LIFE

THE OUTBURST OF LIFE IN THE HUMAN SPHERE Scientific Philosophy I Phenomenology of Life and

the Sciences of Life

BOOK II

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA

THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME LX

Editor-in-Chief:

ANNA- TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

Belmont, Massachusetts

A Sequel to Volumes LIX, L, XLIX, XL VIII.

LIFE THE OUTBURST OF LIFE IN THE

HUMAN SPHERE Scientific Philosophy I Phenomenology of

Life and the Sciences of Life

Book II

Edited by

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

A-T. Tymieniecka, President

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Llfe-- sclentlfic phl1osophy phenomenology of life and the sctences of life I edited by Anna-Teresa Tymtentecka.

v. <1- > cm. -- (Analecta Husserliana : <59-60» 6ased on a conference. Includes blbltographlcal references and Indexes. Contents: bk. 1. Ontopolesis of llfe and the human creative

condltlon -- bk. 2. The outburst of ltfe In the human shpere. ISBN 978-90-481-5058-8 ISBN 978-94-017-2083-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2083-0

1. Ltfe. 2. Phenomenology. 1. Tymtenlecka. Anna-Teresa. II. Series: Analecta Husserllana 59. etc. 63279.H94A129 VOl.59.etc (60435) 142' .7--dc21

ISBN 978-90-481-5058-8

Prepared with the editorial assistance of Robert J. Wise.

Printed on acid-free paper.

AII Rights Reserved © 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice

98-8187

may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IX

THE THEME I A New Copernican Turn in Western Culture: Toward the Alliance between Philosophy of Life and the Sciences of Life XI

INAUGURAL ESSAY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA I The Ontopoietic Self­lndividualisation of Being: In Search of the Foothold of Change, Becoming and Transformation 3

PART I

INDIVIDUALITY AND COMPLEXITY - CLASSIC QUESTIONS

PERTAINING TO THE ONTOPOIESIS OF LIFE

FRANCESCO MOISO I Nature and Individuality 23 T AKAKO SHIKA Y A I Faktizitat und lndividualitat: Der friihe

Heidegger und Aristoteles 43 DANIELA VERDUCCI I Life and Human Life in Max Scheler:

Phenomenological Problems of Identification and Individ-ualization 71

MARIA LETIZIA PERRI I The Lifeworld as Hermeneutical Principle for Understanding the Human Condition: Functions and Limits of the "Everyday Life" Concept 93

MAMUKA G. DOLIDZE I The Phenomenological Conception of Quantum Theory and the Polyphony of Modern Fiction 113

ALEXANDRU GIUCULESCU I Outlines of an Axiology of Human Creations 129

v

Vl TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART II

SELF-REVELATION OF LIFE AND ITS HUMAN SPHERE

MIECZYSI:.AW PAWEI:. MIGON I The Ideals of Life in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's Thought 137

ISABELLE GILLET I The Cosmic Tree According toLe Clezio in Le Proces-Verbal, Desert and Le Chercheur d'Or 155

MARLIES KRONEGGER I Poetic Inspiration and the Renewal of Life: Le Songe de Vaux 169

ANTONIO DOMINGUEZ REY I Groundwork for Ontopoetics 201 CHRISTINE BERTHOLD I Stefan Zweig and the Secret of

Artistic Creation 213 v ASILE v ASILE I Une Approche Phenomenologique de Ia

Musique Byzantine 223 EVA RIZZUTI and DA VIDE MONDA I Calvinistic Anthropology

and French Poetry in the Sixteenth Century: Purity and Guilt in the Baroque Age 229

MARIA AVELINA CECILIA I Imagination and Practical Creativity in Paul Ricoeur 241

PART III

THE EXISTENTIAL SPREAD

MARGARETE DURST I A Phenomenological Psychology of Emotion: From Sartre 's Esquisse d'une Theorie des Emotions to Ignacio Matte Blanco's Biological Theory 265

IRENE ANGELA BIANCHI I Solipsism, Empathy, Otherness: On Husser/'s Overcoming of the "Closure" ofthe I, to Otherness as a Guarantee of an "Aperture" to the World 277

SIMON DU PLOCK I Ontological Insecurity, Existential Self-Analysis and Literature: The Case of Henry James 295

MINAH SEHDEV I The Construction of Reality in the Magic World 315

VLADISLAV BORODULIN and ALEXEI VASILIEV I The Phenomenon of Loneliness and the Meta-Theory of Consciousness 327

PIERO TRUPIA I Economy and Social Planning: Economic Development and the Mobilization of Society's Basic Resources 333

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii

VERNA GEHRING I The Embodied Politics of Thomas Hobbes 355 J. C. COUCEIRO-BUENO I Ideology, Utopia and Religion: The

Monumental and Absolute Metaphors of Social Imagination 379 FRANCESCO TOTARO I Friedrich Nietzsche: Bringing Truth

to Life 391

PART IV CONTINUITIES/DISCONTINUITIES OF LIFE'S EXPANSION

AURELIO RIZZACASA I On a Phenomenological Analysis of the "Erlebnis" of Time 409

ELDON c. WAIT I How to Wake up from Descartes' Dream or the Impossibility of a Complete Reduction 417

sPAs sPAs so v I Teleological Explanations and Reductionism in Molecular Biology 431

ROBERTO GIUSTI I Life and Negativity: Towards an Ontology of Human Lack 441

MARCO MILLUCCI I Human Creative Activity as Separability of Principles: The Possibility of Good and Evil 461

GABRIELLA FIORI I Realism and Faith in Transformation through the Creativeness of a Conscious Life: Simone Weil (1909-1943) 473

INDEX OF NAMES 505

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection presents the studies read at the FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY/PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE AND THE SCIENCE OF LIFE held by the Institute at the University of Macerata in Italy, April 19-22nd, 1996.

We owe heartfelt thanks to our Italian co-organisers, especially to the Department of Human Sciences of this university, which under the direction of Professor Francesco Totaro has, with the direct help of Professor Daniela Verducci, secretary general for the congress, and Daria Carloni, prepared ideal conditions to hold the meeting in this beautiful old city of Macerata, as well as carry its programme. First of all, however, we express our thanks and appreciation to the numerous scholars from various fields of learning who "heard" the call of urgency of our times that brought our theme of "the philosophy of life and the sciences of life" to the light in its bold, pioneering debut, and came to Macerata from different parts of the world.

This collection holds the second batch of the papers, the first one having been published in Volume LIX of the Analecta Husserliana.

Warm thanks are due, as usual, to our dedicated and learned copy­editors Isabelle Houthakker and Robert J. Wise, Jr. who expertly handled the translations from foreign languages by polishing their English.

A-T. T.

lX

Panorama of Macerata.

THE THEME

A NEW COPERNICAN TURN IN WESTERN CULTURE

Toward the Alliance between Philosophy of Life and

the Sciences of Life

The striking fact in the present time of Western culture is that the roads traditionally trodden throughout history by philosophy as well as by science seem to be eroding, their direction dispersing and with great intensity and forceful efforts, new openings and passways are being sought and drilled. At the heart of these strivings, some radically new starts and strategies are being devised. I have in mind here the widely spreading inspiration of the phenomenology/philosophy of life, and the upsurge of the sciences of life on the one hand - and the so-called "new Science", on the other.

The nature of these developments on both sides calls for a genuine alliance to be struck between phenomenology/philosophy of life and the sciences of life.

Philosophy began with the same search after the understanding of the world that gave birth to science. Entwining in history and sepa­rating by unfolding different approaches to reality, different methods of appreciation and postulates up to an opposition reaching as far as the opposition between "calculating" on the one side and "intuitive" method, on the other, would separate them, a separation in which reigned mistrust and misgivings. Philosophy and science vainly tried to built bridges over. They were successful, at best marginally, in absorbing one another. With the new developments mentioned above, however, they take an analogous turn in which they necessitate each other.

It is remarkable to see how nowadays the hard sciences - biology in all its sectors: neurology, genetics, embryology, etc. lay out their material in evidence of intuitive observations - referring often to phenomeno­logical description and laying down the foundations of "sciences of life" - as if seeking their further interpretation in philosophical reflec­tion. It is equally startling to witness a closing of the circle in which philosophy has been moving for two thousand years corroborating and digesting the concepts, ideas, intuition which laid down its perimeters, and awakening to a novel start. In fact, phenomenology/philosophy of life leaves behind the millenial conceptual tissue through which reality has been seen, to encounter reality itself: LIFE.

xi

Xll THE THEME

The developments on both sides, show the crumbling of barriers which historically arose between them. They also indicate the common areas of inquiry. Lastly and most significantly the strategic points at which they need each other to progress further emerge.

The inward transformations of both philosophy and the sciences come into focus first. The Cartesian model of a mechanistic approach to nature was maintained for a long time, but has in contemporary science, to begin with biology and finish with astrophysics, proven inadequate in the very practice of these sciences applying to nature which, as it is recog­nised in contemporary science, is in perpetual change as well as opening ever new areas of life's differentiation, vital forces, and conditions. This revelation of the dimensions of life calls for an account of the vital spontaneities which carry on the life's progress. For models of development, between the classic mechanistic determinism and the contemporary call for predictability, an abyss seems to have opened with the innumerable differentiation of life's processes calling for an ever deeper drilling into the elusive scheme of life.

As pointed out before, this turn in sciences is paralleled by a turn in philosophy. Western philosophy which seems to have made, from Plato to Husserl, a full circle of its unfolding and pushing with Heidegger's inspirations, its confines as laid down by the seminal ideas of its pro­tagonists, has also come of age to make a new start. Instructed by the past and yet no more entangled in the web of inheritance with its formulations, ideas, concepts, convictions and disputes, philosophy/ phenomenology of life freed from doctrinary constraints reaches the core of reality, the palpitating concreteness of life. Uncovering its territory, it accepts the challenge of the Real and instead of seeking to throw over it an objectivised, conceptual mantle, seeks to come to grips with its dynamic transformations and to reveal it to the human mind as its part and parcel, as its sphere of existence, as the groundwork not only of actu­ality but also of opening horizons of its elusive potentialities.

This freeing from conceptual constraints, this delving into the core of the concrete, into "matter", this uncovering of an entirely new terri­tory - territory of life - evolved on both sides through numerous transformatory steps. These steps broke the inherited barriers between philosophy and science. Let us just mention here the barrier of method, the separation by the differently conceived postulate of "truth" and that of the objectivity-subjectivity of cognition.

First of all, the methodological preconceptions about the validity of

THE THEME xiii

a type of cognition over an other: mathematical methods (more geometric) versus the intuitive, speculative ways of thinking considered in their specificity but with disregard for their involvement and interdependen­cies within a larger framework have in history radically opposed certain types of philosophy and the sciences. With the new turn in both fields there is no question of a method, because all ways to approach the real may yield legitimisation of their proceeding. With this legitimisation is connected the understanding of the principle of "truth". While concerning the method the advantage lay on the side of the sciences, they have claimed - the empirical sciences that is - the contact with the real and the mathematical, the undeniable validity, so with respect to the postu­late of truth of cognition which they yield, it is philosophy which claims an absolute abiding truth disregarding the "hypothetical" character of the scientific inquiry, whose theories were meant to be valid only as long as new ones did not evolve. These methodological presuppositions vanish from sight in the present day fields of philosophy and sciences focusing upon life. The palpitating stream of life with which they deal entails the ways to handle it itself.

The classic ideal of a perfectly intelligible - meaning intellectual or mathematically graspable - view of nature vanishes from sight together with the science's admission of the variety of experiential evidence indispensable to give justice to reality. Phenomenological description and interpretation with its underpinnings of subjective experience, sensing and emotions, imagination, the conjectural and interpretative ways of handling and grasping evidence, efface the previously pretended "strict objectivity" of the scientific approach and the "subjectivity" of philo­sophical experience, specifically human experience.

We will return to this point; first however, let us emphasise that while phenomenology/philosophy of life relies on all types of intuitions conjectured as life, its subject matter calls for science - empirical as well as theoretical science - to legitimise its discoveries also in a new way, in a unique way: through their concordance with the laws of nature, their technical efficacity.

Instead of referring to the absolute reason, science refers for its prin­ciples of adequacy - the "truth" of its results - to their confirmation by technical application.

The accent does not fall upon the hypothetical "truth" of their theories but upon their concordance with the rules of nature which is practi­cally tested in technology.

xiv THE THEME

Yet there is even a stronger and deeper bridge thrown by the scien­tific work of today and philosophy. Science, construed through centuries and offering the views of a "disinterested", "neutral" observer, has nowadays recognised the central figure of the "subject": the individual researcher who forms a center of the reality which he approaches from this center.

The recognition of the human subject as involved within the scien­tific process brings in the interplay of this latter with the human endowment, with the entire set of the faculties of the mind with its deeper circuits of sensing, emotions, inclinations, imagination, etc. And of course with its fulcrum: The creative act of the human being.

Phenomenology/philosophy of life evolves around its Archimedean point: Human creative condition. Hence it spreads its rays within the entire territory of life to tie an intimate knot with one another. Philosophy of life and science are uniquely matched to encounter each other in the point of the creative subject.

Both, then, philosophy of life digging deep down into the creative pos­sibilities of the human being and its springboard, leading beyond into the self-individualisation of life - and the scientific inquiry, with its recognition of its central "subject", the creative human mind, share in a most intimate way in the human creative condition as their spine. They both moved from the abstract to the concrete, from being to becoming, from the static to the dynamic, from the priority of one type of reason to the intelligibility of all factors which enter into the creative experience, thus effacing the separation of theory and praxis.

Neither of them gives up the essential significance of the notion of truth as a guarantee of the human commerce with the real; they merely bring it to this heart of the encounter between the creative mind and the fulgurating reality of life.

Thus the pursuits of the phenomenology of life and of the sciences of life deal with dynamisms, forces, vitality and the changing course of the living being. But beyond that, with the concrete and conjectural conditions of life itself, its cosmic dependencies etc. Each of them seeks articulations, processes, rules of unfolding ... But they propose their search in a different way. Scientific inquiry is drawn in the concrete ever evading moving deeper and deeper. It calls for the rules of organ­isation and unfolding. Phenomenology of life focuses upon designs, delineation, rules and principles of life. Moving from the creative act of man and following its direction it devises the model for the unfolding

THE THEME XV

of life. It is, indeed the ontopoietic principle of life, its self-individual­isation-in-existence with its design that meets the concerns of science. They solicit each other. While science calls for constitutive designs of life to map its further progress, phenomenology of life needs the resources of the scientific inquiry into the concrete to corroborate, develop, enrich its further inquiry.

It is not that intuitions similar to those proposed in phenomenology of life toward its transactions with science has not been proposed before in the history of philosophy or in sciences themselves. Entelechy, for instance, has come from Aristotle and has been reproposed several times since. Nor are the intuitions which animate the new science alien to history. It's enough to mention Leibniz, who in spite of his fascination with the mechanism of nature, has been emphasizing the spontaneous, dynamic fulgruating life of nature. Yet these insights had to wait till the present times to come to their own, to the forefront of philosoph­ical as well as scientific thought.

Let us emphasize that not only were both effaced, philosophy of life and the sciences of life, and in an essential way the barriers which sep­arated philosophy and science, but their convergence in the creative condition of the human being has opened the vast field of their future cooperation. In fact, both of them have suspended the barriers between the inanimate and the animate, between the physical and the psychic, between the specifically human experience, thought, spirit and animality.

The phenomenological intuition and model of self-individualisation of life expresses both the vital/animal self-individualisation-in existence, as well as the specifically human-creative-self-interpretation-in-existence. It covers without a disruption, a hiatus, even without a bridge, the entire spread of life. As it is the great concern of science to inquire into the "passages", "continuities" or "discontinuities" within the great process of life, it leaves phenomenology of life an entire field to unravel in response to the scientific needs.

But as a science of life opened up toward the philosophical horizons, so phenomenology/philosophy of life in its convergence with the sciences of life is no more an alien field; on the contrary, it becomes itself scientific. And this is not by accepting the assumptions of science, not by assuming its methods or uncritically incorporating its results, but by entering into a profound dialogue in which the intuitions of science are being digested by the critical mind and confronted with the specif­ically philosophical ones.

XVI THE THEME

The present collection of essays is devoted to bringing forth some of the main ideas, insights, issues emerging within the ontopoietic spread of life. It focuses upon "self-revelation of life and its human sphere" as the uncovering of the new territory which follows the rays of the human creative condition. Beginning with the classic issues of individ­uality, it brings a new perspective upon continuity, passages, complexities, transitions within the processes of life. There is no thing which is alien to life. On the wings of the creative spirit it combines sensing and empathy, solipsism and otherness, poetic inspiration and ideology, ideals, good and evil. . . .

These intuitions, stemming from the adumbrated new territory of life, charting its, need to be reexamined, their nature reassessed, their for­mulation transformed according to their place and function, intertwining within the new context.

In fact, phenomenology of life/philosophy of life encounters the scientific endeavor in the creative mind of the human being, the new type of subject for science and the starting point of all philosophy for philosophy, dealing in an essential way with the issues of differentia­tion and order indicated above.

First of all, however, science in its search after clues to bring together the innumerable operations of life, finds in the conception of the self­individualisation of life, or its ontopoiesis, a key. The ontopoietic design which I am proposing, offers a key to the developmental processes of life by which science is tantalized. It spreads its tentacles from the cosmic life-relevance connects to the zenith of the human spirit.

An entire universe with the continuities and discontinuities of life's expansion through the cosmos on the one side, and human culture on the other, opens - as a territory to be shared and investigated in the new alliance between phenomenology/philosophy of life and the sciences of life.

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA