The Material and the Organic by David Abram (pt. 2)
Toward an Ecological Epistemology
The Gaia hypothesis may well signal the emergence of just such a mature science—a science that seeks not to control the world but to participate with the world, not to operate upon nature, but to cooperate with nature. If the chemical composition of the air that we breathe is, at this very moment, being actively monitored and modulated by all of the earth's organisms acting in concert, as a single, coherent, living metabolism, then the material world that surrounds us is not, in any sense, inert or inanimate. Nor are these insects, these trees, or even these boulders entirely passive and inert. For material nature can no longer be perceived as a collection of detachable working parts. It is not a created machine but rather a vast, self-generative, living physiology, open and responsive to changing circumstances. In short, it is an entity.
Of course, we may still attempt to speak of Gaia in purely mechanical terms, or try to conceive of Gaia as a strictly objective set of processes, straining thus to hold our science within the old mechanical paradigm to which we have become accustomed. We may be reluctant to give up the dream of a finished objectivity, and of the fixed reality to which it would correspond. Nevertheless, Gaia will never fit very neatly within the discourse of mechanism. A mechanism is entirely determined; it acts, as we have seen, according to a set of predictable and fixed rules and structures that it itself did not generate. Yet it is precisely such a formulation that Gaia, as an autopoietic or self-generating system, resists. Of course, we may say that Gaia is a machine (or a set of mechanisms) that is building itself. But then we will have given up, perhaps without realizing it, that part of the metaphor that makes mechanism so compelling. That is, a machine that generates itself could never be wholly predictable. For it must improvise itself as it goes, creatively. (We have no guarantee, for instance, that the so-called mechanisms that Gaia employs to regulate the salinity of the oceans, or to modulate the temperature of the atmosphere, are precisely the same that Gaia will be employing two centuries from now.) Gaia, as a self-organizing entity, is no more and no less predictable than a living organism, and we might as well simply acknowledge the fact, and cease pretending that it is anything like a machine that we could build. The Gaia hypothesis suggests that the world we inhabit is rather more like a living physiology than it is like a watch, or a spaceship, or a complex computer.
And we ourselves are entirely inside of this physiology, circumscribed by this organic entity. For the Gaia hypothesis indicates that the atmosphere in which we live and think is itself a dynamic extension of the planetary surface, a functioning organ of the animate earth. As I have written elsewhere:
It may be that the new emphasis it places on the atmosphere of this world is the most radical aspect of the Gaia Hypothesis. For it carries the implication that before we as individuals can begin to recognize the Earth as a self-sustaining organic presence, we must remember and reacquaint ourselves with the very medium within which we move. The air can no longer be confused with mere negative presence or the absence of solid things; henceforth the air is itself a density—mysterious indeed for its invisibility—but a thick and tactile presence nonetheless. We are immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea. It is the medium, the silent interlocutor of all our musings and moods. We simply cannot exist without its support and nourishment, with its active participation in whatever we are up to at any moment.
In concert with the other animals, with the plants, and with the microbes themselves, we are an active part of the Earth's atmosphere, constantly circulating the breath of this planet through our bodies and brains, exchanging certain vital gases for others, and thus monitoring and maintaining the delicate makeup of the medium.(9)
So simply by breathing we are participating in the life of the biosphere. But not just by breathing! When we consider the biosphere not as a machine, but as an animate, self-sustaining entity, it soon becomes apparent that everything we see, everything we hear, every experience of smelling and tasting and touching is informing our bodies regarding the internal state of this other, vaster physiology—the biosphere itself. Sensory perception, then, discloses itself as a form of communication between an organism and the animate earth. (And this can be the case even when we are observing ourselves, noticing a headache that we feel or the commotion in our stomach caused by some contaminated water. For we ourselves are a part of Gaia. If the biosphere that encompasses us is itself a coherent entity, then introspection—listening to our own bodies—can become a way of listening and attuning to the earth.) Perception is a communication, or even a communion—a sensuous participation between ourselves and the living world that encompasses us. We have seen that, phenomenologically, this is precisely the way that we commonly experience perception—as an interaction, a participation or intertwining between ourselves and that which we perceive.
