My Biophilosophy Conference Talk: Romanticizing Evolution with Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead

Below is my talk at the “Revitalizing Biophilosophy” conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for “Cognizing Life,” another conference that I’ll present at next week in Tübingen, Germany (there is a free livestream option if you’d like to tune in).

Transcript:

All right. So, next is me.

It’s lovely to go right after you, Alan, since where you ended—with Goethe and intuitive thinking as a new way of approaching the life sciences—is exactly what I’m focusing on.

What I’m going to try to do is bring you along the path of the argument I develop in a paper I’ve been working on for the last few months.

It’s a paper that is addressing this conference on biophilosophy, but I’m also attending a conference in Tübingen, Germany, next week, hosted by the Akanthos Academy, which is directed by Christoph Hueck—who, Alan, I think you met last year, or maybe knew already—who is a geneticist by training, but very much coming out of this school of thought that takes the Goethean phenomenological method of studying life very seriously. And Alan, you also mentioned Rudolf Steiner—I bring him into my paper a little bit as well.

If anyone’s curious about this conference in Germany, if you happen to be in Europe, it’ll also be streamed online. There’s a link to it.

So, this paper I’ve written is called Romanticizing Evolution: Recuperating Schelling’s Natural Philosophy and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as examples of a participatory approach to the life sciences. Very often this sort of Goethean approach is referred to as participatory, and I’ll get more into what that means.

And I also ended up bringing in Charles Sanders Peirce—I just couldn’t help it. He was too relevant to leave out. Even though I’m focusing on Schelling and Whitehead, Peirce was deeply influenced by Schelling, and Whitehead knew of his work. Charles Hartshorne, who was Whitehead’s assistant at Harvard, along with Paul Weiss, were editing Peirce’s papers in the 1930s. And there’s a story Hartshorne relates where he showed Whitehead some of Peirce’s later cosmological work, and Whitehead was so shocked by the resonance and convergence that he told Hartshorne to promise that he would say he was just now showing him these papers—because Whitehead was worried someone might accuse him of plagiarism.

So, I’ll address Peirce a bit in what follows.

Let me say a bit about the title, Romanticizing Evolution. Obviously, I’m drawing on the Romantic tradition. This comes specifically, though, from a quote by Novalis—Friedrich von Hardenberg, pen name Novalis—one of the Romantics in Jena, friends with the Schlegels and Schelling, Schiller, Goethe, and so on. Novalis was very much involved in the sciences—he directed a mine, he studied minerals and geology and all of the sciences quite deeply—and he had this participatory view where he said, “The world must be romanticized.”

And what that means is that we need to recognize that the knower and the known are bound up in a reciprocal process of creative becoming, and that the scientist is not separate from the phenomena they are studying. And that has tremendous methodological implications, because this mechanistic view of the natural world is downstream of a bifurcation—a dualism that follows from the founding of modern science, with Descartes, right? We all know that story.

And while many contemporary biologists wouldn’t claim to be Cartesian, their understanding of the living world as reducible to mechanism is very much an inheritance of this Cartesian split between the human mind and the objects in the extended world that we are measuring and modeling.

And so, when Novalis says that the world must be romanticized, and when I say Romanticizing Evolution in my title, I’m exploring what happens when we look again at this phenomenon of evolution from a participatory point of view—when we look again at life, remembering that we ourselves are an example of what we are studying.

In other words, even our own thinking process—our imaginative activity—is, in Rudolf Steiner’s terms, a kind of diluted form of the very formative forces responsible for shaping our bodies, our physiology, and growing us from, you know, the zygote to adult form. And so that type of symmetry between our own thinking and the forms of the natural world, I think, is what Novalis is getting at when he says the world must be romanticized. And that’s what a participatory approach really entails.

In Schelling’s terms—you know, he says in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature—he says, “So long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life. As soon, however, as I separate myself—and with me everything ideal—from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object, and I cease to comprehend how a life outside me can be possible.”

So, from the perspective of mechanistic biology, there is no life—there’s just mechanism. And evolution, similarly, is understood by neo-Darwinians as a process of selection of random variation that leads to the appearance of purposefully organized beings—but actually there is no purpose there; it’s just cause and effect that accidentally happens to give rise to what we perceive as living form. But really, life is not something that a mechanistic biologist would even want to acknowledge.

