Michael T. Caley is a Taoist in the Moment and he plays Taijiquan, Qigong
and Liuhebafa. He has been a developer and provider of science education
outreach programs for the past decade. His Trumpeter collection begins with
Vol. 1, No 1.
Currently an Emeritus Professor at the University of Alberta, Daiyo Sawada has spent the last few years in the US serving as an evaluation consultant for projects funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at reforming science, mathematics and technology education.
“. . . it is hard, very hard indeed, for an individual to change his behavior and seek a more sane and less destructive personal ecology (it means changing many things, including the work that you do, the way that you live and the things that you believe); it is harder still to convince large numbers of people to consider the consequences of their total behavior and modify this behavior so as to alleviate its destructive results.” Daniel Kozlovsky1
“We need to fashion a new philosophy consistent with the constraints of the Age of Ecology.”2
Gnostic Christian, Taoist, Buddhist, Sufi, Wiccan and traditional Amerindian epistemologies are only a few exciting basic philosophies that are suitable for an ecological age. Many, many individuals are even now oriented to ecologically benign ways of living.
Drengson echoes a similar statement by Kozlovsky: “. . . the present culture cannot relate nondestructively to the natural environment; it does not provide very many acceptable personal environments or nondestructive personal relationships, and it has as its philosophical foundation ideas and principles that are so inconsistent with what we know of biology, so superstitious, so wretchedly ignorant and prescientific as to be utterly ridiculous.”3 The need that Drengson identifies is not a new one. However, it is even more urgent now because we seem to be rapidly reaching the limits of the biosphere to accommodate destructive interactions with humans.
Our interest is not so much in the “need to fashion a new philosophy consistent with the constraints of an Age of Ecology”, but with what we believe is the more pressing problem of bringing about change toward such philosophies even as they are emerging within evolving world views. As Kozlovsky puts it, this will necessitate basic changes in the work that we do and in how we assign importance to it, in the way that we live and allow others to live and in the things to which we hold so tenaciously. We perceive the need for basic changes in and to both ontological and epistemological being. In this paper we present a way in which such change may be understood, enacted and sustained.
There is a voluminous literature on change and how to make it come about, whether in society at large, in the workplace, in the home, or for the individual. Much of this literature focuses on concepts such as change agents, institutional structure, the flow of authority, fluidity of communication, source of initiative, and so on. While acknowledging the existence of this work, we wish to explore another way. Indeed, we surmise that much of the inertia of current thinking about change is precisely the philosophy within which such thinking occurs. It is a philosophy quite different from that for which Drengson calls.
We frame our point of departure by specifying two search strategies: First, we look for a way of understanding current philosophies in relation to how we bring forth the world; second, we look for a way of understanding creativity as a source of transformation within and across philosophies. In both cases, our search would be confined to work that is congruent with the constraints of the deep ecology movement. Our intent is to generate an interactive framework within which transformation can be understood as a manifestation of creativity within and across philosophies.
Our search for ways of understanding current philosophies in relation to how we bring forth the world has led to a close reading of the work of the Japanese systems philosopher Magoroh Maruyama. Our search for a way of understanding creativity has led us to work of Morris Berman, philosopher of science. What is encouraging for us in the work of both men is that they themselves present their major theses within the framework of typologies. It is therefore convenient, particularly in a short paper, to present the gist of their thinking in typological form. Much more important, however, is the fact that these typologies can themselves be used to generate a formal way of framing an interactive integration of philosophy with creativity such that transformation within and across philosophies can be specified and enacted. This transformation may also be anticipated as movement within and across categories in a jointly interactive second order typology that emerges from the interaction.
In the remainder of this paper we briefly present:
In discussing Maruyama’s work, we take his use of the term “epistemologies” as equivalent to our use of the term “philosophies”. Further, he uses the term “Mindscapes” to refer to his typology of epistemologies. This charming term suggests the metaphor of “landscapes of the mind” and “travel across and within landscapes of the mind” and therefore provides a ready vocabulary for transformation. We use his vocabulary in preference to the terms used earlier in this paper.
As a systems philosopher, Maruyama’s basic work is perhaps best expressed in a 1980 publication “Mindscapes and Science Theories”, in which he argued for the explication of a much more comprehensive and anthropologically based understanding of the epistemologies that researchers bring to their work and which imbues their work in hidden and unsuspecting ways. His paper presented four Mindscapes types, not as a comprehensive set of categories, but as indicators pointing to the range of differing epistemologies that he had personally encountered in over 30 years of research. For a summary of his canonical work see Caley & Sawada (1994).4
Mindscapes types are fundamentally different in epistemological terms. That which is consistent within a particular mindscape may be inconsistent across mindscapes. By reporting evidence from business and government, he makes the case that mindscapes are highly resistant to change. For example, business and government leaders often make decisions “from the gut” and use “logical arguments” a posteriori to support the initial position. They are quite resistant to information that contradicts their “gut” feeling. In 1993, for example, the governments of Canada and Alberta deliberately ignored the primary recommendations of the Environmental Review Panel to decommission the Old Man River Dam in Alberta. Instead, they chose to focus on the secondary recommendation to “minimize” environmental impacts.
An extremely brief description of Maruyama’s Typology of Mindscapes is presented in Table 1. For a more comprehensive understanding of Maruyama’s work see Caley & Sawada (1994).
Berman (1989)5 discovered the basis for his typology in work by Freud on creativity. He recognized that the basic typology had the potential to help us understand aspects of creativity trans-culturally. Table is Berman’s synopsis, slightly expanded by the authors, of his modified version of Freud’s typology. The Table is quite brief, however, we believe that the reader will be able to follow Berman’s reasoning. The reader must be able to accept the basic premise that creativity is in some fundamental sense both effected and affected by the degree of sensual repression inflicted by parents during infancy. This repression can be perceived as a continuum from essentially complete repression to almost no repression. The degree of repression is a function of both social mores and parental personal mores within the social mores.
With respect to the typology, Berman makes the following comments about each category:
The three types are descriptive of many of the kinds of creativity that are manifest in Western and perhaps all cultures. Berman describes Type III (non-neurotic) as an “empty category” in Western culture except for Pre-Renaissance and children’s art which are not “compulsive or conflict ridden.” Our comment here is that Type III is empty only within the context of modern Western epistemologies and that, within these, individuals and small groups have been and are outside this tradition. It is evident that Type III, in other cultures, is not only not empty but also may be the predominant category.
Type II creativity describes those characteristics which we usually ascribe to those persons who are seen to be creative giants in their fields. However, we all recognize that, in typical Western societies, these people are often extremely compulsive, egocentric, and, at worst, self-destructive. So the creative geniuses of Western cultures since the Renaissance have been and are the most neurotic. We tend to associate genius and neurotic behaviour, and often excuse the latter in favour of the former. There is a subtle, or not so subtle, irony that often those whom we most admire, call genius and hold up as role models are often the most neurotic. (Madonna, Magic Johnson, Gaugin and Michael Jackson come immediately to mind.) When this compulsion is directed towards art, science, commerce, politics and other socially acceptable pursuits we accept and even applaud the bizarre behaviour that often accompanies it.
On the other hand, if the outlet of creativity becomes destructive, we label it neurotic. This can lead to social approbation, incarceration, and even death (e.g. Michael Millikan, Freddie Prinz, etc). In many cultures, especially traditional ones, Type II individuals would be considered insane or, at least, socially undesirable (i.e. traditional Amerindian, Maori, Inuit).
There is evidence that Type III is not an “empty category.” Berman notes that Pre-Renaissance western art and music belongs in this category as well as much Eastern art and, we think, most traditional folk art. Other aspects of Eastern culture, specifically the Japanese concept of Shibusa,6 belongs in this category as well.7 Note, that in order to fill the empty category, we are forced to look outside our own culture or at least at the fringes of our society. (e.g. communes, spiritual centres, alternate-lifestyle centres, fictional literature and comic strips).
There is a sense in which being creative is its own transformation. To be continually involved in the creative act is to be continually creating and renewing both the world and one’s place in it. And yet to be creative in an H or I Mindscape is quite different from being creative in an S or G Mindscape. For example, a creative H Mindscape would likely produce new products and technologies and interpret their worth strictly within the hierarchy of present social systems (little or no recursive thinking). In contrast, a creative S Mindscape will experience the creative process as itself a significant product and would be sensitive to the effect such engagement would have on the quality of being creative (highly recursive thinking).
Because the creative process is different in different Mindscapes, we feel it worthwhile to explore the different varieties of creativity by generating a matrix using Maruyama’s and Berman’s typologies as the axes. When we developed the matrix and began to fill in the cells using the information from the typology of each author (Maruyama and Berman), we were surprised by four outcomes that emerged in the process.
1. It became immediately apparent that certain cells seemed to be empty. Thus H x TIII may not be possible since its defining components, from each typology, appear to be mutually incompatible. It seems to be impossible to have an H mindscape centred upon a rigidly hierarchical concept of the world and simultaneously entertain a Type III creativity based upon a non-repressive sensuality.
2. As we examined the contents of each cell, particular famous people, real and fictional, came to mind. For instance, I x TIII could be typified by the fictional character Rambo and G x TllI may be characterized by the Laozi (Lao Tse). These people are social icons. Each icon carries much more information than the original descriptive text and makes the information in each cell more transparent. There is an empathy with real or fictional characters that is missing from a simple statement about the interaction of components.
3. Once the “iconization of the cells” became apparent, we also noticed that, as we completed the matrix, there was a distinct flow from the upper left to the lower right, with respect to the development of sensitivity to things, persons and place. This flow is much more obvious when the icons replace descriptive statements about the nature of each cell. It seemed to us that change toward ecologically supportive epistemologies could be understood as a journey across the matrix moving toward the bottom right corner. Given that everyone who has developed an environmentally supportive epistemology has made their way through some or all of the conceptual stances exemplified by these icons, we began to wonder about ways of helping those who oppose environmental reform to catch the flow.
