Presented at the 2024 inaugural philosophy conference at UMass, Boston.

In his book, Tsawalk Principles, Eugene Richard Atleo explores indigenous American ways of knowing the world. In illustrations of their stories, vision quests, and land rituals, he finds a particular assumption underlying all Tsawalk practices. He writes, 

“…the process of making a meaningful connection between heaven and earth is the real challenge, not the connection itself. The connection, the relationship that is assumed to be inherent in the nature of existence, is not the challenge… [t]he only real challenge is to discover what kind of relationship works.” (Atleo, 120, emphasis my own)

The world he describes is one where connection is assumed. All beings partake in existence together. Knowledge is the process of sifting through the swirling relationships between climate and culture, landscape and ecology to uncover and preserve the natural connections that support life. Establishing meaningful connection becomes the challenge, finding ways of living that integrate the human into the world, making that world one where we belong. Relationships are given spiritual significance, viewed as the birthplace of individuals. It might then come of little surprise that, according to indigenous scholar Vine Deloria Jr., “[t]he vast majority of Indian tribal religions…have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature”^[1]. Memories seem to “accrue in space”, becoming alive and present now while one is within them. Orienting oneself towards connection allows one to clearly see connections that may not at first seem present but emerge in live significance when we take relation in stride as a constitutive factor of our world.

Dominant tendencies in western thought, such as the subject/object dualism, split through this image. The subject, the self-validating I, (in the sense of the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”), is separate from the world it inhabits, relying only on itself to exist. The Subject takes priority in a world based on a fundamental split. Dualism sets the human apart from the world, casting the object as an entity merely receptive to the subject’s will. Augustin Berque calls the result of this split “Acosmia”, the refusal of humanity to consider itself the part of a larger cosmic ecology.^[2] Through its conceptual separation, the human subject shares no being with the places it inhabits and thus is blind to any influence place and locality might bear on our activities that does not rationally present itself.

My goal in this paper is to show that dualistic thought results from a misunderstanding of reality as disjunctive rather than relational. In suggesting that reality is relational, I hope to make possible the consideration of knowledge systems whose fundamentally local and adaptive nature make them allergic to universalism and inseparable from their relationship to local environment. Ultimately, I wish to open up the isolated epistemologist to the knowing drawn from our relationship to the space of nature, and perhaps even the spiritual significances of places that seem obvious to non-western groups whose thought is not mired in dualism. I invite us all to become engulfed into the the ambience of our spaces.

I argue that universal – or abstract – knowledge ignores the relationship knowledge has to place because universal knowledge is not relational. We must recognize that knowledge is produced through a reciprocal relationship between humans and our environments, not from the subject in isolation considering the principles of reason. Only when the subject is believed to be the independent producer of knowledge can we take universal knowledge to be unproblematic. To make my case, I will first use Watsuji Tetsuo’s Climate and Culture to show that reality is not a dualism between Subject and Object through an analysis of the experience of cold. Next, I will demonstrate how Augustin Berque’s concept of trajection weaves human beings and spaces together such that our claims to knowledge arrive only through the site of our relation to nature. Finally, using Vine Deloria Jr.’s analysis of temporal versus spatial knowledge, I will show how constructing universal knowledge ignores the co-conditioning relationship between the epistemologist and place, removing knowledge from its native context by over-emphasizing temporal narratives. Human affairs, ultimately, are tied up in space, the local relations to the space of nature that knowledge – as well as human existence – is always derived through. The suggestion of universal knowledge deems any sense of fundamental relationality impossible, denying the relationship knowledge has to our environments – that human life has to local space. 

Watsuji attempts to undo a particular understanding of nature as something distinct from human life. I consider this perspective dualism, the notion that, in order to understand nature, we must grasp it in-itself, discovering what it isindependent of human life. In the dualistic understanding of nature, nature is everything that is not cultural – everything that is not a product of human life. Conversely, culture is everything that is not natural. Employing the scientific method in an attempt to analyze nature involves the “subtraction” the human perspective from the equation. The human, dualistically conceived, is one distinct pole of a reality torn between Subject and Object. Humans, from this perspective, are relieved of our burden to consider the influence that places, relegated to the contingency of the Object, bear on us. If we consider the experience of cold, still from the perspective of dualism, we find it has two parts: the subjective, inner sensation of cold and the objective cold air outside of us.^[3] Dualism assumes, according to Watsuji, 

“that the “cold” and “we” exist as separate and independent entities in such a manner that only when the cold presses upon us from outside is there created an “intentional” or directional relationship by which “we feel the cold“ (Watsuji, 2)

We begin, in dualism, fundamentally split from our environments, relating to them only through our deliberate activity. 

