The delay in the fall, upright posture and the evolution of modeling

• Main Author: Ladd, Stephen
• Format: Others
• Language: en; en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1993/2073

The thesis shows how the acquisition of upright posture has conditioned the structure and evolution of organizational behavior, or modeling, at the levels of both species and individual development. In the course of this exposition the thesis also shows how the concept of the mental evolved on the format of the empirical/conceptual distinction, in the context of the development of sedentary agriculture and linear alphabetic writing. This has the effect of situating the history of philosophy in our anthropological history and life evolution, by showing how Homo sapiens comes to understand itself as ontologically distinct from all animality. It is this characteristic of the thesis, which necessitated a consistent critical dialogue with psychoanalysis. For it is in psychoanalysis that the concept of the human as animal re-emerges in modernity while still retaining the structure of the mental in the concept of psychic life on the model of the empirical/conceptual distinction. From the performative bodily perspective adopted by this thesis, this persistence constitutes a critical symptomatology, which shows the 'psycho' in analysis--the projection of the 'psyche'--to be indicative of a repressiv castration operating systematically within psychoanalysis and the history of western philosophy. A repressive castration that is immediately linked to the dealization of the father, the structure of reality testing, and the repression of role of the mother in the acquisition of independent locomotion in upright gait as the delay in the fall. This critique of the 'psycho' in analysis does not however constitute a repudiation of analysis, but rather a liberation of the body which opens the door to possibilities for pluri-dimensional cognition and analysis no longer limited by the strict linearity of alphabetic notation which has been contiguous with the projection of the 'psyche' for the last two thousand years of western history. Further, it has the consequence of reducing the metaphysical unity of the anthropose to a contingent, upright, postural one, the functional acquisition of which is shown to have made all other specifically human technical developments possible, while conditioning the structure of their deployment. This reduction is also shown to have an ethical component, for it shows the extent to which 'I' can say 'we', beyond all sexual and cultural difference.