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Mind and land III: Theoretical aspects
Q. What kind of academic support can there be for landed mind and a culture of organic high intelligence? This session is about four kinds happening already: 1. Epistemology based on perception Inuit culture same word for "world; outdoors; weather; universe; awareness; sense." Awareness not of but in the whole. Narwhal tusk was for a long time thought to be only for fighting has recently been found to have 10 million nerve endings that tunnel from the tusk's core to tiny tubules on the tusk's surface. These nerve endings measure subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients, salinity, and more.
- section in The perceptual implications of Gaia. www.webcom.com/gaia/percept.html The fluid creativity we commonly associate with the human intellect is, in actuality, an elaboration or recapitulation of a deep creativity already underway at the most immediate level of bodily experience. It is the body - the organic, sensitive body itself - that perceives the world and, ultimately, thinks the world. perception in which what he calls the "lived-body" orients and responds to the active solicitations of the world, [is] a sort of conversation between the body and the gesturing, sounding landscape it inhabits. In numerous later essays, Merleau-Ponty disclosed this perceptual "pact" between body and world as the very foundation of truth in history, in political thought and action, in art, and in science. In the book on which he was working at the time of his early death in 1962 - published posthumously, in an unfinished form, as The Visible and the Invisible - Merleau-Ponty took up this earlier analysis of perception and carried it a step further, seeking to describe experientially the actual world to which our senses give us entry, the common domain that we investigate with our reason and science. He found that the "invisible" in [humans] - the region of thought and ideality - is inextricably intertwined with the shifting, metamorphic, intelligent nature of the enveloping world. If perception gives way in us to thought and reflective awareness, these are not properties closed within the human brain, but are the human body's open reply to questions continually put to it by the subtle self-organizing character of the natural environment. I believe it is possible to experience Merleau-Ponty's radical undoing of the traditional "mind-body problem" simply by dropping the conviction that one's mind is anything other than the body itself. If one is successful in this then one may abruptly experience oneself in an entirely new manner - not as an immaterial intelligence inhabiting an alien, mechanical body, but as a magic, self-sensing form - a body that is itself awake and aware, from its toes to its fingers to its tongue and its ears - a thoughtful and self-reflective animate presence. if one maintains this new awareness for a duration of time, becoming comfortable enough with it to move about without losing the awareness, one will begin to experience a corresponding shift in the physical environment. Birds, trees, even rivers and stones begin to stand forth as living, communicative presences. For when my intelligence does not conceive of itself as something apart from the material body but starts to recognize its grounding in these senses and this flesh, then it can no longer hold itself apart from the natural world in which this body has its place . Thus Merleau-Ponty, who in his earlier work had disclosed the radically incarnate nature of awareness and intelligence, ends by elucidating the world itself from the point of view of the intelligent body - as a wild, self-creative, thoroughly animate macrocosmos. Perception is now understood as the continuous intertwining between one's own flesh and "the Flesh of the World." Merleau-Ponty sought a new language which could ground the various disciplines in an awareness of perception as radical participation. In doing so he began to uncover, hidden behind our abstractions, a sense of the Earth as a vast, inexhaustible entity, the forgotten ground of all our thoughts and sensations.
We are minds by being located bodies. Mind is physical structure. Any moment's perception-action structure results from both own and environmental structure Structural response is complex always: contextual, multiple. Knowing (structural response) is broader than conscious response. The forming of persons is the specifically human part of environmental value. The forming of persons in contact with the world is the core of value in art. A sense of knowledge as the structured person is a sense of knowing that makes knowledge uncommodifiable.
2. Cognitive anthropology studying complex connection - affiliation, tethered nomads, initiation, shamanistic breadth Deborah Rose "talking to country" in northern Australia Hugh Brody 2001 The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers, and the shaping of the world The hunter-gatherer mind is humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition. It is where direct experience and metaphor unite in a joint concern to know and use the truth. The agricultural mind is a result of specialized, intense development of specific systems of intellectual order, . 306 Many people are torn between these two ways. 307 Lawrence Hogue on southern California: an honorable role for humans in nature humans physically co-create the world [Europeans] thought they were entering a naturally verdant and thriving land; what they had really found was a carefully cultivated garden" 110 This desert hasn't been a wilderness in the conventional sense for thousands of years. Two hundred years ago, it was the Indians' garden. Now it's a garden gone to seed. 71 Indians maintained the land at a level below climax by millennia of land management Digging wells and ditches, clearing shrubs back from springs to conserve water while allowing one tree to grow over the spring to provide shade and reduce evaporation, planting a willow where it will hold a bank, aligning rocks to prevent slopes from washing out, burning old growth, laying rocks to increase groundwater absorption, burning palms to increase date yield and kill diseases, tip pruning, planting groves, transplanting, branch or root propagation, scattering seeds. - 2000 All the wild and lonely places Among the Navajo and . . . many other native peoples, the land is thought to exhibit a sacred order. That order is the basis of ritual. The rituals themselves reveal the power in that order. Art, architecture, vocabulary, and costume, as well as ritual, are derived from the perceived natural order of the universe - from observations and meditations on the exterior landscape. An indigenous philosophy - metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and logic - may also be derived from people's continuous attentiveness to both the obvious (scientific) and ineffable (artistic) orders of the local landscape. Each individual, further, undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. Barry Lopez "Landscape and Narrative," in Crossing Open Ground, 1989. Wendell Berry stories about agricultural tetheredness Fictional anthropology, Ursula Le Guin: Le Guin is a science fiction writer of exceptional humane sophistication whose Always coming home is a fictional anthropology of the Napa Valley 20,000 years the future. It imagines a culture with both high tech and intensive connection with the land, a culture worthy of its landscape. Some of what she imagines are vision quests in adolescence, a festival cycle closely tuned to season and weather, a lot of land-based work, slow travel often by foot, architectural layouts that are symbols of interconnection, Paul Shepard says that in adolescence a hunter-gatherer culture initiates [its boys] into a way of thinking about nature that makes it and not a non-physical elsewhere the ground for deeper and wider thinking, so that it becomes inexhaustible of interest. The initiation I would give is to say here is our opportunity in this life: we are physical beings in a physical universe. We are sentient by being just that: great feats of sentient response and sentient invention become possible to us by construction and reconstruction of our bodies. Initiation into the human enterprise, the stage of adult responsibility, is initiation into knowledge of the ground of our possibilities, and knowledge of the possibilities themselves.
3. Understanding disaffection Laura Sewell Sight and Sensibility: The ecological crisis is ... a crisis in perception; we are not truly seeing, hearing, tasting, or consequently feeling where we are... In fundamental terms, our evolutionary challenge is a matter of perceptual development capacity to sustain observation ... a matter of grace. Are we able to open with ease when the occasion arises? Are we able to fine-tune the quality of our presence, shifting the form and degree of our receptivity? ( 246-7) ... here's the skill: In the face of the clearly not so beautiful, we do not look away or unconsciously close in a spasm of denial. Skillfully, we witness ... ... the Other is an opportunity for relationship... distinctions and differences that show us what is possible for a life. Most fundamentally, difference is a manifestation of potential ... The acknowledgment and experience of fear is the door that opens us to heightened presence and perception through which we learn to live in the world as it is. (119-120) * Work to understand social, economic, psychological reasons for exploitation, alienation, and evasion in land use, scholarship, high art, and epistemology, with the intention of learning to intervene correctly, compassionately and to rapid effect in these interrelated fields Understanding dissociation - reasons for and causes of dissociation - symptoms of dissociation modes of dissociation - recognizing cultural advocates for dissociation in dualist ideologies recognizing dissociation in spoiled environments object relations theory, attachment theory
Theodore Roszak from Ecopsychology 1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society; open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity. 2. The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Contemporary studies in the ordered complexity of nature tell us that life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental, and cultural systems we know as "the universe." Ecopsychology draws upon these findings of the new cosmology, striving to make them real to experience. 3. Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment. 4. For ecopsychology, as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn's enchanted sense of the world. Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child's innately animistic quality of experience in functionally 'sane' adults. To do this, it turns to many sources, among them the traditional healing techniques of primary people, nature mysticism as expressed in religion and art, the experience of wilderness, the insights of Deep Ecology. It adapts these to the goal of creating the ecological ego. 5. The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility with the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions. 6. Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively "masculine" character traits that permeate our structures of political power and drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on some of the insights of ecofeminism and feminist spirituality with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes. 7. Whatever contributes to small-scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species or some life-enhancing measure of the industrial power we have assembled. Ecopsychology is post-industrial, not anti-industrial, in its social orientation. 8. Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term "synergy" is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.
