ABSTRACT

This dissertation is an exploration of the ground of being through a study of dialogue between various modes of being and forms of knowledge.
The modes of being are represented by landscapes, individuals who interpret the philosophical and imagistic significance of these landscapes and the interpretative communities in relation to which these individuals are responding. The individuals and the landscapes they interpret are represented by the Oshun Forest in Nigeria and Susanne Wenger and her collaborators who work on and in relation to the landscape. They are also constituted by the Glastonbury landscape in its reconception by Katherine Maltwood and Mary Caine.
The forms of knowledge consist primarily in the imaginative interpretation of spatial forms. The central demonstration of this is in the sculptural, architectural and ideational reconstruction of the Oshun Forest in Nigeria and the cartographic and ideational reinterpretation of the Glastonbury landscape by Katherine Maltwood and Mary Caine.
The forms of knowledge are also represented by our adaptation of divinatory epistemology as exemplified primarily by the Ifa system of divination, in conjunction with insights derived from other divinatory forms such as the Chinese I Ching and Western astrology. We also adapt conceptions of forms of mind developed within Hermeticism and Western neo-Paganism, particularly as these are developed in the work of the Hermetic theorist Dion Fortune. We argue that the epistemic forms realized by the divinatory, Hermetic and neo-Pagan perspectives embody metaphysical ideas and epistemological processes that are central to an exploration of our subject matter. The ideas and modes of expression they actualize are transposed into the idiom embodied by the dominant epistemic frameworks of modern Western discourse. This transposition is also effected in relation to the effort to dramatise those aspects of their conceptions that can not be embodied in terms of modern Western discourse but which could represent possibilities of expansion of the metaphysical and epistemic fields currently central to the Western episteme.
This process of transposing the ideas of what constitutes marginalised discourses in relation to the Western episteme is facilitated through a dialogue between the marginalised and dominant discourses. This dialogue between discursive forms is developed in terms of an effort to examine the central questions of the existence and nature of the ground of being as mediated through dialogue between modes of being. The central dominant discursive forms explored, complementing philosophical explorations of space, are philosophy and the visual and verbal arts.
The study of these artistic and theoretical constructions proceeds in relation to the exploration of questions of relationships between modes of being. These explorations are conducted in terms of a dialogue between various forms of knowledge. We adapt here the understanding of “forms of knowledge” as primary structuring forms developed by the human mind in its effort to interpret existence, as developed by Paul Hirst.
Our focus in adapting this conception is to examine critically, in relation to our exploration of cognitive interfaces, the interface between the genealogy of the notion of the structuring of existence in terms of metaphysical or epistemological matrices from its origin in Plato's Forms as structuring archetypes of being, to Hirst's conception of structuring forms of human knowledge. We examine the distinctions and relationships between the Platonic concept which depicts the Forms as predating and transcendent of the human mind and Hirst's notion of the Forms he discusses as constructions of the mind which embody distinct but interrelated epistemic procedures.
This analysis is correlative with our exploration of relationships between cognitive agents-the knowing subject; cognitive forms-that which is known, the object of knowledge; cognitive processes-the procedures through which knowledge is gained; and cognitive instruments,-the tools, whether material or non-material, ideational, for example, which act as facilitators and catalysts and in the process of gaining understanding.
The relationships between the various conceptual frames at play in the dissertation are dramatised by the following diagram:

This diagram suggests the constitution of the various disciplinary frames in relation to the question of the ground of being. This ground is constituted/ cognized through the integration between the various disciplines. This suggests the effort to explore the central research question through a mediatory, dialogical relationship between the various disciplinary frames.