By Matthew Cuffaro
“Existentialism protests
the rationalism and idealism who would see man creatures only as a
subject—that is, as having reality as a thinking being.” p. 12 Angel, Ellenberger, May, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry in
Psychology.
The following argument advocates existentialism
in biosemiotics to the reader of this blog—presumably up-and-coming
bioethicists—to mull over how an existentialist understanding of biosemiotics
is relevant to considering the ethics of medicine and health, environment, etc.
What biosemiotics
is, how it can integrate existential thought, and how it relates to the
bioethicist is a major concern: the predisposition to think of animal cognition
and decision-making as purely genetic impedes our attempts, as organisms
“creative past our genes”, to identify with animals, if not the biological
world. In fact, you can derive the entire motivation and most of the points
from the first page of the preface in J. Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics. Hoffmeyer’s writing is beautifully lucid and
recommended to the readers, but it will be kept short so the existential
argument may be covered.
To begin, the crux of
contemporary biosemiotics can be understood as the disbelief that organic
communication is merely “mechanical.”
What J. Hoffmeyer,
Biosemiotician, offers:
With the current outlook, other organisms
remain empathetically inaccessible—they are separated by a gulch of
misunderstanding or anthropocentrism. We are still surprised when new
research reveals “human” emotions (grieving) in animals. Perhaps the difficulty of stationing “complex” emotions in cultural
terms—terms not patently equivalent to a notion of a general animal culture—perpetuates this idea.
Partially the mechanical explanation is to
blame from theoretical biology’s honest expedition to resolve the problem. The complete genome is an
enticing structure; it is not hard to imagine that a reductive appetency
towards a promise of rich structural coding creates a tendency to “delegate to
[the animal’s] genetic apparatus” the complete spectrum of their ethology as
well. This continually denies the creature the evolutionary merit of having an intellectual middle-man. Hoffmeyer uses this example to describe the creative
semiotic faculty of the animal:
“When a brown hare spots
a fox approaching in the open landscape, the hare stands bolt upright and
signals its presence instead of fleeing…ethologist A. Holley [claims that the]
hare can easily scape a fox simply by running – a fact that the fox seems to
‘know.’”.
The hare signals
the fox that it has been spotted, and so subverting
the actual use of its physiological advantages. The quick legs of the hare
begin to have a more symbolic importance to the hare that tries to remove the need of their use.
Perhaps we can
assume that a being capable of understanding not just their asset’s advantage,
but what the asset means for it, is
to imply that the genetic body of the hare is interpreted and communicated to
other animals by a being that can experience
itself.
The
hare capable of interpreting and communicating itself must recognize the
significance of itself in sustaining its life.
We suppose that the hare has not just experienced life but is capable of
commuting its interpretations into actions fundamentally significant to its
survival, e.g. signaling the fox. The hare is striving to exist, and so it is exercising a creative faculty to
mediate itself with the environment.
To account for the experiential and
concomitant existential
questions that would crop up if Hoffmeyer and Co. had their way, I sketch in
the sand existential biosemiotics
(EBS) to take up the burden.
What Existential
Biosemiotics offers:
The overt task for existential
biosemiotics is to extend semiotic theory, or the study of signs—“things that
refer to something else”—into the domain of experience. We may formulate this
project to coincide Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with scientific knowledge
under a common metalanguage. Hoffmeyer lobs us a notion of biological
referentiality to organize the
analyses of the organism’s relation to itself. In the case of the hare above, the
hare’s reference to itself is tickled by a suppression of its internal or
bodily ability to run (which it is genetically equipped to do well) in light of
an external threat.
If we
take seriously a creative faculty in the animal, then there is, in
the fabric of experience, certain semiotic weights that give it shape. The
EBStian would deal with identifying the significant structure underlying shaped experience. In other words, how a
bundle of signs (e.g. a predator, a potential mate, a hare’s leg, the arrangement of
a room) designs the world of
the experiencing organism, or á la Hoffmeyer,
how the “ubiquitous intentionality of
communicative behavior” is articulated, and how these decisions that govern the
total and embodied experience of the
creature (e.g. run very fast, a sense of peace in a clean room) have a
conjugate physical response (e.g. mad adrenaline rushes through the prairie,
muscular relaxation etc.) and vice versa (how
does a particular space become associated with my impressions of it, my gut
feeling, etc.?).
The
biosemiotician in this scope hopes to demonstrate that communicative and
behavioral similarities between organisms enriches approaches to interact,
understand, and imagine the biological sciences.
Matthew Cuffaro is a philosophy student at the University of South Florida with a concentration in the philosophies of mathematics and religious studies.
