Monday, June 3, 2013

Form as Morphological

This is a snippet of something that I've been translating from French for publication. Sadly, it won't come out for years, but this passage expresses what I have been saying about process metaphysics in relation to phenomenology for years.


"In order to do this [respond to the antinomy of structure], I have developed the following ideas.
1.         The semiotic layer of sense is not autonomous. It is rooted partly in the morphological structuring of the natural world and partly in the body itself in perception and action (vision, kinesthesia, proprioception, comportment to ethological sense, etc.).
2.         The dependence of sense on the natural world can only be comprehended if the natural world proceeds from a morphological organization to which we could have, as an animal species, ecologically and ethologically adapted ourselves (in Gibson’s sense) and as an Umwelt. Accessible to animals, one such organization is synthetic, perceptive, dynamic, and morphological in a Gestaltist sense. The theoretical implication is that structural approaches become dependent upon theories of form in a dynamic and morphological sense.

3.         The structural concept of form must be replaced by a genetic concept of form as emergent self-organization. The response to the dialectical antimony of structure is that form is the phenomenon of the organization of matter, which is to say the phenomenon of substance."

"Form" in my sense is "morphological" and temporal. For identity to be temporal, it can only be determined by including a principle of change, of natural development. Elsewhere, the author uses the term "entelechies" just as I do. Hence, and jumping way forward, a conscious experience is a phenomenological semiotic response to a simultaneous underlying natural semiotic.

Well after my dissertation, I wish I had discovered the biosemiotic crowd sooner, where everything that is alien to many philosophers is just taken as a given with that crowd.

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