{"id":7750,"date":"2021-10-29T18:56:40","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T16:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=7750"},"modified":"2021-10-30T18:56:24","modified_gmt":"2021-10-30T16:56:24","slug":"strazce-hranice-rozhovor-s-davidem-abramem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/strazce-hranice-rozhovor-s-davidem-abramem\/","title":{"rendered":"Border Patrol: An Interview with David Abram"},"content":{"rendered":"

This interview by Jeremy Hayward with American ecophilosopher David Abram about his book <\/strong>The Spell of the Sensuous<\/strong><\/em> (Pantheon Books, New York 1996; Czech <\/strong>Goat of the senses<\/strong><\/em>. DhramaGaia 2013) was originally published under the title "The Boundary Keeper" in the magazine <\/strong>Shambhala Sun<\/strong><\/em> (May 1997). It was first published in Czech in an abridged version in the cultural weekly <\/strong>A2<\/strong><\/em> (19 \/ 7.5. 2008) and was subsequently published in full in an anthology of texts by David Abram<\/strong> Awakening to the living land<\/strong><\/em> (OPS Nymburk, 2008, pp. 113-130). Czech translation of the interview by Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek and Barbora Svat\u00e1. American Jeremy Hayward is a physicist and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, founder of Naropa University.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy Hayward: <\/strong>Perhaps we could start our conversation by talking a little about animism. It seems to me that the main thing you are trying to convey in your book The Spell of the Sensuous is the awareness that the world is not made of dead matter \u2013 that rich life and intelligence are actually found everywhere.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Abram: <\/strong>One of the strong intentions that runs through the entire book is the effort to break down, in my opinion, the artificially created boundary between what is and what is not soulful, or between what is and what is not alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to suggest very much that everything is alive, that everything has a soul, that everything has a dynamism, that everything moves. Some things just move much more slowly than others, so that we do not notice their movement so easily. Suppose that while walking through the countryside, a beautiful steep rock catches my attention - when I say this, I mean a specific cliff - and I find myself moved by this presence, this rock, by the embrace of that relentless force that seizes me every time I walk around it. If I am moved by this being, how can I say that it does not move? By claiming that the rock itself does not move, I deny my own direct experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: You are not just talking about physical movement, but about inner movement, about the movement of experience.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: Yes, although I wouldn't say it's not physical. I actually experience it as a tangible movement inside my gut, as a real physical encounter of my body with this other body, with this other dynamism. It's a very different kind of dynamism, but it's still a body, it's material, it's matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The animistic sensibility that I am trying to awaken does not mean, then, that one admits the priority of some immaterial mind, or consciousness from which the material world was somehow born. Rather, I wish to maintain a belief in matter and in the sensory particularity of the physical world that we find around us. This sensory world, this material plenum, is not a purely objective set of mechanical processes. Material nature seems to have its own spontaneity, its own limitlessness.1<\/a><\/sup>In the English original: openendedness<\/span>, your own life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, I try to walk a peculiar path between the spiritual idealism of most New Agers, who often renounce the sensory world and speak of the primacy of the spirit or mind, and the detached objectivism of mainstream contemporary science, which similarly isolates our consciousness from the sensory world by describing nature as a determinate set of objects. I very much wish to maintain faith in the earthly world, which I experience not simply as a collection of objects. It is also a field of living entities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: I completely agree with you. It is the awareness of the reconnection of mind and body, or rather the recognition that mind and body are and always have been one.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: It's remembering what we are. Never forgetting that it is this bodily form, this tongue, quivering right now between my teeth, that allows me to get in touch with the trees and the frogs and the sky above. It is the body, with its nervous system and its senses, that puts us in touch with all these other beings and allows us to feel and experience them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: If we realize that what we call our mind is a manifestation or aspect of the body, and if we realize that our body is connected to the physical world around us, then how can <\/em>our experience of not being connected to the physical world? <\/em>And when we experience the interior,<\/em>then surely the physical world we live in must also have some kind of inner consciousness.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: Yes, exactly. Experiencing, feeling, and receptivity are found in every bit of the world around us. It is not necessary to say that I and the world are one, or that the Douglas fir is an extension of my own body\u2014no more than I am an extension of its body\u2014but to feel the inherence of mind within the body and as the body itself. Just as the body of the tree is distinct from my own sensory body, so its experience must be distinct from my experience. It is not a matter of dissolving all differences into some featureless unity, but of awakening to the immense diversity of experience. There are so many different forms of experience, feeling, and perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The human body knows that it needs multiple relationships with its entire environment. Our bodies evolved alongside all these other bodily forms, with all these other bodies\u2014with cedars and salmon, with windstorms, with the moon and the sun, with animals and plants and herbs of all shapes and sizes. The cultures that we have all been a part of for some fifty thousand years have maintained relationships with every aspect of the sensory environment around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To this day, our bodies know, our nervous systems still know, that they need nourishment that comes from the full range of their relationships with otherness. But this nourishment is prevented by our culture and language, which define the sensory environment as unfeeling, as a completely passive, automatic set of processes. There is no active agent, no real otherness, nothing to which we can relate! We think that the only place we can encounter it is in another human being. And so our bodies turn to our human partners, demanding from them the nourishment that they can only get from the full range of their relationships with the natural world. But the other person cannot provide us with all that otherness on their own, and the resulting tension then breaks up so many marriages and partnerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Border guards<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

JH: Most of us become aware of this living connection to our surroundings during childhood. Are you one of the few people who has never lost this connection, or is it something you have had to work on to rediscover it within yourself?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: I think that's true, that children are born into an affinity with the whole sensory world and that only later are they somehow cut off from this awareness of imaginative participation with other beings. But the ability to recognize difference - to be aware of the remarkable peculiarities of other creatures, the differences in their ways of experiencing the world and of expressing and expressing themselves - I think that's something that comes with adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the child is born into the consciousness of unity, and then gradually, as he begins to realize his own uniqueness, his awareness of the uniqueness of others also grows - of the spider and the fact that the spider's experience is completely different from his own experience, the peculiarities of the squirrel, the crow, and the life of the wind. That each of these creatures has its own abilities that are completely different from his abilities and that they are completely different from theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Respect for other forms of imagination only develops when it is allowed to, when our early childhood awareness of connectedness to the world is allowed to grow and deepen. But in our culture, the spontaneously felt kinship with the rest of the sensory world is usually interrupted around the age of six or seven, when the child begins to learn to read and write at school. Then the child suddenly \u201cunderstands\u201d what the adults around him are actually talking about, like: \u201cLook, John, they just say that the tree in front of the house is watching over us, but in reality it does nothing at all except being subject to the laws of chemistry and physics.\u201d And so they instill in him the typically deadened worldview of twentieth-century civilization, as if photosynthesis itself were not an astonishing and mysterious activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I certainly went through that too. But I think as a child I was so permeable and hypersensitive that I was never able to let go of that early awareness of solidarity with other beings. It just kind of lay dormant in me for a while. Once I got into traditional cultures on my travels, it started to resurface and become perceptible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: When did this happen?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: As a child, as I said, I had an unusual feeling that I was somehow permeable. For example, I would involuntarily pick up the accent of the person I was talking to. When I was on the phone with someone from abroad, everyone in the room could tell the nationality of the person I was talking to from my accent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was very imitative \u2013 easily influenced by the way other people spoke or moved \u2013 and I often felt ashamed of it, as if I were somehow spineless, as if I had no integrity of my own. It was only later, when I went to rural cultures in Indonesia, that I discovered that this over-sensitivity, which is completely useless in our society, is actually a very useful thing in cultures where everything is considered alive and sentient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are always individuals who are too sensitive to spend all their time in the presence of other people, because then they pick up too much of their nervous systems and begin to resemble them. If someone walks through the room feeling down, they themselves begin to feel down, and if someone walks through the room feeling happy, they are immediately cheerful. They are too easily influenced by other people, but it is this sensitivity of theirs that allows them to enter into a relationship with different forms of consciousness, such as an owl or an oak tree or an ant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These particularly sensitive people have a natural tendency to live on the fringes of a traditional culture, where they can lean into human society on the one hand and be open to the whole field of non-human forces on the other. They become intermediaries between the culture and the living earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that every culture worthy of the name recognizes the need for such people. They are the guardians of the border, those who maintain the interface between the human community and the wild, more than human world in which human culture is embedded. Their art or work is to maintain the permeability of this border; to ensure that it remains a fluid membrane and does not solidify into an immobile barrier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: And don't you feel, David, that this sensitivity, which is particularly pronounced in the aforementioned border guards, is something that is naturally inherent in each of us? It seems to me that this could be the key to what has disappeared from our contemporary culture.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: I think it's clear that it's a faculty that we all share; it's part of our being. At the same time, there are people who are more sensitive than others, maybe twenty percent of the population, who really don't work well in human society. That's not really their gift. They're not very good at making decisions about their village, but they're really good at connecting with other beings - with animals or local plants - and at discerning what the land itself might need from us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the West, because the earth and all the rest of nature are spoken of as a completely passive and inanimate collection of objects, such people do not know what to do with themselves. There is no recognition that their sensitivity is good for something, that it is actually necessary for culture. Perhaps they try to suppress their instinctive perception, which makes them sick; they become confused and often come into conflict with the mainstream of culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fall into the spell of sounds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

JH: One of the main themes of your book is the role that our language plays in turning away from, or rather, in covering up, this sensitivity. You suggest that the turning point was the breaking away of the alphabetic script from its connection with the natural world, when the words we use became somehow detached from our perception.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: It's a bit more complicated. I don't really think there was one specific moment when things got worse. It's a long and subtle process, and I'm trying to trace some of the stages of this gradual distancing from nature that we've succumbed to, this falling out of direct relationship with the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I'm a trick magician,<\/strong> I was interested first in sensory experience. I wondered what could have so directly affected our senses that they became blind and deaf to the other forms of life and consciousness that inhabit our world, to the point that we carelessly cause their destruction. The devastation of the natural world comes not from any baseness on our part, but from a kind of forgetfulness. We simply do not notice it happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a puzzle to me how we could have become so indifferent to the rest of nature. It seemed to me that the way we speak profoundly influences what we see or hear in the world around us. Our bodies immediately encounter the things around us as soulful forces, as powerful processes that draw us into a relationship with ourselves. If we speak of these beings as objects, we deny our own immediate sensory experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, by defining the world as a mass of objects, we are essentially withdrawing our senses, since our perceiving body directly experiences the world only as a living field of forces. On the other hand, to begin to speak of the world as soulful and living is to rejuvenate our direct sensory experience: to speak in a way that is unified with our senses, to reopen them to reciprocity with the sensory environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how could our way of speaking have cut us off so much in the past? How did we come to speak of the earth as inanimate? Especially when traditional cultures assume that not only humans speak, but that everything speaks? The voices and movements of other animals form the languages of these cultures. And not just other animals\u2014even the wind in the willows is a voice that has its own meaning. How could we ever have this strange idea that language is an exclusively human trait and that everything else is mute, devoid of any real expression?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began to realize that there was one factor that directly affected our senses and our language and the ways we spoke. A factor that directly engaged our eyes and ears as well as our language. That factor was the written word. I began to study the origins of writing, and I soon noticed that most of the cultures that we ecologists value for their respectful and relatively sustainable relationship with nature, such as many of the indigenous cultures of North America, were oral cultures that traditionally flourished without any formal writing system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began to wonder what it was that writing did? I discovered that each writing, each form of writing, engaged our senses in a special way, and thus influenced our relationship to language and the sensory world in a very specific way. But it was one form of writing in particular, which we call the alphabet, that really laid the foundation for the kind of intellectual distance from nature that is widespread in