Ecological Imagination: A Whiteheadian Exercise in Temporal Phronesis

Abstract

This chapter presents an account of temporal phronesis that reflects a somewhat more chastened view of human creativity, drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's original and productive understanding of natural process, time, and creativity. This new temporal phronesis would be a major contribution to habits of thought, and indeed practice, which would not merely transcend the mechanical but move to another level the creative engagement with the environment that Whitehead calls for. To be out of touch, to fail to be attuned to the complexity of time is not just a cognitive but an ethical failure, where the ethical is to be understood not deontologically or instrumentally but in relation to ethos, or dwelling. Such a phronesis would capture both the temporal complexity of the real, and of people's engagement with it, and is central to the ecological imagination. It is only by articulating and enacting such complexity that people can achieve the attunement required for an environmentally sustainable ethos. This attunement is itself a creative accomplishment of the human organism, even as it sets limits to an unbridled sense of the transformability of nature.