In “Philosophical Roots and Branches” Richard Heinberg surveys the major philosophical traditions of East and West with a lucid focus on those philosophers most critical of the authoritarian and alienating development(s) of civilization. Richard Heinberg writes for many alternative spiritual magazines and is author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age. This essay originally appeared in the author’s publication Museletter, which he describes as “a monthly exploration of cultural renewal.” Subscriptions are $15/year; Canada and Mexico: $18 US per year; elsewhere $20 US per year. Send check or international money order to: Richard Heinberg, 1433 Olivet Road, Santa Rosa, CA 95401.
Web site: www.museletter.com/museletter
E-mail: rheinberg@igc.org
The word philosophy means, of course, the love of wis- dom. It is a discipline that encourages people to de- cide what really matters, to discover how to think clearly about it, and to live a good life. Unfortunately, philosophy as a formal academic pursuit hasn’t always fulfilled this mandate particularly well. This is at least partly because the topic is usually truncated to include only Western philosophy—the writings of Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans. Most academic philosophy consists solely of the thoughts of dead European men. Yet every society has its lovers of wisdom. When I try to trace the sources of my own thinking, I tend to start not with Plato, but with some of the few philosophers of traditional, tribal societies whose ideas and names are widely known. I think, for example, of the words of Segwalise of the Haudenosaunee nation:
“In our language, the Earth is our Mother Earth, the Sun our Eldest Brother, the Moon our Grandmother and so on. It is the belief of our people that all elements of the Natural World were created for the benefit of all living things and that we, as humans, are totally dependent on the whole Creation for our survival.”
Speaking of his own society, Segwalise scribed not so much an intellectual outlook, as a way of thinking grounded in a way of living:
“Ours was a wealthy society. No one suffered from want. All had the right to food, clothing, and shelter. All shared in the bounty of the spiritual ceremonies and the Natural World. No one stood in any material relationship of power over anyone else. No one could deny any one access to the things they needed. All in all, before the colonists came, ours was a beautiful and rewarding Way of Life.”
Endless other examples could be offered of this egalitarian, nature-embedded philosophy, through the words of other Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and tribal Africans. Among non-Western civilizations, as well, this current is perceptible. For many years the one book that was my constant guide and companion was the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, which tells of the Way which cannot be codified or known in any absolute sense, because it lies beyond human reason. Yet society, according to Lao Tzu, must follow this intellectually elusive way of Nature if it is to persist.
Already, twenty-five centuries ago, this sage knew that increasing the wealth of the few causes misery for all:
“When the court is arrayed in splendor,
The fields are full of weeds,
And the granaries are bare.
And he offered pristinely anarchistic prescriptions for the management of society:
“The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.”
Centuries before the invention of nuclear reactors or DDT on the one hand, or bioregionalism and neo-Luddism on the other, the Tao Te Ching presented a critique of technology and praised small-scale societies tied closely to the land:
“A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can
work ten to a hundred times faster
than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do
not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages,
no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons,
no one displays them.
People return to the knotting of rope in
place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their
clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.”
Again, scores of similar examples could be quoted—not only from this and other Tao texts, but from the ancient writings of India and Egypt as well.
Nevertheless, since it is Western civilization that has come to dominate the rest of the planet, it’s a useful exercise to trace–just within Western thought—the ideas that inspired Lao Tzu, Segwalise, and so many others. What follows is not a survey of Western philosophy in toto—I’ve necessarily left out many important names and ideas—but an appreciation of some of its brighter lights.
Greek philosophers prior to Socrates (470- 399 B.C.E.) tended to see nature as a living thing—Gaia (from which we derive the root g as in geography). They were holistic thinkers, most of whom appeared to believe that the entire universe is composed of one substance. Among them, Heraclitus (c. 536—479 B.C.E.) believed that all of existence is characterized by flux and process, a view that is harmonious with the discoveries of modern physics.
Pythagoras (c. 572-479 B.C.E.), an ascetic vegetarian philosopher, taught the doctrine of reincarnation and believed that ultimate truth could be discerned through the study of the relations between numbers. Already, with Pythagoras, we see glimmers of an obsession with mathematics (and hence with deductive argument) that has dominated Western thinking ever since.
Socrates, who is often regarded as the real initiator of the Western philosophical tradition, had a similarly ambiguous influence on those who came after him. On one hand, he challenged conventional ideas (and was put to death for doing so), teaching the youth of Athens to think more clearly simply by asking them pointed questions. On the other hand, his philosophy (as recorded—and embellished?—by his pupil, Plato) also tends to celebrate human reason above anything else in the universe.
Plato (428-348 B.C.E.) himself furthered this drift toward rationalism and anthropocentrism, seeding Western thought with the notion that there is a fundamental discontinuity between mind and body, and between the world of reason and the world of the senses. Plato had somewhat of a conservationist view toward nature; meanwhile, his prescriptions for human society were starkly totalitarian. In The Republic, he describes his ideal society as one ruled by an elite of guardians and soldiers, in which women are second class citizens and slave labor enables philosophers to pursue their speculations unfettered. Plato’s most famous pupil, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), laid the foundations for Western science’s pursuit of empirical knowledge, yet still defended slavery and expressed his worship of rationality through his idea of a hierarchy of beings (scala natura), graded according to their degree of “perfection,” with free men at the top, followed by slaves and women, then animals, and finally plants. This notion of what would come to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” would characterize the European conception of nature until the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, however, some lesser-known Greeks were turning their thoughts in quite different directions. Diogenes of Sinope (third century B.C.E.), the originator of the philosophy known as Cynicism, wished to live solely “according to nature,” rejecting the artifices of civilization. Diogenes professed kinship with all beings, including the animals; not only did he abstain from flesh-eating (as Pythagoras had), but he also condemned slavery. When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes in Corinth and tried to corrupt him by offering him anything he liked, the philosopher (who was sunbathing at the time) simply replied, “Stop blocking my sun.”
Zeno of Citium (c. 335-263 B.C.E.), the founder of the Stoic movement, was of similar spirit. He recommended that all people should live together as a herd without family or rank or property, without money or courts of law. Zeno probably deserves to be called history’s first anarchist, if we apply that term only to anti-establishment thinkers living in societies that are already hierarchical and coercive.
But this raises an interesting question: were Lao Tzu, Diogenes, and Zeno the originators of great new ideas, or merely the articulators (within their relatively young, literate, state-organized societies) of opinions with roots in more ancient, oral, egalitarian social contexts? Given the congruity of their views with those of Segwalise and other typical representatives of non-state societies, I would argue that the latter is true.
If we accept recent New Testament scholarship (e.g., Burton Mack’s Who Wrote the New Testament?), then the historical Jesus might well be described as a rural peasant Jewish-Cynic philosopher. In MuseLetter #34 (“Jesus and the Devil”), I described the similarities between Diogenes’ and Jesus’ philosophies: both taught renunciation of ephemeral desires, fearless and carefree public behavior, and contempt for riches. Sadly, as Jesus’ original teachings were subsumed under layers of Roman mythology and political compromise, the peasant Cynic’s ideas took a back seat to otherworldliness, male-dominant hierarchalism, and Aristotelian rationalism. Not only was the original countercultural message of Jesus suppressed; followers of that message were systematically rooted out by the church-cult operating in his name.
With the disappearance of the Cynics and Stoics, the primitivist/anarchist tradition lay buried for several centuries, only to reemerge when European civilization itself began to recover from the partial collapse that engulfed it in the sixth century—a collapse apparently resulting from a combination of diminishing returns from investments in social complexity, human-engendered ecologica1 destruction, and cosmically-induced global climate change.
The European recovery from that partial collapse began in the Middle Ages, but really picked up momentum with the discovery of the New World, the enslavement of millions of Africans and Native Americans, and the confiscation of the immense wealth of distant lands. Now Europeans needed a way to rationalize their organized pillage, not surprisingly, they did so by convincing themselves of their own innate superiority and of their divine mandate to appropriate nature’s bounty and to rule all other peoples. Along the way, this rationalizing process resulted in the construction of the modern liberal democratic state and the economic system known as mercantilist capitalism.
