Against Anthropocentrism

 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is a society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more...
- Lord Byron

In the early 19th century, it did not take long for Byron, otherwise notorious for numerous love affairs, huge debts and scandalous incestuous liaisons, to appreciate an important aspect beyond his love for women.
In the post industrial era, when most parts of the world are governed by democracy and capitalism, there is an unconscious shift of humanity towards anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism describes the tendency for human beings to regard themselves as the central and most significant entities in the universe, or the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective. Time and again there have been movements started and sustained in raising the dignity, importance and relevance of humanity. Every man lives in a society cocooned by human relationships, man-made institutions, working towards ends benefiting humanity. The recent advances in the neuroscience, biology, genetics, psychology and anthropology, have made this point even stronger. Certainly we live in an era where only what is important is “Man” – to a large extent.
There is an urgent need for the society to start accommodating the thoughts on other very important and even bigger and more crucial aspect – the universe itself – its flora and fauna.
The famous American hitchhiker Christopher Johnson McCandless have been aptly shown in the book – “Into the Wild” as saying –
“...but you are wrong if you think the joy of life primarily comes from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It’s in everything and anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at those things”.

The book ends with a deep reflection by the dying Christopher all alone in the wilderness –
“What if I were smiling and running into your arms.
Would you see then, what I see now?”

Pretty profound! Yes, what he saw in his solitary deathly journey in the Alaska was much grander and more beautiful than what he would have seen doing his Harvard law degree and becoming a rich lawyer in Washington, driving a Ferrari, although the trek took his life.

How many among us working as so called professionals are even aware of the passing solstices and equinoxes to start with, leaving aside the Alaskan pristine beauty.  Our project schedules are run through calendar dates. We do not even know about the passing seasons; not to say in the cities like Bangalore, where the climate is almost the same throughout the year. Many among us are not even aware of dawn and dusks, being absolutely busy trapped inside our air-conditioned cubicles. Whatever time is left after working as automatons for the multinational companies, that are either spent watching TV, reading escapist novels, visiting malls, shopping, and trying to resolve complex predicaments in interpersonal relationships. Naturally, flora and fauna does not come into the scheme of things of the modern man.

This constricted way of being, hinders people to live life fully, to be aware of the grand beauty of nature. This separation of man from nature causes deep seated neurosis when dealt psychoanalytically. It is not a luxury today to re-establish the connection of man with nature. It is a necessity. Evolutionarily man has emerged from the lap of nature. If he does not re-establish this lost connection of his with nature, he will be unable to reach his full potential as a human. He will be stunted to live a constricted potentiality of his, in his journey of life.

Creativity, human ingenuity, novelty, and out of the box thinking, have all become such a clichéd today. I feel these are just accidental outcomes, out of addressing other totally orthogonal needs of mankind. One of those symbiotic needs is re-establishment of his connection with nature. The first step would be to start thinking out of the box of anthropocentrism.

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Standing in Love - Essence of being Creative

What is love? Shakespeare mused. The great bard was not the first to ask this. 

To most of the humanity love is something which “just happens”. People “fall” in love. It is considered something which is out of one’s control. Since ancient times, we have tons and tons of literature revering this casual numbing idea about love. It is considered as a powerful trance, when man loses his power to reason. Neuroscientists say love a neural itch. Evolutionary Biologists call it a powerful genetic urge. Psychoanalysts call it an expression of repressed drives. For poets it is an ecstatic state of being. For spiritualists it is communion with God. Since ages poets have gone in full length weaving a tapestry of magic around this thing known as love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley in his usual passionate style of writing beautifully sings about this magical feeling of love in the following lines of his famous poem – “Love’s Philosophy” –

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle -
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother:
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

There is an inherent passiveness in this paradigm of love; a mode of being a victim, a parasite. Love for most is tightly coupled with finding the right “object of love”. Love then, “just happens”. The trance continues till the object is able to fulfill one’s psychological needs. When that ceases, again the lover is in search of the next object of love. Or rather, is “stuck” by the cupid’s arrow, on the sight of another object. Love most of the times is considered as a reactive emotion, which is instigated by an outside agent – “an object of love”.

