In Defense of Appearance: An Antidote to Materialism

By Mr David Eugene Partch

D. G. Haskell talks about "the dissolution of the self into relationship." And that could easily have also been the title of this book. The way we understand ourselves determines how we interact with the world. Are we atomistic, detached beings? Or is the meaning of our own existence irrevocably tied to the meaning and dignity of everything else? To justify the latter answer, ecologists like Haskell appropriately point to the interdependencies of life forms. The strategy taken here, however, is to approach the question from a more fundamental point of view. By reevaluating some age-old questions (what is knowledge? what counts as fact? what is truth?) we arrive at a new interpretation of what it means to exist and correspondingly a new meaning of Self. Existence becomes co-existence - a mutual relationship. Our existence dissolves into the existence of everything else. Self and Other become reciprocity. The concept of the "individual" has misled us into believing that we can treat the world as mere material at our beckoning, rather than seeing the world as integral to ourselves and vice versa. This book hopes to correct that misunderstanding.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GX6LBL6T
• ISBN13: 9798301466038
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 8.0"