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In his classic work, The Sense of Beauty, philosopher George Santayana characterizes the natural landscape as follows:
The natural landscape is an indeterminate object; it almost always contains enough diversity to allow … great liberty in selecting, emphasizing, and grouping its elements, and it is furthermore rich in suggestion and in vague emotional stimulus. A landscape to be seen has to be composed, … then we feel that the landscape is beautiful. … The promiscuous natural landscape cannot be enjoyed in any other way.1
With these few words, Santayana poses the central question of aesthetic appreciation of nature. Natural landscapes, he says, are indeterminate and promiscuous. To be appreciated, they must be composed. Yet they are so rich in diversity, suggestion, and emotional stimulus that they allow great liberty in selecting, emphasizing, and grouping. Thus, the problem is that of what and how to select, emphasize, and group, of what and how to compose, to achieve appropriate appreciation.
There is no parallel problem concerning appreciation of art. With traditional works of art we typically know both what and how to appropriately aesthetically appreciate. We know what to appreciate in that we know the difference between a work and that which is not it nor a part of it and between its aesthetically relevant qualities and those without such relevance. We know that we are to appreciate the sound of the piano in the concert hall and not the coughing that interrupts it; we know that we are to appreciate a painting’s delicacy and balance, but not where it happens to hang. Similarly, we know how to appreciate works of art in that we know the modes of appreciation that are appropriate for different kinds of works. We know that we are to listen to the sound of the piano and look at the surface of the painting. Moreover, we know that we must use different approaches for different types of particular art forms. Philosopher Paul Ziff introduced the notion of “acts of aspection,” pointing out that different acts of aspection are suitable for different types of paintings:
[T]o contemplate a painting is to perform one act of aspection; to scan it is to perform another; to study, observe, survey, inspect, examine, scrutinize, are still other acts of aspection. … I survey a Tintoretto, while I scan an H. Bosch. … Generally speaking, a different act of aspection is performed in connection with works belonging to different schools of art, which is why the classification of style is of the essence. Venetian paintings lend themselves to an act of aspection involving attention to balanced masses; contours are of no importance. … The Florentine school demands attention to contours, the linear style predominates. Look for light in a Claude, for color in a Bonnard, for contoured volumes in a Signorelli.2
With art our knowledge of what and how to appreciate is grounded in the fact that works of art are our creations. We know what are and are not parts of works, which of their qualities are aesthetically relevant, and how to appreciate them, because we have made them for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation and to fulfill that purpose this knowledge must be accessible. In making an object we know what we make and thus its parts, its purposes, and what to do with it. In creating a painting, we know that it ends at its frame, that its colors and lines are aesthetically important, and that we are to look at it rather than listen to it.
Nature is not art and it is not our creation. Rather it is our whole natural environment, our natural world. It surrounds us and confronts us, in Santayana’s words, indeterminately and promiscuously, rich in diversity, suggestion, and stimulus. But what are we to aesthetically appreciate in all this richness, what are the limits and the proper foci of appreciation; and how are we to appreciate, what are appropriate modes of appreciation and acts of aspection? Moreover, what are the grounds on which we can justify answers to such questions?
Various art-based models of appreciation have often been accepted as the basis for deciding what and how to aesthetically appreciate in nature. One such approach may be called the Object of Art Model (OAM). Consider our appreciation of a non-representation sculpture, for example, a work by Constantin Brancusi, such as Bird in Space (1919). We appreciate the actual physical object; the aesthetically relevant features are its sensuous and design qualities and certain abstract expressive qualities. Such sculpture need not relate to anything external to itself; it is a self-contained aesthetic unit. The Brancusi has no direct representational ties to the rest of reality and no relational connections with its immediate surroundings. Yet it has significant aesthetic qualities: it glistens, has balance and grace, and expresses flight itself. Clearly we can aesthetically appreciate objects of nature in accord with OAM. We can appreciate a rock or a piece of driftwood as we appreciate a Brancusi: We actually or imaginatively remove the object from its surroundings and dwell on its sensuous and possible expressive qualities. Natural objects are often appreciated in precisely this way: mantelpieces are littered with rocks and pieces of driftwood. Moreover, the model fits the fact that natural objects, like non-representational sculpture, have no representational ties to the rest of reality.
Nonetheless, OAM is in many ways inappropriate for aesthetic appreciation of nature. Santayana notes natural environments’ indeterminateness. However, he also observes that nature contains objects that have determinate forms, but suggests that when appreciation is directed specifically to such objects, it is no longer genuine aesthetic appreciation of nature. Santayana’s observation marks a distinction between appreciating nature and simply appreciating the objects of nature. In fact, on one understanding of OAM, objects of nature when so appreciated become “readymades” or “found art.” Natural objects are granted what is called “artistic enfranchisement,” and they, like artifacts such as Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, which he enfranchised as a work called Fountain (1917), become works of art. The questions of what and how to aesthetically appreciate are answered, but for art rather than for nature; the appreciation of nature is lost in the shuffle.
However, OAM need not turn natural objects into art objects. It may approach objects of nature simply by actually or imaginatively removing them from their surroundings. We need not appreciate the rock on our mantel as a readymade sculpture; we can appreciate it only as an aesthetically pleasing object. Our appreciation focuses on the sensuous qualities of the physical object and a few expressive qualities: Our rock has a wonderfully smooth and gracefully curved surface and expresses solidity. Yet OAM is still problematic in involving the removal of natural objects from their surroundings. The model is appropriate for art objects that are self-contained aesthetic units such that neither their environment of creation nor their environment of display is aesthetically relevant. However, natural objects are parts of and have been formed within their environments of creation by means of the natural forces at work within them. Thus, for natural objects, environments of creation are aesthetically relevant and, because of this, environments of display are equally relevant in virtue of being either the same as or different from environments of creation.
A second artistic approach to aesthetic appreciation of nature may be called the Landscape or Scenery Model (LSM). In one of its senses “landscape” means a prospect—usually an imposing prospect—seen from a specific standpoint and distance. Landscape paintings traditionally represent such prospects and LSM is closely tied to this art form. In aesthetically appreciating a landscape painting, the focus is not primarily on the actual object, the painting, nor even on the represented object, the prospect, but rather on the representation and the means of represention. Thus the appreciative emphasis is on qualities that play an essential role in representing a prospect: visual qualities relating to line, color, and overall design. Such features are central in landscape painting and the focus of LSM. The model encourages perceiving and appreciating nature as if it were a landscape painting, as a representation of a prospect viewed from a specific position and distance. It directs appreciation to artistic and scenic qualities of line, color, and design.
LSM has been historically significant in aesthetic appreciation of nature. It is the direct descendent of the eighteenth century concept of the picturesque. This term literally means “picture-like” and indicates a mode of appreciation by which the natural world is divided into scenes, each aiming at an ideal dictated by art, especially landscape painting. The concept guided aesthetic appreciation of early tourists who pursued picturesque scenery with a “Claude-glass.” Named for landscape painter Claude Lorrain, this small, tinted, convex mirror was designed for viewing landscapes as they would appear in landscape paintings. Thomas West’s guidebook to the Lake District (1778) says of the glass:
[W]here the objects are great and near, it removes them to a due distance, and shews them in the soft colours of nature, and most regular perspective the eye can perceive, art teach, or science demonstrate … to the glass is reserved the finished picture, in highest colouring, and just perspectives.3
In a similar fashion, modern tourists show a preference for LSM by visiting “scenic viewpoints” where the actual space between tourist and prescribed “view” constitutes “a due distance” that aids the impression of “soft colours of nature, and the most regular perspective the eye can perceive.” And the “regularity” of the perspective is enhanced by the position of the viewpoint itself. Moreover, modern tourists also desire “the finished picture, in highest colouring, and just perspective”—whether this be the “scene” framed and balanced in a camera viewfinder, the result of this in the form of a photo, or “artistically” composed postcard and calendar reproductions of the “scene,” which often receive more appreciation than that which they “reproduce.” Geographer Ronald Rees points out that
the taste has been for a view, for scenery, not for landscape in the original … meaning of the term, which denotes our ordinary, everyday surroundings. The average modern sightseer … is interested not in natural forms and processes, but in a prospect.4
LSM’s answers to the what and how questions cause some uneasiness in a number of thinkers. The model dictates appreciation of natural environments as if they were a series of landscape paintings. It recommends dividing nature into scenes, each to be viewed from a specific position by a viewer separated by appropriate spatial distance. It reduces a walk in a natural environment to something like a stroll through an art gallery. When seen in this light, some individuals, such as human ecologist Paul Shepard, find LSM so misguided that they doubt the wisdom of any aesthetic approach to nature. Others find the model ethically and environmentally worrisome. For example, after contending that modern tourists are interested only in prospects, Rees concludes that the picturesque
simply confirmed our anthropocentrism by suggesting that nature exists to please as well as to serve us. Our ethics … have lagged behind our aesthetics. It is an unfortunate lapse which allows us to abuse our local environments and venerate the Alps and the Rockies.5
Moreover, LSM is also questionable on purely aesthetic grounds. The model construes environments as if they were static, essentially “two dimensional” representations; it reduces them to scenes or views. But natural environments are not scenes, not representations, not static, and not two dimensional. In short, the model requires appreciation of environments not as what they are and with the qualities they have, but as something they are not and with qualities they do not have. The model is unsuited to the actual nature of its objects of appreciation. Consequently it not only, as OAM, unduly limits appreciation, in this case to certain artistic and scenic qualities, it also misleads it. Philosopher Ronald Hepburn puts the point in general terms:
Supposing that a person’s aesthetic education … instills in him the attitudes, the tactics of approach, the expectations proper to the appreciation of art works only, such a person will either pay very little aesthetic heed to natural objects or else heed them in the wrong way. He will look—and of course look in vain—for what can be found and enjoyed only in art. …6
One alternative, alive to the problems of picturesque appreciation and LSM and seemingly skeptical about aesthetic approaches to nature in general, simply denies the possibility of aesthetic appreciation of nature. This position accepts traditional accounts of aesthetic appreciation of art, but stresses the fact that nature is natural, not art, and not our creation. It argues that aesthetic appreciation necessarily involves aesthetic evaluation, which entails judging objects of appreciation as achievements of their creators and, therefore, since nature, unlike art, is not our creation, indeed is not the product of any designing intellect, appreciation of it is not aesthetic. One version of this position is called the Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic (HCA). Environmental philosophers Don Mannison and Robert Elliot have elaborated this view. For example, Elliot claims that our appreciative responses to nature do not “count as aesthetic responses,” arguing that a
judgemental element in aesthetic evaluation serves to differentiate it from environmental evaluation. … Evaluating works of art involves explaining them, and judging them, in terms of their author’s intentions; … locating them in some tradition and in some special milieu. …[But] Nature is not a work of art. …7
A second alternative approach to appreciation of nature is more troubled by the limitations of OAM and focuses on the environmental dimension of natural environments. It argues that traditional aesthetic approaches, as exemplified by OAM and LSM, presuppose a subject/object dichotomy involving an isolating, distancing, and objectifying stance that is inappropriate for aesthetic appreciation of nature. It is claimed that this stance wrongly abstracts both natural objects and appreciators from the environments in which they properly belong and in which appropriate appreciation is achieved. Thus, this position proposes to replace abstraction with engagement and distance with immersion, calling for a participatory aesthetics of nature. One version of this position is called the Aesthetics of Engagement (AOE) and developed by philosopher Arnold Berleant, who argues that
we cannot distance the natural world from ourselves. … [When we perceive] environments from within, as it were, looking not at it but being in it, nature … is transformed into a realm in which we live as participants, not observers. … The aesthetic mark of all such times is … total engagement, a sensory immersion in the natural world.8
By highlighting natural and environmental dimensions of natural environments, HCA and AOE address many of the shortcomings of the traditional artistic models. However, these two approaches have problems of their own. HCA runs counter to both the traditional view that everything is open to aesthetic appreciation and the common sense idea that at least some instances of appreciation of natural things, such as fiery sunsets and soaring birds, constitute paradigm cases of aesthetic appreciation. AOE is also problematic. First, since at least some degree of the subject/object dichotomy seems essential to the very possibility of aesthetic appreciation, its total rejection may necessitate a rejection of the aesthetic itself, reducing AOE to a version of HCA. Second, AOE seemingly embraces an unacceptable degree of subjectivity in aesthetic appreciation of nature. However, the main problem with both positions is that, in the last analysis, they do not provide adequate answers to the questions of what and how to aesthetically appreciate in nature. Concerning the what question, HCA’s answer is quite simply “nothing,” while AOE’s is seemingly “everything.” And, therefore, concerning the how question, the former view has nothing more to say, while the latter apparently recommends “total immersion,” an answer offering less guidance than we might wish.
