The Spell of the Sensuous Chapter Summaries 1-4 Breakthrough Intensive 2016/2017 Chapter 1: The Ecology of Magic In the first chapter of The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram sets the context of his thesis. Drawing from his anthropological studies he begins by describing encounters with shamans that revealed how indigenous people hold a very different relationship to nature than is common in the West. He points out that it is not generally recognized that the shaman s primary function in the tribe was to manage the relationship between the tribe and its natural surroundings. From this starting point Abram begins to outline the living relationship that he saw occurring between the indigenous people and the natural world. Indigenous people have a very different relationship to the world than we do in modern times. When they look out at the landscape, trees, rocks and animals around them, they do not experience it the way we would standing right next to them. They exist inside of a different paradigm and that is why many anthropologists have found it so illuminating to study these cultures. They give us a rare opportunity to observe a dramatically different way of being and in doing so they illuminate our own paradigm in ways that would be impossible without an outside reference point. Indigenous persons experience themselves to be in direct communication with the natural world around them. They walk through a world that is constantly communicating with them. The shape of the landscape, the way the sunlight shines through a tree, the appearance of an animal or bird, are not just random events. They all hold meaning and the human being also holds meaning for the rest of the natural world. The health of a tribe and all the members in it depends on maintaining an ongoing harmonious exchange with nature. The indigenous population must listen to nature and act in accordance with the dictates they hear. Abram relays a personal story of having spent so much time in an indigenous culture that he began to experience his perception opening to a new level of communication with nature. He describes beginning to see the meaningfulness in the different elements of the natural world. As he found himself in a communicative exchange with nature he also noticed that nature seemed to pay more attention to him, increasingly he found that animals would cross his path and pause to commune. After returning to the West he gradually found that he lost this connection with the natural world. One of the primary questions that is explored in The Spell of the Sensuous comes directly from this experience. How did he gain this seemingly magical new perceptual capacity and how did he lose it? And to expand the question further, how did we in the West lose this living relationship to nature and how can we revive it? 1
These questions gain dramatic significance in light of Abram s belief that all ills are caused by disharmony with nature. He recognizes that the Western world is dramatically out of harmony with nature. Having fallen out of living relationship with the natural world we have perpetrated violence upon it without understanding the consequences of our actions. The imbalance in the natural order manifests itself in the ecological problems we face, and returning to balance is the only way to repair the damage to our world. 2
Chapter 2: Philosophy on the Way to Ecology Abram directs us to begin our exploration in the Western philosophical tradition of phenomenology because he claims it poses the most direct challenge to the dominant paradigm of scientific materialism. The current dominant paradigm in the West is often most directly attributed to two enlightenment era thinkers, Rene DesCartes and Sir Isaac Newton. The worldview that came to dominate the Western mind in the centuries following The Enlightenment is one in which the physical universe is seen as the primary reality. The universe itself is seen as an infinite three-dimensional expanse of empty space that is populated by material things that move and develop through linear time from the past to the future. A primary belief of this worldview is that our perceptual experience of the world is a secondary phenomenon generated out of mechanical, chemical and electromagnetic processes. The best way to understand our phenomenal perceptions is to uncover and understand the processes that generate them. It is interesting to note that during the time of Newton the German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proposed a phenomenological approach to science that never gained popularity. The philosophy of Phenomenology was first developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Husserl recognized that the scientific worldview had estranged us from our experience of the world by focusing our attention on theoretical properties rather than direct experience. He wanted to create a way of doing philosophy that focused not on the principles beneath our experience, but on our actual perceptual experience itself. In phenomenology the world does not exist independent of our experience of it, the world exists as a subjective perceptual emergence. We never experience a world independent of our perception of it. Our perceptual world is the only world there is. The obvious challenge to this view is to ask, how is it that we all experience the same subjective world? If the world is truly subjective why don t we all live in our own isolated world? Husserl s response to this objection was to develop the notion of intersubjectivity. The world is not just a personal subjective phenomenon, it is a collective subjective phenomenon. The sensual form of things remain constant because there are so many human and non-human beings experiencing them. This confluence of perception from multiple sources holds the perception in place. The table I am sitting at now will still be here when I return tomorrow because it is being constantly perceived by other patrons who come in and out of this coffee shop, it is being experienced by the floor that it sits on, by the air that passes over its surface, by the insects that crawl on it, etc. The combined perceptions of the entire community of beings holds the perception of the table in place as an intersubjective reality. 3
According to Husserl we do not live in an objective world that exists independent of our subjective experience of it. We live in a life-world that is held in place as an amalgamation of the perceptions of all members of the community. Abram next introduces us to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty wanted to anchor phenomenology in our embodied experience. He recognized that bodies are the vehicle of human perception and that our participation in the community of perceivers is always mediated through our bodies. Merleau-Ponty urged us to turn our attention away from the objectified experience of our body that has come to dominate our perceptions and instead turn our attention to the experience of embodiment without holding any conceptual understanding of bodily form. By examining our actual phenomenological experience of being embodied he hoped to understand our participation in the life-world. This careful examination reveals that perception arises out of reciprocity of engagement with the world around us. Perception is not passive it is active. We experience things by engaging with them. Our perception of things grows and expands as we perceive and engage. Our experience of the world is born out of a perceptual dance of interaction. The dance of perception gives flesh to the world. It gives the world its sensual quality. In a sense the world is not sitting there fleshy and full waiting for us to perceive it. The world becomes fleshy and full as the perceptual dance fills it out. 4
