a cognitive-developmental theory of human consciousness_harry hunt

Harry T. Hunt1

A Cognitive-DevelopmentalTheory of Human

ConsciousnessIncommensurable Cognitive Domains of Purpose

and Cause as a Conjoined Ontology of Inherent

Human Unbalance

Abstract: Kant’s account of the experience of the sublime in nature

and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European tradi-

tions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the

holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to

develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental

interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More

recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates

over ‘emergence’ in modern science and theories of consciousness.

Shifting from competitive epistemologies to a resulting ontology of

human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood

can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete

fusions between person knowing (‘theory of mind’) and a thing/tool

knowing (‘naive physics’), based here on a Vygotskian model of their

reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differenti-

ated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence

is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 9, 2009, pp. 27–54

Correspondence:Harry T. Hunt, Psychology Department, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario,Canada, L2S 3A1. Email: [email protected]

[1] The author thanks David Goigoechea, James Lawler, and members of the James Lawlerdiscussion group for invaluable stimulation, and Linda Pidduck for editorial assistance.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011For personal use only -- not for reproduction

necessarily partial domain integrations, as in the separate direction-

alities of spirituality and science/technology, is fundamentally and

permanently unbalanced. Kant’s sublime and Rudolf Otto’s related

analysis of numinous-uncanny feeling exemplify the inner dynamism

of this intrinsic unbalance, constituting the species specific form of

the perpetual orientation to novelty that drives us forward toward the

very best and very worst of the human condition.

Keywords: cognitive domains, person and thing; Kant’s sublime;

domain fusions; species specific forms of life; uncanny-numinous

experience; James on ‘pure experience’.

In his Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant brings together his previous

independent analyses of human ethics and the apriori categories of

scientific reason by focusing on the experience of the sublime — a

transcendent sense of beauty, wonder, and ecstatic feeling in response

to ‘majestic’patterns in physical nature. Kant understands the sublime

as arising out of the juxtaposition of ostensibly incommensurable

epistemologies — of what in current terminology we would regard as

the separate ‘cognitive domains’ of person knowing (‘theory of

mind’) and thing knowing (‘naive physics’) (Wellman, 2002).2 In

Kant’s account, a category of purpose/meaning, combining Aris-

totle’s final and formal/design categories of causation, emerges as the

‘moral’ inspiration of a sublime and mysterious beauty in patterns of

nature whose causation is in fact physical and mechanical, the latter

roughly combining Aristotle’s categories of efficient and substantive

causation (Ross, 1959). The mountain pass evoking this aesthetic-

spiritual inspiration has been produced by blindly repetitive cause and

effect relations akin, Kant says, to the processes of crystal formation

or frost patterns on windows — whose appearance, it will be impor-

tant to note, we can also find subjectively fascinating in their own

right.

Kant posits a ‘supersensible unity’ between these two domains,

joined in this experience and within the same universe, but un-

specifiable as such in epistemological or psychological terms. We find

two logics in the same mind that both juxtapose and interact while at

28 H.T. HUNT

[2] Although the focus here is on the separate cognitive domains of person and thing, somecognitivists (Boyer & Ramble, 2001) and phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) havefollowed the lead of Leibniz and Aristotle and located three core domains — human,vital/animal, and natural/inorganic. Since the first two domains involve categories of con-sciousness, purpose, or final causation, in contrast to the physical or efficient causation ofthe thing domain, and a middle vital domain can be seen as already fusing this dichotomy(below), we will not develop a full trichotomy of domain relations in the present context.


the same time finally passing each other by.3 In what follows we will

see that Kant’s sublime can offer a more general, species specific,

model of the human mind — of both our highest and lowest and most

dangerous potentialities.

Top Down Purpose/Meaning vs. Bottom Up Causation:

Science from Synthesis vs. Science as Analysis

The cognitive domains of purpose/meaning and cause/mechanism do

intersect, and indeed mainstream modern science posits a complex

emergence of the former from the latter, but, with Kant, their logics

appear to be incommensurable even at their points of maximal juxta-

position. The best way to see this is by comparing their most abstract

formulations as philosophies of science, reflected on the one hand in

Leibniz’ holistic monadology and on the other in Locke and Newton’s

more predominant science of analytic atomism (Lawler, 2006).

Leibniz’ version of science rests on a panpsychism — consciousness

and proto-consciousness are everywhere. It is a science of and from

synthesis, beginning ‘top-down’ from the present reality of human

consciousness and looking ‘down’ through less and less complex lev-

els of organic and inorganic nature for our own ‘seeds’ or organizing

principles (Hunt, 1995a; 2001).

Leibniz (1898) finds three levels of organization, moving from ‘ra-

tional’ or ‘self-aware’ monads, as the dynamic patterning of the

human mind, to the motivational/perceptual ‘basic monads, best illus-

trated in motile animals, to the proto-conscious ‘bare monads’ of

physical nature, with their prototypes to be found in the dynamic

flows and turbulence of air, fire, and water. It is these bare monads of

physical nature that became the optimal focus for both his differential

calculus and the aspects of nature of most direct aesthetic appeal and

fascination. Of course for Leibniz the necessary organizing principle

for the synchrony he posits across these three levels of reality was

God. If, however, we remove God from this system of thought, to be

considered instead perhaps as the most abstract expression of our-

selves as self-aware monads, we are left with an epistemology very

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS 29

[3] Collectors and afficionados of objects such as antique clocks and classic cars, with theirouter patternings of aesthetically crafted form juxtaposed with an inner mechanism orengine, are drawn to these artificial re-creations of both sides of Kant’s antinomy.Although there is no necessary logical relation between the exquisitely painted design,shape, and wood grain of a specific New England banjo clock circa 1820 and its originalclockwork mechanism, the fascination of the serious collector is fully engaged only whenboth sides of the original are preserved or restored together. The clock design with a differ-ent inner mechanism or none at all, does not hold the same value or fascination. It is not as‘perfect’ for the collector — not as ‘sublime’.


like Whitehead’s (1929) organic process philosophy, current com-

plexity and self organizing systems theory (Gleik, 1987; Kelso, 1995),

and David Bohm’s (1980) implicate order, in which every dimension

of reality enfolds to varying degrees the same dynamic principles of

the totality (Hunt, 2001).

A science of synthesis looks from and via human consciousness —

as certainly the most complex system available to us and so reflecting

a complexity tendency of the universe — toward its ‘seeds’ ‘on the

way’ toward or prefiguring consciousness. Since the universe did pro-

duce us and we must thereby be a clue to its potential complexity, this

approach must be as logical and scientific as the more widely under-

stood science as analysis, which locates the fundamental units or ele-

mentary processes from which more complex realities are to be

constructed (Hunt, 2001). It is important to note that science as analy-

sis was already a distinct and separate logic — in short a philosophy of

materialism — before it was a quantitative science, since Democritus,

Newton, and Locke are assuming elementary ‘atomistic’ processes in

both physical nature and mind long before any such empirical

demonstrations.

Domain incommensurability is apparent here in that bottom up ‘el-

ementary processes’ and ‘causal mechanisms’ are not the same as the

top down ‘seeds’ and ‘organizing principles’ of mind. Leibniz’s

dynamically patterned monads are not atoms. They pass each other by

of logical and methodological necessity. First, human beings are but

one of a near infinite line of system complexity formations out of the

cosmic ‘big bang’. The patterns located on less complex levels of real-

ity by using consciousness itself as top down lens are certainly real but

confined within our own ‘line’. We cannot see in this way all the vari-

ous ‘bottom up’ lines to be discovered within the analytic sciences.

More importantly, despite the ‘faith’ of Galileo, Newton, Hobbes, and

Locke that a full synthesis could be re-assembled out of their sepa-

rated elementary causes and ‘inner’ mechanisms (Lawler, 2006), this

has proven rather notoriously untrue. We first measured and then split

the atom, but although it might in principle be possible someday, we

have not yet come close to generating motile protozoan life out of

organic chemistry in the laboratory.

More prosaically, perhaps, ‘sensations’ or ‘qualia’, as the would be

elementary or ‘atomic’ processes of perception and thought for the

British Empiricists, derived in direct imitation of Newton’s analytic

science, famously fail to add themselves up into the later dynamic

gestaltism of Gibson’s (1979) ambient envelope of flow in all patterned

perception — the most basic navigational envelope of perception as

30 H.T. HUNT


generated by moving, self-locating organisms. Sensations, while cer-

tainly open to the measurements of psycho-physics as a separate disci-

pline, are not the units or elementary processes of perception. The

modern rejection of the early laboratory introspectionists was based

on the realization that their ‘sensations’ were actually higher order

analytic dimensions experientially abstracted from the complex pat-

terns they actually presuppose. These supposed units are generated by

means of our neocortically based ‘top down’ capacity to isolate more

and more specific sensory dimensions, as the very stuff of both our

material scientific analyses and our potential metaphoric/ aesthetic

usages. James (1890) was perhaps the first to understand perception

and sensation as alternative ways of ‘seeing’ or ‘taking’ our ongoing

experience — the first immediate and unreflective, the second more

derived and abstract.

Most of the concepts and theories in the human sciences are neces-

sarily, if generally tacitly, ‘top down’ in this way and based on our own

intuitive access to ourselves as self referential beings. Key terms in

psychology are derived from ordinary language and then given a more

abstract and restricted usage, as in parallel processing, affordance,

attribution, episodic memory, unconscious, ecological array, schema,

etc. The specific measurements operationalizing these concepts for

linear experimental and statistical analysis, methods derived ulti-

mately from the ‘bottom up’ physical sciences, in turn never seem to

add up to their originary wholes. These two logics, themes taken from

the humanities and methods from the sciences, creatively interact,

while also passing each other by.

As first articulated by Dilthey (1976) and James (1890) our resul-

tant empirical psychology is thus oxymoronic and subject to a curious

and seemingly permanent parallelism between phenomenon and

method (Hunt, 2005b). This is a juxtaposition and interface of distinct

cognitive domains, but certainly not their genuine synthesis. The phi-

losopher of science Von Wright (1971) shows how even historical nar-

rative itself makes use of pattern/purpose and causal mechanism as

distinct logics also in continuous and unpredictable interaction in

actual events — as in the complex interface of social intentions and

geographical limitations and opportunities. The gun is pointed and the

trigger pulled top down but it fires and the bullet hits, if it does, bottom

up. Again, lived human reality overtly juxtaposes domains that both

collide and fuse, and require our most careful interpretive separation

and alternative focus.



Emergence in Contemporary Consciousness Studies:

Top-down/Bottom-up Interactions and their

Methodological Parallelisms

The closest interfacing of these logics of ‘top down’ synthesis and

‘bottom up’ analysis comes with recent approaches in philosophy of

science to the concept of ‘emergence’ between adjacent hierarchic

levels of system complexity (Sperry, 1991; Scott, 1995; Bunge,

2003), seen by many as central to any solution to the ‘hard problem’of

consciousness. At various levels of complexity in the natural order,

and most particularly with consciousness, there seem to be points of

‘supervenience’, where complexly patterned wholes exceed the sum

of their identifiable parts and so generally require their own new

research methodology — often based on pattern and design recogni-

tion. At the same time, to qualify as genuine emergence, there must

also be a specific ‘downward control’ (Sperry, 1991), by which the

higher order or ‘molar’ system principles causally dominate or ‘slave’

(Kelso, 1995) the lower order ‘molecular’ mechanisms that also make

them possible in the first place. What is striking in these potential

versions of emergence, however, is that at the same time the domain

separation of such fascination to Kant is still preserved. Indeed it

seems to be this juxtaposition that continues as the source of their

creative tension and controversy — as in the debates swirling around

consciousness itself as a qualitative emergent.

If we consider consciousness, with Sperry, Scott, and others, as an

empirically emergent, molar level of complexity, ostensibly exercis-

ing downward control over its more molecular neural and/or biochem-

ical constituents, we are still left with both the methodological

dualisms of phenomenology (ultimately based on person knowing)

and neuroscience (ultimately based on naive physics) and the

incommensurability of the competing theoretical monisms of a holis-

tic pan psychism and an analytic materialism. Each of these monisms

has proven equally unable to conceive, in the language of Strawson

(2006), how an entirely non-experiential reality could give rise to

what is entirely experiential — forcing either the pan psychist view of

a proto-consciousness ‘all the way down’ or the materialist reduction-

ism of a physics that must also go logically ‘all the way up’. Again we

find what may be our inherent inability to directly synthesize the col-

liding epistemologies of spirit and matter, person/consciousness and

thing. With Kant, and here with respect to consciousness itself, we can

see their unity as an empirical fact that nonetheless remains ‘super-

sensible’ to our capacity to fully think it. The hardness of the ‘hard

32 H.T. HUNT


problem’ may be to a large degree epistemological. An ostensibly

emergent consciousness must seem logically ‘magical’ to each per-

spective. It keeps coming apart into its distinct methodological

parallelisms, competing epistemologies, and even the separate tem-

peraments required for the sciences of its holistic ‘outward’patterning

and its determinative ‘inner’ causations.

Cognitive Domains and Human Forms of Life:

Incommensurable Epistemologies as

Conjoined Anthropology

Human evolution, cross modality and cross domain integrations

If we shift our attention from systems of reality linking a bottom up

causation and top down purpose/form to the nature of the being who

thinks and directly experiences in these ostensibly incommensurable

ways — ourselves — we can tilt these competing hierarchies of sci-

ence into a side by side ontology of the separate cognitive domains

whose collisions and partial fusions actually create our specifically

human and enacted ‘forms of life’. This dichotomy and only partial

integration in the human sciences and in the contemporary science of

consciousness rests on a deeper dichotomy in human nature itself.

