The Reach of the Aesthetic

Collected Essays on Art and Nature

Ronald W. Hepburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138726659
• eBook ISBN: 9781351751582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2001. This book focuses on the rich web of interrelations between aesthetic and wider human concerns. Among topics explored are concepts of truth and falsity (within art and aesthetic experience generally), superficiality and depth in aesthetic appreciation of nature, moral beauty and ugliness, the projects of integrating a life, of fashioning a life as a work of art, experiments in the aesthetic re-working of the 'sacred', the role of imagination within religion and in our attempts to place and identify ourselves within the cosmos. The essays are both interlinked and distinct, allowing them to be read in any order, and providing useful themes for discussion groups and seminars. The author aims to arouse in the reader something of his enjoyment in unravelling the connections of ideas that come into view when one approaches aesthetics in its widest setting.

1 Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

1

he aesthetic appreciation of both art and nature is often, in fact, judged to be more - and less - serious. Natural objects and art objects can be hastily and unthinkingly perceived, and they can be perceived with full and thoughtful attention. In the case of art, we are better equipped to sift the trivial from the serious appreciation; for the existence of a corpus, and a continuing practice, of criticism, and philosophical study, of the arts - for all their internal disputatiousness - furnishes us with relevant criteria. In the case of nature, we have far less guidance. Yet it must matter, there too, to distinguish trivial from serious encounters. When we seek to defend areas of 'outstanding natural beauty' against depredations, it matters greatly what account we can give of the appreciation of that beauty: how its value can be set alongside competing and vociferously promoted values involved in industry, commerce and urban expansion. If we wish to attach very high value to the appreciation of natural beauty, we must be able to show that more is involved in such appreciation than the pleasant, unfocused enjoyment of a picnic place, or a fleeting and distanced impression of countryside through a touring-coach window, or obligatory visits to standard viewpoints or (should I say?) snapshot-points.

That there is much work to be done on this subject is of course due to the comparative neglect of natural beauty in recent and fairly recent aesthetics.¹ Although it was the very centre of concern for a great deal of eighteenth-century aesthetics and for many of the greatest Romantic poets and painters, subsequent movements such as Symbolism and Modernism tended to see the natural world in a very different light. Darwinian ideas of nature were problematic and disturbing compared with theistic and pantheistic perspectives. Some later aesthetic theories made sense when applied to art, but little or none applied to natural beauty. Formalist theories require a determinate, bounded and shaped artifact; expression theories presuppose an artist behind an art work.

What, first of all, do we mean by 'aesthetic appreciation of nature'? By 'nature' we must mean not just gentle pastoral landscape, but also tropical forest, tundra, ice floes, deserts, and objects (and events) made perceptible only by way of microscope or telescope. If nature's materials are vast, so too is the freedom of the percipient. We have endless choice of scale, freedom to choose the boundary of attention, choice between the moving whether natural objects or the spectator or both - and the static. Our choice of viewpoint can range from that of the underwater diver to the view of the upper surface of clouds from an aircraft or an astronaut's view of the planet as a sphere.

What sort of aesthetic responses and judgements occur in our encounter with nature? We may speak of 'beautiful' objects in nature, where 'beauty' is used in a narrower sense, as we respond with delight, with love and with wonderment to objects before us. In that sense we may see beauty in the gradations of sky- and cloud-colours, yellow-orange evening light transfiguring a summer landscape, early morning sun-rays seen through mist in woodland, water calm in a lake, or turbulent or cascading in the mountain stream that emerges from the lake. The feel of moss or rock. Sounds curlew, oyster-catcher, lark - and where a single bird's cry makes the surrounding silence the more vividly apprehensible. We may see beauty in formal qualities: flower-patterns, snow- and wind-shapes, the balancing of masses at the sides of a valley: in animal forms and in the grace of animal movement.

'Beauty' is, however, also used more widely. It may cover the aesthetically arresting, the rewarding-to-contemplation, a great range of emotional qualities, without necessarily being pleasurable or lovable or suggestive of some ideal. Tree branches twisted with age or by wind, a towering thundercloud, black water beneath a steep rocky hillside.

We need to acknowledge a duality in much aesthetic appreciation of nature, a sensuous component and a thought-component. First, sensuous immediacy: in the purest cases one is taken aback by, for instance, a sky colour-effect, or by the rolling away of cloud or mist from a landscape. Most often, however, an element of thought is present, as we implicitly compare and contrast here with elsewhere, actual with possible, present with past. I say, 'implicitly'; there may be no verbalizing or self-conscious complexity in the experience.

We cannot deny the thought-element, and it cannot reasonably be held (as such and in general) to fight with the aesthetic character of an experience Consider that paradigm case of aesthetic experience of nature the fall of an autumn leaf.² If we simply watch it fall, without any thought, it may or may not be a moving or exciting aesthetic object, but it must be robbed of its poignancy, its mute message of summer gone, its symbolizing all falling, our own included. Leaf veins suggest blood-vessel veins symbolizing continuity in the forms of life, and maybe a shared vulnerability. Thus the thought-element may bring analogies to bear on the concrete particulars: this autumn is linked to innumerable other autumns: to the cycle of the seasons.

Or we watch the flight of swifts, wheeling, screaming; and to our present perception is added the thought of their having, in early summer, just returned from Africa - the thought (schematically) of that huge journey, their seeming-frailness, their frantic, restless, frightening burning up of energy, in their nearly ceaseless motion. All that is directed to (and fused with the perception of) the tiny bird-forms themselves. Maybe we think of a wider context still, in relation to the particular animal-form (or rock-form) under our gaze - awareness of the wide evolutionary procession of forms: or one may even be aware of the broadest metaphysical or religious background of all - the world as divinely created - or as uncreated, enigmatically there. Not even in the latter sort of case is the thought extraneously or externally juxtaposed to the perception of the natural object or scene. The union, or fusion, is much closer. There is an overall modification of awareness, in which the elements of feeling and thought and the perception all interact.

Although analogies with art suggest themselves often enough about how to 'frame' the objects of our aesthetic interest, where to establish the momentary bounds of our attention; on other occasions the objects we attend to seem to repudiate any such bounding - to present themselves as essentially illimitable, to defy framing, or to be in a way surrogates for the unbounded. This is particularly the domain of elemental experience, of the awesome and the sublime. There is an essential, though contested and variable, thought-element here again. Coleridge, pausing in his descent of Scafell, enacted one version of the reflective content of sublime experience:

The sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the tempestuous clouds just over them ... overawed me. I lay in a state of ... Trance and Delight and blessed God aloud for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining, no danger can overpower us.³

Other versions, Schopenhauer's for instance, saw the moment of ascendancy in our proving able to take a contemplative attitude towards an essentially hostile nature.⁴ Without an adequate thought-element, self-image in particular, counterbalancing the daunting external powers, the experience of the sublime may shrivel, or never establish itself in a subject. To some Mikel Dufrenne, for one - it remains the chief moment in the aesthetic experience of nature: whereas others, such as Adomo, see the sublime as a historically ephemeral and by now faded mode of sensibility.⁵

To chronicle the effects rather than the components of aesthetic experience of nature would require a much longer story than can be attempted here. Among the most general of these, cliched though it is, must be the 'life-enhancing' effect of beauty, release from the stress and anxiety of practical, manipulatory, causally engaged relations with nature into the calmly contemplative. These work together, I suggest, in the case of natural beauty with a lasting, or always renewable, sense of mystery that it should be there at all.

2

Can we then make any reasoned case for distinguishing trivial from serious in this field? If it is a form of perception-and-reflection that we are considering, then as I said at the start, we know that perception (taking that first) can be attentive or inattentive, can be discriminating or undiscriminating, lively or lazy: that the doors of perception can need cleansing, the conventions and the simplifications of popular perception can need resisting. The reflective component, likewise, can be feeble or stereotyped, individual, original or exploratory. It can be immature or confused. And indeed we may secretly be anxious that the thought which sustains our valued experience of nature is in the end metaphysically untenable. To discard these issues, to narrow down on a minimally reflective, passive perception, would seem to trivialize in another way. Adorno suspected that our very concept of nature is 'idyllic, provincial, insular'.⁶ I would argue that it is not always so: but it can be, and from comfortable selectivity comes trivialization by another route

Some of these points, then, suggest the following first approximation: that an aesthetic approach to nature is trivial to the extent that it distorts, ignores, suppresses truth about its objects, feels and thinks about them in ways that falsify how nature really is. All this may be coupled with a fear that if there is to be some agreeable aesthetic encounter with nature, call it trivial if you will, one had better not look too attentively nor think too hard about the presuppositions on which one's experience rests. To break open the parcel might dissipate the aesthetic delight and set one an over-arduous task to regain at some deeper, more serious level what one had possessed at a more superficial level.

