Ecological Phenomenology Research Articles

Madness, virtue, and ecology: A classical Indian approach to psychiatric disturbance

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

生態学的現象学の源泉としての マッハ、ゲシュタルト心理学、シェーラー

生態学的現象学の源泉としての マッハ、ゲシュタルト心理学、シェーラー

The Problem of Bodily Autonomy in the Cinematic Arts

The Problem of Bodily Autonomy in the Cinematic Arts Eliza Steinbock (bio) Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating by Scott C. Richmond. 232 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Paperback, $27.00 In writing about the production of cinema's felt bodily illusions for moving through space, Scott C. Richmond sets himself the task of describing what cinema does to modulate human perception, how we attune to cinema, and how cinema operates above and below the representational level, that is, at the infrastructural and circuitous sensate levels that bodies plug into during a film encounter. The organizing investigation is into "the set of perceptual processes whereby we orient ourselves in and coordinate ourselves with the world" named proprioception, on which a selection of films "thematize and roughen our perceptual and, thus, embodied involvement with the world unfolding before us onscreen" (6). Richmond seizes on the paradoxical doubled body in proprioception that involves the self in the world and one's reflexive self-perception of that self. Polemically then, Richmond seeks to invigorate a "true phenomenology of perception" (69) for cinema studies that refocuses its attention on the viewer's thickened, resonant, and voluptuous experience of films by rehabilitating the concept of pro-prioception via James J. Gibson, Renaud Barbaras, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in conjunction with aesthetics refashioned by Steven Shaviro after Kant and Whitehead (plus a late reading of Walter Benjamin) to account for what happens in the "technicity of the [End Page 143] flesh" (a combination of Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hanson) during the coupling of viewer and cinematic technics. In this regard the book is a startling composition of theoretical frameworks from psychology, media theory, and continental philosophy that enriches every field it engages but most of all seems concerned with advancing the philosophical purchase of cinema for rethinking bodily being as partial, processual, relational. I enjoyed the challenge of reading with Richmond across highly technical idioms to finesse new understandings of "the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space, or cinematic kinesthesis" (18) by developing the central concepts of "proprioceptive aesthetics" (chapters 1 and 5), "ecolog ical phenomenology" (chapter 3), the Epochē and the Écart (chapters 2 and 4), and "cinema as technics" (chapter 6). But, for me, it was Richmond's tackling of the simple idea that cinema presents an illusion to its audience that accomplished the difficult work of overturning hegemonic perspectives in film studies that adhere to philosophical skepticism and modernist debates on medium specificity. Typically scholars are concerned with the "illusion of reality" or the illusion of moving images (58). "Illusions that feel like illusions are not deceptive," he writes (58). This is against the field's skeptical bias that would assume cinema is a system for representing objects that fool the spectator into believing they actually appear. Richmond insists that on the nonrepresentational level, one's proprioceptive grasp of movement abides even when one knows they are not actually moving. Attending to the illusion of flying sidelines the problem of correspondence onscreen and off that entangles debates on film's photographic realism, also in comparison with digital technologies. Instead bodily illusions of proprioceptive movement index "the always palpable divergence between ordinary perception and its technical modulation by the cinema" (70). I was convinced that the overriding cinematic illusion is the proprioceptive fun of being "compelled, even captivated, by the cinema's aberrant information" that I accept (however provisionally) due to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the perceptual faith that conditions my inherence in this world, which is given to the world onscreen and off (89). The "I" that foregrounds his spectatorial position leads the reader into thick description of select scenes and illusory effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma (1926), Tony Conrad's The Flicker (1965), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity (2013) that together amass a range of periods, genres, and technical supports. [End Page 144] The chapters that center on these filmic examples each offer an elaboration of what is at stake in the deconstruction of dualist concepts for embodiment such as the visible and invisible with flesh, and of...

Wang Shu’s design practice and ecological phenomenology

Wang Shu (b. 1963) is a locally trained Chinese architect who has received widespread media coverage in the last decade, especially after receiving the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2012, often considered the Nobel Prize of architecture. Numerous articles and interviews have been published concerning Wang Shu and his design practice, however, there is a lack of analysis of his work from what might be called the perspective of his ecological phenomenology. Wang acknowledges his interest in phenomenological thinking and expresses an ongoing concern about human relationships with place and nature, the continuity of craftsmanship in the face of technological development, as well as the materiality and tactility of bodily perception. Before analysing Wang's work, relevant ideas of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and their influence on architectural discourse are firstly examined. Both of them were seminal philosophers who offered inspiring insights to ecological discourse.

What are Senses and Sense Modalities?

Abstract Perceptual experiences not only have cognitive aspects, through which we acquire information about some objects, but sensory aspects, through which we experience how the object appears. In the traditional view, the sensory aspects have been reduced to sensations or senses, which have the function of supplying materials for cognition. Against this view, E. Strauss characterized sensing as a kind of “communication” with the world in a pathetic dimension and each sense modality as a way of embodied “Being in the world” in its own way. My paper tries to combine this phenomenological view of senses with the ecological approach of J.J. Gibson, according to which senses are considered as perceptual systems. With this attempt at an ecological phenomenology, the paper focuses on the embodiment dimension of perceptual experiences and clarifies the multi-dimensional and multi-sensory character of various perceptual experiences.

