Naturalist intelligence is the eighth of the psychologist Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, the ability to recognise, tell apart and classify the plants, animals and other living things around us, and to be at home among them. Therapeutic Shamanism understands it more widely, as the ability to connect with, interact with and become part of nature, and sees it as the intelligence on which, compared with the rest of the living world, modern humans may come last of all.
What did Howard Gardner mean by naturalist intelligence? #
The ability to recognise and classify the many species, the flora and fauna, of one’s surroundings. Gardner, who proposed in 1983 that there are several intelligences, not one, found that people like Charles Darwin, the environmentalist Rachel Carson or the biologist E. O. Wilson could not easily be explained by any of his original seven. In cultures without formal science, he says, the naturalist is the person most skilled in the traditional ways of naming and sorting living things; in scientific cultures, the naturalist is the biologist. In Intelligence Reframed (1999) he concluded that it “clearly merits addition to the list”.1
The ability does not depend on sight. Gardner notes that blind people can be acute at recognising species, and that one well-known naturalist worked by touch.2 See What are the different kinds of intelligence, and how has the list grown?
Why did Gardner count it as an intelligence? #
Because it met his tests for one. Survival has always depended on telling similar species apart, avoiding some and seeking out others, and the ability is shared with other animals, since birds can tell species of plants and animals apart too. Most young children are drawn to the natural world without being taught, and “The popularity of dinosaurs among five-year-olds is no accident!” Some people with brain damage lose the ability to recognise living things whilst still naming objects, or the reverse, which suggests the ability has a basis of its own in the brain. And every culture has rich systems of names for plants and animals, with cave paintings, ritual dances and sacred rites also drawing on the natural world.3
Is it only about naming and sorting? #
Not even for Gardner. A full naturalist, he says, does much more than classify. Showing what Wilson called “biophilia”, the naturalist is comfortable among living things, and may have a gift for caring for them, taming them or interacting subtly with them, a gift found in roles from hunters and fishers to farmers, gardeners and cooks.4
Therapeutic Shamanism goes further again. In this approach, naturalist intelligence is the ability to really connect with, interact with and become part of nature. One way to put the difference is that Gardner’s naturalist mostly knows about the living world, whilst animism is also a way of knowing with it, meeting other beings as persons to be in relationship with. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
How does shamanic practice use naturalist intelligence? #
Through grokking, and through the two kinds of knowing working together. To grok something is to understand it from the inside out, so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed. In a journey, a person may shape-shift into a plant, a stone or an animal and experience what it is to be that being; to grok Plant, we have to slow down and step out of being Human and Animal for a while.5 Experiencing being another animal, a plant, a tree or a waterfall usually brings a deep sense of interconnectedness with it.
Knowing about still has its place. Facts help us grok. Knowing that birds have hollow bones and no teeth helps a person tune into being Bird. And after a journey, looking up a plant’s uses in herbalism or as a flower essence often confirms what was sensed, building confidence. The embodied experience of the journey and the facts of research each have their place, and together they complement and reinforce one another.6 So Gardner’s naturalist and the animist do not have to be at odds; shamanic practice asks for both. See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?
Are humans good at it? #
Not by Therapeutic Shamanism’s reckoning. Almost everything else in nature, every other animal, the Plant People and the Stone People, connects with and is part of nature better than modern humans do. One of the problems of our species is that we can cut ourselves off from the world around us, and part of the reason for learning shamanism and animism is to put that right. When the intelligences are run across all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, naturalist intelligence is the one on which humans may come last of all. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
The point is humility, not a new ladder. In terms of the Peoples, humans are children. Hunter-gatherers say the oldest and wisest of the Peoples by far are the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, then the Plant People, then the Animal People, and then us.7
What happens to naturalist intelligence in modern life? #
Much of it is turned towards things. Gardner points out that the child who easily tells plants, birds or dinosaurs apart uses the same ability to sort trainers, cars and sound systems. Businesses depend on it, because the ability to tell one brand from another rests on the very capacities that evolved for knowing which plants to eat and which animals to run from. In his word, these capacities have been “hijacked” by the world of commerce.8
From an animist point of view that is a telling image of Taker culture, an intelligence that evolved for relationship with the living world, put to work telling one product from another. Learning shamanism and animism is, in part, a way of turning it back towards the living world. See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication? and Is the living world intelligent?
