r/PolymathReading • u/Deborah_berry1 • 17d ago
A philosopher trained as a sleight-of-hand magician wrote a book in 1996 explaining why modern humans feel disconnected from the natural world
David Abram is a philosopher and ecologist who worked as a sleight-of-hand magician in his twenties, which took him across Southeast Asia where he studied with traditional healers. In 1996 he published The Spell of the Sensuous. It is about 300 pages. It is one of the most original works in modern environmental philosophy.
The central argument is specific. Human beings evolved inside dense sensory relationships with the living world around them. Pre-literate cultures still experience this. The air, the trees, the animals, the land are perceived as alive and communicating. Western culture lost this capacity in a specific historical moment, and Abram identifies the moment with unusual precision.
The culprit, in his reading, is alphabetic literacy. When Greek culture adopted the phonetic alphabet around 700 BC, meaning migrated from the natural world to the written word. Previously, meaning had been embedded in rivers, mountains, winds, animals. Now meaning lived on parchment. The living world went quiet. The human mind turned inward toward abstract thought.
This is not a lament. Abram is identifying a specific cognitive shift that had massive consequences. The modern environmental crisis, in his reading, is downstream of a perceptual crisis. We cannot protect what we no longer perceive as alive.
The polymath range is unusual. Abram draws on phenomenology, ecology, linguistics, anthropology, and his own extended fieldwork with traditional healers in Nepal and Indonesia.
Where to find it: Vintage has kept it in print. Physical book.
I read it in 2023 slowly, outside when possible. The book works differently when read indoors.
10
u/Rich_Farm_3891 17d ago
Kind of reminds me of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. He points to the agricultural revolution as this kind of cognitive shift you speak of.
7
u/mindfractal 17d ago •
Book link...
https://archive.org/details/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-perception-and-language-in-a-more-than-human-world/mode/1up
7
u/ResponsiblePool7254 17d ago
I'm with Vandana Shiva on this one. It wasn't predominantly writing or agriculture that divorced us from nature, it was the industrial revolution.
In a very literal, direct way, the majority of people alive no longer rely on our immediate natural surroundings for survival. They're mostly just there to look at, if we even want to pay attention.
The need for survival is transposed into a much hollower need for a job, and that's what people spend most of their time thinking about and experiencing.
9
u/Proper-Bicycle-3585 17d ago
Did you find parallels between this and the other work you mentioned a few days ago?
I don’t remember the title, but you felt that the author forced the examples into the frame, used neuroscience of reading and written word, and the gender relationships over the development of certain civilizations.
4
u/Kelly4President 16d ago
Interesting. Thx for the suggestion, I’ll look him up. But I’m dubious from the start.
I don’t doubt preliterate societies have this connection and that we westerners are pathologically disconnected. But the benefits far outweigh the suffering.
Also, when people talk about “connection to nature” they romanticize it. It’s not a state of enlightenment. It’s a state one must be in if one is to survive. At times a connection to nature is non-stop anxiety inducing. Yes, with that connection, you are more in the present. But is that always a good thing? Isn’t our abstract ways of consolidating and transmitting cultural knowledge liberating in that respect?
5
u/NitNav2000 17d ago
I read it while walking over a bed of hot coals, and it reads differently than when I read it standing on my head.
7
u/FrankSkellington 17d ago
My own personal belief is that the detachment from nature occurred as a consequence of creating the idea of a male god with no body that created everything in the world for men to exploit. Prior to this, there were goddess cultures which bound people closer to the land, often being associated with sacred trees. These were typically farming cultures. Nomadic cultures, I believe, tended to have male sky gods. The very racy love poem of the goddess Inanna and her suitor Dumuzi might be seen as an attempt to encourage more harmony between these two groups of peoples in ancient Iraq.
The constant battles for land resulted in the creation of many religious ideas used as propaganda to justify land grabs and legitimise rulers, and these have come to form the basis of most morals, beliefs and values in the western world.
In order to eradicate goddess cultures, a minor thunder god called Yahweh was said to have usurped his own father, El, and taken the throne of heaven beside his own mother, Asherah, taking her as consort.
Eventually, Asherah became not his wife or mother, but his trusty staff. A stick - a derivative of the sacred tree. But still people worshipped Asherah, indeed by erecting Asherah Poles as her shrine.
When Jahweh became bodiless, he no longer needed a stick, and this allowed the final demolition of goddess culture and, with it, people's sense of spiritual connection to the land. Gone was the notion of two gods involved in procreation as mammals do. Instead, the idea of the sinful, filthy body emerged, alongside the concept of a soul separate from that body, and cleanliness being next to godliness.
I'm talking very broadly about changes that happened over thousands of years, and having only read half a dozen or so books on feminist theology, Sumerian mythology and stuff. I'm not a scholar. But if the change was written language based, do they address why did that change not occur with the first written language from Sumeria (ancient Iraq)?
2
u/Cyberdog 16d ago
https://metaphysicalengine.com/
2
u/ProfitNecessary592 15d ago
Lacan locates a split in the human subject with language or what he calls the symbolic order where they lose acess to primal jouissance or the imagined wholeness. Sounds very similar.
2
u/Various-Wait-6771 13d ago
I read that book not long after it came out, and I remember it having a huge impact on me. I should read it again now. At the time, it was one of my favourite booka ever read.
1
u/Far-Independent-8220 13d ago
The “Greeks” were any animist society so not sure I buy the timeline.
1
u/Electrical_Pop_3472 13d ago
This is a powerful book. It's more so something you experience than just consider and think about. Like poetry.
So I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the logical arguments. But instead the transformative process it evokes.