3. Five Conditions for an Adequate Aesthetics of Nature and Their Critique

On surveying the field one might get the impression that it is a random mixture of assorted attempts at how to go about things, but such a picture is mistaken. After situating the natural environmental, object, landscape and human chauvinistic models, Carlson, in his book Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (2009), set out five conditions for appropriate appreciation: by “conditions” I mean a set of intuitions, constraints, desiderata and other [requirements] that any satisfactory account of the aesthetic appreciation of nature must meet (p. 38). He is convinced that each of them is highly compelling, and he shaped the selection so that he included among the conditions only those that had been defended (besides himself) by at least one other philosopher in the field, or several. For precisely this reason they are named after the philosopher who developed the individual condition most clearly and most vehemently. It is a fact that no one before Carlson had recognised that, over the years, the outlines of the discipline’s fundamental postulates were emerging in the work of his colleagues; and he himself also points out that no one before him had ever examined how such findings interact.

Each of them on its own already carries great consequences, and all five together, after several decades of groping and circling, represent the first real firm foothold. We must of course be aware that by consolidating and arbitrating the fundamental postulates of the discipline, Carlson made sure that they all pull in one direction – in other words, that they support his natural environmental model. Bearing this warning in mind, and with a consistent critique of this model, I too, after long reading of the literature, decided to incorporate the five conditions consistently into the methodological framework of the dissertation and to test my own theses and observations with their help. At the time of writing the dissertation no better framework could be found, and Allen Carlson was still the most influential thinker.

3.1. First Condition: Ziff's "Anything Viewed" Doctrine

The first condition was highlighted and developed by Paul Ziff in relation to art, and it is at the same time the fundamental condition of the aesthetics of nature. The conviction that anything is worthy of aesthetic consideration is so interwoven with and kneaded into the tradition of Western aesthetics that Carlson goes so far as to call it a doctrine. Following Paul Ziff, Carlson shows that in appreciating works of art we know what to appreciate – so that we can distinguish the work from what it is not – and we know which of its aspects to appreciate, since when we know what kind of art it is, we know how it is to be appreciated …, because works of art are our creations. That is, because we made them as objects of aesthetic attention, we understand what is involved in appreciating them, Carroll reflects (2008, pp. 133–134). Ziff expresses the “anything viewed” doctrine more resolutely: although one is not committed to a narcissistic obsession with the marks of human endeavour, one can look aesthetically at the things of the world without being troubled or restricted by their lack of the status of artefacts … Anything that can be viewed is worthy of aesthetic attention, and none of [these things] is better or worse [for this purpose] (Ziff, 1979, p. 293).

This is a rather important conflict of views, relating to the above-mentioned objections of the human chauvinistic approach to the aesthetics of nature – that it is no aesthetics at all, since natural environments, natural objects and the natural world in fact lack the status of artefacts. How are we to judge nature as the achievement of some creator if nature, unlike art, is not our creation at all? Ergo, since it is not the creation of a creative intellect, its appreciation cannot be aesthetic. Ziff takes a stand against the human chauvinistic non-aesthetics of nature, based on the search for a creator, and against Berleant’s aesthetics of engagement, in which aesthetics is in fact not possible at all (and which is in a certain sense a subspecies of the chauvinistic variant). The claim that nature cannot be an object of aesthetic appreciation is unacceptable to Carlson. The environment is the setting within which we exist as a sentient part, and at the same time it is what surrounds us. But what is setting and surrounds us we hardly truly notice. “If any one part of it becomes obtrusive, it is in danger of being seen as an object or a scene, not as our environment,”✓ says Carlson (2008, p. 125), and adds that the aesthetic values of the environment are primarily values of a background sort, which is why it seems that, in an essentially unobtrusive setting, there is basically little basis for what to include and what to exclude. He thus observes that the concept of the aesthetic tugs in the direction of the subject–object relation, which focuses above all on the close visual scrutiny of an aesthetic object; but the difficulty lies not so much in the subject–object relation and the visual nature of aesthetics in general as in the fact that the aesthetic itself is in conflict with the appreciation of anything as unobtrusive background. “I suggest then that the beginning of an answer to the question of how to aesthetically appreciate an environment is something like the following: We must experience our background setting in all those ways in which we normally experience it, by sight, smell, touch, and whatever. However, we must experience it not as unobtrusive background, but as obtrusive foreground!”✓ (Carlson, 2008, p. 126).

