2.3 The Ternate Letter
Last modified 07/04/2008
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We should note that in a mysterious way the Darwin paradigm was
self-correcting, for the reason that it was not 'Darwin's theory', but that of
Wallace and Darwin together. The famous episode of the Ternate letter shows that
the way that Wallace had come upon the same basic framework as Darwin, and their
joint theory soon became Darwin's. But we should note emphatically that Wallace
quickly came to the conclusion that something was wrong with their early
formulation and, despite being more Darwinian than Darwin at first, came to the
conclusion that natural selection was inadequate to explain, at least, the
descent of man.
As we move toward the close of our essay series, we should connect Wallace's realization with the question of the Kantian problem ideas with which we started, and taking 'totality of the organism' as the surrogate for 'soul' terms, note that Wallace realized that man had a potential that emerged prior to the needs of adaptation, and that this suggested that the regime of natural selection could not explain its emergence for the simple reason that a potential aspect of man had no environmental interactions. Wallace's many later 'heresies' included a brush with 'spiritualism' which isn't a a spiritual subject at all, but an exploration, mostly in vain, of the 'full totality' of the organism. Is the organism a space-time entity or does it have a component that might be beyond space and time, and if so how might we understand it? The answer is that if spiritualists get a hold of the question that might be the onset of hopeless confusion, but logically Wallace's dissent is perfectly valid, and we should note that the 'spiritualists', in principle at least, took this as a practical question, as they pursued the evidences, never conclusive, to say the least, of such ghostly aspects. We should note that behind the bashful rigor of austere Kantian discourse these issues lurk in ominous silence since the question of our representations in relation to some 'thing in itself' beyond the limits of observation poses the unstated and unproven inference that we cannot even observe our own selves, which conceal a noumenal aspect, and that since the categories of space and time are the conditions of possible experience, we could never observe that which is beyond those conditions, indeed our own 'selves'. The question of the observation of the totality of the organism thus resurfaces with a vengeance in the rough passage of the founders of 'Darwinism', as its first exemplar realizes the limits of selectionist explanation.
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