Spirit & Reason

Notes

CONTENTS

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PHILOSOPHY

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PERCEPTIONS AND MATURITY: Reflections on Feyerabend's Point of View

Alfred North Whitehead

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I see and admire your manner of living, your good warm houses; your extensive fields of com, your gardens, your cows, oxen, workhouses, wagons, and a thousand machines, that I know not the use of. I see that you are able to clothe your­ selves, even from weeds and grass. In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.

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almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

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Feyerabend admits that if something varies substantially from our expectations, we promptly banish it so that we will not have to try to understand it.

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Nor does the fact that they are imposing certain restricted patterns on the natural world, thereby limiting its potential for response, seem to worry them. Scientists are not asking complete questions of nature, and they may not even be asking relevant questions.

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Any damn fool can treat a living thing as if it were a machine and establish conditions under which it is required to perform certain functions-all that is required is a sufficient application of brute force.

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Maturity, in the American Indian context, is the ultimate goal of all human existence.

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Thus it is possible to hold sophisticated views about technology while verifying them by reference to personal emotional experiences and using them to predict future behavior.

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Within the life history of maturity one can be said to travel from information to knowledge to wisdom.

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Because Western society concentrates so heavily on information and theory, its product is youth, not maturity

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he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions.

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THE TRICKSTER AND THE MESSIAH

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Carl Jung

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Radin suggests that the civilizing process really begins within the framework of the Trickster myth, relying on the Indian traditions of the Pacific Northwest that attribute the origin of crafts to the Trickster figure, generally Raven or Coyote.

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RELATIVITY, RELATEDNESS, AND REALITY

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Space, time, and matter, Einstein argued, are concepts whose measurement should be in relationship to the context in which they are to be used.

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In the social sciences in particular, the idea of including the observer meant a reduction of certainty almost to the point of personal preference. Americans, as we are likely to do, have reduced relativity to a form of psychobabble.

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The Indian principle of interpretation/observation is simplicity itself: "We are all relatives. "

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The buffalo loved the simple and odorless sunflower just as did the Lakota. These great beasts wandered through the sunflower fields, wallowing their heads among them. Sometimes they uprooted the plants and wound them about their backs, letting sprays dangle from their left horns.

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we have in this behavior a much deeper meaning than we can presently explain.

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IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, YOU WILL SEE THAT IT IS TRUE

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In fact, tribal peoples are as systematic and philosophical as Western scientists in their efforts to understand the world around them. They simply use other kinds of data and have goals other than determining the mechanical functioning of things.

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not a few of their people actually had the ability to see into and through a rock discerning its make-up, similarly as we look into a community or grove of trees. I have known many Indians believing they possessed this ability-and not regarding it as anything remarkable-and there was no occasion for doubting their sincerity

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The idea of atoms and electrons is easy and pleasing to an old Indian, and he grasps the idea of chemistry. Such things make ready contact with his previous observation and thinking

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Absent in this approach was the idea that knowledge existed apart from human beings and their communities, and could stand alone for "its own sake." In the Indian conception, it was impossible that there could be abstract propositions that could be used to explore the structure of the physical world.

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In formulating their understanding of the world, Indians did not discard any experience. Everything had to be included in the spectrum of knowledge and related to what was already known. As the general propositions that informed the people about the world were the product of generations of tradition and experience, people accepted on faith what they had not experienced, with the hope that during their hfetime they would come to understand.

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After finishing his story, Black Elk paused, was silent for a time, and said: "This they tell, and whether it happened so or not, I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true." This is not only a statement of faith: It is a principle of epistemological method.

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Indians believed that everything that humans experience has value and instructs us in some aspect oflife.

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we cannot "misexperience" anything; we can only misinterpret what we experience.

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There cannot be such a thing as an anomaly in this kind of framework: Some things are accepted because there is value in the very mystery they represent.

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the content of whatever configuration may exist in the middle would seem to be, following the Western Sioux and Plato, a knowledge of the physical universe arranged or understood in such a manner as to call forth some form of moral response.

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history of warfare between sacred and secular forces in Western civilization

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did not make any particular entity a deity alone and apart from everything else. Most of the tribes were content to stop their description with a simple affirmation of the existence of Spirit. The Sioux, in fact, simply said the "Great Mysterious . "

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The Universe Is Alive

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the idea of the "living universe" is often dismissed as "merely pantheism," as if labeling a belief could thereby explain it.

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the debate has often centered on false arguments, with both the advocates and the opponents of the theory restricting the definition of "life" to reactive organic phenomena that are ob­ served primarily in the higher organisms.

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The Sioux, as well as other tribes, interpreted the scheme of life as leading eventually to the production of human beings. Unlike Western religion and philosophy, however, the fact that humankind had been the final product of the purposeful hfe force did not make them the crown of creation. Coming last, human beings were the "younger brothers" of the other life-forms and therefore had to learn everything from these creatures.

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Everything Is Related

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All Relationships Are Historical

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Space Determines the Nature of Relationships

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Time Determines the Meaning of Relationships

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prebirth, babies, children, youths, adults, mature adults, and elders. The idea of the "seven generations"

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generations, not decades, were the measure of human life.

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Medicine men taught that plants and animals do not become extinct-they go away and do not come back until the location is being treated properly.

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Although science cannot adequately explain the mechanism of evolution, it regards changes as permanent. The Sioux traditional people say that the important thing is the spirit of the creature; that it can and does change aspects of its physical shape in order to deal with change but that basically it remains the same entity.

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LOW BRIDGE - EVERYBODY CROSS

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whether or not the Bering Strait is simply shorthand scientific language for "I don't know, but it sounds good and no one will check. "

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"Well, dearie, we are all immigrants from somewhere. "

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Laughlin is the acknowledged dean of American Bering Strait scholars, and he offered no concrete evidence whatsoever in support of this theory. I must conclude that generations of scholars, following the so-called scientific method of inquiry, have simply accepted this idea at face value, on faith alone.

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Almost every articulation of the Bering Strait theory is woefully deficient in providing a motive for the movement.

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American Indians, as a general rule, have aggressively opposed the Bering Strait migration doctrine because it does not reflect any of the memories or traditions passed down by the ancestors over many generations.

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"in the whole history of mammals there are exceedingly few cases (e.g. , Lower Eocene between Europe and North America) where the evidence really warrants the inference of a wide-open corridor between two now distinct continental masses. "

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TRADITIONAL TECHNOLOGY

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If a person were to chart the relationships of the various academic disciplines, the resulting outline might find physics and mathematics as coequal partners at the top of a pyramid of knowledge, with chemistry; biology, psychology, and eventually the humanities as imperfect subsets or special cases of the application of physics to selected phenomena.

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in order to claim some historical roots for their ideas, as new ideas are forbidden in academia, ancient or tribal peoples are cited

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The primary focus of creation stories of many tribes placed human beings as among the last creatures who were created and as the youngest of the living families. We were given the ability to do many things but not specific wisdom about the world. So our job was to learn from other older beings and to pattern ourselves after their behavior.

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Modem man uses weapons, tools, and instruments to extend the capabilities of his own self, and he uses these things mechanically. Tribal man, in using his instruments, did not simply extend the scope of his own capabilities but enhanced his abilities through the addition of the powers that were inherent in the relationships he had with other living things.

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the knowledge that the old ones attached to their technology demanded that they use their powers sparingly and on the proper occasion. A person could not indiscriminately use powers as we casually use our instruments today.

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Modem science tends to use two kinds of questions to examine the world: ( 1 ) how does it work? and (2) what use is it? These questions are natural for a people who think the world is constructed to serve their purposes. The old people might have used these two questions in their effort to understand the world, but it is certain that they always asked an additional question: what does it mean?

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