Abstract

Modern materialism has failed nature, let it down or betrayed it, through rejecting a "noetic" or contemplative vision of it. Yet since Parmenides and Plato, nous (the highest faculty of knowing apprehension, which German Idealism called "intellectual intuition") was directed away from the earth toward what transcended (meta) nature (physis). Proceeding through the Latin Middle Ages into Modern Metaphysics, it is argued that since materialism has ignored the noetic, and the noetic has neglected nature, the West (including Heidegger) has never philosophically articulated a noetics of nature. Nevertheless, Byzantine and Russian thought, art, and spirituality have emphasized the eruption of the transcendent within the immanent, the invisible into the invisible, God into creation, while Western poets and nature writers have also addressed this theme. This "marriage of heaven and earth," apprehended noetically, served as the initial impetus for environmental thought, and remains the best prospect for its further development.

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