737
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_81
Chapter 81
Biological Proxies for the Individual
81.1 The Natural Selection of an Individual
He “clearly savors the paradox” of being “trapped” “in the inauthenticities of
civilization and of language” wrote Peter Caws of Emil Cioran’s book, and its hagiographic context, The Temptation to Exist
1
. There is no adequate participle to
encompass “trapped” when referring to an entire species that vacillates between
itself and a specific personage. In this test of gamboling pivots, the odds favoring the
individual are significant, however. One always favors the one, unless greed, or an
altruism born of empathy enters the equation, thereby changing the entire edifice of
what is possibility. Cioran grasped the fatal ironies of this condition, upon which the
fate of the world now hinges. Aquinas qualified its same challenges by taking up the
very cause and circumstances of Being, namely, essentia and substantia. Immanuel
Kant exhorted logic, reason, and the dualistic pressures posed by Reality in attempting to grasp the cosmological mess made more bewildering by the unsteady atom of
Being lodged precariously between the finite and the infinite, with no sure roadmaps
to exhume phenomena and noumena, ethics, and the transcendent.
Ultimately, contrary dogmas stacked up like pieces of firewood ready to be
ignited on the altar of the human ecological crises and their abundant storytelling.
Stories likely to go in opposite directions on a whim, much like “formal proofs of
the non-existence of a God who creates and organizes the world”—so contradictory
a series of ultimately self-destructive selectivity as was described in the
Bodhicharyavatara (“Bodhisattva’s Way of Life,” Chapter ix, Verse 119) of
Shantideva (685–763)
2
. Again, we’re speaking of the dialectic wherein the individual
chafes at, and is victimized by, his/her own species, thus giving rise to a seemingly
hopeless paradox.
1 “When Adam ate the apple, God lost His Head,” The New York Times, March 14, 1971, https://
www.nytimes.com/1971/03/14/archives/the-temptation-to-exist-by-e-m-cioran-translated-byrichard-howard.html, Accessed January 23, 2020.
2 See “Buddhist Atheism,” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Edited By James Hastings, With
the Assistance Of John A. Selbie and Louis H. Gray, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, Volume II, 1971,
pp. 183–184.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_81
Chapter 81
Biological Proxies for the Individual
81.1 The Natural Selection of an Individual
He “clearly savors the paradox” of being “trapped” “in the inauthenticities of
civilization and of language” wrote Peter Caws of Emil Cioran’s book, and its hagiographic context, The Temptation to Exist
1
. There is no adequate participle to
encompass “trapped” when referring to an entire species that vacillates between
itself and a specific personage. In this test of gamboling pivots, the odds favoring the
individual are significant, however. One always favors the one, unless greed, or an
altruism born of empathy enters the equation, thereby changing the entire edifice of
what is possibility. Cioran grasped the fatal ironies of this condition, upon which the
fate of the world now hinges. Aquinas qualified its same challenges by taking up the
very cause and circumstances of Being, namely, essentia and substantia. Immanuel
Kant exhorted logic, reason, and the dualistic pressures posed by Reality in attempting to grasp the cosmological mess made more bewildering by the unsteady atom of
Being lodged precariously between the finite and the infinite, with no sure roadmaps
to exhume phenomena and noumena, ethics, and the transcendent.
Ultimately, contrary dogmas stacked up like pieces of firewood ready to be
ignited on the altar of the human ecological crises and their abundant storytelling.
Stories likely to go in opposite directions on a whim, much like “formal proofs of
the non-existence of a God who creates and organizes the world”—so contradictory
a series of ultimately self-destructive selectivity as was described in the
Bodhicharyavatara (“Bodhisattva’s Way of Life,” Chapter ix, Verse 119) of
Shantideva (685–763)
2
. Again, we’re speaking of the dialectic wherein the individual
chafes at, and is victimized by, his/her own species, thus giving rise to a seemingly
hopeless paradox.
1 “When Adam ate the apple, God lost His Head,” The New York Times, March 14, 1971, https://
www.nytimes.com/1971/03/14/archives/the-temptation-to-exist-by-e-m-cioran-translated-byrichard-howard.html, Accessed January 23, 2020.
2 See “Buddhist Atheism,” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Edited By James Hastings, With
the Assistance Of John A. Selbie and Louis H. Gray, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, Volume II, 1971,
pp. 183–184.