Chapter 12 - Return to Earth: A New Natural Philosophy?

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter I argue that the human violence against Earth has been in part a function of philosophy's love with the trope I term “Divine Child,” at the expense of the trope “Earth Creature.” I suggest the need for a new natural philosophy and look briefly at three clues that may help in the task: the philosophy of Albert Schweitzer, Daoism and somatic practice.

In her now classic God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Phyllis Trible explicates the Jewish myth of the creation of humanity. She points out that a careful reading of Hebrew tells us that Adam, formed of the dust of the Earth, was a gender undifferentiated human being. Gender differences come later when the undifferentiated human being becomes male and female. She translates:

And Yahweh God formed ha-adam [of dust] from ha-adama

And breathed into its nostrils the breath of life

And ha-adam became a living nephesh

(1978 , 79)

The undifferentiated human being formed from the dust—ha-adam—she calls the Earth Creature. But this Earth Creature is formed by receiving breath from God and so is born of God—at once a creature of Earth and a child of God. The Jewish myth tells a story that encapsulates the self-identity of humanity—connected with the divine through reason, consciousness and moral sense and with the Earth through physicality, embodiedness and animalism. “Earth Creature” and “Divine Child” become tropes recurring throughout the history of philosophy.

In my reading of philosophy, the weight has been placed by far on the Divine Child. Philosophers in the West since Socrates—and in large part in Eastern philosophy—have been enamored with the human as most-nearly divine and above the material world. They have also often despised creaturely existence and have sought ways to transcend the limitations of physical embodiment. The means used toward transcendence have moved between the life of the mind through higher thought and learning and the life of the spirit through meditation and self-abnegation. In religious and nonreligious garb the human task has been to transcend the humanly animalistic. In many cultures to call someone an animal—dog, bitch, cow, pig and rat—is to humiliate and disrespect.