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Quote by David E. Cooper

“It's one thing to assent to propositions like 'The way of things is ineffable', and quite another to internalise what it is being gestured at by such propositions, to get a sense or feel for mystery. For me, at least, it is in and through ways of engaging with nature that this sense is intimated. These ways include being in the garden.”

Quote by David E. Cooper

Author

David E. Cooper

David E. Cooper, born in 1942, is a renowned author whose works span across philosophy, religion, and science, enjoying widespread popularity among readers. more

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“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 Relation Good Life Humankind Discourse

Author:David E. Cooper

“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.”

“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.”

Care Certain Practice Virtue Example Humility Goodness Excellent Internals Gardening Gardener

Author:David E. Cooper

“Not one has shown an iota of fear of death. They want to end this agony.”

Want Ends Agony Fear Of Death

Author:Jack Kevorkian

“As for the meaning of gardens, particular gardens may have, of course, all sorts of different meanings - emotive, historical, emblematic, religious, commemorative, and so on. But I think that good gardens all signify or exemplify an important truth about the relationship of culture and nature - their inseparability.”

Thinking May Important Different Culture Courses Religious Particular Garden Historical Different Meanings

Author:David E. Cooper

“How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens.”

People World Way Culture Courses Literature Natural Example Painting Garden Bounds Natural World Representing

Author:David E. Cooper

“The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.”

Culture Garden Symbols Spheres Dialectics

Author: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.”

Kind Seems Together Fit Affinity Ineffable

Author:David E. Cooper

“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.”

Years Art Book Reading Language Lines Results Listening Everyday Philosopher Orthodox Phenomenon Reading Books Privileged Sociology Anthropology Art History Professional Life

Author:David E. Cooper

“There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.”