Biography of Arne Naess

Here we have an account of sublime experience that oscillates between feeling reduced to nothing in comparison with the great spatial and temporal expanse of nature, and then feeling elevated by two thoughts ‘that only philosophy makes clear’. First is the thought that as cognising, thinking subjects we in a sense create (support, construct) our ow

For me personally, I now find it thrilling to embrace reality, to look down on myself through nature’s perspective, and to be an infinitesimally small part of the whole. My instinctual and intellectual goal is simply to evolve and contribute to evolution in some tiny way while I’m here and while I am what I am. At the same time, the things I love m

as Arne Naess clearly recognized: Care flows naturally if the “self” is widened and deepened so that protection of free Nature is felt and conceived as protection of ourselves…Just as we need no morals to make us breathe…[so] if your “self” in the wide sense embraces another being, you need no moral exhortation to show care…You

Man is small; Nature is great. Man is finite; Nature is infinite. Man struggling against Nature is like a tiny boat buffeted by the waves.

The deepening of our understanding of how the vast variables and interactions in the natural world are functioning will inform our actions; it will inform our ethics, our choices, and our epistemological frame. Take out the vast variables and replace them with oneness, and you lose the differences, the information, the aesthetics of interaction, th