly materialistic, that is, that “Matter is the ground of all existence” meaning that “mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity” (ibid., pp. 12–​13). Gould’s subsequent comment by way of a “suggestion” is extraordinarily topical to understandings of human nature and “the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.” He writes, “Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn’t care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought. Indeed, I suggest that the true Darwinian spirit might salvage our depleted world by denying a favorite theme of Western arrogance—​that we are meant to have control and dominion over the earth and its life because we are the loftiest product of a preordained process” (ibid., p. 13). The “true Darwinian spirit” is anchored in wonder in relation to the natural world, humans included. Unfortunately, however, the prejudices and arrogance of which Gould wrote in 1977 are still with us today, distracting us from wonder and the wonderful. They are apparent in the elevation of the human brain uber alles, just as they are apparent in the disregard of human-​made climate change and its devastating and destructive effect on nonhuman animal life and on the planet earth itself. As Gould earlier comments, “Individuals struggle to increase the representation of their genes in future generations, and that is all. If the world displays any harmony and order, it arises only as an incidental result of individuals seeking their own advantage—​the economy Adam Smith transferred to nature” (ibid., p. 12). It is of interest to note in this context Darwin’s own comment regarding human arrogance, a comment Gould quotes

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from “one of his [Darwin’s] transmutation notebooks” (ibid., p. 25): In answer to his question, “Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?,” Darwin answers, “It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves” (Darwin 1987, Notebook c, No. 166, p. 291). Darwin’s consistent wonder about the natural world does indeed consistently override human arrogance and self-​admiration. A further link with today’s 21st-​century world is evident in Gould’s historical sketch of the 19th-​century world that Darwin inhabited. “To nineteenth-​ century Darwinians,” Gould writes (Gould 1977, p. 88), “the natural world was a cruel place. Evolutionary success was measured in terms of battles won and enemies destroyed. In this context, antlers were viewed as formidable weapons to be used against predators and rival males.” Gould notes that Darwin in fact “went on to interpret antlers according to the ‘law of battle’ and their advantages in ‘reiterated deadly contests’” (ibid.). Though it should be noted that antlers came to be viewed simply as courtship displays in the pursuit of females, thus to “ritualized displays” of dominance rather than to dominance in actual fighting, those courtship displays nevertheless function as “‘visual dominance-​rank symbols’” (ibid., p. 91). In effect, size and shape are still significant physical markers of male-​male competition. In addition to calling attention to 20th-​21st-​century genetics, Gould calls specific attention to the error of thinking that morphological and behavioral differences are determined by single genes, or in other words, to “the atomistic notion that each organic trait is controlled by a single gene” (ibid., p. 53). He uses the small genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees as an example and documents the importance of regulatory genes, genes that control the temporal on and off action of genes. He points out that “[l]‌iver cells and brain cells have all the same chromosomes and all the same genes. Their profound difference does not arise from genetic constitution, but from alternate paths of development” (ibid., p. 54). He specifies the point further by way of the hand and its developmental form: “To differentiate a hand from a homogeneous limb bud, for example, cells must proliferate in some areas (destined to be fingers) and die in others (the spaces between them) … Clearly, change in a single regulatory gene can have profound effects upon the entire organism” (ibid.). In short, the distinction of humans from chimpanzees—​and from gorillas, monkeys, and other primates—​is a distinction in degree, not in kind, precisely as Darwin originally showed in documenting continuity rather than discontinuity in their relationship. Gould in fact furthermore laments the “cosmic arrogance” of humans in this context when he writes that “educated people now accept the evolutionary continuity between humans and apes. But we are so tied to our philosophical and religious heritage that we still seek a

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criterion for strict division between our abilities and those of chimpanzees” (ibid., p. 51). His conclusion: “The only honest alternative is to admit the strict continuity in kind between ourselves and chimpanzees. And what do we lose thereby? Only an antiquated concept of soul to gain a more humble, even exalting vision of our oneness with nature” (ibid.). A final appreciative reference to Darwin is pertinent, and not only to his revolutionary formulation of the fundamental interconnected evolutionary relationships of animate beings, but to the incredibly inquisitive ways in which he went about observing the global world of nature, in effect, to his continual wonder in face of the animate world. When Gould writes that Darwin was “a gentle revolutionary” (ibid., p. 26), he quotes from a letter Darwin wrote to Karl Marx who, as Gould notes, identified himself as a “‘sincere admirer’ of Darwin” (ibid.): It seems to me (rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science. Darwin’s “freedom of thought” pathway describes a freedom to wonder unimpeded by religious beliefs as well as by purely theoretical constructs. Indeed, through his continual wonder, Darwin gradually enlightens himself as he observes the world about him, soliciting and taking into account studies by others and relentlessly questioning and criticizing his own thoughts. We read of his consistent solicitation and inclusion of studies by others not only in the “historical sketch” he first gives at the very opening of The Origin of Species in which he describes “the progress of opinion on the origin of species” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 53), but throughout the book as well (e.g., pp. 90, 104–​105, 112, 188–​189, 240, 272, 310–​311, 339, 367, 387 389, 402, 403). We likewise read references to the studies of others in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (e.g., pp. 39, 40, 70–​71, 119, 135, 143, 167) just as we read such references in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (e.g., pp. 13, 14, 44–​45, 73, 76, 109). Moreover in the “Introduction” to the latter book, Darwin lets readers know that he sent out a detailed query regarding the expression of emotions to a variety of persons and that he received “thirty-​six answers from different observers, several of them missionaries or protectors of the aborigines, to all of whom I am deeply indebted for the great trouble which they have taken, and the valuable aid thus received” (Darwin 1965 [1872], p. 16). We similarly read

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Darwin’s questioning and critical appraisal of his own thoughts in his books and in his Notebooks, the undercurrent theme of which is an ongoing sense of wonder that leads him to describe aspects of animate life as “wonderful.” He writes of “the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants,” for example (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 145), as we saw earlier; he writes of “an organ so wonderfully complex and important as the brain” (ibid., p. 188). In addition, when he writes of “intellectual emotions and faculties,” he points out that “All animals feel Wonder, and many exhibit Curiosity” (ibid., p. 42). Moreover as we have seen, he also writes of wonder in a specifically questioning sense: “Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves” (Darwin 1987, Notebook c, #166). He furthermore writes in both a questioning and self-​ critical way of wonder in the context of “organization” (ibid., #175): “We never may be able to trace the steps by which the organization of the eye, passed from simpler stage to more perfect. Preserving its relations.—​the wonderful power of adaptation given to organization.—​This really perhaps greatest difficulty to whole theory.—​.” He again wonders in the form of questions and self-​criticisms when he succinctly states, “The weakest part of my theory is, the absolute necessity, that every < animal > ‘organic being’ should cross with another.—​” and then goes on at length to examine various global perspectives on the issue (ibid., #150–​156). We may finally note how wonder infuses his “passion for collecting” beetles, not to dissect or compare features of a particular beetle “with published descriptions,” but to study beetles themselves. He gives “proof of my zeal” as follows (Darwin 1887, p. 50): [O]‌ne day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one. In short, Darwin’s “freedom of thought” is “a never-​ending shoreline of wonder,” a shoreline intimately connected with knowledge (see below). Gould succinctly and explicitly recognizes the connection when, in writing of the way in which Darwin’s writings were “so disruptive to traditional Western thought that we have yet to encompass it all” (Gould 1977, p. 27), he states, “Wonder and knowledge are both to be cherished. Shall we appreciate any less the beauty of nature because its harmony is unplanned? And shall the potential of mind

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cease to inspire our awe and fear because several billion neurons reside in our skulls?” (ibid.). ii

The Complex Experiential Nature of Wonder: Its Value, Challenges, and Importance to the Nature of Human Knowledge

Huston Smith, a religious studies scholar and historian, connects “the shoreline of wonder” to “mystery” (Smith 1991, pp. 386–​389), the ongoing mystery of life itself. The “shoreline of wonder” and even “the ongoing mystery of life itself” resonate in foundational ways with what Fink describes as “the creative poverty of not yet knowing.” Both disclaim ready-​made theoretical, pregiven, and traditional beliefs in their recognition of the epistemological reality of wonder. Smith actually borrows “the shoreline of wonder” metaphor from Pastor of Christ Church Ralph Sockman, who wrote, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder” (https://​www​.brai​nyqu​ote​.com​/auth​ ors​/ralph​-w​-sock​man​-quo​tes)​. Smith elaborates Sockman’s metaphor in terms of mystery, stating first that “Reality is steeped in ineluctable mystery; we are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.” He then specifies the epistemological nature of mystery: A mystery is that special kind of problem which for the human mind has no solution; the more we understand it, the more we become aware of additional factors relating to it that we do not understand. In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes. ibid., p. 389

As noted elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone, unpublished), Sockman’s and Smith’s avowal of the relationship of ongoing knowledge to ongoing wonder or mystery actually leads to the realization that the true nature of human knowledge exists not simply in relation to “the shoreline of wonder,” but to “the never-​ending shoreline of wonder,” in essence, to the possible personal realization that one never runs out of questions about the world—​or oneself—​and in turn never shies from the challenge of answering them.

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Wonder is indeed intrinsic to knowledge and to the ongoing pursuit of knowledge. Moreover it should be particularly noted that when something is declared ‘wonderful’, it is precisely something which both fills one with wonder and is itself full of wonder. This double aspect is apparent in the above quotes from Darwin in which he remarks on “the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants,” on “an organ so wonderfully complex and important as the brain,” and on “the wonderful power of adaptation given to organization.” It is substantively and most eloquently remarked upon with respect to evolution as a whole in Darwin’s concluding observation in The Origin of Species (1968 [1859], p: 460): “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”1 The difference between the ontological and epistemological reality of wonder is important to consider. The ontological reality of wonder is a singular experiential phenomenon that is more akin to the singular felt experience of joy and shame, and to feelings such as surprise and disgust, than to fear or to anger, for example. Fear exists along a gradient from apprehension to terror; anger exists along a gradient from irritation to rage; sadness may also run along a gradient, from sorrow to despair, for example, or from troubled to hopeless. Albert Einstein’s brief experiential description of wonder (Albert Einstein, https://​www​.brai​nyqu​ote​.com​/quo​tes​/alb​ert​_​eins​tein​_121​255) is helpful in clarifying the distinction between the singular ontological reality of wonder and the epistemological realities of wonder. Einstein states, “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” When we stop to think about it, we realize that ‘pausing to wonder’ is experientially different from ‘standing rapt in awe’. Standing rapt in awe is an experience in which one is passively stilled by something, involuntarily transfixed by its wonder-​filled presence. The ontological reality of wonder is thus a pure as well as singular affective reality: no cognitive strand of inquiry attaches to the reality or informs the reality. It is affective through and through. The epistemological reality of wonder is indeed quite different. The onset of that reality might well be not simply a pausing to wonder, but a composite of feelings as deftly captured in Leonardo da Vinci’s experience before a great 1 To be noted in conjunction with what Darwin describes as forms “most beautiful and most wonderful” is Gould’s book titled Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History in which chance events in nature in the early Cambrian eventuated in organisms, the fossils of which are preserved in the Burgess Shale (Gould 1989).

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cavern, an experience that is a complex of fear and longing: “Standing there [before a dark, ominous cavern], I was suddenly struck by two things, fear and longing: fear of the dark ominous cavern; longing to see if inside there was something wonderful” (Leonardo da Vinci 1959, p. 19). The progression of this beginning affectively complex experience of wonder into full-​bodied epistemological wonder is perspicuously summarized in Fink’s phenomenologically-​ rooted experiential description: “Wonder dislodges man from the predjudice of everyday, publicly pregiven, traditional and worn out familiarity … drives him from the already authorized and expressly explicated interpretation of the sense of the world and into the creative poverty of not yet knowing” (Eugen Fink 1981, p. 24). Opening to the epistemological reality of wonder—​to “the creative poverty of not yet knowing”—​may be disagreeable and even considered a false challenge for those humans who esteem themselves so highly that the idea of being ignorant of something or of not fully knowing something is anathema to them. Indeed, for such humans, the doubly vaunted intelligence of Homo sapiens sapiens is a given that cannot be questioned. In effect, the inclusion of oneself in the epistemological equation of “not yet knowing” is problematic: arrogance makes wonder disagreeable, if not precluding it altogether. It is in fact significant that self-​knowledge is not commonly included in “the shoreline of wonder.” As Saint Augustine wrote, “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering” (Saint Augustine 1949, p.205). There are of course multiple forays into third-​person accounts of “oneself” via scientific studies, and while such studies might produce a kind of wonder—​an adult human brain has on average about 100 billion cells while a mouse brain has only about 70 million—​that wonder is not equivalent to self-​wonder. We might readily appreciate this lack of equivalence by way of a terse comment by historian and humanist Herbert J. Muller in response to scientific renditions of “man” that reduce “man” to a collection of chemical elements: “To say … that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer” (Muller 1943, p. 107). We might further note in this context that while Einstein wrote specifically about the import of wonder vis-​à-​vis the world, he did in fact write implicitly about the import of self-​wonder when he penned the following line: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former” (https://​www​.brai​nyqu​ote​.com​/quo​tes​/albert​_ein​stei​n121​255)​. Moreover it is notable that nearly 500 years ago, Michel de Montaigne (1533–​1592) wrote

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discerningly and at length about the basic causes not only of human stupidity but of human lies: Merely human opinions become accepted when derived from ancient beliefs, and are taken on authority and trust like religion or law! We parrot whatever opinions are commonly held, accepting them, as truths, with all the paraphernalia of supporting arguments and proofs, as though they were something firm and solid; nobody tries to shake them; nobody tries to refute them. On the contrary, everybody vies with each other to plaster over the cracks and prop up received beliefs with all his powers of reason—​a supple instrument which can be turned on the lathe into any shape at all. Thus the world is pickled in stupidity and brimming over with lies. michel de montaigne 2003, p. 605

Jung’s sense of what he describes as “the world of darkness” offers what might be taken as a straightforward insight into the challenge of self-​wonder and thus a reasoned explanation of why human stupidity and lies prosper while self-​ wonder dies away. Jung first observes, “Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness.” He then points out, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular” (Jung 1983, pp. 265–​266). Breaking out of the prism of darkness that precludes self-​questioning, that enforces epistemological obedience of one sort and another, and that constitutes an epistemological dead-​end, is clearly challenging and testifies to the challenge of self-​wonder. Delving into one’s motivations and actions, one’s beliefs and opinions can indeed be painfully enlightening and thus not a pursuit commonly undertaken, precisely as Jung acknowledges. Yet wonder about oneself would seem a natural proclivity in the sense of wondering how one became the person one is—​how one came to believe such and such, for example, how one came to be motivated to act in such and such a way, how one came to espouse certain values, and so on. Such self-​wondering has the form of genetic phenomenology: it is a questing not to describe the nature of what is present, but how what is present came to be. The end result of such wondering, theoretically at least, would confront one with choices as to whether to continue on a particular present path—​whether to continue believing as one has believed, whether to accept a certain motivation and to continue acting in such and such a way, and so on. In short, wondering about oneself, one’s values,