You know, Alan, you also spoke about the way in which much of molecular biology—and the life sciences generally—are more interested in prediction and control than anything else.

And there’s a thinker named Owen Barfield—who was influenced by Rudolf Steiner and Goethe and the whole Romantic tradition—who, in his book Saving the Appearances, comes up with this great term for this form of science that is only concerned with prediction and control, modeling the world so as to gain more control over it. He calls it “dashboard knowledge.”

And the metaphor here is that you can sit in the driver’s seat of the car, and you have access to the wheel, and you can shift the gears, and you push all the buttons on the dashboard—but you have no idea how the engine works, what internal combustion is. But you don’t need to know that to drive the car.

And so, you know, we have a certain form of science—particularly in physics—that allows us to land, you know, probes on the Moon and other planets. It’s very effective in terms of prediction and control, but deep understanding—especially the kind of understanding that we, as human beings, can grasp in an intuitive sense—science doesn’t want to go there.

Quantum physics just becomes about calculation—“shut up and calculate” becomes the mantra—instead of really asking: “Well, wait, Richard Feynman, you’re telling me I can’t understand the physical world?” Feynman says, “Nature is absurd,” and celebrates that. I think that’s a symptom of science going down the wrong path.

The Romantic view—this participatory view—wouldn’t just be seeking dashboard knowledge; it would be seeking actual understanding of the natural world, and an understanding of life, then, not just as an accidental byproduct of physical and chemical processes, but rather life as intrinsic to cosmogenesis as such, right?

This is an expanded conception of life. I think this follows not only from what the German Romantics were saying, but also from Whitehead’s similar view. And the point in making life a cosmic principle, as it were, is not to deny mechanism—it’s to recognize that mechanism is always a partial perspective on the whole, with the whole always being organic.

Schelling says right out: the world is an organism. He thinks of the world in terms of a Weltseele—a world soul. There’s a cosmic organism, and all particular organisms are kind of recapitulations of that cosmic organism.

And it’s not that there isn’t mechanism—organicists aren’t denying the role of mechanism. It’s the mechanists who deny there’s any such thing as organism.

Obviously, organisms make use of mechanisms—it’s part of how we move our muscles.

So, let me trace the argument here in this paper.

I begin, of course, with Immanuel Kant—his Critique of Judgment. I won’t rehearse this in too much detail—I think most of us might be aware of him coining the term “self-organization” and introducing the idea of “natural purposes.”

His “Copernican revolution” in philosophy—and his whole transcendental approach—made it such that Newtonian physics was more a function of the endogenous organization of our own minds. That is, the human mind has a certain set of categories and forms of intuition—space and time, inner and outer—and what scientists are really doing, whether they’re thinking of Galileo or Newton, is working out the structure of the human mind and how nature appears to us through that mind.

What nature might be in itself—Kant left as a sort of X, an unknown, that we can’t say anything about. He’s not a Berkeleyan idealist who denies that there’s a world beyond our mental apprehension of it; he’s just saying we can’t know anything about it. Everything that does appear to us, in space and time, he thought could be determined by the categories of our understanding—such that we could have universal and necessary knowledge, what he called synthetic a priori knowledge of nature.

Mathematical physics is the paradigm case of that.

Now, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant’s looking at our aesthetic judgments of beauty, but also our teleological judgments of the living world. He builds this analogy between art and nature, and he zeroes in on organisms—in the second half of the Critique of Judgment—as an example of a form of causality that our mechanistic categories don’t actually apply to.

He develops these concepts of natural purposes and self-organization. Self-organization, here, is this idea that, in an organism, the parts produce one another for the sake of the whole.

He thought this was unlike the physical, inorganic world, which could be understood mechanistically. It was as if, Kant said, there’s an idea incarnate in living organisms—a holistic form that allows the parts to work for the sake of the production of that whole.

However, Kant limited this notion of self-organization and natural purposiveness to a regulative idea. In other words, we can’t help but judge organisms as if they were purposive and self-organizing—with this reciprocal, whole-to-part causality—but we can’t scientifically determine them as such. We can’t have constitutive knowledge, Kant would say, of nature as self-organizing.

And this, through neo-Kantian interpretations, I think, has filtered into contemporary biology as this understanding of teleonomy—where it’s a kind of heuristic way of saying, “Of course, we understand the biological world as realizing functions,” but this is thought of as just a matter of us lacking a complete molecular explanation of what’s going on. And so we attribute purposes to organisms to understand their evolutionary history—but it’s not seen as real purposiveness.

Now, Schelling and the other Romantics—Goethe, in particular—picked up on the Critique of Judgment. And where Kant didn’t want to proceed to making self-organization or natural purposiveness constitutive of nature, the Romantics just rushed through that door and tried to re-articulate not just the biological sciences, but all of cosmology in terms of self-organization.

And Whitehead, of course, later picks up on that.

So, after I rehearse this Kantian picture—where Kant recognizes the power of self-organization, that life is irreducible (he even says there will never be a “Newton of the grass blade”—this famous line, meaning there will never be a mechanistic explanation of self-organization or of natural purposiveness)—I then turn to look at Darwin.

Very often in biology textbooks, Darwin is introduced as precisely the Newton of biology that Kant had forbidden, and Kant is caricatured as a sort of foolish, armchair philosopher who tried to limit the advance of science with his conceptual machinations—his account of self-organization in this case.

But I think that this completely misunderstands Kant, and also oversells Darwin’s hypothesis—which I characterize as a humble hypothesis.

I think it’s important to distinguish what Darwin was up to from what the Darwinians later did to his thought.

In On the Origin of Species, I argue, Darwin is presupposing—rather than explaining—spontaneous variations that appear in every generation of living beings. His real genius is to notice that, once these variations are granted—once we grant that there is this principle of variation—then the process or mechanism of natural selection, or differential survival in the struggle for existence, can gradually accumulate functional novelties.

Darwin lays out this mechanism of spontaneous variation and differential selection, which can account for specific functions—right?—and the differentiation of species.

But the point here is that natural selection is a filter acting on developmentally produced variations. It’s not the engine responsible for producing those variations. Nor is it capable of explaining self-organization.

A neat, pithy way of putting this is: Darwin addresses the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fit.

That is, he presupposes that there are self-organizing beings which vary, and that this process of differential selection can then lead those purposive, self-organizing beings to acquire specific functional traits.

Now, Darwin was very aware of the limitation of his approach. He confesses in Origin of Species that, quote, “our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.” He didn’t need to know how variation worked or what was causing it—he just needed to assume that it occurred.

He also marveled at the mysterious correlated variations that transform whole organ systems during development. And he conceded that these ontogenetic dynamics aren’t closely checked by natural selection.

So, my point here is that Darwin is not the Newton of biology. His theory requires variation—but does not explain its genesis or its dynamics.

Now, this question of the role of variation is, I think, very interesting. I’m pretty sure my friend Tim—Tim Jackson—will address this later today.

Because, as some very perceptive commentators have pointed out—particularly Jerome Rosé Veron—this emphasis on variation in Darwin is a real historical break from the Newton-Galileo paradigm in physics, where it was assumed that things maintain their state of motion unless externally constrained.

What Darwin does is assume that everything tends to vary unless constrained.

And if we push this variationist principle beyond just the biological world—if we cosmologize it, in a way—then we can see how this evolutionary turn represents a profound inversion of classical physics, where we’re replacing the idea of the conservation of motion with creativity as a primary principle.

But there’s an important philosophical divide here.

Neo-Darwinians would argue that the Darwinian mechanism—random variation and differential selection—when properly generalized, actually explains the origin of purpose.

As Andreas Weber and Francisco Varela put it in their paper, Life After Kant—I think it was Varela’s last paper before he passed away—they say, quote: “The overwhelming preference among neo-Darwinians is to explain biological facts as the statistical result of natural selection, which post facto gives the semblance of goal-directedness.”

So, on this account, purposiveness arises through iterated cycles of variation and selection—random changes occasionally produce configurations that happen to maintain themselves, and these self-maintaining patterns get differentially preserved.

Through this bootstrapping process, the appearance of agency emerges from purely mechanical interactions.

Rather than thinking of organisms as realizing teloi—purposes—this view treats what appears to us as purpose as merely a teleonomic artifact of our own limited heuristic explanations.

