2. Some Reservations about Natural Beauty

If, before treating the subject named in the title, we set out to answer the question of what nature is or what it is not, we would probably use up the entire length of this doctoral dissertation, and at the end we would still have raised more questions than answers. We could also declare that something such as what nature represents in the Western conceptual world does not in fact exist at all — and we would not be wrong. A whole range of other concepts do not really “exist” either: the Other, the phenomenon, the a priori intuition, being, purpose, illusion, spirit and the like. Of course concepts do not exist, are not located anywhere and have no extension — that, after all, is their essence! We can acknowledge them as epiphenomena of cognitive processes, but we could hardly grant them any connection with things in themselves. In this respect “nature” is just one of many (loosely defined) concepts. And yet for the most part we use it as if it were something real. More than that: we mostly use it as though we knew exactly what it means and as though everyone else understood just as precisely what we mean by it. The concept of nature is quite different from the concept of ethics or the idea of the good. It seems to us that we can actually grasp nature, smell it, destroy it, preserve it, experience it and change it. Nature is at our fingertips; we need only stretch out a hand. The concept of nature pretends to be a thing in itself, while at the same time trying to conceal its true, transcendental character. It merely looks like the experience of a thing, whereas in truth it is what makes such experience possible in the first place.

The story of the use and usage of the concept of nature is also a story about ourselves. Through our bodies we are, in a very intimate way, part of nature; we are nature. We know very well what it means to be nature. Asking what the essence of human existence is and how it might be summed up, the NASA astronomer Dr Michelle Thaller answers that it turns out to be quite simple: we are dead stars looking back up at the sky (Wells, 2014) — explaining the fact that practically all the atoms in our bodies were formed in stars. The universe began with, and feeds on, the simplest element — hydrogen. All the remaining elements were formed through the birth and death of stars. Everything you are, Thaller adds — literally, the iron in your bloodstream — was formed in the moments when stars were dying; when you cut yourself and see the red liquid of oxidised haemoglobin, you are in effect looking at the moments of death of some solar system, and your body literally is such a moment of death. She notes that there is of course no unlimited quantity of hydrogen in the universe, which means that in time all the stars will go out and the universe will be in complete darkness, whatever that may mean. Astronomers such as Thaller are aware of the unique position in which humanity exploits the light of the Sun and its free energy in order to develop, to become sentient and to look outwards into the universe. How incredible it is that this is only a fleeting moment in the history of the universe … it is then that we really become aware of what a wonderful time this is and how wonderful our life is; I wonder whether one day people will tell myths about the stars and their light energy (Wells, 2014). Because of the totality of its perspectives, scientism can sometimes be tedious; in the aesthetics of nature it is downright irksome, since it establishes relations that unsettle established philosophical doctrines. On the view just outlined, man is an inseparable part of nature, and nature extends from the first to the last corner of the universe. If man is nature, then everything else is nature too, and the discussion is over before we have asked our first question: what, then, of the things that humanoids made of stardust create? Where do we put artefacts — the matter that humans transform into tools, works of art and other objects? Artefacts, too, are made of elements formed in stars, and if we try to picture vividly the stock of energy and matter in the universe, artefacts are, so to speak, merely rearranged elements of “stardust” … It is precisely thoughts such as these that reinforce the remark above about how the concept of nature conceals its transcendental character. And it is precisely such a thought — the one that seems most concrete and comprehensive — that is, as far as reflection on the concept of nature is concerned, the most speculative. A framework of this kind has a solution for every problem, including, for instance, the one in which, starting from the first atom and passing through chains of reactions in celestial bodies, we arrive at a present in which we can call the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human internal combustion engines a “natural phenomenon”. Our main concern is not what real nature is, but whether “nature” is the right word for it at all. What is to be done when the framework offers a solution to every problem, and the problems are infinitely many?

Critics of the “natural” rightly point out that human influence is so great, extensive and all-pervading that in a world of globalised transport of people and goods we can no longer speak of nature in its classical sense. Weisman reminds us that when human beings began to travel all over the world, they took living things with them: plants from the Americas changed not only the ecosystems of European countries but also their identity — think of Ireland before the potato, or Italy before the tomato; and the newcomers from the Old World not only fell upon hapless women and appropriated land, but also spread other kinds of seeds, above all wheat, barley and rye. In the term coined by the American geographer Alfred Crosby, this “ecological imperialism” allowed the European conquerors to leave a lasting mark on their colonies (Weisman, 2009, p. 36) — and Weisman thereby points to the fact that today’s world is in truth a colony.

Since more than 95 per cent of the world’s oceans remain unexplored, fewer people have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench than to the Moon. It seems that the depths of the unexplored oceans have been colonised by our rubbish before us. The results of a survey of the seabed in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic Ocean off Europe reveal that plastic bottles, plastic bags, fishing gear and other litter are found even at a depth of four and a half kilometres below the surface, and up to 2,000 kilometres from the coast (Pham et al., 2014). In the 1960s more and more plastic particles — and more and more kinds of them — began to be observed in the world’s seas. By the 1990s samples already contained three times as much acrylic, polyester and other synthetic polymers as three decades earlier. Science has found that the slow mechanical action of waves and tides, which grinds down coastlines and turns rock into sand, is now breaking up plastic as well; large objects bobbing on the waves have gradually become ever smaller, while there has been no sign that all this plastic biodegrades, even when crushed into tiny particles (Weisman, 2009, p. 127). The quantities of plastic in the world’s oceans are so great that entire islands of plastic float in them, visible on satellite photographs. In 1975 the US National Academy of Sciences estimated that all ocean-going vessels together dumped 3.5 million kilograms of plastic a year; more recent research has shown that the world’s merchant fleet alone shamelessly dumps 639,000 plastic containers every day (p. 133). Ten years ago the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was estimated at 25 million square kilometres, almost the area of Africa; plastic pellets in the sea act as sponges for persistent toxins such as DDT and PCBs. Scientists at the University of Plymouth predict that tiny plastic particles will soon be eaten by everything that lives, and that when the particles have been reduced to the size of dust, even zooplankton will be swallowing plastic.

Why it makes sense to ask how much of the environment on Earth is still natural at all is perhaps best illustrated by yet another of the all-too-numerous examples in Weisman’s book. There is a great deal of depleted uranium on Earth today, and new nuclear power stations will produce still more; it will still be here in 250,000 years. In the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for the isolation of nuclear waste has been operating since 1999 in salt domes 700 metres beneath south-eastern New Mexico. It can take approximately 156,000 two-hundred-litre drums of plutonium-laden waste, and it is being filled from a few dozen strictly guarded military plants from all over the country. The first to send its waste to the salt domes was the weapons plant at Rocky Flats, 25 kilometres from Denver. Until 1989 the Americans manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons there, and safety measures were applied rather loosely. As Weisman describes, everything at Rocky Flats that was too contaminated or too heavy to move was covered with concrete and seven metres of soil and the area closed to hikers, although it is not yet known how they will be stopped. WIPP, where much of the Rocky Flats plant ended up, is required by the US Department of Energy to ensure that no one approaches the site for the next 10,000 years. After a discussion of human languages, which mutate so quickly that after 500 or 600 years they are almost unrecognisable, it was decided to put up, in addition to pictures, inscriptions in seven of them after all — carved into eight-metre-high, twenty-tonne granite blocks and into twenty-centimetre tablets of fired clay and aluminium oxide buried at random throughout the area (Weisman, p. 230). More detailed information about the dangers lurking below will be written on the walls of three identical rooms, two of which will be buried. Over the whole area there is to rise a ten-metre-high berm, one square metre in cross-section, in which magnets and radar reflectors will be embedded, warning the future with every possible signal that there is something dangerous below (p. 231).

