Table Of ContentS T U D I E S I N M U L T I D I S C I P L I N A R I T Y
SERIES EDITORS
Laura A. McNamara Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque,
New Mexico, USA
Mary A. Meyer Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos,
New Mexico, USA
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Ray Paton The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
On the cover:
Imaginary Garden by Tamar Neuman
S T U D I E S I N M U L T I D I S C I P L I N A R I T Y V O L U M E 6
Reviving the Living
Meaning Making in Living Systems
Yair Neuman
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Beer-Sheva, Israel
Amsterdam – Boston – Heidelberg – London – New York – Oxford
Paris – San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo
Elsevier
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First edition 2008
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Series Dedication
Studies in Multidisciplinarity is dedicated to the memory of Ray Paton.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
As always, to my beloved children Yiftach, Yaara, and Tamar
Acknowledgments
Rabbi Moshe Ben-Maimon (1135–1204), known as the Maimonides, was an
eminent Jewish scholar, physician, and philosopher. In his treatise Mishneh
Torah he wrote an insightful statement about the relation between a person
and his teacher:
Just as a person is commanded to honor and revere his father, so it
is his duty to honor and revere his teacher, even more than his
father; for his father has secured him life in this world, while the
teacher who has taught him wisdom secures for him life in the
future world.
The Hebrew word for a teacher is far remote from the English translation.
The etymological source of ‘‘teacher’’ tells us that it was used to denote the
slave who escorted children to school. In contrast, the Hebrew term denotes
the activity of pointing at the right direction. According to the Jewish sense,
a ‘‘teacher’’ can only point at the way. The context of my acknowledgements
is not the same context of the Maimonides teaching. However, the
Maimonides statement draws an important analogy between being a good
‘‘teacher’’ and being a good parent. This analogy is important for
understanding the meaning of learning and the role of significant others
in our personal development. It is my pleasure to thank two significant
others, Irun Cohen for teaching me the wisdom of the immune system and
Peter Harries-Jones for teaching me the wisdom of the social systems.
I would also like to thank Steven Rosen for ‘‘recursive dialogues’’, Meni
Neuman for a constructive reading, my university rector Jimmy Weinblat
for supporting the publication of the book, Jeanette Bopry for her excellent
editorial work, Michael Weinstock for correcting my ‘‘Hebrew English’’ to
‘‘American English’’, and Mouton de Gruyter for their permission to reprint
copyright materials.
Finally, I had the pleasure to work with two professional and friendly
editors who made the best efforts to support this project. I would like to
thank them both warmly: Laura A. McNamara, the academic editor and
Elsevier’s editor Anne Russum.
Dedication
One day my Grandfather called me on the phone and wished me a happy
birthday. I was pleased that the old man remembered the birthday of his first
grandson, and I was interested in the mnemonic tactic he used to recall the
date. ‘‘Very simple’’, my Grandfather explained ‘‘I write all the birthdays’
dates of my children, my grandchildren, and my Great-grandsons in my
daily prayer book’’.
For an unknown reason at that time, this story excited me. I shared this
excitement with a narrow-minded friend who dismissed my Grandfather’s
explanation as simply reflecting the mnemonic technique of an old man.
However, for me, my Grandfather’s mnemonic technique was full of
meaning. In retrospective, I realize that the association between the Holy
words of the prayer, between the most abstract and transcendental concept,
the one of God, and the most concrete and localized event of an individual’s
birthday is something that perfectly characterizes my Grandfather and my
Grandmother. Not a detached abstract thinking neither meaningless
concrete nor particular activities but life in between. I have realized then
that beyond the generation gap, the cultural gap, the age gap, the
educational gap, or any other gap between me and my grandparents, each
of us is trying in his own way to live the logic of in between.
This book is about meaning making in living systems, a novel perspective
for understanding the realm of the living. However, underneath the surface
the book is about the logic of in between and the way living beings manage
their way in the world by orchestrating a delicate balance between order and
disorder, past and present, the abstract and the concrete, and the static and
the dynamic. This underlying logic of the book provides me with a good
excuse to dedicate my second book to my Grandfather Meir Lifshitz and to
my Grandmother Bracha (Berta) Lifshitz, two good and honest people who
taught me, in their own way, a lesson about the meaning of life beyond its
molecular level.
Preface
Among the unpaved ways one is mine
—Vladimir Vissotsky, ‘‘Shattering’’
Opening a book is always a challenge especially if it appears under the title
Studies in Multidisciplinarity. Disciplines are organized around common
themes, concepts, problems, shared enemies, and other features that give
them a sense of coherence. This disciplinary ground allows an author of a
disciplinary book to address his audience without ‘‘foreplay’’ and to get
directly to the point. This is the reason why I usually find disciplinary books
to be so boring. Both in lovemaking and in book writing, foreplay is of
indispensable value.
An author who addresses different audiences and challenges them from an
interdisciplinary perspective is facing a problem: How to introduce your
book while having no simple common ground with your audience? I was
struggling with the question of how to open this book, then one day I
watched, with my kids, Walt Disney’s version of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. In one of the scenes Alice arrives to the tea party of the Mad
Hatter. In the party she meets the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the
Dormouse. She tries to share with them the adventures she has had but does
not know where to begin. Ah! This was exactly my situation and I hushed
my kids in order to learn a lesson from the Mad Hatter. The advice Alice
receives from the Mad Hatter and the March Hare is illuminating and
impressive in its simplicity: Start at the beginning and stop at the end.
