As I walk on a path beside the Stanislaus River,
passing by patches of bear clover, areas strewn with pine cones, earth of
different colors, and arrangements of interestingly shaped granite rocks, a
feeling of happiness rises up. My
friends and I find another path down to the river, leading to a spot that we
hadn’t ever visited before. Although the
river itself has dangerous currents, this area has shallows in which one can
wade. My happiness increases as I take
off my hiking boots, roll up my pants and slowly work my way through the water
across stones and past miniature falls, facing the rushing river on the other
side and the dramatic cliff that forms the far bank. The happiness I describe is a response to the
situation in hand, particularly the aesthetic features of the surrounding
environment, but also to other aspects of the situation. I am there with my wife and friends in
harmonious friendship. We are together
and responding to nature, this specific nature, i.e. this place by a river that
has rich personal meaning going back, in my case, more than fifty years. For me, at least, any adequate theory of the
aesthetics of the natural environment must be measured against this experience. To be sure, there are many other ways that
things can be experienced in nature as beautiful, or as having some other
aesthetic quality (for example, grace, elegance, or magnificence), and many
other kinds of things that can be experienced aesthetically, but if a theory
cannot handle this experience or this
type of experience then, in my view, it is a non-starter. This is to me not only a high
point in the aesthetic experience of nature but also a high point in life. I write this essay in the hope (and
expectation) that you will have a similar experience to which you can refer as
you read it.
Two leading theories of the natural environment are the
engagement theory of Arnold Berleant and the scientific cognitivist theory
first promoted by Allen Carlson and defended more recently by Glenn
Parsons. I will make some brief comments
about both in what follows. Begin with
scientific cognitivism as presented by Parsons.
This view, which is intended to provide a basis for objectivity in
aesthetic judgments of the natural environment, holds that knowledge of the
natural sciences is necessary to ground appropriate appreciation. Geology, biology and natural history can, on
this view, correctly describe a natural object and show how aesthetic views inconsistent
with science (for example Medieval religious views) are false.[1] Yet scientific knowledge, although it can
contribute to aesthetically positive experience, is neither necessary nor
sufficient to have the appreciation of the natural environment I have
experienced on the Stanislaus. I myself
have very little scientific knowledge of the river and cannot detect its presence
in my appreciative experience. (That I
can name a couple plants and rocks as I did above hardly counts as scientific
knowledge.) Moreover, although my
experience will of course be influenced (perhaps unconsciously) by whatever
knowledge I have, this has little bearing on its value. Also, scientific
knowledge is not sufficient for
aesthetic experience of nature: one
could imagine someone with a great deal of such knowledge having an experience
of the river with no aesthetic component at all.
I am more sympathetic to Berleant’s view. Berleant and I both begin with analysis of
experience, i.e. with phenomenology, we both emphasize sensuous experience more
than the scientific cognitivist, and we agree on the centrality of engagement
(i.e. sensory immersion and “living in” as participants rather than mere
observers). The rest of this article
will be devoted to noting differences between our positions. To provide a context for my discussion I turn
to a recent debate between Carlson and Berleant. In a review of one of Berleant’s books Carlson
argues that he fails to define aesthetic experience, that his theory is too
subjective in that if fails to provide a basis for objective evaluation, and
that it does not account for the distinction between difficult/serious and
easy/superficial beauty.[2] In a follow-up article, Berleant cogently
replies that he does not accept the model of philosophy in which the goal is to
provide a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (an
essentialism he associates with Aristotle), that he does not accept the notion
of a deep objective/subjective split (is objectivity really independent of
subjectivity? …at the very least, they form a continuum), and that although
scientific cognition of the natural environment can add to our appreciation, it
is not necessary.
[3] Also, whereas Carlson distinguishes serious
from superficial beauty on the basis of scientific knowledge, Berleant
characterizes it as involving a “high degree of intensity, complexity, and
perceptual engagement.” He thinks the
best we can have in terms of objectivity is a Humean good judge which renders
not a universal or absolute judgment but one that is good enough. Berleant’s reply to Carlson fits my own
experience of the Stanislaus
River. So where do we differ?
One point of disagreement is on disinterestedness. Berleant first proposed the idea of
engagement in opposition to the Kantian idea that aesthetics is characterized
by disinterestedness. Yet I cannot
really tell, when looking into my river experience, whether it is a matter of
engagement or a matter of disinterestedness.
Am I engaged? I certainly am
focused on the world around me. I look
at the river, I smell the forest air, I feel the cool of the water, and so
forth. Am I disinterested? Traditionally, to be disinterested, one needs
only be disconnected from practical matters.
Perhaps one component of my intense happiness is that I am “on vacation”
in every sense of the word: I am not
worrying about work or (for the moment at least) about my relations with other
people. I do not intend to use this
river for any other purpose than pleasure.
So it seems that I am engaged and
disinterested, and even engaged because
I am disinterested.
Also unlike Berleant, I do not see much room for Hume’s idea
of connoisseurship here. Hume believed
that objectivity in taste could be tied to the determinations of a good
judge: the good judge is distinguished
by having “delicacy of sentiment” which is the capacity to analyze the work
into discrete elements and evaluate it by way of evaluating those
elements. To have delicacy of sentiment
the good judge must have had practice in observing objects in the category
under consideration (for example, landscape paintings) and in comparing
these. He or she must also have good
sense and lack prejudice. Hume’s idea of
the good judge is an admirable, though much-debated, solution to the problem of
taste in art. Does it work as well in
the appreciation of nature? I am not so
sure. I cannot imagine my acceding to
someone who came along, for example, and said that my experience on the
Stanislaus was incorrect or of low value in comparison with another, even if
that person has had a lot of practice in appreciating nature, and had the other
virtues of a Humean good judge (although whether delicacy of sentiment is
possible here is open to question when there is no traditional set of
evaluative criteria). This doesn’t mean
that comparative judgments can never be made:
I might say that this spot on the river is more beautiful than
another. However, that judgment does not
play a significant role in my experience.
Nor is it clear how practice and comparison or even delicacy of
sentiment would improve my experience. I
am not here noticing fine distinctions in the way I would when appreciating the
subtle taste of fine wine.
It could be argued, however, that I do focus on particular
aspects of the surrounding environment.
Perhaps this is a matter of discrimination. I have a camera with me and I take pictures
of features that particularly move me (they illustrate this essay). Taking pictures is part of the experience: a way of noticing. Are my choices (where to point the camera)
the result of practice and comparison or some fine discrimination that comes
from that? It’s hard to say. Even if I did have increased discriminative
capacity based on a long experience of aesthetically appreciating this river,
the point of my experience is not in the judging or in the capacity to condemn
the judgments of others. So, it is not
even clear that the idea of “objectively correct judgment” is important in this
case, and I wonder how important it is to the aesthetics of nature in
general.
Also, whereas Berleant rejects the view that there is a
“single, unique feature” to the aesthetic, I believe that there is such a feature, and this is a quality
which I have elsewhere called “aura.” [4] The Stanislaus River in this spot at this
time (and for me) has the quality of aura, as do many of the components of that
environment on which I am focused. I have
described this quality as one in which the object, event or environment under
consideration has heightened significance.
It is experienced as more valuable by way of, and through, its sensuous
nature. It seems more than itself, more
real, more alive. During my experience
on that day at the Stanislaus everything around me, the rocks, the river, the
sky seemed more intense, the perceptual features more meaningful, and even
though I am an atheist, it is an experience of the world as if it pervaded by
something divine or numinous. A note
about this: like other atheists I accept science as providing the best
explanation we have for natural phenomena.
However I do not think science can tell us much about values or about
the nature of experience. Religious
experience should be taken seriously even by atheists. Only religion (not science, philosophy, or
even art) portrays the world as full of meaning. For atheists like myself, aesthetic
experiences of the sort I have described are somewhat like religion but without
dogma, or even belief.
A unique feature of my discussion is the presence of the
concept of happiness. When I am talking
about happiness here I am not speaking of a state of general satisfaction or
overall success in life, but rather the feeling
of happiness. Philosophers, for example
Aristotle, have often argued that happiness is the goal of life. How happiness is to be defined is not my
concern here, but rather the connection between the happiness and aesthetic
experience. More specifically, I am
interested in the connection between aesthetics and the feeling of happiness
when that feeling comes specifically out of sensuous experience in, and related
to, a place and time.
Happiness is not much discussed in aesthetics. The Encyclopedia
of Aesthetics does not have an entry for happiness, nor does it appear in
the index. Yet surely one of the reasons
we pursue the arts and one of the main reasons we contemplate nature is that
doing so makes us happy. Aesthetic
pleasure is discussed in the literature, and at great length, but although the
feeling of happiness is pleasurable, there are many other sorts of
pleasure. Perhaps the close relationship
between natural beauty and the feeling of happiness is not discussed because it
is considered too obvious, or perhaps it seems too personal to deserve presence
in the world of theory. I do not know.
Haig Khatchadourian is one of the very few philosophers to
have discussed aesthetics, and specifically the aesthetics of nature, in terms
of happiness: for him the aesthetic life is one of ways to achieve happiness.[5] He speaks the aesthetic life as a full
savoring of a variety of natural beauties.
He further observes that life in isolation from nature’s charms cannot
be aesthetically complete.
Khatchadourian seems to agree with Berleant when he says that the aesthetic
life requires involvement and should not be purely spectatorial. At the same time, like me, he believes that
this can be consistent with a positive view of the idea of disinterestedness as
represented in his case by Edward Bullough’s metaphor of distancing.
Another recent figure who has recognized the importance of
happiness in relation to aesthetic
experience is Alexander Nehamas, although, unlike Khatchadourian, he
does not connect it with the experience of nature.[6] Yet Nehamas believes that beauty issues the
promise of happiness whereas I would say, especially in the case of
appreciation of natural beauty, it is the objective side of the experience of
which the subjective side is the feeling of happiness. So in a sense, rather than happiness delayed,
beauty and happiness are one. Nehamas
may be right about those sorts of beauty associated with desire: but sometimes beauty and happiness are just
there together.
I want to end with a brief discussion of the scene itself,
illustrated in these photographs. It
might be thought that the images picked out show a strong interest in
formalism, influenced in part by modern art’s fascination with relations of
forms and colors and by postmodernism’s interest in process and change (as
found for example in video art). This is
to some extent true, however there is something probably more primordial to my
strongly emotional response to the sparkling flow of water over rocks, the
contrast of the strength of the river’s current against the calm of the
shallows, the dramatic placement of trees on the face of the cliff, the languid
positioning of my friend on a rock.
Clive Bell, the classic formalist, saw formal relations in terms of a
special aesthetic emotion to which they give rise, that emotion quite distinct
from the emotions of everyday life. Yet,
happiness is an emotion of everyday life, the one we most seek and
cherish. Photographs that feature formal
relations and textural qualities have their own value but as a record of an
aesthetic experience of nature (and nature as experienced with friend) they are
poor: they capture only a memory of
something infused with meaning, of a whole environment unbounded by rectangular
frames and limitation to one sense, of the dynamic of the live creature
interacting in a fulfilling way with its environment (as John Dewey would put
it), all giving rise to a feeling of happiness that cannot ultimately be
separated. As Berleant would put it, the
subjective and the objective are fused in aesthetic experience.[7]
Thomas Leddy, Department of Philosophy, San Jose State
University
Tle403@aol.com
[1]
Glenn Parsons, “Freedom and Objectivity in the Aesthetic Appreciation of
Nature,” British Journal of Aesthetics
46:1 (2006): 17-37.
[2]
Allen Carlson, “Critical Notice:
Aesthetics and Environment,” British
Journal of Aesthetics 46:4 (2006): 416-427.
Berleant’s book was The Aesthetics
of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple
U.P., 1992).
[3]
Arnold
Berleant, “Aesthetics and Environment Reconsidered: Reply to Carlson,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47:3 (2007): 315-318.
[4]
Thomas Leddy. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Broadview Press, 2012).
[5]
Haig Katchadourian, “Natural Beauty and the Art of Living,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 16:1
(1982): 95-98.
[6]
Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of
Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a
World of Art (Princeton University Press, 2007).
[7] John Dewey. Art as Experience (New York:
Minton, Balch & Company, 1934) I took a somewhat different approach
to these issues in “A Defense of Arts-Based Appreciation of Nature,” Environmental Ethics 27 (2005): 299-315.
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