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one’s truths, one’s opinions, and so on, is clearly part and parcel of the spiral of inquiry that constitutes the never-​ending shoreline of wonder. In what follows, we shall consider two major obstacles, the first, a major obstacle to pursuing the never-​ending shoreline of wonder about the world, a never-​ending shoreline that Darwin clearly pursued; the second, a major obstacle to pursuing the never-​ending shoreline of wonder about oneself, a never-​ending shoreline that Darwin also clearly pursued in critical concerns about his own observations and thoughts. The obstacles are apparent in present-​day research, conversations, and news—​both academic and popular. They center on two features with respect to human knowledge: “the brain” and “information,” both of which have been and are heralded in the annals of time. The Decade of the Brain was initiated by U.S. President George H. W. Bush in 1990; the Age of Information was singled out as such in the 1970s. The first obstacle continues to be bred along the lines established in “The Decade of the Brain,” the second along the lines established in “The Age of Information,” now known also as The Digital Age, The Computer Age, and The New Media Age. Thus, while changes have obviously been made from the original, each feature retains its centrality, the first prominently apparent in present-​day scientific studies, the second prominently apparent in educational practices. A critical assessment of these studies and practices follows. The assessments will show why one finds little or no room for wonder in present-​day understandings of human cognition and intelligence, a far cry from Darwin’s seemingly indefatigable quest to document the origin of species and more, documentations that illuminate the nature of human nature, its integral relationship to evolution and to interconnections with animate life. iii

Obstacle #1: the Ongoing Decade of the Brain

As described in Wikipedia (https://​en​.wikipe​dia​.org​/wiki​/Deca​de​_o​f​_th​e​_Br​ ain), the Decade of the Brain was “part of a larger effort involving the U. S. Library of Congress and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health” that was “‘designed to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research’.” The larger effort is specifically detailed: “The interagency initiative was conducted through a variety of activities including publications and programs aimed at introducing members of Congress, their staffs, and the general public to cutting-​edge research on the human brain and encouraging public dialog on the ethical, philosophical, and humanistic implications of these discoveries.”

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The “Decade of the Brain” thus set in motion a research program that continues to this day. Twenty-​first century neuroscience is first and foremost focused on “the brain,” notably, the human one, its major research programs being devoted to studies of the brain in relation to cognition. Indeed, that the brain is the agent of knowledge has eventuated in experiential ascriptions to the brain. As we saw earlier (Chapter 2, “Naturalizing Phenomenology and a Proposed Neurophenomenology”), the brain “ascertains”—​“An object’s image varies with distance, yet the brain can ascertain its true size” (Zeki 1992: 69)—​ and“ asserts” such and such is possible—​“F5 neurons code actions. Any [one] of them, therefore, when [it] fires, asserts that an object is graspable … Some of F5 neurons assert that an object is graspable with two fingers, others with the whole hand” (Rizzolatti and Gallese 1997, p. 222; italics in original). Moreover a brain “mechanism” is claimed to anchor social understandings—​“embodied simulation” (via “mirror neurons”) is “a mandatory, nonconscious, and prereflexive [brain] mechanism” that “generates representational content” allowing one person immediate understanding of another person’s intentional goal, emotion, or “sensation” (Gallese, Eagle, Migone 2007, pp. 143–​44). Further still, the brain’s “self-​organization” anchors emotions. As stated by philosopher Evan Thompson (Thompson 2007, p. 365), “The guiding question for an enactive approach to emotion is well put by [neurobiologist Walter] Freeman: ‘How do intentional behaviors, all of which are emotive, whether or not they are conscious, emerge through self-​organization of neural activity in even the most primitive brains?’” Given these various and far-​ranging brain experiences and capacities, it is hardly surprising that an advertisement for a teaching course on the brain waxes incredulously on what a brain does and can do (See Science News 2009, p. 3). The course titled “How Your Brain Works,” as we also saw earlier (Chapter 2, “Naturalizing Phenomenology and a Proposed Neurophenomenology”), clearly raises the brain to the power of an oracle whose wisdom and whose cognitive and creative capacities know no bounds. Locutions extolling the oracular powers of the brain recall Gould’s third answer to his question, “Why has Darwin been so hard to grasp?” (Gould 1977, p. 11), namely, the belief that Darwin espoused a completely materialistic view of nature: “Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity” (ibid., p. 13). Gould’s immediate follow-​up suggestion, however, calls that belief into question and leads us quite elsewhere, namely, to human arrogance as was pointed out and in fact quoted earlier.2 Moreover arrogance apart, we 2 “I suggest that the true Darwinian spirit might salvage our depleted world by denying a favorite theme of Western arrogance—​that we are meant to have control and dominion over the

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ourselves may readily question “the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.” In particular, we may wonder whether the “wondrous results of the neuronal complexity” of the brain unequivocally and by themselves alone explain mind (not to mention “spirit” and “God”), or whether, as Darwin emphasized, “mind is a function of body,” in which case the neuronal complexity of the whole body and the body’s morphological features, which together allow it to sense, feel, and perceive both itself and the world about it, anchor “the mind,” the mind of both human and nonhuman animals. To begin with, does the brain wonder? Is it indeed capable of experiencing wonder—​is it capable of “paus[ing] to wonder” or of “stand[ing] rapt in awe,” for example, as Einstein describes the experience? If the brain does not wonder, does the brain nevertheless “control” wonder since wonder is ontologically a feeling and feelings, as earlier specified by a neuroscience professor, are “controlled by your brain” (See Science News 2009, p. 3)? Alternatively, is the opposite the case? That is, does wonder “control” the brain? Consider the following question as an example of the quandary: Is the brain really “capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights” or does wonder motivate, lead to, and even in some instances remain operative in the process of accomplishing—​and of directly experiencing—​“breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights”? For example, do athletes or even young children wonder if they can do something highly challenging, something that is to them a “breathtaking athletic feat,” and proceed to work to do it? Does wonder lead artists to the creation of “sublime works of art” by an initial wondering about embarking upon a new work of art, then actually undertaking the new work, and in the process wonder how this new form will actually become a completed work and perhaps even wonder where this new work will lead them? Does wonder lead scientists to profound scientific insights by an initial wondering about the nature of something or about what caused something to be or about how something develops, and does that wonder continue to propel them until they indeed reach “profound scientific insights”? In this extended “Decade of the Brain,” experiential ascriptions and accomplishments as exemplified above are accepted as legitimate, not to say, rational. But do brains actually experience? Is experience even possible short of an animate body moving about in the world and directly perceiving things and people in a surrounding world? For example: Does a brain run to catch a bus

earth and its life because we are the loftiest product of a preordained process” (Gould 1977, p. 13).

