Existential intelligence is the capacity, proposed by the psychologist Howard Gardner, to locate ourselves in relation to the biggest questions: the cosmos, the meaning of life and death, and where we stand in the whole. Gardner held back from adding it to his list and saw it as distinctively human. Therapeutic Shamanism sees it differently: the other Peoples, it holds, already understand the real question, which is how to live, and it is modern humans who are most lost.
What did Howard Gardner mean by existential intelligence? #
The capacity “to locate oneself with respect to the furthest reaches of the cosmos”, and to such features of the human condition as the significance of life, the meaning of death and the fate of the world, along with profound experiences such as love or total absorption in a work of art. Gardner stresses that it is not about reaching any final truth. It is a potential to engage with ultimate questions, which every known culture has valued, through religious, mystical or philosophical systems, and in modern times through art, philosophy and science too.1
He thought explicit concern with these questions probably came to the fore in the Stone Age, most of which humans spent as hunter-gatherers, and that much early art, dance, myth and drama dealt with cosmic themes. He saw myths and drama as implicit explorations of the existential, with direct, spelt-out accounts arriving only later, with formal religion and systematic philosophy. He also suggested that such questions may have arisen partly as a response to pain, helping people bear it.2 See What are the different kinds of intelligence, and how has the list grown?
Why did Gardner not add it to his list? #
He found the case for it strong, and still held back. Existential intelligence “scores reasonably well” against his eight tests, and he saw it as the most clearly mental strand of spirituality, which is why he preferred it to a broader spiritual intelligence. But there is little evidence of particular brain regions dealing with these questions, beyond some suggestive findings from people with temporal-lobe epilepsy, and the psychological evidence is sparse. He found it perplexing enough, and far enough from the other intelligences, to call for caution, and settled for joking about “8½ intelligences”.3
Is existential intelligence uniquely human? #
Gardner thought so. Like language, he wrote, it is a distinctive human trait that separates us from other species.4 Therapeutic Shamanism disagrees, and it starts by separating two things that tend to be lumped together.
One is the ability to see broad sweeps of history and to think in terms of generations. Most modern people are not especially good at this, and other animals clearly can do it. Among African elephants, older matriarchs carry social knowledge that their family groups rely on; researchers have found that families led by older matriarchs are better at telling the calls of familiar elephants from those of strangers.5 When bighorn sheep and moose were moved to new landscapes, they took decades to learn to migrate again, which suggests that migration routes are knowledge handed down from one generation to the next.6
The other is the great questions, such as what the meaning of life is, or why the universe exists. Here, too, shamanic experience points the other way. Journeying into other beings, getting over being human and experiencing them from the inside, suggests that animals, plants and even the Stone People, waterfalls and mountains understand these things perfectly well. What they understand is that “What is the meaning of life?” is an abstract question with no answer, and that the real question is how to live and what will give life meaning, which they all live out. They do not fret about it, not because they cannot grasp it but because they do. Humans, by contrast, tend to get lost in our heads, inventing questions and then answers. From an animist perspective, modern humans may be the least existentially intelligent beings on the planet. See What is the myth of human supremacy?
So what is the meaning of life? #
In Therapeutic Shamanism, the other Peoples already know it. The meaning of life, in this view, is “to be what Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this intended you to be”, and rocks, trees and cats know that exactly. When we ask what the meaning of life is, we are really asking for a story to live by, and the real question is how to live our lives. What makes humans unique is not that we are better than the other Peoples, but that we forget how we are meant to live. We forget the Story of Human given to us by Mother Earth and invent stories of our own instead. Some are good ones, close to the stories our hunter-gatherer ancestors knew, which kept them from losing their way; others are just plain terrible.7
Seen this way, existential intelligence is less about how big a question a person can ask than how well they live the answer. See What does rewilding Soul mean and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
What has existential intelligence to do with shamans? #
Much, if it includes the ability to step back and see the whole. The shaman has always been someone who sees differently, someone who can see past consensus reality, the constructed reality of a society’s stories, myths, conventions and traditions. Standing somewhat outside normal society, the shaman can see why things have gone wrong in a community and what needs to be done to put them right, and so acts as its knowledge and wisdom keeper.8 That is the capacity to see where we stand in relation to the whole, turned on a culture’s own stories. See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