We can observe an interesting reversal. From a position in which everything — from the Big Bang to the iron in our blood — was nature, we have arrived at a place where — because of nuclear tests and the saturation of the world with microscopic particles of plastic — nothing is natural any more. This position is interestingly consolidated by one of the distinctions proposed by Pierre Hadot in interpreting the “secrets of nature”. We can choose between two approaches: the first is the “Promethean” and the second the “Orphic”. The first uses the methods of science; the second — note this — uses aesthetic perception, insofar as art can be understood as a method for understanding nature (Hadot, 2006, p. 211). Let us dwell on the Promethean approach, which Hadot does not experience as aesthetic: the approach that disappoints lovers of the natural with data about the nuclear material scattered by years of nuclear testing, about the litter on the bottom of the oceans and about the invisible mechanisms of the substances that humanity leaves behind it. As Bruno Latour observes in Pandora’s Hope, in the modernist settlement objects were placed in nature and subjects in society; now we have replaced objects and subjects with scientific facts and technical artefacts, which have an entirely different fate and form. Whereas objects can only be set against subjects — and vice versa — nonhumans can be folded into humans through the fundamental process of translation, articulation, delegation, of shifting out and shifting down. What can we call the house in which they have settled? Certainly not nature, since its existence is entirely disputed (Latour, 2011, p. 200) — nor, likewise, society.

Kante agrees that in the contemporary world the sharp boundary between nature and artefact is becoming ever more blurred and ever harder to determine and discern. Latour speaks of “hybrids”, in which the natural is so intertwined with the artefactual that the one can no longer exist without the other, since the “human” and the “technological” help to shape each other. We find the present so hard to understand precisely because the whole of nature and the whole of culture are mixed together in it every day … Our basic categories are mixed up; things are too richly determined for us to deal with them successfully in categorial terms … We are incapable of separating the natural from the cultural sphere — not because they are hopelessly and indistinguishably intertwined, but because the dualism of nature and culture is above all meaningless. The purification of the one by means of the other is impossible, since there never were two separate, opposed spheres (Kante, 2009, pp. 24–25).

Does our intuition, then, tell us that natural science sees too much in nature, while aesthetics pretends that nature is something it is not? This opposition is not new. Kant¹⁶ was already aware of the difference between the scientific and the aesthetic approach. Among other things he illustrates it with the example of the ocean: “we are not to regard it as we, with our minds stored with knowledge on a variety of matters (which, however, is not contained in the immediate intuition), are wont to represent it in thought, as, let us say, a spacious realm of aquatic creatures, or as the mighty reservoirs from which are drawn the vapours that fill the air with clouds of moisture for the good of the land, or yet as an element which no doubt divides continent from continent, but at the same time affords the means of the greatest commercial intercourse between them — for in this way we get nothing beyond teleological judgements. Instead of this we must be able to see sublimity in the ocean, regarding it, as the poets do, according to what the impression upon the eye reveals, as, let us say, in its calm a clear mirror of water bounded only by the heavens, or, be it disturbed, as threatening to overwhelm and engulf everything” (Kant, 1999, pp. 110–111).✓

The question of how to see things so that we do not overlook them is, of course, an important one. We humans are accustomed to looking at the environment — and above all at nature — in a set way. The aesthetics of nature cannot be a matter of a sudden flash of insight, but of conscious effort. By way of illustration, Hadot sets up three worlds as three paradigms of the perception of the environment. The first world is the world of everyday life, in which we perceive what is useful to us and important at that moment. Usually we do not concern ourselves with stars and mountain ridges. If we live in a city, the countryside or the seashore is an opportunity for rest and relaxation; if we are farmers or fishermen, it is an opportunity to earn a living. Opposite the first world stands the world of scientific knowledge, in which, for example, the Earth revolves around the Sun. The Copernican revolution changed the theoretical discourse of scientists and philosophers, but in reality it changed nothing in their lives. Edmund Husserl, and after him Maurice Merleau-Ponty, showed convincingly that in our lives there is no Copernican revolution, Hadot observes (2006, pp. 211–212), referring to the fact that, despite all our knowledge, we humans still perceive the Earth as a motionless surface. Opposite the world of everyday life there also stands the world of aesthetic perception, in which we no longer look at things and phenomena from a utilitarian standpoint, and therefore no longer select things merely according to their purpose for our momentary interest. The illustration with the three worlds, and the claim that scientific knowledge does not influence our (aesthetic) perception, are problematic.¹⁷ Hadot takes the aesthetic approach in art and tries to apply it to nature, whereby the debates of the past return once more to the agenda. And rightly so.

Kant stresses that “the fact that the delight in beautiful art does not, in the pure judgement of taste, involve an immediate interest, as does that in beautiful nature, may be readily explained. For the former is either such an imitation of the latter as goes the length of deceiving us, in which case it acts upon us in the character of a natural beauty” (Kant, 1999, pp. 141–142).✓ We have an interest in nature and natural phenomena. They move us. We seek them out; we set them apart from the rest of the world because they are supposed to be natural: “The bird’s song tells of joyousness and contentment with its existence. At least so we interpret nature — whether such be its purpose or not. But it is the indispensable requisite of the interest which we here take in beauty, that the beauty should be that of nature, and it vanishes completely as soon as we are conscious of having been deceived, and that it is only the work of art”, Kant observes (1999, p. 142),✓ and offers the example of a boy who, hidden in a bush beside an inn garden, imitates the song of the nightingale. “But the instant one realizes that it is all a fraud no one will long endure listening to this song that before was regarded as so attractive … It must be nature, or be mistaken by us for nature, to enable us to take an immediate interest in the beautiful as such” (p. 143).✓

In asking where the gap between aesthetic judgements about art and judgements about nature comes from, Kante, in his article “Natural and Artistic Beauty in Kant: Free and Merely Adherent (Conditional, Dependent) Beauty”, draws on Walton’s categories of art. Four circumstances must be fulfilled for us to perceive a work of art correctly within the appropriate category. As Kante explains, the last two are that the artist who created the work intended or expected it to be perceived within a certain category, and that this category is well established and recognised in the society in which the work was created. The difficulty, of course, is precisely that nature was not created by an artist … For this reason an important part of Walton’s account cannot be transferred without hesitation to most judgements about natural objects. Not only works of art are products of society, but also the categories of art themselves — which does not hold for nature. In a word: nature does not fit the categories of art (Kante, 2008, p. 86).

How, then, does the aesthetics of nature differ from the aesthetics of art? In the article mentioned, Kante argues that the object itself — nature — cannot be the factor that distinguishes the aesthetics of nature from any other aesthetics. We can therefore adopt two positions: according to the first, the aesthetic evaluation of nature and of art differ only in the different nature of their objects; according to the second, we can look at nature as if it were art. Kant adopted the second position: the concept that originally arises from the power of judgement and is peculiar to it is thus the concept of nature as art (Kant, 1999, p. 336). Kante rejects this position: just as the aesthetic evaluation of art is the evaluation of art as art, so the aesthetic evaluation of nature is the aesthetic evaluation of nature as nature. For if we hold that the natural world is no one’s artefact, then the aesthetic evaluation of nature as nature, if it is to be faithful to what nature actually is, must be the aesthetic evaluation of nature, but not as an intentionally created product (and therefore not as art) … Finally, the experience of nature as art offers no sufficiently essential benefits to outweigh the advantages of the aesthetic experience of nature as it actually is, such that it would be better to perceive nature in the first way rather than the second. So it is not necessary for us to judge a natural thing aesthetically as though it were a work of art; and since nature is not art, judging it as though it were art is simply a mistaken judgement (Kante, 2008, pp. 86–87).

We may therefore have several reservations concerning nature and natural beauty. Besides grappling with the question of the extent to which our perception of nature is “weighed down” with patterns and models from the world of art, we must ask whether we are dealing with “nature” at all. Kante, too, observes that the aesthetic evaluation of nature is stretched between two poles: on the one hand we have pure, pristine nature, on the other unlimited nature. Pure nature is nature not yet touched by the human hand, and as such it is a fiction, since we know that such nature no longer exists in today’s world … The concept of unlimited nature, on the other hand, encompasses everything in the universe, particular and general, object or force, however it is recognised and whatever its origins (Kante, 2009, p. 25). Pure nature admits no artefacts and no changes introduced by humans; unlimited nature accepts all influences as natural. The aesthetics of nature tries, unsuccessfully, to resolve this dichotomy by means of the dichotomy between pure nature and artefact, which in turn expresses the traditional division into the aesthetics of nature and the aesthetics of art. Hadot does equate the aesthetics of nature with aesthetics (of art) in general, but in the end, with reference to Goethe, he observes that art, especially in the technological sphere, may attain an enviable level of perfection and give the impression that it can transcend nature; yet still nothing [of this kind] can surpass the living being (Hadot, 2006, p. 220). Already in the introduction, when setting out the thesis, I mentioned that we would try to distance ourselves from aesthetic-artistic depictions of nature and from the aesthetic appreciation of nature on the model of art. The aesthetics of nature ought to appreciate nature, not “nature on postcards”. Nature as an object of aesthetic appreciation is different from a work of art in a gallery. We will behave like the guest in the inn garden where a boy hidden in a bush wonderfully imitates the song of the nightingale — and Kant sobers us up and acquaints us with the deception. What, then, are we to appreciate if “pure nature” is in fact a fiction?

To defend the position that there is no longer any pure nature, and therefore no nature at all, and that the aesthetics of nature is consequently questionable, is fruitless and unnecessary. Parsons is convinced that we can, and must, retain the concept of nature, though it needs to be supplemented. The movement of clouds in the sky, the tides of the seas and the beating of the human heart are natural phenomena, and we can call nature everything that is not intentionally brought about by humans. We are dependent on nature, and a great many natural phenomena still take place without human influence. The consequences of nuclear accidents and the disasters caused by climate change may to a certain extent be “unnatural”, but gravity, the motion of the planets, the contraction of the universe and the changing of the seasons cannot be unnatural. Although many things happen because of our presence, many do not, he calls us to reason (Parsons, 2008, p. 3). A very widespread criticism (which shamelessly flirts with the concept of unlimited nature) holds that human civilisation sprang from the same physical processes that created forests, reptiles and other animals. In Parsons’s view, separating “real” nature from a categorically different human world is a rather arbitrary decision. As we saw above, we can only agree with him, and it is precisely for this reason that Parsons asks whether it would not be better simply to abandon the current concept of nature — and, more importantly still, to forbid talk of beauty when we speak of nature.

In his view, abandoning the concept of nature would be a very unwise move, since we would be left without a very fruitful concept. It is different with the concept of beauty, which is perhaps one of the most indeterminate and broadly conceived of all. When we speak of something as beautiful, we are in fact speaking of our relationship to it. To its parents a child is beautiful because they feel affection and duty towards it. Parsons reflects that the use of “beauty” is particularly conspicuous in the case of nature, since many people cherish very strong feelings of love or attachment towards it … This raises the worry that when we speak of the beauty of nature we are in fact speaking of something else — of our love for it — and in an indirect and complicated form (Parsons, 2008, p. 5). In his view the concept of beauty adds little to the discussion of the aesthetics of nature and, if anything, obscures its object. For cases in which we use the words beauty and nature in the same sentence, Parsons therefore proposes the following definition: [nature] is a certain perceptible phenomenon that has come about or occurs without the intervention of human beings … Most contemporary philosophers use the notion of “beauty” with a certain reluctance; they prefer to speak of the “aesthetic qualities” of natural things (p. 6).

What, then, can we do about the worries that reflection on nature and natural beauty brings with it? Kante observes that we should not expect to be able to find a single, more or less pure conception of nature that will be adequate to the complexity of the various ways in which we appreciate nature aesthetically. Aesthetic nature and art are probably more closely connected with each other than we are prepared to believe, or than our intuitions tell us (Kante, 2009, p. 27).

2.1. The Original Sin: Hepburn and/or Adorno?

The most prominent and longest-standing authors in the field of the aesthetics of nature belong to the analytic tradition of the British and American philosophical world. As has been said, a very broad consensus has been reached concerning the “re-enthronement” (Drenthen and Keulartz, 2014, pp. 41–42) of the discipline: in 1966, with his article “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” (Hepburn, 2006), Ronald W. Hepburn placed natural beauty on the list of philosophical topics. His text truly deserves the oft-bestowed title of a “seminal article”. In some twenty-five pages he set out questions that opened up many new themes, and with his warning that the neglect of natural beauty is “a very bad thing” (Hepburn, 2006, p. 47) he unsettled the philosophical community to such an extent that, almost half a century after its publication, it is still occupied with him. Reading the lists of literature and sources, one may get the impression that the aesthetics of nature is the domain of analytic philosophy and that it only rarely meets with representatives and works of the continental tradition. In this respect Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment naturally stands out; Hegel is less “popular” and is cited insofar as his reflections on art and nature in the lectures on aesthetics are relevant (Hegel, 2003). Here and there someone mentions Hans Jonas; otherwise it seems as though the aesthetics of nature sprouted from seeds sown by British landscape painting and from horizons opened up by tireless walkers across the American prairies and mountain ridges.

To a certain extent this picture is accurate. When Europeans concern themselves with the aesthetics of nature, Kant, Hegel¹⁸ and other authors appear much more frequently than when the problems of natural beauty are written about by representatives of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical world. In a way this is “natural”, but it creates the mistaken belief (of almost mythical proportions) that it is exclusively thanks to Hepburn that humanity began to appreciate natural beauty. For four years after Hepburn, Theodor W. Adorno devoted a separate chapter of his Ästhetische Theorie to natural beauty. As Marta Tafalla (2011) observes in her article “Rehabilitating the Aesthetics of Nature: Hepburn and Adorno”, these were two different philosophers who did not know each other, came from different milieus and wrote in different languages. Nevertheless, almost simultaneously they published texts in which they called for the reintroduction of an aesthetics of nature that the academic world had until then entirely neglected. Although we shall not return to Adorno in the following chapters, it is precisely he who drew attention to the aesthetic problems of the media mediation of natural beauty with which, among other things, I deal in this doctoral dissertation. He assumed that many factors in our culture make the aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty more difficult, and that we must therefore investigate the positive and negative influences of the education system, the mass media, the entertainment and tourism industries and other fields on our relationship to nature.

Tafalla begins the “strange story” of the publication of the two fundamental texts with their reception: with these two texts aesthetics once again opened the door to reflection on natural beauty, “in a process which also included reflection on other phenomena such as fashion, design, advertising, urban environments, etc., thus putting an end to the primacy of art”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, pp. 45–46). Although the aesthetics of nature has developed enormously in the decades since the publication of the two texts, the analytic discourse that followed from Hepburn’s work and the continental heritage of Adorno’s reflections remain separate orientations to this day, with almost no communication between them. Hepburn and Adorno could not, of course, have discussed the subject, since the chapter on natural beauty in Ästhetische Theorie was published after Adorno’s death. Nevertheless, their successors did not establish a dialogue either. Tafalla wants to show that — despite the clear differences between Hepburn and Adorno — there is also a range of affinities and similar ideas between the two texts that could make a dialogue between the two traditions possible. She attempts to begin it with four questions and a comparison of Hepburn’s and Adorno’s answers to them:

1. Why should aesthetics reflect on natural beauty?

2. Why did the aesthetics of nature sink into oblivion?

3. How do nature and art differ?

4. What should the fundamental concept of the aesthetics of nature be?

At least on the first question — why aesthetics should reflect on natural beauty at all — Hepburn and Adorno offer similar reasons: the first concerns the benefits that such reflection brings to aesthetics in general, the second the beneficial effects of such an attitude on people’s relationship to nature. As far as natural beauty is concerned, Hepburn writes, “a critical literature scarcely exists. The philosopher must first work out his own detailed and systematic account of the aesthetic enjoyment of nature. And this he has so far been slow, or reluctant, to do”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 47), and he explains why “the neglect is a very bad thing: bad because aesthetics is thereby steered off from examining an important and richly complex set of relevant data; and bad because when a set of human experiences is ignored in a theory relevant to them, they tend to be rendered less readily available as experiences” (Hepburn, 2006, p. 47).✓

Adorno agrees with the idea that aesthetics should embrace natural beauty, and he tries to support this decision with an analysis of the relationship between art and nature. For him they are opposed entities — the first is a human creation, the second is pre-human and different from humans, although we humans emerged from nature. Art and nature sustain a dialectical tension, or, as Adorno announces: “The concept of natural beauty rubs on a wound, and little is needed to prompt one to associate this wound with the violence that the artwork — a pure artifact — inflicts on nature. Wholly artifactual, the artwork seems to be the opposite of what is not made, nature. As pure antitheses, however, each refers to the other: nature to the experience of a mediated and objectified world, the artwork to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of immediacy. Therefore reflection on natural beauty is irrevocably requisite to the theory of art”¹⁹ (Adorno, 1997, p. 98).✓ At the same time, in Adorno’s view, an aesthetics centred solely on art and focused on the human being renounces the understanding of the complexity of reality. As Tafalla explains, “In Adornian language, it is analyzing only that which is identical to human reason and neglecting anything that is non-identical. This is the great error that Adorno attributes to Hegel, and it is an error that leads to a solipsistic aesthetics, and a closing down of the monologue of humans themselves”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 47).

