Embodied minds in a community of life: what does “cosmic interdependence” mean?

Activity: Talk or presentationOral presentation

Description

The kind of knowledge needed to achieve the understanding of the nature of the universe cannot be merely scientific. Instead, if we want to grasp the meaning of the phenomena that compose the whole world, we have to take our lived body into consideration, as it belongs to the phenomenal world considered by sciences but is also something else, from which we can derive an understanding of the essence of the manifest universe. Such assumptions, which in many ways can be found in the works of Schopenhauer, Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry, are also present in two of the original works of American philosopher and anthropologist David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal). To answer our question concerning the nature of cosmic interdependence, we would like to draw from this author’s reflexions on the conditions for a needed metamorphosis in our relations with the living land and on the dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. In particular, we would like to analyse the reasons why, according to Abram, if we want to recover our understanding of a wider community of life, that includes humans and more-than-humans (animals, mountains, rivers, winds and weather patterns, oceans, stars… ), we have to subvert the distance towards the wild intelligence of our bodies that keeps the living world aside, behind our scientific and technological representations, by exploring from within the elemental kinship between our embodied minds and the breathing Earth.
Period7 Jul 2022
Event titleCosmos and Ecological Consciousness: Free Online International Conference
Event typeConference
LocationLisbon, PortugalShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Community of Life
  • Interdependence
  • Embodied Language
  • Signs
  • Breath
  • Animality