Episode 173: Relating to American Indian Philosophy (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 173 is something like what is wisdom? We read three articles from the 2004 collection American Indian Thought what Coyote and Thales Can Teach Us An Outline of Native American Epistemology by Brian Yazzie Burkhart. The second was Philosophy and Native Science by Gregory Cajete and the third was Language A Metaphysic of Non Discrete Non Binary Dualism by Anne Waters. We Also read Chapter 17 from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt, 1932. For more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer broadcasting from my flaming rainbow teepee in the moon where calves grow hair in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Seth: This is Seth Paskin facing south in Austin, Texas.

0:48 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a very square place.

0:53 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey wishing I picked the blue feather suit in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:59 Jim: And this is Jim Marunick from Nashville, Tennessee, via Buffalo, New York, where I'm currently sitting.

1:06 Mark: Welcome, Jim.

1:07 Jim: Glad to be here, Jim.

1:08 Mark: You had contacted me about something unrelated through our contact page, and somehow it came up that you had studied Native American philosophy, which I had heard a lecture on by Kathy Higgins, one of the UT people, some time ago, and had not really run across any other mention of it anywhere in any kind of academic context. So I was intrigued and I asked you to pick some readings. Why don't you give us a little bit of background of how you got into this and your story with it.

1:36 Jim: I got into American Indian philosophies even as a kid. You see those romantic pictures of natives in books and you see movies like Dances with Wolves. The university that I got my master's and my bachelor's at, there's a professor there, Thomas Norton Smith, his name's Listening Owl and is a Shawnee Nation. He's a professor there at one of the satellite campuses. And by the time I got to my master's program I was getting very much into a cross cultural comparative philosophy, in particular East Asian philosophy. And I started thinking back to when I was young and had an interest in American Indians.

I thought, well, surely there's something about that. And I just did some cursory research and found out there really isn't a lot. It's a really underrepresented branch in philosophy. Pretty soon after I got in the master's program, he put his book out Listening Owl. Did he's very much in the analytic tradition. He's a disciple of Nelson Goodman. My own thesis was on American Indian ontology and their metaphysics in general. And I've always been more process oriented anyway. And I was finding through all the literature that I could find that it's thoroughly process oriented.

And I know that people say there's a certain fad going on right now that everybody's, oh, process and continental and all this. But so much of the literature is. I mean, it's. It's hard to find something that says the opposite unless you want to get into interpretation of languages and stuff like that. But anyway, I did my thesis with a lot of good but small literature that there is, and that brought me here today.

3:24 Mark: Yes, we should add to our. That list of readings that I read. Probably the most helpful thing that we read was your master's thesis. Process Metaphysics in the Far West American Indian ontologies, as that kind of gave us a gateway into the articles, into Black Elk Speaks that you'd read. It was very hard to kind of get a handle on what might be seen as this primary source folk material. Even the secondary sources of stuff in the American Indian Reader especially the Cajete article was still very much like listening to, you know, a wise man spinning his doctrine rather than, you know, a philosopher laying out something that can be easily digested and evaluated.

4:02 Jim: I wanted to resist proffering my thesis only because there is a sensitivity for the traditionalists to non Natives speaking on behalf of the people's knowledge. And not only that, but for most Native nations, knowledge is a very sacred thing. It is something that's to be handled with the utmost respect and tact, which

4:34 Mark: we're known for here, obviously.

4:36 Jim: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Before I committed to doing the show, I had to reach out to Listening Owl to ask him, you know, what he thought about me doing the show and sharing the gift of knowledge. And he basically said, if it was me, I wouldn't do it. But he's a traditionalist in the most serious sense. I've been very careful and very respectful in all the research that I done so far. So I thought it would be okay.

5:08 Mark: Well, we appreciate it and I thought about this. Certainly we can't see us doing an episode on this. This has to be considered in part a political act, given the political history involved. But hopefully it'll work. That the way that we effectively show respect for somebody's thought is to actually take it seriously enough to try to give it the same treatment that we would give to anything else. So certainly respect can't just mean, oh, please grant us the wisdom. We will sit here quietly and listen to it. No, we have to. If we're diving into these things and they seem obscurantist or crazy.

Well, as long as we're not being dismissive. As long as we try to really describe in detail what we have the issue with. And of course, we're very upfront about the fact that apart from you, Jim, we are entirely beginners in this area. So all we've been exposed to are just what we could scramble together in the last few weeks. We kind of threw a lot of darts out there to see what would hit. You had recommended the two articles. Anne Waters was the editor of the book. And I think Seth, while we were discussing things, was like, we should do something by her.

And I found that article that you had referred to in your thesis. So we added that real cool article. Yeah, you had brought up Black Elk Speaks to us. Just because it's kind of the most read native wisdom book in the country since 1930. It's had many different editions. But then you had said initially, yeah, this is not philosophically rigorous enough. We should not really include this. And I kind of insisted, in fact, so I read the whole thing, I think, Seth, you read the whole thing, right?

6:39 Seth: I did.

6:39 Mark: I also found some. Since you had mentioned, and one of the articles had mentioned Coyote stories. So I looked up a few more of those to kind of get a better sense of. Since the main thing it seems like we have handed down to us in terms of primary sources, since it's an oral tradition, are these stories. So any account of this has to treat like, well, what were they doing in telling these educational stories? What techniques were they using? Are they giving literal accounts of the origin of the earth? Is the earth really is on the back of a turtle and crazy sounding stuff like this, or is there something more subtle going on?

So between all these things, hopefully we have some idea of at least the flavor or some entry points. But our goals for this discussion have to by necessity be pretty modest, pretending to treat of a whole tradition. But you said that the scholars scholarship in this area is very, very small, right?

7:30 Jim: It's small, it's expanding. But it's also done by people from so many areas of different disciplines. You know, there's guys with law degrees and may teach at law schools. And there's scientists, communications people, people that teach at religious schools. And so the writing tends to be less rigorous than us philosophers would like to see.

7:54 Mark: So I thought maybe we could go around, you know, we'll start with you, Jim, and give opening statements in terms of trying to lay out for the listeners what the main points of what we read were, what issues particularly interested us in either what we read or the act of trying to study this area, et cetera. Jim, do you want to start us off?

8:14 Jim: So I think what you see from all of the readings and the recurring themes, first and foremost is relationality. Everything is related. Going off of that, you can see how the second notable mark, I would say, walking the right road, everything relates back to living morally. But if everything's related, then any action you make obviously has moral implications because it affects everything else. So I would say that relationality is the overarching theme of native philosophies. And a lot of other things are a result of a fully interrelated world.

9:01 Seth: It's kind of a diversity of readings. It was an interesting set. I felt like there were a lot of potential philosophical themes that come out of thinking in terms of. As you mentioned, Jim, the idea that ethics precedes ontology brings me back to mind of our Levinas episode and Black Elk Speaks. Black Elk represented himself as having received a vision and a power that he felt he was unable to fulfill, or maybe he wasn't sure if he had fulfilled it. And so I started thinking about the status of prophetic knowledge versus deductive knowledge that we typically think of in the West.

And so it put me in mind of Spinoza, Anne Waters. Talk of gender fluidity and language brings back a number of different episodes where we've talked about either linguistics or the white privilege episode or what have you. So there seemed to be many themes that were teased out in the readings, and I think any one of them would be interesting to pursue. So as this conversation goes on, I'll be curious to see what strikes us as interesting and see where you end up.

10:13 Dylan: I had a similar experience that Seth just described. In reading it, I was constantly struck by the relation between the ethical dimension of the philosophy, that living rightly was of paramount importance. And that seemed to be the role of the stories that I read and then trying to extract an ontology either from the worldview as sketched out. It wasn't clear to me exactly how those two things are related, except insofar as that that's a perennial question in Western philosophy is do you get an ethics out of your ontology? Does your ontology imply an ethics, or is it super added on top of it?

And I also found myself thinking over and over again about what Jim calls process ontologies. And I found it quite interesting that a link was made over and over again to themes within Western philosophy. And so I did find myself seeing a bit of tension with the distinction between Western philosophy and Native American philosophy. Or same thing happens with Eastern philosophy, which is typically, there are themes that are. Or it becomes hard to talk about. Well, there being one lesson out of these things. You end up talking about there being predominant Western philosophy or something like that, and that ends up being typically being something political that is trying to say that something about the philosophy or the ontology leads to or undergirds some sort of political activity.

That seemed to be a theme that could be worth talking about as well.

11:51 Wes: So, yeah, just to add to what Dylan is saying there, what I took away from this is in addition to the ontological part and its implication for ethics, there's the epistemological part and its implication for ethics. So, especially in the Burkhart, it seems like the argument is that Native Americans emphasize a different way of knowing things, and that different way of knowing things has implications for how we live, how we comport ourselves in the world. So in addition to the principle of relatedness that Jim mentioned, this idea that we, as Burkhart puts it, we must never forget things around us and how we are related to those things, and keep in mind the simple things that are directly around us and our experience and so on.

Burkhart also mentions a number of other principles, including what he calls the questioning principle. The way he puts it is that how we act is not merely a result of causal interactions with the world. And this is on page 16, by the way. How we act is not really a response to stimuli. The world is not empty and meaningless, bearing only truth and cold facts. We participate in the meaning making of the world. There is no truth without meaning and value, and meaning and value arise in the intersection between us and all that is around us. And then later on he'll say things like facts, truth, meanings, even our existence are normative.

So this, we get this idea that normativity is built into things from the ground up, which gets at some of Dylan's concerns about the ontology and its implications. And I think it's helpful to lump the ontology and epistemology together, because it seems like the Native American way of knowing, according to Burkhart, is oriented more towards the fundamental normativity of the universe, which is sort of an ontological claim.

13:43 Mark: So we've read several different things over the years that have posited, usually in ancient Greece, that There was some time before we introduced all the conceptual mistakes that have given us our current set of philosophical problems. So why do we have this unbridgeable gap between mind and matter is because at some point we made this distinction and we're never able to bridge it again. And so we need to go back somehow to the life world. Some of these articles discuss this as being in Edmund Husserl. So the idea that all the abstractions, all the principles, the scientific method, all that stuff is parasitic upon, is not a fundamental description of the world.

Or at least we have to, in talking about it honestly, we have to acknowledge that it was created out of a pre scientific setup that was kind of cut into pieces by these new ways of conceptualizing things. And so the Native American viewpoint holds the promise of giving us a root that's quite a bit more historically recent into a potential view of the world that is not caught up in this way. And so that's where we get this talk of maybe things are fundamentally processed. But the most exciting part of that to me was the idea that Burkhart says this, that there really are no principles, even though he says, well, okay, we can talk about the principle of relatedness or something, but a principle is by necessity an abstraction.

And so, like, ethically, you're applying rules. We have to follow these rules. These are principles. Well, to think of them that way. We have made this critique in past episodes, like the Nietzsche episode, is to wrongly abstract from the sort of, you know, where do these principles come from? You know, they're human accretions. They're sort of the result of the wisdom of the ages built up over time and ultimately the insight of individuals. And so Burkhart would say, the ethical meaning is not a matter of we consult our rule book, we do a utilitarian calculation or something like that to determine what we should do.

It's something more immediate than that. So trying to figure out what that means, what ethics without principles amounts to. You know, you're always open to new things. And the other way that you would be without principles is there are no scientific theories about the world. There aren't these abstract models, maybe, that we then hold up and we test individual pieces of. There's something like that. In fact, the Cajete even talks about, you know, what models would mean in the Native American viewpoint. It might have something more to do with metaphors, kind of more concrete, practical tools for coming to grips with things as opposed to abstractions.

And again, the way Burkhart describes this is just as we don't have a priori moral rules that then we look around and try to apply to specific situations. And maybe we come up with ridiculous outcomes that cause us to do evil things. Right. If you really take the don't ever lie seriously, if you interpret Kant as saying that, then maybe you have the Nazi at the door problem. There's all these, you know, or you. You take utilitarianism seriously and you come up with, okay, we have to kill the one to save the many. There are all these examples that are commonly put forward in objection to a principled approach to ethics.

Well, it's the same thing scientifically. We got from Kuhn this idea that there's always a scientific paradigm, that that's what enables you to make progress. So you kind of have these principles. And in fact, it's very hard to shift from one paradigm to the other. It's not just that new information comes at you and then you can comfortably shift. It's more like the believers in the old paradigm basically have to die off and the new generation maybe can accept a radically different view of things. Well, Burkhart is presenting Native American thought as not having strong principles.

Beliefs about this is how the universe works. Instead, it's a continual openness to new information, to new potential ways of connecting to the world, to learning about the world. And so that is supposed to make it so that you don't have those problems of rigidity, that you have more flexibility, you have a more natural response, so both ethically and in terms of knowledge. But then the thing that I'm worried about in all this is how does that let you rule out ridiculousness? If the epistemology is supposed to be inclusive, it's supposed to allow not just, you know, we're going to have very strict scientific standards for what sort of explanation we're allowed to admit.

No, it seems like it's more trusting the professed experiences of any individual person and the way that this builds up into a social body of knowledge, a social outlook. And so you have all these things that to our modern scientific ears sound absolutely ridiculous about, you know, doing a rain dance. And that's supposed to objectively cause changes in the world. So how do we retain what's maybe good about this inclusive epistemology while still not committing ourselves to the existence of literal magic, you know, without completely abandoning our scientific worldview.

18:52 Dylan: Can I piggyback on that, Mark? Because I'd split it into two threads. One is the one that you just ended on, which is pointing to the goal of a kind of Objectivity, that's part of natural science. And I thought that you articulated some of the problems of scientism and the ways you can go wrong with that. But the other thread is the question of political authority and who gets to decide these things. And they may not be necessarily scientific. They may be simply the rules of society, even if it's understood that we've agreed upon them, how we talk about that authority and whether that authority is at some level supposed to be inspired, or is it supposed to be the role of prophetic knowledge that Seth pointed to?

So I would underline that sort of Spinoza character of how do you deal with prophetic knowledge versus the kind of politics that were relatively familiar with. With a liberal democracy, where you have rules in place that are designed to allow people of many, many different views to be getting along with one another, and what's the reason for it to avoid conflict and promote independence of thought.

20:02 Jim: I like the picture that you drew of sort of this idea that Plato split the Western world when he created the ideal realm, and how, ostensibly, anyway, that the Native world is this. The fabric is fully woven and it's still connected. And you had mentioned how the Native world is still fully woven together. And I wanted to add in the introductory remarks, in a lot of books you'll read about Native philosophy, you may have even encountered it in one of the Burkhart or the Kaete, that in Native nations, there isn't actually things like called religion, philosophy, agricultural science.

They aren't thought of in terms of that. It's all thought of as just life. One thing before we continue, and I don't expect people to remember this all the way through, but a lot of scholars hesitate in using the term Native American. The safer thing is American Indian, because when you say Native American, you're saying, and to me, I thought, oh, this is a flattering term. They're saying, oh, yeah, they're native to this country, but they're actually native to a nation. You know, the Shawnee, the Cherokee, the Seneca. They're native to that nation, not America.

That's an important distinction for them. But I thought I would just add that because it's been expressed to me many times by many different people that it was an important thing to say.

21:36 Mark: So it's American Indian is actually better.

21:39 Jim: Yes, I know how it sounds. They just seem to prefer that. Because when you say Native American, you're saying they're native to America.

21:47 Wes: I think Mark's saying that because at some point in our lives, we were told not to say Indian and told to say Native American instead. And now it's gone back the other way, really?

21:57 Mark: Is it moved to indigenous something just

22:00 Jim: from the three scholars that I had worked, you know, Cajete and Dr. Norton Smith listening Al. That's how they preferred it. And they made it sound that perhaps it was more universal. But I've seen other scholars that still say Native American, so I don't follow that entire line of thinking. But you know, it's their name tag, so they get to pick how they want to use it.

22:27 Mark: We might as well say a little bit more about the whole political complexities of dealing with this. Another source that I used for this, I mentioned that this whole interest in this was kicked off for me. It was actually a great courses lecture in world philosophy from Kathy Higgins. So Kathy Higgins is somebody that worked at University of Texas that I took a Nietzsche course from. She was the wife of Bob Solomon that we have talked about many times in this podcast. Most of this course was not relevant to what we talked about, but she did have one lecture specifically on Native American philosophy and then another one kind of just setting up the relationship between traditional beliefs and philosophy.

And so just gave a couple of distinctions which I think are important to kind of keep in mind, one of which is just the difference between what are you doing when you do philosophy? We tend to be universalists. In other words, philosophy is one endeavor throughout the world. We're just trying to figure stuff out. It doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter who you are. You can make philosophical claims, you can evaluate anybody else's philosophical claims. On the other hand, culturalists, she picks out in another category as philosophy is always pursued within a particular cultural context that's dealing with historically and geographically variable situations.

You know, certainly we can acknowledge that the way that we would be talking about slavery versus the way an ancient Greek would be talking about slavery are going to be different. We kind of feel like as universalists that we can overcome, we can translate the other cultural context to what we have now. But there, I think, are dissenters. You know, we might say white people have no business talking about this kind of philosophy. On the other hand, what's the deal with modern Western philosophy neglecting this rich tradition? Like it's sort of insulting either way.

If you talk about it, you're insulting. If you don't talk about it, it's insulting. The other thing is, you know, philosophy, we kind of expect it to be well written down, which this was not written down. Most of these folk traditions you know, Kathy's talking about different kinds of African philosophy, South American, other things. These are oral traditions, and I think not unrelatedly. They're probably not systematized. Even if there are some sort of general principles of relatedness, like, well, what does that mean exactly? There's not necessarily one famous thinker who gave a definition of connectivity, relationality, such that we can put that up on the board and parse it word for word.

