Deconstructing cosmos as autopoeitic system

Re: Derrida, Death and Forgiveness by Andrew J. McKenna
by Debashish on Mon 13 Nov 2006 12:35 AM PST Profile Permanent Link

I am reflecting further on the openness/closedness of cosmos in the context of your remark:

"...autopoiesis speaks to me of individual authenticity and if we conjures with Heidegger who often rambles around the issue of openness/authenticity and calls authenticity openness to B/being and the holism of the present moment, (GB) The relationship of beingness to Being, and opening of the spatio-/temporal horizon to the coming of the Other could also be taken as a feature of autopoiesis.

"Although autopoiesis as defining system closure does not lend itself easily to this view, it is however a bit more complex because albeit autopoiesis is self-referential and defines the boundaries of organism it also enables coupling with its environment through self-mirroring (self-reference). It does this by internally tinkering with its own structure which allows it to make adjustments to ever increasing environmental demands. But it is paradoxically through the process of maintaining their differences (self-closure) that both organism and environment cohere in co-evolutionary relationship. Both organism and environment (order and chaos, deva and asura) cohere in this relationship through languaging and so are both enfolded in a “larger” shared semantic space of Worlding. So to the extent the Other and the autopoietic system, while maintaining individual authenticity, remain open to each other through languaging, they emerge together in the holism of the present moment. "

Apart from the challenge to closure offered by the radical freedom of the inidividual, there is the problem of whether we are to consider the cosmos as finite or infinite in its being. By cosmos I am referring to whatever is manifest in its objectivity and whatever is available to forms of manifested subjectivity as experience. In our normal human condition, our experience is one of Avidya (Ignorance) as a multiplicity without unity. At the heights of cosmic experience (Overmind), we may experience unity in being with the cosmos or unity in consciousness with cosmic force, but the two are not united. This is the fundamental separativity of cosmos. Beyond this, there is the Supermind but this is not manifest here (or was not until 1956, if we are to take the Mother's words on faith) - the concealment of Being from which it may disclose itself unpredictably or which may respond to aspiration within cosmos and disclose new powers of itself there. The fundamental disunity in Overmind is one between opposite formulations of the One, for example, cosmic Purusha and Prakriti, as I wrote of in my response to Rakesh. Here is Sri Aurobindo on this:

"Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness." (The Life Divine: "Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya")

Thus, there seems to be a boundedness to cosmic experience. Somewhere Sri Aurobindo speaks of cosmos as a bounded infinity. One may conceive of this as an evolving Ignorance, which has a ceiling at any point, but can keep growing in content of knowledge, without ever passing into the Knowledge (Vidya). Even astrophysically, this is the characterisation of the cosmos, since its expanding limits are seen to have an envelope. At the same time, Sri Aurobindo speaks of Being as radical and fundamental infinity. The experience of cosmos as this would propel us into a supramental manifestation. But even here, the "difference" between Overmind and Supermind, though practical to our experience, is not a hard line (or even a thin line) to Supermind's own experience (which rekindles the "under erasure" injunction of these dinstinctions). Sri Aurobindo's description of the dividing line between Overmind and Supermind reads somewhat like Derrida's indeterminacy of the "hymen" (the membrane that is an inside and an outside at once) or "fold":

"...Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light."

Thus this bounded cosmos is also at once unbounded, translucently open to the mystery of Being.

Phenomenologically speaking (which is how this discussion began and continues through your reference to Heidegger's authenticity as an openness to Being as the Other), I think we have ended up deconstructing cosmos as autopoeitic system as bounded/unbounded or a system of vidya/avidya. In any case, we come back to the requirement for openness to the Other, the radically Unthought because Unthinkable. In Heidegger this is Being in its double status of disclosure and concealment. It is That which discloses itself as it chooses in Time and we partake of its disclosure as the ontology of our Age - what Hegel called the Zeitgeist, but whereas Hegel's Zeitgeist is Consciousness as the Reason of God proceeding in a predictable linearity, the phenomenological Zeitgeist is unpredictable though not unrelated to its constituents (human will) who through their openness to the Other (Unmanifest) call forth its disclosures.

It is this that Foucault calls by the name of "episteme" - the specific way of knowing that characterizes an Age and changes unpredicatbly from Age to Age. To "think" (intuit) the dimensions of disclosure of Being in an Age opens us to our own limits as ontic beings and orients us to a future which is the hope of an intervention in Time of a new disclosure of Being, one which overcomes the insufficiencies of the past. Critical enquiry is the method of this thinking of limits which takes us to the edge and gives us a voice (without content, what we may call an "aspiration") to call the Other. Heidegger's entire life (including its "errors") was such a thinking of limits, which is why he could say in his last interview with Der Spiegel in 1966:

"Only a god can still save us." ("...If I may answer quickly and perhaps somewhat vehemently, but from long reflection: Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline..." - Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview, 1966).

It is this preparation of the aspiration by "thinking" the limits or margins of our historicality and waiting there in readiness for the coming (or not) of the avatar that Derrida also refers to as l'avenir: "the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to see their arrival." This is the relationship of human and Being (both infinite) in Time, a relationship which you have rightly characterized as a "co-evolutionary relationship." DB