Implications of the Western Self
It would be beyond presumptuous to attempt to do anything more here than refer briefly to some of the more important (for our purposes in this inquiry) of the wide-ranging and profound implications of the Western conception of the self, which occupies the center of philosophical inquiry in the Western tradition. But two implications bear mentioning.
First, many scholars have associated the coherent, rational self of the Enlightenment (which I consider to be a manifestation of what I am calling "the Western self") and the related split between subject and object with the rise of capitalism. That is, capitalism requires such a self, in part because of its need to commodify the labor of individual workers, and in part because of its need for individual consumers of that labor who act out of "rational" self-interest as economic beings. This grossly oversimplifies a complex dynamic, but the point is that modern industrial society and its consumer-based economic systems rest in large measure on the idea of the Western self. Alternative versions of the self that replace the notion of separateness and undermine the primacy of mind in relation to the body represent a threat to these systems. This is one reason why the kind of change I believe is necessary to address growing environmental crises is so difficult to achieve.
Second, the mind/body duality allows for a hierarchy in which mind (or reason or intellect) takes precedence over matter (or the body or the physical). In this sense, to define the human being essentially as intellect is to assign it the power to control or "humanize" the physical. Thus, the Western self becomes master not only of its own body but of the embodied or physical world. There are many manifestations of this idea, including religious doctrines that proclaimed humans lords of the earth (think of John Winthrop's Boston, the"shining city on a hill" representing a "taming" of the wilderness that surrounds it) and nationalist movements that promoted "improvement" of the land as patriotic (think of the Oklahoma land rush and similar government-sponsored efforts to "reclaim" the wilderness). I like Crispin Sartwell's (2000) way of stating the matter as well as anyone's. In the following passage, Sartwell is addressing the problems he sees in our search for meaning through narrative, which requires a focus on textuality, but the idea he expresses about the implications of our notion of the human subject (again, a fundamentally intellectual being) is relevant here:
That human subjects are zones of inscription for particular sign/power configurations, particular economic contexts and institutions that cannot operate without texts, is concealed as a metaphysics and ethics of human being-in-the-world, so that even very particular inscriptions (such as that of practical rationality) and very particular uses of such inscriptions (such as a technological conception of the human relation to nature) are "naturalized" or rather metaphysicalized (sorry) into basic conditions of human existence, or into basic configurations of the "human" world. Indeed, the "humanization" of the world, the collapse of the separation between, say time "as it is" and time "as it is experienced" is a reification of power relations, here conceived most generally as the power of human beings over "our" universe. (45)And that sense of power over the physical world, which is a function of our ways of being-in-the-world that in turn grow out of our sense of self as separate from that world, leads to the environmental destruction we now accept as routine. Significantly, this self is a literate self.