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

0:00 Mark: I think in the second Half here we want to get a little more into the specifics of what at least the Burkhart and Cajete articles had to say.

0:07 Dylan: That makes me think of the propositional knowledge section at the beginning of the Burkhardt. Maybe we can start with that as a way of getting into that paper. If I go to the beginning here, he characterizes propositional knowledge is knowledge of the form that something is. So is the kind of knowledge that can be written down, that can be directly conveyed through statements or propositions, as opposed to non propositional knowledge, knowledge by direct awareness or acquaintance. And how to knowledge or knowledge of how to do something.

0:36 Jim: Yeah. And in the Burkhart article, did y' all encounter the part about the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash?

0:44 Mark: Do you want to sum up what that is before we.

0:46 Jim: Yeah. So throughout their history, Native nations found that when you planted the three sisters, which is corn, beans and squash together, the beans reinvested the soil with nitrogen. The corn stalks allowed the squash leaves to climb up the corn stalks and allowed it to hold the beans and the squash up. And the squash leaves on the ground covered the soil to keep it moist. And you could probably done the entire podcast just off that story because it hits on so many things, relationality among others. But. But the thing about procedural knowledge, I think he relates that to a how to knowledge.

1:36 Wes: So you contrast that to scientists discovering later the role of nitrogen in the soil or things like that, things that could scientifically verify why that works. That's a different mode of knowledge than the way it was acquired.

1:48 Jim: There's two narratives going on. The natives would say, well, it's because you're putting these three beings, corn, bean and squash, together in a harmonious way. And that's why beans do so well. And the soil never gets depleted because you're working with proper relations. And then a Western scientist would say, well, actually, what's happening is the nitrogen. I'm not sure I want to go into the tension between the two, because I think that could easily collapse back into what we've been talking about. In the first part. There's an interesting story how some of the Native nations people, they discovered that you would only want to pick berries from one side of a bush.

Their narrative on that was the wind from the west is blessing the berries on this side, and they would only eat those ones because it didn't make them sick and they were sweet. But the ones on the other side of the bush that weren't blessed with the wind were bitter and at times poisonous. And it turns out that it was something about the wind. But the western scientists said it's not that wind, it's just that the gases are something that it emits. They were sweeped away and the bushes foliage didn't keep that gas in there and make the berries noxious or something.

But it's a similar story to illustrate the point.

3:04 Dylan: It makes me think of the criticism of hubris as being the more important one. The inability to recognize non propositional or procedural knowledge. How do you evaluate whether you actually know something, something and discounting that procedural knowledge that's been handed down over the years as definitely not being true. Because it can't possibly be the case that these three plants need to be together because, you know, sisters in the universe or something, rather than looking and saying, well, there must be a reason why this clearly works kind of thing.

And putting aside for a little while that you don't know why it works. And to me it's a sad bit of hubris because there's all kinds of things in the world that you don't know why it's happening. You have to figure out why it works. The whole generation of understanding electricity and magnetism is like this in the early days. It's basically magic. No one knows how it works. And there's lots of just observation of that phenomena that happens for many, many decades without understanding exactly what's going on and being able to provide what we think of as a scientific underpinning, yet you in fact leverage it even technologically, just like here.

And it seems to me that the main reason for being discounted is a kind of just cultural prejudice. Right? Discounting that procedural knowledge because.

4:26 Jim: Because they don't agree with the narrative.

4:28 Dylan: I would go further and say they don't agree with the narrative because of being racist.

4:33 Wes: But also, as Burkhart notes, we see this scientism, we see prejudice against literature and philosophy and theology in general as sources of knowledge. Whatever kind of knowledge is involved in those disciplines. It's certainly not scientific in the more narrow sense that we're not used to using that term. But I think we now believe it can be systematic in some sense. Which is in tension, of course, with this idea of procedural knowledge and know how. But Dylan, as you pointed out, we build off of that. This is kind of goes to the Husserlian point that we start in the life world, we start intuitively, we start with know how and then we build off that and systematize that. And we can do the same thing in literature and philosophy.

5:16 Jim: I keep coming back to this fundamental tension between a Western notion of the many things we've been talking about, like causality and ritual and physical causality mostly. And I wonder, is it racist or is it truly a clash of worldviews? And just like you guys had mentioned earlier, I think we would fairly say that we would take a hard line against physical causality, the two versions that we were contrasting. And that's something I've encountered a lot in cross cultural studies. In a lot of the comparative work that I've done, I see use of something that they call the focus field model.

The analogy that they use best is there's a night sky with a bunch of stars in it. And you. Some cultures come up with constellations and some find the enduring static nature of the stars, even the planets that don't glitter, those seem to be the most fundamental part of the night sky for them. If they were to describe it or want to understand it or study it, it's that permanentness and fixedness. And in another culture they would say, well, no, look how it changes. And the constellations end up in a different spot according to the time of year.

6:34 Mark: So, yeah, you mentioned in your thesis about what the different worldviews amount to. It's often having a different focus in terms of what you consider fundamental. This is one of the interesting things that you raise is the connection between ontology and worldview that we often in this podcast, we generally talk about ontology as just the list of things that you think exist. So our universal is going to be kind of just part of the ontology. Is everything ultimately reducible to processes or to atoms or the types of things that exist? And it kind of comes out as a list, but that sounds like a very technical thing.

And every time we talk about that, Seth usually says, why do we care whether something is on the list or not? You sketch out in your thesis why this would be the case. That ontology, there's kind of that technical sense of ontology, and then there's also the worldview sense of ontology, which even though you posit in your thesis that they had a process philosophy worldview, in other words, the ultimate constituents in the universe are not particles or things, but they are processes. But you say, well, there's really actually not enough in the stories and in what we have passed down to us for us to say what they would actually think about this particular question about ontology and the reduction Is everything actually reducible to processes?