John Locke (1632-1704) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) played important roles in these latter projects. Locke theorized that the ownership of property is not just a personal right enjoyed by members of a society; people have a positive duty to generate wealth. In words that could only have helped fuel our modern environmental crisis, he wrote that “land that is left wholly to nature . . . is called as it indeed is, waste.” According to Locke, industrial production and economic growth are not merely desirable; they are our moral obligation. A river left undammed, or a coal-bearing mountain left standing, is, to Locke, an ethical affront.
Adam Smith, famous as an early economist, is more properly remembered as a moral philosopher who treated economics as merely a branch of his chosen discipline. Ironically, he did so by declaring that any notion of morality should be removed from economics altogether. Each individual is assumed, in Smith’s view, to be rationally pursuing his or her economic self-interest, and the sum of all individuals’ acquisitive efforts is a free market governed by an “invisible hand” which automatically and optimally allocates capital, jobs, resources, and production. In The Wealth of Nations Smith offers a prescription for the increasing division of labor, and the accelerated exploitation of nature and people, as sure paths toward the betterment of society.
Not all European economic philosophers followed in Locke’s and Smith’s footsteps. The most famous dissident of capitalism was of course Karl Marx (1818-1883), who argued that capitalism contains internal contradictions that will eventually lead to its demise. He theorized that the contradiction between the value attached to a laborer’s productivity and the worth of the goods produced would eventually become apparent to the working classes, so that they would spontaneously overthrow the system. Marx was an economic determinist, believing that history is guided by the material conditions within which people live. He divided history into four stages: primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, and finally true communism—a condition in which workers themselves manage the economy. The eventual outcome would be a withering of the state and the emergence of a classless, self-regulating society.
For all his skill in discerning the injustices and weaknesses of capitalism, however, Marx failed to appreciate the flaws of industrial production. He wrote: “Only the conscious organization of social activity with planned production and distribution can give man his social freedom and liberate him from the remnants of his animality, just as production itself gave him his biological freedom.” For Marx, nearly as much as for Locke or Smith, nature is merely a storehouse of raw materials destined to be transformed by the power of human labor amplified through machines.
Max Weber (1864-1920) was nearly as incisive as Marx in his theory of the origins and nature of capitalism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he attempted to explain why capitalism emerged in Europe and not elsewhere. For Weber, economic systems arise more from social culture and human values than from material conditions. The social factors in Europe that led to the emergence of capitalism, according to Weber, were the values characteristic of Puritanism—among them, the belief that God is best served not by worship, but by hard, earnest, productive work on Earth. Nowhere was this belief able to take a more secure rooting than in North America, where the cults of efficiency, invention, and technical expertise have flourished relatively unhindered by older cultural traditions that emphasize intergenerational continuity.
Weber also believed that the signal invention of the modern West is the bureaucratic state. Of course, the idea (and reality) of the state had been around since before the Greeks—recall Plato’s paean to totalitarianism in The Republic—and state societies developed independently also in China, Mesoamerica, and Africa. Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), who deserves to be remembered as a philosopher as well as an architecture critic and social historian, described the state as the prototypical social machine, leveraging power (as all machines do) but with human beings in the place of levers and gears. According to Mumford, the human “megamachine” dates to the Pyramid Age, and its essential features have been retained and refined (and more recently mirrored in industrial hardware) in the centuries since. Thus while the state could hardly be said to be a uniquely Western invention, Weber was undoubtedly right in asserting that, in the West, the state as an institution (and machine) has been rationalized and perfected.
