Marjorie Grene, who here introduces the thought of Dr. Portmann, is currently teaching philosophy at the University of California at Davis. Her books include Dreadful Freedom (1948) Heidegger (1957) and A Portrait of Aristotle (1963). She has recently completed The Knower and the Known, which Basic Books will publish next Spring. The present article is based on a lecture delivered last August at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

In New Paths in Biology,¹ Adolf Portmann makes a distinction which can serve as a useful introduction to his thought. He points out that the dramatic advance of biological research in the past few decades has been proceeding on two very different fronts. One of these fronts is constituted by those fields of research collectively designated as molecular biology; it is characterized by the triumphs of biochemistry in its detailed study of the nature and regulation of metabolic processes; by the startling advances of molecular genetics—for example, DNA “code-cracking”; or by the revelation, through the electron microscope, of a whole new world of complex organization at the minutest level. A little less conspicuously in the headlines, but as ingenious in its methods and certainly as significant in its philosophical implications, is the almost equally new and equally rapidly growing science of animal behavior, or ethology, which studies not the minute component parts of animals, but their action patterns both as individuals and in groups.

The difference between the two fronts is illustrated by their different research procedures. In the laboratories of molecular biologists one can find blackboards full of calculations, expensive electronic equipment, carefully isolated preparations of various tissues of micro-organisms or metabolic substances; but anything that looks like a plant or an animal is conspicuously absent. True, molecular geneticists still perform breeding experiments, but for this purpose they usually use bacteria phage or other borderline organisms invisible to the naked eye. Even in electron microscopy, where techniques of looking, of “pure observation,” are undoubtedly crucial, the structures “seen” are far removed from ordinary vision.

Ethologists, on the contrary, must spend hour after hour and week after week devotedly watching animals—living animals—in laboratory conditions, in zoos, or best of all, in the wild, managing or submitting to environments which differ greatly from species to species. They do, of course, perform experiments of great ingenuity and sophistication, interfering with the environment of their subjects in such a way as to infer from altered or constant behavior the fundamental patterns of action which certain situations call forth. For example, they spend much time trying to discover whether a given pattern of action is “innate” or “learned.” In every case, however, their concern is not with tissue cultures, proteins, or genes, but rather with the actions of whole, individual animals or groups of animals. However abstract and elaborate their theoretical explanations of such behavior may be, they always talk about what animals do, and this is a very different subject matter from that of their molecule-oriented colleagues. Indeed, the ethologist more nearly resembles his more old-fashioned colleague, the morphologist; both are engaged in the study of perceptible patterns in things that are visible and audible on the surface of our world.

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Portmann refers to this whole class of perceptible patterns in space and time as authentic phenomena, and he distinguishes these from the subject matter of all the other sciences (including molecular biology), which he calls inauthentic phenomena. This distinction is both more important and more revolutionary than appears at first sight and deserves a brief historical excursion to see what it entails.

The term “phenomena” has a venerable history. Astronomical theory was traditionally concerned to “save the phenomena,” that is, to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies as seen in terms of the mathematics of the circle. But the intellectual revolution of the 17th century initiated a profound change in the understanding of what constitutes a phenomenon. The modern experimentalist’s “phenomena” are not what appears to the ordinary star-gazer, but rather the data accessible to the mathematical physicist, and these are, as a rule, obtainable only in highly contrived experimental situations.

This change can be documented in the writings of Galileo, especially in two famous passages from The Assayer. The first reads as follows:

Philosophy is written in this great book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

So authoritative is the place of mathematical physics in our conception of scientific knowledge, that we are likely to take this pronouncement—trail-blazing in its time—as a truism. But let us think again and ask, first, what Galileo’s statement really means, and second, whether it is true.

