Introduction

Human life occurs in daily living. This statement sounds obvious, and it is so. Yet, by saying it I want to emphasise that all our activities, regardless of whether they are homely, artistic, professional, or technical, are only particular cases of our daily living, and do not entail anything different from what we do in our home chores other than the special features of the relational and operational spaces in which they take place, or the different purposes, aims or desires under which we do what we do. This book is a reflection about how we do whatever we do, and about the history of how the various notions presented in it arose in the course of my daily living in the attempt of understanding how we see, how we hear, … and in general how we know what we claim to know.

I was an ordinary child with an ordinary living, and the only thing that perhaps was in some way peculiar in me was that I have conserved as features of my daily concerns certain questions that arose in me as a child. And as I conserved these questions I lived them as if they were aspects of my daily living that I wanted to answer with the elements of my daily living. This was not trivial. Somehow I was not interested in essences. I did not want to know how things were in themselves. I wanted to know how they happened. I loved to make my own toys, I loved to climb trees and to listen to the many sounds that the insects made. I loved insects, crabs, plants, animals in general, and I liked to collect the hard remains of their bodies, to see how they related to each other and to their manner of living.

I liked to move, to jump, to walk and to run, and in that way I knew my body as well as the different worlds in which I existed as they arose with my movements and live them in the pleasure of doing whatever I did. I felt that I was like the insects and the crabs that I liked to contemplate, and whose skeletons I liked to examine to see how they moved in relation to the way they lived. I lived in doing. I saw in doing. I thought in doings. This just happened to me. Yet as a child of my culture I lived at the same time in a world that happened around me and existed outside of me by itself.

This book reveals the history of a metaphysical change in my thinking, in my feelings and my way of understanding life and the worlds I live. This book does not contain the history of the reflections of a philosopher or the history of the doings of a scientist, it contains the history of some aspects of the experimental research and philosophical reflections of a biologist interested in understanding living, perception, and cognition as a feature of the continuous flow of the living of living systems in general, and of us human beings in particular. Therefore, although this book does not contain the history of a scientific quest, it tells of the history of the expansion of the understanding of life and of humanness that takes place when a biologist accepts as a matter of daily experience that all that living systems in general, and all that human beings in particular, do and experience takes place in the realisation of their living as living systems, and thinks that life, cognition, and consciousness are biological phenomena to be explained as such with the features of the coherences of living without additional assumptions.

Our present patriarchal-matriarchal culture is lived in an implicit, and sometimes explicit metaphysical view that entails accepting as a matter of course that existence occurs in a background of essences that exist independently of what we human beings do. I call this metaphysical attitude or fundamental reflective standing point of our patriarchal-matriarchal culture the metaphysics of the transcendental reality.

Our patriarchal-matriarchal culture is centred around the separation of what is apparent from what is essential under the spell of the question that asks for what is, for what is real, rather than for what do we do when we claim that something is the case. In this culture we live in the search of our essential being, our true self, in a quest that proves again and again impossible to fulfil because at the same time we accept a priori that that question does not have an answer in the domain of our daily living which is where in fact we do all that we do. And, as a result, we are forced to fall again and again either into total scepticism about our possibility of understanding ourselves as selfconscious languaging systems, or we are forced to fall in a sort of theological thinking to justify our biologically unexplainable existence as human beings.

This book shows how I abandoned the metaphysical attitude of our culture that takes for granted the existence of an independent reality as the transcendental background on which everything occurs, conscious that this attitude cannot be sustained because it has no operational support in daily life experience. As a result, instead of asking questions such as “What is life?”, or “What is cognition?”, or “What is consciousness?” in a way that takes for granted that the answer must arise searching for some support in an external reality in the way we develop our arguments, I began asking questions such as “How do we do what we do as we do whatever we do as human beings?” or “How do we know what we claim that we know?” or “How do we operate as observers making the distinctions that we make in any domain?” in a way that implied that I accepted that the answer that I would accept had to take place in the form of the actual operation of the living systems. And I did so explicitly accepting that all the concepts and notions that I was to use as I answered these questions had arisen derived from the coherences of my living as a living system without introducing any transcendental assumptions in the process. Indeed, to ask these questions as they are presented above entails abandoning de facto the implicit metaphysical attitude or a priori thinking of a culture that accepts the existence of a transcendental reality as the necessary fundament of all existence, and source of validation of all that we human beings do or can do. Moreover, the very act of asking questions like “How do we do what we do?” in the disposition of answering them as I do, implies accepting that one can answer these questions because they are asked in the domain in which the human beings do what they do as living systems.

A metaphysical attitude that accepts that the essence of being is transcendental entails an attitude that denies the body as the fundament of human knowledge, human understanding, and human consciousness, and gives rise to an epistemological view in which the body is seen as an interference and limitation in the path of true knowledge. At difference from this, a metaphysical attitude that does not arise from the a priori acceptance of the existence of a transcendental reality is not concerned with the essences, but instead accepts that all that a human being does arises through his or her body dynamics in the conservation of living in interactions with the medium that makes it possible. From such a metaphysical attitude the body and the body dynamics are recognised by the observer as the fundament of all that the human being does, and the observer asks the questions mentioned above under the general form of “How do we do what we do?” in the full acceptance that our existence as human beings occurs in our relational space in the realisation of our body dynamics. In fact, the implicit or explicit acceptance that we exist as human beings doing whatever we do in the continuous conservation of our human living through our body dynamics is the basic understanding that leads one to abandon the metaphysics of the transcendental reality adopting a new one that takes as starting point for any explanation or rational argument the acknowledgment that we are living systems and do all that we do in the realisation of our living. In this metaphysical view our biology is our condition of possibility. And as a matter of fact it cannot be otherwise since the observer disappears as his or her bodyhood is destroyed.

An example. The metaphysics of the transcendental reality

What is this? – A table. – How do you know that this is a table? – I know because I see it. – And how can you see it? – I can see it because it is there, and I have the ability to see what is there.

This argument stands on an a priori explanatory principle that says that something can be distinguished because it is independent of the observer and is independent of the observer because it is real. Moreover, this argumentation stands on the implicit acceptance that there is outside of me an independent reality that is the fundament for all I do, including the reasoning that validates this statement. In this metaphysical attitude a statement is universally valid in relation to what is independent of what the observer does.

A metaphysical attitude arises as a matter of course implicit in the cultural upbringing of a child as an unreflected background of legitimacy that is lived as the ultimate fundament that gives validity to whatever he or she may claim in that culture to be undoubtedly true as a matter of fact or rationally supported. That background is not reflected upon, and if a question arises about its validity such a question is usually answered taking as a fundament for the validity of the answer precisely...