Adam Lovasz - Tumblr Posts
“Walking is an acting that always unfolds within a certain landscape. [Anthropologist] Tim Ingold has used the notion of ‘taskscape’ to denote pragmatic uses of terrain. Whilst walking, we come to intersect with a variety of taskscapes … When somebody walks, they melt into a taskscape not entirely of their own design. Mind is inherently ecological. It is enacted within a certain ecology, and is actually inseparable from its environment. Mind is the sum of intelligent enactments … walking may be approached in an object-oriented manner. Each form of behavior composes an enactment that meshes with a certain ecology, what has [been] called a ‘behavioral field,’ Mind is the inherently relational enactment of set of behavioral disposition which are always already enmeshed with a field. When these dispositions enter ‘fields of sense,’ mind and walking become independent objects in their own right.
To walk is to establish manifold connections with multiplicities. The impulse to walk corresponds with a deeply rooted impulse to lose ourselves within a landscape, and ecology of openness. At any given moment, we walk a thin line between picking out a certain aspect, a specific site of concentrated desire or completely losing our sense of self. There is a gap between linguistic, theoretical representation, and actual feeling. No atomistic, one-piece notion will do when confronting the phenomenon of walking. Voluntary mobility is something that cannot be rationalized or traced back to rational reflection … The manifold, humming world we encounter never forms a complete whole. Neither perception nor its ecology from a coherent, holistic structure. Rather, both are dissected into an infinity of spatio-temporal world-slices. Practice, including the practice of walking, is a partial revelation, a becoming-alive that breaks into our interiority like a bolt of lightning that strikes down unsuspecting bathers. On other occasions, practice is more akin to the spreading of some as yet undefined sensation, filling our bodies with a certain atmosphere.”
Adam Lovasz, from “Walking as Intelligent Enactment: A New Realist Approach,” Open Philosophy (vol. 2, no. 1, January 2019)