This traditional paradigm forces me to reflect about the ancient Egyptians in the 700 BC till a century hence. They took their thoughts and emotions to be the work of spirits and gods. Also the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts form 2000 B.C., for instance, refer repeatedly to the “commands” of the gods – literally heard as utterances by the rulers of society. Most of the ancient western world believed that the thoughts are something which is not created by man in his mind, but is put by an external God.

It was in 600BC when man for the first time started contemplating that thoughts are not casted by an external entity, but is created from within the mind. In India, Buddha attributed human thoughts to our sensations and perceptions, which, he said, gradually and automatically combine into ideas. In China, Confucius stressed the power of thought and decision that lay within each person. The signs of change were even stronger in Greece, where poets and sages began to view their thoughts and emotions in wholly new terms. The locus of control of the thoughts thus started shifting from outside to inside.

Unfortunately the emotion of love is still considered by most of the contemporary world from the archaic perception of the ancient Egyptians. It is the “object of love” - the beloved - who controls the button of the wellbeing for a man. Not only in romantic love, but also in other forms of love, it is assumed that if the object of love is worth, love happens automatically. Love is considered as a passive state, in which a person is seduced into with a magical spell, where he is powerless and tranced. This spell originates from the object of love. This spell continues till the object of loves behaves in a particular way. And then it ceases to exist, when the object of love fails to behave in that pattern. Slowly the emotion of love transmutes into hate. All the while man is paralyzed in the emotion of love and hate.

The state of love had been a subject of immense contemplation and research in the field of psychology. There have been many enlightening discoveries done by many modern psychologists on this subject, which is generally un-known to common man. In general parlance, still the world stays in the outdated superstitions on what love occurs to them.

Victor Frankl in his book – Man’s Search for Meaning, had given a powerful and thought provoking definition of love, based on his research on Logotherapy. He says –

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true”

Erich Fromm in his book – The Art of Loving, goes ahead and clarifies; love is not a passive state, where people “fall”. It is not about “falling in love”, but about “standing in love”. He says love is an active process, where a person chooses to think and act in a certain way. He says –

“Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. It is not an affect in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active striving for growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love. To love somebody is the actualization and concentration of the power to love.”

He continues, “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism”

Now, that is interesting! The contemporary developments in psychology has a different outlook towards love. Love is considered as an art. The attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. In the words of Fromm, “If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, I love you, I must be able to say, I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

Saying that love is an orientation which refers to all and not to one does not imply, however, the idea that there is no differences between various types of love, which ofcourse depends on the object which is loved. But the important thing is although nature of the love differs with respect to the object of love, but the essence of the state of being in love is the same. It is independent of the object of love. If by any chance it is being directed by the object of love, it is not love, but narcissism.

This realization of love is crucial in the contemporary world. It is important not just in the interpersonal relationships, but in the whole context of life. Being in love with life, its opportunities, its challenges, work, play etc, is at core of this realization. If this attitude is carried forward in our everyday thoughts and actions, it enables to bring about lots of creativity and harmony. Being in love is difficult, so is being an artist difficult. It needs patience, knowledge, creativity, understanding and above all, a zest to evolve and increase the sum total beauty in the world.

It is high time for humanity to wake up to the realization that it creativity and novelty does not come through a linear process of following one step to the other. But they are the fall outs of an attitude of being in love – an “active love” – “standing in love”. One has to keep in mind the following pillars of genuine love postulated by Erich Fromm - care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. I feel they are the essence of being creative. Only when you are genuinely in love, can you be genuinely creative.

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Being an Artist

An artist, whether a poet, a painter, a photographer, a singer, or anyone who is involved in a creative endeavor, shares a very special place in this world. She is involved in an activity (her work of art) which attempts to create something beautiful. In that effort, she tries to bring perfection to the physical world, which otherwise is non-existent. That perfect beauty, that divinity, that Godliness, that perfection which is otherwise invisible to the world of mortals, comes up in its full grandeur through the creativity of the artist, either in form of that beautifully written poem, or an impeccably carved out sculpture. An artist enjoys that very unique opportunity to be able to attract the divinity to the world of mortals. She contributes to increase the sum total of beauty in this world. Life becomes a beautiful journey, not only for the artist, but also for others who happen to observe and appreciate her art.

