This was another beautifully written piece my friend, up there with ghosts without a shrine for me. I will make a longer comment shortly with some of my own thoughts on the subject. I also greatly enjoyed your other post from the other day!
Yes . . . what an honor to be devoured by a tiger (or a grizzly) preferably in old age! I've always heard that that is the Buddhist notion of the best death. I founded a natural burial ground on the edge of a beautiful wild canyon in Washington State. Most people choose to be wrapped in shrouds and buried so they can become available to the many life forms that will feed on them and break down their constituents so as to feed, in my case with my chosen site, the ponderosa pines around me. My father, who taught ecology, and died in the year 2000 carried this poem in his wallet his whole life, and got it out to share with us when he was diagnosed with leukemia. It captures the spirit I think, of your wonderful essay:
Aug 24, 2023·edited Aug 24, 2023Liked by David B Lauterwasser
I loved this post. Sorry it took me a few days to get to it. There are a few themes in this that make me more certain you will enjoy my novel when you get to it.
Aug 22, 2023·edited Aug 23, 2023Liked by David B Lauterwasser
Here let me take one of your phrases and change a few things:
"To me as an iconoclast, much of what constitutes the realm of spirituality are the confused musings of alienated humans trapped in a matrix of abstract delusion. Their musings (ramblings) are merely a symptom of this alienation that people of the human lineage have ubiquitously suffered from since the emergence of symbolic thought itself, having themselves been separated from Nature by a near continuous veil of reification."
Two can play at this game. In the end it's best to simply avoid "us and them" dichotomies in the first place, for they are always false at base, but since you clearly set up such a dichotomy in you opening paragraphs (the "primitivist" vs. the "over-socialized, hyper domesticated" person) I thought it pertinent to demonstrate how the same light can just as easily be reversed and shone right back on you, the so-called primitivist. The truth is that human delusion knows no bounds. It matters not where one lives geographically, the degree of ecological integrity in one's home region, or what kind of material culture one was born into. Symbolic thinking will yield rampant delusion irrespective of time, place or circumstance. "Primitive" peoples are not spared this fate. Examples abound.
In my view your writings would be more impactful were you to curb the pomp, the posturing, and the rather consistent undertones of righteous indignation. You share more in common than you realize with the "moderns" that you jeer at. So do "indigenous" people. This is the dirty little secret of primitivism.
Aug 22, 2023·edited Aug 23, 2023Liked by David B Lauterwasser
"most philosophers have historically had a skewed or entirely false perception of human Nature, since almost nobody in civilized cultures correctly assessed the natural state of humans, and nobody cared to include the overwhelming majority of time we humans existed – ninety-nine percent of our existence, mind you – into their conclusions."
Here you tacitly imply that a person from some group that you would deem "genuinely primitive" would necessarily have a "correct" assessment of "the natural state of humans," and therefore presumably a non-false perception of human nature. I dispute this. Your position here relies heavily on the common primitivist trope that humans lived "the same way for 99% of our existence.” From this premise, you appear to draw the conclusion that all peoples living during this “99%” period would have had the same frame of consciousness, therefore presumably granting them direct insight into what is natural and what isn’t.
I have a couple questions that I would pose here. First, by what measure do you draw the conclusion that humans lived the same way for 99% of our existence? This giant leap of a conclusion could be disputed all day long, but I think it’s simple enough to point out that the tiny bands of humans roaming the plains of Africa 300,000 years ago were NOTHING like the complex culture of PNW Coast tribes, circa 1750. You may counter by saying that the PNW tribes had so significantly deviated from the “natural” state so as to be excluded from your 99% bracket, but then the question becomes: where does one draw the line? Were the spear thrusters of 300,000 years ago the same as the Mesolithic people of 30,000 years ago with their ranged-weapons, microliths, advanced fishing ability, and what essentially amounts to agroforestry? Hardly. In fact, it’s quite possible that symbolic thought itself manifested sometime between these two benchmarks. If this is indeed true, then the idea that the two groups lived “in the same state” is frankly laughable, being as the emergence of symbolic thinking changes the “nature” of an being's existence about as proudly as any evolutionary development can.
Secondly, are we only taking into account the Homo Sapien timeframe in this 99% exercise? If no, how far back are we going? To the dawn of the homo genus? Would Homo Habilis have had the same “correct” understanding of “the natural state of humans” as a Mesolithic Briton? Let us put ourselves in the shoes of H. Habilis for a second here. In doing so we will grant the assumption that Homo Habilis could even make an assessment of human nature (a purely abstract, symbolic specter) in the first place. They might look at a Mesolithic tribe and say “wow, you guys have really lost the plot. What’s with all this complexity and nonsense? You’re burning fires and cooking your food now? Appropriating the flesh of other animals to wear as your own? Herding buffalo off of cliffs? Harnessing plant succession for your own purposes? Burdening yourself with a bunch of possessions that you must carry around? Building semi-permanent dwellings? Preserving and storing food? Living in large groups? Engaging in strange rituals?"
H. Habilis might have in turn thought “you guys have no concept of what true human nature is.” But why draw the line there even? Being as all other primates live in forest environments and subsist on primarily raw forest plants, maybe the first Australopithecines who ventured out onto the savannah and began walking on two feet were the first real derivation from what’s “natural.” After all “99% of primate existence” was in the forest eating mostly raw plant foods. It’s also true most of primate existence was spent in a primarily arboreal fashion. Perhaps the Gorilla left the "natural state" when they started inhabiting the forest floor?
Do you see the game we’re playing here? To the extent that earlier human tribes had a “spirituality,” it wasn’t based on their living in “the natural state.” There is no natural state. Nature is constant flux. If I were pressed into a corner though, and forced to divide natural from unnatural, the point I’d choose would be the arising of symbolic thought itself. In this case, even Alan Watt’s observations count for naught. You write:
“Alan Watts has argued that the idea of the separate and independent ‘self’, the illusion that we are “skin-encapsulated egos,” is a root cause of many of humanity’s biggest problems, which of course includes the ecological crisis. We think of ourselves as a monolithic entity, set apart from the environment we inhabit. It is this illusion of being a monolithic entity, a skin-encapsulated ego (that we mistakenly assume to be who we are), that diffuses and is being dispersed when we die. Are we not also the mountains, the rivers, the soil, and the wind? Are we not also the plants and animals we eat, for without all those things we would simply not exist?”
And yet, in order to conceive of oneself as “mountains, rivers, soil, wind, plants and animals,” one must have already leaped straight into the abyss of the symbolic. Before abstract divisions enter the picture mountains, rivers, animals etc. do not exist. These are arbitrary divisions made by humans. It is not clear that early humans would have made such distinctions at all; they may have instead inhabited a world of “suchness,” as is alluded to in the Zen tradition, where there are no borders delineating things at all. In such a state, you’re “circle of life” story ceases to be. Nothing lives and dies to become something else, because there are no two things to begin with. The very concepts of life and death, or cycles of any kind, are impossible without symbolic thinking. Even if early Homo Sapiens did in fact think symbolically in this way, it’s certainly the case that symbolic thought arose *at some point* during the course of hominid evolution. This may have been w/ H. Erectus, or earlier (doubtful). The exact date will probably never be pinned down, but we know that there was at some junction a profound shift. Our shared common ancestor with Chimpanzees certainly didn't think symbolically. Modern humans do. Somewhere during the course of our evolution from there, to here, there was a monumental shift in consciousness. That shift can essentially be described as a dividing line between two distinct modes of being/experiencing, and that dividing line can just as easily be argued to be the most befitting marker delineating what is “natural,” and what is “unnatural.”
What you are calling “Animism” is most certainly a direct product of the second, later frame of consciousness. Chimpanzees know nothing of Animism. To our knowledge, no other animal does. Earlier hominids wouldn’t have either, and it’s distinctly possible that very early Homo Sapiens didn’t. From this observation, one can draw the very reasonable conclusion that your “Animism” is in fact entirely unnatural, a very recent invention, and that the driving force behind it – symbolic thinking – guarantees that your Animist tribes have, in a twist of irony, more in common with modern philosophers than they do with earlier (non-symbolic) hominids. Perhaps whatever beings existed before Animism had the “true” understanding of nature, because they had no conception of truth or understanding to begin with. How's that for a paradox?
It would be perfectly within reason to say that you like Animism because the lifeway aesthetic of earlier humans that practiced/experienced Animism resonates with you. I have no problem with this, as far as it goes. But you go further, presumably so that you may comfortably position your own spirituality with what you deem to be “natural,” when you state “almost nobody in civilized cultures correctly assessed the natural state of humans.” In other words, a human must “live naturally,” or perhaps, at a minimum, study what natural living looks like, in order to “correctly assess” the natural state of humans. From there, it can be inferred, one may begin cultivating (like yourself?) a true natural spirituality, and get away from "unnatural" modern forms of philosophy. Of course you qualify elsewhere that there is no "correct" form of spirituality, but this does little to hide the flavor of your post here, which smacks of an obvious (albeit indefensible) binary.
Hey david it’s me Kay F from fb. I’m not finished with reading this essay yet but wanted to ask before I forget to: you use the word oversocialized when describing certain people now and then - could you explain what you mean with that - I mean i can take a guess but if you could expand on the idea of oversocialization? Thanks!!
This was another beautifully written piece my friend, up there with ghosts without a shrine for me. I will make a longer comment shortly with some of my own thoughts on the subject. I also greatly enjoyed your other post from the other day!
Yes . . . what an honor to be devoured by a tiger (or a grizzly) preferably in old age! I've always heard that that is the Buddhist notion of the best death. I founded a natural burial ground on the edge of a beautiful wild canyon in Washington State. Most people choose to be wrapped in shrouds and buried so they can become available to the many life forms that will feed on them and break down their constituents so as to feed, in my case with my chosen site, the ponderosa pines around me. My father, who taught ecology, and died in the year 2000 carried this poem in his wallet his whole life, and got it out to share with us when he was diagnosed with leukemia. It captures the spirit I think, of your wonderful essay:
The Song of the River (W.R. Hearst)
The snow melts on the mountain
And the water runs down to the spring,
And the spring in a turbulent fountain,
With a song of youth to sing,
Runs down to the riotous river,
And the river flows to the sea,
And the water again
Goes back in rain
To the hills where it used to be.
And I wonder if life's deep mystery
Isn't much like the rain and the snow
Returning through all eternity
To the places it used to know.
For life was born on the lofty heights
And flows in a laughing stream,
To the river below
Whose onward flow
Ends in a peaceful dream.
And so at last,
When our life has passed
And the river has run its course,
It again goes back,
O'er the selfsame track,
To the mountain which was its source.
So why prize life
Or why fear death,
Or dread what is to be?
The river ran
Its allotted span
Till it reached the silent sea.
Then the water harked back
To the mountain-top
To begin its course once more.
So we shall run
The course begun
Till we reach the silent shore.
Then revisit earth
In a pure rebirth
From the heart of the virgin snow.
So don't ask why
We live or die,
Or whither, or when we go,
Or wonder about the mysteries
That only God may know.
I loved this post. Sorry it took me a few days to get to it. There are a few themes in this that make me more certain you will enjoy my novel when you get to it.
Here let me take one of your phrases and change a few things:
"To me as an iconoclast, much of what constitutes the realm of spirituality are the confused musings of alienated humans trapped in a matrix of abstract delusion. Their musings (ramblings) are merely a symptom of this alienation that people of the human lineage have ubiquitously suffered from since the emergence of symbolic thought itself, having themselves been separated from Nature by a near continuous veil of reification."
Two can play at this game. In the end it's best to simply avoid "us and them" dichotomies in the first place, for they are always false at base, but since you clearly set up such a dichotomy in you opening paragraphs (the "primitivist" vs. the "over-socialized, hyper domesticated" person) I thought it pertinent to demonstrate how the same light can just as easily be reversed and shone right back on you, the so-called primitivist. The truth is that human delusion knows no bounds. It matters not where one lives geographically, the degree of ecological integrity in one's home region, or what kind of material culture one was born into. Symbolic thinking will yield rampant delusion irrespective of time, place or circumstance. "Primitive" peoples are not spared this fate. Examples abound.
In my view your writings would be more impactful were you to curb the pomp, the posturing, and the rather consistent undertones of righteous indignation. You share more in common than you realize with the "moderns" that you jeer at. So do "indigenous" people. This is the dirty little secret of primitivism.
"most philosophers have historically had a skewed or entirely false perception of human Nature, since almost nobody in civilized cultures correctly assessed the natural state of humans, and nobody cared to include the overwhelming majority of time we humans existed – ninety-nine percent of our existence, mind you – into their conclusions."
Here you tacitly imply that a person from some group that you would deem "genuinely primitive" would necessarily have a "correct" assessment of "the natural state of humans," and therefore presumably a non-false perception of human nature. I dispute this. Your position here relies heavily on the common primitivist trope that humans lived "the same way for 99% of our existence.” From this premise, you appear to draw the conclusion that all peoples living during this “99%” period would have had the same frame of consciousness, therefore presumably granting them direct insight into what is natural and what isn’t.
I have a couple questions that I would pose here. First, by what measure do you draw the conclusion that humans lived the same way for 99% of our existence? This giant leap of a conclusion could be disputed all day long, but I think it’s simple enough to point out that the tiny bands of humans roaming the plains of Africa 300,000 years ago were NOTHING like the complex culture of PNW Coast tribes, circa 1750. You may counter by saying that the PNW tribes had so significantly deviated from the “natural” state so as to be excluded from your 99% bracket, but then the question becomes: where does one draw the line? Were the spear thrusters of 300,000 years ago the same as the Mesolithic people of 30,000 years ago with their ranged-weapons, microliths, advanced fishing ability, and what essentially amounts to agroforestry? Hardly. In fact, it’s quite possible that symbolic thought itself manifested sometime between these two benchmarks. If this is indeed true, then the idea that the two groups lived “in the same state” is frankly laughable, being as the emergence of symbolic thinking changes the “nature” of an being's existence about as proudly as any evolutionary development can.
Secondly, are we only taking into account the Homo Sapien timeframe in this 99% exercise? If no, how far back are we going? To the dawn of the homo genus? Would Homo Habilis have had the same “correct” understanding of “the natural state of humans” as a Mesolithic Briton? Let us put ourselves in the shoes of H. Habilis for a second here. In doing so we will grant the assumption that Homo Habilis could even make an assessment of human nature (a purely abstract, symbolic specter) in the first place. They might look at a Mesolithic tribe and say “wow, you guys have really lost the plot. What’s with all this complexity and nonsense? You’re burning fires and cooking your food now? Appropriating the flesh of other animals to wear as your own? Herding buffalo off of cliffs? Harnessing plant succession for your own purposes? Burdening yourself with a bunch of possessions that you must carry around? Building semi-permanent dwellings? Preserving and storing food? Living in large groups? Engaging in strange rituals?"
H. Habilis might have in turn thought “you guys have no concept of what true human nature is.” But why draw the line there even? Being as all other primates live in forest environments and subsist on primarily raw forest plants, maybe the first Australopithecines who ventured out onto the savannah and began walking on two feet were the first real derivation from what’s “natural.” After all “99% of primate existence” was in the forest eating mostly raw plant foods. It’s also true most of primate existence was spent in a primarily arboreal fashion. Perhaps the Gorilla left the "natural state" when they started inhabiting the forest floor?
