Thursday, May 21, 2009

Thinking Ecologically than thinking of ecology-IV

After posting the last article on this series, somebody asked me, “What does that mean ‘somebody thinks for you’; is it equivalent to love? To answer straight, it may be love but I would try to save this conclusion from any simplistic kind of understanding. Love is generally assumed to be equivalent to compassion and benevolence but a relationship in ecological terms may not be a very soft relationship. For example, to a person immersed in addictive aspects of a relation, it's not very easy to convey the true meaning of love without being hard or harsh. Similarly, to a person stuck deep in the systems of violence, it would be impossible to communicate the language of compassion and justice. Again, for a person untrained in the domain of aesthetics, it would be amateurish to make him understand the beauty of love. That is why the ecological relationship may be an exact replica of love but here Love needs to be contextualised. Any general treatment of love outside its context may be a total failure of understanding the ecological nature of a relationship. In certain terms, we cannot necessitate the form of relationship because all forms are in sustained communion with their surroundings and hence keep undergoing a substation shift every time. Love is more about the deep awareness of this communication and resultant change. Any kind of essentiality stops the entire process there and then. Whatever I have said about love can also be said about the exact opposite of love which is enmity. Here, somebody thinks against you instead of thinking for you. For a person who is too much afraid of his enemy, it is ridiculous for him to think of anybody other than the enemy. Similarly, if the person doesn't know the art of self defence or cannot make the strategy of defence, any kind of reaction can possibly mean lacking total commonsense. Again, if one of the characters has a historical record of being exploited or impoverished, the possibility of a genuine response is quite limited. Such kinds of perception can actually lead to totally unpredictable kind of behaviour which can stall the possibility of a dialogue in a permanent fashion. In these cases, if other is not the enemy, the eventuality may tend to create one out of a non-situation. That is why to define an ecological relationship both as love or enmity may lead us into a direction of total irrelevance. Setting one kind of idea against the other kind is not the route I am suggesting. Such frameworks shall remain addictions of two extreme kinds-one is extremely schizophrenic and the other is extremely narcissistic. Our precise objective is to avoid both these two extremes because they are isolationist in form as well as texture. People find it very difficult to understand this kind of philosophical suggestion because they find it very difficult to bypass the overrated-ness of the self. To give an attribute to Gramsci, I would put it closer to the distinction he offers between the traditional thinking and the organic thinking. To him, organic thinking is a result of deep understanding of history and the present while the traditional thinking is a result of the conditioning done by the structures of hegemony. It's a kind of position without an identity, a kind of “subaltern” definition as given by Gayatri Spivak. Both Gramsci and Spivak would have defined ecological as rising from the darkness of earth. It is quite supporting for me with just one caution that the directional essential should not be taken too literally. Of late, thinking ecologically is turning out to be an activity less of brain and more of being.

1 comment:

Sudhir Singh said...

But Sir without brain how can we know about others and plz also tell me about the Organic thinking.