THESIS - CHAPTER FOUR - A META-REFLECTION

“The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know”

– James Baldwin, man who can tell you how long the train’s been gone (Elgrably, 1984, n.p.).

“Nature might well be thought of as the original Rorschach test”

– Jan E. Dizard, someone interested in denial and radical misanthropy (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 51).

How Do I Feel About Descartes?

Only in retrospect did I realize that by reading his work I began to strongly relate to René Descartes. This was a strange realization. If only from the standpoint of our language barrier, I'd convinced myself I could not hope to understand the guy, and certainly not without learning Latin. His religious education and worldview seemed like barriers at least as significant as language. Still, personal details drew me in and convinced me I knew something about this man. To start, the deaths of his mother, daughter, and sister, his relationship with his father, his being turned off school and book learning, his travels and self-imposed exile all felt relatable. Then, I found him agonizing over the definition of words, trying to understand where our thinking gets confused and us into trouble, and also struggling to get something deeply right. And, though it seemed he was mostly content to be alone in his own world of ideas, he also had this need to share and to feel understood which frequently got him into trouble; and, there, it seemed to pain him a great deal that he could be misconstrued and would be forced to continually defend himself. Though his writings were difficult to get through (particularly his tangential thoughts that seemed to be missing or abusing punctuation and run-on for half a page or more), taking a stroll through his ideas made his writings now feels less like a window into a distant and alien past and more like a mirror.

With the above research for perspective, today I believe Descartes’ life and aims made him less of an Einstein or Darwin, the scientific coterie he is commonly lumped into, and far closer to a figure like Joan d’Arc (c.1412-1431). Just like Joan, René was a Medieval French Catholic compelled by three divine visions. Though René died prematurely in exile and was suspected of atheism due to his prescribed skepticism (a charge he vehemently denied), unlike Joan, René was not burned at the stake for heresy. That said, he did not become a national hero and was never canonized a saint, either. Also unlike ‘The Maid of Orléans,’ heroine of France, René’s supernatural sightings did not lead him into battle or provide a morale boost for his nation’s armies; but, they did transform him into a kind of spiritual warrior. As I read him, he was something akin to a Catholic Brahmin, foregoing conventional employment and a normal life while committing himself to study, teaching, and defending his faith. Or perhaps he was more like someone of this sort found in Tibetan Buddhism: a creative soul and a treasure revealer oriented toward combatting the universal enemy of avidya (self-ignorance).

Having read a translation of his life’s works and letters, I believe Descartes used his religious and scholastic footing to undertake his own personal, metaphysico-philosophical, seventeenth century version of the Manhattan Project (that secretive World War II program to develop the first atomic bomb, the results of which continue to have profound and far-reaching repercussions). As silly as that may come across, the philosopher is explicit about his intent to compose a rational, sacred text-inspired device so powerful, so convincing and irrefutable, as to rid the world of any serious non-believers and establish Catholic spiritual supremacy for the rest of time.[1] Though he failed in this aim, I don’t know how else one could interpret his published works without denying his words and attributing to him ulterior motives.

Descartes’ overall philosophy lands on me less like a dreadful misinterpretation of the truth of the nature of reality than an intelligent articulation of the network of representations and relations he was enmeshed in. The essence of Descartes’ philosophy appears to rest upon a standard Abrahamic vision of God and Creation, to which he adds unconscious innate knowledge and then tacks on the primacy of subjective experience.[2] I understand this philosopher and mathematician to be of the view that we don’t perceive reality so much as participate in the improvised co-creation of an impossibly elaborate interpretive dance with all the rest of Being – one participants can gain deeper insight into with introspection and the careful application of the best of our collective intelligence. Yes, he felt we have all we need within us to make sense of the world, mostly a rational mind, but he also understood that we are deeply flawed. Most essential, he didn’t keep all of this to himself but shared it all and vigorously sought critical feedback. To me, this feels a more accurate summary of his thinking and behaviour than what's typically found. As a result, though often presented as Descartes’ antithesis, as found in Environmental Education readings, I believe René’s works and actions (obsessed with the sacred, the moral, and the bigger picture) are congruent with Goethe’s (1749-1832) thinking. Descartes could also be said to be in sync with related ideas articulated within the current milieu by cognitive psychologists and others such as Donald Hoffman (1955-), as found in his, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Your Eyes. Not unlike Descartes, Hoffman (2019) argues that we do not directly perceive reality how it truly is; but, through a meticulous application of reason, we may be able to dig deeper and tease out more of this deeper truth, one that is not within the narrow envelope of perception and intuition gifted to us by nature and experience.

