ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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And when we blend this Western notion of spirituality with non-Westem
systems of meaning, we face another set of problems. The journey from a
non-Westem language into the language of spiritus is a tricky one indeed.
Hopes to find in pagan, Neolithic, Eastern, and indigenous religious practices, a
non-dualistic understanding of spirit are undermined by appeals to a dualistic
linguistic tradition of spiritus; a tradition predicated on ideas of activating
principles counterposed to a passive matter. While the idea of spiritus, or
breath, is appealing to ecologically oriented theorists, for the ancient Romans,
spiritus entailed a breath that activated an otherwise dead body. Today we
know that breath does not activate, but rather, is functionally integral to a body
that is already very much alive.
Still faced with the need for a metaphorical antidote to the problem of
capitalist rationalization, a trend in society that cheapens all that is meaningful,
we must engender other ways to articulate meaning. Disenchanted with
capital-driven science and technics that promise to render all knowledge and
experience ‘operative’, ‘useful’, and ‘efficient’, theologians are left with few
alternatives (other than spiritus) for describing meaningful practice and
perception. Such theorists yearn to be able to point to qualities of reality that
are irreducible, qualities that cannot be known or conveyed through the
language
of logical
positivism,
behaviorism,
biological
determinism,
or
physics .4 Moreover, such thinkers long to be able to convey the possibility of
knowing the poetry of bodies and the natural world, illustrating the irreducible
quality of the connections between bodies and within bodies themselves.
However, there is another tradition tq which we may appeal. Leaving the
world of spiritual metaphysics, we may engage another way of talking about
meaning. There exists another kind of principle that, while not activating, or
spiritual, is relational and social. The term ‘Eros’ contains an idea of love, an
expression of desire between individuals.
It is in the space between
individuals, within the hearts of individuals, that Eros flourishes. Eros, then,
represents an embodied quality of social relationships—an attraction, passion,
and yearning of one self for other selves.
However, to emphasize the relational and social quality of Eros, we must
first establish an understanding that is distinct from the Freudian definition that
reduced Eros to a physical energy .5 Freud reconstituted the idea of Eros into an
energistic life force that must be repressed in surrender to a civilizing reality
principle. In the era of liberal capitalism, desire is often cast within energistic or
individualized terms, and it is usually framed in terms of scarcity, as the will to
overcome a particular deprivation, replacing desire with a particular object of
want that is external to the self .6 However, when we shake our theoretical
kaleidoscope slightly, we may reconfigure the idea of desire as a will to
express a potentiality that lies not outside of ourselves, but inside our very