Feeling the World Anew:
Reflections on Maria-Teresa Teixeira's Ontology of Ecology
Feeling the World Anew:
Introduction
In "The Ontology of Ecology," Maria-Teresa Teixeira invites us to feel the world anew with help from the philosophy of Whitehead. He believes, as does she, that everything on earth - everything! - is alive with intrinsic value. One way to practice this new way of feeling, itself quite old in many respects, is to reclaim our connections with plants through gardening. In the very act of gardening we feel connections with the more than human world and also with other people. In an intuitive and bodily way, we know the value in the plants, the value in ourselves, and we know that these forms of value are unique but interwoven. We know that each partner in the process - the plants and the people - having their self-creativity and self-enjoyument. At least this is one of my suggestions later on this page, but it is offered in the spirit of her essay.
Teixeira is associated with the Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos, Universidade de Coimbra, in Coimbra, Portugal, Teixeira. In "Ontology of Ecology" she offers a process-relational critique of the dualisms and fragmentations that have shaped much of modern thought, along with an explanation of how aspects of Whitehead's philosophy - especially his notions of intrinsic value and relationality - might offer hope for the world. Her essay appears in Process and Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy, a volume she co-edited with Andrew M. Davis and Wm. Andrew Schwartz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
In what follows I offer an overview of her essay. I then suggest from practices in local settings that might help us feel the world anew. And I conclude with questions for further discussion, especially designed for those familiar with Whitehead.
Teixeira is associated with the Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos, Universidade de Coimbra, in Coimbra, Portugal, Teixeira. In "Ontology of Ecology" she offers a process-relational critique of the dualisms and fragmentations that have shaped much of modern thought, along with an explanation of how aspects of Whitehead's philosophy - especially his notions of intrinsic value and relationality - might offer hope for the world. Her essay appears in Process and Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy, a volume she co-edited with Andrew M. Davis and Wm. Andrew Schwartz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
In what follows I offer an overview of her essay. I then suggest from practices in local settings that might help us feel the world anew. And I conclude with questions for further discussion, especially designed for those familiar with Whitehead.
Overview of Teixeira's The Ontology of Ecology
The Problem and the Alternative
What is the problem with positivism and its fragmentations? And how might a process understanding provide an alternative? Teiseira writes:
Positivism and its fragmented views of the world has erased the notion of connection and relationship from the scientific worldview, emptying life of its living character and of its durational nature. Dualism is at the root of this problem; dualism leaves out relationship and connection as it severs matter from spirit and body from soul.
We tend to think of nature as something detached from ourselves, an object to be observed, managed, and controlled.
And on the alternative, she writes;
If, instead, we understood ourselves as participants within nature, our vision of the world would be profoundly different. We would see living beings as self-creating, each arising through the ongoing creative advance of the universe. We would recognize human beings as existing in deep symbiotic relationship with their environments rather than standing apart from them. We would attend to the distinctive rhythms by which different beings endure—their varied tempos, durations, and ways of inhabiting time, many of them quite different from our own. And we would imagine a larger temporal harmony, a universal process within which these diverse forms of becoming find their place and mutual belonging.
A Relational Universe filled with Intrinsic Value
Teixeira's ecological vision resonates deeply with Whitehead's philosophy. Reality is not a collection of isolated substances but a living web of relationships, rhythms, and processes of becoming. We human beings are within and part of, not apart from, the larger web of life - and this web includes, for Whitehead, the local comunities of which we are a part, including our fellow humans; the bioregions in which we live; the earth itself' and the wider universe, with its countless regions of an extensive continuum that may well include countless other forms of life.
Yet one of the most important features of Whitehead's relational philosophy is that it never reduces beings to their relations. Every actual entity is related to others, but every actual entity also possesses intrinsic value and an inwardness of its own. Relationality is not simply an external connection among things in the world; it is a felt relationship with the world from the standpoint of a subject in the process of becoming.
A New Ontological Ethic
Teixeira finds this side of Whitehead extremely important because it provides an ontological basis for living with respect and care for individuals, including fellow human beings, and other sentient beings. Indeed, one of her points is that in creating their own intrinsic value actual entities also find value in the creatures of the world to which or whom they are responding amid, not apart from, their own self-creativity. In her words:
Each actual entity creates itself and in so doing creates its own intrinsic value in so far as it has value for itself. But this process of self-creation and self-valuation is also a process that finds value in other individuals and in the actual world.
She proposes that a recognition of the complementarity of relationality and intrinsic value offers a foundation for "a new ontological ethics" and "a new path for what could be named 'ontological natural law.' Again, in her words:
In recognizing intrinsic value in every existing thing, Whitehead points to a new ontological ethics and opens up a new path for what could be named an “ontological natural law.” The order of nature presupposes a subjective aim in every entity that comes into existence. The subjective aim follows and realizes the order of nature. It conducts the emerging being in the process of becoming according to its own nature. It allows for creativity and self-constitution, but it keeps the evolving entity within the boundaries of its own nature reflecting the order of nature.
Order in Nature
As this passage suggests, Teixeira has in mind two kinds of "order in nature."
One is the internal order of a given entity's subjective aim: the particular kind of harmony and intensity toward which an entity is drawn as it seeks fulfillment in the course of its becoming. The other is an order that is given to the entity by its actual world—the many relationships, inheritances, and patterns of organization that help shape its possibilities from the outset.
This second kind of order is social in the deepest Whiteheadian sense. Every actual entity emerges within a network of relationships and is partly constituted by them. Unless it happens to be a puff of energy in far off outer space, or to some other non-social nexus, it belongs to one or more "societies"—a Whiteheadian term for enduring patterns of organization that persist through time by transmitting characteristic forms from one generation of occasions to another.
At the same time, Teixeira's argument also applies to societies in the ordinary sociological sense: families, communities, institutions, cultures, ecosystems, and civilizations. These larger patterns of relationship help shape the possibilities available to individuals while never completely determining their responses.
The subjective aim thus arises at the intersection of personal creativity and social inheritance. Each entity inherits an order from the world it receives, yet each also contributes something of its own. In Whitehead's philosophy, creativity is never exercised in isolation. It is always a creative response to a world already given.
World Loyalty
With this "ontology of ecology" in mind, Teixeira highlights Whitehead's idea that human beings can and should live with what he calls "world loyalty." By implication, world loyalty involves living with respect and care for the entire community of life on Earth, recognizing that humans are participants within a larger web of existence rather than masters standing above it.
Teixeira then turns to the fact that contemporary society often discourages this way of living. Consumer-driven approaches to life frequently treat the natural world as little more than a collection of resources for human use and consumption. Other forms of life are valued primarily in terms of their usefulness to human beings rather than for their own intrinsic worth.
She is equally critical of forms of legal positivism that define crimes almost exclusively in relation to harms inflicted on human beings. Such frameworks often fail to recognize the profound injuries that humans—especially powerful individuals, corporations, and nations—can inflict upon other forms of life and upon ecosystems as a whole. From an ecological perspective, these injuries are not merely unfortunate side effects of progress. They are forms of violence against the community of life itself and can rightly be understood as forms of ecocide.
Against these tendencies, Teixeira's ecological ontology invites a broader moral and legal imagination—one that recognizes intrinsic value throughout the natural world and calls human beings to become responsible participants in the flourishing of the Earth community.
Natural Law and a "Rightness" In Nature
Her hope is that, alongside more ecologically sensitive ways of living, there can emerge a new, Whitehead-inspired understanding of, and recourse to, natural law. Such an understanding would build upon the efforts of Aristotle and Aquinas to ground ethics and law in the nature of things rather than in human convention alone. At the same time, it would avoid some of the limitations of earlier natural law traditions by recognizing the intrinsic value not only of human beings but also of the more-than-human world and our responsibilities toward it. Guided by a new sense of natural law, we would live with respect and care for the community of life.
Teixeira notes that, for Whitehead, such a vision presupposes what he calls a sense of "rightness" woven into the very nature of things. This rightness is not a rigid moral code imposed from above. Rather, it is a dynamic tendency toward the realization of value, a lure toward forms of harmony that respect and adjust the interests of each and all. It is present wherever beings seek fulfillment in relationship with others and wherever creative activity contributes to the flourishing of the wider community of life.
A neglect of this natural law, this spirit or 'rightness' in the nature of things, is at the heart of many of our problems today.
In our societies and in our economic systems, the rightness “inherent in the nature of things” has been excluded from a vast majority of human endeavours. Intrinsic value is no longer considered. The value of things is merely speculative. Commodification has changed our lives forever. We no longer respect the self-immanent purpose of things, their subjective aim or their particular, temporal, existential identity. They no longer become in accordance with their own nature. We have no need for a coherent physical environment that respects natural rhythms. We no longer recognize the inherent value in things. Fragmentation favors value obliteration.
Understood in this way, natural law is not opposed to creativity. It is creativity guided by a sense of fittingness, proportion, and mutual enhancement. It encourages forms of living that are good not only for human beings but also for the larger Earth community of which humans are a part.
Teixeira urges readers to recognize the radical evil of what happens when then natural law is forgotten and violated. It is, she says, ecocide - an ecocide which ultimate includes our own self-destruction. And, strangely, it become commonplace and banal, to use Hannah Arendt's phrase. It becomes ordinary, even normal and often unnoticed, that so many of us, especially the privileged and powerful, are living 'against' the rightness in the nature of things, against the intrinsic value of life, and against ourselves. We have normalized evil and called it progress.
Thus, along with many others today, she calls for a revolution in consciousness and in action: a revolution in which, in terms of action, the many aspects of our lives, including our economies, would be guided by the goal of eco-social well-being. The cult of money would be critiqued, along the goal of unlimited growth, and a healthier and happier way of living would emerge in which the flourishig of life, not the accumulation of wealth and power, would be the 'how' our living. In Process and Reality Whitehead writes that "how an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is.' Teixera is inviting her readers and, truth be told, the whole of humanity, into a new form of 'how.'
Understood in this way, natural law is not opposed to creativity. It is creativity guided by a sense of fittingness, proportion, and mutual enhancement. It encourages forms of living that are good not only for human beings but also for the larger Earth community of which humans are a part.
Teixeira urges readers to recognize the radical evil of what happens when then natural law is forgotten and violated. It is, she says, ecocide - an ecocide which ultimate includes our own self-destruction. And, strangely, it become commonplace and banal, to use Hannah Arendt's phrase. It becomes ordinary, even normal and often unnoticed, that so many of us, especially the privileged and powerful, are living 'against' the rightness in the nature of things, against the intrinsic value of life, and against ourselves. We have normalized evil and called it progress.
Thus, along with many others today, she calls for a revolution in consciousness and in action: a revolution in which, in terms of action, the many aspects of our lives, including our economies, would be guided by the goal of eco-social well-being. The cult of money would be critiqued, along the goal of unlimited growth, and a healthier and happier way of living would emerge in which the flourishig of life, not the accumulation of wealth and power, would be the 'how' our living. In Process and Reality Whitehead writes that "how an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is.' Teixera is inviting her readers and, truth be told, the whole of humanity, into a new form of 'how.'
Seven Practices for Feeling the World Anew
- Community Gardening
- Cultivate vegetables, flowers, or native plants in a community garden.
- Learn through direct experience how human well-being depends upon soil, water, pollinators, sunlight, and cooperation with others.
- Walking Attentively in Urban Green Spaces
- Spend time in parks, along rivers, beneath street trees, or in neighborhood greenways.
- Practice noticing the rhythms and forms of life that coexist within the city and learning to appreciate them as fellow participants in a shared world.
- Working with Children in Nature
- Help children explore gardens, parks, forests, streams, and wildlife.
- Children often possess a natural curiosity and openness to the living world. Accompanying them can help adults rediscover wonder, attentiveness, and affection for the community of life.
- Therapeutic Gardening in Nursing Homes and Senior Communities
- Create opportunities for elders to plant flowers, grow vegetables, care for herbs, or simply spend time in cultivated outdoor spaces.
- Such activities can awaken memories, foster connection, and remind participants of their continuing place within the cycles of life and growth.
- Ecological Education
- Participate in nature study groups, citizen-science projects, environmental workshops, public lectures, or local history programs.
- Learn the names, histories, and relationships of the plants, animals, watersheds, and ecosystems that shape your region.
- Neighborhood and Civic Organizing
- Participate in neighborhood associations, sustainability initiatives, environmental organizations, or community improvement projects.
