david spooner

I spoke at the Thoreau Society Gathering on "The Individual and the State: the politics of Thoreau in our time"
my specific Address was:
METAMORPHOSES OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
The text can be read on the EVENTS page of this Website.

the follow-up to THE INSECT-POPULATED MIND: HOW INSECTS HAVE INFLUENCED THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
is coming in 2012:
FROM TADPOLE TO BUTTERFLY AND HOW HUMANS COULD READ
THEIR NATURE WHEN THEY INVENTED LANGUAGE.

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“anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must once in his life withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”
(Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations).

In mathematics the symbol i stands for square root of -1, which cannot be expressed as a real number and is thus an imaginary number. But one without which mathematics and physics cannot function fully, just as the psyche cannot be understood without the invisible unconscious. Leibniz called the imaginary number "a monster and amphibian between being and not being."
This key arena can only be approached by a technique that Novalis termed the "HOVERING" of the mind.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION being the first chapter of FROM TADPOLE TO BUTTERFLY: HOW HUMANS DISCOVERED THEIR NATURE WHEN THEY INVENTED LANGUAGE

The Scottish visionary Patrick Geddes lived for a time in the house once occupied by the prototype for Stevenson`s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He looked on it, so he told his biographer, as an imaginative if ambiguous commitment, positioning him strategically as it did for his raids on the University:
"Long ago, I bought this fine old house in High Street and carry on the business. I am a burglar by profession too…That`s my secret! My diagrams are really skeleton keys, and to ever so many of my colleagues` departments of sciences, philosophies and what not, so I go round by day and burgle more universities than this one."
His method is not dissimilar from that of any thinker today ransacking all intellectual fields to gather the theoretical coordinates able to counteract that fearful paralysis diagnosed as mummification by Nabokov`s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading. This criminal and writer complained that his soul had “grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes,” and while he is in this pupal state he feels he is surrounded by “wretched spectres, not people,” semi-created outcasts on the lines of Apuleius` larvae or the unmade of William Blake.
So the spine of my book is fourfold metamorphic, and constitutes a journey inside an almost genetic helix. I shall be arguing that natural processes of transformation have their reflection in the greatest cultural achievements of the human species. However it is important to understand that my theory is to do with the relation with nature built into language meanings. It is not concerned primarily at all with the growth of syntax and grammar. It precedes the uses of language as a social bond, what has been called a tool for "doing things to other people (James R. Hurford)," i.e. subject and object.
And to follow the arguments of this book, there are a number of paradigms the reader needs to keep in mind:

 the processes of insect development: ovum, egg → larva, caterpillar → pupa, chrysalis → imago, fully grown insect.

 the structure of sonatas and symphonies: 1st movement, statement of themes (ovum) → 2nd , typically a slow movement (larva) → 3rd, scherzo, febrile pace (chrysalis) → 4th , finale, culmination (imago).

 the organic growth of the personality: infant (ovum) → child (caterpillar) → early adult (pupa) → mature adult (imago).

This is the story of how the world of insects has penetrated to the innermost reaches of human experience. It involves music, language and genetics. As in the world of physics, what we observe as the commonsensical world is only a fraction of reality. Quantum data is an even larger part of what is going on out there. The formulation of a theory that unifies the Einstein model and the small and often infinitesimal quantum atomic activity remains to be discovered for a fuller version of the real world.

This book aims to show how there is also a parallel quantum world of natural organic history, that of the insects, that also needs to be unified into a fuller evolutionary apprehension of their links with the great apes and thus with humans. By now a century and a half after Darwin`s publication of The origin of species, every schoolchild knows we are directly evolved from apes. But because of the limited state of genetics, embryology and morphology, he could not be expected to distinguish the equal and, perhaps even more significant, relation with the insects. However when evolutionary biology met embryology and genetics, it opened up an entirely new perspective on the profiles of species.

Richard Dawkins has spelt out the remarkable change over the past 25 years of research:
"Insects too have a segmented body plan. It was a ...triumph to show that the insect head contains ― again all jumbled up ― the first six segments of what, in their remote ancestors, would have been a train of modules just like the rest of the body. It was a triumph of late twentieth century embryology and genetics to show that insect segmentation, far from being independent of each other as I was taught, are actually mediated by parallel sets of genes, the so-called hox genes, which are recognizably similar in insects and vertebrates and many other animals, and that genes are even laid out in the correct serial order in the chromosomes! That is something none of my teachers would have dreamed of when I was an undergraduate learning, entirely separately, about insect and vertebrate segmentation. Animals of different phyla (for example, insects and vertebrates) are much more united than we ever used to think. And that, too, is because of shared ancestry. The hox plan was already sketched out in the grand ancestor of all bilaterally symmetrical animals. All animals are much closer cousins to each other than we used to think."

The situation began to change some quarter century ago with the discovery of the homeobox set of genes, and after this, the main features of animal development were found through Drosophila merganogaster. Further research has shown how between 120,000 and 30, 000 year ago, “the effusive mass of tangled neurons took a significant new step that formed the essential patterns of thought and greatly increased human consciousness…” And the recent discovery of the spindle cells has thrown more light on the evolution of brain and consciousness . These cells appeared some 10-15 million years ago in the common ancestor of humans yet to be discovered, and rapidly increased 100,000 years ago. The spindle cells deal with high-level emotions and exist in the fronto-insular cortex.

