Organism and Environment: Inheritance and Subjectivity in the Life Sciences by Russell Winslow (review)

Russell Winslow has written a book that makes a serious contribution to both the philosophy of science—particularly the philosophy of biology and more particularly to "the contemporary metaphysics of biology"—and to hermeneutics and the intellectual history of the hermeneutical tradition. Winslow's is an ambitious and wide-ranging book, full of interesting facts and challenging arguments; to say I learned a lot from it would be an understatement.

The central theme of the book, as its subtitle makes clear, is the relationship between inheritance and subjectivity, especially the manner in which a certain attitude toward subjectivity (call it "humanist" if you want to be sympathetic; call it "anthropocentric" if you want to be critical) unduly prejudices our understanding the phenomena of life toward individuality. Winslow aims to show that insofar as contemporary biological theory pushes us to acknowledge the marginality not only of "humans" or "humans and other animals" or (even) "human, animals, and plants" as forms of life, a philosophical reconsideration of "biological inheritance" is long overdue. When we begin to question our prejudicial preference in favor of the individual plant, animal, or (especially) human, Winslow argues, we find that "there may not be such things as human subjectivities, animal subjectivities, or plant subjectivities without qualification, at least if we begin our interpretation of living organization with the model of the microbe."

The core reorientation required for such a shift—from (a) individual subjectivity based on the paradigm of each of ourselves, individually taken up as an organism completely accessible to consciousness to (a') microbial subjectivity based on the paradigm of what Winslow calls "ecologically constituted organisms"—is a turn away from the hegemony of "vertical inheritance" as the sole (or standard, or main) means of "evolutionary significant inheritance … from parent to offspring through reproduction" toward a picture of inheritance in which horizontal inheritance is both "evolutionarily significant" and "constitutive of our concept of the organism." Only when we thus attend to what Winslow calls "intersecting streams of inheritance" can we replace "the metaphysically present individual" that comes along with our traditional concept of subjectivity with a microbial subjectivity that emerges from and persists through "a concrescence of inheritances" both vertical and horizontal in composition. What, exactly, does this picture of mechanisms of inheritance mean for the philosophy of subjectivity and for the metaphysical analysis of the field of life science when attending to the microbial stratum? Winslow concludes that "the model of the biological individual … does not show itself as an impenetrable membrane bracketing off these streams of inheritance" (as it would and does in the traditional paradigm); rather, "it is a concrescence emerging as a consequence of their complex interactions."

So much for Winslow's fine-grained and meticulously sourced hermeneutical analysis of contemporary life sciences in parts 2 and 3 of the book, entitled "Ecological Inheritances" and "Microbial Inheritances." Winslow's central contribution to hermeneutics proper and the intellectual history of the hermeneutical tradition (found in part 1, "Theoretical Inheritances") rests in the challenge he presents for thinkers who react to Heidegger's "fundamental ontology," chiefly Gadamer and Foucault, in contrast with Husserl. For these thinkers, as for Winslow, do not aim to answer "the age-old question: what is a living thing?" but rather "to understand how these discourses of biology … are heralding a competing interpretation of the individual organism." The ontological question is thus inseparable from the question of interpretive tradition for Winslow, for "the interpretations of biological organisms are interpretations of texts," insofar as he accepts "Gadamer's arguments regarding the importance of prejudices in all understanding."

One can, and I would, quarrel with Winslow's response to the Heidegger/Cassirer debate that is in the background here. Winslow explicitly follows Gadamer and Foucault, who take up the best possible version of Heidegger's position in 1928, while I would advocate Husserl's position, developed in explicit opposition to Heidegger. Still, Winslow's central point with respect to...