" The world is not a machine but an exquisite sanctuary. "
- Henryk Skolimowski -
In ancient times, Earth was revered as a sacred place to dwell. But, in the name of material civilization, the spirit of reverence was mortgaged for physical well-being at the cost of the ecological heritage. Now we are on the verge of having to make and execute major decisions on behalf of the generations to come as the world we are inhabiting is increasingly getting impoverished in spirit.
Henryk Skolimowski is an eco-philosophical visionary. "To treat yourself well, to treat others well, you must know that the world is not a heap of meaningless rubbish but a place reverberating with divine energies," he writes in A Sacred Place to Dwell. He is one of the founding thinkers of eco-philosophy.
His message to the people at large is for them to see the world as a sanctuary. When he first landed in USA in 1964, he did find Los Angeles 'intoxicating but somewhat bewildering.' "Somehow my life in Los Angeles did not quite feel the paradise I was told I was in," he recollected later while reflecting on the history of eco-philosophy. He noticed that the freeways were always crowded. If a new one was built, it was clogged in a few months. "I was told by a knowledgeable civil engineer that freeways do not relieve traffic; rather, they attract traffic," he contemplated on the paradox that drove him to an odd conclusion: "It began to dawn on me that this may be the case with our wonderful technologies — they do not satisfy our needs but increase them. "
The Hippie Revolution passed by him with all its countervailing demos when the youth asked Skolimowski: ""You are a philosopher. Tell us where we have gone wrong." The youthful unrest - the sense of alienation of the younger generation - triggered Skolimowski to wonder what was wrong with what seemed to be a 'perfect civilization'.
Henryk Skolimowski, dipping into the 400 years of Western philosophy, discovered that the conceptual acceptance that 'the universe is a machine, that knowledge is power, and that nature is ours for exploitation and plunder' were exactly the reasons that were the root causes for the ecological upheaval. " We simply conceived of a wrong idiom for the interaction with nature, " he summed up.
Reminiscing, 'I saw the beauty and the potency of technology,' Henryk Skolimowski with a telling 'but', observes, 'I also saw that technology was condemning itself by the fruit it has been bearing: desolate environments, atomized society, and individual alienation — all being the consequences of a certain way of reading the world and interacting with it.' His ideas were crystallized into an insightful paper: "Technology—the Myth Behind the Reality" and led a to a series of papers which paradigmatically forayed into what was ailing the mechanistic society. One of his sledgehammering insights was: " We consider ourselves to be a clever, quick and intelligent people. Yet we learn awfully slow from our past mistakes, and we are so reluctant to see and admit that the whole blueprint of our civilization is riddled with shortcomings, is in tatters, and has always been lamentably lacking in vision. "
In 1981 he published the book 'Eco-philosophy, Designing New Tactics for Living'. In recollecting the intellectual milieu under which his eco-philosophical ideas germinated, Skolimowski wrote in Eco-Philosophy in an Historical Perspective (2008): 'On 20 June 1974, I was invited by the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London (one of the best schools of architecture in Europe) to participate in the symposium entitled, "Beyond Alternative Technology." We were convinced, already at this time, that the Ecology Movement had somehow burned itself out. Building windmills and insisting on soft technology was not enough. So four of us took the floor to ask ourselves, "Where do we go from here?"'
In the allotted ten minutes, Skolimowski nutshelled his perspective by calling for an Ecological Humanism wherein the imperative need for orienting toward 'social relationships based on the idea of sharing, and stewardship rather than owning things and fighting continuous ruthless battles in open and camouflaged social wars' was articulated. He called for soulful values instead of pecuniary equivalents which contributes to a deeper understanding of people by people, and a deeper cohesion between people and the rest of creation.
Denouncing the 'process of naked greed and robbery', he made it clear that it was not natural and that it was pathological. Being an optimist that he was - 'sane and honest people will not allow it to continue' -Henryk Skolimowski, though accepting the fact that alternative visions of reality have had a rough passage to actualize themselves, proclaimed with an immense self-confidence giving hope to others: " ... mark my words, the New Renaissance is not far off. "
So, Henryk Skolimowski - Professor of Ecological Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at the University of Lodz, Poland, - has set the ball rolling with inspiring lectures and uplifting ideas through his books on ecological philosophy. Now, it is time, the present generation wakes up to the real imperatives for an ecological humanism with the realization that the world is a sanctuary that should not be forsaken and any negligence on that score would only be eco-genocidal for all the species in the long run.
- Henryk Skolimowski -
In ancient times, Earth was revered as a sacred place to dwell. But, in the name of material civilization, the spirit of reverence was mortgaged for physical well-being at the cost of the ecological heritage. Now we are on the verge of having to make and execute major decisions on behalf of the generations to come as the world we are inhabiting is increasingly getting impoverished in spirit.
Henryk Skolimowski is an eco-philosophical visionary. "To treat yourself well, to treat others well, you must know that the world is not a heap of meaningless rubbish but a place reverberating with divine energies," he writes in A Sacred Place to Dwell. He is one of the founding thinkers of eco-philosophy.
His message to the people at large is for them to see the world as a sanctuary. When he first landed in USA in 1964, he did find Los Angeles 'intoxicating but somewhat bewildering.' "Somehow my life in Los Angeles did not quite feel the paradise I was told I was in," he recollected later while reflecting on the history of eco-philosophy. He noticed that the freeways were always crowded. If a new one was built, it was clogged in a few months. "I was told by a knowledgeable civil engineer that freeways do not relieve traffic; rather, they attract traffic," he contemplated on the paradox that drove him to an odd conclusion: "It began to dawn on me that this may be the case with our wonderful technologies — they do not satisfy our needs but increase them. "
The Hippie Revolution passed by him with all its countervailing demos when the youth asked Skolimowski: ""You are a philosopher. Tell us where we have gone wrong." The youthful unrest - the sense of alienation of the younger generation - triggered Skolimowski to wonder what was wrong with what seemed to be a 'perfect civilization'.
Henryk Skolimowski, dipping into the 400 years of Western philosophy, discovered that the conceptual acceptance that 'the universe is a machine, that knowledge is power, and that nature is ours for exploitation and plunder' were exactly the reasons that were the root causes for the ecological upheaval. " We simply conceived of a wrong idiom for the interaction with nature, " he summed up.
Reminiscing, 'I saw the beauty and the potency of technology,' Henryk Skolimowski with a telling 'but', observes, 'I also saw that technology was condemning itself by the fruit it has been bearing: desolate environments, atomized society, and individual alienation — all being the consequences of a certain way of reading the world and interacting with it.' His ideas were crystallized into an insightful paper: "Technology—the Myth Behind the Reality" and led a to a series of papers which paradigmatically forayed into what was ailing the mechanistic society. One of his sledgehammering insights was: " We consider ourselves to be a clever, quick and intelligent people. Yet we learn awfully slow from our past mistakes, and we are so reluctant to see and admit that the whole blueprint of our civilization is riddled with shortcomings, is in tatters, and has always been lamentably lacking in vision. "
In 1981 he published the book 'Eco-philosophy, Designing New Tactics for Living'. In recollecting the intellectual milieu under which his eco-philosophical ideas germinated, Skolimowski wrote in Eco-Philosophy in an Historical Perspective (2008): 'On 20 June 1974, I was invited by the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London (one of the best schools of architecture in Europe) to participate in the symposium entitled, "Beyond Alternative Technology." We were convinced, already at this time, that the Ecology Movement had somehow burned itself out. Building windmills and insisting on soft technology was not enough. So four of us took the floor to ask ourselves, "Where do we go from here?"'
In the allotted ten minutes, Skolimowski nutshelled his perspective by calling for an Ecological Humanism wherein the imperative need for orienting toward 'social relationships based on the idea of sharing, and stewardship rather than owning things and fighting continuous ruthless battles in open and camouflaged social wars' was articulated. He called for soulful values instead of pecuniary equivalents which contributes to a deeper understanding of people by people, and a deeper cohesion between people and the rest of creation.
Denouncing the 'process of naked greed and robbery', he made it clear that it was not natural and that it was pathological. Being an optimist that he was - 'sane and honest people will not allow it to continue' -Henryk Skolimowski, though accepting the fact that alternative visions of reality have had a rough passage to actualize themselves, proclaimed with an immense self-confidence giving hope to others: " ... mark my words, the New Renaissance is not far off. "
So, Henryk Skolimowski - Professor of Ecological Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at the University of Lodz, Poland, - has set the ball rolling with inspiring lectures and uplifting ideas through his books on ecological philosophy. Now, it is time, the present generation wakes up to the real imperatives for an ecological humanism with the realization that the world is a sanctuary that should not be forsaken and any negligence on that score would only be eco-genocidal for all the species in the long run.
Indeed, Skolimowski's analysis of the present condition of the world and suggestions for a different world, based on an eco-philosophical paradigm are quite compelling. Unfortunately, they are not widely known and appreciated.
ReplyDeleteGreat work
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