Abstract
Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a holistic, ongoing, meaningful and Umwelt-oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence.
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Notes
Of the many relationships between living beings, I limit my focus to animal groups as defined. I do not examine incidental groupings of individuals of different species. I do not examine either more stable symbiotic relations, such as groups of local species that use the same resource, such as the “rodents, birds, and ants feeding on the seeds of desert plants” (Findley 1993, 1), or cohesive symbiotic systems, such as the collection of bacteria and other living species that may coexist in a human being. I acknowledge that an inquiry about sociality stands to gain a lot from a reflection on botanic sociality, which I do not address here.
To be clear, my thesis is not that animal groups are the most basic unit of existence in the natural world and that individual organisms are not. This clarification allows me to acknowledge a terminological similarity with the discussion on “biological individuality” in theoretical biology. That discussion seeks to determine what is the most basic unit of existence in the natural world. It looks for facts of the matter in biological terms—categories like genetics, taxonomy, biochemistry, or physiology; or categories like permanence, reproducibility, being the object of selection, etc.—, and requires the use of methodological tools proper to the biological sciences. From that point of view, it would be somewhat confusing to say that this paper navigates the tension between individuality and sociality, because the possibilities for what could count as an individual include the cell, the gene, the organism, animal groups, or functionally cohesive symbiotic systems (like the system of animal organism plus bacteria, and other living species, in a human being), among others. In this debate, individuality itself is the category to be adjudicated, since both animal groups and individual organisms are a possible answer to the question of the living individual.
My discussion does not look for the basic unit of life or the living. My discussion is, in contrast, a conceptual one about the ontological status of animal groups, and it focuses on the concept of behavior. For the terminological issue, suffice it to note that in my working definitions I have used “individuality” as the term that designates individual organisms.
To say that my answer is conceptual does not mean that it is unhinged from empirical reality. In fact, the phenomenological argument from behavior and the application of the concept of behavior to animal groups show that the my argument has enough traction in reality. My argument does not necessarily mean that behavior is separate or transcendent from empirical facts. I leave it to the biologist, the zoologist, and the ethologist the task of supplying, if possible, correlates of what, within the observable repertoire of the science, constitutes the concrete referent of the notion of behavior I will propose. For a good survey of issues related to groups and individuals in theoretical biology, see the collection “From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality” (Bouchard and Huneman 2013). Articles by Godfrey-Smith, Goodnight, Clarke and Okasha, Hamilton and Fewell, Haber, Turner, and Bouchard, offer detailed treatment into different aspects of the issues associated with the problem of biological individuality, in relation to organisms and in relation to groups and collectives.
See, for instance: “All individuals in a school [of fish] [are] considered to be identical in every aspect of morphology and behavior […] A set of identical individuals all contributing to the well-being of the group led to a group selectionist paradigm” (Hamner and Parrish 1997, 166).
See, for instance: “Assuming that selfish individuals are the currency of selection, and individuals […] are not necessarily, even usually, related to each other or even faithful to the group [...] membership must be individually advantageous because it exists” (Hamner and Parrish 1997, 166, emphasis mine).
Additional doubts may be cast when the behavior does not have (or does not seem to have) a clear purpose for the supposed superorganism, as in the case of animal social play. Social play has often been defined as purposeless or functionless. At the very least, it is unclear what the function of it would be for individual organisms, for the groups engaged in social play, or for larger groups to which animals may belong. See Fagen (1981, 42–67, 500–504), Heinrich and Smolker (1998, 27), and Bekoff and Allen (1998, 99).
A variation of the selfish individual alternative is that, since the evolutionary paradigm focuses not on the life of specific living beings or groups of living beings, but on the transhistorical evolution of genetic material, we should rather talk about the selfish gene(s). In this variation, there is not even a question about living beings, whether organisms or groups. This article, however, is concerned with reality at the level of living beings. Ontologically speaking, the existence of concrete animals and groups of animals has a reality that warrants them the character of explanandum. For a similar line of thought in theoretical biology, see Varela (2000) and Maturana and Varela (1984).
I am not talking here about one’s experience of one’s own life: this is not a question of self-consciousness.
There are references to related problems in the Phenomenology of Perception, mostly in an indirect way, as well as in other smaller works such as the collection The World of Perception (2008), particularly the lecture entitled Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life (2008, 67–77).
This inner causality, however, seems at times to be merely a disguised teleological account, working retrospectively, as in the case of the existentialist position. It is as if idealism creeps in the realist spirit of these reflections.
Vitalism is an objectivistic position. Despite initial appearances, vitalism’s objectivist nature can be seen in the fact that it issues from the ontology of the object, that is, it depends on conceiving living beings as having an independent existence. The fact that the specific power of life cannot be explained more than simply named does not entail that it is not ontologically conceived as objectively existing. Illustrating vitalism with the case of the swimming axolotl, Merleau-Ponty says that vitalism supposes that inside the axolotl there is “an entelechy,” some “hidden qualities, […] a swimming power”—all of which evince an independent pre-formation, which, as Merleau-Ponty notes, would be contradicted by embryological development (2003, 152).
In the second set of lectures (1957–1958), Merleau-Ponty draws from a number of his contemporaries that were exploring diverse topics, among them: Coghill (and the relation between motility and development), Gessell (and the notion of form in the organic), Michotte (and the perception of causality in the living), von Uexküll (importantly but not exclusively, the relation between organism and Umwelt, and the perceptual and actional dimensions of behavior), E.S. Russell (and the relations between internal regulation in the organism and outward behavior), Hardouin (and the phenomenon of mimetism), Portmann (and the relation inner-outer), and Konrad Lorenz (and the notion of instinct). See the section on animality in the second course (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 139–199).
Although Merleau-Ponty did not witness the raise of genetic studies, it is reasonable to assume that he would have shared similar suspicions about this type of reductionism, since it shares in the ontology of mechanism.
My argument does not depend on whether or not such definition is Merleau-Ponty’s—whether he actually offered it, or whether it is compatible with all his analyses on the topic, or whether Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy itself can be considered a unity that would support or not support my argument. A full exegesis of Merleau-Ponty’s texts in this respect may be an important analysis that I cannot offer here and that falls outside of the scope of my article.
At the basis of the Merkwelt-Wirkwelt distinction lies the more general figure-background phenomenon, which is central to Gestalt psychology and to the way Merleau-Ponty appropriates it for the purposes of construing his phenomenology. The basic idea is that the world of perception is revealed in what is perceived and not in the characteristics of the real world. As the term Gestalt suggests, the central category is that of form or figure. An analysis of form shows that understanding form (and this Merleau-Ponty extends even to the construction of external stimuli) requires the pair figure-background. This perspective puts perception in a holistic context, and makes every perception dependent not on atomic qualities of the perceived object, but rather on the contrast between what is perceived and the perceptual field on which, and from which, the specific object gains significance.
See Toadvine (2007) for a detailed analysis of the use of the melody metaphor in Merleau-Ponty.
See also Sheets-Johnstone (2007, 328–334) for a discussion of other ways in which philosophers may be operating with preconceived categories and dramatically ignoring discussions in biological and evolutionary sciences.
A widely accepted definition of play is the following: “all motor activity performed postnatally that appears purposeless, in which motor patterns from other contexts may often be used in modified form or altered sequencing” (Bekoff and Byers 1981, 300–301). See also Appendix 1 of Fagen’s Animal Play Behavior for a compilation of representative definitions of play (1981, 500–504). Other than social play, other types of animal play are solitary object play, locomotor play, or vocal play. In object play, an animal interacts with an object, moving it around, throwing it, etc. (Burghardt 1998, 7–12; Heinrich and Smolker 1998, 32–33). In locomotor play, an animal spontaneously, and seemingly without a purpose, moves around running, swimming (turtle), hanging (ravens), cavorting (foal), soaring (hawk), or leaping out of the water (fish), etc. (Burghardt 1998, 12; Burghardt 2005, 84–85; Heinrich and Smolker 1998, 36–37). In vocal play, an animal (e.g., a singing passerine) would emit, seemingly purposelesly, sounds or short melodies different from serious adult songs (Heinrich and Smolker 1998, 40–41).
While it is reasonable to infer that the proposed definition of behavior extends to some symbiotic relations that include botanical or bacterium species, among others, I do not offer that explicit connection. Ultimately, I think there is room to conceive of other ontological relational and inter-relational dimensions, like an interanimality, or a pan-inter-coporeality that would extend to non-animal living beings, or to a life-sustaining domain that would cover not only the living but also the whole that makes life possible. See also Sussmann (1999, 27–8).
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Arango, A. Animal groups and social ontology: an argument from the phenomenology of behavior. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 403–422 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9430-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9430-2