Western civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even within the alphabetic (or phonetic) script itself, however, there are different forms of the alphabet that have brought unique and specific changes to the way we see and hear the world. The ancient Semitic aleph-beth, from which all alphabets are derived, did not record any vowels in written form. When reading consonants, the reader himself added vowels, which are breath sounds (traditional Hebrew texts are characterized by the same feature). It could be said that consonants are bones that we must lend our own breath to in order to bring them to life and make them speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The absence of written vowels preserved the sense of sacredness that in many oral cultures was associated with wind and breath. For these cultures, speech is nothing more than formed breath, and the invisible wind is the true mystery of the spirit that gives life and consciousness to all things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the Greeks who first used specific signs for vowels, for breath sounds, effectively desacralizing air and breath. They allowed us to forget this invisible medium in which we, along with other animals and plants, are immersed\u2014a medium that tangibly connects the inside of our breathing bodies with the inside of trees and clouds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wind is the mystery of all mysteries for so many oral cultures, yet it is often forgotten by our culture, like air and breath. We are not talking about the air between us, but simply the empty space. It is as if we feel that there is nothing there, no physical connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: What was it that separated people from nature to the point where they thought of changing the alphabet in this way? I wonder if the separation of language from its immediate connection with the natural world was not prompted by something else. If we look, for example, at some traditions with phonetic alphabets, such as Sanskrit or Tibetan, we do not necessarily encounter this kind of denial of nature in them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: That's why I keep emphasizing that it's a complex process that happens differently in each place. It's remarkable how unique the stories of writing are in each of the places where they take place. For example, when the alphabet appeared in India, it encountered such a vibrant and functional oral culture at so many levels of society that writing was never able to replace it. It became more or less a complement to oral culture, a servant to spoken stories, which retained their primary role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel, at least at this point in my research, that the technology of writing does not necessarily embody a distance that would be given here a priori, as you, Jeremy, suggested. I believe that our tools and technologies have their own potential and power, their own ability to change or influence our relationships with the world, and that we should therefore respect them accordingly. Alphabetic writing was a useful and very beautiful thing that captivated various cultures across the globe. But such technology has its own power and magic, and if this magic is not handled carefully, it can be very dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that the separation you speak of, this incipient awareness of the separation of mind from body, was itself made possible by this new reflexivity that arises between the literary intellect and its own signs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cultures that do not have writing begin to know themselves primarily when they are reflected back by other animals and the living landscape: many such cultures are organized in a totemic way, according to which they belong to the turtle tribe, the beaver tribe, etc. Human society has reflected itself in the movements and patterns of the landscape. With the advent of phonetic writing, people can for the first time think about themselves in abstraction from other animals and the local landscape. They begin to enter into a reflexive relationship with their own signs, and thereby bypass, or rather short-circuit, the original reciprocity between their senses and the physical earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is no coincidence that the word "spell<\/em>" has a double meaning: on the one hand, it means to arrange the letters correctly to form a word, but also to cast a spell, to cast a spell. Because to start reading or writing with this new technology also meant to create a new kind of spell. Very often, it also meant to cast a spell on our own senses. It's as if we are all in Western culture bewitched by the alphabet. A kind of spell of spelling, you could say.2<\/a><\/sup>In the English original: spell of spelling<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Autonomous human area<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

JH: This is also reflected in the Internet and the entire virtual world that people are so fascinated with today. When we were surrounded by the magic of writing, we lost our immediate relationship with the trees and animals that spoke to us. Today, we are enchanted by the web and lose our immediate relationship with other people. In effect, each of us begins to live in our own box.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: It is to some extent a fulfillment of Plato's philosophy, his dream of an ideal dimension of pure forms that take precedence over the sensory world with all its weaknesses. An example of Plato's heaven of pure forms is cyberspace. Finally, it seems, we are offered a way to break free from our bodies, to free our minds from all corporeality. But it is the body that connects us to other animals and to the earth itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Older forms of non-alphabetic writing, pictorial or ideographic, derived some of their shapes from the non-human environment. However, with the emergence of the phonetic alphabet, letters began to refer exclusively to human sounds, and the more than human origin of their shapes was gradually forgotten. The rest of nature was no longer an essential part of the practice of reading and thinking, as it had been in the reading of Mayan hieroglyphs or Chinese ideographic writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This subtle shift has made all the difference \u2013 reflective thinking is now beginning to experience itself as a uniquely human faculty. The act of thinking is beginning to inhabit a uniquely human dimension. And the Internet is developing this to its full extent. No other organisms are participating in our survival at the television screen, except, of course, virtual organisms, invented and programmed by humans. We are just wandering around inside the collective nervous system of humanity. This is exactly what Jerry Mander talks about as a kind of intraspecific incest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: When you think about all the millions of computers on Earth being connected together by these wires, you start to realize that it's all taking on a physical form and intelligence of its own. That it's somehow communicating with us and even using us in a sense.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: Of course, and how could it not be? From an animistic perspective, everything is somehow alive, even a computer. When so many millions of nodes are connected, a complexity arises that undoubtedly resembles a very mysterious being indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Language and country<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

JH: So how do we deal with this trap we have created for ourselves? Is there a different way of learning for our children?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: Damn, so many things come to mind at once. I think it's very important to focus our efforts on reviving oral culture, on reviving the world of storytelling. My God, children today are raised in front of screens, both the television, which seems to be the universal caregiver, and increasingly the computer monitor. I think it's essential that before a child enters the world of screens, and even before they enter the world of text and writing, they first enter the world of storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I'm talking about stories that are told face to face, not about reading to children from books. Just telling a story about what happened under the full moon at the edge of the forest, or whose footprints are winding across this dry riverbed. What are the stories of your place? Why is there such a huge and strangely shaped boulder sticking out of that hillside? Or a story about that street corner over there where the street lamp buzzes intermittently - what is going on there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Children need stories that take place in the landscape, stories in the physical world, because unlike other forms of our discourse, we inhabit stories with our bodily imagination. Before we begin to conceive of language as an immaterial realm of abstractions, we need to experience it bodily. We should favor improvised storytelling so that the child grows up in a landscape woven with myths and has an awareness of language as something that belongs not only to people but to the whole world. A child who grows up inside a world of stories has a sense of being immersed in a meaningful cosmos, a world in which meanings seep from every branch and blade of grass and beak that happens to open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the foundation that a cultivated literary intellect, and perhaps even a computerized mind, absolutely needs to be able to accept some kind of ethical constraint. And they can do so only if they are rooted in a bodily awareness of being immersed in a world inhabited not only by humans but also by other beings and other bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The connection of language with land, the renewal of their forgotten intimacy, is therefore very important. I am talking about the revival of storytelling, because it is necessary to rejuvenate the awareness that language and speech are rooted in specific places, and therefore that they do not just float freely through the landscape. Isn't it strange that whether you study at a university in New York, in California, in Texas, or in New Mexico, you learn exactly the same things everywhere? We learn the same things everywhere, because the place where we are, the particular ecology, is assumed to have no influence on our knowledge and thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how bizarre is this assumption! It is the result of written texts, of the fact that words once written can be carried anywhere. Stories were once rooted in the details of particular places \u2013 the way other animals moved and hunted, what plants grew there and at what time of year, which roots could be eaten and which could not, which plants could cure certain diseases. All this local knowledge will remain lost until we recover, within the framework of oral speech, the dimension of stories that is the basis, the soil for the literary layer of language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JH: So what would you say to someone who comes to you and says, "David, your book has deeply affected me. But when I realize how trapped I am by language and disconnected from the natural world, I feel desperate. What can I do in this situation?"