Dasein und Umwelt
by Arthur Albion
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my native land. (Sir Walter Scott)
THE SOIL OF A LAND is suited to the men who inhabit it; the soil forms animal and man’s environment; known in German as Umwelt, a word coined by Jakob von Uexküll which translates to the surroundings and environment as perceived by organisms. Umwelt is the relation and perception of the environment by a species. Species perceive the world differently from each other; this is determined by their evolution, their environment and what stimuli each animal responds to. The blind and deaf tick responds to temperature and the smell of butyric acid. The bat responds to waves propagated through the air by echolocating, a black ghost knife fish responds to electrical fields. The reality of each animal is different in each case. If you transported animals to different environments, they would fail to survive. Man does not live in water so he has no gills; he was not built for water but for land; the fish was built not for land but for water. This transportation of things from their original environments is a modern phenomenon which spells doom for us. But that is the plan, isn’t it?
Until recent innovations in mass transportation, we lived in a world where different peoples and races lived in their own separate environments. We reacted to these environments and perceived different things from one another — and detected our environments in diverse ways. The pygmy and Bantu peoples who live in equatorial Africa near the Congo Basin experience life in a different and unique way, completely different from what a Nordic or Celtic man experiences in his Umwelt in the vast and trackless regions of northwestern Europe. We as humans have formed complex social systems, rites, rituals, and practices. We have different gods, gestures, manners, physical features, building styles, clothing, and other cultural and religious artefacts which individuate our tribes across geographical lines formed by nature and the way we interact with it, our Umwelt.
These barriers were meant to transcend time, separating us into our biomes. Nature used to ordain what migration was to take place. Now we have aeroplanes and ships which can traverse vast regions in a matter of hours or days. In nature, migration used to only occur when the Umwelt changed, usually for the worse: a great flood purging the lands forcing people to move, a volcano erupting, a tsunami ripping across a coastal village. All prehistoric migrations can be linked to natural disasters and natural factors; an environment becoming too hostile or inhospitable to be inhabited.
Over time through natural means Dasein is achieved: The animal is fully suited to its environment, its Umwelt, and its roots are firmly placed in its surroundings — to a point where the land “owns” the animal and vice versa. This metaphysical bond of “being-there” and knowing that you will be there, knowing your progeny will track through the lands you once did, and, in the case of humans, the deep understanding of this connection passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, of the land, of the environment — and how best to live within it. This is Dasein.
We live in a modern world which has divorced us from both Dasein and Umwelt. Where man is uprooted and mixed, where the understanding of the bond of self and land is abolished, crushed into a pastiche of foreign languages, strange clothing, imported art, and food alien to your tongue in what we call a “multicultural society.” Like matter and antimatter, cultures interact in cataclysms and calamities. Understanding, truth, and logos are lost in the cacophony of cityscapes where cars spewing gasoline-waste out of their exhausts fill the air with bitter smells — neon lights shine bright promoting the basest degeneracies, the next “hot” fashion trend or gaming experience — and most extreme pornography. Littered with bars and kebab shops, nightclubs, and homeless vagrants begging for money to get their next “hit” of a synthetic drug made by a synthetic criminal attached to the material decadence.
This entanglement of modernity, this hopeless confusion borne from capitalism, has severed all bonds of kinship, heritage, and identity.
Is this to be a grey world filled with grey people? That is up to you, White man!
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Source: Avalonian Worldview
