Feral Philosophy? Primitive Worldview?

Main
#1

(This can serve as a follow up to my last post)
So I’ve asked the question What is the primitive worldview? And I got the references: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes; Wandering God; and the seemingly outdated Primitive Man as Philosopher

I’ve been growled at a couple times because I used the word ‘philosophy’ in the same sentence as ‘primitive.’ Understandable. Although I mean it more loosely in this context, like ‘worldview’ or ‘thought pattern.’ This doesn’t have to be a system spun out in a treatise. Hell, the Australian aborigines seem to be oratorical system builders of the Dreaming.

If we end up finding only ‘religions,’ then well enough. Animism seems to be the recurrent theme in my searches (http://genealogyreligion.net/tag/relational-ontology). Although ‘religion’ to them will probably mean something unexpected to us. Who knows whether any group in question wasn’t pulling a joke on the ethnographer about it or what. But while I doubt for thousands of years nobody thought in a non-religious way, I doubt even more that they didn’t think with articulation, profundity, insight, in dialogue or in secret. For one, any given academic participating in high-art fuckery today is using the same paleolithic brain design. And secondly, they had/have free time, if not relatively more than we do. So the question stands. What was the primitive worldview?

On another note, I think de-colonizing one’s thoughts today is important. Being anti-intellectual in radical circles is disingenuous, as if one wakes up one day from his culture and thinks, “You know what? Civilization should burn.” Sure we could use fewer books and more action. But I’ve watched this anti-intellectual position develop in hyper-intellectual fashion more times than I want to remember. Thinking is a form of self-defense and play. There’s a sense that we can do it right, namely by de-colonizing ourselves in our day to day thoughts. Epiphanies are enjoyable. Even if you could abolish thinking, why in the hell would you? So I asked What could a feral philosophy be?

I’ll just remark first that if one’s going to re-wild one’s mind, it’s not at all necessary that this be done in reference to the ‘the primitive’ of ethnography or not. Why? The answer I think is provided in some findings…

So in the process of wondering what a feral worldview could be as civilization tightens its death grips and/or collapses around us in its mandatory theatre of unasked-for drama, I reviewed my memory about the history of philosophy, the meme-genealogy of dead white dudes, did some research, set a process of elimination rolling, and came up with only four ‘schools’ out of ~2500 years that have clear significance here:

https://lincolnjfinch.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/primitive-worldview-feral-philosophy/

#2

Nice writeup. I did not really know about the Cynics before — I like those guys. If you ask me, in my experience/opinion, primitive thinking was not based around the desire to attain “answers” to inquiries, or to
“solve” philosophical problems (indeed, philosophical problems likely did not exist — a la Wittgenstein). I see Daoism as most closely aligned with my own personal sense of what the primitive mind is. Of course, Daoism is a reactionary philosophy in many ways. Even the founder, Lao Tzu, is said to have arrived at his teaching after getting fed up with
civilization. Just before departing into the wilderness, from whence he was never seen again, he was asked to write down all his wisdom before he left. In one sitting then, so the legend goes, the Dao-de-ching was penned.

Once you live alone in nature for awhile, the form of one’s inquiry naturally changes. Instead of focusing on problems (reductionist thinking) and musing on possible solutions (discursive thinking), thinking becomes much more wholistic, being grounded in the senses and our own embodiment. In my experience, philosophical inquiry gives way to at first a kind of Ordinary Mind meditation (in the sense of the Zen school). Questioning and Deciding gives way to Accepting and Observing. Thinking gives way to Awareness.

Eventually, once the animist line is crossed and one begins to feel their heart tugging against the trees, develops a sensitivity to plant energies, etc., what I’ve called the Ordinary Mind meditation begins to give way naturally and gradually to something deeper, more along the lines of what’s described in the Carlos Castaneda’s book, Don Juan: A
Yaqui Way of Knowing. But again, this is all based around experience. What was at first simply bodily awareness, becomes refined into a spiritual awareness, as sensitivities to our subtle energetic bodies are developed — and these subtle energies will eventually lead us outside our ordinary bodies.

So the trajectory I’d outline is Thinking (civilization) –> Awareness & Observation (nature) –> Knowledge (spirit).

#3

Upon re-reading my response, I realize I didn’t actually describe a worldview. I think this is appropriate though, as a primitive worldview would derive strictly from experience, and is not abstract, disembodied, and disconnected as is so often the case in the Western world. Even the spiritual stuff I mentioned — it’s all there, rooted in our sense-experience and conscious mind. The worldview comes about from watching how it works. It’s a picture that is already there — we just need to see it.

#4

I agree with you there about problem-solution thinking as being our civilization’s main style. And styles may have differed between civ’s, e.g. it was probably not the Tibetan civilization’s; Ellul at least wants to grant that Tibet had a ‘passive’ civilization once Buddhism arrived.

I’ll say more about Heidegger in connection with thinking, to kind of show where I’m at on it. Despite being pro-civilization (and occasionally an elitist inspired by Nietzsche) as far as I can tell, he was staunchly against Modernism and its technology. He didn’t even want to call the problem-solution style of thinking ‘thinking,’ but instead observing (in a different sense than you use it), i.e. a reductionist making-entities-present-at-hand, taking them to be exactly as they appear to us or can be used by us. And these entities, he says, are ‘enframed’ today as a standing reserve of resources, on stand-by to be converted for and used by something else, which is itself on standby for something else, which is in turn for yet another purpose, ad infinitum, such that nothing has its own distinct purpose and purpose itself is thereby destroyed. His version of thinking is an openness to the way things are made intelligible or meaningful at all instead of taking it for granted (instead of ingratitude in a sense), setting this way into word or art to preserve it (and here I start to disagree with him like Zerzan insofar as only some special people are artists or thinkers and that they need to externalize these insights into the dead products of artwork or writing), but also setting out into the wild (he says ‘uncanny’ or ‘unhomely’) overwhelming precedence of the way itself in all things, in order to possibly receive from it new instructions as to how to be / see / feel (and insofar as these changes are received degeneratively, I think he sees this as constituting history, a systematic developing and dealing with an original error in lockstep, whereas if the instructions had been received properly and in full, the thinker would have stayed in an original and powerful mythology, not history). An interesting thing to note about him is that he completed a translation of the Tao Te Ching, but problems arose and it wasn’t published, and he had lengthy correspondence with Zen Buddhists in Japan (the Kyoto School if I recall).

So I can very much see what you mean by thinking more differently as one becomes more wild/feral. I didn’t mean to say ‘the primitive worldview’ as I did above. That’s very misleading. There would be as many views as there are different viewers and even those would change per person over time, which isn’t to say there wouldn’t be an overall pattern in a whole band. So I didn’t mean that a given worldview that is primitive would somehow be stable, which would suggest that it had been written down or ensconced into a priesthood or elite through which everyone else would have to go for ‘the goods,’ whatever those may be. When I said ‘the’ I meant that overall pattern that makes a certain bioregion’s bands’ or a certain tribes’ thoughts distinct from others’. This would be the culture’s superstructure, in cultural materialist terms. That’s all I meant by worldview. I would even take issue with the term ‘world’ insofar as its roots mean ‘the age of man.’ But I don’t kick out the word altogether because thankfully language is not simply its history.

I’m interested to hear more about Casteneda. I don’t know about him, but the impression I got when I last looked him up is that he made many personal innovations on his portrayal of certain tribes’ beliefs, and that he has been taken to most kindly by new agers.

#5

I am definitely someone who has given flack over any philosophy. Philosophies, in my mind, are abstractions. I think it’s important to distinguish philosophies, critiques and world views. And I think dirt time can kill the most ardent of philosophers.

I could write forever about rewilding and “primitive” worldviews, and I probably will, but I think few have done as good a job describing what I have found and felt as Jon Young. What the Robin Knows is a great starting point for this.
Primitive worldviews are, like all wildness, available through observation and integration. No doubt anthropological accounts contribute a great deal to this, but it can be clear where bias and missionary contact taint overarching themes. I cannot recommend Young as a starting point enough. There’s times where listening to him tell about experiences similar to mine just made the world feel sane.
He harks back to the same line that I’ve looked back to regularly, referring to “spirituality” or “connectedness” as “the air/breath that moves through all things”. It’s impossible to talk about primitive worldviews without having some grasp on that.

#6

@heyzach could you extend on that? Or provide some useful links to dig a bit deeper? In particular about the thinking grounded in senses and embodiment. How can life be lived at its best without needing problem/solution thinking? (Even in the wild? )Btw, some spiritual authors say Awareness is the absensce of thoughts, but I can grasp what you mean by ‘Thinking gives way to Awareness’.