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Descartes’ dualisms and the epistemology of
biosemiotics
By Morten Tønnessen
Associate professor in philosophy at University
of Stavanger’s Department of health studies
René
Descartes (1596–1650) has been reckoned as a primary antagonist of biosemiotics
ever since Friedrich Salomon Rothschild introduced his seminal 1962 paper with
the following statement (p. 774):
The concept
of the symbol shows the way to overcome René Descartes’ partition of man into
the self as res cogitans and the body
as res extensa. In the symbol
psychological meaning and physical sign appear as a unit.
What is
referred to here, and has repeatedly been referred to in later biosemiotic
literature, is Descartes’ infamous substance dualism, which is often associated
with the mind–body problem, a problem Descartes can be said to have introduced
in the modern age. While substance dualism is an instance of ontological
dualism, Descartes’ position, which was so important to the establishment and
growth of modern science, also implied epistemological dualism, i.e. the view
that the (in Cartesian sense human) subject and the objects perceived by it are
radically different. In simplified terms, this perspective can be characterized
as implying that the knowing subject stands “outside”, or is independent of,
the world which it comes to know about.
In
contrast, phenomenology (in its non-Cartesian versions) and hermeneutics have
maintained that the knowing subject is always a part of the world that it
navigates in and attempts to understand. This perspective is also central to
Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, and to Uexküllian
phenomenology (Tønnessen 2011), a version of phenomenology derived from
Uexküll’s work and characterized by the assumption of the universal existence
(in the realm of life) of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of
experienced worlds. A living being and its phenomenal world is a unity, and the
two can only be understood in tandem.
“Knowing”,
as Kalevi Kull (2009: 81) has argued, “is a distinctive feature of living
systems.” Animals know – plants know – even microorganisms know (not to mention
distributed knowing in various composite systems). It is the task of biology to
study and describe what they know,
and how they know what they know. This
implies the ontological finding that all living beings are knowing creatures,
and the related epistemological observation that in order to get to know as
much as possible about the world at large (the natural world included), we must
base much of our human knowledge on getting acquainted with what non-humans
know. In consequence, biology, and perhaps zoology in particular, is key to
contributing to overall human knowledge. This perspective is very unlike that
of Descartes, which was that animals are machine-like and bereft of any true intelligence
or rationality.
In
conclusion I will refer to the common critique of Cartesian dualism found in
health science in general and nursing science in particular. In doing this I
will discuss to what extent biosemiotics does or should share a (w)holistic
view of humanity, and of nature. In one version, such a view of humanity
implies that human life has four dimensions, namely a physical, a
psychological, a social and a spiritual dimension (and a reductionist view
typically amounts to acknowledging only the physical dimension).
References
Kull,
Kalevi (2009). Biosemiotics: To know, what life knows. Cybernetics and Human
Knowing 16(3/4): 81–88.
Rothschild,
Friedrich Salomon (1962). “Laws of symbolic mediation in the dynamics of self
and personality”. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 96:
774–784.
Tønnessen,
Morten (2011). Umwelt Transition and Uexküllian Phenomenology – An Ecosemiotic
Analysis of Norwegian Wolf Management (= Dissertationes
Semioticae Universitatis Tartuensis 16). Doctoral dissertation. Tartu:
Tartu University Press. Introduction available online.
