Nature, Man and Woman

Alan W. Watts – 1958

Such a compassionate and gently insightful book by Alan Watts.  Though published in the 50s, because it deals with infinite rather than timely things, it reads as though written yesterday; (only Watts’ modesty of language and lack of glibness betray its origins in another era).  Watts was often disparaged as a popularizer in his time, but that judgment is only relevant if he was nothing more than a Western interpreter of Asian belief systems.  I tend to see him more as a philosopher in his own right, with his own ideas, rather than simply a translator, at which he may have been flawed at times no matter how many years he studied.  Watts was only a specialist in eastern mysticism in the same way that Carl Sagan specialized in astronomy; obviously, as mass media educators, they were also so much more.  I can’t do justice here to Watts’ observations in Nature, Man and Woman, but the gist of it is that we pay sad consequences for the conditioning our society puts us through; a lifelong process that persuades us that nature is the enemy; a force that exists outside of us, a force of corruption and contamination; leading to the common tenet of monotheistic religions that the body is something to be suppressed, ignored, tolerated at best; a slowly withering reminder of everything painful and transient about life.  Watts argues that this kind of thinking leads to little but unhappiness and frustration, and needlessly so, because it goes against everything that we feel naturally, which is a profound connection to nature that attracts us not only to animals and the outdoors, but to each other.  Civilized man tends to never learn to relate to nature or have a strong sense of his place in it because he is so seldom able to be alone and to contemplate; in contrast to rural cultures where solitary endurance tests and learning to survive in the elements are rites of passage.  This estrangement from nature leads to arrogance in general and discomfort whenever the realities of bodily functions need to be faced.  Inevitably, the greatest implications of either communion with or disdain for nature appear in sexual relationships, where one can either stomach indignity in exchange for the fastest possible satisfaction or recognize, savor and be humbled by a cosmic glimpse into the same mysterious powers that generate new life.

Excerpt:  “There is a place in life for a sharp knife, but there is a still more important place for other kinds of contact with the world.  Man is not to be an intellectual porcupine, meeting his environment with a surface of spikes.  Man meets the world outside with a soft skin, with a delicate eyeball and eardrum, and finds communion with it through a warm, melting, vaguely defined, and caressing touch whereby the world is not set at a distance like an enemy to be shot, but embraced to become one flesh, like a beloved wife.  After all, the whole possibility of clear knowledge depends upon sensitive organs which, as it were, bring the outside world into our bodies, and give us knowledge of that world precisely in the form of our own bodily states.”