Rethinking Our Connection With Nature
Reviewing the book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World’ By David Abram
The title and the cover deeply captivated me. I knew nothing else about the book. Somewhat instinctively, I figured that it would dive into the relationship of human beings with something other, something beyond human. And I was right, although in a different way than I expected. I expected to argue for some higher abstract patterns, but it went completely in the opposite direction. Away from abstraction into the particular, but in a new way that is completely absurd to us.
The first part of the book was incredibly enchanting. It described his experience with shamans and magicians that he encountered, how this changed his view of nature and how we ought to relate to it. The chapter was so good that I was a bit disappointed reading the rest of the book. Not that the rest was bad, but because the first chapter was so delightful that I wanted to keep reading it forever. It really captures the liveliness of nature that is hard to express. But this was only meant as a background for the author’s thesis, a sort of preview that he will later argue for.
The following chapter is about phenomenology, which is absolutely crucial to Abram’s philosophy. It starts by giving a brief history of what led to our mechanized world, such as Galileo and Descartes, and then covers some phenomenological thinkers that tried to fight against that worldview and recover the human experience. First with Husserl, who started the whole movement, but the thinkers he draws from the most are Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and the book uses their work very heavily until the end.
While still accessible, reading this chapter was a heavy contrast from the first. While this first was an enjoyable journey through the wonders of nature, here you are plunged deep into philosophy. There is a very coherent narrative to such transition, but it feels odd nevertheless. And while I deeply admire phenomenology, and I’m fairly familiar with it, it still wasn’t a very easy chapter and I’m a bit afraid the philosophical shock from it will put some people away. But it was certainly required, as it explores the inherently interactive nature of perception, and how objects are seen as “alive”. This is deeply counter-intuitive to our modern worldview, and without it nothing about the book makes sense.
The rest of the book is the articulation of the groundwork of these two chapters. How phenomenology can help us to regain an almost magical relationship with nature that seems so natural to mankind in its tribal environment and yet so alien to civilized man. The way it does this is incredibly vast, but the main story it tries to tell us that our worldview is by default animalist. And that isn’t some form of “lower” mode of cognition, but rather it is deeply attuned to the environment and incredibly functional for its purpose.
Man is deeply connected nature and the land itself, with a constant dialogue. In part, what separates the more ancient and the modern worldviews are that the former is an oral culture. The myths and stories tribal people use contain information about the land and how to interact with it. But it is deeply attuned to it, and it isn’t fixed. It is in a constant state of flux.
Yet, with writing, myths then began to be fixed in paper. Their dynamic structure was lost, and they started to be seen more as precise events. Phonetic literacy, in specific, strengthened this effect even more. Before Greek’s invention of vowels, writing itself was still partially dynamic, such as Hebrew. There was an interpretation that was constantly required by the reader. But with modern phonetic language, the meaning became fixed.
As our alphabet became increasingly focused on sounds rather than real-world references, language became completely looped and self-referential. In the past, writing was inherently connected to nature, as it required real-world phenomena for its descriptions. It was alive and connected to the external world. But now it is dead and only a mirror of itself, trapped in a human-exclusive world. And thus, the animism of nature is now confined to animism in writing. Hence that you can “hear” and “see” what you are reading.
It is hard to appreciate what the author is trying to show, as it’s not easily described in a few paragraphs and takes a certain shift of thinking provided by the countless examples he gives of many tribes he personally encountered, such as Australian aboriginals and their “Dreamtime” stories or the native American Apache tribes; their interlinked systems of songs, locations, and ancestry. All of it is fascinating from a purely anthropological view, even without taking his argument into account.
I don’t agree with everything. I don’t share his overly positive view of nature, and I think the overestimates the “communication” between animals and the land, even when only from a purely phenomenological standpoint. But it makes you appreciate certain aspects that you have never thought about or noticed. And you can’t think and notice them as they are so alien to our culture that they are outright insane. But afterwards, the animism of indigenous cultures starts to take a whole new meaning.
It’s not a book for everyone. If you’re interested in both ecology and philosophy, then you are the perfect match. If you’re only interested in one, I think you can still get a lot out of it if you can stand going out of your comfort zone. It’s not a perfect book. There are claims that are hard to accept, sometimes it’s a bit repetitive, and the philosophy can be a bit tough if you’re completely new. But what this book most definitely isn’t is dull or unimaginative.
What I liked the most, perhaps even more than the specific content was the journey it offered. A peek into a completely new and alien world and showing the possibility of a lost and magical perception of reality. Something that has been lost through time and culturally inhibited with our modern language and obsession with technology, but that the author allows you a short glimpse of.
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