{"id":6306,"date":"2020-06-01T16:41:57","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T16:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=6306"},"modified":"2020-11-23T05:58:26","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T05:58:26","slug":"ecology-of-sense-making-political-eco-logy-and-non-ethical-re-founding-of-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/volume-15-no-3-2020\/conference-proceedings-volume-15-no-3-2020\/ecology-of-sense-making-political-eco-logy-and-non-ethical-re-founding-of-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecology of Sense(-making), Political Eco-logy and Non-ethical Re-founding of Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

We all know that this new century won\u2019t be an ordinary century: the future of the terrestrial ecosystem and of humanity is now threatened, and the human being is itself (himself or herself) the very source of the danger. More precisely, modern \u00a0globalisation and its more recent or contemporary techno-capitalistic process of production and consumption are what threaten and already alter the health of both nature and culture : global warming, air and ocean pollution, \u201cpsychosocial risks\u201d[1]<\/a>, the extension of phenomena like professional burn out, the extinction of many species, the suffering of other species in intensive and industrial \u2018breeding\u2019, the disappearance of the last cultures of harmony with nature[2]<\/a>, the aggravation of the distance between rich people and poor people in the world, etc.<\/p>\n

I said: the health of both nature and culture<\/em>. Maybe what is happening needs a deep theoretical change which would make us able to understand that such a situation reveals the non-duality of nature\/culture. Transhumanism and many other new ways of thought are still \u2013 implicitly but undoubtedly \u2013 submitted to the paradigm of the duality nature\/culture, since their position needs in the last instance a discontinuity between nature and culture. For example, transhumanists can\u2019t claim without contradiction that they are evolutionary<\/em> \u2018thinkers\u2019. Indeed, the transhumanist claim to an evolutionary thought is incompatible with their conceptual design of a human being which would be able to reconstruct himself to such an extent that he would no longer be human but post-human and potentially immortal. The fact that human being is a historical process of self-construction doesn\u2019t mean that human being would cease to be human once reconstructed: transhumanists need here a discontinuity named \u2018Singularity\u2019 (Kurzweil), which would be also a becoming-absolute of the evolution\/history difference. I know that they would refuse my interpretation, and they could argue that post-human being would be a new species in human evolution. But the contradiction lies in such an evolution which would not build post-human being since human being would be the builder. The only way to stay evolutionary while thinking human self-construction is to admit the finitude of human being as historicity or self-construction which prolongs evolution and reveals the fact that biological life itself has no essence.<\/p>\n

That is what I try to do in my book La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 de l\u2019invention<\/em>[3]<\/a>, where paleoanthropology and neurosciences converge to assert that cumulative historicity is based neither on language nor on technology, but results from a very progressive interpenetration of these two phenomena which are already present but not interpenetrating in other species. Such an interpenetration, which goes beyond Leroi-Gourhan\u2019s \u2018coordination\u2019[4]<\/a>, makes language capable of becoming a grammaticalized or technicized language – what French people call \u2018langue\u2019 rather than \u2018langage\u2019 -, and reciprocally technology becomes a system of objects which \u2018refer\u2019 to each other, that is to say a symbolic system. Now, this interpenetration is what leads to a cumulative historicity which is only the full revelation of the fact that biological life itself has no essence, since each of its properties results from the interpenetration of properties which were present but not interpenetrating in chemical and non-vital phenomena[5]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Such an anti-substantialist emergentism as evolutionary ontology also integrates Frans de Waal\u2019s lessons on what he calls \u201cmotivational autonomy\u201d: while some drives of complex animals have been selected by evolution, their psychic motivation is only pleasure and not the reproduction of the species, since animals don\u2019t know that copulation means reproduction. One should notice that this psychic dimension of complex animals is not seriously taken into account, neither by reductionist naturalism nor by technicist transhumanism. Here, \u2018naturalism\u2019 means \u201creduction of both human being and non-human animal to their physico-chemical substratum\u201d, and the very strange fact is that naturalists do not even consider the non-human animal when they assert that \u2018consciousness\u2019 is reducible to its physico-chemical substratum: in their minds, the \u201cproblem of consciousness\u201d is a problem which concerns human being only. For its part, transhumanism inherits from technicist cybernetics, which theorized animals on the basis of the double question of retroaction and information in the machine. But the new and supreme ambition of transhumanists is to build an immortal post-human which would be able to feel emotions inside its technological brain. Such an ambition violates the conditions by which thought is not calculation : a\/ first condition, the biological character of the sensitive brain ; b\/ second condition, the double \u201cconstitutive transcendence\u201d that is the interface formed by our grammaticalized-technicized language and our system of \u00ab symbolized \u00bb \u2013 they refer to each other – artefacts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Re)thinking sense(-making) as multimensionality in crisis beyond Husserl\u2019s noematic thought<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s come to the central and fundamental problem raised by La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 de l\u2019invention<\/em> : the problem of what I call the multidimensional crisis of sense(-making) – I will soon explain why I use the word \u2018sense(-making)\u2019 rather than the word \u2018meaning\u2019. First, one may say that transhumanists are not philosophers but ideologists who take advantage of speculative techno-capitalism to dream of a post-human era instead of worrying about the future of the planet. Now, some of their opponents share with them the old, powerful and tendentiously anthropocentric conviction that human being occupies a central position in our Universe. In such a theoretical debate, therefore, the Anthropocene is considered by one and the other as the confirmation of our central position. I assert, on the contrary, that what is called the \u2018Anthropocene\u2019, instead of confirming the anthropocentric thesis through the power of human being, is, at least through its ultimate and dramatic consequences which reveal it, the indirect index of the crisis of sense(-making) which results from the misunderstanding of human finitude \u2013 that is to say: human non-originarity (or being-derived) and therefore human mortality. I know that the Anthropocene doesn\u2019t begin with the 20th century. But its ultimate and dramatic consequences are not old, and what I call the \u201ccrisis of sense(-making)\u201d is also a process which began three centuries ago but became only recently global, therefore actual and no longer potential.<\/p>\n

Here, the most important point lies in the words \u201cglobal, therefore actual\u201d. Indeed, I assert that in virtue of the multidimensionality of sense(-making), its crisis can\u2019t be actual without being itself multidimensional. We know that Husserl was seeing a crisis of sense(-making) in his own time, and that in his opinion such a crisis was the result of the mathematization of the scientific knowledge of nature, which obscures the intentional source of its own noematic sense-giving. But such a noematic and therefore one-dimensional \u2018crisis\u2019 is not a crisis of sense(-making) as <\/em>multidimensional. Certainly, Husserl had understood that the crisis of sense(-making) would be a crisis of reflexivity. But what we must understand today is that the knowledge referred to by Husserl as well as by science is in any case related to the noematic dimension of a sense(-making) that is irreducible to this dimension, because it is multidimensional, and whose crisis itself is multidimensional only today. It is precisely because Husserl didn\u2019t see this multidimensionality of sense(-making) that he believed in the \u2018originarity\u2019 (being non-derived) of his own intentionality as noematic \u2018sense-giving\u2019. This crucial point will be now explained.<\/p>\n

Our time is a time of multidimensional crisis, and La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 de l\u2019invention<\/em> is dedicated to the invention of the method which will make us capable of thinking this multidimensional crisis as a crisis of sense(-making) and of reflexivity. It means\u00a0that:<\/p>\n

a\/ Far from being noematic and therefore one-dimensional, the sense(-making) of each meaning is always multidimensional and, more precisely, tridimensional \u2013 we will see why. By the words \u201ceach meaning\u201d I mean what Post-Kantian philosophy named \u2018representations\u2019, and the reason for this substitution is that the word \u2018representation\u2019 doesn\u2019t say express the multidimensionality of each object of thought: this word is too tied to the noematic dimension \u2013 the dimension of ob<\/em>-ject. One can understand at the same time why I didn\u2019t use the expression \u201ccrisis of meaning\u201d: if meanings are in my vocabulary what was called \u2018representations\u2019, the so-called \u00ab crisis of meaning \u00bb is rather a crisis of the sense(-making) of each meaning;<\/p>\n

b\/ If we want to understand the multidimensional crisis as a crisis of sense(-making), we must invent a philosophical reflexivity which reveals each object of thought and each meaning \u2013 or \u2018representation\u2019 – as multidimensional, that is to say as non-ob<\/em>-ject \u2013 the ob<\/em>-ject is noematic and one-dimensional. We know that Antonio Damasio\u2019s work shares with Simondon\u2019s ontology \u2013 but without the former knowing the latter\u2019s work \u2013 the idea that animal action, perception and emotion participate in each other[6]<\/a>. Now, dimensions of human existence are directly linked to this tridimensional constitution\u00a0that they complicate:<\/p>\n