Are art-mediated responses to be disregarded in appreciation of nature?

Aestheticians of nature frequently refer to John Muir in supporting the idea that art-mediated responses should be disregarded in our appreciation of nature.  He is often described as an opponent of the concept of the picturesque.  This is surprising given that in his book The Yosemite (1912) he uses the word "picturesque" positively at least eleven times.  For example, he refers there to the picturesque Cathedral Rocks and picturesque oaks.  The impression that Muir is opposed to the picturesque and to art-mediated responses to nature is usually based on a reading of his "A Near View of the High Sierra" to be found in Nature, Aesthetics and Environmentalism edited by Carlson and Lintott (from his book The Mountains of California, 1894)  Here he says that "To artists, few portions of the High Sierras are, strictly speaking, picturesque." (64) However this is not to say that they lack this quality for Muir himself!  He seems rather to be speaking here specifically of painters of his time.  Even this seems a strange thing to say since there are many amazing paintings of Yosemite by artists of his own time, not to mention the works of later artists, such as photographer Ansel Adams.  The paintings of Albert Bierstadt, for example Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Park (1868) and Thomas Moran, for example Domes of Yosemite (1904), show that Yosemite has long been a rich source for painters.  More recently, consider the watercolor "Birch Lake, near Hetch Hetchy" by Stephen Curl (2012). 

Muir has a theory for why he thinks that painters will find the Sierras problematic.  He speaks of how the mountain landscape there is "not clearly divisible" into smaller units and how this fact makes it difficult to isolate "artistic bits capable of being made into warm, sympathetic, lovable pictures with appreciable humanity in them."  Perhaps artists in 1894 had trouble using the Sierras to produce such effects.  But this in itself is not an argument against seeing the Sierras from an artist's perspective.  It may just be that artists from different periods will see different things.  Well, actually, that's pretty much the way it is.  It is not required to be picturesque that a landscape look like a picture by a typical painter of 1894.  The landscape could be picturesque by looking like a painting by David Hockney, a contemporary landscape artist.  That is, it doesn't have to be warm, sympathetic and lovable to be picturesque.  Or, if readers balk at this expansion of the notion of the picturesque, it is certainly the case that "seeing something in nature as like a picture" is not itself limited to seeing it as like a picture by Claude Lorraine or like a picture by Bierstadt.  Muir himself, I will argue, has a view of the picturesque that expands beyond that which is warm, sympathetic and lovable.   

Muir actually says some very positive things about the picturesque in "A Near View."  There he writes about how "on the head waters of the Tuolumne, is a group of wild peaks on which the geologist may say that the sun has but just begun to shine, which is yet in a high degree picturesque."  (65) His description of this scene in terms of foreground, background and colors could have been made by a painter or a poet.  Also, noteworthy in his description is his constant use of metaphor:  he speaks of the "crystal fountains" of the Toulumne, the river "swaying pensively from side to side with calm, stately gestures past dipping willows and sedges....ever filling the landscape with spiritual animation, and manifesting the grandeur of its sources in every movement and tone."  He even gazes repeatedly at the "glorious picture" and encloses it in a frame with his arms, speaking of it as being "ready and waiting for the elected artist."  And he wishes that he himself knew how to paint, although he contents himself with mental "photographs" and "sketches" in his notebooks.  

Following this description we have the humorous episode in which he encounters two artists, one of them Scottish (is it Moran?), who wanted to know whether he had come across a landscape "suitable for a large painting."  He then describes this one at Toulumne meadows which had "excited my admiration."  The humorous part is that although the artists are impressed by the colors they saw they are disappointed (at first) saying: "All this is huge and sublime, but we see nothing as yet at all available for effective pictures."  The problem, for them, is that the foregrounds, middle-grounds and backgrounds are all similar.  However, they are soon satisfied when "the whole picture [of what Muir previously saw and admired] stood revealed in the flush of the alpenglow."  What they wanted was "a typical alpine landscape" which they weren't getting previously, but now they are.  Notice that nowhere does Muir reject the beauty that the artists seek.  Indeed he speaks of "feasting awhile on the view" that the artists enjoyed.  

In the story, Muir decides to leave his companions to climb Mr. Ritter on his own.  As soon as this happens one might think that his aesthetic references would no longer run into the realm of the arts (if contemporary aestheticians who take a cognitivist approach to the aesthetics of nature are right).  And yet this is not what happens.  In speaking of the Tuolumne river he says "what a fine traveling companion it proved to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the mountain's own joy!  Gladly I climbed along its dashing border, absorbing its divine music, and bathing from time to time in waftings of irised spray."  And then "new beauty came streaming on the sight; painted meadows, late-blooming gardens, peaks of rare architecture."  Each beauty is described in terms of a different art!  Muir did not limit himself to the art of painting in his descriptions:  music and architecture also play a role.  Sculpture does too when he speaks of a scene "adorned with characteristic sculptures of the ancient glaciers that swept over this entire region." (67)  The art of gardening is also mentioned, as when he says "pools at this elevation are furnished with little gardens."

It is true that the knowledge he had about geography also animates his experience.  For example, recognizing that the waters lead eventually through the San Francisco Bay to the sea adds to the entire experience.  It gives it a certain aura.  However, this is not just geographical knowledge that informs perception.  Rather, it is form of story-telling in which his experience of the mountains  scenes he perceives is imaginatively enhanced by the story. 

Yuriko Saito, a well known aesthetician of nature, takes another approach to this.  She writes, "In contrast to the accompanying artists' pictorial appreciation of the landscape, Muir attends to the way in which the geological events are embodied in the rock formations, and celebrates nature's own story-telling without imposing his own vision and poetry upon it"  ("Appreciating nature on its own terms" in Carlson and Lintott, p. 161.)  My reading of Muir is somewhat different.  I see him as a strong advocate of using arts-based viewing in his appreciation of nature.  He did incorporate his knowledge of geological events into his perceptions and his descriptions of Yosemite.  However, rather than this being in contrast to his artist friends and contrary to the picturesque I would say that this is a supplement to his experience that enhances his concept of the picturesque.  I would agree that he did not impose his own vision and poetry on the landscape.  However, it is clear that he has his own vision and that he constantly uses poetic metaphors in articulating this vision.  In a sense he is using his own vision and poetry.  The term "imposition" is supposed to imply something negative, something to be avoided, and it may be that some poetic visions or renderings of natural scenes seem like impositions (for example, ones that stress aesthetic properties that cannot be found when one is there).  It is not clear to me why his own vision and poetry is any less an imposition than that of Bierstadt or Moran.  In any case, I do not accept the idea of contemporary aestheticians of nature that nature has its "own story-telling" independently of the stories we tell about it.  At best, we can say that the story Muir tells seems immensely fitting to those who have visited the same scenes.


Many aestheticians of nature have commented on these passages by Muir.  They frequently make fun of the painters for their interest in finding something "alpine" to represent.  However, remember that what the painters saw was "alpenglow" and that if Muir was opposed to the alpine picturesque one would think that he himself would be opposed to using this concept to describe his own aesthetic experiences.  (alpenglow has been described in Websters as "a reddish flow seen near sunset or sunrise on the summits of mountains" and originates from the German Alpenglühen, from Alpen Alps + Glühen glow, first used in 1871.) But instead, as he hikes by himself, he writes of the rosy glow that gradually deepens in the evening and says, "This is the alpenglow, to me one of the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.  At the touch of the divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness..."  This is hardly someone taken only by the glories of geological science or nature's "own story" told through geology or natural science alone.  Nor do we find here that Muir limited himself to perceiving the mountains as an artist would.  This is a highly aesthetic experience of the sublime that partakes of the religious.  This religious dimension is also to be found when he speaks of "the darkest scriptures of the mountains [the desolate scenes in the very high sierras]" as "illuminated with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone."  (68)  [see my next post for more on this.] 

Thoreau on Walking

   Henry David Thoreau,  June1856.by Benjamin D. Maxham 

The comments here are on a selection from Thoreau's "Walking" that appears in a textbook Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism ed. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, Columbia university Press, New York, 2008.   All quotes are from pages 54-56.  I am currently using this text in my graduate seminar on aesthetics.  Ideally I should be commenting on Thoreau's essay as a whole, but I like the limitation of using a selection, or in this post, a selection of a selection.

Much of the interest in reading a writer from another time is to try to perceive the world a bit as he did, testing his experience against one's own, and perhaps finding one's own a bit wanting.  Thoreau begins his essay by identifying Nature (he capitalizes it!) with "absolute freedom and wildness."  This in itself requires the modern reader to stretch his or her imagination:  I at least would not associate these words closely together.  For me, nature is just the world, i.e. what is, and some of it is more free, some less free, some more wild, some less wild.  But clearly Thoreau is talking about a small part of what I call "nature" when he speaks of Nature.  Moreover, it seems clear that he is speaking not just of a type of place but of a type of experience associated with a type of place.  The type of place is really wherever he took his walks, i.e. within ten miles of his home of Concord, Massachusetts. (Bear in mind that this land would have looked a far cry different then than it does today.) The type of experience is one characterized by feelings of absolute freedom and wildness.  The feeling of wildness is associated both with the fact that the place is wild and that one is oneself wild or wilder than at home.  Thoreau also stresses that he wants to make "an extreme statement" i.e. as a champion of Nature.  He wants to see man as part of Nature rather than as part of society.  But it also turns out that he thinks there are enough champions of civilized society already.  So, perhaps his "extreme statement" is a rhetorical device and he does not want to wholly dispute the value of civilization.  In fact, there are many passages in his writings that show a profound love of reading, and reading the classics at that.    

