Conclusion

This chapter shows how each of the three sections of the book relates to the other two. As a work of revisionist philosophy, the book proposes a new view of Nature, human psychology, and God in service of a new, ecological worldview, one that underwrites a new ecological ethics. Part I offers a novel interpretation of Nature and of what it calls “modes of Nature” that focuses on their “self-realization” and “interbeing.” Inspired by this conception of Nature, it provides an alternative ethics, one that it calls “ecological.” This ethics is a species of virtue ethics, which seeks to detail those dispositions that engender a good life given the modes of Nature we are. Part II is about the conditions necessary for self-realization, the most important of which is that a mode act freely. One of the chief ways in which we cannot act freely is when we are slaves to our emotions. Hence, Part II is devoted to the study of the emotions and being liberated from this slavery by transmuting passive emotions into active ones. One result of this analysis is a new conception of freedom not as autonomy but as self-realization. Part III turns to religion as a source to reinforce the ecological ethics of Part I. It examines pantheism and panentheism. Because of a problem with pantheism, the book outlines its own version of panentheism, which it calls “apophatic panentheism.” The chapter ends with a search for a signature term to capture the worldview presented in the book: “interconnection.”