Читать книгу The Woods - Vladimir Bibikhin - Страница 7

The ancient Greeks’ awareness of wood as a versatile substance which could be consumed by flame to produce different forms of energy ensured that the term ὕλη (hyle, wood, timber, forest) should be adopted to designate matter. Facilitating its adoption was the use of the term in ancient medicine, hence in biology. With its non-metric space (notions of the biological cell as a tropical forest), through imaginings of a primaeval, hairy human living in the forest, through the mythopoiesis of the World Tree, through the return of our contemporaries (who have turned their backs on nature) to such surrogates of the forest as wine, tobacco, and narcotics, hyle is far more present in the daily reality of modern humans than we care to admit.

The powerful presence of the forest is underappreciated. It is to be found in the philosophical concept of hyle (matter) in religion and theology (the Cross as World Tree), and in poetry (in images of the tree, the bush, and the garden). We are surrounded by the forest, and what seems so personal to us, our own thinking, is no less affected by it than are our bodies. The forest is all around.

Modern science’s periodically renewed interest in the biological treatises of Aristotle and his school is fully justified. We shall find that in his biology, hyle is not viewed as being in contrast to form, eidos, whose opposite is ‘formlessness’. The female principle of matter is found to contain the entire potential for development. We need to link the so-called spontaneous generation of living things in Aristotle to his interest in parthenogenesis. To eidos as the male principle he ascribes the role of the historical, purposeful meaning of motion, its dynamic supported by the material, female, and maternal principle.

The topic of matter is one of the most difficult in Aristotle. The difficulties are of two kinds: first, having propounded one thesis, Aristotle does not always feel obliged to be consistent and may later propound a contradictory one; and the second difficulty, for Aristotle himself, is that primary matter should not just be ‘such’, because then a different kind of matter would be conceivable. There could be two kinds of primary matter, or more, whereas primary matter must be primary. At the same time, Aristotle emphatically refuses to remove matter from the category of things and see it as separate from them. Just as there is no donkeyness, other than purely imaginary, without a particular donkey, so matter is always ‘just this’. Current trends in biological research have heightened interest in the practice, common in the classical world, of placing humans on a scale of living beings, in respect of morphology, physiology, and ethics.

The cosmic unity of life, or, more broadly, its unifying sensitivity (Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky), complicates discrimination between inanimate and living matter.¹ (Neo-)Darwinism as a principle of systematic replacement of life forms needs to be reconsidered in the light of adverse selection and non-stochastic development (nomogenesis). Overall, the views of Lev Berg, compared with those of Darwinism, lose out by failing to take into account the importance of a gathering, concentrating, focusing, extreme element which is critical for life.² Berg leaves this role to natural selection, but only as a means of maintaining the norm. He discerns a significant role for deviations from the norm. Berg does not argue that the status quo of a constant natural dispersion of variants and deviations is preserved within a species, but that, although in every generation there is invariably a large dispersion, there is, through the action of Darwinian selection, a thinning out, a testing for vitality. Marginal forms are eliminated and the species reverts towards the norm. Berg quotes Karl Pearson’s research into generations of poppies to the effect that every race is much more a product of its normal members than might be expected on the basis of the relative numbers of its individual representatives.³ The same applies in human society: the dispersion of deviants, degenerates, and alcoholics is great in every generation, but in each subsequent generation, children, on the whole, again begin within the norm. If the number of children in poor health increases, then it is to a lesser extent than among adults. Typically, children are more normal than their parents. The opposite is less common. Attention needs to be paid to Berg’s thesis. By itself, natural selection does not change the norm; for that to happen, other factors are needed. There is a great need to clarify the concepts of improvement, adaptation, fitness, and survival. When Darwinism, or selectionism, talks of survival of the fittest, if by ‘the fittest’ is meant only those most able to survive, we are looking at a pleonasm. This awkward fact has been noticed, but it is one of those instances where a striking expression takes on a life of its own.

In reality, ‘survivors’ and ‘the fittest’ are not synonyms and are even, in some respects, opposites. It would not be wholly absurd to say that the miracle of life is that the fittest do actually survive. Darwinism does more than present a picture of stray individuals, some of whom happen to be selected. We need to recognize that this array, this spread and these degrees of possibility are objective. It is not the fittest that exist and there is, moreover, no need to wait for the extinction of individuals or a species before concluding who does. Already in their behaviour, in their every movement and the profile of every living creature, the divergence between the fittest and the rest is obvious.

