{"id":5724,"date":"2020-09-30T19:11:25","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T17:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=5724"},"modified":"2021-01-25T21:08:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T20:08:19","slug":"jiri-zemanek-jak-znovu-ozivit-svet-a-lidskou-kulturu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/jiri-zemanek-jak-znovu-ozivit-svet-a-lidskou-kulturu\/","title":{"rendered":"Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek: How to revive the world and human culture?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our association PILGRIM held its fifth seminar of the Itinerant University of Nature from August 10th to 15th this year at the Rychleby Ecocenter near Javorn\u00edk in Silesia and at the Dance Hall in Ra\u010d\u00ed \u00fadol\u00ed, this time entitled "Everything around me lives, feels like me... paths to a regenerative culture<\/a>". In it, we addressed the question of how to move from the current destruction of ecosystems, species extinction and climate change to a new ecologically sensitive culture that would be able to care for the benefit and wealth not only of us humans, but of life as a whole; or rather, how could we as a human society reintegrate into nature? In what ways could we unite our wishes and desires with the desires and needs of the biosphere in a way that would support its further possible regeneration and flourishing? In this reflection, we were inspired by some poets \u2013 Joseph von Eichendorff, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, etc. \u2013 and above all by contemporary leading thinkers in the field of ecophilosophy and sustainable culture \u2013 David Abram, Freya Mathews, Andreas Webera, Hildegarda Kurt and Derrick Jensen \u2013 whose texts we published in the same-named volume small anthology<\/a>Here is the editor of this anthology's opening reflection on the fundamental challenge of transformation that these authors' texts open up, and which can be summarized in a terse statement: Live poetically!<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have no independence, no integrity of our own as a species separate from the other species of this world, no collective existence as a creature separate from the living Earth. \u2026 Our true collective body is not the body of \u2018humanity\u2019 as an independent abstraction, but the living Body of this breathing biosphere. That is us.\u201d<\/p>David Abram<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The real cause of today's global ecological tragedy, manifested in the dizzying destruction of ecosystems and the progressively advancing climate crisis, originates in the fundamental metaphysical assumption on which our current materialistic civilization is built: namely, that the only intelligent creatures on Earth are us humans and that the rest of non-human nature is just inert matter, a mere reservoir of resources, which entitles us to control, dominate and exploit it without any restrictions. The German biologist Andreas Weber calls this dualistic view, born of the Enlightenment scientific revolution, the "ideology of dead matter", and the Australian eco-philosopher Freya Mathews describes it as "deanimated", a worldview that has deprived the world of its own life and meaning and brought human society to the brink of today's self-destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mathews adds that when science \u201cIt deprived matter of any animating principle, it made the world itself no longer to be considered either morally significant in its own right or as a model for our human meanings and purposes; henceforth we had to seek our purposes and meanings within ourselves by means of our innate faculty of reason.<\/em>" (1) As a result, the non-human world of nature has become a mere backdrop for questions about the meaning of life and the nature of goodness, which, from the point of view of science, necessarily lie in the existential fact of humanity itself. We have ceased to perceive our human destiny in a grand metaphysical or cosmological framework and have turned to our own intellect as the starting point of reference for all our philosophical reflections. Thus was born the typically humanistic self-reflexive thinking of the West, and with it modern anthropocentrism, which primarily celebrates the importance of us humans, while nature, the Earth and its integral functioning are considered secondary, derivative. Modern, closed-off society tends to understand non-human nature more as a kind of complement to itself - as a source of usable raw materials, as a place of temporary recreation or as an impressive aesthetic backdrop - without any deeper meaning. The birth of this peculiar pathological deformation, as far as the relationship of modern man to the Earth is concerned, was perhaps most succinctly described by Thomas Berry and David Abram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Berry writes in this context about the autism of modern people, which was born with the Enlightenment. Descartes' understanding of the natural world as a machine "It did not give man any opportunity to enter into a relationship of connection with him, and therefore the people of the West turned into autists in their relationship to the outside world; they were unable to establish any connection with birds or other animals or plants, because for them they represented only mechanical apparatuses... Because of this autism, the members of my generation never heard the voices of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet, they had no connection with the non-human world... My generation showed no sensitivity to the forces contained in the various phenomena of the natural world, did not feel any depth of respect that could curb our aggressive attacks on nature,...<\/em>". (2) Both Berry and Abram alike point out that today we "talk only to ourselves," that we no longer talk to rivers, mountains, seas, that we simply no longer listen to the natural world. The main reason why so many people today feel separated from the world around them, a feeling that they are somehow outside of it and do not feel part of it, is, according to Abram, that we have distanced ourselves from our bodily senses and suppressed the sensory reciprocity of our bodies with the sensory cosmos. This separation from the "living, breathing earth" is further maintained by the abstract ways in which we speak today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"David
David Abram, Andreas Weber and Hildegarda Kurt \u2013 from the seminar "Poetics of the Living World" at the Kampa Theatre (March 12, 2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

David Abram<\/strong>, who in his philosophical work uniquely connects the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with the animistic experience of indigenous cultures, argues that if we want to open ourselves to reciprocity and solidarity with the living land around us, we must adopt more participatory ways of speaking that allow us to realize that we are in a dynamic relationship with all the beings and entities that surround us. The animistic experience is not just the feeling that everything is alive, "but also the awareness that everything speaks, that everything, at least potentially, expresses itself<\/em>". (3) This experience, as Abram emphasizes, is nothing exceptional and represents a fundamental value for the human organism; the normal way we encounter the world and things around us is always, according to him, connected with the feeling, "that they too meet us... with the sense that things speak to each other and that they simultaneously speak to us - not with words, but with the rustling of leaves<\/em>". (4) Abram argues that in a sense we should all become poets. Our everyday speech should touch people and things physically as well as psychologically. The philosopher recommends that we pay more attention to the music in our speech and, as sensory and feeling creatures, address other sensory creatures, "so our animal bodies are moved by this speech and invited to a conversation from which no other animals are excluded. We feel their close presence, and therefore we take care not to disturb our communion with the animals and with the living earth.<\/em>". (5)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developing this rich mutuality with the more than human world is a recognition of our dependence on the myriad relationships within the living biosphere from which we are all born and which, according to Abram, constantly maintain the coherence of our senses and our minds; our bodies and minds are expressions of the incredibly complex metabolism of the Earth, and in this sense our perception \u2013 including our language \u2013 is an attribute of the biosphere itself. We therefore have no independence, no integrity of our own as a species separate from other species and from the living Earth. "We can only understand ourselves and feel what it is to be human through our interaction and connection with all those other non-human beings with whom our lives are so perfectly intertwined.<\/em>". (6) The Living Body of this breathing biosphere, David Abram emphasizes programmatically, is us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shift from the earlier modernist metaphysics of the autonomous isolated self to the new metaphysics of the ecological community within the ecosystem or the entire biosphere is similarly articulated by biologist Andreas Weber and philosopher Freya Mathews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andreas Weber<\/strong> views the functioning of all humans and all other creatures within ecosystems through the prism of the reality of the commons (common goods or commons<\/em>). In this way, he attempts to dismantle the understanding of \u201cculture\u201d and \u201cnature\u201d as separate categories. According to Weber, these two spheres are in fact one sphere, the connecting element of which is what he calls \u201cliveness\u201d. Liveness is inherent in all social and biological systems, it has an objective empirical substance and a subjective dimension; it is the understanding of the world as a living process of mutually transforming relations, subjectivity and expression. In his \u201cManifesto of Liveness\u201d, Andreas Weber and Hildegard Kurt<\/strong> articulate liveliness as a new \u201cbios,\u201d as the core of the challenge of the Anthropocene:\u201dWe can only survive the Anthropocene well if we realize that humans \u2026 consist of something that cannot be consciously created by humans \u2013 a self-organizing aliveness that is deeply intertwined with ecosystems in terms of metabolism and metaphor.<\/em>". (7) They come up with a vision of the politics of life as an effort to develop a culture that is aware of and responsible for the potential imaginative vitality in all things; and that seeks alternatives to the dogma of growth and the dependence on consumerism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australian philosopher Freya Mathews<\/strong>, which develops the metaphysical concept of cosmological panpsychism \u2013 as a new paradigm in relation to existing materialism \u2013 asks in this context the question of how human culture can be reintegrated into nature. How could our complicated human desires and wishes be unified with the desires and needs of the biosphere itself? Or rather, how could we arrive at a truly ethical understanding of nature? According to Mathews, becoming part of nature does not mean just limiting our negative impacts on it, but actively complementing it, actively recreating the biosphere in everything we do. "Our desires must be interconnected with the desires of other elements of the ecosystem, in the sense that the effects of the activities we undertake to satisfy our desires must provide the very conditions that the other elements of this system need. This is how the biosphere works.<\/em>" (8) However, our emotions can only connect with nature if we can imagine natural systems as systems of meaning, "as systems that, like human systems, are filled with psychic activity as well as physicality, that have the character of subject as well as object<\/em>". (9) Which ultimately means the abolition of the dualistic understanding of nature as it is encoded in science today, including ecology itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freya Mathews, like David Abram, is convinced that such a fundamental pre-evaluation of our desires can only occur if we are able to open ourselves to an animating touch, to mutual communication with a more than human world. Mathews in a sense imagines Abram's call that we should all become poets, or rather his idea of how important it is today (especially from an ethical point of view) to speak not so much "about" the world, but above all to speak "to" the world; to see the world again in a poetic mode as our speaker in