On the Poët-Sigillat, between the Alps and the Mediterranean, in the Southern Pré-Alpes where mules pathways cross the geological overlapping waves of the Barremo-Bedoulian, the Hauterivian and the Oxfordian, regions haunted by the two hundred million years of the Ammonites of the Secondary, sitting by the typewriter upstairs, next to the window from where we gaze out in summer nights beyond the Mont Ventoux, somewhere between the Scorpio and the Sagittarius, towards the centre of our Galaxy with its black hole. A bit higher up to the left, we see the Andromeda Nebula, which will one day crush into ours, and that shines under the scrutiny of painter Micheline Lo. The bed is placed in such a way that one lies down in the axis of the Galaxy. Hubert Reeves walked under this window when he visited the amazing centripetal mozarab arches of the choir
of the 11th century church of Sainte-Jalle, which stands some way below. This anthropogenist physicist enjoyed comparing the stars, measuring their age in billion years in the miraculously clear sky of the Haute Provence Observatory, with the humble millenaries of our human constructions. This region, which comprises the Faille de Condorcet and the Fosse des Voconces, is told by its cartographers an open book of geology.
In view of some elementarities
characteristic to every living, and of a few fundamental coherences and
incoherencies typical to Homo, the Anthropogeny
is so systematic – or at least systemic – that he who delves in it
has little opportunity to look at it from the outside interrupting his reading
to question its limitations and openings. Let us do this for a moment, being only
indicative, else being forced to go through the entire system once again. And letting
the reader the freedom to explore this path as he pleases.
Post-scriptum must be
understood in its strictest sense, i.e. something that is written afterwards and
that is not part of the same text. And hence does not engage it.
1
THE ANTHROPOGENY AS A DISCIPLINE
When Stephen Jay Gould
positions himself in comparison to Darwin, he uses the word 'discipline'
throughout the two thousand pages of 2002 's Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which was translated into
French in 2006 under the title of Structure
de la Théorie de l'Evolution and where, in his race against a forecast
death, he attempts a last inventory of his intention. Indeed, Darwinian
Evolutionism is not a science like biology, nor is it a specialisation,
like neurology or gastro-enterology. There is something philosophical about it,
insofar as it goes to the core of the ultimate questions of the what-how-why in
one area specifically, that of the Living.
However, Evolutionism is
certainly a discipline, meaning a certain way of looking at things, of
envisaging, of going into what is encountered, both in floating attention and
in the outline of a system. When it delves with the Living, it is above all a
way of noting not simple analogies,
but homologies. Hence, with the
Horse, it means not considering what goes from the knee to the ground as a
forearm, but as a finger whose nail is the hoof, just as Cuvier had done when
he founded compared anatomy. Still,
Darwin must probably be even more careful than Cuvier. For his evolutionism,
homologies themselves need to be considered not as stable models (in the manner
of Aristotle for whom species were eternal) but as the metastable moments of a
biological, technical, semiotical becoming that responds to two main
requirements. (a) That, for the Living, there should be unceasing, multiple variations
in action, in power, or in reserve. (b) That these variations should
constantly be subject to selections, either through external
factors – like the drift of continents, climates and resources – or
through internal factors – such as the anatomical and physiological compatibilities
of organs and groups. Therefore, Darwin studied the sexual selection of men and
women as being the most palpable for determining the species.
Since 1980, Eldredge and Gould
have specified that these variations and compatibilities of the Living do not
occur in a manner that is spatially and temporarily continuous as Darwin
thought, giving way to frequent orthogenesis
(the orthogenesis of the Horse was a moment of pure bravery for biology
teachers in the 40's), nor by purely erratic leaps. They occur, they say, in a punctuated
equilibrium whose units comprise regions, continents, or still, the
entire planet in its five great extinctions of Living that have already taken
place before the current sixth. The variations, which are relatively brisk
compared with the usual persistence of the species once they have appeared,
being explained (at least in many cases) by the temporary secession of marginal
specific groups that hence favour variation, then by their return or
displacement towards a main group that is sometimes far away. We could then
think that the Anthropogeny (taking
its definitive shape during the Gouldian era - around the 80's) has only had to
add to the biological 'punctuated equilibrium', the technical and semiotical 'punctuated
equilibria' characteristic to Homo – the angular Primate – who is
by that precisely a technician and a semiotician.
But then, the Anthropogeny
supposes an even more severe nominalism than that of biological
evolutionism. Darwin could still speak of 'legs', 'wings', 'beaks' when
observing the variations of the birds of the Galapagos. Gould needs to be more
careful when he describes the extinctions and explosions of species, genres,
families, orders, but also of classes and branching, and he needs to stick
– rather than to names of organs that are too fixist –
to more versatile terms of functions as 'means of blowing,
engines of movement, engines of repetition, flight, walk, reproduction, and
oxygenation'. Since the Anthropogeny also deals with technical –
and later semiotical – variations
and selections that are frankly volatile, it must often be more careful and
generalised than the Gouldian vocabulary.
Indeed, how would it dare to
naively speak of 'memory', 'intelligence', 'will', 'art', 'religion', 'love',
when these words have never been appropriate for anything but very limited
historical circumstances, for example those of the Greek, Latin, European WORLD
2, where besides those terms had a sense that was more ideal than defined : 'L'amour
est un je ne sais quoi' (Corneille), 'O charmes de l'amour, qui a pu vous
peindre ?' (Benjamin Constant). The same applies to 'intelligence' :
John is intelligent, Pierre is not, we dare say. Yet, our cerebral images and
explorations 'neurone by neurone' of the Aplysie date back to the 70's,
inviting us to speak of billions of local and transitory intelligences, of
connections, disconnections, reconnections, accentuations, fading, cleavages
varying from one brain to the next, but also in each brain varying at every
instant. And what is the 'will' if it is true that the object of both the Greek
boulè and Latin voluntas is supposedly good aims, whereas the German Wille (that of Niebelungen, Luther,
Wagner, Hilter) is ontologically indifferent to accomplishments as it is content
with displaying an immense, diffuse Wille zur Macht.
This lability of organs and
functions commands the status of the definitions in Anthropogeny. In
Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, we can make very useful tables of definitions.
The short table that Hawking joined to A
Brief History of Time not only enlightens a few fundamental notions of Physics
that are not very familiar to the non-specialist, such as that of singularity
('Singularity, a point in space-time at which the space-time curvature becomes
infinite'), but still, because this word was chosen by him for being defined,
this sole fact shows its importance in Hawking's general intention, which is to
make do in a Physics Theory – as much as possible – without not
intuitive notions, as 'singularities', and thus to diffuse the two principal of
the time , (a) that of the black holes (and he insists on their halo of
emission), (b) that of the Big Bang (and he insists on its quality of pole
rather than of mere beginning). In the same way, Chemistry dictionaries such as
that of Cambridge's, by the sole fact that they choose and define a word, and
paradoxally situate it fortuitously in a hasardous alphetical order, often give
it new synthetic enlightenments.
On the contrary, the Anthropogeny,
say a bio-techno-semiotical discipline, makes tables of hominoid faculties almost
impossible, because Homo is infinitely more instantly evolutive, more swiftly
punctuating his Gouldian equilibria, than every other Living. So that, for
defining a human case, we should have to remember the complete Anthropogeny
for every case. As a consequence, the only satisfying anthropogenic survey is
to produce short, tightened, succinct anthropogenies. Here it is Around
Homo in Eighty Theses, or the present Post-Scriptum. And the
Systematic
table listing all the titles of every chapter in their anthropological
order. And even the Alphabetical table where, a little like in Chemistry
Dictionaries, the chances of the alphabet create close partings and distant
proximities.
The Anthropogeny
is a work of WORLD 3, that of the Discontinuous, and it is closely consanguine
with computer manner of writing or scripting of WORLD 3. If the Internet text
is scrolled rather than leafed through, and thus no longer favours stable
definitions by immediate synoptic comparisons like the Mediterranean codex did since
the first century of our era, when it succeeded scholarly to the Greek bublos,
hence innovating the Plotin (+250) systematic philosophical "discourse", ignored
by Plato and Aristotle, it conveniently invites us to play with the varied
fonts and characters to suggest, between different and similar typing in next
and distant places of the text the Gouldian equilibria, biological, technical,
semiotical. For this reticular (allagmatic)
systematicity, by Gilbert Simondon
and the painter Micheline Lo. (Cf,
Ontologies locales, Cosmogonies contemporaines)
2
INTERDISCIPLINARITY WITH
HISTORY
Seeing the Darwinian
evolutionism – or more exactly Eldredgian-Gouldian – of the
Anthropogeny, history is the most necessary of humane sciences. History in
both senses: in the strict sense, that of eras recounted by written
documents, and in the wide sense, that of before the writings of
primary empires and that can only rely on paintings, sculptures, development,
ecological systems such as those for the neolitic, paleolitic, the eras of Homo
Erectus, Homo Habilis, Tumaï, Orrorin tugenensis, etc.
Between 1900 and 1960,
philosophers of History (in particular Germans and Italians) tried to determine
the part of truth in historical studies. Some intended only to trust an
exclusively factual history, consisting of dates, taxes, titulars, victories
and defeats, and the other, at the opposite, for whom events were more or less
necessary apparitions of a priori principles
in the line of thesis, antithesis and synthesis with Hegel, or of the class
fights with Marx and Engels. Between these two limits, intermediate positions
were hardly reassuring.
