Edmund Husserl (1859 to 1938) was a German philosopher, the founder of phenomenology, the careful description of experience as it is actually lived. In his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences (1936), he warned that modern science, from Galileo on, had mistaken its mathematical picture of nature for nature itself and forgotten the lived world, the ‘lifeworld’, leaving a world pictured as dead matter in motion. Therapeutic Shamanism holds the opposite, that everything is alive and conscious, and dates the loss of that experience far earlier, to the beginnings of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this.
Who was Edmund Husserl? #
He was born in 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia, then in the Austrian Empire and now in the Czech Republic. He taught at Halle, then at Göttingen from 1901, and from 1916 held the chair of philosophy at Freiburg, where Martin Heidegger was his assistant and, on his retirement in 1928, his successor. His Logical Investigations (1900 to 1901) launched phenomenology; Ideas I followed in 1913.1
He was of Jewish descent, though he had become a Protestant in 1886. Under the Nazis he was barred from teaching and publishing and lost his German citizenship. He died in Freiburg in 1938. His unpublished manuscripts, some forty-five thousand pages, were smuggled out of Germany by Hermann Leo Van Breda and are kept at the Husserl Archives in Leuven.2
What is phenomenology? #
A way of doing philosophy by describing what actually appears in experience, before theory has been laid over it. Its slogan was “to the things themselves”. Husserl’s main tool was the epoché, or bracketing, which means setting aside for a while our everyday, unquestioned belief that the world simply exists out there, not to deny the world, but so that we can look closely at how it is given to us, how things show up in experience at all.3
Phenomenology became one of the great currents of twentieth-century thought. Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur all began from it, and Ricoeur translated Husserl’s Ideas as a prisoner of war.4 See Who was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and what has the body to do with knowing?
What is the lifeworld? #
The everyday world we actually live in and take for granted: the world of sights, sounds and smells, of tools, homes, landscapes and other people, full of practical meanings and shaped by history and culture.5 It comes first. Every science starts from it, and every scientist lives in it before and after their measurements.
Husserl’s Crisis, written in his last years and left unfinished, holds that the sciences had lost touch with this ground. In treating as true only what can be objectively measured, they could no longer say why any of it mattered. He asked whether the world and human life in it “truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established?”6
How, on this account, did the world come to be seen as dead matter? #
Through a step taken in the seventeenth century. Galileo held that the universe is written in the language of mathematics, and in his physics he treated only what can be measured, size, shape, weight and motion, as really belonging to things. Colour, taste, smell and sound became ‘secondary qualities’, merely subjective, existing only in the observer. Husserl’s point was that this began as a method, a brilliant way of calculating, and quietly became a claim about what is truly real, so that the mathematical picture came to stand in for the lived world it was drawn from.7
René Descartes then carried the step further. He pictured the universe as a giant machine of non-living matter in motion, and the human being as a thinking mind looking out at it.8 Once beauty, value and meaning were placed in the observer and not in the world, nature at its most basic level became, in David Fideler’s phrase, “disenchanted matter in motion”. See What does David Fideler mean by restoring the soul of the world? and What did Owen Barfield mean by original participation?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most directly in the claim that the world is alive. Everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious. Many Westerners divide things into the living and the non-living, the animate and the inanimate, and reserve consciousness for humans and perhaps a few ‘higher’ mammals; but things very different from us are still conscious, just in a different way.9 The dead matter of the mechanical picture is, on this view, a failure to recognise consciousness, not an absence of it. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Husserl’s forgotten lifeworld is also close to the teaching on the two halves of the brain. Modern, ‘civilised’ humans are strongly left-brain dominant and have almost entirely fallen into an experience of life as separateness. Hunter-gatherers seem to have held a sense of self and a sense of interconnectedness side by side, and that interconnectedness was not a belief but a real, vivid experience.10 The world reduced to measurable quantities is the world as the left brain sees it. See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On when the world began to die for us. For Husserl, the forgetting of the lifeworld began with Galileo and the science of early modern Europe. Therapeutic Shamanism places the break from animism much earlier. It begins with domestication and the move to agriculture in the Neolithic, when, instead of being part of the land and sharing it with our non-human kin, we decided that we owned the land and would decide who lived on it, and lost our compassion and empathy for the non-human.11 It accelerates with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, the rise of city-state cultures from around 4000 BCE.12 Galileo and Descartes, on this view, gave a late philosophical form to a separation thousands of years old. See What is the Fall?
And on the remedy. Husserl’s answer to the crisis was a deeper philosophy of consciousness, still centred on the human knower. The shamanic answer is relationship, to experience directly, in journeys and in shapeshifting, that the Animal, Plant and Stone People are conscious kin, and to live accordingly.
Is the story of a disenchanted world disputed? #
Yes. The historian of religion Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), argues that attempts to banish magic and spirits from modern life largely failed, that the founders of the modern human sciences were often deeply involved in the spiritualist and occult revivals of their day, and that the story of a disenchanted modernity is itself a myth needing historical examination.13 Earlier writers such as David Fideler held that the machine picture did become the dominant way of seeing nature in the modern West, and that it sanctioned treating the world as an exploitable resource instead of a living community of which we are a part.14
Therapeutic Shamanism has something to say to both. Many people do, at some semi-conscious level, still experience their computers as temperamental, name their cars and feel the atmosphere of a room; the experience of a living world has been pushed down, not removed.15