Or are things real? But yet processes are important to talk about? But what you can say Is that processes are the most salient features that we should be concerned with in relating to things.

7:56 Wes: So the claim this is page 47 is the ontological implication here shows us that in the Native world, objects must be in process in order for relations to exist. Relationality and process go hand in hand in the Native world, you cannot have one without the other. Do you want to say more about that, Jim, and what that means? How is relatedness related to process?

8:20 Jim: The way I see it is that for something to be in process and changing, it's going to rely on something else in some way. For a rock to move, somebody needs to kick it. For a plant to grow, it relies on the sun and water. And even dying is a process too. The Native world, we would say, well, it's because it lost its relations. That's a real basic way. I would say.

8:46 Wes: One thing to point out is that if we talk about a process ontology, we're not just talking about ways in which processes apply to some static entity. Right. Or maybe you call this a soft process ontology. The idea that, for instance, that there are atoms in motion and that they're. Well, I don't even know how to put it.

9:08 Dylan: Newtonian mechanics would be a good example of weak process ontology, where you have entities that have real existence and they're bound together by physical law, laws that constrain the way they interact with one another. But it's not a strong process ontology because you have enduring elements. So.

9:29 Wes: Yeah, so the world at bottom is particles. And then you describe a set of laws relating those particles, and that the way they're related is process oriented. Right. It's not that just one is to the left of the other. It's that they have certain causes, motions in each other. Yeah, dynamics. That's what you call weak process ontology. But we might believe in strong process ontology that it's not these particles that are fundamental, that it's processes themselves.

9:54 Dylan: We saw this in Heraclitus ourselves, that kind of thinking. And you get it in Whitehead.

10:01 Jim: Yeah, big time in Whitehead.

10:03 Dylan: Born out of thinking about quantum mechanics and what kind of entities these are that can constantly be transforming.

10:13 Wes: Is a way to describe that, that we start with a field. And I mean, I know Dylan's going to correct me. And then particles are emergent on that field, as opposed to particles being fundamental or how would you put that?

10:24 Dylan: That's exactly one of the ways you go on talking about it. Because the field in this case ends up not being the permanent enduring entity in the Same way that the particles themselves are. And you very naturally begin to speak event language, which. Where things that we consider the hard enduring objects are events that are time based. That is just long compared to what we're used to dealing with. So just the way you think of a wave on the water as being. I can point it, I can call it a wave, but I don't think of it as an enduring entity the way I think of a dog or a rock as an enduring entity.

11:04 Wes: Well, we think of the wave as inhabiting its medium, the water, and we think of the water as sort of the substantial thing underlying the wave. But to be process ontologists about that, we'd have to think of the wave as itself primary, which it seems like there's some of that in Maxwell's description of electromagnetic radiation, where it's not a medium, it's this piggyback production of electric and magnetic fields.

11:29 Dylan: Yeah. And we encountered some of this kind of thinking again when we were talking with Stewart Umphrey and the natural kinds of business, where we ended up talking about natural kinds in this strong substance,

11:42 Wes: strong substance ontology, continuants.

11:44 Dylan: It was a little bit to the side of that conversation. But in the search for genuine natural kinds, you end up putting things at least into a kind of weak process ontology universe, if not a strong process ontology universe, where the kinds of things that the individual entities end up being so dependent on and interrelated with other things that them being a natural kind is just not admissible in the sense that, at least in the way Stewart was talking about, that they arise as enduring entities during continuance all on their own, mainly because they're not enduring.

12:22 Jim: Yeah.

12:23 Mark: The reason I brought this up in the context of the thesis was the relativity of worldviews, that different worldviews are a matter of emphasizing different things. And what I found very new to me in your description of the substance versus process ontology is the strong versus weak distinction. So we've talked in the past about what would a strong process ontology be? Well, that's. Everything is ultimately reducible to processes. Any of these strong versions are really, again, very kind of technical, philosophical things because they have to do with reduction of the categories that we actually deal with to something more fundamental, which is an abstraction.

So you would think that unless the Native American languages in question did not even have a word for rabbit, that they only had rabbit existing at time T. That was another thing that was brought up in the Stewart Umphrey discussion between continuant, which is the rabbit, which Exists over time. And a potential other way of conceptualizing things where you're just referring to time slices. So, like, if you were a serious. In your worldview, a serious, strong process philosopher, then you would have to be talking about things in terms of happenings and time slices.

And there are, as you point out, Jim, a lot of the native American languages, at least in terms of their adjectives. They don't have, you know, the dog is red.

13:39 Wes: I think if you're a process ontologist, it's the transtemporal thing that is the primary entity, and the time slices are the abstractions.

13:46 Jim: That's fair.

13:47 Wes: So the time slices aren't the fundamental entities. Exactly. The continuing thing across crosstime is the primary entity, but it's not the continuous thing.

13:54 Mark: It's the doing.

13:55 Jim: Right.

13:55 Mark: It's the event.

13:56 Wes: They call them worm somethings.

13:59 Jim: I don't know, wormholes.

14:01 Dylan: I think you're sort of saying the same thing. Right. Is that if you talk about the event, that has the strongest correlation to the substance ontology in it being a fixed thing at a given time. But the genuine entity is the thing that is dynamically changing over time. And so.

14:18 Mark: So even calling it an entity prejudices you.

14:20 Dylan: Yes.

14:21 Wes: The entity is, say, Blackie the squirrel, to take Umphrey's example, across all time, we're used to thinking of, here's an entity that's primary, and then it travels through space, it travels through time. But the primary entity for a process ontologist is the entire history of Blackie the squirrel through space and time. And then the abstractions are how you analyze that. By taking time slots in the manifestation

14:45 Dylan: of Blackie the squirrel, you might be able to point to at different times along the trajectory of Blackie the squirrel. Right. And you'd still want to talk about that entity, Blackie the squirrel, as being something, as being a thing. But it's very hard to talk about the essence of Blackie the squirrel in

15:04 Jim: terms of its individual time slices and also its qualities.

15:09 Mark: So I knew that the adjectives are made into gerunds or made into verbs. That it's not that the dog is red, it's that the dog reds.

15:17 Jim: Yeah, it's Redding. Right.

15:18 Mark: It's Redding. What about the nouns? Are the nouns thought of in the way that Wes was just describing continuants, that when you say the rabbit, you're really referring to not a thing, but you're referring to kind of the rabbit event.

15:33 Jim: I'm out of my depth on the language thing. So most of that, with the exception, I think One exam, stuff that I've imported from other scholars. And I mean, I cite them and everything. But yeah, I'm out of my. When it comes to the language and stuff.

15:48 Seth: I mean, I wasn't on the natural kinds episode. But natural kinds are the easiest types of things that you can think about. How they're tied to conceptual schemes in language. It's very easy to conceive of. Instead of picking out a particular tree and calling it a tree, we could have different words for the type of tree based on the bark. These are scientific classifications, evergreen, deciduous, and whatever. But my point is, is that with natural kinds, it's easiest to kind of put yourself in the frame of mind of somebody else who's got a different linguistic structure and worldview. And it's much easier to do that than to start talking more abstractly about

16:23 Jim: or to explain it from within itself.

16:26 Seth: Yeah, but, you know, I was thinking about this when I was reading your thesis, Jim, that if we think about proper names, Western people, I think, have names that may have meant something or may have some residual meaning, but the name itself becomes a designator. It points to the person. But American Indians have descriptive names, Lame Deer and Sitting Bull, which are intended to be more descriptive of personality or reflective of past experience or something like this. And just the idea that naming and identity are somehow more connected to the world and more fluid with respect to not being noun like but being more verb like, I think also comes through a little bit there.

17:08 Mark: So I would hypothesize, at least based on your not having heard strongly, it seems like if the way that they talked about nouns was really strongly process oriented. In other words, they talked about not just being read as a verb, but rabbit itself as a verb. And they really didn't have nouns in those Iroquois and Sioux languages. And so I think you probably would have heard about that. So I'm going to hypothesize that their process ontology did not spring that strongly to that extent through their language. But yeah, Seth is pointing out a way that individual names of people really did have that action component, even if it's still a noun.

17:42 Seth: Well, there's two different things, Mark. So one open question that we're not going to answer here today is how do they perceive nouns? And how are nouns used? And is a noun representative of an activity or a process as opposed to being more like a name that designates a quote unquote thing? But Jim did mention in his thesis, I believe it was there, that at least in a couple of languages, there's no verb for to be.

18:05 Dylan: Yes.

18:05 Jim: Right.

18:06 Seth: So if there's no verb for to be, whatever function nouns have, you can't essentially attribute properties to a thing in the same way that we do in our language. You just wouldn't be able to say the red dog.

18:19 Wes: So I'm highly skeptical of this language stuff because there's lots of constructions in different languages where the verb to be is just implied, even including Western languages.

18:28 Jim: So, yeah, over the years, maybe I've softened a little bit on the sharp distinction between Western language because, you know, through college, we've all taken a language. I took Italian, and having been outside of college for a long time, I was sort of losing my Italian skills. So I started taking courses at the community education center just to hone in and sharpen up. And it occurred to me, in the Italian language, when you say, what's the weather like out there? They use a verb. And the way the question's asked, it implies, what's it doing out there? It isn't meant to imply.

19:07 Mark: It doesn't imply God. That's when I learned Spanish. That's what they taught me, like that. It literally was, he makes rain in all these Romance languages. That it actually did have a theistic component built right into the language.

19:17 Seth: Yeah.

19:17 Jim: When they say, how is it out there? What's it doing? The weather itself is a being, and it's doing something whether it's raining or being cold. And so I've softened up a bit on that. I do believe that in a native language, you have a very difficult time saying an enduring property about an object. I think that's a compelling factor.

19:41 Mark: So the language is going to be, as you say in your thesis, it's inconclusive whether they're.

19:45 Jim: Yeah, sure, sure.

19:45 Mark: I just want to get is the worldview of the American Indians, you know, in general, seem like it's more strong process philosophy. Well, we don't know, but that would be kind of weird. It just seems like that strong process philosophy is a philosopher's reductionist game, is a way. You know, maybe Whitehead thinks that ultimately all of our talk of things should be reduced to talk of processes. But even he is probably not going to suggest that we actually change our language, that we're only talking about processes. Like talking about things is still useful as a device.

Where are my keys? Oh, the keying. Where is the keying going on? Like, no, that's not useful. I hadn't heard this term, weak process ontology. I want to read your quote here. You've already described heraclitus which we had an episode on as a strong process ontologist. Empedocles is an early advocate of weak process ontology. He maintains there are four basic elements we can think of as enduring, unchanging substances or objects. Earth, air, fire and water. According to Empedocles, it is the mixing and arranging of these various elements that account for the objects we experience in the the world.

Furthermore, it is the various ratios at which these elements combine and contribute to objects that account for the diversity that exists in the world. However, these elements by themselves are motionless. They require, thinks Empedocles, two fundamental forces or processes personified as love and strife, which are by nature opposed to each other. These two fundamental processes are responsible for the movement of the elements, and this in turn initiates and forces the mixing, combining of the substances to make objects. So in other words, objects would not exist, they would not be what they are, if it weren't for the fundamental processes that are driving them.

So even though in the ontology you might say there are objects, there are these earth, air, fire and water, but it's the process that is primary. And so your ontology is a mixed ontology, but one of them is primary. And so it was the cultural difference between believing in both processes and see, most people believe in both processes and things. But you could have a different in worldview just by emphasizing one over the other, right? By saying this is important for our experience.

21:47 Jim: Weak process ontology contrasted with strong process ontology. You see that as we talked about, if you tried to just scoop a handful of one process, you'd be getting one event in it. And in the strong process worldview, you would say it's impossible to separate this moment from the rest of them. I'm just choosing to focus on this one. And one of the things you can tease out of that pretty forwardly is the idea of relationality and how it's impossible to separate things apart from each other because they rely on each other in a mutually complementary way.

And that, to me, as I mentioned early on, is what provokes the idea that it's important to walk the right road and behave in a moral sense, because if everything's related, then anything and everything you do affects everything else. And you should be very worried about what other people are doing because they, just like you affect each and every other thing.

22:57 Mark: Well, it just occurs to me, forestalling the ethical discussion for a second, but you were saying that essential to process ontology is really there's no atomism in processes that you can't Pick out one process, because they're all interrelated. Like, it would just be a matter of analytical convenience to pick out. Okay, we can talk about the growth of a particular acorn into a tree, but really that's just for our own convenience. The way that we're carving up reality like that, in reality, there's so many processes going on at the same time that the word process itself is already an abstraction, that there's really just the whole.

And then the various ways that we cut it up. And we had, in one of our various earliest episodes, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, we argued for a long time about what could an atomic fact be? Because he emphasized that he's not an atomist in terms of things. They're not Democritean, they're little point objects. The fundamental thing has to be an action, has to be a state of affairs. But once you talk about state of affairs, like, again, just like I was saying about processes, can we really distinguish abstract one state of affairs out of the state of affairs of the world, like we can psychologically, but can we do that with any sort of logical efficaciousness?

And moreover, can we boil this down to there being basic unanalyzable states of affairs? You know, this point red or something? We had a hell of a time trying to figure out what that could possibly mean. So buying the idea that this is not possible, it seems attractive.

24:28 Wes: He says in the Tractatus, objects are held together like links in a chain. So the facts, the states of affairs, are ontologically primary. They're analyzable into objects. And then the relatedness of the object is not some further thing in your ontology. They're structurally held together like links in the chain. But I think, Mark, what you're getting at is you might go even further. And then you take the whole web of facts, the whole world fact, and you make that primary. And then everything else is analyzed out of that, all the other facts. In the same way that objects would be analytical entities achieved by analyzing facts. The facts are just analytical entities achieved by analyzing the world fact, which would turn out to be the world process.

25:11 Mark: You already, Jim, laid out how the world fact, what that means for our ethical comportment is that if everything is interrelated, then every action has waves throughout the whole big fact. So therefore we have to be careful. I don't know. So we saw this exact kind of thing in Confucianism in terms of having right comportment, as been brought up earlier. In the discussion.

25:32 Seth: Yes, and some echoes of Schopenhauer.

25:34 Wes: It's also about embeddedness. And we ought to make a link here to what Burkhardt talks about, which is that at bottom, our existence is normative and that facts, truth, meaning, even our existence are normative. And I'm not sure if I can make this link. When I asked this question, I was trying to think about the relationship between an ontology, which is process oriented, and then an ontology which says normativity is foundational. Maybe it's even prior to factuality. So the sense at which that would change your comportment to the world is that the things around you aren't ethically inert. And if you're relating to them. And the way to acknowledge the fact that they're not ethically inert is to approach them more with the procedural kind of knowledge than with the non procedural, the analytical, the knowing that.

26:26 Jim: Did we all encounter the Coyote and the rock? Iktomi, that's a perfect example of what you just said.

26:34 Wes: Explain that further.

26:35 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

26:36 Mark: Coyote and his friend are walking along. They see this rock, and they're like, wow, that's a really strong rock. Look at the veins in that rock. I really admire this rock. And the rock is like, oh, thank you. And so Coyote gives it his jacket, like, just to praise it a little. Time passes and it rains. It gets cold, and Coyote wants the jacket back. And he tries to get his friend to go get it. His friend's like, nah, you gave it to him. So Coyote goes and asks for it back, and rock says, no, what's given is given. This happens a couple times. He finally says, come on, rocks don't need jackets.

This is ridiculous. I'm gonna take my jacket back. So he takes his jacket back, and the rain stops. A little while later, they hear the sound of big things moving around. And it's the rock has gotten up and come after the jacket. And so his friend slips away, turns into a spider, goes into a little hole, and Coyote gets run over, he gets squashed, and the rock takes the jacket back. So there you go. So you tell us what. What we're supposed to get out of that.

27:30 Seth: There's an extension to the story, too, in the collection of stories you sent, where a white person comes along and picks up Coyote as a rug and puts him in front of his fireplace as a rug. The flat coyote.

27:42 Wes: So even rocks aren't ethically inert? Apparently.

27:45 Jim: Yeah, right. Not only are they not ethically inert, they're not ontologically or Physically inert. And that is to say that they did an interesting experiment. And I'm just going to be general about it because I don't know who did it when it was. But they had a big group of Native students write down a list of name all the types of people you can, women, children, adults, things like that. And then they asked a group of just the colonial students or, you know, somewhere out probably the west, to write down a list of people. And they found that the Native students, not only would they list men, women, children, but there were particular trees that were native to their area, like a redwood or something, and there would be the big river that ran through the area they lived on.

So everything that they encounter is a person. Now, I don't know that they called grass, you know, blades of grass, a person, but they would certainly say that all grass, meaning the ground they walk on, is a person. I don't know how the language works. I don't know if they say person. But nonetheless, something that you want to take pretty serious in trying to understand the Native worldview is that they think everything is a person, or at least a type of being.

29:02 Wes: If you think of that metaphorically, you might think, well, maybe we owe things not just to people, but to the environment or to rocks, to grass. And then the question is, what do we owe them? Exactly. And I'm not just talking about straightforward environmentalist stuff. Maybe it's our attention, maybe it's our certain kind of awareness, but can we conceive of things that we might owe to what's around us?

29:22 Jim: I know that most Natives would unanimously and instantaneously respond, respect. A lot of the tribes, they felt that would say of the Wasichu, you know, us white people coming in, that it's much easier to respect an enemy than love an enemy for them. And respect is a very big component of all of the Native traditions. It even comes out like where I talked about knowledge being sacred and to be treated with respect. And that's what I think a response would be that's owed, if not other things as well, water the plants and things like that.

30:01 Mark: So does respect primarily mean kind of like it does for Kant, seeing them as having their own telos, as having their own goals, their own path, you might say, and not just willy nilly stomping on that right. If you have to get in its face. I know the thing that you're hunting has its own goals, and part of that is not laying down and being your meal. But at least you have a reason for interfering with Its development, its natural development in that way. And you could say, well, as part of the open overall ecosystem, it is natural for things to feed on each other. And so as long as I'm respectful, I maintain through rituals, through thanking the animal or something, the animal is not going to care about that. It's not going to make the animal feel any better. But you're at least keeping your comportment.

30:49 Wes: Our relation to it is not pure negation or contempt or something like that.

30:54 Jim: Right.

30:55 Dylan: I was just thinking about respect in terms of the relationship to the flourishing of that entity. And it would seem to be more complicated than following the example of hunting, that it's not necessarily with respect to always the individual entity. Right. It's something to do with a broader understanding of that. You can hunt a deer and obviously you could have a relationship of respect towards it and still killing it, but that relationship of respect to it is not going to be simply towards its flourishing as an individual deer, but to the flourishing of the entire environment and ecosystem.

Where you would be attentive to the fact that if you kill all the deer, right, Then you're not going to be able to hunt more deer. And a sense of that wholeness guiding your actions. It wouldn't be, well, like the problems that we have in a lot of our environment amount to not paying attention to the fact that there is a ecosystem that has to be attended to. And so, you know, we have overfishing problems and we have over this and over that, problems that presume that the environment is a universal source.

32:07 Wes: And part of that. And I'm just. Before we go the environmentalist route, I think part of the respect thing is acknowledging our dependence on the environment in a way. I was thinking of Rain Dance before as a ritual of acknowledgment of dependence. And that's actually something that's profound. Right. When you talk about, and I'm thinking of Dr. Drew now, but you talk about human relationships, people have enormous problems acknowledging their dependence or being dependent on others. And equally, I think it's not an easy thing to acknowledge in this interrelatedness that we are our finitude.

The fact that we are a kind of flux that's going to come to an end. And that our persistence through time as an entity is so dependent on a certain kind of environment. You know, we wouldn't be last two seconds in Mars, you know, in that atmosphere, things like that. So I think it's also about this acknowledgment of our finitude and dependence. And that's ethically I think really important.

33:05 Dylan: But it's got to translate to more than acknowledgement of it. We're implying that acknowledgement of that dependence implies a connectedness of the world or other entities to us so that we are ethically obligated to treat them more like ourselves. How does action cash out of it?

33:24 Wes: So we might have ethical, I mean, not might. I think we do have certain kinds of ethical obligations to animals. I think we have ethical obligations surrounding our treatment of the environment. Some of those things have to to do with the fact that animals can suffer and that we don't want to destroy the environment because we depend on it. I'm actually trying just to get at something that precedes that and is really more about our state of mind before we even get to the level of the way we treat things around us. What it means to comport our minds in a certain way. And so that's where acknowledgement of dependence comes in and things like that. I mean, I think both are important Dylan and Run with that track. But I just wanted to emphasize that the first part of it and not have it at the obscured by moving on to the second moment. The how do we treat things?

34:10 Seth: I think Wes, that notion of dependence is really critical because whether an agricultural based society or a hunter gatherer based society, in both cases it seems as though, well, there are two things. They acknowledge that their ability to survive and subsist was dependent on what the earth could give them, whether in the form of game or food, weather, rain, all that stuff. So there's this implicit notion of dependence and gratitude for the things that are given to them for the purposes of consumption. But what's also important is that their consumptive model, if we go back to thinking about the recent episode we did on Debord and Marx is the notion of use versus exchange value as far as I can tell.

I mean, I'm sure there's a sense in which prior to white colonialism that there was a notion of exchange value and things for exchange value. But I get the sense of that there is somehow a principle that's tied to use and consumption that would prevent, for example, the exploitation. If the bison or the buffalo are plentiful, you give thanks that they're plentiful and they would hunt to the extent that they needed to furnish their tribe with food and clothing and all that. The concept of killing beyond the level of consumption just because you can like the way white people did out of the sides of train cars and so forth.

They slaughtered all of the animals, but not with the intent of using them to subsist.

35:40 Mark: Just for their tongues.

35:41 Seth: Just for their tongues. Or, you know, the way ass clowns are killing elephants and all this stuff and rhinoceroses that I think is somehow embedded in the ethos.

35:52 Jim: Right. They viewed them as objects rather than relations. They just shot them out of the train and to sell the tongues or whatever they were using them for.

35:59 Mark: So it sounded like Wes earlier was trying to get at, more fundamentally the relationship between is and ought here and how this would, you know, if we're just considering in the abstract, everything is a process, and therefore everything is related. And so how does that then give duties for me? I mean, that's a very abstract way of thinking about it. And maybe both these articles, Burkhart and Cajete, appeal to phenomenology as a better model. And there's certainly a lot of treatises about the. The phenomenology of moral experience. And so it could be that even this whole everything is a process is not a matter of, like an abstract theory.

Everything is reducible ultimately to processes. But that the way that things look, that. That description that we were just giving it, that we carve out individual objects out of the overall mega process, that that's just a phenomenological description. That's kind of like what William James says. We've got the blooming, buzzing confusion that is experience, and then we carve it up in certain ways. That's not an uncommon analysis among phenomenologists. And as we were saying, Husserl talks about that as being the life world, and that all these scientific things and abstractions we come up have to be laid against this background picture of a more global set of unarticulated beliefs and things.

If you look at your experience carefully, you will just find that you feel an obligation toward things. The usual objection to that is like, well, I don't feel that. Okay, well, then it's not purely a description of anybody's old experience. It's experience, sort of properly conceived experience informed by the wisdom of the group, something like this. So that if you are functioning properly, if you have been raised properly, then you will perceive the world as animate and yourself as owing something to them. There's not a lot of room for justifications for somebody that doesn't feel that way.

I don't think I have any obligations toward the rock or the animals or any of the rest of it. Fuck it. There's nothing you can say to a person like that. But yet within that context, within that acculturation process. This is the way their phenomenology reads. And they can try to describe that to you. If you don't feel that way and say, why don't you just carefully look at your own experience? And. And I think you will find that despite your initial feeling that you're not connected to everything, that it doesn't matter, that you will find that you have these obligations as well.

That's the best they can do. In terms of an argument to an outsider.

38:23 Wes: I mean, there's not much of an argument either that you can give to someone who doesn't think there's such a thing as morality. To a nihilist, you can give them Kant's transcendental deduction from autonomy. You can talk about Aristotle. And in the sense in which we have a telos and happiness requires a certain kind of comportment to the world and certain kind of activity and all that. But if you're not interested in happiness, if you're not interested in morality, I'm not sure what argument you can really give. I think most ethicists sort of presume there's a presumption that there is such a thing as morality.

And then you proceed from there. What is its nature? What specifically does it require? And I think, Mark, you were onto something with. We could link it to Aristotelian virtue ethics and say it's a virtue to be comported to the world in this way, to think that we owe something to the environment.

39:13 Mark: And they have a similar. You talk about in your thesis, Jim, about the concept of balance, which looks very much like the way the virtue ethicist, the way Aristotle and other folks we've read talk about it. It's just that it's not just balance between your own faculties, but a balance with your environment, a balance in your nexus of relationship. Because they don't necessarily. Even though obviously they acknowledge the telos of an individual and that an individual grows in a certain way that is not really analyzable profitably in terms ultimately of just that one organism alone, you have to take into account all the relationality of the larger system.

39:48 Jim: Right, exactly. And when you ask a question, how should I behave towards these trees or something, you're also. You're essentially asking yourself, how should I treat myself? And I don't mean to get into the, oh, treat others the way you'd like to be treated sort of thing,

40:04 Wes: but yeah, well, that a certain state of mind is, let's say, vicious or it's not good for us. It Actually is good for us to have other concern, including concern that goes beyond we extend other concern to include not just human beings, but plants and animals and even inanimate objects. And it's not that we think the rock suffers or something like that. It's that we suffer if we are not attending to the world in a certain way.

40:29 Jim: Right.

40:30 Seth: I kind of want to highlight too, that a lot of this attentiveness and connectedness to others, I think, is based on the social organization and the state of the strength of the community. And so, you know, if your survival depends on your cooperation with others, you're going to take a different approach. One thing that we didn't get out of these readings that I still would be interested in learning more about is there were hundreds and hundreds of different tribes, and yet there's probably were not as many racial or ethnic diversity as the tribe suggested.

So how was it that the Oglala, you know, or I guess Lakota, there were seven different tribes that made up that nation. Like what distinguished them from the Crows and the Cheyennes? And why was there such hostility between them? So I'm still interested in all that, but also there's definitely a strong sense in which virtue is learned and it's taught. It's a virtue focused community. The Black Elk Speaks version that I had was annotated, a newer version that, you know, where the editor points out places where the author took license and all that, and he highlighted in there that they considered there to be four virtues.

41:41 Jim: The impression that I've got over the years, particularly in the more recent years, is that I think the scholars are going to start going in that direction of talking about American Indian philosophy in terms of Cherokee virtue ethics or Chickasaw metaphysics, you know, instead of saying American Indian. Because right now it's at a pretty general stage, and it will be until there's just more scholarship, ideally philosophical scholarship, you know, philosophers doing the work. But also, another thing about stories that I did want to make it on was that a large component, and I did send you guys a quick snapshot of how the buzzard got his clothing, and there was a commentary on that. And that is that what listening owl Dr. Norton Smith, who wrote the commentary I sent you mentions is that a lot of Native stories are primarily intended for moral direction.

42:43 Wes: They're fables.

42:44 Jim: Right. And I wanted to point out that these days a lot of people are using some of these Native stories as verification for something. And the best example, and something that really has been bothering me lately is Native stories about Bigfoot. And people are using them as indications that, well, there was a Bigfoot. And they're sort of taking the native stories out of context.

43:08 Mark: There's also a giant talking coyote that can extend his penis over the length

43:12 Wes: of a lake, apparently literally. Should we recap how the buzzard got his feathers? Say what the significance is now, Mark, I think you'd be way better at the recap than me.

