Longitudes: A Collection of Essays, Ideas and Writing in Progress

This Is Your Brain, This Is Your Brain on GLS:

A recent program on Radio-France presented a discussion between neuroscientists and psychiatrists who were interested in the possibility of a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and neurobiology. Until recently, such a concept would have been balked at by the scientific community who, generally speaking, have rejected claims––including those of Freud himself––that psychoanalysis can be properly considered as having any significant scientific application. It seems, however, that recent studies into emotion and the brain––such as those carried out by Damasio and his colleagues––have opened up potential avenues of communication between what were long considered as disparate realms of study that concerned separate modalities of being. Indeed, this new understanding of the psychological and the biological as parts of a complex integrated system––rather than as dual entities or substances––may allow both psychoanalysis and neurobiology to redefine themselves, with positive practical results. Indeed, new conceptions of mind, body, subjectivity and experience appear to be emerging on the horizon of human consciousness.

As the process of investigation creates new images of the self out of the combination and integration of older concepts of mind and body, so it seems that these developments will have profound effects in other areas, such as ethics, economy, artistic expression and our relationship to the environment. Although it remains to be seen whether or not we are on the verge of a major paradigm shift, it does appear that there is a growing need for a deeper integration of the disciplines of study as we currently as understand them––a cross fertilisation of ideas, perhaps resulting in new disciplines––so that we may more profoundly engage in the process of understanding ourselves.

This kind of process seems to be what GLS is all about. As a multidisciplinary field of study, GLS poses large questions which, for the most part, defy categorical solutions: What is the self? How are we to understand the relationship between passion and reason? What do faith and science have to do with each other; or nature and culture for that matter? Multidisciplinary study offers the opportunity to relate seemingly disparate elements to each other in an attempt to deepen the understanding of a given concept, or to create new questions which lead in new directions.

By examining a given concept in terms of its historical and cultural representation in literature, theatre, philosophy, psychology, music, art, economics, religion, and science; and by approaching this examination as a process with an aesthetic dimension rather than purely as a search for facticity, the student of Liberal Studies is in the position to form an evolving image of the given concept out of the diverse historical and cultural expressions he or she has studied in connection with it. For example: consider the image of Desire that may be formed by examining Emma Bovary, Darwin, automobile ads, Freud, Medea, St.Augustine, Weber, Damasio, Brittany Spears and … sub-prime lending? Clearly, a very complicated web of elements begins to emerge under the rubric of Desire––it takes on subtly different forms as we examine it from different perspectives. And, once we begin to interpose multiple idea images formed in this way, a great deal of crosstalk emerges between them. This is also of concern because this creates, in a sense, the landscape out of which our ideas are formed––or perhaps it is better think of this crosstalk landscape existing in conjunction with any ideas we might mould out of it. In any case, viewed in this way ideas do seem to take on a complicated life of their own.

The potential hermeneutic challenges associated with this kind of free multidisciplinary study are indeed daunting. And, with out recourse to specialised normalising theories through which to interpret data, the subjective and non centralising nature of this kind of study may be problematic for traditional Anglo-Saxon academia as well as for those trained in Continental thought, who might well view Liberal Studies as a kind of naive postmodernism. However, for those curious souls who for those who don’t engage in intellectual activity simply for the pursuit of facts or theories, but rather for some more mysterious, aesthetic reason, this kind of open intellectual process, despite its challenges, holds great appeal. And this kind of study has clearly shown itself to be of practical value as well––there is always the possibility for multidisciplinary studies to reveal connections that single discipline studies could find extremely useful.

Clearly, the pleasure and insight derived from facing the challenges of Liberal Studies––especially when these studies can find a healthy critical forum for expression and dialogue––greatly enhances the life of the individual and through him, the society. As a process of intellectual discovery and personal development, the value of multidisciplinary studies cannot be over estimated.

“.. nothing real is absolutely simple; each relation is one aspect, character, or function, way of its being taken or way of its taking something else..” ––William James

FELLED: BY ALEX ITIN
(MUSIC BY MORTON FELDMAN)

In terms of the study of emotions, Antonio Damasio describes the 20th century as “the century of neglect.” If the research of emotion is said to begin with Aristotle, then by the end of 19th century we have a body of work that includes the writings of Pascal, Spinoza, Darwin, Freud, Sartre and William James among many others. But all of this success in the study of emotions was cut short in the 20th century when the study of emotion was given increasingly short shrift by scientists and thinkers who embraced a philosophically outdated Cartesian model of the mind in order to support the computational theories of intelligence made so popular by the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950’s. Today, the computational model of the mind advocated by the strong AI theory and Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, has been upset—-philosophically by Searle, Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus; in mathematics and physics by Penrose; and in the field of neuroscience by Damasio. Remarkable advances in brain study have provided us with a very different perspective––an emotional revolution, claims Damasio––which positions emotion as the very basis of reason. As the first mechanism of rational processes, it seems that emotion is a primal and practical necessity.

It is becoming clear that there are a whole host of medical ills that can be illuminated by emotional studies. Indeed, understanding how the emotional system works is crucial for the effective treatment stroke and mood disorders. Emotional studies have important applications in the social space as well; for while it is clear that what goes on in a culture economically, politically, and legally involves decisions that emerge out of rational processes, it seems that these rational processes evolve out of, and work alongside, emotional processes that have their origin in the survival of the organism; it appears that the way we produce moral behaviour is very closely tied to the emotional system in an evolutionary sense. Clearly, emotion has an immense role to play in our decisions as individuals and as a society; but how are we to understand this relationship between emotion and reason? What is an emotion? What is a feeling? And why is reason so dependent on both of them?

Damasio redefines the concept of emotion by amplifying its description into three categories:

1. Basic emotions––fear, anger happiness, as studied by Darwin and others––appear to be universal; even without the same names they are represented by the same behaviour in different cultures and even across certain species.
2. Background emotions, which are the most prevalent emotions we have. We are always in an emotional state, ie.discouragement or enthusiasm. Consciousness is always an emotive state.
3. Secondary or social emotions include compassion, shame, contempt, pride, and jealousy. These are entirely tied to social concerns, to those with whom and towards whom we act, others.

Secondary or social emotions were initially thought of as purely cultural constructions, but this has been shown to be not quite the case. While culture and education––the social environment as a whole––clearly plays an enormous role in directing the specifics of how emotions are applied, animal research has shown that a number of these emotions are present in primates who have been observed behaving compassionately, even towards other animals of other species. It seems as though these secondary emotions permeate our genetics and are as much a part of our biological make up as the primary emotions are.

Using William James as starting point, Damasio outlines the distinction and relationship between feeling and emotion–James’ inversion of the traditional view of the physiology of the emotion/feeling cycle has been been borne out by later research. James writes:

Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.

By interposing the body between the causative stimulus and the emotive mindstate, James shows the inseparability of mind and body; he also shows that body is represented in the brain, either directly or indirectly, and that the brain can map the body. However, James leaves out the possibility of an appraisal of the the stimulus itself. Although there is often no stimulus appraisal––fear may cause a direct body state––it does happen, especially when we are confronted with more complex situations. According to Damsio, James conflated emotion and feeling: on one hand James gives the impression that emotion is a variety of reactive behaviours; but then, on the other hand, he says that the perception that we get from the reaction is the emotion. This was shown to be an inconsistent view by the physiologists in the early 20th century.

In Damasio’s terms, emotion and feeling can be understood separately. Feelings involve cognition and are composite perceptions of:

1. partcular states of the body that are real or simulted
2. states of altered cognitive resouces
3. the deployment of certain scripts (descriptions) which can be really in the body or generated in the brain––ie. a desctiption of happiness
4. different states of cognitve ability in different body states––ie. time perception, learning attentiveness etc.
And all of this is connected to a causative state which is intentionality––how we feel ‘about’ or ‘towards’ something.

And human emotions are understood as:

1. largely unlearned programs of automatic actions and cognitive strategies aimed at the management of life. Largely but not 100% automatic––we can have some measure of control over them.
2. programs aimed at the management of life; one cannot do without emotions; they play an evolutionary role for the self and/or for the group
3. triggered by objects or situations that act on the mind, whether they are real or in the mind as a recollection; defects in particular aspects of emotion can be traced to lesions in certain parts of the brain.

In Damasio’s view, emotion involves an appraisal of stimulus, a triggering of emotion, and an execution of emotion and/or emotional states. Feeling involves an emotional trigger which stimulates brain structures to initiate a set of internal chemical changes which create changes to the viscera in the central nervous system. Thus, the experience of an emotion and the feeling associated with it involves a variety of changes in cognitive resources. Emotions change how we recall past experiences and perceive time; and they alter the relationship between our bodies and the world––even way in which we reason changes profoundly with emotive states. In brief, emotions and feelings change the way in which we attend to the world.

This relationship between emotion and feeling developed out of complex mechanisms of reaction built out of many other processes that were tied to survival: reward and punishment, scaling of internal needs, pain and pleasure. And it is certain that early creatures relied on such mechanisms long before emotions appeared as we understand them. In terms of survival, emotions and their components can be understood as exercising homeostatic or bodily regulating goals–they have everything to do with how an organism manages it’s life cycle. In our life cycle there is a mandate in our genome which drives us to persist and prevail––the emotional system is the latest expression in this blind desire to stay alive. As Damasio points out, the multitudes of cells in the body have a drive to persist, prevail and stay alive; to homeostaically manage the process of energy acquisition and transformation. This is the genesis of emotions and the birth of feeling: pleasure and pain.

