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Values and cosmic imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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I shall mean by ‘cosmic imagination’, first, the mental appropriating of objects, events, processes or patterns perceived in nature-atlarge (or ‘widest nature’), so as to apply them in articulating our own scheme of values (as we seek to establish, or to revise, these), and in our quest for self-understanding. I shall apply the phrase also to the synthesising activity of the mind in our appraising of items in wider nature itself or as a whole – whether we believe nature to have no value save what we choose to confer or project on it, or take it to have a value that sets limits on our appropriation, benign or exploitative.
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References
1 The Prelude, Book XIII, lines 10–116.
2 See Heffernan, J. A. W., Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry (Cornell University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, chapter 4, particularly pp. 102–5. ‘For the rest of his life, [Wordsworth] firmly believed that when a poet transforms the visible universe by the power of his imagination, he imitates the creative action of nature herself’ (p. 105).
3 Cupitt, Don, Solar Ethics (SCM Press, 1995)Google Scholar. In discussing Cupitt I shall make use of material of mine first published in Studies in World Christianity, edited by Mackey, J. L., Vol. XX, No. 1 - with the editor's kind permission.Google Scholar
4 Cupitt, , Solar Ethics, pp. 2Google Scholar, 3, 4, 13, 14, 48, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 19.
5 ibid., pp. 27, 45. On Cupitt's dismissal of realism, see my comments in Studies in World Christianity - footnote 3, above.
6 Cupitt, , Solar Ethics, pp. 58, 59.Google Scholar
7 ibid., pp. 8, 9.
8 To be fair to the author, there are places in the book where Cupitt does acknowledge other and very different values. For instance, ‘It now appears that we humans are … social animals who must co-operate…’ and must ‘procure enough co-operation for survival’, and deal with our ‘discordant impulses’ (45). But in Solar Ethics he does not indicate that much needs to be said about these; nor does he claim that we shall need a reasoned moral scrutiny of the ‘catalysts’ or the styles of life they may instigate.
9 There is an echo here of Ramsey's, F. P. often quoted remark that the stars are no more to us than three-penny bits, The Foundations of Mathematics, p. 291Google Scholar: also a distant memory of Antony Flew and R. W. Hepburn, ‘Problems of Perspective’, BBC Third Programme, Sept. 1955.
10 I pick up the topic of respect again, below, pp. 47–49.
11 It will be clear that I am not working with a conception of autonomy which equates autonomy with a kind of individual relativism - each moral agent as fashioning his or her set of values. Rather, I take it to involve a refusal to let the determining of my moral action pass out of my rational deliberation — and a concern to grasp values I do not make but discover.
12 Cupitt, , Solar Ethics, p. 3.Google Scholar
13 Clark, Stephen R. L., ‘Platonism and the Gods of Place’, in Chappell, T. D. J., ed., The Philosophy of the Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 19f.Google Scholar
14 Something has to be said about the distinction between what I have been calling the ‘I-Thou’ context of value-deliberation and -judgement and ‘wider nature’. For a start, it is tempting to label the former, ‘the (human) life-world’ - and of course (whether or not anchored close to Husserl) the term is often enough used. But the concept of life-world has an unfortunately determinate ring to it. It is easy to see, however, that the distinction between what belongs to the life-world and what is supposed to lie beyond it can be made in many ways. It is a matter of degree how far we modify our unschooled commonsense view of the world to take account in perception and belief of what we know of the world as it is beyond that common-sense view of it: the light- and sound-waves that cause our seeing and hearing, our planetary position in relation to sun, galaxy and beyond. Instead of any concept of life-world, we could work with a spectrum of degrees of ‘cognitive revision’ or ‘adjustment’. The scope and the limits of our knowledge may determine whereabouts on that spectrum we stabilize our ‘reading’ of our world: but will, choice, decision may also play a part.
15 Cf. Barrow, John D., The Artful Universe (London: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 38, 39Google Scholar: ‘Billions of years are needed to produce elements like carbon, which provide the building blocks for complexity and life. Hence, a universe containing living things must be an old universe. But, since the universe is expanding, an old universe must also be a large one.’
16 Kant, The Metaphysic of Morals (The Doctrine of Virtue), part II, chapter 1, section I, divisions 24f. The italics are mine.
17 There is a many-sided discussion of closely related issues in Alan Holland, ‘The Use and Abuse of Ecological Concepts in Environmental Ethics’, Biodiversity and Conservation, 4, 812–26 (1995).Google Scholar
18 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 252.Google ScholarSprigge, Timothy has discussed overlapping topics, e.g., in The Philosophy of the Environment, ed. Chappell, T. D. J., p. 127.Google Scholar Relevant also is Dufrenne, MikelPhénoménologie de I'expérience esthétique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), II, ch. IV.Google Scholar
19 Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Fontana Press 1995), pp. 284f.Google Scholar
20 I am grateful to members of the audience at the meeting of the Royal Institute of Philosophy on 9 October, 1998: their comments have been helpful to me in revising the lecture for publication.