Surrogates

HUMANIZED ORGANISMS AND THEIR SURROGATES

4. HUMANIZED ORGANISMS AND THEIR SURROGATES In the preceding chapter, account was taken of surrogates used by persons ; an earlier chapter dealt with those in the humanized world, on which pragmatism focuses. Since humans also have organisms, no study of surrogates relevant to humans could be complete unless account were taken of the surrogates that human organisms use, as well as of the surrogates that the organisms provide. Also, since humans also have lived bodies and persons, subhumans are not able to use all the surrogates that humans can; they could benefit only from some of these, and then only to a limited degree. Humans and subhumans differ not only in degree, but in kind. There is no evidence that subhumans are able to imagine, speculate, create, or be responsible, though some of them on some occasions are held accountable for what they do. The organisms of humans differ from those owned and used by subhumans in no fewer than three ways: only the first are related to persons by means of lived bodies; only the first are owned and used by singulars at the same time that the persons and lived bodies are, though in different and often independent ways; only the first are owned and used by humans. We express ourselves in and through our organisms. As singulars, we own all three and can act on and through all of them at the same time, while focusing on what is organically undergone, and while attending to what is in one of them, or replacing this with what is in one of the others. Sometimes we slip from a satisfying involvement to the acceptance of some one of the others. Experience, habits, and memory may be rejected or neglected to make possible an acceptance of the presence and possible desirability of what is not within our reach. The problem, which has proved recalcitrant to the ingenuity and surmises of epistemologists, is solved every day, not only by our persons and lived bodies, but by our organisms as well. Each of us uses surrogates not only in the person or lived body, but in the organism as well, to replace what is focused on in that or another part of itself or in either of the others . Like the rest of us, epistemologists breathe, are hungry and thirsty sometimes, occasionally feel pains, and are bigger and usually stronger than they were as newborn infants. None really believes that everything else is just postulated, supposed, imagined to exist somewhere else. How odd it is to hear someone speak to others at professional meetings, and say that he is trapped inside his mind but has ways of distinguishing some of the occurrences there as having counterparts outside that mind. Nothing in the mind, no matter how splendid and purified, tells us what is outside it, unless it has two sides and can, on one side, present to its user what it is able to obtain from the other side. Perceptions are not in the mind awaiting projections into nowhere presumably by no one. Elicited by impingements on the body, they terminate, not at the sources of these, but at appearances of those bodies. The rational antecedents of present beings are copresent with them; what is perceived and the perceiver are copresent. It takes time, though, for something to make itself appear, and it takes time for other beings rationally related to that antecedent to be able to express themselves as perceivers of the appearances. The time it takes for something to be perceived is not spent in connecting this and the perceiver. No one is ever able to look back in time. Instead, one perceives what is a contemporary appearance in the present. The appearance and the perceiver coexist, but it takes time for both to be produced, the former as expressions of the being that appears, the latter as a result of stimulations to which a present being is subject. Don’t epistemologists, who speak of being able to deal only with what is in their minds, ever drink a glass of water? Don’t they ever know that they do? If all that they could know is what is in their minds, how and why did the question of knowing what is outside their minds ever arise? What is perceived is co-present with the perceiver of it; the one is an appearance, the other is an expression of a being that has been stimulated to express itself as a...