Fifteen years ago I began a friendship and mentorship with Bob Dunham and began reading Heidegger, Maturana and Varela , Flores and Dunham. They all referred frequently to “Ontology”. I must have looked up the meaning of that word a hundred times. I could never remember what it was. Now I may know why.
# A WALLED CITY I was born into an infinite world. At some point I constructed a wall and began building my city of knowledge inside that wall, pushing out the wall as the city gained architectural types. It eventually became quite a metropolis that I lived in. I eventually lost sight of the spaces beyond the wall. Even though the wall was only three feet high, whenever I approached it I either faced the city or got down on my hands and knees.
Recently, while reading a book on four British cyberneticians that was exploring their unique “ontology of doing” as compared with the more common epistemological ontology, I suddenly saw the relationship of ontology to Epistemology. It appeared initially as two Venn diagrams, one extremely large—the ontological one, and one quite small—the epistemological one, with the small one inside the large one. This visual quickly turned to an expansive medieval walled city, with a thigh-high wall that would have been easy to peer over. I had not been able to conceive of ontology from the confines of epistemology.
The beauty and the culture of this medieval city had become all consuming for most of my adult life—with consequences. It was a city of knowing and knowable, of understanding and sense making. The language and values of that city’s culture were not adapted to the spaces beyond the wall, where nothing could be named or explained, only felt and pointed toward.
My self-protective preconscious filtering dismissed, before consciousness, anything beyond the wall, it fact this denial mechanism is the wall.
Now I see beyond the wall. What a relief. The gates of my prison opened. While there is not much that can be said about the expanses now open to me, I can assure you that it has changed the quality and tone of my life and my body and my mind. I no longer feel trapped in a tight cycle of knowing. Being is so much freer than knowing. Curiosity has found a home, not a gilded cell. Knowing still has its same value, but now in the context of an infinite world of mystery and experience.
Poetry and other arts are ways to have something to say about the unnamable expanse beyond the wall of knowing and knowability.
(The book referenced above is The Cybernetic Brain : Sketches of Another Future, by Andrew Pickering, 2014.)
# Beyond the Wall and above the City >Written in response to Bill Mahoney’s comment: “You didn’t say what you found outside the wall.”
The city is filled with things and thing ideas. A lot of counting goes on, even some measuring, lots of listing and even some diagrams. With computers all of these activities are amplified and accelerated. Beyond the wall and above this accounting-diagraming city are two phenomena: uncounted things and uncountable dynamic emergent properties of various durations and integrations and disintegrations.
This realization, if it comes, may frustrate our tendency to be counters and diagrammers, but it also is the world that the counting and diagraming persons and personalities arise from and dissolve into. There is no war here. Count and diagram away. Write and read poetry, stare at the moon, smell what you smell, love, hate, live and die. Live inside the wall. Look beyond the wall. As you wish and as you can.
# Simply Don’t unlearn being while learning about being.
The garden of Eden myth reconsidered: Being exiled from the garden (subjective experience of self as world, Beginner’s Mind) into the walled city of knowing about (objectified instrumental world and objectified instrumental self).
# The present question: What is the meta-stance to these seemingly divided positions?
# Answer?: Doing, acting, participating. Improvisation. Dance. Attentive relaxation. PLAY. FULL. NESS.
# Addenda: Pulling an experience over the wall into the city of knowledge kills the idea. Then it is stuffed and hung on the wall to be admired by a certain type. The city is populated by hunters, taxidermists, collectors, and admirers. The living ideas remain outside the wall. A certain type is afraid to venture beyond the wall, among living, into living, without rooms or trophies.
We each and all embody all of these types. Such is living. How wonderful.
Kerry
A reflection on Marc's "Walled City" essay...which is very thought provoking...and evocative: In the french language there are only two auxiliary verbs: Avoir (to have) and Etre (to be). We humans seem to be focused primarily on having (avoir)..in this case knowledge. Beyond the wall is the vast expanse of being (etre). Interestingly "a voir" translates as "for to see"...Being is felt not seen...
Marc
From my understanding, being is felt and seen but not named. It is the naming or the freezing or reification of having seen that is the essence of epistemology — the killing and stuffing and hanging on the wall of experience. Like folks who feel obliged to interrupt every moment of a vacation to “capture” the moment on film (digital). Living as trophy collecting. Nothing eaten only displayed to prove you were alive (as a person obsessed with proving you are alive). Tragic and comic. So transparent. How is this mistake even made?
Kerry
YOUTUBE YR5ApYxkU-U Another Brick in the Wall