Leah, the gorilla with the walking stick

The gorilla in the elephant pool is documented at PLOS biology.

Descriptions of novel tool use by great apes in response to different circumstances aids us in understanding the factors favoring the evolution of tool use in humans. This paper documents what we believe to be the first two observations of tool use in wild western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). We first observed an adult female gorilla using a branch as a walking stick to test water deepness and to aid in her attempt to cross a pool of water at Mbeli Bai, a swampy forest clearing in northern Congo. In the second case we saw another adult female using a detached trunk from a small shrub as a stabilizer during food processing. She then used the trunk as a self-made bridge to cross a deep patch of swamp. In contrast to information from other great apes, which mostly show tool use in the context of food extraction, our observations show that in gorillas other factors such as habitat type can stimulate the use of tools.

Elsewhere it is noted that the gorilla testing the depth of the pond is nick-named Leah.

No viable account of lived-experience, Erlebnis or Lebenswelt is now defensible which is not also adequate to expliate the world of at least great apes, elephants and perhaps also dolphins and whales, our porcine companions and the crow.  Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, did phenomenology (at least as a propaedeutic to a philosophy of leved experience) a disservice in his attack on Galileo as much as in his misplaced Cartesianism (which has so little to do with Descartes.)

The day of a Peter Geach speaking of "brutes" in a text on mental acts is at an end (at least outside the confines of theology.)

One step in the right direction has been taken by Colin McGinn (also an atheist) is restoring some of the terms of conscious experience, awareness, attention and reverie.

The ethnological accoutn will be that Leah acted without thinking and without awareness or experience. But without regard for Heraclitus she steps into the pond a second time but not as she did the first time.  At what point did she become cognizant of her predicament: when the water proved deep or when she noticed the stick?

The challenge is laid out quote clearly in a Merck manual for veterinarians on swine:

Postweaning sows and prepubertal gilts should be kept in the sight and smell of a boar to induce synchronous estrus (the Whitten effect). They also experience a dormitory effect (the McClintock or Fraser-Darling effect) with regard to synchrony due to the presence of other females. Sexual behavior in pigs is almost universally associated with the “chant de coeur” or song of the heart. Courting pigs are vocal. Boars have a gape response (flehmen), and some boars can detect estrous females through olfactory means. Boars will nuzzle the head, shoulders, flank, and anogenital area of sows during courtship. If the pheromonal cues are present, boars progress to pushing on a sow to see if she will move. If she stands, she is willing to mate. Boars exhibit a unique, pheromonally based solicitation behavior toward females: they “champ”—chewing and gnashing their teeth, producing frothy saliva that is rich in the pheromone androstenol. Androstenol is also present in preputial fluids. Courting boars mark trees with urine and saliva produced by champing. Boars are naturally slow to ejaculate (up to 30 min), which may be a correlate of their long courtship, but mate best if raised in a rich social environment. Boars raised in isolation have decreased sexual performance later in life.

The pheromone explanation would have appealed to the Viennese neuroanatomist who reassured Ludwig Binswanger that he would find a place for his higher concepts in the chemical basement. What a philosophy of the self-aware organism must achieve is not a rejection of reductionism, but an alternative in which reductionism is side-stepped or at least taken out of the focus. In past years, history was thought to offer such an explanatory example.

A pheromone explanation is also relevant in many human contexts: but it is not the singular determinant for most human action in the arena of eros, sexuality and sexual relations.

Until we have studies of porcine social groups in relatively natural settings, we will be ill-positioned to assess the behavioral determinants in boar and sow behaviour.

When the Mangalitza pigs recently arrived in Great Britain, some may have been unaware of what necessitated their delivery. The last Lincolnshire curly-coated pigs are reported to have been sent to slaughter when they lost interest for a "large firm" and its "research purposes".  That was in 1972. Hopefully such action would be unthinkable in the western world today.

Marburg or Bennington

One thing that I admire about Bennington College in Vermont is the lack of a chapel.  One thing that worries me is the occasional Heideggerian tone and the recent firing of an Arendt critic.

Jaspers could not conceive of a university without a Faculty of Theology.  Perhaps he was right: better to have theologians in the open than disguised as philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, social commentators, journalists, feminists or literary critics.

Consider the Jonathan Miller interview with Denys Turner.  Turner need not be troubled by the loss of the Ontological Argument to scrutiny by philosophers - he has the really big question enshrined by Heidegger.  He may not talk freely of Satan as a peripatetic, but he is very free to talk about Nothing.  He follows certain steps.  The chorus is dispersed.

Suppose we follow Turner's lead to consider the "gift".  This theme comes validated by both Gabriel Marcel and Heidegger.

We do not consider the world as given.  We encounter the world as "gifted" to us.

We are but one step from the "gift of the Son"? His only begotten Son?

And from there it is but a few steps to squash the Arian and other inevitable heresies.  We come full circle, common in many folk dances.

But was the great gift not Mary devoid of sin - and the physical assumption to heaven - this may be the judgment of Hispanic Catholicism in the New World (and how much is this a reaction to the fact of the Magdalen?)

Were Bolzano alive in 2002 when America went to war on the grounds of lies and suspicions, we can imagine what he might have said.  Were Brentano alive when the physical ascension of Mary became dogma, we can imagine what he might have said.  And Heidegger on this new dogma - this incontrovertible thesis, true for all time and ever, hidden, unspoken,  true since the event?

Here is Heidegger's trinity from "What is Metaphysics?" [Krell]

1. relation to the world
2. stance
3. irruption

I imagine Master and wood-nymph together in the carefully cleared woods of the Lahn Tal that I know so well.  Imagine what you will.  He has left us that opening.

Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein end with a Catholic burial.  Heidegger only asks that we follow the train of his thought.  Wittgenstein asks us to stop thinking as we tend to [conatus ? Treib?] and to listen to pluralities of speech instead [not singular, eidetic reflection or Wesenschauung]. We talk around and spare the listener our positive theses.  Unlike judgement, there is no end to it, and still there is no end to it, no result: mere polemos.  But the theologians have been able to keep talking - unlike those asserting a flat-earth but rather like those asserting a recent Earth -say, 5000 years old or so.  They need not assert it, but only remind that the Word says it is so.  True historicity.  Embrace your faith.  In speakings such was and ever is given unto you.

Are we to "follow" a "way of thinking" that brings us to the physical ascension [1950]?  As Lutherans? As Anglicans? As Orthodox?  Had She first died?  Must She not have first come to her death?

What have the philosophers laid at theology's threshold?  Serious questions about omnipotence.  Serious questions about omniscience.  Serious questions about prayer.  Serious questions about evil.  Serious questions about prophetic revelation.  The theologian in the West stands at one remove, out of reach, the simple side-step of faith.  But what is fide without credo - or failing those asertions, at least doxa?

Would Bultmann have chided Denys Turner for making of Heidegger a new myth?  Why embrace Heidegger? Why not Mohamet? Why not Buddha?  Because of who we are as a people.

Habermas' followers may yet sell this Tao to China as a post-Confucian discursive-action tonality.  But who could sell this in a Souk?  The text of the Koran, for all its commentaries, is what it is.  The divisions of that faith need no lesson in historicity, bound as they are to nephews and sons-in-law.  "Paul" was not another name for a brother named "John of Jerusalem".

see: Hans Jonas, Memoirs with Christian Wiese and Krishna Winston
see Hans Jonas on Heidegger and the theologians in The Phenomenon of Life.