Summary

Aesthetic Problems of Modern Mediation, Representation and Falsity of Nature

Since 1960 we have witnessed a flourishing of the aesthetics of nature, a field meant to concern itself with natural objects and environments. When we examine this period closely, we find that with the beginning of the age of space flight aesthetic interest in nature and in planetary questions also spread among the general public. This growth of interest was made possible by the mass media, transnational television broadcasts and the World Wide Web, but above all by a series of iconic photographs of nature and natural scenes.

Taking the present situation into account, the dissertation asks whether we are perhaps witnessing a repetition of the circumstances that spurred the flourishing of the discipline in the eighteenth century. The hypothesis holds that the aesthetics of nature developed as a discipline by means of reproductions and representations, a fact that has to a large extent remained unreflected. The main object of the aesthetics of nature has in fact not been nature but its photographs and, with the development of the Web and social networks, other contemporary media depictions of natural scenes as well; as a result, most existing models of the appreciation of nature run into theoretical and practical limitations.

In the same period the conquest of space confronts the aesthetics of nature once again with old/new theoretical questions; because of space flight and the new images and perspectives it has brought, the object of appreciation must be redefined and our perspectives extended from landscapes to the universe as a whole. Through the historical milestones in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, the research question of the dissertation seeks answers to the following sub-questions: what kinds of reproductions of nature do we create, to what extent does depicted nature predominate in the aesthetics of nature, and how far into “the thing itself” has the discipline ever ventured?

It is essential that we also analyse the scope of the concept of nature in the light of the advent of the Anthropocene, and that we set alongside Hepburn, the author who sparked the renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature, Adorno’s treatment of natural beauty, which was published almost simultaneously. The text examines Carlson’s five basic conditions for an adequate aesthetics of nature and tests the soundness of the hypothesis by criticising them.

Although our intuitions tell us otherwise, the aesthetics of nature lacks the argumentative power to make a successful case for the protection and conservation of nature; the analysis of aesthetic arguments proceeds by comparison with the more developed argumentation of environmental ethics.

The last decades show that, with new technologies, new ways of mediating and depicting nature have spread and become entrenched among the public, while within the discipline the problem of the limitations of the human body in the appreciation of natural environments has been overlooked. This finding is supported by “field research”: with the special permission of the management and the guides, the author made an intensive study of the responses of visitors to Postojna Cave and Križna Cave. He did the same in examining contemporary ways of falsifying nature, which he presents through an analysis of the renaturation of the Škocjanski zatok area. Here we discover a range of aesthetic problems that we create by falsifying nature, while through renaturation and other eco-technological approaches we at the same time mediate and depict it anew.

During space flights astronauts, looking at the whole Earth, experienced the overview effect and passed on to humanity a series of iconic depictions, so that the horizontal perspective of the landscape was extended into a view from above and further out into space. In photographs from space, which consist of exposures of the sky lasting several days (and of phenomena that no longer exist), the aesthetics of nature in space faces the fact that it is not appreciating nature but — just as in its beginnings — depictions modelled on landscape painting. Global images of the Earth and of nature “from above” have, on the model of Anderson’s imagined communities, made possible an approach of environmental imagination, through which the perception of the hyperobject of nature first becomes possible at all.

The author proposes a deep aesthetics of nature, conceived with the help of the concept of deep ecology, which refrains from mediating, depicting and falsifying nature.

Keywords: aesthetics, nature, reproduction, representation, Anthropocene, environmentalism, ecology, mediation, depiction, falsification, space, overview effect, environmental imagination, hyperobjects, deep aesthetics of nature