The language of nature, Galileo tells us, is one that we must learn. Certainly—all languages must be learned. It is not, however, like one’s mother tongue, assimilated in infancy by any normal human child; it is in some sense a foreign language. And indeed, for most of us, the language of mathematics, which to Galileo is nature’s language, has to be learned in school, not at home; it is a secondary and artificial acquisition. How do we learn such a secondary, foreign language? Either its alphabet is written like our own or it uses different kinds of characters, which must be mastered before we can even begin to understand the words. The latter situation holds for nature as Galileo sees it: not even the letters of its language form part of our ordinary environment. This, too, is of course true of the language of mathematics: we must familiarize ourselves with its formalisms before we can make use of them in order to understand what they have to teach. To the ordinary English-speaking person, then, the language of nature bears a relation to the perceptible surface of the things around him rather like that which a page of Chinese bears to a page of English prose. In short, if Galileo is correct, the universe that “lies open to our gaze” is a volume written in a secret code, which only the trained cryptographer can interpret. The rest of us can only “wander in a dark labyrinth.”

Is this true? Are all of us blind to nature who have not learned to decipher the applied mathematician’s code? Is there no mother tongue of nature that we have learned in early childhood, and on the ground of which we acquire the second, formal speech of mathematics?

Two difficulties obstruct an honest answer to these questions. One is that our world view is so much a product of the 17th-century revolution in science, that to us nature has come to mean Galilean nature. We thus tend to ignore the existence of the primary “life world” of that pre-scientific human understanding which is shared by all human beings, and which is the necessary basis for the “objective” world of science.

Secondly, most of us have always lived in an urban, industrial environment. Urban man’s non-human environment is chiefly one of artifacts. He is cut off by roads and pavements from earth itself, by smog and steam from the sky, by electricity from hewing wood and drawing water, by processed and packaged foods from man’s age-old wrestling with the elements in heaven and earth to gain his sustenance. Thus the abstract language of mathematics may well be the only language of nature he has ever learned. So the sophisticated city-dweller can easily identify the objective world of science and technology with “nature” itself. He is a Galilean to the point of denying the existence of nature in the primary sense.

If, however, we can, by acknowledging them, hold these difficulties in abeyance, we must admit that, taken at its face value, Galileo’s pronouncement is false. Of course nature includes the geometrical shapes which are his favored mathematical “characters,” but it also includes colors and sounds and tastes and smells. Now this is precisely what Galileo denies in the other passage from The Assayer, in which he initiates what Locke was to call the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.

Now I saw that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. But since we have imposed upon them special names, distinct from those of the other and real qualities mentioned previously, we wish to believe that they really exist as actually different from those.

How true, we say. This is the story of Eddington’s two tables: the hard, brown, smooth, coffee-stained or ink-stained object in my study which is my table, and the buzzing congeries of billions of subatomic particles which is the physicist’s table, the real table. But think of the condition on which the whole construction depends: “If the living creature were removed.” This great book of nature would be a nature deprived of life, a nature without ourselves. The letters of Galilean nature quite literally exclude the language of life, including the life of man; modern naturalism does not have, and cannot have, any adequate concepts for the interpretation of organic phenomena, nor for the disciplines that deal with that most strange though most familiar animal, man.

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Yet we do have a world of color and taste and smell and sound which is not just part of our individual subjectivity, but part of our biological environment, as much genetically determined as are our more “mechanical” powers. And it is this whole range of perceived and perceptible phenomena—the world which would not exist at all if the living creature, with his sense organs, did not exist or were not at least possible—that Portmann calls authentic phenomena. What for Galileo is authentic because it is independent of living things, and exists out of all relation to them, is for Portmann inauthentic, just because of its want of such relation. It is not a genuine appearance because it does not and cannot appear to any one. Conversely, what for Galileo is a “mere name,” given reality only by the living creature’s presence, and therefore inauthentic, is for Portmann authentic, just because it does, or can, properly be said to appear. His nature includes living creatures, and its qualities, rather than being “mere names,” call on us to name them.

Authentic phenomena, then, are the perceptible surfaces of the things around us: rocks, clouds, stars, and above all the pullulating variety of plant and animal life as seen and heard. Now most biologists, it must be admitted, would make short work of this conception. They would agree with Galileo: such surfaces will appear mere names once science has “explained” them, and such explanation is imminent, if it has not already been accomplished. Granted, these biologists argue, that colors, sounds, smells, and tastes enter into the life histories of plants and animals in important functional ways. They are confident, however, that such matters can be explained on the one hand as the effects of underlying biochemical conditions, and on the other by mechanical causes, in particular by the so-called “mechanism” of natural selection. Thus bees are attracted by the colors of flowers which are then “explained” by pollination through the flight of bees.

Portmann makes two objections to this purely functional interpretation of authentic phenomena. First, he does not agree that all the great multiplicity of situations in which animals appear to other animals can be interpreted exhaustively in terms of natural selection. Selection can indeed explain the change of such phenomena, but not their origin. Their origin, in neo-Darwinian terms, would have to be explained by mutation: that is, by tiny random errors in the mechanisms of heredity. Such errors, however, are usually harmful and are in any case themselves errors in an already existent system. Selection and mutation are, of course, well-established principles of small-scale change, but to extrapolate them to the whole range of living phenomena in their whole development is, Portmann believes, a procedure unjustified by the present state of our knowledge.

Secondly, Portmann argues that the range and complexity of authentic phenomena far exceed those functional needs which only natural selection can explain. For example, to explain the elaborate pattern of the peacock’s tail by natural selection in the orthodox fashion, meant attributing to the female a kind of artistic con-noisseurship. Recent experiments, however, have suggested two more plausible but restricted explanations for the functional aspect of the peacock’s fan. First, from an early age the female displays a marked response to small kernel-shaped objects; this is plainly a drive connected with feeding behavior, and would account for the selective advantage of clearly developed eyes in the fan. Secondly, the fan and the whole courtship dance seem to furnish an overall index of the liveliness and individual superiority of a given male. Both these explanations are selective; in neither context, however, need we invoke the anthropomorphic conception of a developed artistic taste on the part of the female. But what then of the whole intricacy of the pattern, which is, relative to both these ends, superfluous? Portmann insists that we cannot explain it by reference to any automatic external control, but must acknowledge that it has a value of its own.

Further emphasizing and expanding this point, and more directly contradicting the neo-Darwinian reduction of all organic phenomena to their functions, Portmann sub-divides authentic phenomena into two classes: addressed and unaddressed. By unaddressed phenomena he means such appearances of living things as do not have their raison d’étre in being directed to the sense organs of other animals. The superfluity of detail in the peacock’s fan is such a phenomenon. So is the black pattern on the wing of the mother-of-pearl butterfly, which, Portmann comments, “however ‘optically’ it may affect us, is in the details of its form, even in its existence or non-existence functionally insignificant. . . . Yet it is there.”

Even more plainly “unaddressed,” moreover, are the patterns of animals without vision. Portmann describes the dramatic variations and arrangements of color in sea snails, which the marine biologist observes and which to him, again, are optically effective, but which can have no optical significance for their eyeless owners, nor presumably (in such elaborate detail as they display) for the inhabitants of their normal environment. Yet they are there: the oranges and blues and purples and golds in glowing regular array. From a Galilean point of view, this riot of color and immense diversity of constant form must, in some way so far wholly unintelligible, be purely coincidental to the mechanisms of living, while these in turn must be but accidental by-products of the working of inorganic laws. Yet the living creature does display colors, sounds, and smells to our perception and, at higher levels of life, it responds to these displays in others; this is a massive fact of the living world around us, a puzzling, even a mysterious fact, but a fact nevertheless. We have no right, in the name of science, to deny the fact just because our favored kind of explanation, a Galilean explanation, could not allow it to exist.

