Discuss: Down with Descartes

I think deeper understanding of the reality of inseparability would resolve the political left-right divide that’s an obstacle to sustaining human and planetary well-being.  A post-Cartesian philosophy would heal the doctrinaire splits that define freedom based on the individual alone and, on the other side, freedom constrained for the sake of aggregates of the same separate individuals.  I wonder what philosophies can help “birth” greater awareness of the wholeness, or oneness, concepts introduced in this article.

Are Eastern spiritual traditions or the Christian mysticism of, say, a Meister Eckhart a path to learning more about reality that’s denied or contradicted by mainstream science, economics and the Western religious beliefs that present man as a creature whose self-definition is based on dominion and control?

In the Ascent of Humanity, Eisenstein discusses the isolation and alienation of modern “man,” severed from older forms of family and community—from relationships that were essential in defining an individual’s identity, individuality.  It’s interesting that etymology suggests the same truth: from L. individuus “indivisible,” from in- “not” + dividuus “divisible,” from dividere “divide.”

This article and the Ascent of Humanity inspire hope and cautious optimism.

It is common for people who haven’t read him to blame Descartes for all kinds of things.  Descartes’s intuition about the self came to him in a moment of mystical insight, a cold night in November.  He was looking for a way to warrant knowledge, not for a way to separate us from nature.  This is something others have done after him, so we shouldn’t lay the blame at his feet.
The split the article speaks of is more due to readings of the Genesis creation story in which God tells humans to “rule the earth.”  Therein is a more solid root of the split, as Carolyne Merchant showed years ago in her book “The Death of Nature.”

My Oklahoman Senators,Coburn and Inhofe have signed a petition stating we should not rush to do much to stop global warming…This is in response to many Fundamentalists concern about the issue..They say God made “man”
as the Pinnacle of creation..as such we were given the responsibility to be Stewards of creation…How do you counter this??

Certainly a critique of Descartes’ dualist philosophy is basic to moving beyond the interwoven crises of late modernity. But Descarte’s subject-object split(spiritual consciousness versus mechanistic extension)is simply his epistemological follow-through in philosophy on the atomistic or mechanistic cosmology adopted by many early modern scientists. In that sense, Cartesian dualism is a symptom of a still deeper problem, namely, the mechanistic root-metaphor that came to define the cosmological paradigm of modern science. It is there that the deepest critique needs to be focused.

Jean, I don’t have an answer to your question, but this is interesting:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/conspiracy

Louise, there is a philosophy of the inseparability and interdependence of humans and nature.  It draws on indigenous and Eastern spiritual traditions, on science, on Christian mysticism, on Gandhi and Spinoza, and on the poetic intuitions of many individuals since the Romantic movement that first rebelled against industrialism.  It also offers a thorough critique of mechanism, materialism, reductionism, anthropocentrism, and “dominion.”  It was named “deep ecology” in 1972 by the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess.  Much has been written about it since then, and it has inspired some interesting controversies and movements.
Mr. Eisenstein’s article on Descartes expresses this philosophy’s outlook quite well, though deep ecology doesn’t blame only Descartes for the dualism of our modern, dysfunctional worldview.  It does, however, ask all of us to question the assumptions of that worldview, and that is what takes us “deep.”  Deep ecology also encourages to open ourselves to our inherently profound intimacy and identity with the natural world, the source of our love for nature, which is what inspires us to protect it.  Look it up!

I have been reading the responses,trying to figure out how to be helpful in Oklahoma..I have considered that I should pretend to be Gandhi,looking inside…I find an unpleasent desire to DOMINATE Senators Inhofe/Coburn..Would Gandhi hope to change their minds?..I know them both a little and they have always been kind,friendly to me(even when I am dressed as Polar Bear).Jean

Actually, I am not blaming Descartes, who as Ignacio points out was just the eloquent articulator of a concept that has been ambient in Western civilization (and to some extent Eastern) for thousands of years. The original title of the article was “The World of the Separate Self”.

To Jean: There are other interpretations of the Bible that lead to the opposite of your senators’ conclusions. For example: It is a sacrilege to treat as trash the divine gift of the Creator. We are Creation’s stewards, not its owners. In one of the psalms it says, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof…”