Abstract
This work examines the representations of the Perennial Philosophy in the literature of
the Deep Ecology movement, and the negative response of critics to the Self-realisation
approach. It then goes on to suggest that a deeper engagement with the nondualistic
doctrines Naess embraced could lift environmental philosophy out of the Cartesian
framework in which it appears to be bogged down. Deep Ecology has been accused of
being politically ineffective, and letting down the environmental movement, because it
remains insufficiently engaged with debates concerning power, class, sex, and other
hegemonies that occupy the minds of social ecologists, ecofeminists, and cultural studies
theorists. I argue that Deep Ecology is not as ineffective as detractors claim, but that it
remains philosophically undeveloped, and has not provided sound foundations for
environmental ethics.
The qualified nondualism I advance, based on Vedânta, the work of David Bohm, and (to
a lesser extent) Platonic thought, treats cosmos, society and the individual as intelligent
creative systems in which the interrelated parts are expressions of a vital generative order
to which each is actively related. The Self is a mirror of the cosmos, engaged in the
process of becoming a more complete reflection of the totality. In all of this the nature of
consciousness as vast creative intelligence is paramount, and freedom dominates the
entire process from beginning to end. This thesis offers an opportunity to rethink ideas of
value, moral considerability, and the nature of the empirical self, from a nondualistic
perspective. It proposes that "intrinsic unity" might replace the community as the
foundational moral concept for environmental ethics. In the process, emphasis shifts
away from the objective sphere and settles firmly on the thinker and thought. Following
Bohm and Krishnamurti, I argue that conditioned thought is the only barrier to (inner)
freedom and creativity. Most important, the metaphysics of nondualism privileges
processes of universal Self-realisation, and reveals the limitations of the empirical self.
Understanding thought as a process then becomes something of a moral imperative.