Apparently, this advice should inspire any rational author. However, Lewis
Carroll’s characters are not the best models for rational thinking. What is
wrong with the Mad Hatter’s appealing and illuminating advice? The
answer is that, as creatures with consciousness and memory, we have no
simple beginning ready to hand, no Euclidean point from which we may
start. For any beginning there is a previous and/or alternative beginning
from which we may begin to tell our story. Indeed, as all other living
creatures, we are born, live, and end our lives immersed in intricate webs in
which a straight path from ‘‘The Beginning’’ to ‘‘The End’’ is seldom
xii Preface
observed. In this context, the Mad Hatter’s advice, with all of its apparent
rationality, is the advice of a mad man who is seeking something that does
not exist. Therefore, opening a story, a lecture, or an academic book can
never start at ‘‘The Beginning’’ unless the Big Bang or the Book of Genesis
has clear relevance to our story.
Where should I start? I would like to start with a feeling of dissatisfaction,
which may be wrongly interpreted by some people as a religious or more
accurately, a scientific heresy. This feeling of dissatisfaction concerns our
understanding of living systems, and the way this understanding, in a very
deep sense, banishes organisms from their unique status as living systems.
Our knowledge of living systems celebrated its alleged victory through
downward reductionism. Let us take two disciplines as an example: biology
and linguistics. Concerning our own species, both in biology and linguistics,
we improved our ability to break the system into small component parts and
to achieve a better and better understanding of those parts and their
organization. The Genome project has increased our knowledge of the way
the genetic ‘‘letters’’ are organized and Chomsky’s theory of grammar has
made a similar contribution with regard to the way in which the basic
components of a sentence are organized.
The advancement of knowledge both in biology and linguistics cannot be
denied. However, living systems are more than stubbles of cells (or genes)
just as language is more than a collection of linguistic signs. Each expresses
the gestalt property of a whole which is different from a collection of its
parts; a whole that exists only as long as it is constituted by its interacting
parts, by interacting with itself, and by its interaction with its environment.
No language exists without a community of language users arguing, asking,
joking, explaining, tempting, and constructing a shared reality. Along the
same line, our genes are meaningless if they are taken out of the context of a
living organism.
Context, as its Latin etymology teaches us, comes from contexere ‘‘to
weave together’’. Understanding context is understanding the way things are
woven together in a network (textere). Without understanding the way
things are woven together, we are left with a fragmented and mechanistic
conception of the realm we would like to understand. This book is a study in
biological weaving; it aims to revive the study of living creatures that have
turned, under the influence of reductionism, into a dead stubble of genes.
This is the reason why I titled the book Reviving the Living.
The holistic nature of living systems is a fact that cannot be denied
(Noble, 2006) although it is definitely a fact that can be oppressed. It is
important to recognize the conclusion that is necessarily derived from this
observation. If living systems are gestalt-like wholes that are constituted
through micro-level interactions then ipso facto reductionism is extremely
Preface xiii
limited in helping us to understand them. This conclusion sets a clear barrier
to our understanding of living systems. Digging more and more deeply into
the components of living systems would not help us to understand the
meaning of their behavior. Like children who have successfully uncovered
the components of a mechanical toy, we are now facing the challenge of
understanding the working whole. This conclusion is valid both in biology
and natural language, two fields that will occupy my attention in this book.
The reader should not mistake the above conclusion for a naı¨ ve holistic
alternative that aims to dismiss the proven benefits of reductionism or to
replace scientific rigor with general and vague non-scientific terminology.
This is clearly not the alternative that I am seeking and the reader should
avoid the straw man fallacy while critically judging my thesis.
Now, let us assume that living systems are interactive wholes and that we
would like to understand them as interactive wholes. Is there a non-
reductionist alternative? The reader familiar with the ‘‘complexity sciences’’
may immediately think he or she has the answer. Indeed, the idea of
macrostructures that emerge out of micro-level interactions was found
illuminating in certain respects. However, I would like to address the
challenge of a non-reductionist alternative from a different perspective. To
introduce this alternative, I would like to quote an insightful excerpt from
Art and Answerability, a treatise written by the Russian polymath Mikhail
Bakhtin in 1919.
Bakhtin is unfamiliar to biologists and hardly well known to philoso-
phers, but just listen to what he has to say:
A whole is called ‘‘mechanical’’ when its constituent elements are
united only in space and time by some external connection and are
not imbued with the internal unity of meaning. (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 1;
emphasis mine)
Bakhtin is making an important statement, which is the cornerstone of this
manuscript. The internal unity of a ‘‘non-mechanical’’ whole, a living being,
is achieved through the internal unity of meaning. What does he mean by
meaning and is meaning a key concept for our understanding of living
systems as wholes? The second question is still an open question and I hope
to make a case for the positive answer in this book.
Excluding several rare cases such as Anton Markos’ (2002) Readers of the
Book of Life, Hoffmeyer’s (1996) Signs of Meaning in the Universe, or
Marcello Barbieri’s (2002) The organic codes, the concept of meaning has
not been directly faced in the scientific literature dealing with theoretical
biology. Even in these important texts meaning, in the sense in which it is
discussed in this manuscript, is not the main Organizing concept.
