Expressive Organicism: An Outline, #1.

“Marmorslottet/Marble Castle Rock Formation, Norway,” by C. Brown (Wikimedia Commons, 2021)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. PART I

3. PART II

The essay below will be published in two installments; this, the first, contains sections 1 and 2.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

Expressive Organicism: An Outline

1. Introduction

How to formulate a new philosophy? It can only be done piecemeal, exploring the terrain as it comes into view. One must walk, think, sketch, and puzzle the many threads together that hopefully one day will coalesce into a new image, holding the threads in suspension for the time being, involved in a state of searching. Some clear ideas start suddenly, others emerge over time, gradually working their way towards an intelligible form. Here, I set out some ideas for a philosophical position I called “Expressive Organicism” elsewhere (see Paans, 2020a, 2022a). These ideas form a comprehensive philosophical framework, encompassing metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, environmental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, existentialism, moral philosophy and philosophy of religion.

2. PART I

1. Organicism is an integral, philosophical response to three interlinked problems: (i) the inert matter problem, (ii) the part-whole problem and (iii) the imaginative leap problem (Paans, 2022b; Hanna and Paans, 2020).

2. Like a vicious circle, these three problems cause and aggravate each other: they cannot be thought apart, although they can be discussed separately, legitimizing the mistaken assumption to the idea that they are also separate and that their causes have little in common.

3. The first, fundamental question for making any headway is: what is the nature of reality? If we conceive of it as a machine or a mechanical contraption of some sort, we use an improper metaphor, although this metaphor can be useful in various ways or a limited domain of application. If we conceive of reality as being isomorphic (i.e., sharing structural features with) organic processes, we may be closer to the nature of the cosmos, because organic life arose from the structure of the universe itself. It seems to be one of its manifestations.

4. This is, of course, an assumption. As Klaus Krippendorf has pointed out, the very idea of organization stems from a biological metaphor to explain the structure of the universe (Krippendorf, 2008). That is, it provides a topological and processual template (i.e., a root metaphor) to conceptualize the structure of the cosmos. For the root metaphor to be isomorphic to its subject matter, it must share as many essential properties with it as possible. Mechanistic, anthropomorphic and network metaphors are all systematic abstractions from the underlying organic structure. As such, they usefully highlight certain limited domains of reality, or they provide useful conceptual lenses to temporally view reality. They are “as-if” instruments. But since they are abstractions, they abstract away from their subject matter, leading sometimes to great clarity due to simplification, but leading to less isomorphy. In given cases, this is a good thing, as it allows for certain relationships to be pulled into the conceptual foreground, in much the same way that a subway diagram is not a map of the city, but a very useful navigational tool due to its simplification. But to use the subway map to learn about those aspects of the city that are not depicted on it would be a first-class mistake.

5. This does not mean that the continued unfolding of reality is an organic process itself, but instead merely that metaphorically conceiving it as an organic—and indeed ontogenetic—process gives us in certain respects a better moral and metaphysical grounding for thinking (Paans, 2019a, 2021, 2022c).

6. But what is the entry point for our train of thought then? It should start with what we can observe about the manifestly real world, but simultaneously with what we can apprehend about the manifestly real world. This point of departure is not entirely unknown in the West, but it gives rise to a kind of “crude empiricism,” as the German Idealists quickly realized.

7. If we constrain ourselves to brute or sheer empiricism, we run headlong into all the conceptual problems that have marked British Empiricism and later Utilitarianism and Consequentialism from the start. Notably, the domain of the a priori is overlooked almost by default. Moreover, one must resort to the breathless invention of concepts to explain a plethora of observations without ever be able to define an overarching theory because the foundations are not being developed.

8. But most importantly, it puts the observer in a detached mode of interacting with the world. The proverbial scientist-with-the-clipboard became the hallmark of 20^th century science. It is prejudiced on the God’s Eye point of view (nowadays exacerbated by mass surveillance, CCTV and biometrics). The scientific mode of thought has become a mode of exerting surveillant power. The detached observer reinforces the subject-object distinction, trapping the subject in a viewpoint from which certain phenomena cannot be grasped or cannot be properly understood.