You know, all we have are these very vague formulations thrown around in a folk way, which is necessarily going to lose some sort of subtlety. So if you're trying to treat this folk wisdom like philosophy, put it into a system, it might sound like you're trying to actually systematize it in a way that it wasn't originally. You're kind of falsifying it. You're kind of impressed, imposing the Western approach on this raw material. And that's, you know, inherently condescending or falsifying. On the other hand, merely preserving. Like, we just want to get clear about what these ancient people believed.

What, like, well, that's not philosophy anymore. That's kind of a museum curation anyway. So just throwing those out there, I don't think that's. Would that affect how we're going to actually do this?

25:29 Dylan: Well, I thought that was really good, Mark.

25:33 Jim: Yeah, that's a good point, Mark. And that also, I think that hits on a concern that I think everyone else has voiced, is that how do we deal with these people who say, you know, Black Elk said, I had this vision and all the things that happened and how. He said, well, I had a dream. I saw this herb, and then I went out and found the herb, and I knew it was the herb from the dream. And I think, Mark, you had said, you know, how do we respect this and accept it while not at the same time allowing ridiculous things to come into play? And I still struggle with it saying, you know, how do we accept when someone says, well, I had a dream, and that's how I found the herb, and that's how I knew this herb was going to cure somebody when it was just a dream.

And the responses that I've come to understand from natives is that if you've been born into that fabric and that framework, listening Al would say, their constructed world, being a part of that constructed world, influences each and everything that happens in that world. And that's the way that dreams can give you real knowledge. And coming from a Western framework like we do, we're not woven into that fabric. And of course, this just like circularity it's going to be. Relationality is always coming into play in the native world. And that's the kind of response that I always sort of anticipate that we can't understand, we can't make the necessary connection between the dream of the herb and knowing that it would cure the illness and actually going out and just finding this plant by a creek and it working.

27:24 Dylan: The part that I find confusing, I guess, is there's a combination of language, of causality. For instance, that I saw this in a dream and then I went out and that was the inspiration for me to go find it. So there's a language of cause and effect there and a figuring out that is different, or the contention is that it's different than the various notions of causality that I would be normally thinking about. And what you just said is it's tied up in interrelatedness. But it's not clear to me that that notion of causality or the sort of fluidness of causality of attributing something to a dream is necessarily a consequence of the interrelatedness of everything. Because you can have a much more, let's call it scientific, Western, scientific style of causality and have interrelatedness for sure. So they seem different from each other to me.

28:19 Jim: Right, but would you say that perhaps somebody throwing a fork into the road and somebody being in the hospital three days later, how would you deal with something like that? You know, or chaos theory? Say a butterfly flaps his wings in Africa and we have a hurricane in Florida. That's sort of what I wonder, you know, where does a Western comportment towards causality and where does a native.

28:48 Wes: What about the role of procedural knowledge? Is it Burkhart who talks about that a little bit as an example? You know, so there's explicit knowing that, and then there are things that, you know, we learn how to do things and that's something that's more unconscious in a way. Right. So if we learn to play tennis, we don't consciously apply the principles of tennis. If we do that, any sort of self consciousness in tennis, in your game, it falls apart. So you have to sort of acquire the procedural memories by doing, and then you use those procedural memories.

So I was thinking, as you guys are talking of a friend I have who grew up in the countryside of China. So there's a sort of folk tradition of being able to identify all the plants in the area, including being able to identify this mushroom, which is poisonous, which looks exactly like another mushroom, which is not poisonous, which they would eat. And apparently the two look so much alike that there's not a single trained botanist who can distinguish them. It's not the kind of knowledge you can acquire by principle, by doing as much study as you like.

You actually have to have grown up, acquired a certain kind of procedural acquaintance through a very, very concrete kind of relationship with the environment, and only then do you develop that skill. It's like playing tennis from a very young age, let's say. So, getting to my point, it's going to sound like I'm demythologizing the dream in a way, but what the dream to me seems to reflect is a certain kind of intuitive knowledge of the environment which can kind of well up or bubble to the surface in a dream. So the embeddedness is sort of the grounds of the dream becoming that kind of knowledge.

