Beilage XIII: Normality and Animal Species

<Contents:> In advance: normal corporeality and normal psychic life, for each organ, for the entire corporeality and for each species; all observed in constitutive relation and later in transcendental. The problem of the transcendental necessity of an organic and psychic development-system.

Norm. A world is constituted as universe of possible spatio-temporal experience in relation to a corporeality. Already we have in relation to the various perceptual organs differences of presentation. The same thing-determinations present themselves in various "senses" in relation to the various organs. To normal corporeality belongs a system of possibilities of presentation, and these belong to the idea of an optimal mode of givenness or a possibly optimal system of modes of givenness, that pertains to a certain stage of truth.

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What remains of a normal world-experience in relation to normal corporeality? Constitutively we have originally the "intuitive world" in its possible transformations in correlation with transformations of corporeality: transformations which I come upon for the "world-view" in dependence on the altered species of physical animal-corporeality. We look around in the animal world in general and follow the analogy. We have a biological-physical normality, the biological individual, the physical-organic develops in normal fashion under the life conditions that are normal for it and its individual development. Bad conditions result in sickness. For an animal being in the psychic relation of the normal functioning of perceptual corporeality, there corresponds a normal "world-view," a normal constitutive system for a world.

To biophysical normality and anomaly there corresponds a constitutive factor, namely a system of constitutive world-experiences. On the biophysical side only the "perceptual corporeality" of course comes into consideration. In experience and the constitution of the world of experience belonging to it, this parallel biophysical and psychic development - here the constitution of the world-view - is given. We have thus the idea of a normality which is also intersubjectively dominant.

To this parallelism corresponds the constitution of the normal world-view, the system of possible normal perceptions, the biophysical optimum (in contrast with deviations), as health is so to speak the optimum. It lies in the line of organic teleology. What applies to the entire living being applies to single organs and systems of organs and to their normality and anomaly.

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The Apperception of "Animals" Already Presupposes My Own Apperception As I-Human-Being As Primal Apperception

Empathy is an apperception. In each apperception there is prescribed the origin of a sense-norm. Of course, once a determinate bestowal of sense has been accomplished in a single case, similar material of apprehension is grasped in a similar sense. ...

What now if I, as a human being, see an animal? At first a higher animal. That is like a human being, in a certain sense a deformed human being from a corporeal point of view, in some way anomalous: the hand lengthens and becomes a foot, the fingers become claws, etc. These "degenerations" can be intersubjectively understood. I can think to myself that not only external members appear differently, but also that parts and their sensorialities and functions are absent, that whole members are absent, that it is a mere head with trunk, but moving etc. "What I can understand, insofar as I can empathize, that is precisely determined through the ideal transformations of the primal type human being..

"My body in `inner experience,' in solipsistic experience,' is thus the primal apperception and provides the necessary norm. Everything else is a transformation of this norm.

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"A monad can only exist in so far as it develops, and a world-view can only exist as its developmental product. The true world as intuitively realized is only conceivable as something developed in the self-development of consciousness. True being is only an index for consciousness, and for every existent monadic consciousness an index for possible development, which however is not merely possible in imagination, but is really possible - a rule for development. Every consciousness necessarily has hyletic data. But if it came lawlessly, it would contradict a development of the world-view. Every consciousness must be provided with hyletic data in such a fashion that they must come and go, that the necessary development proceeds in the direction of an, even if at first rudimentary, world-view, and that every monad must accord with every other one. Every monad must thereby constitute a living body, and this body must be really [reell] given in the world-view of each one or be implicated in the horizon. Empirically expressed: every development is limited, bound to the organic type of the [relevant] corporeality. Is it only an empirical fact that every body only develops up to a certain extent (that of the mature animal), and could it not develop in infinitum so that it would be the experiential organ of a complete world-knowledge? Or is a transcendental necessity to be demonstrated instead that a world in general can only be constituted in unison with a development-system of animals and animal-monads, with a certain parallelism between psychic and bodily development (here proceeding according to the side of experience)? Does there not develop in this system in which always new animals and kinds of animals are `produced,' the world itself, although it contains a penetrating structure under the title of physical nature, which retains its unwavering lawfulness with its persisting being through all changes of its absolute elements? Or can physical nature also develop, but so that a complex of laws and a penetrating identity persists? What then should development be called? Do new laws appear which do not destroy the old? Do new elements appear? Or rather does there not appear always new organization in new typicalities, which must however fulfill transcendental conditions?

"`Our' world has its determinate structure. Subjectivity is objectively present in it in the form of animal and human subjectivity, in a system of propagation, incarnation, development in which always new monads objectivate themselves and thereby newly appear as psyches and disappear with age as psyches. And as the corporeality of the world is authentically a unique unity which is typically branching in infinitum and thereby repeatedly perishing in individuals and producing itself, so also are the parallel psychic monads. It appears as though in the propagation involving the physical germ, a psychic germ, a germinal monad branches out of the lower passive psychic underground, and in the development an individuality of its own, perhaps a higher personality, a rational individuality, is constituted.

"Thus all consciousness which stands in this world-nexus is - it appears - a unitarily connected consciousness (or better psychic life); it has ontogenetic and phylogenetic unity. But the question occurs as to whether that precisely is a correct and possible interpretation, whether out of a monad (Leibniz' concept already says that this is an impossible opinion) a `germ' branches off, instead of something branching off from its body, an organic germ, which as partial organism is itself an organism, [and] bears a psyche which in new conditions of development develops parallel with the organic germ in relation to its physical conditions.

"If one attempts then to regard the entire world as a universal organism, then one sees that this does not go and that the concept of organism here breaks down. This universal organism no longer has an outer world, physically it would no longer be a body developing under surrounding conditions; and psychically no I would be present any longer, which as animal could be actively related to an surrounding world in the animal-human sense.

"The existence of a common world for subjects presupposes the objective animal existence of subjects in the world, as reciprocally the coexistence of many subjects presupposes a common world for them, in which they are themselves animal. If now subjects of a world or subjects, which are present for one another and which coexist, must have in their world a living body, thus are animal in the widest sense, what necessarily prescribes this idea of animality and what allows it then to be grounded on the transcendental ground of the possibility of knowledge?

Could a world exist which in all eternity on empirical grounds lacked knowledge of itself? Would it be enough to say on transcendental grounds: if a world exists, it must be an organic world, in which the organisms are bearers of psyches? But the levels of organization can be as deep as you like and organization itself can be eternally present on the low levels, without at the same time anything like development existing; the organisms of our world contingently possess the basic properties of propagation, of ontogenesis and phylogenesis. The body signifies only a system of signification of the psychic, but that need not reach further etc. Must a body be a metabolic thing that maintains itself merely as typical individuality? Can one such individuality also not be nonoriginating and nonperishing (that is originating in the sense of an organic originating of a new individuality), although on the other hand one such organic individuality is always in origination and typical self-maintenance, enduring like a rainbow?

"However can not one deduce a priori in formal propositions as far as the in forma must reach? One might indeed think at first that a world might very well be possible which, and indeed in all eternity, contained only the lowest `animals,' and that these animals eternally continue, precisely if the world is accepted as eternal. But already that is a problem. Must consciousness, must spirituality last eternally, indeed eternally, if the world is eternal, if nature is eternal? In general here the time- and infinity-problems.

"I said: every subject is in development and its world is a development-product, and thus a developmental level must precede it before world experience. But hyletic data must already be present. If it were already present in infinity, then it would be present either without change or with change. If it were without change, then it could give no development of subjects, the subjects must thus sleep, be sleeping monads. If it were in change, then it would be either a chaotic change or a regulated one. Does that permit the insight that in the latter case a world must constitute itself and that then the world must have long been constituted, and in the other case that a world could no longer be constituted because the world includes the existence of everything spiritual as psychic in all the past, and a world with an infinite two-sided time is constituted and must be constituted?

"But all those are actually attempted beginnings. According to Leibniz, there are sleeping monads which, if I understand correctly, must not be bodily monads (?). He construes the world in intuitive possibilities, but it is no scientific attempt at a systematic eidetic, which alone could help us.

"One will not say that the existence of the world requires that in every time of its being human beings or even higher subjects of knowledge exist; already human beings with science are higher than human beings without science.

"But does not the possibility of a world, as intentionally construable, as identical surrounding world of possible experiences for its subjects, require a unity of the development-process of its subjectivity, which can never be lacking, whereupon the world has a beginning as development-beginning for its subjects, and then the entire typicality of organic and psychophysical development with always new individualities? But the beginning can itself be the death of an earlier development (world-period).

"Must the creative God put all possibilities to the test, and is this problem thus something like the constitution of the `true' world, for which the world-periods are the `appearances?' But now order must be brought into such transcendental thought processes! It must nevertheless be possible to posit fact and ideal possibility and necessity in a scientific relationship!"