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Phenom Cogn Sci (2007) 6:327–348

DOI 10.1007/s11097-007-9053-3

Finding common ground between evolutionary biology


and continental philosophy

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Published online: 17 April 2007


# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract This article identifies already existing theoretical and methodological


commonalities between evolutionary biology and phenomenology, concentrating
specifically on their common pursuit of origins. It identifies in passing theoretical
support from evolutionary biology for present-day concerns in philosophy, singling
out Sartre’s conception of fraternity as an example. It anchors its analysis of the
common pursuit of origins in Husserl’s consistent recognition of the grounding
significance of Nature and in his consistent recognition of animate forms of life other
than human. It enumerates and exemplifies five basic errors of continental
philosophers with respect to Nature, errors testifying to a philosophical fundamen-
talism that distorts the intricate interconnections and relationships of Nature in favor
of a preferred knowledge rooted in ontological reductionism. It shows that to
discover and appreciate the common ground, one must indeed study “the things
themselves.”

Keywords Nature . Animals (human and nonhuman) . Origins . Primal sensibility .


Fundamental errors . Embodiment

Introduction

Given the pervasively fashionable use of the term “embodiment,” it is surprising that
continental philosophy has not formed a relationship with evolutionary biology. The
absence of a relationship is all the more surprising in light of the fact that evolution

M. Sheets-Johnstone (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1295, USA
e-mail: msj@pioneer.net
328 M. Sheets-Johnstone

in general – and human evolution in particular – is not uncommonly (if erroneously)


pictured as exclusively a matter of bodies, the attribution of minds to nonhuman
animals being problematic for some if not many humans. The irony is that, in the
absence of a consideration of evolutionary biology, the human body, like the human
mind, appears to be a deus ex machina phenomenon. Indeed, whatever the term
‘embodied’ might stand for – a packaging of the self, the mind, the spirit, or the will,
for example – the phenomenon itself lacks any and all historical roots. Embodied
humans just suddenly appear out of the blue on the world scene and are duly written
about as just so descended.
However conveniently contemporary philosophers – analytic as well as
continental – “embody” humans for ease in handling, the nature of human nature
is in need of deeper philosophical explication, and evolutionary biology warrants the
attention of continental philosophers in precisely this context. Though the charge of
biologism might be raised, it is in fact readily answerable by way of demonstrating
the common ground that obtains between evolutionary biology and continental
philosophy and the ways in which that ground may both enlighten and support
philosophical research: on the one hand, along the lines of already existing
theoretical and methodological commonalities between evolutionary biology and
phenomenology; on the other hand, along the lines of theoretical support from
evolutionary biology for a set of prominent present-day continentalist theses and
concerns.
With respect to the first set of lines, three commonalities in particular warrant
attention: 1) the pursuit of origins; 2) a grounding in descriptive foundations; 3) a
separation of the sciences from the humanities. In order to provide a sense of how
theoretical and methodological commonalities already exist and how their import
can be deflected by ontologically-driven agendas of one kind and another, I will give
concentrated attention to a single commonality, the pursuit of origins, and offer only
the following highly abbreviated exemplifications of the two other specified
commonalities.1
Common ground in descriptive foundations is readily exemplified in the fact that
methodologically-informed taxonomies and methodologically-informed analyses of
experience both give rise to the possibility of verification by others. Because
exacting methodological procedures are followed in each instance, others can
validate any descriptive account that is offered; they can elaborate it further; they can

1
An extended exemplification of descriptive foundations may be found in an article of the same name,
originally presented as the Keynote Address at the Association for the Study of Literature and
Environment, Flagstaff, AZ, 2001. See Sheets-Johnstone 2002. An extended exemplification of how the
separation of the sciences from the humanities is bridged by conceptual complementarities anchored in
animate life is given in Sheets-Johnstone 2004, an article first presented as an invited paper at “The Perils
and Promises of Interdisciplinary Research,” a conference sponsored by the Center for Subjectivity
Research, University of Copenhagen, 2002.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 329

question it; and so on. Descriptive foundations are empirical foundations, and, being
grounded in a specific methodology, they are open to rigorous verification by others.
Common ground between the sciences and humanities exists in the fact that,
though they set themselves off from each other, the sciences and humanities face
each other across the same imposed divide, variously identified as an opposition
between biology and culture, nature and nurture, the objective and the subjective,
and so on. The artifactual divide is in reality the common ground, the separation of
what in actuality – the everyday lifeworld – is all of a piece. Common ground may
be elucidated, for example, in terms of the ways in which cultures rework what is
evolutionarily given, as in cross-cultural beliefs in the evil eye (Dundes 1992),
beliefs that derive from the experienced power of optics in everyday human and
nonhuman animal life (e.g., Goodall 1974; Hall and DeVore 1972; Sartre 1956; see
Sheets-Johnstone 1994 for a full elaboration). Specifying common ground between
the sciences and humanities through conceptual complementarities reconciles
traditional Western binary oppositions such as biology and culture by uncovering
inherent relationships.
Before turning attention exclusively to the pursuit of origins, I would like to say
something briefly of the second set of lines – the ways in which evolutionary
biology can enlighten and support present-day continentalist theses and concerns.
Three areas are particularly notable, each of them highlighting an empirically-
grounded staple of evolutionary biology: 1) the singular Hominidae evolutionary
lineage, which argues against typical rationales and justifications for racism,
ethnicism, and, we might add, religionism; 2) the ecological ties that bind all life
forms in the natural world to each other and to the natural world itself; 3) notable
inborn dispositions, particularly the feeding and nurturing of young on the one hand
and male–male competition on the other. A single highly abbreviated exemplifica-
tion of the first of these areas will suffice to demonstrate the significance of
empirically-grounded staples of evolutionary biology to current continentalist
concerns. The example centers on Sartre’s concept of fraternity in his last published
book (Sartre and Levy 1996) and its coincidence with a basic biological fact: a
singular Hominidae evolutionary lineage. At bottom, continentalists will find in
Sartre’s concept of fraternity a deep concordance of evolutionary and phenomeno-
logical thought that can be mined in strong support of continentalist theses
concerning racism, ethnicism, and religionism.

The common concern with origins

In different but complementary ways, getting to the bottom of things human is a


mark of both evolutionary biology and Husserlian phenomenology. An investigation
of lineages, in the one instance animate lineages, in the other instance meaning
lineages, is of sizable significance to human self-and world-understandings. In each
instance, an illumination of origins uncovers a developmental history, a history of
how an animal – human or nonhuman – has arrived at its present form or how an
experience has come to have the meaning and value it has. In the one instance, it is a
question of morphology; in the other, a question of epistemology. More particularly,
330 M. Sheets-Johnstone

in the one instance, it is a question of how the movement possibilities of animate


forms and their ways of living have evolved, one form having become the point of
departure for the emergence of a different form with movement possibilities and
ways of living that are slightly to highly modified with respect to the earlier form. In
the other instance, it is a question of how experienced meanings have arisen, one
meaning with its sedimentations and horizons having become the point of departure
for the emergence of experienced meanings with sedimentations and horizons that
expand or alter the original. As Husserl points out, “The Ego always lives in the
medium of its ‘history’; all its earlier lived experiences have sunk down, but they
have aftereffects in tendencies, sudden ideas, transformations or assimilations of
earlier lived experiences, and from such assimilations new formations are merged
together, etc. – just as in the sphere of primal sensibility, whose formations also
pertain to the medium of the Ego.” Moreover he sums up his recognition of the
Ego’s history by saying, “All this has its natural course, thus even each free act (i.e.,
an act involving reason) has its comet’s tail of nature” (Husserl 1989, p. 350).2 In
effect, living meanings and living forms each hold possibilities of further
development, which is to say that they evolve over time and that investigations of
their origin and historical development in each case tell us something fundamental
about life in general and human life in particular.
That fundamental something is quintessentially tethered to Nature, as Husserl
himself indicates in calling attention to “the sphere of primal sensibility” and to the
fact that “even each free act has its comet’s tail of nature.” It is indeed remarkable
that Husserl’s consistent attention to Nature and his consistent recognition of humans
as part of Nature are rarely noted elements of his phenomenology. Two interrelated
dimensions of the neglect are of singular moment with respect to origins and I will
dwell on them at length. The first is a matter of evolution, notably human evolution;
the second a matter of animate forms of life other than human. I will spell out each,
using Husserl’s analyses as testimony to their import and show their omission or lack
of studious attention to be a source of grave philosophical error that can be neither
rationalized away nor summarily dismissed.

2
Given Husserl’s striking and unusual metaphor of a “comet’s tail” to describe the foundational and
perduring connection of spirit and nature, and thus to describe an ontological as well as epistemological
dimension of personhood, it is curious that Merleau-Ponty finds different uses for the same metaphor,
taking it up for quite other purposes. He uses the comet’s tail first as a descriptive simile when he writes,
“I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole of
my body trails behind them like the tail of a comet” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 100), and subsequently uses
it as an explanatory device to resolve his puzzlement about movement, notably about movement and
objects in motion vis-‡-vis the sight of a bird in flight: “It is not I who recognize, in each of the points and
instants passed through, the same bird defined by explicit characteristics, it is the bird in flight which
constitutes the unity of its movement, which changes its place ... like the comet with its tail” (ibid., p. 275).
(For a critique of the not uncommon notion of movement as a change of position, see Sheets-Johnstone
1999, 2003).
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 331

Evolution: human evolution in particular

When Husserl speaks of “primal sensibility” (ibid., pp. 344–347), he is speaking of


sensibilities that are the psychic basis of the intellectus agens, the reasoning subject
who actively makes sense of the world through his or her judgings, calculatings,
inferrings, and so on. From this perspective, it is clearly Husserl who understands
that “Nature is at [there from] the first day” (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 267;
Merleau-Ponty 1988, p. 133; see Sheets-Johnstone 1999, pp. 306–308 for a dis-
cussion); he consistently underscores Nature as the primal epistemological ground of
the human epistemological subject. He states explicitly, for example, that “the
subject of spiritual acts” – the reasoning subject – “finds itself dependent on an
obscure underlying basis of traits of character, original and latent dispositions, and
thereby dependent on nature” (Husserl 1989, p. 289). He goes on to speak in this
context of “the ancient distinction” between reason and sensibility, sensibility being
“the stratum of hidden reason” (ibid.), a stratum he elsewhere specifies as “instinct”
(Husserl 1970, p. 52). He states that this “obscure underlying basis” “first of all at
least extends as far as the constitution of nature,” and moreover even further “since
this constitution is also there for spirits,” i.e., for the intellectus agens. “[I]ndeed,” he
writes, “all complicated relations of the ‘if-then’, all causalities, can become guiding
lines for theoretical, thus spiritual, explications” (Husserl 1989, p. 289). In short,
primal sensibilities are spontaneous sensibilities that are present naturally “from the
first day” – with the birth of the animate organism itself – and constitute the ground
of all subsequent motivated acts of the organism. What is primal is not only the
sensuous – colors, sounds, and so on – but feelings, dispositions in the form of “determining
tendencies” such as patience or temper, instincts, and so on (ibid., pp. 288–289), all of
which enter into the receptivity of the organism and the act of “turning toward”
(ibid., p. 346). These fundamental aspects of sensibility dovetail existentially as
well as conceptually with the evolutionary specification of responsivity as a
primary “sign of life” (Curtis 1975, p. 27). Primal sensibility and responsivity are
complementary descriptions of the animated livingness of animate forms generated
by Nature. Moreover Husserl’s recognition of “determining tendencies” that derive
from Nature and that specify differences among individuals corresponds empirically
to Darwin’s elemental observation formulated in his first central tenet of evolution,
namely, that there is natural variation among individuals in any given species, one
individual being more alert than another, one more pugnacious than another, and so
on (Darwin 1968 [1859], 1981 [1871]).
That origins in phenomenology as well as evolutionary biology are anchored in
Nature should surely not be a surprising fact of life. In turn, it should not be
surprising that, in examining Nature, we find common empirical ground between
phenomenology and evolutionary biology. Human evolution, from this perspective,
is of moment. Like all other animate forms of life, humans are part of Nature. Any
ontology that purports to lay bare the Being of human being but omits this
dimension of humanness lacks coherence. When Renaud Barbaras, for example,
writes that “To some extent the living being emerges from a nature to which it gives
rise” (Barbaras 1999, p. 538), he seems grudgingly to recognize the obvious and to
332 M. Sheets-Johnstone

get off the uncomfortable human evolutionary hook by conveniently cutting the cake
both ways, admitting that humans are part of nature – they “emerge from” Nature –
but at the same time diminishing the fact and in turn ignoring it, preferring instead to
exalt “the living being” above nature. But if nature cannot be understood apart from
“the living being,” as Barbaras affirms (ibid.; italics added), then an original
epistemological rather than solely ontological grounding is vital since the question of
just how “the living being” is privileged to understand Nature needs elucidation, and
that epistemological grounding is clearly anchored in the natural phenomenon of
primal sensibility on the one hand – the primal sensibility that indeed distinguishes
all animate forms of life – and human evolution on the other.
What does it mean to take human evolution into phenomenological account in
this way? It means recognizing the animate nature of humans, which is to say their
origins in, and animate ties to, the animate world. Humans who wish to pedestal
themselves above “the animals” commonly deny, ignore, or minimize their
evolutionary heritage, and/or alternatively, they try to show straightaway how
nonhuman animals do not measure up. The underlying aim of ontologically-bent
philosophers not infrequently appears to be just such an effort, i.e., an effort to set
humans apart and in effect, to ignore origins. But the capacities of humans and the
knowledge grounding their capacities – including their full scale of I cans, which, as
Husserl indicates, is not simply a compendium of physical capacities (Husserl 1989,
pp. 266–268) – are the result not of a sudden mutation in the brain (let alone in “the
being”) of some unwitting animal heralding the birth of a new species. They are the
result of evolutionary shifts over thousands and even millions of years, precisely as
the invention and production of stone tools, changing toolkits, drawings on the walls
of caves, initiation of burial practices, invention of a verbal language, institution of
agricultural practices, and so on, show. Archaeological finds and paleoanthropolog-
ical discoveries document not simply changes in behavioral practices but new
conceptual awarenesses and capacities. They document the evolution of hominids. It
follows that the origin of human facultative capacities and the concepts emanating
from those facultative capacities may be elucidated in interdisciplinary phenomeno-
logical and evolutionary studies, for example, in terms of “I cans” with respect to
morphologically and kinetically distinct possibilities – e.g., consistent bipedality, an
opposable thumb allowing both a precision and power grip – and their conceptual
and theoretical corollaries.3

Animate forms of life other than human

The above substantive reflections attest to the centrality of evolution, notably human
evolution, to phenomenological concerns with origins and bring us to the second

3
It bears emphasis that ‘I cans’ are not simply physical proficiencies but a confluence of physical,
theoretical, and conceptual proficiencies, precisely as in judging distances and thus having formed
concepts of near and far, for example, and in judging weights and thus having formed concepts of heavy
and light, for example.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 333

dimension of note with respect to Nature: an acknowledgment of other animals. Here


again, Husserl, in contrast with many continental philosophers, consistently includes
animals in the course of his inquiries into constitution and his analyses of how humans
constitute the world. Why, we may ask, would he consistently include animals if not in
implicit recognition of animate life, the whole of animate life, which is to say in
implicit recognition of the ties that bind all creatures in a common evolutionary
history? He writes, for example, that “An animal, a human being, has its stable causal
style in the multiplicity of its changes, not only as to its sheer physical body but ...
psychophysically and psychically – in the last respect, e.g., the psychic total character,
individuality in the mental sense” (Husserl 1977, p. 102). There is no doubt but that
for Husserl, an animal and a human are co-extensive forms of life. Moreover he notes
explicitly that in pre-scientific experience, nature and mind “appear in an originally
intuitable intermingling and togetherness” and that, [i]f one had always returned to the
complete original concretion of the world, as it is always experienced in naive
originality,“ not only ”would [one] never have been able to think of interpreting mind
as merely causal supplement to material bodies, or as a causal sequence paralleling
that of physical matter, ... [but one] would never have been able to regard human
beings and animals as psycho-physical machines or even as parallelistic double
machines (ibid., pp. 40–41).4 While Husserl straightforwardly recognizes that “the
stratum of theoretical thought in the pregnant sense is lacking” in animals (Husserl
1989, p. 142), he in no way denies them a psychic life coextensive with that of
humans, as witness his description of a playing cat, which “is something physical and
moves physically just like other things, except that beyond the merely physical
qualities it constantly has aesthesiological and psychic ones” (ibid., p. 186). Clearly,
Husserl has observed real cats playing in the real world and in turn reflected on real
cats playing in the real world. He is not an arm-chair philosopher pronouncing on
nature from afar or through a distorting experimental lens.
Now when we contrast this understanding with Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s
understandings of nonhuman animals, we find obvious and striking deficiencies in the
latter philosophers. David Morris has pointedly and rightly criticized the comparative
approaches of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, specifically, their reliance on “the
lone animal” as the unit of comparison with humans (Morris 2005, p. 49), Heidegger
utilizing experimentally mutilated and non-mutilated bees, Merleau-Ponty utilizing an
experimental study of a laboratory chimpanzee. Deficiencies, however, run far deeper

4
It is pertinent in this context to note an instance in which Husserl explicitly rejects the notion of
embodiment. He writes of “an egregious error” of which “one must beware” (Husserl 1977, p. 106),
namely, the error of either inductively uniting a physical body to a psyche or conceiving a physical body
and a psyche to be parallel worlds. He states that the notion “is flatly absurd” on two counts: “Not only
because psyches do not have a properly psychic space which would have its own psychic geometry, but
also because according to this interpretation, it would be just as proper to say that bodies must be
spatialized in the parallel psychic space, present themselves by expression in the psyches, etc. just as the
psyches are embodied, physically incarnate and expressed in physical space” (ibid., p. 106).
334 M. Sheets-Johnstone

than the “lone animal” comparison and are apparent even in Morris’s account itself,
not least because of what passes without the slightest notice; namely, the lumping of
all animals – of which “[m]ore than a million species have been described and the
actual number may be close to 10 million” (Curtis 1975, p. 1002), Arthropoda alone
numbering at least 2,000,000 (Keeton and Gould 1986, p. A5) – not only into a single
category but into a single experimental specimen.5 The lumping indicates an egregious
human arrogance as well as ignorance. Indeed, the deficiencies are anchored in an
assumed knowledge, a merely presumptive erudition of both human evolution and
the evolution and lives of nonhuman animals. While it is certainly true that
Merleau-Ponty’s and Heidegger’s writings on animals predate those biological,
ethological, and primatological field studies that today constitute an abundant
resource, both philosophers are oddly naive with respect to science, not only with
respect to using experimental animal studies to inform themselves about nonhuman
animal life, but with respect to taking those experimental studies as determinate,
conclusive scientific truths about animal life. More broadly, such philosophers lack
all sense of history, an evolutionary history that includes humans; they pretend as if
we all just got here – bees, chimpanzees, and what have you, which is by no means
the case. An attempt to forge links through “lateral” relations and “mythical
thinking” (Merleau-Ponty 2003)] is symptomatic of this lack of history and is no
substitute for understanding evolutionary continuities. Evolutionary continuities
are in fact the basis for specifying bona fide discontinuities among animate forms
of life. They readily quell if not discredit metaphysical hankerings for a separation
of “man” and “animal.”6 Indeed, to appreciate the common ground between
evolutionary biology and phenomenology, present-day continentalists need to
eschew speculative armchairs and practice philosophy close-up, consulting primary
sources in invertebrate biology, ethology, and more, i.e., learning of animals in
their natural habitats, precisely reading first-hand a literature that was not
abundantly available to either Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. Practicing philosophy
close-up, they would furthermore read earlier biologists and ethologists themselves
rather than take as gospel truth what Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, or any other
philosopher says about biologists such as Adolph Portmann, Konrad Lorenz, and
Niko Tinbergen. If it were a question of another philosopher, after all,

5
In a recent article titled “Taking Inventory,” entomologist Piotr Naskrecki points out that “nobody knows
exactly how many species have already been described, though the consensus seems to hover around 1.7
million.” He goes on to say that “Estimates of the total number of species vary from 3 million to more than
100 million; the truth is probably between 6 million and 12 million species” (Naskrecki 2005, p. 46).
6
Ted Toadvine’s detailed exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s “mythical” strategy for arriving at “the present
state of separation” of “man” and “animal” (Toadvine 2005, p. 18) – whatever “the present state of
separation” might represent for Merleau-Ponty in terms of a definable natural time period or for that
matter a particularly Western mode of thought since he finds the masks of the Inuits to “[recall] a time ...
when the separation was not yet effected” – implicitly demonstrates the sharp contrast between
ontologically-driven divisions within nature and bona fide evolutionary discontinuities illuminated by
close studies of nature and a natural history of the animate. (See Toadvine 2005, pp. 18–19.)
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 335

continentalists would read that philosopher first-hand; he or she would hardly take
a second philosopher’s word for what that philosopher wrote.7

7
The lack of commensurate first-person readings of earlier biologists appears to be based on a naive belief in
the acuity and veridicality of other philosophers’ readings of these biologists, a belief that warrants serious
critical attention. In a recent conference paper in which he explores Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures vis-‡-vis
the question of the “human–animal” relationship, for example, Ted Toadvine appears to take as authoritative
Merleau-Ponty’s account of biologist Adolph Portmann’s analysis of the appearance of animals. Recapitulating
Merleau-Ponty’s account, Toadvine states that Portmann’s analysis “resist[s] explanation ... in terms of
adaptation for survival” (unpub. ms, p. 15), and later states that “Portmann’s study of the forms of animal
appearance underscores the fundamentally expressive character of the animal’s relation with its milieu and the
internal relation or indistinction that exists between them” (ibid., p. 16).
The first statement misrepresents Portmann’s analysis. It is not that animal appearances “resist”
utilitarian or adaptational explanations, but that such explanations do not exhaust the significance of the
morphological features of animals; they fall short of acknowledging precisely what Portmann aims to set
forth: “the intrinsic value of what is visible” (Portmann 1967, p. 35). “Intrinsic value” is tied to features
that distinguish organic forms from one another (ibid., e.g., p. 13) and to meaning, interanimate meaning
(ibid., e.g., pp. 213–214). It is precisely in this double sense that, as Portmann states, “the production of
forms of the animal body [go] far beyond the elementary needs for preservation” (ibid., p. 201).
The second statement misrepresents Portmann’s analysis in an even more serious way. It transduces
Portmann’s concept of “Form as an Expression of Inwardness” (actually the title of his tenth chapter, ibid.,
pp. 183–201) in a way to suggest coincidence with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm. While Portmann’s
“inwardness” might be construed as the “internal relation” of animal and milieu in the sense that an
animal’s moods, excitements, social exchanges and communications – all of which specify what Portmann
means by ‘expressions of inwardness’ – are linked to an environing world, that construal of inwardness is
most definitely not characterizable as an “indistinction” existing between an animal and its milieu.
In broad terms, Toadvine falls short of doing justice to Portmann’s actual analysis because he is
seemingly unaware that Merleau-Ponty falls short of doing justice to Portmann’s actual analysis. Merleau-
Ponty takes Portmann’s general term “presentation value” (ibid., p. 214) and turns it into “an existential
value of manifestation,” a phrase that will resonate with his chiasmatic ontological renderings of nature,
but a phrase too that is pointedly similar to Buytendijk’s earlier descriptive phrase “‘displayed existential
value’,” a phrase Portmann calls attention to in the course of emphasizing the special form value of the
morphological features of animals (ibid.).
In the context of morphology, it is pertinent to point to a further example in order to emphasize the
need for first-hand readings. When Merleau-Ponty notes that Darwin termed morphology “the soul” of
natural history (Merleau-Ponty 2003), he gives no reasons for Darwin’s doing so. On other contrary, he
seems to want to infer in a brief and oddly, even subtly derisive way that Darwin was trying to give
something wholly empirical – the material science of morphology – foundational metaphysical
significance. In the passage referred to (non-referenced), however, Darwin was in fact recapitulating his
earlier discussions of resemblance; that is, how “members of the same class, independently of their habits
of life, resemble each other in the general plan of their organisation,” or in finer terms, how a “‘unity of
type’” among parts and organs of different species indicates homologous rather than analogous
relationships. “The whole subject [of resemblance or ‘unity of type’],” he states, “is included under the
general name of Morphology.” He then observes, “This is the most interesting department of natural
history, and may be said to be its very soul.” What follows is precisely a straightforward indication of what
he means by soul: “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a
mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be
constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?”
Homologous organs or parts, in other words, “may change to almost any extent in form and size, and yet
they always remain connected together in the same order” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 415). “We see the
same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects,” Darwin observes, in “the mouths and limbs
of crustaceans,” and in flowers and plants (ibid., p. 416). In effect, the soul of natural history lies in
morphological invariants linking different classes of animals to one another in foundational ways.
336 M. Sheets-Johnstone

Five fundamental errors

Given space limitations, I will enumerate and give examples of five fundamental
errors. However critical, the examples are intended as wholly constructive and even
mobilizing on behalf of both philosophy and evolutionary biology.
1) Basic classificatory errors: Morris states that humans “lie to one another, wage
war” etc., and then comments, “But maybe some primates or cetaceans lie, wage
war,” etc. (Morris 2005, p. 54), as if humans were not primates! He repeats the
error at several points. For example, in the context of affirming that “group-life”
is “[t]he pervasive form of animal life,” he notes that “animals cast out of groups
that have social rankings and roles, such as primates or elephants” constitute
exceptions to the “group-life” of animals (ibid., p. 55);8 in the context of
comparing human and chimpanzee tool use, he writes, “When we [humans] use
sticks as tools, the thing that is being turned into a tool is inanimate matter. But
perhaps primates are geared to group life, and when taking up sticks, they are
treating the stick as an honorary ‘hand of another’” (ibid., pp. 64–65); he later
speculates about the possible “difference between primates and ourselves”
(ibid., p. 65). His recurrent classificational error recalls Alden Fisher’s ignorance
of the difference between an ape and monkey, and his consequent error in
rendering les singes inférieurs as “the lower monkeys” in his translation of La
structure du comportement (Merleau-Ponty 1967, e.g., pp. 112, 114, 116). It is
reminiscent as well of Scheler’s talk of “man as a subclass of the vertebrates and
mammals” (Scheler 1962, p. 6), as if “man” constituted a class rather than a
genus, as if mammals were not themselves vertebrates, and as if vertebrates
were a class rather than a phylum. An additional impediment, however,
permeates Morris’s comparison of primates and humans. Bereft of membership
in any biological order and thus of any natural biological lineage, that is,
existing ostensively without any evolutionary standing or relationships
whatsoever, humans on Morris’s account cannot be compared to animals at all
since there is no basis for a comparison – any more than, mutatis mutandis,
there would be a basis for comparing apples to fruit.
2) An ignorance of chimpanzees: In the so-called comparison of ‘primate’ and
human tool use, specifically tool use by chimpanzees and humans, Morris states,
“Perhaps the difference between primates and ourselves is not that we take
something as something, and they do not, but that primates are animists, and expect
things themselves to animate themselves as something” (Morris 2005, p. 65). More
will be said presently of the pointed distinction of “taking something as,” a
distinction resting heavily on Heidegger’s original formulation. The critical
point here concerns actual tool use by chimpanzees in the wild, especially but
not exclusively their discriminating selection and fashioning of sticks for use in
termite-fishing, a practice that has been extensively documented by many

8
We might note that male orang-utans are notorious loners, leading quite solitary lives apart from mating
encounters in which they not infrequently assault the female (see MacKinnon 1979; Rodman 1979;
Galdikas 1979; for a discussion of same, see Sheets-Johnstone 1994).
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 337

primatologists over many years and that shows beyond doubt that chimpanzees
recognize whether a stick is transformable into an effective, usable tool or not
(e.g., Goodall 1974; McBeath and McGrew 1982; Boesch and Boesch 1990), i.e.,
whether they take something as something. Morris’s deficient assessment of
chimpanzee tool use carries forward the ignorance earlier displayed by Merleau-
Ponty when he wrote, “The chimpanzee, which physically can stand upright but
in all urgent cases reassumes the animal posture, ... manifests a sort of adherence
to the here and now, a short and heavy manner of existing” (Merleau-Ponty
1967, p. 126). Morris’s deficiency in real-life understandings of chimpanzee
tool-making and tool-use is essentially an extension of Merleau-Ponty’s error in
real-life understandings of chimpanzee bipedality and the evolution of
bipedality in primates, not to mention his implicit estimation of kangaroos,
bipedal dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex, perhaps even ostriches, and for
that matter, the entire biological class of avians, as preferring “the human
posture” to “the animal posture.”
3) Incoherence: With respect to his “guiding thesis” that “the animal is poor in
world” (Heidegger 1995, p. 186), Heidegger initially states that the thesis “does
not derive from zoology, but it cannot be elucidated independently of zoology
either” (Heidegger 1995, p. 187). At the conclusion of his analysis, he states,
“The fact that biology recognizes nothing of the sort [i.e., that the animal is poor
in world] is no counter-argument against metaphysics” (ibid., p. 272). Between
the two incompatible statements, he attempts to determine “the essence of the
animality of the animal” (ibid., p. 193). He places the essence between stone and
man insofar as the animal both has and has not a world (ibid., p. 199), and
insists that while the contradiction of both having and not having a world is
logically impossible, “metaphysics and everything essential has a logic quite
different from that of sound common understanding” (ibid.). We might note that
the metaphysical logic he has in mind appears to turn again and again on
finitude and death (ibid., e.g., 208, 209, 238, 273). As if recognizing that critical
aspects of animality are altogether omitted from what amounts to his
‘metaphysical essence of animality,’ he explicitly calls attention to his selective
characterization, declaring, “I would like to point out once again that we are
pursuing it [the essence of animality] here only from one quite specific
perspective and thus in a one-sided fashion. We cannot claim in any way to be
offering a complete and thoroughly developed determination of the essence of
animality.” Moreover he adds that, “If it is indeed true that this interpretation of
essence must be drawn independently from the phenomenon of animality, it is
equally true that it remains utterly rooted in the problematic of metaphysics
which must be adequately clarified” (ibid., p. 240). In sum, if Heidegger’s
‘interpreted essence’ of animality has nothing to do with the phenomenon of
animality, then a real-life basis for his ‘interpreted essence’ is lacking and his
metaphysical thesis that “the animal is poor in world” is incoherent. In turn, the
five pages he devotes to “Concrete examples of animal behaviour drawn from
experimental research” (ibid., pp. 241–246) in order to show that bee feeding
behavior is nothing but driven performing (ibid., p. 237; italics in original) are
not simply pointless but devoid of credibility with respect to actual
hymenopterous life. A single example of the navigational capacities of zebra
338 M. Sheets-Johnstone

