Philanthro
Aristotle is probably the most important antique author in the theme of anthropology.
For Aristotle, the most important sciences that build up his metaphysics is biology and zoology. Most of his writings are about animals and plants. Aristotle wants to figure out where they came from, how they develop, and how they die.
This theory of biology is inextricably connected to his metaphysics. He interprets his metaphysics in a biological way. The Eidos, the visible form of an organism vs. The Morphe, the dynamic form of the organism.
Everything insofar as it is alive has Eide. There are as many as there are living species. In latin the word is translated into Species. It is not just a logical term, but a biological term. You cannot understand the metaphysics of Aristotle lacking this information of the zoon.
Zoology has a subordinate importance for Plato, he prefers rather Astrology and mathematics.
Biology is the concredisation of the eidos in a living being, the principle of life of an individual.
Aristotle always treat all animals together, and humans are among them.
There are a lot of psychic and mental capacities that human beings share with animals according to Aristotle, like the soul as the impetus of life.
Aristotle observes the fusis, the nature around him, and it is in this that he observes the eidos and what it is as an immanent principle of life.
The hylomorphism is the dynamic principle behind the becoming of an individual. An individual emerges because there is a morphe implemented in a hyle. The hylomorphism is the dynamic tension of the organism too then. Morphe constitutes one part of the eidos in which it is expressed.
Plato considers the soul, psuche, but mainly as a problem for ethics and metaphysics. How can the soul know the good?
In Aristotle the soul becomes a problem for biology. Aristotle’s biological writing is called ’de anima’, on the soul. What we call biology is actually for Aristotle psychology, because the soul is the principle of the living organism.
An organism lives because it has a soul. The soul is implemented in the hyle from the outside. The organism has a dynamism that strives towards the realisation of its own accidents.
Animated things have a soul, and non-animated do not.
Inanimate objects can have an eidos, they have a principle, but this is nothing else than the expression of the reason and end of a thing. A thing is a chair because it was made for sitting on. This is its telos. Having an eidos is to have a reason for it. It is the organising principle of the thing.
But it also needs the realisation of its end. Living organism realise their ends themselves. Whilst inanimate objects need other things to realise them.
This principle is also called Entelechin, that is, having the end in itself. The living organism has its end in itself, its Z_weck_ for Kant. Having the end in itself is a privilege of animated beings.
The soul is for Aristotle is not a substance of its own. We are not in the cartesian picture where we differentiate the living soul from a body, having both of two different kind of substances (substance dualism).
For Aristotle, the soul cannot be seperated from the kind of matter in which it is realised. The soul is only one side of the body’s wholeness. The soul without the body is entirely unthinkable for him.
There are some argumenting that nous in its highest perfection, such as when doing philosophy, is actually disconnected from the body. God is nothing else than this disconnected thinking activity. However as philosophers we can only elevate ourselves to this degree momentarily. Most of the time I am very much connected and causing for the thoughts I have. If the soul is precisely the enthelechi, then it is absurd to disconnect from the organism, as body. The body realises its end from the soul, whilst the soul does so through the body. If you kill the body, the soul dies with it. It doesn’t make sense to think of it as living on infinitely.
Aristotle speaks of two kinds of _nous_es, the suffering intellect and the active intellect. The active one is the one with capacity to go beyond bodily incarnation.
The soul is not simple or unitary, but is multy-layered. There are different kinds of souls, like plant-souls, human souls etc. it depends on the kind of process going and the goal contained within it. The process of a plant is to enter into metabolism, productive exchange with the environment, in order to grow.
Lower animals have only senses such as touch and taste, whilst higher animals have more and more complex abilities related to its soul, depending on the kind of goals it must accomplish. Higher animals may have further perception, whilst higher have memory of that perception and so on. Dogs will remember their experiences and acting based on them in the future. It is an enriching of the mere sensory experience as something more.
What only humans have is nous, or vernunft in Kant. There is a layering to the structure of the soul. The nous brings us closer to divinity and seperates us from the lower stages of life. It is a clear bottom-up organisation. The higher forms of the soul presupposes the lowest dimensions of the soul. The nous as the highest perfection of the soul can only be insofar as there is an organism that has all these other important things in the soul. It has different dimensions that need to be fulfilled.
But Aristotle would not say that lower lifeforms are less complete than the upper ones.
Aristotle thus thinks man and animal are in one another, but simultaneously believes that humans are specially privileged.
He explicitly states this on multiple occasions on ethics, as the principle of the good is reserved to human beings.
The human body for him is the most perfectly designed body because it has a lot of things that animal bodies do not have, and he also thinks that humans are much more well-organised politically than animals.
Not having access to a certain kind of perfection, like lower animals to humans, does mean that they are incomplete. They are complete in virtue of their enthelechin.
Jakob von Uexküll, Scheler, Heidegger and Cassirer.
Uk is both a genius biologist, but also a source of inspiration for other thinkers. Heidegger, Deleuze, and cybernetics generally, loved Uk.
He comes up with interesting ideas for how we should approach the human being in relation to animals and the world. He has been interpreted in a wide fashion of ways.
He was born from Germans in the baltic states, and came from an aristocratic wealthy family, and loved Kant. He started working in biology and studied in Prussia. He was a specialist of organisms in the sea, especially nepalese sea organisms. He ended up being the director of the Heidelberg institute of animals studies, it used to have a very famous zoo so this was quite prestigious for him.
He was closely connected nazism and loved Hitler. He collaborated with Heidegger on implementing nazism in the academic world. He died in 44 in Bari in Italiy.
”There are as many worlds as there are subjects. These worlds are phenomenal worlds.”
Uk was super kantian. For Kant the world is something reserved to the human subejct, and the human subject brings with it certain cognitive structures that process a priori the kind of information we encounter from the exterior world, like colors, space, or time, or as disconnected objects – things.
A priori: before making experience – there are certain concepts that we understand automatically like the sound of a russian missile.
There are certain conditions ingrained in our subjectivity that gives us a world and an order. It is because the subejct has in itself certain a priori conditions that we can perceive the world as world, and this is for Kant therefore a kind of phenomenon, which it means it is not the world-in-itself, described from a non-human perspective. God does not at all perceive the world like we do.
We cannot step out of the phenomenon into the thing in itself according to Kant.
The subjects are no longer only human subjects, but all organisms are elevated into the rank of subject. These subjects all live in phenomenal worlds. This is the kind of biological switch that Uk applies onto biology.
Ontology is the scientific discourse (logos) on what is. It says what is and what it means to be. For Aristotle being is to be a substance, with some accidents. Everything that is is a substance to Aristotle, and all change is a transformation of said substance.
What is new in Uk is that he implements the notion of semiology as a new tool to think the being of things.
Semiology: the study of the linguistic sign, the signs of human language of logos.
Semiotics: the study of all kinds of signs, not only the semiological ones. Semiotics encompasses semiology therefore.
Uk uses semiotics to get a better understanding of how animals and human beings relate to their worlds. The relationship between a subject and its world will now be deciphered in terms of the reading and interpretation of signs.
Everything that is for us is something in our world, so the very determination of what being is also takes plates in this realm, the relationship between me and world. By implementing the interpretation of signs between the subejct and the world, Uk proposes to also take on the old signs of ontology.
Something that is, is for Uk only a sign. This is the most common denominator of a thing. Otherwise it would not appear for us.
”For the psysiologist, every living thing is an object that is located in his human world. He investigates the organs of living things and the way they work together just as a technician would examine an ufamiliar machine. The biologist, on the other hand, takes into account that each and every living thing thing is a subject tjat lives in its own world, of which it is the center. It cannot, therefore, be compared to a machine, only to the machine operator who guides the machine.”
We have to overstep the anthropomorphic way in which we view things, and try to understand the world in the way of the animal. But we should not have to imagine the life of an animal. We do not ask ourselves what it is like for the earth worm to experience sleep. But rather we are analysing the pure structure from the signs interpretable by the animal, and the kind of behaviour from which we read it.
Uk is arguing that there is a kind of a pilot in the animals too, and they are not just machines.
Uk invents the notion of the Umwelt – the environment. Literally translated it means roundworld. World is a christian term, the munuds, the world of the human beings gifted from God. Uk finds a middle-part. Animals also live in a kind of world, not a welt, but an umwelt. This is a gradual difference, and not a qualitative one.
That in which the animal’s behaviour unfolds is the umwelt. From the environment to the human world there is a difference only in degree of complexity. This is reflection and consciousness.
The subject is understood as a thing that has some a priori structures and concepts, and these are engraved in the powers of the subject, the vermügen. In each and every faculty there are some a priori principles, a pre-configuration. Not everything we experience according to Kant is the result of empirical processes. Some of the meaning we experience in our world comes from ourselves, the very pre-configuration of our faculties. It comes with us. The innate structures of our mind.
The subject for Uk is in the very same way as Kant. It has sense-organs determine the way in which the stimuli are experienced. How they are interpreted. Stimuli for Uk is not just the electromagentic excitation and so on, it is a sign to be read. And the way the animals reads the sign depends on its physiological structure. The animal does not merely react the stimuli, but reads them according to the sense organs that it has.
For the tick, the sun has to be something fundamentally different from how we experience it. The tick reacts to sunlight by climbing up a tree or a plant. This interpretation is related to the physiology and the structure of the organism of the tick. It is the tick that decides in which way it interprets the stimulus. The reaction is however probably ingraved in the innate structure of the animal. The way in which the animal interprets the signs is inherent to it. According to some forms to which we necessarily must interpret, just like in Kant.
Animals have transcendental powers, that is of pre-understanding. Yet the animals do not experience the things in themselves, but the animal experiences always the thing according to its innate structure, which happen in its phenomenal world.
No anthropomorphism, no animal psychology.
We rather focus on the subejcts capacity to implement and read biological signs. No physiological or purely mechanist interpretations. The animal’s movements are not mere transfers of forces. Our stimuli have to be noticed, bemerkt, by the animal subject.
Mechanists would say that because there is a continued exposure to sunlight, the tick will learn to be sensible to sunlight. But why is the earthworm not sensible to it? Well of course because they have completely different capabilities physically. The subject is the necessary pre-given of any biological inquiry, the subject decides based on its structural conditions. This is the building plan that connects the organism to its environment.
Uk implements a kind of holistic view, in which he is not considering animals as things taking in stimuli, but rather as a pregiven unity of organism and world.
Mechanism disconnects the world and the animal, and tries to understand why the animal reacts to certain things but not other. The problem for Uk is that these cannot be seperated.
The animal is the active organiser and interpreter of its world, and it reacts only to stimuli it can understand.
Plants do not have a central nervous system. There needs to be a centralised place where all information gathers for there to be stimuli response. The central nervous system receives questions and from the responses.
The tick is sensitive to sunlight, and as soon as the female tick can reproduce, it will search for sunlight and climb up to the places that are sunny, that is those that are higher up, and as soon a mammal walks by, the tick smells its butyric acid and to this stimulus it lets itself fall in the case that the mammal is nearby.
The tick is merely realising the building plan from its environment.
According to all of this, it is everything we need to speak of a phenomenal world. With these indicators we can draw a map of the way in which different entries relate to each other structurally.
Uks leading methodological questions:
Which parts of the world are accessible to animals?
Which qualities of the obejcts surrounding us have an influence on the meaning orkans of single animal species?
What remains, for an earthworm for example, of the world surrounding us?
The tick is not open to the things of our world, it is not apart of its world. There is an incompatibility between our worlds. All things that are meaningful for me the tick cannot react to, and if it can, it reacts in such a strange way that the signs are fundamentally different. We cannot say that the tick reacts to the same sun as we do. The tick-sun has a different phenomenal structure.
It is about building a world from scratch according to what we think the animals has access to in virtue of its central nervous system.
All stimuli are organised to an animal’s physiological and psychological capacities.
Uk makes the concept of the I_nnenwelt_, which is a network of nerve connections in an organism. This is distinguished from the Umwelt. The interrelationship is the very kind of blueprint of the structure to which the organism has access to the external world of it. The Umwelt is only a projection of the world in the organism.