The second paragraph starts by observing that he has met few who have understood the art of Walking (his caps. again).  Of interest here for the aesthetician is the very idea that Walking can be an art.  We do speak of the art of conversation.  Perhaps Walking is an art of that sort.  He then speaks of a genius (which term was, at that time, associated with the fine artist) of SAUNTERING (his caps!), his term for the art of Walking. The implication is that walking can be a creative, art-like activity.  

He draws on the etymology of "sauntering" to explicate the art a bit more:  one source is in the notion of those who are on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and another is those who are without home, i.e. their home is everywhere.  They are like a river, which meanders, but at the same time seeks the shortest route to the sea. (One senses something Taoist about this.)  Thus, every walk (in the sense of a walk as part of the art of walking) is a crusade (religious) and the ideal walk is one from which one will never return, leaving family and friends, having settled one's affairs, "ready for a walk."  This is extreme, indeed, as if Thoreau were Jesus himself asking us to follow him.  Walking then, for Thoreau, is a fine art with religious pretensions or overtones.

I can hardly claim to know anything of walking in this sense, and yet, when reading Thoreau, I must connect him with my own experience.  Like Thoreau I often take walks from my home, although much shorter ones, and much more urban.  I live near the center of San Jose, a city of almost a million people, spread out over miles.  One walk I take is towards Olinder park, a park that was open grasslands and a clump of pine trees when I first moved here, but now has a green park lawn and marked trails.  It is a small park of a few acres bounded on the south by a freeway and on the east by Coyote Creek.  This creek is not cemented in:  so it does have a certain wild look, and fortunately, there is another park on the other side of the creek.  So, for me, Nature on this walk, is what happens to me when I am walking along the path that parallels the creek.  I admit it...not terribly wild, but pleasant enough.  My wife asked me yesterday whether I experienced things as magical and whether I could give an example.  I thought that a vision I had of a very old oak tree on that walk, near the creek, had something magical about it.  In my book I speak of aesthetic experience as experience of objects as having aura, and in this case, the oak tree had a magical aura.

Hey, I am not saying that Thoreau would consider me a fellow Walker.  Speaking of himself in the plural (in the way of a journalist?) he writes "We have felt that we are almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art," and then he observes that the others cannot do so since they need the "requisite leisure, freedom, and independence" which can only come by God's grace.  Others have only experienced Walking when they have lost themselves for half an hour in the woods.  Most have since confined themselves to public roads.  

Perhaps my experiences hiking with friends in the mountains count a bit more to practicing the art of walking.  Although an atheist, I still find myself feeling as if I were on some sort of pilgrimage, as if something spiritual were happening.  Or perhaps I could say that something spiritual does happen to me while walking in the Sierras, although I do not connect the word "spiritual" in any way with belief in God (or "magic" in any way with belief in things that violate the laws of nature).  So there it is, perhaps I partake in the art of Walking a bit.

Thoreau distinguishes Walking from mere "taking exercise" and makes a humorous comment about how swinging dumb-bells is of no real value in this respect since while you are doing this for health you are not visiting springs bubbling in far-off pastures: "If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life."  This tells us something more about Sauntering.  It includes a search for the springs of life, and this includes, sometimes literally, a search for a bubbling spring.  

Thoreau oddly worries some about the impact of Walking on his civilized side.  He observes that it might produce a certain "roughness of character" and rob us of "delicacy of touch."  The other extreme is to stay at home and have "a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin"  and also "increased sensibility to certain impressions."  He even thinks that if he had spent less time outdoors he would have been "more susceptible to some influences" important to his moral development.  The conclusion he seems to draw is that one should balance these two:  "proportion rightly the thick and thin skin."  This proportion is like that between thought and experience.  His concluding thought on this, however, is more like Rousseau:  "The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.  That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience."  So, so much for proportion, I suppose.

