Betweenness, the Illusory Self, and the Disruptive Subject: In Evolutionary Biology and Cognitive Science

This paper is to launch a discourse on subjectivity as betweenness illusorily presented as the self and to seek out its traces in science literature, especially in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. A hope between the lines of this text is most of all to bridge the religious and philosophical subjectivity to these scientific fields via betweenness discourse. Betweenness is argued to be a basic structure in which the self the sense of the “I,” is produced. Originally it derives from the transliteration of the Chinese character, 人間 (human betweenness). Betweenness does not refer to person or subject, but it is a condition under which subjectivity may arise.

Discourses in evolutionary biology contain this sense of betweenness-being between genes, organism and environment. Through the interaction of and between them, individuality arises. The ways to explain the emergence of the sense of the self out of the interaction would be different, but it is agreed that individual subjectivity comes out of the interaction. With regard to the subjectivity issue, cognitive science materials also show the sense of betweenness in its frameworks of the computationism (Pinker 1997) and the enactionism (Varela 1993) models. From the perspective of the enactionism, the interaction between genes and environment creates the sense of the “I.” All these say that betweenness is the condition for the emergence of subjectivity.