CARTESIAN INDIVIDUALISM, RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY, AND A NEW ECOLOGY OF BEING HUMAN: TOWARDS RECOVERING THE VALUES OF HUMAN MUTUALITY, INTERDEPENDENCE, AND SOLIDARITY

Tóm tắt

Despite hundreds of years of thinking and imagining, and after countless clumsy attempts of implementation, we have not moved much closer to the desired ideals of a genuinely socialist society. We are finding out the hard way that the ideals of a socialist society remain elusive. Without having enough people with a genuine, pro-social, philanthropist mindset, actualized in daily practiced virtues, the socialist vision remains out of reach. In other words, people’s minds and moral imagination must be ready for such an essential transformation. Or, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, the working class’s path to emancipation and a profound societal change must lead through a thorough mental and spiritual development of the masses which cultivates the conscious support of the majority of the working class for a societal change. In my paper, I argue that one of the essential obstacles to the emergence of a socially cohesive, just, prosperous, and sustainable society in a Western context is the lingering legacy of a “Cartesian anthropology”, which leads to excessive individualism and downplays the importance of human relationality, interdependence, and mutuality. I argue for a new anthropological paradigm - one based on a “relational” understanding of human beings as contingent, interdependent persons. Also, I argue that our common humanity is both a given and an emerging property of the intricate interplay of our biological constitution and social environment. I propose that it would be helpful to conceive of humans as complex “sociobiological ecosystems” (hence my reference to a “new ecology of being”) instead of autonomous “thinking selves” (following the fateful mind/body dualism of Rene Descartes), as this would likely increase our sense of human mutuality resulting in more widespread solidarity.