Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
tient entities, then every instance of perception conveys something to us about the state
of that greater being in which we are embedded.
According to Abram, the bifurcation of mind from matter in the modern world has
precipitated an extreme dissociation of our conscious, thinking selves from our bod-
ies; in his writings he seeks to draw readers back to the simple experience of their own
corporeality, coaxing them to notice the ongoing, improvisational way that their animal
senses spontaneously respond to the sensuous surroundings. His writings carry forward
the tradition of 'phenomenology', a branch of philosophy that studies our direct, pre-
conceptual experience of the world (the way things reveal themselves to us in their felt
immediacy, prior to all our theorising and categorising). Abram draws especially on the
work of the great French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But Abram takes up
phenomenology only in order to transform it and bring it into new terrain, deploying its
methods to elucidate our felt relationship with the rest of nature. For, as he writes,
The recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of
the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded. As we return to our senses, we gradually
discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of percep-
tions and sensations borne by countless other bodies—supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by
icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings, and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable
wind. . . .
Abram takes up Merleau-Ponty's notion of the collective “flesh of the world” to speak
of this vast, planetary tissue of sensations and interdependent perceptions in which our
own lives (like those of the trees, the crows, and the spiders) are embedded. The term
“flesh” provides Abram with a way of speaking of reality as a fabric woven of experi-
ence—and hence of the material world as thoroughly animate and alive. While his work
draws multiple insights from the natural sciences, the notion of “the flesh of the world”
offers Abram a way to describe the earthly biosphere not as it is conceived “by an ab-
stract and objectifying science, not that complex assemblage of planetary mechanisms
being mapped and measured by our remote-sensing satellites, but rather the biosphere as
it is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body—by the attentive human
organism who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, experiences.”
According to this way of thinking, perception is never a unilateral relation between a
pure subject and a pure object, but is rather a reciprocal encounter between divergent as-
pects of the common flesh of the world. Abram calls attention to the obvious but easily
overlooked fact that the hand, with which we explore the tactile surfaces of the world,
is itself a tangible, tactile being, and hence is entirely a part of the tactile field that it
explores. Similarly our eyes, with which we gaze out at the visible world, are them-
selves visible. With their shiny surfaces and their brown or blue hues, the eyes are in-
cluded within the visible landscape that they see. Our sensing and sentient body—with
