Le Breton, David
A cosmologic feeling
- 2023.
64
The feeling that there is a continuity between the environment and the self is found in many human societies. At the beginning of the century, ethnologists followed Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s lead in speaking of “participation.” For numerous human societies, the environment is a living envelope endowed with elements that, while differing from one another, do not produce ontological ruptures with each other. The feeling that the landscape bears witness to a hidden and intense life, where invisible and inaudible forces commingle beyond human awareness, is an anthropological disposition that many walkers (or mountaineers, or sailors…) continue to experience. They recover this ancient intuition by restoring the unity of such a feeling.