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or to catch a ball? Does a brain actually board the bus or catch the ball? Does a brain collapse in grief or jump for joy? Does a brain think? Does it solve a mathematical problem or understand a geometric relationship? Moreover does a brain decide to take a shower, and if it does, does it take the shower and does it get wet? Does a brain answer the telephone and does it even hear the telephone ring to begin with? We may in fact ask a quite basic question: who—​ or what—​senses and has feelings, and who—​or what—​makes decisions and choices and who—​or what—​moves and carries them out? People or brains? In short, are humans the dutiful and ever obedient subjects of their respective brain, or is their brain simply a part, an integral and essential part, of their all-​ encompassing nervous system? The above questions are not meant in any way to minimize the extraordinary structure, functions, and capabilities of the human brain, or the brains of nonhuman animals for that matter, structure, functions and capabilities Darwin recognized in remarking on “an organ so wonderfully complex and important as the brain” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 188). But Darwin also clearly recognized that separating the brain from the whole body, or mind from body, was a counter-​productive move and practice. As he astutely observed on the basis of his global studies of animate life, “Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself.—​the mind is function of body” (Darwin 1987 [1838–​1839], Notebook N, #5, p. 564). Though we might well agree that the path of adaptation is difficult to trace whereby something simple evolves into something complex and hence wonder at “the wonderful power of adaptation given to organization” (ibid., Notebook c, #175, p. 293), we might also in this context recall anthropologist William Howells’s observation: “Man himself could only appear when a very high level of organization had been attained. For hands and a big brain would not have made a fish human; they would only have made a fish impossible” (Howells 1959, p. 341). The “power of adaptation given to organization” is indeed full of wonder. Of equal importance too, however, and in fact of seminal importance is Darwin’s ending thought regarding what “experience shows,” namely, not only that “mind is function of body,” but that “we must bring some stable foundation to argue from” (Darwin 1987 [1838–​1839], Notebook N, #5, p. 564). The pathway to this “stable foundation” requires first a clarification of what Darwin meant by the words “experience shows.” As pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-​Johnstone 2010a, p. 159) and as we saw earlier, what Darwin meant by the words may be interpreted in two possible ways. To begin with, “[Darwin] may have been referring to philosophers who attempt to show the nature of mind ‘by attacking the citadel itself’,” an interpretation that may of course be extended to present-​day scientists, many of whose “attacks on the citadel itself” include

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experiential ascriptions to the brain, as in the perhaps classic ascriptions “If you see the back of a person’s head, the brain infers that there is a face on the front of it” (Crick and Koch 1992, p. 153) and “Nonhuman primates have brains capable of cooperative hunting” (Harding 1975, p. 255). But given Darwin’s global studies, “Darwin may very well have been referring to his own extensive, highly detailed first-​person experiences of animate life, experiences that showed him in person that the mind was not something distinct from the body but precisely as he states, a ‘function of body’.” His fine-​grained descriptively rich study of emotions lends additional credence to this interpretation and indeed merits attention. Consider, for example, his observation regarding terror: With all or almost all animals, even with birds, Terror causes the body to tremble. The skin becomes pale, sweat breaks out, and the hair bristles. The secretions of the alimentary canal and of the kidneys are increased, and they are involuntarily voided, owing to the relaxation of the sphincter muscles, as is known to be the case with man, and as I have seen with cattle, dogs, cats, and monkeys. The breathing is hurried. The heart beats quickly, wildly, and violently … In a frightened horse I have felt through the saddle the beating of the heart so plainly that I could have counted the beats. The mental faculties are much disturbed. Utter prostration soon follows, and even fainting. A terrified canary-​bird has been seen not only to tremble and to turn white about the base of the bill, but to faint; and I once caught a robin in a room, which fainted so completely, that for a time I thought it dead. darwin 1965 [1872], p. 77

Of moment too is Darwin’s perceptive comment that follows his consideration of “a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure.” He first describes such experiences as “a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds,” a tendency that is apparent “[in] young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands and jumping for joy; in the bounding and barking of a dog when going out to walk with his master; in the frisking of a horse when turned out into an open field” (ibid., p. 76). He then comments, Now with animals of all kinds, the acquirement of almost all their pleasures, with the exception of those of warmth and rest, are associated, and have long been associated with active movements, as in the hunting or search for food, and in their courtship. Moreover, the mere exertion of the muscles after long rest or confinement is in itself a pleasure, as we ourselves feel, and as we see in the play of young animals. ibid.

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What experience shows is indeed that mind is a function of body, and not only with respect to emotions, but with respect to “mental powers.” In his meticulous discussion of same, Darwin remarks on the fact that since “man possesses the same senses with the lower animals, his fundamental intuitions must be the same” and that some few instincts are held in common, “as that of self-​ preservation, sexual love, the love of the mother for her new-​born offspring, the power possessed by the latter of sucking, and so forth.” Moreover as he also earlier points out, “We must also admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man” (Darwin 1981 [1871], pp. 36, 35, respectively). Further still, and as we saw in good part earlier, Darwin calls attention to the highly esteemed power of reason in humans: “Of all the faculties of the human mind, it will, I presume, be admitted that Reason stands at the summit. Few persons any longer dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning. Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve” (ibid., p. 46). Darwin’s subsequent comment is of moment to consider too: “It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts” (ibid.).3 Of import in this context are the observations of renown physiological psychologist Roger Sperry. On the basis of his investigations and studies, Sperry concluded not only that the brain is an organ of and for coordinated movement (Sperry 1939, p. 295), but that the function of consciousness or subjective experience is “coordinated movement” (Sperry 1952, p. 309, italics added; see also Kelso 1995, Sheets-​Johnstone 1999a/​2011c, Chapter x). Sensing and moving are indeed at the heart of animate life. The significance of self-​movement and the consciousness of self-​movement throughout the entire evolutionary spectrum of self-​moving forms of life can thus hardly be ignored. In turn, neither can the qualitative dynamics of movement and the kinesthetic awareness of those dynamics be ignored. Those dynamics indeed inform all forms of effective self-​preservation, as is explicitly evident in the foundational movements of approach and avoidance. Moreover those dynamics inform curiosity, inquisitiveness, and wonder. As an epistemological reality, wonder moves us to move—​into “the creative poverty of not yet knowing” and from there into exploring in one way and another, the ever-​expanding and seemingly limitless unknown along the never-​ending shoreline of wonder. 3 Darwin adds the following footnote to this comment: “Mr. L. H. Morgan’s work on ‘The American Beaver’, 1868, offers a good illustration of this remark. I cannot, however, avoid thinking that he goes too far in underrating the power of Instinct.”

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In sum, the “citadel” is part of a whole-​body nervous system. It is centrally dedicated to coordinated movement on behalf of life itself and is falsely regarded as a cognitively astute and assertive, affectively motivated and driven autonomous organ, in essence, as an above-​it-​all, even supercilious brain in a vat. In light of this fact, a final acknowledgment and specification are relevant to a full account of the brain. In particular, though the cerebellum is a far less investigated and esteemed structure of the brain than the cerebrum, it is essential to what is biologically identified in reciprocal concepts in evolutionary biology and in phenomenology, i.e., to “responsivity” (Milius 2009, p. 29, Curtis 1975, p. 28) and to “receptivity” (Husserl 1973b), respectively, both of which are fundamentally tied to sensing and coordinated movement. The beginning words of the Princeton Brain, Spine and Sports medicine website (https://​www​.pri​ncet​onbr​aina​ndsp​ine​.com​/resour​ces​/learn​ing​-cen​ ter​/brain​-anat​omy​/) give a beginning indication of the essential role of the cerebellum: “A brain is made up of nerve cells. The cerebrum houses right and left hemispheres; it is the largest part of the brain. However, the cerebellum—​ in Latin, cerebellum means ‘little brain’—​has more nerve cells than the cerebrum, both hemispheres combined.” Observations of a team of brain researchers, Henrietta Lerner and Alan Lerner, amplify the relevance and import of the “little brain” (Lerner and Lerner [no date], grants.hhp.coe.uh.edu › clayne ›Unit6_​files › Cerebellumreading): One of the most impressive parts of the human brain, named the cerebellum, has been underestimated for centuries. Located at the lower back of the brain, it is a fist-​sized structure whose function is now being reappraised. Formerly this structure was thought to have only a motor function, which it performed by helping other motor regions of the brain to do their work effectively. But during the past decade a broader view of its function has emerged as a result of new research, and now the cerebellum is regarded as a structure that can help not only motor but also nonmotor regions to do their work effectively. Lerner and Lerner go on to speculate, “Perhaps the reason why it has traditionally been underestimated is its low-​level location in the brain, which contrasts with the light-​level location of the structures that are thought to subserve higher mental functions.” They in fact point out, First of all, [the cerebellum] contains more nerve cells (neurons) than all the rest of the brain combined. Second, it is a more rapidly acting mechanism than any other part of the brain, and therefore it can process

