> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction > there are, arguably, poetic patterns, patterns of meaning that may be discerned beneath the often-chequered ordinariness of everyday affairs; one might choose either to ignore them or align with them. If one aligns with them, the contours of those larger, hidden, poetic patterns may become a little more discernible. ### Lecture 2 #### Law The law of energy is at the core of existence. It is what the term "synergy" refers to. Synergy - a ‘process whereby two parties join their conativities to create a new end which subsumes, but at the same time enlarges, the respective conativities of each party’ It consists of 2 principles: - conativity - accomodation and least resistance > Working together, the two principles result in complex synergies of mutual accommodation: each organism seeks its own existence in ways that help to perpetuate the existence of the organisms surrounding it. In aggregate, such mutually adaptive organisms make up larger, self-perpetuating systems. Conativity is a term borrowed from Baruch Spinoza, who described *conatus* as a will to self-existence. > A conative being or system has a constitutive interest in self-realization – self-actualization, self-maintenance and self-increase. I call such conative beings or systems, selves. > As beings highly endowed with reflexive awareness, then, we can choose to depart from Law and act instead in an ‘impose and control’ mode. We have gotten away with doing this without depleting ourselves only because we have co-opted sources of energy external to ourselves, such as those afforded by domesticated animals, slaves and, in more recent times, fossil fuels. However, self-depletion was only one of the selective consequences of the impose-and-control mode; the other was the depletion of the environment that sustains the imposer. The imposer eventually selects itself out of existence by thwarting the conativities of the systems that support it. #### Communicativity > But how could such communicative engagement occur? In this context we might speak of the possibility of a poetic order – an order of poetic revelation – unfolding alongside the more familiar causal order of events. By ‘poetic order’ I mean an order of meaningful configurations of circumstances that constellate as a result of invocation on our part: when we as finite selves invoke the world, in terms drawn from our own particular narrative or poetic frames of reference, the world may choose to respond by arranging itself to match those terms. The terms in question will be unavoidably poetic, in the sense of metaphorical, since the only ‘language’ available to the world is a language of things. The world cannot literally address us in speech, but it can synchronistically arrange concrete particulars in meaningful configurations in the same way that poetry and dreams use imagery to create and convey meaning. Instances of such poetic engagement between self and world might be described as instances of ontopoetics. > Aboriginal culture has the longest continuous history of any human society, ever. At least 50,000 years, and the estimates of its duration are continually being revised upwards. Although Aboriginal material tools were simple - digging sticks, boomerangs, bark canoes and bowls, fish traps, grinding stones, didgeridoos - their cultural technologies were impressive. These include fire and water management techniques, and regenerative hand-harvesting techniques. > It was thus knowledge rather than an elaborate material culture that enabled Aboriginal peoples to flourish in Australia on a geological time scale; they relied on deep understanding of and communicative engagement with natural processes to guide those processes in ways that served the interests of all aspects of the ecosocial system. The material simplicity of such a culture, so disparaged by Europeans, was precisely the measure of its fitness: people needed nothing more than this knowledge in order to flourish. Being materially unencumbered, moreover, they were free to move easily during periods of climate disturbance or other forms of natural disruption. There was no heavy material superstructure or ‘civilization’ to come crashing down, as modern civilization is perhaps likely to do in the near, climate-deranged future. Europeans equated civlization with material culture. Cities are core to the concept of civilization. The Latin *civitas* means city. > The Aboriginal example demonstrates that a society may be economically and socially unstratified, administratively decentralized, based on forms of land care and custody that do not conform to traditional definitions of agriculture, and guided by mnemonically based rather than literacy-based knowledgesystems, and yet arguably count as more ‘advanced’ than the societies traditionally lauded as paradigm instances of civilization. Indeed, if we hold to the prescriptive rather than descriptive sense of the term, the Aboriginal example suggests a radical reversal of customary conceptions of civilization: societies which can sustain the health, longevity, security, dignity and joie de vivre of their people by way of a culture rooted in deep understanding of the indwelling meaning of the cosmos rather than in manufacture may claim to be more advanced, and in this sense more civilized, than societies that merely boast high levels of material culture. ### Lecture 3 - But is holistic theory even possible? What does it mean to know the world holistically? Subject/object duality originated with the Greeks and their attempts to construct theories of the world. Philosophy was a never-ending process of matching abstract theories to a fluid and ever-changing world. The root word of theory is theoria, which is related to the theater and the idea of a spectator. Since the subject is the one that creates the theory, it can never be included in the theory itself. Thus theory will always be an incomplete picture of the world. By contrast, the Chinese sages were more like strategists. They were more interested in being in harmony with the world. They didn't need to understand the whole world. They just needed to sense into the world around them, and to work with the path of least resistance. In this worldview, knowledge of the world is gained through feeling. We can cultivate somatic awareness of the inter-locking relationships around us. The Aboriginals had a practice of "walking the land". This somatic awareness is suppressed in education based on theoretic approaches. --- [Jullien 06/2002 - Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?](zotero://select/items/1_6SQM453K) [Black 2010-10-4 - The Land is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with Indigenous Jurisprudence](zotero://select/items/1_W6EJALDH) ### Lecture 4 - Do we need to reinvent praxis to create and ecological civilization? We need a different epistemic orientation - a strategic as opposed to theoretic one. praxis - the forms of activity in which we obtain a livelihood from the environment In China, the shift to agriculture began in 6000 BCE. The Daoist texts only appeared in the 4th century BCE. The persistence of pre-agrarian thought in China might be due to the continuity of its history. It was seldom invaded by outsiders. Even when the Mongols invaded, they preserved Chinese culture. In contrast, Greece suffered many waves of conquest and occupation. # Quotes