From my current vantage point, I see Descartes’ clockwork thinking as approximating the common core of human and other animal activities rather than a radically transgressive departure. Not only did the mechanical and mathematical thinking Descartes is notorious for precede him by centuries, or perhaps millennia, and arrived in Europe from Asian and Arab sources but so did the automata that inspired the clockwork of Europe’s Middle Ages (deSolla Price, 1964; Truitt, 2015). Further, these were largely celebrations of life, myth, magic and/or the sacred that used nature as their template. Mechanical clocks, like the mechanical thinking that preceded them, were nothing like avant-garde abstractions but instead coherent reflections of the world of relations their co-creators witnessed and interpreted. As Truitt (2015) argues of early clocks and automata, these devices and the ideas that impel them “pose enduring questions about the limits of knowledge and creation; about the relationship between people and technology; and about identity, subjectivity, and the definition of life” (p. 153).

I find Descartes’ other philosophizing on this same spectrum. What he definitely did not do was concoct an alternate universe or some kind of utopia to aim for; instead, he tried to paint the clearest, most accurate and ultimately useful picture of the world, really a map, that anyone had ever seen. Though it may be offensive to some, I read this as a seventeenth century Catholic rationalist’s version of an Aboriginal Australian’s songline or dreaming track (see Glynn-McDonald, 2021). I would summarise much of Descartes’ work and motivation to something like the following: this life will kill you, regardless; but, given what we know about who and where we are, if you follow this track I’ve discovered laid down here by the Creator, you can orient yourself and traverse this formidable and shifting terrain to sources of real nourishment and, with luck, maybe even return home with something valuable to share. And his mind-body dualism (sic) does not appear much different in this sense. Descartes was describing the world as he felt it must be, given his environment and education, and provoked us (Cornell West’s Heideggerian "beings-toward-death") to really grapple with the material and temporal implications.

Was this seventeenth century philosopher wrong about many things? Of course he was, and in all the ways all of us are, especially given enough time and distance. He acknowledged as much himself in his earliest publications:

…[I]t could be that I am mistaken, and what I take for gold and diamonds is perhaps nothing but copper and glass. I know how much we are prone to err in what affects us, and also how much the judgements made by our friends should be distrusted when these judgements are in our favor. But I will be very happy to show in this discourse what paths I have followed and to represent my life in it as if in a picture, so that everyone may judge it for himself; and that, learning from the common response the opinions one will have of it, this may be a new means of teaching myself, which I shall add to those that I am accustomed to using. (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 47)

Tragically, I believe we are at least as wrong about Descartes as he appeared to be about physics, biology, or psychology. And, so as to not leave anything too neat and tidy and in light of the above, I would ask if everything levelled against Descartes and his philosophy could be directed at anyone or even everyone else? What about the person who produced the earliest and simplest of handprint cave paintings or built the first fire? What about those responsible for any of the grand pyramids across the globe? Could all these be interpreted as clear anthropocentric expressions in explicit defiance of nature? Could one draw lines between languages, ideologies, and cultures to formulate an argument that these events and the worldviews that gave rise to and evolved from them are the precursors to species extinction, strip mining, GMOs, and global climate change? It would be simple. It would also be just as narrow as the attack on Descartes and I cannot see any value in it. Absolving Descartes in this way, I am not inclined to find others to fill his place, to push the blame deeper into history or to another continent. I see as much sense in calling out one person, generation, or culture as I do in emphasizing human endeavours over the activities of other species or to point to mothers Earth or Nature. Though doing so might fill some need, I am not sure it gets us anywhere. And, though I think I understand the arguments commonly brought into discussions of this sort (about how certain species or peoples are different in what are said to be numerous or critical ways), I find these to be unsatisfyingly simple and fragmented and, ultimately, failing to deal with the reality in which many of us seem to agree we find ourselves: a wildly precarious and fleeting existence with new and formidable challenges of all sorts and scales, all arriving faster than they can be attended to.

How Do I Feel About the Relationship Between Descartes and Environmental Discourses?

