Natur og Kultur som Folkehelse - NaKuHel

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
24
ABSTRACTS:
Environment, forest and health: The extended view
Walter Kofler
Maybe everybody makes the experience of different
feelings during his presence in forests or even
by observing pictures of “lovely” forests. Maybe
you also experienced the supporting effect of music
in such situations.
But can we understand why? And if so, can this be
understood on the basis of the same evolutionary
principles we can understand the human person as
a social being? This is relatively easy for all negative
sensations in nature, like e.g. anxiety: Forests
have been places with hidden risks like carnivores
for our precursors.
The relevance of forests as resource for food and
other basic resources for survival is not a sufficient
argument for the emergence of emotional positive
feelings and especially not for the emergence
of sense-experiences which are a stimulus for
creativity – as musicians, poets or artists but also
many scientists report. And why e.g. Heisenberg
had the urgent pressure to climb up a rock on the
island Sylt in the deepest night in consequence of
his exaltation after the fulguration of his world
famous formula of Uncertainty Relationship, just
to look on the ocean and to wait for sunrise? We
touch with such questions fundamental aspects of
the nature of a human person as a social being.
Maybe the Extended View can give some hints for
a better understanding. The Extended view is a
model which integrates material and immaterial aspects
of a human person and their relationships to
different types of environments. It is based on the
assumption that the scientific incommensurabilities
between body and mind, individual and society,
as well as physical and psychosocial reality and
virtuality (including the related creativity) would
disappear within a model of the evolutionary process
from “Big Bang” up to now, which
covers the energetical/materialistic and idealistic/
informationrelated aspects. Such a model was developed
and partly presented in former meetings
of the hosting society.
Some principles could be made plausible thanks
to this model which gives hope for further arguments
about the intersubjective aspects of nature
experiences and their interactions with human
persons: One is based on the explanation of the
occurrence of emotional aspects in general by the
“fundamental break of symmetry”: This was the
emergent win by the autopoiesis of sense oriented
animals. This emergent step was linked with the
shift of the focus on energetical/materialistic
(symbol)intentions to relation-oriented ones: The
obvious difference is that the materialistic ones
can be directly observed, the relation-oriented ones
must be constructed.
The summarizing simplification of the materialistic
structure-based level can be covered with the
term “shape”, the idealistic/information-based
one with “feeling”. Another argument is given by
the principles how an evolutionary win is getting
generalized: The emergent new is applied step by
step to all the former given aspects. And there are
consequences of this process visible for the development
of individual identity and further on for
personality. Such a process causes also a need to
develop summarizing information – and therefore
the differentiation and development of the “precursors”
of the information of a balanced relationship
with the given world.
A third principle of the EV deals with the intention
to integrate self-orientation, consent orientation,
interrelationships with the environments and feedback
effects between them. Further considerations
will be presented.