The state was subjected to critical scrutiny by several Western philosophers prior to Mumford and Weber. Notable among these was William Godwin (1756-1836), who is often cited as the father of modern anarchism. Godwin countered Locke’s claim that a state authority is needed in order to protect individual rights, such as the right to property; and rather than arguing mildly (as did other antiliberal philosophers): for a government that places justice within the whole of society above the property rights of the individual, he boldly declared that “Government is, in all cases, an evil; it ought to be introduced as sparingly as possible.” Godwin, who opposed the institution of marriage, nevertheless married the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women); their daughter, also named Mary, wed the poet Percy Bvsshe Shelley after writing (at age nineteen) the novel Frankenstein, a remarkably insightful work of fiction which must be considered the archetypal cautionary tale for the age of biotechnology.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was the first political philosopher to actually call himself an anarchist. His famous dictum, “Property is theft!”, was his own answer to the title of his most famous book, What Is Property? (1842). Proudhon believed that property—in the sense of private control of productive resources—leads to tyranny, because it is by property that the masses are subjected to slavery through the necessity of selling their labor. “To be governed,” he wrote, “is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated over, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about by men who have neither the right, nor knowledge, nor virtue.” Proudhon believed that revolutionary violence is justified, even necessary, to put an end to state violence. However, he only vaguely outlined his envisioned alternative to the state, which, he admitted, could be achieved only by elevating human nature to a higher degree of respect for justice and the needs of others.
While Proudhon had a pessimistic view of human nature (“man is by nature a sinner, that is to say not essentially a wrong-doer but rather wrongly made”), the philosopher whom many regard as his successor, the geographer and biologist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), held a much more sanguine opinion. In his book Mutual Aid (1902), Kropotkin presented abundant evidence that most species living in the wild survive not by constant competition (as Darwin had suggested), but through cooperation, play, and mutual aid. Human beings, therefore, in their “natural” condition, should also be expected to be more cooperative than competitive. As evidence that they are (or were), Kropotkin cited abundant anthropological and historical data, culminating in a detailed description of life in medieval European free cities. According to Kropotkin, the state—even a socialist state—can only act as a disruptive and antisocial force, since Government by authority must inevitably divide in order to rule, hindering people from giving free expression to their inherent social tendencies. “In short,” he concluded, “neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. And the need of mutual aid and support which has lately taken refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbors, in the village, or the secret union of workers, reasserts itself again, even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it always has been, the chief leader towards further progress.”
Throughout the past five centuries the current of European philosophy has flowed mostly in a direction that can be characterized by the words rationalism, secularism, and materialism. Modernism (as this trend has come to be known) implies an idealization of economic and technological “progress”; the envisioning of organisms, society, and nature as machines; the increasing subordination of the world of the senses to the world of the mind; and justification for the bureaucratic state and for the division of labor within society. However, not everyone has jumped on this Faustian bandwagon.
Among the Enlightenment philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) stood nearly alone as a critic of modernism. Collecting reports filtering back to Europe from explorers and missionaries about primitive societies, Rousseau became the first armchair anthropologist. He took seriously descriptions of natives living what seemed idyllic lives in comparison with those of urban Europeans, and from such tales he fashioned a devastating critique of civilization.
Rousseau attacked rationalism, the idea of the world as a machine, and the notion of private property. He also symbolically cut his links with the social establishment by dressing in simple clothes, foregoing a wig (an emblem of fashion), unbuckling his sword (a badge of cruelty and war), and breaking his watch (the fetish of mechanistic civilization).
The early nineteenth-century Romantic philosophers and poets —Blake, Goethe, Byron, and Shelley—built on Rousseau’s insights, questioning the virtue of disembodied reason. The Enlightenment philosophers had posited that human beings have a special status in nature due to their possession of an intellect that controls the senses, enabling the realization of higher ideals such as truth and justice. The Romantics insisted that the intellect can never be separated from the body, the senses, emotion, and desire. They advocated a good life that was based both in the universal spirituality of intuition and mysticism, and in immediate sensuous engagement with nature, a life not regimented by the needs of the nascent industrial system, but free to respond to the soul’s spontaneous aesthetic stirrings.
But, of course, industrial capitalism had other business in mind and so, even though the Romantics were popular and influential, their message could only slightly temper the increasing economic, technological, and political excesses of European civilization. In the twentieth century, the Frankfurt School of philosophers would dissect industrial capitalism in ever more sophisticated terms, with Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) arguing that the aspects of Western society that are most valued are its instruments of oppression and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) criticizing capitalism’s popular culture, as well as its science and technology, as leading humanity into a “new kind of barbarism.”
