The Ontological Turn, Religious Tradition, and Human Cosmological Fittingness

Abstract

The central claim of this chapter is that the indigenous ancestors of contemporary moderns believed in an external order of relationships and Being in which human individuals and communities were cosmically situated. This sense of a prior cosmic order was said to arise outside the self and human society, and it gave to premodern humans a mythic and transcendent sense of their place in the world, The cultural, ethical, and religious practices of premoderns were therefore primarily concerned with fitting the desires and practices of humans to this prior objective cosmic order, and to the beings which they encountered within that order. Meaning came, first and foremost, from fitting the self towards an objective transcendent order, and not from within. The rediscovery of this ‘original’ ontology among indigenous cultures by anthropologists and philosophers is known as the ‘ontological turn’. But this same ontology is present in ‘world religious’ traditions of the Indian subcontinent’s Vedic traditions, and of Near Eastern ‘axial age’ traditions including those of classical Greece, Judaism and, under their influence, Christianity and Islam. During the Scientific Revolution, the cultural imaginary of participation in a shared realm of being declined in favour of a new mechanistic cosmology. At the Enlightenment, this cosmology merged with rationalism and personalism, and conferred on modern humans a sense of control and dominion over Earth, under the influence of which they have progressively eradicated the agency, and diversity, of other Beings. The resultant growing asymmetry between human and nonhuman influence on the Earth risks destabilising human as well as nonhuman habitats and reversing the trajectory of evolution. In this chapter, it is argued that efforts to rebalance the agency of humans and nonhumans may be achieved through the recovery of the cultural influence of the original ontology and related practices of human ancestors which are better fitted to the conservation of species diversity than the modern mechanistic cosmology. Music is described as a key means of achieving fittingness between human life and cosmic and creaturely order.