Life and Universe manifested in Phenomenological World

Life and Universe manifested in Phenomenological World

(as unfolded into appearance: Entfaltung von Unsichtbar)

 

Evolution is charting a unknown course where Life is like a long journey in the evolutionary process walking on a tight rope woven by phenotype and genotype in alternating manner. In oriental civilization and wisdom, evolution has been viewed more cosmological evolution rather than biological. The term 演化 yǎnhuà precisely implies both cosmo-evolution or cosmovolution (the word I coined). Biological evolution is a miniscule part of cosmovolution. The universe in which we live as well as we as a life are manifested only in the phenomenological world.

Richard Dawkins, an advocate for the gene only and author of Selfish Gene, claims that genotypic elements are everything dismissing the phenotype of the world or life. He went further that phenotype is nothing but a vehicle to carry the gene. This view is not only dangerous but also wrong and misleading. If one views the phenotype, a phenomenological landscape of life as only a vehicle to carry and transmit the gene, he does not understand or grasp the meaning of life as a whole. We should not and cannot separate cosmovolution and biological evolution in a long process of cosmovolution where biological process is a part of a whole. It may be that evolutionary process of biology is a mere tinkering, a process of adding and eliminating a piece or two through stochastic process as if a Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins) plays indiscriminate game, but I have a difficulty in imagining the cosmovolution taking the same tinkering course. If the cosmovolution cannot be considered a random process, then the biological evolution must follow the universal law of nature as manifested in the phenomenology. Nobody knows whether the biological evolution occurs through tinkering like drinker’s walk or moves toward a highest point, the omega point which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin advocates.

But if the cosmovolution is not like tinkering, biological evolution as a part of cosmological evolution cannot be a mere a random walking. Phenotype is the only window through which conscious world can see the outside. Distorted lady’s image of Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, psychedelic paintings of Vincent Willem van Gogh, George Frederic Handel’s Messiah and image pattern recognition of John Forbes Nash are not the results of mental disease, but equipped with special endowment they can see a new world through the windows which we the normal people cannot see. (This article is taken and translated from Kang Sungzong, Your Brain from Womb to Tomb, Life Science Publishing Co., Seoul 2008, page 187, Chapter 4, Section 14. (강성종 작, 당신의 두뇌, 안녕하십니까? 자궁에서 무덤까지, 라이프 사이언스 출판사, 서울 2008 년, page 187, 제 4장 14절) Korean Version)