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The Mystery of Reproduction and the Limits of Automatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Raymond Ruyer
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Extract

Samuel Butler sees the nightshirts of the master and the lady of the house drying on the line in the garden next door. The following year he notices that a small baby's shirt has been added. As a superficial onlooker he could be led to believe that the two large shirts have engendered the small one. We make a somewhat similar mistake, says Butler, in believing that the bodies of the parents have made the baby. The body of the baby has no more been made by the two grown babies, on whose pattern it is modeled, than the small shirt has been made by the two large ones… What makes the small shirt as well as the baby is something we know absolutely nothing about. In any case, it is always risky to “place” the organic lines of continuity or of “genidentity.” One risks taking the resulting and secondary forms for the constituent reality itself, the machines for the machinists, especially within the organism, where the machines and machinists are intimately bound together.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 12 , Issue 48 , December 1964 , pp. 53 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Samuel Butler, Note-Books (London, 1912).

2 S. Butler, Ibid.

3 Von Neumann, The Hixon Symposium (New York, 1951).

4 A. Abbott, Flatland (Doves).

5 Cf. J. S. Wilkie, The Science of Mind and Brain, p. 27 and 133.

6 Cf. Encyclopédie française, under Philosophy, Religion, R. Ruyer, "Science and Savoir philosophique."

7 Which, according to Reichenbach, is not moreover logically contradictory (The Direction of Time, p. 37).

8 Cf. Zazzo, Les jumeaux, II.

9 Certain problems are posed, more generally, by the possible, and even actual, progress of surgery. (Cf. A. David, Structure de la personne humaine, P.U.F.).

10 Cf. Frey-Wyssling, Submicroscopic Morphology, p. 130.

11 As N. Wiener suggests.

12 A colony of unicellular organisms, such as the Dictiostallium, travels like a unicellular organism (cf. Bonner). R. Ruyer, La genèse des formes vivantes (Flammarion).

13 This is a resumé of a chapter in our work, L'animal, L'homme et la fonc tion symbolique (Gallimard, 1964).