In a work arguing for the rejection of Descartes’ thinking and, to my reading, all that might be said to have been inspired by it, Robbins (2005) wrote, “This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity's alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism” (p. 113). In a similar tone, Orr (2004) insists that Descartes, with his cold mechanico-mathematical mind, threw out loyalty, friendship, sentiment, empathy, and charity. These things and many others like them form the foundation of key arguments within the Environmental Education discipline. We can’t ask Descartes for a rebuttal, but we do have his worldview expressed in his own words and preserved in ink. There he shares such sentiments as:

Though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth. And the interest of the whole, of which each of us is a part, must always be preferred to those of our particular person... (cited in Marshall, 1998, p. 139)

These words don’t leave me feeling René wanted us to be alienated from the world or to discard feelings of loyalty and empathy. And there are many more lines of this sort that could be cited, making all of this is very clouded and confusing to me still today.

Though it is true that I am deeply puzzled, it could be worse: I may be misconstruing what I interpret as the consensus about Descartes within our readings. Worse still, I may be ignoring or just blind to my own bias and egregious cherry-picking of both Descartes and our readings and the general discourse. Or, perhaps the authors and translators I’ve been reading have themselves horribly misinterpreted Descartes. Maybe, for whatever reason, the problem lies with the consensus around Cartesian thought within those course readings and, seemingly, in broader Eco discourses and those adjacent. Or maybe some curious combination of all of the above and more has conspired to paint what I see as a deeply conflicted picture. The simplest and most palatable scenario is the first, and this was the one I was becoming comfortable with. Two books made me feel that, if nothing else, at least I am not alone in my confusion.

I arrived at the first text when conducting readings at the outset of my thesis preparations. Trying to make sense of my own and other’s take on Cartesian Dualism, I discovered a pair of authors with a similar reading of Descartes to my own. Despite coming at the topic from different backgrounds, taking a different approach, and highlighting different points, we arrive at a similar place – largely by looking at the meaning of words and the shift in consensus thinking over time. In their book titled, Descartes’ Dualism, philosophers Baker and Morris (2002) resolutely conclude that Descartes, of all people, could not have been a Cartesian Dualist. This was a shock to read. It was the feeling I was trying hard to suppress. And yet the authors argue convincingly, to me at least, that the modern evaluation of Descartes’ work is catastrophically eschew and insist “there is no solid textual foundation whatever for ascribing any single element of Cartesian Dualism to Descartes” (p. 23). Their sense is that this confusion has arrived primarily by way of modern people accidentally smuggling modern words, concepts, and assumptions into Descartes’ thinking or otherwise demanding that he missed out on something essential, something that did not exist in his time and could not have been within his awareness. All of this adds a tremendous amount of additional weight a substance to my own research as well as new avenues to consider.

The second text arrived in my email inbox. In my scholastic frustrations, I reached out to a fellow student from another cohort in our program. Over the course of several months, we corresponded about some of these ideas and that I felt I was struggling. These communications were a big help. After not having chatted for about a month, this email landed like a letter slipped under the door in the dark of night and without so much as a knock. It read only: “1) Anthony Gottlieb The Dream of Enlightenment p. 22; 2) Richard Rorty Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature p. 64; All the Best!” Rorty’s work was interesting but the Gottlieb reference struck me so hard that I had to sit down. Within his discussion of the rise of modern philosophy, this British author and historian of ideas ends his opening chapter on Descartes with an observation that could suffice as an introduction to this thesis. Gottlieb (2016) writes:

The pervasive myth that Descartes stressed a ‘profound separation’ between ‘our intellect and the physical world’ has been fancifully employed by environmental campaigners – including a former American vice-president, Al Gore, and the heir to the British throne, Prince Charles – to blame Descartes for the doctrine that ‘we are separated from the earth, entitled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate collection of resources that we can exploit how we like.’ This rather oversimplifies the long history of man’s relationship with the rest of nature. (p. 22)

Two months later, I’m still sitting with all of this but feel less like I’m on my own or wildly out-to-lunch.

How Do I Feel About My Relationship With Environmental Discourses?