Indeed, the weaknesses of the
historian are blatantly obvious. First, what are the frontiers of an event,
admitting that there is an event? Then, when an event is delimited, the
historian can only consider four or five of its factors, whereas there are one
hundred, or myriads, amongst which the most essential are often unsuspected. On
the other hand, historical interpretations are the most ideological. The
consensus of the interpreters garantees ontly that there is a people that
largely depends of the history it imagines. Since the dawn of days, the
historian has been the principal factor of the social consensus. Michelet makes
an exalting history 'of' France, for he feels that he is not only a Frenchman but France itself, just like Hitler felt as
being and was recognised as 'the voice of the German people'. After a war, one
hundred years are usually necessary before the children of the fighters are
able to admit that the enemy of their fathers did not commit all the atrocities
conferring him his statute of enemy. This is without considering events that
hid others. Marignan's Escarmouche exaggerated to the Jannequin's War to help forget the true defeat of
Pavie. Merleau-Ponty's 'Plato still speaks to me' summarises the perplexities
of the historian. What exactly 'Plato', 'me', 'parle' and 'encore' mean here?
But with that all, how can an Anthropogeny
– whose radical evolutionism endlessly requires history – still
stand? Unless the historicity that matters to the Anthropogeny is would be of
another nature. Then, in the hominoid populations that it considers, it should
not care as much for their objective or objectal events than for their destiny-choice-of-existence,
which holds above all in four dimensions : (a) a general and differential topology, (b) a cybernetics, (c) a logico-semiotics, and (d) a presentivity. (Anthropogénie générale, 8).
Let us detail. (A) In the general
topology, we find the propensity adopted and usually practiced in the fundamental
couples : close/faraway, continuous/discontinuous, surrounding/surrounded,
closed/open, path/barrier, etc. And, in differential topology, we find the
propensity for one of the 'singularities' of the seven René Thom's elementary catastrophes
(strepHeïn kata, tranformation from one form to another by means of a
singularity) : the fold, the break, the swallowtail, the butterfly, the
hyperbolic umbilic, the elliptic umbilic, and the parabolic umbilic. (Anthropogénies locales, Sémiotique, Mathématique
et sexualité) (B) In cybernetics, a propensity shows
either for the feed-forward or the feedback, for the adjustment or the easing
of pieces, etc. (C) In logico-semiotics, a propensity for
the adjectivation, the substantivation, the adverbialisation, the gerondisation,
the syntactism, the paratactism. (D) Finally, in presentivity, the
emphasis on the functionings, or rather on the presence-absence-apparitionnality
according to the primordial universal anthropogenic distinction : functionings / presence-apparitionality.
Fortunately, these four
characters are often accessible in sensu stricto history's written documents, and
even in the archaeological documents of history sensu lato. Here are some
examples that are frequently encountered in the Anthropogeny. (a) The passage from the backbone line of Paleolithic animals (Lascaux) to the
Neolithic quadrated framing, first on
the ground and consequently on the wall (Çatalhüyük). (b) The exclusion of the
wheel in the Amerindia may be because of the penchant for topological
compactness of the thick creative blood (Quiq). (c) The ontological and
epistemological implications of the graphisms, according to their status as ideographic
(Chinese) or phonetic (Sumerian). (d) The implications of the passage from (uncoiling)
Bublos to the (leafing through) codex in the first century of our era. (e) The
existential consequences of manual scripting and printed scripting. (f) The
'lifestyles' deriving from the replacement of the sundial and the hourglass
with the pendulum clock. (g) The autarkic Greek frontality contrasting with the
Roman-Stoicist-Christian-Neoplatonic intimacy. (h) The opposition between the
Greek tekmèrion (demonstrative) and
the roman indicium (probabilistic).
(i) The priority of the convex in Greece and the concave in China (Lao Tzu).
(j) The conflict of the three Mediterranean aesthetics : the numeric of Sem
(Hebraic), the pulsatory of Cham (African), and the harmonic of Japheth
(Greek). (k) Disjunctions inclusive in China ('wu'), exclusive in Greece (third
excluded) , askew in Talmudic logic. (l) The dual articulation (Mazdean,
Manichean) versus the indefinite articulation (Indian). (m) The passage from abstract
machines distinguishing ostentibly their functions to the concrete machines
that conduct their functions in overlapping
(Simondon) (Anthropogénies locales, Phylogenèse. Priorité
de la Technique (Le Nouvel âge, 1962). (n) Nature as a
vis-à-vis for Homo versus the 'median reality' of the technique-nature or
nature-technique of concrete machines (Simondon). (o) The passage of stable or
instable complete individuals to the temporary and local encounters of
'metastable' individuations (Anthropogénies
locales, Ontologie, De l'individu aux individuations (Simondon)).
We shall probably agree that
the history of destiny-choice of
existence, rather descriptive, is much more reassuring than narrative history,
and that an anthropogeny can find its root in it as it brings unsuspected
dimensions to eventful history and can even found it. We shall justify this point
using two examples, one of which is very general while the other is more
particular.
A) Like many others,
Wittgenstein notes that artists practicing different arts (a writer, a painter,
and a musician) but of a same historic moment are more similar amongst them
than artists practicing the same art but in different moments. Concerning the
destiny-choice of existence, Descartes is a material and mental contemporary of
painter Georges de La Tour. Painter Vermeer is the exact contemporary of
Spinoza. Bach of Leibniz, Mozart of Diderot, Beethoven of Hegel and Lamarck.
Physicist Max Planck of the artist Marcel Duchamps and the inventor of comic
strips Mc Cay. The anthropogenist historian will not be surprised that a
generation usually shares similar – even identical – topological,
cybernetic, logico-semiotic and presentive choices. Bergson had observed how
the most opposing philosophers – such as the 18th century
rationalists and empiricists – in fact activated the contrary poles of a
same fundamental party.
B) Now let us choose a
specific example that is rich enough to measure the stakes with some
sensitivity, and imagine a historian intending to write a History of sexuality in the
Middle Ages. If he is trivial, he will probably invoke the taboos of
Judeo-Christian morality and the influence of the 'Church', along with the few
usual quotations related to this topic. If he is somewhat anthropogenist,
things get much more complicated, although they may become more more clear.
The Anthropogenist will indeed
remember the will of Greece, which initiated WORLD 2 since -750 (the "world" of
the distant continuous), of only seeing everywhere wholes consisting of integral
parts, hence forms standing out adequately from their
background and following the axiom of the excluded third. (a) Then,
each Greek form possesses a certain autarky, a aFt-arkeïa, whose
etymology requires a sufficiency (arkeïa) by itself and for itself (aFtos). (b) What follows is a theory of
the desire as the consequence of some missing element (Plato). (c) The
requirement that every operation as human – according to the rational artisan inaugurated by Greece – must have an end, a goal, and
not merely procure a satisfaction (Aristotle). (d) Geometrically, that
postulates the right distance of the viewer ('mèden agan', nothing too much), the
tHeastHaï of the tHeatron in front of its skènè (tent, stage) where the spectator grasps things in
a synchronic manner, like does the Logos, the reason-language, - Vinci will say
: like God the Painter. (e) Consequently, the perfect object is the
top-pointing triangle of the Parthenon (penial). (f) In differential topology,
the concave rift (vulval) is suspect to the profit of male convex bodies that
Pindar has sung in his Olympics. (g) Logic demands the axiom of the
excluded third, never tolerating the axiom of the Chinese inclusive disjunction
(wu), even if the daily discourse uses the latter endlessly. (h) What follows
is a certain fascination of masculine homosexuality that we even find in
Socrates when he speaks of Alcibiades.
Yet, the entire Greek program
is incompatible with the coupling and orgasm. The first
establishes an equivalence of the convex and the concave, muddling bodies to
the extent that it is at the opposite of the excluded third, the second
unsettles the rational detachment of forms on (against) the background, and the
articulating power of the Logos in general. In the coitus, physical and mental
intimacy hurts Greek frontality and the scenic totalisation of the theastHaï,
the tHeoria and the tHeatron.
Since pure satisfaction without ends is deemed insufficient, sexuality must be
justified by an goal, which will be generative (genital) in a civilisation of eternal species (Aristotle). The unease of WORLD
2 regarding sex is confirmed in its unease towards friendship. Although the latter is recommended in practice,
it remains a theoretical threat for the autarky (aFt-arkeïa), unless we
admit – like Aristotle, who was visibly embarrassed on this occasion
– that the Greek 'me' is by itself sufficiently vast to be simultaneously
the Same and the Other, in such a way that the friend brings nothing exterior
(another theoretical advantage for homosexuality).
We clearly see that, for the
anthropogenic discipline, the unease of the west regarding sexuality starts in
no way with the 'Judaeo-Christian' moral of the first century of our era, but
begins in Greece as it is pre- and protohellenic. This unease will last until
the very end of WORLD 2, as proven two millennium later by westerner Paul
Valéry in his correspondence with Jacques Rivière, in which he explains the
violent trouble he feels as he has just had a 'positive' sexual experience.
However, for the historian who
has set his mind on medieval sexuality as a theme, and who has some
anthropogenic views, this unease of WORLD 2 gets even more complicated during
the first century of our era. This time was marked by the invention of Virgilian-Latin-Stoicist-Christian interiority and tenderness whose
philosophical formulations will be provided by Plotin's neo-platonism in + 250 AD and will dominate the entire first
millennium, reigning until Dante in the 1300's. In classic Latinity, the 'persona'
would only define the mask and the actor. With the first Century, it soon took
such a consistency that Athanasius conceives (in Nicaea, + 325) the Creating
Principle as being the love of two persons, the Father and the Son, in an
interpersonality that is so intense that it is itself a person, the Pneuma
(Greek and already Mazdean). This vertiginous audacity of three 'persons' into
one 'being' will find its confirmation in 1250, when Thomas Aquinas lifts the ontological
contradiction by making the semiotical distinction between the divine unity as substance and the
plurality of divine persons as relations, right to Hegel's and
Engel's' Dialectic of the simultaneously logical and ontological thesis/antithesis/synthesis, where the
Thought-Substance, initial and final, is indeed one in three moments.
Hence, is it not surprising
that the Fathers of the Western Church, who were penetrated with Neo-Platonism,
have made the sacramental orgiastic coupling (what defines the Greek-Christian
'sacrament' is that it is ontological and substantialist) of the intrinsic trinitary
union of God, the prominent symbol of the union of the Church and the Faithful,
in a symbolism that is still vivacious with today's Orthodoxy (Evdokimov), in
the Eastern Church . The Fathers of the Western Church, starting with Ambrose, are
not far from these views : 'omne masculinum adaperiens vulvam sacrum domini
vocabitur'. Moreover, when African Augustine, disciple of Ambrose and whose
child is called Adeodatus, asks "what do I love when I love God?", he excludes
– but with what descriptive complacency! – the 'membra acceptabilia
carnis amplexibus' whilst he attributes his 'interioris hominis mei' 'quemdam
amplexum quod non divellit satietas'. Nothing in the evangelical text opposed
this view that Augustine would daily commented to the faithful of Hippo.
Moreover, we know, since the discovery of Philip's
Gospel c. 1940's, that it is through the sacrament of the kiss on the mouth
of the Adon and Mary Magdalene that, around +200, a Gnostic Gospel understood the words of the canonical Gospels : 'In the kingdom there are no longer men and
women'. So was borne the gnostic version of "the other as an 'I'", and "the I
as the Other", commanded previously by friendship
according to Aristotle. A Muslim tradition relates that, around + 620, Muhammad
received and conceived some verses of the Koran 'under the blankets with
Aïcha'.
For the Sexuality in the
Middle Age, i.e. the theme of our anthropogenic historian, these symbolic
breeding of the Flesh and the Mind characteristic of the 'mediteraneism' (a concept
of Ungaretti and Verdenelli about Dante), will make the servant of Montaillou
village occitant (Leroi-Ladurie) say that her carnal relations with her
vicar were in no way guilty, as they were not venal (Greek 'pornos'). It was
only in the neighbouring town of Montaillou, in the beginning of the
bourgeoisie, that the 'good order' required more formality. Underground but
firmly, the ontological and epistemological carnal synthesis of primitive
Christianity will survive until the infinite 'gozar' of the Spouse in Jean de
la Croix's Nuit obscure. And the substantialist
Bossuet – although not mystical himself – still resorts to the most
sacramental orgasmic coit in his Meditations
on the Gospel to proclaim, right in the face of Tartuffe, the ontological
union of the catholic eucharistic sacrament : 'In the transport of human love who
does not know that we eat, that we devour each other, that we should like to
incorporate him in every way and, like the poet would say (Lucretius, De natura rerum) tear out with our teeth
what we love to become united to it, to feed from it, to live on it…'. In
around 1900, Claudel – who was from the same substantialist family as
Bossuet – remarked that the most ontologicalically sexual nudes of human
history had been painted by Titian, bought by Charles the fifth and admired by
Philip II during the Counter Reformation. The 1600's were the years when the
opera was conceived, when in Jesuit colleges of the time para-orgasmic screams
of martyrs saints resounded alongside the properly orgasmic screams of the
Lovers (a topic familiar to Robbe-Grillet and chiefly to his paramystical wife).
In such a context, the
anthropogenist historian will not implicate 'the Church', nor 'Judaeo-Christian
morals', when encountering in the Middle Age the recurrent occidental topic of
the 'female body as a horn (a bag) of refuse', pecularly with a "troubadour de
fine amour" whose verses still were cited with insistence c. 1960 by the
psychoanalyst Lacan. The repulsion of WORLD 2 towards the convex and the slit
will suffice. As to the recurrent affirmation that the sexual act is justified
by the providential necessity of 'increasing the number of the chosen', its
roots have to be sought in the Aristotle' doctrine that the happiness ('eF-daïmonia')
is to be obtained only in productive actions,
never in pure satisfactions, and even less in experiences of pure presence. The
occidental conviction that the useful is the value will persist until Bentham's
utilitarianism. Victorian modesties and immodesties are akin to bourgeois technician utilitarianism, more
than) to ritual Jewish modesty and ontological Christian modesty of the same
period. On that point, physicians and theologians speak the same language.
So many paradoxical views are
a good opportunity for an Anthropogeny to remark in passing the feeble impact
of theories over practices. Plato's and Aristotle's anti-sexual theories
never prevented the Greek to reproduce or to enjoy – in a secular or
mystical manner – such experiences for which their philosophies had no
words. Moreover, the anthropogenist will use this opportunity to mention that,
in Greece, we find the same contradiction concerning art. In his Ion, Plato offers to chase the poets
from the Republic for their 'irrationality'. Aristotle points out only the
'ritual purgation', catharsis, a quasi-medical aspect of the Greek tragedy
(Ross, Aristotle, 1923). Both were theoretically
incongruous. However, in practice, the Greek were the most powerful thematisers
and accountants of pictorial, sculptural, architectural and theatrical
perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects, which is the central characteristic
of art. In fact, the Aristotelian aFt-arkeïa never blocked the way to friendship
as it was recommended by Epicurus. Additionally, some Athenians (although they
were careful disciples of Aristotle) probably had true 'autartic' friends that
were very 'different' from themselves.
This should suffice – we
hope – to briefly illustrate the interdisciplinary exchanges between anthropogenic
historicity and trivial historicity. However, these
exchanges are of such importance that the present Anthropogeny must provide a few developed examples of it. They are
Histoire langagière de la literature
française on the same site, where are found the destiny-choices of
existence of fifty writers in what was once described as a 'phylogeny of the
French intelligence' (Anthropogénies locales, Phylogenèse, Histoire
langagière de la littérature française, France Culture, audio 30 x 30').
Similarly, Photographic history of
photography shows the topological, cybernetical, logico-semiotical and
presentive destiny-choices of fifty photographers. (Anthropogénies
locales, Phylogenèse, Histoire photographique de la photographie). We
hope that the reader, helped by passim remarks on the same site, will be able
to carry out himself in the same spirit a Pictorial
history of painting, an Architectural
history of architecture, and a Musical
history of music. And even an Essential
history of dance. Dance, as
being the rythmic thematisation of the gesture and the step, is still the most
specific artistic exercise of Homo, the angular Primate.
Stephen Jay Gould feeled that,
by instituting paleobiology,
Eldredge and himself gave the Macroevolution its autonomy, and that the latter was
not at all a simple extrapolation of the Microevolution as it was still the
case for Darwin, but an autonomous discipline, determining the "punctuated
equilibria" of the Living. We hope that the few anthropogenical examples we provided
a moment ago will suffice to confirm that Macro-history, that of the Anthropogeny,
is not a simple extrapolation of the evenemential one, or Micro-history. Its sustained
attention to topologies, cybernetics, logico-semiotics and presentivity underlying
the events gives it own referentials that are thrivingly heuristic. Now, this macrohistory
is more gradualist (orthodox Darwinism) or rather punctualist
(Gouldian-Eldredgian Darwinism)? Rather both.
3
INTERDISCIPLINARITY WITH HUMAN SCIENCES
Very often, the beginning of
humane sciences (something to which the Anthropogeny
appears as being the missing link) is set at Wundt's experimental psychology,
around 1880. Indeed, at that time, Physics, Chemistry and Biology reached such
a consistence that they felt almost complete, and Homo could believe that their
methods were about to lead to wonders through their application to specific domains
such as 'intelligence', 'will', 'memory', 'emotions', 'feelings', 'family',
'guilds', 'motherlands', 'arts', 'mathematics', etc. The moment was even more
favourable that 'exact sciences' were about to undergo their 'crisis
of fundaments', questionning the unity or disparity of geometries with
Klein and Poincaré, the One or the Multiple as the source of numbers with
Dedeking, the reliability of induction with Dorolle, the idea of
experimentation versus experience with Mach, Meyerson's notion of 'physical theory', or Gödel's
limitations of axiomatics, etc.
Therefore,
was there a better circumstance to launch a Semiotics (Peirce), a Linguistics
(Saussure), a Sociology (Durkheim), an Experimental Psychology (Dewey,
Watson), a Transcendental (Husserl) and an existential (Heidegger)
phenomenology, a Psychoanalysis (Freud), a Genetic psychology that
would lead to an Experimental pedagogy (Piaget)? Darwin's evolutionary
views had made Homo appear as a species amongst other species, albeit higher in
the hierarchy of complexity according to Spencer. For the Ancients, the
historicity and geographicity of men were accidents of a human essence. Now,
they made it. Why not apply to him the
common tools of scientific knowledge?
A. The new paragdigms
It was stirring at first. In
1890, James Frazer inaugurated the twelve volumes of The Golden Bough. He finished this work
in 1915 and compiled it into one volume in 1922, having experienced a success
that was both scientific and popular and that would influence English literature
for the entire first half of the 20th century. Totems and taboos,
more than concepts and ideas, were at work in every human society, pritivie but
also developed, deriving from the resources of metaphor (similarity) and
metonymy (contiguity). Frazer was anticipating Homo as an indicialising and
indexating primate. His contemporaries called him a social anthropologist, but he himself spoke of mental anthropology, a project of epistemological and ontological
phylogenesis of Homo that would herald, in many traits, the discipline of Anthropogeny.
Very soon, Malinowki doubled this
cabinet anthropology with an on-site anthropogeny that he collected in the
Pacific islands, showing the functional consistencies of cultures around what
the Anthropogeny would call their
destinies-choices of existence. Simultaneously, scholars realised the cultural
importance of the physical characteristics of the groups according to the
races. In 1885, Topinard published a first manual of Physical anthropology, noting the geographical disparities that, in
1986, for its anniversary, a collective book of French CNRS would call the
'sub-species' or 'great races' of sapiens sapiens.
Economically, Mauss
pointed out that the human exchange systems, that were subject to theories
since Adam Smith, did not respond to various kinds of equalities, nor even to
the optimization of profits supposed by Walras's General Equilibrium Theory.
Quite to the contrary, the Amerindians' potlatch
demonstrates him that often they
search the maximizations of the gift in search of the prevalence of the chief, or
of another social figure. His 1925's Essai
sur le don was relayed by the concept of 'spending' with Georges Bataille c.
1950.
Inspired linguists were soon to make discoveries which all unsettled the WORLD
2 Occidental sense of equivalence, rationality or semiotical arbitrariness. As
for the time of the verb, Worf, an American linguist, studying the language of
the Hopi discovered an Amerindian destiny-choice of existence without future,
where any present was a continued ancestral past. In New Zealand, Leenhardt, a
French linguist, appreciated by Mauss, found that, , human bodies were not
fatally closed wholes that were limited by the skin, but linguistically opened
wholes where the organs of a same 'I' would send back to different places,
objects and qualities of the environment, with inversions of the close-by and
the faraway. In one word, languages
were not systems of communications that had every advantage of remaining fixed,
but they were actions, Speech acts as
Searle will say in 1969, constituting from instant to instant, almost of word
to word, new worlds, or at least new appropriations of the world. Since I930, Wittgenstein,
departing from the metaphysical and abstract "silence" of his 1927' famous Tractatus logico-philosophicus, begun to
explore the inexhaustible concrete performances of speach practices, that will weave
his unexhaustible posthumous Philosophische Untersuchungen (1951).
The human essence of classic
anthropologies also veered to the Anthropogeny
when, since 1900, Durkeim's static sociology started being
conscious of the notion of human populations, making the Darwin-Gould
distinction between centers in stasis and margins of innovation. For instance,
this explained the stability of the number of adherents in political parties,
who paradoxically, in democraties, every one is convinced of his singular freedom
of opinion. In addition, social systemic allowed correlations between different
areas, like for instance; in Durkheim's mind, when a rise in suicide rates
would forecast a war or, as Durkeimians say today, when the decrease of female
fecundity of Muslim women perhaps betrays a fading or re-organisation of the
Muslim faith. Hence, each human specimen was a collection of singularities, altouhgh
belonging to large numbers.
However, the most violent anthropogenical
shattering of humane sciences took place when, in 1902, Golgi took the first
photographs of neurones, and when,
in 1906, Ramón y Cajal obtained a Nobel Prize for having photographed neuronal
connections and cleavages. Hence it was no more enough to want to understand
Homo's faculties using introspection and philosophical discourses! Or to be content
with measuring stimuli / reaction couples, as required Dewey's behaviourism and
Koehler's Gestal Theory. Behaviorism and Phenomenology were initiated at the
same time. No, from Golgi on, we could understand nothing about ourselves without
having visited our nervous supporting structures. The human soul had definitively
lost its unity as an "arx mentis" (the culminating citadel of mind, like a
finest point).
In the 1960's, the knowledge
of neuronal paths had made such progress that Hebel decided to clarify the most
obvious of human perceptive systems (Ich bin ein Augentier, Goethe), the visual system. When a cat – or
ourselves – sees a mouse running, we grasp forms, movements, sometimes
even colours (hue, lightness, saturation). Now, Hebel was stupefied to see
that, for each of these functions, separate nervous suites would intervene. The
latter, even after their passage from ganglion to ganglion, would continue to
work separately without ever requiring a mother
cell that would totalize this information to create "one" unitary
perceptive object, for instance 'a
grey mouse running across the floor', which then launches a motor gesture (I chase it with my broomstick). The nervous system
was interconnected relays more than places, or even real derebral areas. A satisfactory
opportunity to remember that in the Living the nervous system is mute about
itself, and that, in the perceptions-motricities there are only percepta and mota. The
phenomenologists, as Husserl, had pertinently observe that we do not grasp a Cartesian
'cogito', but only 'cogitata' whose 'cogito' is merely a collateral pre-supposition.
Let us say the same anthropologically : A singular human "I" is a state-moment
of the Universe limited at a singular World determined (and memorized) by the
perceptivo-motor selfish cycle (Damasio) of a particular body and nervous
system.
Finally, circa 1970's,
psychologists could no longer ignore that, besides hominoid and animal nervous
systems, exist analogical computers, digital
computers, hybrid computers (both analogical and digital), which
were capable of carrying-out operations not without similarity with a nervous
system. They even begun acknowledging that, in our brain (ressembling a hybrid
computer), the right hemisphere, which
had less to change evolutionarily, continues working chiefly in an analogical manner, whilst, in the left hemisphere – and in
particular since the great Apes– some more
digitalizing functions had progressively regrouped. This goes eminently for
the Broca's (emitting) and Wernicke's (receiving) areas of the language,
interconnected by a massive bundle, and for some differentiating aspects
(oppositive) in music and drawing practices. In the eigthies, at the M.I.T., in
his seminal study, Vision, David Marr wondered which computerizations
a computer (analogical, digital, hybrid) had to perform to 'see' a bottle taking
on a certain unity and stand out like an object on a table. On this occasion,
one of the fundamental principles of the work of nerves stood out : to make
what stands out stand out until a connection
; to erase what stands out less until a cleavage.
The 'system' and
the 'structure' – so dear to Vitruve – ceased to be
preliminary to any construction to the profit of notions as modules
and network, adapted to Darwinian (now Eldredgian-Gouldian) variations
and selections. Agreeing with Searle's Speech
Acts, experimental linguistic
focused its interest on the modular construction of language in the
infant and its modular deconstruction with the senile. The first copyright on The emergence of language (Sc. Am.
Library) dates back to 1972. Our RMI makes us able now to follow the neuronal activations
and deactivations of the Neurones of
reading.
For summarizing, let us go
back to the psychology of the "Me" that haunted WORLD 2, fond of Characters since Theophrastus (the
disciple of Aristotle) right to the followers of La Bruyère' Caractères,
and even Kretschmer's. In 1950's, under the effect of all of the above, Le
Senne's Caracterology was the last of
the genre, and soon replaced by factorial
analysis. It was no longer about distinguishing the wise from the mad, the
intelligent from the stupid, the phlegmatic from the sanguine, pychniques, leptosomes
or athletics or still, manic depressives, schitzophrens and paranoids amongst
the psychotic, or hysterics and obsessionals amongst neurotics. In a world
becoming planetary, around 1960, it was decided to urgently define identical
and identifiable 'symptoms', whether in a New York city dweller or in an Australian
aboriginal. These symptoms gave way to statistical correlations leading to
recognising 'factors' that were non definable in essence and accident, but
that were sufficiently delimited that 'remedies' could correspond to them,
remedies that were testable, even experimentable although they did not
necessarily brought an explanation. Disputable or not, the factorial analysis
has been one of the major epistemological and ontological revolution in the
evolution of human species. In perfect mental consanguinity with the Evolution
conceived as 'ponctuated equilibria' by Eldredge and Gould.
B. The stasis of paradigms (Kuhn)
We have just put together a
few of these events when human sciences, recently created, enlightened the anthropogeny, and when the Anthropogeny begun to found them in return. We still need to
understand the stasis of a few others of humane sciences during the same
period. Every time, the essential explanation lies in the ambiguity of their
mentality. Their aim was to approach Homo using the methods of the exact
sciences of WORLD 3, but by staying at the same time in the epistemological and
ontological destiny-choices of WORLD 2. It was in this climate that Kuhn
generalized his notion of paradigm,
and of decided and hesitating change of paradigm.
In particular, since 1900, Freud's psychoanalysis
has never gone away from western paradigms that contributed to its huge success
in society with its hermeneutical sterility. (a) A concept of the dream that
refused to see in it the repairs to the neuronal bugs of the day, thus a training and learning animal function,
and prefered to seek in it, - in a Greek finalist view, – the indirect
accomplishments of an ultimate ending (finis ultimus debitus) that was
Platonician or Aristotelian, the libido.
(b) The genitality as the ultimate justification of the sexual function in the
straight line of Aristotle's theory of the pleasure as a complement of utility.
(c) The vertical orientation of the two Freudian topics right up to a theory of sublimation
reminiscent of Jamblique's Proteptic.
(d) The sexuality treated as an abstraction (Sexual-ität) without reading at
least phenomenologically the orgasm (three lines to say it 'gewaltig'), nor
even the coupling, probably in the Hellenic fear of anything compromising the
ideal of wholes consisting of integral parts. (e) An almost Hegelian dialectic
of bucal, anal, genital phases punctuated by 'universal' ou mythical complexes
(Oedipus, Jocaste, etc). All that in such a way that, for hermeneutical
strudies, every existence – even of the most innovative artists –
would be reduced to the same chorus : Hölderlin ou la question du père. To
his honour, Freud (whose friends had made him aware of the photographs of Gogli
and Ramón y Cajal in Vienna very early on) wrote down in some of his
unpublished works, and in some passages of his publications, that his
'hypothesis' would crumble when more would be known about the nervous system.
Concurrently, around 1900, in
his creation of a linguistics, Saussure suffered and even despaired of remaining
locked in the WORLD 2, always considering language as the arbitrary
manifestation of a non arbitrary logos, without seeing that, anthropogenically,
Language presupposed Technique, its glossems being only the technems with their
operativity put in suspense. Hence, as a perfect western classical rationalist,
he carried on considering that languages were adequately translatable one into
the other, since their significant expressed their signified in an arbitrary
– hence codable – manner, and that their signified were not the
objects of works distributed by (according to) ideas, as for his contemporary
Peirce, but these ideas themselves, which made linguistics independent from the
technical changes around it. By such improbable hypotheses, the linguist had
the advantage of working on a science entirely sprawling on his table without
every getting out, yes, without suffering from any change, even dramatic, in the
technical environment. Simultaneously never assured that there was something
outside corresponding ontologically or epistemologically to his contructs.
One generation later, Jakobson deserves particular attention concerning
the stasis of the paradigms of WORLD 2 in WORLD 3. Indeed, in his remarkable
theory of the 'twelve phonematical traits' that he developed with Halle, he has well seen and pointed out
that the language was on one hand an audition (particularly distinctive) like
for Saussure, but on the other hand an emission whose significance was
existential according to the vocal efforts and relaxes. Hence, he caresses very
closely the anthropogenical definition of languages as phonosemical productions.
However, in his analysis of The Raven,
under the general title of The sound and
the sense, he is content with counting games of assonances and
alliterations without ever marking that they implicate a particular topology,
cybernetics, logico-semiotics, presentivity, in a word a 'work subject', the
realisation of Edgar Allen Poe's 'destiny-choice of existence'. Why this
paradoxical shortcoming ? Jakobson remained faithful to the two surannated
Saussurian doctrines: (a) the arbitrariness
of the sign (in contradition, for instance, with the Kluge's Etymologisches
Wörterbuch) and (b) the universal
translatability of languages. Possibly confirmed into error by the fact
that, in 1950, the two Saussurian presuppositions of WORLD 2 seemed to find confirmation
in the first translating machines. Indeed, during the second half
of the 20th century, school-taught linguistics became a science of
the translation, meaning that the pertinence and power of a linguistical theory
is judged by its capacity of accounting for the programs of translating machines
(James Allen). This useful and lucrative aim of blind, deaf and clumsy
linguists had been ignored by all the proper linguists, as were Worf,
Leenhardt, Wittgenstein, Searle, and traditionnally by all the most acute practitionners
of language, i.e. the writers, all knowing that speaking was a matter of phonosemics,
the proper object ot this "new discipline" that Mallarmé said he had created in
the 200 pages of his English words.
Since the 1950's, , who concluded
this perseverance of WORLD 2 paradigms, offered a Cartesian syntax, thereby continuing to differentiate surface (local
and transitory) structures and deep structures (meant to be universal) of the Grammaire de Port-Royal, as well as a
roughly Leibnizian binary semantics. In Leibniz's Kombinatorik,
the closed inventory of the monads, which are necessarily deduced from a
necessary God as the most favorable of the compossibles, allowed locating any
object of the world exclusively using a suite of 0/1 bits. Chomsky continued to
understand the sign, for the needs of
this syntax and this semantics, using their medieval status of 'stare pro
aliquo', without seeing their technical source which – following the ceaseless
progress of Technique – would have forbidden any definitive binarization.
Finally, Chomsky, having turned back to his purely Platonist roots, went so far
as to suppose 'innate structures' of the language. To his honour, he ends up
refuting all this in his Reflections on
Language before turning to political polemic, probably because he had grown
tired of such a dubious discipline.
The semiotical blindness of the
American Chomsky is even stranger that apart from Bloomfield's rather
healthy ideas on the origins of language in the 1930's, he must have known of Peirce's,
a contemporary of Saussure around 1900. Peirce was a close participant of
Emerson's American transcendentalism. He created a general semiotics, where he
never believed that a significant 'HORSE' would refer to a signified
<horse> that was only conceptual, as Saussure put it, but indeed
to Equidae in prairies, even though the latter may be targeted through the idea
of <horsiness>. The question was then if this "horsiness" was
purely arbitrary (according to Occam's medieval nominalism) or was the result
of some essential order of things (Platonist and Aristotelian medieval realism)
or still a formal distinction founded alongside the object according to Duns
Scot's famous 'distinctio formalis a parte rei' whose Peirce was declaratively a
disciple. There, language and all sign systems were not pure games of
difference in the manner of Saussure. When he worked his linguistics, the
linguist knew that there was something behind his door ; something other than
pure 'referents' devoid of own consistency. For 'HORSE', he was
sure that horses were no zebras. In accordance of Pierre d'Espagne, the Peircean
sign was the definer of a true defined. We shall hence not be surprised that Peirce
was the first to grasp something of the semiotics of photography, unfortunately
mixing up its aspects of lat. indices
and lat. indicia. Partly because of
the English language, not departing lat. indicia and lat. indices, partly due
to his Occidental penchant (like Plato, Athanasius or Hegel) to see everywhere
Trinitarian distributions. Here of Being and Signs ("We think only in signs")
as Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness.
At this point, there is
nothing to add anthropogenetically concerning Lévi-Strauss cultural structuralism, where the
French anthropologist proposed a reading of the cultures starting with the mere
oppositive views of Saussure-Jakobson : "Dans la langue il n'y a que des
différences". Mistrustful towards "sense" in general, he claimed that every
existential "significance" in matter of Culture and Art belonged to 'shop girls
philosophy', that is in the 1950, Heideggerian and Sartrian existential phenomenology.
In the 'Chemins de la création' (Skira), the opposition between open mouth /
closed mouth distinguishing two neighbouring Amerindian tribes was interpreted by
him as purely oppositive, without any particular significance of the Opened and
the Closed as such. On this way, Lévi-Strauss considered art works as
'scale models', without consideration for the significant rhythmic of
their perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects, conveying singular
topologies, cybernetics, logico-semiotics, presentivité. His attachment to the logical
excluded middle (binary, Boolean logic) of Aristotelian WORLD 2 was all the
more disturbing that logicians of the time were starting to concoct a logic of
bundles (Théorie des faisceaux) distinctive of WORLD 3. (Anthropogénies
locales, Semiotique, Mathématique et sexualité)
Let us go back one moment on
the photos of neurones and neuronal connections of 1902-6. We could have
thought that they would put everything back in place and creat a new mentality in
one or two decades. However, Homo, this indicializing and indexating Primate,
has an invincible preference for the approximate, the prestigious and
unfounded quotation, the sorcery and magic of the speaking and gesturing, and
this has been the case since the Mazdean Avesta
right up to Harry Potter. As far as
the field of physical sciences, which are the privileged realm of the
controllable, Homo took more than two millennium before accepting the
implacable experimentations of Archimedes. How long will it take before Homo
accepts some evidences concerning his nervous system in humane sciences, where
everything is subject to hesitations?
This probably explains the strange
misfortunes of phenomenology, a particular
kind of introspection, not content with speaking in general of emotions,
imagination, perception, and aimed at describing differentially what was the essence
of perceiving, imagining, being moved, and also of caressing (and not
rubbing), of socializing by playing with a ball rather than with cubes
(Buytendijk), of enduring anguish (without object) rather than fear (that has
an determined object), etc. The phenomenological harvest was rich. However, transcendental phenomenologists like
Husserl and existential phenomenologists
like Sartre often display such disdain for exact sciences that their most
precious observations were soon forgotten, for instance the initial ontological
and epistemological distinction : functionings / presence-absence-apparitionnality,
that Sartre in 1943's L'Etre et le Néant
had hinted in his confusion of Hamiltonian "consciousness" with "presence".
The Interdisciplinarity
between phenomenology and anthropogeny is not easy to describe. The latter is
fatally phenomenologizing when it describes Homo's angular body – hence
angularizing, orthogonalizing, etc – and also panoplic and protocolar, or
indicializing and indexating in the latin sense. And phenomenogical too when
underlining his holosomy. Nevertheless, anthropogeny never forgets physics and
biology. The anthropogenist remains in the fraternity of Peirce, the creator of
American Semiotics and the logician of the abduction and the implication, who
spent many nights when he was young practicing epistemological and ontological
phenomenology with his father, a honorable mathematician, but only before
earning his living in an acutely scientifical American Bureau of standards and
measures.
