https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-Axial/dp/0674061438
Robert Bellah: Multiple Realities
Appreciating Bellah’s sociological explication, I advance to articulate phenomenology of lifelines in terms of synthesis between autopoiesis and Niklas Luhmann’s systems sociology, taking on Husserl and M. Merleau Ponty. Their phenomenology accentuates the significance of perception and body in social cultural context. I take over Steven Rose’s term lifelines based on organismic view of life at multiple levels, and undertake a conceptual clarity in explicating a critical and emancipatory horizon of Ponty’s embodied philosophy..
This approach may resonate with Bellah’s enactive sociology, which stands in relevance to Emile Durkheim, Alfred Schutz, and Clifford Geertz. Bellah makes a heuristic scheme of explanation in identifying Durkheim’s idea of religion as the sacred, a realm of non-ordinary reality. Bellah brings the notion of non-ordinary reality to Alfred Schutz’s analysis of multiple realities.
We live and operate always in a series of non-ordinary realities coupled with ordinary reality, as well. The experience of the multiple realities can be manifest in Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence underlying the ecology of collective behavior (Deborah Gordon) within the systemic representation of the world, such as political leadership of charisma or spectacular experience of collective identity at social cultural level.
Schutz, a pupil of Edmund Husserl, paves the phenomenological approach to sociology of Max Weber, by enriching the latter with philosophical critique and through conceptual clarity. We live in the paramount reality, which is featured as the world of everyday life, because we are confronted with the world of daily life along with a practical or pragmatic interest (Bellah, 2)
Schutz conceptualizes the world of daily life in terms of the common sense knowledge of the social world by investigating types and typical knowledge. Human act is performed within social life-world as indicated by typical constructs, which are understandable in a common sense interpretation of everyday life. The primary activity is to bring forth a projected state of working and striving by bodily dimension. It is governed by the rationality of the means/ends schema operating in standard time and standard space. The bodily dimension is characterized in terms of human project of working and striving in intersubjective contact and communication.
In a similar vein, Merleau-Ponty argues that history does not walk on its head, nor think with its feet. But it walks and thinks with its body. The genesis of meaning refers to the fact that we are in the world, condemned to meaning (Ponty, Phenomenology of the Perception, xix).
Likewise, Schutz measures and evaluates rationality by experience and bodily dimension, so that perception comes along with the emergence of meaning in cultural life-world, bringing forth the regime of the truth into the existence in terms of working, striving, and rationality. The objectivity of society is defined in terms of intersubjectivity, and the facticity of social structure is constituted by and realized in, social interrelations and social praxis. This refers to social construction of reality in which we take part by constituting and changing it.
For the emergence of meaning and rationality Schutz’s phenomenological position is characterized by involving the epoche or suspension of the natural attitude, problematizing what is taken for granted. The social world, into which I am born and is pregiven to me, transcends the reality of my everyday life. Putting our question, we no longer accept the social world and its current idealizations in a naive natural manner. With the phenomenological attitude, we “put in brackets the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him.” (Bellah, 2).
Systems Sociology and Autopoiesis
Husserl’s phenomenology of intentionality and meaning finds its climax in Niklas Luhmann’s systems sociology in which Luhmann takes over the Francisco Valera’s neuron scientific notion of autopoiesis (autonomy, self-creativity) at cellular level. He undertakes systemic understanding of society and meaningful life in terms of communication, functional differentiation, and system formation.
Social systems operate in the autopietic network in terms of autonomy and creativity along with its own intentionality, meaning, and suspension of other systems. A structural coupling would occur, leading to epistemological rupture at the moment of great innovation within itself.
Human practice is embodied in the ecology of collective behavior within the system, participating in system’s communication with other system and its structural coupling between self-reference and other–reference.
The biological concept of autopoiesis is not separated from the study of thermodynamic processes and dissipative structures, as described by Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-born chemist and physicist. The Santiago theory focuses on pattern of life at cellular level, open to the environment, but holding the organizational closure in the description of the autopoietic network.
In fact, Prigogine elaborates on the structure of a living system in openness to the flow of energy and matter. The living organism or structure exists in a boundary region between order and disorder (entropy). It reaches point of instability or bifurcation through the external influence of the environment. They move toward the emergence of new differentiated order, adaptation, system’s change, and new structure.
Cells are dissipative structures in the autopoietic linkage of network, and have the capacity to bring such linkage to a core property of the processes. In a living system of cells we observe the cycles in their metabolic processes, because a cell far from equilibrium may develop through multiple feedback loops into forms of ever-increasing complexity and multiplicity.
