Ontological and Epistemological Questions Evoked by Wenger's and Maltwood's Cosmogeographies

Astrological Mandala
Cancer mandala by Tad Atmann

In addition to exploring the cosmographic and psychological or psychosocial implications of the artists’ recreation of landscapes, I am also exploring the implications of their conceptions beyond the compass of their work. Their work invites a consideration of questions about the nature of being that go beyond the dominant forms in Western high culture, the world’s dominant culture. Western high culture is the world’s dominant culture on account of the dominance of the West in all aspects of life, from the political, to the economic, to the scientific and technological, to the military and cultural. Globally, this culture is the official standard of evaluation of competing world views, of social and economic systems.

[For development of similar conceptions about the West see Francis Fukuyama The End of History and responses to that work.See also Huntindgdon's Clash of Cultures.Also see also works and ideas on Globalisation.But these works will also need to be examined in relation to earlier works that examine the West within different perspectives such as Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee's Civilisation.On the role of physics in this culture see Pythagoras Trousers by Margaret Wertheim]

The ontological questions evoked by the conceptions of both artists and which I explore include:

To what degree could these ambitious efforts to reinterpret spatial forms in terms of more than physical conceptions throw light on the modes of sentience thereby demonstrated by these artists, and by implication, the modes of awareness demonstrated by similar responses to space in other cultures, places and periods?

Could such efforts at correlation across spatial and cultural boundaries assist us in understanding the manner in which people are fitted to space and time?

Or to put it differently, the interactions between space, time and mind and between various forms of being? What credence could be given to Wenger's and Maltwood's claims of modes of agency expressed in or through landscape that are different from those forms of agency privileged in Western high culture?

In the perspectives advanced by Wenger and influenced by the Classical Yoruba philosophy of nature,landscapes are understood to embody sentient beings,beings who are neither plainly and completely human or animal.

Within the world's dominant culture, Western high culture,however,unlike in Classical Yoruba thought,trees are simply vegetative forms that demonstrate the characteristics understood of such forms. They are not sentient nor act as homes for sentient beings. The attestations of non- human and non-animal sentience in nature also emerges in the popular but ontologically marginal neo-pagan movement in the West.The Classical Yoruba/Wenger conception of forms of sentience in nature and those of Western neo-Paganism,which has some significance for Maltwood's work, can be seen,therefore,to demonstrate significant degrees of correlation.

With reference to Maltwood's work,central questions that emerge about its wider ramifications include "Can landscapes be understood in terms of large scale configurations of cultural forms in such a manner that the development of both natural forms and human made forms coalesce over the centuries ?" "Can the various interventions on landscape by the human community coalesce with natural forms to create such expressions as the gigantic representation of the convergence between two different forms of human culture, the astrological and the Arthurian,which Maltwood argues for the Glastonbury landscape?

We shall be moving outward from the centre of the artistic structure, whether cosmographic map or cosmographically structured forest space. In terms of radiation in terms of in relation terms its ideational significance and secondly, the of these correlative physical and ideational correlations to radiations of the artistic creations of the artists from its sources in their mental worlds and the possibility of interpreting these mental worlds in terms of the creations they have enabled to bring into being, as well as a challenge to the dichotomy thus established.

May we not speak of the works shaping as well as being shaped by the artist's minds/and may mind not be understood as thought, feeling, as well as physical activity in as much as it expresses ideational and at times cognitive value that is not registered in mental consciousness, whether emotional or ratiocinative or even intuitive?

Image:Cancer mandala by Tad Atmann at http://www.atmann.net/artdesign.htm