4
INTERDISCIPLINARITY WITH COSMOLOGY.
ETHOLOGY
Homo is not only the angular primate to the extent that he
initiated Technique and Semiotics. His perceptions and motions continue –
whether he formulates this or not – to belong to that of primates.
Enjoying a visual faculty that is appropriate to canopy, thus capable of
globalizations, focalizations, acute distributions, and at the same time polychromous
fluencies. With still a hearing system
that is not multi-punctual like that of the Horse, but establishs sound proportions
in symmetries and and sound depths in echoes. Let us add tactile receptors that are not only able to palpate surfaces, estimate
weights, suffer pain, but that conjugate multiple layers into one substantializing,
hedonistically caressing touch.
More primarily, hominoid
specimens, alongside their deemed sublime actions, continue to perceive
themselves and to move as though they belong to the class of mammals,
these terrestrial and marine animals that are very inter-cerebral and empathic,
and that constantly seek groupings that are cohesive and favoring subtle hierarchy.
Lower, they continue to belong to the branching of vertebrates with their mouth/anus, belly/back, gravitationally
high / low (protreptical) polarized
space-time. Still, Homo never ceases to participate the vegetal
reign with its drive of growth and emergence in the environment.
Finally, Homo maintains and cultivates –very vivaciously in Amerindia
– a certain feeling of belonging to the mineral reign with its weathering. Finally, looking at some
aboriginal drawings in Australia, Homo has very soon feeled to be a trufling minute
relay in the sidereal infinity.
Let us briefly follow the
three canonic WORLDS of Anthropogeny. In ascriptural WORLD 1A, such
perseverance of prehomoid and protohomoid states (layers, stages) and faculties
organised themselves through totemism and taboos in which the primary empires
of scriptural WORLD 1B drew out the contents of their founding epopees. The
Greek, fond of wholes composed by integer parts – and the entire western WORLD
2 after them – asked themselves if, during the construction of the human
foetus, the mineral, vegetable, animal and rational phases added on to one another, substituting, replacing, each other, or if
they subsumed each other, the last
continuing to comprehend the former. Halfway of the WORLD 2, around + 1250,
scholastic Thomas Aquinas, who felt that 'forma educitur e potentia materiae'
(the form emerges according to the potentialities of the matter, materia
secunda and prima) unhesitantly affirmed on several occasions that (except for
Christ, Man-God), foetal forms subsumed each other in a frankly successive manner
(primo, deinde, in fine). This vision of the doctor communis seems to belong to a certain hominoid permanent 'good
sense', since his view still inspire the WORLD 3 laws on abortion, wich is
tolerated during the months of 'mineral, vegetative, sometimes animal'
formation before the intervention of the last supposed 'rational' formation.
Fundamentally, every hominoid
specimen is globally perceiving himself as a recapitulative (microcosmic) state-moment
of a Universe whose habits, characteristics, traits, are consequently to
understand in their specificity for understanding Homo as a whole. Those habits
are today encountered most frequently by the Physicist, the Chemist, the
Biologist. Let us list some of the most fundamental, and may be transcendenatl.
(a) Being composed of energies and differentiations, according
to the formula : e = mc2. (b) Presenting attractions (Special and
General Relativity) and cuts (Quanta, granular structurations
necessary to obtain distinct objects (Schrödinger). (c) Producing formations
through plasticity but also through re-sequentiations, particularly those
of amino-acids resulting into proteins through very few chemical
liaisons (covalent, ionic, hydrogen, hydrophobic) (Anthropogénies locales. Semiotique. Mathématique et
sexualité) (d) Realizing 'negentropies' like those that the
Living 'is' (Pierre Curie), while being thermodynamically a 'state faraway from
balance' (Prigorine), paid by ambient entropy increases in its environment. (e)
Exploiting the seven catastrophes (radical changes in
forms, strepHein, kata, supposing a singularity) resulting from seven elementary
equations of differential topology (Thom). (f) Using modularity in such a way
that unforeseen organs and functions are created according to the displacement
of former biological modules, sometimes very archaic (so that the chymotripsine
is a leitmotiv in the 1992's Discovering
Enzymes of Dressler and Potter). (g) Offering two main types of adaptations
according to Waddington : one antecedent (Lamarckian) and the other subsequent (Darwinian, Eldredgian-Gouldian). (h)
Producing, rather than stable or unstable individuals, ONLY
confluences of meta-stable individualizations (Gilbert Simondon,
L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 1962), etc.
Amongst the necessary (even transcendental)
habits (ethos) of a Universe, the most significant for an Anthropogeny are
those related to the chance. Today, physicists and biologists are
beginning to use a first comprehensive list of it. (1) The Greek tukHè
or encounter of heterogeneous suites, such as when a falling tile hits a
passer-by (Aristotle). (2) The Latin chance
(cadentia, unforeseeable fall) that, according to Democrite-Epicure-Lucretius
sufficed to give things all their forms. (3) The Latin fortuna (fors-fortis),
that became the Goddess Fortuna, when the 'maybe' gives 'one fine day that'. (4)
The Arab al-zahr, parallel to the latin alea, the
dices, where the number of possible falling positions is known in advance, so giving
way to a strict repartition of the gains in an interrupted hazard game (Pascal'
calcul des probabilités). (6) The range of mistakes bound to every physical
experimentation (Newton's errors theory). (8) In today biology, the resequentiation
effects that seem necessary in a second while but are also unforeseeable
beforehand, for instance in the case of amino acids forming proteins. This last
type of chance, absolutely unforeseen thus far by Homo, and fundamental in a
nowaday Anthropogeny, has induced Eble, in a seminal article of Paleobiology (1999), often quoted by
Gould, to distinct two kinds of chance intervening in an Eldredgian-Gouldian Evolution
Theory : (1) The statistical one, (2) The properly
evolutionary one. The latter being for sure the most revolutionary and
disturbing philosophical discovery that Homo has ever made. Rending every
previous philosophy strictly non pertinent.
We will have understood that
all these 'universe uses, habits' are descriptive, not prescriptive. In Antiquity,
the Greek 'ethikè' and its Roman counterpart 'moralitas' were still merely
descriptive (meaning the way an individual or a group acts, whithout any
appreciation about it), and only became normative with the interiority inaugurated by the Stoic-Christian-Neoplatonim, and then
finally, since the 1600s, with the concept of honesty bound to the exact equivalences of the bourgeois money, economy,
behaviour. Today, in our Universe of evolutionary
chances, the only value of a
system is its capacity of survival. Whether it concerns mountains,
plants, animals or technical or semiotical processes, even social values.
WORLD 1, amongst its taboos
and totems, saw and perceived Homo, the angular Primate, from bottom to top,
astral, vegetal, animal, technical, semiotical, presentifying, in an almost
confusing continuity. The Occidental WORLD 2, that of wholes composed of
integrating parts, and with this aim considering the hominoid specimen from top
to bottom, as did Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, considered the Anthropos as generated
and even ontologically deriving of its noblest source (the 'arx mentis'). WORLD
3, the evolutionary one, intends to understand the biological transitions in
general, and anthropologically the progressive emergence of the angular Primate
from the Primates, Mammals, Vertebrated in general.
Hence the most intimate
interdisciplanrity of Anthropogeny with Ethology, this science of the 'mores' of
the animal world no longer in laboratories, as did the Gestaltists and
Behaviorists, but in its natural evolving and prolifereting milieux. It was
founded by Konrad Lorenz in the 1930's. At first, Lorenz was struck with the
Gooses by the impregnation (this precocious and definitive attachment
provoked by the vision of a first 'pregnant' object, in the terms of the
Gestalt Theorie).
Ethology has been the occasion
to set apart several key-notions of Anthropogeny. (a) First, that of stimulus
signal, a complex, imperious, innate cerebral response to a defined exterior
or interior stimulus. The obligatory and differentiated phases through which an
eagle finally hits its prey according to the races are a perfect exemple of it.
And, by contrast, the stimlus-signal has instructed a very good background to
point out the originality of the hominoid sign, which is borne from technemes,
non-innate but technically sets constructed by the angular body of the
angular Primate, then becoming semiotical after the suspension of their technical
operativity. (b) Later on, ethologists made the enlightening observation that
the great Apes had already some native impulse to exploration, hence exhibiting
an allostatic behaviour, confirming
the insufficiency of the homeostatic models of the time, above all in
the case of Homo, still invocated by Freud. (c) Sociologically, ethologists remarked
that in some superior Apes, coupling was not purely an instinctive behavior (innate
building), but acquired with the vision of 'learned fellows'. (d) Finally,
around 1980, Lorenz stated decidedly that "the" Greylag goose, the central
object of his research, 'did not exist', 'there are only "singular" Greylag
geese', every one habing peculiar particularities opened to evolution. A massive
affirmation that must today be nuanced by the Eldredgian-Gouldian 'punctuated
equilibrium'.
