7
best of intentions, or from a critical perspective on incremental change. Paradoxical
behavior, contradictory assumptions and goals appear fundamental to human evolution. We harbor no illusions that in one generation, or in response to unprecedented
catastrophe, our species is going to suddenly change. If it were to embrace some
kind of revolutionary collective wake-up call, ready-or-not, a spiritual epiphany
spanning a critical, now-or-never mass, history renders clear that it won’t be good
for all constituents. Given our habits of domination over most other vertebrates (a
few exceptions earlier noted), and our near total vulnerability to our own bodily
microbes and viruses, and the invertebrates that vast outnumber us (an estimated
400 trillion individual krill in Antarctica’s waters during spring and summer, for
example—500 million tons)
5
both in quantity and their generally rightful claims to
biological tenure, it is a fretful, murky picture for Homo sapiens.
This book is divided into three parts meant to, in British philosopher Gilbert
Ryle’s famed expression, explore category mistakes
6
; to explore through a number
of disciplinary provocations, the dualistic chasms of which Ryle was so enamored,
in order to fathom and translate a crucial abyss, illogical obsessions without correction that have intellectually attacked the world. Literally attacked it. A situation in
which our species has been blind, perverted, propounding a line of reasoning ever
dangerously rooted to narcissistic, mechanistic blind-spots. Those intellectual and
moral caesuras are profound, at the heart of this counter-intuitive discourse; and first
promulgated most demonstrably in French philosopher René Descartes’ (1596–1650)
declaration of human mental and emotional superiority to all other life forms. There
we were, amid one European war within another war, at the proposed zenith of
God’s creation, a central premise of so many philosophical and history of ideas family trees: “Je pense, donc je suis; Latin: cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,”
from Discourse on the Method (1637, Leiden, the Netherlands).
Ryle, and every student of animal rights and conservation, will inevitably collide
with the arrogance inside the furnace of Descartes’ unwavering belief in the human
mind. Our everyday skepticism, he asserted, must help inform all natural science
studies. But with so unvaried a faith in the capacity of the human intellect to surmount any paradox or contradiction as to all but obfuscate the world of nature and,
in so doing, engender an implacable division or dualism between people and all
other organisms (presumed no more than machine-like in their appearance of intricacy and behavior). That intellectual bifurcation point—and Ryle was most certainly
determined to demolish it—was an essential and slow-to-become archaic flash point
in the Renaissance obsession with grasping the role of humanity on earth; denuding
every mystery, mapping every inch of the world in order to better control it.
Science has long abandoned mechanistic thinking per se. But its distinct opposite
orientations, the so-called pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic mythopoetic rituals
and artifice galvanizing our species’ self-righteousness, lift up the human spirit in a
5 See David Attenborough, “Antarctica,” “Seven Worlds One Planet,” BBC World, 2019; see also,
“Virtual World of Krill,” Australian Antarctic Division, August 1, 2017 http://www.antarctica.gov.
au/news/2017/virtual-view-krill,Accessed March 3, 2020.
6 See Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.,1949.
1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse
best of intentions, or from a critical perspective on incremental change. Paradoxical
behavior, contradictory assumptions and goals appear fundamental to human evolution. We harbor no illusions that in one generation, or in response to unprecedented
catastrophe, our species is going to suddenly change. If it were to embrace some
kind of revolutionary collective wake-up call, ready-or-not, a spiritual epiphany
spanning a critical, now-or-never mass, history renders clear that it won’t be good
for all constituents. Given our habits of domination over most other vertebrates (a
few exceptions earlier noted), and our near total vulnerability to our own bodily
microbes and viruses, and the invertebrates that vast outnumber us (an estimated
400 trillion individual krill in Antarctica’s waters during spring and summer, for
example—500 million tons)
5
both in quantity and their generally rightful claims to
biological tenure, it is a fretful, murky picture for Homo sapiens.
This book is divided into three parts meant to, in British philosopher Gilbert
Ryle’s famed expression, explore category mistakes
6
; to explore through a number
of disciplinary provocations, the dualistic chasms of which Ryle was so enamored,
in order to fathom and translate a crucial abyss, illogical obsessions without correction that have intellectually attacked the world. Literally attacked it. A situation in
which our species has been blind, perverted, propounding a line of reasoning ever
dangerously rooted to narcissistic, mechanistic blind-spots. Those intellectual and
moral caesuras are profound, at the heart of this counter-intuitive discourse; and first
promulgated most demonstrably in French philosopher René Descartes’ (1596–1650)
declaration of human mental and emotional superiority to all other life forms. There
we were, amid one European war within another war, at the proposed zenith of
God’s creation, a central premise of so many philosophical and history of ideas family trees: “Je pense, donc je suis; Latin: cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,”
from Discourse on the Method (1637, Leiden, the Netherlands).
Ryle, and every student of animal rights and conservation, will inevitably collide
with the arrogance inside the furnace of Descartes’ unwavering belief in the human
mind. Our everyday skepticism, he asserted, must help inform all natural science
studies. But with so unvaried a faith in the capacity of the human intellect to surmount any paradox or contradiction as to all but obfuscate the world of nature and,
in so doing, engender an implacable division or dualism between people and all
other organisms (presumed no more than machine-like in their appearance of intricacy and behavior). That intellectual bifurcation point—and Ryle was most certainly
determined to demolish it—was an essential and slow-to-become archaic flash point
in the Renaissance obsession with grasping the role of humanity on earth; denuding
every mystery, mapping every inch of the world in order to better control it.
Science has long abandoned mechanistic thinking per se. But its distinct opposite
orientations, the so-called pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic mythopoetic rituals
and artifice galvanizing our species’ self-righteousness, lift up the human spirit in a
5 See David Attenborough, “Antarctica,” “Seven Worlds One Planet,” BBC World, 2019; see also,
“Virtual World of Krill,” Australian Antarctic Division, August 1, 2017 http://www.antarctica.gov.
au/news/2017/virtual-view-krill,Accessed March 3, 2020.
6 See Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.,1949.
1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse