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permaculture - Re: Out of Control - living systems and observation

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Out of Control - living systems and observation
  • Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 21:43:12 -0800


John Schinnerer <eco_living@yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Life "acts" as if it has agency,
>I can say that I observe "life" (whatever that is - "living systems"
>might be more appropriate) acting this way. IMO it would be a
> fundamental mistake for me to say that "it" is a "property" or
> "quality" of life - that 'life' "has" 'agency'.

I'll gladly grant the points that John and Souscayrous make about the care
that, for perfect precision, we must take with our language and our
assumptions. But I think that demanding that kind of precision can get in
the way of developing ideas. That's why I put "acts" in quotes instead of
spending a paragraph justifying the verb. It seemed simpler.

> So it appears to me that Kelly clearly contradicts himself - he
> reiterates the ancient "all is one" theme, implying he understands that
> observer and observed are not separate, and then he separates them

Yeah, but this discussion also kinda strikes me as hair splitting. Kelly
wrote an ecology book for a lay audience, people who might not much enjoy
epistemology explanations or the other abstruse philosophical points made
here. Kelly's also using English, whose sentence structure naturally divides
subject and object, and he would have to go through some really awkward
contortions to avoid that division. So I don't fault him at all for
splitting observer and observed in his work, any more than I fault him for
writing that life has "subjugated" matter. To some observers "life" appears
to "utilize" matter for its "purposes." Every quoted word there could
generate paragraphs of commentary. But that's deadly dull compared to the
not-perfectly-defensible way Kelly said it: Life subjugates matter. I don't
even much object to the verb: If I'm being run down by a lion I'll feel
plenty subjugated. Besides, here Kelly has made a useful observation that
leads him to other useful observations, so I'm glad he didn't do a lot of
philosophical hand-wringing about his words (no offense meant!) and instead
just got on with the interesting process of getting his ideas out and
developing them.

Note that we haven't let his ideas take us anywhere in this discussion;
we've gotten bogged down in whether he phrased himself correctly. That's my
objection to some of this, and to the whole contemporary lit-crit, "no text
has meaning" scene. You never actually work with the substance, just the
form, and author's meaning and ideas get forgotten.

Toby





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