Philosophical Environmentalism

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Our understanding of the world is never finished; we can always penetrate further into its nature. While we view things under limitations or with an admixture of error or misrepre­sentation or deception, we must perforce see the world to that extent blurred or distorted or deformed. The pursuit of truth means the gradual sharpening of the focus and elimination of this deformation; in the meanwhile we took through a refracting medium. This is all the more so when done by deliberate policy, when we project some pre-determined order.

We may regard Oresme's cosmology as erroneous. But the fact remains that if we narrow our horizon then we can look upon the universe as a piece of clock-work; the world is like a clock when viewed through Oresme's eyes. Oresme qua cosmologist projects his system on the world as a projectionist does his shadow show on the screen. By embracing the planar system Oresme and his friends thereafter bent the world to the terms of that system; inertia, celestial-terrestrial parity, and so on are the instruments of that bending; not invincibly so they could have passed on to a wider perspective, a more wholly adequate system, could have climbed out of Nominalism; but while arrested under the dominance of their principles they moulded their understanding of the world's events ac­cordingly and systematised them on that basis. While we entertain errors, aberrations, pre-determined notions, we ipso 'facto project them on to the world.

The projective process is not always a merely external and passive reception. Sometimes there is an inner moulding as well as an external impression. With human regimentation there is quite evidently an impress not merely on the enforced mode of behaviour but on the nature itself. Unless of very strong character, people tend to become dreary and hopeless automata if they are made to conform to an oppressive and dreary routine. The performance of an actor is enhanced, his genius is called forth, by a responsive audience. Animals, like dogs and horses, are very susceptible to sympathetic treat­ment. In the inanimate world can we detect a similar sensi­tivity? The fact that there is no clear line of demarcation between animate and inanimate makes this not unplausible. Is the beauty of the crystal dependent on the sympathy and response of the beholder? Is beauty merely excluded tempo­rarily from purview in treating the crystal as a space-lattice for X-ray analysis or is there a more active withdrawal and atrophy of its aesthetic character and a yielding and conformity to the geometrical probing of its investigator? The viruses seem to look two ways: they will respond as complex molecular lattices or as virulent organisms according to the demands made upon them. Is it merely fanciful to think that the old mahogany chair makes a warm if dumb response to one who treasures it, but withdraws into a wretched subjection when a chemist prepares to analyse its patina?

Whatever we may think of the possibility of an inner response of the inanimate world towards conformity to what is projected on it, there can be little question of its external passive obed­ience within wide limits. A corpuscular-minded physicist will "find" corpuscles in a beam of electrons; his wave-minded colleague will "find" waves; the stream will likewise oblige the wielder of the Schrödinger y wave equation which sub­sumes the wave and the corpuscular properties. The inanimate world is singularly tractable and docile to those who have learnt the rudiments of the art of leading it. Compare Galileo's remark:

"When the geometrical philosopher would observe in concrete the effects demonstrated in abstract, he must defalcate the impedi­ments of matter; and, if he knows how to do that, I do assure you, the things shall jump no less exactly than arithmetical compu­tations"[1]

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[1] Dialogo p. 202, de Santillana p. 222.

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