Aesthetics and the Environment

The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture

Allen Carlson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134623877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

First book by the world leading authority on the subject. Carlson is respected worldwide by both environmentalists and philosophers. The topic has a growing following among geographers, planners and environmentalists as well as philosophers of aesthetics, crossing over many markets.

PART I: THE APPRECIATION OF NATURE

1: THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE

A brief historical overview

In the Western world there has been since antiquity a tradition of viewing art as the mirror of nature. However, the idea of aesthetically appreciating nature itself is sometimes traced to a less ancient origin: Petrarch's novel passion for climbing mountains simply to enjoy the prospect. Yet even if the aesthetic appreciation of nature only dates from the dawn of the Renaissance, its development from that time to the present has been uneven and episodic. Initially, nature's appreciation as well as its philosophical investigation were hamstrung by religion. The reigning religious tradition could not but deem nature an unworthy object of aesthetic appreciation, for it saw mountains as despised heaps of wreckage left by the flood, wilderness regions as fearful places for punishment and repentance, and all of nature's workings as poor substitutes for the perfect harmony lost in humanity's fall. It took the rise of a secular science and equally secular art forms to free nature from such associations and thereby open it for aesthetic appreciation. Thus, in the Western world the evolution of aesthetic appreciation of nature has been intertwined with both the objectification of nature achieved by science and the subjectification of it rendered by art.

Although the scientific objectification of nature had earlier origins, the connection between aesthetic appreciation of nature and scientific objectivity dates from early in the eighteenth century. At that time, British aestheticians initiated a tradition that gave theoretical expression to this connection. Empiricist thinkers, such as Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson, took nature rather than art as the ideal object of aesthetic experience and developed the notion of disinterestedness as the mark of such experience. In the course of the century, this notion was elaborated such as to exclude from aesthetic experience an ever-increasing range of associations and conceptualizations. Thus, the objects of appreciation favored by this tradition, British landscapes, were, by means of disinterested aesthetic appreciation, eventually severed not only from religious associations, but from any appreciator's personal, moral, and economic interests. The upshot was a mode of aesthetic appreciation that looked upon the natural world with an eye not unlike the distancing, objectifying eye of science. In this way, the tradition laid the groundwork for the idea of the sublime. By means of the sublime even the most threatening of nature's manifestations, such as mountains and wilderness, could be distanced and appreciated, rather than simply feared and despised.

However, the notion of disinterestedness not only laid the groundwork for the sublime, it also cleared the ground for another, quite different idea, that of the picturesque. This idea secured the connection between aesthetic appreciation of nature and the subjective renderings of nature in art. The term “picturesque” literally means “picture-like” and indicates a mode of appreciation by which the natural world is divided into artistic scenes. Such scenes aim in subject matter or in composition at ideals dictated by the arts, especially poetry and landscape painting. Thus, while disinterestedness and the sublime stripped and objectified nature, the picturesque dressed it in a new set of subjective and romantic images: a rugged cliff with a ruined castle, a deep valley with an arched bridge, a barren outcropping with a crofter's cottage. Like disinterestedness and the sublime, the picturesque had its roots in the theories of the early eighteenth century aestheticians, such as Addison, who thought that what he called the “works of nature” were more appealing when they resembled works of art. However, picturesque appreciation did not culminate until later in the century when it was popularized primarily by William Gilpin and Uvedale Price. At that time, it became the reigning aesthetic ideal of English tourists who pursued picturesque scenery in the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. Indeed, the picturesque remains the mode of aesthetic appreciation associated with the form of tourism that sees and appreciates the natural world primarily in light of renderings of nature typical of travel brochures, calendar photos, and picture postcards.

After the close of the eighteenth century, the picturesque lingered on as a popular mode of aesthetic appreciation of nature. However, the philosophical study of the aesthetics of nature, after the flowering of that century, went into steady decline. Many of the main ideas, such as the idea of the sublime, the notion of disinterestedness, and the theoretical centrality of nature rather than art, reached their climax with Kant. In his third critique some of these ideas received such exhaustive treatment that a kind of closure was seemingly achieved. Following Kant, a new world order was initiated by Hegel. In this world, art was a means to the Absolute, and it rather than nature was destined to became the favored subject of philosophical aesthetics.

However, even as the theoretical study of the aesthetics of nature declined, a new view of nature was initiated that eventually gave rise to a different kind of aesthetic appreciation. This mode of appreciation has its roots in the North American tradition of nature writing, as exemplified by Henry David Thoreau. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was reinforced by the work of George Perkins Marsh and his recognition that humanity is the major cause of the destruction of nature's beauty. It achieved its classic realization at the end of the century with American naturalist John Muir. Muir saw all nature and especially wild nature as aesthetically beautiful and found ugliness only where nature was subject to human intrusion. These ideas strongly influenced the North American wilderness preservation movement and continue to shape the aesthetic appreciation of nature associated with contemporary environmentalism. This kind of appreciation may be called positive aesthetics.¹ In so far as positive aesthetic appreciation eschews humanity's marks on the natural landscape, it is somewhat the converse of picturesque appreciation with its delight in signs of human presence. Thus, it has become the rival of the picturesque as the popular mode of aesthetic appreciation of nature, although contemporary nature appreciation frequently involves a somewhat uneasy balance between the two different modes.

In spite of the developments in popular appreciation of nature in the nineteenth and twentieth century, however, philosophical aesthetics, with few exceptions, ignored nature throughout most of this period. In the nineteenth century Schelling and a scattering of thinkers of the Romantic Movement considered the aesthetics of nature to some extent, and in the first half of the twentieth century George Santayana and John Dewey each discussed it. But, by and large, in so far as aesthetics was pursued, it was completely dominated by an interest in art. Thus, by the mid-twentieth century, within the analytic tradition, philosophical aesthetics was virtually equated with philosophy of art. The major textbook in aesthetics at this time was subtitled Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism and major aesthetics anthologies bore titles such as Art and Philosophy and Philosophy Looks at the Arts.² Moreover, when aesthetic appreciation of nature was mentioned, it was treated, by comparison with that of art, as a messy, subjective business of little philosophical significance. However, in the second half of the twentieth century this situation was destined to change.

A brief overview of contemporary positions

Many of the issues in contemporary work on the aesthetics of nature are foreshadowed in one article: Ronald W. Hepburn's seminal “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty.”³ After noting that by essentially reducing aesthetics to the philosophy of art, analytic aesthetics virtually ignores the natural world, Hepburn sets the agenda for the discussion of the late twentieth century. He argues that aesthetic appreciation of art frequently provides misleading guidelines for our appreciation of nature. Yet he observes that there is in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, as in appreciation of art, a distinction between appreciation which is only trivial and superficial and that which is serious and deep. He furthermore suggests that with nature such serious appreciation may require different approaches that can accommodate not only nature's indeterminate and varying character, but also both our multi-sensory experience and our diverse understanding of it.

The contemporary discussion of the aesthetics of nature thus stresses different approaches to or models for the appreciation of nature: models intended to capture the essence of appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. Certain more traditional models that are rather directly related to the aesthetic appreciation of the arts are seemingly inadequate. Two such models may be called the object model and the landscape model. The former pushes nature in the direction of sculpture and the latter treats it as similar to landscape painting. Thus, the object model focuses aesthetic appreciation primarily on natural objects and dictates appreciation of such objects rather as we might appreciate pieces of abstract sculpture, mentally or physically extracting them from their contexts and dwelling on their formal properties. On the other hand, the landscape model, following in the tradition of the picturesque noted in the first section of this chapter, mandates appreciation of nature as we might appreciate a landscape painting. This requires seeing it to some extent as a two-dimensional scene and again dwelling largely on formal properties. Neither of these models fully realize serious, appropriate appreciation of nature for each distorts the true character of nature. The former rips natural objects from their larger environments while the latter frames and flattens them into scenery. Moreover, in focusing mainly on formal properties, both models neglect much of our normal experience and understanding of nature.⁴

Although the aesthetic appreciation of the arts does not directly provide adequate models for the appreciation of nature, it yet suggests some of what is required in a more adequate model. In serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation of works of art, it is essential that we appreciate works as what they in fact are and in light of knowledge of their real natures. Thus, for instance, serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation of the Guernica (1937) requires that we appreciate it as a painting and moreover as a cubist or neo-cubist painting, and therefore that we appreciate it in light of our knowledge of paintings in general and of cubist paintings in particular. This suggests a third model for the aesthetic appreciation of nature, the natural environmental model. This model, which I develop throughout Part I of this volume, recommends two things. First, that, as in our appreciation of works of art, we must appreciate nature as what it in fact is, that is, as natural and as an environment. Second, it recommends that we must appreciate nature in light of our knowledge of what it is, that is, in light of knowledge provided by the natural sciences, especially the environmental sciences such as geology, biology, and ecology. The natural environmental model thus accommodates both the true character of nature and our normal experience and understanding of it.⁵

Nonetheless, the natural environmental model may be thought not to characterize our appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature completely accurately. Although it does not, as the object and the landscape models, distort nature itself, it may yet be thought to somewhat misrepresent our appreciation of nature. Its emphasis on scientific knowledge gives such appreciation a highly cognitive and what may be judged an overly intellectual quality. In contrast to the cognitive emphasis of the natural environmental model, a fourth model, the engagement model, stresses the contextual dimensions of nature and our multi-sensory experience of it. Viewing the environment as a seamless unity of organisms, perceptions, and places, the engagement model beckons us to immerse ourselves in our natural environment in an attempt to obliterate traditional dichotomies such as subject and object, and ultimately to reduce to as small a degree as possible the distance between ourselves and nature. In short, aesthetic experience is taken to involve a total immersion of the appreciator in the object of appreciation.⁶

The engagement model calls for the absorption of the appreciator into the natural environment. Perhaps in doing so it goes too far. There are two main difficulties. First, in attempting to eliminate any distance between ourselves and nature, the engagement model may lose that by reason of which the resultant experience is aesthetic. As noted in the first section of this chapter, within the Western tradition the very notion of the aesthetic is conceptually tied to disinterestedness and the idea of distance between the appreciator and the appreciated, The second difficulty is that in attempting to obliterate dichotomies such as that between subject and object, the engagement model may also lose the possibility of distinguishing between trivial, superficial appreciation and that which is serious and appropriate. This is because serious, appropriate appreciation revolves around the object of appreciation and its real nature, while superficial appreciation frequently involves only whatever the subject happens to bring to the experience. In short, without the subject/object distinction, aesthetic appreciation of nature is in danger of degenerating into little more than a subjective flight of fancy.

Another view that also seems to diverge from the natural environmental model is the arousal model. This model challenges the central place the natural environmental model grants to scientific knowledge in aesthetic appreciation of nature. The arousal model holds that we may appreciate nature simply by opening ourselves to it and thus being emotionally aroused by it. The view contends that this less intellectual, more visceral experience of nature is a way of legitimately appreciating nature without involving any knowledge gained from science. Unlike the engagement model, this model does not call for a total immersion in nature, but only for an emotional relationship with it based on our common, everyday knowledge and experience of it. Consequently, in contrast to the engagement model, the arousal model does not lose the right to call its experience of nature aesthetic. Nor does it undercut the distinction between trivial and serious appreciation of nature, even though the appreciation it stresses may be more the former than the latter. However, the contrast between the arousal model and the natural environmental model is less clear. If we recognize our scientific knowledge of the natural world as only a finer-grained and theoretically richer version of our common, everyday knowledge of it, and not as something essentially different in kind, then the difference between the arousal model and the natural environmental model is mainly one of emphasis. Both models track the appreciation of nature, although the arousal model focuses on the more common, less cognitively rich, and perhaps less serious end of the continuum.⁷

A more fundamental challenge to the natural environmental model comes from what may be called the mystery model of nature appreciation. This view holds that the natural environmental model, in requiring that we must have knowledge of what we appreciate, has no place for the way in which nature is alien, aloof, distant, and unknowable. It contends that the only appropriate experience of nature is a sense of mystery involving a state of appreciative incomprehension, a sense of not belonging to and of being separate from nature. However, the mystery model faces major difficulties. With only mystery and aloofness, there seems to be no grounding for appreciation of any kind, let alone aesthetic appreciation. The mystery and aloofness of nature is a gulf, an emptiness, between us and nature; it is that by which we are separate from nature. Thus, mystery itself cannot constitute a means by which we can attain any appreciation of nature whatsoever. In short, insofar as nature is unknowable, it is also beyond aesthetic appreciation. However, even though mystery and aloofness cannot support appreciation, they can support worship. Thus, perhaps the mystery model should be characterized not as an aesthetic of nature, but rather as a religious approach to nature. If this is the case, then rather than revealing a dimension of our appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature, the mystery model leaves the realm of the aesthetic altogether.⁸

If the mystery model of nature appreciation moves such appreciation outside the realm of the aesthetic, it does so unintentionally. However, the possibility that our appreciation of nature is not aesthetic is expressly embraced as the central tenet of the nonaesthetic model of nature appreciation. This view constitutes a radical alternative to all other models in explicitly claiming that nature appreciation is not a species of aesthetic appreciation. It holds that aesthetic appreciation is paradigmatically appreciation of works of art and is minimally appreciation of artifacts, of that which is human-made. Thus, in this view the appreciation of nature itself cannot be aesthetic app...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE APPRECIATION OF NATURE
• PART II: LANDSCAPES, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE