ABSTRACT
Traditional cultures have usually seen nomos (custom, culture) to be an interpretation of physis (nature), and therefore the order of reality to be ethical. Particularly since the Enlightenment in the West, however, this obligation to the fundamental natural conditions has been inverted: the dominance of mind over matter has become orthodoxy in both the sciences and the humanities. To the extent that this orthodoxy has wrought planetary damage and has promoted the view that non-Western lifestyles are ‘primitive’, it deserves review. It is clear that humanity’s aspirations for freedom from its ultimately natural context present an ethical dilemma. Drawing upon literature, philosophy and anthropology, and mindful of recent conceptions of a continuum of embodied information, this chapter seeks to articulate an understanding that clarifies our ethical position, suspended between freedom from and obligation to these fundamental conditions. By stressing the concrete phenomena of embodied temporalities (rather than ‘time’) and spatial typicalities (rather than ‘space’), the analogical background for judgements of praxis is exposed.