Do you see the game we’re playing here? To the extent that earlier human tribes had a “spirituality,” it wasn’t based on their living in “the natural state.” There is no natural state. Nature is constant flux. If I were pressed into a corner though, and forced to divide natural from unnatural, the point I’d choose would be the arising of symbolic thought itself. In this case, even Alan Watt’s observations count for naught. You write:
“Alan Watts has argued that the idea of the separate and independent ‘self’, the illusion that we are “skin-encapsulated egos,” is a root cause of many of humanity’s biggest problems, which of course includes the ecological crisis. We think of ourselves as a monolithic entity, set apart from the environment we inhabit. It is this illusion of being a monolithic entity, a skin-encapsulated ego (that we mistakenly assume to be who we are), that diffuses and is being dispersed when we die. Are we not also the mountains, the rivers, the soil, and the wind? Are we not also the plants and animals we eat, for without all those things we would simply not exist?”
And yet, in order to conceive of oneself as “mountains, rivers, soil, wind, plants and animals,” one must have already leaped straight into the abyss of the symbolic. Before abstract divisions enter the picture mountains, rivers, animals etc. do not exist. These are arbitrary divisions made by humans. It is not clear that early humans would have made such distinctions at all; they may have instead inhabited a world of “suchness,” as is alluded to in the Zen tradition, where there are no borders delineating things at all. In such a state, you’re “circle of life” story ceases to be. Nothing lives and dies to become something else, because there are no two things to begin with. The very concepts of life and death, or cycles of any kind, are impossible without symbolic thinking. Even if early Homo Sapiens did in fact think symbolically in this way, it’s certainly the case that symbolic thought arose *at some point* during the course of hominid evolution. This may have been w/ H. Erectus, or earlier (doubtful). The exact date will probably never be pinned down, but we know that there was at some junction a profound shift. Our shared common ancestor with Chimpanzees certainly didn't think symbolically. Modern humans do. Somewhere during the course of our evolution from there, to here, there was a monumental shift in consciousness. That shift can essentially be described as a dividing line between two distinct modes of being/experiencing, and that dividing line can just as easily be argued to be the most befitting marker delineating what is “natural,” and what is “unnatural.”
What you are calling “Animism” is most certainly a direct product of the second, later frame of consciousness. Chimpanzees know nothing of Animism. To our knowledge, no other animal does. Earlier hominids wouldn’t have either, and it’s distinctly possible that very early Homo Sapiens didn’t. From this observation, one can draw the very reasonable conclusion that your “Animism” is in fact entirely unnatural, a very recent invention, and that the driving force behind it – symbolic thinking – guarantees that your Animist tribes have, in a twist of irony, more in common with modern philosophers than they do with earlier (non-symbolic) hominids. Perhaps whatever beings existed before Animism had the “true” understanding of nature, because they had no conception of truth or understanding to begin with. How's that for a paradox?
It would be perfectly within reason to say that you like Animism because the lifeway aesthetic of earlier humans that practiced/experienced Animism resonates with you. I have no problem with this, as far as it goes. But you go further, presumably so that you may comfortably position your own spirituality with what you deem to be “natural,” when you state “almost nobody in civilized cultures correctly assessed the natural state of humans.” In other words, a human must “live naturally,” or perhaps, at a minimum, study what natural living looks like, in order to “correctly assess” the natural state of humans. From there, it can be inferred, one may begin cultivating (like yourself?) a true natural spirituality, and get away from "unnatural" modern forms of philosophy. Of course you qualify elsewhere that there is no "correct" form of spirituality, but this does little to hide the flavor of your post here, which smacks of an obvious (albeit indefensible) binary.
Hey david it’s me Kay F from fb. I’m not finished with reading this essay yet but wanted to ask before I forget to: you use the word oversocialized when describing certain people now and then - could you explain what you mean with that - I mean i can take a guess but if you could expand on the idea of oversocialization? Thanks!!
Great stuff! 👍✨💫🪷🙏
['Woah, That's Deep Bro' meme]
Just kidding, these are amazing thoughts.