The Within, The Without
The German forester Peter Wohlleben has aroused the ire of some scientists, as reported in The Guardian, with his book on The Hidden Life of Trees. Some scientists, it seems, have accused Wohlleben of writing “fairy tales” about the inner life of trees and forests.
This controversy is, in some ways, an excellent illustration of the dichotomy of the “outside” and “inside”, or of the explicate and implicate, or subjective and objective orientations that was raised in the comments to the previous post. I only know of the contents of Wohlleben’s book from hearsay, but the notion of “the secret life of plants” or plant consciousness is hardly a new one, even among some plant ecologists.
Dimensions and Directions
I mentioned earlier that I was reading George Morgan’s The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness (1968), and excerpted a couple of quotes from the introduction to post in the comments to the last post on Smith’s “Invisible Hand”. I do recommend Morgan’s book in connection with Gebser studies, since The Human Predicament can be considered a more extended treatment of — or contribution towards fuller understanding of — what Jean Gebser means by the “disintegration” of the consciousness and personality structure of modern man, ie, the “perspectival” or “mental-rational consciousness structure”.
Smith’s “Invisible Hand” and the Tribal Genius
I woke up this morning thinking about neo-liberal economics, Jean Gebser, Adam Smith and his “Invisible Hand”, and how this metaphor (or simile) of the “Invisible Hand” morphed into “mechanism” in the term “market mechanism” — and, in those terms, whether in the form of “Invisible Hand” or “mechanism” (Mumford’s “Megamachine”), we aren’t dealing with a superstition masquerading as “science” or ideology.
There is, actually, an ancient antecedent and precursor to this benevolent “invisible hand” — it is the tribal “genius” (“genie”), or tutelary deity. And this relationship between Smith’s “invisible hand” and the tribal “genius” reveals something very significant about Jean Gebser’s philosophy of “consciousness structures” as well.
The Chrysalis 