DIY Worlds

We build a house, and paint the walls yellow. We furnish it with books and eat Greek salads on the floor - in a moment of inspiration from John Zorn, who ripped out his kitchen for book and record space….

The most remarkable feature of terrestrial organisms is that each one of them manufactures the immediate atmosphere in which it lives… individual organisms are surrounded by a moving layer of warm moist air…. In humans the layer is constantly moving upward over the body and off the top of the head. Thus, organisms do not live directly in the general atmosphere but in a shell produced by their own life activity. (Richard Lewontin)

We create our own atmosphere; we live inside shells….

Lewontin is describing the physical characteristics of our life. But they could equally apply to our mental lives too: out of the world of facts and opinions we have to select, understand and transform; we have to create our own conceptual space. 

And our shells? They will depend on our genetic make up, but also habit and culture; and the strength of Hume’s lassitude (the less energy we have, the less our ability to transform the world around us). But of course the shell can also seal us from the influence of that world, the very thing we need to give richness and depth to our own creations…. We can lock the door on the Garden of Eden.

What a wonderful tension! The need to penetrate the world around us in order to grow the world within; but at the same time the need to transform it, to dress it with our own being. Lewontin’s description echoes Wilhem von Humboldt from the 18th century, whose words bring out some of these tensions (my emphasis):

All moral culture springs solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul, and can only be stimulated in human nature, and can never be stimulated in external and artificial contrivances…. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.

The free creative spirit, who is able to absorb their environment and change it; who is able to make it their own – this was von Humboldt’s ideal. Of course, if human nature is not stimulated and is forced to act mechanically from imposed orders and doctrines the shell will harden, the environment deplete, and that world will both narrower and more impoverished. It’s conceptual outlook it will also be tighter, with a few broad concepts to understand the world. For if you cannot actively engage with the world, to penetrate your shell, then you can only live on your own thoughts and those acquired in childhood and adolescence – meagre fair.

But to return to von Humboldt’s ideal:

…all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures.

An ideal that subsequent scientific research suggests may resemble the physical realities of life itself. Modern science, it appears, confirms some age-old insights.

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