Abstract
The narratives of consumerism and consumption to the point of addiction and harm are well explored in philosophy, particularly in environmental philosophy, as well as in related areas. This chapter explores the relationship between an embodied practice of self-awareness as a means of integration and the obsessive compulsion to consume that is at the heart of so much of the culture of the global North. Using the metaphorical and historical roots of consumption as the disease that consumes the consumer, it asks how we can satiate a raging and inconsolable appetite through practices that integrate and accept the self as other, rather than through the traditional perspectives of illness or weakness of will. To reintegrate is also to rehabilitate or rehome ourselves through practices that have long roots in Asian traditions of thought and their associated embodied philosophies.
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Notes
- 1.
See ‘Addiction, Environmental Crisis, and Global Capitalism’ <https://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/283-addiction,-environmental-crisis,-and-global-capitalism> Alexander has explored links between addiction and both ecological crises and capitalism, but so have many in the field of psychiatry and psychology, including Dr Gabor Maté (Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Illustrated edition (Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 2011); considering addiction as a learned behaviour is key to its resolution, according to Mark Lewis (Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease (Scribe UK, 2016) and Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs, Illustrated edition (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013). These books detail his personal and professional experiences that lead to the insights on addiction as learned behaviour rather than lack of willpower (‘bad’) or mental illness (‘bad’) behaviours. This parallels the findings of Maté and while there is some controversy around which theory most accurately represents addiction, the approaches suggested by these authors and researchers are the ones that accord most closely with the insights of Morton, Wirth, Parkes, and others who have explored Asian traditions of thought and the metaphors of consumption and hungry ghosts.
- 2.
Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World: 10 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 3.
Jason M. Wirth, Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis, SUNY Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017): 67.
- 4.
Graham Parkes, ‘Kūkai and Dōgen as Exemplars of Ecological Engagement’, Journal of Japanese Philosophy, 1.1 (2013), 85–110.
- 5.
Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: 67.
- 6.
Alex Renton, Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery, Main edition (Canongate Books, 2021).
- 7.
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong, Reprint edition (Harper Perennial, 2000).
- 8.
Roger J. H. King, ‘Playing with Boundaries: Critical Reflections on Strategies for an Environmental Culture and the Promise of Civic Environmentalism’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 9.2 (2006), 173–86.
- 9.
Seeing Myself See: The Ecology of Mind, 2009 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQoxalBys-U&feature=youtube_gdata_player> [accessed 16 January 2014].
- 10.
David A. Silbersweig David R. Vago, ‘Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Self-Transcendence (S-ART): A Framework for Understanding the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Mindfulness’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6 (2012).
- 11.
Yair Dor-Ziderman and others, ‘Mindfulness-Induced Selflessness: A MEG Neurophenomenological Study’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7.582 (2013).
- 12.
H. R. Maturana and F. J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science (Springer Netherlands, 1980) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8947-4>; Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
- 13.
Scott Sampson talks about this in his chapter ‘The Purpose of Life is to Dispense Energy’ in John Brockman, What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable (New York: HarpPeren, 2016).
- 14.
J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1989).
- 15.
Eric S. Nelson, Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life, 1st edn (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge explorations in environmental studies: Routledge, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429399145>.
- 16.
I give much more comprehensive attention to the question of our moral agency, which abuts the question of free will, in Lucy Weir, Love Is Green: Compassion as Responsibility in the Ecological Emergency (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2019).
- 17.
However, idealising earlier societies is fraught with problems and we would do well to recall that many more societies failed, and collapsed, than survived and thrived within their geographical limits Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
- 18.
Sam Harris discusses this in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2011).
- 19.
Martha Nussbaum, ‘Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 13.1 (1996), 27–58 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052500001515>. Kristen Neff has an extensive body of work on compassion and self-compassion in relation to individual and community flourishing: https://self-compassion.org/.
- 20.
Yoga as an asana practice boomed during the Covid 19 pandemic, up to almost 38 million people professing to practice yoga in the US alone (according to www.statista.com).
- 21.
Alistair Shearer, The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West, Illustrated edition (London: Hurst, 2020).
- 22.
Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 23.
Frederick Hickling, the eminent Jamaican psychiatrist, suggested that the phenomena of widespread psychiatric illness in countries of the global South that had experienced severe exploitation could be traced to a pathologically dangerous blindness in the cultures of the global North. Current cultural appropriation of yoga practices suggests a similar process.
- 24.
James Mallinson and Mark Singleton have done extensive work in this area, including collating and translating a huge number of early yoga texts that demonstrate both the inherent contradictions and differing approaches to yoga practice, but also illustrate some general features, including recognition of interdependence and its implications for existential understanding.
- 25.
The word ‘Upanishad’ which denotes a key set of yoga texts can be translated as ‘to sit at the feet of’.
- 26.
Alistair Shearer’s text gives a full and detailed account of the different theories of yoga’s early emergence.
- 27.
Vegetarianism is practiced for a number of reasons by yoga practitioners and some do indeed practice vegetarianism or veganism on health grounds, but the fundamental point being made here is that Ahimsa creates clear reasons for a practice on humane grounds.
- 28.
From Bertrand Russell’s ‘On the Value of Scepticism’.
- 29.
Robert Zimmerman, ‘What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?’, in Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. by Robert Frodeman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 207–29.
- 30.
Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion (Del Mar, CA: Puddledancer Press, 1999).
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Wirth, J. M. (2017). Mountains, rivers, and the great earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an age of ecological crisis, SUNY Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics. State University of New York Press.
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Weir, L. (2023). Reconciling Hungry Spirits in the Ecological Emergency. In: Weir, L. (eds) Philosophy as Practice in the Ecological Emergency. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94391-2_7
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