Page 109 - Contribution To Phenomenology

102 MAXINE SHEETSJOHNSTONE

centricity, she considers a possibly strong objection to Portmann's thesis,
namely, that while we humans experience centricity, and unquestionably
so, how can Portmann extrapolate on the basis of our experience "to the
whole living world?"" In answering to this objection, she glosses
Portmann's concept in three ways. She first states that Portmann's
concept, while embracing a notion of consciousness, is not claiming that
consciousness may be predicated of all creatures, but rather that it is
"one style . . of centricity," and that "sentience" may be more generally
.
extended to all animals.^ She then states that sentience is "the inner
expression of centricity as such" and that in "reaching out toward an
environment and taking in from it," a creature is a dynamic individual—a
subject—thus altogether different from something inorganic.^'' Finally, she
states that in claiming centricity is a basic character of living things, she,
like Portmann, is not "extrapolating . . 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." In other words, "Portmann's
extrapolation" she says, "is descriptive and contemporary, rather than
explanatory of an inaccessible past."^
Now in conjunction with the rather odd notion that Portmann's
biological descriptions have no historical significance, Portmann merely
describing what is before us here and now, Grene makes the further
peculiar, even cryptic, comment that in describing "the living forms we
see before us and around us here and now," that we at the same time
"try in imagination to lessen the intensity of centricity in its aspect of
inwardness."^ What is queer is to find both a denial of historical interest
in what is actually before us and an attempt to minimize it Indeed, the
denial and the attempt together appear backward steps among the
forward ones that Portmann seems to be taking; they are a perplexing
refusal of what Portmann as an evolutionary biologist would seem clearly
to be affirming. What is at stake such that it is necessary to rein in
experience in this way? Further, why is an attempt to lessen what we
experience tied to the attempt to detach ourselves from the past? A

" Ibid. 274.
^ Ibid.
^7 Ibid.
^ Ibid., lis.
» Ibid.