Grace’s Reviews > Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild > Status Update

This book could just as well be called “Being Salmon, Being Human: All The Ways in Which Descartes Has Screwed Over Humanity,” and yknow what Mueller makes some really good points.

“Next to science’s piecemeal work of making us more keenly responsive to the systemic changes now under way in the biosphere….there is also a complementary need: to pay close attention to our direct bodily experience, and to the way in which such experience places us squarely inside the metamorphic depth of the presence.” Very fancy way of honoring somatic experience, which I RESPECT

“As modern rationality translates its dream of omniscience into tools of omnipotent, it ignores the truth of-entanglement with the sphere of life.” (Also, unrelated, would like to do a cntrl f search for “ontological” and “fluid” crutch words.)

“…perception of reality. If you wish to be a respected member of the scientific community, you must actively unlearn your spontaneous experience of empathy, with all the consequences for your own actions, as well as for the lives of those animals.” (2/2) W O W. I’ve been saying this for ages as a call to action for empathy in the sciences but I’ve never heard it ARTICULATED like this!!! GO MUELLER!!! 💕

Cartesian philosophy/loss of empathy in science: “you should not trust your senses. On the basis of this distrust, philosophical authority helped institutionalized a certain moral degeneration: The senses might be provoking a feeling of empathy with the screaming animal, but that is not relevant, not true. Your experience of empathy with the suffering animal is giving you an incorrect…” (1/2)