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quickly whatever information it receives from other parts of the brain. Third, it receives an enormous amount of information from the highest level of the human brain (the cerebral cortex), which is connected to the human cerebellum by approximately 40 million nerve fibers. To appreciate what a torrent of information these 40 million fibers can send down from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum, a comparison can be made with the optic fibers in the human brain. The optic tract contains approximately one million nerve fibers, which transmit to the brain the visual information that a human receives via the eyes. Forty times that much information can be sent from the cerebral cortex down to the cerebellum, including information from sensory areas of the cerebral cortex, from motor areas, from cognitive areas, from language areas, and even from areas involved in emotional functions. People’s attitude toward the location and size of something may well anchor the downplay or neglect of the cerebellum, what the researchers ultimately describe as “an underestimated treasure submerged at the bottom of the brain.” Of course, hands and feet, to say nothing of spines, are equally underestimated treasures submerged below the brain, though hands may rise above it and so also with some supple moves may feet and spines. (For a thoroughly engaging and edifying account of such a possibility, see “Man A-​Foot,” Griffith 1970). Reductionist practices in the ongoing Decade of the Brain subvert attention to the cerebellum in ways substantively related to the ways the practices subvert attention to the value of wonder and to the affective and cognitive nature of wonder in relation to the world. Whether one is rapt in awe or moved to move, a whole body nervous system is actively involved: it is caught up in stillness or in movement from top to bottom. Thus, whether one is epistemologically engaged in a pursuit of some kind or is ontologically transfixed before something, one is absorbed in an all-​encompassing whole body experience, an experience that is emotionally tethered, or cognitively tethered, or both emotionally and cognitively tethered. For example, if one is standing rapt in awe before a work of art such as Picasso’s Guernica or the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, or sitting rapt in awe in listening to a Chopin Scherzo or a Verdi aria, or in watching Martha Graham’s Lamentation or Pina Bausch’s Café Müeller, or in seeing wave upon wave suspend, fold over, and crash, or in seeing a brilliant sunset, and so on, wonder is emotionally tethered to the wonderful. Alternatively, if one is pondering how a chimpanzee goes about catching termites or how a crow will manage to grab food attached to the end of a string dangling from a shelf, wonder is cognitively tethered. Alternatively again, if one is involved in a rescue operation of some kind where possible manoeuvres

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are considered, thought through, and evaluated, and where affective concern is paramount, wonder is jointly tethered—​emotionally and cognitively; similarly, if one wonders where someone is or where someone has gone, wonder is jointly tethered. Jane Goodall’s description of Humphrey, a chimpanzee who took up a vigil where he regularly used to sit with his (now deceased) friend Gregor, poignantly attests to this joint tethering of wonder: [I]‌t looked as if Humphrey did not realize he would never meet his old friend again. For nearly six months he kept returning to the place where Gregor had spent the last days of his life, and would sit up one tree or another staring around, waiting, listening. During this time he seldom joined the other chimps when they left together for a distant valley; he sometimes went a short way with such a group, but within a few hours he usually came back again and sat staring over the valley, waiting, surely to see old Gregor again, listening for the deep, almost braying voice, so similar to his own, that was silenced forever. van lawick-​g oodall 1974, p. 224

To attribute real-​life, real-​time experiential realities to the brain as an all-​by-​ itself organ is to shut out first-​person real-​life, real-​time experiential realities of life itself. Wonder is just such a first-​person life-​itself reality, an affective-​ cognitive reality that both links animate life forms to the world in transfixed moments and generates a kinetically-​engaged creativeness or inquisitiveness that leads to ever knew accomplishments and insights. Pathological disabilities and injury studies aside, to reduce experience—​whether cognitive, emotional, or both—​to “the brain” does indeed distort if not obliterate real-​life, real-​time experiences of the never-​ending shoreline of wonder, the wonder of being rapt in awe and thus affectively moved in stillness, and the wonder of being moved to move from the “already authorized … sense of the world” to “the creative poverty of not yet knowing.” In sum, what Darwin describes as “forms most beautiful and most wonderful” is clearly linked not to the evolution of brains, but to the evolution of animate forms of life. In effect, what the earlier questions concerning the brain and wonder serve to question is the epistemological legitimacy and even probity of a reductionist view of the brain, notably the human one, a reductionist practice that completely bypasses the experienced realities of animate lives and the interconnectedness of their evolution. The questionable legitimacy, probity, and even truth of a detached brain is epitomized in the earlier given experiential ascription of Francis Crick (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962) and Christof Koch (Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute

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for Brain Science): “If you see the back of a person’s head, the brain infers that there is a face on the front of it” (Crick and Koch 1992, p. 153). As noted earlier, this critical assessment is not meant in any way to minimize the extraordinary functions and capabilities of the human brain, or the extraordinary functions and capabilities of the brains of nonhuman animals for that matter, functions and capabilities Darwin recognized in remarking on “an organ so wonderfully complex and important as the brain” (Darwin 1981 [1871], p. 188). iv

Obstacle #2: the Age of Information

The age of information was initiated by technological innovations beginning in the 1970s, innovations that are obviously not only still operative but ever-​ expanding. In fact, the technological anchorage of the Age of Information has expanded into educational practices that sizably influence if not determine the way people think and what they consider to be knowledge. In effect, information does not merely deflect feelings of wonder, closing off inclinations to question, to explore, to ponder, and so on; it can suppress wonder altogether in ways reminiscent of Montaigne’s observations regarding the relationship between human opinion and human stupidity. The Merriam-​Webster dictionary definition of the Age of Information is suggestive of why the deflection if not the suppression of wonder takes places. The Age of Information is “the modern age regarded as a time in which information has become a commodity that is quickly and widely disseminated and easily available especially through the use of computer technology.”4 By way of “computer technology” and ever increasing advancements of computer technology, “the modern age” of information clearly dampens thinking precisely by treating knowledge as a “commodity,” something that can be easily picked up or bought and sold like a banana. There is no way of assessing the truth of what is commodified. On the contrary, there can be—​and in fact often enough is—​swift acceptance, and in turn, the spread of misinformation as well as information thanks to social media (notably, Twitter and Facebook). From this vantage point, the “Age of Information,” which according to Wikipedia began in the 20th century and which is “also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age,” might more credibly be termed the Age of Information and Misinformation or even the Age of Trumped-​Up Stories. In short, what passes for truth in our “quickly and widely disseminated” technological world 4 https://​www​.merr​iam​-webs​ter​.com​/dic​tion​ary​/Info​rmat​ion%20​.

