I could also make the more negative argument . . .
that conventional ways of thinking and ways of understanding the self have not resulted in the apparent promise of the Enlightenment. Mark Lawrence McPhail makes the point eloquently:

The assumption of ontological difference, of a world composed of separate and distinct beings has, since the ancient Greeks, been axiomatic in Western thought, and it has shaped and defined both descriptive and prescriptive assertions about the nature of reality. Both physical and human nature have been viewed from the standpoint of a logic of identity that strives for certainty, that attempts to determine a reality in the last instance, to discover final truths. Both philosophical idealism and realism, and the foundationalist and existentialist epistemological strategies they often emphasize, assume the existence of a justificatory ground separate and distinct from human beings and situated in the formal or substantive properties of reality. And yet, this seemingly self-evident assumption has not brought us much closer to understanding our selves or the world in which we live in any enduring sense, for we continue to judge and act against the Other, whether we define that Other in terms of class, gender, language or race, in ways that we would never apply to ourselves." (23-24; my emphasis)

I would add that this sense of Other includes the physical; that is, we assume separateness not only from each other but from the natural or physical world as well.

---

Bowers' discussion of "taken for granted patterns." | Works Cited