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Philistinism and the Preservation of Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2013
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.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013
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.
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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).
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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.