David Abram (1) (1957–)
Author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
For other authors named David Abram, see the disambiguation page.
Works by David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996) 1,374 copies, 12 reviews
Associated Works
How Shall I Live My Life? On Liberating the Earth from Civilization (2008) — Contributor — 89 copies
Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning, Vol. 7, No. 3: Ceremonies (1982) — Contributor — 14 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1957-06-24
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Wesleyan University
Yale University
SUNY at Stony Brook - Occupations
- phenomenologist
ecologist - Organizations
- Alliance for Wild Ethics (co-founder)
Harvard Divinity School - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Nassau County, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- southern Rocky Mountains, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
This book makes absolutely no sense.
Look, I understand that the alphabet is a phenomenal technology that has transformed human thought and consciousness, but if you are able to make your argument using that technology then obviously the technology is not mutually exclusive with that argument.
The thesis of the book--so far as it has one--is that closeness with and participation with the earth as a thing with value in its own right was, for many cultures, enacted within a spiritual system show more that saw breath, air and spirit as all-encompassing and synonymous; and that, as the alphabet codified breath, it must also be responsible for the separation of breath and spirit, and our divisions from each other and from the world around us. But if you are capable of making that argument with the alphabet then obviously the alphabet is not to blame. He makes outright nonsensical assertions such as: "It was not enough to preach the Christian faith: one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology [alphabet] upon which that faith depended." To which I can only say: oh please. The vast majority of christian converts throughout history have been illiterate, and for a good chunk of that time the bible was only available in a language none of them could read or understand!
Oh but that's ok, because, as he says later on, "It is a style of thinking, then, that associates truth not with static fact, but with a quality of relationship .... A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relationship with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth."
How about not. How about you say that, and I throw rotten tomatoes at you for doing so.
First off: truth is a perfectly good word already with a good, valuable, and necessary meaning of its own. You want a word that means "living in a good relationship with the earth?" Come up with a new one.
Second: Who gets to define what "mutually beneficial relationship" is or looks like? And how is that determined without reference to "static fact," or outside, objective reality? How would anyone ever arrive at this relationship from the place we currently inhabit WITHOUT reference to truth using its current meaning?
Third: Even once that relationship has been arrived at, we are going to need to be able to reference "truth" as we currently understand it to pursue other important goals, such as human equality. For centuries now women and people of colour have had to fight slowly and with incredible push-back against inequitable and incredibly unjust systems by referencing external facts such as "in fact no black people are not stupid or violent" and "woman are not motherbots." And let's be clear: it is entirely possible, and has been the case for much of human history, that it is very possible for a human civilization to treat its constituent members like disposable shit while still maintaining their local environments in a fairly serviceable condition, so figuring out the earth-relationship part is no guarantee that it will lead to a just, equitable, meaningful or fair way of life for the people who make up that society.
But the whole book is like this, and his attitude toward "truth" as a concept worth preserving in its current state may be why he plays so fast and loose with actual truth.
Like this one:
"Of course, not all stories are successful. There are good stories and mediocre stories and downright bad stories. How are they to be judged? If they do not aim at a static or 'literal' reality, how can we discern whether one telling of events is any better or more worthy than another? The answer is this: a story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses."
Yeah. Ok. Find your nearest MRA or Nazi sympathizer and ask them what stories "enliven their senses."
So you may be asking yourself then why I gave the book even two stars.
There are parts of it that are written beautifully, and I do feel that I learned a fair bit about the cosmology and spiritual systems of a great number of societies worldwide, which was interesting, though I'm not sure I trust his representations and I'd want to double-check his references before assuming that the information is fair or accurate. After all, maybe they were just stories that properly enlivened his senses. He presents a way of thinking in parts of the book that is fascinating--not his own, to be sure, but that of the cultures he writes about.
So that's worth a star. And I do believe, as he does, that we need to re-embed ourselves with the rest of nature (conceptually and psychologically--we have never actually severed ourselves from it, but our belief that we have is responsible for most if not all of our environmental problems). But I believe that we need to do so with proper respect and relationship to the relevant facts, not on the backs of insubstantial just-so stories that can't bear the weight. show less
Look, I understand that the alphabet is a phenomenal technology that has transformed human thought and consciousness, but if you are able to make your argument using that technology then obviously the technology is not mutually exclusive with that argument.
The thesis of the book--so far as it has one--is that closeness with and participation with the earth as a thing with value in its own right was, for many cultures, enacted within a spiritual system show more that saw breath, air and spirit as all-encompassing and synonymous; and that, as the alphabet codified breath, it must also be responsible for the separation of breath and spirit, and our divisions from each other and from the world around us. But if you are capable of making that argument with the alphabet then obviously the alphabet is not to blame. He makes outright nonsensical assertions such as: "It was not enough to preach the Christian faith: one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology [alphabet] upon which that faith depended." To which I can only say: oh please. The vast majority of christian converts throughout history have been illiterate, and for a good chunk of that time the bible was only available in a language none of them could read or understand!
Oh but that's ok, because, as he says later on, "It is a style of thinking, then, that associates truth not with static fact, but with a quality of relationship .... A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relationship with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth."
How about not. How about you say that, and I throw rotten tomatoes at you for doing so.
First off: truth is a perfectly good word already with a good, valuable, and necessary meaning of its own. You want a word that means "living in a good relationship with the earth?" Come up with a new one.
Second: Who gets to define what "mutually beneficial relationship" is or looks like? And how is that determined without reference to "static fact," or outside, objective reality? How would anyone ever arrive at this relationship from the place we currently inhabit WITHOUT reference to truth using its current meaning?
Third: Even once that relationship has been arrived at, we are going to need to be able to reference "truth" as we currently understand it to pursue other important goals, such as human equality. For centuries now women and people of colour have had to fight slowly and with incredible push-back against inequitable and incredibly unjust systems by referencing external facts such as "in fact no black people are not stupid or violent" and "woman are not motherbots." And let's be clear: it is entirely possible, and has been the case for much of human history, that it is very possible for a human civilization to treat its constituent members like disposable shit while still maintaining their local environments in a fairly serviceable condition, so figuring out the earth-relationship part is no guarantee that it will lead to a just, equitable, meaningful or fair way of life for the people who make up that society.
But the whole book is like this, and his attitude toward "truth" as a concept worth preserving in its current state may be why he plays so fast and loose with actual truth.
Like this one:
"Of course, not all stories are successful. There are good stories and mediocre stories and downright bad stories. How are they to be judged? If they do not aim at a static or 'literal' reality, how can we discern whether one telling of events is any better or more worthy than another? The answer is this: a story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses."
Yeah. Ok. Find your nearest MRA or Nazi sympathizer and ask them what stories "enliven their senses."
So you may be asking yourself then why I gave the book even two stars.
There are parts of it that are written beautifully, and I do feel that I learned a fair bit about the cosmology and spiritual systems of a great number of societies worldwide, which was interesting, though I'm not sure I trust his representations and I'd want to double-check his references before assuming that the information is fair or accurate. After all, maybe they were just stories that properly enlivened his senses. He presents a way of thinking in parts of the book that is fascinating--not his own, to be sure, but that of the cultures he writes about.
So that's worth a star. And I do believe, as he does, that we need to re-embed ourselves with the rest of nature (conceptually and psychologically--we have never actually severed ourselves from it, but our belief that we have is responsible for most if not all of our environmental problems). But I believe that we need to do so with proper respect and relationship to the relevant facts, not on the backs of insubstantial just-so stories that can't bear the weight. show less
With this book, David Abram seeks to bring us deeply into ourselves and our felt experience. The book is composed of engaging personal stories sprinkled with perspectives from various philosophers.
What if everything is animate? The trees, the wind, the rocks? How do we behave differently when we know that the world around us is perceiving us as we perceive it?
What if mind is not our own, but something we move through, part of the landscape? Have you ever noticed the ways in which different show more landscapes and environments affect you?
Although Abram doesn't touch on trends such as "fake news" and "flat earthers" (nor are we led to believe he would endorse such movements), these seemingly irrational concepts do tell us something about the modern human experience. Maybe our society has moved too far in the direction of trust vested in figures of authority (scientists, news agencies, politicians). Nationalist Luddism may indicate that there is a social undercurrent desirous of ideas that can be verified simply and profoundly with our own senses and capacities.
In a world that is increasingly mediated, there is some sense to coming back to an ethic of mastery of our own perceptive capacities, especially when we approach the exercise of perception as a mutualistic experience with an animate earth.
If you're looking for both a mature and magical way to rekindle your sense of wonder with the world, this book might be just the taste of it takes to enter such a world. show less
What if everything is animate? The trees, the wind, the rocks? How do we behave differently when we know that the world around us is perceiving us as we perceive it?
What if mind is not our own, but something we move through, part of the landscape? Have you ever noticed the ways in which different show more landscapes and environments affect you?
Although Abram doesn't touch on trends such as "fake news" and "flat earthers" (nor are we led to believe he would endorse such movements), these seemingly irrational concepts do tell us something about the modern human experience. Maybe our society has moved too far in the direction of trust vested in figures of authority (scientists, news agencies, politicians). Nationalist Luddism may indicate that there is a social undercurrent desirous of ideas that can be verified simply and profoundly with our own senses and capacities.
In a world that is increasingly mediated, there is some sense to coming back to an ethic of mastery of our own perceptive capacities, especially when we approach the exercise of perception as a mutualistic experience with an animate earth.
If you're looking for both a mature and magical way to rekindle your sense of wonder with the world, this book might be just the taste of it takes to enter such a world. show less
At first glance, you might think that the is a book about philosophy. Abram does cover German philosopher Edmund Husserl and French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both of these thinkers were "phenomenologists," focused on human perception and the study of sensory experience.
And yet this book is much more than that. If you can get past the biting critique of the written word [which many will take personally], then you can come to appreciate that Abram is suggesting nothing less than a show more deeply beautiful paradigm shift about how we relate to and experience the world.
The book covers the evolution and emergence of the written word:
* beginning with the first conventionalized pictographic system: Egyptian hieroglyphics, 3,000 BC, thousands of symbols directly representing the natural world,
* moving on to the first hybrid: Semitic aleph-beth, 1,500BC, 22 phonetic characters [no vowels], but with pictographic references
* and concluding with the first modern alphabet: Greek, 700BC, totally abstract characters, adapted from the aleph-beth
Before writing, it was place that held our memories and culture. Jews are archetypically nomadic, and it's no coincidence that they also happened to create the first written language describing human-made sounds as opposed to observable elements of nature. Their written word became their homeland.
The book goes on to highlight a series of breathtaking stories about the world views of indigenous peoples.
Did you know that the Western Apache of Arizona have a name for every place in their homeland, and that these places correspond with allegorical stories? In Apache, you can't tell a story without naming the physical location in which it took place.
Did you know that in Aboriginal Australia, women conceive their babies through the song of a specific place? Elders go back to the place when the mother first felt the presence of her child within, and listen to the song of that place. Once born, the baby is then responsible for the tending of that specific song line, and that specific place. When they die, they are again buried in the place in which they were conceived.
Abram then goes on to discuss theories of time and place. Or rather, he critiques those abstract concepts, and searches for a way to ground something like them in experience. His results: The future is withheld behind the horizon. The past is refused inside the ground. The present is held within the air, invisible and subconscious. In other words, time and space are inherently linked, and referring to them as separate dimensions can only confuse us.
This trend of wholeness and integrity recurs throughout Abram's narrative in an experience that he describes as synesthesia. Traditionally, this term refers to the overlapping of multiple senses. But what if the concept of five distinct senses is contrived to begin with?
The book both begins and ends with a grounding in the pain of both humanity and the earth experiences as a result of artificial separation due to our innovations with the written word:
“From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved.” [Page 22]
“It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid—as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgetter power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs.” [Page 258-9]
Maybe as opposed to having it’s roots in agriculture or civilization, climate change is more closely tied to the thought patterns perpetrated by those who write and read?
Abram ends on a hopeful note, citing the emergence of a movement of people focused on “re-inhabitation”—a return to a place-centric way of life. Such calls echo that of Martín Prechtel’s school of “re-indigenosity.” I myself am amongst this class of individuals bound and faithful to a place.
Not once does he touch on the irony of his medium: a book. show less
And yet this book is much more than that. If you can get past the biting critique of the written word [which many will take personally], then you can come to appreciate that Abram is suggesting nothing less than a show more deeply beautiful paradigm shift about how we relate to and experience the world.
The book covers the evolution and emergence of the written word:
* beginning with the first conventionalized pictographic system: Egyptian hieroglyphics, 3,000 BC, thousands of symbols directly representing the natural world,
* moving on to the first hybrid: Semitic aleph-beth, 1,500BC, 22 phonetic characters [no vowels], but with pictographic references
* and concluding with the first modern alphabet: Greek, 700BC, totally abstract characters, adapted from the aleph-beth
Before writing, it was place that held our memories and culture. Jews are archetypically nomadic, and it's no coincidence that they also happened to create the first written language describing human-made sounds as opposed to observable elements of nature. Their written word became their homeland.
The book goes on to highlight a series of breathtaking stories about the world views of indigenous peoples.
Did you know that the Western Apache of Arizona have a name for every place in their homeland, and that these places correspond with allegorical stories? In Apache, you can't tell a story without naming the physical location in which it took place.
Did you know that in Aboriginal Australia, women conceive their babies through the song of a specific place? Elders go back to the place when the mother first felt the presence of her child within, and listen to the song of that place. Once born, the baby is then responsible for the tending of that specific song line, and that specific place. When they die, they are again buried in the place in which they were conceived.
Abram then goes on to discuss theories of time and place. Or rather, he critiques those abstract concepts, and searches for a way to ground something like them in experience. His results: The future is withheld behind the horizon. The past is refused inside the ground. The present is held within the air, invisible and subconscious. In other words, time and space are inherently linked, and referring to them as separate dimensions can only confuse us.
This trend of wholeness and integrity recurs throughout Abram's narrative in an experience that he describes as synesthesia. Traditionally, this term refers to the overlapping of multiple senses. But what if the concept of five distinct senses is contrived to begin with?
The book both begins and ends with a grounding in the pain of both humanity and the earth experiences as a result of artificial separation due to our innovations with the written word:
“From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved.” [Page 22]
“It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid—as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgetter power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs.” [Page 258-9]
Maybe as opposed to having it’s roots in agriculture or civilization, climate change is more closely tied to the thought patterns perpetrated by those who write and read?
Abram ends on a hopeful note, citing the emergence of a movement of people focused on “re-inhabitation”—a return to a place-centric way of life. Such calls echo that of Martín Prechtel’s school of “re-indigenosity.” I myself am amongst this class of individuals bound and faithful to a place.
Not once does he touch on the irony of his medium: a book. show less
This is a book that should be read in the spring.
Unfortunately, I first picked it up in the fall, and found the first fifty pages a tough slog. Where was the evidence, the statistics, the science? There is none, of course; this is a book of moral and environmental philosophy, and more of the felt-truth flavour than the chain-of-logic variety.
I had much better luck with it when I picked it up after a full day of hiking and gardening, with the dirt still under my fingernails and the songs of show more birds in my ears. Well, of course--the earth is alive, and we are connected to it, and we should remember that we too are animals and part of the world. And it doesn't need any evidence. It's self-evident.
That hurdle overcome, I polished the book off lickety-split.
Abram's central argument (if you can call it that, when it consists largely of appeals to the reader's empathy and personal experience) is that we, too, are animals; and, being animals, we ought not to think of ourselves as or act as if we are separate from the rest of nature. Go outside; pay attention; listen to things, because everything has a voice, and talk to them too, because they are listening to you. You may not find his argument convincing in a typical linear logic sense, but it is beautifully stated and deeply felt, and it's hard to see how taking ourselves off of the evolutionary pedestal and resituating ourselves with the rest of creation could possibly lead to any harm.
OK, the language may be a little overwrought from time to time. Also, Abrams really likes the word "cascading." But as a book to bring you back into your senses, as a living creature in a living world, it's hard to beat. show less
Unfortunately, I first picked it up in the fall, and found the first fifty pages a tough slog. Where was the evidence, the statistics, the science? There is none, of course; this is a book of moral and environmental philosophy, and more of the felt-truth flavour than the chain-of-logic variety.
I had much better luck with it when I picked it up after a full day of hiking and gardening, with the dirt still under my fingernails and the songs of show more birds in my ears. Well, of course--the earth is alive, and we are connected to it, and we should remember that we too are animals and part of the world. And it doesn't need any evidence. It's self-evident.
"there's a tacit sense that we'd better not let our awareness come too close to our creaturely sensations, that we'd best keep our arguments girded with statistics and our thoughts buttressed with abstractions, lest we succumb to an overwhelming grief--a heartache born of our organism's instinctive empathy with the living land and its cascading losses." (p. 7)
That hurdle overcome, I polished the book off lickety-split.
Abram's central argument (if you can call it that, when it consists largely of appeals to the reader's empathy and personal experience) is that we, too, are animals; and, being animals, we ought not to think of ourselves as or act as if we are separate from the rest of nature. Go outside; pay attention; listen to things, because everything has a voice, and talk to them too, because they are listening to you. You may not find his argument convincing in a typical linear logic sense, but it is beautifully stated and deeply felt, and it's hard to see how taking ourselves off of the evolutionary pedestal and resituating ourselves with the rest of creation could possibly lead to any harm.
"Perhaps the broad sphere, itself, needed our forgetfulness. Perhaps some new power was waiting to be born on the planet, and our species was called upon to incubate this power in the dark cocoon of our solitude. Ours enses dulled, our attenntion lost to the world, we created, in our inward turning, a quiet cave wherein a new layer of Earth could first shape itself and come to life. But surely it's time now to hatch this new stratum, to waken our senses from their screen-dazzled swoon, and so to offer this power back to the more-than-human terrain. The cascading extinctions of other species make evident that the time is long past ripe. The abrupt loss of rain forests and coral reefs, the choking of wetlands, the poisons leaching into the soils, and the toxins spreading in our muscles compel us to awaken from our long oblivion, to cough up the difficult magic that's been growing within us, swelling us with pride even as the land disintegrates all around us. Surely we've cut ourselves off for long enough--time, now, to open our minds outward, returning to the biosphere that wide intelligence we'd thought was ours alone. ... Sentience was never our private possession." (p. 129)
OK, the language may be a little overwrought from time to time. Also, Abrams really likes the word "cascading." But as a book to bring you back into your senses, as a living creature in a living world, it's hard to beat. show less
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