Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus”
3.2 The Working Hypothesis of Neurophenomenology and the Absolute Position of the Iand the Absolute Position of the I
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conversely, assigns empirical analysis factual causative power with respect to the meaning of phenomenology. Beyond the mere irreducibility of first-person experi- ence, which is to say of isomorphism alone, which brings into play an external cor- respondence and compatibility between the two kinds of analysis, it is a matter of bringing out their co-productivity, by searching for those generative passages revealing their mutually effective bonds” (p. 259, 2006). As regards practical appli- cations, we will refer here to the studies conducted according to this perspective (Lachaux et al. 1999; Lutz et al. 2002), foregoing any further investigation that would lead us away from our research trajectory and the journey we have embarked on.4 One aspect worth clarifying, on account of its considerable conceptual interest, is the relation between cybernetics and phenomenology. On what bases does the tradition, which finds in Varela its last major representative, intersect with Husserlian phenomenology?
3.2 The Working Hypothesis of Neurophenomenology
second-order cybernetics, without ever raising the problem of its conceptual origin:
all traces of it were erased by the dominant technological and formal focus.
In the French-speaking world of the late 1980s, Livet explored the apparent similarities between Fichte’s themes and those of Varela (1987). He intuited their shared aspects, yet without grasping the continuity between the two. Livet’s suggestions were taken up a few decades later by Goddard (2003), who acknowledged the conceptual proximity between the two thinkers while voicing some strong reservations on the matter: “Nothing suggests that Francisco Varela was acquainted with German idealism” (p. 131).5 Indeed, in order to really grasp Varela’s association with Fichte, it is necessary to view it within a wider framework, one that follows—
with remarkable continuity—precisely the trajectory we have been tracing and which finds its last major representative in Varela.
The interpretation which Varela came up with by grafting Husserlian phenomenology onto the biological egology developed by Maturana and himself is reminiscent of that put forward by one of the most authoritative French interpreters of German idealism: Jean Hyppolite. Hyppolite’s reading of Fichte (1959) sets out from a core principle, through which he seeks to connect Fichte’s philosophical intentions to the deep themes of Husserl’s phenomenology. This core principle is constituted by the project of developing a science of sciences, an epistemology that in order to prove rigorous must have an absolute foundation that rests on nothing but itself. Hence, according to Hyppolite, Fichte proceeds through a methodology which, aside from revealing and articulating this science of sciences, aims to lay bare the original experience—i.e., lived experience—which stands at its basis and is formalized by that science. Hyppolite notes: “An absolute foundation can only be such if it is its own object and precondition” (p. 24).6
Fichte finds this crucial experience of the human spirit in practical action.7 It is only by operating upon objects with a given end in view and by observing the results of his own free acting that the subject becomes aware of himself as self-determining.8 But why should practical agency “with an end in view” be an absolute foundation?
If it really were such, reflective action would only need to be directed toward oneself, instead of being centrifugal and directed toward an object.
Fichte’s discovery, his pure I, corresponds to the recursive closing of reflection upon itself through an openness to encounter. Reflective agency is therefore
5 “Rien n’indique que Francisco Varela ait fréquenté l’dealisme allemand.”
6 “Un fondement absolu ne peut etre tel que s’il est à lui meme son propre objet e sa propre garantie.”
7 Fichte characterizes the activity that the practical subject is supposed to ascribe to itself in order to be self-conscious as “the act of forming the concept of an intended efficacy outside us, or the concept of an end.”
8 Interaction among rational beings is possible because their free agency is mediated by bodies that inhabit the same sensible world. An important step in this proof is the argument of §5 that having a body is a necessary condition of self-consciousness, since the ability to carry out one’s ends requires an immediate link between one’s will and the sensible world in which the will’s ends are to be achieved. Thus, human consciousness is necessarily embodied, and our bodies play an essential role in constituting us as rational beings (Neuhouser p. xviii, in Fichte et al. 2000).
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centrifugal (or intentional, to quote Hyppolite) and hence open to encounter precisely because it is only through encounter that the I can reflect itself: the encounter with the other is nothing but the discovery of oneself. On the other hand, no encounter is possible, or meaningful, if not as reflection (p. 30).
This, then, is the crucial point which Hyppolite grasps in his interpretation of Fichte: “Absolute knowledge, knowledge within immanence, is not opposed to the infinite richness of experience. It shows how such richness is possible. The closure of absolute knowledge does not exclude the openness of experience” (p. 26).9
It is according to this perspective that Varela sets out in Fichte’s footsteps. Like Fichte, he downplays the dualism between the subjective and the objective on which natural awareness is based, to discover a new domain of phenomena that, according to Fichte, correspond to the absolute position of the I (Ichheit) and, according to Varela, to biological autonomy. Before Husserl, through a radical phenomenologi- cal reduction, Fichte brought an original field to light, the experience of pure activ- ity, and established it as the foundation of the production of sense. This is the absolute position of the I, which acquires its determinations only in relation to a world that it encounters and stands face to face with (Anstoss). According to Varela, this I corresponds to life, which cannot escape its organizational closure; the down- playing of the natural attitude, in other words, opens up the prospect of the organiza- tion of the living being—conceived as a system which constantly gives form to itself from within—in relation to everything which elicits transformations of the state or dynamics of the system (i.e., perturbations).10
This view of the living organism echoes Müller’s teaching—taken up by Helmholtz and axiomatized by cybernetics—that nervous impulses do not provide any information on the nature of the external stimuli generating them but are only a sign of such stimuli. Varela radically increases this gap between the autonomy of the organism and the world, to the point of conceiving external stimuli as perturbations of inner dynamics: something nonsensical which only becomes meaningful through the alteration of the inner structure of the organism (structural change).11
9 “Le savoir absolu, le savoir dans l’immanence, ne s’oppose pas à la richesse indéfinie de l’expérience, il montre comment cette richesse est possible; la fermature du savoir absolu n’exclut pas l’ouverture de lexperience.”
