Quotes by David E. Cooper

David E. Cooper

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel’s words, ‘out and out other’ to ‘spirit’. It’s easy enough to see how ‘constructivist’ or ‘humanist’ conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

Effort

Philosophy

World

Between nature and music there seems to be an elective affinity: they fit together, and when they do experiences of an ineffable kind are generated.

Fit

Kind

Together

Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste – from formal, ‘French’ gardens to ‘Capability’ Brown’s landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen ‘dry’ gardens – register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes.

Attitude

Philosophical

Religious

Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are ‘internal’. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.

Gardening

Humility

Practice

I started my professional life as a philosopher of language and for several years took the orthodox line that meaning is an essentially linguistic phenomenon. Whether as a result of simply listening to everyday talk about meaning, or reading books of anthropology, sociology and art history, it dawned on me that there is nothing at all privileged or central about linguistic meaning.

Art

Book

Reading

I think it’s true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are – free, makers of meaning, ‘issues’ for ourselves, and so on – is at the same time a recognition of how we should try to live.

Appreciation

Issues

Thinking

I think that Asian versions of ‘ineffabilism’ have an advantage over the best-known Western ones, like Schopenhauer’s. They are free from the dualistic image of the world of experience as the joint product of mind and reality.

Mind

Reality

Thinking

I’m very sceptical about the prospects for ‘big’ environmental causes – ‘saving the planet’, halving the world’s population, ending the exploitation of animals, and so on – but a person can ask him- or herself how he or she personally may exercise compassion or humility towards animals, vegetal life and so on.

Compassion

Exercise

Humility

In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

Civilization

Garden

Good Life

In the doctrine of the world and humankind as ‘will to power and nothing else’, Heidegger identified not an antidote to nihilism, but the completion of it. For what can be more destructive of truth and value than the doctrine that these are simply the impositions on the world of human exercises of power?

Doctrine

Exercise

Nihilism

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Absolutism

Animal

Appreciation

Art

Attitude

Being True

Book

Bullshit

Civilization

Commitment

Compassion

Denial

Differences

Divorce

Doctrine

Dust

Effort

Everyday

Exercise

Expression

Facts

Fit

Garden

Gardening

Good Life

Hero

Humility

Indulge In

Issues

Kind

Light

Men

Mind

Mystery

Nihilism

Offending

People

Perspective

Philosophical

Philosophy

Plato

Player

Political

Practice

Reading

Reality

Reflection

Religious

Running

Theory

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Quotes by David E. Cooper

David E. Cooper

Between nature and music there seems to be an elective affinity: they fit together, and when they do experiences of an ineffable kind are generated.

Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are ‘internal’. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.

I think it’s true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are – free, makers of meaning, ‘issues’ for ourselves, and so on – is at the same time a recognition of how we should try to live.

I think that Asian versions of ‘ineffabilism’ have an advantage over the best-known Western ones, like Schopenhauer’s. They are free from the dualistic image of the world of experience as the joint product of mind and reality.

In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

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