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Philistinism and the Preservation of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2013

Simon P. James
Simon P. James*
Affiliation:
Durham University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

It is clear that natural entities can be preserved – they can be preserved because they can be harmed or destroyed, or in various other ways adversely affected. I argue that in light of the rise of scientism and other forms of philistinism, the political, religious, mythic, personal and historical meanings that people find in those entities can also be preserved. Against those who impugn disciplines such as fine arts, philosophy and sociology, I contend that this sort of preservation requires the efforts of those whose work exemplifies the core values of the arts, the humanities and the qualitative social sciences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 101 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013

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References

1 See, e.g., the essays by Turner, Frederick and Jordan, William R. in Baldwin, A. D. Jr., de Luce, J., and Pletsch, C. (eds), Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

2 The History of the Countryside: the classic history of Britain's landscape, flora and fauna (London: Phoenix Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

3 In what follows, I focus on the natural history of Britain. I do this simply because I am familiar with this topic, and not because I believe that my argument only applies to the wildlife, natural habitats, etc. of a small group of islands in the North Atlantic. On the contrary, my case applies to wildlife, etc. generally, regardless of its geographical location.

4 Op. cit. note 2, 26.

5 Op. cit. note 2, 247.

6 Op. cit. note 2, 29; cf. Rackham, O., Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape: The Complete History of Britain's Trees, Woods & Hedgerows (Revised edition) (London: Phoenix Press, 1990), 204Google Scholar.

7 Op. cit. note 2, 54.

8 Defending that contentious assumption is beyond the scope of this paper. For an introduction to the relevant issues, see Cooper, David E., Meaning (Chesham: Acumen, 2003), Chapter 5Google Scholar.

9 E.g., Mabey, R., Flora Britannica (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996)Google Scholar; Cocker, M. and Mabey, R., Birds Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005)Google Scholar. See also: Mabey, R., Nature Cure (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005)Google Scholar; Mabey, Beechcombings: The narratives of trees (London: Vintage, 2007)Google Scholar; Mabey, Weeds: A cultural history (London: Profile Books, 2010a)Google Scholar; Mabey, A Brush with Nature (London: Random House, 2010b)Google Scholar; Marren, P. and Mabey, R., Bugs Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010)Google Scholar; Buczacki, S., Fauna Britannica (London: Hamlyn, 2005)Google Scholar.

10 Steven Vogel is one writer who would dispute the claim that the Britannica works are about nature. See his defence of ‘postnaturalism’ in ‘Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature’, Environmental Ethics 24 (spring 2002), 23–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 True, ‘Nature is what naturalists study’ would not be a satisfactory definition. But it is not my intention, here, to define nature. My aim is simply to convey a general sense of what I am referring to when I use the term ‘nature’. Furthermore, although in what follows I refer to natural ‘entities’, I do not mean to suggest that naturalists are exclusively concerned with things. On the contrary, they are typically concerned with a variety of ontological categories – not just things, but processes, for instance, and events. For a more detailed account of these issues, see Buege, Douglas J., ‘An Ecologically-informed Ontology for Environmental Ethics’, Biology and Philosophy 12 (1997), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 ‘The Presidential Address: Nature, Respect for Nature, and the Human Scale of Values’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000), 1–32, at 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Mabey 1996, op. cit. note 9, 7.

14 Mabey 1996, op. cit. note 9, 203, 50–1, 326. Cf. Buczacki, op. cit. note 9, 196, on the old belief that ash trees repel snakes.

15 On these different relations – expressive, allusive and associative, respectively – see Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 113–22Google Scholar.

16 In philosophical logic and philosophy of language, the main focus is on the meanings of linguistic items such as sentences, rather than the meanings of non-linguistic items such as gestures, rituals or natural entities. In what follows, however, I adopt a conception of meaning which accords more closely with the way that term – and related English words, such as ‘significance’ - are used in ordinary discourse. That strategy would be criticised by some writers, including Dan Sperber, but it has been defended by several others, including Hill, Thomas E. and Cooper, David E. (see Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 8–9Google Scholar; Hill, The Concept of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1971)Google Scholar, v; Cooper, op. cit. note 8, Chapter 1). Cooper, for his part, argues that to explain the meaning of any ‘thing’ is to show how it is ‘appropriate’ to ‘what is either larger than or outside itself’ (where ‘appropriateness’ is conceived as a kind of normative, rather than causal, relation), and this enables him to consider the meanings of a wide variety of ‘things’, including gestures, rituals and even what Dilthey called ‘Life’ itself. I merely mention Cooper's position in passing since there is insufficient space, here, to provide a detailed account, still less a defence, of it. In any case, the argument set out in the rest of the paper does not presuppose the truth of Cooper's account, so rejecting it need not compel one to reject the argument.