4. Revision of science New science - network metaphor ascendant complexity theory, chaotic dynamics supports more subtle comprehension. The sense of the world that views nature as a mechanism that is enmeshed in mechanical forces has led to a profound disenchantment with the natural world. There is within these forces of modernism a loss of the sense of a wider cosmology in which human actions are embedded. O'Sullivan Unless we live our lives with at least some cosmological awareness, we risk collapsing into tiny worlds. For we can be fooled into thinking that our lives are passed in political entities, such as the state or a nation; or that the bottom-line concerns in life have to do with economic realities of consumer life-styles. In truth, we live in the midst of immensities. Brian Swimme 1996 The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos Orbis Books
Academic but useful summaries: Cognitive ecology She understood that the colors and textures of the world we live in are body to our sense of self. Djikstra of Georgia O'Keefe, 1998, 3 If the necessary conditions of human aboutness include the human body and its environment, our paradigm of knowing should no longer be the self-conscious ponderings of a man shut away dreaming alone in a room. Manners of speaking founded on alienation and incapability rather than contact and efficacy become suspect. Taking it further, an evolutionary account of knowing and intelligence seems to me to imply an ethical imperative within which the arts and every other human enterprise would share an interest in the conditions needed for excellence of contact. Value of perception Our evolved origins imply the central value to persons of contact with the world in which we are native. If there is a real world, contact is gold. If we are structured to succeed in that world, abilities to be present, perceiving and acting, are of primary value. Perception and action in the real world is our cognitive base. There are depths of order in the natural world - many scales of order coherently co-present. Color, texture, smell, timbre, motion, and shape are all aspects of this order. Our ability to perceive order is our ability to respond with order of our own. Perceived complexity of order always implies that we ourselves are complexly ordered in perceiving. We can see only as much order as we are capable of embodying. When we imagine perception as perception of an image or other mental representation, we imagine it as a sort of skin of appearance projected onto objects. Perception understood as responsive structure, and, further, as multiple, simultaneous, interactive, differentiative, self-organizing response in a widely distributed structure, can be imagined as deeper and wider than sentient perception. There can be responsive structure that is not part of sentient structure, and it can also be more or less accurate, more or less complex. 'The unconscious' can also be more or less responsive, more or less accurate, more or less complex and ordered, and above all more or less integrated with sentient structure. Perception must be understood to be knowledge and it must be understood that there are degrees of excellence of perceptual knowledge. Learning to perceive more builds out from a core or base of evolved ability. Perceiving becomes more particular - we can become more able to perceive particulars in detail - and it becomes more general - more deeply, widely, exactly, and flexibly categorical. If we can think of perception as complex, there is less need to differentiate perception from what was called insight or understanding. The whole gestalt of response in the moment can be understood to be perception. We perceive not only the thing, but what it can do - its effectivities - and what we can do with it - its affordances. Theoretical understanding may be built into the nets by means of which we perceive. With theoretical instruction - theoretical structuring - we may for instance become able to see principles of formation. When we see something in the world we may be able to see how it is organized, how it functions, how it came to be. When we see differences of color of plants on a dry hillside, we can see the course of water in another season. Looking at streaks on a shell or spots on a giraffe, we can see the reaction diffusion processes that engendered them. Looking upward at the Milky Way we can see it as our galaxy's horizon (Churchland 1989). Looking at colors on an oil slick we can see the relative depth and the rapid reorganization of areas of a thin film. In perceiving objects, it also happens that we can perceive their relations, and even our specific relatedness to them, for instance our own emotional or other evaluative response as such. We may also momentarily be able to see them as they will look to someone else whose habits we know. Understanding perception as responsive structure implies something about perceived beauty too. Perhaps it implies a goodness of fit between the object's order and our own, a fit that makes it possible to respond well: clearly and vividly. The simplest way to talk about beauty is probably in terms of liking - liking to perceive, liking to be that form of order. Beauty is thus not subjective and it is not objective. It is a structural fact of some sort, a co-determined fact: something about it, something about us. Cognitive excellence Do we know what to mean by excellence of cognitive structure? There are clear cases of cognitive failure, structural