The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are / quote 99 of 101
Man is an action of the world
To say that man is an action of the world is not to define him as a “thing” which is helplessly pushed around by all other “things.” We have to get beyond Newton’s vision of the world as a system of billiard balls in which every individual ball is passively knocked about by all the rest! Remember that Aristotle’s and Newton’s preoccupation with causal determinism was that they were trying to explain how one thing or event was influenced by others, forgetting that the division of the world into separate things and events was a fiction. To say that certain events are causally connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat. It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself (Kant’s ding an sich), whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable—it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most “practical” reasons of economics, politics, and technology. Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call “things” are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation.