Habits, genesis and trajection: three ontological concepts

Habits, genesis and trajection: three ontological concepts

Rodrigo Cáceres

rcaceresr@fen.uchile.cl

Abstract

In this article I propose an understanding of human milieux as the development of recursive trajections which expand the domain of signs in which human subjects inhabit. From the universal datum of the environment, human beings constitute a qualitative milieu which is afterwards interpreted as a linguistic milieu. Within this linguistic milieu, specific concepts are then interpreted as other concepts which is the basis for philosophical reflection.

Anyone who has been around children for some time can notice that these little people love explanations, children deeply crave for knowing the ‘Why?’ of things, the rationale or logos behind the phenomena they encounter, even to the most mundane of details. ‘Why’ is indeed a fundamental concept for philosophy, it is the driving word that makes us wonder about the reason things are the way they are, creating a desire to imagine explanations that will hopefully satiate our thirst for understanding. In most cases with the word ‘why’ we demand for causality, we are asking that the events whose unfolding gave rise to the current situation are made explicit. Whenever we do this, we explicitly or implicitly accept that events are rational, that things happen for a reason, not in some superstitious sense but as a very concrete belief that events in the world are causally determined. 

However, it is easy to note that there are different levels of causal explanations. Take, for instance, an alcoholic who is trying to kick his habit but one night cannot control him or herself and ends up drunk and humiliated. You as an observer might ask him or her ‘Why did you do that?’ and expect at least two kinds of answers: (i) he or she might provide an account of how an intense craving arose in his bodily feeling at the same time as his internal speech expressed that it would be a good idea to drink; or (ii) he or she might provide an account of some traumatic or existential situation that leads him to be stuck in the drinking habit. As listeners of this person we would understand that these explanations differ in their degree of generality. The first explanation is an explanation of this particular event in terms of particular causes (body craving and self-indulgence) and the second is an explanation of a general event (the drinking habit) in terms of the psychological constitution of this person: his or her trauma and/or long-term internal conflict. 

C. S. Peirce was especially interested in the ontology or mode of being of habits. For him, habits could not be reduced to the sum of particular occurrences or repetitions of an event (i.e. nominalism), rather, he argued they have a mode of being that is different from particular occurrences (or seconds, in his terminology). Unlike seconds or particulars, habits are thirds or generals, they cannot be directly observed because they are generals or organizing principles that mediate particulars. If we take the example of gravity, we are unable to see gravity ‘in itself’ as an isolated thing, but rather we can only see the way in which events in the world are organized according to this gravitational law. The concept of third is one of the few of Peirce’s neologisms which can be understood in a relatively concrete way, because a third is very similar to an intermediary. For instance, just as when a moderator of a presidential debate acts as a third that enforces the legality of the debate, gravity is a third that mediates physical occurrences according to its legality. The difference is, naturally, that the debate moderator is a particular existent (a second) which can be pinpointed at a certain place or locus, while gravity cannot be pinpointed at a specific place, since it is a general law which mediates all sorts of events in the cosmos. 

Indeed, thinking in terms of thirds or general principles has meant significant advances in science. In biology, for example, H. Maturana and F. Varela (1980) elaborated the theory of autopoiesis, which is a theory of the organization of living beings as autopoietic, namely as a network of elements that in their operation produces the very network that produces it as well as its membrane. From the Greek auto (self) and poiesis (creation), this theory defines living beings as self-creating systems. From the point of view of theoretical biology, this theory meant a change in perspective because it diverges from precedent definitions of living beings in terms of specific or particular processes (like reproduction or metabolic processes). Beyond pointing at particulars (or seconds), these authors define life in terms of a third or general by referring to the organizing principle of living beings as a network whose constituting elements continually produce themselves. Just like with gravity, one cannot pinpoint autopoiesis as an isolated thing, as in the way a biologist would isolate mitochondria or a membrane cell. 

This autopoietic perspective has meant important advances in disciplines such as cognitive science and biosemiotics since the notion is closely linked to the concept of the autonomy of the living (Varela, 1979), which puts forward the idea that living beings are structurally determined systems that define the terms upon which their environment will be assimilated. In this manner, perturbations from the environment cannot be instructive or informative, because it is the very organism who specifies the domain of operational coherences in which he operates. 

Coming back to this idea of habit, these general phenomena like autopoiesis and gravity have an abstract mode of being, and in order to be noted as such one needs precisely to abstract a certain organizing pattern that is driving and ordering the operation of a certain phenomenon. In fact, if we understand habit as a third it would be reasonable to claim that living beings are governed by an autopoietic habit, a habit of continually producing themselves as distinct units. 

However, just as Peirce thought that the universe was habit-taking, habits cannot be taken for granted as given or pre-existing phenomena. According to Peirce, habits -even in their abstractness or generality- are also causally determined, they arise out of certain circumstances that make their emergence possible. This points to a deeper and genetic aspect which is more explicitly rendered in the question ‘How did that phenomenon come to be?’, implicitly carrying the view that all that is currently occurring has a genetic causality, even what has usually been placed in a transcendental dimension like the ‘self’, the ‘soul’ or ‘reason’. 

We can see the ancestor of this cosmo-genetic view already in Plato’s cosmology present in the Timaeus, where in contrast to the being in itself (ontôs on) which exists beyond time and space, we humans exist in genesis, in the domain of relative being, where the becoming of the beings of the sensible world (kosmos aisthetos) takes place. As the concept of genesis implies, this world is in the process of birth or becoming, and this can be interpreted in the sense that nothing from this world can be taken as pre-existing or given. It is a continually unfolding process gaining in complexity.

More recently, with the arise of Darwin’s theory of evolution, this cosmo-genetic view has taken a new great leap in legitimacy as an alternative to creationist theories, which took phenomena as given or as an endowment from a transcendental God, a view which permeated scientific inquiry in understandings like the fixity of living species. Building on this Darwinist view, Tomasello (2018) for instance, has provided an evolutionary explanation for the complexity of human thought, drifting apart from its origins in primate modes of thought and, at the same time, laying the foundations for the emergence of conventions and cultural diversity and complexity. 

It is important to stress the difference between both points of view at stake. The traditional view of seeing certain phenomena as given or as endowments is referred to by Maturana (1988) as the ‘explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis’, a view where “the observer operates with the implicit assumption of objectivity, he or she operationally accepts his or her properties as observer as constitutively given, and denies for him- or herself any effective subsequent reflection upon their origin”. In this manner, in this explanatory path “reason appears as a constitutive property of the observer, that is, as a cognitive feature of his or her conscious mind through which he or she can know universals and a priori principles, and which, since it is accepted as given, can be described but not analyzed”. 

A previous moment where Maturana contests this idea of taking cognitive abilities for granted is in his essay on intelligence (Maturana & Guilloff, 1980), where he criticizes the traditional framing of intelligence as an ‘attribute’, ‘faculty’ or ‘property’ of the human mind and proposes an alternative definition of intelligence as the organism’s establishment of domains of structural coupling with its milieu as well as with other organisms. From a philosophical point of view, he is implicitly claiming that the traditional substance-attribute theory is inadequate to explain what intelligence is. His perspective turns out to be the genetic approach that I am trying to point out, as is made evident when the authors claim that: “the question ‘What is intelligence?’ should be transformed in the following question ‘How is intelligent behavior generated?’”.

A logic of cosmo-genesis

On the recent attempts for unification or integration of phenomena at different levels of complexity (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, cultural, ecological), the French mesologist Augustin Berque has provided a logical framework which goes beyond Aristotelian logic, the latter being based on the principles of excluded middle and non-contradiction. Differing from a logic of identity based on the logic word ‘is’, Berque proposes a logic of trajection based on the logic word ‘as’ (en tant que, in French) (Berque, 2019). 

According to Berque, mesology is founded on a recent ontological distinction that dates back to the 19th century, a distinction made by naturalist Jakob von Uexküll between the universal datum or environment (Umgebung) and the ambient world or milieu (Umwelt), the first being the objective world of physics and chemistry and the latter the phenomenological world where subjects live. As Varela (1999) argues, the living organism’s task is to provide a ‘surplus of signification’, to create meaning or to signify this universal datum according to its autonomous perspective, creating thus a meaningful world or Umwelt. Phenomenological reality is thus neither objective (subjects do not interact with an external objective world) neither purely subjective (where subjects create a world ex nihilo) but rather trajective, reality is the Umgebung as an Umwelt. Therefore, there is a base or foundation which is signified in novel and creative ways by different living beings. This trajective logic is represented by the formula S/P that is read ‘subject as predicate’, i.e. neither the subject in itself nor the predicate in itself but precisely the subject in terms of the predicate.

At the minimal level, this means for example that the environment takes a new valence that is informed by the teleology of the organism. For bacteria, for instance, glucose is never glucose in itself but rather appears in the terms of glucose as food, where the affect that leads the bacteria to swim up a glucose gradient is dependent on its structure, where glucose is taken as an energy source.

But at a higher level in complexity this new valence of the environment entails the configuration of the ontology of qualia: the mode of being of images, sensations, sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, as well as the qualities configured by other living beings who can perceive magnetic fields or navigate through echolocation. This is the constitution of what Pharoah (2018) calls a ‘qualitative milieu’, it is the physical datum interpreted as quality. For instance, an electromagnetic wave of λ = 700 nm is a universal physical datum which in our species is perceived (interpreted) as red. However, in the species Bos taurus (the cow), this same wavelength is not perceived as a color, being outside the range of their visible spectrum.

