Rationality and Inclusionality
- The "Outs" and "Ins" of Biological and Other Science
A 2-hr seminar by Alan Rayner
For a Psychology Course on ‘Culture and Belief’
1 May 2003
Rationality - Getting Above It All
For better or worse, most, if not all of us human beings struggle to make sense, to find clarity, to understand how best to live in the world we inhabit. Somewhere along the way we came to lose, or lose trust in our natural instincts as somehow ‘not good enough’ and became, at least to some degree, natural philosophers, thirsting after the elusive quality we call wisdom. We celebrate this quality in choosing to call ourselves Homo sapiens and in telling paradoxical stories like those of Genesis, of our Fall from Grace and Innocence, that cast us outside Paradise on our quest to discover or rediscover it (whatever ‘it’ is). Always haunted by questions of where and how to look, always yearning to believe in the answers we find as some ultimate ‘truth’ or ‘winning formula’.
Believing we are looking for something, the natural tendency is to use that most dominant of our senses, our sight. A sense which, as it happens, predisposes us to separate things out from one another: providing depth of field (3-dimensional view) through binocular vision; sharpening boundaries through lateral inhibition of nerve cells, and regarding what is invisible as ‘nothing’ - empty space. A sense that leads us to focus, literally, on the explicit, material contents of nature and to disregard whatever lies ‘outside’ those contents as ‘extraneous’. A sense that suits us only too well for our role as predatory animals.
This focus on explicit, material entities is at the heart of the rationalistic, analytical mode of philosophical inquiry that goes back in western cultures at least as far as Aristotle and Parmenides and culminated in the ‘Enlightenment’ of Bacon and Descartes, Newtonian mechanics and logical Positivism. This mode of inquiry, in which matter and what moves it from outside (force) is all that matters, continues to dominate much of what we call modern science, notwithstanding the advent of relativity, quantum mechanics and non-linear theory. It is also at the heart of the religious thought and practice from which such science grew, only later to attempt to sever its umbilical links. We divide nature into discrete (independent) categories and quest after the fundamental material entities from which the world and universe are assembled. Always assuming that these entities somehow ‘came to be there in the first place’ and could somehow cohere into organized structure purely of their own or some Almighty external volition.
Ironically, this ‘discretist’ mode of inquiry/interpretation is arguably expressed in its most extreme form in biology, the so-called science of life, perhaps as the result of some inferiority complex and hankering after the ‘hard science’ of physics and chemistry that transcends all that unruly variability of the living world. Modern biology is dominated by the search for and belief in ‘molecular mechanism’ and ‘rules of behaviour’, founded principally on the Newtonian presuppositions of neo-Darwinian interpretations of evolutionary process through the exposure of discrete ‘units’ (genes) to an external force (natural selection). Correspondingly, life forms, including ourselves, are widely treated as ‘computational machines’, a notion which profoundly affects our approaches to environmental management and medicine, and encroaches relentlessly into ‘soft’ social and psychological sciences in search of a ‘harder edge’.
As might be expected, a form of inquiry focused on defining explicit material entities seeks both a source of illumination (nowadays extended, by increasingly sophisticated technology, beyond the range of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the naked eye) and a commanding position from which to view ‘the world out there’. It abhors depth and darkness. Above all, or should I say, beneath it all, it abhors the depth and darkness of the vacuum, the void, the abyss. It sees ascent into Light as a Stairway to Heaven, descent into Darkness as Fall into Hell. It equates darkness with evil, to be eliminated by a process of purification. It seeks the mountain summit rather than the mysterious valley. It builds actual and metaphorical Pyramids - symbolic of hierarchical structures with forceful power imposed from above, rather than cavernous Wells of gravitational influence inviting from below. It worships, symbolically at least, the pushy, assertive ‘male’ on top rather than the receptive, inductive ‘female’ beneath, regarding the latter, at best, as passive, offered with vacant possession.
Above all, rationalistic inquiry attempts to escape from the nefarious influence of the nether world by getting above it all and imposing its own, clearly defined, frame of reference. This is its great strength, providing reassuring certainty and security about whatever comes within its ken, but at the same time its great weakness in ignoring whatever lies beyond its necessarily restricted field of view. Especially when pursued, as it is wont to be, to the exclusion of other modes of inquiry, it is liable to lead in the very direction it seeks to avoid, in effect by declaring War on ‘otherness’, attempting to exclude the space that inseparably includes and is included in everything.
Correspondingly, rationalistic inquiry excommunicates us human beings from our natural origins, setting our ‘human nature’ in conflict with ‘other nature’. And, in so doing, it potentially brings enormous psychological, social and environmental damage in its wake.
Transparency: Excommunicating Nature
Imagine watching a football match from the relative comfort of a grandstand or, even better, from a helicopter above the Ground. Looking down upon a fixed gladiatorial arena, we witness the kinetic actions and transactions of the players as they rush about passing, receiving and shooting. Aware of the superiority of our position, and depending on which ‘side’ we support, we may laugh or rage as they fall foul of the rules imposed by referee and linesman and fail to do what seems obvious to us to achieve their objectives of scoring and preventing goals. But when they do succeed, we stop to marvel with hindsight at the technical skill that enabled them to do exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, forgetting instantly all the aberrations that preceded and followed the moment of triumph. All that is needed, we consider, is to repeat the winning formula that can be seen so easily from our position of overview.
But in the stillness of our quieter moments, we may pause to reflect on the ignorance that necessarily comes from our lofty detachment. How little we can truly know about how it feels to be involved in the thick of the game where the field is not the simplified Euclidean plane surface seen from above, but a continually changing array of spaces and relief opening up and closing down! How impossible it is to predict the complex evolutionary interplay of interdependent bodies shifting their position around this field! What it really might mean to play the game, free from prescriptive rules, regulations and fixed reference frames.
Such reflection may induce us to want to inquire more deeply into what we sometimes call the ‘Game of Life’ - with more humility and with the benefit of our own and others’ unique subjective experience. We may want to bring our feelings into play as well as our critical thoughts, enabling us to empathise. We may find our allegiances strangely drawn to the ‘underdog’. We may begin to recognize the creative significance of frailty, how the ‘meek’ could somehow be inheritors, not weaklings, and how the seemingly strong, smooth operators, in making themselves inaccessible, like an inert gas or Mona Lisa portrait, gain admirability at the expense of lovability. Who, truly, loves a winner?
But we are stopped short by the addictive attraction of the ‘winning formula’, which has become so deeply embedded into human culture as the way of solving all problems and understanding all nature as the product of a competitive, eliminative process of ‘survival of the fittest’. ‘Select the best, dispose of the rest’ has become the clarion call for hegemonic social, political, economic, scientific and technological practice the world over. The basis for what I call ‘Anti-culture’ - a paradoxical organization, characteristic of disconcerted modern human societies, founded on the ‘anti-logic’ of one against other. Like Newton, ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (including Kepler, whose deep insights into the source of planetary harmony he incidentally ignored in order to reference motion to split apart Cartesian space and absolute time), we aspire to the heights and avoid depth like the proverbial Plague. But in so doing, we only end up killing ourselves.
Correspondingly, science's goal-oriented pursuit of a winning formula within a fixed reference frame defined by twin pillars of falsifiability and objectivity has rewarded us richly with seeming technological victories over nature. But it has made spectators of us all, excluded from participating more than vicariously in the pleasurable experience of reality we seek as our birthright. Alienated from the outside, as I unconsciously depicted about thirty years ago in a painting
Slide: ‘Arid Confrontation’
made when depressed after a year of postgraduate research, depicting the limitations of the detached, objective view. After a long pilgrimage, access to life is barred from the objective stare by the rigidity of artificial boundaries. A sun composed of semicircle and triangles is caught between straight lines and weeps sundrops into a canalized watercourse. Moonlight, transformed into penetrating shafts of fear encroaches across the night sky above a plain of desolation. Life is withdrawn behind closed doors.
Delving Deeper - Seeking a Primordial View
Sensing the cultural alienation that comes with rationalistic approaches to modern science, with its mathematical underpinning of discrete numerical units and Cartesian spatial co-ordinates, it is not surprising that many of us should shy away and look for some alternative to objective detachment. And to those looking down in horror from the rarefied heights of rationalistic abstraction, we go looking just where we shouldn’t do - where ‘Angels fear to tread’. Back to Nature. Back to the Mire. Back to Origins. Back to the Primordial Sea. Into the dark cavernous recesses, plumbing the depths of our Unconscious Minds. Ever inwards, experiencing total subjective immersion in Nature, seeking the Enlightenment not of the objective external Authority, but of the Buddha, our authentic, compassionate Self, at Home in the Universe, Eternally at Peace as Undivided Primordial Being. Inhabiting Nirvana.