Perception is never a purely detached, objective encounter with a thing, because to perceive anything at all is to be engaged by that thing, and to feel oneself influenced, however minimally, by the encounter. We have seen that the mechanistic view of nature denies this dialectic by assuming that the material world is ultimately a determinate object, incapable of open reciprocity and response. The Gaia hypothesis, on the other hand, ultimately affirms our perceptual experience, because it describes the sensible environment as open-ended and alive, which is precisely the way that our sensing bodies spontaneously experience the things around us. Thus the Gaia hypothesis enables, quite literally, a return to our senses. We become aware once again of our breathing bodies, and of the bodily world that surrounds us. We are drawn out of that ideal, Platonic domain of thoughts and abstract theories back into this realm that we corporeally inhabit, this land that we share with the other animals, and the plants, and the microbial entities who vibrate and spin within our cells and the cells of the spider. Our senses loosen themselves from the mechanical constraints imposed by an outmoded language. They begin to participate, once again, in the ongoing life of the land around us.
Conclusion
We are now in a position to contrast succinctly the epistemology of mechanism with the epistemological implications of Gaia. The mechanical model of the world entails a mentalistic epistemology, the assumption that the most precise knowledge of things is a detached, intellectual apprehension purged of all subjective, situated, or bodily involvement. It is an abstract, disembodied knowledge. Meanwhile, the Gaian understanding of the world—that which speaks of the encompassing earth not as a machine but as a self-organizing, living physiology—entails an embodied, participatory epistemology. As the earth is no longer viewed as a machine, so the human body is no longer a mechanical object housing an immaterial mind, but is rather a sensitive, expressive, thinking physiology, a microcosm of the autopoietic Earth. It is henceforth not as a detached mind, but as a thoughtful body that I can come to know the world, participating in its processes, feeling my life resonate with its life, becoming more a part of the world. Knowledge, ecologically considered, is always, in this sense, carnal knowledge—a wisdom born of the body's own attunement to that which it studies, and to the earth.
This view is entirely akin to that of Ludwig Fleck, the great epistemologist and sociologist of science, who wrote in 1929 that "Cognition is neither passive contemplation nor acquisition of the only possible insight into something given. It is an active, live interrelationship, a shaping and being reshaped…"(10)
Finally, we may wonder what science would come to look like if such an epistemology were to take hold and spread throughout the human community. It is likely, I believe, that scientists would soon lose interest in the pursuit of a finished blueprint of nature, in favor of discovering ways to better the relationship between humankind and the rest of the biosphere, and ways to rectify current problems caused by the neglect of that relationship. I have written of a science that seeks not to control nature but to communicate with nature. Experimentation might come to be recognized, once again, as a discipline, or art, of communication between the scientist and that which he or she studies.
Indeed, many scientists are already familiar with the experience of a deep communication or communion with that which they study, although current scientific rhetoric makes it rather difficult to admit, much less articulate, such experience. In truth, the taboos against such participation are much harsher in some scientific disciplines than in others. Physicists, from Heisenberg to Bohm, have generally been much freer to openly affirm such experiences than have biologists, and many have done so. Yet the freedom many physicists enjoy to speak of participatory or even mystical modes of awareness rests upon the fact that their objects remain transcendent to the world of our immediate experience. In other words, to mystically "participate" with subatomic quanta (in the manner of Heisenberg's recent interpreters), or to feel oneself fuse and participate with the ultimate origin of the universe (as do adherents of the strong version of the "anthropic principle") need not in any way move science, or society, to alter its assumptions regarding the determinate, mechanical character of the world accessible to our unaided senses (i.e., the surrounding Iandscape), and so does not directly threaten our assumed human right to control and to manipulate the natural world of our everyday experience. However, biologists and ecologists, geologists and climatologists, study this very world that we can directly perceive, and they are for this reason in a much more precarious position politically. They cannot so readily acknowledge, much less discuss scientifically, their felt participation or rapport with the entities they study, whether insects or forests, for this would directly jeopardize our assumed human privilege and the many cultural practices currently justified by that assumption.
However, in a genuinely Gaian science, or in a genuinely ecological community of scientists, it would be manifestly evident that one is always already involved, or participant, in that which one studies. The effort then, would no longer be made to avoid or to repress this involvement, but rather to clarify and to refine it. Scientists, in other words, might begin openly to develop and cultivate their personal rapport with that which they study as a means of deepening their scientific insight.
The work of biologist Barbara McClintok, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for her discovery of genetic transposition, exemplifies the epistemology implied by a Gaian science. She insists that a genuine scientist must have "a feeling for the organism"—and not only for "living" organisms but "for any object that fully claims our attention."(11) McClintok describes a rather magical shift in her orientation that enabled her to identify chromosomes that she had previously been unable to distinguish. It was the shift to a participatory epistemology:
"I found that the more I worked with them, the bigger and bigger the chromosomes got, and when I was really working with them, I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I was right down there with them and these were my friends. As you look at these things, they become a part of you. And you forget yourself."(12)
As Barbara McClintok came to perceive herself inside of the living system that she was studying, so the Gaia hypothesis situates all of us inside of this world that we share with the plants and the animals and the stones. The things around us are no longer inert. They are our co-participants in the evolution of a knowledge and a science that belongs to humankind no more, and no less, than it belongs to the earth.
--------------------
(1) Gould's comments on Gaia were made during a lecture on evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the spring of 1987.
(2) Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, part IV, principle CLXXXVIII; in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans–lated by Haldane and Ross (Cambridge University Press, 1931).
(3) Maintaining a position similar to Gould's, J.W. Kirchner in his critique of the Gaia hypothesis in this volume (Chapter 6) states that "If you try to treat a metaphor as a scientific principle, you will waste your time." Metaphors, he asserts, "are not testable." Kirchner provides, as an example, Shakespeare's phrase, "all the world's a stage," and he suggests that such an assertion can never be tested. It would be testable, he writes, only if Shakespeare provided an independent definition of "stage," such as, for instance, "a raised wooden platform with footlights at the edge."
But let us resist taking Shakespeare's assertion in such an absurdly literal fashion. His metaphor for the world, as a metaphor, is eminently testable just as it is. Indeed, it has already stood "the test of time." The value or validity of a metaphor is readily tested by the ability that it has to articulate our experience, to express succinctly a previously mute or unexpressed sensation (or complex of sensations). Kirchner might well reply that this is hardly the sort of test to which he is referring. Assessing the validity of a metaphor as a metaphor is clearly a somewhat subjective and imprecise affair; only by reducing the suggestive metaphor to a literal assertion can one attain a statement amenable to the precise criteria that, he assumes, are required by scientific analysis.
Yet Kirchner neglects to acknowledge that these very criteria by which he would judge all scientific propositions are themselves supported by a metaphor, and it is one which is no less suggestive and ambiguous than Shakespeare's. This is the claim that "the world is a machine"—the potent metaphor that, for three centuries, has provided the framework within which most scientific research has been conducted. This metaphor of a world-machine, certainly no more falsifiable than Shakespeare's theater of the world, has nevertheless proved itself by its immense heuristic value—its suggestion, for instance, that every aspect of reality should be susceptible of mathematical analysis, its tendency to render natural phenomena in a manner that opened them to technological intervention, and its concomitant ability to inspire and catalyze numerous research programs, many of them astonishingly fruitful. Still, this metaphor has also had its shadow side; it has deflected our attention away from many aspects of nature as well as of our own experience. Indeed, it may be that our mechanical view of the natural world has dangerously outlived its usefulness.
Kirchner makes the mistake of assessing Gaia according to the criteria of a science still structured by the metaphor of the machine. Condemning Gaia as "just a metaphor," he fails to recognize his own allegiance to a set of metaphors. Thus he is unable to discern the real level at which the hypothesis operates. He assumes that Gaia must be a hypothesis regarding some aspect of the determinate, mechanical nature he takes for granted, while in truth the Gaia hypothesis postulates an entirely alternative view of nature (and of our relationship to nature), and hence an alternative way of doing science.