Watsuji argues, however, that dualism is a mistake. He argues that the Subject and the Object – the sensation of cold and the cold air, are never present separately. Rather the two always co-arise, co-conditioned by and dependent on their relationship to each other. As soon as we become aware of ourselves, we also become aware of the cold; as soon as we become aware of the cold, we also become aware of ourselves. Watsuji writes that,

“in feeling the cold, we discover ourselves in the cold itself… The instant that the cold is discovered, we are already outside in the cold. Therefore, the basic essence of what is “present outside” is not a thing or object such as the cold, but we ourselves” (Watsuji, 4).

We find ourselves always within in the cold – within climate, within nature. We cannot discover ourselves apart from the cold air, apart from some environment. We discover too that we are dependent on the cold air to know ourselves, perceiving our sense of cold only through its already affecting us. We do not find the cold air outside of us; rather, when we look to the cold air, we discover ourselves fundamentally related to it – within it – dependent on it. Subject and Object – the subjective sensation of cold and the objective cold air –, then, always co-arise. They are present only in relation, and that they are first related makes it possible for us to grasp them as separate at all. Thus, Subject and Object are mere abstractions from an underlying relationship, depending on one another to exist apart. Nature in the objective sense – as independent from the human – is also an abstraction. We always discover ourselves within and apart of some natural environment, never discovering a natural environment distinct from us.

If the subject and object cannot be known independent of one another, and my sensation and environment co-arise and correspond, the dualistic gap separating us from our environments now seems a mistake. We must recognize some underlying relation as the condition of possibility for our apprehension of subject and object as distinct at all. If subject and object are only abstractions from some prior relational condition, it quickly becomes clear that we can no longer utilize the language of “Subject” and “Object” because these words leave us chained to a fictitious split. Augustin Berque uses the term “trajection” to refer to the way that, due to our fundamental relatedness to our environments, we share and partake in each other’s being. He defines trajection as the “co-creative to-and-fro between the two theoretical poles of dualism” – co-creative in the sense that the two define and construct one another in such a way that their distinctness can only be an abstraction.^[4]

Humans and nature, Berque argues, are not distinct but rather interpolated into each other, both playing a part in the other’s existence. He writes that, for example, landscapes become what they are through the site of relation between human beings and the bare natural environment. Independent of human senses, actions, thoughts, and words, – our predicative abilities – a landscape is actually nothing like a landscape at all. Instead, through our relation to it, we give the space of nature life, intwining it with human significance.^[5] Environments invite us into them, present as beautiful, as dangerous, or as containing possibilities for human creation and organization. Feeling the cold always invites us out of ourselves, causing us to reach for warmer clothes or snuggle up with loved ones. The features of our environments allow us to construct villas, roads, and irrigation systems within the space of nature. Through our responses to the space around us, we discover not only our fundamental embeddedness in these environments, but the completeness of our being, finding in our relation to them our capacities for movement, creation, and passion that make us who we are. Trajectively – in a co-creative “to-and-fro” – our environments become horizons of possibility within which the human flourishes, and the human, through its modification and reconceptualization of space, expands this horizon by elaborating nature into culture, modifying the spaces that influence us.

All human activity bears some reference to nature, thought of now never an object distinct from us but intimately partaking in our being. Human technological developments, such as acclimatized roofs to deal with snow or lack thereof, and air conditioning, are phrases in an ongoing conversation between humans and nature, each development a response to some environmental condition or possibility. Knowledge, then, also develops through our engagement with the space of our environments, accumulating in these spaces as adaptations. The technologies that exist in our environments, then, have reference not only to nature’s influence but also to human knowledge – our conceptual designs – that we intertwine within them.

The intertwining of human life – our knowledge, significances, and constructions – with the space of our environments becomes, for Berque, a milieu,^[6] the tapestry that trajection weaves of human significances and environment. A landscape, as described above, is one result of a milieu because it consists not only of climate and soil, flora and fauna, but human knowledge – specific practices, habits, and constructions adapted for our engagement with it. Knowledge, then, is an adaptation – one response in an ongoing conversation with a particular space – rather than an eternal truth devoid of particularity. If knowledge is tied to its milieu, its relational tapestry, then separating that knowledge from the space of its environment – the local ecology it is adapted to – results from a misunderstanding of what knowledge is. The transplantation of knowledge from one local milieu to another may be, at best, harmless. However, at worst, it may distort the precarious relational balance of the epistemic ecology in which it has been placed.

Vine Deloria Jr. explores the problems of transplanting knowledge across local milieus, problematizing the western epistemic priority given to time as opposed to space. He argues that universal knowledge – knowledge applicable across contexts –is produced only by disregarding its spatiality in favor of its temporality. He argues that westerners look to history to find “a thesis by which they can validate their ideas” and discover the truth of their present condition.^[7]Ideological and national identities, for example, gain meaning from their historical lineages or traditions, not the places they originate, accumulating wisdom through temporal accumulation and not local relationships.^[8] Knowledge, many westerners assume, accumulates through history, with traditions that derive and maintain knowledge from a shared history rather than a shared environment. Because space is thought to bear no weight in knowledge or identity, the transplantation of knowledge across various local environments is par for the course. In other words, historical narratives are for westerners the source of knowledge guiding the present, whereas the local places where they developed are seen as insignificant. 

It is no surprise, then, that Berque too sees the western philosophical tradition as chronically disregarding place when it comes to epistemology. He writes, 

“Correlatively, in his Physics, book IV, Aristotle produces a definition of place which severs any identitarian link between the thing (the logical subject in question) and its place because the thing is mobile while the place is not.” (Berque, 17)

Aristotle’s “place” is defined solely by those who inhabit it. Place is a contingent, mutable factor in the subject’s life, defined wholly by the subject’s orientation within it. For Berque, perspectives such as Aristotle’s are symptomatic of a misunderstanding that knowledge can arise apart from space, placing too much weight on the subjective pole of dualism. Such perspectives leave no room for a reciprocal relationship between person and place, only a place subsumed by human designs. As place is understood only with reference to the subject’s location within it, knowledge can come only from the subject rather than as an adaptation to the relation between subject and object. Such a misunderstanding leads to the priority of historical narratives, such as the political history of liberalism or the legacy of Aristotle, as valid sources of knowledge over the particularly developed practices of attending to place.

The tendency to separate knowledge from place enables the promulgation of so called “universal” truths, Deloria argues, as in the case of Christianity. Christianity developed in a particular location, conditioned by specific ecological relationships local to its place of origin, but its teachings transcend the spatial limits that conditioned its birth. Christian knowledge, deriving from divine revelation, purports to be universal, meaning it is “distilled from its original cultural context”, whereby the revelation becomes “an abstract principle that is applicable to all peoples in different places and at different times”.^[9] In this way, such knowledge is “universal”, transcending locality and applicable everywhere.

By ignoring the relational nature of reality, the western universalist approach to epistemology forecloses connection and leaves knowledge without adaptation to particular contexts. Deloria argues that the abstraction of knowledge from environment leaves it “unsuitable for transmission to other societies without doing severe damage to both the message of revelation and the society which receives it”.^[10] The most obvious example of such transmission is colonialism, where western ideas of race were violently imposed upon non-Europeans, leading directly to their enslavement and genocide.^[11] Such ideas were transplanted into localities where they did not belong, dominating them, functioning as a kind of epistemic invasive species. Ultimately, Deloria’s argument parallels Berque’s in that knowledge is fundamentally related to spaces, born out of a relationship to a particular environment and, when transplanted, it may damage the livelihoods of other epistemic ecologies within different milieus. 

The non-western sources I’ve explored, in stark contrast to western universalism, take relation in stride. Deloria writes that “the structure of [indigenous peoples’] religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from their relationships…”.^[12] For this reason, environmental context is the primary source of knowledge for indigenous communities. Rather than being universally applicable, indigenous ways of knowing saw revelation “as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places”.^[13] Local knowledge is not separated from environments, but rather allowed to flourish within them. As such, the particular relationbetween individuals and their environment (their relationships to particular landscapes, plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, etc.) is the source of knowledge, and this knowledge is permitted to change as these relationships change. There is no dualistic split between humans and the environment that allows for the abstraction of “universal” knowledge from context. There is only an ongoing, trajective conversation whose discoveries bear direct reference to the localities that birthed them. Thus, because of the relational production of knowledge, knowledge must be understood as just one part of our milieu that quickly becomes dysfunctional outside of its complimentary relationship to its environmental substratum. The abstraction of knowledge from the milieu in the construction of universal knowledge strips that knowledge of its significance and utility to its native locale. Therefore, the “place” is as important as the “person” in epistemological practices.

The subjective and objective poles of dualism must not merely be “united”. Instead, we must realize that they were never separate to begin with, that any sense of separation is an abstraction from reality. Instead, relation is the constitutive condition of individuals at all. Universal knowledge, as well, is only an abstraction, a pipe dream of the modern western project severed from relation. If epistemology is to flourish, it must consider a broad scope of relation, remaining open to our connections to space.

Bibliography

• Berque, Augustin. Poetics of the Earth, translated by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. New York: Routledge, 2019.
• Deloria Jr., Vine. God Is Red. New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1973.
• Watsuji, Tetsuo. A Climate: A Philosophical Study, translated by Geoffrey Bownas, Japan: National Printing Bureau, 1961.

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^[1] Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, (New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1973), 66.

^[2] Augustin Berque, Poetics of the Earth: Natural History and Human History, translated by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (New York: Routledge), 48.

^[3] Tetsuo Watsuji, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, translated by Geoffrey Bownas, (Japan: Printing Bureau, 1961), 2.

^[4] Berque, Poetics of the Earth, 48.

^[5] Ibid., 45.

^[6] Berque, Poetics of the Earth, 50.

^[7] Deloria, God Is Red, 61.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid., 65.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Maria Lugones, in her essay “The Colonality of Gender”, explores how European concepts of gender in intersection with race were applied universally to colonized peoples and destroyed previously flourishing ways of life.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Ibid., 66.