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of information is sorely in need of accreditation: back-​up substantive thinking, reasoning, research studies, statistics, and the like. What the Age of Information amounts to in educational terms is disturbing, specifically and decisively with respect to those who are being taught and who are learning. In the age of information, learners are repositories of information rather than seekers of knowledge. The educational spin-​off is in turn sizeable, for repositories are passive; seekers are active. In repository-​ driven educational systems, passivity is readily apparent, for memorizing and testing do not just predominate; memorizing and testing anchor the system. In truth and in effect, it is not that “no child is left behind” as U. S. President George W. Bush’s emblematic educational reform described the system; it is that no robotic thinker is left behind. Of equal concern is the fact that in such an educational system teachers are reduced to being distillers of information. They are required by law to turn education away from being an adventure that challenges learners to think and to question, that in the most basic sense arouses them to wonder and to explore, whether by being surprised by what they read or hear, or by being asked to solve a problem, to explain a mathematical equation, or to account for a certain sequence of events. For teachers as well as learners, a veritably engaging adventure is turned into a ready-​made mill of unquestionable facts to be churned out, ingested, and spewed out on demand. Taking in information incessantly and even exclusively leads to a kind of obesity—​to “iod,” that is, to an affliction well termed “Information Obesity Disorder.” The disorder precludes wonder because it leaves no room for wonder. To take the malady seriously requires taking “taking-​in” seriously. Taking-​ in incessantly and even exclusively involves stuffing oneself and remaining stuffed, however much testing involves letting portions of the stuffing out from time to time. The malady affects a learner’s attitude toward the world, stifling both emotionally-​tethered and cognitively-​tethered wonder. It does so by limiting knowledge beyond “given facts,” not only by simply requiring memorization of the speed of light and the distance of the sun from the earth, for example, but by not arousing wonder about the sun rising and setting, thus wondering about the revolution of the earth around the sun and the rotation of the earth itself and how such movements affect light, and further, by not arousing wonder in direct face of the sun’s “rising” and “setting,” that is, being “rapt in awe” as the sun rises and sets. Questions may arise following experiences of sheer wonder—​wonder at the changing colors of the sun and sky at sunset, for example, or wonder at a flock of birds in the clear light of day swerving this way and that without colliding as they make their way from one place to another—​ thus turning what is originally a purely affective experience of wonder into a

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cognitively-​tethered wonder. Whether ontological or epistemological, the realities of wonder run counter to distilling information and to stuffing learners with information. The realities are veritable openings toward the world and warrant not simply recognition but educational practices that encourage them coming to the fore, and in turn, practices that encompass them. We are readily reminded of Darwin in this respect, of his ruminations, questionings, explorations, and more in the course of formulating the theory of evolution and the process of natural selection. Had he taken the Bible as indisputable “information,” as the source of unquestionable truths, he could hardly have described what he globally witnessed in the ways that he did. Had his education been tethered to information and to being tested on the retention of information, he would hardly have embarked on a worldwide voyage to begin with. In short, wondering matters. It matters too in terms of self-​questioning, an introspective process that is again readily evident in Darwin’s writings, as when, for example and as we have seen, he points out, “The weakest part of my theory is, the absolute necessity, that every < animal > ‘organic being’ should cross with another.” But Darwin’s honesty about his own shortcomings are apparent even earlier, as when, in summing up his travels on the Beagle, he writes, “[A]‌s the traveler stays but a short time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observations. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, in inaccurate and superficial hypotheses” (Darwin 1958, pp. 438–​439). In short, Darwin’s own critical self-​examinations prod him to explore further, to continue to wonder. The realities of wonder can indeed be veritable openings toward oneself as well as the world. The inclusion of oneself, however, can be daunting, considered unnecessary, and even undesirable. We saw this earlier in Jung’s pointed observation: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular” (Jung 1983, pp. 265–​266). Public and private education systems focus on the world and people in the world; they do not focus on “making the darkness conscious.” Yet learning does in fact involve oneself just as teaching does in fact involve oneself. Where learning is a process of uncovering, of exploring, of discovering, of moving from “the creative poverty of not yet knowing” to knowing, learning is a personal journey and learning to teach is just such a journey. Information involves no such journeying. It is notable that in only one instance does one find the word “information” specified on internet sites listed on the topic “learn.” The first definition (non-​referenced) of “learn” that appears on internet sites runs as follows: “gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) by study, experience, or being

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taught.”5 The Cambridge Dictionary definition is similarly pithy. It specifies “learn” as “to get knowledge or understanding of facts or ideas or of how to do things.”6 The Merriam-​Webster dictionary (www​.merr​iam​-webs​ter​.com > dictionary > learn) specifies learn as “to gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience.”7 Only on the Your Dictionary website do we find “information”: “The definition of learn is to acquire knowledge or new information.”8 “Information” is in fact specified again in Your Dictionary definition of “educate”: “To educate is defined as to teach a skill or subject, or provide with information.”9 It is not just relevant but edifying to detail an actual teacher’s account of what it means to educate and how certain practices—​what she terms “disorders”—​-​totally squelch education. On October 23, 2015, Wendy Bradshaw (Bradshaw 2015) posted her resignation from the Polk County Florida Public School system on Facebook. She begins her resignation letter as follows:10 I love teaching. I love seeing my students’ eyes light up when they grasp a new concept and their bodies straighten with pride and satisfaction when they persevere and accomplish a personal goal. I love watching them practice being good citizens by working with their peers to puzzle out problems, negotiate roles, and share their experiences and understandings of the world. I wanted nothing more than to serve the students of this county, my home, by teaching students and preparing new teachers to teach students well. To this end, I obtained my undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in the field of education. At a later point, she specifies in real-​life, real-​time experiential terms the “disorders” of the educational system that precisely obviate the kind of teaching and learning she describes above: My master’s degree work focused on behavior disorders, so I can say with confidence that it is not the children who are disordered. The disorder is 5

6 7 8 9 10

https://​ w ww​ . goo​ g le​ . com​ / sea​ r ch?sxsrf=​ A Le​ K k00​ Z EaW​ N iX9​ _ YxH​ 9 gxn​ 6 SC​ - 8O0S​ g8g%3A15​8437​9109​984&sou​rce=​hp&ei=​5bRvX​tTMO​dDT​-wSqkK​_​oBg&q=​learn+​def​init​ ion&oq=​learn&gs​_l=​psy​-ab​.1​.0​.35i39​i70i​249j​0j0i​131j​0l7​.1240​.1956​.6830​.1​.0​.0​.75​.303​.5​.0​.1​ .gws​-wiz​.S7xf​_​_NaF​C4A​. dictionary.cambridge.org › dictionary › english › learn. www​.merr​iam​-webs​ter​.com > dictionary > learn. https://​www​.you​rdic​tion​ary​.com​/learn​. https://​www​.you​rdic​tion​ary​.com​/educ​ate​. https://​www​.faceb​ook​.com​/wendy​.bradsh​aw1​/posts​/102066​7750​8354​085​.