The organismic metaphor of the world must be assessed, like any metaphor, according to the sense that it is able to make of our experience, its ability to articulate the previously inexpressable and in this case its power to catalyze new insights, and new research. Kirchner may maintain that this is a very fuzzy and unscientific way to "test" a theory. Yet such is the manner in which the metaphor of the machine was itself tested, by countless scientists, in the course of three centuries.
Originally illuminating for our experience and catalytic for our science, today the mechanical metaphor, taken alone, obfuscates our experience and, I believe, precludes an adequate response, by scientists and laypersons alike, to the ecological predicament in which we find ourselves. In this chapter I discuss some of the reasons for our reluctance to recognize, much less set aside, the mechanical metaphors that now limit our vision, and I propose some first thoughts regarding the value of Gaia as an alternative way of speaking, and hence of seeing.
(4) For an excellent and finely documented historical overview of these controversies, see Brian Easlea's Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, 1450–1750 (Humanities Press, New Jersey 1980).
(5) Campenella is quoted in Easlea, p. 105. A fine discussion of alchemy may be found in Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Vintage Press, 1969). See also discussions of alchemy in relation to early modern science in Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983).
(6) From Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, cited in Easlea, p. 128. See also P. Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, translated by S. Rabinovitch (Routledge, 1968).
(7) On this reading mechanistic science went hand in hand with a Christian metaphysics. The schism that we have come to assume today between the scientists and the theologians, or between science and religion, only really got underway with the publication and dissemination of the Origin of Species. For Darwin was beginning to speak of a sort of creative power inherent in nature itself; he wrote of a "natural" selection—a selective power not outside of nature but internal to nature. Of course, by using the metaphor of selection he was still propagating a metaphysics somewhat similar to that of the Church (in which he had been steeped as a young man): "Selecting" is the kind of thing that an anthropomorphic divinity does; and we can see from newspaper articles of that time that many readers interpreted Darwin's use of the term "selection" as a sort of indirect argument for the existence of God. His correspondence indicates that Darwin himself remained somewhat attached to the idea of a transcendental divinity; it may well be that his use of the term "selection," with all its associations of humanlike will or choice, helped him to reconcile his revolutionary theory with his religious beliefs. (See Robert M. Young, Darwin's Metaphor. 1985, Cambridge University Press, pp. 79–125.) Nevertheless, Darwin's work was the first in the modern era to imply a creativity inherent in nature itself, and this was a blow to the church . . . We now are beginning to discern that if the so-called environment selects the organ-isms that inhabit it, so those organisms also selectively influence that environment; perhaps, then, given this more open, circular causality, "selection" is not such a useful term. The interaction is a much more reciprocal phenomenon than that suggested by the metaphor of selection—it is more of a sort of dialogue wherein the environment puts questions to the organism and the organism, in answering those questions, poses new questions to the environment—which that environment, in turn, answers with further questions. It is precisely this sort of open dialectic, this mutual participation between the organism and the earth, that the Gaia hypothesis is beginning to thematize and articulate. Descartes' closest follower, Nicholas Malebranche, wrote succinctly that (nonhuman) animals "eat without pleasure, they cry without pain, they grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, they fear nothing, they know nothing" (cited in Easlea, p. 128). The mechanical philosophy was the principle and oft-cited justification for the vivisection experiments that began to proliferate in the seventeenth century (and that continue, in one form or another, in numerous laboratories today).
(8) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). See also Merleau-Ponty's seminal text, The Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
(9) David Abram. "The Perceptual Implications of Gaia." The Ecologist, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1985.
(10) Ludwik Fleck. "On the Crisis of 'Reality.' " In Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck, edited by Robert Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1986), pp. 47-57. Fleck's brilliant writings on the genesis of scientific "facts" were a major (and at first, unacknowledged) source for Thomas Kuhn's later work on the structure of scientific revolutions.
(11) Evelyn Fox Keller. Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985), P. 166.
(12) Quoted in Keller, p. 165.