Henryk Skolimowski

[Balder]

I am resurrecting a thread from the old version of IPS, since I recently came across a summary of Skolimowski's work (which I will post next), and since the "participatory" in the forum subheader is a nod to his work (as well as Jorge Ferrer's and Sean Kelly's, among others).  I'm not in full agreement with his approach, but it has played a role in my thinking and in (part of) the direction of this forum, so I want to give him a "place" here.  First, I'll start with the posts from the initial thread:

 

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Balder:

 

This weekend, I picked up a book called The Participatory Mind (pub. 1994), by Polish philosopher, Henryk Skolimowski.  I had not heard of him before, so I was a little surprised, flipping through his book, to discover the degree to which he anticipated the recent work of Wilber (integral evolutionary, postmetaphysical spirituality); Cohen, Hamilton, Swimme, and Dowd (evolutionary spirituality); and Ferrer, Tarnas, and perhaps Heron (participatory spirituality), while, to my knowledge, none of these individuals mentions his work.  Of course, all of these thinkers, including Skolimowski, were anticipated by many before them – from Heraclitus to Hegel to Aurobindo.  But I expected, given the focus of his work, Skolimowski would at least be cited by Wilber, Swimme, Ferrer, or others.  If he has been, I haven't found it yet; only a few references to him on the P2P Foundation website.

I have looked around online to find a good review or summary of his work, but have not found anything that is really worth quoting here – nothing that seems to really properly treat what he is attempting in this book.  I have some reservations about some of his concepts and rhetorical strategies, from what I've read of him so far, but in general I am also appreciating his attempt to articulate a post-metaphysical, participatory, evolutionary spiritual epistemology or worldview.  In the book, based on his table of contents and on the synopsis he gives in the introduction, Skolimowski addresses a number of the topics we've discussed on this forum, such as the myth of the given and the representation paradigm; the correspondence theory of truth vs. participatory truth as embodied (species-specific), culturally mediated (culture-specific), evolving, and enactive (pragmatic, a happening); the implications of an evolutionary worldview for concept of spiritual realization; the contributions (and shortcomings) of the views of thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin and Gebser; the sacralization of the secular and an emergent ecological ethic; particularity and universality; etc.  He even gives adumbrations of a “theology of light,” which apparently he spells out in later works.

I will read more of the book (I've only read the first 10 pages so far), and then come back to this thread with more of a report.  If anyone else is familiar with him, please feel free to chime in here with more information, critiques, etc.

On the “light” theme I mentioned above, here is a poem-like something of his that I found online:


At the beginning was light
And all there is, is light.

Its the light transformed into energy,

Into blades of grass,

Into your mind which is

A special particle of light.

That has become

A luminous source of light.
 
All knowledge is light.

All understanding is light.

All meaning is light.

All divinity is light.

And God is light

Not the original light

But a beautifully evolved light.

God was created.

By the original light

Of the universe.

Yet with the help of another light,
the human mind which was finally able to perceive
that the original light was on the way to self-realization,
to become an altogether new light.

The mind has become a component of this new light.

For without mind there is no God at least for human beings.

Every conception of God includes the power of our mind
to make sense of God.

We are part of every God which we cherish,
embrace and worship.

 

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Theurj:

 

I found this interesting essay by Skowlimowski titled “Education for the real world.” Therein he talks about capitalism. Following are a few excerpts:

 

Is capitalism working well enough? My answer is that it isn't.

This answer relates to the bottom line economics. Our bottom line shows profit…. The economics of the bottom line has been so impressive to some that they began to mystify it. The result is economism, a philosophical doctrine which claims (implicitly or explicitly) that economics - the bottom line economics, that is -determines the structure and the ethos of society and should be unconditionally obeyed for it is our god. This last conclusion is not spelled out so clearly but it is nevertheless implied.

Now I will attempt to argue that this whole line thinking and the entire philosophy underlying economism is basically wrong. Let us return to our question: Is capitalism working well enough? My answer is that it isn't. The bottom line economics is a misconceived idea. When we observe how life actually works, then we realize that the genuine bottom line is the quality of life. Unless an economic or a social system meets this ultimate criterion, that of the quality of life, it is an incomplete, inadequate, if not fraudulent one. In this sense economism, or the bottom line economics, may be considered fraudulent.

 

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kelamuni:

 

His credentials look impressive. I find it interesting how, as Balder says, that he anticipates the current world view that others are attempting to articulate — a kind of convergence development.

The tract that theurg locates is also interesting: “the genuine bottom line is the quality of life.” That sounds like something one of my heros, Tommy Douglas, would say: “One cannot worship God and Mammon,” at which point he goes into a defense of public goods over against the attempt to relegate them to the private realm.

 

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Theurj:

 

I also found this site with much info on him including some of his writings.

[Balder]

Here's an excerpt of a summary of some of the general contours of Skolimowski's approach (from the SciMed website):

 

"On the Origin and Significance of Participatory Reality

Prof. Henryk SKOLIMOWSKI

1. The Origin of the Idea

There have been several developments which directly or indirectly led to the emergence of the idea of Participatory Reality and then of the Participatory Mind.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the philosopher Henri Bergson, proposed the idea of Creative Evolution in his book under the same title (Creative Evolution 1911). In this work he postulated that evolution is a far more subtle process than it was assumed in Darwin's model, whereby evolution is reduced to the process of mere chance of brute necessity. Bergson argued that the intricacy and beauty of the evolutionary process is so awesome that we should call it creative.

Teilhard de Chardin, another French thinker, continued this idea and articulated it in his epochal book, The Phenomenon of Man (1959). He argued that the most important process through which evolution is making its ascent is one in which simultaneously organising increase their complexity and their consciousness. As life becomes more complex it becomes more conscious. As it becomes more conscious, it becomes more complex. This process Teilhard subsumed under his complexity/consciousness thesis. The creativity of evolution is here expressed as a never ending process of building ever more refined forms of consciousness.

Almost from the beginning of the 20th Century, science has suffered an acute problem of identity, firstly because it seemed to have lost grip on reality; secondly, because it abandoned the notion of objectivity; thirdly because it had to relinquish its claim of possessing indubitable knowledge of reality.

This state of affairs came about first through Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which profoundly upset the stability of the Newtonian paradigm and then through the development of Quantum Physics and of New Physics, which have departed even more significantly from the mechanistic paradigm.

All these developments prompted Karl Popper to announce that no knowledge is absolute (including the best scientific knowledge); that all knowledge is tentative or conjectural (see especially Popper's Conjectures and Refutations, 1963). This led further to the realisation that all knowledge is evolutionary in character: concepts, theories, paradigms evolve and change with time, come and go. It was another extension of the idea of evolution. Darwin applied evolution to biology and his main concern was with mechanising of adaptation. Bergson and Teilhard gave evolution the wings of creative becoming. Popper brought about the realisation that all knowledge is evolving (conceptual evolution). Thus evolution is being articulated. In the process, it itself undergoes evolution.

While Popper still attempted to preserve the notion of objective reality (maintaining nevertheless that it could never be truly or ultimately described - but only tentatively so) other thinkers went further, acknowledging more explicitly that, with the advent of Quantum Physics, we need to abandon the very idea of objective reality existing out there independently of us.

J. A. Wheeler announced in 1974 ("Universe as a Home for Man" Scientific American, 1974) that in some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe. He used a powerful image to convey his idea. If we imagine the universe to be symbolised by the big letter U; and if we envisage the human eye looking from one area of the "U" at another area, then we realise that our eye looking at the universe is the universe looking at itself. The observer is woven into the observed. We are the eyes through which the universe looks at itself. This is a far-reaching idea.

This development was bound to spill over into our understanding of the nature of mind. If the universe is participatory, then so must be the mind. The universe cannot be participatory if the mind is not participatory. Thus Henryk Skolimowski explicity proposed the idea of the participatory mind. (see: The Participatory Mind, A New Theory of Knowledge and of the Universe (1994). Participatory Mind (P.M.) articulates some of the features of Wheeler's participatory reality is incomplete without P.M. as its necessary component.

P.M. also claims more ancient ancestry. It was Parmenides who said in the 5th century B.C.E.: "No mind, no world". Furthermore, P.M. takes cognisance of William Blake. "To the eye of Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself". Put simply: as Participatory Mind shapes it so reality becomes. This last development leading to participatory mind also created a proliferation of new theories of mind and of consciousness. As new insights into the nature of knowledge and of the universe grew; and as this new evolutionary understanding became deeper and more prevalent, it put pressure on old cognitive structures and the rigid empiricist confines that have controlled the theories of mind and consciousness. The consequence was that these rigid deterministic structures simply crumbled; actually yielding to the flowering of new and often far-reaching theories. These theories still need to be sorted out for their cognitive prowess and their in-depth explanatory power of the world.

The idea of Participatory Reality cum Participatory Mind is clearly gaining ground. Its slow ascent is due to the fact that its field is enormous as it must re-articulate the whole philosophical panorama around us."

 

[Read the rest of the summary here.]

[Balder]

A copy of a chapter from his book, The Participatory Mind, is available here:  Chapter 10: Participatory Truth

 

And here is a link to a resource thread on participatory worldviews that I started awhile back.