dialogue, to use the poet Robinson Jeffers. In such moments of encounter with the world, when we begin to admit that things have a life of their own, according to David Abram, we begin to realize that the consciousness we originally considered ours does not actually belong to us. "It's a country that's really intelligent,<\/em>" says Abram, "not only humanity<\/em>". (10) Freya Mathews views the world, or rather the entire universe, as a subject \u2013 as One coherent field of mind\/matter that differentiates into Many self-actualizing and self-aware beings, subjects that address each other in mutual contact and mutual communication and together create what the philosopher calls poetic ecology<\/em>From this perspective, the world appears to us as a communicative presence, capable of establishing meaningful dialogical connections with us based on our address, our invocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such communicative participation takes place in a poetic order (the order of meaning) that can develop simultaneously with the causal order of the world, and that communicates its meanings in the language of poetics: in images, metaphors, symbols, through material form in the language of things. To designate such invocational practices that deal with the poetic order of the world, Freya Mathews uses the term ontopoetics<\/em>; they can take place through loving attention, through attunement, song, prayer, journey, through ceremony or festival; through the language of myth and archetypes and in some cases even through the language of traditional religion. As the author states:"To experience firsthand the intimately welcoming poetic response of a place or landscape to our communicative attempts at rapprochement \u2026 is to shift our metaphysical anchorage. It is to feel embraced, even loved, by the world, and to be flooded with a devotion and gratitude that regroups within us the deepest wellsprings of desire.<\/em>". (11)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freya Mathews believes that the practice of ontopoetics has the potential not only to re-evaluate our deepest desires and aspirations regarding our relationships with nature, but also to revise our entire existential attitude towards life. In this sense, she sees ontopoetics as a possible revolution in the very context of its significance for human culture. If we embrace it, \u201cIt will no longer be appropriate for us to seek primarily to know the world in the traditional scientific sense, but rather to encounter the world so that it may resonate with us. Nor will it be appropriate for us to assume oversight and control over the world, which we have come to know has its own purposes and meanings; rather, we should let it be, we should allow it to develop in its own way.<\/em>". (12)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The proposals for cultural transformation by David Abram, Andreas Weber, Hildegrada Kurt and Freya Mathews, formulated in the texts contained in this collection, in a sense go beyond the usual idea of cultural transformation that we associate with the idea of sustainability. Rather, in this context, we can speak of a regenerative culture, or rather an animistic or panpsychistic turn in sustainability. However, the ideas of these authors resonate very well with the vision of the ecozoic era of the cosmologist Thomas Berry. We will have a chance to create the mutually beneficial and uplifting future for the whole Earth and for our own human species that Berry speaks of only if we manage to break free from our cultural autism, from our monologue, and rediscover an erotic attitude towards reality. Only if we manage to "to fall in love with someone<\/em>", in the words of Robinson Jeffers, and to participate in the infinitely receptive and inexhaustibly living world around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kresba
Cover drawing: Milo\u0161 \u0160ejn; graphic design: Tom\u00e1\u0161 Gardelka<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Comment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1) Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter \/ A Contemporary Panpsychism<\/em> (State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) Thomas Berry, \u201cThe Ecozoic Era\u201d. In: Seventh generation<\/em> (6\/2016), p. 58.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) David Abram, \u201cThe Earth is truly intelligent, not humanity itself\u201d, see page 41 of this publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4) Ibid., p. 42.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5) Ibid., p. 40.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6) This is a current statement by David Abram on his Facebook page www.facebook.com\/davidriversabram<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7) Andreas Weber \u2013 Hildegard Kurt, Revival Manifesto, p. 81.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8) Freya Mathews, "At Nature's Will", p. 107.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9) Ibid., p. 111.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10) David Abram, \u201cThe Earth is truly intelligent, not humanity itself,\u201d p. 63.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11) Freya Mathews, p. 120.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

12) Freya Mathews, "Beyond a Materialist Environmentalism". In: Nanjing Forestry University Journal 2<\/em>, 5, 2005, pp. 1-2.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our association PILGRIM held its fifth seminar of the Traveling University of Nature from August 10-15 this year at the Rychleby Ecocenter near Javorn\u00edk in Silesia and at the Dance Hall in Ra\u010d\u00ed \u00fadol\u00ed, this time entitled "Everything around me lives, feels like me... paths to a regenerative culture". We addressed the question of how to move away from the current destruction of ecosystems, extinction of species and climate change... Continue reading Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek: How to revive the world and human culture?<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,26],"class_list":["post-5724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-jiri-zemanek","tag-knihy-pilgrimu","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5724"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7142,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions\/7142"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}