Psychology Consciousness Studies

Insides and Outsides

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Animate Nature

by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone Review by David Lorimer, August 2016

Published: 2016
Publisher: Imprint Academic
Format: Paperback
Pages: 284
ISBN: 9781845409111

Publisher’s description

This book brings together diverse aspects of animate nature, diverse not only in terms of animate nature itself, but in terms of areas of study. Indeed, the book lives up to the word "interdisciplinary" in its title. It brings together diverse academic perspectives within each chapter and across chapters, showing in each instance that scientific understandings of animate nature are — or can be — complementary to philosophical understandings. Thus insides and outsides, typically viewed as subjective vs objective, mind vs body, and self vs other, are shown to be woven together in complex and subtle ways in the complexities and subtleties of animate life itself. There are and ever have been only two essential models of government: minority rule of all types (labelled "oligocracy") and regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual (labelled "monocracy"). Vaunted democracies are in reality either oligocracies or monocracies. The present-day "democracies" of Britain and the United States are in reality composite oligocracies made up of several disparate elements. Oligocracies are by definition regimes with a high degree of inequality, but with variable levels of liberty. Oligocracy and inequality are the "default" features of human society. Equality is unattainable except by a radical monocracy like Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then only with difficulty and at the expense of liberty and probably of lives as well. Equality of opportunity must not be equated with equality. Equality of opportunity means an equal opportunity to become unequal. Paradoxically, however, for genuine equality of opportunity to exist there has to be equality — which is practically unattainable. For genuine freedom of expression to exist there also needs to be equality, because the little man standing on his soap-box and shouting his lungs out at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park cannot compete with the media moguls — which is why genuine freedom of expression is rare. Once these truths are recognised, it becomes clear that for one state to attempt regime change in a foreign country is likely to be futile.

This collection of papers from different journals constitutes an interdisciplinary perspective on our experience of inside and outside, self and other, drawing on the work of Husserl, Darwin and many others. The essays invite readers to reflect on their experience of inside and outside, embodiment and being in the world, for example in relation to movement in space and time. The treatment is relatively technical and covers a wide range of themes including the genesis of habit, the relation between emotion and movement, self ignorance and self-deception, the law of battle between disciplines, parallels between Husserl's phenomenology and Vipassana meditation and the body as a source of fundamental meanings. There are two chapters developing the relationship between the concepts of stranger and enemy and how these can be overcome by trust. The author also devotes a chapter to movement and dance and the notion of globalisation as not only an economic phenomenon, but also one with social, political, psychological and ecological consequences. This provides ample scope for the creation of enemies and invites each of us to become aware of the shadow or enemy within and the danger of projecting this on the outside. All this can considerably enhance reader's reflective self understanding.

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