It seems that there really is no separating mind, brain and body. The mind exists because there is a body; the body is the context for the mind/brain. The mind’s principle task is to examine and manage the internal economy of the organism. Feelings are always tied to the body, directly or indirectly; information about the body is so selective that it goes into specialised channels in the brain. Indeed, the brain creates chemical markers that have to do with specific bodily states. These markers allow the brain to carry out somatic perception which is key in the appraisal of stimulus (decision making) and the ability of emotional response to vary with context. Somatic-marker associations are reinstated, or recalled, physiologically and bias cognitive processing. In cases where complex and uncertain decisions need to be made, the somatic markers recall all reward and punishment experiences associated with the relevant stimuli, which are then summed to produce a net somatic state––that gut feeling. This overall state is used to direct (or bias) the selection of the appropriate action. Utilising the somatosensory cortex, the brain can even run internal simulations of responses or transformations in bodily states as representations in the mind. This is what Damsio terms the “as if ” body loop: it is as if the body was actually sensing or undergoing this or that experience recreated internally. This allows us not only to predict possible bodily or emotive states for ourselves but also to project them onto others. This clearly has relevance with regards to the secondary emotions outlined above as well as to predictive mental behaviour that rationalise potential outcomes.

According to Damasio, emotions are action programs which preceed feelings (which are the perception of these programs.) Emotions operate in multistage cycles and cannot be understood as being about or in one area of the brain that is a centre for this or that. They are modified by context––socialisation plays an important role––and reflect the ongoing management of life inside the organism; feelings give us a window into this internal life. Internal needs cannot be repressed. In the case of food, for example, the body declares a state of hunger because it wants to reach homeostasis and therefore lets this situation come into consciousness so that the mind can decide on appropriate action.

Cognitively speaking, we have multiple routes open to us. We have a fast route of decision making, which is biologically entrenched, and governed by powerful emotional, intuitive or “gut” responses to a given object or situation; and we have reason, traditionally understood as a slow methodical “cost-benefit” analysis. But these routes are not necessarily opposed to each other. In a healthy individual they work together in order to expedite the decision making process. Emotions also allow us to make decisions with out consciously confronting every option available to us; they allows us to freely and purposefully rationalise by removing or highlighting certain key options. Indeed, emotion seems to be the seat of practical reason itself; or, at the very least, it is the means by which it can function effectively. As some of Damasio’s patient studies have shown, damage to certain parts of the brain that are associated with emotion can have drastic effects in the realm of reasoning, both in terms of practical decision making and socialisation. And there have been those that, due to a break down in the somatic apparatus, have lost the ability to feel emotions while they can still intellectually understand their significance.

Emotion also plays a role in social processes that lead to social homeostasis. Most of our social engagements involve, to some degree at least, the projections into the social space of our biological needs. But the effectiveness and health of this social homeostasis would necessarily reflect the state of the culture itself and its emotional health and intelligence. It seems impossible, however, that a definitive account of this could be provided here. In the end it seems that everything we say about emotion needs to be put into context …

DAMASIO LECTURE: “Emotion, Feeling, and Social Behavior: The Brain Perspective”

DAMASIO LECTURE: MEDICINE TO SOCIETY I & II

Hubert Dreyfus on Merleau-Ponty, Computers and the mind:

PART II

Pascal: mathmatician, philosopher, writer, Christian apologist, natural scientist. Is there a unity of thought between the inventor of the calculus of probability, and the christian convert? between the defender of the Jansenites of Port–Royal and the moralist who saw glory only in human misery? Apparently many types of truth exist for Pascal: scientific, political, historic and metaphysical. These ‘truths’ do not reveal themselves in the same way and demand different approaches and languages for their interpretation. Is mankind capable of developing a science which could interpret these truths into a universal understanding? or are we forced to admit that reason alone cannot lead us to fundamental truths, which only faith allows us to approach?

The diversity is disturbing. The first temptation is to try to organise the thought of Pascal into some sort of system, to unify it so that we might understand it in its totality. But might this not be at odds with Pascal’s project itself? For it is the very diversity of his thought which allows his critique of reason to extend itself. If Pascal claims that mankind has made an idol of truth it is because, for him, truth without faith is not properly truth at all but rather a kind of diversion or psychological artifice. Scholars have shown that across the various texts there are certain similitudes and analogies which link the mathematical, physical, anthropological and theological thought of Pascal; there is a certain constant search for equilibrium in the face of the chaos of an infinite universe and a disenchanted world. Pascal sees a relationship between the book of nature and the Bible which manifests itself as a coherent centralising force; his thought can be seen as a sort of palimpsest of these two literatures (physical and theological). This perspective allows Pascal to examine the world though mutiple lenses and does not bind his thought in history, science, politics or common notions of morality; it allows him to critique the assumptions and behaviour of mankind from a unique position between these perspectives.

