Charles T. Wolfe: Organisms as Material Agents, Organisms as Meaning-Makers

Описание: The talk took place at The Organic and the Normative conference, taking place in Ljubljana between July 30 and August 1. 2024. Learn more:
https://metanoia.si/ouroboros/the-org...

Abstract:
Organisms, like zombies, nearly extinct Jedi knights or perhaps more gently, like a character in a play who keeps exiting and then somehow returning to the stage, keep having a ‘return’ or a ‘revival’ in bio-theoretical and bio-philosophical thought. Most of the time, they return as key elements of proud empirical claims to “overturn mechanism”; truth claims, in fact: organisms are x, are defined by properties y and z, and so on. I have tried to achieve some (friendly) critical distance on such literal truth claims about organisms in past work (Wolfe 2010, 2014, 2023b), but it is never a clearly resolved issue, for at least two reasons. First, because the strongly opposite view – a kind of pragmatic, constructivist approach along the lines of ‘handsome is as handsome does’, in this case approaching organisms as heuristic constructs – seems to leave something out; some of their “vital materiality,” perhaps, which is characteristic of biological systems. Second, because the empirical definitions keep changing (Claude Bernard’s organicism is different from Francisco Varela’s, and both are different again from the metaphysics of organism in Hegel or Hans Jonas; this is a point of disagreement between me and staunch defenders of organicism who treat it as monolithic). But there is another way in which organisms can and do return: as what one might call meaning-makers (following a line of inquiry often associated with Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt-research). It is a very different approach to organism, to their existence and to ‘what makes them tick’ to say they are defined by metabolism, or organizational closure, and to say that they are defined by the production of meaning (and the responsiveness to meaning). This approach has a definite biosemiotic flavor to it, but instead of reiterating those analyses, I will explore it on the basis of insights from Uexküll, Kurt Goldstein, Georges Canguilhem and Jean Starobinski. Organisms in this context bear some resemblance to the ‘organism as figure of subjectivity’ narrative familiar from the German Idealist and Romantic tradition (which Canguilhem in 1947 wanted to ‘bring back’ into biophilosophical work: Canguilhem 1947a, Wolfe 2024); yet they have a processual, performative quality which makes them rather less foundational or internalist; less like the corps propre of embodied and/or enactivist phenomenology which is defined by its subjectivity (Wolfe 2023a). Hopefully, the return of organisms as meaning-makers is neither tragedy nor farce.

CV:
Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and co-director, ERRAPHIS at the Université de Toulouse-2 Jean Jaurès. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or coedited volumes on monsters, organisms, brains, empiricism, epigenesis, the conceptual foundations of biology, mechanism and vitalism, Locke and Canguilhem, including (w. John Symons, in progress) The History and Philosophy of Materialism. [...]


The conference is part of the “Vital Normativity: Beyond the Is/Ought Divide” project, which is part of the “New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe“ initiative organised by the Ian Ramsey Center of the University of Oxford in cooperation with the John Templeton Foundation. The event is also made possible with the kind support of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. 

We are grateful to the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts (ZRC SAZU) for hosting us in their venue.