Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

Kalevi Kull is part of a growing vanguard of biologists working on a new
view of life. The Estonian is among the founders of a movement called
“biosemiotics” — the theory of nature as a sphere of meaning and
experience. Biosemioticians view nature as a realm not only of cause and
effect but also of interpretation and signification. Biosemioticians
consider feeling and value to be the foundations of all life processes.
They start with the results of cutting-edge biological research while
recovering the nearly forgotten ideas of brilliant holistic thinkers of the
past. Biosemiotics is one of the most important tributaries feeding the
wide, robust river of holistic biology, which I will explore further in this
chapter. It seeks to consider both body and inner experience as
biological phenomena. It takes account of the paradoxical fact that while
organisms may consist of nothing but matter, they nonetheless exhibit
many surprising, unexpected qualities such as the experience of
subjectivity and inwardness, or self. Biosemiotics is the attempt to bring
these two poles together as two aspects of a unified reality. It aims to
overcome the split between “material” body and “felt” experience that
has for so long obstructed our understanding of our own lived reality.
A native Estonian, Kalevi Kull sees himself — with a dash of patriotic
pride — as the inheritor of a long tradition. The German-speaking areas
of Central and East Europe have long hosted a fertile and prominent
school of romantic biology. Its arguments concerning the philosophy of
organisms were in the forefront of scientific thinking for a while,
claiming the empirical and expressive modes of perception were linked.
This claim is personified in one of the first founders of a poetic natural
science, the writer and researcher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. An
eminent biologist following in Goethe’s tracks was Karl Ernst von Baer,
also teaching in Tartu (then called Dorpat), Estonia. And even the
Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant was somewhat under this
influence. Kant developed some groundbreaking ideas about organisms
in his later texts that still influence the holistic tradition in the life
sciences today. Kant even created the term “self-organization.” It is not
unreasonable to think that the vast, scarcely touched wilderness zones of
the northeast in some way furthered the development of these ideas.
Nature was a raw, powerful force; it was real — and beautiful. Some of
the most significant thinkers in holistic biology have come from this
untamed region, the area of modern-day Estonia, so it is fitting that this