How We Know Ourselves

Humanity has had to make some uncomfortable adjustments along the way. It seems that just when you think you have what it ‘is’ to be human down pat, that some danged scientist or explorer comes along and dislocates something seemingly pretty crucial to our self-image. Kind of like a species adolescence, in a way, standing in front of the mirror and trying to comb or preen our way back into a sense of knowing ourselves. Yet the changes are huge and inevitable, and the discomforting anxiety around it almost palpable.

The illusions shattered by Copernicus (no, we are not the center of the universe), Darwin (no we are not set apart from the beasts and are in fact closely related to them) and Freud (alas, we are not as entirely masters of our ‘selves’ as we thought) signify just three more obvious of the probably uncountable numbers of greater or lesser adjustments we have had to make with respect to how we conceive of ourselves in our world. We haven’t even fully dealt with any of these three.

So I can totally understand when someone complains that the workings of life are “obvious, explainable, and thermodynamically inevitable. And relentlessly mechanical…” (Goodenough, p. 46) However, I pause and begin to bite my lip when the angst starts building into “And relentlessly mechanical. And bluntly deterministic.” (Ibid) Then, when the cry heightens into “That can’t be all it is!” (Ibid, p. 33) I have to say ‘stop.’ This is not good enough. As a matter of fact, astrophysics does not reduce the magnificence of the night sky, nor is life demeaned by knowing its component molecules.

And I think I am beginning to fathom the problem. We are again, as a human species, facing a self-reappraisal, stemming again, from a shattering of our self-concept, and it isn’t fun.

Like a teen glaring at the pimple in the mirror, it so easily shows when they come to the breakfast table full of defensiveness, or a sullen existential emptiness, disappointment or resentfulness. It doesn’t have to slip, however, into self-pity. Nor does one have to pine on with a “Why lord, why this”… followed by the familiar "Why Me!" refrain. We certainly don’t have to hand it all over to some deity with an “OK, Thy will be done!”

When you look at the history of life on the Earth, the growth of humanity as a species is actually just a blip on the screen. I might even be pushing things to call this a period of human species-adolescence: it might actually be childhood. Nonetheless, the point is that if ever there were going to be reappraisals, now would certainly be the time for them to show. We are used to raising kids, and though we are never fully prepared for the work they put us through in helping them slip into maturation with more rather than less comfort, it is a whole different matter raising ourselves, as a species. We are not prepared. Nor, can we be. We’re doing this one entirely on our own.

The matter may have a great deal to do with the way we conceive reality to actually be. For instance: what is the ‘real’ unit of life? Is it the organism”? Indeed, as biologists rapture on about how biochemistry and biophysics unfolds into a creature who grows and divides, I am reminded of the history of human self-perception that gloats arrogantly at its magnificence, as the pinnacle towards which all of creation was hitherto striving. Only, this time, falling prey to an understandable error of focusing on a conceptual tier. If the point of view about life’ starts at the level of the organism, it is a biologists natural weakness.

To a biologist, not only is the skin (fur, membrane, shell, exoskeleton, bark, etc.) the natural point of reference, but anything related to a machine draws immediate stern looks. “Life is different than a machine” they said, because machines were created by people, and machines don’t think or do things without human programming (they said), and they go on and on about the glory of life. Heck, if they wanted to work on machines, they would have become a mechanic. Well, that is what they used to say. Now they find themselves saying that life appears like wiring diagrams for a vastly elaborate machine. An amoeba to a biologist, can appear as such an organic machine. It isn’t too difficult to then begin wondering at what it is to be a human organism, full of little cells…

It isn’t ‘all or nothing.’ There isn’t some kind of instant demarcation point in time or space between biology and machine, between life and non-life. These are conceptual points of reference established against a flux, impossible to hold in position, and impossible to define precisely. That is the other issue and what confounds the problem. We have been used to looking at ourselves as not quite the same pinnacles of universal hope and prospect that our earlier, yet more recent civilizations conceived, but we have not quite relinquished the unwieldy definitions. Our language still retains the materials with which our thoughts are constructed and our world is seen, and in this case and most pointedly, as we as humans understand ourselves.

Fetal life is in grand pursuit of its teleology far before its organs are produced. It is, however, a point of view from an organism that a particular ‘self’ begins when all of its parts come together and ‘go.’ The fact is, that the mechanics of life has been producing itself long before any particular organism took form, a process that has been going on somewhere we think between 4 and 4.5 billion years. Even before the primal soup, it was going on as the material from the stars began to form the Earth.

I like to think of the world as a range, rather than a within distinct parameters, and as a flux of many processes, rather than a given state. Of course, this is harder to grasp, and somewhat amorphous if one tries to take hold of it, but that is the nature of flux. If I became attached to the notion of life being separate from mechanics, it would be a serious affront when faced with the mechanics of life. The wonder, of course, is in the phantasmal quality of the flux. Yet, we are afraid of an apparition, haunted by a fear that we are ‘only, just a…’ It is our human self-image that is at stake. On the one hand, humanity is the same, regardless of the self image. On the other, our self image defines us, defines our actions. And we humans have been very active on our Earth.

It seems important for some to consider that as an organism, there is but one of them, though that has never been the case. Each human being is actually composed of untold millions of beings, including mitochondria and bacteria, that make from a skin-defined biologist’s point of view, a ‘single’ being. The most forthcoming complaint to being defined as a multitude, would conceivably be one’s sense of self, in a “but I know me!” as if ‘one’ was ever, only one. Any half-hearted retrospective would, even begrudgingly, admit to having seen, heard, experienced and organized the world and sense of self differently over time. “OK, so where do my thoughts come from!” is an expected retort. You think… yourself, maybe? Hardly. Name one thought, one experience, which does not come laden with epochs of linguistic, cultural, and social ‘pre-organism’ education. Odds are you can’t recall it. The experience, however hard it would be to recall, was likely at birth, or even earlier, in the womb before you began to associate feelings with the sound of your mother’s voice, or the chemistry in her bloodstream…

And do we end at our skin? Not a chance! Take one breath, and try to hold it. Now ‘you’, you say, end at the skin of your pursed lips? Even discounting what you just inhaled, odds are you can’t persist very long at maintaining that you can persist as the organism you think you are, more than a couple of minutes at the longest. And even that’s a stretch for all but the most hearty of us.

The problem is ‘tier-centricism’ at the level of the organism. If we persist in conceiving of ourselves as skin enclosed sacks of ‘self’, we are going to bump up against the fluidity of life. If we loosen whatever unconscious, albeit feverish hold we have on human self-concept and allow our experience of self and world to blend into the manner in which it presents itself to us as we come to know it more fully, we have the opportunity to slip maybe, a little more gracefully into the future. And, importantly, reach a more easily a relationship with an Earth that is not separate from us, but a part of us as we are a part of it.

It is how we know ourselves, however, that is upon which the matter rests.

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(Quotes from Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.)