Chapter 3: The Flesh of Language In this chapter Abram begins an exploration of language. In the current Western paradigm language is seen as a system of symbols and signs that represent real things. The signs and symbols of language are meaningful and can be used in meaningful exchange. Merleau-Ponty saw it differently. Certainly language is a meaningful symbolic system, but first it is an outgrowth of the human interaction with nature. Language first developed as a verbal exchange. The world elicited human vocalizations and in a sense verbalized itself through human beings. Language was not initially developed as a symbolic system it began as spontaneous utterances that occurred in relation to living encounters with the world. We might imagine some early human coming into the presence of a mountain peak and making some sound in response to the magnificence of the sight before her. In a sense, the sound coming from her mouth is not coming from her, but from the mountain itself. The mountain initiates the sound in her mouth and she never utters it except in the presence of a mountain that provokes it. It might have been a long time before a culture came to settle upon a common sound to make in the presence of all mountains and even longer before they began to make that sound to call to mind the image of a mountain when it was not physically present. Merleau-Ponty wanted us to understand that language is an outgrowth of the direct experience of the world. Language has become an abstract system of symbolic meaning, but it was initially part of a bodily response to sensual encounters with the world. Language from this point of view is not a technology developed by humans, but rather an outgrowth of the world itself. The complexity of our language reflects the complexity of biodiversity in our world. We have not been trained to think of language this way. We have been trained to see language as a mental activity, as something that happens in our heads. We imagine our words to be materially inconsequential. They are born of our minds and only affect our minds. Language in the current paradigm remains distinctly separate from our bodily experience and from the world. Abram wants us to consider a different possibility. If our words are not mere abstractions but do indeed grow out of the world then it is already connected to the world. The world affects the language we have at our disposal and the words we use affect the world. This view of language puts us in a living reciprocal relation with the world. Everyday we are speaking utterances that are not coming only from our own minds, but are coming out of our direct living connection with the world we live in. 5
Chapter 4: Animism and the Alphabet This chapter opens by citing that some thinkers have argued that the roots of the hostile relationship between humans and the natural world that we see evidenced in so much of Western culture has its origins in ancient Greek thought. Plato famously saw the manifest realm of Earth to be a flawed reflection of ideal principles that existed in their perfect state only in the mind. Thus a preference for the mental over the material was injected into the Western mind. Abram brings our attention to how the construction of our current written language amplifies this preference for mind over matter. There are two kinds of written language. Some are pictorial and use written symbols to directly represent real things. These languages are cumbersome to use because they require an enormous number of different symbols to represent all possible things. The Greeks used a language based on an alphabet. So now the symbols of the language do not represent any real thing in the world. They represent sounds that humans make. In an alphabetic language the direct link between the written form of the language and what that form refers to has been broken. Language now refers not to the world but to human vocalizations. This form of written language requires many fewer symbols because it bypasses the direct connection to any sensual object. Language in this form is seen as a purely human activity. As written language became divorced from direct contact with the natural world, it resulted in our becoming highly self-referential beings increasingly divorced from the world around us. The advent of written language also separated us from our own words. Prior to written language the only way to pass on information was orally. That meant that important information had to be contained in spoken forms like stories that are easy to remember and pass on verbally. To bring these stories back to conscious awareness necessitated speaking them. With written language we gained the ability to record speech in a form that would allow it to be preserved over time and passed on beyond the limits of verbal communication. Suddenly we could record words that could be read by people at far distances for many years into the future. But we no longer had to play an active role in passing on the story. The stories that explained our lives now lived independent of us. The written word also made it possible for us to interact with our own words. We could write them down and look at them to reflect on them. Initially reading was always done aloud. Words were only experienced as sounds in the voice of a speaker. As we became more accustomed to reading words on a page and reflecting on them, we also changed the structure of writing to include spaces that would allow us to better hear the words as we read them. Words now effectively lived on the written page rather than in the speaker s voice. We had become divorced from our own words as they had become divorced from the world they refer to. In the first chapter Abram describes how the world of an indigenous person is alive and intelligent. The indigenous person lives in an ongoing living conversation with the world 6
around them. In our modern culture we see the natural world as largely inanimate and unintelligent. We do not experience ourselves in constant communication with the world around us. We experience ourselves as perceivers of a world that just sits there to be observed. We do not experience ourselves to be in a living reciprocal exchange with the world. We see the world as inert and we see ourselves acting upon it not with it. This imbalance in our relationship with nature is what Abram identifies as the root cause of our environmental problems. We can see certain similarities between the way an indigenous person interacts with the natural world and the way modern people interact with written text. An indigenous person reads nature the way we read books. An indigenous person out walking will hear a sound and that sound will direct them to look toward it. They will see animal prints in the dirt and that will trigger them to listen for nearby animals. They will feel the wind on their skin and will turn and walk in the direction of the scent they smell. All of the senses work together to incrementally reveal things about the world. Each new sensation carries with it new information and by responding to that information the indigenous person puts themselves in a better position to receive new information. They experience the world as awake and communicating with them always guiding their way forward. Similarly we read the written word. The symbols we look at on the page are in themselves meaningless and yet each passing word gives us more information and the information we receive combines into an inner experience of understanding. Imagine yourself reading a book. As your eyes pass over the symbols on a page, you hear words being spoken in your mind. The words give you information, they might tell a story, or explain something. The symbolic forms on the written page speak to you. The indigenous person relates to the world as a living intelligence that communicates and we relate to written language the same way. We experience words as communicating with us. We may attribute the intelligence to the author who wrote them, but we experience that intelligence through the words. In the modern age we have transferred our living relationship with the world to the written word, and in the process have divorced that relationship from its original connection with the natural world. Merleau-Ponty in his time and David Abram in this book believe that we might be able to reconstitute language so that it revives our living relationship with the natural world. If our current use of language has divorced us from the world, perhaps can we change the way we use language to reconnect us with it? 7