If it trivializes to see nature in terms of ready-made, standard 'views', so does it also to see oneself merely as the detached viewer - or indeed as a 'noumenally' free and rational ego. There is a deepening of seriousness when I realize that I am myself one with, part of, the nature over-against me. So, I want to say, an aesthetic appreciation of nature, if serious, is necessarily a self-exploration also; for the energies, regularities, contingencies of nature are the energies, principles and contingencies that sustain my own embodied life and my own awareness. Nature may be 'other' to us, but we are no less connatural with it. We do not simply look out upon nature as we look at the sea's drama from a safe shore: the shore is no less nature, and so too is the one who looks.

On a superficial reading of nature, objects tend to have an invariant, univocal expressive quality. Fused, however, with less conventional thoughts, considered in wider or less standard contexts, these qualities admit of endless modification. It is reasonable, then, to include among the trivializing factors bland unawareness of that potential variability; and among factors making for serious aesthetic appreciation of nature must be a background realization of it.

Anticipating later discussion, I need to say here that 'seriousness' or 'depth' in aesthetic experience of nature cannot be correlated in any simple way with intensity or fullness of thought-content. Some thoughts (perhaps of causal explanation of the phenomena at the level of particle physics) might not enrich but neutralize the experience, or at least fight and fail to fuse with its perceptual content. Or they might trivialize. Other thought-contents relate to quite fundamental features of the lived human state, and bear directly upon the perceptual, phenomenal dimension which their presence cannot fail to solemnize and deepen. Think, for instance, of that realization (thought and sense-experience in fusion) of the whole earth's motion, in Wordsworth's skating episode in The Prelude, as he suddenly stopped in his tracks while skating in the dark:

So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle, with the din
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud,
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the image of a star
That gleam'd upon the ice; and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll'd
With visible motion her diurnal round . . .⁷

A second important duality characterizes an aesthetic concern with nature. On the one hand, it is nature, nature's own forms, structures, sequences, that we seek to contemplate; and the more serious our engagement, the more earnest will be our regard for, and our respect for, the integrity and the proper modes of being of the objects in nature themselves, inanimate and animate. We see sentimentality, for instance, as trivializing in its tendency, because it may falsely posit human feelings and human attitudes in the nonhuman - or more likely posit failed human life and human attitudes instead of successfully attained non-human life. To put it very schematically, a serious aesthetic approach to nature is close to a Spinozistic intellectual love of God-or-Nature in its totality. It rejects Kant's invitation to accord unconditional value only to the bearers of freedom and reason, and to downgrade phenomenal nature save as it hints at a supersensible, an earnest of which is furnished in nature's amenability to be perceived, its purposiveness without purpose. It rejects, likewise, Hegel's downplaying of natural beauty in favour of the spirit-manifesting practice of art.

But there is another side: even when we discard the excesses of anthropomorphism, to admit no more than this other-respecting concern is to exclude too much. The human inner life has been nourished by images from the natural world: its self-articulation and development could hardly proceed without annexing or appropriating forms from the phenomenal world. They are annexed not in a systematic, calculating, craftsmanlike fashion, but rather through our being imaginatively seized by them, and coming to cherish their expressive aptness, and to rely upon them in our efforts to understand ourselves. Not all of this can be categorized as strictly aesthetic encounter or aesthetic contemplation: some of it can, and the lines of connection are obvious and important.

3

That may serve us as a sketch of the duality within our commerce with nature - a respect for its own structures and the celebrating of those, and the annexation of natural forms. Though divergent, those approaches are not opposed: nature need not be misperceived in order to furnish symbols for our inwardness. But their focus and their intention are distinct. Each presents some problems in relation to the spectrum between trivial and serious.

First, then, we are to consider and contemplate nature in its own terms. This is an aim that sets one serious goal for aesthetic appreciation. What problems come with it?

One interpretation of the phrase 'in its own terms' would prompt us towards supplying a scientific thought-component. Now, it may well enrich our perception of a U-valley to 'think-in' its readily imaginable glacial origins. What, though, about the much less readily imaginable set of transformations at the molecular and atomic level that produced the rock of which the valley is made? Some of that may schematically become part of our experience, but we may soon come up against a limit. We cannot oblige ourselves to think-in what threatens to fragment or overwhelm or dissolve the aesthetic perception, instead of enriching it. Aesthetic experience must be human experience - episodic, phenomenal. To destroy it can hardly be to deepen it!

We spoke of 'respect' for natural objects, and particularly for living beings. But a further and different problem arises when we recall that nature itself shows only a very limited respect for its individuals. For me to respect something is to percei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature
• 2 Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic
• 3 Aesthetic and Moral: Links and Limits Part One
• 4 Aesthetic and Moral: Links and Limits Part Two
• 5 Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics
• 6 Religious Imagination
• 7 Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions
• 8 Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics
• 9 Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding
• 10 Values and Cosmic Imagination
• Index