Detachment and Compensation: Groundwork for a Metaphysics of
"Biosocial Becoming".
Lenny Moss
Rice University
& University of Exeter
There are many in the social sciences and social philosophy who would aspire to overcome
the 'nature/culture binary', including some, who with at least an implicit nod toward a
putatively 'anti-essentialist' process ontology have set out with an orientation toward a
paradigm of 'biosocial becoming'. Such contemporary work, however, in areas such as
social and cultural anthropology and Science Studies have often failed to clarify, let alone
justify, the warrants of their most basic assumptions and assertions. In what follows,
adumbrations will be offered, for a comprehensive metaphysics of 'biosocial becoming' that
can stand accountable to both empirical/descriptive and normative claims.
1. Why a ‘Metaphysics’?
The very idea of “Biosocial [cultural] Becoming”, properly understood, strikes at the heart of
many of the most deeply embedded assumptions and related enduring conundrums of
Western thinking of humans about ourselves going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. To
put forward the intentions of a research agenda shaped by the idea of ‘biosocial becoming’
is, ipso facto, to raise metaphysical issues. “Metaphysics” has meant many things at
different times to different people. At present it is both enjoying a kind of renaissance
within and around philosophy (within the Anglo-American analytic camp, in some if not all
‘Continental’ circles, at the boundaries of natural science and philosophy, in the history of
philosophy, at the intersections of philosophy and theology, and elsewhere) and yet it is
also still a term of derision amongst some of the heirs of ‘post-modernism’ (along with some
later-day positivists). While it won’t be possible to exhaustively review the spectrum of
even contemporary uses of ‘metaphysics’, I will provide some preliminary specification of
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what is intended (and not) by my present usage. A good exemplar and starting place is the
sense of ‘metaphysics’ invoked by E. A. Burtt in his classic (1924) Metaphysical Foundations
of Modern Physical Science. Burtt’s principal thesis, which preceded and evidently
substantially influenced both Koyre (1957) and Kuhn (1962/1969) was that the “New
Science” of the 16th and 17th centuries, was predicated upon, but also substantiated, a
radical shift in fundamental, i.e., metaphysical, presuppositions about the nature of the
cosmos - a shift which had much to do with historical changes in human experience. The
idea that there are always already fundamental presuppositions that both enable and
constrain even our most fundamental scientific views and yet are generally insulated from
them, and that such presuppositions merit the appellation ‘metaphysics’, is closely kindred
to the sense I intend. Inasmuch as a research programme in ‘biosocial becoming’ has
implications with respect to the nature of the human beast (how could it not?) recognition
of the inevitability of metaphysical presuppositions in human affairs also brings with it
implications and obligations with respect to reflexivity. A metaphysics that cannot
countenance, let alone account for, the (arguably inevitable) human proclivity for
metaphysics, broadly construed, surely cannot be an apposite vehicle for the expansion of
human (self-)understanding.
What one does not intend by metaphysics may be as helpful in achieving clarity as the
positive account. In his embrace of the “post-metaphysical” in contemporary philosophy,
what second generation Critical Theorist Jürgen Habermas (1992) targeted for historical
obsolescence, in the name of ‘metaphysics’, was the tradition of metaphysics as a ‘first
philosophy’ whose postulates were taken to be apodictic. For Habermas, the hallmark of
the ‘post-metaphysical’ is simply that it is ever and always open to criticism, including the
challenges put forward by the empirical sciences. Curiously, we still seem to be in our
intellectual infancy when it comes to maturely engaging with the sciences, especially the
natural sciences, with common temptations toward both totalizing dismissiveness on the
one side and uncritical obeisance on the other. Dogmatism resides at both extremes (not
just the latter). Those who resist the latter must acknowledge a categorical difference
between a standpoint that offers the natural sciences a place at the ontological table
without however elevating their status to that of final authority, and that which effectively
excludes the voice of the natural sciences tout court. A research programme in ‘biosocial
becoming’ is one that resists the latent dualism that continues to partition either into one
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side or the other of the biology-nature/humanities-culture divide. But on what basis and
with what warrants can this dualism be overcome? Many contemporaries in the areas of
social, cultural and science studies, actively eschew dichotomies of any kind and yet refuse
to hold themselves discursively accountable to their warrants for doing so. Ironically, it is
these contemporaries who have in effect followed a path back to apodicticity. To the extent
that ‘biosocial becoming’ frontally assaults residual dualisms and dichotomies, as well as
both naturalistic and anti-naturalistic reductionist assimilationisms, it must enter into a
multi-faceted engagement with accountabilities it cannot shirk and metaphysical
backgrounds it cannot help but critically volatilize. The objective of this paper is thus to
take the intentions of ‘biosocial becoming’ at its word and to explore the kind of
‘metaphysical’ contextualization that would both draw upon and nourish it.
2. Desiderata of a Metaphysics of Biosocial Becoming
1.