Irreconcilable tensions and temperaments within both science and

philosophy here become a distinct theory of a specifically human

consciousness.

The cognitive domains of purpose and causation appear to be

largely and initially independent of each other in their first emergence

in human infancy, the higher primates and other proto-symbolic spe-

cies, and on some views Homo Erectus (Leary and Buttermore, 2003).

On the theoretical model of Geschwind (1965) both of these separate

domains of intelligence would rest on an recombinatory, novelty gen-

erating, capacity for a cross modal matching and neocortical transla-

tion directly across the senses and recognition systems that remain

separate and separately conditioned in non symbolic species. Initially

(Hunt, 1995a) I followed Geschwind’s views of the evolutionary tran-

sition from the proto-symbolic higher apes, with their capacity for

cross modal matching restricted to vision and touch/kinesthesis, to the

human symbolic capacity as explained by our addition of a social

auditory-vocalization to vision and touch. This seemed to me to allow

a specifically human and open ended cross modality reverberating

back and forth among three structurally distinct modalities. The result

would become outwardly reflected in language and Gardner’s (1983)

multiple intelligences, and inwardly in the semantic synaesthesias of



felt meaning and understanding (see Hunt, 1995a; 2005). And consis-

tent with this model the proto-symbolic parrots (Pepperberg, 1999)

and dolphins (Herman, Richards, & Wolz, 1984) cross visual, vocal,

and motoric patterns, but without the complex kinesthetic gesturing

central to social intelligence in the higher apes, who in turn lack a

crossing of their visual-kinesthetic fusions with novel articulatory

vocalizations (Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1986).

What I did not see as clearly was that such cross modalities underlie

both nascent social consciousness (person knowing) and tool manipu-

lation (thing knowing) and that, apart from the social imitative learn-

ing of the latter, these two domains remain largely separate as distinct

forms of life in the proto-symbolic parrots, dolphins, and higher apes.

It would be the transition to humanity that entails the progressive, and

we will see inherently incomplete, fusion of these domains — both

already cross modal and recombinatory. It is this fusion, mediated by a

vocalization that gradually becomes both social and instrumental, that

would be the crucial step to the fully human symbolic capacity, with

its species-specific, creatively recombinatory and open ended forms

of domain fusion (see below).

By late infancy early levels of human symbolic intelligence are

beginning a cross translation and recombination of the visual-motor

manipulative play with things and an interpersonally centered, kines-

thetic-gesture and kinesthetic-articulatory vocalization — producing

an essentially open-ended circuit of cross modality translations and

re-translations, back and forth between the predominantly simulta-

neous spatial forms and predominantly sequential and temporarily

extended vocal/auditory forms increasingly common to both domains

(Hunt, 1995a; Hunt, 2005). It would be this more extended range of

cross modality translation that would allow the first stabilized and

progressive developmental integrations of the imitative kinesthetic

bases of person knowing and the visual-motor bases of object manipu-

lation. It is suggested here that human childhood and adult develop-

ment would consist in progressively more complex fusions and

integrations between the inner processes of these initially separate

person and thing domains.

Such domain fusions are largely absent in protosymbolic species

such as higher apes, dolphins, and parrots and certainly do not

develop there as sustained ‘forms of life’. It may be significant for

what follows that occasionally observed forms of more transitory

cross domain fusion in higher apes, linking the largely separated

domains of social-personal and thing intelligence, already create a

nascent, if temporary, ‘abstract attitude’, in the sense of Goldstein

34 H.T. HUNT


(1963). Thus in accounts by Goodall (1986) of one chimpanzee sub-

stituting several large kerosene cans in place of the usual dust generat-

ing tree branches dragged behind in territorial dominance charges,

and of ‘rain dances’, in which chimpanzees move or swing in ostensi-

ble aesthetic resonance to sudden rains and waterfalls, the crossing of

social and physical domains produces temporary abstractions. The

noisy racket generated by the kerosene cans becomes the equivalent

of the large visually perceived clouds of dust raised by the dragging

branches, and the slow motion, kinesthetically expressive vine swing-

ing in front of the waterfall is the abstract equivalent of the endlessly

sustained patterned repetition of the visually perceived falling water.

Bering (2002) makes this ‘rain dance’ the nidus of numinous awe

(below), yet it also undergoes no further development. There is no

rudimentary ape quasi-shamanic trance induction, no systematic

search for other still ‘larger’ branch dragging substitutes.

Person and thing intelligence as separate cognitive domains

The cognitive domain of human personal-social intelligence is usually

defined in terms of a capacity for ‘taking the role of the other’, both in

general and towards oneself (Mead, 1934). From infancy we progres-

sively construct a sense of self by means of our kinesthetically mir-

rored reflections from others. More recent discussions have centered

around a related development of ‘theory of mind’ by which we gradu-

ally come to intuit the purposive perspectives of others as potentially

distinct from our own (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Its most prelimi-

nary form appears as the neonatal and infant facial mirroring games of

such centrality to Winnicott (1971) and Meltzoff (2002). This mirror-

ing capacity is based initially on the same visual-kinesthetic cross

translations presumably required for the highly variable self-recogni-

tion in actual mirrors observed in some higher apes (Gallup, 1977;

Swartz & Evans, 1997). In human infancy, however, this visual-kines-

thetic cross modal matching is itself crossed with expressive vocaliza-

tions by around four months (Legerstee, 1990). Spontaneous cross

modal mirroring from infancy strongly supports the earlier views of

Rousseau and Shaftesbury that empathy and a core sense of morality

is intrinsic in early human development, whatever its ultimate fate

(Lawler, 2006).

It is argued here that the primary ‘logic’of the person domain would

be one of completeness-incompleteness. We may later value and

strive for consistency in everyday life, and certainly consistency is

central to theories of cognitive dissonance, but we also often recognize



that people who seem fully self consistent (1) are probably not, and (2)

seem less fully alive, complete, and genuinely interesting as persons.

Very young children respond to others intuitively and immediately as

a whole, and are themselves notoriously and delightfully inconsistent.

In ‘taking the role of the other’ in adult interpersonal situations we still

immediately intuit a complete view or perspective of the other in that

one moment — one ‘good enough for now’ for our own communica-

tive response — only to be potentially replaced in the next moment by

a completely different intuited context. The creative spontaneity of

self and other in dialogue creates open-ended and formally uncom-

pletable sequences of understanding and felt meaning. New inter-

personal ‘spaces’ arise, potentially enclose, and so change their imme-

diately preceding ones in a way illustrated concretely in Lewin’s

(1936) topologies of the life space, more abstractly perhaps in the

qualitative mathematics of ‘spaces’ created by Spencer-Brown

(1979), and by some applications of infinite mathematical sets

(Monte-Blanco, 1998; Badiou, 2005).

If we consider spiritual intelligence as the most abstract adult

development of Gardner’s (1983) personal-interpersonal intelligen-

ces (Hunt, 1995b; Emmons, 2000), then we could understand the

Christian doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus as the full exemplifica-

tion of the intuitively completed sense of self, while the ‘no-self’ of

Buddha would be the fullest expression of the self of open incomplete-

ness — at each respective end of this primary completeness-incom-

pleteness logic of ‘taking the role of the other’. Indeed, Mead (1934)

used both these paradigmatic figures as his own illustrations of the

maximum embodiments of living from the fully spontaneous ‘I’, in

contrast to the more socially circumscribed and consistent ‘me’s’.

Both Self and Other are ultimately, and alternately, unknowable in

both Mead’s (1934) psychology of the creative, open ‘I’ and Buber’s

(1957) ethical primacy of the Thou.

Correspondingly, we can locate an initially independent cognitive

or epistemological domain of thing/tool intelligence. It is manifested

first in infancy in the spontaneous visual-motor cross modal matching

involved in play with grasped objects, and in the higher apes through

highly variable expressions of a simple tool using intelligence, and in

the creative problem solving of Köhler’s (1926) famous crate-staking

chimps. This purely physical cross translation of seen and tactilely

manipulated objects is also nascent in neonates, as demonstrated in

Kaye and Bower’s (1994) research on the differential visual identifi-

cation of orally palpated objects, and it is the basis of the difficult to

teach and variable performances of higher apes on visual-tactile cross

36 H.T. HUNT


modal matching tasks, first predicted by Geschwind (1965) (For a

summary of this literature see Hunt, 1995a).

We could say that the primary ‘logic’ of a creative thing/tool intelli-

gence is one of consistency-inconsistency. All developed or skilled

tool use is based on a perceived analysis of a linear physical causation.

Of course by early childhood instrumental tasks are also completed,

successfully or not, but here consistency is already presupposed in

that determination. Inconsistency of object usage in terms of a specific

goal of environmental effectance simply will not ‘work’. With

designed tools, the form of the hammer dictates its linear sequential

usage, its logic of first and subsequent steps, in fixed contrast to a saw

or screwdriver. However, the same exclusive logic of causation is also

entailed if a rock is to be used for hammering and shaping as opposed

to smashing and separating. Different rocks will be chosen accord-

ingly. As will be developed below, the fact that causal tool use, based

on successful consistency vs. unsuccessful inconsistency, must on the

human level interface with socially shared and often changeable pur-

poses, means that tool use will also become subordinated to the com-

pleteness-incompleteness logic of the person domain — and, as we

will see below, vice versa.

There is evidence that these two domains, with their respective pri-

mary logics, are not only independent but initially develop separately in

infancy (Wellman, 2002). Kuhlmeier et al., (2004) found that five

month old infants showed reactive surprise when physical objects

moved behind screens and re-emerged in physically discontinuous

fashion, but not if persons did the same thing. Baron-Cohen (1997) has

suggested that early infantile autism can be understood as a selective

failure to develop interpersonal empathic mirroring, while thing/tool

manipulations may even be differentially accelerated, as in mechanical

obsessions and prodigious linear calculations. Finally, although

neo-cortical localization of function in infancy is relatively undifferen-

tiated (Mauer, 1997), there are indications that neonatal mirroring is

centered more frontally and temporally, in areas to be later taken over

by language (Meltzoff, 2002), while the cross-modal matching of phys-

ical dimensions, at least later in childhood and for still later metaphoric

usage, is predominantly parietal (Calvert, 2001; Faust & Mashal,

2007), as also originally reported by Geschwind (1965).

Domain fusions in childhood development

The subsequent normative development of person and thing knowing

can be best understood as involving their progressive fusions, with



each domain progressively internalized as the inner process of the

other. Their differences in predominant intention make each seem

more independent of the other than is increasingly the case.

In human ontogenesis it is vocalized language itself which may

begin this domain fusion and cross referencing. Certainly this is one

implication of recent accounts of language development by Carruthers

(2002) and Mandler (2004). The earliest language learning consists in

interpersonally shared mirroring games based on joint pointing and

‘naming’ of physical objects by means of physiognomically depictive

vocalizations (Werner and Kaplan, 1963). Note that it would be this

beginning potential for the fusion of these two cognitive domains that

ultimately generates and explains language, rather than the other way

around. Indeed, the increasing temporal lobe localization of linguisti-

cally structured vocalizations would constitute the anatomical bridge

linking the anterior cingulate area central to ‘theory of mind’

(Gallagher & Frith, 2003) and the parietal areas of cross-modal

matching (Calvert, 2001) central to ‘naive physics’. Recent research

showing significant adult correlations between degrees of fron-

tal-parietal integration and both verbal and spatial forms of intelli-

gence (Jung & Haier, 2007), and with developed meditation techniques

(Naghavi & Nyberg, 2005), helps to support such a domain fusion

model for both the ‘representational’ and ‘presentational’ or expressive

intelligences (Langer, 1942; Hunt, 1995a).

A more specific line of domain fusion, centered on thing knowing

and to be developed more briefly here, is what Piaget (1963) termed

early childhood ‘artificialism’, also related to magical ‘participation’,

in which children under five or six tend to regard all objects and set-

tings in nature as ‘crafted’ by and for human beings. It is closely

related to Keleman’s (1999) recent concept of ‘promiscous teleology’,

prototypically illustrated by the first grader who, asked why moun-

tains are ‘pointy’, answers ‘so that the dinosaurs can scratch them-

selves’. Here categories from a purpose domain are utilized for the

initial understanding of what older children will take as a purely phys-

ical and causal reality. In contrast to the present approach, both Piaget

and Werner pictured these developmental fusions as residues of a gen-

eral cognitive undifferentiation destined to disappear and be replaced

by a more differentiated and abstract separation of person and thing.

Instead, it seems more plausible to follow Vygotsky’s (1965) view of

development as progressive internalization — initially modeled on

the internalization that shifts an early egocentric speaking of

thoughts out loud into a silent ‘inner speech’, as the condensed

medium for later verbal thought. Accordingly we could say that the

38 H.T. HUNT


internalization of ‘promiscous teleology’ becomes the basis for

Heidegger’s (1927) specifically human ‘at hand’ (zuhanden) attitude

by virtue of which the entirety of the physical environment becomes a

potential tool and commodity. The full development of an adult tech-

nological orientation and expertise is at least as much about the pro-

gressive differentiation of shared purposive thought as it is the

utilization and invention of the linear causal mechanisms more

outwardly predominant in its realization.

A similar Vygotskian internalization model can be applied, here in

more detail, to the development of person knowing as a separate logic

whose later articulation will depend on the internalizing and subordi-

nation of the thing knowing domain as its inner process. Early child-

hood animism is itself a domain fusion on its way toward a later

metaphorically based person knowing. Here phenomena of physical

nature, and especially all that moves of its own accord, such as wind,

water, sun and moon, are regarded as organically and/or humanly

intentional. This can be prototypically illustrated in Werner’s (1961)

example of physiognomic perception in three and four year old chil-

dren who say ‘poor tired cup’ for a cup lying on its side, or ‘the fog is

whispering’ to convey a cross modal and cross domain translation of

the subtle visual pervasiveness of night fog in terms of an abstracted

social quality of human vocalization. Here again the suggestion would

be that animism does not disappear to be replaced by a more abstract

differentiation, but that the latter is itself made possible by the inter-

nalization of childhood animism as the medium for the physical meta-

phors later applied to the progressive sophistication of the person

knowing domain (Hunt, 2005).

Lakoff and Johnson (1999), following the earlier suggestions of

Arnheim (1969), trace the ubiquity of physical metaphor in language

usage to describe the diversity and subtleties of adult feeling (fiery

passion, explosive anger, stream of consciousness), as well as the met-

aphoric origin of separate words for emotion in all languages (the

original ang root of anger, anguish, anxiety, meaning a physical nar-

rowing or compression). For Lakoff and Johnson (1999) physical

metaphor is not simply necessary for the differentiated description of

interpersonal feeling, it is actually constitutive of the form taken by

adult feelings (anger as a heated fluid within a column that can ‘rise

up’, ‘boil over’, or ‘explode’). Asch and Nerlove (1960) documented

the surprisingly slow development of full metaphoric understanding

of synaesthetic ‘double function’ terms like ‘cold’, ‘bitter’, or ‘soft’ as

applied to persons. This is consistent with an earlier gradual internal-

ization of animism as its now subordinated medium. The specific



words exclusively available for emotion are too narrow in all lan-

guages for the full differentiation of adult feeling without these meta-

phoric cross-domain applications from thing to person. For adults the

widespread physiognomic, synaesthetic, and physical metaphoric

bases of interpersonal language remain almost entirely implicit and

unnoticed (Marks, 1978). It is such expressively animated forms,

however, that allow Kant’s mountains to be morally inspiring and

‘sublime’.

The development of a specifically human metacognition — espe-

cially on its presentational ‘felt meaning’ or ‘imaginative absorption’

side (Gendlin, 1962) — seems to require a still more abstract, spatial

level of physical metaphor, allowing older children to begin to ‘sense’

and introspect ‘within’ an ongoing subjective consciousness (Flavell

et al., 1993), which then ‘flows’ and ‘streams’, with its own ‘depth’,

‘fringe’, and open ‘horizon’ ahead (James, 1890). Piaget (1963) had

earlier suggested that animism only fully disappears as the child

begins to become metacognitively aware of its own subjective experi-

ence at around seven and eight years of age, also the years for

Vygotsky’s ‘internalization’ of verbal thought as inner speech. For

Vygotsky (1965) inner speech then crosses with imagistic thinking,

affording an introspectable, ‘saturated’ sense of felt significance as a

‘higher type of inner activity’ (p. 91). The phenomenologies of both

James (1890) and Husserl (1905) understand our felt sense of an

immediately present dimension of lived time, ‘flowing’ into futural

‘openness’, as the externalized face of this metacognitive ‘stream of

consciousness’. It is this shared metaphorically introspectable open-

ness of inner consciousness and felt duration that makes our time esti-

mates so contingent on degrees of subjective involvement (Hunt,

1995a), and which our creative and more driven endeavors seek to

‘fill’ and ‘complete’ (Heidegger, 1927).

Adult development of multiple domain fusions

as species specific ‘Forms of Life’

Adult cognitive and moral-aesthetic capacities, and most if not all of

the forms of life that seem unique to humanity, can be understood as

still more specific fusions, amalgamations, and partial integrations of

our person and thing intelligences, based on their internalizations of

the opposite domain as their respective inner processes. The instabil-

ity and intrinsic conflictedness of some of these species specific

amalgamations may also show that no genuine or complete synthesis

of these two distinct cognitive domains is possible for us, but only

40 H.T. HUNT


diverse lines of interpenetration dominated by one side or the other.

The implication will be that we are an unbalanced, only temporarily

integrated being, perpetually incomplete, inconsistent, and moving

toward the next culturally supported domain fusions. Because inher-

ently persons are not things and things are not persons, human sym-

bolic development drives together domain amalgamations that must

remain finally partial and perpetually provisional.

Things as tools and meanings

Every thing — with physical objects for us already based on multi-

modality fusions in contrast to the single modality ‘releasing cues’ of

nonsymbolic species — is both a potential ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’ for

multiply emergent purposes and also the outer ‘face’ of multiple aes-

thetic and metaphoric significances. These expressive physiognomies

are always latent for us in every physical setting, their actual plurali-

ties determined by set and setting. They are always potential — even if

in the form of ‘flatness’, ‘deadness’, or ‘hollowness’— as expressions

of the same underlying principle of domain fusion allowing Kant’s

experience of the sublime. A particular tree has its own cluster of

potentially expressive metaphors, as inevitably as does a concrete

wall, these being latent in the same sense as their similarly emergent

usages as instrumental objects of physical manipulation.

The maximum integration within the developmental line of a meta-

phor mediated person domain can be found in the world spiritual and

mystical traditions (Hunt, 2006). Here inclusive felt meanings of

meaning and purpose in human existence are mediated by the cross

culturally common and maximally abstract physical metaphors of

‘light’, ‘radiating darkness’, ‘heights’ and ‘depths’. These are the core

of what Laski (1961) terms the ‘quasi physical’ sensations/metaphors

of ecstasy, as reflected in Eastern meditative chakra energizations,

with their synaesthetically fused colors, shapes, and sounds, and in the

‘white light’ experiences of classical mysticism, which I have inter-

preted elsewhere as highly abstract synaesthesias (Hunt, 1995a;

2006). Their most immediate evocations indeed come through the

nature mysticisms of tribal shamanism, Emerson and Thoreau, and

Kant’s mountains and sunrises sublime (Hunt, 2003). Note that the

‘living’ light which mediates the fullest of these experiences, as its

own ‘taking the role of the other’ evoking experiences of sacred love

and compassion, is precisely the metaphoric transformation and kin-

esthetic embodiment of this most abstract dimension of physical space

itself. Note also that while all cultures seem to mark out some such



spiritual path for its ‘religious virtuosos’ (Weber, 1963), the full

development of this line of integration is always maximally exclusive

and difficult, requiring precisely the sacrifice of alternative competing

intelligences. The spiritual path is a maximum integration of mind in

the direction of person knowing, but not a total synthesis of ‘mind

itself’ in all its multi-directionality.

