Abstract
The dramatic advance of biological research in the past few decades has been proceeding on two very different fronts. The triumphs of biochemistry, in its detailed study of the nature and regulation of metabolic processes; the startling advances of molecular genetics, in particular DNA ‘code-cracking’; the revelation, through the electron microscope, of a whole new world of complex organization at the minutest level: in short, those fields of research designated by the package title ‘molecular biology’: these form one such ever-widening front of advancing knowledge. A little less conspicuously in the headlines, but as ingenious in its methods and certainly as significant in its philosophical implications, is the almost equally new and equally rapidly growing science of animal behavior, or ethology, which studies, not the minute component parts of animals, but their action patterns, whether as individuals or in groups.
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References
K. Z. Lorenz, in Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Behavior, Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology IV, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1950, p. 235.
A. Portmann, Animals as Social Beings (trans, by O. Coburn), Hutchinson, London, 1961, pp. 108–109.
A. Portmann, New Paths in Biology (trans, by A. Pomerans), Harper and Row, New York, 1964; Neue Wege der Biologie, R. Piper, Munich, 1960. The translation is inadequate at some crucial philosophical points, especially in the rendering of eigentlich and uneigentlich and also in the omission of some important passages.
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (ed. and trans, by S. Drake), Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1957, pp. 237–238.
Galileo Galilei, II Saggiatore VI, Edizione Nationals Florence, 1965, p. 232.
This thesis has been most clearly articulated and defended in Husserl’s late work. Husserl’s thesis is paralleled in Portmann’s own work in the distinction he makes between Welterleben and Weltwissen, between our primary experience of the world and the intellectual understanding of it we acquire through education, and in particular through science.
Discoveries, p. 272; II Saggiatore, pp. 347–348.
See A. Portmann, ‘Der biologische Beitrag zu einem neuen Bild des Menschen’, Eranos Jahrbuch XXVIII (1959), 459–492, especially 466–472.
T. Holtsmark, ‘Goethe and the Phenomenon of Color’, in The Anatomy of Knowledge (ed. by M. Grene ), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1968, pp. 47–71.
E. P. Land, ‘Color Vision and the Natural Image’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA XLV (1959), 115–129. 636–644;
The Retinex’, American Scientist LII, No. 2 (1964), 247–264;
Color in the Natural Image’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain XXXIX, No. 176 (1962), 1–15.
A. Portmann, ‘Gestaltung als Lebensvorgang’, Eranos Jahrbuch XXIX (1960), 359. I shall return to this point again in connection with Portmann’s account of the social life of animals.
A. Portmann, Animal Camouflage (trans, by A. Pomerans), University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959.
Neue Wege, p. 148.
See Animal Camouflage.
Trans, by H. Lucas (unpublished).
Quoted in Animals as Social Beings, pp. 182–183.
See H. Hediger, Wild Animals in Captivity, Dover, New York, 1964.
Neue Wege, p. 225.
N. Tinbergen, Social Behavior in Animals, Wiley, New York, 1953.
D. Lack, The Life of the Robin, H. F. and G. Witherby, London, 1946.
K. Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring (trans, by M. K. Wilson), Crowell, New York, 1952.
Animals as Social Beings, p. 26.
T. Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom, Columbia University Press, New York, 1956, p. 17.
See Neue Wege, p. 59.
Animals as Social Beings, p. 160.
Ibid., pp. 170–171.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 175–176.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 177.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Time in the Life of the Organism’ in Man and Time III, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1957, p. 312.
Ibid., p. 311.
Ibid., pp. 317–319.
Ibid., p. 320.
See especially A. Portmann, Zoologie und das neue Bild des Menschen, Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1956;
Die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur’, in Handbuch der Biologie, IX, No. 19, Hachfeld, Constance, 1961, p. 437–460;
Vom Ursprung des Menschen, Reinhardt, Basel, 1958. Cf. also A. Portmann, ‘Beyond Darwinism’, Commentary, XL (1965) 31–41.
See, for example, ‘Der biologische Beitrag’, pp. 459–492, ‘Welterleben und Weltwissen’, in Erziehung und Wirklichkeit, R. Oldenbourg, Munich, 1959.
Portmann has put this contrast sometimes as that of experiencing the world (Welterleben) and knowing the world (Weltwissen), sometimes as that of the Ptolemean and the Copernican in each of us. I have not been able to find two English phrases to carry smoothly the connotations of Welterleben and Weltwissen, and I am not quite happy about the other pair. As earth-bound creatures, tied to the history of our species and the traditions of our community, we may be said to be Ptolemeans; as free-ranging analytical intellects, to be Copernicans. And perhaps, since Kant, ‘Copernican revolution’ has indeed come to mean any basic change of perspective which reverses a more naive or natural point of view. Yet Copernicus himself was still so deeply imbued with neo-Pythagorean mysticism, and Ptolemy himself so sophisticated a mathematician, that I prefer to approach the contrast without using these particular names.
Discoveries, p. 238.
Nationalzeitung, Basel, February 16, 1964.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grene, M. (1974). The Characters of Living Things. In: The Understanding of Nature. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_16
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