Indigenous Knowledge in What Sense?

Tarik Cutuk: To continue my musing on gesturing towards post colonial futures

While the diffusion of Indigenous Knowledges into the Australian mainstream is now widely officially supported within government institutions and policy circles, current Australian laws, policies, and perspectives have so far limited the potential for integrating Indigenous knowledge to effect fundamental transformation of the nation due to the inadequate nature of their engagement.

The focus is typically on the potential for certain Indigenous methodologies and practices to solve perceived policy problems in a predominantly calculative, instrumental sense.

According to a CSIRO report, while this can provide great benefit to Indigenous and non-Indigenous folk, as well as Country, misappropriation and misuse of knowledge is rife. Indigenous epistemologies are often commercially exploited, used without consent, and in ways that are considered harmful by Traditional Custodians.

Even where we do see ostensibly positive examples of Indigenous-led practices for strengthening and sharing knowledge with non-Indigenous Australia, I feel that, counterintuitively, there still exists great danger here. Not only do such practices implicitly perpetuate the idea that the crises and unsustainability facing modernity are mere technical problems unrelated to the social, political, economic, and spiritual life of our civilisation, but by considering intercultural exchange and Indigenous Knowledges primarily as a tool to solve said problems, or otherwise merely another resource to extract value from, they also serve to reinforce the same instrumental view of reality prescribed by modernity/coloniality.

As de Oliveira Andreotti has explained (previous blog post), this is key because many Indigenous peoples see the ecological destructiveness, expansionism, violence, genocide, and dispossession of lands characteristic of Western civilisation as symptomatic of the deeper ontological, metaphysical, and cosmological perspectives which underpin it.

As Yin Paradies puts in his 2020 article in the journal, Post Colonial Studies, ‘Unsettling Truths: Modernity, (De-)Coloniality and Indigenous Futures’:

Both impending civilisational and ecological collapse are due to specific views of reality and the ‘good life’ that result in radical alienation from ourselves, other living beings and the environment.

To confront this predicament fruitfully we must treat it as an invitation to radically self-reflect rather than a solely external problem “out there” for us to solve. The crises we see in the world today are inextricably entwined with that which constitutes our own being as modern subjects.

As that most important French philosopher and historian of knowledge, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has explained:

The most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. … We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.

If we attempt to unbecome modernity, it will also be necessary to unbecome ourselves and the ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to existence we have grown accustomed to.

As de Oliveria Andreotti has emphasised, most crucially we will have to unbecome our imposed sense of separation from the dynamic living land-metabolism that is nature and everything beyond, and, as a corollary, the widespread diminishment, extirpation, and suppression of spirit and the sacred our culture has experienced.

Gesturing Toward Re-Connection

Mary Graham expresses a key insight of Aboriginal ontologies:

The world is immediate, not external, and we are all its custodians, as well as its observers. A culture which holds the immediate world at bay by objectifying it as the Observed System, thereby leaving it to the blinkered forces of the market place, will also be blind to the effects of doing so until those effects become quantifiable as, for example, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer and global economic recession. All the social forces which have led to this planetary crisis could have been anticipated in principle, but this would have required a richer metaphysics (p.117)

Here, Graham touches on a characteristic conceptual feature (and, I argue, flaw) of modern philosophy, which can be traced back to the project of Descartes (1596-1650), if not earlier: the opposition between subject and object, the observer and the observed. Descartes’ separation of the body and mind established a tradition in which body (matter) and mind (spirit) were dualistically opposed.

Importantly and fatefully, In the history of European ideas, this perceived separation brought about the formation of two equally unbalanced, inverse schools of thought: materialism (privileging matter over spirit) and idealism (privileging spirit over matter).

The centrality of the subject/object divide is culturally distinct to us. Many non-Western systems of thought, in addition to Aboriginal ontologies, have problematised this dichotomy.

In the Japanese context, the case of the Kyōto School is a particularly illustrative example. In the early 1850s, Japan reopened to the rest of the world after more than two centuries of national isolation. A generation of young Japanese scholars began to import and integrate Western Knowledges, including “philosophy”. Chief among these thinkers was the unintentional founder of the Kyōto School of thought, Kitarō Nishida, the first to go beyond merely learning from the West, by constructing his own system of thought that creatively drew on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia in order to produce a synthesis with the content of philosophy.

This process was exceptionally challenging, as Nishida had to reject both the perspective of ordinary Western logic, which attempts to suppress the paradoxical by centrally assuming the rule of non-contradiction (that something only either is or is not), as well as the dialectical tradition, which, although it seeks to incorporate and unify opposites, also still strives to suppress paradox within a single whole or oneness.

What Nishida sought, according to Carter in his ‘The Nothingness Beyond God’ (1985) was a way of articulating a relationship to reality which could embrace both the subject and the object, the thesis and antithesis, without privileging either or dissolving one into the other. For Nishida, this was finally achieved in the system he termed his Logic of Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity, which argues that the phenomenal world is both one and many, subjective and objective, changing and unchanging, and that reality is self-contradictory in essence:

Nature and spirit are not two completely different kinds of reality. The distinction between them results from differing ways of looking at one and the same reality. Anyone who deeply comprehends nature discerns a spiritual unity at its base. Moreover, complete, true spirit is united with nature; only one reality exists in the universe. As I said before, this sole reality is both infinite opposition and conflict and infinite unity. It is an independent, self-fulfilled, infinite activity. We call the base of this infinite activity ‘God’. God is not something that transcends reality, God is the base of reality. God is that which dissolves the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity and unites spirit and nature (p.79).

It is not only non-Western cultures which have problematised subject/object dualism. Although less common, some highly creative and self-reflexive theorists and schools of thought within the Western tradition itself have also challenged the subject/object split. This was arguably done most powerfully and influentially by Martin Heidegger, the founder of existentialism who rejected Descartes’ idea of the human being as a discrete observer of the world, instead maintaining, very similarly to Nishida, that both subject and object are inseparable.

In conceiving of the subject (being) as inseparable from the object (world), Heidegger introduced the term dasein (being there), intending to invoke a ‘‘living being’’ through the activity of “being there” and “being in the world” (Horrigan-Kelly, et al., 2016). Notably, Heidegger also saw the philosophical division between subject and object as being intimately entwined with modernity’s economic rationalism, extractivism, and exploitation of nature:

The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines… man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing… every time he as a subject relates to an object.

…When man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.

A similar perspective is also shared by Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, an exploration of the socio-psychological dynamics they felt were responsible for the failure of the Age of Enlightenment:

Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination, p.6).

The resonances between the critical perspectives of the subject/object division offered by diverse Western and non-Western thinkers and movements, and Aboriginal Logic as expressed by a philosopher like Graham, I feel, are apparent:

There is no division between the observing mind and anything else: there is no ‘external world’ to inhabit. There are distinctions between the physical and the spiritual, but these aspects of existence continually interpenetrate each other… There is never a barrier between the mind and the Creative; the whole repertoire of what is possible continually presents or is expressed as an infinite range of Dreamings, p.113.