In turn, the Anthropogeny attracts
the attention of the Ethologist concerning the fundamental difference between
the instrument and the utensil. The instrument is common to
both animal and man, at least since the sea otter breaks its eggs using stones
; instruments are right complements or supplements of one's body. The utensil
– as the Latin etymology fortunetely emphazyses (usus, verbal substantive of the middle
voice verb uti, to employ but as does a man) supposes that the
instrument should be grasped in the field of a panoply and a protocol
(with their perceptivo-motor field effects), which is characteristic to Homo,
as a transversalizing Primate. Unfortunately, paleanthropologists and
ethologist frequently mix up the animal instrument with the hominoid utensil.
Had this distinction been perceived more clearly, when in the 1970s, the Leakey
family discovered choppers and bi-faces in Eastern Africa, then Ethology,
Paleoanthropology and even Paleobiology would have made great and rapid contributions
to Anthropogeny. In fact, the search of fossils is a so absorbing a task that
it leaves little time for such anthropogenical subtel distinctions.
All this contributed to the
Anthropogeny's increasingly clear conviction that Homo did not present itself as
the result of an orthogenesis, but in multiple taxa and clads that
were so heterogeneous that they could no longer be disposed as simple advances,
meanders, temporary backings, but growing in a biological busl (buissonnement),
where Homo, Homo habilis, Homo erectus-ergaster, Homo neandertalensis, Homo sapiens
sapiens appeared as solutions amongst a myriad of others possible. With only
the particular chance that Homo is the most angular of all hominoid primates,
and even of all beings in our Universe. Hence the most capable constructing not
solely instruments, but tools and utensils disposed in panoplies and protocols.
Hence capable of Technique and Semiotics. For new environmental openings and
cleavages.
5
INTERDISCIPLINARITY WITH
MATHEMATICS
A. The anthropogenic definition of mathematics
An anthropogeny alone can give
an adequate definition of mathematics, emphazysing that Homo is the angular,
transversalizing primate – hence indicializing and indexating – and
that, in contrast with ever-fleeing lat. indicia, the lat. indices that he produces
have very particular propeerties. Although they are in themselves empty
signs, the latter can function as full
signs, hence as lat. indicia,
when they signal the physical or mental state of he who emits them, for
instance in the charge of an order to begin or to stop a battle. However, they
can also – and this is what cncerns the mathematician – be discharged
and disincialized,
in which case we shall call them 'pure'.
'Pure' lat. indices
enjoy a clarity, an inalterable comparability to the point that they can
engender ideally fixed forms (of
geometry) and ideally fixed numbers
(of arithmetic). On the other hand, they give us a unique case of equipollence
between mental content and gestual, spoken, and written expression. To the
extent that often the mathematical writing translate exactly and often overlaps,
exceeds the mind : "The tensorial (written) calculation knows physics better
than the physicist" (Langevin). Today, cerebral imaging almost gives us to see the
foundations of this purity when, at the emission of the number 4, we see
different cerebral relays switch on according to the type of graphs, phonic,
gestual, that's 4 as lat. indicia, while some relays remain strictly
stable, which we can attribute to the number 4 as pure lat. index-indicis.
Therefore, very early on, Homo
was invited to produce (at least implicitly) a general theory of pure lat. indexations
and an absolute practice of pure lat. indices.
This theory and this practice were so general and primary that the Greek called
them 'the learning' as such, the matHèsis, hence mathematics. The anthropogenic
definition of wich is thus : 'mathematics is the general theory of pure lat.
indexations and the absolute practice of pure lat. indices'. The result
is all the properties that are usually recognised to mathematics as cultural
events: their necessity, demonstrability, and simultaneously magic power and
morals that they are linked to in the works of Pythagoras, the Chinese, the
Indians, and the Amerindians.
B. The fundamental constructions of the Universe
The hence-conceived mathematics
provided Homo quite naturally with all the ontological and epistemological
shaping of his Universe. Indeed, how could he indexes (in the latin
sense) a Big Bang without the general
topology of the close and the faraway, the continuous and the
discontinuous, the closed set and the opened set, the path and the barrage? How
could he indexes (in the latin sense) the places and moves of galaxies, stars,
planets and their constellations, without the differential topology of the seven elementary catastrophes: the
fold, the break, the swallowtail, the butterfly, the hyperbolic umbilic, the
elliptic umbilic, and the parabolic umbilic? How was Homo to index (in the same
sense) energies, masses and speeds of every events before Galileo, or even Relativity
(e=mc2) and Quanta, without using geometry and arithmetic?
It is still mathematics that
basally indexes (in the latin sense) the formations of living beings. Whether
it is the geometries of formations through plasticity (remember Linus Pauling),
but also the ordinances of formations by sequences and re-sequentiation, when
suites of amino acids build proteins; when other suites build the collecting
ARN, the ribosome ARN (which serve as workbench), the messenger ARN, right upstream
to the general orchestrating DNA that, we know it lately, are modulable
(re-sequentiable) by some environmental activities (famines, wounds)
into a certain heredity of acquired characteristics (not Lamarckian yet).
Finally, when the Living selected
sexuality as the surest mean to
produce a sufficient amount of adaptive variations, the catastrophes of
differential topology again were used to invent co-aptable organs and to give
way – using the vertigos inherent to those – to the male ruts and the
female heat until they operated the necessary cooptations. (Anthropogénies
locales, Sémiotique, Mathématique et sexualité)
C. The original myths
All this probably sheds light
on the relation between mathematics and the original myths. Not
– it is true – in ascriptural WORLD 1A, not even in scriptural
WORLD 1b (where the Origin was an Egg in the Orphic Greece) or an archetypal
Great Mother (Amerindia). But right when WORLD 2 begun. In his Timaeus,
Plato assures us and himself that the Cosmos is good and beautiful. Hence, his
Demiurge – who is thus beautiful and good – could only make it by
contemplating – in the panoply of eternal Ideas – regular polyhedrons,
sources of every 'normal' object. (Anthropogénies
locales, De la métaphysique à l'anthropogénie)
How about risking a myth of
origin for evolutionary WORLD 3 ? Let us suppose that the Evolution has reached
the superior Primates, with their fingers, their vision and their hearing. What
resource would this Evolution still have to implement novelty, like for example
Technique and Semiotics? If we think about it, there is only one solution : the
angle.
Before Homo, there is nowhere in the Universe where we can find a single right
angle, not even any angle that is ever so slightly tense or decided thant those
of the human body, at least not in the dimensions of practicable time and space
(to exclude the spins of Quanta mechanics). On the contrary, when we suppose settable
angles, within practicable dimensions, everything can result. First, an operative
Technique, very soon joined by a Semiotics through the desoperativity
of technical relations (and references).
And for a while let us think
biologically. What is more anatomically realisable that the angle, when we
already have the great Apes and their articulations that are inchoatively
angular and that have been selected since millions of years to pick the fruits
in the canopy and to jump from one tin branch to the next? We only had to wait
for a few more million years before the evolutionnary Variation and Selection
(gradualist or punctualist) ended up anatomically and physiologically set, in
the hands and feet and in every articulation of the limbs, angles that are
increasingly regulatory, grasping – yes – obtuse, acute, right angles,
to the extent of inaugurating humane anthropogenic 'WORLDS : 1 (continuous
close, 2 (contiuous distant), and 3 (discontinuous), with different topologies,
albeit with three dimensions, the three so-called 'normal' dimensions between
them : width first, then height and depth. Width is the most 'anthropogenic'
dimension. Indeed, as it is transversalizing, it will dispose any hominoid
environment into panoplies and protocols. Right to the transversality of the
Cartesian coordinates where all Galilean 'products' – the 'elements' of
the Universe – will strictly position themselves, thus technically.
D.
Conceptual Mathematics
How satisfying it would be for
the anthropogenist to have at his disposal a mathematical system making all
these cosmogonical virtues of mathematics at the hand and sensitive ! Now,
since the 1950s, this mathematics exists. It is called Theory of Categories. And
the anthropogenist can use it today in the form of an essential exercise, not
solely a simple vulgarization, in Lawvere and Schanuel's Conceptual mathematics published by Buffalo Workshop Press (1972).
The two first lines already
anthropogenize and cosmogonize at one's liking : "We all begin gathering
mathematical ideas in early childhood, when we discover that our two hands match" ;
that's for the angular articulations of Homo's body. Then, "and later
when we learn that other children also have grandmothers,
and then that 'uncle' and 'cousin' are 'of this type also'" ; that's for the social enunciations of
Homo, but also for the sequentiations
and resequenctiations in general (thus as mathematical event).
Furthermore, the following Preview of the book, Galileo and Multiplication
of Objects is no less anthropogenical, as it shows Galileo create
mathematical Physics by trying to write (draw) the flight of a bird and noting
that, in his projection, the product (of the direction and spedd) precedes
the sum. So much so that, in the Theory of Categories, the sum is
defined by the reversal of the arrows defining Multiplication. Here, you see,
the categorician mathematician has become ontologist, saying and seeing that any
'world event' is first a 'Product'.
The product is, in last resort, the metaphysical definition of the event ; so French and Latin use
the phrase : 'il s'est produit quelque chose'. And why arrows? Because
in mathematics, which is anthropogenically the general theory of pure lat. indexations
and the absolute practice of pure lat. indexes, everything can be said using
arrows (Anthropogénies locales, Phylogenèse,
La mathématisation de la flèche, with René Lavendhomme)
And Anthropogeny goes from mathematics to logic, when the Theory of
categories offers a ory of bundels (théorie des faisceaux) that will be of much
use to the WORLD 3 logician to express that every event requires multiple
viewpoints – or infinite viewpoints – right up to iridescence. In
opposition to western classical 'strong logic', supposing the axiom of the
excluded middle (the third excluded), that had served Aristotle as a preliminary
of all scientifical knowledge of WORLD 2, WORLD 3 favours 'weak' logics that
are called 'intuitionists', 'synthetic', 'without excluded middle', and
therefore capable of moving within the nilpotent elements of the continuous (Grootendick,
Lawvere) and then to axiomatize the right line (René Lavendhomme, Basic
Concepts of Synthetic Differential Geometry, Kluwer, 1996). More generally,
the mathematics of the Theory of Categories encourages to
envisage a Logic of the topos, called Topos theory, which unconsciously we
practice everyday in our daily languages. The latter almost never used strict Boole's
binary algebras of the excluded middle supposed by our digital computers, but
indeed often plays with Heyting algebra (without excluded middle). The topos theory can be said in French une
"théorie des univers de discours" (see René Lavendhomme, Les lieux du sujet,
Seuil, 2001).
In Physics, this logic is the
sister of the Theory of emergences, which is nowaday experiencing
some regain of attention among the physicists. Ir sounds like this. 'There is
no Universal law of physics. Every physic law is a viewpoint on the Universe'.
Feynman already insisted on this view in his classic 1963 Lectures on
Physics, in which he offered not to teach Physics – that the selected
Caltech students were supposed to know in advance – but to suscitate physicists,
and then starting with insisting on the arbitrary of measure standards in exact
sciences. In the previous generation, Dirac, who discovered positron and
anti-matter, had more fundamentally pointed this relativity when he remarked dryly
as ever to a fellow train traveller who had murmured, looking out of the window
: "There are some freshly-shorn sheep" : "Yes if you look at them from here".
In any event, all the recent biological orientations undoubtedly point to a "bushy",
stricto sensu evolutionary Universe made up of punctuated equilibria
(Eldredge-Gould). Potulating categorical theories of the bundles.
After all those breedings
between mathematics, physics, the arts, erotic, and mystic, we shall not be
surprised that, a few weeks before succumbing to a fatal brain haemorrhage,
Eilenberg, who was then professor of mathematics at Columbia (where he was free
to teach anything he liked for his salary) confided in the author –with
insistence – that the following academic year he intended to go to teach
Chinese painting. Indeed, what a better occasion than Kouo Hi, the most
essential painter of human history, to experience that, with Homo and the
Universe in all their common dimensions, there is topology before geometry, and
that the former is general before being differential.
E. Mathematics as a model for other kinds of anthropogenical interdisciplinarities
The author – who is not
a mathematician – and René Lavendhomme, a mathematician who happened to
be categorician and toposist, and fond of Anthropogeny, were acquainted during 53
years. Six weeks before his death, René stopped his car in front of the house,
and taking in some of the precious breath from his oxygen bottle, turned to the
author and said: 'To think that, for ten years, I heard you say that mathematics is the general theory of purelat. Indexations and the absolute
practice of pure lat. indices (silence)
and I did not understand'. This is a good demonstration that, even in the
course of a long-running relationship, indisciplinarity is neither immediate
nor direct. For ten years, the mathematician had sufficiently accepted the
anthropogenist's definition of mathematics when the latter would repeat it in
front of his auditory, but without fully situating it in the system; something
he only did four of five years before this surprising declaration.
This dictates the
pluridisciplinary practice of the anthropogenist. His texts – when committing
a specialisation - must be reviewed by specialists, who will be alone in
perceiving that something is inadequate, either by incomprehension, by excess
of generality, or still, by limited viewpoint. Any suspicion or frank unease of
one specialist will exclude the proposition, or will at least be clearly signaled
as controversial. However, it would be sterilizing that the simple suspense of
the specialist should prevent from going forth. Gould and Eldredge have a long
time must share this attitude about the 'punctuated equilibrium' that in their
opinion was the key of a Macroevolution that is something else than an
extrapolation of the Microevolution as Darwin wanted it. It is probably with
this care in mind that René Lavendhomme did not say anything to the author
about his incomprehension. Because it is possible to have admitted something,
and even to have admitted it quite surely, without having completely understood
it. This is what happened to Poincaré when, he tells us, he stepped on the step
of a Paris bus and was enlightened with Fuchsian functions. He roughly moved
them around as he took his seat, and then checked them thoroughly –
meaning that he 'wrote' them down clearly at his desk that evening. For the
anthropogenist, the specialist, limited by his speciality, is heard respectfully,
further he is absolutely necessary to consult, but in sile distance. British
scholars say ironically : eager of finding something new, do not ever follow
the advice of an Oxfordian professor. That was the case of Stanley Miller
perseverating in his experimentations about the possibility to obtain amino
acids in laboratory conditions.
6
INTERDISCIPLINARITY WITH
FUTUROLOGY
The Anthropogeny is in no way futurological insofar as it is Darwinian,
and even Gouldian-Eldregian. It sees the Universe and the Living as being
radically evolutionary, and does not envisage any means of foreseeing any
future, either at long or middle term, not even at short term. Futurologists,
when they insisted on the current wearing out of resources and the fragilities
of the Planet and the Species, on the powers and risks of a technique that had
become transformational through the Matter (in nano-engineering) and the Living
(in geno-engineering), conduct a useful task that is necessary to enlighten the
political deciders and pedagogues, or simply to reassure the citizen in his
ordinary choices. Yet, their reflections, which are fragile and fatally
prescriptive and normative, are short or out of the scope of Anthropogeny.
In 1962, the alarming
previsions of the Club de Rome and the reassuring forecasts of the Sciences
Academy of Russia had made futurology fashionable among scholars. The author
had to review a book by Nobel Prize Thomson, whose the frank title was The Foreseeable Future. Nothing –
or almost nothing – turned out to come true in the end. Yet, at the same
time, the author's Le Nouvel Age,
which did not allow itself any anticipation, was content with seeing the
present of the era to exhibit solely novel processes and objects, and supposed that,
in a biological, technical and semiotical Evolution, the truly new has greater
chances of belonging to breakthroughs, albeit under unforseeable forms and
restrictions. Today, almost half a century later, Le Nouvel Age can still be read without laughing, because of its descriptive character in the present tense,
for instance when it considers that the passage from energy machines to the information
machines during the Second World War was a major anthropogenic hinge.
Without deeming it good or bad, and recalling that a modification of that
extent can give way to results that will one day be incompatible among one
another, hence self-destructive. (Anthropogénies locales, Phylogenèse, Priorité de la
technique, Le Nouvel Age, 1962)
Since 1980, the Anthropogeny has further radicalized
this mere descriptive intention of the Nouvel
Age. Its aim is to go back (as much as possible) into the morals (habits) of
the Universe and the ways of the Living as such, stressing the specificities of
Homo, in particular its singular faculty of an angular Primate, which is
thereby angularizing, orthogonalizing, indicializing and indexating, etc… with
the innovative and paranoid possibilities and innovative restrictions hence
implied.
Today, this epistemological
and ontological attitude takes on a new interest, since prejudicial questions
concerning the Living – and even the Planet Earth – rear their
heads in every domain, and that globalized media make this questioning shared
by almost everyone. It is no more too abstract to look at the Atlantic Gulf
Stream and the Pacific Humboldt Stream to know that their salt content is
either increasing or decreasing, and that they are either slowing down or
accelerating, or even to perceive that everything known decidedly 'humane', or neolithic,
occurred in a short Interglacial Period that begun 13;000 years ago.
Our cosmological situation is
made even more tense biologically that Homo sapiens sapiens is a sub-species that (since the disappearance
of the Neanderthal man around 25.000 years ago) exhausted its species (Homo sapiens sapien) and even
its genre (Homo), hence limiting its natural capacities of adaptation.
These questions and answers change every day, every hour, and innumerable teams
and publications delve on it, trying to crossover the longest term with the
shortest as they are increasingly intricated. An Anthropogeny should not meddle in it.
However, it can be not only
speculative but also useful envisaging the initial and congenital faculties
that Homo would have when faced with extreme situations. In reason of their
extremity itself. The angular primate, who is primarily lat. indicializing and lat.
indexating, nourishes short and paranoid visions in an almost invincible manner.
Yet, at the same time he is possibilizing. And thus it is not completely
excluded that, under the effect of extremely violent questioning, he should
display aptitudes of attention and cooperation unknown until now. From the
beginning of the times on, his madness was technically and scientifically so limited
that, when he was delirious, his 'Mother Nature' could reestablish a
sufficiently viable order sooner than later, and that he had no need to dig himself
into his last resources, even in the event of a black plague. Today, his delirious
powers are quasi illimited technically and semiotically. With almost
irreversible mad consequences. But, why not, for unknown resiliences too.
Around thirty years ago, a
hadful of top scientists were asked whether they believed that, at the same
time in the Universe, there could be civilisations of our kind. A frequent
reply sounded that it was not excluded, but that any civilisation that had
reached the stage of ours was probably fatally self-destructive. Today's
Homo could well have to verify the part of truth and error in that intimidating
statement sooner than he thinks.