longwing butterflies in the wild9 should in fact be sufficient to dispel any


illusions that “the animal is poor in world.” The navigational capacities in fact
astounded a construction crew whose members at first refused to believe that the
butterflies had not been trained by a human (Ross 2005, p. 72).10
4) Inaccuracy: As an example of animal group learning over generations, Morris
cites “snow monkeys learning how to wash their food and teaching the
behaviour to subsequent generations” (Morris 2005, p. 65). The literature on
sweet potato washing by Japanese macaques shows unequivocally and pointedly
that 1) the practice originated in a single individual and developed on the basis
of individual learning, not group learning; 2) that it was never a matter of

9
Butterflies belong to the same biological class as bees, i.e., both belong to the Class Insecta, but
butterflies are of the Order Lepidoptera within that class rather than the Order Hymenoptera.
10
In defense of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it should perhaps be emphasized in more explicit terms
that field studies of bees, chimpanzees, lions, pronghorns, ants, gorillas, and multiple other nonhuman
animals were not as extensive as they are today. Thus, Heidegger’s foray into biology in his 1929–1930
lecture course (which constitutes The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), specifically, his
consultation of experimental studies of bees, predates Karl von Frisch’s classic studies of the honey bee
dance in the mid-1940s (Frisch 1946; see Frisch 1950 for a full bibliography; see also Keeton and Gould
1986, pp. 585–587). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on chimpanzees in his 1942 book La Structure du
Comportement (The Structure of Behavior [1967]) predates Jane Goodall’s classic studies of Pan
troglodyte in her original 1968 monograph “The Behaviour of Free-Living Chimpanzees in the Gombe
Stream Reserve.”
On the other hand, but precisely in light of the above defense, it should perhaps be emphasized in more
explicit terms that both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show a serious and astonishing naiveté with respect to
science, accepting laboratory experiments as reliable records of the actual lives of bees and of chimpanzees,
respectively, and more generally, accepting not only current findings of science but, particularly with respect
to Merleau-Ponty, current theories generated by contemporary scientists of his day – notably, the
psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan – as unquestionable fact. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s project of
carrying out “a psychoanalysis of Nature” (Merleau Ponty 1968, p. 267) appears less a matter of giving
Nature her natural, i.e., dynamic and evolutionary, due than of transmogrifying her into a reductionist psycho-
metaphysical mold. Most lamentably, it appears that neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty read Darwin’s The
Origin of Species, much less The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, or The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animal, all of which are based on first-hand observations and studies of Nature, that
is, on first-hand observations and studies of animate life as it is actually lived. Indeed, while he writes of
“Darwinian thinking” and “Darwinian-type thinking” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, e.g., p. 175), Merleau-Ponty in
actuality displays a gross ignorance of the writings of Darwin, mentioning Darwin specifically and directly
only twice in his course notes on Nature. He writes that “For Darwin, life is endlessly menaced by death”
(ibid., p. 171), and that in contrast to Lamarck, “with Darwin there is the idea according to which the milieu
discriminates that which allows or does not allow the surivial of the organism” (ibid., p. 151). In the first
instance, he gives no notice of the “entangled bank,” for example, or of the “forms most beautiful and most
wonderful [that] have been, and are being, evolved” of which Darwin writes (Darwin 1968 [1859], pp. 459,
460), and in the second instance, he fails completely to understand the complex ecological relations
underlying all forms of life that Darwin takes pains to describe, as when he describes “how plants and
animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations (ibid., pp.
124–125) or when he remarks how ”interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants
of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaboratedly constructed forms, so different from each other,
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us“ (ibid.,
p. 459). In sum, an appallingly deficient and egregiously stunted notion of Darwin and of evolution is evident.
In its stead, we have an evolutionary doctrine that denies outright any form of ”filiation“(Merleau-Ponty
2003, p. 258) and any “theory of descent” (ibid., p. 271) – the evolution of birds from reptiles, for example
(ibid., p. 260) – and in turn simply a Nature according to ‘Merleau-Ponty dans son cabinet’.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 339

teaching at all, but of imitation,11 initially by relatives and friends; and 3) that it
was not a matter of washing ‘food’ generally, but of washing sweet potatoes
specifically, and later washing wheat (see, for example, Galef 1996, pp. 99–103;
Tomasello and Call 1997, pp. 276, 278).
5) Categorical declaratives: Heidegger tries over and over to hammer the point
home that humans are categorically separated from animals on the basis of the
latter’s inability to apprehend something as something. He first questions
“whether the animal can apprehend something as something, something as a
being at all” (Heidegger 1995, p. 264). He answers immediately that “If it
cannot, then the animal is separated from man by an abyss” (ibid.). He later
states more decisively that “[B]ound up with world is this enigmatic as, beings
as such, or formulated in a formal way: ‘something as something,’ a possibility
which is quite fundamentally closed to the animal” (ibid., p. 274). Still later he
states categorically, “It is this quite elementary as which – and we can put it
quite simply – is refused to the animal” (ibid., p. 287). All his hammering,
however, comes to naught because there is nothing solid and holeproof beneath
the hammer. As a character in William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life
states over and over again, “no foundation all the way down the line.” Merleau-
Ponty echoes Heidegger’s categorical declarative when he states, “The animal ...
cannot recognize something in different perspectives as the same thing”
(Merleau-Ponty 1967, p. 118), and when he avers, “In animal behavior signs
always remain signals and never become symbols” (ibid., p. 120). Honey bee
dances straightaway falsify the categorical declaratives. Moreover not only do
termite-fishing and anvil-using by chimpanzees, to say nothing of their learning
and using a verbal language, demonstrate their recognition of something as
something, but so obviously does their practice of first making a tool and then
carrying it to the place they are going to use it. Primatologists Toshisada Nishida
and Mariko Hiraiwa, for example, describe chimpanzee tool preparation for ant-
fishing in fine detail (Nishida and Hiraiwa 1982). Furthermore, chimpanzees are
not the only primates besides humans to apprehend something as something.
Not only do orang-utans and bonobos use tools, but recent field studies
document notable uses of tools by gorillas for “postural support” (Bower 2005,
p. 253).12 However abbreviated this account of the “as,” it bears notice that

11
Some primatologists prefer to distinguish between imitation and what they term “emulation learning”:
see Tomasello and Call 1997.
12
A BBC News electronic article reported the field observations as follows: “Gorillas have been seen for
the first time using simple tools to perform tasks in the wild.... Scientists observed gorillas in a remote
Congolese forest using sticks to test the depth of muddy water and to cross swampy areas.... ‘In the first
case, we had a female crossing a pool; and this female has crossed this pool by using a detached stick and
testing the water depth, and trying to use it as a walking stick.... The second case saw another female
gorilla pick up the trunk of a dead shrub and use it to lean on while dredging for food in a swamp. She
then placed the trunk down on the swampy ground and used it as a bridge. What’s fascinating about these
observations is the similarity between what these creatures have done, and what we do in the context of
crossing a pond’, observed Dr [Thomas] Breuer. ‘The most astonishing thing is that we have observed
them using tools not for obtaining food, but for postural support’” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/
nature/4296606.stm). (Note: Dr. Thomas Breuer leads the study team in Nouabal-Ndoki National Park in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is associated with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max-
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany).
340 M. Sheets-Johnstone

Heidegger’s as is not a matter of ambiguous meanings “that need to be


negotiated,” as Morris claims with respect to the as of both Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty. On the contrary, for Heidegger “as” specifies an incontrovertible
ontological divide between animals and humans, a divide in large measure
structured by language. Lacking language, animals are outside “the lighting of
Being which alone is ‘world’ (Heidegger 1977 [1946], p. 206). Indeed, in his
1946 “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger suggests that humans are closer to
divinity than to animals: “the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is
foreign in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance which
however distant is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is
our appalling and scarcely conceivable bodily kinship with the beast” (ibid.).13

Return to the common concern with origins: Huxley and Husserl

The five basic errors testify to a fundamental lack of knowledge of evolutionary biology
and of those fundamental evolutionary primate relationships that the noted biologist
Thomas Huxley endeavored to set forth over 140 years ago in his well-known book
Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.14 At the opening of his last chapter, Huxley
states, “I have endeavoured to show in the preceding Essay that the ANTHROPINI,
or the Man Family, form a very well defined group of the Primates” (Huxley 1959,

13
The term ‘appalling’ – a term obviously used here to mean something inspiring a revolting dismay,
repugnance, or horror – and the descriptive phrase “scarcely conceivable” are significant. They signal a
strong affective response to the notion of human animality. Thus Frank Capuzzi, in his translation of
Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” renders Heidegger’s distanced view of the “kinship” of human and
beast in highly qualitative terms. (Capuzzi’s translation was done in collaboration with J. Glenn Gray and
was edited by David Krell.) An oddly different translation occurs in William McNeill and Nicholas
Walker’s “Translators’ Foreword” to Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. McNeill
and Walker call attention to the fact that Heidegger’s “engagement with experimental biology occurs in the
course of the possibility of an ontology of ‘life’, the term referring primarily to the ‘natural’ life of plants
and animals, but also encroaching uncannily, no doubt, on what Heidegger, in the 1946 ”Letter on
Humanism,“ would call our ”scarcely fathomable, abyssal bodily kinship with the animal.“ The strong
affective response to the notion of human animality in Capuzzi’s translation does more than simply affirm
the relationship of humans to animals to be intellectually challenging – ”scarcely fathomable“ – and the
distance between the two to be immeasurable – ”abyssal.“ Indeed, it indicates that the relationship of
human to beast is something rivetingly shocking and virtually unthinkable for Heidegger.”
It is of interest in this context to note that in attempting to reconcile the relation of ‘man’ and ‘animal’,
Merleau-Ponty characterizes their “kinship” as “strange” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, pp. 214, 271). If “kinship”
is “strange,” however – or if it is “appalling and scarcely conceivable,” or “scarcely fathomable [and]
abyssal” – it is not only because an evolutionary history, and one that includes humans, goes
unrecognized, but because an implicit ontological belief holds that “mind” could not possibly evolve
part and parcel of Nature. Reading Darwin readily dispels the ignorance and groundless belief. It is indeed
ironic that Darwin himself, by consulting experience, long ago realized the methodological challenge and
pointed to the methodology proper to the challenge, a methodology continentalists, including Merleau-
Ponty, began to adopt more than a hundred years later. Darwin wrote: “Experience shows the problem of
the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – the mind is function of body. – we must bring
some stable foundation to argue from. – ” (Darwin 1987 [1836–1844], p. 564).
14
The book is printed under the title Man’s Place in Nature, but in his introduction to the University of
Michigan 1959 publication, Ashley Montagu points out that the full title of the book, originally published
in January 1863, was Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 341

p. 139). Certainly a knowledge of the “very well defined group” is mandatory for
anyone writing about humans in relation to other animals, especially since the
placement of humans in the biological Order “Primate” is hardly recent and since
untold numbers of field studies of the lives of nonhuman animals make abundantly
clear that the more than 999,999 described species other than human – not to
mention the estimated 9,999,999 species other than human – not only cannot be
summarily dismissed in ‘lone animal’ comparisons, but that their lives cannot be
summarily pronounced upon, accurately grasped in speculative thought, or
authentically portrayed in abstract metaphysical disquisitions. On the contrary, what
is required is a diligent, studious, and extensive reading of the literature that
describes their lives first-hand.
That the reading should be clear-headed is an important additional requirement.
There can hardly be doubt that philosophers bent on setting humans apart from all
other living creatures seek differences and ignore evolutionary continuities. Husserl,
in contrast, would in all likelihood agree to the letter with Huxley when, in answer to
those who would exclaim in protest to their classification as Primates, “‘We are men
and women, and not a mere better sort of apes [sic],” he states,
To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be most just and would
have my own entire sympathy, if it were only relevant. But it is not I who seek
to base Man’s dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape
has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away
this vanity. I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of
demarcation ... can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I
may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical
distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of
intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life (ibid., p. 129).
Huxley, like Husserl, is honestly inquisitive. He examines the facts of the matter.
He has no hidden agenda and is not trying to prominence himself in any way. He is
simply striving after the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.
Primal sensibility is again topical in this respect. It identifies something with
which comparisons of animals and humans must start, namely, Nature. It is
significant that Husserl opens his exposition of the constitution of “animal nature”
with the statement, “Let us now proceed to investigate the essence of the soul, the
human or animal soul ... in its connection with the material Body” (Husserl 1989, p. 96).
Philosophers who overlook or deny animate continuities within Nature and in
consequence the evolutionary heritage of humans do so at their peril. It is not simply
that they will not be true to the truths of animate life and that common ground will in
consequence remain invisible, but that they can all too readily fall into egregious
errors and oversights in order to champion a particular ontological claim.15 In

15
Epistemologists and cognitivists generally may also be at great pains to prominence humans,
specifically with respect to rationality, intelligence, and consciousness. (See, for example, Bennett 1964,
Carruthers 1986, Flanagan 1992, Dennett 1991, Povinelli 2000.) As I pointed out in an earlier work,
however, “One is easily led to think, at least with respect to some of the creatures they write about –
lobsters and scallops, for example – that their only encounter with them has been on a plate” (Sheets-
Johnstone 1998, p. 291; 1999, pp. 77–78).
342 M. Sheets-Johnstone

ontologizing Husserl’s epistemology, for example, Merleau-Ponty converts


Husserl’s “obscure underlying basis” into flesh, alchemizes primal sensibility into
the chiasm, and thereby makes what is phenomenologically non-immanent–primal
sensibility “is simply there, it emerges” (ibid., p. 346)–immanent. Moreover
substituting ontologically reductionist rhetoric – i.e., “reversibility is the ultimate
truth,” flesh is “an ultimate notion” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, pp. 155, 140) – for an
elucidation of origins and for real-life descriptive analyses, he obliterates the
possibility of common ground. Tracing out evolutionary continuities or conceptual
accomplishments becomes superfluous: they are already “given” in the omnipres-
ent chiasm that explains everything. In effect, rather than unravelling the intricate
interconnections and relationships inherent in the whole of Nature, investigating
them scrupulously and directly, a reductionist ontology is installed at the heart of
phenomenology. In turn, a philosophical fundamentalism is practiced in which
ontological reductionism holds sway over real-life origins, reifying in a static sense
what is both essentially and existentially dynamic and historical: living meanings
and forms of life.

Conclusion

In sum, ‘Nature is there from the first day,’ but she is recognized as such only
insofar as humans start with Nature herself and with epistemologically elemental
and historical realities rather than with ontological agendas. So recognized, she is
there in the form of animate beings and a temporally rich and harmoniously
ordered world. When humans ignore or devaluate living Nature (even when
claiming no hierarchical valuation, as does Heidegger [Heidegger 1995, p. 194]),
they ignore or devaluate the intricate and complex connections inherent in both
cognitive accomplishments and evolutionary continuities, denying or devaluating
their own ontogenetic as well as phylogenetic histories in the process. In point of
fact, a metaphysics of human being in default or disdain of the whole of living
Nature totters on unsound foundations because it is based on a metaphysics of
absence. The term ‘embodiment’ documents the absence from a different but
equally significant perspective. What senses and what evolves are not species of
embodiments but animate forms. A lexical band-aid cannot heal a 350+ year-old
wound. On the contrary, we must see what the lexical band-aid of embodiment is
hiding, assiduously examining what is there to the end that the band-aid is thrown
off and replaced by deep and meticulous understandings of Nature in the fullest
sense. We are otherwise indeed tethered to a metaphysics of absence, the things
themselves having been abandoned in favor of theses and speculations about them.
In sum, to find common ground, one must apply oneself to studies of living Nature,
“to the things themselves,” which means putting opinions, presuppositions, and
dearly held valuations aside, and taking other such substantive clues from Husserl.
A rethinking of Nature by continentalists, in other words, properly starts with what
Husserl recognized as the comet’s tail of Nature.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 343

Afterword

David Morris refereed this paper for publication. I thank him for his measured and
thoughtful comments and would like to address two issues in particular that he
raises. The issues are intimately related and warrant attention. The first hinges on his
concern about “evolutionary reductionism,” the second on his support of the notion
that we need to “rethink nature.” I will consider each in turn in a discussion that is
intended as clarifying rather than exhaustive, and as a possible stimulus to further
ontological inquiry. (Note: quotations from Morris are from his review.)
When Morris questions “whether we as phenomenologists have to accept
uncritically the view of nature that is part and parcel of mainstream evolutionary
biology, or whether there is room to think about it differently,” he is concerned that the
uncritical view might lead to “evolutionary reductionism.” He states that “in his view,”
Barbaras and Merleau-Ponty “are (in varying degrees) not neglecting our evolutionary
roots, but trying to seek common ground from a different direction.” Whether they are
seeking common ground is open to question, but supposing they are, they are to my
mind doing so with their bags already packed. The subtext of their ontologies, like
that of other similarly bent ontologically-minded continental philosophers, carves or
is meant to carve a categorical rift between humans and animals, a preternatural joint
that secures a special and thoroughly unique relationship of humans to nature–or
Nature. The subtext has a history that can be traced back to Bishop Samuel
Wilburforce who in 1860 was the first to protest publicly against Darwin’s theory of
evolution. That humans could be placed within a line of descent from animals was
indeed an appalling idea from the start. In Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on Nature,
the subtext hovers at the surface and is near explicit, most pointedly perhaps in his
denial of evolutionary “filiation” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, p.).16 It is far more implicit
but nonetheless evident in Barbaras’s equivocation regarding “emergence,” his
negative idealization of Nature, a “‘reality’,” as he terms it, that is thoroughly
dependent on “the living being” for its understanding (Barbaras 1999, p. 538), and in
the singularity of his “living being” to begin with.
Clearly, without evolutionary ties, humans are in the clear of a natural history. But
the natural history of humans traced out in lines of descent through species of Homo
to a common primate ancestor, and indeed to the beginnings of life on earth, hardly
constitutes an evolutionary reductionism. Quite the contrary, insofar as that natural
history documents an efflorescence of new capacities – the production of toolkits,
the institution of burial practices, the invention of a verbal language, painting on
walls deep inside caves – capacities signaling new ‘I cans’ that are plainly not mere
physical abilities but markers of new epistemological as well as ontological ways of
being and living in the world.17 Not only this but the interconnectedness of animate
16
How can there be an evolution without filiation? Without filiation, there are no relationships. There is
only an original overall creation of species or intermittent special creations of each species, which creation
or creations are by some kind of decree said to constitute a history that is “evolutionary.” On the contrary,
a veritable evolutionary history cannot be devoid of homologous relationships among animals.
17
Concepts engendered by these developing capacities make a human ontology possible in the first place.
The concept of death, of drawing and painting, and of oneself as a sound-maker, for example, are clearly
not just intimately tied to various extant phenomenological ontologies, but conceptually structure them.
344 M. Sheets-Johnstone

forms – living beings – whose lives are interwoven in myriad and intricate ways
cannot be ignored: human life, like the life of any species, is dependent on
ecological relationships, as Darwin painstakingly and eloquently described not only
in The Origin of Species but in fine detail in the last book he wrote–on worms: The
Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on
Their Habits (Darwin 1976 [1881]; see also Phillips 2000; Sheets-Johnstone 2007]).
An acknowledgment of ecological ties, like an acknowledgement of human
evolution, hardly constitutes or leads to evolutionary reductionism. Again, quite
the contrary, insofar as these ties open out onto a world of beings whose very
diversity in ways of living is – and has been from the beginning – the touchstone and
guarantor of all life, including the life of “the living being” both as living and as
being. Barbaras in fact subverts both the efflorescence of capacities and the
interconnectedness of the whole of life by temporally disjointing Nature into a series
of moments. “The originary Whole,” which he defines as “the unity made up of the
living being and its environment,” “only resides in the moments that constitute it, and
rigorously speaking, it is nothing other than these moments” (Barbaras 1999, p. 532).
Accordingly, at any moment, Nature is “a ‘reality’” (ibid., p. 538) that is no more than
what an intentionality makes of it; it is constitutionally tethered to “the living being,”
which itself floats untethered to any natural history of its own let alone to a natural
history of the Whole. The Whole is indeed devoid of history.18
The charge of “evolutionary reductionism” at times seems something of a scare
tactic, a warning that if one gets too close to evolution, one will contaminate or
undermine one’s ontology of humans. As is evident, however, to acknowledge
human evolution is to open one’s eyes to a human history foundational both to
understandings of human being and to understandings of the continuities and
discontinuities that illuminate the nature of human being in relation to other forms of
life. In short, it is to open one’s eyes to an ontology of humans grounded in both a
common humanity and a common creaturehood.
The point is illustrated by Darwin’s remark that morphology “may be said to be
[the] very soul” of natural history. Merleau-Ponty refers to the remark in a seemingly
pejorative and disdainful way (Merleau-Ponty 2003), perhaps because use of the
word “soul” in this context is jarring to ontological sensibilities, but if this is so,
there is a lack of attunement to the reason for Darwin’s remark, i.e., the seminal

18
Though Barbaras writes of Nature being “potential and, to some extent, unfinished,” and speaks of
Nature’s “infinity” (Barbaras 1999, p. 538), thus suggesting a temporality of Nature, the temporality is not
an inherent dimension of Nature herself and thereby lacks historical continuity, in addition, one might add,
to a recognized past to begin with. In short, any sense of a natural history of Nature herself, precisely such
as that adumbrated in James Hutton’s famous observation, “no vestige of a beginning,-no prospect of an
end” (Hutton 1960 [1795], Vol. 1, p. 200), is nowhere in sight.
One might further comment in this context on a puzzling line of thought. Barbaras writes that “Nature ...
provides us a sense of Being that overcomes the difference between physical world and Life.” Why the
physical world and Life are or should be taken as oppositional in the first place, however, is nowhere
explained. Depth understandings of ecology would indeed seem to be far from inimical to ontology. “Being-
in-the-world,” for example, means precisely “Being-in-the-world,” hyphens and all.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 345

distinction Darwin is drawing between analogies and homologies. As noted in note


no. 7 of this article, following his statement that morphology “may be said to be
[the] very soul” of natural history, Darwin asks, “What can be more curious than that
the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the
horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed
on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative
positions?” (Darwin 1968 [1859], p. 415). Clearly, Darwin’s remark is based on
observations and studies of the natural world, observations and studies open to
anyone caring to take the time to make them. But it is also based on a sense of
inquiry and wonder in face of those observations and studies, inquiry and wonder as
to the basis for discernible morphological patterns among a diversity of living
beings. Merleau-Ponty, in effect, refers to Darwin’s remark without grasping the
realities underlying its meaning, notably, the remarkable and indeed wondrous
similarity and ordered relationship of parts obtaining among very different creatures
having very different kinetic possibilities and ways of being in the world, and their
evolution as homologously related structures. Neither Darwin’s observations and
studies nor his inquiry and wonder are about merely physical bodies; they are about
living beings, animate forms of life, humans included, and the ways in which these
living beings go about living in the world. On this basis, there are surely ontological
and not merely scientific grounds for concurring with Darwin that, rather than
reductionism, “[t]here is grandeur in this view of life” (ibid., p. 459).
By definition, a veritable re-thinking of Nature necessarily begins with, or at least
does not disregard, obfuscate, or discredit empirical facts of life. A veritable re-thinking
of Nature would in fact seem to demand that we begin by giving Nature her living due
in and across evolutionary time rather than begin by ahistorizing life, considering only
humans today along with current laboratory studies of nonhuman animals. We
otherwise risk offering an evolution by ontological fiat, ignoring Darwin’s ecologically
astute understandings of life on earth and his genuine sense of inquiry and ongoing
sense of wonder at the fact that “whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the
fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (ibid., p. 460). Indeed, rather than ending
in evolutionary reductionism, lines of descent open out on the phenomenon of Life
itself. Hence, whatever might be meant by the claim that we need to “rethink” Nature,
the rethinking surely entails – and from the beginning – a recognition of the evolution
of “forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” for these forms are the foundation of
living Nature, forms without which “man” or the “living being” would not be.
From this perspective, what is in truth appalling are descriptions that belittle
nonhuman animals in egregiously narrow and fallacious ways. Merleau-Ponty, for
example, writes that the world in which animals exist, like that in which children,
primitive people, and the sick exist, is incoherent: “In the case of children, primitive
people, the sick, or more so still, animals, the world which they occupy – insofar as
we can reconstruct it from the way they behave – is certainly not a coherent system”
(Merleau-Ponty 2004, p. 72). He states that “Adult thought, normal and civilised, is
better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought, but only on one condition. It must
not masquerade as divine law, but rather should measure itself more honestly against
the darkness and difficulty of human life and without losing sight of the irrational
roots of this life,” the “irrational roots” deriving from human “animality” and
346 M. Sheets-Johnstone

childhood (ibid., p. 73).19 Indeed, the incoherence and “irrational roots,” are
adducible to a certain manner of living in the world that Merleau-Ponty observes to
obtain in animal life: “Centred on the animal is what might be called a process of
‘giving shape’ to the world; the animal, moreover has a particular pattern of
behaviour. Because it proceeds unsteadily, by trial and error, and has at best a
meagre capacity to accumulate knowledge, it displays very clearly the struggle
involved in existing in a world into which it has been thrown, a world to which it has
no key. In so doing, it reminds us, above all, of our failures and our limitations”
(ibid., p. 76). Though clearly awkward, dull-witted, and incompetent, “the animal”
evidently serves a human purpose: as with children, the sick, and primitive people,
“the animal” keeps adult humans humble and perhaps even in line if they are open to
its “abnormalities” (ibid., p. 73). In fact, since according to Merleau-Ponty adult
humans never actually attain coherence (ibid., p. 72), they do well to remain open to
the incoherencies of children, animals, the sick, and primitive people: they thereby
see how those incoherencies “keep them [the children, animals, and so on] from the
truth” (ibid.).
Given the above construct of nonhuman animal life, it is no wonder that descent
with modification must be struck down in one way or another, for it unalterably
confutes such a construct of nonhuman animals and brings to the fore the evolution
of humans themselves. In other words, a recognition of continuities with other
primates and other forms of life and a recognition of human evolution itself
obliterates the desired ontological line between humans and “barbarous” others. It
thereby robs the desired ontology of humans its putative thoroughgoing uniqueness.
An ontological phenomenology, however, must be rooted in methodologically
verifiable realities of human life; it cannot float off into an abstract blue and remain a
phenomenology. Given this entailment, ontologically-minded phenomenologists
wanting to find both veritable and verifiable common ground between evolutionary
biology and continental philosophy might profitably ask: What is the nature of a
being who cannot live in peace with its own kind, who through centuries of human
history has been and is still obsessed with power and who has in his very being the
power in equal measure to create and to destroy? In more prosaic terms, what is the
nature of a being who makes war on the one hand and art on the other?20 Does such
a being indeed suggest not an intertwining but an opposition at the heart of being, a
harboring of something ethically akin to what Sartre ontologically described as a

19
Apart from wondering whether the charge of “irrational reductionism” might be made in light of
“irrational roots,” one might wonder and in fact find it near impossible to understand how a person
appointed to teach child psychology at the Sorbonne could write so unknowingly and even arrogantly
about children. It is as if Merleau-Ponty never held much less interacted with an infant or played with a
child. Particularly insofar as a bona fide study of evolution includes embryology and developmental
biology, a study of evolution requires careful study of ontogeny as well as phylogeny. Whatever is
otherwise offered in the way of evolution risks being adultist as well as specieist.
20
One might proceed along this line of questioning by asking, What is the nature of this being who in fact
has developed the technological power to destroy the very earth on which all life exists? Alternatively,
proceeding along a different line, one might ask, What is the nature of this being who, at times appearing
morally disabled, appears challenged to behave ethically and who fabricates gods and forms of a higher
power to help him abide in a moral mortal life and at the same time procure him life everlasting? The
ontology of this being in relation to Nature appears indeed complex and in want of examination.
Evolutionary biology and continental philosophy 347

worm coiled at the heart of being? Surely, at minimum, one can ask whether a proper
ontology of human being can ignore that being’s own history or its “lowly origins”
(see Kingdon 2003) without compromising its phenomenological veridicality. Surely
too, at minimum, ontological phenomenologists might be aware that an ontology
absorbed in proclaiming or trying to demonstrate the utter uniqueness of humans and
their absolute categorical separation from nonhuman animals fails to see the
historically solipsistic script it writes because it is blind to the wonders of life and
living beings. In such ontologies, the foundations of a common humanity and
creaturehood are lost sight of, and so too, I might add, are their ethical implications.

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