Insides and Outsides: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Animate Nature

431 Pages·2016·14.264 MB·English

by  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Contents
Prologue iii
Chapter Abstracts and Acknowledgments of
Original Publication xxxii
Chapter I Kinesthetic Experience:
Understanding Movement Inside and Out 1
Chapter II Animation: Analyses, Elaborations,
and Implications 28
Chapter III On the Origin, Nature, and Genesis
of Habit 65
Chapter IV Getting to the Heart of Emotions
and Consciousness 92
Chapter V Schizophrenia and “the Comet’s Tale
of Nature”: A Case Study in Phenomenology
and Human Psychopathology 112
Chapter VI The Descent of Man, Human
Nature, and the Nature/Culture Divide 147
Chapter VII On the Hazards of Being a
Stranger to Oneself 174
Chapter VIII On the Elusive Nature of the
Human Self: Divining the Ontological
Dynamics of Animate Being 197
Chapter IX The Body as Cultural Object/The
Body as Pan-Cultural Universal 224
Chapter X Descriptive Foundations 260
Chapter XI The Enemy: A Twenty-First-
Century Archetypal Study 280
Chapter XII Strangers, Trust, and Religion: On
the Vulnerability of Being Alive 309
Chapter XIII Movement: Our Common
Heritage and Mother Tongue 343
Chapter XIV Globalization and the Other:
Lifeworld(s) on the Brink 360
Also available 385
Insides and Outsides
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
on Animate Nature
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
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Prologue
[T]here belongs within my psychic being the whole
constitution of the world existing for me and… the
differentiation of that constitution into the systems that
constitute what is included in my peculiar ownness and
the systems that constitute what is other… If perchance
it could be shown that everything constituted as part of
my peculiar ownness… belonged to the concrete essence
of the constituting subject as an inseparable internal
determination, then, in the Ego’s self-explication, his
peculiarly own world would be found as “inside” and,
on the other hand, when running through that world
straightforwardly, the Ego would find himself as a member
among its “externalities” and would distinguish between
himself and “the external world ”
—Husserl (1973, pp 98–9)
How might ideas, processes, and things that seem entirely
different and separate actually be reconciled as inextricable
complementary aspects of complementary pairs… To see
how, first appreciate that very little in life, even at the most
elementary molecular level, happens unless two or more
individual things come together… But things don’t just
come together, do they? They must also be able to move
apart again This is the complementary nature at perhaps
its most basic
—Kelso and Engstrøm (2006, p 85)
This Prologue sets the stage for the chapters that follow It situates
the chapters in the most basic aspects of insides and outsides,
aspects having to do with both our subject–world relationship and
our personal relationship with others as those relationships are
present from the beginning It identifies these most basic aspects
of inside and outside in terms of Husserl’s phenomenology of
the “Ego,” the “I” who is the subject of any and all subject–world
relationships, including relationships with other animate beings,
and of Kelso and Engstrøm’s complementarity thesis that shows
how, rather than being polar opposites, inside and outside are
complementary The chapters that follow are from this perspective
widely varying and highly detailed interdisciplinary elaborations
of the real-life, real-time aspects of inside and outside set forth in
the Prologue
I: Husserl’s Abstractive Epoché and Kelso and
Engstrøm’s “Complementary Nature”
In the first epigraph above, Husserl is describing what is present in
the “abstractive epoché” by which he distinguishes what is “I” from
“Other ” This distinguished “I” is not a matter of “I ‘alone’ remain”
(Husserl 1973, p 93), but a matter of “I” in relation to all that is
alien What Husserl finds in this methodologically abstracted “I”
is an “animate organism” that is “uniquely singled out,” that “is not
just a body but precisely an animate organism: the sole Object… to
which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe fields of sensation…
the only Object ‘in’ which I ‘rule and govern’ immediately” (ibid , p
97) Husserl goes on to specify three further dimensions of this
“sole Object” that is an animate organism, namely, doings and “I
cans” and thus the ability, by way of “the kinesthesias,” to “‘act’
somatically”; a reflexive relationship between organs of sense and
objects of sense, as in one hand touching the other; and “psycho-
physical unity” (ibid ) In his further methodological abstraction,
Husserl proceeds to a descriptive analysis of “externalities,” of what
is in fact alien and hence Other In this analysis there is recognition
of both subject–world relationships and corporeal–intercorporeal
relationships In effect, Husserl is essentially distinguishing
between insides and outsides
It is important to realize that though Husserl specifies the realm
of the abstractive epoché as “the sphere of ownness,” and speaks
over and over of “ownness,” of “my” and “mine” (ibid , pp 92
ff ), he is not claiming ownership of “my animate organism” as a
possession He is delineating basic I/Other ontological distinctions,
elucidating to begin with essential features of the “I,” and on that
basis and in turn, concerning himself with how that “I” “wholly
transcends his own being” (ibid , p 105) in the constitution of the
world “Ownness” is thus indeed not a matter of possession; it is a
matter of ontology, what one might designate a primordial ontology
(see ibid , pp 103–06), and of an epistemology on the basis of that
