When did we stop seeing the world as alive?
I come back to this question often. It’s a practical question. A serious one. Not a romantic one.
At some point, we started to view living things as mere objects: items to count, manage, and use. Craig Holdrege, a Goethean scientist, calls it object-thinking.
This is the habit of viewing everything outside our minds as lifeless matter. It happens even when we think of ourselves as nature lovers or environmentalists.
Object-thinking earns its place. It gets rockets into orbit and bridges across rivers. But the shadow it casts has a cost we rarely account for.
Reduce the world to a mechanism and you lose the felt sense that you belong to it. You become a subject adrift in a world of objects, looking at life from behind glass.
We did not always see it like this.
Many indigenous traditions have no equal to the English ‘it’ for the living world. They use the word ‘they.’
Plants, rivers, mountains, and other animals are seen as people. Not human persons, but beings with intelligence and agency, held within a web of mutual relations.
What happened in between? Partly Aristotle. His Scala Naturae (the ladder of nature) ranked plants near the bottom. People saw them as passive and insensate, barely worth considering.
That belief has carried on in our philosophy for two and a half thousand years.
Stefano Mancuso, the Italian botanist who led the way in plant neurobiology, made a small observation that stayed with me.
Noah took no plant into the Ark. Our creation stories, even our myths of preservation, assumed plants were beneath consideration.
Botanists have a term for this: plant blindness. The tendency to see plants as scenery rather than participants.
Most people can name more corporate logos than wild plants growing within a mile of their home.
We perceive the human-built world with precision. The rest of the living world we look straight through.
There’s another condition that concerns me even more: soul blindness.
This is when someone can’t see the inner life of another person. They view others as hollow.
This failure of perception is what makes industrialised cruelty possible. If you can’t understand another’s feelings, you may see them as just an object.
You do this without guilt or sadness. Extend that outward, and you begin to see what we have done to the rest of the living world.
Plant blindness and soul blindness describe the same issue. They reflect a refusal or inability to see that outer appearances may hide something deeper.
The biologist E.O. Wilson named this future the Eremocene, or the Age of Loneliness. This era is marked by mass extinction and the emptiness we feel when we disconnect from nature.
The ecological crisis demands urgent action. Beneath it runs something harder to name: an existential crisis of relationship.
We no longer inhabit a cosmos that feels alive. And somewhere along the way we forgot that we are not separate from it.
I don’t mean that as a philosophical position.
I mean it in a bone-deep way.