Customer Reviews

Morality & Imagination

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I am a big fan of Yi-Fu Tuan's books. This is not the sort of claim most people would advance for an academic author - but then, Tuan is not your typical academic. His work represents the best of the geographical tradition. It is synoptic and synthetic, moving deftly from physical culture and landscape to the moral and imaginative aspects of cultural life. His books assume no specialized knowledge on the reader's part, instead gently requesting the reader to follow Tuan's path through his myriad examples toward the lofty goal of self-improvement.

I see Tuan as a major contributor to the practice of moral perfectionism (look for Stanley Cavell's books as a foundation). In Morality and Imagination, and a few other titles he has published, he articulates a uniquely geographical perspective on morality. He ties our moral self-awareness (as individuals and groups) to our awareness and cultivation of place. "Geography" for Tuan is thus an attitude and a way of seeing, rather than a specific body of knowledge. Geography is a way of training the imagination to see certain aspects of our existence - embeddedness in place, the tension between hearth and cosmos - that would otherwise escape notice.

This book is also remarkable for Tuan's readings of "fellow travelers" Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, and Simone Weil. In his preface, Tuan explains that these three philosophers have served him as guides - as much for what they wrote, as for how they lived. Tuan sees each of these figures as leading exemplary moral lives. In a way, Tuan serves his readers in the same manner. His life, and his books, are exemplary models of ethical living.

Imagination is the key faculty guiding the moral life. Imagination is, as Tuan has elsewhere written, the ability to see what isn't there. In the sphere of morality, imagination means sympathy and connection - seeing moral significance where it isn't immediately apparent. Geography aids the development of moral imagination owing to its synthetic perspective - the ability to see things in networks of relations - and its appreciation of scale.

In all, Tuan's books are unique - not only in geography. His voice is suggestive rather than pedantic. He only means to point out different ways of seeing the familiar, rather than bludgeoning the reader into accepting a single point of view. In this manner, not only is the content of his work significantly concerned with morality - the very style in which he writes and presents his ideas is no less moral.