steveatwaywords's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
4.75
Ingold's reflective/intimate attention to the world around him, to the relationships with the objects (both man-made and natural) which he meets, are his "correspondences." And while this might seem a novelty or personal essay at first glance, instead is nothing less than an undertaking to expand meaning-making for all of us.
At times, Ingold gives short and sharp criticisms of the limits and damage which traditional/conventional thinking and language use foster. These are relative "givens," however, treading familiar territory in the bindings of Western ontological discourse. He calls for a movement to a more ontogenic cognitive model, one which demands we see how all of the world (ourselves included) have as our essences the relationships that have formed us, that mold us through different environments, and which will shape us moving forward. We are not static entities, and by rejecting the sterile stasis of theories and abstractions, we discover ways of knowing which have been too too long closed off.
Rather than simply preach this desire, Ingold powerfully demonstrates ontogenic potency through a far-reaching series of short essays written across the past several years, each brief and more or less successful. The overall effect of the book is a transformative salutation to readers, inviting them to the conversation which has been born from the experience of reading.
As I implied above, not every essay is equally successful, and the departures are not always epiphanies of magnitude but more ruminations and questions, yet this has ever been the cost of the wanderings of the mind, the 'essai' as Montaigne might have it: we may sometimes get lost, but the discovery when it happens . . . the discovery . . . .
At times, Ingold gives short and sharp criticisms of the limits and damage which traditional/conventional thinking and language use foster. These are relative "givens," however, treading familiar territory in the bindings of Western ontological discourse. He calls for a movement to a more ontogenic cognitive model, one which demands we see how all of the world (ourselves included) have as our essences the relationships that have formed us, that mold us through different environments, and which will shape us moving forward. We are not static entities, and by rejecting the sterile stasis of theories and abstractions, we discover ways of knowing which have been too too long closed off.
Rather than simply preach this desire, Ingold powerfully demonstrates ontogenic potency through a far-reaching series of short essays written across the past several years, each brief and more or less successful. The overall effect of the book is a transformative salutation to readers, inviting them to the conversation which has been born from the experience of reading.
As I implied above, not every essay is equally successful, and the departures are not always epiphanies of magnitude but more ruminations and questions, yet this has ever been the cost of the wanderings of the mind, the 'essai' as Montaigne might have it: we may sometimes get lost, but the discovery when it happens . . . the discovery . . . .
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