<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: There's so much that can be done. The first thing I would tell him is that being caught up in language is not a problem, because language is not the culprit. There are wonderful ways of speaking that faithfully reflect our direct sensory experience. What we need to do is slow down for a moment, quiet down the constant chatter in our brains, and give our eyes and ears space to start to perceive all the other voices that surround us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why not try to listen to these sounds and let them become real voices? Let all those other sounds become meaningful. They don't speak to us in words, of course, but it is still a speech that has meaning. How much more open our ears could be! To start listening with our animal ears and looking at the world with our animal eyes! To start appreciating our own bodies and our animal physicality again. To feel embedded in the body of this living earth, to take enough time to enjoy the sensory contact with the soil beneath our feet and the air that caresses our skin. To take off our shirt, even in the middle of winter, and feel for ourselves what it feels like. To take off our shoes and walk barefoot on the ground, to restore direct contact between us and what is not human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All these gestures are very important, yet they are not enough, because we also need to communicate with each other. It is necessary to return from this silence back to the world of expressions, but to find ways of speaking that are faithful to our immediate sensory experience of the world, to our animal kinship with the rest of the living earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many people have developed an incredible distrust of words, feeling that language rapes that pure experience. Well, that's not accurate. We have just largely forgotten how we, as earthly, sensual, corporeal beings, should speak. An important key to this is story, and another important key is poetry, which for me simply means beautiful speech that speaks as the body speaks rather than the mind. One must carefully choose words that move my body, that resonate physically with it, and that echo again in my mouth and muscles. Words that are not just abstract terms, but words that still have soil at their roots, words that feel earthy, that are appropriate to the body and the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life and depth<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

JH: What about television and computer?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: With writing, we began to enter into a relationship with the flat surface of a sheet of papyrus, with the flat page. This later evolved into the flat screen of a television or a computer monitor that we stare at. It is these flat surfaces that we spend so much of our time staring at, which completely contradicts our primary experience of the perceptual world as something that exists in depth\u2014something that surrounds us, characterized by relationships of near and far, a topology that changes as we move through this world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depth is the experience of being embedded. There is no dimension of depth in relation to the world without being included in it yourself. You do not gain the experience of near and far except by being embedded in this visual field yourself, somewhere within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we stare at screens with our children, it is not a fully bodily experience of being situated in the density of the perceptual field. What is communicating with my body is nature, but even the nature that I watch on a wonderful PBS television program is something I merely look at. It is not something I am a part of. That is perhaps the greatest danger of this "screen consciousness" to me.3<\/a><\/sup>In the English original: screen consciousness.<\/span>to which our civilization seems to be subject - we increasingly relate to the world as something "at which" we look, rather than as something "in which" we are immersed and permeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the deepest impulse of my work is to recreate this experience of being embedded, embedded in the depths of the living world. This is exactly what the phrase \u201cdeep ecology\u201d expresses. It simply means being in the depths of ecology, in the thicket of this real world that we have mistakenly objectified as if we were outside of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we are not outside of it. We have no privileged position from which to survey the world and thus obtain its complete plan, for we are entirely part of it; we are situated within it, by virtue of our being corporeal beings. We are embedded in the thicket of things. Our life is connected with the life of the world which surrounds us on all sides. So to invite people to speak of the earth as living is simply to ask them to notice that they are within it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interview by Jeremy Hayward with American ecophilosopher David Abram about his book The Spell of the Sensuous (Pantheon Books, New York 1996; in Czech Kozlo smysl\u016f. DhramaGaia 2013) was originally published under the title \u201cThe Boundary Keeper\u201d in the magazine Shambhala Sun (May 1997). It was first printed in Czech in an abridged version in the cultural weekly A2 (19 \/ 7.5. 2008) and was subsequently published\u2026 Continue reading Border Patrol: An Interview with David Abram<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40,35,59,43],"class_list":["post-7750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-david-abram","tag-ekofilosofie","tag-preklady","tag-rozhovory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7750","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7750"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7761,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7750\/revisions\/7761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}