SCHUMACHER COLLEGE
An International Centre for Ecological Studies
Holistic Science MSc 2000/2001, module:
Philosophy of Holistic Science
Experiencing Ecology: Toward a Participatory Ecopsychology
by Michael Crowley
Introduction
Since the writings of Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 20th century, the science of phenomenology has attempted to move our understanding of perception beyond dominant mechanistic and reductionist assumptions. Revealing the limitations of applied “value-free” objectivity, phenomenology attempts to create a conceptual methodology which unifies subject and object (observer and observed).
Ecopsychological methodology applies the phenomenological basis of the relationship between observer and observed primarily to move beyond traditional reductionist concepts of the self; moving from the egoistic self to the “ecological self.” Ecopsychological conceptions of self awareness involve understanding constructions of the self in relation to local and global human and more-than-human surroundings.
This paper explores the integration of phenomenology and Ecopsychology on three self-reinforcing levels. The first, sensory cognitive perception, explores the fallacies of objective understandings of the process of interpreting meaning. The second level, the life-world, explores the non-analytical interpretations of meaning in every day, taken for granted experiences. The third level, the phenomenology of Ecopsychology, applies the phenomenological understanding of meaning toward the psychological health of people and the ecosystems they interact with.
Sensory Cognitive Perception
Henri Bortoft, in his book The Wholeness of Nature gives an extensive analysis of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) participatory approach to science, demonstrating Goethe’s rejection of the notion that knowledge could be passively transferred through objective empirical methodologies. Objective empirical sensory reception of phenomena, according to Bortoft, does not alone equate for our conception of knowledge. He writes, “There is always a nonsensory factor in cognitive perception, whether it is everyday or scientific cognition” and that “knowing the simplest fact goes beyond the purely sensory.”
To illustrate this notion, Bortoft provides the picture seen in Figure 1.ii
When one first glances at this image, one may see only a random configuration of black and white splotches. What is “seen” is what is on the page. Upon closer inspection, however, a giraffe suddenly “appears.” While it is clear that the purely sensory experience of the picture has not changed (the physical picture itself has not changed and the light reflected on the retina is of the same pattern), we can clearly see an image there which was not there before. Bortoft asks the question, “...what happens in this instant of transition? There is evidently no change in the purely sensory experience, i.e., in the sensory stimulus to the organism.”
Mechanistically speaking, the pattern on the page and the pattern of light reflected on the retina is the same “whether the giraffe is seen or not.” So, using this example, Bortoft makes the case that knowledge of the giraffe cannot be explained as a “difference in sensory experience.” There is literally “more than meets the eye” within this picture.
So, what changes when the giraffe is perceived if it is not the actual object seen which has changed? Bortoft refers to the philosopher of science Norwood Russell Hanson who has remarked that what has changed is not an “element in the visual field, [but] rather the way in which elements are appreciated.”
This appreciation is an organization of meaning in the non-sensory field of perception derived from an otherwise random assortment of black and white splotches. Bortoft concludes that what is seen is in fact the perception of meaning which is understood through a combination of sensory and non-sensory cognition. Yet even the random splotches on the page are not without meaning. According to Bortoft, “there cannot be a cognitive perception of meaningless data, because in the act of seeing the world it is meaning that we see.” We can never fully separate ourselves from the perception of meaning.
David Levin, in his unpublished paper “Liberating Experience from the Vice of Structuralism,” examines the methods of phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and Buddhist Nagarjuna in the deconstruction of rationalism and empiricism as “doctrinal positions” (Levin, p. 3) Levin is quick to criticize Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method of “pure description” of phenomena. Similar to Bortoft’s assertion that unaided empirical sensory perception is impossible without cognitive perception, Levin emphasizes that pure description is impossible because the relation between experience and language is an “ongoing process of hermeneutical disclosure” (Levin, p.2). He argues that “ language forms the experience it is articulating in the process of articulating it and… experience continues to talk back to the words that have been used to render it articulate” (Levin, p.2). If experience is articulated as an objective and static reality rather than an ongoing dialogue of lived experience, then language will form meaning which will become independent of experience, rendering it to an abstract conceptual structure. In this sense, a form of descriptive structuralism, rather than lived experience, begins to dominate perception.