- Work with others to create communities that are healthier, more just, more beautiful, and more ecologically responsible.
- Democratic Engagement for Ecological Well-Being
- Support public policies and institutions that protect ecosystems, strengthen local communities, promote environmental justice, and encourage long-term sustainability.
- Recognize that ecological awareness is not only personal and spiritual but also civic and political.
Together, these practices help transform an ontology of ecology from an abstract philosophy into a lived way of being. They cultivate attentiveness to the intrinsic value of life, deepen our participation in communities both human and more-than-human, and nurture forms of loyalty that are at once local and planetary. Through them, we may learn not simply to think differently about the world, but to feel the world anew.
Questions for Further Discussion (for Whitehead scholars)
The richness and existential importance of Teixeira's essay opens up many questions, offered not as objections but as invitations to further reflection on the part who is interested in a Whitehead-inflected ontology of ecology.
They concern perception, the relationship between world loyalty and local loyalty, the role of tragedy in nature, the different kinds of value at work in Whitehead's philosophy, the meaning of "rightness," the place of the consequent nature of God in an ontology of ecology, and the relation of her proposal to earlier process-relational contributions in ecological economics and environmental ethics.
What difference does an ontology of ecology make to perception itself?
Teixeira invites us to understand ourselves and other beings in terms of intrinsic value and relational becoming. Yet it is one thing to think about the world in such a fashion and another to perceive and feel the world in that way at an experiential level.
How might we perceive the natural world around us—and ourselves within it—in light of our intrinsic value and our embeddedness in felt relations with one another? What is it like to encounter a tree, a bird, a river, a landscape, or another person through the lens of an ontology of ecology? What is it like to feel the presence of the world in this way?
These questions point beyond metaphysics toward perception, practice, and lived experience. They raise the question of what habits of attention, forms of contemplation, educational practices, communal rituals, artistic activities, or spiritual disciplines might help cultivate this ecological mode of awareness. If an ontology of ecology is not only a theory but also a way of inhabiting the world, what forms of practice contribute to this enhanced mode of perceiving, feeling, and participating in the community of life?
Is world loyalty enough? What about local loyalty?
Ecologically minded and process-relational thinkers often emphasize the importance of expanding our loyalties beyond narrow identities and interests. Whitehead himself speaks of "world loyalty," and many contemporary thinkers argue that what is most needed today is a sense of loyalty to the Earth and its many forms of life, ourselves included, rather than loyalty only to nations, ethnicities, institutions, or local affiliations.
Yet there are important questions to be asked about world loyalty thus understood. One concern is that it can become a privilege of relatively secure and educated people who are not struggling simply to survive within local settings. Another is that it can mask a form of cosmopolitanism—or perhaps cosmobiologism—that is insufficiently attentive to the concrete places where people actually live, work, suffer, and care for one another.
For this reason, many process thinkers today emphasize not only world loyalty but also what might be called creative localization: a commitment to particular places, neighborhoods, watersheds, communities, and ecosystems. Creative localization involves digging in locally with affection and care, seeking to become a healing presence within a particular community while remaining mindful of one's connections to the larger Earth community.
This raises a question for an ontology of ecology. What are its implications for local loyalty? How should loyalty to the Earth as a whole be related to loyalty to particular places and communities? And how might an ecological worldview encourage forms of local belonging that avoid both parochialism and abstract cosmopolitanism?
What role does tragedy play in an articulation of natural law?
Teixeira begins her essay by acknowledging Whitehead's recognition that "life is robbery." Living beings survive by consuming other living beings. If there is a violent dimension built into the natural world itself, what role does this tragedy play in an ontology of ecology? Can a sense of "rightness" fully account for the realities of suffering, loss, and predation, or must any adequate account also make room for a certain measure of "unrightness" woven into the fabric of existence?
What are different kinds of value present in Whitehead's philosophy?
It seems to me that Whitehead speaks of at least four forms of value. One is the intrinsic value embodied in the self-enjoyment of each concrescing subject—in what he calls subjective immediacy. This is the value a creature has for itself. A corollary question arises here: Are there degrees of intrinsic value, such that creatures with ostensibly less capacities for sentience, individual microbes, for example, have less value than, say, creatures with obviously high capacities for sentience, porpoises for example, Or does this very way of thinking contradict what Teixiera rightly and poignantly calls the "dignity" of each creature? Might entities have different degrees of intrinsic value but equal dignity? What would this mean philosophically? What would it mean practically?
A second form of value is the instrumental value that a subject has for others as it contributes, for better or worse, to their becoming. A third is the value that a subject has for God, as its experiences are received into and enrich the consequent nature of God. This is what Whitehead calls the Harmony of Harmonies in Adventures of Ideas. A Harmony that is intuited by human beings when a sense of peace emerges in the soul. complemented by a falling away of personality and release from acquitiveness. It is there all things are 'together' as transformed by divine prehensions. And a fourth is the value of ideals and possibilities relevant to creative realization: truth, beauty, goodness, wisdom, compassion, peace, and the like. These ideals may or may not be actualized in the world, but they nevertheless function as normative possibilities and lures for realization.
How are these different forms of value related in a Whitehead influenced ontology of ecology?
Where does "rightness" fit among these different forms of value?
Does it belong primarily to the intrinsic value embodied in subjective immediacy, the value a creature has for itself? Does it belong to instrumental value, the value a creature has for others as it contributes to their becoming? Does it belong to the value a creature has for God as its experience is received into the consequent nature of God? Or does it belong to the realm of ideals and possibilities—truth, beauty, goodness, wisdom, compassion, and peace—which may or may not be actualized in the world?
Perhaps rightness includes all four. But if so, how are they related? How are conflicts among them to be understood? The instrumental value of one creature for another, for example, may come at the expense of its own flourishing, as in predator-prey relations. Ideals may remain unrealized. Intrinsic value may be sacrificed for wider forms of harmony. And the value a creature has for God may not coincide with its value for itself or for others. How, then, should "rightness" be understood in relation to these different forms of value? Is it their harmonization? Their mutual adjustment? Or something else altogether?
What role does the consequent nature of God play in this vision?
Much of the discussion of rightness naturally directs attention toward subjective aims, ideals, and the realization of value in the world. But Whitehead's God is not only the source of possibilities. God is also the fellow sufferer who understands, the one in whom the achievements and tragedies of the world are gathered and preserved. As notyed above, Whitehead sometimes speaks of this divine reception as a "harmony of harmonies." Does rightness include this consequent dimension? Is it only a lure toward the realization of value, or does it also include the preservation and harmonization of value within the divine life? Is there something in the universe - a cosmic Mind - who aborbs all that happens in the world, even the pain and suffering? Even the evil? Would a recognition of this soften, or intensify, a commitment to the common good?
They concern perception, the relationship between world loyalty and local loyalty, the role of tragedy in nature, the different kinds of value at work in Whitehead's philosophy, the meaning of "rightness," the place of the consequent nature of God in an ontology of ecology, and the relation of her proposal to earlier process-relational contributions in ecological economics and environmental ethics.
What difference does an ontology of ecology make to perception itself?
Teixeira invites us to understand ourselves and other beings in terms of intrinsic value and relational becoming. Yet it is one thing to think about the world in such a fashion and another to perceive and feel the world in that way at an experiential level.
How might we perceive the natural world around us—and ourselves within it—in light of our intrinsic value and our embeddedness in felt relations with one another? What is it like to encounter a tree, a bird, a river, a landscape, or another person through the lens of an ontology of ecology? What is it like to feel the presence of the world in this way?
These questions point beyond metaphysics toward perception, practice, and lived experience. They raise the question of what habits of attention, forms of contemplation, educational practices, communal rituals, artistic activities, or spiritual disciplines might help cultivate this ecological mode of awareness. If an ontology of ecology is not only a theory but also a way of inhabiting the world, what forms of practice contribute to this enhanced mode of perceiving, feeling, and participating in the community of life?
Is world loyalty enough? What about local loyalty?
Ecologically minded and process-relational thinkers often emphasize the importance of expanding our loyalties beyond narrow identities and interests. Whitehead himself speaks of "world loyalty," and many contemporary thinkers argue that what is most needed today is a sense of loyalty to the Earth and its many forms of life, ourselves included, rather than loyalty only to nations, ethnicities, institutions, or local affiliations.
Yet there are important questions to be asked about world loyalty thus understood. One concern is that it can become a privilege of relatively secure and educated people who are not struggling simply to survive within local settings. Another is that it can mask a form of cosmopolitanism—or perhaps cosmobiologism—that is insufficiently attentive to the concrete places where people actually live, work, suffer, and care for one another.
For this reason, many process thinkers today emphasize not only world loyalty but also what might be called creative localization: a commitment to particular places, neighborhoods, watersheds, communities, and ecosystems. Creative localization involves digging in locally with affection and care, seeking to become a healing presence within a particular community while remaining mindful of one's connections to the larger Earth community.
This raises a question for an ontology of ecology. What are its implications for local loyalty? How should loyalty to the Earth as a whole be related to loyalty to particular places and communities? And how might an ecological worldview encourage forms of local belonging that avoid both parochialism and abstract cosmopolitanism?
What role does tragedy play in an articulation of natural law?
Teixeira begins her essay by acknowledging Whitehead's recognition that "life is robbery." Living beings survive by consuming other living beings. If there is a violent dimension built into the natural world itself, what role does this tragedy play in an ontology of ecology? Can a sense of "rightness" fully account for the realities of suffering, loss, and predation, or must any adequate account also make room for a certain measure of "unrightness" woven into the fabric of existence?
What are different kinds of value present in Whitehead's philosophy?
It seems to me that Whitehead speaks of at least four forms of value. One is the intrinsic value embodied in the self-enjoyment of each concrescing subject—in what he calls subjective immediacy. This is the value a creature has for itself. A corollary question arises here: Are there degrees of intrinsic value, such that creatures with ostensibly less capacities for sentience, individual microbes, for example, have less value than, say, creatures with obviously high capacities for sentience, porpoises for example, Or does this very way of thinking contradict what Teixiera rightly and poignantly calls the "dignity" of each creature? Might entities have different degrees of intrinsic value but equal dignity? What would this mean philosophically? What would it mean practically?
A second form of value is the instrumental value that a subject has for others as it contributes, for better or worse, to their becoming. A third is the value that a subject has for God, as its experiences are received into and enrich the consequent nature of God. This is what Whitehead calls the Harmony of Harmonies in Adventures of Ideas. A Harmony that is intuited by human beings when a sense of peace emerges in the soul. complemented by a falling away of personality and release from acquitiveness. It is there all things are 'together' as transformed by divine prehensions. And a fourth is the value of ideals and possibilities relevant to creative realization: truth, beauty, goodness, wisdom, compassion, peace, and the like. These ideals may or may not be actualized in the world, but they nevertheless function as normative possibilities and lures for realization.
How are these different forms of value related in a Whitehead influenced ontology of ecology?
Where does "rightness" fit among these different forms of value?
Does it belong primarily to the intrinsic value embodied in subjective immediacy, the value a creature has for itself? Does it belong to instrumental value, the value a creature has for others as it contributes to their becoming? Does it belong to the value a creature has for God as its experience is received into the consequent nature of God? Or does it belong to the realm of ideals and possibilities—truth, beauty, goodness, wisdom, compassion, and peace—which may or may not be actualized in the world?
Perhaps rightness includes all four. But if so, how are they related? How are conflicts among them to be understood? The instrumental value of one creature for another, for example, may come at the expense of its own flourishing, as in predator-prey relations. Ideals may remain unrealized. Intrinsic value may be sacrificed for wider forms of harmony. And the value a creature has for God may not coincide with its value for itself or for others. How, then, should "rightness" be understood in relation to these different forms of value? Is it their harmonization? Their mutual adjustment? Or something else altogether?
What role does the consequent nature of God play in this vision?
Much of the discussion of rightness naturally directs attention toward subjective aims, ideals, and the realization of value in the world. But Whitehead's God is not only the source of possibilities. God is also the fellow sufferer who understands, the one in whom the achievements and tragedies of the world are gathered and preserved. As notyed above, Whitehead sometimes speaks of this divine reception as a "harmony of harmonies." Does rightness include this consequent dimension? Is it only a lure toward the realization of value, or does it also include the preservation and harmonization of value within the divine life? Is there something in the universe - a cosmic Mind - who aborbs all that happens in the world, even the pain and suffering? Even the evil? Would a recognition of this soften, or intensify, a commitment to the common good?