Researchers often naïvely judge success in terms of what they would see as success for themselves: that is, having a full stomach, being in good health and fertile. Clearly, however, other criteria are possible. Life is contingent on possibility and selection, where the criteria are uncertain. There are at least two of these, survival and fitness, and the correlation between them is uncertain. Only a total absence of fitness precludes survival, but the opposite does not follow: total retention by a savage beast of its savagery in the presence some hundreds of thousands of years ago of human beings led to extinction. When, after the radiation death of this planet, only the rats remain, their survival will not in any customary sense prove they were the fittest. Although logical analysis of premises is a rarity and everything is allowed to remain on the level of intuition, academic biologists might be surprised to know how often in assessing fitness they are applying a criterion that Konstantin Leontiev used for arguing against positivism. This was the criterion of ‘flourishing complexity’, which, while not excluding protracted observation, does not require it, relying less on observation than on sympathy and empathy.⁴ We can also note, dotted around in the economy of nature, pre-existing niches of fitness, hospitable locations to which life forms are attracted and into which they are drawn. That ‘strokes of luck’ are a possibility in our world deserves to be considered alongside the observation by physicists that our part of the universe is itself a stroke of luck because of the clear segregation here of energy and matter. In respect of the attraction of life forms to fitness, it should be noted that in the behaviour of herds, including the human herd, we do not find a stochastic distribution of more and less successful forms of behaviour from 0% to 100%. Technically, according to mathematical probability theory, this could be the case, but life seems from the outset to be predisposed to hitting the target. In view of all this, it is proposed that Darwin’s term ‘fitness’, in the sense of successful adaptation, should be replaced with the term ‘goodness’, in Russian godnost’, ‘to be good for something’. In the Indo-European languages, this word is in good company. The word for ‘weather’ in Russian is pogoda; in Slovenian, a related word means ‘timeliness’, ‘ripeness’, ‘festivity’, ‘anniversary’; in Latvian, it means ‘to hit the target’, ‘to gain’; in Lithuanian, ‘honour’, ‘glory’; in German, there is gut and in English ‘good’; in Greek, αγαθόν, agathón, ‘good’.

For a life form to be good for something does not necessarily mean only that it is successfully adapted to a purpose: it may indicate that it is a celebration, a glory. There is a great deal of controversy surrounding selectionism and Darwinism’s concept of natural selection, which we can sidestep by defining fitness as ‘goodness’. We have no grounds to oppose the idea that the spread of possible forms of life, including forms of behaviour, is enormous, or that which of these are ‘good’ becomes evident post factum. We must not, however, overlook the fact that even ante factum a ‘taste’ for goodness, either immediate or after trial and error, determines or tends to determine the behaviour of living creatures (as evidence from ethology tells us). It resembles such things as joy and celebration, and dictates not the content of behaviour but purely the form, in terms of gesture, brilliance, and beauty. This is born of anticipation that a pleasing action is possible in our world. We do not have to reject Darwinism and its random mutations and imagine that God has stored up a set of forms for future content into which life preforms itself. There are no ready-made anticipated forms, but something that argues in favour of an attracting, anticipatory effect of goodness is the absence of intermediate species in the gaps between those that have been successful. Darwin supposed they had just not yet been found. ‘The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.’⁵ Now it is almost conclusively clear that these intermediate forms have never existed. Nature can be compared to an artist whose works always find a place in the exhibition. ‘Nowhere do we find monstrous forms such as would indubitably have occurred in the event that limitless variability was the rule’ (Berg).⁶ This makes it all the more pressing to find an explanation for the succession, and abandonment, of hundreds of millions of its forms in the course of life’s history on earth.

The polarities of life are reflected in science in the contrast between the processes of feeding and reproduction; of proteins and nucleic acids; of symbiosis, inquilinism, parasitism, and xenobiosis; in the hypothesis of two lives; and in the ‘tyranny of genes’. It appears helpful to view the cell as an anthill, a colony of lower physiological units, in the light of the fact that absolutely all organisms are in fact colonies and communities, and that life is fundamentally ‘sociogenic’. All life is drawn towards other life and either assimilates or collaborates with it (symbiosis, inquilinism, parasitism, xenobiosis). The guiding principle is not so much the struggle for survival as an organism’s ability to find its place, to compromise, to serve the interests of unity and of other organisms in a kind of ‘egoistic altruism’.

Myrmecology, the study of ants, provides an opportunity to observe collective organisms. It opens up perspectives for understanding, on the one hand, the interaction of cells in an organism and, on the other, that of communities of living beings, including human beings. It also shows how expedient many processes in fact are which, if not closely examined, might lead to superficial conclusions. In ant colonies, we can observe age groups, a calendar, castes and caste-based laws, purposeful organization, training in personal hygiene, social education of the young, collaboration, mutual care, division of labour, general education, ethics, etiquette, taboo foods, donation, greeting, rituals of personal care, hygiene, incest taboos, language, care of larvae, medicine, metamorphosis rituals, honeymoon trips, deference to a leader, warrior castes, surgery, tool making, commerce, visiting, and meteorology.

This study reveals the importance of distinguishing between the true, living automaton and the mechanical automaton or robot; between genetic programming as against planning; of focusing on the distinctive features of the true automaton and how it copes with a situation of crisis, extreme stress, uncertainty, and amekhania (aporia). We find a degree of complexity that is not adequately observed using modern techniques of close study, and a great subtlety in phenomena ranging from the ‘unity of the genotype’ to the compaction of the genetic programme of a large organism into a vanishingly small cell.

Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, especially in extravagant breeding behaviour, offers the prospect of a convergence of the humanities and biology. Rehabilitating the classical world’s location of human beings in the animal realm enables us to review in a new, down-to-earth manner the history and purposes of the development of life on earth.

Analysis of geological, biological, and philosophical knowledge relevant to the history and current situation of life on the planet gives a clearer understanding of the prospects for human theory and practice to contribute positively to the process of life. These prospects are seen less in the area of global planning than in recognition by individuals and the human species at large of their potential role in moving life on earth in an auspicious direction.