I had thought of writing a review of David Abram’s book, Becoming Animal, but the breadth of its vision, the variety of its original ideas, the density of its poetical descriptions would take a long time to digest, before I could say anything of value. It would have been easier if I didn’t admire it so much. From the dust-cover I read that someone calls it “an original work of primary philosophy.” It’s more than that, but it is that too. So instead of trying to be comprehensive, I shall try to convey one or two examples of how differently he sees things through some selected quotations.
His philosophical method:
Is it possible to grow a worthy cosmology by attending closely to our encounters with other creatures, and with the elemental textures and contours of our locale? We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents arising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing. (Introduction, p4)
It is for the reader to judge whether his declared method is possible or not. I must confess to bias. What he describes is an approach I already seemed to have blindly stumbled upon: so naturally I’m in favour of it. I embrace it eagerly, like a stranger meeting a fellow-traveller who knows the road.
Some might claim that this is a book of solitudes. For I’ve chosen to concentrate on those moments in a day or a life when one slips provisionally beneath the societal surge of forces, those occasions (often unverbalized and hence overlooked) when one comes more directly into felt relation with the wider, more-than-human community of beings that surrounds and sustains the human hubbub. (Introduction, p9)
Solitary immersion in nature, as I’ve experienced, is a way to leave one world and enter another, by leaving behind some of the baggage that stops us seeing for ourselves.
Learning from other animals:
How easy it is for inherited concepts to stifle our senses! So often we assume that other animals are not conscious—that birds, for example, lack real intelligence, since their brains (or their “brain-body ratios”) are so much smaller than ours….
“Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies. (“The Discourse of the Birds”, p188)
The meaning of inner space:
In truth, it’s likely that our solitary sense of inwardness (our experience of an interior mindscape to which we alone have access) is born of the forgetting, or sublimation, of a much more ancient interiority that was once our common birthright—the ancestral sense of the the surrounding earthly cosmos as the voluminous inside of an immense Body, or Tent, or Temple. For the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the vault of the sky was considered th6e canopy of an enormous tent held up by the mountains that rise at the boundaries of the world….
… And so, when Copernicus and his followers wrecked this Aristotelian image of the cosmos, Western civilization suffered the dissolution of the last, long-standing version of that huge interior. (“Mood”, pp154,155)
Abram considers that the Aristotelian cosmology was “a refined instance of the same [Babylonian] notion”. We are cradled in the world, the centre of our own universe. We are not terrified by its immensity, not like Pascal: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” That dehumanisation of the cosmos we owe to Copernicus, whose influence on our perceived world Abram blames for our modern notion of a private inner universe of thought.
On immortality:
In response to my last post, Bryan has put up a new post on the question of immortality called Dust to Dust. John Myste has responded to his with a post called The Minds of the Dead. I felt sure that Abram said something about immortality too, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ve already expressed what I think about it in two comments on Bryan’s post, and to date one on John’s. If I find something by Abram on the topic I’ll append it.
a wayfarer’s notes 
You are making me want to read that book. I have neglected books all over the place now. I cannot keep up with this demanding reading schedule.
OK, back to work :(.
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Then I have succeeded in my intention, John! (I have a ridiculous reading schedule too. I put up some of the books on Amazon's Shelfari in order to punish myself with it.)
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I still haven't made it back to work, because I have 16 “comments” on people's blogs to respond to. Life is too short for all of this. I am clearly going to have to quit my job to make more time for reading and blogging.
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“We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents arising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing.”
Sounds very familiar 😉
“So often we assume that other animals are not conscious—that birds, for example, lack real intelligence, since their brains (or their “brain-body ratios”) are so much smaller than ours….”
I've certainly never assumed that birds (or any other animals) weren't conscious. I have questioned their intelligence, but I consider that a different matter. If I DO judge birds to lack an intelligence comparable to our own, this would be not on the basis of their brain size, but rather on the basis of the fact that they have not advanced as a civilization or invented new technologies (that I know of). This, of course, doesn't mean that they don't possess an intelligence of a different sort, or even that the difference between us and them is a matter of intelligence. It's just a sense that our eyes are open to possibilities in a way that theirs are not. I've talked about all this before here, even using birds as an example.
“Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.”
I like this. I feel a strong sense of what he means here, but I can't explain it.
“… And so, when Copernicus and his followers wrecked this Aristotelian image of the cosmos, Western civilization suffered the dissolution of the last, long-standing version of that huge interior.”
I suppose I should blame Copernicus for killing Santa Claus as well. 😉
Seriously though, I do get what he's saying, but I can't look at the Copernican Revolution in such a negative light. What Copernicus showed us with the truth, regardless of how it may have shattered our comfortable notions of the cosmos. I can't begrudge him for that.
“It is only natural that psychological qualities fled from this open exteriority in the wake of the Copernican revolution, taking refuge in the private space now assumed to exist inside each individual. Feelings and moods are mercurial powers; they require at least a provisional sense of enclosure to hold them.”
This is certainly a fascinating idea. In fact, all of this is fascinating. I may disagree with a great deal of it, but I like the way this guy thinks, and like John there, I'm curious to know more. I can see this ending up on my own reading list.
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I've just followed that link, Bryan and read your excellent essay of a year ago on the Garden of Eden, which inspired me to write a comment there, which if you'll forgive me I’ll paste here too.
It is interesting to come across this essay a year after it was written (hot off the press in conventional publishing terms, a long age in the speedier blogosphere).
For me, your essay comes at the right moment. It allows me to relate it to other ideas, in particular David Abram’s Becoming Animal and our discussions on this over at my place.
I now see in the old Biblical story a treatment of the essential flaw in the human design. We weren’t made complete like the other animals. A bird knows how to build its nest. An average young person in England today doesn’t know how to negotiate the various coming-of-age rituals like acquiring a house to live. Five years ago it was almost criminally easy to obtain a mortgage. This caused the financial crash. Now it has swung the other way, and you might find yourself waiting for the death of both parents before you could successfully “climb the property ladder” as they put it here. The replacement of university grants (like the one I enjoyed fifty years ago) by student loans doesn’t help. Not only have you no idea how to build your nest, you enter the adult world burdened with a huge debt.
These are just examples, not all of which can be put at the door of the Lord God of Israel & fellow-travelling good Christian folk like us.
Taking the story as teaching “original flaw” and not “original sin” is a subtle difference but it shifts the blame a little, helps us realize we can’t help it, but are merely stuck with the dilemma, and would do better to admit it.
I could take it a step further and say that here is a point too where the rationalist humanist may have it a little wrong if he claims that reason & conscious choice of good & not evil can help us create a perfect world, and are within our reach as choices.
The difference between an atheist and a believer comes down to this. The believer is supplied with a life-guarantee:
“Follow these rules and if you have any problems with your life, just ask your manufacturer and He will provide you with the help you need.” Whether it is worth the paper it’s printed on is debatable but it’s one of the most popular placebos the world has known.
Whereas the rationalist/humanist/socialist, or other atheistical -ist, thinks we can fix it ourselves, with our own special human intelligence, one that uses hubris in place of instinct.
“Hubris?” Yes, to apply the kind of intelligence which can land on the moon and construct computerised slave robots, to try and fix the big flaws in human design which make it so hard to live in our own bodies.
Abram proposes we go the other way, and become animal, a shamanistic skill our ancestors had but we have lost.
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[I posted your comment over there (both versions), but I'll reply to it here for the sake of convience.]
I think that seeing it as a “flaw” is only to see half of the story. I prefer to think of it as more a…dilemma. It's true that somewhere along the way we've lost the guarantee of the animal instincts, but we've gained a freedom and the entire dimension of possibility. This both our blessing and our curse. It's a double-sided coin.