Nonetheless, in spite of the problems inherent in HCA and AOE, both positions, in their respective emphases on the natural and the environmental, point toward a certain kind of paradigm for appreciation of nature, which is exemplified in the following description by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan:
An adult must learn to be yielding and careless like a child if he were to enjoy nature polymorphously. He needs to slip into old clothes so that he could feel free to stretch out on the hay beside the brook and bathe in a meld of physical sensations: the smell of the hay and of horse dung; the warmth of the ground, its hard and soft contours; the warmth of the sun tempered by breeze; the tickling of an ant making its way up the calf of his leg; the play of shifting leaf shadows on his face; the sound of water over the pebbles and boulders, the sound of cicadas and distant traffic. Such an environment might break all the formal rules of euphony and aesthetics, substituting confusion for order, and yet be wholly satisfying.9
Tuan’s characterization of how to appreciate nature accords well with AOE’s answer to the question of what to appreciate, that is, everything. This answer, of course, will not do. We cannot appreciate everything; there must be limits and emphases in appreciation of nature as there are in appreciation of art. Without such limits and emphases, our experience of natural environments would be only “a meld of physical sensations” without any meaning or significance, what philosopher William James characterized as “blooming buzzing confusion.”10 Such experience would indeed substitute “confusion for order” but, contra to both Tuan and AOE, would be neither “wholly satisfying” nor aesthetic.
Consider Tuan’s example: we experience a “meld of sensations”—the smell of hay and of horse dung, the feel of the ant, the sound of cicadas and of distant traffic. However, if our response is to be aesthetic appreciation rather than just raw experience, the meld cannot remain a “blooming buzzing confusion.” Rather it must become what philosopher John Dewey called a “consummatory experience,”11 one in which knowledge and understanding transform raw experience by making it determinate, harmonious, and meaningful. For example, we must recognize the smell of hay and that of horse dung and perhaps distinguish between them; we must feel the ant at least as an insect rather than as, say, a twitch. In this way recognizing and distinguishing generate foci of aesthetic significance, natural foci appropriate to particular natural environments. Such knowledge of environments also yields appropriate boundaries and limits; the sound of cicadas may be appreciated as a proper part of the environment, but the sound of distant traffic excluded much as we ignore coughing in the concert hall.
Moreover, knowledge of natural environments is relevant not only to the question of what to appreciate, but also to that of how to appreciate. Tuan’s case may be taken as exemplifying a paradigm of nature appreciation, somewhat of a general environmental act of aspection. However, since natural environments, as works of art, differ in type, different natural environments require different acts of aspection; and as with the question of what to appreciate, knowledge of the environments in question indicates how to appreciate, indicates the appropriate acts of aspection. Ziff tells us to look for contours in the Florentine school, for light in a Claude, and for color in a Bonnard, to survey a Tintoretto and to scan a Bosch. Likewise, we must survey a prairie, looking at the subtle contours of the land, feeling the wind blowing across the open space, and smelling the mix of prairie grasses and flowers. But such acts of aspection have little place in a dense forest. Here we must examine and scrutinize, inspecting the detail of the forest floor, listening carefully for the sounds of birds and smelling carefully for the scent of spruce and pine. In appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature, as in that of art, classification is, as Ziff says, of the essence.
Thus the questions of what and how to aesthetically appreciate concerning natural environments may be answered analogously to parallel questions about art. The difference is that with natural environments the relevant knowledge is common sense and scientific knowledge that we have discovered about the environments in question. Such knowledge yields appropriate boundaries of appreciation, particular foci of aesthetic significance, and relevant acts of aspection. If we must have knowledge of art forms, classifications of works, and artistic traditions in order to appreciate art appropriately and aesthetically, then we must have knowledge of different natural environments and their different systems and elements in order to appreciate nature appropriately and aesthetically. Just as the knowledge provided by art critics and art historians enables us to aesthetically appreciate art, that provided by naturalists, ecologists, geologists, biologists, and natural historians equips us to aesthetically appreciate nature.
This position, which takes natural and environmental science as the key to aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, may be termed the Natural Environmental Model (NEM). Like HCA and AOE, this model stresses that natural environments are both natural and environmental and, unlike OAM and LSM, does not assimilate natural objects to art objects nor natural environments to scenery. Yet, unlike HCA and AOE, NEM does not reject the traditional structure of aesthetic appreciation of art as a model for aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. It applies that structure directly to nature, making only such adjustments as are necessary in light of the nature of natural environments. In doing so it avoids the absurdity of deeming appreciation of nature non-aesthetic while yet promoting aesthetic appreciation of nature for what it is and for the qualities it has. Moreover, it thereby addresses the concerns that traditional aesthetic models of nature appreciation, such as OAM and LSM, are anthropocentric or superficial. They have been criticized as anti-natural, not appreciative of nature “on its own terms,” and arrogantly disdainful of environments not conforming to artistic ideals. The root source of such environmental and ethical criticisms is that artistic approaches do not encourage appreciation of nature for what it is and for the qualities it has. Thus, NEM, in basing aesthetic appreciation on the scientific view of what nature is and of what qualities it has, helps to dispel such concerns.
In sum, NEM acknowledges Santayana’s assessment of natural environments as indeterminate and promiscuous, so rich in diversity, suggestion, and vague stimulus that they must be composed to be appreciated. Thus, it suggests that to achieve appropriate aesthetic appreciation, to, as Santayana says, find nature beautiful, the composition must be in terms of common sense and scientific knowledge. The challenge implicit in Santayana’s remarks—that we confront a natural world that allows great liberty in selecting, emphasizing, and grouping, and that we must therefore compose it in order to aesthetically appreciate it—holds out an invitation not simply to find the natural world beautiful, but also to appropriately appreciate it for what it truly is.
1George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of an Aesthetic Theory (1896) (New York: Collier, 1961), p. 99.
2Paul Ziff, “Reasons in Art Criticism,” in Philosophical Turnings: Essays in Conceptual Appreciation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 71.
3Thomas West, Guide to the Lakes (1778), quoted in J. T. Ogden, “From Spatial to Aesthetic Distance in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 66–67.
4Ronald Rees, “The Taste for Mountain Scenery,” History Today 25 (1975): 312.
5Ibid.
6Ronald W. Hepburn, “Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in Aesthetics and the Modern World, ed. H. Osborne (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p. 53.
7Robert Elliot, “Faking Nature,” Inquiry 25 (1982): 90. The label is from Don Mannison, “A Prolegomenon to a Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic,” in Environmental Philosophy, ed. D. Mannison, M. McRobbie, and R. Routley (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980).
8Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature,” in Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 169–70.
9See Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 96.
10William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 462.
11See John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) (New York: Putnam, 1958), especially chap. 3, “Having an Experience,” pp. 35–57.