Over in the US – I kid you not! – I came down a mountain with students from a local college. They moved a heck of a lot quicker than I did, I can tell you. But I managed to keep pace with them (OK, I admit, they stopped and waited as I caught up with them). They were philosophy students as well as local leaders. Young, keen, eager, can-do people who give Hope. The coming generation preparing to pick up the baton and take it on. They loved Mill and utilitarianism, I gave them my views on Kant and Aquinas and virtue ethics as qualities for successful living etc. All this whilst hopping over rocks on the descent, a heady experience indeed (like chasing mountain goats).
But at one point I got really interesting. And they stopped to listen, and asked me to repeat so they could remember. This was when I gave them the H philosophy – Hope is found in Head (intellect/understanding/knowing) plus Heart (conscience/ethics/being) plus Hand (a practical and loving engagement with the world we live in) forged by Hand into Habits of social practices and sustainable living Happiness (Aristotle’s eudaimonia as flourishing) so that we all live in the Happy Habitat.
Hallelujah! I'd love to fit soul in there, but I need a word beginning with "H". The Latin Anima will do.
The idea comes from Scottish human ecologist, Professor Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), who referred to the ‘three H's’ – Heart, Hand and Head. These terms and their sequence refer to the need to combine emotional development, physical growth, and, finally, intellectual training. For Geddes, the educative process begins in the childish interest in the natural world and is inspired by the wonderment it evokes. "Good teaching begins, neither with knowledge nor discipline, but through delight." It develops on the basis of "the feeling for the subject".
This is a ‘grounded philosophy', one that puts heart and head together through the hand, a down to earth practical experience.
The three H’s – Heart, Hand and Head – become four with Habit. The Habits of Heart, Hand and Head. They are good habits, habits for right reason. I connect the idea with virtue ethics, a tradition I seek to develop as the ecological ethic we need for successful, respectful and planful planetary living. Virtues involve doing the right thing, right way, in accordance with the general maxim of "acting in accord with right reason." Virtuous action for right reasons combined with a sufficiency of goods within right relationships precludes the possibility of actions that are detrimental to the well-being of ourselves or anyone with whom and anything with which we interact. And we do the right thing and generate the right results through Habitat. We acquire and exercise the virtues in the appropriate Habitus, bringing about flourishing as Happiness (eudaimonia). Human and planetary flourishing in the Happy Habitus.
American biologist Aldo Leopold advanced a 'land ethic' along these lines. For him, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." This amounts to more than connecting the head with the emotions and values of the heart. There is a need for a practical and loving engagement with the land. Head and Heart need to the applied help of the 'hand'. Ways of being and knowing and doing combine, engaging with place and people, invigorating communities, enabling others. People who build and share a place together will act to protect and save it.
In Howards End, E.M. Forster seeks the integral approach that inspires by an affective knowledge:
"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?"
“The light within,” in my understanding, is the Heart as motive, inspiration and guide.
Geometer and philosopher, Keith Critchlow writes this:
“The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them."
The Hidden Geometry of Flowers, 2011, page 39
Head divorced from heart leads us astray every time. Both detached from Hand - practice - leaves us powerless and despairing. Head, Heart and Hand together lead, by way of good work, virtuous action or what Tocqueville called 'the habits of the heart' to authentic Hope. An active Hope based on affective knowledge. The factual knowledge, upon which we are increasingly reliant, leads only to further description and explanation, leaving the world unchanged.
Keep walking the line, and facts, feelings, and actions will come together. The integration of Heart, Hand and Head is what signifies the integral personality, an educated person as a whole person as distinct from the instructed person. A person who can respond to others, take responsibility, and walk the line with a blind fold. We live forward into mystery. “We live as if we knew” (Nietzsche). How do we act when we cannot know? What possible means do we have to carry on with life, or "living it forward," as Kierkegaard said? Yet we do. “Living as if we know, whether or not we muddle through or brilliantly move along a clear path, is part of the creativity of human culture.” (Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred).