[PREV - EMPIRICAL_MORALITY]    [TOP]

WILD_MIND


                                             September 13, 2007


                                               RYDING_THE_BURN
The introduction (titled
simply "Note") of "A Space
in Place" (1996) by Gary
Snyder is a single
elegantly phrased page
that says a number of
really striking things:
                                   (striking to me, any way).

  "Ethics and aesthetics are                   Hell yeah:   BEAUTIFUL_GOODS
  deeply intertwined. Art,
  beauty, craft have always
  drawn on the self-organizing                 Right:    CONTROL
  'wild' side of language and mind."

                                               But then... is he
                                               associating intuition
                                               with instinct?

                                               By all means pay
                                               attention to the
                                               "animalistic" qualitites
                                               of the human animal, but
                                               if you abandon the
                                               human/animal distinction,
                                               then you really are
                                               running wild.



                                       From  BURNING_WILD

                                       wild mind  = spontaneous intuition?

                                         But then, what has that
                                         to do with wilderness?

                                         Animals follow their instinctive
                                         rote, intuition is a human thing.

                                              (Bertrand Russell discusses
                                              a turn-of-the-century mystic
So... what does Snyder really                 named Bergson that made
mean by this wild side?                       an equation between instinct
                                              and intuition.  See
From the essay                                "Philosophy in the 20th Century",
"Language Goes Two Ways":                     p. 265 of the "Basic Writings".)

  "Language is considered by some
  to be a flawed mathematics, and
  the idea that mathematics might
  even supplant language has been                      A problem with
  flirted with.  This idea still                       many a wikipedian...
  colors the commonplace thinking
  of many engineer types and
  possibly some mathematicians and
  scientists."         p. 173

  "But the world ... remains forever
  unpredictable.  The weather, for                      "hoary example"
  hoary example.  And take the very                      heh.
  mind that ponders these thoughts:
  in spite of years of personhood, we
  remain unpredictable even to our                            CONSILIENCE_PRIZE
  own selves. Often we wouldn't be
  able to guess what our next
  thoughts will be.  But that clearly
  does not mean we are living in
  hopeless confusion; it only means
  that we live in a realm in which
  many patterns remain mysteriously
  inaccessible to us."   p.173-174


  "Languages were not the
  intellectual inventions of
  archaic schoolteachers, but are
  naturally evolved wild systems
  whose complexity eludes the
  descriptive attempts of the
  rational mind."      p.174

  " 'Wild' alludes to a process of
  self-organization that generates
  systems and organisms, all of which
  are within the constraints of -- and
  constitute components of -- larger
  systems that again are wild, such as
  major ecosystems or the water cycle in
  the biosphere.  Wildness can be said
  to be the essential nature of nature.
  As reflected in consciousness, it can
  be seen as a kind of open awareness --
  full of imagination but also the
  source of alert survival intelligence.
  The workings of the human mind at its
  very richest reflect this
  self-organizing wildness.  So language
  does not impose order on a chaotic
  universe, but reflects its own
  wildness back."        p.174




From the essay
"Unnatural Writing":

   "So I will argue that consciousness, mind,
   imagination, *and* language are fundamentally
   wild.  'wild' as in wild ecosystems -- richly
   interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly
   complex.  Diverse, ancient, and full of
   information.  At root the real question is how
   we understand the concepts of order, freedom,
   and chaos.  Is art an imposition of order on
   chaotic natures, or is art (also read
   'language') a matter of discovering the grain
   of things, of uncovering the measured chaos
   that structures the natural world?
   Observation, reflection, and practice show
   artistic process to be the latter." p. 168


   "The 'art of the wild' is to see art in the
   context of the process of nature -- nature
   *as* process rather than as product or
   commodity -- because 'wild' is a name for
   the way that phenomena continually actualize
   themselves.  Seeing this also serves to
   acknowledge the autonomy and integrity of
   the nonhuman part of the world, an 'Other'
   that we are barely beginning to be able to
   know." p. 168, 169


   "The truth is language is part and parcel of
   consciousness, and we know virtually nothing
   about either one." p. 167



--------
[NEXT - BEYOND_WILD]