On Sept. 17 The N.Y. Times published an essay by author Andrea Wulf entitled “An Old Philosophy of Oneness Can Guide Us Today.” Meant to enlighten us on the philosophical basis of Inclusiveness, it in fact reveals the absurdity of what Wulf appears to see as the answer to all our problems. Her book “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self,” to anyone aware of our cultural history, is pretty much self-explanatory.
Enlightenment thinkers such as Newton and Descartes, Wulf declares, invented the notion of a distinct Self able to assess the external world “from a so-called objective perspective.” This is a lie. That each Man is a discrete/intelligent Being was an assumption shared by most of the philosophers of Ancient Greece 2500 years ago. In a book I have written which remains but a document in my computer, I outline the intellectual evolution of Western Civilization from Socrates to the European Enlightenment to the 19th Century Romantics who rejected the very essence of the definition of Man that had in one way or another informed the previous two thousand years of our history.
Wulf begins by citing the revolutionary message of a late 18th Century German teacher/philosopher: “There is a ‘secret bond connecting our mind with nature,’ the professor, Friedrich Schelling, told the students. His idea, that the self and nature are identical, was as simple as it was radical.” Later we are told “this philosophy of oneness became the heartbeat of Romanticism.” The Romantics, Wulf joyfully declares, “wanted to feel rather than observe. They wanted to discover themselves in nature.”
Quite aside from the fact that this ontological definition would seem to blatantly ignore the differences between a Human Being and every other biological life-form on the planet, what are the inevitable pragmatic repercussions of the notion that we are just another Animal whose intellectual/moral aspirations are a mere exercise in futility?
The first and most obvious result of this world-view is the death of rational, civilized discourse. You have your p.o.v. and I have mine and any criticism of the ideas or values of others purporting to be Rational or Objective is really but a devious expression of Hatred! Does this sound familiar? Wulf’s celebration of Feeling over Thought represents an implicit endorsement of the childish, self-indulgent “woke-ism” that has metastasized throughout our culture.
One of the more controversial valuations to emerge from the 18th/19th Century Romantics was the notion of the “noble savage” generally affiliated with the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Wulf, however, approaches the subject through the experiences of world traveler Alexander von Humboldt who, unimpressed by Man’s capacity as an Intelligent Being, focused instead on his definitive roots in the natural world. Humboldt, we are told, “had seen these connections during his five-year expedition through South America where he encountered Indigenous peoples who had long regarded earth as alive and interconnected.”
So the Romantics and the contemporary Left as represented by Wulf, actually value Primitivism above Western Man’s traditional devotion to Reason which they see as the product of his arrogant assumption that he is not just another animal. Hence the Left’s simplistic demonization of Western Colonialism which focuses exclusively on the sins of those colonialists while utterly ignoring the benefits they may have introduced to peoples still living in the stone age. Hence, to cite just one example, the oft repeated charge of cultural genocide leveled at Canada’s founding fathers who had the audacity to assume their Enlightenment Rationalism was inestimably more valuable to our Indigenous population than Ignorance and Superstition!
Yes, apparently impervious to Irony, those who call themselves Progressives actually cherish Primitivism over Intellectual integrity. As I point out in my book, the personal results of the notion that Man must cast aside the dictates of Mind and unite with his natural, instinctual Self, led many of the cultural icons of the 19th Century to lives of dissolution, lives marred by drug abuse, alcoholism, venereal disease, etc., etc.. Coleridge was an opium addict. Shelley’s self-indulgence destroyed the lives of many in his inner circle. Byron actually boasted that he had had sex with hundreds of prostitutes, both male and female, on his sojourns in Greece. He was, apparently, in quest of what many of the Century’s thinkers rationalized as that higher level of wisdom afforded by Eros. Or was he in fact just a self-indulgent child?
Those of Wulf’s mindset insist on Man’s “oneness” with the natural world in an attempt to promote a higher level of environmental responsibility. But the worthiness of her cause hardly exonerates her of her gross simplification of the human dynamic. We are not just another animal, and while it was Man’s amazing ingenuity which led him to exploit the natural world to his own advantage, it is that same faculty which, if employed with integrity, will ensure the future of the planet.
Capable of a level of Self-Awareness unavailable to the rest of biological creation, we are Moral Beings who must answer to our responsibilities as such. Wulf’s celebration of the Romantics’ inclination to “feel” rather than “observe” is ridiculous. It is an assertion based on the oft-repeated contemporary notion that we are basically empathetic beings, though all of history, that of more “civilized” societies as well as their less evolved contemporaries, shows this to be a naive delusion.
Deemed insane by many of his contemporaries, the poet William Blake insisted the Objective world ought not to keep Man from his heart’s desires. He was basically endorsing the urge to ignore reality; endorsing self-indulgence as an inalienable right; indeed endorsing the narrative that any impediment to our fulfillment is a form of oppression. As I have said repeatedly, there are still elements of intolerance infecting our culture, but a significant % of the rants lodged against so-called social injustice in the West today are but expressions of the degeneracy of the contemporary Left, a regime which purports to occupy the intellectual high ground even as it suggests with Andrea Wulf that Hurt Feelings rather than Truth ought to be the preeminent concern of those who rule our world.