HENRY K SKOLIMOWSKI PENGUIN /1RKANA THE PARTICIPATORY MIND Educated in Warsaw and at New College, Oxford, where he received a D.Phil, in 1964, Henryk Skolimowski has been actively engaged in healing the planet for the last fifteen years. He is the creator of eco-philosophy and the director of the Eco-philosophy Center. His book Eco-philosophy: Designing New Tactics for Living was the first in its field and has been translated into twelve languages. He runs workshops on eco-philosophy and eco-yoga during the summer at the village of Theologos, on the island of Thassos in northern Greece. He has published sixteen books and over 300 articles; his book Living Philosophy is also published by Arkana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In the autumn of 1991 he was appointed to the Chair of Ecological Philosophy (the first in the world) at the Technical University of Lodi, in central Poland. His main interests are eco-philosophy, eco-ethics and evolutionary epistemology. The Participatory Mind A new theory of knowledge and of the universe HENRYK SKOLIMOWSKI ARKANA PENGUIN BOOKS ARKANA Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London, w8 jtz, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmonds worth, Middlesex, England First published 1994 }J79 10 8642 Copyright © Henryk Skolimowski, 1994 All rights reserved The artwork for the figures in this book was prepared by Nigel Andrews at Capricorn Design Set in 11/14 pt Monophoto Garamond Typeset by Datix International Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Made and printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Contents Introduction xi chapter i : Outlining the Participatory Mind i /. Mind and life i 2. From the minds of amoebas to the mind of Einstein 6 — — }. Sensitivities consciousness mind i o 4. A new concept of the human 1 8 /. A model of mind as reality: Noetic Monism 26 chapter 2: Mind in History 39 — /. Empiricists and rationalists their views of the mind 39 2. The pigeon methodology vs the co-creative mind 45 }. Karl Popper— a partial liberation from positivism 54 4. The Three Western Projects 61 chapter 3: The Spiral of Understanding 7 5 /. Ontology and epistemology in a circular relationship 7 5 2. The walls of the cosmos and the spiral of the mind 78 ). How stable is our picture of the universe? 83 4. The peculiarity of the process of understanding 86 chapter 4: Teilhard's Story of Complexity: its Beauty and its Essential Incompleteness 91 /. Teilhard's legacy 91 2. Is gradualism an ideology or a scientific theory? 94 j. The thesis of simplicityIcomprehension 101 CONTENTS chapter 5 : The Four Great Cycles of the Western Mind 109 /. Recapitulating our position 1 09 2. From the tempestuousness of the Homeric heroes to the lucidity of Plato 117 }. From the fall of the Woman Empire to the building of Chartres Cathedral 123 4. The Renaissance: the civilisation that did not make it 1 28 /. The engines of Mechanos are beginning to run a new civilisation 132 6. Evolutionary Telos emerging as a new logos 139 chapter6: The Methodology of Participation and its Consequences 147 /. The objective mind and its problems 1 47 2. The methodology ofparticipation as superseding the methodology of objectivity 1 5 1 3. Participatory research programmes 1 5 9 4. Participatory strategies 163 j. Participatory thinking 169 6. Sensitivity of matter 176 CHAPTER7. Structures, Symbols and Evolution 1 8 5 /. the ascent 1 8 Structures and of evolution 5 2. The origin of structures 1 89 3. Symbols and their role in the ascent of man 194 4. Dominant symbols in Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity 1 99 /. Scientific knowledge and its enigmatic symbols 208 6. The mind as the creator 21 of symbols 5 chapter8: The Individual Spiral of Understanding 2 2 1 /. Our individuality and our universality 2 2 1 2. The pain of becoming 222 3. Personal truth 226 The 2 4. meaning of transformation 3 5 /. The spiral of understanding and meditation 242 CONTENTS 6. The fable of the brain's two hemispheres 244 7. A model of the integrated self 248 8. The 2 participatory mind and the space ofgrace 5 4 CHAPTER9: The Universal Spiral of Understanding 265 — — /. Different cultures different spirals different perspectives 26 5 2. Brains, minds and computers 276 }. Interactionism and the participatory mind— the historical record 282 4. Some forerunners of the participatory mind 287 /. On the dangers of subjectivism 289 chapter 10: Participatory Truth 298 1. The correspondence theory 298 2. The coherence theory of truth 305 3. Participatory truth 309 4. Participatory truth as the search for the completeness of the universe 3 1 5 the the 1 8 /. Truth is consequence of participatory context 3 chapter 11: Grand Theory in the Participatory Key 3 27 1. The return ofgrand theory $zj 2. Significant experiences 333 ). Experience and knowledge 338 4. From new illuminations to new realities 340 /. The axis of reality and the axis of meditation 343 6. Knowledge as power and knowledge as liberation 348 chapter 12: The Promise of Participatory Philosophy 3 5 4 the /. Philosophy as pursuit of a life-style ofgrace 3 5 4 2. From perennial philosophy to scientific philosophy 3 5 9 }. Philosophy as courage 364 4. Participatory philosophy 368 j. Participatory ethics 371 Notes 384 Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to Susan Gorka for her drawings for Figs, i , 2 and 3 in Chapter 7; to Pierre Le Neuve for supplying the photographs reproduced as Figs. 4 and 5 in Chapter 7; and to Christie's, London (photo: Bridgeman Art Library), for supplying the photograph reproduced as Fig. 6 in Chapter 7. Q £% This book is dedicated to £^ Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and all those who take evolution seriously ^JU Throughout this book, when I mention concepts of 'man' I mean of course concepts of the human person. Traditional usage makes it more idiomatic to say 'man is a rational animal' than 'the human person is a rational animal'. Introduction The dream of absolute knowledge that Isaac Newton and his followers cherished is shattered. It is all in pieces — all coherence is gone. We need to reassemble our world-view in a new way. We need to create new perspectives and visions to comprehend afresh this fabulous universe of ours. We need a deeper and better understanding of the subtle expanses of our inner selves, of our complex relationships with all other forms of creation in this cosmos. This book outlines a new theory of mind which is the key to multifarious forms of new understanding. The Participatory Mind, conceived as the herald of the unfolding universe, is offered here as a form of liberation from the shackles of the prevailing mechanistic world-view. The same mind also offers itself as a significant healer, since our world needs healing on a vast scale. Academic philosophy of our time is written by pure brains. It has become unreadable to ordinary persons and even well educated ones. It stands out as a curious marred monument abounding in intellectual labour and yet leaving us totally dry and uninspired. This philo-sophia has renounced all claims to sophia. As an antidote to this inhospitable dryness and aridity, a new genre of books has appeared — filling the gap that professional philosophy has left in its wake. Many of these xi INTRODUCTION books are written out of pure emotion. They deliver an emotional salvation but only for a weekend. They do not go deep enough. They do not take the human condition seriously enough. They stroke and appease rather than try to recon struct and break new ground. Our world needs mending and healing; so does our psyche, which has undergone an unprecedented battering in the twenti eth century. This fundamental healing cannot be accomplished through pop philosophies that provide a temporary psycho logical fix. Nor can it be accomplished by professional philo sophical treatises full of inscrutable formulae which dissect language until it becomes a dead tissue. This healing can be achieved by the development of a new philosophy. This book attempts to provide such a philosophy. It provides a new rendering of reality and a new concept of mind, and by simultaneously reinterpreting the two arrives at a new notion of mind/reality. The philosophy offered here fuses Logos with Eros and shows that the right interpretation of the mind — in its evolutionary unfolding history — not only does not pit mind against emotion but demonstrates that they are two different parts of the same spectrum, the spectrum of human (and evolutionary) sensitivities. The healing of the world of ourselves within and a new (and it) understanding of the universe are complementary aspects of the same process. The time has come to attempt a new unity. This unity will not come about by reshuffling the existing pieces. We must evoke the pioneering spirit of the pre-Socratics and by bold strokes of imagination remould the universe into a new shape until we gasp in wonder and say to ourselves: why haven't we thought about that before? The key to our reconstruction of the universe is the mind.