Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram

And although many of the experts who speak in this manner – relegating the sensuous world to a kind of secondary or derivative status – are avowed atheists, and although they will rail passionately against the creationists and any others who they think are caught up in a superstitious worldview, this approach that privileges abstract dimensions, wh... See more

If I sense the things of this earth not as a resources but as sources, if I feel them as wellsprings bubbling out of the unknown depths, well, this is not to deny that many of those springs seem to be drying up. This is a horrific circumstance that we’ve gotten ourselves into. But the way beyond this mess has to involve, first, a reconceiving and a... See more

The term ‘resource’ always befuddles me. If we would simply drop the prefix, ‘‘re,’’ whenever we use the term, it would become apparent that we’re almost always talking about ‘sources’, like springs bubbling up from the unseen depths. But when we put that little prefix in front of the word, and speak of things as ‘resources’, we transform the enigm... See more

‘A central question was: what if we were to really honour and acknowledge the fact that we are animals?’ he explains. ‘How would we think, or speak, about even the most ordinary, taken-for-granted aspect of the world, like shadows, or gravity, or houses, or the weather? So much of the language we’ve inherited is laden with otherworldly assumptions.... See more