Metamorphosis

Join author Jeremy D Johnson for an imaginative exercise in ecological self-fashioning.

If history is being re-visioned, and the history of human origins, in particular, has been a story replete with variation, institutional plasticity, and reinvention, what new images of human identity come to the fore? How does a re-visioned history also help us to re-constitute models of human identity?

Past and future are entangled horizons, and if our history has been that more rich and polyvalent, that much more full of variation, possibility, and freedom (and not just an inevitable and predetermined march towards that ambiguous thing we call ‘progress’), then our present as well as our future cease to be foreclosed by the end of our worldview.

On the contrary, the living present becomes a new, creative horizon where the virtual and the possible at last become imminent, and actual.

This course begins by looking back to the explosion of creativity and consciousness that characterized the Upper Paleolithic, drawing a series of revised insights concerning the protean nature of human nature. If human consciousness and culture has, for the majority of its long history, been making and unmaking self and world, shifting back and forth between alternative forms of social organization and ‘structures’ of consciousness, then our models of human nature and development are in need of dramatic re-visioning: what we need are new models that help us to center the emergent meta-themes of plasticity, integrality, and what French philosopher Felix Guattari calls ‘transversality.’

The ‘paleolithic retrieval’ recasts human beings as transversal beings, which is to say, beings of the ecological ‘middle.’ The human species has long inhabited the liminal, metaxy, or what Gloria Anzaldua calls nepantla.

Since the eruption of creativity and consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic, we have moved back and forth between possibilities. We have called the ecological middle, the heart of relation, our home.

From the Upper Paleolithic, this course leaps to another point of historical importance: the dawn of humanism in the Western Renaissance. It was during this time that modern conceptions of the individual were taking hold. Pico Mirandola’s famous text, Oration on the Dignity of Man, proclaimed that human beings stood apart from the rest of nature. Why? Because in all of creation, the human alone was given a divine gift: humans, alone, could “self-fashion.”

With this idea came a host of new possibilities for the self and its world: the self could become. The individual could fashion themselves in a world that had, likewise, suddenly become dynamic.

As this course seeks to develop an image of a dynamic and self-transforming human, Mirandola’s Oration is insightful, but its anthropocentric grandiosity needs to be addressed. The Renaissance must be rendered tentacular, as Donna Haraway likes to describe, and the Oration must undergo its own radical mutation: self-fashioning becomes ecologized.

Modernity, since the Renaissance, has championed the human freedom to ‘self-fashion.’ But new views of nature continue to de-center the human. Nature, after all, is the great self-fashioner, and every “I” is teeming with the Other. Every “I” is a holobiont, a consortium of creatures and critters that have been in the business of self-fashioning for billions of years. This course invites participants to reconsider the self as a relational being in a world, as the philosopher Jean Gebser describes, “without opposite.”

New views of nature have exploded the self into living technicolor. The new ‘self’ is multiple. Every “I” is an ecology of selves. Enter the ‘holobiont.’

With these ecological insights in mind, our course is free to turn to a diverse set of thinkers that help to prepare a philosophical groundwork for our re-visioned model of human nature.

We will explore Henri Bergson’s evolutionary metaphysics, the ‘Sorcerer’ of Gilles Deleuze, and the ‘Shapeshifter/La Naguala’ of Gloria Anzaldua and indigenous Mexican philosophy. We will consider Jean Gebser’s descriptions of ‘integral consciousness’ and what he calls homo integer, the ‘integral yoga’ of the revolutionary mystic of Sri Aurobindo, as well as the kaliedoscopic holism of media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

True self-fashioning, we will come to see, does not place us outside of nature, nor does it make us the center of this nature. We find ourselves, instead, in the ecological middle. At the heart of creation we find no center. Only radical relation. We find that human nature, and therefore nature, is a site of mutual becoming, and mutual imbrication. Another word for this, the course suggests, is metamorphosis.

Join us for a five week course that, although it begins with an exploration of human nature, concludes with a meditation on the nature of nature. The Earth’s metamorphosis is our own, and it may be through such ecological conceptions of self that we rekindle our metamorphic nature—our birthright since the efflorescence of culture and consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic.

Metamorphosis has been designed to be lively, engaging, and open to everyone. Familiarity with the course materials will not be needed in order to enjoy the class.

When we see ourselves as transversal beings, beings capable of making and remaking ourselves while remaining in radical, ecological relation, we exceed the cultural limitations of the present. We make possible other kinds of planetary futures beyond that of collapse, or foreclosure.

This is, after all, a philosophy of metamorphosis, where we find that what makes our species so exceptional is precisely what finds us most at home, in unthinkable continuity with the living Earth.

Class Outline

Lectures will be held on Saturdays at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET. At the same time on the Thursday following each lecture, an "Office Hours" session will allow students discuss with the instructor and the rest of the group.

Students receive a recommended reading sheet, and optional weekly reading assignments.

Please note that reading assignments are designed to enhance the experience of the course, and are not prerequisites for attendance.

June 28      Lecture 1: Paleolithic Retrievals [Free registration, sign up here]

July 6          Lecture 2: The Renaissance Goes Tentacular

July 13        Lecture 3: Shapeshifting Selves

July 20        Lecture 4: Homo Ludens, or Homo Integer?

July 27        Lecture 5: Metamorphosis, or Towards a Philosophy of the Future

Please note that all lectures and discussion groups will be recorded and made available to students on the Mutations site throughout the duration of the course.

The site also includes a course-specific discussion forum and a section for course materials.

Student Learning Outcomes

Students will:

·      be exposed to a variety of philosophical, artistic, and esoteric ideas that have shaped modern ideas of nature and human nature

·      renew their sense of wonder by contemplating metamorphosis as a principle replete in both the human and more-than-human world

·      have the opportunity to share and exchange with the instructor and fellow students on their own experience, interpretations, and ideas

·      join a community of seekers concerned with the direction our world is taking and convinced that a different way of seeing the world is possible.

Registration: $165

Alumni receive a $15 discount. Please send us a note if you would like to receive access to alumni registration.
Student rates:
Send us a note to receive a pay-what-you-can registration link: info (at) nuralearning (dot) com

Thank you, and see you in class!

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