American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

I. Opening

The ecological crisis is one of the most critical moral concerns of the present. But the concern is not with the environment, or with that which surrounds us; it is not with an objectified nature, in relation to which humans stand as mere passive observers. Rather, ecological concern emerges from recognition that humanity participates in nature, that our behavior in the natural world affects our own present and future as well as the present and future of the biosphere and that we are morally answerable for this behavior, or responsible in, through, and for our participation.¹ Understood in these ways, the ecological crisis can be viewed as an unfolding historical process generated by the structural forms and systemic values of human cultural life. Adequate response to the ecological crisis thus calls upon us to reimagine our moral responsibilities within nature.

What does it mean to claim this, and what on earth could be the roles of the arts and of religious life in response? In this brief reflective article, I will engage this question by thinking through the ways in which the ecological crisis calls upon us to enlarge our moral imaginations and to enact moral creativity. The task is to reflect upon ways in which ecological responsibility can be understood as an aesthethical practice.

The article is divided into three parts: 1) reflection on the relations between the true, the good, and the beautiful (I will be brief); 2) a discussion of connections between symbolism and responsibility; 3) and thoughts on the roles of the arts and religion in reimagining and creatively manifesting ecological responsibility.

II. True, Good, Beautiful

According to the dominant philosophical tradition in the modern West, claims to truth are justified insofar as they correspond to the way things are, and judgments [End Page 136] about the good are in some way derivative from this correspondence. This moral realism, couched within a correspondence theory of truth, parallels traditions of aesthetic realism according to which the metric of aesthetic value is verisimilitude, or likeness to reality. But in explaining his approach to knowledge and morals, the American pragmatist William James once wrote that he understood truth to be a species of good. This view of the good as a species of truth is a reversal of the dominant modern view just described.

According to James and other pragmatists, knowing is something much more than adjudicating the correspondence of knowledge claims to reality. James's counterposition is that knowing is a practical, morally engaged, value-laden and value-constitutive craft, the craft of getting into right relationship with the world. The true is contingent on the good insofar as the moral life is a project of discerning how we ought or should be in a world that we cocreate through our engaging discernment of it. On this account, the moral agent is both a creature and a creator of the moral world. Instead of viewing the work of knowledge as the endeavor to discover correspondences, knowledge work becomes the discovery and enactment of an ultimately moral commerce between knowers and the world.

And yet, if truth is a species of good, is the good the self-sufficient principle around which everything else swings; or, is the good itself a species of something else? It would be foolish to attempt to trace the philosophical genealogy of this question in this short article, let alone to attempt to answer it. But I will nonetheless briefly explore the idea that while truth may be a species of the good, the good may be a species of the beautiful. According to such an idea, contemplation of and interaction with beauty—whether manifest in its crafted aesthetic forms, or in the natural world, or in the play of human sociality—becomes a field of moral practice. Beauty trains the moral imagination. As John Dewey famously put this, "Change in the climate of the imagination is the precursor of the changes that affect more than the details of life."² The limits of imagination are the limits of moral possibility.

Let me offer a brief illustration from my own life. I...