ontology In light of this terminological-semantic clarification, the
following comparison can in fact be made
Just as Husserl describes the Body as the “zero point” of
orientation with respect to all appearances in the world (1989, p
166)—to the nearness or farness of things, to their being above or
below, to the right or left, and so on—and thus describes subject–
world relationships, so the “sphere of ownness”—fields of sensation,
“I govern,” “I can,” and so on—describes the zero point of the
subject tout court, the zero point of purely “personal” happenings,
abilities, and relationships (Husserl 1973, p 97) The zero point of
the subject tout court is indeed the “uniquely singled out” animate
organism within the abstractive epoché, the Body that, as Husserl
states with respect to the zero point of orientation, is “always
here” (Husserl 1989, p 166) Thus, precisely as with the zero point
of orientation, what is specified in the zero point of the subject
tout court is a hereness, an “ultimate central here” of the subject
in relation to any “there,” a hereness that is “not just a body but
precisely an animate organism: the sole Object within my abstract
world-stratum to which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe
fields of sensation…” (ibid ) In short, whatever the happenings,
abilities, and relationships, they are ontological dimensions of
the “uniquely singled out” animate organism that constitute the
experiential ground on which the Objective world is constituted
and thus the ground of a veridical epistemology Hence clearly,
Husserl’s use of the term “ownership,” “my,” and “mine” is properly
understood not in the vernacular or colloquial sense of possession,
but in the sense of the subject tout court, the subject divorced as
it were from the world, from all that is alien Being a question of
the subject tout court, and in turn, of the subject in relation to
the world, it is a question of how, as animate organisms, we are
individually gifted with sense modalities and capacities, and how
on the basis of these modalities and capacities we progressively
make sense of “externalities”: the Objective world, both the world
of things and the world of other animate beings
In The Complementary Nature, Kelso and Engstrøm cite
researchers from many different fields of study, all of whom in
one way and another view their own research and findings as
encompassing complementarities rather than contraries—“both/
and” rather than “either/or ” Kelso and Engstrøm quote William
James, for example, who describes the stream of consciousness
in terms of a bird’s “perchings and flight” (Kelso and Engstrøm
2006, pp 175–6) They quote Isaac Newton’s description of
nature as “generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids,
fixed things out of volatile and volatile out of fixed, subtle out of
gross and gross out of subtle, some things to ascend and make
terrestrial juices, Rivers and Atmosphere; and consequence others
to descend …” (ibid , p 72) They quote Niels Bohr whose coat
of arms reads “Contraries are complementary” and who wrote
with respect to the dual wave and particle nature of light, “The
quantum postulate forces us to adopt a new mode of description
designated as complementary” (ibid , p 62) Kelso and Engstrøm
point out that “In the last few hundred years … the complementary
nature has become increasingly important to human beings, as
they have developed more and more sophisticated methods to
study and manipulate nature in order to understand it” (ibid ,
p 252) They give as examples James Maxwell’s discovery of the
“inextricable complementarity” of electricity and magnetism in
the phenomenon of electromagnetism and Einstein’s astrophysical
discoveries showing that time and space are “inextricably
connected as complementary aspects” (ibid )
Kelso and Engstrøm introduce a semantically rich diacritical
mark to designate this inextricable complementarity They term
this mark “~” a “squiggle” or tilde (ibid , p xiv), a mark placed
between two words and indicating a “complementary pair”
(ibid , p 7) The mark will be used at times in the Prologue text
that follows Kelso and Engstrøm give as an example “body” and
“mind,” which are “complementary aspects of the complementary
pair “body~mind ” They pointedly explain, “We use the tilde ~
not to concatenate words or as an iconic bridge between polarized
aspects, but to signify that we are discussing complementary
pairs Equally if not more important, the tilde symbolizes the
dynamic nature of complementary pairs” (ibid ) As they later
state, “complementary pairs move” (ibid , p 8), and as they later
quote Sheets-Johnstone, “In coordination dynamics, the real-life
coordination of neurons in the brain and the real-life coordinated
actions of animals are cut, fundamentally, from the same dynamic
cloth Integrity is in turn preserved because it is never threatened
Psychophysical unity is undergirded at all levels by coordination
dynamics” (ibid , p 9)
What Kelso and Engstrøm are at pains to describe in their classic
study and reformulation of classic polarizations is precisely how
“[p]olarized aspects of a complementary pair appear as modes of
a dynamical system that is capable of moving between boundaries
even as it includes them” (ibid ) They later specify examples of
how coordination dynamics informs complementary pairs One of
these examples concerns “togetherness~ apartness”: “Tendencies
for togetherness coexist with tendencies of apartness This is likely
an inherent property of all complex organizations For example,
successful groups are loosely bound both by a commitment to a
common goal and by the diverse needs and capabilities of their
members This is the essence of metastable coordination dynamics”
(ibid , p 225) One could easily extend the metastable dynamics