NOTE-720: Weber & Varela — Life after Kant

Contribution

A philosophical essay, published after Varela’s death, that reads three lines as one. Kant’s account of organisms as natural purposes in the Critique of Judgement, read as non-reductive. Hans Jonas’s philosophy of the organism, built on metabolism. The autopoiesis theory of Maturana and Varela. The authors argue that the last two, developed independently, resolve the “unstable middle position” Kant left. Teleology in organisms is intrinsic and real, not an observer’s “as-if”, and it is “inevitably intertwined with the self-establishment of an identity which is the living process”. Nothing new is defined or measured. The autopoiesis definition is quoted from Varela (1997).

Key insight

A thing that makes itself has, by that fact, a purpose: to go on making itself. Self-production “is already and inevitably a self-affirmation that shows the organism as involved in the fundamental purpose of maintaining its identity”. The rest follows from that purpose. The organism’s own point of view, valence, meaning and the difference between environment and world are all relative to it.

Assumptions

• Kant read against the reductionist reading. The argument needs the KdU to hold “the possibility of a third way between a strong teleology and a brute materialism”, and Kant’s “subordination of the principle of mechanism under the principle of teleology” (KdU § 80) to be more than a maxim of inquiry. The authors admit that Kant’s stance “may depend on the chosen quotations”.
• Phenomenological evidence counts. Jonas’s inversion is accepted: “we have the evidence of our intrinsic teleology in us”, and “life can only be known by life”. The argument from our own case to the bacterium is an argument by analogy and is not defended as one.
• Metabolism is the defining quality of life (Jonas): “every living being has it, no nonliving being has it”.
• The scope is the cell. Autopoiesis is “explicitly formulated for the minimal living system, the cell”. Its extension to multicellular organisms goes through a “neural identity”, deferred to other work.

Key results

The paper has no theorems. These are its theses, in its order.

• Kant (§ 2).
  • Organisms are natural purposes: “A thing exists as a natural purpose if it is (though in a double sense) both cause and effect of itself” (KdU § 64). Every part is “an organ bringing forth the other parts”, and “an organized and self-organizing being can be called a natural purpose” (KdU § 65). The authors credit Kant with the first modern use of “self-organization”.
  • Kant’s interest is “intrinsic, and not relative purposiveness”, which is the authors’ distinction between internal purposes and Darwin’s “external seemingly purposeful design”.
  • Organism against artifact: artifacts “always point to an external purpose they are made or used for”, while organisms “are purposes with the goal of keeping existent by organizing themselves”.
  • Kant’s position is unstable: an “ontological reductionist, but an epistemological anti-reductionist”, a “transcendental agnosticist”.
• Jonas (§§ 3.1–3.2).
  • Teleology becomes real through “our wish to exist further on as a subject, not our imputation of purposes on objects”.
  • Metabolic identity: the organism “keeps its identity exactly by not keeping the same matter” (Jonas 1973). “Organisms are things whose existence is their own achievement” (Jonas 1992).
  • Four features of the living: exchange of matter from “a subject pole partially independent of the underlying matter”; precariousness and concern; a subjective perspective even in “the simplest forms of life”; the antinomies of freedom and necessity.
• Autopoiesis (§ 3.3).
  • Minimal autonomy is “a circular process of self-production where the cellular metabolism and the surface membrane it produces are the key terms”.
  • The definition (Varela 1997, p. 75): “a network of processes of production (synthesis and destruction) of components such that these components: 1. continuously regenerate the network that is producing them, and 2. constitute the system as a distinguishable unity in the domain in which they exist”.
  • “A multicellular organism … is not in itself an autopoietic unit of second order, since its organization does not follow the same self-contructing principles.” It “inherits its autonomous nature and sense-making qualities through the configuration of its neural identity”, which “cannot detain us here”.
  • What sets autopoiesis apart from dissipative structures and autocatalytic cycles is not a mechanism. It is that it gives “the origin of ‘concern’ based on its ongoing self-produced identity”. The authors grant that “One could envisage the circularity metabolism-membrane entirely from the outside”.
• Intrinsic teleology (§ 3.4).
  • Two modes: “a basic purpose in the maintenance of its own identity”, and “a sense-creation purpose” that introduces a difference between environment (“the physical impacts it receives”) and world (“how that environment is evaluated from the point of view established by maintaining an identity”).
  • Valence is “dual at its basis: attraction or rejection, approach or escape”. The sucrose example is quoted from Varela (1991).
  • Persistence is not the standard: Jonas, “If mere assurance of permanence were the point that mattered, life should not have started out in the first place. … Not duration as such, but ‘duration of what?’ is the question.”
  • “Subjectivity is the absolute interest the organism takes in his continued existence.”
• Conclusion (§ 4). The thesis is double. Only an organism taken as “self-producing individuality” yields a strong intrinsic teleology, and admitting biological individuality, “and hence the precariousness of the living”, commits one to it. Intrinsic teleology is “an empirical feature of an organism”, objective “not in an absolute sense, only insofar as an organism is a center that organizes matter into a living being and its Umwelt”. The “Newton of the grassblade” was not Darwin but “a historical convergence of philosophical and biological thinking”.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Kant’s KdU contains a non-reductive account of organisms as self-organizing natural purposes, not only an “as-if” teleology	moderate as exegesis	quotation from KdU §§ 64, 65, 77, 80 and the Opus Posthumum, in the authors’ translations; secondary literature (Löw, Spaemann and Löw, Lenoir, Zumbach)
C2	Jonas’s metabolism-based philosophy of the organism and autopoiesis converge	moderate as history of ideas	parallel quotation; no textual contact between them is shown, and Jonas was reluctant to accept the cybernetic version
C3	A self-producing system has an intrinsic purpose, the maintenance of its identity	asserted, not argued	”Bluntly stated”; the step from self-production to purpose is the paper’s premise as much as its conclusion
C4	Such a system thereby has a point of view, valence and a world, as distinct from an environment	weak	Jonas’s phenomenological inversion and Varela (1991); the analogy from human experience to the bacterium is not defended
C5	Intrinsic teleology is an empirical feature of organisms, objective relative to the organism	weak as an empirical claim	no observation or measure is proposed by which it could be found or missed
C6	A multicellular organism is not itself autopoietic; its autonomy is inherited through its neural identity	asserted, deferred	Maturana and Varela (1984) and Varela (1979, 1991), cited

Concepts

• Natural purpose (Naturzweck). A thing that is “both cause and effect of itself”, whose parts produce one another and the whole (KdU §§ 64–65).
• Intrinsic against relative purposiveness. Purposes immanent to the living thing, against the usefulness of things to one another (Kant’s “relative finality”, and Darwin’s apparent design).
• Teleonomy. The “as-if” teleology of modern biology (Pittendrigh, Nagel), which the paper sets out to replace.
• Autopoietic system. A network of production of components that regenerates itself and constitutes itself “as a distinguishable unity in the domain in which they exist” (Varela 1997). Stated for the cell.
• Concern (Sorge). The need of a precarious system “to avoid perishing”.
• Environment and world (Umwelt). The physical impacts on a system, and those impacts as evaluated from the point of view its self-maintenance sets up.
• Leibapriori. Apel’s “apriori of the lived body”, which the authors find in the late Kant.

Connections

• Di Paolo (2005; LIT-1017). Valence here follows from autopoiesis directly, “attraction or rejection”, with no further condition. A system that only maintains itself or fails has no grades of better and worse, and that is the gap the LIT says Di Paolo’s adaptivity fills. On this reading, the paper is the target of that correction. Di Paolo was read the same day in NOTE-719, and his account of this paper fits this reading; the two accounts are filed as rival THEORYs, THEORY-666 and THEORY-628.
• Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009; LIT-566, read in NOTE-458). Their individuality condition, and their use of Jonas’s identity “owned by, not loaned to its subject”, come from this tradition. They separate individuality from agency. Weber and Varela do not: self-production gives them sense-making and a world at once.
• Mossio et al. (LIT-570). The organizational account names the cost of closure that this paper does not count. A candle flame also maintains itself, and this paper sets autopoiesis apart from dissipative structures by “concern”, not by organisation.

Bearing on the record

For CLAIM-194: the paper gives “produced” a definition and no test. The LIT expected this to be “the account in which ‘produced’ is defined”. In a weak sense it is. The definition’s second clause says the components “constitute the system as a distinguishable unity”, and the cell’s “surface membrane” is one of the system’s products. That is the distinction CLAIM-194 draws between a membrane the cell makes and a beam joining two pendulums. The pendulums do not produce the beam, so they fail the clause. But four things limit what the counter can take from it.

• No operational criterion. The paper gives no way to find out whether a given boundary was produced. It applies the definition only to the cell, where production is known from biochemistry. It has nothing to set beside the gap test as a measurement, so it does not answer the counter’s own “What would answer it” and does not reduce THEORY-072’s unmet promote_when.
• The scope is narrower than the counter needs. “A multicellular organism … is not in itself an autopoietic unit of second order”. CLAIM-194 is about combined forms: pairs, groups, firms (CLAIM-157, CLAIM-174). If even an animal does not produce its own boundary in the autopoietic sense, a dancing couple does not. Strictly read, the produced/imposed distinction from this source would rule out every combined form the record cares about. Their individuality would have to come from the “neural identity” the paper defers. So the counter is stronger with this source than CLAIM-194 states: on autopoiesis, no combined form has a produced boundary. But the source does not help anyone say which combined forms come close.
• The difference is placed in the point of view, not in the dynamics. The authors grant that the metabolism–membrane circle can be described “entirely from the outside”. What they say autopoiesis adds over dissipative structures and autocatalytic cycles is “the instauration of a point of view” and “concern”. That is a phenomenological claim, and the paper offers no observable that would carry it. THEORY-071 asks for the system to distinguish itself “and an observer does not do it for the system”. This paper supports the idea and offers no measure of it.
• Not the fiat/bona fide distinction. Smith and Varzi (LIT-1024) sort boundaries by whether they track a physical discontinuity. Here the test is who made the boundary. A beam’s surface would, on the LIT’s description, be bona fide in the first sense, and it is imposed in the second. The LIT’s caution that the two differ is right.

What the counter can cite from this paper is the definition and the membrane example. It should not cite it for a criterion that would decide a case.

For CLAIM-075: value for the organism, and one step past it. Most of the paper stays on the side CLAIM-075 permits. Value is value for the organism: “Only that which influences the steady state of the organisms is real” for it, and teleology is objective “only insofar as an organism is a center that organizes matter into a living being and its Umwelt”. The Jonas passage the paper quotes on survival also refuses to make persistence the standard: “Not duration as such, but ‘duration of what?’ is the question”. That is close to CLAIM-075’s own point, that viability does not settle what ought to persist.

But in § 3.1 the paper goes further, and in the direction CLAIM-075 disclaims. The “Yes!” to continued existence is “the mother-value of all values”. The argument “parallels the central figure of Apel’s ‘transcendental pragmatics’ as well as the ethic of Habermas”. And “Our teleological reality cannot be denied without equally denying our own status as sentient beings who have a right to the pursuit of an undisturbed life.” This is the inference from self-maintenance to a moral claim. It is made in one paragraph, by a transcendental argument that runs from our own case, and its development is left to Hösle (note 14). It is not argued, so it does not threaten CLAIM-075. But it shows that this tradition does make the step CLAIM-075 refuses, and a citation of the paper as a source only of norms for the system would be incomplete.

The paper’s teleology is also limited to living things. It has nothing to say about an institution’s viability, which is CLAIM-075’s example.

Nothing here is a machine-learning instruction. No anthology topic holds it.

Limitations

• An essay of exegesis and convergence. There is no model and no case, and the authors’ own term for the conclusion is “immodest”.
• The step from self-production to purpose is asserted (“Bluntly stated”). The step from purpose to subjectivity is Jonas’s phenomenological argument, accepted rather than examined.
• All Kant and Jonas quotations are the authors’ translations. The authors say published translations “are not always in accordance with the author’s views”.
• The extension to multicellular organisms and to nervous systems is deferred to other works.
• The relation of autopoiesis to dissipative structures is settled by “concern”, not by organisation. The paper does not address the candle flame, which LIT-570 and THEORY-072 make central.
• Varela died in 2001, before publication. The paper does not say how the writing was divided.

Open questions

• What observable would tell a produced boundary from an imposed one in a system whose biochemistry is not known in advance? A protocell model in which the membrane can be made by the network or supplied from outside, analysed with and without the supply, would test it.
• Does any combined form of more than one organism meet the second clause of the definition? The paper’s answer for the multicellular organism is no, and it gives no account of what replaces it.
• Can the “point of view” said to come with self-production be found in the dynamics, or is it only attributed? Without that, intrinsic teleology as “an empirical feature” has no evidence that could fail.