Correspondingly, we can locate the maximum integration of a pri-

mary intelligence of things in modern physics, with mathematics as its

instrument. Here again, more briefly and perhaps with more contro-

versy, we can locate the internalized metaphors and abstract analogies

of person and metacognitive consciousness that would also operate as

its subordinated and guiding template. In particular we have the

debate over whether mathematics itself reflects laws and principles

external to us or is ultimately an internal reflection of our own mental

organization (Penrose, 1997; Lakoff & Nunez, 2000). On the latter

model, mathematics would be a formal abstraction from linguistic

syntax, with its linear sequences and its ‘if … then’, ‘and … but’ trans-

formations all ultimately abstracted from a template of purposive

movement and its consequences. Finally, in addition to suggestions

dating at least from Nietzsche (2006) that Newtonian force is an

abstraction from our own purposive motoric effectance, there is the

acknowledgment of Niels Bohr (Holton, 1968; Bohr, 1934) that he

actually derived his own formulation of the complementarity and

uncertainty principles of quantum physics from his earlier reading of

James (1890; 1912) on the stream of consciousness, with its alternat-

ing transitive and substantive aspects dependent on our introspective

attitude (Hunt, 2001).

In between these separate lines of spiritual and mathematical repre-

sentational intelligences, with whatever metaphoric convergences

they may prove to have for each other (Hunt, 2006), we find the multi-

ple species specific forms of life in which properties of the physical

environment are directly made over for our aesthetic and moral pur-

poses. Certainly we could include here music and art, where proper-

ties of the physical order are utilized in terms of their patterned

expressions. Although suitably rewarded chimpanzees (and ele-

phants) can be taught to ‘paint’, they show no sustained interest in

their work after it is finished and their ‘styles’ undergo no systematic

development. Cooking belongs here as well, by which plants and the

dead bodies of game are transformed in terms of a complex aesthetics

of taste which undergoes progressive and continual refinements in all

cultures. Currency and coinage can be added as well, by which spe-

cially created physical forms are utilized to ‘measure’ social value and

42 H.T. HUNT


power. Shelter and dwelling, as further developed in architecture, and

clothing, as both decorative and itself a measure of social standing, are

further adaptations and subordinations of a manipulative thing intelli-

gence to the person domain. Finally we can add the domain fusions of

dance and sport, Gardner’s kinesthetic intelligences, in which the pur-

posive transformations of body movement are directly pitted against

the steady resistance of physical gravity and bodily limitation. As

intelligent as chimpanzees are, they do not show any sustained interest

in ‘measuring’ their bodies against the resistances of a soccer ball and

the precisely restrictive rules of its play. In terms of what follows, it is

important that all our species-specific domain fusions appear as sus-

tained ‘forms of life’ that engender a permanent sense of fascination

and even bliss in their more serious participants. Each is considered an

art and aesthetic in its own right.

For the anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1966) nonliterate tribal

mythologies are complex classification grids of multiply opposed

opposites that systematically mix human and physical cognitive

domains. Boyer & Ramble (2001), following the earlier basic princi-

ples of Piaget and Werner, consider these as domain ‘violations’,

which misses that for Levi-Strauss these mythologies are intentionally

crafted in order to understand human nature itself and its insoluble

personal and social tensions via metaphoric dimensions that cross and

utilize the realms of physical nature, plants, and animals. The further

point here is that human nature entails the actual living out of these

domain crossings as species specific fusions — including the above

‘forms of life’ that do separate humanity from all other species.

Persons as meanings and tools

Persons are both empathically understood as ‘ones like us’ and as

potential tools for not just social coercion but direct physical manipu-

lation. The abstract development of the first leads toward integrated

ethical systems and codes, as in Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’

(Lawler, 2006), and is traditionally expressed in the arts and humani-

ties. The modern novel is a sustained inquiry into this domain, making

full and necessary use of metaphoric mirrorings as above. The second

line of development, persons as instruments and tools, leads us toward

all those species-specific and seemingly intrinsic forms of life that

fully developed ethical systems in the modern West rightly regard as

‘monstrous’ — while often falsely labelling them ‘animalistic’.

Thus we have the steady historical development of the domain

fusion of weaponry through which people are slaughtered in the



manner of hunted animals, but in the service of a purposive

territoriality and social power. Meanwhile physical torture, also cross

culturally and historically ubiquitous, involves the slow physical dis-

mantling of the person’s purposive moral world (Scarry, 1985), by

means of technologies sometimes derived from animal butchery and

cooking, sometimes from applied physics. The final form of life to be

considered in which persons are transformed into things, here more

precisely as tools more than things, is slavery.

Slavery has proven historically universal whenever a society

becomes sufficiently complex or extended to permit it. In contrast to

Hegel (1807), slavery is less a limited stage of history in the world civ-

ilizations, than a mechanism that undergoes successive refinements.

Witness our very post-modern digital enslavements, bureaucratically

downloading tasks once assigned to real others and mainlining our

endless e-mail and blackberries. More gravely, a society in which the

vast majority of its inhabitants are one or two months away from

homelessness, along with the steady erosion of worker rights and

social safety nets in a globalizing world economy, is often termed one

of ‘wage slavery’. At least on the better slave plantations one was

mostly assured, on purely pragmatic grounds, of food, lodging, and

some medical care. Its modern sublimation demands almost as much,

but leaves out that minimum expectable security. The ultimate force

and compulsion behind this mentality may be now emerging as a plan-

etary wide single world history, in which globalizing corporations and

their massively overcompensated CEO’s and effectively lobbied poli-

ticians are literally willing to destroy the viability of the earth itself for

future generations for the sake of continued quarterly profit margins.

From the perspective of systems theory the modern globalizing crisis

is indeed an example of an ultra-complex economic ‘downward

control’ or ‘slaving’ (Kelso, 1995).

As above, each of these domain fusions has its own compelling fas-

cination, here more in the sense of an uncanniness and strangeness as

we contemplate their fuller consequences. Of course Kant (1790) and

Buber (1957) are right that the core of moral evil is treating persons

merely as means rather than as intrinsically valued ends in them-

selves. But the transformation of persons into nothing other than

means, both as economic tools and as the physical objects of torture

and murder, is also inevitable and intrinsic to our species. Heidegger’s

comment that the Nazi death camps manufactured mass death by

means of the same uncanny technologies that modern chicken facto-

ries use to manufacture food (Safranski, 1998) is both notorious and

accurate. Certainly, as we are seeing with purely ‘materialist’

44 H.T. HUNT


philosophies and societal values, the application of a ‘thing based’

instrumental and ‘objective’ logic to the personal spheres of the ethi-

cal is withering and desiccating in its effects. But it is species specific

and defining.

It appears that the most we can do with this second grouping of

intrinsic domain amalgamations, from the perspective of systematic

ethics, is to identify their points of inward juxtaposition and continu-

ously seek to render them as separated and distinct as historically

changing circumstances will permit. The very struggle involved in

order to fully understand and live the person centered, empathic ethi-

cal systems of the major world civilizations attests to a continuous,

ever more complex pull of these person-as-tool domain fusions. Yet to

paraphrase James (1902) all that we do in these ‘objective’ forms of

life must also pass through our personal intelligences, and this with

life long consequence.

Numinous-Uncanny Experience as the Maximum

Expression of Domain Juxtaposition:

The Inner ‘Engine’ of a Species-Specific Capacity for Novelty

Kant’s analysis of the sublime received its fullest later development in

Rudolf Otto’s (1923) phenomenology of what he termed numinous

experience, as the spontaneous cross cultural core of mystical/spiri-

tual experience. On Otto’s view the different religions ‘schematize’

these experiences in terms of their own cultural traditions, as attempts

at their immediate expression in categories understandable for that

time and place. In fact, his full continuum of these spontaneous felt

experiences is considerably broader in application and implication

than the sense of the ‘sacred’ or ‘sublime’ alone.

Numinous feeling begins with a sense of radical dependency, as

something that seizes and compels one’s fascinated attention, more

akin to ‘it has you’ rather than you having it. It’s developing phenom-

enology then includes feelings of awe, ineffable portent, wonder, and

fascination. It’s lower forms involve more a sense of the uncanny, as a

strangeness, eeriness, or sense of the grotesque, with an awe shading

into a more overt dread. The noetic or cognitive object of the full

numinous is felt as an initially nonverbal contact with something tran-

scendent, all encompassing, and ‘wholly other’. In its highest expres-

sion this is the core sense of the ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’. As with the

domain juxtaposition central to Kant’s sublime, the numinous is medi-

ated by physical metaphors abstracted from the most fundamental



‘thing’ dimensions of spatial perception — light, darkness, flow,

horizonal openness, heights, and depths.

Influenced by Kant, Otto understands the numinous as an apriori

category for the intrinsic unknown and mysterious. We could take it as

an abstract, symbolically driven form of the organismic orientation

response to pure novelty. It develops on the human level far beyond

curiosity motivation as a general organismic motivation and rein-

forcer. The inherent novelty of a domain juxtaposition/collision of

two logically separate symbolic mentalities creates an abstract dyna-

mism permanently oriented to the immense range for us of all that

thereby has the capacity to ‘fascinate’. As such, numinous-uncanny

feeling is, among other things, at the core of all culture, and we can see

its centrality not only to religion and major art, but also to modern sci-

ence in the sense of the wonder, fascination, and awe described by

Einstein and others in the face of our ‘wholly other’ modern physical

cosmology — with its sudden expansion out of singularity and quantum

indeterminacies (see also Hunt, 2006).

However, the separate dimensions of Otto’s numinous extend much

wider than the higher forms of culture, since we can also find the

events of serial killing, war, and torture to be weirdly and uncannily

fascinating and full of awe. Indeed its juxtapositions and fusions of

cognitive domains are clearest with its lower manifestations as the

sense of the uncanny, which the psychiatrist H.S. Sullivan (1953)

understood as the characteristic emotion of schizophrenic onset. The

schizophrenic concretization of emotional metaphors is associated

with a hyper-reflexive introspective sensitization to one’s own meta-

cognitive self awareness as bizarre physical forces and energies, in

this most tragic and terrifying form of domain collision (Sass, 1992;

Hunt, 1995a). Freud (1919), in his essay ‘The Uncanny’, describes the

sense of eeriness, strangeness, and fascinated dread emerging from

ghost and horror stories as similarly based on the direct crossing of the

categories of person/purpose and physical thing. He divides these

crossings into three subtypes: (1) the magical or omnipotent control of

mind over matter, as in sorcery and parapsychological events, includ-

ing synchronously meaningful juxtapositions of personal and physi-

cal realities, (2) physical objects as alive and imbued with human or

animal-like intelligence — the very stuff of animism and tribal tote-

misms, (3) persons transformed into mechanical and or purely physi-

cal objects — including not only malign robots and zombies, but

bodily mutilation, and death itself in the form of our shock and strange

disquiet before the dead human body. Some proto-symbolic species

show prolonged grieving and nurturant behaviours towards the

46 H.T. HUNT


recently dead, but only we bury, burn, elevate in tree platforms, or in

ancient Tibet personally dismember the dead, and then protect against

and/or solicit their ghostly re-visitings.

Bergson (1900) offers a closely related analysis of humour and the

comic in terms of a direct crossing of persons and things, but here in

social situations with an initial absence of strong emotion. We thus

find ourselves laughing when people give the impression of mecha-

nism, ranging from calling attention to physicality itself as in slap-

stick, to more subtle expressions of a thing-like motoric and mental

rigidity, and automatic rule following. Correspondingly, the core of

the sense of tragedy, with its own strong sense of the uncanny, is of a

person full of spontaneous vitality and brilliance following a path of

blind automatic repetition, Freud’s ‘repetition compulsion’. This

becomes a logic of pure consistency, the linear logic of physical things,

leading to the point where that promise has been systematically

destroyed.

The point here is that the human mind systematically crosses the

domains of person and thing and that their most directly felt crossings

are exactly what elicit this wider continuum of the sublime, numinous,

and uncanny — and indeed tragic and comic — in short the sustained

fascination that drives and compels all of the above species specific

forms of life. The uncanny-numinous, in its various shadings, is

‘about’ anything that truly fascinates us, and ultimately what fasci-

nates us are domain crossings and fusions. These are in turn the flash

points for all forms of culturally mediated forms of creativity.

We can further understand the ambiguity of these crossings in and

as human life in terms of a re-casting of the later William James on

what he terms ‘pure experience’. For the later James (1911; 1912) this

room gets counted twice over, as the personal ‘thisness’ of our

‘thought of the room’, and as the ‘whatness’ of a more objective,

instrumental ‘room thought of’. Yet in terms of the preceding discus-

sion, both personal ‘thisness’ and physical ‘whatness’, whose juxta-

position and collision is potentially emergent in and as any human

event, already contain the other as their internalized and subordinated

process. As adults neither domain can encompass the other, since its

supporting process is based on the opposed logic — the consistency/

inconsistency of physical metaphor supporting and articulating the

incompleteness/completeness of person knowing, and the complete-

ness/incompleteness of intention and purpose guiding all explicitly

constructed mechanisms and tool based consistencies. The outward

juxtapositions/fusions of the domains of person and thing are thus

complex, multi-level, and intrinsically open-ended.