Calling into question the traditional categories of human experience, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) contended that power resides not just in the coercive instruments of the state; it displays itself even more effectively in the elite’s ability to define and to create distinctions that shape mental—and hence social and physical—reality for the entire culture.
Jean Francois Lyotard (1924-), in his influential book The Postmodern Condition (1984) argued that today national governments and economies are dwarfed by global structures of communication and trade that render meaningless the Enlightenment’s “universal” ideals of freedom and democracy.
Early in the century, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) had laid bare the profound links between language and reality, arguing that language is not just a medium through which we express our imperfect views of the world, but that it is the very essence of the humanly perceived and interpreted world. Building on Heidegger’s insights, Jacques Derrida (1930-) has “deconstructed” (his term) the West’s intellectual tradition, tracing the rise to dominance of “logocentrism” (the celebration of reason) over all other values—which the West typically denigrates as “mythical,” “superstitious,” or “irrational.” Derrida’s deconstructionism, ironically, reveals how the progress of reason and freedom in the West are actually based on myths—a fact that inherently contradicts the values of logos which those myths purport to valorize.
During the past twenty years, a school of ecological philosophers—including Arne Naess, Gary Snyder, Dolores LaChappelle, Paul Shepard, Jeremy Rifkin, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Helena Norberg-Hodge—has arisen, questioning human dominance of the biosphere, criticizing “authoritarian” technologies and civilization itself in ever more sophisticated terms, and arguing persuasively that the survival of the human and natural worlds can be achieved only by reintegrating the former within the latter and by renewing land-based cultural traditions.
Perhaps the growth of contemporary eco-philosophy is best represented in the 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, in which author David Abram traces our modern estrangement from nature to our use of alphabetic writing, which subtly disengages language from sensuous experience. Building on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)—who had pleaded for science to acknowledge that its abstractions and generalizations are, and must ever remain, rooted in everyday sensory experience—Abram calls not merely for a halt to industrial civilization’s wholesale assault on the natural environment, but literally for a return to our senses. He writes: “The apparently autonomous, mental dimension originally opened by the alphabet—the ability to interact with our own signs in utter abstraction from our earthly surroundings—has today blossomed into a vast, cognitive realm, a horizonless expanse of virtual interactions and encounters. Our reflective intellects inhabit a global field of information, pondering the latest scenario for the origin of the universe as we absently fork food into our mouths, composing presentations for the next board meeting while we sip coffee or cappuccino, clicking on the computer and slipping into cyberspace in order to network with other bodiless minds.”
We have fooled ourselves into thinking we are rationa1 selves acting independently of body and nature, when we are in fact creatures of Earth, our thinking shaped by metaphors that are themselves grounded in sensual reality. We’ve cut ourselves adrift and largely destroyed the very world we depend on for our existence. And now we are realizing what we’ve done, and what we must undo and regain.
And so here we are: I at my computer, you reading words on paper, sharing relatively abstract ideas—yet also sharing a world of real sensations we can talk about only with difficulty, but that nevertheless unites us at the most basic biological and spiritual levels. Pathetically, perhaps, people’s attempts to point back to that shared dimension of reality often begin and end with comments about the weather—seemingly trivial but nonetheless real affirmations of our ultimate interconnectedness and our dependence upon nature.
Throughout this essay I have been thinking about thinking, and about other people’s thoughts, which is a typically Western occupation. I’ve been summarizing summaries of intellectual efforts, trying to wrap my intellect around 2,500 years of intellectual history. This is, of course, what the intellect loves to do: to surround, divide, and (at least symbolically) conquer, by signifying and summarizing what it considers important, all the while leaving out the endless details of actual lived experience. At the end of that process, having contained and categorized every named entity, having summarized the summaries of the summaries, we learn that what we have left out was actually the very essence of what we need to know.
As I sit here typing, I hear parakeets twittering away in their little house in my living room; I both see and feel the sunlight streaming through the window next to me. The air smells of the approach of winter. It’s a beautiful day here. I hope it is for you, too.
Reprinted with permission
Copyright 1999 Richard Heinberg
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Updated: 4/26/2001