https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-dualism-of-descartes-ruined-our-mental-health ... Nature was thereby drained of her inner life, rendered a deaf and blind apparatus of indifferent and value-free law, and humankind was faced with a world of inanimate, meaningless matter, upon which it projected its psyche – its aliveness, meaning and purpose – only in fantasy. ... The bifurcation of mind and nature was at the root of immeasurable secular progress – medical and technological advance, the rise of individual rights and social justice, to name just a few. It also protected us all from being bound up in the inherent uncertainty and flux of nature. It gave us a certain omnipotence – just as it gave science empirical control over nature – and most of us readily accept, and willingly spend, the inheritance bequeathed by it, and rightly so.
In the face of an indifferent and unresponsive world that neglects to render our experience meaningful outside of our own minds – for nature-as-mechanism is powerless to do this – our minds have been left fixated on empty representations of a world that was once its source and being. All we have, if we are lucky to have them, are therapists and parents who try to take on what is, in reality, and given the magnitude of the loss, an impossible task. ... "How did we ever get the notion of the mind as something distinct from the body? Why did this bad idea enter our culture?" -- Richard Rorty https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/april13/rorty-041305.html @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/66ebf031-d9ed-4855-9151-7c5a214b0bd4%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
