The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon argued, in Incomplete Nature (2011), that purpose, meaning and value are real features of the living world, neither illusions to be explained away nor a mind smuggled in from outside, and that they emerge from ordinary physics and chemistry when processes come to constrain one another in the right way. Central to his account is the idea that what is absent, a goal not yet reached or a possibility ruled out, can shape what happens. Purpose is indeed real throughout nature, and it is there from the start, in the Soul of every thing.
Who is Terrence Deacon? #
An American biological anthropologist, born in 1950, who is Professor of Anthropology and a member of the cognitive science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. His first major book, The Symbolic Species (1997), argued that language and the human brain evolved together, with language as something like a parasite and the brain as its host, each adapting to the other. His second, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011), takes on a larger question: how anything in nature comes to be about something, or for something, at all. It is this second book that sets out his account of purpose.1
What problem was Deacon trying to solve? #
How to fit purpose into a scientific picture of the world. Living things act for the sake of things. A root grows towards water, a wound heals, an animal seeks food, and a person hopes, means and values. Deacon gathered all of these, purpose, function, meaning, value and the rest, under one invented word, ‘ententional’ phenomena.2 Modern science has tended to deal with them in one of two ways. Either they are explained away, as nothing but the movement of molecules, or they are quietly assumed, as if a little mind were already inside the system doing the purposing. The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who draws heavily on Deacon’s work, notes Deacon’s warning against this second habit, the ‘homunculus fallacy’ of picturing a self as a little person inside us.3 Deacon wanted a third way: to show how purpose could arise from physics and chemistry without being either denied or presupposed.2
How can something that is absent make a difference? #
Through constraint. Deacon’s starting image comes from the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: the hole at the hub of a wheel is nothing, yet it is what makes the wheel useful. Deacon calls this kind of shaped nothingness a ‘constitutive absence’, and holds that it is found throughout biology and in any kind of self, not only in human tools.4 A purpose is an absence of this kind, a state of affairs that does not exist yet and that organises what the living thing does now. Kohn gives an example from evolution. An anteater’s snout fits the shape of ant tunnelsTunnel. The descent at the start of a journey. Still middle-world territory, all the way down: the Lower-World begins only where you emerge. More about this because the lineages whose snouts fitted less well did not survive; what is missing, all the other possibilities, has shaped what is there.4
How does purpose emerge, on Deacon’s account? #
In three nested steps. At the bottom are ordinary physical processes, which run down towards disorder, as heat spreads through a room; Deacon calls these homeodynamic. Under the right conditions, with energy flowing through, some of these processes organise themselves into regular forms: a whirlpool, a snowflake, the rolling cells that appear in a liquid heated from below. Deacon calls these morphodynamic, self-organising but also self-undermining, since they use up the conditions that make them and soon vanish.5 Such forms, in Kohn’s summary of Deacon, are not alive, and despite the name ‘self-organising’, they involve no self.6
The third step is where purpose begins. When two self-organising processes are coupled so that each preserves the conditions the other needs, the whole becomes able to keep itself going, repair itself and reproduce. Deacon calls this teleodynamic, from the Greek telos, end or goal. His model is the ‘autogen’, a simple chemical system in which one cycle of reactions makes a shell that encloses and protects the other, offered as an illustration of the kind of partnership early life may have involved, not as the first living thing itself.5 At this threshold, he argued, function and purpose appear in nature for the first time, and natural selection then works on these self-preserving tendencies, moulding them over time.5 Each level depends on the ones beneath it and is never cut off from them.6
Who has taken up Deacon’s ideas? #
Among others, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, in How Forests Think (2013). Kohn builds his account of a forest full of living selves, all reading and interpreting signs, on Deacon’s application of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs to biology, and on his idea of emergence.7 Kohn’s forest is full of selves because, following Deacon, he treats life itself as a matter of signs and their interpretation, not only human language. See Who is Eduardo Kohn, and how do forests think?
What do critics say? #
The sharpest objection is to the idea of absence as a cause. Reviewing Incomplete Nature in The New York Review of Books in 2012, the philosopher Colin McGinn objected that “the nonexistent cannot cause something existent to happen”, and that, however the story is told, “nothing can literally emerge from nothing, and nothing does”. He also found the book’s account of consciousness unpersuasive.8
Deacon replied in a letter to the same paper later that year that the review “distorts, caricatures, and largely ignores nearly 80 percent of the book”, fixing on a nontechnical use of ‘absence’ from its first chapters and missing the fundamental distinction he draws between merely self-organising processes, such as whirlpools and snow crystals, and teleodynamic, end-directed processes, such as those of life.9
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In taking purpose seriously. Much of modern thought treats striving and meaning in nature as illusions, things humans read into a world of blind mechanism. Deacon refuses that. All beings have a template, like a seed within them, a blueprint of what they could become, and all beings, deep down, have a drive to grow into it, the drive the psychologist Carl Rogers called the actualising tendencyActualising tendency. Carl Rogers’s term for the drive in every living thing to grow into the best version of what it is meant to be. In animist terms, this is the drive of the Lower-World Soul. More about this.10 In the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, a thing’s Soul is what it was born to be, its truest nature, and is both the blueprint for how it could appear in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and the drive to try to become that thing.11 So purpose here is not a late human addition to the world but woven through it. See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
Whether a being grows into what it is meant to be depends not only on that drive but on the environment around it. A seed given the right conditions grows into a healthy plant, and one without enough light grows sickly, still trying to be the best it can be.10
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In where purpose comes from and where it reaches. For Deacon, purpose emerges from the bottom up, at a threshold, out of processes that have none; a whirlpool or a crystal is organised but has no self. Things are as they are because of the Stories Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this tells them to be, and everything is part of her body being told a Story.12 Purpose does not appear partway up; it is there in the Soul of every thing from the start.
And it reaches further down. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, in ways very different from ours.13 The Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer are alive and conscious, simply so different from us that most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all,14 and they are the eldest of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, from whom, billions of years later, Plant and then Animal came.15 Where Deacon draws the line of self and purpose at the first self-maintaining chemistry, there is no such line. See What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring?
