Oh - this channels Nagarjuna's Conditional Arising! (Buddhist figure roughly analogous to Augustine)
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"And a human being is not an isolated self, navigating a neutral backdrop. We are bodies shaped by air, food, language, microbes, culture, ancestry, and place. Even our thoughts emerge within networks of relation… familial, social, historical, material."
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To amateurishly summarize Nagarjuna's thinking, we exist, but not independently -- we are subject to conditions and contexts. Those shape us, deeply or shallowly, in a multitude of ways. And since we can be shaped so differently by different conditions and contexts, we are "empty" of intrinsic essence. Who we become, is a conditional arising of the circumstances we're in -- like how the tree is an interaction with the light and the insects and other plants as you talked about!
Yes! I think that’s a really perceptive connection. Nāgārjuna’s account of conditional arising captures something very close to what I was trying to move toward here. The ecological view, at least as I understand it, also unsettles the idea of independently existing selves or things. What we encounter instead are beings that come into presence through relationships, histories, and material conditions. The tree is not a self-contained object, and neither are we.
In an ecological sense, that “emptiness” can be understood not as absence, but as openness… a kind of relational permeability (at the heart of empathetic ecology). "Things" (these strange forms of matter that we call solids, liquids, and gases while we ignore plasma) are not empty of meaning, but empty of isolation... they exist through participation.
Many (most?) of our social and environmental crises trace back to the illusion of separateness, as we're being programmed by algorithms to believe that humans stand apart from the systems that sustain us. Conditional arising, ecological interdependence, and even some strands of phenomenology are all pointing, in different vocabularies, toward the same recognition: life happens in webs, not in sealed containers.
Thanks for bringing Nāgārjuna into the conversation… that’s a really rich lens through which to read this!
Thanks! That line is the hinge for me (even though I deliberated a bit about including it)... Once ecology shifts from a subject to a way of seeing, everything else starts to look different.
Oh - this channels Nagarjuna's Conditional Arising! (Buddhist figure roughly analogous to Augustine)
- - - - - - - - -
"And a human being is not an isolated self, navigating a neutral backdrop. We are bodies shaped by air, food, language, microbes, culture, ancestry, and place. Even our thoughts emerge within networks of relation… familial, social, historical, material."
- - - - - - - - -
To amateurishly summarize Nagarjuna's thinking, we exist, but not independently -- we are subject to conditions and contexts. Those shape us, deeply or shallowly, in a multitude of ways. And since we can be shaped so differently by different conditions and contexts, we are "empty" of intrinsic essence. Who we become, is a conditional arising of the circumstances we're in -- like how the tree is an interaction with the light and the insects and other plants as you talked about!
Yes! I think that’s a really perceptive connection. Nāgārjuna’s account of conditional arising captures something very close to what I was trying to move toward here. The ecological view, at least as I understand it, also unsettles the idea of independently existing selves or things. What we encounter instead are beings that come into presence through relationships, histories, and material conditions. The tree is not a self-contained object, and neither are we.
In an ecological sense, that “emptiness” can be understood not as absence, but as openness… a kind of relational permeability (at the heart of empathetic ecology). "Things" (these strange forms of matter that we call solids, liquids, and gases while we ignore plasma) are not empty of meaning, but empty of isolation... they exist through participation.
Many (most?) of our social and environmental crises trace back to the illusion of separateness, as we're being programmed by algorithms to believe that humans stand apart from the systems that sustain us. Conditional arising, ecological interdependence, and even some strands of phenomenology are all pointing, in different vocabularies, toward the same recognition: life happens in webs, not in sealed containers.
Thanks for bringing Nāgārjuna into the conversation… that’s a really rich lens through which to read this!
“Ecology, then, is not merely a branch of biology. It is a way of perceiving reality.” is a nice invitation to the piece
Thanks! That line is the hinge for me (even though I deliberated a bit about including it)... Once ecology shifts from a subject to a way of seeing, everything else starts to look different.