Certainly it is about creation of novelty, which gives a good feeling to humanity. Yes, it even has a utilitarian applicability. Yes it adds up to the aesthetics of existence. It definitely increases the happiness quotient and well being for the people who are surrounded by beauty and magnificent works of art. It for sure adds lots of meaning to the life of the artist even. But there is another more profound relevance of a work of art. Keats had beautifully put it in his famous poem     Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams and health, and quiet breathing.

Yes, beauty is eternal.

There is another very interesting aspect of beauty and art. It is fundamentally non-physical in nature. It belongs to the realm of non-form. For example the beauty of a flower does not belong to the flower, or the plant, or the petal or its color. It is a holistic arrangement of the petals in that golden ratio, which in its entirety conjures up a sense of awe and appreciation in the heart of the beholder. If the petals are taken up separately and analyzed under the microscope to look for the source of the beauty, nothing physical will be realized. The beauty of a well made painting cannot be analyzed and the individual aspects separated which gives the immense aesthetics to the painting. The work of art in its entirety is much more than its individual constituent parts. The process that went in creating the art, the inspiration involved in conceiving the art, the intercourse of the emotions, thoughts, skills and expertise of the artist and the materials involved, holistically creating the work of art in synergy, certainly belongs to a non-physical realm. All these go beyond the artifact of art itself. It is correct to infer that an artist cannot be judged just based on her work of art. There are aspects beyond the artifact.

It appears that this ethereal nature of a work of art was known to mankind since the earliest artwork excavated, which dates back to earlier than 30,000 BC!!! These were in forms of cave paintings. The later artworks from the Egyptians, the Greeks, and then those of the Renaissance, have time and again tried to bring forth this unique and special aspect of art. Art had always been an expression of perfection in this otherwise imperfect world, and artists – the bridge between that celestial perfection and the physical world. Aristotle has succinctly expressed this as –
“…All the arts always have in view some good that we desire to achieve.”

The concept of God is also something that belongs to the realm of non-form. Through a work of art, which tries to portray perfection, God can be experienced. There is no way to really touch, see or experience God through the human senses. It solely belongs to the domain of experiencing that bliss indirectly though a vehicle of art and creativity. It might not be incorrect to conclude that the only way to appreciate, understand and know God, is through the eyes of an artist. Creativity and imagination appears to me the first step to know God. Being a psychological zombie, being drugged by material pursuits, being solely busy in the transactional chores of every day existence, lost in the world of sensual gratification, a person loses his opportunity to know God. It is simple. Having a limited psychic energy (attention) that we are endowed with as humans, and given the limited time we have in a day, when we allow ourselves to be totally occupied with things which are gross, we lose out the opportunity to experience something which is higher, finer and more beautiful. It is just that we have limited resource of time and energy.

When I call for being an artist, it does not necessarily mean that the person is occupied in a profession or a hobby particularly into fine arts. A person can be an artist doing what he does for his living. Einstein was a clerk in a patent office. He chose to be creative at his work being a clerk, which led to creation of things as profound as the Theory of Relativity. Same was the case with Pythagoras, Archimedes, Kepler, Euclid, and later Newton, and series of scientific creators of the modern world, who apparently did not have any creative vocation to start with. But they scooped out being artists in their own respect. Art and aesthetics was part of their everyday life, even when they were apparently involved in things which appear so very dry and “scientific” on surface. The problem is that, most of the post industrial society today feels art as a prerogative of poets and painters. If you want to do something to earn your living, and something meaningful or worthwhile, you have to give away being artistic, and start putting on the hat of analysis, rationality, scientific investigation, and a well defined sequential process to achieve something material. There is not much place left for imagination and creativity. The state of affairs appears more farcical when we see those “consultants” who come up with their superficial weekend workshops on “creativity and innovation.” It is similar to the new age hypocrite gurus, who promise you enlightenment if you attend their week long workshop, shelling out a big share of your hard earned money.

As society flocks more and more into instant gratifications, sensory adventures, one night stands, weekend nirvanas, more is the need to remind oneself of art and being an artist. 

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