I understand that we must be careful about what we ascribe to nature. But we cannot give up the understanding that we have become alienated from nature and that this alienation also exacts a price....of false consciousness....of believing that we are alone, of believing that everything must be owned, of ignorance of interdependence, of the inability to be silent or still.
Joanna
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Yes we can. The overwhelming majority of humans have very little understanding of how this planet and cosmos do what "they" do; we're too ignorant to even know whether a term like alienation even applies to our collective self-descriptions of "our place in the scheme of things" other than as some rhetorical tautology used for political emotions. We have no evidence that there's even such a beast as "the intrinsic nature of reality" to get in touch with and if we don't we're in some sort of deep trouble. Space-time is perfectly indifferent to all our modes of production/ being-in-the-world. Earthquakes don't care. Forest fires don't care, mitochondrial myopathies in our own brains don't care; even as we're utterly [inter]dependent on/with these systems we hardly understand.
"Silence does not exist." [John Cage]
Ian