This counter-current to the advancement of rationalistic science and western religious tradition has been gathering pace, finding many forms of expression. Western Art, once in cohorts with Science (or natural philosophy as it was called then) and Religion has, post-Renaissance, increasingly gone its own way, abandoning conventional framing and symbolism to explore increasingly formless and surreal worlds. This departure may in its turn have allowed science to become even more inflexible in its promulgation of rationalistic principles, setting the scene for what C.P. Snow described as the polarization of civilization into Two Cultures, irresponsibly artistic and responsibly scientific, which we have to choose between, even as schoolchildren. At the same time, some scientists have increasingly been arguing the case for a more ‘holistic’ approach and questioning just how responsible science can be. Meanwhile, our sense of spiritual being has been torn between secular and fundamentalist poles, with many variations in between.
The upshot is that we live in a confused, confusing post-modern world in which, according to many, we find ourselves more divided from one another and our living space than ever, a far from United State, ill at ease with itself, deep in conflict, full of argument. But maybe, this is a State of Turmoil we have to go through in a process of Transformation that can take us into a new kind of human relationship with ‘otherness’.
Inclusionality: Reconnecting inner and outer worlds in a revitalized ‘living inquiry’ into the nature of living
For myself, I have only too keenly felt the pain, and corresponding existential fear, of confusion between seemingly opposing views of how ‘best’ to live my life. The condition of what Jack Whitehead has described as being a ‘living contradiction’ between my compassionate human feeling and dispassionate ‘zero tolerance’ of ‘error’. Outwardly, this contradiction was apparent in the way that, for many years, I tried to keep my intellectual work as a professional biological scientist separate from my personal enjoyment of expressing my feelings artistically. Whilst doing this I never felt able to measure up (literally) to my own and others’ scientific expectations, and at the same time was disconcerted that my efforts seemed to be destroying rather than enhancing my sense of belonging in the world.
A few years ago, however, I began seriously to question whether my objective and subjective ways of seeing were as contradictory as they seemed - whether they were actually complementary rather than mutually exclusive, as recognised in Taoism, some aspects of Hinduism and Paganism (whose day of the Divine Couple is today, May 1st, Beltane). I began to imagine that it might be possible to revitalize my understanding through bringing my artistic sense of kinship with the living space within and around my self into communion with my hard won scientific knowledge. I remembered the sense of joyful involvement I had felt in a painting made a year before ‘Arid Confrontation’
Slide: ‘Tropical Involvement’
after my final examinations in Natural Sciences, depicting the immersed feeling of dynamic complexity in living systems. A turbulent river rushes between rock-lined banks from fiery, tiger-striped sunset towards unexpected tranquility where it allows a daffodil to emerge from its shallows. A night-bird follows the stream past intricately interwoven forest towards darkness. A dragonfly luxuriates below a fruit-laden tree, bereft of leaves. Life is wild, wet and full of surprises.
Moreover, my work with the extraordinary ‘Underworld Forms’ of Fungi, which I’ll return to shortly, had initially seemed to confirm but then profoundly challenged my received wisdom of a Living World populated by discrete ‘units of selection’. So, I took the opportunity to share this idea of combining artistic and scientific perspectives by specially preparing and presenting a painting entitled ‘Fountains of the Forest’ as part of my Presidential Address to the British Mycological Society, in 1998.
Slide: Fountains of the Forest. Within and upon the branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of forest trees and reaching out from there into air and soil are branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of finer scale, the mycelial networks of fungi. These networks provide a communications interface for energy transfer from neighbour to neighbour, from living to dead and from dead to living. They maintain the forest in a state of flux as they gather, conserve, explore for and recycle supplies of chemical fuel originating from photosynthesis. So, the fountains of the forest trees are connected and tapped into by the fountains of fungal networks in a moving circulation: an evolutionary spiral of differentiation and integration from past through to unpredictable future; a water delivery from the fire of the sun, through the fire of respiration, and back again to sky, contained within the contextual boundaries of a wood-wide web. (From Rayner, 1998)
At about the same time, an interview with a well-known scientist in response to what was then a growing interest in re-connecting Art and Science, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. To my dismay, the scientist pronounced that Art and Science were completely different human endeavours and should therefore keep a respectful distance from one another. I was taken aback, because the scientist seemed to be arguing that difference was a reason for staying apart, whereas I had come to think it was a reason for partnership, an opportunity to realize the new possibilities implicit in complementary viewpoints, as in a mutually beneficial symbiosis.
So, the difference between me and the well-known scientist seemed to lie in the evolution of our attitude to difference. He wished to exclude difference, for fear of the contamination, take-over and dysfunction it could bring about; I wished to include it for the new opportunities it might bring. He wanted Art and Science to agree to differ – each to adopt their own distinctive one-sided view of the world and not intrude upon one another, especially not Art into Science. I wanted them to differ to agree – to discover through their diverse perspectives a common but many-stranded reality, all views of which were necessarily partial but for that very reason also unique contributions to the overall picture, as in a hologram.
As I have already implied, it seems to me that this tension, this difference in our attitude to difference, epitomized by the seeming difference between Art and Science, lies at the heart of the way we human beings relate to one another, other life forms and the living space that we all share. It persists in all kinds of adversarial debating systems, philosophical concepts and approaches to problem solving that presuppose the need to choose between one and the other. Do we try to eradicate or exclude difference in a quest for conformity, or do we nurture and include it as the very foundation for the rich heterogeneity and ultimate resilience and creativity of life? Do we take an antibiotic or probiotic view of those differences that can be seen both as life’s problems and as life’s opportunities, depending on how we interpret and respond to them?
Here, it’s worth appreciating that this tension is by no means unique to human beings, but has deep biological roots, evident in the contrast between the widespread tendencies of all forms of life both to conflict bodily with and unite sexually and symbiotically with their neighbours. From molecular to global scales of organization, encounters with what may be perceived as ‘other than self’ bring both the risk of damage to individual identity and an opportunity for renewal and innovation. Some striking illustrations of these distinctive possibilities for differentiating and integrating individual identity are provided by colonies of mycelial fungi.
Slides: Fly Agaric
Mycelium
Ukrainian Sisters
Torreyol Pairing
Hypholoma vs Coriolus
Beech Mosaic
Mycorrhizally connected seedlings
Foraging
Magpie Matrix
So, how can differences be reconciled, threat diminished and promise fulfilled without abandonment of individual identity? To understand that, we have to appreciate the dynamic contextual origins of difference itself and realize the possibilities it gives rise to for mutual transformation as well as damage. This is the kind of understanding that I think we might have access to through examining the difference, and consequent potential for complementary relationship, between objective (detached, rationalistic) and subjective (immersed, primordial) perceptions of nature and human nature.
Most fundamentally, what I think the combination of objective and subjective viewpoints can bring about is a radical transformation of our perceptions of space and boundaries that revolutionizes our understanding of dynamic processes in biological, ecological and social systems. It can do this by restoring the communication between humanity and nature that has been disrupted by millennia of philosophical and religious severance, providing the basis for a kind of reasoning based on a logic of - ‘one with other’ rather than ‘one or other’.
This transformation is the hope of the ‘bridging’ philosophy of ‘spatial togetherness’ or ‘Inclusionality’ (as distinct from ‘Rationality’), currently being developed by myself and others. As so often happens, I found I had anticipated this bridging many years ago in one of my paintings:
Slide: "WILLOWY BRIDGE"
A rowing boat is guided along a channel, too narrow to dip its oars, between opposing cliffs of abusive aggression and serene obstinacy, symbolized by hawks and swans. The way out into the sunlit ocean is through a curtain of leaves trailing from the hair of two willowy female figures who bridge across the chasm between sides that, at base, are not so very unlike one another.
And again, many years later, in another painting:
"LOVING ERROR"
This painting illustrates the dynamic interplay between differentiation and integration, irregularity ("error") and regularity, and negative draining and positive outpouring that is embedded in living system boundaries. The erratic fire in the venation of a lobed ivy leaf is bathed in the integrating embrace of a heart-shaped leaf which converts negative blue and mauve into positive scarlet and crimson. The midrib of the heart-shaped leaf emerges as a bindweed which communicates between extremes of coldness and dryness.
