Formas elementares do psíquico. Um esboço teórico-sistemático a partir da interpretação hegeliana do organismo

Abstract

The organism, self-preserving its species-universality, has, in Hegels interpretation, the character of an acting universal, ie. of a subject, of a self, which thus already inheres the plant. For the animal, so Hegel, beyond that a double self is characteristic. This structure is system-theoretically re-interpreted as auto-regulation in the sense that the organismic process is controlled by the set-points of the system existence itself and in this sense by a self-instance, which regulates the biochemical functions of the plant, and, for the animal, additionally the movement actions. The latter presuppose perception and thus sensual organization and a nervous system. The entanglement of external perception and self perception is, referring to Hegel’s interpretation, determined as feeling, by which an inner dimension is spanned, characterized, amongst others, by privacy and quale-predicates. A behavior adapted flexibly to the situation and thus potentially ‘intelligent’, as is shown further, is only possible as feeling-controlled, not as robot or reflex behavior. The Psychic is thus not a superfluous epiphenomon of the Organic, but possesses real biological relevance. Reinterpreted in a systemtheoretical vein the Psychic thereby is determined as an emergence phenomenon of a material, self-preserving system qualified for perception and – following Hegel – exhibiting the self-self structure of the animal subjectivity. Soul and self-preservation indeed essentially belong together – an insight, which might be substantial also for the project of artificial intelligence. Essential for the emergentistic interpretation is that it is possible only on the ground of an objective-idealistic ontology of nature providing a sustainable ontological basis for the empirical-systemtheoretical argumentation.