Closer to human history and the human emergence, we see the appearance of words, which are distinctions of aspects of (qualitative) experience through conventional sounds or sign systems like written or pictorial alphabets. This text and academic texts in general take place in this conventional and symbolic domain. The word ‘red’ for example, arises in order to distinguish the distinctive quality of the red color or -as certain philosophers like to call it- the ‘redness’ of red. Naturally, the word is not the quality, since it merely stands for the quality. 

What this means is that the already interpreted qualitative milieu of the human species (of images, sounds, sensations, smells, etc.) is taken as ground to make distinctions among aspects of it. In mesological terms, this is called a hypostasis of an insubstantial predicate. This insubstantial character of a milieu by no means should be interpreted in that it is not real or unworthy of consideration. Instead, one should interpret it from its original Latin meaning ‘substare’, from ‘sub’ (under) and stare (to stand), literally that which stands under. In other words, in this chain of predications or interpretations, the common ground from which all umwelt/milieu stands above is the universal and meaning-less umgebung. All the different milieux in their peculiar interpretive configurations stand above this universal common ground. However, we see that even within a certain milieu, the human qualitative milieu, new signs -words- can emerge which reflect upon aspects of this very milieu. These new signs which arise in order to refer to the milieu out of which they arise actually expand that very milieu, and thus human beings are now confronted with a new milieu of words as well as the phenomena that words make possible: rules, orders, descriptions, questions, agreements, institutions, etc.

In summary, what we get so far is in this historical chain of predications of the human milieu is: Umgebung as qualitative milieu, then qualitative milieu as linguistic milieu. In formal notation, this is (S/P)/P’. This means that at this point human subjects operate on a double layered milieu including the qualitative milieu as well as the linguistic milieu.

We understand that a relatively trivial word such as ‘red’ has little philosophical significance, however there are certain words which have been paramount for human history and philosophy, such as ‘truth’, ‘mind’, ‘knowledge’, ‘causation’, ‘reason’, among others.

One of the things we find analyzing common language and philosophical language is that we pervasively understand certain concepts in terms of other concepts. For example, when we say things like ‘I ran out of time’, ‘you’re wasting my time’, ‘I saved some minutes’, ‘She spent some time with her father’, and so on, what we are doing is understanding time as a resource. This is known in academia as conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999). From the Greek metaphero which means to carry over or transfer, conceptual metaphors are not metaphoric in the usual poetic or stylistic sense but rather they function as semantic transfers. In other words, they take meaning from one concept in order to understand another (usually more abstract) concept. Another common example of conceptual metaphor is when we say things like ‘the prices plummeted’, ‘my energy is higher than ever’, examples from which we abstract the metaphor ‘More as up/less as down’ or more generally the metaphor ‘quantity as verticality’.

At this level we continue to see this trajective logic that operated at the earlier levels we previously examined. For instance, when we take the metaphor ‘time as a resource’, we can understand that the metaphor is not the subject alone (time) neither its predicate alone (resource), but precisely the subject in terms of the predicate (S/P). Indeed, Berque notes the fundamental homology between trajection and metaphor when he affirms that “In principle, trajection is analogous to a metaphor: it carries S toward P, substance (S) beyond itself, toward the perception we have of it, i.e., the interpretation (P) makes of it” (Berque 2013, p.67).

From the seminal works in conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999) one of the main findings obtained is that “abstract concepts are largely metaphorical”. Since philosophy’s activity concerns the conceptual elaboration of abstract concepts, then philosophy has to be reliant on conceptual metaphors. This is indeed what is found in the approach called ‘the cognitive science of philosophy’ which employs empirical findings from cognitive sciences (such as conceptual metaphor theory, prototype theory, image-schema theory) in order to understand how philosophers reason and why they reason in the specific ways they do, often relying heavily on the use of multiple conceptual metaphors which are composed or blended in novel and creative ways. Let me examine some examples to see how this might be the case. 

Mind as container

In the case of the concept of ‘mind’, in common language we say things like ‘I can’t get this out of my mind”, “You should bear that in mind”, “Are you out of your mind?”. From these common usages we can abstract the metaphor ‘mind as container’ in which the mind (S) is understood as a container (P): a bounded, isolated, independent object with an inside/outside orientation, an internal/external separation and an input/output dynamic. This metaphor carries an ontology with it, since from it we understand that there is an inner world ‘inside one’s mind’ and an outside world ‘external to one’s mind’. The rationalism/empiricism debate in epistemology is due to the ontology of this metaphor, since the issue in this debate concerns how do we gain knowledge and form ideas ‘in the mind’ from perceiving things from the ‘external world’. Their disagreement concerned the origin of these ideas: experience or reason. From the point of view of mesology, this reason/experience opposition is a false dichotomy, firstly because we reason with words, and words arise as distinctions of aspects of experience, so there is a continuity between experience and language, these domains are not estranged from one another. And secondly, because a subject’s world is his or her own world, not an external, objective world that is alien to him or her. It is the structure of his or her organism which configures a milieu/umwelt as a creative interpretation on the basis of the universal datum of the umgebung.

Mind as society

Another relevant philosophical metaphor of the mind is ‘mind as society’, a classical metaphor in which the mind is understood as a group or community of faculties which are understood as autonomous and independent from each other: will, memory, imagination, reason, understanding, feeling and perception (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Each of these faculties perform nonoverlapping and distinct tasks. Philosophers like Plato, Augustin, Descartes and Kant have all used this metaphor in order to portray a conflict between reason and bodily feeling for the control over will. Reason and feeling are portrayed as antagonistic forces which fight in order to take a hold on will. Indeed, the ontology of the ‘mind as society’ metaphor which depicts faculties as thoroughly independent makes it possible to imagine metaphorical ‘fights’ or ‘conflicts’ between these faculties. In the philosophical tradition, this has come down to us through the writers that Nietzsche calls the ‘despisers of the body’. 

“A source of countless distractions by reason of the mere requirement of food,” says Plato; “liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the pursuit of truth; it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in very truth, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all” (Phaedo). For Augustin, “The enemy [“the madness of lust”] held my will in his power and from it he made a chain and shackled me”. For Kant, a moral person must “stamp out the tendency which arises from sensuous motive” and “discipline himself morally” (cited in Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 427)

The way the ‘mind as society’ metaphor -specifically this ‘reason’ vs. ‘bodily feeling’ antagonism- has been contested in neuroscience is through the work of Antonio Damasio (1999) whose main finding is that in the brain there is no “pure reason” module which can be dissociated from feeling and emotion. Instead, reason requires emotion because a person without emotion literally cannot know what to want (Lakoff 2016). In the same vein, Maturana (2006) argues that all rational systems are founded on non-rational bases, and these non-rational bases are personal preferences. In other words, a rational system will always imply a preference from his or her author, but this preference takes place at the level of feeling. In other words, an author commits to a certain rational system because he likes that rational system for some reason (consistency, scope, explanatory power, formality, etc.). A third argument against this reason/emotion separation and antagonism is that the concepts of ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ are general categories which encompass a vast amount of specific emotions and affects. The point is that some of these emotions are fundamental for scientific and philosophical inquiry, such as curiosity, wonder, fascination, uncertainty, certainty, doubt and even obsession. A ‘desire to know’ is not possible in the absence of these emotions.

What are the implications of this kind of analysis? First, it shows us how the logic of trajection is still operating even at this philosophical level. Retracing our steps, from the very beginning of this recursive process we start with a universal environment (umgebung) which is interpreted as a qualitative milieu, then this qualitative milieu is interpreted in terms of words, which creates a linguistic milieu. Then the philosophical gesture is to examine specific words of this linguistic milieu and interpret them in terms of other words and concepts (such as the mind as society and mind as container). At this level, philosophers tend to take literally the ontology of these metaphors and create moral precepts that arise from these metaphors, such as to disdain and repress one’s bodily feelings in order to stay rational. 

The extent to which this trajective logic unifies the common logic of the increasing complexity of living beings and their worlds up to our human cultural and linguistic milieu is for the reader to judge. The contribution is to offer a simple logical device, a logic of ‘as’ or ‘en tant que’, in order to establish a deep continuity between different levels of phenomena, from the qualitative to the philosophical. 

We are now in a position to contrast this logic of ‘as’ against Aristotelian logic. Aristotle’s logical framework concerns the evaluation of declarative statements which make use of the verb ‘to be’ as in ‘Socrates is mortal’, declarations that can only be true or false, not both true and false (biaffirmation) nor neither true nor false (binegation). If we examine within this framework the status of a trajective phenomenon like the metaphor ‘time as a resource’, we would have to reframe it as ‘time is a resource’ which could be either true or false. However, we would not be able to say it is absolutely true because anthropological evidence reveals that the ‘time as resource’ metaphor does not exist in other cultures (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). At the same time, we would not be in a position to say it is absolutely false because in western culture understanding time as a resource has a massive presence and efficacy. We get then to a binegation: the statement is neither true nor false, which is not allowed within Aristotelian logic. The issue arises precisely because in Aristotelian logic we have to frame a metaphor -which is structured through the word ‘as’- in terms of the word ‘is’, which leads us to think in absolute terms. Indeed, if we understand the metaphor through the trajector ‘as’, we see that the metaphor is a composition or copula between both elements articulated by the metaphor. Furthermore, it need not be absolute since trajections always occur within a certain milieu, and in this case, the ‘time as resource’ metaphor occurs within the milieu of western culture, but not in the milieux of other cultures different from the western. 

References

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