Reanimating Nature: The Integration of Science with Human Experience

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. ABSTRACTThis article describes the emergence of a new science based upon the empirically and intuitively perceived unity of an evolving nature in which all conscious beings partake. The author suggests that knowing is at once an acknowledgment of nature's unity and, at the same time, an active participation in the creation and shaping of reality. A discussion of the ways in which these principles provide the possibility for the unification of human experience and creativity follows.its starting point the unity and intelligibility of a world that is partly of our own making. This orientation has major implications for human action and creativity, as I shall demonstrate. ALIENATION AND THE DEMISE OF THE ORGANISMMany great civilizations, both past and present, have regarded the unity of nature simply as a fact of immediate experience that needs no special understanding. The history of Western science, however, is remarkable for its major preoccupation with separating and reducing this unity into ever smaller and smaller fragments. Alongside of that is our own progressive alienation from nature and from ourselves as natural beings, which really began the moment the human mind set itself apart as observer on a nature observed. From that vantage point, the drama of nature mysteriously unfolds, and we become unwitting sufferers of unknown fate.In the same way that the physical world was reduced to mechanisms and atoms, so within the biological world Darwin's theory reduced organisms to objects acted on by blind selective forces in a hostile environment, and Mendelian

Radiological Analysis of Human Hand in Terms of Artistic Anatomy

“…Tu ring's pa per has ins pi red a cur rent ge ne ra ti on of mat he ma ti cal mo de ling of spa ti al patterns in li ving or ga nism. 12 In his study "On Growth and For m", Thompson po in ted out how the Fi bo nac ci se qu en ce under li es many na tu ral forms such as the spi ra ling Na u ti lus shell, the ar ran ge ment of sca le rows on Nor way spru ce co nes, cel lu lar struc tu re, ar ran gements of le a ves and ani mal horns. Ac tu ally, Thomp son has de mons tra ted that the re is a law ful un derl ying mat he ma ti cal struc tu re to forms ba sed on the gol den sec ti on and Fi bo nac ci se qu en ce.…”

Systemic Intervention

“…In physics, quantum theory (e.g., Bohr, 1963;Bohm, 1980) has illuminated a relationship between the observed and the method of observation-the latter playing a fundamental role in constructing the former. 4 In biology, the theory of evolution has been revised to embrace the idea that organisms co-construct their world rather than passively adapt to it, resulting in the conclusion that or~anisms are inevitably a part of what they observe, not separate from I it [see Margulis and Sagan (1987), Lovelock (1988) and Ho (1989) for some general accounts]. Finally, in psychology, scientists have' argu~d that much of what human beings assume is factual is actually what is socially relevant within a particular discursive context (e.g., Middleton and Edwards, 1990;Gergen, 1991;Shotter, 1993;Harre and Gillett, 1994).…”