At the same time remarkable advances have been made in understanding the nature of the brain stem, which has been inherited from amphibians and reptiles. The stem lying at the boundary of the brain and spinal cord largely controls our breathing, heart-beat, digestion and sexual drive, everything involuntary in our lives. As Neil Shubin writes: “the brain stem originally controlled breathing in fish; it has been jerry-rigged to work in mammals.” It is Shubin who has identified hiccups as the clue to our debt not only to amphibians in general, but specifically to tadpoles. The sudden closure of the tadpole`s glottis to prevent water entering the lungs is suggested as the ancestral experience that explains the advent of hiccups. Shubin`s Arctic researches into fossils produced the clues for our relationship to aspects of amphibian physiology. He discovered the transitional water-to-land creature, the Tiktaalik, “which is just as much a part of our history as the African hominids, such as Australopithecus afarensis, the famous `Lucy.` Seeing Lucy we can understand our history as highly advanced primates. Seeing Tiktaalik is seeing our history as fish.”

So our heritage is mighty mixed. I hope to show by the end of this book how it is even more mixed when you take into account the natural reflexes of the working of the human brain, and the duplicate structures in the great works of music and literature. From tadpole to butterfly.
NOTES
Defries, Amelia, The Interpreter: Geddes - the Man and his Gospel (London: Routledge, 1927), 241.
Nabokov, Vladimir, , Invitation to a Beheading (London: Penguin, 1963), 30-2.
Dawkins, Richard, The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution (London: Bantam, 2009), 358-9.
Solso, Robert L., The Psychology of Art & the evolution of the conscious brain (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003), 39.
Kurtzweil, Ray, The Singularity is Near: when humans transcend biology (London: Duckworth, 2009), 194.
Shubin, Neil, Your Inner Fish: a journey into the 3.5 billion history of the human body (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 192, 26-7.


CHAPTER 2

THE CLASSICAL WORLD BECOMES QUANTUM

Modern philosophy kicks off with Descartes. As he emerged from obscurity, he famously declared in 1619 “larvatus prodeo,” “I proceed masked.” He goes on to say in this early manuscript: “The sciences now have masks upon them: if the masks were removed they would show up as extremely beautiful.” He has a “contempt for logic,” and from the first his thinking takes on a double-helical character. The modern philosopher was to be a new kind of human. Hobbes had already picked out the linguistic associations involved in early modern self-definition in his all-encompassing Leviathan:

"The word Person is latine: insteed whereof the Greeks have πρόσωπον [prosopon], which signifies the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himself, or an other."

Norman O. Brown picked up the masking phrase from Descartes` Cogitationes Privatæ (1619) and from Hobbes, transforming it into a stunning sequence:
"Larva means mask; or ghost. Larvatus, masked, a personality ― larvatus prodeo; it is also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession. Larva is also “the immature form of animals characterised by metamorphosis”; in the grub state; before their transformation into a pupa, or pupil; i.e. before their initiation. Children are reincarnated ghosts."

So as terminology from natural history bumps into human growth, the next word in the chain is imago, completing the ovum→larva (caterpillar)→pupa (chrysalis) transitions. The larva or grub masks the completed, dis-closed insect. And the Greeks imaged the psyche, soul, ψυχή, as a butterfly.
Brown himself elaborates on his theory of mask, via Erving Goffman:
"Personality is persona, a mask. The world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation: `The self, then, as a performed character is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die: it is a dramatic effect arising from a scene that is presented.` The self does not belong to its possessor. `He and his body merely provide the peg on which something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time.`"

Imago, of course, is the perfected insect, the butterfly itself or moth, but also the image, what the Greeks interpreted as a wraith of the dead person`s unquiet soul, or eidolon. The magisterial philosopher of the Psyche, Erwin Rohde , drawing on the evidence from Homer put the matter like this:
"According to the Homeric view, human beings exist twice over: once as an outward and visible shape, and again as an invisible “image” which only gains its freedom in death. This, and nothing else, is the Psyche."
Such an idea – that the psyche should dwell within the living and fully conscious personality, like an alien and a stranger, a feebler double of the man, as his “other self” – this may well seem very strange to us…It was the experience of an apparent double of the self in dreaming, swoons, and ecstasy, that gave rise to the inference of a two-fold principle of life in man, and of the existence of an independent, separable “second self” dwelling within the visible self of daily life.

These parallel existences within a single individual were abstracted by Descartes, and molded into a whole philosophy. Metaphysics is the root, while the trunk is physics and then there are the branches of knowledge with the fruit at the end of a branch. Metaphysics and physics are equal aspects of philosophy and both are sciences, or scientia, knowledge in the strictest sense. For Descartes, the soul is a substance distinct from the body, and it is a rational entity as opposed to the Aristotelian “vegetative and motive force of the body” which is shared with plants and animals. (Letter to Regius, May 1641). Animals, according to Descartes, have no anima, which applied only to man. By 1636 he had already outlined a project for a universal science to raise our nature to the highest degree of perfection, demonstrating the separation of the soul from the body.

Dieter Heinrich has advocated the bringing to completion of philosophical ideas where the author has for historical reasons lacked the advance in knowledge and therefore not been able to be fully aware of the potential advances possible by way of his methods. I believe this to be the case with Descartes. The finest writer on Descartes, Stephen Gaukroger, argues that “any attempt to show that the soul must both have an existence independent of the body and an identity independent of the body can only be dualist.” But if the psyche is both a reflection of the natural world (as in the entomological progression to imago), while presenting itself to the unknowing human as a spiritual or abstract entity, then mind and body become a single object. In the light of advances in knowledge over the past 40 years, we can reconsider the volleys ranged against Descartes` dualism.

In his Preface to Principles of Philosophy, he argues that the human soul is immortal and separable from the body. And he believes that true ― which is to say metaphysical ― knowledge is free of the evidence of the senses, “even somehow opposed to what the senses habitually conceive.” This is entirely the situation with the quantum world, a sub-atomic region which is not susceptible to common sense(s). So Descartes is most succinctly characterized as saying `I doubt and know I doubt. Therefore I am.` The principles of metaphysics, as Descartes states them in the preface to the Principles of Philosophy, are that God is the creator of all beings and the source of all truth, and that the human soul is immortal and separable from the body.

His principles do not have their origin in the scholastic metaphysics of Aristotle but in the Augustine doctrines of God and soul. Descartes presented Augustinian thought as suitable first principles for philosophy. He puts himself forward as the philosophical proponent of the Counter-Reformation against Aristotle. Christian philosophers had felt bound to maintain the doctrine of the separability of the human soul, which Augustine (following the Platonists and the Greek Fathers) had made normative for Latin Christianity; and Thomas Aquinas had managed to interpret Aristotelian philosophy in accordance with this doctrine, following Avicenna and the older tradition of Platonist commentary on Aristotle. But many later scholastics, even within the school of Thomas, felt unable to prove that the soul was separable from the body…Aristotelian philosophy began with sensible things, and encountered the soul only at the end of its journey, as the last and most obscure question of physics.

In his ground-breaking book Beyond Natural Selection (1993), Robert Wesson hazarded the observation that “the hope of biologists theoretically to base their discipline on physics, the model science, is delusive…Living beings operate on a very different level from atoms, and evolution is not a mechanical but a historical process.” This is not quite accurate. The opposite of “mechanical” is not “historical” but `organic,` and I believe that the life of mammals has monopolized theoretical thought as a result of the needs of evolutionary and historical accounting. If the significances of insect life and organization enter the equation, a very different result is possible.

The fact is that here in the insect world is the life science equivalent of modern physics` quantum universe. Metamorphosis occurs because the larval form, the pupal form and the adult form have evolved independently of each other to fit different environments. The process has arisen independently perhaps 8 times. Insects such as Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera undergo this complete four stage transformation known as holometabolic. These moths, bees, flies, beetles first appeared in the Permian (220-190 m.) Some other insects - the so-called hemimetabolic, grasshoppers, cockroaches, dragonflies and true bugs - merely go through three steps, reaching maturity by a series of molts omitting the pupa or chrysalis form. This is not merely an issue of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm. It is rather a matter of organic changes that are common among the insects that have only a marginal echo in the life of a few mammals, such as frogs. Metamorphosis defines the core of quantum biology, a unique and multifaceted process that has implications throughout human culture, both directly and indirectly. The microcosmic transformations are disguised in the mature creature. Insects can destroy their former selves and build a new stage of growth. Larval tissues perish and adult ones emerge from imaginal disks that have been present but undeveloped during the caterpillar`s life. It is a sleight of nature, an unusual evolutionary mechanism, and it is built into the structure of our languages.

When Descartes came out of the shadows where he had been incubating his theories, he sensed an insect parallel with his own intellectual development. In ancient Greece the imago signifies the fourfold cluster of butterfly and soul and mind and breath of life in one, ψυχή. And there was a belief that the soul resided in the eye in the form of a homunculus. This is related to the ambiguity of κoρή, both a girl and pupil of the eye, and by implication also pupa and pupil-student. Hence when the soul departs from the eye at death, the chrysalis has burst its integument. Ancient Egyptian funerary rites enact this as a central conception, since mummification of the corpse represents and images the chrysalis. Though Aristotle includes a number of groups no longer considered insects — worms, spiders, scorpions, myriapods — for him ψυχή signifies butterfly, and as already mentioned, this is the only Greek word for the butterfly as such, though the word “phalein” was already in use for Lepidoptera in general. Jan Bremmer argues that this would indicate "the meaning will be older than its first occurrence suggests." Aristotle is the first author actually to employ the word `entomon,` entomology`s root.

The Greeks in their pride – or perhaps hubris – believed that only a knowledge of Greek would allow an individual to understand his or her perceptions. Number 16 of the Fragments of Heraclitus makes this clear: “Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls (psychai) do not understand the language (literally, `if they have barbarian souls`).” And the cosmos, or its Logos and organizing principle, is articulated in the Greek language. The world order speaks to men as a kind of language they must learn to comprehend. Just as the meaning of what is said is actually `given` in the sounds which the foreigner hears, but cannot understand, so the direct experience of the nature of things will be like the babbling of an unknown tongue for the soul that does not know how to listen.This is apparently the first time in extant literature that the word psyche `soul` is used for the power of rational thought. Heraclitus is the first to have had something specific to say about psychology of man. For Pythagoras the soul is merely on loan to the individual. Moreover as Erin O`Connell points out, Heraclitus along with other Presocratics “presumes a universal consistency between the logos of the elemental processes of the physical world and the logos of the human cognitive processes.”

Could the helix of evolution from ovum through larva then pupa to imago not be what Kant had seen as the “schema” within humans that unifies understanding and the objective world? As he put it in Critique of Pure Reason, “This schematism of our understanding, with respect to its appearance and its mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true workings we shall hardly coax from nature or expose unconcealed to view.” However as in the relation between classical and quantum physics, the `coaxing` of the subterranean world into the open is no straightforward affair. Who, after all, would imagine from the visual evidence that humans have so much in common with insects?

Hermann von Helmholtz supplemented by Henri Poincaré identified a quaternal pattern of scientific progress as saturation, incubation, illumination and verification, a more general example of the ova-larva-pupa-imago process. And as we shall see, in the sphere of human culture the development of the sonata and symphony follow a parallel course, but one that is more instinctive, an oblique enactment of individual growth. It is ironical that post-Kantian German philosophers from Wilhelm Schlegel to Hegel imagined they were entirely surpassing the original master. It is, though, only in the past 30 years that the full evidence from research into the unity of differing species has been discovered. As Sean B. Carroll explains it: “the genetic revolution in development biology and a series of discoveries that began to unfold in 1984, when evolutionary biologists were again confronted with molecular data that did not fit prior expectations ― namely that the disparate body forms and structures of long diverged members of the animal kingdom were governed by very similar sets of genes.” In other words mammals may not look like insects, but they are internally identically formed.

So this is a tale of inner parallels between phyla, by definition not apparent to the naked eye. Motoo Kimura writes that “the pattern of molecular evolution is quite different from that of phenotypic evolution,” from the growth of appearances. Giraffes and frogs hardly resemble each other, yet at some points of development the embryos do share common features. Likewise, apes together with insects share specific groups of genes that prescribe and regulate central aspects of the body forms (phenotypes) of all animals: “animal body plans emerged using novel signaling and regulatory genes that arose at the inception of multicellular animal life, and…once established, the gene-expression patterns underlying the specification of the different body plans have remained fairly invariant.” These determining genes were first identified in insects, primarily through genetic and molecular biological research on the long-suffering fruit fly – Drosophila melanogaster. For example the eyes of the flies, mice and humans are encoded by common ancestral (that is, homologous) genes, which suggests that “eye morphogenesis is under similar genetic control in both vertebrates and insects, in spite of the large differences in eye morphology and mode of development.” As a result “the traditional view that the vertebrate eye and the compound eye of insects evolved independently has to be reconsidered.” And often it is impossible to distinguish insect from ape and from human merely on the evidence of the embryos of the different species. A billion years of evolution have remarkably left the biochemical properties of the determining proteins and their modes of interaction unchanged. This goes back to the earliest of cells with nuclei ― eukaryotes, and extends backwards to before the Cambrian explosion when diversity expanded some 545 to 490 million years ago.

The great atomic physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, remarked following Niels Bohr that every new philosophy is founded on a paradox. Where the intellect is concerned, the double world of insect-mind corresponds to the wave-particle fusion in quantum physics. Electrons can be produced simultaneously as wave and particle, though no experiment can allow the two to be studied at the same time. So in life, the doublet of insect metamorphosis and mind processes can only be artificially separated. The particle equates with the living metamorphic creature such as butterfly, while the wave represents its transference into consciousness. After all, we do use the phrase `brain wave`. They constitute a fused duality. As the recent Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism suggests: it is only “secret correspondences between the natural realm and the human mind that can activate true thinking.” The problem from the standpoint of formal and academic education is that this is a process of simultaneity, whereas academic education tends to encourage a procedure of division and specialization. Certain `animal` structures inhere in the embryonic mind and are there in the ovum. The clues lie in strings of words conceived during the very birth of language, and apprehended before cultures had ossified into the Greek and Sanskrit mainstream, a type of molten big bang in the language world. It is not, pace Chomsky, that the embryos are forming for sentence structures.

Darwin only revealed the descent from the great apes. But as A.R. Wallace his co-founder of the theory of evolution saw, the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity follows a separate line of growth. So we dangle between ape and insect. It was in the Devonian period, some 370 million years ago, that amphibians came onto land heralding the start of metamorphosis.Their progenitors had been the rhipidistians, a genus of fleshy-finned fish. Like today`s amphibians, their eggs and tadpoles developed in water but the adults could move on land. They came onto land in the same epoch as early ametabolous insects such as silverfish and bristletails, that is those undergoing very little change in each notch of growth from instar to instar. Still today, tailed amphibians and anurans (toads, frogs) pass through a larval stage before they reach maturity. Insects with complete metamorphosis (holometabolic) diverged from a common arthropod ancestor some 300 million years ago during the Permian. The amphibians remain as makeshift creatures, at home neither in water nor on land. Their metamorphic stages are slow and sometimes regressive. And many marine invertebrates revert to a larval character as late adults, so that sedentary lives are often the culmination.

Bees and moths would appear during the Cretaceous period some 140 million years ago. They seem to have needed several historical attempts before metamorphosis became established. Many modern Lepidoptera were present by the early Tertiary 60-70 million years ago, and by 40 million years ago, all major butterfly families were present. As James W. Truman and Lynn M. Riddiford discovered in 1999, the process of transformation is fired by the way a group of insect hormones, juvenile hormones and ecdysteroids interact during embryonic, larval and pupal stages. These juvenile hormones eventually disappear to become imaginal discs which program the adult. Natural selection favors this sharp differentiation between caterpillar and adult. The aptly named Vincent Wigglesworth explains: “the sort of body that will be best suited for chewing leaves or burrowing in the carcasses of animals will be very different from the sort of body required for flitting from flower to flower to seek a mate.” So the body grub specializes in eating, the imago in mobility, while the pupa is the powerhouse of the transformation. The division of labor, and of form, promotes the survival of the organism. Two different modes of maturation in insects exist. One where the larva or nymph phase passes over to the finished insect without an intervening stage of a pupa, and the other where the full four-set metamorphosis has to be undergone. This dichotomy has a profound significance throughout nature.

George Wald has observed: “a free-swimming echinoderm or unchordate larva, specialized almost wholly for motility and hence dispersal, metamorphoses into a sedentary or sessile adult, specialized for feeding and reproduction [first on plankton and then on the benthos, bottom of the sea]. The winged insects reverse this order: the sedentary larvae, specialized for feeding and growth, metamorphose into highly motile, winged forms, specialized for coupling and reproduction.” So holometabolic insects, those that pass from egg to caterpillar to pupa to imago, prepare for flight through a full-scale growth. They are the only taxa that pass through a transformation taking them from terrestrial to aerial life. And the angiosperms, from their first flowering plants such as magnolia, follow their evolution and transform via spores to provide the food for the larvae and the nectar for the imagos, the perfected insects. As Alexandr P. Rasnitsyn`s History of Insects records, “Arborescent plants appear in the Upper Devonian, and as Carboniferous insects increasingly dwelled in them to feed, gliding probably became so adaptive for escape and dispersal that flapping wings and powered flight evolved rather suddenly.” This dual process of evolution is approximately similar to Bohr`s idea of complementarity, where the spectral lines of the structure of atoms revealed through a spectrograph has its equivalent in parallel doublets.The flowering plants are thought to have originated in water and then taken to land via wind-pollination.

This is a fourfold process and why this is such a crux will become clear as we progress. As we shall see this structure in nature has been appropriated by some of the greatest poets and composers. Quite beyond merely descriptive or passionate expression, here the writer or composer threads into the natural world at his and her heart. The integration with that structure meets its point of fusion in the dialectic of microcosm (the poems, sonata) and macrocosm (the dimensions of the universe). A cluster of words expresses the unique outlook of the Greeks. Unlike their predecessors, the Babylonians and Egyptians, the Greeks lived for the present. It was not until Aristotle that the word ώρα (hora) was adopted to signify “hour.” The Greek experience was entirely embodied in the moment; past and future were of no account. While the world of the Pharaohs contested mortality and the present, the Greeks embraced it which is why they could linguistically release the soul as `butterfly` which fed into Christianity, while the Egyptians rested in the phase of pupation, or mummification.

The so-called Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s partially updating Darwin and pioneered by Ernst Mayr had, from our standpoint, the paradoxical effect of compounding the insect-ape-mammal succession while emphasizing the bases of evidence that ultimately can lead to an appreciation of the insect connection to humans. So under the evolutionary synthesis: “gradual evolution can be explained in terms of small genetic changes (`mutations`) and recombination, and the ordering of this genetic variation by natural selection; and the evolutionary phenomena, particularly macroevolutionary processes and speciation, can be explained in a manner that is consistent with the known genetic mechanisms.” However the crucial fields of embryology and developmental genetics played little role in this Synthesis for decades after its definition. Mayr had spelt out the philosophical underpinning:

Darwinism has a well-defined philosophical basis, an understanding of which is a prerequisite for the understanding of the evolutionary process. It has long been a puzzle for the historian of biology why the key to the solution of evolution was found in England rather than on the European continent. "No other country in the world had such a shining galaxy of famous biologists in the middle of the last century [i.e. 19th] as…Germany…and yet the solution to the problem of evolution was found by two English amateurs, Darwin and Wallace, neither of whom had had through zoological training. How can one explain this? My answer is that philosophical thinking on the continent was dominated at the time by essentialism. This philosophy, as was shown by Reiser, is quite incompatible with the assumption of gradual evolution."

But Mayr has failed to appreciate as other than fragmentary the philosophical and evolutionary insights of Schopenhauer. The full unified coherence of modern knowledge can only be established by accepting the remarkable advances in knowledge prepared by this thinker.

NOTES
Descartes (2), xxii; Descartes (3), 371; Menn, 5, 44, 402; Brown, 90-1; Hobbes, 207
Budick, 6; Wesson, 22; Kahn, 106, 107; Bremmer, 22; O`Connell, 88; Kant, 181; Kimura, 55; Prud`home, 468, 769; Quiring, 265, 785; Truman & Riddiford, passim;
Wigglesworth, 43; Gilbert, 4; Rasnitsyn, 458; Mayr (1), 11; Mayr (2), 1.

CHAPTER 3

SCHOPENHAUER`S LOST EQUATION
Throughout his intellectual growth, Schopenhauer sought out the structures in nature that corresponded to the mental processes occasioned by his experience of music. This was no dilettantish fad or pursuit of elegance. It was a profound quest for a comprehensive philosophy of nature. For Schopenhauer was aware that he had struck upon the greatest intellectual mystery ― what are the pivotal dynamics of the highest of the arts, music? One of the reasons Schopenhauer has not become central to discussions in the English-speaking world is that his reputation has never recovered from the years between 1930 and 1959 when there were only 3 books and no articles in English on the philosopher. And for many, any introduction to Schopenhauer comes via Thomas Hardy who found his pessimism especially congenial.
Here we are speaking of the music of such as Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and their ilk. (Schopenhauer specifically praised Beethoven`s symphonies). Although at a later date Nietzsche and Wittgenstein will put music at the core of their philosophies, neither grasped the overwhelming significance of classical music`s fourfold forms. These forms shape intimate expressions of the will, which is to say of something fundamental to both human and organic nature. Indeed Schopenhauer`s philosophy traces, in one great sweep, the quaternities of sonata and symphonic structure. Thomas Mann described his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation (WWR), as a symphony in four movements, with the four segments embodied in Books 1, 2, 3 and 4. Indeed Schopenhauer`s early work, The Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason follows the one-dimensional quaternity of medieval thinking inherited from Aristotle, and which he is to explode in The World as Will and Representation. In The Fourfold Root, he catalogues Aristotle`s doctrine of the four causes (efficient, material, formal, final) and insists on the difference between Aristotle`s cause, and modern causation defined as the relation between events and aspects of life. So one critic has reproached the philosopher, “while interesting, many of his analogies between music and nature are little more than myth or lore.” Leibniz had written that “music is an occult practice of arithmetic in which the spirit is unaware that it is counting.” Schopenhauer took this to a higher level and saw music as “an unconscious exercise in metaphysics, in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing (WWR 1: 261).” The task is then to ground the metaphysics in organic nature. It may seem an act of hubris to propose to complete Schopenhauer`s philosophy. Yet it is now recognized that the most creative and positive act of commentary involves building upon the groundwork of the giants of Western thought and bringing to fruition what still often remain incomplete insights determined by limits in scientific knowledge of earlier times.
Schopenhauer points out that music is recognized as a `language,` so it must be representational, connected to reality as a copy (Abbild). But since it is not a copy of the world of objects as empirical representations, it must necessarily be of the Will (WWR 1, 257). “Will” can be read a number of ways, and I shall be reading it as the Other, by which I intend another evolutionary line discernible by instinct, and actually involving humans in forms of intellectual and artistic development that paradoxically link our species to the insects. Schopenhauer was fully aware of the lineage, long before the scientific proof was available:
If we descend through the series of grades of animals, we see the intellect becoming weaker and weaker and more and more imperfect; but we certainly do not observe a corresponding degradation of the will. On the contrary, the will everywhere retains its identical nature, and shows itself as a great attachment to life, care for the individual and for the species, egoism and lack of consideration for others, together with the emotions springing therefrom. Even in the smallest insect the will is present complete and entire; it wills what it wills as decidedly and completely as does man. (WWR2: 206).
Indeed I shall be arguing that what we call `instinct` often expresses the structures of entomology hammering on the human mental carapace, or cranium.
Schopenhauer writes that if we could succeed in giving a perfectly accurate and complete explanation of music which goes into detail, and thus a detailed rehearsal in concepts of what music expresses, this would also be at the same time an adequate rehearsal and explanation of the world in concepts, or one wholly corresponding thereto, and hence the true philosophy. (WWR1: 264). Michael Tanner writes à propos Schopenhauer`s approach to music (and defines the issue I am addressing):
For music does, at its finest, for example in Bach`s 48 Preludes and Fugues or Beethoven`s late string quartets - Schopenhauer is oddly undiscriminating about it - seem to express something that is deeper than the other arts. Whether we can explain this other than by elaborating a full-scale metaphysic into which it fits is a moot point.
And it is the search for this comprehensive metaphysic that is the journey through my book, during which we shall find that the quest opens up evolutionary issues that are generally (unconsciously) avoided or glossed over, when in fact they are the key issues of our day.
John Barrow has observed that “unlike us [the Pythagoreans] didn`t think that numbers were just attributes of things. They thought that everything was number. Numbers had intrinsic meanings. They were not just relationships between things.” And Schopenhauer wrote that Pythagoras “implanted in our mind the quaternary number, the source and root of eternally flowing creation (Berlin Manuscripts 3:325).” Plutarch in Isis et Osiris 75, calls it “Κόσμoς, oύραvός, πάv,” that is cosmos, heaven, everything. But Bryan Magee has this excellent remark linking Pythagoras, Schopenhauer and the tetrad:
The fundamental harmonic intervals permeate independently, and always have permeated, the material environment within which man has come into existence, and out of which he is formed (and, among other things, in response to which the biological mechanisms of hearing were evolved). What all this indicates, I think, is that some of our structures of response involving music are programmed into us at much earlier and `lower` evolutionary levels than anything to do with language - levels which are by countless ages pre-human. And it seems obvious that this fact has a connection with our feeling that music goes deeper than words...It relates music at a very deep level with the emergence of man - and hence of consciousness - out of inorganic nature...
This musical rooting will then have influenced the emergence of key words as language grew. The World as Will and Representation locates the uniqueness of music in its capacity to replicate the sense of willing. Elsewhere Mallarmé was to value music not for its euphonic elements, but for its structure. Putting these two perceptions together suggests that the human will is predicated on a purposive search for symmetry, that in responding to music the human brain is not seeking out the superficial elements of sound, though it may be these that lead the listener into the labyrinth. When threaded into music, the will intimates some crucial element of human life itself. Music in the form of song associated with work rhythms preceded the literary arts of lyric and tragic verse as Nietzsche suggests in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, so that it appeals to some primary life-impulse. In becoming engrossed in music until a sense of everyday time is lost, we enter the heartland of what I have defined in another book as the Cosmic Cultural Faculty, a faculty which links us purely and directly, if intuitively, to the patterns of the cosmos:
Accordingly, the whole nature of the world, both as microcosm and macrocosm, may certainly be expressed as mere numerical relations and thus to a certain extent be reduced thereto. In this sense, Pythagoras had been right in placing the true nature of things in numbers. But what are these numbers? Relations of succession whose possibility rests on time. (Parerga and Paralipomena (PP) 1: 38).
Although there have been various attempts to lump this experience in with the main demands of natural selection, and thus discover a utilitarian and social function, this is merely in line with the routine sociological thinking that has swamped the more subtle processes of thought which in turn has ripped through non-academic civil society.

Steven Pinker goes so far as to reduce the issue to the question: “if music confers no survival advantage, where does it come from and why does it work? I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tackle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.” This is too simple and arises from his inability to estimate the impact of the shape of music, its patterning and appeal to human deep structures. So he writes that “music communicates nothing but formless emotion.” But as one leading researcher into the musical brain has vividly put it: “When music causes one of these `skin orgasms`, the self-reward mechanisms of the limbic system ― the brain`s emotional core ― are active, as is the case when experiencing sexual arousal, eating or taking cocaine.” Actually music expresses four structures; melody, rhythm together with metre, timbre alongside tone, and volume plus dynamic progression. The brain works through a considerable series of processes in order to organize this variegated set of events, and the more experienced the listener or practitioner, the faster these are absorbed. There are specific neural circuits that filter the music. Eckhart O. Altenmüller describes the system:
After sound is registered in the ear, the auditory nerve transmits the data to the brain stem. There the information passes through at least four switching stations...[after which] the thalamus ― a structure in the brain that is often referred to as the gateway to the cerebral cortex ― either directs information on to the cortex or suppresses it....Early stages of music perception, such as pitch (a note`s frequency) and volume, occur in the primary and secondary auditory cortices in both hemispheres. The secondary auditory areas, which lie in a half-circle formation around the primary auditory cortices, process more complex music patterns of harmony, melody and rhythm (the durations of a series of notes). Adjoining tertiary auditory areas are thought to integrate these patterns into an overall perception of music.

Schopenhauer wrote that “metaphysics is impossible as being the science of that which lies beyond nature, that is, beyond the possibility of experience (PP1:81).” Nonetheless experience itself is ambiguous. Insect metamorphoses seem to be remote from human experience. Even in artistic works, they seem alien except for works such as Kafka`s The Metamorphosis, Hardy`s The Return of the Native, or David Cronenberg`s film `The Fly.` But if we look at classical music, matters are not so simple. Take the usual structures of symphonies and quartets. A symphony is a sonata for orchestra with, normally, four movements. In the first movement, themes are stated (the egg, or by some recent interpretations, the proto-larva); the second movement proceeds slowly like a caterpillar; the third such as the scherzo of the Eroica tends to be febrile and anticipatory like a shimmering chrysalis trembling with incipient finality; while the fourth usually represents a summation, which as Berlioz analyzed in relation to Beethoven`s composition, leads from tension to release, from compulsion to liberation, from the tragic to the joyous. (There are exceptions such as the sombre last movement of Brahms`s Fourth Symphony.) Undercurrents of profound sadness often underlie the most capricious evolutions of a Beethoven scherzo, and I would interpret this as the process of the loss of imaginal buds which accompanies the emergence of the pupa and later the imago, but nonetheless a loss of youthfulness and an intimation of the end. As listeners or performers, we travel through these stages as the musical form unfolds.
The classical style constructed itself on the four-measure phrase once it had broken from the flowing continuity of the Baroque. The great Cantatas had decorated their music with vocal and instrumental colour like the painted church images. As Spengler puts it: “Music frees itself from the bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration.” So music became more abstract and independent of the Church in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Charles Rosen estimates that it was about 1820 that the four-measure unit gained pre-eminence in rhythmic structure, but the four-movement symphony had already become dominant even by 1780, although three-movement ones continued to be composed. In other words, the very fabric of the great period of classical achievement is both an anthem to quaternity, and a reverberation of the insect connection. Robert Simpson catches something of this contradiction when he writes that the last movement of Beethoven`s Ninth symphony has the composer saying in effect the visions of the first three movements are such as to reduce man to the apparent size of a microbe; but a man conceived them, so let us all rejoice in our potentialities. The great works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and those who followed them, are metaphysical to our consciousness, yet have a very real basis in the natural world. Our experience of them is at one and the same time seemingly immediate, and yet ghostly and phantom-like.

More than this, though, there are meta-musical patterns also. Brahms wrote 4 symphonies, as did Schumann, and his final works include the 4 Piano Pieces and 4 Serious Songs. So also of course Richard Strauss`s 4 Last Songs. Brahms`s Second Piano Concerto does not follow the usual 3-fold concerto shape, but rises to the symphonic four movements. He originally intended his Violin Concerto to have four movements, while his first Piano Concerto was conceived as a symphony based on Beethoven`s Choral Symphony. All Brahms`s symphonies have a four-movement structure, and all of their first movements follow a sonata shape. Their totality constitutes a hymn to the Tetradic, with their particular thematic continuity and integration through the four sections. They constitute an abstract of the nature of humanity. Schubert also, who so strove to emulate Beethoven, stretched out towards a series of fourfold works, his compositions being “the product of my mind and spring from my sorrow; only those that are born of grief give the greatest delight to the outside world.” Three crucial works though are left unfinished: the Quartettsatz in C major, and the E major and 8th B minor Symphonies. As Wilfrid Mellers explains, Schubert “finally solved his most difficult technical and imaginative problem. He had resolved drama into song; and in the andante of the B minor had followed this resolution with the bliss of Eden. He could not rest permanently in a recovered Eden; but at this stage in his career he could not see how he could continue without descent or bathos. He found an answer only in the last three quartets and the C major Quintet, composed during the last four years of his life.

