Participatory Practice
our own ways of thinking and doing and shapes our meaning-making and action. We can only then start to integrate different ways of knowing that will serve to help create a more integrated world.
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The separation of theory and practice is false; they are not opposites but two sides of the same coin. We cannot act wisely without making sense of the world and making sense of the world is in itself a profoundly practical action that informs our reality. (Wahl, 2016: 20) As we make the deep dive into exploring the underlying mindset that needs to change and the reconfiguration that is needed before we can be embodied participatory practitioners, bear the above quote in mind. As Skolimowski (1994) argues, the nature of our mind is the nature of our knowledge and the nature of our reality. In other words, ontology, a theory of being, and epistemology, a theory of knowledge, are intimately related. We are socialised into a particular mindset which creates a particular form. Hitherto, that mindset has been largely a monological approach to the world. What is needed is a multidimensional one. So, let us start by unpicking our old ways of thinking before we take on new ways of thinking and a more participatory mindset.
The Western mind Man [sic] faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe. And he faces the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view – ie in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomised, soulless and self-destructive. The crisis of modern man is essentially a masculine crisis. (Tarnas, 1991) Even those of us who think we have moved towards a participatory view of the world are often not aware of how Western ideological perspectives pervade the very essence of our existence. Beneath the forces of domination and subordination, alienation and fragmentation there is a worldview that came to dominate globally through European colonialism, but also through scientific development and patriarchy. This worldview has affected the way we view what knowledge is and how it is created, and also how we see ourselves in relationship to nature and each other. In both cases, the dominant worldview has been one of dualism, or opposites – of separation of mind from matter, subject from objects, parts from the whole – and a search for linear causality to develop simple solutions to problems. The above quote comes from The Passion of the Western Mind (Tarnas, 1991), which traced the development over the last 300 years of this approach to making sense of the world and its implications. While the mechanistic reductionist methodology of science and the associated continuing separation of knowledge 66
