Curtis The Soul in the Stone

Why the Worldview That Will Save Our Planet Is More Credible Than the One That Is Destroying It
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-905574-05-0
Verlag: Kommode
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 207 Seiten

The currently unfolding ecological catastrophe is the result of more than just deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, and factory farming. Behind the immediate causes of the degradation of our environment lies something else: a deeply rooted but ultimately absurd understanding of our place in the universe. Through a series of encounters with a striking array of protagonists-from revolutionary physicists and embattled philosophers to subsistence hunters and Himalayan shamans-The Soul in the Stone exposes the incoherence of the barren, human-centered perspective dominant in most societies today. It recommends instead an alternative worldview: one that acknowledges and honors non-human experience and, precisely because it does, is both more logically consistent and more fulfilling. And might just save the planet.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Curtis, Ashley

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

The Good Bishop

,

In 1744 the Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, published the best-selling book of his lifetime. It ran through six editions in the first year of its publication and was titled . In 1752, a year before his death, he published a sequel: .

The bishop’s recipe for making tar-water was to place a quart of pine tar in a large glass vessel and pour a gallon of cold water over it. Stir for four minutes with a ladle or a stick, then let stand for 48 hours. At this point the liquid can be poured off. Its color ought to be no lighter than that of French white wine, and not darker than Spanish. The general rule for taking it was to drink half a pint morning and night on an empty stomach; children and “squeamish persons” were permitted to dilute it and take it more frequently.

This regime, the bishop claimed, would cure all manner of afflictions. He described a family with seven children during a smallpox epidemic. The six children who drank tar-water “came very well through the infection.” The seventh “could not be brought to drink the tar-water,” and we are to understand that he died. Tar-water was effective at curing “so many purulent ulcers” that the bishop tried it on “other foulnesses of the blood,” including “cutaneous eruptions” and the “foulest distempers … pleurisy and peripeumony.”

•

The writer of —a man whom the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant would later dub “the Good Bishop”—promoted tar-water so energetically out of concern for his flock. Cloyne, an isolated and impoverished rural area, had recently been hit by epidemics of smallpox and dysentery—or, as the bishop colorfully termed it, “bloody flux.” The bishop’s country was described in a contemporary letter addressed to a British parliamentarian—“The Groans of Ireland”—as “the most miserable scene of universal distress, that I have ever read of in History.” Besides disease, it suffered from a “scarcity of bread (that in some places come near to a Famine).” So scarce was bread, in fact, that the bishop, in a gesture of solidarity with his congregation, stopped using flour to powder his wig until after the fall harvest.

The bishop thought he had found an inexpensive way to maintain the health of a devastated population. But his best-selling book did not stop at establishing the physiological virtues of tar-water, or at providing a scientific explanation for its effectiveness. Its third aim, as the puts it, was to “lead the mind of the reader, via gradual steps, toward contemplation of God.” The word “Siris” in the title is derived from the Greek word for “chain,” and the bishop’s “chain of philosophical reflections” leads from tar-water, albeit in a somewhat meandering fashion, to divinity.

Which brings us, somewhat abruptly, to God.

•

The virtues of tar-water have been by and large forgotten in the intervening centuries, but the bishop’s earlier writings have not. It is these early works, penned in his mid-twenties as a struggling research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, that make him a well-known if misunderstood figure today. For in these early writings, more strongly and effectively than any other philosopher, George Berkeley, the future Bishop of Cloyne, denied the existence of matter.

When someone says to you, “You’re so materialistic,” they usually mean that you care too much about consumer goods, possibly at the expense of more important things like human relationships or noble causes. But materialism can also refer to something other than an addiction to shopping: the belief, quite prevalent in academic circles, that the universe and all that is in it can be satisfactorily explained . That is, it can be satisfactorily explained with no need for any God, spirit, purpose, or meaning beyond what we matter-built people with our matter-built brains ourselves invent.