10 Varela’s entire conception of mind, and ultimately of experience, is concerned with the constraints exerted by the specific phenomenology of our concrete coping upon our internal dynamics as autonomous systems, and reciprocally, the effects of the latter upon the former, in a circular framework (Rudrauf et al. 2003, p. 33).
11 This I is constantly emerging and therefore constantly determinable: it represents a constant possibility of determination. It is the absolute subject of judgment. Certainly, in the light of this view, the fundamental question of the nature of the subject loses its meaning. Heidegger notes:
“Sofern Subjekt als das unmittelbar und gewiß gegebene Selbst und als absolutes Urte
ilssubjekt fungiert, und diese Bestimmung einzig die Problematik des Subjekts umschreibt, heißt das: die Frage nach dem spezifischen Sinn des Subjekts als Ich wird überhaupt nicht gestellt”
(“If the subject stands as the immediately and certainly given self and absolute subject of judgement, and this determination alone defines the problem of the subject, the question of the specific meaning of the subject as I does not arise at all”) (GA 28 1997, p. 121).
3 “Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus”
It is evident, therefore, that one’s relation to the environment cannot be understood in terms of information or contextualization. Goddard writes: “The autonomous self of Varela, like the I of Fichte, is without an outside or, to be more exact, it is from within that an environment, a world takes shape for it, as a possibility for its own dynamism, as that which is meaningful for it—which is to say, as a ‘self’” (p. 133).12
Therefore, although perturbations come from the outside, they do not convey any sense from the exterior; rather, sense coincides with the reformation of inner
“mechanics.” “Cognition or behaviours are operational phenomena without final cause: they work in a particular way” (Varela 1986).
The most evident, and most problematic, consequence of this view is the fact that the recognition of alterity is always traced back to the properties of the system.
Based on this integral immanence established as a foundation, the recognition of the other can only occur by depriving the latter of its condition of absolute alterity.
What we have here is a theory of encounter with no absolute transcendence (Goddard 2003).
At the same time, however, this privation is what nourishes Fichte’s I and Varela’s autonomous system, insofar as it is precisely nonsense—conceived as an external perturbation—that, through the production of internal changes, fosters the closing of reflection upon itself, providing some content: the encounter with the nonself. By eliciting an inner change, this encounter contributes to the emergence of a new sense. This is the recursive circle which links encounter and cognition.
Through circularity—supported by the mechanism of the closure of the organization of the organismic operations, coupled with the possibility of modifying their inner dynamics—the I and the other are redefined and indissolubly bound in one sweep. They effectively turn into two perspectives on the same reality: self- referential identity or the absolute position of the I. And the latter can only take shape by relating to the nonself—to nonsensical perturbation—which, in turn, can only relate to the self-positing of the I.
In this respect, the You only exists for the I in relation to the dynamics of the inner operations establishing it as a system, as self-positing—and the same holds true of the I in relation to the You. The encounter (Anstoss) with the other, therefore, amounts to a call for self-determination, and the same applies to the encounter with the I for the other. Within this framework—that of intersubjectivity understood as the structural coupling of two organisms—the transformations of my self-concerned cognition represent perturbations for a You that, by making sense of them through the restructuring of its inner dynamics, generates perturbations for the I. Through this intertwining, one’s own inner dynamics support, and in turn are supported by, those of the other. Hence, “The relation with the other is invariably a relation with oneself.”13
12 “Le soi autonome valerien, comme le moi pur fichtéen, est sans dehors ou, plus precisement, c’est de l’interieur que se definit et s’esquisse pour lui un environnement, un monde comme une possibilitè de son dynamisme propre, comme ce qui a sens pour lui, c’est-à-dire comme ‘soi’.”
13 “le rapport à autrui n’est jamais que rapport à soi-même.”
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This reduction of the other to oneself entails a considerable danger: confusing one’s own consciousness with the self-consciousness of the other. By preserving autonomy as its core foundation, neurophenomenology envisages—or, rather, is forced to establish—intersubjective validation as a means of mediation between the subjective and the objective perspective. It is here that the notion of empathy derived from Husserlian phenomenology comes into play, as both a conceptual requirement and a methodological guideline: the second-person position, which takes shape through a shared, disciplined experiential praxis. Nowhere is the kind of empathic resonance which Husserl described as “taking another’s place in one’s imagination”
(“sich Hineinphantasieren”) better realized than in the laboratory.14 With regard to this “egoistic” position of Fichte’s subject, on 28 October 1794 Schiller wrote to Goethe:
According to some verbal communications of Fichte, for he had not yet come to the point in his book, the I is the creator of its own images, and all reality is in the I itself. The world is but a ball which the I has thrown up, and catches again by reflection. (quoted in GA 49 1991 pag. 161)
Practical action, the inalterable and underivable facticity envisaged as the extreme limit which cannot be questioned any further—the limit to (self-referential) reflection itself—is a fact of the I for Fichte and of biological organization for Varela. As Kiesel emphasizes, “The self-positing absolute I of Fichte still does not feel its thrownness, it rather posits and ‘throws the world’” (p. 64, 2008). From the perspective of Varela’s biology as well, we might argue that the organism preserves its autonomous stability by referring the perturbations coming from the world back to itself in meaningful terms (self-reference), thereby bringing forth the world.