My thesis supervisor, Dr. Hilary Leighton, prompted me to find a place in the world to connect with while writing my thesis. That I did. On one of my last visits to that spot I was trying to sort out how I would finish my thesis. I had a few ideas and posed myself some obvious questions. In truth, it all felt a little half-hearted and a touch fake. I had definitely cracked open a window to my world and thinking but, despite all the revealing, had not really let any light in. I stood within the small parliament of trees I had been getting to know better since the Fall. This was the site of a heronry: what in the Spring and Summer becomes the cacophonous and pungent home to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of giant pterodactyl-like beasts who spend their days swooping and soaring and crashing into these treetops. I wondered what it was about this seemingly unremarkable collection of trees in the middle of a city park of all places that drew families of herons here in the first place and then back every year. I felt I should have an answer but came up with nothing very convincing. Even more, I wondered what brought me to this spot in the wet and dead of Winter and where I knew there would be no nests for months. I didn't really have a good answer to that, either. Standing in that soggy absence of herons brought up more questions. For instance, why I wrote a thesis about Descartes? The question made me laugh out loud. I hadn't really asked myself that before. I had no “why”. I had an answer for “what”, of course: it was the kind of response plagued with -isms and -ologies you give when a serious professional asks you what you're writing your thesis on; and I also had something cuter and less opaque to suit any other inquirer. When I asked myself “why”, without thinking, I immediately told myself that I was writing about Descartes because I had been curious about him, related themes were relevant to the program, and I'd done a bunch of research already – and so it seemed an obvious undertaking. It was a perfectly accurate and satisfying answer. “Okay, now try just half a shade braver,” I imagined Dr. Leighton responding, just as she had prompted myself and the rest of my cohort so many times before. It was true, a deeper “why” was there but it was messier and I hadn’t formally acknowledged it.

I now believe I wrote about Descartes because I was sure nobody really cares about him. Talking about this seventeenth century philosopher was essentially the least controversial subject I could think of. Though he does form the premise for many arguments within Environmental discourses, and there was some threat of ruffling feathers, I was sure people were not at all committed to this particular fellow. Not only was I unlikely to change minds with what would, as a master’s thesis, (easily go unread or otherwise be disregarded as a bit of solipsistic sophistry) but it seemed folks could simply formulate their argument another way or just find a different target were they convinced of my arguments regarding Descartes but still committed to similar argumentation. As such, this thesis was the safe way out, the path of least resistance, while still allowing me to say some of the things I was feeling. This thesis was an imitation in this way: not exactly false but not the goods either; in the spirit and style of openness and intellectual courage but only in a manner sufficient to conceal the real cowardice of the thing.

Though encouraged in every way by all of our professors to wrestle with our ideas and our feelings, and also to express ourselves, I don’t think I did much of that. I did feel free to share all manner of ideas; and those, like this thesis, felt like straightforward observations as opposed to abstract or out-of-the-box in any sense. They were, after all, submitted in the form of public comments, reading responses, assignments, and papers for the purpose of grading and not as acts of theatrical rebellion intended to be provocative and difficult to swallow. In fact, I don’t think I expressed any ideas that I myself felt were contrarian or controversial. It is true that I am certainly more disagreeable and a bit of an absurdist at times, but I am also the product of a pair of teachers from Vancouver, Canada. Yes, someone east of the Rockies or south of the border might consider me a ‘Hippie’ – probably because I would rather walk or cycle than own a car, don’t think a pipeline is a solution to anything, and would rather pristine forests and coastlines than piles of money – but I interpret these and other traits as moderate and, if anything, common and conservative. “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke,” “Leave it better than you found it,” and “Save for a rainy day (which in Vancouver is a whole lot of saving)” are all things you are likely to hear me say. My most extreme opinions are around freedom of expression: that I think freedom of expression should be as near to absolute as possible, and probably more so than any of us are truly comfortable with. I think this way because I believe that this is the primary right upon which all others are made possible and because it feels nonsensical to hope to sustain the protection of minority voices on nothing more than the wisdom and good will of the majority. This, to me, once again, comes across as an old and deeply conservative perspective (reflected in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and U.S. Constitution) rather than a weapon wielded by a renegade. This also highlights that I am disinclined to be silent myself or wish that of others; and yet I found it hard to be open about ideas that felt so thoroughly dissenting.

The truth is that I feel similarly about many of the ideas and themes that arose in our courses as to how I feel about these discussions of Descartes: much of the time I didn’t know what people were talking about or how they saw and understood what they were describing. As such, attempting to tackle any of these topics as a thesis seemed to dig deeper and promise to be far more challenging of people’s stated beliefs, including my own. And so, I mostly kept my distance. Still, I tried at times. While also strongly reflecting this thesis, three examples of these attempts illuminate what seem to be fundamental disagreements I have with much of the current discourse.

Our first reading in our first year was from chapter twenty of David Orr’s (2004) Earth in Mind. There the author wrote about human’s innate biophilia and what he sees as our growing biophobia and necrophilia. I was so turned off by his perspective, I wrote in our reading reflection that I had a visceral reaction, hated everything I read, and stopped reading only halfway through. That was my honest immediate reaction. I went back and read the piece and then submitted my interpretation of his essay:

When they aren’t gushing about the innate beauty and harmony of a wholly make-believe and unbelievable ‘Nature’ they’re pitching a version of the ‘noble savage.’ While arguing for a holistic biophilic worldview they appear, perhaps only to me, to be enforcing a permanent division between humans and the world. They talk about the antithesis of biophilia being necrophilia; pretending, somehow, that the one isn’t, most fundamentally, the other.

I was so annoyed I wrote a poem to Orr and submitted a version of it as part of my reflection. The poem read:

What is the sweet soil but a stack of decomposing corpses

(and poop, which is only more spent corpses!)

What is a stately coral and the reef it belongs to but a house made of skeletons

(among a suburb of skeleton houses!)

And what is an elegant wasp nest but the flesh torn from a tree.

And what is that majestic mountain but the ninety-million-year-old graveyard of an uncountable number of an unimaginable variety of marine organisms

(all thrust undignified, into the sky!)

I mean, what am I!?

Right! Little more than the reconstitution of that which I’ve killed (or had killed for me!)

And every part of all of that is, as Carl Sagan said, stardust

(aka DEAD STARS!)

So, dear Orr, this “life” and this “nature” of yours, I fear and suggest, is little more than death

(ALL THE WAY DOWN!)

This did not feel like an expression of my uniquely astringent obliquities but, surely, what everyone knows or can easily see. I did not know the author, my instructor, or any of my fellow students yet – or even the intended purpose of the reading, our written response, or what we might be doing with it later – and I was fully prepared to defend all the ideas expressed. It did not come to that and our excellent instructor responded with encouragement.

As we moved through more readings, I only continued to disagree. I assumed these scholars and myself were on the same page on so many fronts, and at the outset felt they just had to be my people, my tribe, the folks I could walk with in shared understanding and commitment (or at least direction), or as close to that as I was likely to find. And yet I found it challenging to wed very many of the views presented with my own. Halfway through our courses we picked up Capra and Luisi’s (2019) The Systems View of Life. The opening line of their introduction starts with the simple statement that, “Questions about the origin, nature, and meaning of life are as old as humanity itself” (p. 1). This is stated as fact. It probably strikes most, if not all, of their readers more like a clear and banal description; yet, I could not bring myself to move beyond the period enclosing the thought without asking, “Really, is that true?” This asserted conspicuousness just screams like a cattle prod in my backside. I am not so certain about my own mind much of the time, never mind that of my closest friends or living kin with whom I disagree all the time. Why then would I presume to know the minds of my most distant ancestors and insist upon similar experiences and views? Where they exist at all, such ideas and questions felt open to extraordinary interpretative deviations in the present alone and then, very obviously, disappear entirely when looking back far enough. As expressed earlier in this thesis, I consider specific words and ideas to be technologies or tools, and so this comment of theirs struck me as little different than claiming airplanes or the internet, writing or numbers are human universals.

I didn’t know how to drill down on this topic except to look into the meanings and derivations of the relevant terms. I assumed that “meaning” arose very recently on the timeline that I understood Capra and Luisi to be working with: “as old as humanity” (or, most generously, 250,000 years, though millions may be the appropriate scale) (see Harvati et al., 2019; Richter et al., 2017). As such, this read to me as the same scale of error as that of the Harvard professor who thought it more likely songbirds overwinter on the moon than in the south – an intuition so off that to think of the error on the scale of mere orders of magnitude is deficient. I reasoned that, of the few things all humans across time definitely share one would be the experience of sitting under a blue sky; and yet, I knew that the concept “blue” is both culturally specific and also one of our most recent innovations (see Abumrad & Krulwich, 2012; Deutscher, 2010; Roberson et al., 2006). So, for just one example, though looking up at this very same sky, the Himba, those peoples of northern Namibia and southern Angola with no distinct concept of blue (just like the Homer and the Ancient Greeks), were never before and are not now acknowledging never mind contemplating its blueness. My own intuition could not resolve why, then, Capra and Luisi’s “meaning” (something far more abstract and concealed) would be more universal or innate than the “blue” of the sky. Yes, there are texts from around the world and thousands of years old that consider why we must die or how to live well (from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the The Bhagavad Gita and on); but, again, as far as I was concerned the oldest of these are brand spanking new, arriving only in the most recent sliver of our human existence, and none contained culturally or temporally transcendent concepts about the human condition. Were there reason to believe associated ideas were far more general than I imagined – as much as 10 or even 20 times older than what is found etched in extinct languages on fragments of clay tablets – they would still arise within the most recent verse in the song of our species (see e.g., Henley, 2020; Sterelny, 2011). That said, I was not granting any of this and was willing to bet that these concepts, like so much of our vocabulary, were new even within the English language – itself not even 2,000-years-old.

With these thoughts, it was no surprise at all when I found a curious history when I went looking. To start, for something said to be ubiquitous across time and space, simultaneously elemental and most profound as well, “the meaning of life” did not appear anywhere I looked. The earliest usage of the phrase I was able to find in English came from 1834. I found it spelled out first by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), arriving in chapter nine of his novel, Sartor Resartus. There he writes, “Our life is compassed round with necessity, yet is the meaning of life itself no other than freedom, than voluntary force…” (cited in Phillipps, 1869. p. 58). I also found that Hochschild (2017) before me searched the phrase in French (“le sens de la vie”), German (“der Sinn des Lebens”), Danish (“meningen med livet”), and Russian (“смысл жизни”) and found similar results, with no such idea arising before the nineteenth century. In an essay about this, the professor of philosophy almost laughingly states:

As we’re used to hearing, the question of the meaning of life is a timeless philosophical concern. Rooted deep in the human heart, it has been explored by great philosophers including Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Pascal and Rousseau, Kant and Marx. It is so fundamental a question it has occupied intelligent minds from outside of formal philosophical circles by pastors and men of letters, by essayists like Montagne and Emerson, by poets like Virgil and Dante, Milton and Shakespeare. Indeed, one could hardly count as an educated person without having surveyed history’s rich variety of answers to the question of “the meaning of life.” Just to ask the question is to participate in a fundamental human quest. That’s the common account, anyway, so familiar as to be trite. It is also entirely false. Every single claim of it, false. (Hochschild, 2017)

And I found other philosophy scholarship in agreement that this question is a modern one, not older than 250 years (Landau, 1997; Metz, 2018).

So, it seemed Western civilization has only recently started using this phrase. Digging further, I wondered about the individual words themselves. I imagined that if one had the term “meaning” it wouldn’t be too long before you’d slap it next to “life” in a poem or conversation. Another etymology search proved wildly interesting. “Meaning” appears to have arrived in our language as “that which is intended to be expressed” only in the fourteenth century (around the time of the first mechanical clocks) but did not take on the sense of “significance or import” until the late seventeenth century (only after Descartes) (Harper, n.d.-a; Oxford English Dictionary, 2019c). Interestingly, it also took another two centuries to evolve the adjective “meaningful” from the noun “meaning”, and not until the twentieth century did “meaningfulness” emerge (Merriam-Webster, n.d.; O’Brien, n.d.) All of this slow evolution and newness was surprising and drove home how presumptuous and taken for granted my language is and thus the very contents of my own mind. During this inquiry I also discovered the existence of “Meaning of Life” study within Philosophy. Poking around in the literature I found that even in the present, where these words and this phrase are commonplace, there appears an inherent struggle at the heart of it all. Philosophers today remain conflicted about what they study: whether “meaning of life” does or should focus on significance (life’s inherent value), purpose (life’s direction and aims), or coherence (one’s life making sense) and how to understand and harmonize this knotty and thorny trichotomy (Martela & Steger, 2016).

Yes, my research and assessment of this topic could have been misguided in all sorts of ways, and I may have just missed the point altogether, but what it demonstrated for me was that – though Capra, Luisi, and I have similar access to information as well as backgrounds as alike as possible – we did not appear to have anything approximating a similar perspective or common language regarding what they consider to be the most basic of human experiences. (Again, though absolutely defiant and contrary, I did not feel I was acting the rebel but instead stumbling upon what anyone would find if they went looking.) And, I wondered, on what basis then would we as a species agree on anything far more obscure or contentious than what they claim is truly axiomatic?

