Becoming Alive to the More-Than-Human World
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
Tuukka Toivonen April 16, 2024
Sometimes life brings us in contact with people who help us discover aspects of reality we did not know existed. Their behaviours can serve as gentle guides to new ways of seeing.
Recently, an old friend and bandmate from South Africa came to visit me in Finland with his wife. On his first morning in a totally new environment, he had taken a dip in the sea and ventured out into a nearby forest. There, he picked up a humongous edible mushroom – the kind I had never noticed before – that he promptly delivered to a hotel chef who generously turned it into a delicious dish on the spot. This delightful episode reminded me of how, by being actively curious and alive to one’s surroundings, it is possible to let joy and wonder emerge.
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
Years ago, when I was a foreign student in Japan, I shared a university campus – and on occasion, a communal bathtub – with a remarkable young Tongan. A towering man with an angelic singing voice and the warmest smile; it was impossible to walk across the campus with him in any reasonable amount of time, as friend after friend after friend would stop us to say hello. Having grown up in a tight-knit village with around a thousand people whose names and life events he kept track of, he had developed an extraordinary power to connect. Able to detect the nuanced facial expressions and emotions I would miss, it dawned on me that my friend saw reality as something more finely textured than I did. For him, it appeared rich with possibilities for genuine moments of connection.
Several other friends have aroused similar feelings of fascination in me when they have instantly recognised (and eaten!) wild plants; spotted rare birds by ear; or when they have shared magical encounters with nonhuman animals. I also find myself inspired when art and design school colleagues explain how they have learned to create art with multiceullular organisms (like slime molds) or developed new materials from fungi or seaweed.
Compared to the friends just mentioned, I seem to be only half alive to my surroundings, nonhuman living beings and other people, perhaps numbed by long years of indoor living and the stresses of my adopted cities of London and Tokyo. Music became my partial window into this more-alive world through a well-nurtured teenage obsession with electric guitar. In spite of my overall slumber, music opened that window just enough so that I could imagine that a different way to experience the world might exist.
Having subsequently become a sociologist interested in regenerative making and organizing, I have started to wonder whether the mysteries of aliveness could be fruitfully approached by re-engaging with the notion of the more-than-human world. Introduced by the ecological philosopher-anthropologist David Abram in his now-classic book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (1996). This curious term points to a way of being that recognises and embraces our deep entanglement with the world as experiencing beings. Perhaps by revisiting Abram’s work, we can better comprehend why attuned ways of being feel inaccessible for many of us.
“Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.”
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
For Abram and the philosophers he draws upon (most notably, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961), everything begins with the contention that human reality is fundamentally rooted in the embodied, perceivable world. Abram invites us to notice the strangeness of how quantified abstract knowledge and measurable ‘systems’ have been given ‘realer’ status in society over the fluid experiential world. He challenges us to think how we might reclaim the primacy of experiential life and knowledge, overcoming our culture’s tendency to de-value direct experience in favour of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge and data.
Re-establishing the centrality of direct experience does not imply (or urge) a withdrawal into hermetically sealed, private experiential worlds – far from it. For in the sensuous, more-than-human world, experience and perception are inherently bound up with meaningful, responsive participation and interaction. For Abram, engaging fully in perception is a gateway to interchange and the formation of relationships:
“In the act of perception, in other words, I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Perception, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures”.
Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.
This brings us to a challenge: modern society directs us to treat things as dead objects; as materials for consumption or narrow instrumental use. We enjoy wooden furniture but rarely think of where that wood was grown; we enjoy trees as beautiful objects in our parks and forests without considering that delicate habitat that tree provides wildlife, or the mycelial network connecting it to others.
To gain entry to the more-than-human-world, we need to not only acknowledge the intrinsic worth and beauty of all the things we may encounter, but also their animateness, their potential for aliveness and interaction.
Moving beyond societal inhibitors, one assumes, greatly increases the potential to find aliveness in the social and ecological world. Aliveness always has the potential to emerge from the attuned interactions between us and the world when we are willing to imagine that there may be qualities, resonances and possibilities just below the level of conscious awareness that can be brought forth through an active process of ‘perception as participation’. I now realize it is precisely this kind of willingness to imagine (and openness to possibility) that I found so remarkable in my friends from South Africa and Tonga.
“If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.”
What The Spell of the Sensuous teaches us is that, through the process of attuned perceiving and imagining, we can enter into an authentic relationship with the world. Conversely, when we refuse to view the world as animate and intelligent, or other people as interesting and worthy of our attention, we deny the possibility of rich, nuanced and mutually nourishing relationships. It is this refusal to perceive and imagine – whether personally, societally or philosophically induced – that kills the potential for aliveness. If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.
To make these philosophical and ecological ideas more personally relevant, you may wish to think back to episodes in your own life that have given you a sense of aliveness or that have hinted at new possibilities for relating to other humans and the living world in a more imaginative, responsive way. Is there something in those episodes that might nourish you today and that might invite you to try new ways of connecting with the world?
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
