Philosophical Anthropology and Dasein: the Octopus as immersion in being

Edith Stein never had a child (nor did Hannah Arendt.)  I like to think that if a Professor Stein had a daughter then she might have made some significant corrective to Heidegger and his followers.

I would like to think that the self first emerges in its relation with the nurturing presence.  There is no need to opt for the machinations of Melanie Klein.  I prefer the insight offered by Richard Hughes.

But if a philosphical anthropology is to escape a solipsistic epistemology and yet escape an ontology emptied of values there will still remain the problem of the octopus.

No philosophical anthropology can ignore biology anymore than it can ignore psychology or ethnology.

I am not concerned with octopus in relation to problem-solving as such - although the sight of the pacific giant in a small, empty tank at San Diego's SeaWorld (2003/4?) revealed in an instant how little they know about both "world" and life in the sea.

No the problem is that unlike even the crow, the octopus begins as an unmothered, untutored larva.

If in time the octopus evolves to have mirror self recognition such as that of crows, dolphins, apes, pigs and elephants, it will be truly unique in the known course of evolution (who will hold a mirror up to T. Rex?)

The eye of the octopus has the very glands that doom the female as she broods her eggs.

The eye of the octopus, the window into a universe undesigned.

But what world beheld by the eye of the cephalopod?  If the elephant is there-in-my-world as its own recognized self, what are we to make of the octopus?

Consider the self-less cat, the domestic feline*.  Pace Roger Scruton, I suggest that Felis silvestris catus lives in a world governed not by percepts but utterly impelled by imagination.  If to be is to be distinguished, then in the world of the cat, to move is to be imagined edible.

And in the world of the octopus?

An author deplores that we possess cats as pets.  Wrong.  These little cats of the Levant  domesticated us.

Some have asked us to learn to hear what it is that we fail to see.  The cat doesn't ask.

And the logos in relation to the octopus?

* my apologies to those 30 years ago who endured my tendentious exploration of "cats don't really see".