Central to the intentions of ‘biosocial becoming’ is a transition to a vocabulary and a
conceptual toolkit in which the resources of biology and socio-cultural analysis have
been brought together to the detriment of neither. As biology cannot simply be
plucked out from its linguistic, theoretic and epistemic context within the natural
sciences, what will be required is a new, or renewed, philosophy of nature such that
the phenomena of biosocial becoming can recognize its place within the natural
world generally.
2.
A metaphysics of biosocial becoming must be science friendly but in such a fashion
as to provide a framework in which insights from within the ambit of first and
second person points of view can reciprocally find resonances and give and take
investigative leads with insights obtained from empirical third person perspectives.
3.
A metaphysics of biosocial becoming must provide its own internal resources and
motivation for the moving away from the privileging of explanatory antecedence
and toward explanation within an horizon of open-ended possibility. In this sense,
the metaphysics of detachment finds common cause with attempts at elaborating a
theory of 'emergence' at the boundary of the natural sciences and philosophy. The
warrant and force however of this standpoint will depend upon the strength of said
resources and not merely an abstract commitment.
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4.
A metaphysics of biosocial becoming must be able to span any chasm between 'is
and ought' that would reproduce nature/culture partitions. Any understanding of
nature that is inimical to the possibility of a non-discursive nature giving rise to
implicit norms, condemns us to more nature/culture dualism. The metaphysics of
biosocial becoming must be able to reveal the roots (and stems) of normativity
within nature.
5.
A new metaphysics of nature must be able to show what has been wrong with
'humanism' without eschewing any articulation of human self-understanding as
such.
6.
A metaphysics of biosocial becoming which can locate itself within the horizon of
the epistemic possibilities it reveals will also see the conditions of its own epistemic
constraints. A metaphysics of biosocial becoming can be no de facto positivism that
falls beneath the level of reflection inaugurated by Kant.
3. The Idea of Detachment
The key to the adumbration of the new metaphysics being proposed is a concept of
'detachment' with wide-ranging scope and implications. At its most general level of
abstraction (where physics becomes metaphysics and metaphysics becomes physics), the
proposed new metaphysics claims that 'nature explores greater levels of detachment'. But
what is detachment? And how can this concept yield both theoretical and normative
insight? How can it meet the preceding desiderata required for grounding and enabling the
perspective of 'biosocial becoming'? I will begin with a preliminary sketch of the idea of
‘detachment’.
A simple physical system can be described in terms of its 'degrees of freedom'. To fully
describe the degrees of freedom of some system is to exhaustively account for the scope of
its possibilities, i.e., of its state space. If a single atom, for example, is perturbed by being hit
with a photon, it can respond through movement in space ('translation') with respect to
three (X,Y,Z) axes, it can rotate, or it can transiently elevate the energy level of one its
electrons. It can thus be said to have 6 degrees of freedom. To all of the above, a simple
diatomic molecule adds a new dimension, a new degree of freedom, because it can now also
vibrate along the axis of its covalent bond. Detachment is a measure of relative autonomy, a
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measure of ‘ontic autonomy’ one might say. To enjoy a larger space of ontic possibilities is
to be more detached. If some entity was nothing but a fully determined ‘slave’ to its
surround it would enjoy a very low level of detachment. So far as we know, the way in
which a particle such as atom or a diatomic molecule responds to a perturbation is fully
stochastic. To have a greater number of dimensions for responding stochastically to a
perturbation would constitute a higher level of detachment than having fewer. While in the
grander scheme of things, it is only comparatively simple systems whose degree of
detachment can be calculated in terms of countable degrees of freedom, there are already
qualitative distinctions that can be seen at the level of simple systems. The mono and
diatomic entities that respond stochastically to a perturbation do not have a history, i.e.,
there is no arrow of time immanent in their behavior. Like an honest slot machine, the way
in which an atom or diatomic molecule responds to a perturbation in one instance has no
influence on how it will respond in the next instance. This changes already with, for
example, a molecule as simple as butane, a saturated hydrocarbon with its four carbons in a
linear chain. In addition to those modalities of response already discussed, a butane
molecule can also respond to a perturbation by undergoing an isomerization (or 'mutation')
reaction and converting into isobutane (a branched chain as opposed to a linear chain of
four carbons). Subsequent responses to perturbations would be affected by whether such
an isomerization event took place. Butane is thereby susceptible of having a history and is
thusly more detached than entities that are not. With the idea of an enzyme, another
transition in detachment-relevant phenomena enters the scene. An enzyme is a large
organic (protein) molecule (that may or may not bind a co-factor) that can fold back upon
itself in a variety of ways thus adding multiple folding degrees of freedom to the roster of
those previously discussed. Enzymes certainly are susceptible of a history, as dramatically
demonstrated by scrapie prion phenomena, but as this example also suggests, the very idea
of an enzyme entails an implication of normativity. The catalytic activity of an enzyme
involves response to perturbation. An enzyme catalyzes a reaction when, on an entirely
stochastic basis, it engages in a collision with another molecule at its active catalytic site.
Although possessed, not of fewer but, rather with vastly greater degrees of freedom than an
atom or small molecule, its response to the perturbation is self-constrained, as if in accord
with a norm. Not only does the enzyme constrain its response to that dynamic deformation
that mediates the state transition of its perturbant (the catalytic reaction) but furthermore
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it then responds such as to recover its original state and become quickly poised to repeat
the same cycle.
An even more salient transition in level of detachment is achieved when (at least
hypothetically) a multiplicity of large molecules enter into a boundary-maintaining, selfsustaining organizational consortium, or proto-cell. “Life”, which has never lent itself to any
consensual/univocal definition, becomes re-visioned in this new metaphysics, in relation to
a position along a natural continuum whereby material systems, now possessed of an
historical trajectory and endowed with innumerable degrees of freedom, are seen to
respond to perturbations as if guided by a single norm-cum ‘internal telos’, i.e., that of acting
so as to sustain their high “autopoietic” level of detachment. A 'system' is deemed to be
autopoietic, if on the basis of its own organizational structure and dynamics it maintains a
self-defining boundary and produces the components that enables it to reproduce its
autopoietic organization. Autopoiesis, for many, marks the sine qua non of an 'autonomous
system', and so clearly a new threshold of detachment, yet as discussed above, the
properties of an autopoietic system are 'anticipated' by even complex large molecules.
Ascriptions of 'autonomy', which are widespread in disciplines such as theoretical biology
and the cognitive sciences, however, can be misleading. Autonomy, in various usages, such
as Kant's treatment of the 'moral law', has meant to convey an all or nothing status
('autonomy' versus 'heteronomy' in Kant's usage), which continues to be part of the
semantic resonance of the term. But, autonomy in reference to the state of autopoietic
systems and the like is very much a relative matter, a state of affairs best depicted by a
continuum of levels of detachment that can be distinguished by various criteria.
Which is also to say that detachment is always relational. Other than the universe as whole
(as best we can tell) there are no absolute states of detachment, only deeper or shallower
wells of relative detachment, relative autonomy, nested inside higher level wells of
detachment and within the larger fabric of nature. In this sense stories about 'detachment'
are also always stories about 'attachments'. A bi-atomic molecule loses some of the
quantitative degrees of freedom of two individual atoms taken and summed separately but
gains one additional qualitative degree of freedom as a unit. An autopoietic system
constrains the degrees of freedom of its constituents but has a far greater capacity to buffer
itself against perturbation than any sub-ensemble of its components. The leap in
detachment-cum-autonomy brings with it also a new form of 'attachment', i.e., that of
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metabolism - the obligatory execution of work-cycles which entail the harvesting of energy
from the local surround and its dissipative transference in the on-going achievement of
autopoietic organization. The autopoietic unit (this transition to a qualitatively new level of
detachment) constitutes a new platform, a new possibility space, for nature to explore yet
other forms and higher levels of detachment (and correspondingly new forms of reattachment as well). Contrary to the individuating emphasis usually placed on the
autopoietic system, the emphasis here is meant to be relational, i.e., with respect to the
relation of constitute molecules and sub-molecular assemblies to the autopoietic unit, and
the that of an autopoietic unit in turn to the open-ended realm of new detachment
possibilities in relation to which the autopoietic unit would be a constituent part. Indeed
there are now several forks in the road with paths to be warned against. These are as
follows:
1. Life should not be reduced to the model of the machine. The need and capacity to
transduce ambient energy in the 'interest' of realizing a higher order of detachment, which
in invoking concepts such as a thermodynamically defined concept of work already harkens
towards the possibility of assimilating autopoietic phenomena, i.e., 'life' to that of the
classical machine, has provided a powerful temptation to then proceed to grasp all higherorder detachment reductively in terms of its energetics, i.e., organisms as machines, albeit
'survival machines'. The mid-20th century cybernetics-inspired move toward assimilating
organisms to the model of information-processing machines was just another byway
stemming from the same reductive path.
2. Following the machine image and metaphor, the ground of higher-level
(autopoietic) detachment has been abstracted from out of the continuum of nature to the
extent of supposing the material constituents of living systems as purely contingent and
fungible. Theoreticians of the mechanisms of life endeavor to decompose the organism into
just so many functions that are conceived as being neutral with respect to the matter of
their instantiation. But 'functions' are functions for something and that 'something' is a
state of self-sustaining detachment that is, in every respect (logically, ontologically,
chronologically), prior to any particular description of how it happens to be functionally
sustaining itself in short or even longer term perspectives. For all its hyperbolic claims to
have constructed 'new life forms', Synthetic Biologists continue to be limited to either
creating de novo assemblies which never become living systems or beginning with a living
organism and retooling or replacing some of its components. The functional reification of
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the higher 'living' states of detachment has not yielded the synthetic achievements it has
aspired for, and I suggest it never will. The 'stuff' of nature matters. Autopoiesis, as we
know it, is an aqueous phenomenon. While the continuity of autopoietic organization
requires the dissipation of energy (and so the acquisition of new energy sources) it is also
constituted by spontaneous sources of self-organization based in the properties of liquid
water. Liquid water, no machine by any stretch, already has propensities for assuming
biomorphic form. At the microstructure, liquid water transits through crystal-like and fluid
phases, in anticipation, one could whimsically say, of the gel-sol transitions vital to living
cytoplasm. The cellular-like beads that water forms when thrown against a hydrophobic
surface, a transient detachment episode one could say, is driven not by energy-consuming
mechanisms of imposing order but by the entropic forces that strive toward the free-play of
random exploration within the aqueous bulk phase. Suppressed or merely ignored in the
metaphysics of the machine is the constitutive role that aqueous-phase, entropic, random
exploration plays in the living world ever after. Pace the mechanistic functionalists, water is
not a functional component of living systems, water is the very medium in which nature's
exploration of higher order detachment has blossomed into those higher-order, autopoietic
forms of detachment we call 'life'.
3. The idea of the autopoietic unit is an analytic abstraction that should not be
taken as an invitation to converge one's focus onto the concept of an isolated entity.
Autopoietic units do not exist in vacuo and should always be thought of as part of a larger
context. The metaphysics of detachment is not about the evolution of isolated units but
about the changing "textures" in and of the universe. Before there were atoms with rest
mass the universe was less discontinuous, less lumpy, a high-energy storm of inconceivable
proportions but without stable boundaries, and without regions of self-buffering. The
congealing of energy into matter made for a far more granular texture. Transitions in levels
of detachment (such as the formation of matter) open up new worlds of possibility that
become immanent in the local and global textures that emerge. Grainier textures, deeperwells of detachment, mean more buffering. Interactions ensue within the grainier fabric,
between any and all parts, resulting in on-going explorations, and continuous permutations,
deformations, and transformations of the larger fabric. Buffering is also de-localizing. The
buffered unit can 'hold its breadth' and investigate a different ambient medium. Buffered
units interact with buffered units and form deeper wells yet of buffering. Wells of
detachment deepen as buffered units build nested hierarchies - microcosms. Microcosms
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nest within microcosms. Autopoiesis, so far as we know, is a phenomenon of liquid water
and terrestrial chemistry. Detachment does not terminate interaction, quite to the contrary,
it results in massive increases in the complexity and the power of interactions. From
aqueous autopoiesis comes a biosphere that permeates the seas, blankets the lands and
transforms and invades the atmosphere. In fits and starts, with punctuated equilibria,
autopoiesis building upon autopoiesis, detachment building upon and with detachment, has
been transforming the fabric of the earth for over 3 billion years. The logos of detachment,
surely within the "aqueous/terrestial universe", has always already been one of 'bio-social
becoming'.
4.The Peculiarity of the Human - a Tale of Two Detachments
Even the simplest autopoietic system is possessed of an enormous number of internal
degrees of freedom. What characterizes transitions to higher levels of detachment, however,
is not just the accrual of greater and greater degrees of freedom but the interplay between
the ability to randomly explore a possibility space and the constraints within which such
exploration takes place. A wider scope for exploration allows for what has become known
as 'adaptive plasticity'. But 'excess openness' also poses risks and so there are trade-offs at
play. Constraints occur at many levels. There is no prior principle that predetermines what
can or cannot be part of a 'unit of detachment' or what may or may not be included within
such a unit, or at what 'level' amongst nested hierarchies of detachments a unit of
detachment can be identified. What then demarcates a unit of detachment?
It was suggested earlier that even a large molecule such as a protein-based enzyme can be
thought of as observing a norm in the particular way in which it mediates its propensity for
random exploration and its structural constraints. An autopoietic system is a
consummately normative entity inasmuch as perpetually producing its autopoiesis is its ongoing orientation. Normativity enters into the scales of detachment even at fairly
rudimentary levels and the capacity to not just instantiate higher levels of self-buffering but
to actively and continuously produce the condition of self-buffering marks a clear
demarcation in the ontogeny of detachment. Maturana and Varela (1980), the originators of
the concept of 'autopoiesis' had referred to as 'second-order' autopoiesis (Maturana and
Varela, 1992) all those life-forms such as colonies, symbioses and multi-cellular (i.e, animal,
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plant and fungal) organisms whereby lower level autopoietic units give rise to higher level
autopoietic units of which the former are constituent parts. But can all higher-level units of
detachment be thought of exclusively in terms of associations and hierarchies of autopoietic
units? Recent trends in the direction of 'material agency' suggest some decentering of the
autopoietic unit in the composition of higher levels of detachment. Science studies theorists
Latour (2005) and Pickering (1995) see joint agency of actors and non-animate 'actants'
coming together into networks and/or 'mangles'. Proponents of extended cognition such as
Andy Clark (2008) see various artifacts as being co-constitutive of mind, and Peter Sloterdjk
(Lemmens, 2009) amongst many others, conceives of techno-human hybrids.
Developmental Systems Theory (Oyama, Griffiths and Gray, 2001), more broadly, conceived
of their unit of evolution—'the developmental system'—as composed of all of the resources,
autopoietic or otherwise, that were co-constitutive of stably reproduced developmental lifecycles. A nest or a burrow, by their thinking, or perhaps even the salinity of a pond, would
thus be proper and necessary constituents of a 'developmental system'.
While these various postulations of material agency are instructive in their own ways, I will
argue that the metaphysics of detachment offers a more capacious framework that captures
the best of their insights without sacrificing crucial distinctions. What comes, in a sense, for
free with the idea of 'detachment' is the possibility of a need for compensation. And where
there is a need, there are better and worse ways of fulfilling it. The case for gradations of
'detachment' with respect to internal degrees of freedom, the possession of a history that
has purchase on the future, and the ability to buffer against perturbation would be hard to
contest and yet many would be quick to correctly point out that such entities are in fact also
intimately embedded in a context.
With history, with immense numbers of degrees of freedom, with complex capacity for
buffering against ambient perturbation, the relationship of a highly detached (autopoietic)
system to its context becomes one of attunement. Attunement is a normative relationship; it
is susceptible of better and worse. Our best intuitions, and those of the vast majority of
humans perceivers, suggest that members of other species, animals in particular, are not
mere energy or information processing machines but creatures with an affective
relationship to their surround, who are susceptible of flourishing or floundering. The
concept of attunement captures these intuitions. Whether as a mere heuristic, or part of a
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new 'speculative physics', we do well to take it that with increasing levels of detachment
there is a breach that needs to be mollified but that this mollifying re-attachment, which has
become particular and selective, can, although might not, achieve its own immanent ideal. I
am here, of course, largely 'rediscovering' or perhaps just paraphrasing, Aristotle. A
detached being's attunement is its areté, its excellence. And in the realization of its
excellence, its attunement, it realizes a pleasure in its being that could not exist without the
reciprocal danger of an uncompensated breach, an uncompensated 'pain of detachment'. In
view of the dynamic, hierarchical nesting of levels of detachment within the fabric of nature
as a whole, relations of attunement at one level will be constituents of a higher level of
detachment at another. We can, for example, both characterize the attunement of an
organism to a dynamic, co-constructed niche, and also characterize a putative multi-species
niche, if it stably reproduces itself in accord with implicit norms, as a higher level of
detachment.
The situation and story about humans follows from this and yet is also special in its own
way (and this 'specialness' has more than an incidental relationship to why we are having
this conversation, i.e., it is not due to a thinking, talking or philosophizing gene, nor is
language making us do it). Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes (and continuous
through the likes of John Searle and a great many other contemporaries) took the human
individual as its unit of interest and attempted to ascribe properties (rationality,
intentionality, etc.) to 'him' from which all human social, cultural, political, etc., attributes
could then be derived. Pace the assumptions of methodological individualism, the
metaphysics of detachment looks upon the question of levels of analysis as not pre-decided
but case specific and multifocal. Already in the 18th century, thinkers, most prominently
Gottfried Herder (1827/1966), noticed something very peculiar about the human
individual, i.e., that unlike any closely related species, we are born radically dependent,
under-specialized and lacking the kinds of 'natural' attunements exhibited by other species.
For Herder, and crucially, the human had become detached from the beck and call of any
specific frequencies of nature and thus 'world-open' meaning receptive and susceptible to
any and all stimuli. To be 'attuned' in the manner of all other species, is to both be
exquisitely responsive to some particular stimuli but also to structurally shut out all the
stimuli which is not relevant to a particular attunement. For Herder, and for that tradition
that follows upon these insights and reaches its peak in the mid-20th century German
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School of Philosophical Anthropology, world-openness is an opportunity but it first of all
poses a mortal danger to the viability of human existence. More than a century after
Herder, his idea of the specificity of world-openness was given further empirical credence
by the work of theoretical biologist and science of ethology founder, Jakob Von Uexküll
(2010). Von Uexküll substantiated the idea of world-openness by characterizing its
contrast, the structural closure of an animal's effective (and subjective) world, which he
termed its 'umwelt'. The tic, owing to the clarity of its simplicity, became emblematic of the
idea, as Von Uexküll revealed that its umwelt consisted only of sensitivity to heat,
fluctuations of light and the 'scent' of butyric acid. A natural umwelt then, was exactly what
humans, and arguably only humans, lacked. If the individual animal could be characterized
by an invariable species-typical umwelt, this is exactly what was not the case for the
individual human.
If anything has been widely accepted amongst anthropologists with an interest in human
evolution it has been that early hominid survival on the savannah required a hitherto
unprecedented degree of con-specific solidarity. For many, 'Dunbar's magic number' of
roughly 150 (Dunbar, 1993) has become a rule of thumb for the size of the core
hominid/human group that has long since become deeply embedded in human social
psychology. What has been less subject to consensus is what enabled this new level of
social cohesion to occur. The metaphysics of detachment has something to offer in this
regard. The loss of specialization of the human/hominid and the de novo rise of the
expanded social group were no mere coincidences. The origination of the hominid line
constituted a transition both in degree but also in level of detachment. What emerged as a
radically new 'experiment' in detachment was a kind of hominid super-organism. Several
million years prior to the advent of spoken language the normative glue that held the superorganism together had to be powerfully affective and deeply embodied. The
underdevelopment of the hominid, the loss of primate specializations, was most likely based
in an evolutionary neoteny that simultaneously served to retain and extend patterns of
early developmental plasticity. Hominid underdevelopment and world-openness both
enabled and necessitated massive compensation at the level of the social group. Only as
part of a highly integrated whole could the hominid weaklings conquer the rigors of life on
the savannah. But as an integrated whole, the hominid super-organism/group constituted a
force to contend with. As the principal unit of detachment, it was the super-organism that
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became the principal unit of attunement. Composed of world-open constituents in dire
need of grounding and orienting compensation the attunement of the super-organism
consisted in the formation of a normative world, i.e., a coherent horizon of embodied
practices and know-hows, implicit interpretations, perceived affordances, and behavioral
norms only through which, and by means of which, individual attunements could be shaped
and realized. The radical dependence of the hominid neonate and world-openness of the
developing organism were in turn sources of strength and flexibility for the super-organism
- strength with respect to group coherence and flexibility with respect to the adaptive
plasticity of the group. With the emergence of the hominid-super-organism as the principal
unit of detachment, and with competition between hominid groups being the principal
source of selective pressure, evolutionary changes further cultivated the increasingly deepseated sociality of the hominid individual. It is surely a testament to the tenacity of the
Cartesian standpoint that only with the very recent work of psychologists Merlin Donald
and Michael Tomasello (and others) are we finally coming to fully appreciate the primacy of
human sociality on an empirical basis.
In his lecture course of 1929/30 published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
(1995) Martin Heidegger famously made the claim that 'animals have an umwelt and
Dasein (humans) have a world'. We've said that other species find their compensation for
detachment (their re-attachment) through their attunement to the natural surround and
their attunement is both enabled and constrained by their umwelt. Heidegger so
sufficiently felt the urgency of the need to move us beyond a Cartesian-subject view of the
human that he introduced the term 'Dasein' to substitute for human a designation that
immediately refers to radical situatedness . For Heidegger the relationship of Dasein to its
social world was beyond intimate, Dasein just is its 'being-in-the-world'. Could any
description of the possible meaning of being part of a super-organism be any more
apropos? In Division One of his magnum opus Being and Time, Heidegger brilliantly
explicates the structures of human subjectivity that are intrinsic to Being-in-the-World.
Without intending to, Heidegger has recovered the strains of continuity of modern humans
with our super-organism ancestry. "Proximally and for the most part" Heidegger tells us,
Dasein lives as a kind of ultra-conformist, an any-man or any-woman, who is continually in
the business of sub-consciously monitoring any possible deviation from average behavior
and adjusting to fall into line. From the earliest stages of our life, we inhale our world and
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become part and parcel of it. Long before Science Studies Heidegger described a confluence
between human bodies and the material equipment of daily life and daily pursuits such that
bodies come to shape and comport themselves according to the contours of the equipment,
and the equipment in turn becomes transparently lost in its usage like the arms and legs of
one's body in action. Many have celebrated Heidegger's, anti-Cartesian, de-centering, and
anti-cognitivist phenomenological disclosure of the fundaments of human being yet
curiously without asking why we happen to be this way.
For the hominid denizens of the super-organism, the 'world' that Heidegger describes, or its
ancestor, a normatively structured totality of organism-orienting practices, comportments,
moods, perceived affordances, kinships, concerns, pleasures and pains, implicit
interpretations, and the like constitute the principal compensation for the radical
underdevelopment of the individual being. The attunements of which we spoke before are
now attunements within a world. When Heidegger's phenomenological world is (re)united
with the ancestral unit of hominid detachment, the tension between biology and culture
evaporates. The implicit normativity of natural forms and their attunements move to a new
level of detachment with the hominid super-organism. In a rough and ready way one might
want to say that 'biosocial (cultural) becoming' begins here. The hugely flexible but vastly
underspecialized biology of the super-organism's individual constitutes the conditions of
need and possibility for the dynamic global normative integration we call culture. The
socio-cultural normative world of the super-organism became the motive organizing force
of the further, post-natal developmental shaping and fine-tuning of each and every new
member of the group and so effectively an on-going continuation of its biology.
The detachment-theoretic account of human biosocial becoming cannot conclude with the
formation of the super-organism. In a recent debate representative of the best possibilities
of philosophical discourse John McDowell (2007a, 2007b) defended the view that human
experience is conceptually structured through and through versus Hubert Dreyfus (2006,
2007a, 2007b) who drawing on an account of the phenomenology of everyday and expert
skill claimed that what we do most and what we do best is not conceptually structured at
all. Each of these skilled interlocutors had their points but also their vulnerabilities. What I
will want to show is that some of the conundrums bedeviling our best philosophers can be
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clarified by understanding human biosocial becoming in terms of not just one, but also a
second, albeit incomplete, detachment.
McDowell (1994), following Wilfred Sellers, decries the so-called 'Myth of the Given' in
claiming that we never just encounter nature in a brute, unmediated, undigested fashion but
rather that our experiences are always already conceptually pre-structured such as to be 'in
the space of reasons'. So too would this be the case for our intentional actions. Dreyfus by
contrast has argued fairly effectively that all or most skills follow a common pattern
whereby what may begin in an ostensibly rule-and-concept structured fashion for the
novice becomes, with increasing experience and expertise, taken up as embodied abilities
that far outrun anything that could be distilled into reasons. Dreyfus's view that the more
skilled we become (including in practical everyday routines) the more we resemble animals
in their natural attunements would seem to resonate with the idea that through the
provision of ensembles of possible skills in our world, we are compensated for that which
we are lacking at birth. Yet Dreyfus (2007b), by his own acknowledgement, feels befuddled
as to how it is that we move from our involved coping to conceptual explicitation.
McDowell, for his part, appears to be unable to reconcile his account of the primordiality of
the conceptual with various accounts of everyday and expert performance, such as grandmaster chess playing, that could not possibly require discursive thought processes.
The hominid/human form of life begins with a radical transition in both degree and level of
detachment and the phenomenologies of both Heidegger and Dreyfus in some ways harken
back to it. Long before language (and thus before discursive conceptuality), Homo erectus
was able to set up permanent encampments, utilize fire, engage in big-animal hunts that
required the social coordination and possible differentiation of tasks, the crafting of stones
tools and the adaptive ability to colonize highly disparate regions of the Euro-Asian as well
as African land masses (Donald, 1991). Far too little attention has been paid to how this
was achieved at the level of the group (super-organism) that emerged as the principal level
of detachment. Heidegger and Dreyfus's accounts, while harkening back to the
phenomenologies of this ancestral form still suffer from their own methodological
individualism. Heidegger (1962) grasped that Dasein's world was always already a 'we'
world but this insight was sidelined by the individualism implicit in Heidegger's quest for
authenticity. In Dreyfus the treatment of sociality disappears within his concept of the
15
world. But what holds 'the world' together? Human (and one must imagine hominid)
infants are sensitive to and desirous of the approval of others well beyond that of any other
species (although there are those which are much closer than others). The radical
dependency and under-determination of the human, along with as yet ill-defined evolving
capacities for social cognition, are responsible for this. The super-organism was
dynamically, normatively, integrated through the on-going need and capacity to feel and
internalize the judgment of others. That this could be mastered, pre-linguistically, at the
level of somatic styles, embodied know-how, affect-attunement, shared perception, etc., well
accounts for the nature of everyday skill to which Dreyfus refers. What Vygotsky (1978)
observed about the internalization of language and thereby thinking, holds also for the
internalization of the mimetic styles and practices of the group. Tomasello's disclosure of
the pre-linguistic human capacity for we-intentionality provides further powerful
corroboration of this view. The patrimony of those implicit norms and styles and patterns
of action and perception that are internalized, in one's attunement to the judgment of
others, brings with it an entailment of on-going, if tacit, accountability to the judgment of
others.
What is tacit, but could become explicit, in 'our' accountability to the judgment of others is
what I take to be key in the transition to the second (albeit incomplete) hominid/human
detachment. Where to begin drawing lines between first and second detachment is at best a
matter of speculation but could be the basis of a heuristically potent research programme.
As there can be no doubt we are still also creatures of 'the herd', of the super-organism, of
the first detachment, the metaphysics of detachment provide a new purchase on the hybrid
character of modern humans that resonates well with kindred and parallel views such as
that of the Helmuth Plessner's theory of the excentricity of 'human positionality' (Plessner,
1970) and Merlin Donald's (2001) model of 'the hybrid mind'.
Where the first detachment, was a detachment from physiologically structured attunement
with a natural environment and into a new macro socio-cultural organism, the second
detachment is a detachment of individuation and arguably re-attachment on a different,
more individually 'autonomous' basis. In the name of the 'rational animal' philosophy has
valorized and celebrated the product of the second detachment. Philosophy, as such, can
even be said, in some sense, to be the second detachment discovering and seeking to come
16
to terms with itself. What could have been the motive force of a second detachment? While
all action, perception and intention within the hypostatized super-organism was not always
already within 'the space of reasons', the life of the super-organism was normatively
saturated albeit on a pre-linguistic/pre-conceptual basis. As Tomasello (2008, 2009) has
demonstrated, pre-linguistic children already feel the force of shared expectation and can
perceive a failure to carry-through as a normative breach whether it be their own or
another's. If indeed a feeling of accountability is part and parcel of the normative glue that
held the hominid group together, then the very resources and dynamics of the detached
group could have set the conditions for its partial dissolution through eventual incremental
explicitation and problematization of background accountabilities and norms.
The idea that we implicitly know all that we are accountable for in making an assertion is a
cornerstone of Robert Brandom's inferential semantics (Brandom, 1994). For Brandom, a
concept is, in effect, a crystallization of this knowledge. The potential to 'make it explicit'
can be viewed as having been latent in the tacit normativity of the super-organism and may
well have been the detachment event waiting in the wings that led anthropogenesis,
incrementally, in the direction of symbolic speech. Anthropogenesis in this view is always
about improvements in compensation for primary detachment by way of, amongst other
things, richer and more fulfilling forms of normative integration. Ritual, ceremony and
elemental narrative could all have been achieved by a mimetic culture, and all contributing
to grounding, to affective stabilization, to second-order attunement, indeed to eudaimonia.
Quests, however for absolute grounding, absolute dispensation from anxiety, can never be
complete, which is also to say that the impetus for new forms and levels of compensation
can never be permanently quelled. The present suggestion is that, increasingly, abilities for
making accountabilities explicit began as integrative and compensatory but led to the
beginnings of the second detachment. The human subject, in this view, both discovers and
constitutes itself as subject in making explicit to itself its deeply entrenched accountability
to the judgment of others. In Kant's regulative vision of a kingdom of ends, the cognitive
impetus of the second detachment can be said to have anticipated its completion, in the
form of a 'rational and autonomous' individuality that could only exist in the context of a
new form of sociality. Modern Western thinking generally has proceeded as if Kant's
counter-factual rational subject was a fait accompli, helping itself to the fruits of an at best
only speculatively possible accomplishment that in any event it never achieved.
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5. Conclusions: What are some implications of the Metaphysics of Detachment for
Research in Biosocial Becoming?
1. The metaphysics of detachment challenges research in biosocial becoming to quantum
tunnel through disciplinary boundaries, to disclose and expose the fractured and fractious
verities of human ecologies of compensation, to locate normative footholds immanently
from within the ambit of its engagements, and to embody the gravitas to stand upon them.
2. The idea of the incompletion of a 'second detachment' establishes a general rationale for
why human life is distinctively about 'Biosocial Becoming'. One way or another human life
straddles a line between pervasive needs for compensation intrinsic to the first detachment
and the individuating stepping away from its compensating enclosure within the superorganism/group intrinsic to its incomplete second detachment.
3. The need for compensation (on many levels) pervades human life. Stabilizing narratives
(indeed metaphysics) are co-extensive with human existence as we know it. Temptations
towards absolutes are perennial. Individuation from out of the super-organism issues into a
new space of possible socialities (indeed into biosocial becoming!), yet an absolutizing
fiction of the primordiality of the atomic individual has become one of the dominant myths
of our age. The precarious straddle of human existence between the remains of our
visceral, mimetic, affective attachment to the group and that individuating plunge into the
unavoidable accountability of the conceptual that forbids our return to full enclosure,
prefers not to look itself in the eye.
4. The idea of a 'pain of detachment' that must be mollified by some contingent (not
dictated by 'the laws of physics') form of attunement, enables an understanding and
appreciation of nature no longer tethered to the machine metaphor and/or the paradigm of
instrumental survival.
5. The idea of 'attunement' is not incommensurate with much work and thinking in the life
sciences and it identifies and makes explicit an affective dimension and a normative
18
dimension to our understanding of emergent forms of detachment. By 'normative' I mean
simply an immanent criterion for distinguishing between good and bad, better and worse.
6. Notions of natural (albeit contingent and not eternal) finality and even of eudaimonia can
be critically reconstrued and recovered.
7. Inasmuch as the Metaphysics of Detachment highlights the fragility of, and the desperate
need for, attunement in humans and inexorably links descriptive understanding with
normative understanding, it discloses Biosocial Becoming as a 'critical' enterprise.
Research in biosocial becoming itself cannot help but be a player in realizations, or
frustrations, of human flourishings and must understand itself as such.
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