The second reason the two authors give in answer to the question of why aesthetics should reflect on natural beauty concerns the benefits such a step brings to the relationship between people and nature. Hepburn observes that a good many people enjoy aesthetic experiences of the natural environment, but without an existing theory (and consequently a language) such experiences also remain without proper analysis: “If we cannot find sensible-sounding language in which to describe them—language of a piece with the rest of our aesthetic talk, the experiences are felt, in an embarrassed way, as off-the-map; and, since off the map, seldom visited”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 47). We can detect a warning here that without the proper language humanity might not have such experiences at all. To a certain extent it is true that we never visit towns and places that are not on the map, or else we find ourselves there by chance. And if we do find ourselves “there”, we do not know that this is “it”.

Adorno similarly observes that the absence of an aesthetics of nature is connected with the ever greater scale of the exploitation of natural resources. Reflection on natural beauty could curb it, and at the same time humanity would no longer see in nature merely a means for the realisation of its ends, but a source of beauty and inspiration. Tafalla completes Adorno’s thought: “It is in the aesthetic experience of nature that humans recognize themselves as finite, that they learn to admire and respect what is different and to understand that there should be a limit to their actions”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 33). “The progress of civilization, however, easily deceives human beings as to how vulnerable they remain even now. Delight in nature was bound up with the conception of the subject as being-for-itself and virtually infinite in itself; as such the subject projected itself onto nature and in its isolation felt close to it; the subject’s powerlessness in a society petrified into a second nature becomes the motor of the flight into a purportedly first nature”✓ (Adorno, 1997, p. 103). Already in comparing the answers to the first question, Tafalla points to the possibility of beginning a dialogue, and a mutual complementing, between Adorno and Hepburn.

On the second question — why the aesthetics of nature sank into oblivion, or was banished from the discipline — we can observe the greatest divergence between them. Hepburn identifies the problem at the very beginning of his article, but does not go on to look for its causes. In his words, “In our own day, however, writings on aesthetics attend almost exclusively to the arts and very rarely indeed to natural beauty, or only in the most perfunctory manner … Relevant facts, then, are these: that—for all the cult of the open air, the caravans, camps and excursions in the family car—serious aesthetic concern with nature is today rather a rare phenomenon … The characteristic image of contemporary man, as we all know, is that of a ‘stranger’, encompassed by a nature, which is indifferent, unmeaning and ‘absurd’”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, pp. 45–46). The role of nature as an “educator” conveying morally ennobling messages through beauty has been taken over by science and art. Aesthetic theories focused on art, and since nature was not successfully incorporated into such reflections, it came to be regarded as uninteresting — in expression theory, for instance.

Adorno, by contrast, is convinced that the aesthetics of nature can come to life only if we first grasp why it disappeared and what the history of this eclipse has been. Among other things he stresses that the aesthetic experience of nature is not universal and ahistorical; rather, the bare possibility of the aesthetic appreciation of nature is itself historically conditioned. We cannot know what makes up the aesthetic experience of nature unless we delve into its development in different historical periods. As Tafalla observes, Adorno recognises a parallel between the domination of nature and the neglect of natural beauty. Neglect itself is, in her words, “a strategy for domination, which in its most absolute form is one in which everything that is dominated is forgotten, making it impossible to awaken feelings of solidarity. Therefore, to put an end to that domination, a process of remembering lost natural beauty is required”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 49). Adorno took a similar approach in confronting entirely different philosophical problems. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, he asked how a renewed moral philosophy could be aware of what had happened and ensure that nothing like it ever happened again. As Tafalla points out, Adorno found his answer in a new kind of moral philosophy built on the idea of remembrance, in which Kant’s categorical imperative is transformed into an imperative of memory. As she writes, “In considering this question in depth, I would suggest that the Adornian idea of remembering natural beauty forms part of a broader philosophical project that consists of remembering everything that has been subjugated or violated in the name of false progress … this is the only way to defeat the strategy for domination that is neglect. In this sense I believe that Adornian philosophy could be understood as a philosophy of memory”✓ (2011, p. 49).

In posing the third question — how nature and art differ — Hepburn and Adorno utter the same warning: for a true aesthetic theory of natural beauty we must not use the theory of art. We must start from natural beauty in order to find out how nature differs from art. Both agree on this, but it is Hepburn who systematically explores three fundamental differences between nature and art.

In his view, the first and most important difference is the fact that works of art are human creations, whereas nature is not. For this reason we cannot appreciate art and nature aesthetically in the same way. Given the lack of a systematic description, Hepburn first offers a kind of account of the diversity of the aesthetic experience of nature. Since this is immensely varied, he proposes two principles of selection:

a) Art objects have a number of general characteristics which objects in nature lack.

b) Art objects are set apart from their environment in a distinctive way.

Concerning point a), Hepburn observes that the absence of some of these characteristics is not merely negative or privative in its effect, but can contribute positively and valuably to the aesthetic experience of nature (2006, p. 48). In nature we are involved in the aesthetic situation to varying degrees. We may be static and disengaged observers, but for the most part objects in nature surround us on all sides — in a forest, for example, or while swimming in the sea. If we walk, cycle or fly in a glider, movement is also an important component of the experience. As Hepburn puts it, we have not only a mutual involvement of spectator and object, but also a reflexive effect in which the spectator experiences himself in an unusual and vivid way, and this difference is not merely noted but dwelt upon aesthetically. This effect is not unknown to art, especially architecture; but it is far more intensely realised and pervasive in the experience of nature, since we are in nature and a part of nature; we do not stand over against it as we stand before a picture on a wall (2006, p. 48). There is of course a kind of disinterestedness, Hepburn adds, in that we do not exploit nature, manipulate it or anticipate what we might do with it. But I am both actor and spectator, ingredient in the landscape, lingering on the sensations of being thus ingredient, rejoicing in their variety, playing actively with nature and letting nature, as it were, play with me and my sense of myself (2006, pp. 48–49).

The second difference between nature and art is the separateness of art objects from their environment. Under point b) Hepburn admits, of course, that by no means all art objects have a frame or a pedestal, but we nevertheless perceive them as set apart from their surroundings: the words “frame” and “framed” can be used in an extended sense to cover not only the physical boundaries of pictures but also the various devices used in the different arts to prevent art objects from being mistaken for natural objects or for artefacts without aesthetic interest (2006, p. 49). The list of such frames includes, for example, the division between stage and auditorium in the theatre, the concert convention that the sounds of the orchestra matter and not the coughing of the audience in the hall, the typography of books that separates the text from headings, notes and critical apparatus, the frame of a picture, the pedestal of a statue … On the other hand, Hepburn is convinced that natural objects know no such limits. Nature is supposed to be frameless, and when we walk in a forest we do not know exactly what we should appreciate and what not. Everything we perceive with our five senses makes up our aesthetic experience. As Tafalla also vividly remarks in her article, in a gallery we know that a dog running through the room is not (necessarily) part of the aesthetic experience, whereas a dog running past us in a forest can be included in it calmly and without much difficulty. The absence of a frame is a disadvantage, Hepburn admits, yet he nonetheless sees some considerable compensating advantages. Whatever lies outside the “frames” of works of art cannot normally become part of the aesthetic experiences relevant to them: “If the absence of ‘frame’ precludes full determinateness and stability in the natural aesthetic object, it at least offers in return such unpredictable perceptual surprises; and their mere possibility imparts to the contemplation of nature a sense of adventurous openness”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, pp. 49–50). Compared with the experience of art, then, the experience of nature is less determinate, more all-inclusive and spontaneous, and contains room even for adventure and surprise. Hepburn observes that in the art object we find built-in guides to interpretation and contextual controls on our response, whereas with natural objects we are faced with a different background experience: “Again, it is a kind of exhilaration, in this case a delight in the fact that the forms of the natural world offer scope for the exercise of the imagination, that leaf pattern chimes with vein or pattern, cloud form with mountain form and mountain form with human form”✓ (2006, pp. 50–51).

Many years before Hepburn and Adorno, Hegel had resolutely put things in their place. He broke with the praise of nature and subordinated it entirely to art. According to Hegel, we have an interesting notion of the work of art as a product of human activity, one that refers to the relation of the work of art to the external phenomena of nature: “Here the ordinary way of looking at things took easily to the notion that the human art-product ranked below the product of nature; for the work of art has no feeling in itself and is not through and through enlivened, but, regarded as an external object, is dead; but we are accustomed to value the living higher than the dead” (Hegel, 2003, p. 46).✓ The work of art is of course not active in itself, Hegel concedes, adding that living nature is, inwardly and outwardly, an organisation perfected down to its smallest details, while the work of art gives the appearance of life only on its surface. Something becomes a work of art only if it receives “the baptism of the spiritual”. In the work of art we grasp human interest, and much better than in non-artistic actuality: “Therefore the work of art stands higher than any natural product which has not made this journey through the spirit. For example, owing to the feeling and insight whereby a landscape has been represented in a painting, this work of the spirit acquires a higher rank than the mere natural landscape. For everything spiritual is better than any product of nature” (pp. 46–47).✓ What the spirit grasps in its own interior it is also able, as Hegel puts it, to endow with a certain permanence. No such permanence is found in natural environments, since “the individual living thing in nature is transient, vanishing, changeable in outward appearance, while the work of art persists” (p. 47).✓ Hegel naturally also takes issue with God as the “author” of nature, declaring that “God is more honoured by what the spirit makes than by the productions and formations of nature. For not only is there something divine in man, but it is active in him in a form appropriate to the being of God in a totally different and higher manner than it is in nature” (p. 47).✓

Adorno claims exactly the opposite: certain artistic genres, especially landscape painting, seem to show us how we should appreciate natural beauty. This intuition is mistaken, since in Adorno’s view art cannot capture natural beauty. “Only what had escaped nature as fate would help nature to its restitution. The more that art is thoroughly organized as an object by the subject and divested of the subject’s intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significative language;²⁰ this would perhaps be the same language that is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name, ‘The Book of Nature’ … The vanishing point of this development — admittedly an aspect only of modern art — is the insight that nature, as something beautiful, cannot be copied.²¹ For natural beauty as something that appears is itself image. Its portrayal is a tautology that, by objectifying what appears, eliminates it”✓ (Adorno, 1997, p. 105). With this position Adorno sets himself firmly against Hegel, who claimed that the work of art “stands higher” than the landscape that inspired it.

Tafalla observes that Adorno’s attack on landscape painting is interesting because a few decades later a similar development took place in a prominent author of the analytic tradition, Allen Carlson. He clearly and decisively rejected the widespread habit of using landscape painting as a model for the appreciation of nature and natural environments. Tafalla sums up the gist of Carlson’s work: “To see a real forest or a valley in a way that is influenced by landscape painting, is to flatten and frame and freeze nature and see only an image, a view”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 51). Carlson himself is even more uncompromising, calling such an approach to nature nothing less than the scenery cult, which, as he puts it, “accentuates overall form and formal qualities and thus implicitly guides the appreciator towards these qualities in the appreciation of the natural environment”✓ (Carlson, 2000, p. 33). He does not reject landscape painting as such, for he does assert that for canvases and “their poor cousins, the postcard reproductions”✓, formal features are of exceptional importance; but, he writes, “the Claude-glass, the camera viewfinder, and the scenic viewpoint all help make the environment look more like landscape art as they tone down harsh contrasts, make detail less evident, accentuate overall relations and patterns, and more or less provide limits for the scene”✓, and in all this, he adds, form is enhanced at the expense of the other aesthetically significant qualities of the natural environment (p. 33). In her analysis Tafalla notes that the reasons for rejecting landscape painting (in the aesthetic approach to nature) differ in Adorno and Carlson, but that it is nevertheless “very interesting that both authors place some expectations on another artistic discipline: architecture”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 51). Adorno perceives it as an art that does not depict or copy nature but coexists with it. Such coexistence is supposed to help us appreciate natural beauty; more than that, through it we are supposed to discover ways in which we might coexist more peacefully with nature. As his model Adorno holds up the “cultural landscape”, in which buildings adapt to the forms and contours of the land.

After the first three questions, in which Tafalla compared the parallels and divergences between Hepburn and Adorno, she also confronted their views on the fourth question — what the fundamental concept of the aesthetics of nature should be. Here, too, she found similar positions in both. At the time his article was written, Hepburn observed that accounts of natural beauty sometimes focus on a single natural object for the sake of its individuality and uniqueness — a snowflake, say, the flow of a river or a falling autumn leaf. “Other writers, with greater metaphysical daring—or rashness—speak of the enjoyment of natural beauty as tending towards an ideal of ‘oneness with nature’ or as leading to the disclosure of ‘unity’ in nature”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, pp. 51–52). The unity of the aesthetic experience of nature has been (and was), as Hepburn already observed several decades ago, a constantly recurring theme; but this is not a matter of rejecting theory and bowing to pantheistic and mystical visions. Hepburn expressly warns that we must not think of two different aesthetic excellences: one contemplating individual uniqueness and the other aiming at some great synthesis. As he writes, “I want to argue that there are certain incompletenesses in the experience of the isolated particular, that produce a nisus towards the other pole, the pole of unity”✓ (p. 52). Hepburn points out that there is, of course, no single kind of unification or union, but several notions within the ideal, and the relations between them are complex. What matters above all is that different kinds of experience of unity in nature can lead to different theories in the aesthetics of nature.

The first such notion of the experience of unity Hepburn calls the challenge of integration. In it we notice, and accept as aesthetically relevant, certain forms or sounds that initially lie outside the limits of our attention. In such an experience we strive to grasp and coherently arrange the greatest possible amount of information: the stream of stimuli through our senses, spatial extension, scientific knowledge about a given environment, and our interpretative capacity concerning it. Hepburn compares the stereotyped experiences of the aesthetically apathetic and unadventurous person with the finely varied experiences of the aesthetically courageous person: “His courage consists in his refusal to heed only those features of a natural object or scene that most readily come together in a familiar pattern or which yield a comfortingly generalized emotional quality”✓ (pp. 52–53). For courage also means accepting the risk that we will be unable to hold the various elements together as a single object of contemplation, or that we will be unable to draw from them any significant aesthetic experience at all (p. 53). Nevertheless, the “challenge of integration” is more or less an ideal, Hepburn stresses, adding that unity here performs a regulative, that is, an ordering role. Nature is not a given whole, and there are also practical and psychological limits to such an extension.

A further step beyond the contemplation of uninterpreted particulars Hepburn calls the humanising or spiritualising of nature. In this experience of unity, observers project their personal world onto nature and turn it into a mirror of the landscape of their own interior. In such an experience nature becomes less and less alien and more and more familiar. Hegel thought of this as the universal and absolute need of art: that man is a thinking consciousness — that “man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is … he is just as much for himself; he sees himself, represents himself to himself, thinks, and only on the strength of this active placing himself before himself is he spirit” (Hegel, 2003, p. 48).✓ Man can arrive at this consciousness theoretically or practically. Through practical activity he produces himself in what is immediately given to him and externally present, and in this, too, he recognises himself: “This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself” (p. 49).✓ Even small children, as Hegel says, have the “impulse” to alter external things in practice: for example, “a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing” (p. 49).✓ Hepburn sees such imaginative activity as a means of bringing together the spectator and his aesthetic object: “[U]nity is again a regulative notion, a symbol of the unattainable complete transmutation of brute external nature into a mirror of the mind”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 53). Adorno, too, treats a similar kind of unity when he takes a position on Hegel’s thought about nature and art, but — unlike Hepburn — he perceives this unity of humanisation and spiritualisation as domination and mastery. For him this is not true unity but, as Tafalla puts it, “an imposition of unity in which human reason projects itself upon nature, refusing to recognize the difference of nature, its otherness”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 53).

The third of Hepburn’s aspects of the striving towards unity is emotional experience. It can be roughly analogous to our other emotional experiences. In nature we can find phenomena that we experience as the embodiment of human emotions. “But instead of nature being humanized, the reverse may happen. Aesthetic experience of nature may be experience of a range of emotion that the human scene, by itself, untutored and unsupplemented, could not evoke”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 54). Unity with nature in this case means placing oneself in the landscape as a form among forms: the aim is “not to have nature’s ‘foreignness’ or otherness overcome, but in contrast, to allow that otherness free play in the modifying of one’s everyday sense of one’s own being”✓ (p. 54).

With all this talk of unity, we eventually think of the fact that nature is for humans essentially a dangerous, arduous and in some cases hostile force. Unlike art, which we admire in galleries or other exhibition spaces, the natural environment is the one from which we wrest our food by force, against which we protect ourselves in order to survive, and which sustains our lives, Hepburn points out. In this case the sense of unity is reconciliation,²² the cessation of conflict. In what sense? In the sense that we put an end to such conflict and no longer perceive nature as hostile, in need of conquest or subjugation, or as a means to our ends, but as a source of beauty that we can admire and appreciate for its own sake: “To attain, and sustain, the relevant detachment from such an environment in order to savour it aesthetically is in itself a fair achievement, an achievement which suffuses the aesthetic experiences themselves with that sense of reconciliation. A cease-fire has been negotiated in our struggle with nature”✓ (p. 55).

Interestingly, the fundamental concept with which Adorno tries to outline an aesthetic theory of nature is precisely the principle of reconciliation, or Versöhnung:²³ “For communication is the adaptation of spirit to utility, with the result that spirit is made one commodity among the rest; and what today is called meaning participates in this disaster. What in artworks is structured, gapless, resting in itself, is an after-image of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks. Vis-à-vis a ruling principle, vis-à-vis a merely diffuse juxtaposition, the beauty of nature is an other; what is reconciled would resemble it”✓²⁴ (Adorno, 1997, p. 115). Tafalla finds a comparison with reconciliation as an aesthetic experience of nature in Hepburn, who writes: “There is immense variety in the ways in which this can manifest itself in individual experience. The objects of nature may look to us as if their raison d’être were precisely that we should celebrate their beauty”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 55). At the end of his treatment of the notion of unity, Hepburn clearly warns that accounts of natural beauty which rely on it are often metaphysically extravagant and impenetrable on account of their own ambiguities: “We should be ill-advised, however, to take this cluster of unity-concepts as by itself adequate for all explanatory purposes … for the sense of reconciliation is not an independent and autonomous aesthetic experience, but hangs entirely upon the occurrence of particular experiences of particular aesthetically interesting natural objects”✓ (pp. 55–56). The notion of unity, in the various senses discussed above — including the sense of reconciliation — has, once again, only a regulative role.

Adorno points in the same direction and declares correct the intuition that natural beauty is a promise of reconciliation, a promise of overcoming conflict and of peaceful coexistence with the other. Nevertheless, it must be understood that for Adorno natural beauty is only “a promise, an allegory of that full reconciliation”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 54). The belief that we can achieve unity and fusion with nature is utopia and illusion. The offer of perfect reconciliation is a lie, one that at the same time deters us from letting the hope of reconciliation act as a guide to our thinking. As Tafalla writes, “This is precisely what happens when the tourist industry tempts us with trips to paradise. In fact, they are only selling us an administered experience, every aspect of which is carefully managed, where there is no freedom or spontaneity”✓ (p. 54). For Adorno the tourism industry annihilates the essence of the experience of nature: “There is hardly anything left of it in organized tourism. To feel nature, and most of all its silence, has become a rare privilege and has in turn become commercially exploitable”✓ (Adorno, 1997, p. 108). Or, as he writes in Minima Moralia about images — which in this case we may also understand as tourist postcards or the glossy brochures of travel agencies’ advertising material: “Amid the network of now wholly abstract relations of people to each other and to things, the power of abstraction is vanishing … The omnipresent images are none, because they present the wholly general, the average, the standard model, as something unique or special, and so deride it”✓ (Adorno, 2007, pp. 156–157). Hepburn and Adorno, as Tafalla observes, in a sense round off their analysis of the notion of reconciliation with a call for prudence.

Tafalla concludes her comparison by stating that a fruitful dialogue is possible between the two fundamental texts — despite the fact that they come from different traditions, are written in different languages and present their reflections on natural beauty in entirely different styles. In their treatment of natural beauty, Adorno and Hepburn essentially complement each other: “I claim that if we take the two proposals made by Hepburn and Adorno forty years ago together, they set an agenda for the discipline which is more complex and more ambitious than either individually”✓ (Tafalla, 2011, p. 54). Over the last four decades a great deal of research has been done on the questions about the aesthetics of nature listed above, the author observes, but some have received more attention than others, and she believes that insufficient attention has been paid to the relations between them. Tafalla proposes a return to the two fundamental texts and a joint reading of them, which would enrich the aesthetics of nature.

As the first of four areas of research, Tafalla singles out the area concerned with what we should aesthetically appreciate in nature and how such appreciation differs from that in art. This is the task of philosophical analysis, the area with which Hepburn was most concerned and which later saw the greatest progress. The second area of research tries to go beyond conceptual analysis in order to examine, through critical reflection, the past development of the aesthetics of nature and the ways in which people have aesthetically appreciated nature. It is proposed precisely by Adorno, who is convinced that we ought to seek the origins of contemporary philosophical problems and uncover the history and heritage of the concepts in use today. What is at stake is an understanding of the present situation and of the path by which we arrived at it: “This historical review must be performed from a critical perspective in order to correct the many mistakes that were made in the name of false progress”✓ (Tafalla, p. 55).

The third area is of particular interest to us, since it reaches beyond conceptual analysis and historical reflection. It examines the approaches with which we aesthetically appreciate nature in today’s society, adopting a critical standpoint in a way similar to Adorno with his model of critical theory. “Doing so requires us to study which cultural factors influence our aesthetic appreciation of nature positively or negatively: education, mass media, the tourist industry, the entertainment industry and many others”✓ (p. 55), Tafalla observes, recalling Adorno’s thought that many elements of culture make it harder to appreciate the beauty of nature, for which reason they must be subjected to thorough study.

In fourth place is the attempt at reconciliation with nature. For Hepburn and Adorno this is supposed to be the most important area, and Tafalla observes that it is also the most difficult to research: both authors shared the hope that aesthetics could open the door to ethics, but building on that hope through precise analysis will not be easy (2011, p. 55). In everyday life nature is hostile and dangerous to humans, and confronting it demands a great deal of effort. In this sense it is impossible and unwise to speak of reconciliation, since we must domesticate nature, subjugate it and instrumentalise it. It is quite different when we approach it aesthetically. First we stop fearing it; then we cease to perceive it as a mere means, since through natural beauty we acknowledge that it has value in and of itself. The absence of fear and the abandonment of the need for domination offer the possibility of, and the space for, peaceful coexistence with nature — with entirely appropriate warnings about the irrational errors into which such a foundation may lead us. This doctoral dissertation focuses above all on the third area, the analysis of the cultural factors that influence the appreciation of nature — first and foremost the mass media²⁵ and, to a limited extent, the tourism industry. In the light of Tafalla’s proposals for the research with which the aesthetics of nature should concern itself, I can thus place my own research within the field of the study of cultural and media processes that “pollute” the perception of natural beauty, influence it and change it.