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For Portmann, the appearance of living things—the way they show themselves in surface patterns, in rhythms of movement or voice—constitutes one of the two basic characteristics of living things as such. He calls it Selbstdarstellung, life’s showing of itself on the surface. The concept is difficult to render in a single English word; with some hesitation, I shall translate it as display, emphasizing however that its meaning is wider than the usual biological concept. Ordinarily, “display” refers to the active posturing of an animal, as in courtship display and the like. But as a rendering of Selbstdarstellung, I am using “display” in a sense similar perhaps to its use in merchandising. It includes active display, but also all the passive show of animal shapes and patterns. All animals but the very simplest have an outer layer, a skin that is marked in characteristic, often symmetrical and highly complex, patterns, in contrast to the less regular arrangement of their internal organs. Portmann points out that even in very simple transparent animals the internal organs are often knotted up in a corner, as if they were put there so as not to interfere with the symmetry of the overall body design. For such species, moreover, as for the sea snails, visible patterns cannot conceivably serve a “useful” purpose, because they have no eyes; yet pattern is nevertheless constant, intricate, and universal, even as it is in all the higher forms of life. Why? No one can say; but it is a basic character of living things that it is so.

Portmann will doubtless be accused by hard-headed evolutionists of “teleology,” “vitalism,” and “mysticism.” What of these charges? Note, first, that it is the neo-Darwinians whose thought, in this context, is over-teleological: they must have a “function” for everything. They cannot stomach descriptive laws that simply accept a massive body of phenomena without “explaining” them, if these phenomena plainly resist their favored form of teleology, that of “improvement” through the external control of natural selection. Portmann, on the contrary, does not invoke any mysterious “purpose” for display; he simply acknowledges its existence, openly admitting a massive reality to which Galilean thinkers must close their minds, as well as their eyes. For him the patterns of animals, feathers, scales, and so on are indeed in principle “explicable” in terms of their foundation in a genetic basis, as all persistent characters are. And they may some day be explicable not only causally but in the sense that we may find some new—other than functional—perspective from which to understand them. For the present, however, we should honestly admit the existence of organic display as a given, an ultimate fact of the organic world. We have no adequate theory to explain the fact, only an adumbration of causal laws, which could account for its persistence and modification, though not for its ultimate origin.

Is this “mysticism”? In a sense: openness to unexplained phenomena is openness to mystery, and Portmann likes to stress the mysterious complexity of life in a way which intensely irritates mechanistically minded biologists. But why is it “unscientific” to admit the unexplained, to turn afresh to the phenomena? To face and acknowledge mysteries may be, not the rejection of science, but the first step to discovery. Besides, are not scientists supposed to pride themselves on “open-mindedness”? Yet it is scarcely “open-minded” to deny the very existence of those non-Galilean phenomena which constitute most of the living world, and therefore of our own lives as well.

Nor, finally, is the acknowledgement of display as a basic character of living things a renewal of “vitalism.” It does indeed involve resistance to reductivism: to the view that life is “nothing but” statistical variations in the gene pools of populations. But it has nothing to do with any addition of a mysterious “life force” over and above the obvious appearance of the things themselves.

There is, however, more to the life of animals than display. Living things are not mere surfaces, nor are they, as used to be said, simply “sacks full of functions.” Just as their appearances to one another form a significant, indeed essential aspect of their nature, so does what very broadly speaking one can call their “inner life.” A second essential characteristic of living things, in other words, inseparably allied to, but contrasted with, display, consists in the fact that organisms are centers of perceptions, drives, and actions. This is most plainly true of ourselves, and of mammals close to ourselves in the scale of living things. We know that we are conscious, and that our awareness of our own identity somehow matters. We know, moreover, that our conscious thought is only a narrow center of a much broader field of unconscious processes. The totality of our “sentient” life far outruns its self-conscious, wide-awake core: it ranges from the narrow circle of focal awareness through a continuum of gradations all the way to the wholly unconscious. Indeed, many of the transactions through which we both master and submit to our environment, making of it a human world, are entirely out of the range of consciousness; yet they are nevertheless our achievements. Such, for example, is the achievement of color vision. We do indeed see colors and know that we see them, but we cannot “see” or in any direct way apprehend what our nervous system has done to achieve this end.