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in the system which requires them to attempt curriculum and demonstrate behaviors far beyond what is appropriate for their age. The disorder is in the system which bars teachers from differentiating instruction meaningfully, which threatens disciplinary action if they decide their students need a five minute break from a difficult concept, or to extend a lesson which is exceptionally engaging. The disorder is in a system which has decided that students and teachers must be regimented to the minute and punished if they deviate. The disorder is in the system which values the scores on wildly inappropriate assessments more than teaching students in a meaningful and research based manner. The ontological and epistemological realities of wonder run definitively counter to the regimented educational practices that Bradshaw describes, practices tethered to “information,” and even more specifically, to memorizing and testing as the prime, pivotal, and all important measure of intelligence and knowledge. Indeed, no robot is left behind in such a regimented education system—​or in more explicit terms, no robot is driven to explore by way of “the creative poverty of not yet knowing” or of a “longing to see if inside there was something wonderful.” Wonder is indeed active in a bodily felt sense; the bodily felt character of wonder moves through the body and moves one to move exploratively, questioningly, and so on, or to stay still. It is equally relevant and edifying to consider ways in which the Finnish educational system differs from an informational education system. For example: Finland’s education system is regarded as one of the best in the world, and other nations are striving to emulate its structure of well-​paid teachers, plenty of recess time, and less emphasis on homework and tests.11 Finland is an example of a country that has not followed many of the global education reform principles. There is [sic] no standardized tests or school inspections but the education system leans on “intelligent” accountability. This means that while there are national quality standards for learning and teaching in the form of national core curriculum and laws and regulations, there are no rankings of the schools based on test results. However, self-​evaluation of schools and education providers exists and are [sic] regularly applied … The Finnish education policy values more quality and less control and competition. Schools, teachers and

11

https://​the​cult​uret​rip​.com​/eur​ope​/finl​and​/artic​les​/why​-finla​nds​-hig​her​-educat​ion​-sys​ tem​-is​-the​-best​-in​-the​-world​/​.

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local authorities are trusted and there is a political consensus about the commonly agreed goals of education.12 [T]‌he tiny Nordic country places considerable weight on early education. Before Finnish kids learn their times tables, they learn simply how to be kids—​how to play with one another, how to mend emotional wounds.13 Though freedom is not highlighted in the above descriptions of Finnish education, it is clear that children enjoy a freedom quintessential to wonder, a freedom unexperienced in information education systems anchored in memorizing and testing. Wonder, after all, is a spontaneous feeling that arises on its own, that cannot be learned or taught. It can only be given room to be experienced, which means a freedom to encounter the world untrammeled by information, hence a freedom to be amazed, to be stupefied, to be curious, to explore, to question—​and most essentially, to wonder. The value of such a freedom is not commonly recognized within education systems, perhaps because it is extraordinary in the sense of being wholly spontaneous. While it might be encouraged and perhaps even feigned, it cannot be inculcated in any way. Jung pointedly if implicitly recognizes the affective spontaneity of wonder when he points out that emotion “is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him” (Jung, 1978, pp. 8–​9). Emotions are indeed “involuntary”: though we are free to choose what we do in light of our emotions, we are not free to choose the emotions themselves. From this perspective, wonder is a gift, both an ontological and epistemological gift: the doubly valuable gift of awe and of not knowing. Relevant too in this context are Jung’s observations of what he terms “the shadow.” Jung points out first that the shadow is “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-​personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.” He then immediately adds the following warning of sorts: “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (ibid., p. 8). As may be apparent, the warning is explicitly specified in the earlier quote regarding “making the darkness conscious”: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular” (Jung 1983, pp. 265–​266). 12 13

https://​www​.wefo​rum​.org​/age​nda​/2017​/07​/finla​nds ​-educat​ion​-mira​cle ​-and​-the ​-less​ ons​-we​-can​-learn​. https://​www​.wefo​rum​.org​/age​nda​/2017​/05​/why​-finla​nds​-educat​ion​-sys​tem​-puts​-oth​ ers​-to​-shame​.

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Wondering about oneself does indeed require “moral effort,” for wonder about oneself may disturb the sanctity, so to speak, of one’s self-​regard not only through unforeseen, unexpected, or unpleasant insights, but through still unaccomplished tasks, still long-​held beliefs, still questionable theories, still what one has taken as the proper path ahead, and so on. Aspects of such wondering are readily apparent throughout Darwin’s writings. Moreover his six-​year voyage on the Beagle to begin with together with his following years of experiments and thought show that “making the darkness conscious” is not a procedure one undertakes and readily accomplishes on a lazy Sunday afternoon. v

Concluding Thoughts

Though not specifically focused on wonder or even mentioning wonder, observations of a former software engineer are of moment to consider in summing up the value of wonder. In answer to the question, “what will come after the information age?” Brian Bi first states, “I would say that we’re currently in the transition from the Information Age to what I call the Age of Reckoning” (Bi 2019).14 He goes on to observe, In the Industrial Age and the Information Age, there was widespread optimism that technology would eventually solve all of our problems—​ poverty, disease, violence, and others. In the last 5 years or so, it’s been slowly dawning on us that more technology, by itself, cannot be the solution, and in fact, the systems we currently have in place, while they solve some problems, create other problems that may be equally severe. What he ends up describing as a much needed “reckoning” is as pertinent to the ongoing “Decade of the Brain” as to the ongoing Age of Information: I believe that in order to confront the major problems that we will face this century, we are going to have to look inward and confront some uncomfortable truths about human nature, understand the fact that technology can amplify both the best and the worst aspects of it, and possibly come

14

https://​www​.for​bes​.com​/sites​/quora​/2019​/01​/16​/what​-will​- come ​-after​-the ​-info​rmat​ ion​-age​/#5c000​0a63​d7d​.

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together to make big sacrifices in order to build a world that’s truly better for all of us. This is the “reckoning” that I speak of. Whether a question of the brain or of information, reckoning with the truths of human nature is to be encouraged. Such reckoning is desperately needed in terms of both knowledge of the world and self-​knowledge. To reduce knowledge and human learning to brain mechanisms and to information nuggets is a travesty of the intelligence epitomized in the doubly vaunted evolutionary designation of humans as Homo sapiens sapiens, a designation not infrequently proclaimed as what celebrates “man from beast.” A reckoning is challenging but at the same time it could not be more urgent, for human stupidity, as Einstein remarks, knows no bounds. The never-​ending shoreline of wonder indeed competes with a never-​ending shoreline of reductionist explanations of knowledge and a never-​ending shoreline of information, thus of ongoing experiential ascriptions to the brain, for example, and of robotically memorized facts. In a word, it competes with ongoing human stupidity. One could even say that it competes on moral grounds in that stupidity precludes the experience of awe and the “poverty of not yet knowing,” and thus precludes awakening to real-​life, real-​time existential realities of life. When David Quammen writes of Darwin’s The Origin of Species and laments its neglect in today’s world, he words his lament precisely in terms of “wonder”: “It was a brilliant start toward understanding how life works, how the wonders of diversity and complexity and adaptation have come to be.” Stupidity trumps wonder on moral grounds as well when it precludes deliberating on actions that best meet global crises, and in fact precludes recognizing crises in the first place, crises ranging from Arctic sea ice melting to species decimation to global pandemics. In short, global crises encompass the earth itself, its fauna and flora, and the full range of its life forms. We might thus ask, as Elizabeth Kolbert implicitly does: Are humans sufficiently intelligent to rise to the challenge of climate change and the preservation of insects, forms of life that “keep the planet livable” (Kolbert 2020, p. 54), hence forms of life on which human and other forms of animate life are actually dependent? Stupidity furthermore trumps wonder on moral grounds when humans fail to recognize a basic evolutionary fact of life: that the struggle for existence is rife with competition, animated foundationally by “the law of battle” on behalf of reproduction and exapted by humans on behalf of war, power, territory, and more. The fundamental interconnections of animate life itself, and of animate lives with particular environments, all of them interconnections Darwin so carefully observed and fully documented, are indeed fundamental to the continued existence of all forms of animate life, hence to species preservation and extinction.

