Cutting down the Porphyrian tree: Objective reality as created by the innerness of living beings
Cutting down the Porphyrian tree: Objective reality as created by the innerness of living beings

Summary/Abstract: The concept of hierarchy has been shown to be extremely useful in many areas of human knowledge, and parsing the world into higher and lower, more or less complex, developed, or intelligent units is a heuristic tool we commonly use in order to understand the world around us. A scala naturae extending from rocks to humans to angels to God, or nowadays from elementary particles to humans to galaxies, is integrated into the fabric of our worldview. The concept is especially useful in biology, where it features either in its static form in biological systematics (Linneaus), or in the historical, evolutionary dimension such as we find in the works of Darwin and Haeckel, but also in cladistics and other fields. Markoš and Das (2016) argue that the term “domain” would be more appropriate for classification of living beings because it does not assume a hierarchy. When considering communicational processes within biological systems, a heterarchical concept indeed seems more appropriate (Švorcová 2016; Bruni, Giorgi 2015).

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