Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of everymember.. . . . . . A man thinks aswell through his legs and arms as his brain. We exaggeratethe importance and exclusiveness of the headquarters. Do you suppose they were a race of consumptives and dyspeptics who invented Grecian mythology and poetry? The poet's wordsare, "You would almost saythe body thought!" I quite say it. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Journals For many who feel an affinity with life, the Earth, once ever bountiful, is now increasingly checkered with wounds and despair. In the midst of unprecedented economic growth, a general pauperization and homogenization of both culture and nature abound. We are smack in the middle of our planet's sixth great extinction crisis, and this time we are the perpetrators. There is no simple, single cause. Since at least the age of the Sumerians, humans have brought about large-scale abuse of the Earth and each other. The rate ofchange,the magnitude, and the complexity ofour presentsituation , however, are unprecedented. Population growth, consumption , commodification, technology, globalization, and atangled web of other ostensibly autonomous, out-of-control factors allseemingly conspire to quell the evolutionary process. Our healing efforts— cooked up using a narrow, trite notion of rationality—frequently xiii amount to quenching a blaze by fueling the fire. Taking this picture in, it is easyto feel numbed into inaction. Arne Naess is a ray of sunshine, a beacon of hope, in what for many has become a melancholic world. This is not because heviews our society and the Earth's condition in a fundamentally different way. He doesn't. He is fond of saying that he is pessimistic about the twenty-first century but optimistic about the twenty-second. What makes Naess so unusual is that he also reminds us, unrelentingly, in his spritelike way, that we live in a world of unsurpassed wonder, beauty, and possibility. It is a world worth fighting—nonviolently— to save. Anything can happen. The future need not mirror the past. There is always reason for hope. In Life's Philosophy Naess urges us to reflect on our values and to more securely anchor our actions to them. A fundamental tenet of his life philosophy is a firm belief that "we need to return to a perception that considers something rational and reasonable only if it appears to be so in relation to the broadest and deepest norms— those that are considered most essential for the individual and society " (p. 3). With a grin and an aura of great seriousness, he cajoles us to seek the center of conflict rather than mill around the periphery . At the same time, he implores us to strictly adhere to Gandhi's principles of nonviolence. Naess would have us cheerfully invite our adversaries over to tea and coffee; we should decry their unsustainable actions, not them. Everyone is a potential ally. The ecocultural crisis is not merely a topic for academic bantering and internecine battles over the existence or nonexistence of the "intrinsic value" ofnonhumans. We feel nature's wonder, joy,beauty, and possibility, so it exists. It is under fire, so we must, with all our might, fight for it. We fight for it because it exists and because we depend on it for our survival;because in its profound otherness lies a key to our own spiritual, emotional, and cultural development— our maturation process both as individuals and as a species; and because its loss is our loss. Hume's fact/value dichotomy is essentially xiv Introduction sophistry. His separation of "facts" from "nonfacts," value-free descriptions from norms, rests on a false assumption—the existence of an ontological divide. Once this illusion is shattered, the divide vanishes and the distinction blurs forever. Our ever clever and creative minds search for easy ways out of the ecocultural crisis. Our hearts remind us that no silver bullets exist. Try as we might, we cannot simply reason away poverty, inequity , climate change, loss of cultural diversity, soil depletion, impending fresh water shortages, acid rain, and the ozone hole. The force of Descartes's arguments notwithstanding, separate lives of pure cognition and feeling simply don't exist; they are integrated into one mind-body. We experience the world somatically and intellectually in concert as variously ordered, multilayered gestalts.As Thoreau asserts, the mind-body "separation" is yet another absurd dichotomization. Addressing the momentous problems before...