43:23 Mark: As the story goes, the usually shy and humble Buzzard was sent as an emissary to the creator on behalf of the bird people. For a creator had forgotten to give them clothing. When the world was made, they were cold. Creator made many beautiful feather suits of various sizes and colors, and to Buzzard was given the honor of selecting his own feather suit. One by one, Buzzard examined and rejected the beautiful feather suits, letting them fall to the earth to the grateful bird people below. As beautiful as they are, thought Buzzard, they are not good enough for the emissary to the Creator. But before Buzzard knew it, there was only one left. The small, ugly, drab, brown, black suit he now wears. In his embarrassment, Buzzard realized how vain he had been. And he forever blushes. So his head will always be red.

44:03 Wes: So that's actually. That's a synopsis of the story, but there's an actual story which is detailed.

44:08 Mark: I don't think I read it.

44:09 Jim: The point is that the buzzard forgot his relations, and because he forgot those relations, he forever suffers. He's the ugly vulture. He's got a bald red head, and the sun burns his head every summer. The whole point of the story is not to tell you how buzzards became to look as they do. It's to express, probably to children, as he mentions later on in the book, that there are ramifications for forgetting or neglecting or disrespecting your relations.

44:44 Wes: He tries on all the suits, you know, and he's like, I don't like the red. I don't like the. You know, it's like the picky person going through their wardrobe before a night out. Right. It's something frivolous and it's the last one that's ill fitting. And then the creator says it's the only suit left. And so you think it's simply a

45:04 Seth: morality tale about humility or gratitude or something like that.

45:08 Wes: Yeah, gratitude or being not so picky or content with what you have. Not always looking for something better. But it's actually more than that because it says the very end of the tale is a little bit of a reversal to this day you can see Buzzard wearing the suit that he earned for himself. He still eats things long dead because of what he ate on his journey to the place of creator. And though some make fun of the way he looks, Buzzard still remembers that he was the only one who could make that long journey. Even in his suit of dirty feathers that fits him badly, even with his head burned scarlet from the heat of the sun, he remembers that he was chosen to be the messenger for all the birds.

When he circles high in the sky, he is close to creator. Then, even in his ill fitting suit of feathers, he is proud. So the buzzard isn't simply punished for that pickiness. And there's something heroic about his journey. Right before he's picky about his wardrobe, he does take a journey that no one else could make. And even though the consequence of that journey seems to be a kind of failure, it actually keeps him close to the creator and it makes him a messenger for the bird. So it seems also to say something to me about it's the journey in a way rather than the result.

Even when the result isn't what you want it to be, often because of your own failings, because of your own lack of virtue, there's still something redemptive that you can get out of that negative result. It still could connect you to something larger. It's not just the having. So this gets at the relatedness and the substance ontology. It's not just the having of dirty feathers and all that that fit badly that you have to look at. You have to look at the feathers as a signifier of a larger relatedness. The relatedness is positive and then the significance is positive, even if the reality is somewhat negative.

46:59 Jim: Right.

47:00 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up, Wes, because I read the longer version too. I saw that as pointing to more of what Waters brings up. Part of the point of the story when you read it that way, is it doesn't allow you to just categorize the buzzard as tragic or foolish, like in the way we would do in a fable with the fox and the hedgehog and all this. The point is, is that at times the buzzard has both the characteristic of having bad judgment in the sense of he went through all these, but that's also a reflection of the same kind of maybe hubris that enabled him to actually make the journey that nobody else could make.

And so you have to see the character as mixed and not necessarily just see it one way or the other or take that many faceted Characteristics of the personality that appear at different times, this whole notion of becoming that. My suspicion is that it would be much harder for an American Indian from that perspective to categorize and call somebody good or bad in terms of some sort of character flaw. As such, they might have bad action or good action and be representative of

48:06 Wes: the same character trait functions differently in different environments.

48:09 Seth: Exactly. Which, of course, makes perfect sense in the notion if you're in a virtue culture, because not only do you have to learn virtue from the actions of others, virtue is not something that you're born with or that you get and you never lose or achieve and never lose. It's a constant process of acting and reinforcing and learning. And that's probably why. They probably have a strong wisdom tradition, too. And their oral history and oral tradition probably bears that out. By the way, the four virtues from the Lakotas, from Black Elk Speaks are bravery, generosity, fortitude, which is also endurance and integrity.

48:44 Mark: So could we just talk about the downside of this conservatism? The problem with him is he forgot his place. And everything you do affects everything else. There are all these wheels in motion that you could. Couldn't possibly be consciously aware of. So kind of, you don't want to step out of line because it could swing things into disarray. I see this as just a general conservatism that we've seen in many different forms. And I agree with some of this. Like when I think about, yeah, let's just rip up all this land and build a big thing. Like, there's something in my gut that there seems something wrong with that, even if I don't know exactly what.

Okay, well, we should at least do an environmental impact study before we do that. Now, that's. That's our thing now. But people will say that with regard to the economy, don't step in. The economy is kind of like an ecosystem. Don't step in and set prices for something because that's going to have all these effects. You don't anticipate. Eat only Soylent, replace all your regular eating with vitamin pills and things like that. You don't know what havoc that's going to wreak. These seem reasonable precautions in some ways, at least things that you should take into account.

But also just don't throw away social norms. So we saw this when we read Edmund Burke. We've got this system in England with the nobility and the peasants and the lower class. And if we somehow were to upend those, even though it seems like, oh, you might have Some abstract principle that says everybody should be equal. If you just willy nilly impose it on things, you're going to get all sorts of horrible consequences.

50:10 Wes: Yeah, the hierarchy is the primary means of social relationship and you undo critical social relations by undoing the hierarchy.

50:17 Mark: But in that discussion, I voiced the opinion that, well, we've committed to actually improving our social relations, improving the world. And even though we might be timid because of we don't want all these horrible unintended consequences, we still want to move forward. Like, that's pretty key. And do we have the sense that, yes, Burkhart says we're always learning we're not conservative and dogmatic, pragmatistic, we can ever achieve better acknowledge our relations and things. But I don't see a lot of room for. So this would be partially be a historical question. You know, Anne Waters gets at this a little bit. Like she says, I'm not going to pretend that those tribes were paradises for differently gendered individuals and that they were

51:01 Wes: socially liberal or were they pacifists or

51:03 Mark: is she vastly understating things? From the little I know of the history, but even reading Black Elk here, it seems she's vastly understating that, that these were severely conservative societies, not hierarchical in the way that we are familiar with and object to, but certainly didn't seem to have a problem with men abducting women. You know, there's a chapter in Black Elk about the story of how this guy got his wife. And it just, this is extremely, extremely backward. Like, is that just a matter of. Well, that's the kind of thing that with proper attention to your relations, these small societies will eventually progress forward and, you know, certainly leave more room, as Anne Waters says, for normative difference than our current very dualistic categorizing society.

51:46 Wes: Send your emails to Mark Linsenmayer.

51:52 Jim: I think a lot about that and I think something that's de emphasized is the relation human nature has or the human condition has to the macro web of relations. You know, so I'm caution about that myself. And also, you know, another downside that I see potentially developing is we had talked about the rain dance physically affecting the outcome. And when everything's related and you say, well, I did the rain dance and it didn't rain, I could see it being as stunting the growth of understanding because you say, oh, well, the gods didn't want it to rain today because they're thirsty, so they needed the water and sort of deflecting it.

And it just gets to, I think, a worry that all of you had. It's like how well, how do we develop some kind of narrative that provides us with the context for saying past regularities will extend into the future? I see that as a downside, too, but not so much a worry for making a coherent worldview, that is.

52:59 Dylan: I just wanted to thank Jim for being on the podcast. And also I enjoyed reading your thesis. As Mark said, it was useful and I enjoyed it. I thought it brought together a bunch of themes. I thought it really clarified some of the process ontology thinking that drew you to American Indian thought in a way that I found very accessible and similarly thought provoking. Yeah.

53:24 Wes: I also wanted to say thank you, Jim, and.

53:26 Jim: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

53:28 Wes: So I think I had some reservations about this just in terms of because we're, we're dealing with fables and folk tradition and the sense in which we could say something philosophically about that coming into it. I was, I was worried about that. But of course I think that was not right. I think, you know, all the things that we've discussed today, much of it is new territory for me, stuff that I hadn't thought about and very happy to have been prompted to think about it.

53:54 Mark: Yeah, thanks again, Jim. And next time we're going to be turning to Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations. Some selections from that you can look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com upcoming. We'll put the particular sections that we read for that. And folks should I interested to see what people have to do say about this. Other people that have a special insight in here and what way we should have approached the topic if we didn't do it the right way. People should go on partiallyexaminedlife.com, make a comment on the blog post for this episode or go on our Facebook group talk about that.

Tell us what else you'd like us to cover. If there are other things in these neglected traditions, or if you're sick of us covering neglected traditions and want us to get back to mainstream philosophy, by all means, email us. Tell us what you'd most like to hear about in the show. So one of the themes we ended up not reiterating here, that was expressed in the very beginning of the episode when we were introducing ourselves, is Black Elk's preference for circles over squares, circular teepees, the circle of life cycles. That's all very natural.

Whereas the square dwellings that he was living in as an old person telling the story to John Neihardt, the author, is very stultifying. So our closing song is Circles Gotta go by Kim Rancourt. We actually discussed this song on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 52. Check it out at nakedly examinedmusic.com all right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks. Good night.

55:13 Seth: Good night.

55:14 Jim: Good night.

55:22 Unknown speaker: That circle's gotta go the circle's gotta go the circle's gotta go it's gotta go, yeah, yeah the circle's gotta go Circle's gotta go the circle's gotta go it's gotta go, yeah and then we can think about circles like we should. Like, round. Yes. Like, yeah.

55:40 Jim: Like we know

55:43 Unknown speaker: the circle has to go Circle has to go Circle has to go, gotta go now and many of you know that the circle. I have to go. Poetry and sunshine. Circles gotta go, circle's gotta go, yeah Circles gotta go, yeah Circles gotta go, gotta go Dan. Hey. You think you really know but all across the skyline you think you really know it might be the same time that you will finally know the story of the same time Circle's gotta go, you got to go Something got to go, yeah go, go, yeah got to go, yeah it's got to go, yeah it's got to go, go, Go and certainly you'll know it might be at

56:48 Jim: the same time that the circle's gotta

56:50 Unknown speaker: go it's gotta go, yeah something's gotta go something's gotta go the circle's gotta go it's gotta go, yeah, yeah the circle's gotta go oh something's gotta go, oh circle's gotta go, it's gotta go, yeah, yeah Maybe you think, you know we're just circling that go. Yeah. You really think about it and you should so it's gotta go, it's gotta go now. It's gotta go I gotta go, go, go it's gotta go now it's got to go, go, go it's got to go, yeah c's got to go, yeah c's got to go, it's got to go, yeah Round and round and round Sur's going to go all across the skyline what we see, yeah got to go sur got to go Inside you and me it's so part of me now man but I want so you got to go, got to go, yeah Maybe draw a square maybe grow some hair got to go, got to go now Seeing what you want seeing what you believe seeing deep, deep deep dive my heart and I'm telling you baby's gotta go.