Reflection: Your Own Ontology

Prompts to consider

• Escobar argues that Western modernity treats its own ontology, its particular way of dividing the world into nature and culture, subjects and objects, individuals and collectives, as the universal background reality. Can you identify three or four specific ontological assumptions you carry that are probably culturally specific rather than universal? Think about: what counts as a person, what counts as alive, what has intrinsic value, how causation works. How did you come to hold these, and are you confident they are correct?
• The Whanganui River now has legal personhood in New Zealand. The Maori relationship to it is not that it is a valuable resource or an ecosystem to protect, but that it is an ancestor. If you set aside your first reaction, what would it take to take that seriously as an ontological claim rather than a metaphor? What would change in your relationship to rivers, forests, or landscapes if you genuinely held them to be persons in some relevant sense?
• James argued against the drive toward a unified, single-framework description of reality, suggesting that the urge to reduce everything to one story is a philosophical preference, not a discovery. Do you feel that urge? Is there something uncomfortable for you about the idea that reality might be genuinely irreducible? What does your discomfort or comfort with that possibility reveal about your deepest metaphysical commitments?