This coin finds it ultimate expression in the Artificial. Consider that for billions of years, the Earth and everything on it carried on in a completely natural manner. Even now everything outside and beyond human action is “the natural.” We introduced something new into the world. We introduced the Artificial…for better or for worse. Not just in our technology, but in our very deeds and actions, something as simple as snapping your fingers. None of it is pre-ordained or pre-programmed by nature. We are natural creatures, but yet we've somehow transcended nature. And I say, “For better or for worse”, because that is the crux of the dilemma. The Artificial raises the moral issue while The Natural does not, hence all the controversy surrounding any given case of the Artificial. It is an almost god-like ability to create, but yet it's also a horrific ability to destroy. We can reach for the stars or torture and inflict pain on each other in ways the animals could never imagine. It's atomic energy and the atomic bomb all rolled into one.
But it is what it is; it's the dilemma that we have to live with. We can't go back to being the birds, no matter how much we might admire or even envy them. We've eaten the apple. Our eyes are open to the possibilities and we can't go back. We are Human Beings, and we have to make the most of it.
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It just clicked for me too, your point about the mortgage crisis and nest building. Clever. And yes, we do get lost without the pre-set instructions of the bird, and our lives become at times absurdly complex. But once again, there's the other side of that. We also have comforts and securities that the bird doesn't have in their fragile next, doctors and medicine, heat and insulation.
You can scoff at these things, and insist we've be better off like the birds. But again, I'm afraid that that's one choice we can't make, precisely because it isn't a matter of choice for the bird in the first place, and that's what makes all the difference.
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“next” should be “nest” (Clearly a mistake a bird would never make 😉 )
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Ok, more of a dilemma than a flaw. When I said “flaw” I had a whole lot in mind that would need another post, and in particular would require I bring in another book, which I haven't mentioned till now: Sex, Time and Power, by Leonard Shlain. I'm not sure of its merits and haven't managed to finish it yet. But the questions it asks are I think more important than the answers it proposes.
I shall not here list the detailed questions it asks, but they are all in the genre, “What specific physiological and psychological differences exist between Man and his closest cousins? What kinds of evolutionary advantage or handicap did these present when the mutations first appeared? What kinds of drastic environmental change could have fostered these mutations as being viable adaptations able to thrive and not die out?”
A great deal of it is about sex.
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You can scoff at these things, and insist we'd be better off like the birds. But again, I'm afraid that that's one choice we can't make, precisely because it isn't a matter of choice for the bird in the first place, and that's what makes all the difference.
Yes, Abram is not of course saying we'd be better off like the birds. He's saying that we have allowed this wonderful thing, Artificiality, to disconnect us from our own roots. To disconnect from one's roots is to weaken one, perhaps fatally.
And the flip side of the freedom we have–to build newfangled nests as the whim takes us, when we have become rootless–could be expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's vivid term “loose cannon”:
“I don't want to be the old cannon loose on the deck in a storm.”
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If we get to choose, I want to become an old dog lying in front of the fireplace. I'll get up and bark now and then if I hear a noise but otherwise I'm taking a nap. Birds are way too active and freaking cheerful way too early in the morning.
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I seem to hear a wistful voice within you, Rev, complaining of too little sleep, too much playing the sheepdog to a flock of dumb animals, too long till retirement …
But that old dog by the hearth dreams as he sleeps. His ears twitch and his nostrils twitch and in his doggy mind he's forever a young dog, following a trail. I hope to join you in that hearth and leave the twittering to the birds.
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I found that I couldn't formulate anything to contribute to the current conversation so I took the name of the book literally and decided to make my own comic relief commentary. My time to be the old dog by the fire is creeping up on me with cat feet waiting to pounce my tail while I dream of trails and chases past. Is it dinnertime? Or bedtime? No? Don't bother me, then. I'm sleeping.