2.2. Survey²⁶ of the Field: Established Positions in the Aesthetics of Nature

Although there is no consensus about the right position or the right approach to nature, there is nonetheless agreement about which approach is out of the question in any case: formalism. Although Kant has an undisputed place and role in the aesthetics of nature, most do not take seriously the neo-Kantian view that in aesthetics only the treatment of form counts, regardless of the purpose, genesis or (social and political) context of the object. Most authors agree, namely, that natural environments are natural, that is, they are not artificial, and moreover that they are environments, that is, they are not objects. There is also agreement that in nature we cannot simply measure and describe shapes, patterns, textures and colours and declare that such-and-such combinations are preferable to others. Most also do not take seriously a somewhat naive aesthetics of nature, in which it is enough simply to experience nature and natural environments and establish why they are aesthetically attractive, or to try to collect as many people’s responses as possible and recognise a qualitative pattern in them.²⁷

The fact is that there are better and worse approaches to natural environments, and at the same time we need “something more” than the senses alone in order to judge them aesthetically in an adequate way. The aesthetics of nature, though it hides this well, in fact strives (or at least wishes) to be a normative discipline. The bulk of the debates focuses on the appropriateness and inappropriateness of aesthetic appreciation, and the crux of the disagreements lies precisely in the question of what that “something more” is. Cognitivists such as Allen Carlson, Holmes Rolston III, Glenn Parsons, Marcia Eaton and, in part, Yuriko Saito more or less agree that for appropriate appreciation of nature we need concepts, and not just any concepts, but concepts from science and the natural sciences. We can rely on common sense and perceive, for instance, the Earth’s revolution around the Sun as the Sun’s rising and setting, but in this case science reveals an entirely different story. In reality the Earth revolves around the Sun, which has ideological, metaphysical and aesthetic consequences. Instead of perceiving the yellow ball in the sky dynamically, it becomes static, and we find ourselves on another, smaller ball moving around it. Whenever we are in doubt, then, about how to appreciate some part of nature, we should turn for advice to biologists, ecologists, geologists and other natural scientists – much as we consult art critics, curators, keepers and art historians when we stand helpless before a work of art.

The non-cognitive camp is considerably less unified. Noël Carroll and Mark Sagoff emphasise the power of the emotions, Emily Brady²⁸ ascribes a large role to imagination, and Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics of engagement could be described as a phenomenological approach. What unites such positions, more than anything else, is the conviction that science and scientific concepts cannot be a necessary condition of environmental aesthetics. Berleant even warns that we make a mistake when we treat environmental aesthetics differently from the aesthetics of art. In his view it would be far better to develop a holistic aesthetic theory.

After several decades of debate about the aesthetic appreciation and evaluation of nature, contemporary²⁹ positions in the aesthetics of nature are thus divided mostly into two camps: the cognitive and the non-cognitive (Carlson and Berleant, 2004, p. 16), or the narrative and the ambient (Foster, 1998). Within the different camps we find different treatments of aesthetic questions about nature. In the article “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms”, Yuriko Saito developed the idea that “One of the most prevalent modes of appreciating nature, particularly in the West for the past two centuries, has been to attend exclusively to the pictorial surface of the object without reference to any associations”✓ (Saito, 1998b, p. 136). The approach to nature as a scene in which general shapes, events and combinations of various colours play and intertwine is an instance of the Romantic heritage mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation: “For example, we are to view a landscape as if it were a landscape painting, often with the aid of a Claude glass”✓ (Saito, 1998b, p. 137). The author proposes that we appreciate nature “on its own terms”. We humans have a moral duty to appreciate nature and the things in it aesthetically for what they are in themselves: appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature must include the moral capacity of “recognizing and respecting nature as having its own reality apart from our presence, with its own story to tell”✓ (Saito, 1998b, p. 148). Saito,³⁰ mindful that nature is permeated by cultural tradition, does not wish to reject approaches from art altogether, since these too can contribute to the appropriate appreciation of nature. With works of art we must know, roughly, what their true nature is. We do not look at Picasso’s Guernica as an abstract painting, but as a Cubist one.

Certain “units of appreciation” have come to be regarded in the literature as more adequate. We encounter many of them as soon as we enter the discipline. According to the impressionist model,³¹ as Kante calls it, we appreciate not so much individual things as their impression or appearance. If, say, we look at the chain of the Kamnik Alps, it presents itself to us in a constantly changing visual field: this image of the visual field is affected by light (a morning or evening view), the position of the observer, the season, and so on. Adequate appreciation of the Kamnik Alps would thus lie in a precise “snapshot” of the momentary impression (Kante, 2009, p. 28). Besides treating nature according to the landscape model, there is also an approach in which we can focus on particulars, such as a blazing evening sky; such an approach is called the object model. The formalist approach, on the other hand, understands proper appreciation of nature as a restriction to the properties immediately available to the senses, and sets aside any need to rely on scientific knowledge. The question, Kante adds, is whether such selective appreciation, as proposed by the models mentioned, is adequate or not: when, for example, I look at a landscape as if it were a landscape painting, this does not mean that the landscape I am looking at is two-dimensional, or that the landscape itself is a representation (p. 30). Why, then, should we look at it in this way, if the models listed are only partial and incomplete for the appreciation of nature?

Among the representatives of the cognitive approach, and as an important author in environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of nature generally, the most prominent is Allen Carlson, who with his natural environmental³² model ascribed a decisive role in the perception of nature to scientific categories. In Carlson’s view nature must be appreciated as an environment, not as a view or a prospect. We must appreciate the natural environment “on its own terms” and for the properties that nature itself possesses. These properties can truly be revealed only by the natural sciences, that is, by science. When we appreciate art aesthetically, for instance, we have art history and art criticism at our disposal. For this reason natural history and scientific truths should play an equivalent role in the appreciation of nature (Carlson, 1981, p. 25). The notion of an “appropriate” aesthetic appreciation of nature and the environment is one of the most contested questions, and it is precisely Carlson’s natural environmental model that, of all the approaches, defends such a position most strongly. His starting point is the conviction that there is such a thing as the appropriate appreciation of nature, and that it can be grounded, explained and put into practice through a scientifically grounded cognitivist approach. Of the debate that followed in the years after Carlson presented the natural environmental model, Saito offered the interesting opinion that it can be described in terms of the extent to which each thinker agrees or disagrees with Carlson’s position (Drenthen and Keulartz, 2014, p. 33). This says a great deal about Carlson’s influence; yet throughout all this time the debate has focused chiefly on whether science should have the exclusive right in the appreciation of nature, and has not asked at all whether it would be more judicious to speak of better or worse aesthetic approaches.

Kante therefore rightly points out that in general there is no adequate aesthetic evaluation of nature. Precisely determined aesthetic qualities and values, such as we find in works of art, cannot be traced in nature. The most important aesthetic dimensions of natural things, objects and environments depend on the particular time-slice in the object’s natural history, the sensory mode, the mode of perception, the perceptual aspect, and so on (Kante, 2009, p. 50), so a certain freedom is permitted in contemplating them. Just as the aesthetic appreciation of art is appreciation of art as art, so the aesthetic appreciation of nature is aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature (Carlson and Berleant, 2004, p. 21). The appreciation of nature must take into account that it cannot be appreciated as an intentionally created object, nor as a work of art.

Opposed to the cognitive approaches stands a range of non-cognitive (non-conceptual, or ambient) responses to nature. The term non-cognitive should not be understood to mean that emotive responses are in play. The emphasis is rather on approaches that take as the basis of responses not knowledge of natural history or cultural tradition but something else entirely. The best-known non-cognitive “response” to nature was the proposed aesthetics of engagement³³ (or absorption) of Arnold Berleant, which challenged the theory of disinterestedness, since the latter, through an objectifying contemplation of the object, was said to tear both the object and the observer out of the environment to which they belong and within which aesthetic appreciation can happen at all. The aesthetics of engagement explicitly emphasises the multisensory perception of nature and our context within it, and attacks the dichotomy between subject and object. The observer must reduce the distance between himself and nature as far as possible and immerse himself in it. What is more, Berleant defends a similar position for the aesthetic approach to art as well: the boundlessness of the natural world does not merely surround us but assimilates us. Not only are we unable to perceive absolute limits in nature; we are also unable to distance ourselves from the natural world so as to measure and judge it with complete objectivity … When the environment is perceived from within, as it is – not by looking at it but by being in it – nature becomes something else entirely. It is transformed into a realm in which we live as participants, not observers (Berleant, 1992, pp. 169–170). The rejection of the subject–object dichotomy is problematic. Such a relation is, after all, essential to aesthetics, and if we reject it, we reject aesthetics itself. If the answer of the aesthetics of engagement to the question of what we should appreciate aesthetically in nature seems to be “everything”, there is yet another kind of aesthetic relation to this question that strives for an entirely different answer: “nothing”.

In so-called human chauvinistic aesthetics (Carlson, 2009, p. 30), we appreciate things as the achievement of an artist, a creator or a creative intellect. Since nature is not our work, responses to it are therefore not aesthetic. Robert Elliot points out that “Evaluating works of art involves explaining them, and judging them, in terms of their author’s intentions; it involves placing them within the author’s corpus of work; it involves locating them in some tradition and in some special milieu. Nature is not a work of art though works of art (in some suitably broad sense) may look very much like natural objects”✓ (Elliot, 2005, p. 75). He offers the example of forgeries in art and of “faking nature” through environmental-engineering interventions in the landscape, in order to support the claim that the origin of an object does in fact affect its aesthetic assessment. Kante disagrees with him and argues that responses to nature can be, and certainly are, aesthetic, by which of course we do not mean that we look at nature as art. The validity of Elliot’s analogy between faking art and faking nature, however, depends on whether we count the property of “originality” as merely an artistic or also as an aesthetic property (Kante, 2009, p. 53). Elliot’s comparison is valid only in the first case.

Also of interest is a position that opposes Carlson’s emphasis on scientific knowledge as something that should permeate our relation to nature. Just as Berleant, in the aesthetics of engagement, foregrounded a direct approach to nature, several other philosophers offer a similar solution. Noël Carroll does not deny Carlson’s natural environmental model, but in his view such an approach excludes certain very ordinary evaluative responses to nature. Here he has in mind above all responses to the way nature moves us (Carroll, 2008, p. 132). In some cases nature also arouses emotional responses in us: It does not follow from this, of course, that they are non-cognitive, since emotional arousal has cognitive dimensions. But it is far from clear that all the emotions appropriately aroused in us by nature are rooted in cognitions of the sort derived from natural history, Carroll explains (2008, p. 132). His arousal³⁴ model thus strives to show that the emotions aroused by nature are entirely secular and require no demystification as displaced religious sentiments (Kante, 2009, p. 63). A general aesthetic response to the world and to things does not include scientific knowledge, Carroll reasons, and so a direct and bodily response to nature is entirely legitimate, since he assumes that emotional arousal, although cognitive, need not rely on categories derived from science (2008, p. 139). Carroll does not wish to reject Carlson’s³⁵ model and proposes that the two coexist, since our responses are guided now by one, now by the other, and sometimes they overlap.

Many things, for instance, have a beauty that seems to us incongruous with the natural category to which they belong, Kante observes of Carlson’s capturing of natural things in a categorial net. He recalls Hepburn’s reflection on inorganic nature and categories: “Suppose I am walking over a wide expanse of sand and mud … But suppose that I bring to bear upon the scene my knowledge that this is a tidal basin, the tide being out. The realization is not aesthetically irrelevant”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 53). We are walking across an expanse that for half the day is sea floor, which is somewhat eerie. It also shows that a change in the natural category to which a thing belongs is by no means irrelevant and also affects the aesthetic properties of that thing (Kante, 2009, p. 67). Aesthetic properties do depend on (scientific) context and history.

The supposed ineffability of the aesthetic experience of nature was adopted by Stan Godlovitch, who is convinced that knowledge does not offer an appropriate aesthetic response. Not because such a response should be purely emotional, but because any true knowledge of what nature is is inaccessible to human beings. Nature in this sense is alien, aloof and unknowable. The mystery model requires us to feel entirely separate from nature, and this separateness is further reinforced by an awareness of the impossibility of appreciating and evaluating it. His attempt to develop an acentric approach to nature strives to show that cognitive or emotive responses to it are not a sufficient foundation for a true aesthetics (and ethics) of nature.

Rather than on knowledge and emotions, Emily Brady focuses on imagination, or the power of mental representation. The ground for the imaginative approach had already been prepared by Hepburn, who, in his article on the neglect of natural beauty, singled out among the various levels of our responses to nature imaginative representation (Hepburn, 2006, p. 57), and later also “metaphysical imagination”✓ (Hepburn, 1996). Our imagination, Hepburn argues, can, by interpreting the natural world, disclose universal metaphysical truths about the meaning of life, the place of the human being in creation, and so on. Brady strengthens the role of imagination further and identifies four imaginative approaches in the appreciation of nature: the exploratory, the projective, the ampliative and the revelatory: “We may use none, some, or all of them, and our responses range from imaginatively thin to imaginatively thick, depending on the aesthetic object and the imagination of the percipient”✓ (Brady, 1998, p. 143).

An even more subjective position was presented by John Andrew Fisher, using the example of natural sounds. It is precisely through sound and the auditory experience of natural environments, in his view, that we can establish how the experience of nature differs entirely from the experience of (musical) art. Our perception of nature depends on the conditions available to us for experiencing it. When we appreciate a soundscape, as Fisher calls it, we at first do so in accordance with our learned perception of music, which we later abandon. Disregard for objectivity and the deliberate rejection of theory are of course at odds with established aesthetic currents, but in Fisher’s conviction they are entirely appropriate for the aesthetic appreciation of natural soundscapes. A person who listens to nature is simply freed from the criteria that guide the appreciation of music and that at the same time exclude many approaches to listening to melodic soundscapes. Nature is filled with sounds of every kind, and a free approach to appreciating them means more sonic abundance for our ears (Fisher, 1998).

Alongside the positions³⁶ that thus emphasised engagement, emotion, mystery and imagination rather than the cognitive dimensions of aesthetic experience, a number of other authors came very close to Carlson’s cognitive positions. In the mid-1990s Yuriko Saito, Marcia Eaton and Holmes Rolston III consolidated the basic premises of the cognitive approach. Reflections on the appreciation of natural environments have also made their way from Western academic settings into other parts of the world. In a sense it would be most honest – even though such a statement is not politically and philosophically correct – to speak of a “Western environmental aesthetics”. Regardless of this, quite a few authors have also scrutinised the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the environment within other cultural spaces, among whom Saito stands out, frequently drawing on features of the Japanese cultural tradition. Besides the fact that Japanese appreciation of nature delights in relatively small and delicate objects and natural phenomena, Japan stands out for its enthusiasm for the transient aspects of nature: “Flowers (most notably cherry blossoms) do not stay in bloom forever, the bird song is always changing and passing; wind is literally passing and transitory by definition; and the moon is constantly changing its appearance and location”✓ (Saito, 1985, p. 245). The flower, the bird, the wind and the moon are (or were) the favourite motifs of Japanese art. Other natural objects and phenomena that frequently appear, such as rain, dew, mist, insects and seasonal flowers, are likewise short-lived. In this regard, Saito adds, we must also view the Japanese obsession with the changing of the seasons (p. 245).