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In sum, a reckoning with “some uncomfortable truths about human nature” could not be more urgent given global crises, inept, power-​driven autocratic national leaders, and doctrinaire dogmatic humans who never stop to explore, to question, to doubt, to critically assay, in short, who never stop to wonder either about the world or themselves, thus indeed leaving the world—​and themselves—​“pickled in stupidity and brimming over with lies.” A further reckoning, however, could also not be more urgent, a reckoning concerned not with uncomfortable truths of human nature but with affirmative truths about human nature, including human nature in relation to the natural world. “To contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborated constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, by laws acting around us” urge us precisely in the direction of this further reckoning (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 459). So also do the “wondrous results of neuronal complexity” (Gould 1977, p. 13) and the “longing to see if inside there was something wonderful” (daVinci 1959, p. 19). Positive truths of human nature do indeed exist. They prompt us to wonder, and not just wonder in face of the here and now, but to continue along the never-​ending shoreline of wonder, wonder at both the world and ourselves, and thus along an ongoing spiral of inquiry that turns us in ever new directions, expanding our knowledge beyond “the prejudice of everyday, publicly pregiven, traditional and worn out familiarity” and into “the creative poverty of not yet knowing.” Darwin is the epitome of just such wonder. Wonder successively leads him to discover more and more “in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (Darwin 1968 [1859], pp. 459–​460).

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Name Index Alatalo, R. V. 39 Angell, Tony 97 Attenborough, David 26, 39 Bartenieff, Irmgard 99n9 Bashar al-​Assad 24n5, 31, 32, 34, 39 Bastian, H. Charlton 85n6, 112 Beal, William James 6n1 Becker, Ernest 41 Bell, Sir Charles 85n6 Benesh, Joan 99n9 Benesh, Rudolf 99n9 Bernet, Rudolf 69n2 Bi, Brian 153–​154 Black, Scott 11–​12 Bolsonaro, Jair 24n5, 31, 32, 34, 35 Bonner, John Tyles 17 Botero, Juan-​José 121–​123 Bradshaw, Wendy 150–​151 Bush, George H. W. 138 Bush, George W. 30, 39, 43, 148 Byrne, Richard 97–​98 Call, Josep 98 Colvin, Jill 43 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 85n6 Crick, Francis 59, 142, 146–​147 Curtis, Helena 144 da Vinci, Leonardo 135–​136 Daly, Martin 13 Damasio, Antonio 59 Damasio, Antonio 59 Damasio, Henrietta 59 Damasio, Henrietta 59 de Biran, Maine 85n6 de Montaigne, Michel 136–​137 De Vore, Irven 25, 31, 75 de Waal, Frans 26, 75n3 Diamond, Jared 14 Eagle, M. N. 139 East, Edward M. 6n1 Edelman, Gerald 99 Eibl-​Eibesfeldt, Iräneus 27, 54–​57

Einstein, Albert 135, 136, 140, 154 Engel, J. J. 85n6 Fentress, John 99 Fink, Eugen 128, 134, 136 Fossey, Diane 75n3 Friedman, Uri 34 Gallagher, Shaun 77–​78, 84–​85n5, 109 Gallese, Vittorio 59, 139 Ghiselin, Michael 129 Golani, Ilan 99 Goodall, Jane 56–​57 Gould, Stephen Jay 25, 38, 129–​134, 135n1, 139–​140n2, 155 Griffith, Richard M. 145 Grünbaum, A. A. 79 Harding, Robert 59, 142 Hecht, Ravit 34 Heinrich, Bernd 97 Hincks, Joseph 34 Hitler, Adolph 24n5, 28–​30, 31, 32 Höglund, J. 39 Huizinga, Johan 39–​40 Husserl, Edmund 58–​59, 68–​74, 69n2, 76–​78, 89–​92, 97, 100–​101, 103–​108, 106–​107n10, 110, 110n12, 115–​124, 117n2, 126, 127, 128, 144 Hutchinson, Ann 99n9 Jeannerod, Marc 76, 85n6 Jung, Carl G. 26, 28–​32, 137, 149, 152 Kelso, J. A. Scott 80, 109, 121, 124–​127, 125n3, 143 Kern, Iso 69n2 Kim Jong-​un 24n5, 28, 31, 32, 33 King, Winston L. 90n7 Koch, Christof 59, 142, 146–​147 Kolbert, Elizabeth 1, 10–​11, 154 Kummer, Hans 26 Laban, Rudolf 99n9 Laverack, M. S. 111–​112

168  Lerner, Alan 144 Lerner, Henrietta 144 Lewis, Dori 99n9 Liptak, Kevin 32 Lissman, H. W. 111–​112 Lorenz, Konrad 53, 53n10 Luria, Aleksandr Romanovich 77, 84n5 Lyadov, Anton Anton 33 Marbach, Eduard 69n2 Marzluff, John 97 Matthew, Owen 33 May, Robert 17 Mendel, Gregor Johann 37 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 68–​69, 71–​72, 78–​ 85, 84n5, 102, 109 Migone, P. 139 Milius, Susan 144 Mill, P. J. 111 Moran, G. 99 Muller, Herbert J. 136 Netanyahu, Benjamn 24n5, 31, 32, 34 Nobles, Ryan 32 Pachoud, Bernard 103–​106, 106n10, 107, 120 Panksepp, Jaak 59 Petit, Jean-​Luc 115–​118, 115n1, 117n2, 120, 121, 122 Petitot, Jean 105–​107, 120 Putin, Vladimir 24n5, 28, 31, 32, 33

Name Index Scheerer, Eckart 85n6, 112 Schneirla, T. C. 27, 31, 74–​75, 104 Schuwer, A. 107 Scott, John Paul 75 Sheets-​Johnstone, Maxine 13n3, 16, 26, 27, 30–​31, 32, 39–​41, 51, 54n11, 57, 59, 60–​61, 62–​63, 70–​73, 74, 76–​78, 79–​80, 83n4, 84n5, 85n6, 90, 94, 94n8, 95, 96, 99–​100, 104, 109, 109n11, 110–​111, 110n12, 112, 117, 118, 119, 126, 126n4, 127, 134, 141, 143 Sherrington, Sir Charles 112–​114 Shull, George 6n1 Smith, Adam 130 Smith, Huston 134 Smith, R. L. 13n3 Sockman, Ralph 134 Sokolowski, Robert 110n12 Stalin, Joseph 24n5 Thompson, Evan 63–​71, 76, 85–​90, 100, 102, 123–​124, 139 Tomasello, Michael 98 Trump, Donald 24n5, 28, 31, 32–​33, 35, 39, 43 Van Hoof, J. A. R. A. M. 27 Van-​Lawick Goodall, Jane 46–​47, 56, 146 Varela, Francisco 59, 63–​71, 69n2, 76, 85–​89, 90–​92, 100–​103, 123–​124 von Helmholtz, Hermann 93–​95, 94n8, 126 Vrba, Elizabeth 25, 38

Rank, Otto 41 Rizzolatti, Giacomo 59, 120, 139 Rojcewicz, R. 107 Rosch, Eleanor 63–​71, 76, 85–​89, 100, 102, 123–​124 Rudofsky, Bernard 26

Wagner, David 11 Weiner, Greg 33 Wells, Martin 75 Westwood, Sarah 32 Whiten, Andrew 97–​98 Wilson, E. O. 1, 12–​16 Wilson, Margo 13 Wotan 28–​30, 31–​32, 35 Wright, B. R. 111

Saint Augustine 136 Scanlon, John 106n10

Zahavi, Dan 77–​78, 84n5, 109 Zeki, Semir 59, 139

Quammen, David 12, 39, 154