VOLUME I THE PRIMOGENITAL MATRIX OF LIFE AND ITS CONTEXT

THE ORIGINS OF LIFE

VOLUME I

THE PRIMOGENITAL MATRIX OF LIFE AND ITS CONTEXT

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA

THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME LXVI

Editor-in-Chief:

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

Belmont, Massachusetts

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

THE ORIGINS OF LIFE THE PRIMOGENITAL MATRIX OF

LIFE AND ITS CONTEXT

Edited by

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

A-T. Tymieniecka, President

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The origins oflife / edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. p. cm. -- (Analecta Husserliana ; v. 66)

Includes the work ofthe 2nd International Congress. held al Ihe Politechnical University ofGdansk, Poland.

Inc1udes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Book 1. The primogenital matrix of life and its context. ISBN 978-90-481-5430-2 ISBN 978-94-017-3415-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3415-8 1. Life--Congresses. 2. Phenomenology--Congresses. I. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. Il.

Series.

B3279.H94 AI29 voI. 66 [(80431]] 142'.7--dc21

ISBN 978-90-481-5430-2

Printed on acid-Iree paper.

AII Righls Reserved

© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2000 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice

00-028393

may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical. including photocopying, recording or by any information

storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ~ THE THEME / The Origins of Life: The Primogenital Region

of Sense xi

INAUGURAL STUDY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / Origins of Life and the New Critique of Reason: The Primogenital Generative Matrix 3

OVERTURE

THE TREE OF LIFE IN AESTHETIC INSPIRATION

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL / Leonardo's Sala delle Asse and Sullivan's Organic Architecture 19

NANCY GOLDFARB I Creative Timber: Poets and Trees 35 SUZANNA B. SIMOR / The Tree of the Credo: Symbolism of

the Tree in Medieval Images of the Christian Creed 45

SECTION I THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN LIFE SCIENCES

AND PHILOSOPHY

VIJA Y SHANKAR RAI / The Origin of Life: Individuation and Evolutionism 57

BOGDAN OGRODNIK / On the Metaphysical Foundations of Life 73

A. J. ANTONITES / Creative Emergence and Complexity Theory 83 SPAS SPASSOV / Contemporary Life Sciences and the Scientific

Worldview 97 PIOTR LENARTOWICZ, S. 1. and JOLANTA KOSZTEYN / On

Some Problems Concerning Observation of Biological Systems 107

v

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

RINALDS ZEMBAHS I Life-Space and Life-World: Merleau-Ponty on Situations 121

SECTION II

PRIMAL ORIGIN, INDIVIDUATION, INTERPLAY

BENGT TJELLANDER I The Construction of the Concept "The Omnividual" 131

GRZEGORZ GRAFF and KAROL DZIEDZIUL I The Mathe-matical Horizon of the Future 157

HENRYK SZABAt.A I The Individualism of Twentieth-Century Phenomenology and Existentialism 165

Wt.ODZIMIERZ PA WLISZYN I Is Phenomenology as a Science Possible? Reading Heidegger's Viewpoint 177

JAROMIR BREJDAK I Self-Interpretation of Time as a Rule of Individuation in Scheler's, Dilthey's and Heidegger's Concepts of Man 187

SECTION III THE TRANSITIONS OF SENSE:

BODY, ORGANISM, CONSCIOUS LIFE

CARLA CANULLO I The Body and the Self-Identification of Conscious Life: The Science of Man between Physiology and Psychology in Maine de Biran 203

W. KIM ROGERS I The Reciprocity of Human Organism and Circumstance: An Ecological Approach to Understanding the Actions and Experiences of a Human Organism in Its Environment 225

EVA SYRISTOV A I Die Sprache des Traumes und der Traum der Sprache: Beitrag zur Phiinomenologie der Triiume in den kritischen Lebenssituationen 241

BRUNO CALLIERI I The Connection between Phenomeno-logical Culture and the Clinical Practice of Psychiatry 253

E. v. ALTEKAR I The Dyadics of Complementarity: Towards a New Vision of Reality 261

DANIELA VERDUCCI I Giving Form to Life: Processes oj Functionalization and of Work in Max Scheler 287

S. v. KOMAROV I The Consciousness-Corporeality Problem 297

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii

JARI KAUPPINEN / Death as a Limit of Phenomenology: The Notion of Death from Husserl to Derrida 323

JERZY GRZESZCZUK / A Possible Reason for the 'Fatal Vision' of the Famous American Surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald 349

ALEXANDER KUZMIN / Reflexion and the Universal Structures of Consciousness 357

APPENDIX / Program of the Gdansk Congress 367

INDEX OF NAMES 377

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with great pleasure that I present this volume, which includes the work of our second International Congress of Phenomenology/Philosophy and the Sciences of Life that was held in my native land of Poland (at the Poly technical University of Gdansk). We thank those at the Poly technical University for their collaboration, support and generous hospitality. In particular, Professor Dr. Alexander Kodziejczyk, President of the University, and the Dean, Professor Dr. Piotr Dominiak who presided over the Organization Committee, which was composed of members of the Department of Administration and Economics. Professors Adam Pawlak, Dr. Franciszek Blawat, and Boleslaw Garbacik among them, deserve our warmest thanks for their interest in and support of this important venture. We particularly appreciate the support of Dr. Mieczyslaw Migon, Secretary General of the Organization Committee, and Professor Dr. Adam Pawlak, for their tireless attention to logistical problems and their contribution to the expense of preparing this publi­cation. To them we owe the marvelous success of the congress, the echo of which will continue to resound in the world.

First of all, however, our thanks and appreciation go to our old and new philosophical collaborators who came from all around the world to contribute their innovative ideas to the common pool of this pioneering work.

Isabelle Houthakker and Robert S. Wise, as usual, merit our recog­nition and gratitude for their expert editing and proofreading of the papers. My assistants, Jeffrey T. Hurlburt and Louis T. Houthakker, were of significant help in preparing this volume for publication.

Last but not least, the generosity of the NATA, a Polish company that produces soft drinks, and that gracefully supplied us with refresh­ments throughout the conference, cannot be forgotten!

A-T.T.

ix

A group of participants in our 2nd International Congress of PhenomenologylPhilosophy of Life and the Science of Life (the 46th International Congress of WPI) 1997, in Gdansk, Poland. In the front row: with Mieczyslaw Migon at the center, Marlies Kronegger at left, A-T. Tymieniecka at right, Daniela Verducci . .. second row: Christine Christine Berthold, Francesco Totaro, Walter Lammi, Robert Sweeney, . . . In the back: Edyta

Supinska Polit, Alberto Carillo Cana, Adam Pawlak, among others.

THE THEME

THE ORIGINS OF LIFE

The Primogenital Region of Sense

We propose in this volume to approach life through an investigation of its origins. To understand life is to reach the network of rationalities that orient and sustain the play of its forces within the constructive design that they project. This means that we have to disentangle the knots of the innumerable meanings that constitute the networks of its manifes­tations and those of its functional operations, stations from whence significance is transmitted or novel sources of meaningfulness emerge. Then, along the lines of their indications, we have to seek the very mean­ingfulness of the "sense of life" through which they are infused. In short, the project of understanding life is convertible to a full critique of reason. Yet, even the most preliminary, naive perusal reveals not one but several original senses of life per se. How can we approach such a gigantic project of investigating life in its innermost workings when it spreads in a vast dynamic, ever-moving expanse, with all its proceed­ings, connections, effects, etc. mixing for the eye of the perceiver a vast and colorful canvas on which there is no obvious point of conver­gence to suggest a point at which the investigation could commence?

In our present period of thought, human beings having become aware of the historicity of their own beingness together with the mobile change­ability of their life-world, we witness on all sides the turn to the "origins" as the point of departure from which to pursue understanding. While some philosophers disclaim the very validity of the question of origin, Leibniz claims that to understand anything we have to seek its origins, or at least the way of origination.

Accordingly, in our present phase of inquiry into life, we will adopt the Leibnizean dictum, which I have already revived in my book, Leibniz' Cosmological Synthesis.! This dictum is the very point of departure for our investigation of life. That is, we propose that, to understand life in its ungraspable variety, it must be approached from the point of view of its origin and pursued along the evolutive route of its unfolding.

This means that our ambition is not to grasp "what life is"; rather, it will be sufficient for the present purpose if we excavate some main rationalities that preside over its primogenital origination and bring to

xi

xii THE THEME

light further regions of sense as they carry the evolutive course of life onward.

Focusing now on the content of the present volume, we must clarify at the outset that the questioning of the origins of life in its organic/vital phase is also a focal point of interest of modern biolog­ical science. Philosophical inquiry into life goes hand-in-hand with scientific investigation; we find significant connections between them. According to the program of phenomenology/philosophy of life - integral and scientific - we pursue our investigation in a dialogue with the sciences of life.

