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The Fear of Holism, Fluidity and Decreation: Misguided notions of PersonalIdentity as Static.5/18/2021 It is empirically undeniable that in Western society today there has developed an overt and palpable tension in the shift from ecological individualism to ecological holism. The wave of Veganism and the hostility confronting it is particularly interesting and symbolic of this aforementioned shift. Entire eco-systems and species, the human one included, are on the brink of mass extinction. Yet, bafflingly, people are seemingly being more resistant to practically applied Holism than they are being towards an extinction level event. The question at hand for us all, is why? In this paper, I explore the possibility that the resistance that this Holistic Paradigm Shift is experiencing stems from a misguided fear that Holism demands a loss of Personal Identity. The dominant idea of Identity in the West is intimately bound up with the idea of people as exploitable resources. And, in order for the human entity to be accepted as an exploitable resource, we have been culturally reduced to static things. Holism asks us to sunder our relationship with a static notion of Identity and marry ourselves to existence as a fluid, ever- changing process. When we ask people to make Holistic shifts, Veganism par example, it seems as if we are asking them to sunder their relationship with what they know to be themselves. I challenge this fear, considering it to be the result of a reductive concept of Identity reinforced by Capitalism in order to maintain people as exploitable resources. I draw largely on the ideas of Simone Weil to assert that this exploitative framework does not do justice to Identity, which is experientially more akin to a process than anything static. Weil's notion of Decreation and the danger of the Collective, show this static idea of Identity to be partly underpinning the fear of Holism. The paper firstly explores that resistance to Holism is, in part, a fear response to the idea that it requires a loss of Identity. Such a fear stems from Western attempts to reduce Identity to something ontologically isolated from the rest of the world; an inert, exploitable thing. This has entangled the notion of Identity with the idea of stasis which is constantly reinforced by what Weil called the Collective. From this then, stems a misguided fear that a Paradigm Shift towards a more Holistic relationship with the world, would entail a loss of one’s own Identity. From there, the paper challenges that misconception by evoking Hydrofeminist philosophy as a better way of making sense of our experience of Identity. What is empirically apparent to us is that Identity is fluid. We are shaped by the world just as much as we shape it. Thusly, this fear fostered by the West of change erasing Identity, is itself shown to be unfounded in the human experience. We have a Holistic relationship with the world by virtue of being-in-the-world. Weil’s practice of Decreation is here vital for making sense of how Identity is not undone but formed through the act of change. I hope to demonstrate that under fluid notions of Identity, the misguided fear of losing oneself to the world dissolves, and our tense relations with Holism dissolve with it. Paige Colton(Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University) Comments are closed.
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