Another important inspiration was from Spinoza*.* According to his Ethics, everything in nature has a conatus, a fundamental striving to continue to exist: ‘Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.’ (View Highlight)
Spinoza’s God is similar to what we now call ‘the universe’, the totality of all that is. This totality expresses itself in infinitely many modes, such as thought and physical bodies. We, like everything else, are expressions of this one substance (View Highlight)
Unlike a traditional theistic God, Spinoza’s God has no overall higher purpose, no grand design. This God is perfectly free and acts in accordance with its own laws, but doesn’t desire anything. Nature simply is, and it is perfect in itself (View Highlight)
As Næss interprets him, Spinoza’s metaphysics is fundamentally egalitarian. There is no hierarchy, no great chain of being with creatures lower or higher. We are on an ontological par with fish, oceans and beetles. A bear’s interests roaming about in the Norwegian countryside matter just as much as those of the surrounding farming communities (View Highlight)
Loss of place has by now well-documented effects on mental health, including eco-anxiety, which arises from a sense of loss of places to which people feel a strong emotional connection. When our surroundings are hurt, we feel hurt too (View Highlight)
I am constantly defining my selves, for I am, as we all are, made up of so many different parts. But when those selves war within me, I am immobilised, and when they move in harmony, or allowance, I am enriched, made strong. (View Highlight)
the climate crisis seriously hampers our ability for self-expression. Its degradation of our sense of place and belonging makes it difficult for us to realise ourselves as human beings (View Highlight)
Self-realisation implies a unity of acting and knowing: you need to know yourself accurately as part of a vast, interconnected nature, and as more than a narrow ego. Once you know this, you can begin to act. By contrast, lack of knowledge (of ourselves, as conceived of a larger whole) immobilises and disempowers (View Highlight)
Normally, our emotions help us seek out what is good for us and avoid what is bad. We have three basic affects: joy, sadness and desire. Desire is an expression of the conatus: we seek things that bring us joy and avoid things that bring us sadness. (View Highlight)
The ethicist Eugene Chislenko argues that we might all be climate crisis deniers in some sense. Not that we literally deny that there is a climate crisis or influence policy to fuel denialism, but that we look away, much like a person in grief who realises someone is dead but has not been able to integrate the loss into her life (View Highlight)
he did not think that flourishing or, in his terminology, ‘blessedness’ (beatitudo) could be found in material wealth and fame. Instead, his work as a lens-grinder offered more opportunities for self-realisation, because it made him part of the interconnected, budding community of early scientists at the start of the scientific revolution, many of whom used lenses in their telescopes and microscopes (View Highlight)
Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them (View Highlight)
Self-realisation requires that we accurately understand ourselves as modes of God and thereby come to love God (View Highlight)
this does not mean that we are parts of God, like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Rather, each of us – an individual damsel fly, a rose, a mountain or a cloud – ‘expresses the whole, in its own particular way’. (View Highlight)
Once you realise that you are an expression of the whole of nature, you come to realise that, although you will die, you are also eternal in a non-trivial sense, since the one substance of which you are an expression will endure. Spinoza also makes the strong claim that, if we are rational, we cannot but love God. It is the rational thing to do, because the love of God spontaneously and naturally arises out of an accurate understanding of ourselves and the world. Once you realise this, you achieve blessedness (View Highlight)
Such resilient, walkable and child-friendly communities provide a great scope for self-realisation. In an important Næssian sense, Harris created a home for herself and others. Næss’s ecosophy is all about home, but in a broader environmental and ecological sense, where self-realisation is the ultimate norm. (View Highlight)