Is there a starting point for a project? A logical one? Thinking on nature by working on civil disobedience, or better, on the search for justice, is an odd objective as in nature aren’t rules we could argue to be unjust, but through history, this was and is an intent to cast a sense of justice in nature.
Does this mean everything in nature is just?
Again, to answer this question diverse hypotheses are seemingly determined by belief systems. Well, therefore, I think we will never know because we are partly in nature and are natural creatures and on the other side we are outside nature – since the paradise exile. Maybe it will be in our knowledge through a form of reconciliation. But now, we are in a suspense and miss tranquility and harmony, and fill the absence with different models and rules, which generate history and press us to believe and live those models as a higher natural order. What remains is the dichotomy between nature and culture.
Though some of those models help us to transform on a different harmony level, similar to idealized nature, remains the struggle as we are caught in the trap of power illusion, an imagined power. Can our brain, our consciousness distinguish between reality and imaginary?
Nature as a social imperative, as for example Rousseau claimed it, is the starting point of our modern disobedience story. Cultural approaches are the indirect way towards divinity in modern history as religion yielded to culture.
Thinkers of all centuries find in nature examples of a moral co-living on Earth. Henry Thoreau, the author of the often-cited Civil Disobedience, did his living-in-nature-experience, reflected in his book Walden. And this is only one famous example in literature in which models of a just and disinterested society are set in nature.
We are using natural elements and qualities as a social model, like the grassroots to describe the activity and success of specific social activities, and the rhizomes as a horizontally structured society are since Deleuze and Guattari a common image.
We are in nature and in society with our bodies. Our body is a bridge, model and laboratory to experience and contemplate on the effects society have on nature, on the body, therefore on our mental processes and vice versa.
The social body has an imaginary content which diverges and meanders in different forms and outcomes, like our inner canals, nerve nets, and blood vessels.
Where to start? With nature! Or better with the social body!
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