The Interdependent Constitution of Subjectivity and the Socio-ecological Challenges of the 21st-century: An Approach from Dōgen

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that the thought of the classical Japanese philosopher and Zen master Eihei Dōgen (1200-1253) can make a very significant contribution to the efforts aimed at tackling the current worldwide social and environmental crisis. This contribution consists of a perspective from which human subjectivity can reconnect with the environment and with the other. Thus, it would be possible to overcome the tendency of the modern subject toward self-confinement which is at the root of realities that have fueled the current socio-environmental crisis, such as individualism in a general sense and consumerism in a particular one. In order to ground the paper’s main point, I will proceed in four steps. First, I will pinpoint the meaning of the self-confinement to which modern subjectivity tends and how it has been an essential condition for the emergence of the socioenvironmental crisis. Next, I will examine Dōgen’s thought in order to formulate a way out of self-confinement and towards a connected subjectivity: the subject configures itself not against the rest of reality, but in a radical connection attuned to the environment. Then, I will demonstrate how the attunement at the core of this connected subjectivity can be evinced through an aesthetic experience of the environment: concrete awareness of the environment is the occasion for subjects to discover who they are. Finally, from this point of view, I will suggest eventual measures to put connected subjectivity into action in a way that empowers us to face the socio-environmental crisis.