The key point I want to make here is that the problem with this neo-Darwinian account of teleonomy—the appearance of purpose that isn’t really purpose—is that there’s a conflation between the idea of specialized functions (which I think natural selection can explain) and the capacity for purposive organization as such.

Autopoietic theorists—in the lineage of Maturana and Varela, all the way to Evan Thompson—would say that evolution presupposes autopoiesis, or autopoietic beings. Logically speaking, you need self-producing, self-maintaining beings—beings that can reproduce—before you can get this process of natural selection going.

And I used to be convinced by that argument for a while—but there are issues there. As Weber and Varela point out in Life After Kant, they’re only willing to grant purposiveness to autopoietic beings at the level of biological cells—whereas physics and chemistry are still described as neutral and valueless. All value, all normativity, they say, comes from the cell and multicellular organisms derived therefrom.

The Schelling–Whitehead–Romantic lineage I’m drawing on goes further than that.

I try to make the case that there is a gradient of aims or purposes operating throughout cosmic evolution—so that what appears as blind mechanism at one level is actually a low-grade form of purposiveness when viewed from a wider perspective.

(Checking my time here… I go till the top of the hour, right? Okay, this is the problem when I don’t have a clock in front of me.)

Let me speak a bit about this cosmic extension of purposiveness.

As I mentioned, Schelling, Goethe, and the Romantics are building off the Critique of Judgment. Schelling wants to articulate—what you could say is the systems-theoretical account—of the cosmos as a whole. Joseph Esposito makes this case in his book on Schelling.

From top to bottom—from light and gravity to electricity and magnetism, up to living beings and human consciousness—Schelling describes this process of self-organization out of a creative Abgrund—a kind of originary abyss—where subject and object, mind and matter, haven’t yet fully differentiated.

He sees nature as a function of a polarity between infinitely opposed forces that are constantly seeking equilibrium—but never finding it.

His method, here—he’s coming out of the idealist tradition, having been a student of Fichte, who emphasized the self-positing “I,” radicalizing Kant in a sense by making all of nature exist merely as a check on the freedom of the “I.” For Fichte, nature becomes just the “not-I.”

But Schelling—and Novalis, too, as much as they appreciate Fichte’s insights—want to do justice to nature as an autonomous, self-organizing system in its own right, not just as an appearance for mind to organize itself.

In a sense, Schelling is trying to alchemically distill human self-consciousness down to its minimal experiential potencies—to strip away all empirical content and just reach what he would call “pure activity”—a pure activity where knower and known coincide.

Then, he tries to reconstruct nature’s evolutionary path upward from this original duplicity of infinitely opposed forces, through a series of organizational stages or potencies, where at each stage there’s a temporary equilibrium—but it’s always unstable.

It’s a kind of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic process, as we would describe it today.

I mentioned the importance of Peirce here.

Peirce says in a letter to William James that his views were influenced by Schelling more than anyone else. What he admires most about Schelling, he says, is his freedom from the trammels of system, and his holding himself uncommitted to any previous utterance.

Hegel—who was Schelling’s friend, then collaborator, and then critic—said that Schelling conducted his philosophical education in public. He was constantly starting afresh, developing new systems, following new insights. And while for Hegel that was a criticism, for Peirce that’s exactly what made Schelling more scientific.

Peirce transforms Schelling’s dialectic of opposed forces into his evolutionary categories. It’s a dialectical way of thinking in terms of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Where Schelling sees nature arising from this tension between infinite expansiveness and contractiveness—these opposed forces—Peirce describes a universe where spontaneous feeling, or what he calls firstness, gives rise to actual events and resistances—what he calls secondness—whose regularities crystallize into habits or laws—what he calls thirdness.

I’ll go more into this triadic logic because I think it speaks precisely to this variation–selection issue in evolutionary logic.

For Peirce, thirdness—or this tendency to take habits, or this capacity for learning—can’t be understood as merely a byproduct of firstness and secondness, or, in other words, merely a byproduct of variation and selection.

That is, the kind of selection Darwin describes—as differential selection in an environment where there’s a struggle for existence—yes, firstness and secondness are very important. But Peirce would say you don’t get thirdness just as a byproduct or an emergent phenomenon out of firstness and secondness. Thirdness is equiprimordial with firstness and secondness.