9. Conversely, this subject-object distinction traps the observed subject in the predicament of having to invent what Foucault called “practices of the self,” in which the body becomes the site of cultivating beneficial, that is, sanctioned, habits and behavioural patterns. Put differently: a process of full natural social responsivity devolves into a form of constrictive instead of generative thought-shaping.

10. So, the starting point must be tangible and philosophically workable, however, without being confined to the limitation of the empiricism that formed the foundation of the Enlightenment, and that most unfortunately coincides with an obstinate Rationalism.

11. This is why the organicist approach must start with what can be observed and apprehended. By “observation,” I mean the array of methods inherited from classical empiricism, but equally insights that come to us after prolonged meditation, practical experience and careful consideration. For instance, the observation that everything in the world is in a state of perpetual change or becoming (Japanese: mu) seems to me equally a valid observation as the fact that ecosystems possess a certain carrying capacity. By “apprehension,” I do mean the sense of openness and vastness that permeates everything (Paans, 2020b). This feeling is often aesthetically but always non-conceptually experienced. It emerges through contemplative practice and aesthetic experiences, and it also permeates and fosters creative piety. It cannot be reached in any other way than attuning our bodyminds to the cosmos at large, mostly through learning some practice or craft, or due to prolonged exercise.

12. This double approach is closely bound up with what I call “the ecological view.” This is the diametric opposite of Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere” coveted by mechanistic science. The ecological view regards reality on long timescales and departs from the transitoriness of the manifest reality. If everything is in flux, we only witness part of the transformation process. In the case of the one-day fly, we survive long enough to grasp the process completely. In the case of the Sequoia growing, we only witness a small part of it; the rest we must infer by reference to other examples, the application of a priori rules we devised and empirical evidence. So, the rule that water has an absolute zero point holds across this universe as far as we know. But water is always in a state of becoming here—it changes states from gaseous to solid via liquid. On Earth, it does not reach its absolute zero point. This simple insight applies to everything. We only observe “becomings,” i.e., transitions between one state and the other. Therefore, the appropriate view of thinking about reality is not by only setting fixed categories, but by thinking such taxonomies in terms of processes with an ecological (i.e. large-scale, long-term, interconnected) mindset.

13. This fully includes the apprehensive (aesthetic) mindset and the feeling of awe and finitude. However, this is not a plea for a false finitude that leads to defeatism or nihilism. That was the fault of the 20^th century. Finitude is no reason for fatalism. And neither for nihilism, its destructive, life-denying counterpart (Paans, 2022d).

14. If anything, the finite is always cut out from the infinite; yet, it is not a dead specimen. It is a boundary that exists temporarily and that we call “individuality” or “self.” We are just so many self-aware points of finitude in an infinite universe—at least, for all intents and purposes. In any version of organicism, the universe spawned a kind of universal perspectivism. In that regard, the starting point of Berkeley’s subjective idealism was correct. Its conclusions, however, were deeply solipsistic – pointing towards and even exacerbating the problem, but not solving it.

15. But fully describing this infinite-finite dialectic in discursive terms is a task which is traumatic, and which leads easily into comforting Cartesian dualism (falling into misleading abstractions and mechanist optimism), Hegelian dialectics (historical-optimistic conceptualism of the Leibnizian kind), Schopenhauerian-Sartrean Existentialism, or postmodern relativism. The universe opens up to us, but also away from us, stretching out in all directions from under the conceptual cupola that we erected for ourselves (Paans, 2019b). The objects and situations we encounter are open-ended (2020c), or they can be said to possess “infinite inwardness” (Paans, 2020d).

16. This, in turn, makes us quite rare and above all singular entities. I possess my inalienable, unique perspective on the world, one that I can express and articulate. But this expression proceeds through language, but equally – and primarily – through agency. We are, in the Nishidean sense, “expressive monads” (Paans, 2022e). But not only human beings are such monads expressing themselves. The pine tree who sheds his needles and extracts water from the ground, and creates pinecones embodies this his expressive, processual agency as well. The same applies for every ant in the anthill, and every carrion beetle. Also, it applies to the dead oak leaves that increase the soil’s acidity levels, or chemical substances that offset genetic methylation. Every form of agency that causes a change, I shall call an expression of that particular agency.

17. By “expression” I do not merely mean to designate our linguistic utterances or bodily gestures—in short, all those things that we customarily designate with the term “expressive,” like artworks, or performances, or turns of speech that fall within the realm of expression as they are within our fully embodied and extended agency.

18. “Expression” also includes our gene expression and our ecological and social footprint, as well as our agentive actions. A person with certain religious ideas might for instance leave a lasting expression that reverberates through the centuries. The person who passed the mutated gene for developing blue eyes on some 10, 000 years ago left a lasting physical expression in thousands of individuals that still pass it on. One’s ecological footprint is a form of expression that narrows down or opens up the possibilities of future organisms, the Aristotelian potentia that lie dormant in the structure of the cosmos.

19. So, the cloud of expressions effectuated by all those individuated “expressive monads” in the cosmos influence and freely determine the developmental trajectory of the planet and eventually even the cosmos itself. Certain potential options are foreclosed, while others are opened up by actions that can start small, but that reverberate over (sometime enormous) timescales. A small mutation in a bacterium may have enormous consequences once set off over geological time scales and across entire populations.

20. On the ecological view, there is no sharp biological difference between oneself and others. Even the notion of an organism itself is a problem. Yet, on the experiential level there is a clear moral and psychological difference. These things exist side by side, and do not rule each other out. Instead of thinking along the lines of Platonism, which seeks definition or the constitutive terms of oppositions, we best think along the lines of Taoism to do justice to the fluidity of reality. Instead of trying to circumscribe terms too neatly, we might as well see them as temporal reference points, or multidimensional discursive points.

21. We must drive this claim to its end: we are conglomerates of unicellular organisms. Even within a single specimen of Homo sapiens do we find a differentiation that obliterates the lines between the one and the many. The two basic categories of Greek thought simply revert into one another in organismic life, leading often to a mistaken type of part-whole thinking when this is not detected in time. Our immune systems respond to the proximity of other individuals and even potential hazards in the environments; all these expressions and interactions make us continuous with the cosmos in the most literal sense imaginable. Our skins can absorb water—a fact that many people don’t know, but this very ignorance posits the digestive tract as a kind of fuel pipe through which our inner motor processes fuel—a machine metaphor again.

22. The “moral” domain is not concerned with what one ought to do, or at least not directly. Its significance according to the ecological view derives completely from the fact that one leaves something for others to work with as all manifestaintos of Life are dependent on the biosphere. With this basic and fundamentally altruistic fact in mind, we must rethink and revalue the edicts of traditional morality. Notions like dignity, duty, obligation, and justice all just derive from this single fundamental altruistic attitude. They are not primary, but secondary. The main mistake of Western metaphysics was to regard the secondary notions as being primary, from the very first Platonic dialogues onwards.

23. In that sense, the Socrates as presented by Plato was too complacent: he did not investigate the primary notions that his predecessors, the pre-Socratics, were so busy with. He sought to isolate morality from the world in which we are moral. Christianity took this mistake even further, by relegating the ideal world to the afterlife.

24. Given all this, what we can say about the nature of reality? First, that we grasp it merely incompletely because (a) our vocabulary is always restricted to what we bodily, gesturally, mentally, emotively, and linguistically understand, and (b) we live only to witness a small part of it (c) we always grasp it from a monadic, irreducibly perspectivist position. Second, that the parts that elude us can be often apprehended more accurately than framed discursively. Third, that there is a degree of order inherent in the universe that mechanist thinking cannot grasp accurately. Fourth, that the universe tends to produce differentiation, as can be clearly observed in biological evolution and its unfolding. And fifth, that we grasp continuously, giving rise to dead ends, the accumulation of experience, attunement and cultural formation. Culture is not thinkable outside evolution, and not thinkable without continuous striving.

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