The core idea of inclusionality is that space, far from passively surrounding and isolating discrete massy objects, is a vital, dynamic inclusion within, around and permeating form across all scales of organization, allowing diverse possibilities for movement and communication. Correspondingly, boundaries are not fixed limits - smooth, space-excluding, Euclidian lines or planes - but rather are pivotal places comprising complex, dynamic arrays of voids and relief that both emerge from and pattern the creative togetherness of inner and outer domains. Inclusional geometry - natural, dynamic geometry - is not configured in fixed Cartesian space, but is rather a geometry of ‘nested holeyness’ - inductive, participatory space.
I alluded to this geometry of ‘nested holeyness’ in a poem-painting, ‘The Hole in the Mole’.
The Hole in the Mole – an 'inclusional' poem, by Alan Rayner
I AM the hole
That lives in a mole
That induces the mole
To dig the hole
That moves the mole
Through the earth
That forms a hill
That becomes a mountain
That reaches to sky
That connects with stars
And brings the rain
That the mountain collects
Into streams and rivers
That moisten the earth
That grows the grass
That freshens the air
That condenses to rain
That carries the water
That brings the mole
To Life
And I alluded to how this inclusional view leads to an understanding
of the diversity of life as an ‘embodied water flow’ rather than
discretely packaged genetic information in another painting:
Slide: ‘Future Present’
The gift of life lies in the creative infancy of the present, whence its message from past to future is relayed through watery channels that spill out and recombine outside the box, re-iterating and amplifying patterns over scales from microscopic to universal.
Perhaps of most significance for questions of ‘culture and belief’, and the potential for conflict referred to earlier, is what Inclusionality may have to contribute to our understanding of the nature of ‘Self’, ‘Identity’ and ‘Death’.
The identification of ‘Self’ reciprocally implies identification of ‘Other’ as in the relation between ‘Content’ and Context’, ‘Figure’ and ‘Ground’. Rationalistic objectification dislocates this reciprocal relationship by severing one from other, and so making ‘one’ a ‘stand-alone’, completely bounded, independent ‘entity’. This entity is hence perceived as self-defined and self-originating, and so death of this entity implies annihilation of its self and whatever self-contained consciousness it might have. Living things are perceived to avoid this ending by reproducing - making and transmitting more of themselves to future generations - and any altruistic (other than self-perpetuating) action is an unsustainable evolutionary dead end. Death is perceived as the enemy - the dark ‘other’ - of life.
The dynamic inclusion of space within and around every thing, by contrast, renders every entity not a discrete, self-contained unit, but rather a ‘coupled identity’ of one with the other - inner space phase with outer space phase mediated by co-created inter-space phase [necessarily incomplete (holey), dynamic boundary] across all scales. Every uniquely situated ‘coupled identity’ hence has both an individual or local inner self aspect and a collective or non-local (universal) ‘outer self’ aspect. The inner self aspect exists dynamically in a dialogue with the outer self aspect as both transmitter and receiver, with each shaping the other through their co-created, co-creative interface, as through the banks of a river system that mediate the dynamic relationship between stream and catchment. Death, loss of local self-identity marks assimilation by non-local self identity and possibility (opening or ‘exformation’ of space) for renewal of local self-identity (closing down or ‘information’ of spatial possibility). It is not annihilation, far from it, and the continued evolution of life depends upon it as indicated in the following painting:
Slide: "OPENING ENDINGS"
An elm tree’s demise, its wing-barked boundaries opened by ravages of bark beetle and fungus, makes way for new life to fill its space. Maple leaves take over the canopy between earth and sky, but their coverage is only partial, leaving openings for arriving and departing flights of woodpeckers. Fungal decay softens the wood to allow the tunnelling of long-horn beetle larvae and probing and chiselling of beak-endings. A nest cavity provides a feeding station between egg and air.
In nature, death feeds life, through the attunement of the opening up and closing down of local self-identity boundaries. But if the one is dislocated from the other, so that the communication breaks down, there is every possibility that life will feed death (loss of communication between human body cells, for example, leads to cancer, degenerative disorders and miscarriages). In our excommunicated human Anti-culture, that possibility is very real - unless we transform our way of seeing.
Well, to open up this ending, I’d like to show you a way in which we can explore the implications of the divergent, but ultimately complementary ways of seeing that I have been describing:
Transparencies of ‘Complementary Visions’