CHAPTER 3

PLATO AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH

While a Christian is honestly serving God, he is a stranger

even in his own state. We have been enjoined as strangers and
sojourners to sojourn here but not to dwell here.
(St. Cyprian of Antioch)
THE WESTERN HUMAN/NATURE RELATIONSHIP AS DUALISM
“The natural world and the biosphere have been treated as a dump, as forming the
unconsidered, instrumentalised and unimportant background to ‘civilised’ human life; they
are merely the setting or stage on which what is really important, the drama of human life
and culture, is played out. […] Systematic devaluation and denial are perceptually
ingrained in backgrounding, involving systematic not noticing, not seeing.” (p. 69) “The
natural world is homogenized and definied negatively and in relation to humans as ‘the
environment’.” (p. 70) “In dualistic construals of the mind/body division, mind and body
are assumed to belong quite different orders, being seen as so different as to give rise to the
classic problem of how they interact. The sphere of mind, of rationality and intellect, is
similarly assumed to be quite different from the sphere of physicality. Thus is widely
assumed to be the possession of metal attributes which makes humans different from other
animals.” (p. 70) “The polarising effect of radical exclusion facilitates the conclusion that
there are two quiet different sorts of substances or orders of being in the world; for
example, mind and body, humans and nature. […] The ideals which are held up as truly
worthy of human life exclude those aspects associated with the body, sexuality,
reproduction, affectivity, emotionality, the senses and de dependence on the natural world,
for these are shared with the natural and the animal; […] The human species is thus defined
out of nature, and nature is conceived as so alien to humans that they can ‘establish no
moral communion’ with it (James 1896:43).” (p. 71) “This leads to an alienated account of
human identity in which humans are essentially apart form or ‘outside of nature, having no
true home in it or allegiance to it. […] The key to existential homelessness and to our denial
of our dependence on nature is the dualistic treatment of the human/nature relationship, the
view of the essentially or authentically human part of self, and in that sense the human
realm proper, as at the best accidentally connected to nature, and at worst in opposition to
it.” (p. 71)
THE DEEPS ROOTS OF HUMAN/NATURE DUALISM
PLATO AND THE CARTESIAN ‘BIRTH’ OF ALIENATED IDENTITY