Lastly, in a final assignment before taking up this thesis, I attempted to express something related once again. It was a long and meandering exploration of my frustration with the meaning of words, with representation, and what I felt to be very confusing recurrent attacks on science, modernity, and Western civilization. I felt there were plenty of critiques to make in this area, and some far more damning, but these felt uncommonly shaky. I believed I understood where these arguments were coming from but, though referring to myself and my world, our readings did not seem to correspond with almost anything I knew or believed; and so, I simply did not follow. In composing the essay, though strongly disagreeing, I thought I was merely attempting to describe the world as it appears rather than offering a radical reversal of self-transforming kaleidoscopic contortions. Still, in doing so I felt like I was writing an op-ed for Dabiq (the official publication of ISIL). It seemed like I was opposing all that was just and good and sacred in people’s eyes – and that it would be read as me offering an alternative justice that involved stonings, beheadings, and worse. I kept at it because, once again, I was sure I was only offering the most popular of mainstream assumptions, something you might hear on CBC over a season of The Nature of Things.[3] In direct opposition to a selection of favoured environmental voices, I observed that:

[T]he old story I grew up with was that my greatest-great-grandmother was African; and not just me, but every person I know and every person I’ve seen and every person there has ever been belongs to one big human family with her as our common ancestor. And I was told that we know this because of a deep animism in which the living earth and the living rocks and the living bones speak together with one consilient voice to tell us so. Deeper still, and more recent, this story has been enhanced by another ancestor tale. And it is not one found locked away in a dusty library or being whispered in the halls of a monastery or buried in some ancient tomb; instead, it’s the most intensely personal story: one that we all carry around in our own hair and flesh and blood. And, most beautifully, our elders tell us it comes in the form of a paired, four-letter-based helical poem not less than three billion lines long. (And that every one of the countless copies of this epic poem, that you hold in the hearts of every one of the tiniest bits of you, is written in a sacred alphabet composed by the stars in the night sky in the time beyond time.) Further, to read this epic poem is to learn not just that we’re one big human family but that all life we know of has just such a familial relationship: that much of what I want to call “me” is identical to that of things as seemingly different as a humpback whale and a daffodil.

I felt like the above was a vulgar rejection of thousands of pages of publications forming and informing the basis of Environmental Education; but I also could not pick out where I was misrepresenting the culture or the abundant evidence. I argued further still that this story was not a good one or even merely the greatest ever told but was likely the greatest story that could be told – the most beautiful, unifying, and uplifting story of life possible. And yet I felt I had read again and again that exactly everything and everywhere and everytime beyond this collection of ideas, their progenitors, and anything associated was something far less barren and rigid, less dumbing and stultifying, immensely more holistic and nourishing, embracing and astonishing – unimaginably so, really. And, the suggestion appears to be, I might be able to see all of this were I not so obviously manipulated by and willing to radiate all of Descartes and friends. It was true that whatever that was I could not see it. And I remain just so blind and confused today.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] Descartes spelled this out in his most visible writings. He begins Meditations on First Philosophy (1641):

…[A]lthough it suffices for us believers to believe by faith that the human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists, certainly no unbelievers seem capable of being persuaded of any religion or even of almost any moral virtue, until these two are first proven to them by natural reason. …I judge that there is no greater task to perform in philosophy than assiduously to seek out, once and for all, the best of all these arguments and to lay them out so precisely and plainly that henceforth all will take them to be true demonstrations. (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 97-98)

[2] Two considerations arise with this point. Firstly, I have read modern researchers and authors as wanting to chastise the philosopher for forwarding this subjectivity. Doing so they label it too constricted, egocentric, and anthrophilic: a clear rejection of more holistic thinking and the more-than-human world. At the very same time, these folks seek to deemphasize the empirical and quantifiable for being insufficiently well-rounded while offering modes more qualitative and subjective in their stead. I don’t know how these ideas harmonize. Secondly, regarding innate knowledge, Descartes did not subscribe to the tabula rasa conception of consciousness that had been popular with Aristotle and Aquinas and was later championed by Locke, Hume, and Freud (“Tabula Rasa,” 2020; Duschinsky, 2012). Today, this thinking of his is considered modern – a rejection of the wayward empiricist and romanticist assertions of prior centuries which led us to countless errors and horrors – and is of the sort held by sophisticated mainstream public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker (Smith, 1999; Pinker, 2003).

[3] Hosted by world-renowned environmentalist David Suzuki, The Nature of Things is now 60-years-old and the longest-running science series, as well as one of the most successful programs (science-based or otherwise), in television history (see Delisle, 2020).