Ecosystems emerging. 5: Constraints

Ecosystem constraints are both ontic and epistemic. They limit activity, and as problems to be solved they drive organization, which is our hypothesis: Solutions proliferate further constraints in an unending spiral of problem (constraint) generation and solution. As constraints proliferate, behavior narrows, and species diversify to compensate (paradox of constraint). Resource enrichment reduces constraints, releases behavior, and reduction of challenges decreases diversity (paradox of enrichment)—high diversity is expressed in low-resource environments and low diversity in high-resource environments. A three-part model of constraints is formulated for non-living systems, and also for goal-directed, problem-solving biota. Mode 1: dynamical means behavior is co-determined by internal states and external inputs. Mode 2: cybernetic employs negative feedback to keep dynamics within goal-oriented operating limits. Mode 3: model-making entails ability to represent (model) physical reality and respond to both phenomenal (modeled) and physical inputs; this property distinguishes living from nonliving systems. Principal sections of the paper elaborate dynamical constraints (three classes), boundary constraints (expressed in edge effects and trophic dynamics), physical constraints (space, time, temperature), chemical constraints (environment fitness, ecological stoichiometry, chemical evolution, limiting factors), coding constraints (environmental vs. genetic coding), network and pathway constraints (connectivity), and natural selection constraints (fitting to the biosphere). Consideration of how the world would look without constraints suggests how fundamental these are in ecosystem emergence, and how the next property in this series, differentiation, would be unmotivated without them. We conclude that constraints as a category are under-studied in ecology, poorly understood in ecological phenomenology, and (our hypothesis) comprise a ubiquitous organizing force in nature.

The Ethical Experience of Nature: Aristotle and the Roots of Ecological Phenomenology

I demonstrate here how Aristotle's teleological conception of nature has been largely misunderstood in the scientific age and I consider what his view might offer us with regard to the environmental challenges we face in the 21st century. I suggest that in terms of coming to an ethical understanding of the creatures and things that constitute the ecosystem, Aristotle offers a welcome alternative to the rather instrumental conception of the natural world and low estimation of subjective experience our contemporary techno-scientific culture espouses. Among other things, I consider how his conception of orexis and eudaimonia (happiness or, as I prefer here, "the flourishing life") might be extended to include the eco-system itself, thus allowing us to better understand the moral meaning of nature. I conclude with a look at the way in which modern phenomenology re-addresses the fundamental Greek concern with ontology, meaning and human authenticity. I consider the ways in which phenomenology reasserts the value of direct human experience that was so important to Aristotle; and I consider how this view, and that of Deep ecology, may help us to experience nature - and all of Being for that matter - in a more authentic, meaningful and altogether ethical light.

Post-Secular Nature: Principles and Politics

AbstractMonist essentialism posits a worldview that has pervaded monotheistic religions and the imperatives of global capitalism. Relational pluralism acknowledges multiple perspectives and lends itself to a more ecocentric form of discourse. Monist essentialism has been associated with both religious and secular hegemony. Relational pluralism, while not advocating rootless relativism, allows for the importance of spirituality and the sacrality of nature for nature's sake. Hence, it may be deemed post-religious and post-secular. Wonder plays an important role in the adoption of a post-secular, spiritual worldview, and provides a welcome antidote to the crypto-religions of contemporary consumerism and the "god of progress." The ecocentric view must be distinguished from a facile veneration of nature, which can revert to insidious forms of anthropocentric monism or purely personal spirituality. Archaic religious paths as well as emerging disciplines such as ecological phenomenology can help lead to a re-enchantment of nature.

Space and color: Toward an ecological phenomenology

Against the Newtonian view of color, according to which the world is colorless and colors are subjective sensations, phenomenologists keep insisting that colors are in the world. In order to defend this view of the “being in the world” of colors, this paper tries to elucidate the essential spatiality of colors on the basis of James’s thesis of the intrinsic spatiality of sensation, Katz’s phenomenological description of various spatial characters of color, and Gibson’s ecological optics. The noticeable correspondence between Katz’s phenomenology and Gibson’s ecological optics indicates to us a possible way to an ecological phenomenology of colors.

What is Ecophenomenology?

AbstractWhat is eco-phenomenology? This paper argues that eco-phenomenology, in which are folded both an ecological phenomenology and a phenomenological ecology, offers us a way of developing a middle ground between phenomenology and naturalism, between intentionality and causality. Our grasp of Nature is significantly altered by thinking through four strands of time's plexity - the invisibility of time, the celebration of finitude, the coordination of rhythms, and the interruption and breakdown of temporal horizons. It is also transformed by a meditation on the role of boundaries in constituting the varieties of thinghood. Eco-phenomenology takes up in a tentative and exploratory way the traditional phenomenological claim to be able to legislate for the sciences, or at least to think across the boundaries that seem to divide them. In this way, it opens up and develops an access to Nature and the natural, one which is independent both of the conceptuality of the natural sciences and of traditional metaphysics.