Re-animating the universe: Environmental education and philosophical animism

I argue, along with other theorists, that Plato and Descartes made a decisive, immense, and enduring contribution to the creation of the disembedded and disembodied self and its attendant de-animated consciousness in the west. Based on the insight gained from the first task, my second task is to explore a way to reanimate our disembodied perception. Can we do our perception differently so that the world may appear to us in its full intrinsic worth or, to speak in a more metaphysical language, in its numinous presence of Being? In answering this question, I suggest that the key to altering our normally disembodied perception is reversing the habiitual superimposition of the conceptual over the perceptual. What could this seeminly esoteric sounding practice mean? A detailed explication of this practice awaits us in this chapter.