Humanize the earth - looks & landscape

Humanize the Earth
The Internal Landscape studies non-meaning in life in relation to the struggle against nihilism within each human being and in the social life, exhorting readers to transform their lives into activity and militancy at the service of humanizing the world. The human Landscape treats the question of establishing a foundation for action in the world, realigning meanings and interpretations of values and institutions that had seemed beyond question and accepted as established once and for all. Landscape and looks are involving the body and an emotional way of being-in-the world. 

That is why I think that to educate is fundamentally to prepare the new generations to exercices a non-naive vision of reality, so that their look takes the world into account not as some supposed objective reality-in-itself but rather as the objcct of transformative humans actions.
Humanize the Earth Silo, «The human Landscape » - p. 91, p. 92

Today, we are presenting the book Humanize the Earth written by Silo, Mario Rodriguez Cobos and publish by Latitude Press in 1993. The book was first publish in Spanish and is three writings in poetic prose—“The Inner Look,” “The Internal Landscape,” and “The Human Landscape”—that address human existence from its most profound interiority to everyday life.   Theses three book are in fact moments that follow in a sequence running from the most profound internal, the world of dreams and symbols, toward the external and human landscapes. They involve a journey, a movement in point of view that begins in the most intimate and personal and ends in opening that begins toward the interpersonal, social, and historical world.

The first work, The inner Look, was completed in 1972 and revised in 1988; the second, The Internal Landscape, was written in 1981 and subsequently revised in 1988; and finally, The Human Landscape was completed in 1988.

Between the initial publication of The inner Look and its revision sixteen years elapsed, during which time the book circulated in many languages to both East and West, giving rise to personal communication and correspondence between the author and readers from many latitudes.

And so it is that The Human Landscape, while it maintains the basic qualities of style of the preceding two works, unlike them emphasizes particularities of the cultural and social world, forcing a turn in the treatment of these themes that inevitably involves all components of this literary work.

Regarding content, we can say that The inner Look focuses on meaning in life. The principal theme of its discourse is the psychological state of contradiction. It clarifies that suffering is the register that one has of contradiction, and that surpassing mental suffering is possible in the measure that one’s life is oriented toward non-contradictory actions in general and non-contradictory actions in relation to other people in particular.  

«The perception of the human landscape brings me face to face with myself - it is an emotional engagement, a thing that negates me or propels me forward. I am drawn forward from my «today» by future intention. This future, which conditions the present ; this image ; this feeling, confused or desired ; this action , freely chosen or imposed, also marks my past, because it changes what I consider to have been my past.» (Silo, human Landscape, p. 100)

Today I share with you some chapters from the book Human Landscape.

I.                 Looks and Landscapes

1.      Let us speak of landscapes and looks, turning once again to what was said in the beginning: «external landscape is what we sift from them through the sieve of our internal world. These landscapes are one and constitute our indissoluble vision of reality.

2.      Beginning with the perception of an external object, a naïve look may confuse «what is seen» with reality just as it was. And still others confuse objects they have perceived and then transformed in other states of consciousness (their illusions, or dream images) with material objects.

3.      It is not difficult for reasonable people to understand that objects perceived in an earlier moment can appear distorted in dreams and memories. But the simplicity of daily action, of doing with and among things, is shaken to its core by the idea that perceived objects are always covered by a multicolored mantle woven of other, simultaneous perceptions and memories; that perception is an overall mode of being-in-the-midst-of-things, and includes an emotional tone and the general stat of one’s body.

4.      The naïve look grasps the «external» world along with its own pain or its own joy. I do not look with my eyes alone, but also with my heart, with gentle recollection, with ominous suspicion, with cold calculation, with stealthy comparison. I look through allegories, signs, and symbols, and though I do not see these things in my looking, they act on it nonetheless, just as when I look I do not see my eye or its activity.

5.       Because of the complexity of perceiving, I prefer to use the word landscape rather than object when speaking of reality, whether external or internal. And with that, I take it as given that I am referring to complexes and structures, and not to object in some isolated and abstract individuality.

I want to emphasize, too, that these landscapes correspond to acts of perception that I call looks (encroaching, perhaps illegitimately, on fields unrelated to visualization). These looks are active and complex acts that organize landscapes. They are not simple passive acts of receiving external information (data that arrive through my external senses) or internal information (that is, sensations from my own body, memories, and apperceptions).

There should be no need to add that in these mutual interrelations between looks and landscapes, the distinction between internal and external is drawn on the basis of the direction of the intentionality of the consciousness – and not as is frequently set forth in the naïve schemata that are presented to schoolchildren.

If you have understood the foregoing, you will also understand that when I speak of the human landscaped I am referring to a type of external landscape that is composed of people and – even on those occasions when the human being per se is absent – human acts and intentions made manifest in objects.

It is important, then to distinguish between the internal worlds and internal landscaped, between nature and external landscape, between society and human landscape. What I am trying to emphasize is that to speak of landscaped always implies one how looks, as possessed to situations in which the internal (psychological) world, nature, or society are naively taken as exiting in themselves, independent of any interpretation.

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