Pascal’s philosophical reflections are dominated by a theological interpretation of the human condition inspired by Saint Augustine’s interpretation of Adam’s Fall from grace. Pascal views human nature as essentially corrupt, and without the possibility of recovery by natural means or human effort. This theological perspective determined Pascal’s views about human freedom, ethics and politics; and it also set extra-philosophical limits to his theory of knowledge, resulting in a critique of reason. Additionally, Pascal cannot be seen as being apologetic for religion in the way the term ‘Christian Apologist’ is usually understood. Unlike the 19th century apologist movement which sought to reconcile reason and faith or reduce religion to reason alone, Pascal saw reason as completely inadequate to the task of connecting with a transcendent divinity–– the only way to God was by ‘faith’. For Pascal, true belief in God’s revelation is not based on rational calculation nor, as with Descartes, does it presuppose a philosophical argument in favour of God’s existence. For Pascal faith provides appropriately ‘disposed’ Christians with a means to transcend the limits of what is intelligible and to accept as true even matters that we cannot understand. To claim otherwise would be to set boundaries to the reality of God by reducing faith to the limits of human understanding.

“if one submits everything to reason, our religion will contain nothing that is mysterious or supernatural.”

Thus those who are given the gift of genuine religious faith are expected not only to accept things that are uncertain but also to embrace realities that transcend reason itself–– priority is given to intuitition, faith and belief.

However, for those not in posession of the gift of faith Pascal posits The Wager: it is a better “bet” to believe that God exists than not to believe. As the potential value of believing––which is assessed as infinite––is always greater than the value of not believing, in Pascal’s view it is inexcusable not to investigate this issue.

“If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing”

There is a schematic quality to Pascal’s thought which pre-figures Kant, both epistemically and theologically. Like Kant, Pascal’s epistemology begins with an intuition of space and time, as well as a critique of the limits of reason and its relation to morality and theology. Additionally, there is an existential element which drives Pascal to vanquish the fear brought on by the self-awareness of an existence between infinity and nothingness––his project is to find man’s place of equilibrium. In Pascal’s view, the role of science is to serve epistemology; reflection on science permits man to know himself better and to more effectively meditate on his position in nature and the universe. For Pascal, science is merely operative, allowing us to fabricate ideas about the universe; mathematics is a métier; there is no scientific truth in the world, or if there is it is of a superficial order––physics is at best a contingent and necissarily human biased description of nature. Science is a method, or a group of methods which allow us to organise perception. Nature itself is not encoded; it is we who encode it with meaning. Contrary to the position put forward by Francis Bacon, Pascal does not view physical science as being an interpretation of nature but rather of man’s place in it: Science and Reason are, properly understood, tools which allow man to approach existential balance. And this goes to the heart of Pascal’s project which strives to understand the place of man in the world; but this place, existing in an infinite universe, is also, in a sense, a non-place. For Pascal it is the process of becoming: a hermeneutic quest for existential and spiritual equilibrium.

“Nobility–L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser; une vapeur, une goutte d’eau suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui; l’univers n’en sait rien.”

With the rise of the Christian right in the United States as a powerful political entity, the last two decades have seen a re-emergence of the kinds of theological arguments that were dominating philosophical thought in the 18th and 19th century. Indeed, these kinds of debates about the existence, proof and nature of God go back to antiquity and the emergence of the Western consciousness; they have permeated philosophical discourse ever since. These arguments have exerted powerful influence over the ways in which we view and exercise our most fundamental social institutions and understand our relationship to nature and the society in which we live. And, it does appear that certain societies at certain historical periods show themselves to be more fervently engaged in this discussion than others––as it is today in the United States, so it was in England and Scotland in the 18th and 19th century. We will be looking at the perspectives of two thinkers from this period who held diametrically opposed views with regards to the debate around what has come to be known as ‘Intelligent Design.’

With the Scientific revolution well under way and the Industrial Revolution just around the corner, David Hume (1711-1776) and William Paley (1743-1805) found themselves on either side of a dispute about whether or not the existence of God could be proven by demonstrating design in nature. For some, science––and the new definitions of reason associated with it––presented a challenge to faith because it offered a paradigm for ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ in which religion could not take part. While there were some who claimed that faith itself was a distinct faculty of understanding and did not need to qualify itself rationally; and others who took the position that reason’s true purpose is to serve faith, suggesting that the tools of reason cannot be directed properly with out it; it did seem to many that a growing scepticism fuelled by the increasing predominance of scientific reason was beginning to threaten faith in the Church. As a result, we notice in this period a renewed interest in the project to marry Reason and Faith which had been such a concern for St Augustine; attempts were made to create rational, logical, and emperical arguments which could secure the place of religion and God in a world increasingly dominated by a new scientific epistomology and philosphical/political thought which began to question theological assumptions.

Philosophically inclined thinkers, such as Paley, laboured to shape what begins essentially as intuition, into a more formal, logically rigourous inference. The theistic arguments that resulted tend to focus on plan, purpose, intention and design, and are thus classified as teleological arguments––or, more commonly, as arguments from or to design. As opposed to cosmological perspectives, which start from the position that there are contingently existing things and finish with conclusions concerning the existence of a maker to account for their existence; or ontological arguements which posit that God must nessicarily exist because to deny him is absurd; teleological arguments focus on finding evidence of cognitive design in nature. They begin with a specific group of special properties and conclude with the existence of a designer possessing the intellectual powers (knowledge, purpose, understanding, foresight, wisdom, intention) necessary to design the things exhibiting the special properties in question. Some type of order is the starting point of design arguments and as a result design arguments are often viewed as the most persuasive of all purely philosophical theistic arguments.

The basic positive argument for design generally goes something like this: nature exhibits such beauty of structure, function, and interconnectedness that is impossible not to see a deliberative and directive mind behind it; the necessary mind in question, being prior to nature itself, is of course taken to be supernatural: God. While this kind of argument is at the heart of the position that Paley takes in his Natural Theology, he gives it a modern, machinal interpretation (ie. the watch) in order to foreshadow his design argument which is aesthetic and quasi-legalistic. There is a subtil difference between Paley’s thought and the ‘classic’, comparative teleological arguement that allows him––to a certain extent at least––to deal with Hume’s critical view of the design arguement. Before we examine this however, we will need to have a look to the logical chain of analoguous teleological reasoning as well as Hume’s critique of it.

As we have implied above, design arguments are generally analogous arguments—various parallels between human artefacts and natural entities being taken as supporting parallel conclusions with regards to final causation (the mind of man or of God) in each case. This is summed up very well by Hume’s Cleanthes:

“Look round the world; contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.”

We can follow the analogous/comparative chain of reasoning in this way: entity ‘e’ within nature is like specified human artefact ‘a’ (e.g., a machine) in relevant respects ‘R’; ‘a’ has ‘R’ (relevant aspects/teleological aspects) precisely because it is a product of deliberate design by intelligent human agency; Like effects typically have like causes (or like explanations, like existence requirements, etc.) Therefore: it is (highly) probable that ‘e’ (entity) has ‘R’ (relevant teleological aspects) precisely because it too is a product of deliberate design by intelligent, relevantly human-like agency (in this case, GOD).

David Hume held a view that was critical of this line of reasoning. Hume denied the the analogy between nature and human artefact, ironically suggesting that nature more closely resembled a living organism than a machine. He claimed that even if the analogy could be made, it would not necessarily constitute anything like a traditional conception of God: natural evils or apparently imperfect designs might suggest a less than perfect designer or a group of designers; if phenomena instrumental to the production of natural evils (e.g., disease ) exhibited ‘R’s (teleological aspects), then they would presumably have to have come from the designer as well, further eroding the designer’s resemblance to the good and perfect God. And, according to Hume, even the most comprehensive empirical data could establish only finite power and wisdom, rather than the infinite power and wisdom usually associated with divinity. More famously however, is Hume’s argument against the empirical certainty of causality which is central to the analogous chain of reasoning; for Hume causality is psychological, a habit of the mind which occurs through regular conjoinment of events––the basis of his famous scepticism. Hume’s critique of the analogous chain can be summed up in this way: if we are to go as far as to say that human artefacts (a) may be said to resemble natural phenomena (e) it is only by way of causality (like effects typically have like causes) that we can obtain this resemblance and therefore infer ‘R’ (relevant aspects/teleological aspects). Hume claimed that any number of alternative possible explanations could be given in place of causation of allegedly designed entities in nature–– eg. chance or saturation of the relevant space of possibilities. Thus, from Hume’s position, even if we could point to fundamental resemblance between ‘a’ and ‘e’ ––which Hume doubted–– the analogous chain does not necessarily lead us to the conclusion of inferring ‘R’.

It seems possible that Paley would have been aware of Hume’s position and of the problems with the teleological argument outlined above. Paley attempted to position his argument from a perspective which did not rely on explicit references to human artefacts and the causality––or constant conjunction––which Hume was so sceptical of. He sought to found his evidence for a cognitive force behind natural phenomena in a more intuitive fashion. Paley attempted to capture natural properties that in and of themselves offered evidence of design and which were not wholly dependent on analogous reasoning. For Paley, beauty and purpose when combined with intricate, dynamic and stable functioning was sufficient to be taken as suggestive of cognitive design; it seemed the sort of thing that minds and only minds were capable of producing. Thus the more perfect the balance and relationship of these above elements were, the more certain Paley was of intent, will, mind and therefore design:

“[T]he eye … would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator. …”

Paley’s deductive (inferential) reasoning can be summed up in this way: natural entity (e) is too complex, orderly, adaptive, purposeful, or beautiful to have occurred randomly or accidentally; (e) must have been created by a intelligent and purposeful being; God is that being; therefore, God exists.

With Paley, the direct dependance on human artefacts has dropped out of the argument; the argument is no longer comparative, it has become deductive. While Paley’s discussion of the watch does play an analogous role, it is by way of demonstrating of design inferences rather than as the analogous foundation for an inferential comparison; it is necessary only in as much as it destroys potential objections to concluding design in the watch. He is laying the foundation by which we can begin to claim evidence of design and designers in general terms. The analogy here is paradigmatic rather than correlative to particular instance.

Indeed, even if one sides with Hume in taking the view that nature is more organic than mechanic, it is difficult to deny that nature is full of things that look designed (on their own terms) and seem to be purposeful in terms of function. From an aesthetic point of view Paley’s arguement for design is compelling. However, the existence of a designing mind existing apart nature need not be the only explanation for such phenomena. Another position could be that nature itself is its own designer; intelligence as we understand it exists in nature as a provable phenomenon simply because we are; and that although this intelligence (our own) is itself a natural phenomenon, it cannot be reliably used to explain the universe as it constitutes only a small fraction of its (nature’s) expression and thus will be skewed to view and interpret nature from the narrow perspective of human cognition. Of course this gets us nowhere if our goal is to prove or disprove the the existence of God and raises questions of whether such a task is even sensible: can God, faith or religion be rationalised? is it within the capacity of human rational faculties to know, to some degree at least, the mind of God? Can questions about God and the mystery of life/existence even be properly posed? Why do we (some of us anyway) so desperately need answers to these kinds of questions when there are multitudes of things in the world that we can come to some relative understanding of?

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” ––Wittgenstien

This entry will deal with the thought of Charles Darwin. From the Voyage of the Beagle and The Principle of Divergence to Natural Selection and the Descent of Man, Darwin displays remarkable changes (and consistencies) in the nature of his reasoning. As his ideas emerge into society at large they evolve in remarkably conflicting and often disturbing ways. This essay is a first step towards a better understanding the phenomenon and complex legacy of Darwinian thought.

When Charles Darwin set off on his voyage aboard the Beagle there was absolutely no sign that this relatively simple naturalist would cause such a great wave in western thought. His student years were the epitome of mediocrity––hunting and gambling his days away––and his presence on the ship seems to have been not much more than an after thought. The ship’s captain, a phrenologist, almost denied Darwin passage on the ship because the shape of his nose seemed to indicate undesirable moral tendencies (laziness). But Darwin seemed to have an innate passion for natural history and, through his friend Adam Sedgwick, found himself very interested in geology. The works of Alexander Humbolt and John Herschel were also very influential to Darwin––while Humbolt’s scientific travelogues sparked in Darwin the urge to travel, Herschel’s investigations into natural philosophy introduced him to rigourous philosophical and scientific thought. It was, however, geology that would first inspire Darwin’s theoretical task.

Lyell’s Principles of Geology influenced Darwin profoundly. Lyell presented a rigourously empirical historical view of natural science oriented around five key ideas:

1. The geologist investigates both the animate and inanimate changes that have taken place during the earth’s history.
2. His principal tasks are to develop an accurate and comprehensive record of those changes, to encapsulate that knowledge in general laws, and to search for their causes.
3. This search must be limited to causes that can be studied empirically.
4. The records or ‘monuments’ of the earth’s past indicate a constant process of the ‘introduction’ and ‘extinction’ of species, and it is the geologist’s task to search for the causes of these introductions and extinct ions.
5. According to Lyell, the only attempt to deal with 4 above, that of Jean Baptist Lamark who proposed the idea that species are capable of ‘indefinite modification’, is a failure on methodological grounds; for Lyell all the evidence supports the view that species variability is limited, and that one species cannot be transformed into another.

Well before Darwin arrived in South America, a fiery debate was raging with regards to the geological nature of the earth and the origins of life itself. The Platonic forms and the Aristotelian ‘chain of being’ were being challenged; and the biblical concept of creationism was being modified in an attempt to accommodate compelling new modes of thinking about the nature of life which had been introduced largely because of correlative observations made in the fossil record and geological strata. Although the idea of evolution had been introduced long before, these new observations challenged the Christian values which lay at the centre of 19th century British society in an unprecedented way. The Church countered these challenges as best it could. Arguments were made by faithful scientists with regards to the age of the planet, who claimed that it was too young to allow for evolution, and for the permanence of the geological structure of the earth––the only changes incurred were those brought on by God’s great flood. Change of any type, whether it be evolution, the introduction of new species or the extinction of others, geological or living, was inconceivable. But this was at odds with clear empirical evidence in the fossil record that demonstrated that some animal types disappear while others seem to undergo drastic changes. Christian scientists tried to explain this by putting forth the theory that there had not been one cataclysmic flood but many––God deliberately destroying his creation and recreating it. It soon became clear, however, that what was being observed was a process of transformation: invertebrates in the oldest and lowest level of the fossil records, then fish, reptiles, birds, mammals and man at the highest and most recent level. For a while pious scientists were able to counter this with the claim that these developments were distinct instances of creation and that the idea that new animal and plant types were evolving was merely an illusion.