So, as a critique of neo-Darwinism, I think Peirce would say there’s always already this tendency to take habits, to learn, to organize—that’s present. And variation isn’t then merely random.

And I think Whitehead also provides us with a way of understanding variation not as merely random, but as guided by what he calls an initial aim.

Now, I don’t have time to get too much into process theology here, but we talked earlier about teleology and how it’s often wed to a substance metaphysics—and to a whole theological framework. I mean, Aristotelian teleology has its own Deist theology behind it—even the mechanistic philosophy, as Newton understood it, had this background where teleology meant imposed design from a divine being.

I think Whitehead allows us—with his process philosophy, his process-relational ontology—to understand the role of what he calls initial aim in a more immanent way, much akin to what Kant was talking about in terms of natural purposes, or even to Aristotle’s sense of immanent purposiveness.

Aristotle already distinguishes between external telos—like the design of an artifact imposed by an external agent—and the immanent teleology of organisms, where purpose arises from within.

So I think we can—with Whitehead’s, Schelling’s, and Peirce’s help—understand teleology and directed variation in a way that doesn’t necessarily imply something supernatural.

Very quickly—I want to leave some time for comments—I want to connect Peirce’s notion of abduction to what Goethe describes as this intuitive form of thinking—or we could say, imaginative perception.

You know, Goethe develops a whole science of morphology—an understanding of plant metamorphosis, an understanding of color—applying his artistic sensitivity to scientific observation. He observes the growth of plants with empathy and even with love, he says. He called it “gentle empiricism,” where he tries to recreate in his own imagination the same formative process he’s witnessing over the course of time.

There’s a temporal synthesis involved here—he’s witnessing it in the growth of the plant.

I think this is akin to what Peirce meant by abduction.

Usually we think of modes of logical reasoning as induction and deduction—where induction is the empirical method, where, out of many specific instances, you develop some general account; and deduction is the reverse—starting with general ideas and deducing particular consequences.

Abduction is different. It’s Peirce’s account of how variation could be directed—that there’s an implicit continuity between our minds and our guesses—our intuitions—and the forms, structures, and causal processes of the natural world.

Peirce considers an evolutionary or Darwinian account of how it is that Galileo and Newton happened upon the right ideas to develop their physics. And he thinks you can’t account for that just in terms of random variation—as if you just throw out ideas until one happens to work experimentally.

Peirce thinks that, through abduction, what we’re actually seeing is that the dice are loaded in a certain way—that we have this “natural light,” as Galileo called it—and, as Peirce emphasizes, because we are living beings, we can leap to the right understanding of other living beings.

Now, the point isn’t that we always leap to the right explanation—we need induction, we need experimentation, we need deduction and logical rigor to check our intuitive leaps.

But I think the participatory approach I’m trying to derive here from the Romantics is given a very rigorous logical justification by Peirce.

Karl Popper talked about the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of justification—I think abduction is very much about the logic of scientific discovery.

Then we still have to do all the rigorous work in science to justify our intuitive leaps. But if we don’t train scientists to develop their intuitions, then we’re not going to have major scientific breakthroughs.

I think the Romantics can provide us with a way forward there.

One last thing I want to say before I open it up: The role of metaphors came up earlier—mechanism, organism, and so on. And I think here too, all of the Romantics are emphasizing the role that literature and the arts play in science.

Scientists are making observations, doing experiments, developing mathematical formalisms—but human beings understand the world as language-using creatures. Science will always have a literary element.

The role of metaphor is very important. And if scientists aren’t paying attention to that aspect of scientific practice, then I think we’ll get stuck using dead metaphors—literally dead metaphors, dead in multiple senses.

Whereas I think the Romantics provide such a wonderful example of what an alternative science could look like—if we took our own aesthetic experience seriously when observing the natural world.

So—sorry, that was a little chaotic. Lots of ideas have come up listening to others, and I didn’t exactly follow the flow I’d intended. But I’ll pause there and invite comments and reflections.

