Man, the great protoplasm bag, originated as a recoiler
There is no basic agentive biological unit. But the cell is the official unit of biology, and the obvious unit for anyone who looks. The distinction is this: at what level does division thwart automatic self-reproduction? The smallest level is the most “basic.” We can divide organisms and organs, but not cells. The cell is a unity that cannot be rearranged or halved.
We also arrive at the cell when moving from the reverse direction. How much do we need to add before we arrive at a sheltered hypercycle that robustly reproduces itself (or: one that makes it through far-from-equilibrium perturbation)? The answer is At the level of the cell.
The cell is the lowest level where re-identifiability is strong and connotes Aristotle’s occult underlying striving. Substance is temporally identical—that’s the objective view. But internally, as Aristotle and Spinoza and Schopenhauer point out, “temporal identity” is in-itself prehension—conation. Time-transcendence and -binding have an inner life with two aspects—striving and expecting. Both are projective in time—they skip ahead and posit the future as an object for consciousness now. The tension comes out as our acting to realize the thing projected. (This is also the gateway that allows “the sphere of reason” to impact matter.)
But the cell gets props because it is so damn responsive. Organelles are responsive but only inside their functional channels; they are too self-absorbed to know how to compensate for their insufficiency, for dependencies they cannot take care of through their own action. Organelles are, by themselves, unable to supply or acquire the conditions for their survival. They are parasitic on other products of work. They are symbiotic, and this is why they are such good team players inside the cell.
Now, take a human body cell. Poor fella won’t last a minute outside the body. Throw a skin cell, or a neuron, or a chief cell into the wilderness and it will quickly die. But throw an amoeba, and it will thrive—overcome perturbation, eat energy, split in two, and colonize the spherical Lego box of atoms that is the Earth. It makes me want to shout — Oh mighty amoeba, greatest of all the cells! You are the cell become autonomous agent! Oh amoeba—you are a cell, but also a nomad. Always churning and hunting to remain intact as you free fall through time. Whither all this flying?
This idea, that subjective being emerges as ever-churning work of negentropic flying, reminds me of the same idea expressed by Crowley as a swan compelled to fly by the laws of its embodiment, and upon it sits the puzzled rational subject with its equally a priori demand, the Principle of Sufficient Reason —
Aleister Crowley (1919). Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente , II:17-25.
Also the Holy One came upon me, and I beheld a white swan floating in the blue.
Between its wings I sate, and the æons fled away.
Then the swan flew and dived and soared, yet no whither we went.
A little crazy boy that rode with me spake unto the swan, and said:
Who art thou that dost float and fly and dive and soar in the inane? Behold, these many æons have passed; whence camest thou? Whither wilt thou go?
And laughing I chid him, saying: No whence! No whither!
The swan being silent, he answered: Then, if with no goal, why this eternal journey?
And I laid my head against the Head of the Swan, and laughed, saying: Is there not joy ineffable in this aimless winging? Is there not weariness and impatience for who would attain to some goal?
And the swan was ever silent. Ah! but we floated in the infinite Abyss. Joy! Joy!
White swan, bear thou ever me up between thy wings!
O silence! O rapture! O end of things visible and invisible! This is all mine, who am Not.
The amoeba knows two things:
- Moseying around
- Recoiling upon contact with non-food
This action of the amoeba cannot be unique to it. All cells are recoilers.
Conclusion: Our bodies are made of tiny recoilers! A person is a walking conglomerate of 40 trillions recoiling but lame amoebas.
The amoeba is a cell person. A self-sufficient and agentive cell.
The human is a colony of symbiotic invalids. Yet in their memory, when they were individuals, they were eaters and recoilers, expanders and retractors. Our constant state of existential anxiety makes us all chronic psychological retractors. Even whole-organism executive consciousness identifies with the body, and is always poised for flight, which is just whole-organism retraction. The basic orientation towards space of the survival-capable cell is one of retraction. This is one quality that has been transmitted through all the stages of emergent complexity—right up to the social.