how to feel the world

one of the things i like most about summer is the way that one's senses seem to come alive along with the everything else in creation. in the summer you feel more. you feel the air and the sky. you feel the trees full of leaves. you feel your body -your feet in the grass, the air in your lungs.

it a commonplace (and an good one, i believe) for philosophers to talk about virtues and vices in terms of responsiveness to a given situation. the virtuous person sees/feels the right way to respond in a given situation and she responds that way, whereas the vicious person responds incorrectly. we do fairly well at thinking about how to respond in lots of paradigm 'moral' cases -what to do if you're taking a test (don't cheat), what to do if you see a stranger in distress (help him), etc. it striking, though, how much of our life is spent responding to less obviously 'moral' situations and objects-responding to the sky above us as we drive, responding to strangers that pass us on the sidewalk. responding to novels and movies, to a new song on the radio, to the tree outside our window, to the squirrel on the lawn, to the feeling of our tennis shoes.

on the one hand, it seems hard to say how one ought to feel or act in some of these 'less-moral' situations. we can say that one ought to be pained at the sight of injustice, but how ought one to feel at the sight of a particular shade of blue on the lake? joyful? content? it seems strange to say that there is some definite way one ought to respond to many 'less-moral' situations. on the other hand, it also seems strange to suppose that there is no better or worse way to respond in these situations. one's response to these situations seems to express or embody what it means to live well, in the same way virtues like courage or compassion embody living well. it seems that a life full of joy and wonder at the world is a better life than one full of boredeom and half-hearted attention to things, even if one responds 'correctly' in all the 'moral' contexts.

how, then, ought one to see/feel a tree, or a frisbee, or a bicycle? perhaps the answer is that we must begin by seeing and feeling them at all. we must cultivate an awareness, and an appreciative awareness, of all that is around us. there is something about wonder which seems important here. something about having a taste for the strangeness or the specialness of ordinary things. a sense too of how fantastic things are.

i don't think the idea is that we all need to think like annie dillard (though i think she could be a good influence, even a guide, in this whole discussion). and its not that we need to spend all of our time stopping and looking instead of feeling the world by doing stuff (though i think stopping and looking more might be part of cultivating the capacity for the right kind of responsiveness).

christianly speaking, it seems that the proper responsiveness will involve, perhaps even center on, a sense of thankfullness and joy in creation viewed as such. that is, a joyful viewing of the world not as brute fact, but as the handiwork of our loving Creator.