Further, in our experience of the world we immediately and indubitably confront the fact that other animals, especially higher mammals, appear and behave in a way analogous to our own, as “centers of doing and letting be.” Stimulus-response theory, for all its vaunted “objectivism,” cannot explain away our experience of animals as living centers; for example, the experience of Rilke as he watched a caged panther:

Circling, revolving, lithe prowling strength soft-footed,
The narrow ring he treads is like a dance,
A dance of power with at the center rooted,
A great will stupefied, a will in trance.²

Rilke’s poem begins with the “look” of the panther (sein Blick) all but destroyed by the bars of his captivity. Indeed, it is on those occasions when we meet the eyes of an animal with our own—just as we encounter our own kind “face to face”—that we most directly acknowledge the centered depth of animal life. A dog, unnaturally bound to human life, directs to his master a mute appeal that seems at first sight to make him, like a Hegelian slave, a personality only in relation to another, fuller personality. Yet his look at the same time displays a structured resonance of mood, of character, sometimes of something almost analogous to wisdom.

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But the most eloquent animal countenances belong to our closer kin, the apes. Portmann illustrates the quality of this life, so familiar to us and yet so foreign, with the picture of a male gorilla from the Basel zoo, or of a gorilla mother and child. How rich a center of experience meets us here: the muteness of the gaze serves but to deepen the reverberation of the mood that confronts us. Whatever our theories of animal behavior or animal evolution may be, we must in this case quite simply and factually acknowledge the presence of a center in which the living being’s dealings with its environment are drawn together and from which they radiate.

Now admittedly, as we move away from styles of living like our own, it seems strange to speak at all of an animal’s “knowing” what it is doing, to speak of “consciousness,” or even in a more tenuous sense, of “awareness.” Yet in some way even a hydra moving its tentacles or an amoeba in its pseudopodia shows in the broadest sense a kind of “sentience” and through this controls the patterns of its relation to the surrounding world. Looking downward across the continuum of life, we find universally some such principle, which is unlike anything in the inorganic world.

Early in this century, mechanists like Loeb hoped to reduce all living processes to “tropisms”; twenty-five years ago Fraenkel and Gunn made a similar attempt to explain animal orientation in purely mechanical terms. But animals do not simply move; they behave. They do not simply display reactions, as acids and bases do; they perform—to borrow a psychologist’s term—transactions, and transactions demand an agent, an individual center of giving and taking, of doing and ceasing to do. In some extended sense we must admit the presence of such centers of experience wherever there is animal life at all.

This second pervasive and essential characteristic of organisms Portmann describes by the phrase “Weltbeziehung durch Innerlichkeil” (literally “relation to the environment through inwardness”), again a difficult phrase to make viable in English. I shall translate it by a neologism: centricity, ³ and say that centricity, along with display, is a fundamental character of living things. Again, this statement is not meant to explain anything, but to acknowledge the existence of a range of phenomena too often neglected or even denied. Though we cannot, obviously, get inside the skins, so to speak, of other organic beings and feel how their mode of living feels, we need not deny that such lives exist and have—in a way forever inaccessible to us—their own style of significance. In a passage reminiscent of our earlier reflections on the Galilean language of nature, Portmann writes:

The inwardness of these forms, widely different from our own organization, speaks to us through its appearance. That we cannot translate this language into human words is no reason not to see the appearance itself. If, in a distant country, I attend a dramatic performance, of which I understand not a single word, I shall not on that account assert that nothing at all is being presented, that nothing is happening but a random noise.

The concept of centricity may have—like that of display—far-reaching consequences for our thinking about nature, about science, and about ourselves. Revolutionary concepts, however, are hard to take seriously. Perhaps we can strengthen our grasp of centricity by considering some objections that might be made to it by more orthodox biologists.

