The Ecological Self
Embracing a Self-Realizing Cosmogony could profoundly Reshape our Civilization toward Purposeful Regeneration
Freya Mathews wrote The Ecological Self in 1991 as a work of Metaphysics.
She believes the highest human thought order determining our destiny resides in our particular, very invisible assumptions of how we believe the world works:
The way we understand the world
shapes how we live in it.
And how we shape the world
back to us.
In other words…Metaphysics…what we believe to be the truth of our own existence…what we believe reality actually is…how we believe the world really works…such that we overtly and subliminally live our lives to comport with that belief…is our ultimate framework for ethics, meaning, and purpose of life.
I believe this too.
For her, a metaphysic definitively characterizes any philosophy, and her particularly held metaphysic is influenced by her deeply internalized reading of Baruch Spinoza’s rigorous and profound text: Ethics / 1661-1675.
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Spinoza’s Metaphysic is, ultimately, understood by the notion of conatus: whether mind, matter, or the profound cosmos overall…everything has an intrinsic inclination to preserve and enhance itself…suggesting everything in Nature is innately drawn toward improvement, abundance, and positive evolution.
Monistic Universe: positions the entirety of our reality as a single substance, a total unity, mental/mind and physical/matter are created from the same…pebbles, trees, buildings, animals, stars, horse carts, people, the cosmos…as not separate entities but mere modes of this underlying unity.
God-the Unknown and Nature are synonomous.
Determinism: everything in the universe is causally determined by prior causes and the laws of nature, with human free will as a misunderstood illusion.
Ethics: understanding the necessary order of the universe and aligning oneself with it to preserve and enhance our beingness is the greatest virtue.
In general, Spinzoa’s: monistic, singular substance/mind-matter universe in which God-the Unknown and Nature are synonymous with all life forms intrinsically motivated by self-preservation and higher order complexity is the foundation by which she cultivates her own.
Her take is a much appreciated update and divergence emphasizing how much we gain by recognizing the link between our current suffering and our misalignment with the true universal order…which is the metacrisis…due to the fact that we’ve never questioned the half-truth/erroneous order sold to us 400 years ago by the Enlightenment…an era Spinoza played a part in. (plus the fact that more recent scientific break throughs have never been properly socialized-enculturated for the past 100 years)
Further, she shapes Spinozan fundamentals into a much more vital, relevant Ecocosmic Metaphysics by emphasizing the interconnectedness of all living-nonliving things and our imperative to start acknowledging the intrinsic value of Nature.
Mathews successfully delineates her holistic framework by curating the full arc of humanity’s philosophical-social-historical dynamics, the full arc of fluid scientific discoveries including the most recent 21st Century confirmations, and aptly walking us through her sensemaking and imagination literacy.
Part 1 | So how do we understand the world now?
Our modern western civilization, now, reflects at every level the Materialist premise of classical science, first laid out 400 years ago in Newtonian Physics, heavily influenced by Rene Descartes and Johannes Kepler. Namely: that at its most essential, reductivist state Nature/the Natural World is comprised of atomistic-mechanistic particles, devoid of life force or any moral significance, that aggregate together to create all the things we observe everyday.
Upon the full, unequivocal embrace of Newton’s conception of how the world works detailed in his Principia Mathematica in 1687 by the empirical-theoretical scientific community…the, then, socio-political scientists and philosophers of the day like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Voltaire picked it up to translate-enculturate Newton’s logic, ripe with a FANTASY of predictability, rationality, neutrality, and fundamental inertness, into the social fabric at every level of organization-operation, including our political-governing institutions.
So, through their collective desire to not only rid society of pervasive, de rigueur superstition, as well as elevate their own professional status, they employed their conceptions of how the world really works as an overarching MECHANICAL METAPHOR to manifest individualism with respect to a then very cohesive societal texture…consistent with Nature’s cohesiveness…and, going even further, reframed humans as wholly distinct from Nature…which Christianity clergy exaggerated even more…along with amply implicating human superiority over Nature…never ventured previously…plus an underlying conclusion that everything is random and devoid of purpose.
This was an unprecedented IDEOLOGICAL FLIP away from anything before it. In general, whether animistic oriented indigenous conceptions or mysterious-supernatural westerners conceptions, the majority of the collective-human-consciousness was anchored in reverence-respect for Nature as how they understood the world working.
What these men did was redirect human-metacognition at a vast cultural scale, away from identifying with and honoring the imperative of Nature to a new understanding of the world that put HUMANS IN CONTROL OF NATURE, with a dual-goal to both dissect and subjugate Nature to their will and control. Thusly, exalting themselves within the moment and projecting forth onto subsequent generations the powerful metaphor of:
Conquer Nature…through whatever Man-Made Means necessary.
So deeply embedded we are…right now…within this way of approaching-understanding the world…some 400 years later…it’s proven to be, literally, Earth shattering.
In the 21st century, we still only understand how the world works in a 17th century, rationalist, reductivist, masculine-minded way…exclusively…
a 400 year old mechanistic mental model biased to me-first, exploitative will, power, and control over both Nature and other Humans.
But none of us even realize this.
It’s been like this for too long.
Part of our preset headset.
Fish don’t know they’re in water.
At this point in humanity’s journey, the only way to, again, redirect our deterministic collective-metacognition/consciousness for the GREATER GOOD is to yank this default male perceived-rationalist-reductivist way of understanding the world by the roots…excise its perpetual toxic veil that is slowly or rapidly destroying every authentically meaningful remnant of Nature or human culture we still possess…for over almost half a millennium and counting.
Part 2 | How might we understand the world tomorrow?
Atomism and its Ideological Implications
Geometrodynamics: a Monistic Metaphysic
System and Substance: Alternative Principles of Individuation
Value in Nature and Meaning in Life
Spinoza’s heartily? established cosmogony greatly inspires the metaphysic Mathews' proposes in The Ecological Self, this book more or less justifies his mental model in four realms: