2. Phenomenology as a Radically Empirical Challenge to Scepticism

Phenomenology is a radically empirical philosophy that seeks to get our conceptual frameworks right by seeking a method for letting the phenomena tell it how to think.Footnote ¹⁰ This contrasts with a method that articulates concepts solely, or mostly, by analysis or reflection on what we humans have said or thought about things, which, from a phenomenological perspective, might allow cognitive prejudices, deeply rooted or hidden in our natural attitude, to distort our concepts. Phenomenology, in others words, is a descriptively and empirically driven method for, as Wittgenstein would put it, showing the fly the way out of the fly bottle. But it goes further than methods such as Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis or Kantian critique, since, in showing the way out of the bottle, it trusts neither our existing language nor our reflective activity as immediately obvious. It ends up being a sort of eversion of Kantian critique: it seeks concepts manifest beyond our own reflections, such that rigorously describing what shows itself also thereby in effect describes and articulates a conceptual critique that has already taken place in things beyond us.

Phenomenology typically pursues this radically empirical method by showing how, prior to philosophical reflection, the flow of our experience, as empirically manifest, descriptively demands and warrants certain concepts. This paper seeks to radicalize this empiricism even further by revealing ‘life as transcendental field’, that is, revealing life as empirically manifesting a pre-experiential field of irreducible meaning, that, as meaningful, likewise demands and warrants certain concepts. Below I introduce this effort as extending phenomenology’s method of radically empirical critique. But to help contextualize and orient my discussion, I first want to say something about the terms ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’, because I am using these terms in ways that spring from the phenomenological tradition and are not standard for all audiences, and because so much is methodologically at stake throughout in my concept of the empirical.

So, first, I use ‘empirical’ in a broad, descriptive sense, to designate that which appears and manifests itself, that which can be encountered. This gets back to the original sense and etymology of the term ‘empirical’. This descriptive sense needs to be disentangled from a prescriptive sense of the empirical that arises, for example, in a classic philosophical empiricism or scientific tradition that would already theoretically, conceptually or operationally prescribe that the empirical is, for example, what is materially given, what can be measured with instruments, a given that has the form of a self-contained sense-datum, and so on. It also needs to be disentangled from views that would prescribe who or what it is that can do the encountering, such that what is encountered and who encounters it are elided, thus reducing the empirical to, for example, something merely subjective.

What is philosophically at stake in this descriptive usage is preserving the empirical as a pre-theoretical domain in which we encounter something as given (in some broad sense of given), as something whose determinations we do not ourselves constitute or determine. Such a pre-theoretical domain is crucial to phenomenology as a philosophy that seeks to start with and be oriented by what is given, with what insists on its own determinate characteristics, versus something whose characteristics we might be determining through our own conceptual activity, which is perhaps prejudiced. The methodological issue here is keeping us from making mistakes by checking our claims and concepts against the empirical, and this procedure is begged if we start with a theoretically overloaded conception of what the empirical is.

It should be added that such a domain of givenness is methodologically necessary to getting the project of science or philosophy off the ground. For example, for science to end up with some prescriptive specification of what counts as empirical in a scientific sense, the scientist must start with something given on a pre-scientific level, for example, the world that she encounters, that prompts and checks her scientific efforts—and checks her concept of the empirical. And such a domain, as pre-philosophical, is also crucial to getting philosophy off the ground. For example, the above noted elision between the empirical and merely subjective experience hinges on various epistemological and ontological presuppositions that, in the phenomenological project pursued here, would need to be justified on the basis of what can be empirically encountered. This twofold point about science and philosophy is a key starting point of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, see the preface especially.

In this respect phenomenology is a radical empiricism, in that it turns to what is empirically given in order to be educated into the proper conception of the empirical, experience and so on. Phenomenology is not unempirical, unless one presupposes that what is given to us to experience is ‘merely subjective’ (mere introspection, etc.) and therefore doesn’t count as empirical, according to some standard of the empirical. But that ‘mere subjectivity’ would need to be proven, and such a proof, it can be argued, would need to start with presuppositions about what subjectivity is, that something ‘merely subjective’ is possible and cogent, and such presuppositions might be betrayed by the phenomena. But, we cannot test this if we already decide in advance that the empirical and empirically manifest phenomena are merely subjective. What is radical about phenomenology is that is seeks to root the standard of the empirical in what is empirically given, it seeks to go back to the empirical as starting point. Here the terminology of phenomenology as radical plays on the connation of ‘root’ in ‘radical’, via the Latin ‘radix’.

