Reviews for Linked Arms

The average rating for Linked Arms based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-16 00:00:00 Joe Aleman I first read this book in college, in an amazing class, by far the best class I've ever taken in any context, mind-expanding and life-changing like college, I hear, is supposed to be. That class was on John Cage and Silence, taught by the amazing Thalia Field, and the fact that this book, which has nothing to do with music, or silence, or John Cage, was part of the syllabus is a good example of what made the class so amazing. Professor Field took Cage as a starting point, a wonderfully fertile starting point, and from there branched in every concievable direction; we read and learned and talked about music, and Zen, sure, but also Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Buckminster Fuller, anarchism, mycology, globalization, just an amazing range of topics. And environmentalism, the curious environmentalism of this book, was one of them. It's curious because, despite the bizarre blurb from the Globe and Mail on the front cover (did they even read it?) it is most certainly not a "call to arms"; as Evernden says towards the end, "I have aspired only to ask 'what if?' - not to prescribe some splendid alternative which would solve all our percieved problems. In fact, even to deal in terms of problems and solutions would defeat my purpose." In Evernden's view, what we are doing to the planet (what we call the environmental crisis, or whatever) is not something that can be fixed by simply changing our behavior but rather by a change in our entire way of seeing the world, a radical, fundamental shift in philosophy. Basically, that we must dissolve the subject-object distinction, stop distinguishing between figure and ground, discard the Cartesian divide. That the word "environment" itself is part of the problem, as it separates the subject self from the rest of the world: "If the environmentalist is only concerned about a thing - environment - then that concern is easily resolved, either by safeguarding and repairing that thing, or by showing that it is of no consequence. But environmentalism, in the deepest sense, is not about environment. It is not about things but relationships." To achieve this reset of ontology (if I'm using that word right? I'm not a philosopher myself) he mostly looks to the phenomenologists, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. There is some difficult stuff about Dasein and so on. I'm not sure how well I follow it. One thing that was interesting about this re-read, almost 20 years later, is that the book seems much less startling and forceful than it did at the time. Not because the ideas aren't radical and fascinating. But because they are explained in rather academic language and in a relatively gentle persuasive tone. I remember being struck, amazed, by concepts like Jakob Von Uexkull's vision of creatures surrounded by the 'soap-bubble' of their own Umwelt; or Paul Colinvaux's suggestion that a species might be nature's way of avoiding competition, the animal growing to fill the ecological niche, so that the niche feels more important to defining the species than the creature does. But rereading I was mostly surprised that I even noticed these things, which are not presented as amazing astounding new ideas, but simply noted along the way. When it came to reading for school, I was something of a skimmer, and I can only imagine that Professor Field called my attention to these things. But it's definitely fascinating, Evernden's undermining of the perception of any creature as discrete and bounded. (I have recently been listening to a talk by biologist Scott Gilbert, called "We Are All Lichens Now", where he explains that most everything living is symbiotic, including humans with our necessary gut bacteria, which also attacks the concept of individuality, which reminded me of this book and prompted this re-read.) As he notes, territorial creatures like the stickleback have a sense of self which extends far beyond their skin; on the other hand anosognosiac patients' self does not include their entire body, feeling their arm or leg as something alien to themselves. And everything needs a context: "A solitary gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla; it is a gorilla-shaped imitation of a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings. And that society in turn is only itself when it is in its environmental context, and so on. To preserve only a package of genes is to accept a very restricted definition of animality and to fall into the trap of mistaking the skin-encapsulated object for the process of relationships that constitute the creature in question." Wonderful. What has all this got to do with Cage? Well, something about his ideal of non-interfering yet interpenetrating sounds, and ideally, beings. Cage too was an environmentalist of an unusual sort, trying, like the pheonomenologists (um, I think) to discard the assumptions of the past and experience reality directly, with a complete dispassionate sympathy and respect for everything. He listened to any sound the world made, from flowing water to radio static, with the attention and enjoyment that everyone brings to music, and so made music of every sound; something like the radical respect Martin Buber recommends as the "I-Thou" relationship, and which Evernden thinks we must learn to bring to the world. I think this is why Thalia had us read this book. But honestly I don't totally remember, and wish I could take the class all over again, and perhaps better understand it the second time around, without being distracted by the fact that it was changiing my life.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-26 00:00:00 Rick Boettner This is probably the first book I've read in the environmental ethics/philosophy genre. Overall, it's not a particularly enjoyable read and if you're anything like me you certainly won't go flying through it, but it has both modified my world view and given me a greater understanding of the one I already had. Truly it deserves more recognition than it has, and I am glad to have been lent it.