{"id":11010,"date":"2024-01-16T20:16:31","date_gmt":"2024-01-16T19:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=11010"},"modified":"2024-01-16T20:19:47","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T19:19:47","slug":"jiri-zemanek-mezi-lidskym-telem-a-dychajici-zemi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/jiri-zemanek-mezi-lidskym-telem-a-dychajici-zemi\/","title":{"rendered":"Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek: Between the human body and the breathing earth \u2013 about the books The Magic of the Senses and Becoming an Animal by David Abram"},"content":{"rendered":"
"Becoming the earth. Becoming an animal. And becoming \u2013 in this way \u2013 fully human."<\/em>\nDavid Abram<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The first book by American philosopher, ecologist and visionary David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous<\/em> (1996; in Czech: The magic of the senses<\/em>, DharmaGaia 2013) has been received as a groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy and ethics that magically overturns the dichotomies between culture and nature, between body and mind, and opens up a new perspective for us. "organic being"<\/em>, as the prominent American philosopher Max Oelschlaeger succinctly characterized it; in other words, which opens up the possibility of how, in this time of planetary crisis, we might reconnect intimately with the larger earthly community, expand the dimensions of our humanity, and begin to effectively address today's unprecedented ecological problems. In The magic of the senses<\/em>which reawakens in us the fascination with liveliness and spirituality breathing earth<\/em>, Abram's now widely used term first appeared "more than the human world"<\/em>. It is an expression for the entire community of earthly life, which includes humanity and its culture, but at the same time far exceeds them and thereby undermines the generally shared feeling of anthropocentric superiority of modern man. In this sense, Abram's book became <\/em>a real cultural challenge for us, which can be formulated as follows: Only when we restore our belonging to the wider community of earthly beings can we begin to form a new human culture that will support life and regenerate devastated terrestrial ecosystems while meaningfully shaping our interpersonal relationships \u2013 establishing new forms of local communities and planetary solidarity. Because, as Abram writes: "We are human only in contact and companionship with that which is non-human."<\/em> For David Abram, then, the ethos and potential of our humanity is not made clear by our human exclusivity, but by our capacity for participation, or if you prefer, our symbiosis, with the non-human world. The magic of the senses<\/em>, which draws on the philosophical tradition of Western phenomenology, especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and at the same time on the rich animistic experiences of numerous indigenous cultures of North America and Asia, is conceived primarily as a theoretical compendium; in it, the author rigorously philosophically explores topics such as the ecological potential of Western phenomenology, the expanded understanding of language in the context of a more than human world, the relationship between animism and alphabets, the different understandings of time and place in alphabetic cultures and in oral cultures, etc. This groundbreaking philosophical opus magnum helped catalyze the emergence of several new scientific disciplines, such as ecopsychology, ecophenomenology, and ecolinguistics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Abram's second book Becoming Animal <\/em>(2013), whose Czech edition is titled Becoming an animal<\/em> is currently being prepared by the Brno-based Host publishing house, and continues the outlined line of the author's philosophical reasoning, however, its overall concept differs from Magic of the senses <\/em>differs significantly. Becoming an animal<\/em> is a more personal, experiential, literary and also, we can say, practical book. In it, Abram gives an insight into his personal life, comprehensively presents his early training with one of the Tibetan dzankri (sorcerers), his numerous own experiences and knowledge, as well as practical recommendations and instructions on how to open up to a direct experience of animistic participatory perception in the landscape. How to awaken our animal senses, obscured and dulled by technology, and physically immerse ourselves in the depths of the living, breathing earth. How not only to become aware of our physicality, the mysterious density and heaviness of our own body, but how to listen through the body to the winds and weather patterns, birds, walruses and moose, rocks and stones, houses and roof beams. How to feel the many-voiced expressive speech of this multifaceted earthly cosmos, that intelligence without words, since meaningful speech, as the author claims, is not the exclusive property of us humans. Thought (and therefore language itself) is not born in the human skull \u2013 it is a creativity inherent in the body as a whole, which spontaneously arises from the interaction between the organism and the multi-layered landscape through which we travel. "For a fully bodied animal, any movement can be a gesture and any sound can be a voice, a meaningful expression of the world. And therefore, to my own human body, everything speaks!"<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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David Abram performs a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins in the Upper Gorge
Kamenice River in Bohemian Switzerland, November 2, 2021 (photo: J. Zem\u00e1nek).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Abram's sensitivity to the sensibilities and voices of the more-than-human world developed largely through his training with the sorcerers and shamans of indigenous oral cultures, which he describes in part in the second half of his book, which concludes with a discussion of the intentional alteration of our senses, magic, and the transformation of form and the metamorphosis of culture. Oralists regard certain animals, plants, and even certain forms of the landscape as subjects capable of expressing themselves and holding conversations with them; they learn to understand their enigmatic speech, and they realize that language is not our human possession, but that it is a property of the breathing earth, and that we humans are merely participants in it. Abram characterizes oral speech as a flow supported by "windswept land"<\/em>, which flows through us and which connects all subjects of the more than human world in mutual exchanges, communications and symbioses. The power of oral language therefore does not lie in re-presentation, but "in his ability to sing and establish contact with other beings and the cosmos..."<\/em> His "The main gift is to invite us to enter into the vital presence of this world - and into the deep mutual presence that we feel with each other."<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The aforementioned ability to speak, through which our bodies resonate with each other and with other beings around us, is, according to Abram, the foundation and support of all its other roles that it occupies in our modern world today. It is the oldest and longest-lasting cultural layer stored within us, the layer of indigenous consciousness that shaped human communication after 95% of our cultural presence within the biosphere, and which we very much need to be aware of today. It is the way of experiencing to which the human organism is best adapted, the way of consciousness that has most profoundly defined our imagination and intelligence. "Without the tendency to animistically connect with every aspect of our earthly home, we would never survive as a species."<\/em> The fact that participatory animistic experiences remain accessible to many of us today, even in the midst of a technological world, suggests, according to Abram, that there is something fundamental to the very health of the human being, something that is essential to our continued vitality as a species. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is why David Abram proclaims the restoration of oral culture. The oral culture of storytelling, which is inherently local, is, according to him, the forgotten foundation that constantly supports those more abstract cultural layers, such as the literate culture of the book and the digital culture of the computer, which both depend on it for their integrity. For if oral culture degrades, the ungrounded mediated mind of the cosmopolitan culture of the book or the global culture of the computer loses its orientation and forgets its enduring commitment to the body and the breathing earth. Abram\u2019s project of restoring oral culture, which is close to the practice of nativism of the Australian ecophilosopher Freya Mathews, is comprehensive and represents a comprehensive transformation of education. First and foremost, it requires the restoration of the art of telling and the art of listening, and also the art of returning stories to the local landscape.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Abram is a magician who overturns our habitual ways of perception and brings the world around us to life before our eyes, in which everyday things acquire new meaning and purpose, a new surprising liveliness and radiance. He teaches us to perceive shadows, gravity, depth, matter, our own body and mind in a new way. His reflections on the influence of writing on our senses or his essays on the nature of language are absolutely fundamental in this regard. When he describes the elemental kinship between the human body and the living earth, he draws us into their depths and reveals to us the embodied earthly intelligence that we share with the world. As he says in an interview with Derrik Jensen: \u201cThe truly intelligent is the earth, not humanity itself.\u201d At a time when our obsession with artificial intelligence is at its peak, Abram\u2019s discovery of living earthly intelligence is absolutely crucial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first encounter with David Abram's ideas was his essay "The Perceptual Consequences of Gaia", which brought him significant attention as a philosopher for the first time in 1985. In it, he came up with a phenomenological interpretation of Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, or rather a new psychological interpretation of the atmosphere, i.e. air, and also a revolutionary new interpretation of our perception as "the constant communion of us and the living world that surrounds us"<\/em>. While reading this essay, I began to fully realize that we do not live on earth as its observers, but that we are literally immersed in it like fish in the sea, or rather that it breathing earth<\/em>, as Abram calls the earth, is also within us; that our bodies, our perceptions, and our minds are expressions of the incredibly complex metabolism of the earth itself, whose primary medium is air. In the book Becoming an animal <\/em>David Abram calls the Earth Air-ground <\/em>(Eairth) to remind us of this fact. "Air is the forgotten presence of the Earth." <\/em>says elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0Only when we realize that, as we pass through the earth, the earth passes through us, that it is not a mere stage on which we act out our historical dramas, nor a mass of raw materials to be mined, but rather a living organic matrix in whose depths we live and of which we are an integral part\u2014a matrix that constantly nourishes, influences, and shapes us (our very emotions, language, imagination, and reflections seem to be properties of the earth)\u2014will we be able to show due respect to this mysterious being, this Airland, which indigenous cultures called, and still call, Mother Earth, and begin to develop mutually beneficial relationships with it. Our own survival depends on it, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Literature:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Abram, \u201cThe Perceptual Implications of Gaia.\u201d In: Dharma Gaia, essays on Buddhism and ecology.<\/em>  Editor Allan Hunt Badiner. CAD Press, Bratislava 1994; translation: Anton\u00edn Kone\u010dn\u00fd and Martin Solotruk, pp. 63-75. The original essay \u201cThe Perceptual Implication of Gaia\u201d was originally published in the journal The Ecologist, <\/em>summer 1985. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
"The Earth is truly intelligent, not humanity itself," an interview with Derrick Jensen and David Abram. In: Everything around me lives, feels, like me...<\/em> \/ Paths to regenerative culture<\/em>. Editor Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek. PILGRIM 2020; translation: J. Zem\u00e1nek, pp. 21-66.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Abram, The Magic of the Senses \/ Perception and Language in a More Than Human World<\/em>. DharmaGaia, Prague 2013, translated by Michaela Melechovsk\u00e1 and Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Abram, Becoming an Animal \/ Terrestrial Cosmology<\/em>. Guest, Brno 2024, translation: Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek, editing: Marek Se\u010dk\u00e1\u0159 and Ale\u0161 Anto\u0161\u00edk.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cBecoming the earth. Becoming an animal. And becoming \u2013 in this way \u2013 fully human.\u201d David Abram The first book by American philosopher, ecologist and visionary David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996; Czech: Kouzlo smysl\u016f, DharmaGaia 2013) has been hailed as a groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy and ethics that magically overturns the dichotomies between culture and nature, between\u2026 Continue reading Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek: Between the human body and the breathing earth \u2013 about the books The Magic of the Senses and Becoming an Animal by David Abram<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[40,15],"class_list":["post-11010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-david-abram","tag-jiri-zemanek","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11010"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11021,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11010\/revisions\/11021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}