Now, how do you know random plant is going to heal? Well, there's. There's a bunch of background of the story that we don't know. There's a bunch of other sorts of knowledge about which herbs are healing and which aren't, and the knowledge of the natural environment, which serve as a context, which can be used inferentially. And figuring out that an herbal might have a healing power, and that inference doesn't have to be conscious deduction. It can happen intuitively. I don't know if I'm off track on that or not.

31:07 Dylan: I think you're right on track, Wes. But I would also add that there are other aspects of that story that seem extraneous regarding, like the way he goes into the teepee and the importance of particular directions and moving around in a circle and stuff like that. And to me, I'm thinking, he got an herb, he's just got to give the herb to the guy. But your point about the procedural nature of the knowledge would make a little bit more sense, not just from the standpoint of it being sort of a sacred process at some level, but that those other aspects of process and habit that are tied up with it come along for the ride and might not be so easily extracted from what I might say. Well, the nub of the thing is here at the end, you got this herb and you got it for him. And this other stuff that's just extraneous. It may not be.

32:05 Wes: Well, now I'm thinking of simple diffusers and the role of ritual. Right?

32:09 Dylan: Exactly. Exactly.

32:11 Wes: And so how is that important?

32:13 Dylan: Well, and it may be important for. I mean, we could have a discussion about its importance for the healing of this Particular boy or the importance of that ritual or ritual around finding the herb or whatever. That's part of that process of figuring things out. That's part of that habit. And ritual.

32:32 Wes: Rituals also create an environment. They create a certain kind of environment.

32:36 Dylan: Exactly. Exactly. That's the way to say it.

32:38 Wes: And that can actually be important, you know, in a subtle way to healing. And, you know, I'm not saying it's a decisive thing, but, you know, whether you're recovering in a antiseptic hospital room or in a nice, comforting environment at home, that there are implications for that, or whether you're recovering in the context of ritual and a certain state of mind and that sort of communal bonding that occurs around ritual, I think you could argue, might be important.

33:04 Dylan: I agree. I was also thinking of the component of the ritual that was important for Black Elk himself in terms of it is an extension of his figuring out his way of becoming a healer. That it was not just the ritual in the teepee associated with the healing of the boy. But like I said, I called them seemingly extraneous things were part of the whole process of figuring out. Your analogy with the tennis player makes me think of all of the rituals that most good athletes go through that you look at, you say, that can't possibly matter to you, playing well, but it turns out if they don't do

33:40 Wes: it, they play for crap like Nadal with lining up the water bottles. I always love that. Yeah.

33:48 Jim: And we also shouldn't forget that because of relationality, each and everything that they do is because of everything else. Part of all rituals include recognizing and respecting the grandfathers and the six directions. We encountered it so many times in Black Elk when he talked about the sacred pipe. When you give somebody an herb, you're also recognizing that my grandfathers and my people who died in this ground and fertilized it are also giving the herb. And without the sun, this herb wouldn't grow. So in the process of giving you this herb, I'm also saying thank you to the sun and the sacred winds and the directions, because they are also giving you the herb. And for them, it's important to recognize where something came from. You know, so that's also an important part of ritual. So instead of just going, well, here's some Tylenol. Well, you know, the herb.

34:56 Mark: Yeah. So it seems like that this is all about orienting the people involved. It's not necessarily about literally, you know, like prayer, doing a rain dance or something. It's not literally impacting the cosmos in the desired way. Yes. When you're dancing around. You're moving air around. Oh, the air is the same air that the animals breathe. Like, no, that's not the causal thing that's in play. It's a matter of just, like, all these rituals, you know, why do you wear a yarmulke all the time? Or why do we have to pray five times a day? It's about reminding yourself of your place in the ethical order.

And so that's going to make it less likely that you're going to stray. We ran into this in Dostoevsky in our recent episode was saying, wow, now that we don't have Christianity running things, people could just do random acts of violence and, like, there's nothing preventing them. That's exactly the lack of rootedness that is here just being reinforced in every little thing. Well, maybe not every little thing, but at least in ritual contexts and making those a regular part of life.

35:58 Jim: Right. I sometimes wonder if American Indian nations, not only did they truly think the rain dance was physically impacting the universe, but I do wonder if it actually isn't. Obviously, I'm very sympathetic to relationality, but it's a very hard thing to put together because you can always come up with cases where you go, you got to try to explain this one, pal. You know, so.

36:27 Wes: So I think Mark and I, at least, and Dylan and maybe Seth would probably take a hard line against that. Right. And so that's the. What Mark is sort of getting at is, is we would deny the causal potency of. Of a rain dance. We would try to give other explanations of its significance.

