C3. Spirit & Bone

Prior to this, Kant had already allowed osteology to productively constrain cognition by emphasizing the importance of the subjective incommensurability of Left and Right in anchoring spatial orientation.1 He used this observation to demonstrate that our specific sense of space is a ‘form of intuition’ (rather than any necessary or independently verifiable feature of reality separate from our sensing). Thus, Kant rallies incommensurability as an illustration in order to further his overall rationalist argument. However, such Left-Right ‘enantiomorphism’—the fact that each hand is a non-superimposable mirror image of the other (an ‘incongruous counterpart’)—derives from our chiral handedness, which is a direct consequence of our anciently inherited bilateral symmetry—that is, symmetry along a sagittal, i.e. spinal, plane.2 The fact that Kant looks to our hands in order to support his master-idea of ‘togetherness’ then suggests an even deeper connexion between spirit and bone. To fully grasp this, we need to explore Kantian togetherness.

Kant’s comparison of self-legislating reason to the globe’s antipodal self-enclosure captures, in an image, the fact that the very possibility of knowledge is secured by a kind of closure or infolding. It is only by generating its own limits—imposing its own rules upon itself—that knowledge becomes possible. For, as Kant argued, merely having a perception is not the same as being justified in believing one’s perception veracious. Talking of how the world ‘objectively is’ is therefore inseparable from some grasp of what is permissible and impermissible for me to say about it; and this distinction, in turn, cannot come from sensible passivity or brute perception (as Hume noticed, sensations license no rules); it can only come from actively electing to impose limits upon oneself. In other words, just as the sphere presents an unbounded surface and a finite and definite shape because of its enclosure of itself in three dimensions, so too is a bounded space of possible knowledge—rather than a boundless mess of unconnected sensations—made available only by the self-relation involved in setting oneself rules of conduct or permissible judgements (that are not to be found within perception itself, just as the boundedness of the sphere is not to be found merely by traversing its unbounded surface like a blind beetle). There is no objective experience that does not harbour a covert relation to the justification one has in believing said experience to be objective. (There is no knowledge without self-relation, no consciousness without self-consciousness, no sphere without antipodal closure.)

Cognition, that is, is constitutively governed by its own rules of organisation and regulation, which are sui generis in the sense of being self-defined and endogenous, or produced by the increasing tendency of a system to take only its own states as functionally efficacious or informative (in other words, collapsing into yourself is the same as the generation of spontaneous ‘criteria’ through which alone you can become conscious that your experiences can be wrong and, thus, become conscious of yourself as a conscious agent). It is a most fundamental lesson of Kantian purism: a rational actor, insofar as it is rational, can only respond to rational arguments. This is what Kant meant by ‘spontaneity’. Yet, at the same time, it is also true of a nervous system that it can only experience its own states or its own inputs. It is receptive, of course, but only in the ‘language’ of its own inputs. In the same way in which a model Kantian rational agent can only obey rational rules (i.e., those set by itself), there is a definite sense in which a nervous system only experiences itself. Both, in other words, are forms of enclosure. And they echo one other across the aeons. There is no such thing as an innocent metaphor, and we will draw our genealogical thread from this insight hidden in Kant’s selection of chirality and bipedality as illustrations of rationality.

From an aeonic perspective, the entrenched constraints of discursive initiation (glottogony) are revealed as only the most recent frontier of life’s infolding collapse into its own spontaneous parameter space—whether anatomized by rational rules or sensorial modalities. Both rules and senses are generators of endogeneity, thus allowing for the possibility of formal comparison. For it is only by coiling into further self-relation—in the sense of a system’s propensity to constrain functionally relevant states to ‘internal’ states—that an outer world, of increasing phenomenological immersion and categorial complexity, emerges.3 Orientation (upon a rolling planet as much as within a discursive exchange) is multilayered, historically variegated, and polymodal. ‘Immediacy’, wherever it is encountered, is a secondary product of the organism’s tendency to disappear up its own ganglia (and, later, its own glottis). So both cerebrospinal ensconcement and semantogenic englobement are legible as thresholds of an inward collapse that was initiated around six hundred million years ago with the evolution of nervous architectures.4 We, as representational systems, have never been in immediate contact with anything except our own modellings: this applies not just to propositionally structured knowledge but also to representational states in general, whether sentential or sentient.5 Hence worldedness proceeds not only from rational apertures but also nervous ones (where ‘aperture’ is just the constraining-through-closure requisite for a perspective), and we can generalize over vertebral and conceptual armatures: for finitude (as an implexion into system endogeneity identifiable across both neuronal and juridical forms of constraint) concordantly embeds its own prehistory. Morpho-space and conceptual space echo one another across the aeons. We have been collapsing inward since long before we began to rationally orient ourselves on this planet.