As a point of fact, let us state that in both biological sciences and in the phenomenology/philosophy of life (as it explores the primogenital bio-vital phase of the origination of life) an axis of investigation comes to the fore: self-individuation of life as accounting for the formation of the living beingness, on the one hand, and the evolution of types of life, on the other.

However, in our pursuit of the origins of life we give to life its uniquely own characteristic: the enactment. It is along the lines of life's enactment that we find the rationalities constituting it in their concrete dynamic course. There is also a further characteristic of the life-enact­ment being proposed here: the various spheres of sense in the main trait of life which is "sharing". No individual emerges spontaneously alone; there is always a cluster of individuals, entities that share the common lot at their emergence as well as at their unfolding.

The various senses that the sharing-in-life acquires in the evolutive progress of forms of life touches the very nerve of life's rationalities.

Present-day scientific attempts to understand life are to honor two pos­tulates. First, one must avoid unwarranted reductionism of one sphere of life (e.g. biological/vital) to another (intentional, cultural). Second, one must avoid the problem of infinite regress. This dictum raises for us the following question: how, in probing ever further into the biolog­ical origins of life, may we find a definitive point of departure?

In our approach, we attend to the first of the two postulates by paying attention to the four major spheres of rationalities of the sharing-in life which, in turn, give birth to spheres of life that are autonomous and inven­tive from within their routes.

The second postulate is satisfied by our conception of the genera­tive model, or of the pattern of origin that I elaborated in discussions about scientific research. Philosophy/ontopoiesis of life comes to the fore

THE THEME xiii

here, offering an axis for such a model. This axis is an onto-poietic design that constitutes the backbone of and direction for the originary, constructive progress of life. We may circumscribe the pattern of the primogenital, that is, bio-vital, origination of the sense of life with reference not only to its constructive role, but also to its role as conductor of the transitions of the sense of life in its evolutive advance. Thus, life's various phases/spheres of sense - of modes to share-in-life - orig­inate from the primogenital attunements and common modalities of participation in the circumambient condition until the occurrence of intelligible, intentional communication among conscious human beings in the societal sharing-in-life. In this volume we focus on the primogenital origination of life, which stands out from non-life and yet does not subsume but merely offers the groundwork for the forthcoming spheres of sense to which we just make here a "transitory" place, reserving their full treatment for the second volume.

Pursuing the unfolding of novel circuits of functions that lead to novel emergences of senses, or novel origins of senses of life, we pursue an essential route of the logos of life in its unfolding. This is a most significant task for the critique of reason, which I have elaborated elsewhere.2

In fact, the originations of life as it passes through several phases substantiate the new critique of reason through a significant clarifica­tion of the structure of reality: vegetal, animal, and human.

Hence the composition of our first volume dealing with the subject of the primogenital origination of life in its organic/vital significance. Towards the end of the volume, we will move toward intermediary zones of emerging significance, which will lead us to the second volume. That volume will be devoted to the issues concerning the three further originations of life: the animal sharing-in-life; the emergence of full intentional consciousness constituting the human reality of life, which is a surging, autonomous sphere of the societal sharing-in-life; and the origination of the creative work of the human being, exemplary in its originality and uniqueness, which carries the weight of the entire human significance of life in its incessant progress and transformation.

We give this quick outline of our two-volume collection here, in the first volume, to pinpoint the striking novelty of our approach to the origins of life. This approach via the critique of reason reveals the well­founded character of our view of the pluri-significant nature of life through its four autonomously originated spheres of significance.

xiv THE THEME

Thus, our approach is not vulnerable to criticism about the reduc­tion of life to one biological sphere. There are not one but several phases of the origins of life that, although founded in each other, stand out in their autonomy of meaning and their unique roles, as our inquiry shows. In fact, the reducing of one to the others reflects merely an unwar­ranted, naive prejudice.

Interest in life is quintessential to the human mind and heart. It runs through all the spheres of life, beginning with pragmatic concerns and reaching up to the contemplation of beauty.

It is, then, appropriate that we begin our inquiry with the aesthetic/ artistic symbol that comprises it: the tree of life.

NOTES

I Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Leibniz' Cosmological Synthesis (Holland: Royal van Gorcum, 1963). 2 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXIV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).

The inaugural session of the Congress: Dr. Kotodziejczyk, president of the Poly technical University, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Dean Piotr Dominiak speaking, Franciszek Blawat.