| Ellie Epp workshop index | Embodiment Studies web worksite index |
Mini-course introduction This is the first session of a three-part mini-course about the relation of intelligence to the natural world. Arguments for preserving or restoring natural systems are often stated in terms of the physical health or emotional well-being of humans, or else in terms of the well-being of other kinds of organisms. Those are good reasons, but they leave room for historical kinds of contrast between mental and physical well-being. People have often believed (implicitly or explicitly) that contact with nature is good for human bodies, which, like nature, are kind of dumb; but mind develops and defines itself apart from nature, or even against nature. I am going to suggest that this assumption is deeply and dangerously wrong, and that since intelligence has evolved in contact with the physical world, preserving a sound and beautiful natural world - and full contact with that world - is essential to the well-being of human minds. When we destroy the beauty, the complexity, the manifold coherence of the natural world, we are destroying potentials of perception and comprehension. To say it another way: the founding premiss of these workshops is that the forming of intelligent human beings through contact with the natural world is the specifically human part of environmental value, and the core of value in the things humans make. And yet there have been tensions between our ideas about land or nature and our ideas about mind and cultural prestige.
What is the culture that would hold their interest, give scope to their idealism and brightness and newness - what cultural attitude is hard enough and alive enough and yet achievable enough? What ways of being would be so compelling everyone would want to be them when they see them? - This first session of Mind and land will lay out an open question about whether environmental love and concern are necessarily in tension with human aspirations to be culturally sophisticated and technically cutting-edge. The second workshop, Practitioners of marvelous contact, will look at ten examples of organic high intelligence _ ten people who, by being highly developed as humans in relation to the natural world - rather than in the old ways thinking of themselves as 'transcending' it - are cultural shapers and innovators: brilliant self-enjoying minds. In the third workshop, Theoretical aspects, I'll describe some academic areas in which there have been important shifts that support this new cognitive ecology. They are in the philosophy of mind, in anthropology, in psychology, and in the philosophy of science.
Mind and Land I: Cognitive ecology: sketch of a project What I see in this painting is cause for pagan post-post-modern hope. It is hope of intelligence that is grounded in contact with the natural world and at the same time the very opposite of primitive.
1. Image: two kinds of bad houses We can no longer tolerate seeing ourselves everywhere, for we are ugly & dirty & tasteless . We are the same as this ugly outer world we've made . - Alice Notley in The scarlet cabinet The highway south of Tijuana passes through chaparral country that s thick-strewn with paper, bottles and cans, plastic bags caught in the bushes. Scattered all over this trashed land are unfinished cinderblock shacks standing roofless, without windows or doors. North of the border in San Diego County there is beautiful mountainous country, also chaparral, not many roads yet, but from the freeway shooting through you will often see single house placed on hilltops. There's been no effort to fit them into the landscape: on the contrary, they are designed to be visible like billboards. Hilltops are sliced off like the tops of eggs, and on this flat pad is placed a three storey stucco mansion in a style that could be called Disneyland Spanish. This house will have five bedrooms and eight bathrooms, cathedral ceilings, a four-car garage, a 'great room' and a stone fireplace in it large enough to roast oxen. There will be a TV in almost every room of this house and most of them are on. Chaparral in summer shows a subtle palette of silvers and olive greens, toned to the reddish boulders strewn among them - agave, Cleveland sage, buckwheat. These hillsides after a wet winter spring into color - fifty kinds of wild flowers, California poppies and goldfields, lupins - all of their blues and golds and pinks and purples and maroons exquisitely drifted among the silvers and greens, always in a way that tells us something about the terrain - there's a seep here, there's a shaded slope here, there's wind shelter here. But around the mansion, a hundred feet deep on all sides, whether it rains or not, planted in the dumped earth carved off the hilltop, is a solid-colored sheet of fire-retardant groundcover blooming so violently mauve it can be seen five miles away: a lurid patch. This hillside house is in effect a billboard, and what it is saying all day long is We're rich. What is the Tijuana landscape saying? Is it saying We don't care? Is it saying We don't see this anymore, we've given up? In both instances one thing we can see right away that there is something wrong with the people who live in these houses - the minds that live in these houses. They are both mindless, though in contrasting ways.
2. What is cognitive ecology? - some definitions.
So a cognitive ecology is a study of mind and land, or better said, mind in land. Cognition immersed in environment.
3. A fight, a task There's a fight going on about what humans are and can be and should be. There is a war going on and a transformation taking place. That war is not simply the contest between the socialist camp and capitalist camp over which political/economic/social arrangement will enjoy hegemony in the world, nor is it simply the battle over turf and resources. Truth is one of the issues in this war. The truth for example, about inherent human nature, about our potential, our agenda as earth people, our destiny. I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus ) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as whole. There are no career labels for that work, no facile terms to describe the tasks of it. Suffice it to say that I do not take lightly the fact that I am on earth at this particular time in human history . - Toni Cade Bambara in What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow The fight is about culture for the next 20 centuries.
In a way it's about prestige: about who will matter. Is this a worry about what's happening to the natural world? - Not in the usual way, though it is related. It's a worry about what's happening to minds that don't have enough world in them. Minds that don't have enough world in them are wrecking the world, but they are also wrecking themselves. So the fight is about defending the value of the real earth, the value of contact with the real earth, and the value of cultural forms that promote these things. Smart, lively kids rushing to get away from the real world into virtual reality or dissociated realms of abstraction or complex theological speculation - could we make a culture that would hold their interest, give scope to their idealism and ambition and brightness? Can there be a culture that is challenging enough and prestigious enough and yet nature-based and nature-loving? What ways of nature-minded being would be so compelling everyone would want to be them when they see them? - Your work: many of you are already drawn to this large task of culture creation, and from a number of directions. For example, just among those of you I've recently worked with: Jeremy asks, "Is it possible that technology - the ultimate symbol of humans' extension and control over nature - can be re-contextualized, and realized as the means for our re-unification with the natural world?" Josh concludes that "my own experience of the world must be the beginning of my work to help understand how we as a culture can form more respectful relationships to other lifeforms and the complex emergent systems that life relies on." Jody has worked on place-based curricula reviving rural hand-craft technologies with their specialized nature-adapted forms of perception and intelligence. Kate has worked on understanding what prevents and what fosters loving connection. Kirsten is working on finding the sources of loving intelligence and alternatively of inattention. James worked with me on the evolution of cognitive capabilities and on how to think of the relation between the world and consciousness. In the application materials of my new students this semester,
the words 'pagan' and 'mysticism' have come up a lot, and what I understand
by them is something about expanding felt perception of the universe around
and beyond us. 4. What kind of mind is good to be? Make your own lists -
5. Less good Some contemporary styles of mind:
(These are not just 'cultural attitudes' - they are styles of body. They are often visible as such.) The point about these attitudes for my purposes here is not that they are bad for the world (although they are) but that they're unintelligent, cut off, and signs of wrecked minds of one kind and another. - Make a list of other some other qualities of poor minds:
Cultural symptoms:
Existing styles - Ask if they are so compelling everyone would want to be them when they see them, and if not, what is missing.
6. Right cultural change needs a new underlying philosophy 'New humanism'? I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus ) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as whole. Cultures that are better at creating good minds (that are also able take good care of the world) need a revised founding philosophy. What I'm hoping for could be called a new humanism, a cosmic humanism that is interested in humans as part of cosmos. Or we could call it a new paganism, a re-Renaissance. What could this mean - Western dualist philosophies imagine humans in terms of a hierarchized duality of body and mind (or soul or spirit or whatever). Body is imagined as a machine and mind as something non-physical. The non-physical is considered more valuable than the physical. Dualisms can never solve the problem of how to understand an interaction between the two essentially different kinds of things. Later efforts at non-dualism picked one term of this dualism: idealisms pick the non-physical term and say there are really no such things as physical bodies. Mechanist monisms have said everything is physical, and as such is a machine. Even now people seem to decide to identify with one or the other side of this conceptual split. We have the option, though, of refusing the original dualism and not opting for either of these alternatives. We can say that humans are one thing rather than two, but that one thing - the body - is not a machine, but an organism inherently capable of all we have considered to be mind/spirit/soul. Mind is something a body can do. Soul is something a body can do. Spirited is something a body can be.
7. End of the machine age? Bleak dream:
I wake and say it is a dream about technology. The land has died and is sinking. It has been ruined for the sake of this sleek seamless structure more airplane than airport, a sort of office building for dissociated men. - If we look at the history of our own intellectual cultures since the Middle Ages, we see an accelerating transition both of invention of machines and of machine metaphor. Body as machine, cosmos as machine, economy as machine, empire as machine - it has been a flame-through of a certain kind of masculinity finding its power. the post-medieval Enlightenment period taking us into the mid-twentieth century is the apex of what we have referred to as the final phases of the Late Cenozoic period. What is characteristic of this period is the major cultural revisioning of thought systems that are now identified as the technical scientific-industrial world-view. The movement into this post-medieval period represents a very profound change in cultural consciousness. Lewis Mumford characterizes this change from the medieval into the modern temper as one of the most far reaching cultural changes in human history. Mumford notes that, as with other great historical junctures, the movement from the medieval world into the modern world, was a movement that involved a new metaphysical and ideological change involving all major cultural institutions and, in essence, forms a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human. What style of mind was promoted by the machine age? What sort of person thrives and has cultural power in an era dominated by machine metaphor? We're at a historical moment where machines themselves are changing, and where our dominant metaphors are changing. I will talk more about changes in dominant metaphor in the third session, Theoretical aspects. What else is hopeful in our historical moment - what are other present conditions that support better minds in land, better nature-cultures?
8. A growing alternative: post-mechanist organicism The forming of persons is the specifically human part of environmental value. EE Cognitive ecology: minds that understand themselves as part of nature Organic high intelligence A view of human excellence that doesn't refuse technology, and that doesn't give up humane sophistication, culturedness, virtuosity, flair, skill, style. What specifically do natural environments have that we seem to innately need but cannot find in built environments? The elaborate scientific explanation can be succinctly summed up as a very unique relationship between complexity and order. - Julie Stewart-Pollack The destruction of beauty, of complexity, of physical coherence, all of these are forms of destruction of mind, that is, of practices of intelligence that depend on the flourishing of the natural world. - EE In the next session, Practitioners of marvelous contact,
I will bring examples of people who are finding their own ways to be culturally
cutting-edge by getting into always closer contact with the natural world.
|