Phenomenology, then, cannot exist within a purely analytical structure because it recognizes that direct phenomenological experiences “solicit the implicit meaningfulness of experience, bringing it forth in a way that lets ever new, or different dimensions, features, traits, qualities emerge, only in so far as it is hermeneutical” (Levin, p. 1). In this way, the language of phenomenology must be recognized as a phenomenon itself, and not separate from the phenomenon as it is lived.
In my view, Levin’s approach is in the domain of critical realism, as he is careful not to interpret phenomenology as either a form of relative postmodernism or naive realism. Relative postmodernism, in this sense, cannot acknowledge the implicit, intrinsic nature of things because to the postmodernists, there is no reality outside of our intersubjective interpretations and social constructs. Naive realism takes the opposite stance, asserting that there is a world independent of us, which is ultimately objective in the “pure description” sense. Critical realism, on the other hand, says that there is indeed a world outside of ourselves, but everything we know about it depends on our experience with it. In this sense, it is within our intersubjective hermeneutical process of direct engagement in the world where intrinsic natures are continually apparent. Experiencing intrinsic natures therefore allows open perceptions of meaning which are continually brought forth within our sensory cognitive perception.
While Levin criticizes Merleau-Ponty for his methodology of pure description, he also acknowledges Merleau-Ponty’s valuable contributions to phenomenology. Quoting Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Levin discusses Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of reflection and objectification. Merleau-Ponty’s statement, “it is reflection which objectifies points of view or perspectives, whereas, when I perceive, I belong through my point of view to the world as a whole” (Cited in Levin, p. 6) is recognized by Levin to portray an “implicit meaningfulness always at work—or rather, always in play—in the context that surrounds our explicit conceptual discourse…more possessed by meaning than in possession of it” (Levin, p. 7). In this regard, it is the complexity of the lived world in which interactions among beings continually arise that meaning unfolds in novel and creative ways. For Merleau-Ponty, the lived world was regarded as Husserl’s life-world, a direct and ongoing interaction of beings (living and non-living) where meaning and reality are completely embodied and always in process.
The Life World
We have just seen how meaning is always elicited within a cognitive sensory perception. We will now apply this concept to Husserl’s life-world.
David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous provides a beautifully written account of Husserl’s life-world, and Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of it. For Abram, the life-world is our immediate experience as we continually live it; a complex world of continual and spontaneous interactions with an ever emerging unfoldment of meaning.
The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience, as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it. It is that which is present to us in our everyday tasks and enjoyments—reality as it engages us before being analyzed by our theories and our science. The life-world is the world that we count on without necessarily paying it much attention, the world of the clouds overhead and the ground underfoot, of getting out of bed and preparing food and turning on the tap for water. Easily overlooked, this primordial world is always already there when we begin to reflect or philosophize. It is not a private, but a collective, dimension—the common field of our lives and the other lives with which ours are entwined—and yet it is profoundly ambiguous and indeterminate, since our experience of this field is always relative to our situation within it (Abram, 1996, p. 40)
Abram shows us the participatory nature of the life-world, experienced not in an analytical consciousness, but primarily through sensory (and contextual) cognitive perception. This is a world which has us engaged in life, and engaged in an unfoldment of meaning as we live. Because of the complex interactions and unpredictable emergent qualities experienced in the life-world, meaning is never fixed or static except in the illusions of abstracted conceptual structures. Because of the non-analytical nature of the life world, the life-world often goes unnoticed, or it is taken for granted, for it cannot exist in totality. The whole meaning is always “absent,” yet always implicit, because it is always inter-subjective and within an ongoing dynamic.
According to Husserl, direct engagement in the life-world is becoming subverted in Cartesian influenced Western civilization by what he saw as a compulsive need to objectify the unpredictable aspects life-world (Abram, 1996). Objectification, when taken to the extreme (attempting to identify a predictable, total and explicit blueprint for reality) focuses entirely on the abstract analytical, eliminating the need for direct engagement in the world. This, of course, traps us in our cognitive constructs, as we are unable to see phenomena for themselves.
Henri Bortoft provides a illustrative example of such objectification of the life-world by examining our experience with the descriptive nature of the English language. According to Bortoft, the English language is particularly analytical because of its subject predicate grammar, having the effect of treating elements in the world as if they exist in isolation. An example given by Bortoft is the sentence “I see the tree.” This sentence interprets an experience as comprising a subject and object, with an act of seeing linking them together. Language, in this regard, “discloses the analytical world” (Bortoft, 1996, p. 62). According to Bortoft, in order to experience the life-world directly, one must be concerned less with language as-such, and more concerned with the dynamics of the life-world, “concerned more with relationships than with the discrete elements that are related” (Bortoft, 1996, p. 63). His example of such a dynamic is as follows:
Imagine cutting an orange… We see the knife and orange simply as separate entities which are brought together externally in space and sequentially in time. But another way of experiencing this is possible, which is entered into by giving attention to the act of cutting the orange, instead of to the separate entities which are brought together. If this is done, the process of cutting can be experienced simultaneously as one whole, as if it were one present moment instead of a linear sequence of instants. Similarly, if we watch a bird flying, instead of seeing a bird which flies (implying a separation between an entity, “bird,” and an action, “flying,” which it performs), we can experience this in the mode of dynamical simultaneity as one whole event. By plunging into seeing flying we find that our attention expands to experience this movement as one whole that is its own present moment (Bortoft, 1996, p. 64).
Hence, the life-world, if seen analytically can be taken to consist of separate entities moving linearly through time. This, while it is not an incorrect way of seeing per se, ignores our experience as a “mode of Being” (Bortoft, 1996, p. 64). Accordingly, an embodied awareness of the life-world requires an awareness which is beyond the analytical assumption of separate bodies moving through space and time. Phenomenologically, this deconstructs our analytical constructs and engages us experientially within the life-world.
But how do we effectively engage in the life-world? According to Abram’s interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, we are thoroughly intertwined in the life-world through “the mindful life of the body” (Abram, 1996, p. 44). The mindful body is “the very means of entering into relation with all things” – it is the means in which we are in the world and how we communicate with it – in this sense it is “the very subject of awareness” (Abram, 1996, p. 47). Discussing an embodied reality, Merleau-Ponty completely immerses us into the intersubjective. He demolishes any possibilities of interpreting the world explicitly and in totality from the outside because our bodies and hence, ourselves, survive, communicate, interact and create reality and meaning within the world through “[our] power of responding to other bodies, of touching, hearing, and seeing things, resonating with things” (Abram, 1988, p. 103). Therefore, our whole sensual experience and mindful feelings are aspects of our intrinsic nature which inform our cognitive sensory perception -our minds are not separate from our bodies.
Rooting the intellect cognitive sensory perception within the whole body therefore reveals the qualitative and sensory dynamics of life. The body cannot be a pre-programmed machine or an automized robot, because it, or rather, we, need to be spontaneous and creative as we are engaged in the complexity of the world and its ever emergent relations and phenomena. Interpretation of meaning of ever new phenomena is rooted in the senses, our intrinsic feelings, requiring ever new unfoldment of sensory cognitive perception, and further participation within new interactions, gestures, and relations of which we are further engaged in creating. This is an iterative process where each interaction changes something in us, effecting the whole person (or animal, plant, rock, etc) and their intrinsic nature. For Abram, “It is this open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself), that we speak of by the term perception” (Abram, 1996, p. 50).
It is through this receptivity and creativity within the animate world that the development of the ecological self is cultivated. This identity, which extends beyond the immediate body to a relation with the interrelated dynamics of one’s surroundings, is what Merleau-Ponty, in his later writings, had come to call the “the Flesh.” Abram points out that Merleau-Ponty’s use of “Flesh” to describe the intersubjective world marks a progression from Husserl’s intersubjectivity as presiding in the human intellect (what Merleau-Ponty describes as the “invisible”) to an embodied “mindful body,” to a virtual non-distinction between the individual and their animate world (the Flesh) (Abram, 1988). It is the ecological self as understood through Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh that I would now like to turn to as an approach to Ecopsychology.
The Phenomenology of Ecopsychology
The emerging field of Ecopsychology approaches human psychological health within the context of the ecological health of the life-world. Like other approaches to psychology, Ecopsychology recognizes that the identity and health of the self (formally understood in isolation), is wholly dependent upon its quality of relations, both in groups and among other individuals. Ecopsychology, however, takes this concept a step further, recognizing that the health of the identity of the self is also embodied within its quality of relations within the non-human world; an identity termed “the ecological self.” It is within the human and non-human world where the ecological self extends a wider sense of belonging and meaning as well as a connection to a whole larger than, and fully within, one’s self. Perceived phenomenologically, the ecological self is an identification with the Flesh, a fluid expansion of mindful consciousness and unity with one’s surroundings.
This wider sense of belonging and meaning can extend to include interrelatedness and meaning within the larger whole of an ecosystem, bioregion, or even the earth and the universe at large. This is a belonging within all relations. In this sense, our psychological health is dependent upon the integrity of our surroundings and our perception of them. If our sensory cognitive perception of meaning found within our surroundings does not resonate well within us, or if we are unfulfilled by our surroundings because we have developed conceptual barriers to direct experience, then not only our health, but the health of our surroundings with which we interact with, will suffer.
From the phenomenological perspective, the embodied psychological effects of the physical and cognitively constructed world of modern industrial culture becomes evident. The psychological effects of living in a world where meaning is constantly dampened by the explicit nature of physical and cognitive structures has, Ecopsychologists believe, lead to a form of “existential depression” where one’s sense of belonging has been overcome by a sense of loss for the spontaneous and alive intrinsic nature of the life-world.
Henceforth, Abram points out that a continual engagement in a civilization with an overemphasis on artifacts based upon their function leads to an addictive need for active stimulation:
...the mass-produced artifacts of civilization, from milk cartons to washing machines to computers, draw our senses into a dance that endlessly reiterates itself without variation. To the sensing body these artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and even alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the specific “functions” for which they were built. Once our bodies master these functions, the machine-made objects commonly teach our senses nothing further; they are unable to surprise us, and so we must continually acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest model of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves (Abram, 1996, 64).
Further, if we live a place where the natural world is disturbed or replaced almost entirely by human artifacts, and human and human/non-human relationships are not valued, then the world can seem to be meaningless place where we do not belong. The Flesh, as such, resonates within one’s own feelings of meaninglessness, because both the “inside” and “outside” have grown together: cognitive constructs manifest into physical artifacts; physical artifacts then resonate within sensory cognitive perception, reinforcing the creation of stronger cognitive constructs and more physical artifacts.
Ecopsychologists believe that the way to heal this sense of alienation and non-belonging is through a reawakening of the senses. It is by this means that they hope, as well, to restore our relationship to the earth as a whole. Further, Ecopsychologists believe that the health of the individual is an indicator of the health of their human and more-than-human relationships. “Perception, consciousness, and behavior,” according to Ecopsychologist Laura Sewall, “are as radically interdependent as the rest of our biosphere” (Sewall, 1995, p.203).
Therefore an approach to Ecopsychology includes cultivating the skill of seeing things phenomenologically; a skill which Bortoft has shown, involves a recognition of our non-analytical cognitive sensory perception. Because of modern industrial culture’s overemphasis on functionalism and its over -dependence on cognitive constructs, part of the therapy of Ecopsychology involves practicing not only the art of perception, but also a feeling of renewed belonging within the world.
Laura Sewall, in The Skill of Ecological Perception, identifies five skills which are intended to help such a reconnection. They include: 1. learning to attend (mindful bodily and sensory awareness of intrinsic natures); 2. learning to perceive relationships (non-analytical perception of processes and meaning); 3. developing perceptual flexibility across temporal scales (wider identification of the self); 4. learning to perceive depth (receptivity to the Being or health of one’s surroundings); and 5. the intentional use of the imagination (creative play). These skills are meant to be used as guidelines to “intentionally sense with our eyes, pores, and hearts wide open… requir[ing] receptivity and the participation of our whole selves…” (Sewall, 1995, p. 204). I mention these skills to demonstrate one of the many evolving therapies which are geared towards a healing of the ecological self. It is through these types of conscientious exercises that science and meditation, analytical and sensual, and belonging and creating can become better balanced.
Conclusions
The science of seeing the world phenomenologically aids in enhancing our cognitive sensory perception, yet it also reveals the loss of meaning that humans have created and lived in. Therefore while we all see the world phenomenologically every day, because it is always meaning that we see, either cognitive constructs or embodied constructs in physical environments encourage us to only see the world analytically. This creates a feedback cycle which brings people further into a functionalist perception because, in environments which predominantly feature human functional artifacts upon the landscape, often the meaning of what is seen is painful to see from the point of view of the ecological self. A simultaneous cultivation of the skill to perceive phenomenologically therefore would not only help us to break free of harmful constructs, but to simultaneously engage in the world in a manner which respects our interrelatedness and shared meaning within its dynamics.
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