Externality and materiality as themes in the history of the human sciences

Abstract

This article presents and discusses some attempts to overcome the “Cartesian” dualism of “mind versus matter” and “interior versus exterior”, in particular the attempts of anthropologist Tim Ingold in his book “The Perception of the Environment” (2000). Central to Ingold’s argument is a shift in focus from structure to process (temporality), from design to growth, from the organism in a context to organism and environment as co-evolutionary and co-constitutive entities. Ingold builds on ecological thinking (Bateson and Gibson) and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger). This article characterises Ingold’s position as a neo-romantic reaction to the “linguistic turn” in the human sciences and the “genetic turn” in biology and compares his position to historical romanticism.