The more explicitly felt these domain crossings become, the more,

in the present view, James’ third category of ‘thatness’or ‘pure experi-

ence’ appears as the expression of the fascination emerging between

and around them. For the later James ‘pure experience’, as for

Heidegger later, is the immediate sense of isness, thatness, or exis-

tence per se. The ‘just that’ or ‘uniqueness’ of each situation is akin, I

would suggest, to the ‘suchness’ of each moment in Zen Buddhism

(Blofeld, 1962), and is the occasion for the capacity for sustained

wonder and fascination that defines us. The later Heidegger (2006)

similarly speaks of ‘Being-experience’ as latent and potential in all

human situations, arising as the in-between within and around all

events. Heidegger (1994) explicitly identifies this experience of

Being with Otto’s numinous. In its fullness, it appears as wonder, awe,

and fascination. Where lost or occluded, as in his understanding of a

secularized modernity, it appears as a sense of alienation and implaca-

ble strangeness (Heidegger, 2006). This is the estrangement, nausea,

and revulsion so central to Sartre (1953), and which for Heidegger

underlies our artificial conceptual separations of subject and object,

mind and body.4

Conclusion

The collision of incommensurable yet inseparable cognitive domains

means that essentially any event can become for us fascinating, com-

pelling, numinous, and/or strange. This is the hole at the center of all

specifically human experience, pulling us in, up, or down, and into

our highest and lowest potentialities — until the ‘form of life’ thus

engaged finally secularizes, satiates, and/or disenchants. The cognitive

48 H.T. HUNT

[4] The Cartesan dichotomy of mind and body, taking the latter as part of the purely materialdomain rather than as itself the purposive manifestation of Leibniz’s basic (living)monads, has become a perhaps specifically Western expression of a purely conceptual andso alienated domain collision. More pragmatically, James (1912) and Merleau-Ponty(1968) talk of the body itself being taken twice over, both as a lived purposive ‘thisness’and as a material ‘whatness’ subject to gravity and other purely physical limitations(Merleau-Ponty’s ‘chiasm’). Here our simple sense of surprise at the weirdly excessivepain of a stubbed toe pushes us toward the temporary alienation that were it to becomechronic would amount to a clinical depersonalization and schizoid detachment. The meta-physical concept of a body-mind dualism creates its own artificial version of such anestrangement. From Descartes through Locke and Hume this led to the supposed ‘mys-tery’ of how ‘I’, here defined as disembodied mind or spirit, can move my arm, as ‘matter’(Lawler, 2006). The sense of estranged perplexity that can be induced over such artificialpuzzlement is best reconciled when we realize we are not similarly ‘puzzled’ over how adog or cat can move its legs. Mainstream Western philosophy, by translating Pla-tonic/Christian spirit into ‘mind’, and ‘animal soul’ into literal ‘matter’, induced its ownartificial, quasi-diagnosable version of domain collision, which once evoked becamepermanently ‘fascinating’ to later analytic philosophies.


domains of person and thing collide and fuse. They cannot fully syn-

thesize or fully separate, but rather must partially integrate along the

multiple lines of our multiple intelligences and species specific ‘forms

of life’. Their enforced crossings generate the abstract capacity that

differentiates us from the other proto-symbolic species on this planet,

since any dimensions linking logically incommensurable domains

must select and abstract from each in a creatively emergent fashion.

These domains then undergo partial fusions/integrations ever short of

any completed synthesis. The categories of person and thing do divide

into each other, but with infinite, perpetually fascinating remainders.

We are accordingly rendered permanently incomplete, permanently

inconsistent. We arrive then at a cognitive and existential version of

those traditional religious/mythological views of human beings as

intrinsically unfinished and/or tragically flawed.5

All specifically human ‘forms of life’ thereby exemplify something

like a social-psychological version of Gödel’s mathematical incom-

pleteness theorem, by which the consistency and completeness of for-

mal systems are potentially inversely related at any point in their

subsequent articulation, and so rendering all such systems ultimately

open and unfinishable (Bronowski, 1966; Goldstein, 2005). Given

that the primary logic of the person domain is completeness-incom-

pleteness and the primary logic of the tool domain is consistency-

inconsistency, with each then becoming the subordinated, internal-

ized process for the development of the other, Gödel’s theorem

becomes the most abstract formulation of a domain fusion model of

the human mind.6

It is we who are uncanny, and only occasionally sublime. We are

now uncanny to ourselves on a planet wide basis — all this mighty


[5] It has come to my attention that the present discussion of human nature as forms of lifepartly fusing but never fully synthesizing ‘theory of mind’ and ‘naive physics’ bears somesimilarity to Sartre’s (1953) distinction between our human ‘being for itself’ and a vastnonconscious ‘being-in itself’, and their perpetually unbalanced and failed synthesis. Thedifference seems to be that the fusions/collisions of person and thing/tool domains underdiscussion here are occurring within Sartre’s ‘for itself’. The ‘in-itself’, which sadlyevoked for Sartre only a nausea and estrangement in the face of Being as such, would herebe emergent within the for-itself as the fuller sense of ‘thatness’ or ‘being’ — includingwonder, fascination, and numinous mystery as well as the uncanny and strange. It wouldarise through the directly felt juxtaposition of James’ personal ‘thisness’ and material‘whatness’. As with Sartre, but on this different basis, being-experience overflows allspecifiable knowledge and emerges as an uncompleteable hiatus or hole at the center ofhuman experience, which certainly unbalances, but can also inspire and at least partiallyredeem.

[6] To the extent that, with Lakoff and Nunez (2000), formal systems of mathematics are ulti-mately derived from the spatial metaphors in all human intelligence, Gödel’s theoremwould be the maximally abstracted consequence of a domain fusion model.


purpose in collision with the earth itself. We are both the source and

object of this response. Kant’s sublime becomes the model for a much

broader portrayal of human nature and one less optimistic than he

intended. It offers a theoretical explanation for the multiple ‘forms of

life’ that are specific to us. Our unique ontology is this more general

juxtaposition of the simultaneously incommensurable and inseparable

cognitive domains of person and thing present within all that we do. It

mandates our partial integrations and entails our ultimate unbalance

— since a complete synthesis of developmental lines and forms of life

remains ‘supersensible’ and unachievable. Historically and culturally

we can at best tilt back and forth between eras of relative integration

and eras, such as our own, of more radically open ended and unpre-

dictable excess and imbalance — religious, technological, economic.

This unexpected extension of Kant’s sublime as a general anthropol-

ogy of human nature illuminates us at our highest — in the most truly

sublime of our ethics, spiritualities, and artistic traditions; in our most

endearingly engaged collections of what fascinates — be it coins,

antique clocks, or chestnuts; and in those equally compelling fusions

of person as things that find us at our most very, very dangerous.

What we are left with then is a human sciences restatement of the

classical tensions between the domains of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’, with

no completed synthesis possible across their multiple amalgams,

along with a very traditional conclusion concerning the perpetual

necessity of choice.

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