Heroes Not Zombies

I look out at this mountain every day (It’s called Ben Ledi), but how different the world might look to me if I actually climbed to the top of it (I haven’t done that….yet!)

Climbing a mountain for aesthetic reasons was, apparently, a defining moment in the development of human consciousness. The famous climb was that of the Italian poet, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) in the fourteenth century. He was the first to record climbing a mountain to see the view.

We can say that the origins of our modern appreciation of nature go back to 26 April 1336, when the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), better known as Petrarch, made his famous ascent of Mount Ventoux in France. This event has gone down in history as the first time someone climbed a mountain solely to see the view. Clearly people had scaled heights before, but Petrarch claimed he was the first to do so solely out of curiosity, for what we might call aesthetic reasons. He recounted his excursion in one of the letters making up his Epistolae familiares (1350)

That’s a quote from Gary Lachman‘s “Caretakers of the Cosmos”. He points out that several thinkers and writers reflected on this famous ascent.

Ernst Cassirer saw in Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux ‘testimony to [the] decisive change in the concept of nature that began in the thirteen century’ and which led to nature becoming a ‘a new means of expression’ for human consciousness, as well as to a ‘desire to immediately contemplate nature’.

Cassirer wrote brilliantly about how human beings create a world of symbols. Unlike other creatures which live on their instincts and sensory organs, we humans use symbolism to create a richer world and to live in it quite differently from other forms of life.

what began with Petrarch’s ascent, for Gebser, was the age of what he called ‘perspectival consciousness’, the perception and representation of the world from a unique human vantage point.

Jean Gebser’s “Ever-Present Origin” describes an evolution of consciousness from the archaic, to magical, to mythical and mental, and up to the present evolution of  an “integral” form.

I’m sure you can discover many other references to Petrarch’s ascent, but as I look out again at Ben Ledi, I’m able to imagine being at the top and to see Scotland from there. That profoundly influences my sense of who I am and my place in the world. I wonder what it’s like to live in a country without mountains?