The Phenomenology of Wild

Phenomenology classically deals with lived experience. A fleeting or one off experience may be the domain of poetry, but a range of repeated experiences that can be reflected upon is something a phenomenologist can get working on. The experiencer uses his own knowledge derived from the experience and, going back and getting closer, takes apart as much of the coalesced memory of the experience as he can. By doing this he or she arrives at things unsuspected by the analytic approach which goes from explicit knowledge to conclusion without teasing around the hinterland of tacit knowledge.

When we repeatedly experience a thing we build up tacit and explicit knowledge. There is stuff we don’t even know we know, we just do it. There is also the effect of perhaps hidden or buried influences. There may be a buried unconscious impulse lurking below the surface that affects the experience in ways that are not entirely obvious.

As we progress in our look at what being wild means in terms of experience we will surely more areas in which wildness plays a part and correspondingly more ways to talk about being wild.

1. 1.    My starting point is to refer briefly to a book by anthropologist and structuralist Claud Levi-Strauss- L’homme Sauvage- translated as the Savage Mind. This book is naturally rather out of favour in current times. It is hardly politically correct to use such terms as ‘savage’. And even to suggest there are different types of mind is perhaps racist in some way. But what the book does do, is highlight a different way of organising knowledge, and perhaps a different way of experiencing. The ‘savage’ is a bricoleur- a bodger and improviser and a jack of all trades. The modern man is a specialist. The idea of the polymath is fondly imagined to be something that only applied in the past to such greats as Leonardo or Goethe. But those polymaths are closer to the savage mind than a specialist.
2. 2.    The book implies of course that the savage is inferior to us, that he would be better off becoming more like us, that crucially he has nothing to teach us except in an objective sense of increasing facts about savages. He has nothing to teach us that will improve or change our experience of living.
3. 3.    What gets in the way is that the primitive man or indigenous man is characterised as less intelligent than us. There can be no Einstein lurking in the trees clutching a spear. There is of course some truth in this for a contactable tribe. Any child with superior linguistic capabilities would have been attracted out and educated we surmise. What is left behind is the people who are not quite as bright. But primitive man has no such escape. Primitive man, the cave dweller and rock artist, had just as much raw intelligence as us. And we will see that he had a much more balanced view of man’s place in nature than we do. Though he could not leverage his energy as we can through machines, methods and contrivances, he made up for that by superior wisdom- that is- foresight and alignment with his environment over time.

Why are we tame and how can we be more wild?

Modern life is tame. We are like caged beasts so long in a zoo we don’t know we are institutionalised and imprisoned. We think zoo life is normal- with the state or our employer doling out our money which we are then forced to pay to the rentman, the utilities company and the supermarket. We believe we have to live as others live- be like the tame herd. But the tamer we get the more easily we are milked and exploited. We do not need fancy products and clothes and cars and other things that are depleting the planet of wilderness and beauty, polluting the seas with plastic and our rivers with hormones. Yet we believe we need this stuff and this is because we are tame.

Tameness is characterised by fear. When fear is exploited its flipside, greed, comes into play too. Why? Because a fearful man loses sight of the fact that we live in an abundant world utterly suited to human life. He thinks ‘life is hard’- but life is only hard when we impose artificial structures. Humans are immensely adaptable and when they are masters of their own fate they do not mind harsh conditions. These make them stronger and they revel in them. Eskimoes feel the cold- for sure- but they do not think this is a terrible problem. They solve it with fur and fat. But a tame man, forced to work sixteen hours a day in a factory in a damp cold climate- that is hard, that is what will break a man’s spirit.

Men are tamed. When tame the uberstructures of nation, tribe and state become more powerful and more able to ‘act through’ individuals in the group. When a man or woman experiences power and enjoys it they will often act to increase that feeling. Subjugating others is easier if they are tame. So perhaps subconsciously, the power seeker approves measures that make people tamer. And, what is more, they do it in the name of the bigger structures- Napoleon used the idea of the nation of France to enslave millions in his army. The idea of a suprahuman organism acts on individuals and they do its will. It is a kind of hive mind, everyone doing his bit. And the tamer men become the more easily they adapt to being a worker bee, a member of the hive.

But the hive keep us alive you say.

No, what keeps you alive is your humanity, your higher qualities of empathy and pursuit of wisdom and to further both of these you need to be wild, not tame.

The wild man is characterised above all else by fearlessness. He is afraid of nothing. He may be cautious. He may be very canny, but he has no fear because it is business to know his world, and, when it is known, to master it. He therefore has no place for fear. He is above all else, not institutionalised, nor even tribalized to the extent that some tribes make him as tame as some corporations do.

The way a corporation works is to make life without the corporation unthinkable. The way a tribe works is to make life outside the tribe seem unthinkable.

Yet no man is an island. And look at what happens when you leave the tribe- you become an outcast, a scrounger, a parasite. Stranger in the Woods tells the  true story of a young man who lives for 27 years by stealing from remote cabins in Maine and living in a hidden encampment. He is not a hunter or a fisherman or even a farmer- he steals from humans in order to live a ‘free life’ – yet he lives in fear of being caught all the time. When he is, he confesses all. Now he lives a quiet life with his family- an oddball for sure.

No that cannot be a model for anything except madness. The wild man is still a sociable man.

The first step, therefore, is de-institutionalising. It is being self-sufficient.

The wild man refutes land rights. The right to roam replaces the right to own. There are hunting rights and cultivation rights but these are not ownership. There can be no building on the land, no damming and destroying. But when numbers increase because of cities men become tame in order to survive. This is a crime.

The higher man, the man of foresight and intelligence choses to be wild. 

The essence of life is not knowledge. It is taking some piece of knowledge seriously and to heart. You may have heard the injunction- find something you can sell and sell the hell out of it. But you will only DO THIS if you have very much take it to heart and believe you either have no choice in the matter or that this is your course of action, your next step on the rungs of life. A higher point. Because being wise must be accompanied by being wild, being free. Yes, a tame man can be a wise man in words. But he can only be wise in deeds if he is free and his own man.

The celebrity is a proxy wild man or wild woman. The celebrity really ‘lives life’ whereas the tame man just survives. He lives a watered down version of life. Because in the 1980s it was discovered that celebrities sold things the culture reorganised around celebrity worship. Earlier you had to kiss the feet of a royal or a member of the aristocracy to get things done. Now you had to enlist a celebrity.

Wild culture is in opposition to celebrity culture. A celebrity is someone famous for being famous. Their name attracts people who will then buy products associated with that name. The only moral position is to be an anti-celebrity; certainly it is the only way to maintain normal relations with people.

The wild man has something to sell. They may be fruits from the forest, or the fruits of his labour.