disorganization, failure of aboutness. They include failure to thrive, failure of energy and health, failure to act in one's own interest. Madness, alienation, withdrawal, a life in fantasy. Incoherence, or coherence so fragile it can only be sustained within a contracted sphere. Narrowness, conformity, dogma. Imperception. Isolation, depression, anxiety. Irresponsibility. By contrast, good structure - a good soul, psuche - would show vital competence: energy, flight, detail, scope, autonomy, fertility, enjoyment, coherence, love, street smarts, vividness and trust, effectiveness in being alive. If there is such a thing as excellence of aboutness, we become interested in therapy/ethics, that is, we study how contact is spoiled and how it is restored. For example, we need an understanding of lying, of addiction (which is a form of biological lying), and of the ideological pathologies founded on evasion. An evolutionary epistemology suggests that maintaining a clear distinction between contact and simulation is important. We need to stay aware of the limitations and powers of simulational cognition. Excellence of simulation might itself be judged in relation to its perceptual origin. We might ask of imagining how accurate it is, how comprehensive, how integrated. If contact-cognition is the gold standard and if abstract and simulation-based cognition is, structurally speaking, less secure, more prone to dynamical freewheeling, we should also be particularly aware of the fragility, the relative ungroundedness, the limitations of thinking structured simulationally. We could make conscious and provisional use of structural metaphor, for example. Such metaphors work, in a way. There is something we are able to do by means of them. Something about them feels right. But they are forms of fantasy and need to be understood as such. If the tendency to think in asymmetrical binaries is understood as fantasy, for example - the deep necessity to think by saying "...on the one hand, and ...on the other hand" - the need to make one of the hands always preferred becomes less compelling. Excellence / ethics / aesthetics / epistemology What does the biological sense of mind have to do with art: excellence in art, the value of art, directives for art? What could a biological sense of mind add to the practice of art? A new biological epistemology seems to me to be a base for an aesthetical ethics, that is, an ethics for the makers and users of representational artifacts. Accurate responsive self-construction, over time, and in the moment, seems to me to be a personal imperative implied by evolutionary realism. This is not to say that anything is simple. There are always interests to be balanced. There must also be provision for the self-construction of others. But these interests may at times be aligned rather than competing. Evolved effective structure comes into being through necessary mutualities: through epistemic reciprocity. Perception requires world structure and personal structure equally. Ordered persons require ordered communities. Excellence in art has traditionally been described as excellence of the art object. This description belongs to the tradition that thinks of the representational object as the locus of representational effect. Excellence of representational making needs cognitive excellence of the maker, however, and requires and creates excellence of aboutness in the people who use what is made. The excellence or value of an artwork, like the representational effect of any representational object, will depend on something about the maker and the user as well as on something about the object itself. What are the implications for art (or science, or philosophy) if they are seen as practices requiring and forwarding the effective formation of persons? Excellence in art can be thought of as a subset of representational excellence, but it is related also to excellence of nonrepresentational making, for instance excellence in the making of boats, houses, meals, gardens. It is further related to excellence in friendship, romantic love, child rearing, education, community activism, and other sorts of intervention in the making of persons. All are, like art-making, subsets of excellence of aboutness. Representation-makers are like magical operators in the sense that they use perceptible form to evoke illusion. Like magicians, artists have and rely on powers of seduction. If representational experience structures us, and if most representational experience is simulational, and if the simulation evoked is shallow or false, art can be used to disorganize, to ruin cognitive order. This is where aesthetics and ethics overlap. Artists need to understand the relation between artifact structure and human structure. A well-ordered thing will be more able to set up a well-ordered person. If the ordered thing that structures us is made by someone whose own structure is in wide, competent contact with the world in which we evolved, it will structure us in ways congruent with our foundation. In these ways cognitive value is added. Humans structured by art become more able to enact and to enjoy contact. - Ellie Epp from Chapter 10 of Being about: perceiving, imagining, representing, thinking Mind and land III - bibliography Sources on revalued and expanded perceptual contact with environment::
Anthropology of complex connection
Sources on reasons for disconnection and means of reconnection
Revision of science
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