While other defences were put up with varying degrees of success by the Christian scientific establishment, Natural Theology being chief among them, the growing feeling was that these transformations observed in the fossil record were the result of a gradual process rather than individual instances of creation. As the study of geology improved, the gaps between records became smaller thus reinforcing the idea of a continuous process; the observation of common rudimentary organs, sometimes non functional in certain species, brought Intelligent design into question; the common structure of vertebrate limbs as well as the observed similarities in embryonic development across animal types suggested common ancestry; evidence of the successes in selective animal and plant breeding as well as the discovery of new ‘non-biblical’ species in Australia questioned the permanence of types. All of this evidence, as well as the understanding that animals generally reproduced faster than the available food supply––resulting in a ‘struggle for existence’––led many to begin to view the world as a unity which was slowly changing its appearance under the influence of forces which were acting in the present moment.

Reflecting on his observations in South America and the Galapagos islands, Darwin was indeed confronted with certain facts that did not agree with the accepted Christian model of life and creation. Darwin became convinced that the fossil record and the current distribution of species could only be due to the gradual transformation of one species into another and was determined to articulate a theory to explain this that measured up to Lyell’s principles. He set out describe the process that produced the systematic patterns in the fossil record and the otherwise strange biogeographic distribution of species. He realised that he would eventually need to come up with a causal theory that would account for the transformations implied by his observations; every element of the theory would have to identify ‘causes now in operation’, which could be investigated empirically. For Darwin, the problem, and the methodological constraints, had been outlined by Lyell and defended philosophically by Herschel; but there were, however, other theories put forward by some of Darwin’s contemporaries and predecessors which would also profoundly influence the way he viewed things.

For Lamark, all living creatures––all ‘organic matter’––contained, in a manner of speaking, a will to self improvement. Lamark claimed that the behaviour and needs of the animal would lead to the development of certain traits; as a species inevitably moved its way upwards to greater complexity, matter formed itself into basic creatures which filled in the space opened up by this ascent. This endless process of generation put forward by Lamark––a development on the Aristotelian chain of being––was scorned by Darwin’s hero Lyell, and publicly given very little credence by Darwin himself, although it certainly had an effect on his thought. The Lamarkian position most certainly influenced Darwin’s ‘Theory of Pangenesis’ which we will discuss later. In addition to the concept of the ‘struggle for existence’ proposed by Erasmus Darwin and Buffon, the work of Chambers, which posited that the progression of fossil types was the evidence of the unceasing transformation of God’s initial creation created such a scandalous uproar that it could not have gone unknown to Darwin.

Darwin’s observations across the South American pampas eventually lead him to view the process of transformation as ‘continuous descent with modification.’ He saw a connection between the historical resemblance of organisms and their geographical proximity: different types of ostriches or armadillos seemed to descend from similar ancestors––they did not appear to be representative of separate instances of creation but rather the results of geographic separation. Bifurcating from a common ancestor the ancestors of the different types of ostrich would eventually become so estranged from each other that interbreeding would become impossible. Darwin’s experience on the Galapagos islands confirmed what he had observed on the continent. Despite the fact that the environmental conditions were very similar from island to island, the populations of birds and lizards that populated them bore unmistakable differences. Darwin would come to the conclusion that the separation of these animals had permitted the populations to vary independently from island to island. Ultimately this view would now put Darwin in conflict with Lyell who contended that, while the earth itself undergoes extensive changes, living organisms remain constant. For Darwin, Lyell’s objection to biological change was made incoherent by his belief in geological change.

Like Lamarck, Darwin initially saw biological evolution as being influenced by environmental change, as an adaptive process; but he also realised that, contrary to Lamark, the process could not be seen as a continual line of ascent. His observations had shown him that a given organism could evolve into a more complex organism with out disappearing itself. This developed into a concept of ‘adaptive radiation’ which posited the evolutionary movement of organisms into all possible habitats. Thus Darwin presents his theory of a tree of life in which all life branches out irregularly from a common stem.

But Darwin’s theory was not original. It owed profound debts to Lamark as well as Erasmus Darwin; the theory of common ancestry had also been postulated by Diderot and in the field of linguistics by Jones and Bopp. And, although Darwin had come some way in explaining how evolution works, he still had no idea why it worked––what was driving this process?

As we saw above, Darwin started by taking the position that evolution was prompted by environmental changes which bring about changes in behaviour––he was never able to quite shake off the spectre of Lamark. Darwin then moved to an hypothesis which stipulated that sexual reproduction produced ‘random unsolicited novelties’; and that positive ‘novelties’, or variations, would have the tendency to propagate themselves. While Darwin was very interested in the ways in which plants and animals had been selectively (consciously) bred by humans, he could not bring himself to believe that natural evolution worked in this way. Although Darwin was aware of the idea of the struggle for existence put forward by his grandfather and Buffon, it was only after examining the mathematical model of population growth put forward by Malthus that he came to the conclusion that any organism which found itself in the possession of a favorable variation would be more likely to survive and reproduce––whether it be the ability to move into new habitat (divergence), more easily aquire food and mates, or evade predators. For Darwin the only solution was a theory of blind competition which eliminates the unfit: Natural Selection.

Darwin still had problems. While he now had a theory, it was not one that lived up to the principles of credibility as he understood them. Darwin had always hoped to develop a properly inductive theory, but all he had was an hypothesis. He began to accept the fact that evolution would not be able to be observed directly and that the only way to present his theory in an acceptable manner would be to amass such an overwhelming volume of indirect evidence that deduction of his ideas would be impossible to escape. And, he still had not effectively explained the means by which variation was caused and maintained.

In attempting to explain causes, Darwin was caught between chance variation or the development of ‘random unsolicited novelties’ on one hand, and the idea that environment (Erasmus Darwin, Buffon) and the generational effects of use and disuse (Lamark) played a decisive role on the other. Indeed, the very title he gave to his theory, Natural Selection, is ambiguous in this regard and his texts vacillate between these concepts. At this point Darwin seems to give up on his cherished notions of scientific rigour, postulating theories which had little or no compelling evidence to found them. His theory of ‘Pangenesis’ suggested that physical traits acquired by parents during their life time such as muscle growth or certain talents were inherited by the offspring––this could also work in reverse. As Weismann later showed, the kind of clear rigorous research into observable facts that Darwin so excelled at in his earlier yeas would have been sufficient to prove that no compelling evidence exists for such a theory and that offspring invariably revert to type. Perhaps because of the lack of a genetic model on which to base an understanding of the connection between generations, this profoundly Lamarkian theory found a large audience in the United States where the clear causal––but unscientifically founded––model of the inherited effects of use and disuse and environmental influence were preferable to the chance effects of ‘unsolicited variation.’ Indeed, even with the advancement of modern genetics, many continue out of ingnorance, or preference, to understand evolution in this way.

Darwin’s own vacillations with regards to the interpretation of his observations allowed his audience to interpret the theory itself in a number of ways. And indeed, many began to pose the question: does natural selection work at levels other than the level of Darwin’s focus? Darwin himself offered a social theory in the Descent of Man. While the phrase “favoured races” which appears at the beginning of Origin of Species certainly refers only to pigeons, it does seem to echo throughout Darwin’s ‘Descent’ under the guise of the evolution of races as a driving force of human advancement. This unrepentantly classist and anglo-centric document––the spectre of Malthus looming heavily all the while––contributed greatly to the development of racialism which promulgated wildly speculative ideas regarding the superiority of races while masquerading as science. Again, Darwin vacillates in his understanding of man’s place in natural selection and society, leaving himself open for interpretation. This led to unfortunate consequences such as Social Darwinism and the development of other racist and economically exploitative doctrines that gave themselves credence by associating themselves with the increasingly deified Darwin.

As the figure head for contemporary naturalists and environmentalists, and as the foundation––at least in part––for the “scientific” credibility of laissez-faire economics and colonial military expansion, the iconic name ‘Darwin’ has taken on many guises over the course of the last century. The triumph of Darwin the man was to create the most comprehensive empirical model of the distribution and evolution of species; and indeed, modern genetics still uses his model a fundamental part of the interpretation of its data. But, while Darwin’s thought has inspired an appreciation of the mystery and beauty of nature and has undoubtedly played a crucial role in our understanding of biology and genetics, it has also contributed, directly or indirectly, to the creation of the social nihlism and malaise that are so characteristic of the 20th century––this due, perhaps in part, to the conclusion many have drawn that Darwinism exludes God and shows that man’s special status in creation is not only an illusion, but that mankind itself is inescapably bound up in the savage and bestial struggle to survive.

Clearly, Darwin himself was surrounded by an incoherent buzz of scientific and religious dogmatism and in light of this, the limpid nature of his observations should not be underestimated. What is remarkable, however, is how the observations and ideas this unassuming naturalist came to play such a profound role among the dialectical forces that drive modern history.

READING:
1. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage.
2. Charles Darwin, On Evolution