When in nature, be as your primitive ancestors, or as Iris Murdoch says:
A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced. More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones, trees. “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.”
(Quoted on pages 37 of Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World, by Mick Smith. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.)
For a brief biography of Iris Murdoch, click here. For images of or relating to Iris Murdoch, click here.
For a brief biography of Mick Smith, click here.
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