36:44 Jim: And in a way, it's sort of, this conversation's over. No, I'm just.

36:51 Wes: And for me, I just. What immediately occurred to me is, in a way, maybe the causality runs the other way. Maybe the rain dance, in a way, is just an acknowledgement of our dependence on the rain.

37:02 Seth: Yeah.

37:02 Jim: And it very well could be the

37:04 Wes: sacred importance of that. But. Yeah. On the other hand. Yeah, I thought, you know, as Mark was saying, well, yeah, probably they think it's affecting the rain, and it isn't. So how do we deal with. Are we gonna say that reflects some sort of Western obtuseness, or are we going to stand by our naturalistic framework and say, no, these two worldviews conflict, and one of them is right.

37:27 Dylan: And there's also plenty of similar cases in the Western tradition. Right. It's not like rain dance. Like, things don't exist in the Western tradition.

37:36 Mark: Maybe if we take Burkhardt's analysis, it's that there can be no a priori principle, that we say this kind of causality works and that kind of causality doesn't. What have we actually experienced? Well, if the rain dance pretty much never works, maybe we shouldn't do it anymore. But insofar as it has seemed efficacious, then why not? Who knows? Like, relative to the knowledge that they had? And even now, like, we can say, okay, well, we know a lot more about atmospherics. We can't see any possible reason why somebody dancing on the ground would affect that. But still, we can have it as a hypothesis that that kind of stuff shouldn't work. But Burkhart is at least saying that we don't have the justification to say this is a scientific law, that this kind of stuff doesn't work. So we kind of have to be open to any alleged explanations.

38:25 Dylan: I like the pragmatic nature of it and saying, okay, sure, yeah, there can be lots of different kinds of rules, and maybe we don't know. But what I end up thinking about is other kinds of superstitions that are not nearly as innocuous as a rain dance. So the same exact thinking goes into drowning witches. Right? And so I'm totally fine with there being an innocuous ritual that I don't get as making a difference. And the west is full of all kinds of such rituals.

38:58 Wes: Well, this makes me think of Spinoza. It's okay if you have your rituals, as long as you don't take them seriously. As long as you don't take them so seriously that they become doctrinal grounds for mistreating other human beings.

39:12 Dylan: That's the nub of it, right? That's where it gathers political import in which you are now using it as a criteria to subjugate or adversely affect other people.

39:24 Mark: In Black Elk, he every time he has a vision and it only happens a couple times, he thinks like, well, in order to take advantage of that vision or to get the power that the vision promises, you have to do a ritual reenacting part of it. And so he has at some point a secondary vision. Not the main primary one that he had when he was young that kind of influences his whole life, but a secondary one that involved these thunder beings that he had encountered in his previous vision coming back and killing a dog. And so he felt like if he didn't tell this to the appropriate people in his tribe and that they would do a ritual that would correspond with this, then, in fact, he might get struck by lightning, the thunder beings would be offended.

So they end up killing a dog in this ritual. It seems very hard to avoid a principle that, if you know what I've described Burkhart as claiming, is that there are no scientific paradigms, there are no principles. Well, the fact that you think rain dances work, the fact that you think that it's necessary to do this kind of thing, and it justifies killing a dog, even if you're killing it in a nice way and thanking it for its sacrifice, like, that's not very comforting for the dog, it seems like you're taking action based on this superstition. And even if you say, well, they weren't burning witches, they weren't doing these kind of things, like, certainly the people in the tradition have to acknowledge that mistakes were made, mistakes that hurt, mistakes were made.

40:48 Wes: The press conference with the, you know, indigenous peoples, mistakes were made.

40:54 Seth: Well, let me say this about that particular episode that you were talking about. Mark Black Elk has this vision when he's very young, which he keeps to himself for many years before he finally acknowledges it to somebody else in the tribe. And there are a number of different rituals. That one about the dog was one, and then there's another one. But the point of it was he goes to an elder, a medicine man, and there's some relationship between the ability to heal and the visions. And the premise here is that the power that's promised in the vision cannot be manifested until it is articulated to the community and the community understands and accepts it.

So the purpose of going through the ritual is, in a sense, a formal way. If we want to think of it in those Spinozan terms that Wes was just mentioning, it's a formal way to validate the prophetic knowledge. Now, we didn't read anything, and it's not clear in that book whether it's possible for the community to reject the vision or how people get to that point. But clearly there was a recognition that whatever it was, that the experience he had was sort of passed at the first stage by being validated by an elder who had wisdom, and then secondly, through the reenactment, that the broader community acknowledged it.

So this is not exactly the same thing as having a vision. Apophantic like that, you're going to have a vision and then suddenly get a clear moral course. And, in fact, throughout the entirety of the book, he struggles to identify what it is specifically that he's actually supposed to be doing. And that's part of the story.

42:42 Dylan: I just want to ask a question to you and Mark about it, because I didn't Read the whole book. You characterize it in a way that was interesting, which is the killing of the dog isn't a sacrifice, like a sacrifice to the gods, but it's a way to cement the knowledge or to make the content of the vision accessible in a way that you could ultimately get knowledge out of it. Am I understanding that correctly?

43:07 Seth: Yes, I believe so.

43:09 Dylan: Okay.

43:10 Mark: Well, it sounds like from the kind of the thing that Wes was saying in terms of when you make it public, then you're establishing an environment. So the kind of effects on the group in terms of if you're setting yourself up to be a healer, then a lot of what makes this kind of healing work is psychosomatic, is the people accepting you as a healer. And like, oh, they know what they're doing.

43:32 Jim: And so the potency of performance, telling a story as opposed to reading it or acting something out as opposed to. Well, for example, when you read the words I do, it doesn't mean much. And sure, there's context involved, but when you say it in front of a preacher or the magistrate at a courthouse, it has significant potency.

43:57 Mark: So the Gregory Cajete article, philosophy and Native Science, I think, skates the line between yes, we believe in supernatural stuff, but also throwing out a lot of things that sound like the naturalistic explanations that we've been pointing to. Like, he talks a lot about the unconscious. He talks a lot about intuition. So we had in our Carl Jung episode, Carl Jung talked about intuition. And Carl Jung, of course, is an actual psychologist, even though he bought into a lot of the power of dreams, not just as in terms of your psychical elements floating around influencing you, but as tapping into collective unconscious, interpersonal, you know, the universal unconscious.

There are lots of. Yes, the collective unconscious. There's a lot of supernatural adjacent stuff. In Jung, he talked about synchronicity, which is mentioned in the Cajete paper. But his version of intuition is just. It's not that it's magic. Right. The kind of intuition that rationalists typically object to is what it sounds like we were talking about. Like, I didn't know how to heal, and then I had a dream about the herb, and then I knew exactly where to go. Like, that kind of thing makes no sense to us. But in terms of the explanation that Wes was giving, intuition is a matter of synthesizing background knowledge unconsciously.

It's not a matter of sitting down and making a list of pros and cons and trying to figure out a problem explicitly in that way, or doing

45:18 Wes: a lot of animal testing with different Herbs before you settle on one. But yeah, go ahead.

45:23 Mark: It's a. A lot of different things and background knowledge percolating around and you suddenly come up with an answer and you might not know where it came from. And so we use intuition for a lot of things. And we even had just in our Dr. Drew episode, the idea of direct right brain to right brain communication between people, that a lot of this relationality between people or our immediate reactions to the environment, immediate reactions to nature, is stuff that we can't articulate how it works.

45:52 Wes: It happens unconsciously and it happens through body language and all the rest of it. But yeah.

45:57 Mark: Yep. So this is what Cajete, I think means by this intuitive openness to the world and our relationality with the world is that we're always taking in information such that if we reduce what we're going to admit as knowledge to the explicit, the quantifiable, the articulable, then we're actually denying a lot about the way that we actually relate to people and things in the world and blocking off those kind of intuitive leaps that we could potentially make.

46:30 Seth: I was thinking about that. When you say it that way, and this thread of the conversation about causality, we have this presumption that that causality is. It's almost like the principle of principles, or in many respects, the concept of physical causality especially is very intimately tied with the notion of substance, the substance ontology that we've inherited. And I'm thinking about this in terms of if seeing the world as connected and seeing the world as in process or happening, and that the experiential knowledge is the primary knowledge, there's a way in which you can, I don't want to say ignore causality, but it becomes a very human kind of approach where from the perspective of what I know, I know that the sun is going to rise.

I know that this time of the year the winds come from this direction and whatever. And I know these things because it's always been that way. And I presume that it will be that way in the future. But I don't necessarily have a causal understanding of why that's the case. And so I'm not going to be surprised if it doesn't happen that way next year or tomorrow. And so I can imagine a worldview here where the prioritization of immediate experience and the mapping of that against both memory and the natural world just makes it such that a causal relationship, it becomes less interesting or less important, maybe even in a sense, less practical.