We have not tried to be exhaustive in completing the cells since each reader will have personal social icons that evoke even stronger personal meaning. Also, the reader may disagree with our placement of icons. The matrix is, after all, only a mechanism for generating transformation. For example, we have deliberately chosen and shown several persons straddling the boundaries between cells. This was done to demonstrate that the boundaries are merely convenient thought categories and nothing more. In effect, we were “playing with the rules”. More significantly, the straddling also indicates movement, movement toward another cell, and this sort of movement itself constitutes transformation in personal epistemological space. It is specifically this kind of movement, particularly movement toward G XT III that is central to the intent of this paper. Such movement is itself an enaction of Type III creativity.
We urge readers to reconstruct our matrix using their own icons. Make the matrix a useful working tool, not just an interesting exercise in philosophy! We believe that this exercise may be explicitly useful to those who are engaged in confrontational situations involving ecologically sensitive issues. (i.e. logging of old growth forests, pulp mill construction, preservation of endangered species habitat, recycling programs, etc.). Perhaps if the protagonists are placed within the matrix, ways of influencing their epistemological transformation may become more apparent.
How can each person begin a journey along the diagonal path towards G x III, which represents what is best known as enlightenment? Many paths have been determined and validated for such attainment, but all are known to be long, arduous, and self-selected (Zen, Taoism, and Buddhism). Remembering Kozlovsky’s statements, it is not reasonable to expect very many people to elect to take these paths.
We now will address the question posed at the beginning of this paper. We take the concept of sustainable development as an example to show this movement.
. x TI sustainable development is not in this reality
. x TII sustainable development is a facade used to assist in the accumulation of personal wealth and power. Under social pressure sustainable development is accepted but when entered on the balance sheet is listed as a liability. Sustainability is the concept of maintaining what you have; there is no thought of change, except what is forced by external events. Big players establish the rules; small players play within them.
. x TII in this cell, two types of sustainability emerge; sustainable development and sustainable environment. Advocates of the former have accepted explicitly or implicitly the perpetuation of current economic systems; advocates of the latter have realized that current systems are incompatible with sustainable environment. Both recognize the need for change in habits or behaviour, but offer quite different courses of action with different, often conflicting, outcomes.
. x TIII this is the way of being one with the world so that sustainability is simply actionless action (Caley & Sawada, 1990). In Kozlovsky’s (p. 11) words, “We know today that the evolutionary process has no overriding scheme, no final goal. The living world is not going anywhere.” We invite readers to articulate more precisely how deep ecology emerges in this space.
The matrix, by generating embodiments of many different world views, demonstrates that movement through contrasting epistemologies is possible. It also suggests impediments to such movement (i.e., the contradictory elements in H x TIII). We invite readers to explore the matrix in order to create new ways for bringing individuals to deep ecology and to resolving conflicts within ecosophy and other critical areas.
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps To An Ecology of Mind. Ballantine, New York
Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bantam Books, New York.
Berman, Morris. 1989. Coming to Our Senses. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Caley, M. T. and D. Sawada 1990. “Shibusa: An Aesthetic Approach to Ecosophical Education” The Trumpeter Vol. 7 No. 3 :107-109
Caley, M.T. and D. Sawada 1994. Mindscapes: The Epistemologies of Magoroh Maruyama. Gordon & Breach, N.Y.
Drengson, Alan R. 1989. Editorial: “Why environmental ethics is not enough” The Trumpeter Vol. No.4: 121-122.
Hadamard, J. 1945. The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Sciences. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Kozlovsky, Daniel G. 1974. An Ecological and Evolutionary Ethic. Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey.
Maruyama, M. 1980. “Mindscapes and Science Theories” Current Anthropology 21: 589–599.
Yanagi, S. 1972. The Unknown Craftsman. Kodansha, Tokyo
1. Kozlovsky, Daniel G. 1974. An Ecological and Evolutionary Ethic, p. ix, Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey.
2. Drengson, Alan R. 1989. Editorial: “Why environmental ethics is not enough” The Trumpeter Vol. 6 No.4: 121–122.
3. Kozlovsky, Daniel G. 1974. An Ecological and Evolutionary Ethic, p. ix, Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey.
4. Caley, M.T. and D. Sawada 1994. Mindscapes: The Epistemologies of Magoroh Maruyama. Gordon & Breach, N.Y.
5. Berman, Morris. 1989. Coming to Our Senses. Simon. & Schuster, New York.
6. Yanagi, S. 1972. The Unknown Craftsman. Kodansha, Tokyo
7. Caley, M. T. and D. Sawada 1990. “Shibusa: An Aesthetic Approach to Ecosophical Education” The Trumpeter Vol. 7 No. 3 :107-109
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