Those who disagree with such materialists generally think that something exists —say, the human spirit, or God, or a life force. But they generally concede that, of course, matter also exists. Matter is physical : chairs, tables, rocks, water, atoms. The debate between materialists and non-materialists tends to concern whether there is anything matter, not whether matter itself exists.

Berkeley opposed both camps. He thought matter did not exist . And although this might seem a laughably radical doctrine, he did not even consider it a doctrine but rather a simple fact that, with a little reflection, was completely self-evident. And as a side-benefit, it did something quite useful for a bishop: it proved the existence of God.

•

We all have dreams, and some of us have or have had hallucinations. In our dreams or hallucinations we see, feel, hear, smell, and taste; we experience pleasure and pain; and when we are in them, we believe wholeheartedly in their reality. When we wake up, we realize—“Oh, it was a dream.” Often—at least in the contemporary West—we say, “It was a dream.”

When you think about it, what we mean by this is that there was no making up the objects in the dream, no matter in the sense of . It was all in our heads. By contrast, when we are awake and see a chair, we suppose that we are seeing a piece of real, honest-to-goodness matter. And we suppose that this real matter, by being there, makes clear that we are now living in reality, whereas before, in our sleep—when there was no to our chairs—we were living in a dream.

In my dream, I see a chair. I stumble against it and hurt my foot—ouch! I am convinced, in the dream, that this is a real chair, that it is made of real matter. That is why I can see it, and that is why it hurts when I crash into it. Yet when I wake up, I have no problem grasping that my conviction in the dream was wrong and that in fact there was no real chair (that is, no chair made up of ) there at all.

I am thus perfectly willing to say that I sometimes (in my sleep, or while hallucinating) see things, and feel them, and am hurt by them, even when there is no there for me to be seeing, feeling, or hurt by.

Berkeley in essence asks why, if I grant this in my dreams, I then insist on supposing that there is causing any of my sensations—even my waking ones. If the dream chair doesn’t need to be made of stuff, why does my waking chair have to be? True, my waking chair behaves in ways that are more regular than my dream chair. It doesn’t, say, turn into a pink elephant all of a sudden. But why does imply ?

In fact, Berkeley argues, the difference between dreams and what we call reality has to do with regularity. Reality regularly obeys the laws delineated by our common sense and our natural sciences, while dreams often don’t. The idea of , however, adds nothing to our understanding of . We gain nothing from it—and in fact, we lose—for , claims Berkeley, is a completely meaningless term.

•

I sit at my desk in my office and write. I get thirsty. I leave the office, close the door behind me, and head to the kitchen. I drink some tea. I return to my office and, on opening the door, I see my chair. It is the same chair, I suppose, that I was sitting on before I went to get my tea. One of the greatest arguments in favor of there being is that must have remained in my office throughout my absence and that this explains how the chair could have been there when I left the room and still be there when I come back. This is the fundamental role of matter: it exists even when we are not aware of it. It doesn’t care whether we see it or not.

We get into trouble, however, when we try to conceive of this matter—the material chair that remained in my office. What do we mean by it? What is it like? Is it brown? Is it solid on the back and cushiony on the seat? Does it weigh five kilograms? Is it comfortable? Is it good-looking?

The problem lies in what we mean by all of these qualities. Brown is something that I . I cannot brown without imagining brown. Sure, I can form a mathematical model of electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency—but the thought of electromagnetic waves is an utterly different thought from the thought of . (Just try it.) Without seeing, or at least imagining that I am seeing, loses all its content and becomes an empty...

Über Autor(innen)

Curtis, Ashley
Ashley Curtis was born in California in 1959. He studied Chinese and biblical literature at Yale and physics and physics pedagogy at Smith College. He taught for many years at the Ecole d’Humanité in Hasliberg, Switzerland, where he served as co-director from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Error and Loss: A Licence to Enchantment and the mystery novel Hexeneinmaleins, both published by the Kommode Press, and the cultural history “O Switzerland!” (Bergli). He lives just outside the Val Grande National Park in northern Italy.