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They might argue that our most immediate and massive experience of centricity comes from our own inner life and that we can never directly know the inner core that holds together the threads of organism-environment relation in other species. What Portmann does in counting centricity a basic character of all life, they might argue, is to extrapolate something we know in ourselves and apply it, if in diminished form, to all organisms. But he objects to the Darwinians’ extrapolation of natural selection to the whole history of life; how then is he justified in his own equally sweeping extrapolation, in ascribing what may well be a unique character of our own, the possession of consciousness, to the whole living world?

First, Portmann by no means alleges that “consciousness” or “mind” is to be predicated of all animals, let alone plants. Consciousness as we experience it is merely one expression, one style, of centricity. Even in the human individual it forms, in fact, only a narrow band in the much wider spectrum of mental life. And so, since even our own awareness is by no means wholly focal, we need no great imaginative effort to extend a generalized concept of sentience, of some sort at least, to other animals. Secondly, consciousness in us, sentience in a broader sense in animals generally, is again but the inner expression of centricity as such: of the fact that organisms are centers of metabolism and development, of ordered reaching out toward an environment and taking in from it, of birth and death. It is this centered dynamic, dependent as it is upon the existence of individuals, that is characteristic of all life and is not characteristic of inorganic phenomena.

Thirdly, one reason for approaching the general concept of centricity from our own consciousness as its characteristic human expression, is that it is this expression, this dimension of centricity, which we know most intimately and indubitably. We also know, immediately and unmistakably, that some similar structure characterizes other higher animals; and finally, even as we try in our imagination to lessen the intensity of centricity in its aspect of inwardness, we are still describing, and describing what is common to the living forms we see before us and around us here and now. We are not suggesting abstract explanatory theories, nor extrapolating from these to a vast and remote past, but only trying to pin down with a fitting phrase a description of a common quality of our present experienced world. Portmann’s extrapolation therefore is less adventuresome than the Darwinian one, since it is descriptive and contemporary rather than explanatory of an inaccessible past.

To such an answer, however, it might in turn be objected that, no matter how plainly “descriptive” the concepts Portmann is introducing, they exceed the scientist’s brief in a way in which the Darwinian extrapolation from present to past does not do. For even if centricity is not equivalent to consciousness or sentience, it does involve a reference to inwardness, not just to a geometrical center of centripetal forces or the like, but to a literally subjective center. And such a reference, it would be alleged by the orthodox biologist, is obviously non-objective and therefore non-scientific. The Darwinian account of evolution as the product of chance mutation and external selective control, on the other hand, invokes, its adherents believe, no concepts not compatible with strict scientific mechanism: it presents “life” in Galilean terms. And it is true, indeed, as we have seen in the discussion of display, that Portmann’s reflections about living things cannot be contained within the frame of Galilean science. Rather, they arise from an effort like that of the phenomenologists to overcome the abstractions of the Galilean tradition and return “to the things themselves.”

Further, it must be emphasized that Portmann is not in the least denying, he is only supplementing, the great storehouse of biological knowledge accumulated by a more mechanistically oriented science. In particular, he is not denying the importance of self-maintenance as a characteristic of organic nature. In fact, we may add self-maintenance here, parenthetically, as a third basic character of living things. For all the intricate mechanisms of reproduction, growth, metabolism, regeneration, learning behavior, and so on are of course rightly interpreted by biologists as devices for the preservation of the individual and the species. Many biologists, however, would make self-maintenance, or “survival,” the sole explanatory principle for all organic phenomena. And where they are engaged in detailed studies of particular physiological or genetic mechanisms, there is nothing wrong with this; it is in the philosophical implications of their work, when they think about them, that they go astray.