Discussion

Krishna Keshava Das: So, it’s a question, I guess. When you were talking about thinkers playing with what came before—this apparent separation between knower and known, or subject and object—if this is one of the ideas that you said Whitehead was playing with… do they talk about how that separation—if they accept kind of a consciousness-first worldview—how the separation between observer and observed has to be a projection of the content of consciousness, as external to itself? And then there’s this prioritization of the externally projected content, and then a forgetfulness of that whole process in order to arrive at a worldview where you have external matter, and then you try to explain conscious experience through that external matter?

Matt Segall: Yeah, interesting question.

I think… it’s a little more ambiguous with Schelling. Whitehead wouldn’t say that he was a “consciousness-first” thinker. His metaphysics is what’s called panexperiential, but he would say that most experience is not conscious.

So it’s not that consciousness is primary, and then this split into what seems like an external material world and some kind of self-deluded ego arises. I mean, that’s more of the idealist orientation.

I think Schelling is more complicated than that. But there is this sense that contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science are saddled with this so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” which is not really a solvable problem—it’s a deeply problematic framework, because it’s coming downstream of this split between mind and matter.

We’re asking: “How do we get mind out of matter?”—when maybe it would be better not to sever them to begin with, right? The way the problem is framed, it can’t be solved. There’s a need to swim back upstream—to what Schelling describes as the Abgrund—German for “groundless ground.” It’s really hard to conceptualize—it’s before the split between subject and object, before the split between concept and percept, you could even say.

But I think we can still intuit it, nonetheless. Whitehead calls it “Creativity.”

If we can recognize that as our metaphysical starting point, then these questions—like “How do you get consciousness out of arrangements of matter?”—don’t come up anymore. That’s just the wrong kind of question to ask.

I’m not sure if that’s quite what you were getting at, but…

Krishna Keshava Das: It’s helpful. Thank you.

Matt Segall: Spyridon, please.

Spyridon Koutroufinis: Thank you, Matt. That was excellent. I have two remarks—two short remarks.

First, about mechanism and organism—Georges Canguilhem says that mechanisms and machines cannot explain vitality—but vitality explains mechanisms and machines. Every organism needs to have some mechanical aspects in order to survive in the world.

This makes very good sense to me—that vitality produces mechanisms and machines.

My second remark is about Kant and his reduction of telos—or teleology—to a regulative principle in the Critique of Judgment.

As you know, in his last work—the Opus Postumum—he ascribes to teleology a constitutive power.

What’s interesting there is that he does this by referring to our human experience—our experience of our own body.

We know that telos is something constitutive because we experience it—we feel, so to speak, what it means, how it feels to work with our body in the world.

The self-experience of our body allows us to understand what teleology is.

Matt Segall: Right, yeah—I’m familiar with the Opus Postumum and Eckart Förster’s commentary on it. Förster actually argues that Kant may have been influenced by Schelling in that text—which survived as, I don’t know, a dozen different versions, since he kept starting over and never finished it. It was in quite a mess after his death.

Förster did us all a great service by trying to organize it.

Yes, I think Kant—had he lived a little longer—might have been able to accomplish what the Romantics attempted to do with the Critique of Judgment on his own. But then again, he may have already been influenced by them in that text.

And I was thinking, in terms of the mechanism-organism question—Etienne Gilson wrote a book—I believe it’s called From Aristotle to Darwin and Back.

I think Gilson was at Harvard, if I’m not mistaken, around the same time as Whitehead, and Whitehead learned quite a bit from him.

Gilson makes this remark: It’s not the organicists who are denying mechanism—it’s the mechanists who are denying organicism.

Spyridon Koutroufinis: One more question—did you show any slides?

Matt Segall: No.

Spyridon Koutroufinis: Okay.

Matt Segall: You didn’t miss anything.

Marcus, please.

Markus Wild: Yeah, thank you very much. I have a question about what you’re calling the Romantics or Romanticism.

I have a little bit of the feeling that maybe in your presentation this whole movement comes across as too unified or homogeneous—it seems to flow too smoothly.

But if you look at the reception of the Critique of Judgment—the way Kant tries to handle the autonomy of the teleological judgment—he basically posits two kinds of understanding: intellectual intuition and intuitive understanding, which are really going in different directions.

Fichte picks up on intellectual intuition, and Schelling thinks he can apply intellectual intuition to nature.