In Blakean terms, Schubert hovered here around the threefold gates of Beulah, while his last four sonatas are the apogee of his writing for piano, perhaps his natural medium with the human voice. Later, Bruckner would build the bar cells of his symphonies using the quaternities of the Mass as his basis. So the final fourth movement of his 5th Symphony unifies the themes of earlier sections in “a double fugue which also embraces elements of sonata style,” and which in turn echoes the Agnus Dei of his F minor Mass. Schumann though sensed that the first part of the nineteenth century was the apotheosis of the sonata-based symphony, and wrote in 1835 that he “almost feared that the term `symphony` might soon become a thing of the past,” while by 1839 he feared that “isolated beautiful examples of [the sonata form] will certainly still be written now and then ― and have been written already ― but it seems that this form has run its life course.” (Interestingly these dates approximate to the epoch of the last indisputably great English poetry running from Blake to Shelley and Coleridge, after which Tennyson began to absorb the new sciences.) Although Michael Tippett kicked against the historical archetype of the classical symphony in favor of the notional archetype which permits endless variation, even he ended up writing four symphonies.
Schopenhauer`s description of music makes it clear that for him Leibniz`s arithmetic of music is only the husk of the issue, a clue to profounder reverberations. Because music appeals so forcefully to humanity`s innermost being through a universal language, it goes beyond even the world of perception. And similarly it transcends Leibniz`s unconscious exercise in arithmetic, because while that is fine as far as it goes, it only touches the exteriority of the matter and only provides the satisfaction of a sum that comes out right. In fact music appeals to and expresses “the deepest recesses of our nature (WWR1:256). Schopenhauer attributes to music a key role in what was after his death to be defined as natural selection. Music is seen as crucial to the will to survive of the individual since it is a “copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence (WWR1:257).” Schopenhauer is offering a purely abstract description which yet makes precise knowledge of the elusive `thing-in-itself` that Kant could not admit. Absorbing oneself in a symphony allows the individual to see the whole of her or his life passing along, for “music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more exactly, of the will`s adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon (WWR1:262).” Music is a familiar yet remote paradise which is perfectly accessible to us, and yet, as Schopenhauer sees it, fundamentally different from our true nature and our environment. What it expresses are “the innermost stirrings of our will, that is to say of our true nature, and since we are not usually aware of these aspects of the essential self, music seems strange and remote (Manuscript Remains (MR) 3:11-12).”
The strangeness and remoteness of music though arises because it shadows the world of the insects in their metamorphic evolutions, and that unbeknown to us it transports us to that world which paradoxically is also our own internal world of self-evolution. This has a cosmological element as the experience echoes in a ghostly manner contemporary humanity`s relationship to the fundamentals of relativity. The listener or practitioner of music is, mentally speaking, in motion as in Aloys Wenzl`s description of the twentieth century scientist:
One could say, that the observers of moving systems are like Leibniz`s monads and that Leibniz`s idea of a pre-established harmony finds an analogy in the theory of relativity. Just as the world is mirrored differently in each monad and yet the sights of all monads are related to each other and translatable into each other, so also does the `absolute` four-dimensional world-continuum appear in different values of spatial and temporal measurements to every observer imprisoned [as he is] in his own system, yet all sights are transformable into each other.

Schopenhauer is necessarily working within the postulates of Newton`s absolute space and absolute time. In that sense he is shackled by the limits of the intellectual spirit of the age. So when he comes to the more oblique questions, he is drawn into making mystical projections of consciousness: “There is something which lies beyond consciousness but which sometimes breaks into this, like a moon-beam into a clouded and overcast night....It is our essence-in-itself that lies outside time (MR 3:629-30).” Music is the clue to the inner nature of the phenomenal world missed by his great progenitor, Kant, and is “so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself (WWR 1:256).” It is “as it were the innermost soul of the phenomenon without the body (WWR 2:262).”
Bryan Magee in his book on Schopenhauer argues that
the reason why words cannot dig down to the same level [as music] lies in their excessive generality....Language cannot make use of concepts which are formed by a process of generalization, and this means that it can never communicate insight into the unique in-itself-ness of anything. Music, however, does. And in doing so it is `completely and profoundly understood by [man] in his innermost being as an entirely universal language whose distinctiveness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself.` Now since what a philosopher like Schopenhauer is trying to do is to formulate an `expression of the inner nature of the world in very general concepts`, it follows that the composer is already doing in concreto what the philosopher is attempting to do in abstractio. Therefore if, per impossibile, we could succeed in giving a `perfectly accurate and complete explanation of music which goes into detail, and thus a detailed rehearsal in concepts of what music expresses, this would also be at the same time an adequate rehearsal and explanation of the world in concepts, or one wholly corresponding thereto, and hence the true philosophy....The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom, in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand.` His is therefore the purest, the most undiluted form of genius of all, because it is the least contaminated by conceptual thought or conscious intention.
It is the per impossibile that is the challenge.
This is the molten lava of the many unanswered questions and crucial links between science and linguistics; in other words what knowledge of the noumenon depends on, and where it can be found. Get to grips with this, and there will be an extension to the theory of evolution, distant though for the moment the professional scientific world is from admitting this as an issue. (See also Chapter 5, “The Latent Message of Language,” for much more on this). Whereas Relativity theory places all time on one curve so that past, present and future are contemporaneous, quantum physics makes time entirely uncertain, to the degree that its next move is unknown in advance – it is wave and particle. But neither of these can explain the human (subjective) sense of the flow of time. It has been suggested that musical composition, with its evocation of the passing of time which is yet brought to closure by the structure may offer some clues here. I suggest in my The Metaphysics of Insect Life that the sense of time elapsing as experienced in listening to (the usual) 4 movements of a symphony or quartet is also a passing through 4 major stages of intellectual and spiritual life corresponding to the 4 stages undergone by those insects that undergo metamorphosis. In other words, playing or listening to the key works of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and perhaps especially Brahms, re-create our sense of time passing, of growth within an instinctively structured setting. Indeed these works are an experiential clue to the inner (genetic?) meaning behind language, quite beyond the structural grammars essayed in Terrence Deacon`s epic The Symbolic Species.
Clusters of words also discussed both in my Metaphysics and The Poem and the Insect reach deep back into the formation of language, and represent both a response to surrounding nature, and some inner hinge that connects us not only to other primates, but from a more evolved cultural level, paradoxically, to the insect.

©David Spooner 2012
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