David Fideler is an American writer and historian of ideas whose book Restoring the Soul of the World (2014) traces the old Western idea of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, the view that the cosmos is a living, intelligent whole in which we take part, not a machine we look at from outside. By restoring the soul of the world he means recovering that way of seeing, which he believes was pushed aside when nature came to be pictured as dead matter, and living by it again, in partnership with nature’s own intelligence instead of in control of it.
Who is David Fideler? #
He is a writer, editor and teacher, born in 1961.1 He has a doctorate in philosophy and the history of science and cosmology, and a background in ancient Greek philosophy and the religions of the ancient Mediterranean, studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He is known as an authority on the Pythagorean school, has edited the humanities journal Alexandria, on cosmology, philosophy, myth and culture, and has worked as a college teacher, an educational consultant and the director of a humanities centre.2 His Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence is a history of ideas written for the general reader. An argument runs through it about how we might live now.
What is the soul of the world? #
The idea that the cosmos is one living being, with a soul of its own. Fideler traces it back to the ancient Greeks, farming and city-state cultures, and above all to Plato, who in the Timaeus called the universe “a single Living Creature which encompasses all of the living creatures that are within it.” Plato’s World Soul, in Fideler’s words, is “the vital pattern of relatedness in which the life, beauty, and order of the cosmos are rooted.” Fideler stresses that Plato never offered this as a literal description. He told it as a story, which he called the “most likely account”.3 See What did Plato teach about the living cosmos, and why did he downgrade the material world?
From Plato the line runs, on Fideler’s account, through the Stoics and Plotinus, through Renaissance writers such as Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno, and into the Romantic poets. His central claim is that, from ancient Greece through the Renaissance, the idea of living nature was not a fringe belief but the mainstream of Western thought, and that it “helped to maintain a healthy bond between humanity and the larger-than-human world in which we are embedded.”4 See Who were the Presocratic philosophers, and which of them saw the world as alive?
How, on his account, did the world lose its soul? #
Through the picture of the world as a machine, which took hold in the seventeenth century. God came to be pictured as a distant engineer who set the universe running like a giant clock and then stepped back to watch. Reality was reduced to dead matter and the motion that pushed it about. Animals became machines, so that a dog that yelped when it was hit was giving off an automatic response, like a mechanical doorbell. With René Descartes came a new idea of what it is to be human, a disembodied, rational spectator gazing at a world that is wholly other.5
Francis Bacon gave the attitude its language, writing that the new science would make nature “the slave of mankind” and establish the “Dominion of Man over the Universe”. The result, as Fideler puts it, was a world pictured “more and more as an exploitable resource rather than as a living community of which we are a part.”6 Every worldview, on his account, sanctions particular ways of relating to the world and to other people, and this one sanctioned control and consumption.
What would restoring it involve? #
Two things: a change in how we see the world, and a change in how we act in it. On the first, Fideler holds that the machine picture, useful as it was, was never accurate, and that the sciences of the last century, from quantum physics to the study of self-organising systems and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia theory, have found matter to be “creative, energetic, and community building” and living things to be nothing like machines. He offers the astronauts’ view of the Earth from space as a modern experience that makes the spectator stance impossible. Seeing the whole planet, we sense ourselves as participants in life, not onlookers.7 See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock? and What is autopoiesis, and what does it say about what is alive?
On the second, he turns to people already working with nature’s intelligence, not against it: biomimicry, which takes nature as model and mentor for design, and the ecological designer John Todd, whose “living machines” use communities of living organisms to turn wastewater into clean water. He sets ‘regenerative’ design, which restores what has been damaged, against ‘sustainability’, which can mean only keeping a damaged world going. His book closes on the image of the whole Earth as a garden, “a living but damaged paradise”, with us as gardeners “working in collaboration with the soul of the world.”8
The book is a history and an argument, not a practice manual. It offers no rituals or ways of relating to particular beings; its practical side is ecological design.
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in the conviction that the world is alive. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, in many different kinds of consciousness, from animals and plants to rivers, mountains and the objects humans make.9 Fideler’s history shows that a living cosmos is part of Western thought too, not only of animist cultures.
His spectator meets the teaching on the two halves of the brain. Modern, ‘civilised’ humans are strongly left-brain dominant and have almost entirely fallen into an experience of life as separateness, where hunter-gatherers held a sense of self and a sense of interconnectedness side by side.10 And his account of nature turned into a resource meets the teaching of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, in which animals and plants came to be treated as ‘things’ to be used and exploited.11 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Plato’s choice to tell the World Soul as a story, not a literal report, sits close to the distinction between mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, what is metaphorically true, and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, what is literally true.12 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
First, on when the soul of the world was lost. Fideler places the decisive break in the seventeenth century, with the mechanical picture of nature. Therapeutic Shamanism places the break thousands of years earlier: it began with the shift to farming and gathered pace with the Fall, the birth of the first city-state ‘civilisations’, when the respect hunter-gatherers held for animals, plants and the earth gave way to treating them as things.13 On that account the Greek thinkers Fideler draws on already lived in farming, city-state cultures, after the Fall had begun. See What is the Fall?
Second, on how it is restored. Fideler restores the soul of the world chiefly through ideas, science and design. For hunter-gatherers the living, interconnected world was “absolutely not just a belief”; it was “no left-brain intellectualisation”, but a real and vivid experience.14 So in Therapeutic Shamanism the restoring happens through direct relationship: through shamanic journeying, through working with the Animal, Plant and Stone People, and through simple practices such as looking at each thing around us and allowing the possibility that it is conscious, until we begin to experience the world as alive, not only thinking it could be.15 See What does it mean to live as if it is all sacred?
Third, on the whole and the parts. Fideler’s emphasis falls on the one great soul of the cosmos. Animism keeps both in view. At a deeper level we are branches of a larger whole, and at the same time each being is conscious in its own way and to be related to as itself.16 See Is animism the same as ‘all is one’?