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I hope you'll forgive me not reading this post until my copy of the book has arrived and been considered (which should be late this month). I enjoy reading your reviews and promise to return to read and discuss this one with you.
All the best.
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“Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.”
though i haven't read the book in question, and perhaps should follow Susan's lead and refrain from comment accordingly, i have to say that i think we see evidence of this 'physical thinking' enacted in sports, and by people who live very simply (some would say primitively). it's an odd paradox that technological and cerebral advancement don't appear to be compatible with being in touch with ourselves.
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Romanticism which creates Nature gods always puts me off a bit.
all are born of the ongoing interchange between our life and the wider Life that surrounds us. They are no more ours than they are the Earth’s.
“Life” becomes an entity.
“Earth” becomes an entity.
And although, the book may be written by a person who is creative and insightful, such language makes it hard for me to beneficially read this material. So I will have to read blogs like this, written by people who are just fine with such German Romanticism.
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That's fine by me, Sabio. I shall not defend my quoted author. Let him stand up for himself.
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What is life (Life (LIFE)) but an entity? All the metro zen tree hugging macrobiotic bullsnap aside, what are we as individuals and a collective other than Life Itself?
(waggles his eyebrows) It's more than just a game by Milton Bradley, you know.
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darev2005 :
Yeah, I think there is a problem with taking particular things, abstracting a word to describe similar traits, then concretizing that abstraction.
I not only think it is a philosophy of language issue but indeed has real negative practical outcomes. I have written about it, but I need to write a better post. So I can't point you to it now.
But maybe I misunderstood you.
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I meant to thank you gfid for your comment. Personally, I do aspire to live both simply and primitively, without any grand gestures of rejecting anything that I like of course.
Also I think that technology has gone far enough. It should now devote itself to cleaning up the problems it created, without trying to be clever and create more problems. Mankind has got rid of the steam engine (a wonderful dignified form of transport, both on and off rails). I look forward to its getting rid of the automobile as well. (not in my lifetime but I hope for my descendants.)
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Susan, I hope you'll return in due course, or else on your own blog say what you think about David Abram's book.
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Rev, I shall resist looking up Milton Bradley. I hope to meet you one day. The best way would be as a member of your flock. In what State, in what County, would I have to be condemned by a court to serve out my sentence in your jail? It would be interesting.
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Sabio, I think it's just animism, accrediting something a name and giving it a personality so that we can be more comfortable talking about it. Referring to it as a person or entity or even a deity makes it easier to dissect it and see what makes it tick. Like referring to our planet as Mother Earth rather than just thinking of it as a semi-molten mass of rock and debris. It's a comfort thing.
Vincent, I'd much rather you just came to visit. A stay in Raccoon City would be disappointing.
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Rev, thanks for the invitation. Let me know if ever you land at Heathrow Airport. I'm less than half an hour's drive away. Your guest bedroom is ready, and I hope to give you a brief course in the glories of English ale, in several of the remaining traditional English pubs.
But before you come, or before I arrive unexpectedly on your doorstep, let's clear one thing up: what you call 'just animism'.
It's a deep belief that everything is alive, has its own kind of consciousness and intelligence. David Abram is profoundly animistic in his approach to Life, Earth and every being.
Of course it is nice to be comfortable talking about it. But the most comfortable way of talking about things is to keep them at a distance and not change one's viewpoint by a single iota, whatever that is.
So there is a certain type of talking that you are not supposed to be comfortable with, for it takes your life by the throat; and you wonder if you'll ever be the same afterwards. The answer is NO.
We shall not talk like that in the pub, for it would be disrespectful.
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Well, I certainly wouldn't want to be rude to my host. I wasn't discounting animism. Heck, we all do it all of the time. I even talk to my own body parts on occasion, as if they were separate from me.
It seems I am having this very same discussion on Bryans blog as well. Maybe it's just me…
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[…] also Becoming Animal, which takes a lengthy book to say the same thing.I’ve another essay to write about this […]
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