Animals must indeed be adapted to their environments if they are to survive, and the techniques for survival do form a very substantial, perhaps even the major, segment of the totality of living structure and process. But biologists, under the guiding influence of Darwinian theory, often treat living things as nothing but aggregates of such techniques. Life, they seem to believe, is adaptation, and adaptation is the fitting of the organism into its internal and external environment in such a way as to enable it to survive; in other words, it is the sum total of means to survival. Now the governing concept in this kind of thinking seems to be utility. Organisms are understood as aggregates of devices useful for survival. Thus a woodpecker’s beak is useful for getting insects out of trees; the brooding habits of fishes and birds are useful for keeping the young alive; the colors of snails are useful as concealment from hungry thrushes, and so on through the whole vast variety of living functions and forms.

Utility, however, is a doubly relative concept. A use is a use not only for something—in this case, survival—but also to someone. Birds, fishes, snails: in every case there is an individual or a group of individuals, that is, a species, to whom the activity or pattern or process in the case is useful. How is the biologist to interpret the beneficiary of the adaptive relation, the individual woodpecker who gets his meal or the individual snail who does not get eaten by the thrush? There are two alternatives. Either the individual is itself simply useful for some further end, or he is intrinsically valuable. In the former case, we have to say, as Dobzhansky has done on occasion, that the whole life of multicellular organisms is nothing but a device for the self-duplication and recombination of the genes, the only part of living things that can survive indefinitely. In other words, a hen is an egg’s way of making another egg. This is an amusing, but also surely an absurd fashion of looking at the achievements of all living things, including the whole of human culture. The other alternative is to acknowledge frankly that mechanisms for self-maintenance are instrumental in relation to the intrinsic value of the entities they maintain. And that is just what Portmann’s criteria of display and centricity are meant to convey: living things are significant in themselves. The criterion of self-maintenance, though important, is subordinate to the other two.

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According to Portmann, the study of the social life of animals supports this view of organic life.

The observer of social life must time and again be shifting his attention between two different aspects. . In one of these, society is an organization where the individual has value merely by being a member of it: it is considerably limited in possibilities of self-expression, but contributes toward achievements only realizable in society and is integrated with other individuals for purposes which can be seen only in judging the whole. In the other aspect, equally essential and indeed complementary, the individual finds complete fulfillment only in and through social life, which allows the greatest possible “individuality” and vitality for individuals.

In the first of these aspects, social life is geared to the maintenance, not, it is true, primarily of the individual, but of the species. In the selective process those characteristics are favored which increase the probability that an organism will leave descendants. Portmann mentions as one example of such a process the breeding habits of the Emperor penguin, where communal rearing and brooding of young by a succession of adult birds has helped to make possible their survival in the most extreme Antarctic conditions. We can see how such a species would have developed from a species like the King penguin, living in a slightly less forbidding environment. According to Portmann, any small mutations “which weaken penguins’ normal drive for a brooding territory and limit aggressiveness to the drive to possess an egg or a chick” would clearly have selective value, and the accumulation of many such mutations would finally issue in a pattern of behavior adapted, as the Emperor penguin is, to the worst of Antarctic weather. In general, variants in territory-possession, associated as this phenomenon is with reproduction, are clearly functions of the need to preserve the species: or strictly speaking, in selective terms they are phenomena in the absence of which the species in question would have become extinct.

At the same time, however, territory-possession is not only a device for species preservation, but marks the enhancement of individual life as well. To illustrate this point, Portmann refers to the social life of birds such as the great tit. In the summer the male bird will leave the flock and stake out for himself and his mate a favorite haunt. The two birds will then develop what biologists call “ownership behavior,” for it shows a striking resemblance to analogous human actions.

And such ownership of territory serves to enhance the individuality of the single animal:

. . . the male tit singing in his look-out is recognized from a distance by other tits in the vicinity as a particular bird. The territory thus adds distinguishing marks to those of body and behavior, it becomes a part of the whole individual, also an expression of his capacity for self-assertion. It has its inner side in the bird’s experience: he knows his territory exactly, recognizes it again when he returns there. . . .