Language can be funny and sometimes there is a quote that has a newer aptness just because of the change of word meaning.  Thoreau says "When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods:  what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?"  Mall!  Well, he probably meant a sheltered walk, or a walk by a park bordered by trees:  basically an urban walk.  But it works well with our sense of "mall" too.   I have no quasi-mystical experiences walking in Valley Fair Mall, although I could see myself having one walking in one of the 18th or 19th century walkways Thoreau was probably thinking of....maybe because of the historical nostalgia I would feel.  Thoreau, in this paragraph, also speaks of philosophers "importing woods to themselves" since the ancient philosophers would plant goves and walks and walk in "porticos open to the air."  I often feel more philosophical on walks in nature, by which I mean that it puts me in a contemplative mood and turns my thoughts to life, meaning, reality....the big topic (although not usually in any way that I could turn into a professional article.)

One part of the art of Walking is the right attitude.  Thoreau believes that one should be in the woods in spirit, not just in body.  One should forget one's morning obligations and ones obligations to society.  To do this is to "return to my senses."  When I take my urban walks I often find that it works best if I try to make my mind empty.  Perhaps Walking is a kind of meditation.  

What was the goal of Walking for Thoreau?  He talks about how when he can achieve an "absolutely new prospect" this is "a great happiness."  An example of this is being carried in one of his local walks to "as strange a country as I expect to see," and an example of that, in turn, is that "a single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey."   So it is the strangeness and beauty of something new that he seeks.  Another aspect of his aesthetic experience, discussed in the same paragraph as this one is the harmony he finds between his own lifespan and the capability of the landscape within walking distance of his home which cannot be exhausted aesthetically during that span.  How often do we experience things as bracketed by and conditioned by our own awareness of our own lives, how long we have lived, and what the future holds for us personally. 

This then is followed by a new paragraph with a familiar theme:  "Nowadays, almost all man's improvement, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.  A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forests stand!"  I do regret not being able to see the things Thoreau saw on his walks.  And yet we just have to live with what we have, or improve it in some way.  

The Object of Art Model for Appreciation of Nature

Allen Carlson famously opposes the "object of art model" for appreciating nature. He agrees with Santayana’s suggestion that when appreciation is directed to objects that have determinate form in nature “we no longer have genuine aesthetic appreciation of nature.” He thinks that in doing so we must remove the object from its surroundings in reality or imaginatively. Then, he thinks, we will be treating it like a work of art, perhaps as a "readymade," but not as it is in itself. There seems to be a confusion here about how we appreciate art. When we appreciate art we seldom really remove it from its surroundings, even imaginatively. As Paul Ziff has observed, we are, when appreciating a painting, at least subliminally aware of the frame and the gallery walls. And, except for the strictest formalists, we confront the work in the context of information we may have about the processes and context of its creation. This is why we pay attention to the label on the wall. Carlson is simply mistaken that art works are “self-contained aesthetic units such that neither their environment of creation nor their environment of display is aesthetically relevant.” Even when we know nothing of these matters we have a tendency to view the work in terms of how it was probably created: we try to reconstruct its context. Carlson says that “natural objects are a part of and have been formed within their environments” as though works of art were not formed within their own environments or are not part of the environments in which they are displayed! I would like to argue that focusing on determinate objects in nature, for example a specific rock, pine cone, or flower, is a legitimate form of appreciation of nature. This can happen when these items are found in nature or even when they are taken home and put on a mantelpiece. In doing so we may have the very kind of background knowledge and awareness of the original background of creation that we bring to a work of art.

I am not denying that natural objects can take on different qualities when moved from their environment of creation to another environment of display (e.g. the mantelpiece). This is also true for works of art. Whether this is a negative is another matter. To be sure, natural rocks when incorporated into the wall of a work of architecture take on different aesthetic qualities than they would have had in their original location. (It is doubtful, by the way, that they would have had any aesthetic qualities at all if they were underground and invisible in their original location.) They do not lose their historical context: that context is simply placed in the background so that we are only vaguely aware that, for example, these rocks were collected locally. Carlson speaks as though the highlighting of those features of such objects that are not related to the context of origin makes their appreciation “limited” in the sense that something has been lost. But in fact much has been gained. The incorporation of the rocks into the piece of architecture enhances our own experience of the building as a whole and brings us close to nature in ways that, although different from those of the naturalist, are not necessarily worse.

I have just been looking at a spider in its web in sunlight: what a thing of beauty! But when appreciating this beauty I did not think much about the surrounding garden or about the evolution of spiders. I just focused on the web and the spider, on how they looked at that moment. On Carlson's view, this would be wrong: I would not be treating the web as it is in itself. I just don't buy it.

Allen Carlson, "Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment," in Aesthetics ed. Susan Feagin and Patrick Maynard. (Oxford U. Press, 1997) 30-40.