Second, I use the term ‘transcendental’ to designate determinate characteristics of a domain that, in terms of that domain itself, turn out to be unsurpassable and thence irreducible: that without which a given domain could not be the domain that it is. A classic illustration is to be found in Kant’s argument that a pure intuition of space is a transcendental condition of there being a domain of spatial experience. The transcendental is not to be confused with the transcendent, which, in my usage, is something conceptualized as existing over and above, beyond, a given domain, for example, Platonist ideas conceived as being beyond the domain of appearances of which they are ideas.

As discussed at the end, to say that life is a transcendental field is to say that in life we find a domain in which meaning is manifest, and that we cannot surpass or escape finding that this is so, or reduce the terms of this meaning-manifestation to some other domain over, above or beyond the terms of the domain of life itself. To say that life manifests this empirically is to say that our encounter with living phenomena, if oriented by and to those phenomena themselves, is such that life itself in our very encounter with it manifests meaning-structure: it is not we who determine that life is meaningful, life itself in its very living determines itself that way, and that is an unsurpassable characteristic of life. Note that the scientific empiricist, in the typical, current views of scientific empiricism, might precisely deny that meaning is empirically manifest in living phenomena, because meaning is not quantifiable or given in a manner that is empirically satisfactory for the scientist, except insofar say, as meaning is equated with information (where information, however, is in fact neutral to meaning). But the larger issue at stake here and in phenomenology is precisely what scientific knowing is, and what experience and the empirical are, how meaning fits with these, and so on. And the view developed here is that meaning is an irreducible element of living phenomena, even if the traditional scientist can abstract from this in certain kinds of inquiries.

With these terms in mind, let me now introduce my approach to showing that meaning is an irreducible element of living phenomena, and that life thence demands and warrants certain concepts. My approach extends traditional phenomenology’s strategy of describing the flow of empirically manifest experience so as to reveal it as having a meaningful structure that demands certain concepts. Let me illustrate this extension and what is methodologically behind it in terms of issues of conceptual critique, by drawing on Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. He discovered that the flow of cognitive experience itself manifests what he calls a ‘horizon structure’.Footnote ¹¹ For example, a table appears as such in virtue of its present aspect inherently indicating a determinate yet open-ended horizon of other as yet indeterminate aspects that are revealable as I move around. The condition of possibility for the appearance of a table, as empirically manifest in experience thus challenges (as we’ll see below) clear-cut conceptual oppositions between actuality and potentiality. Describing this horizon structure, as it is itself manifest, thus amounts to the articulation of a descriptive, empirical critique of classic conceptions of actuality and potentiality. The field of experience thus offers a critical lens into conceptual and ontological points.

In developing this descriptive, empirical critique, phenomenology challenges what I call our anthropocentric prejudice: a tendency to take what is obvious to us as human beings in our everyday lives as a model for grasping things in their own terms. Husserl’s horizons provide an example: actuality and potentiality are easy to conceptualize on the model of a storehouse of possibilities, where actuality ‘takes out’ and activates a possibility already determinately there in the storehouse. But Husserl shows that horizonal phenomena themselves challenge our human storehouse model, since actualities and potentialities dynamically reshape one another in open-ended ways. There is no fixed storehouse given in advance, the basis of the actuality-potentiality dynamic is itself dynamic. This phenomenological structure is appropriately dubbed a ‘horizon’, precisely because horizons out there in the world are ontologically strange vis-à-vis our deep anthropocentric prejudice which seeks to grasp all phenomena as ‘stuff’, ‘solid things’ or ‘all there’.Footnote ¹²

Now science also identifies and challenges anthropocentric prejudices. For example, it makes a great deal of sense to us to conceptualize things as having and reflecting essential and fixed identities, but Darwin famously shows that such thinking is challenged by living things and muddles our conception of them. Indeed, the life sciences typically conceptualize living systems in terms of the latest human technology, but then find that life challenges such concepts. Yet science typically solves such conceptual problems by discarding one human model for another. Evelyn Fox Keller’s studies of shifting concepts of ‘the gene’ gives nice examples of this, for example, with the conception of the gene in terms of information technology, as ‘information’ or ‘program’.Footnote ¹³ Let me be clear: such models let science do productive, predictive work. But in the end, even a predictive model could very well betray the phenomena – and to address this we might need new concepts altogether (versus merely correcting muddled concepts).

To rule out this betrayal of phenomena, and to get our concepts right, we would need a rigorous, principled way to show that natural phenomena, in their own terms, fit with our concepts, that they are not merely anthropocentric projections. With this observation, we move from the work of science to the worries of philosophy. Methodologically, we would beg such worries if we tried to resolve them through anthropocentric means or perspectives. This is where phenomenology comes in as rigorously seeking to let phenomena lead us to our conception of them. It tries to cut short our worry about being stuck in a merely anthropocentric position – which is precisely the sceptical worry that meaningful experience is cut off from nature – by leaping out of that worry altogether. It does this by an empirical demonstration that in fact what is given in experience is already something more than just our anthropocentric position merely. In other words, phenomenology is radically empirical to the extent of saying it is an empirical question whether we are in fact stuck in an anthropocentric view split from nature. And, by the way, the very idea of an ‘anthropocentric view’ precisely buys into a human manufactured concepts of self-enclosed views and of what human beings are – which all need phenomenological critique.

In slightly more technical terms, we would seem to run into a methodological difficulty deploying phenomenology to address our problem about experience and nature. This is because phenomenology aims to start from what we call ‘experience’. So it would seem that any of its conceptual results about nature would be merely subjective, as they spring from our experience. My claim, though, is that this view gets both phenomenology and experience wrong. In fact, it begs the question of what experience is, it presumes that experience is just ‘in the head’. Indeed, I would argue that Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, understands that we must be radically empirical in letting thinking and experience themselves empirically show us what they are. He thereby discovers that thinking is not really a Cartesian ‘I think’ that could be detached from the body and nature, but in fact inherently involves a bodily-kinaesthetic ‘I can’. Bit by bit, living movements beyond us are revealed as integral to experience. Husserl thus suggests a way in which living and natural movements, beyond the anthropocentric, are integral to the experiential field, such that they could give us an educating lens into a new concept of nature itself. This is the phenomenological strategy I want to pursue.

Now I have to confess that this strategy leaves thorny scholarly and methodological difficulties. Some of these prolong the above worry that phenomenology cannot rightly integrate nature and experience, and some prolong the sceptical worry that phenomenology can never get beyond subjective experience. You can see that these methodological worries in fact coincide with our very question about the relation of experience and nature. I also have to confess that in beating my head over these worries, I find that the response boils down to insisting, as above, that the answers to these worries are empirical: the worries start with unempirical presumptions about the cogency of a scepticism that posits a merely subjective experience that stands outside of nature as object of scepticism, and presumptions as to what experience, nature and phenomenology are. It is an empirical question whether phenomenology is possible and whether experience makes nature available as a meaningful field for phenomenological study. The phenomenologist insists that her conceptual results are empirically descriptive: what will convince you she’s got the concepts that truly lead us out of the bottle is the way things themselves are, not an argument she contains within herself. The sceptic will respond that we can’t get anywhere through mere description, that is all too naïve. But in saying that, the sceptic presumes that we must first of all run our claims through our own autonomous critique and reflection. But that presumption is the very thing that leads to, invites and demands scepticism. In a word, phenomenology begins with a radically empirical critique of what I shall call ‘the sceptical complex’ of philosophy. This is why, for example, phenomenology must begin with what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘perceptual faith’, and interrogation as a ‘hyper-reflection’ that begins from reflection’s installation in being, versus the claimed autonomy of classical reflection and critique.Footnote ¹⁴ Put otherwise, if we autonomously and reflectively prescribe what counts as the empirical, which is what Descartes in effect does in order to get past radical doubt and to an indubitably empirical science, then we shoo ourselves into the flybottle of the sceptical complex. And in shooing itself into this complex, reflection eschews any resource for getting out.

Now the sceptical complex is symmetrical with the very experience-nature divide that is our concern. Getting out of it, I contend, entails an empirically driven demonstration that experience already manifests resources for a critique of this divide, namely: it manifests life as a transcendental, irreducible, field of meaning that manifests a lens into an ontology that undoes the experience-nature divide.

3. Meaning, Sense, and Life as Transcendental Field

The demonstration that experience already manifests resources for a critique of the experience-nature divide first requires a phenomenological description of meaning. As a first step, I urge us to describe meaning through the term ‘sense’. Here I draw on Merleau-Ponty, who discovers that human meaning is at root a bodily phenomenon that emerges from the way the body fits into and is oriented by a situation beyond and prior to what is meant. This issue nicely resonates in the French word for meaning, ‘sens’, which also connotes direction and sensation. It also lurks in the English ‘sense’, as when we speak of mirror images having different senses, or things not making sense when we can’t fit them together. The shift from ‘meaning’ to ‘sense’ helps challenge our anthropocentric prejudice of thinking meaning is ‘in the head’, since sense emerges in a fit with something beyond ‘the head’. The sceptical worry is that this fit with something beyond is merely our projection, in which case experience and nature remain divided.

Fits between things entail differences between them. But not all differences manifest fit or sense. Descriptively, sense involves something showing itself as this, not that, such that the difference between this and that is itself at issue in and makes a difference in and to that very showing. Consider a familiar case in human life: grasping the sense of love entails encountering it as emphatically not being hate (etc.), and moreover encountering the difference between love and hate (etc.) as salient, as making a difference, in that very encounter. Someone pre-pubescently oriented to erotic behaviour, but who does not yet grasp that/how such behaviour makes a difference (is salient) to the erotic as such, does not (yet) quite grasp the erotic.Footnote ¹⁵ Sense entails differences that make a difference (a phrasing that echoes but pushes farther Gregory Bateson’s discussion of information as a difference that makes a differenceFootnote ¹⁶).

On this description, we can detect sense in a broader field of life. For example, in bacteria, the difference between the distant presence of glucose, versus the presence of something else, makes a difference to the swimming behaviour of the bacterium. Moreover this is a difference the detection of which the bacterium itself works to maintain. It is thus a difference that makes a difference to a bacterium. If you don’t find that difference making a difference, you have a dead bacterium (or one not sensitive to glucose). And distant gold doesn’t make a difference in this way to the bacterium. To this extent we can say that glucose is meaningful to the bacterium, but gold isn't. This point echoes in Varela's enactive approach to cognition, which grants bacteria a kind of cognition in such behaviour.Footnote ¹⁷

But I want to turn to embryos, through biologist Eric Davidson’s remarkable 2006 book, The Regulatory Genome Footnote ¹⁸, which shows, in astounding detail, how bilateran animal embryogenesis can be explained in terms of a ‘regulatory genome’. The central problem for Davidson and embryology is explaining how one totipotent cell develops into a highly differentiated and species-typical body, even in face of perturbations. Development to type, despite perturbations, is said to be regulatory. Davidson focuses on the genome as the enabler of regulatory development, hence his concept of the regulatory genome. His central claim is that the regulatory genome amounts to a computer composed of hardwired genetic elements. The genomic computer’s complex information processing capacity is what explains development. Information processing, then, determines where, say, legs versus antennae are to grow. It is because this processing is inherently flexible in responding to changing inputs that development can be regulatory.

In our terms, such processing would in fact generate sense. Proper positioning of organs within the organism’s layout is crucial to the viability and thence salience of the organs and organism: that this organ is to be a leg, not an antenna, and that the leg is to go here, not there, is a difference that makes a difference in and to the living organism. Sense thus appears in embryos. But the skeptic urges sense is not really there in nature itself, it is just our projection of meaning into nature. Science would typically endorse this claim, because science can show how differences are produced, say by information processing, without granting they are differences that make a difference for or to something beyond consciousness. The issue is this: can the production of differences be reduced to informational processes that can, thereby, be abstracted from any fit, orientation, or embeddeness in nature and living systems beyond their informational formula or algorithm? Or do we need to describe and conceptualize sense as inseparably generated right there in living, natural movement itself?

Let’s go back to Davidson. He argues that each regulatory DNA sequence of the regulatory genome ‘amounts essentially to a hardwired biological computational device’.Footnote ¹⁹ The regulatory genome is ‘a vast delocalized computer’Footnote ²⁰ and its operation ‘can be symbolized, as in a computer program, by a series of conditional logic statements’.Footnote ²¹ While Davidson acknowledges differences between the regulatory genome and a digital computer, he nonetheless conceptualizes it as executing an information processing task that can be analyzed and operates as a series of modular information processing subtasks. This implies that generated differences are conceptually reducible to an abstractable, idealized algorithm.Footnote ²² So embryogenesis doesn’t involve what I am calling sense or differences that make a difference. Is this right?

But not even Davidson is so simple on the matter, and what my phenomenological strategy demands is looking at how the regulatory genome actually manifests itself and operates. This will show, I contend, that the genome’s modular operation as an ‘information processor’ in fact depends on a complex embeddedness in its environment. This environment is first of all the internal milieu of the growing body, which is in turn embedded in and open to a broader environmental surround. I argue that the bodily environment of the regulatory genome in fact plays a key role in orchestrating development: the operation of the regulatory genome as information processor and the growth of the body are reciprocal and ontologically internal to one another. In effect, I am arguing for something like embedded, extended, and enactive cognition on a micro-scale, where not cognitive, but developmental discriminations, are at issue. And because of this embeddedness, we find sense, not just information.

We need some technical precision to make this claim and its conceptual implications regarding meaning clear and compelling, and I am afraid I have to be all too terse, since it would not be possible here to cover the details of the biochemical workings of the developmental systems that Davidson studies.Footnote ²³ My claim is that the regulatory genome ought not be conceptualized as a classic computer, a finite state automaton – an anthropocentric strategy.Footnote ²⁴ Instead, the operation of the regulatory genome involves something much stranger and harder to think about, namely the organism as what I call a ‘finite state structure’, or better, a ‘self-articulating structure’. This structure encompasses both the regulatory genome and the growing body (in its broader environment), as ontologically internal to one another.Footnote ²⁵ Here I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s early concept of structure, e.g., his description of the soap bubble as shaping itself through its overall dynamic in its environment, such that we cannot separate a formula or idea of the bubble’s shape from the bubble’s existence or vice versa.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, what is responsible for the bubble’s shape, which we might conceptualize as a function in information processing terms, is inseparably embedded in the very dynamics of the bubble. The developing organism is like this bubble structure, but the regulatory genome gives the organism as structure a dynamic and recursively complex articulacy and responsiveness that the bubble lacks, what I call its self-articulating character, which enables regulatory development. Without the regulatory genome, the organism would not have this self-articulacy, but, crucially, it is not the genome on its own, as information processor, that does the articulating: what does that is the organism with its genome.

To support and deepen this point, let me note that the regulatory genome does not specify an already fully fixed, overall growth process, as if development merely reads out steps of a fixed plan.Footnote ²⁷ The frog egg, for example, doesn’t grow directly into a frog, it first grows into a tadpole that only then can grow into a frog. The tadpole-body is thus imbricate in whatever we might call the ‘frog-plan’. It’s not the genome itself that pulls off the trick of being a frog-plan; to have a frog-plan that can actually make a frog requires the genome operating in a tadpole body, because it is only as spread out and rhythmed in a growing tadpole body that the genome is able to affect and enable frog development. The regulatory genome is not building and assembling parts according to an algorithmic plan, but complexly modulating the dynamics of the growing body. Development operates recursively, by modulating prior bodily-stages to develop new plans. It’s more like London building on and through its imbricate past than Brasilia rolling out over an empty plane according to a master-plan. The operation of the regulatory genome is thus always internally related to ‘its’ body.Footnote ²⁸ Again, while we can (rightly) construe the regulatory genome as exhibiting informational processing characteristics analogous to those of our machines, that does not mean the regulatory genome as it is itself manifest operates as or actually is a mere information processor or program for differences. This is an abstraction conduced by our anthropocentric models.Footnote ²⁹

To put it another way, the regulatory genome works by recursively responding to genetic signals in ways that modulate these signals but also modulate the very way the genome responds to these signals. To this degree, the regulatory genome approximates to a classic finite state automaton, which has computational power precisely in recursively switching itself from state to state, based on inputs – where each state has different sets of responses to inputs. Now classic finite state automata depend, for their operation, on their program and fixed mechanics, which classically involve a clock or other coordination system to orchestrate and sequence computations. But, given the regulatory genome’s internal relation to the body the genomic ‘computer’ not only grows, what orchestrates its ‘computation’ is the very body whose development it is regulating. We can’t really conceptualize the regulatory genome as an information processor that in and of itself generates developmental differences; the regulatory genome’s ‘processing’ is as much regulated and orchestrated by the body that it regulates as it regulates that body. To demonstrate another way: any program that runs on a classic Turing machine can be specified in abstraction and run on any other Turing machine. But you can’t do that with the regulatory genome. As cloning shows, you can’t simply take the genome from one organism and stick it in just any organism, expecting it to be viable: you have to stick it in the right sort of organism, and in an organism in the right state. In other words, the regulatory genome’s operation is open to and embedded in further dynamics beyond it. Indeed, we find that cellular dynamics and states can be epigenetically inherited, and modulate development.Footnote ³⁰

It is this embeddedness in something beyond information and the genome, in bodies and environments, that I think warrants my claim that embryogenesis manifests sense, something more than differences produced by an abstractable or idealizable information processing system. We find differences that make a difference to and in the organism, insofar as the generation of these differences is inseparable from the very life, body and environment in which these differences arise. And all of these differences are being generated – I would say instituted – on a level far below that of movement or perception, on a kind of pre-perceptual-kinaesthetic level, in which the organism is pre-affectively feeling itself out, in a way that will eventually enable it to feel the world.

To recap: The scientific move I am challenging would say that the ordered production of developmental differences can be boiled down to abstract informational processes that can be analyzed without reference to anything like a point of view or meaning. The differences are meaningful to us, but not in themselves. Against this, my effort was to return to the phenomena themselves, as revealed by science, and have the phenomena challenge the anthropocentric conceptual models, in this case computational, that enable the above claim. What we find when we do this is that the ordered production differences are oriented by and inseparably embedded in the dynamics of the living body. The differences are not specified by an algorithm abstractly coded and inherited in genetic material; there is no code apart from the full fledged differential development of the living body. This is why we must speak here of sense, oriented by life and environmental embeddedness, versus abstract information decoded by an abstract standard.Footnote ³¹ And this allows me to argue that the sense we find manifest in human experience is also manifest in life more generally.

For Merleau-Ponteians, the point can be put in terms of expression. Primary expression creatively figures out what is expressed, through a gestural process inherent in and open to the body. The genome is not a fully determinate program, but a modulator of a development that becomes determinate only through developmental movement. The organism thus figures itself out in developmental movement, which is thus proto-gestural, in that its unfolding is inseparable from developmental movement. To this degree development is expressive and needs to be conceptualized in terms of sense.

This lets me speak of life as a transcendental field of sense. A full account of this term would take more room than I have, but here’s the basic thought: In the Cartesian Meditations Husserl engages us in a transcendental reduction that suspends all already given or presupposed claims of meaning. He shows us that in the midst of this suspension, in ‘my pure living’, cognitive experience appears as having a self-evidently meaningful determinacy.Footnote ³² For Husserl, this institutes an irreducible and thus transcendental field of sense, which, as sensible, is an empirically manifest platform for justifying philosophical claims (contra the sceptic who can anchor justification only in purely internal criteria). My point is that once we have scientific access to nature, we find that life in fact also institutes a transcendental field of sense – but beyond ourselves merely. Strategically and methodologically this is important, because nature thus shows itself as a platform for making claims about it. This means that there is a sense, a meaning, beyond human experience as anthropocentric. This can give us a non-anthropocentric lens into such meaning.

4. Sketch of an Ontology of Sense Within Nature

Philosophy, though, remains tangled in the hall of mirrors and shadow boxing inaugurated by its sceptical complex. Mightn’t all of the above remain our own projection? It might show the way in which we can grasp sense as in nature, but how is it really there in nature? We find it easy to grasp that there is sense in us because sense is so self-evident in self-reflection. This is precisely what Descartes reveals in the cogito. Further, the cogito reveals sense as appearing within our own activity, so if we have to say how sense appears, to give an account of its ontology, we’d say: it is constituted by our activity. That doesn’t quite go all the way in accounting for sense, but it is at least cogent and compelling. Yet, recent work on the body and Merleau-Ponty says: we don’t wholly or wholly actively constitute sense, we are passive to the body, life and so on in our own experience of sense.Footnote ³³ And above, I argued that there is sense in nature. So, once, again: how is there sense in nature and the body beyond our own experience?

Here we’re running into an ontological problem. For underneath the above worry is, I think, an issue about what philosophers call negation and the negative. Negation is manifest in the cogito’s activity. Recall Descartes’s argument that grasping the ever changing wax entails an idea that entirely surpasses any positively given presentation or imaginary image of wax. Only such an idea could let us comprehend wax as such, so as to judge this-here is wax, not something else. Similarly, Socrates urges that grasping two sticks as equal entails an idea of equality that surpasses any positive givens we look at. Ideas are not given positively, they are negative.

Now sense, as we have described it, entails negation: love is not hate. But it looks like this sort of negation would have to involve a sort of activity that surpasses givens. Sartre is the most vociferous advocate of this position: he argues that the origin of negation and thence meaning is our nothingness as freeing us from any sort of positivity.Footnote ³⁴ So, we have an ontological problem here: how can the negative be within positively given material nature? Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I call this the problem of ‘the negative-in-being’.Footnote ³⁵ My position troubles the skeptic precisely because I claim that negation arises in nature, is tainted by life. Indeed the thought that negation is tainted by life is precisely what prompts sceptical worries that our cognitive activity might be muddied and mistaken, taken in by a world to which it is passive.

In response to this sceptical complex, I am going to double down on phenomenological empiricism. I am going to let life itself educate us out of this ontological worry and problem by showing us how there can be a negative-in-being, albeit one that is ontologically peculiar vis-à-vis our anthropocentric concepts. To do this I briefly turn to the acquired immune system. There too we find sense being generated, and in a most remarkable way, precisely because we mammals can acquire immunity to pathogens never previously encountered. How does this work? The usual answers amount to a selectional shuffling of ontologically positive terms. The immune system hinges on protein receptors that latch onto antigens, in the manner of locks fitting to keys. But, the very process of generating receptors randomly reshuffles the ‘locks’, and the body destroys ‘locks’ that would latch onto self antigens. The result is locks keyed only to pathogens. Scientists and philosophers like Irun Cohen and Henri Atlan have challenged this essentially informational processing model, arguing that meaning is actually at stake in the immune process.Footnote ³⁶ Further, Cohen contests the anthropocentric lock-and-key model by focusing on the chemistry of protein receptors, which reveals that receptors are quite dynamic systems that would never univocally lock onto just one key. They are sloppy, in biochemical lingo, ‘degenerate’. To explain how degenerate receptors nonetheless discriminately identify pathogens, Cohen shows how immune identification arises when receptors come together in a complex, such that receptors respond to one another’s degenerate responses, in a process that Cohen calls ‘co-respondence’.Footnote ³⁷ In this process, we find a determinate difference or negation arising, without that negation being reducible to some already given positive locks. (The conceptual target here is analogous to the view that development is specified by an already given genetic algorithm.) Negation thus arises as a sort of surpassing of positive givens from within their own dynamic. In my view this process opens an insight into the negative-in-being.

What interests me here is the way this hinges on what we call degenerate receptors. For Cohen, this degeneracy is positively given, there in the receptor itself. But this, I think, is an all too anthropocentric view and concept. When we say receptors are degenerate, we are saying: they fit with more than just the one antigen that we’d expect them to fit. But imagine a receptor that we chemists see can fit A, B, or C. Yet, in its environment it only ever encounters B. It doesn’t then actually exhibit what we call degeneracy. This leads me to realize that degeneracy is a phenomenon manifest relative to, and enabled by, what the bounds of the cell and body let in (where these bounds are themselves modulated by the immune system within). There would be neither degeneracy nor immunological sense if everything always interacted with everything else at once (simultaneously).

In my view, the immune system thus yields an insight into what is ontologically at stake in the negative-in-being. The insight is that if sense is ever to sneak into being, being has to ‘leave room’ for ruptures, boundaries, spacings and distances between things, for non-connection or incongruence, such that the places where things happen matters, as do the boundaries and distributions of material that allow places to stand out as distinct. At bottom, there could not be sense in an isotropic universe that would not let things spread out differentially (a principle that echoes Darwin’s realization that geographical isolation and regions facilitate species differentiation). Here we start getting into ontological concepts that are hard to articulate because they challenge our deepest anthropocentric prejudices and the deepest commitments of the sceptical complex, namely, the need to find some ‘smallest possible’ unit of analysis (in some sense of ‘small’) that is already given and all at once with absolute certainty (such a unit would be self-contained as to its determinacy; classically it is the ‘atom’), in some sort of system where the relations of all parts can be simultaneously given as determinate (classically, this would be, for example, by way of laws that govern relations of the atomic units). What’s really at stake underneath these commitments is the view that something needs to already be fully and determinately given, in and of itself, if we are to grasp and explain things, otherwise there is no starting point or foundation from which our explanations can proceed. And what’s at stake behind this is the view that if anything is to be certain, then something must at some point already be given as certain. On the contrary, we are seeing that the condition of sense is a being that is not given as already all connected but rather operates as it does through a sort of operation of figuring itself out, connecting itself up, refiguring itself, through a distribution across places that is always already underway. This point that I making, which emphasizes a distribution that ruptures a would-be all-given simultaneity mirrors a point about time made by philosophers like Henri Bergson and scientists like Ilya Prigogine. They argue that time is real and makes a difference to being as ‘successive’. Time is not a dimension given in advance, but ‘figures itself out’ through duration. I am saying that a sort of distribution that ruptures being is real and makes a difference to being as ‘simultaneous’. Put otherwise, for Bergson, being is not really ‘successive’ because the notion of succession puts succeedents spatially alongside one another, as if succeedents are already lined up, ready to go. But I am saying being is not ‘simultaneous’ either: parts are not really simultaneously alongside one another, you have to get from one to the other through a distribution that is always already underway, that ruptures being, and that takes place across places. This is what’s at stake in speaking of being as ‘figuring itself out’ (in the sense of giving itself a figure—not of deliberate problem solving). Being and space do not have an already given figure, space is not a given figure, being is a ‘figuring out’, and only in virtue of that does being have a determinate endurance and distribution. Indeed, at this point we find a conceptual analogy between a developing organism and being itself: just as an organism develops in situ, via inherited dynamics already underway, we would have to think of being/the cosmos as distributing itself not through abstract laws, but through differences endogenous and unique to it as a historical phenomenon. The difference is that the organism’s development takes place in a larger environment and dynamic, whereas the coming-to-be of the cosmos takes place as a making place in the first place, and it is its own dynamic.

All this leads me to the difficult thought that if there is a sense in being, this is because being is a sort of non-coincidence, such that being is never purely identical or equal with itself, it is marked by a kind of difference that is nonetheless yet to be shown. Being thus always surpasses itself, but from within, not because of some already given ideal independent of being. This would almost say: being is sense; it is oriented by its own being as differing, or dislocated from itself. Earlier I said that the sceptical complex worries that its point of view, which is the locus of cognitive activity, might be dislocated from itself, from the safe-harbour of the cogito; the worry is that cognition might be embedded in a body or nature that would thereby taint, disrupt or subject thinking to doubt. Here I am led to the thought that perhaps the fundamental dynamic of being just is a sort of non-unitary dislocation that challenges any effort to find anything, let alone a point of view, that is what it is in some purely localized or unitary fashion. Being is itself embedded in something further, but that something further is its own dislocation. Put in terms closer to contemporary science, I could say: being is uncertainty itself. It is not positively given (not even as an already established probability pattern), but neither is it a purely negative ideal that could be grasped as pure information. Rather, as uncertainty, it does not coincide with itself in its givenness. And, as uncertainty, being itself would be the standard in virtue of which information, understood as determinate distributions of probability actualizations, becomes information. Information would thus not be abstract, but immanent in being. Being as uncertainty would thus be sense. I know these thoughts are hard to follow, but they might help us grasp how meaning is an institution older than human experience, such that experience and nature are not at odds.