An inner attachment to this place develops, it becomes a “home” associated with special values and feelings of familiarity and safety. Home is a place where through peace and security essential moods of every higher animal find most satisfaction. . . .

This is only one instance among very many. The existence of social ranking among the individuals of a species is another conspicuous example of individuality in social life. Or again, the greater ferocity of combative behavior in mammals as compared to birds, Portmann believes, also reflects the increased individuality of the former.

Ownership behavior, the sense of home, focuses organisms at a center in space. But centricity is expressed in time as well as space, in rhythms of living as well as in the cherishing of a dwelling place. Portmann reminds us that, as zoo keepers know, animals can be bored; they need to “fill time” as we do. Quite generally, he suggests, those aspects of social life which heighten individuality give meaning to life as it passes. So termites, for example, are more active—more “lively”—in the presence of their royal pair, or bees of their queen.

Nor is time simply an empty stretch, waiting to be filled. Indeed, ordered process, rhythm, is the fundamental expression of centricity. In a paper on “Time in the Life of the Organism,” Portmann writes:

Every form of life appears to us as a Gestalt with a specific development in time as well as space. Living things, like melodies, might be said to be configured time; life manifests itself as configured time.

The most dramatic instance of this principle is the phenomenon of bird migration, where the rhythms of living are marvelously integrated with larger temporal rhythms. Portmann takes as an example the life of the arctic tern:

Twice a year, the little white bird effects [an] immense flight that carries him almost from pole to pole, from one summer to another, from a life in the long light days of the northern hemisphere to another with equally long and bright days in the southern half of our earth. Experiments with banded birds have shown for certain that this species has a longevity of at least twelve years, but for all we know they may live longer. An aging tern, then, has carried out at least twenty-four flights, each measuring almost the entire length of a meridian. We have little knowledge of the physical performance required by these journeys, and even the biologist surely reflects too little on the extraordinary inward processes of a bird engaged in migration. This transformation of many structures in the course of the interval from breeding time to migration period also belongs to the picture of the bird in whom the dimension of time is extraordinarily filled with varying content, with transformations of structure and action—an extreme example of configured time.

Nor is the wonder we feel in the face of such phenomena a mere “subjective” addendum to what is “really” only a story of mechanisms of survival more complicated than most. Portmann continues:

There is no doubt that bird migrations represent a solution to certain ecological problems, that they enable the bird to exchange unfavorable seasons for more propitious ones. But if we consider all the aspects of these migratory phenomena in their immense variety, it becomes increasingly plain that they surpass elementary practical needs, such as the preservation of the species. All necessity is transcended in these great formative processes, into which tellurian events are integrated as wonderful alarm-signals for the awakening and enrichment of organic life in time. The passage of clock time, meaningless in itself, is employed for the enrichment of life. It need hardly be added that human life is a magnificent configuration of time in this same sense, offering in its successive ages ever new possibilities of development in time and hence of living riches.

From the concluding sentence, it should be clear that Portmann’s view of the character of living things has important consequences for the understanding of ourselves. Portmann’s reflections on and appreciation of all organic life lead him inevitably to speculations on “the special position of man in the realm of the living.”

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In modern times, biology has exercised a decisive influence on man’s understanding of himself. The great authority of science, deriving from its intellectual rigor and its use for “the relief of man’s estate,” has challenged the assumptions of humanism and religion, particularly their insistence on human uniqueness. At times it appeared necessary for all honest men to concede that man differed only quantitatively, but not qualitatively, from other animals, and that animals in turn could best be understood mechanistically. Yet recently the “scientific” challenge to man’s traditional understanding of himself has been challenged by scientists themselves, a trend exemplified by the work of Adolf Portmann.

¹ Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Harper & Row, 170 pp., $4.95.

² Translated by M. Lucas.

³ This term was suggested to me by Mr. Peter Alscher.