17 See Mabey 1996, op. cit. note 9, 7–8.

18 See The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 163Google Scholar.

19 On the recent provenance of many ‘traditions’, see Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

20 See, e.g., Buczacki (op. cit. note 9) on yellowhammers (180), swifts (311), swallows (321) and magpies (359–60).

21 Quoted in Nicolson, M. H., Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetic of the Infinite (New York: Cornell University Press, 1959), 210Google Scholar.

22 Quoted in ibid., 200. Macfarlane, R., Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (London: Granta, 2003), 27Google Scholar.

23 See Nicholson, op. cit. note 21, chapter 2.

24 Cf. Cocker and Mabey, op. cit. note 9, ix–x.

25 Mabey 1996, op. cit. note 9, 9.

26 Op. cit. note 2.

27 Tuan, Y-F., Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974)Google Scholar, Schama, S., Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 14Google Scholar.

28 See, respectively, Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)Google Scholar, and Season Songs (London: Faber and Faber, 1985)Google Scholar. See also the discussion of ‘Swifts’ at Mabey 2005, op. cit. note 9, 19. On ‘gathering’, see Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Hofstadter, A. (trans.) Poetry, Language, Thought (NY: Harper & Row, 1971), 165–86Google Scholar.

29 Both poems are from Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1991)Google Scholar.

30 Mabey 2010b, op. cit. note 9, 155.

31 Excepting, perhaps, those of the T'ang dynasty Buddhist recluse, Han Shan, which were said to have been etched onto cliffs and trees.

32 Thus Robert Macfarlane writes that the frozen shoulders of Ben Hope in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland ‘refused any imputation of meaning’ (The Wild Places (London: Granta, 2007), 157)Google Scholar. Against such claims, it could be contended that, like the artworks of Duchamp and Schoenberg, some natural entities have a special significance or meaning precisely because they resist being incorporated into our usual schemes of significance.

33 On the embodiment of meaning in artworks, see Danto, Arthur C., ‘The end of art: A philosophical defence’, History and Theory 37: 4 (1998), 127–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch's discussion of how national flags embody meanings in Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 72–3Google Scholar.

34 This is a form of what Mikael Stenmark calls ‘axiological scientism’. See his book Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 11–3Google Scholar.

35 Hawking, Stephen and Mlodinow, Leonard, The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions in Life (London: Bantam Books, 2010)Google Scholar, 13. For evidence of Dawkins's scientism, see the extract from his 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture quoted in op. cit. note 34, 19–20.

36 See Grice, H. P., ‘Meaning’, The Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Not all commentators believe that this sort of translation is feasible. See, for example, Cooper's discussion of the statement ‘Those clouds mean rain’. This, he contends, is not simply a statement of some regularity or causal connections. Rather, it is in virtue of the appropriateness within a human practice of using clouds as signs of rain that talk of the clouds' meaning something has its point. See op. cit. note 8, 36–7.

37 Most, but not all. A small proportion of those who endorse axiological scientism will be familiar with work in the philosophy of language, and of these a small proportion will subscribe to causal theories of meaning.

38 The latter suggests a commitment to what Stenmark calls ‘epistemic scientism’ (op. cit. note 34, 4–5).

39 ‘Politics and the English Language’, in Orwell, Essays (London: Penguin, 1994), 348–359, at 350Google Scholar.

40 Basic Writings, ed. Krell, D. F. (London: Routledge, 1993), 329Google Scholar.

41 Discourse on Thinking, trans. Anderson, J. M. and Freund, E. H. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)Google Scholar, 56 (emphasis removed).

42 See further, Furedi, F., Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (London: Continuum, 2004)Google Scholar.

43 Talk of ‘bulwarks’ might seem needlessly alarmist. At any rate, it suggests that it is a bad thing, indeed something that there are moral or other sorts of reason to avoid, when people lose their sense of nature's meaningfulness. Various arguments could be offered in support of this last claim. For example, it could be argued that the members of a philistine society will typically be unable to live truly worthwhile lives. I do not have space, here, to develop this argument. But for an indication as to how it might go, see Peter Goldie's intriguing remarks on the effects of Soviet philistinism in ‘Towards a Virtue Theory of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 47: 4 (2007), 372–87, at 385CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 See further, Nussbaum, M., Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

45 I would like to thank David E. Cooper, Andy Hamilton, Dawn M. Wilson and Matthew Ratcliffe for the very helpful comments they provided on drafts of this paper.