But one way to read Goethe is to say that Schelling was completely misled by Fichte’s lead—to take intellectual intuition as a principle of nature—because Schelling confused intuitive understanding and intellectual intuition all the time.

That would suggest another reading of all this—where intuition as a productive power, and intuition as a reproductive power, are sharply distinguished.

So, my feeling is that maybe this Romanticism is a little too unified in your account.

Matt Segall: Yeah—sure, I definitely agree with you.

And in the paper I nuance that quite a bit. There’s a wonderful text that Joan Steigerwald recently published—Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life. She begins that book by pointing out there is no unified system of Romantic biology.

This distinction you’re making—between intellectual intuition and intuitive understanding—is very important. I go into that distinction as well.

I think Eckart Förster, and also Dalia Nassar in her book Romantic Empiricism, really zero in on this question.

You could say Goethe kind of did a mashup of Kant’s Critique of Judgment with Spinoza’s notion of intuitive science.

I like Förster’s framing of it—that Kant says we reach the limits of our understanding with discursive reason and the sensory world. But it could be that this intuitive form of understanding can take us further.

I think Goethe exploited that methodology in a way that, in my argument, the life sciences could still learn quite a bit from.

And it seemed to me—listening to your presentation—that Portmann was doing something similar. It seems like he was adopting a kind of Goethean method—wanting to take our sensory encounter with how nature shows itself to us seriously, and not necessarily looking for something invisible behind it to explain it.

Markus Wild: Hmm.

Matt Segall: I guess we could do one more—from Alan—and then we’ll have to move on.

Alan Rodrigues: Oh yeah, can you hear me?

Matt Segall: Yep.

Alan Rodrigues: It seemed from your talk that self-organization is a very critical phenomenon in life processes and evolutionary processes. I’m wondering—though I don’t know how much you keep track of how terms are being used in biology—but I’ve noticed more and more people now willing to use that term, even in molecular biology and laboratory research.

But when they use the term, they mean emergent properties that result from parts interacting. And then they call it a day, right? There’s a bit more creativity now being allowed into the system, but it’s still just parts stochastically interacting, producing something emergent.

Matt Segall: I mean, the challenge is that, in real—actual—self-organization, as I think it has historically been understood, the parts don’t pre-exist.

Alan Rodrigues: Right, right—I’m not saying I agree with how it’s being used. I’m just noticing that, in terms of the sociology of science, the term “self-organization” is getting kind of gutted.

It’s similar to how the term “epigenetics” got swallowed and neutralized. I’m just noticing that happening with self-organization too. I wonder how we can counter that move—but I don’t know if you’ve noticed that trend.

Matt Segall: Yeah, it’s definitely become a bit of a buzzword.

I think there’s a text that came out recently—edited by Dupré and Nicholson—called Everything Flows, on process biology. They make a similar point—that self-organization isn’t just about simple parts assembling into something more complex.

It’s that you can’t even separate the parts from the whole anymore. In a self-organizing system, the parts are produced by the system—they didn’t pre-exist that organization.

There aren’t pre-existing parts that, in an additive way, build up into a higher-level system.

And I think you were getting at that in terms of the top-down and bottom-up causation—and how changes in the organization of cells, based on even physical features like how water beads together, can feed back onto genetic expression at the molecular level.

It’s like teleonomy again—acknowledging the appearance of purpose in the living world without granting it full ontological significance.

Alan Rodrigues: Yeah, yeah—I’ve noticed that kind of minimal concession being made now. Just to that level.

Matt Segall: Yeah.

Should we take one more comment, Spyridon?

Matt Segall: Should we bring—

Spyridon Koutroufinis: Maybe just a short remark.

I’ll try to make it as brief as possible—about what Alan just said about self-organization being reduced to something that merely emerges from interactions among parts.

In my opinion, that’s not what Kant meant by self-organization. In his explanation of self-organization, the term Zweckmäßigkeit—purpose—is not something that emerges from parts.

The parts interact with each other for the purpose of producing the whole. And this purpose is not something that can be explained by the interactions of parts alone.

That’s a totally different understanding of self-organization from this new mechanistic understanding we see today—the whole nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory approach.

Matt Segall: Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Spyridon.

All right, let’s take a ten-minute break and come back at… let’s say, just past the hour. So, ten minutes—and then Jack will be up.