C6. Fearful Symmetry

The fact that all representation requires mediation (that there is nothing simply ‘given’, either in conceptual graspings or in neural activations) means that the more complex our world-model becomes, the more we must fold into our own systems. Yet for the living, each gyre of life’s egress into its own parameter space is experienced as a painful departure from immersion.

Chronognostic range and nociceptive capacity are positively correlated.1 So that while, from the finalistic perspective of propagative function, such complexification spells unparalleled adaptive potentiation, from the embedded perspective of the actually-existing organism, it implies a cursed inheritance, the legacy of an increasing nociceptive, and eventually dysphoric, burden. The more conversant you are with time—that is to say, the more time inhabits you—the more painful life is going to be.

We chordates are immanence’s self-lacerating attempt to escape itself; or, what amounts to the same thing, a spine is the axial marker of nature’s first attempts at dissimulation through simulation. Hence it is a ledger of traumatisms. As Kant anticipated, it all begins with orientation—and gaining a head was one of the earlier forms of orienting oneself. In dispensing with morphological radiality, the promotion of a solely sagittal plane of symmetry generates an orientational ‘front’ and ‘behind’ for the segmenting organism, whilst also optimizing for the localization of a sensory array into an anterior ‘head’: sense receptors and transducers bubble up, flowing backwards around the buccal orifice into ocelli (primitive eyespots) and auricles (sensory lobes), facilitating the dorso-posterior ballooning of an entire simulative universe as ganglia pile into cephalizing brain case.2 (Leroi-Gourhan called this the generation of an anterior field.)3 This onset of faciality cranially lifts the post-chordate heterotroph out of panoptical immersion, reinforcing a directional aperture onto the world via filtration of peripheral fields. Yet with potentiation comes pain.

As the first inauguration of unmistakable perspective and orientation, urbilaterian take-off dimly prophesies later conceptual finitude (by half a giga-annum) inasmuch as it provides conditions of objectivation that cannot themselves be objectivated (without a mirror, of course). Faces are catastrophic, however, because faciality—appearing first amongst planarian worms—is a marker of lethality.4 Life, as self-entrenching asymmetry, migrates its turbulence from energetic domains toward the mechanical: the potential gradient between ‘in’ and ‘out’ transmutes into the projectile path from ‘front’ to ‘back’. In Gnathostomata (vertebrates with a true, opposing jaw) this process coils the entire organism behind a denticulate orifice: directional hunger lurking behind front-facing sensory aperture (simulative universe projecting backwards into cranial vault; culinary universe surging downward through serrating mouth). Schopenhauer: ‘teeth, throat and bowels are objectified hunger’.5 Registered with the appearance of otoliths (calcified organs for perceiving linear acceleration) within early fish, bilaterality brings ballistics to life. Urbilaterian directionality, indeed, provided the Cambrian conditions under which predation first truly flourished—locked in, upon arrival, by trophic arms race.6 It was as far back as 1907 that Henri Bergson noticed that, as a tipping point within life’s ‘marching on to the conquest of a nervous system’, this explosive predatory escalation first triggered ‘the imprisonment of the animal’ within a lithified skeletal ‘citadel’.7 And it was a flare of predation and pain indeed that called for such fortifications: on the Cambrian sea floor we find the remains of our planet’s first cases of ‘genocide’, ‘infanticide’, and ‘cannibalism’.8 Bilateralism truly is a ‘fearful symmetry’.

The post-chordate world is utterly fallen: it is where voracity becomes self-selecting. Ultimately, the bilaterian face marks the vertebral fall from prelapsarian radial pacifism and Ediacaran spherico-sessile innocence. But we fell upward. For, with the perpendicularization of the hominin backbone around six million years ago, and the subsequent increase in encephalization quotient (EQ), orthograde rationality came to superimpose itself upon bilaterian hunger: an appetite that could orient itself in thinking, and thus would eventually come to consume the whole globe.9 A whole new Potenz of viciousness; a whole new atrocity exhibition of spinal traumata.10 Felix culpa, indeed.