A theory of dissipative structures can be better explained in terms of weak linkage in eukaryotic cells in multicellular organisms, which have added more complexity and versatility to the linkages. They are synthesized by cells of the organism, passing along to other cells. These added and enriched signals may regulate the most complicated developmental circuits, yielding the entire nervous system.
According to Kirschner and Gerhart, the network of linkage becomes crucial in the mechanism of many core processes (for example, DNA replication, transcription and signaling between cells). This network view regulates large combinations of genes through extremely complex circuits, metabolism, and mechanism.
Seen in this regard, an autopoietic system is operative in regulatory linkage, set within a symbiotic rhythm and catalytic metabolism and allosteric modulation at the multiple levels. This implies how information is passed from one component to another on the molecular level. Signals may come from outside the cell or the organism, passing through a chain of command until a response is made in an appropriate manner. In turn, that response could affect the environment or the organism (The Plausibility of Life, 110).
This epistemic constellation helps me to incorporate a theory of dissipative structure into a cellular structure of punctuated equilibrium, explicating the extent to which physiology of organism would be capable of generating physical adaptation, variation and innovation of novelty. This perspective can be reinterpreted in a phenomenological suite in dealing with perception and the bodily dimension as the site of embodied cognition.
Embodied Intentionality and Scientific Method
According to Merleau-Ponty, perception opens a window to the external things, in co-ordination with them. Scientific method is sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Intentionality implies that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The intentionality is in original and primitive contact with the world through perception, oriented towards that world (intentionality of acts).
In the notion of operative intentionality, “our evaluations and in the landscape we see, more clearly than in objective knowledge, and furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language.” (Ponty, xviii).
Merleau-Ponty acknowledges in the operative rationality (underlying voluntary acts, judgment and discursive reasoning) the most profound sense of intentionality, which belongs to phenomenology’s task for elucidation. The body plays a significant role in two kinds of intentionality, since consciousness is situated or embodied in the world, having intentional expression.
The world of perception cannot be dismissed as mere ‘appearance,’ which is in contrast with the ‘real’ world revealed by the natural sciences. The science offers just an approximate expression of physical events (contra Descartes), as compared with the perceived world. Two realities can be combined with each other, because "the relationship between perception and scientific knowledge is one of appearance to reality. It befits our human dignity to entrust ourselves to the intellect, which alone can reveal to us the reality of the world." (Ponty, The World of Perception, 42).
A sense experience is the vital communication with the world, grasping its meaning of the perceived object in reference to or in affinity with one’s own body’s movement. The study of consciousness in the world is not separated from our lived experience of the body, which is different from physiology or anatomy.
By means of my body, I observe objects, situating myself in relation to them and having perspective on them. Therefore, my perception restructures the perceived world in a way of correlation between the acts of perception (noesis) and the meaningful regime of object perceived in the act (noema).
Organismic view of the whole body as phenomenal body (intentionality and meaning) is not an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space, but pre-reflectively apprehended in its functional value. The phenomenal body has expressive unity seated in the intentionality in projecting itself onto the world.
Ponty’s systemic thinking of the phenomenal body finds its relevance to scientific method and concept, which amplify scientific research process, constituting the perceived things by means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. The natural object remains a network of general properties. “It is no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value.” (Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 55).
An embodied scientific method elaborates on the unity of mind and body (ensouled body in distinction but not separated). It has nothing to do with dissolving or assimilating the mind or consciousness merely to the psychological quarter. There is a dialectical sense between the mind and body in terms of integration and Gestalt in the phenomenological scheme: I am my body who eats (integration), yet I have my living body (distinction). An integration-distinction approach may come to terms with Varela’s cognitive science and phenomenology of autopoiesis in terms of the enacive embodiment.
According to Valera, "cognitive science stands at the crossroads where the natural sciences and the human sciences meet." Therefore, cognitive science is Janus-faced, looking down both roads at once. "One of its faces is turned toward nature and sees cognitive processes as behavior. The other is turned toward the human world (or what phenomenologists call the "life-world") and sees cognition as experience. ...there can be no science of the human life-world because science must always presuppose it. " (Valera, et al. The Embodied Mind, 13).
This perspective is then promoted in a critical theory of lifelines confronting the genetically determined view of life as well as involving ecological, social epigenetics. Biological study without the embodied dimension leads to compartmentalizing the biological interconnection with organismic view of life. This social ecological constellation belongs to the regime of sociology of scientific knowledge for elucidating in taking on multiple realities of lifelines.