Like quite a few other authors, Carlson too turns to Yi-Fu Tuan for a hint or an example of what such experience should be like: “An adult must learn to be yielding and careless like a child if he were to enjoy nature polymorphously. He needs to slip into old clothes so that he could feel free to stretch out on the hay beside the brook and bathe in a meld of physical sensations: the smell of the hay and of horse dung; the warmth of the ground, its hard and soft contours; the warmth of the sun tempered by breeze; the tickling of an ant making its way up the calf of his leg; the play of shifting leaf shadows on his face; the sound of water over the pebbles and boulders, the sound of cicadas and distant traffic. Such an environment might break all the formal rules of euphony and aesthetics, substituting confusion for order, and yet be wholly satisfying”✓ (Tuan, 1974, p. 96).³⁷

Ziff’s “anything viewed” doctrine must not be understood to mean that we can appreciate anything. Carlson agrees that there must be limits and emphases in our aesthetic appreciation of nature – just as there are in our appreciation of art. Similar emphases and limits – in the case of art, for instance, the edges and colour fields of a painting – of course play their part in the experience of nature, since otherwise the experience of the environment would give us a kind of “soup of sensations”. This would surely substitute confusion for order, but it would certainly not be satisfying. Carlson stresses once again that the natural environment is not a work of art but is natural, and as such “has no boundaries or foci of aesthetic significance which are given as a result of our creation nor of which we have knowledge because of our involvement in such creation. … Thus although we have not created nature, we yet know a great deal about it. This knowledge, essentially common sense/scientific knowledge, seems to me the only viable candidate for playing the role in regard to the appreciation of nature”✓ (2008, p. 127). His point is that the diversity and inarticulateness of the experience do not in themselves mean that it cannot be aesthetic: “Rather it must be … one in which knowledge and intelligence transform raw experience by making it determinate, harmonious, and meaningful. For example, in order for there to be aesthetic appreciation we must recognize the smell of the hay and that of the horse dung and perhaps distinguish between them; we must feel the ant at least as an insect rather than as, say, a twitch”✓ (p. 127).

3.2. Second Condition: Budd's "As Nature" Constraint

Put simply: Ziff’s “anything viewed” doctrine holds that the appreciation of nature can be aesthetic even though nature is not an artefact. The second condition demands precisely this: that nature must not be appreciated as an artefact, but as nature. Carlson calls it Budd’s “as nature” constraint, since it was formulated most succinctly by the philosopher Malcolm Budd in his book The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature: just as the aesthetic appreciation of art is the appreciation of art as art, so the aesthetic appreciation of nature is the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature. For if we hold that the natural world is not anyone’s artefact, the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature, if it is to be true to what nature actually is, must be the aesthetic appreciation of nature, but not as an intentionally created product (Budd, 2002, p. 91).

Budd observes that the “as nature” constraint is defended by a number of philosophers in the aesthetics of nature, the most prominent among them being, of course, Allen Carlson and Holmes Rolston III. Carlson, in establishing Budd’s constraint, notes that its most significant consequence stems precisely from the claim that the appreciation of nature must not proceed as the aesthetic appreciation of an intentionally created object (and therefore not as art). Although the statement appears innocent, in Carlson’s words it nevertheless squarely challenges the long-standing tradition of aesthetic approach to nature that has prevailed at least since the eighteenth century (Carlson, 2009, p. 41). The picturesque way of viewing nature, consolidated by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, is namely nothing other than an instruction to look at it the way we look at art. One of the reasons for the topic of this dissertation is precisely the stubborn persistence of the picturesque tradition (and others like it) – in everyday life and in popular culture and its aesthetic relation to nature. Even today some philosophers – below I mention Donald W. Crawford – zealously advocate scenic models and defend the picturesque.

And it is precisely by defending the picturesque that someone here and there tries to revive formalism. In an academic dispute not lacking in blows below the belt, Nick Zangwill (one of the few) opposes Hepburn and Carlson as well as Budd. He holds, namely, that a formalist approach is appropriate both for art and for nature. Carlson rather slyly emphasises only and above all his view of the appreciation of inorganic nature, which is exclusively formalist (2009, p. 41), and deftly passes over in silence Zangwill’s initial caveat that he defends moderate formalism. Carlson’s reading of Zangwill is deliberately oversimplified: the formalists’ conviction that we must appreciate nature in terms of the formal qualities of line, shape and colour leads Zangwill to reject Budd’s “as nature” constraint, which he calls the “weak qua thesis”, that we are to appreciate nature as nature (p. 42). Zangwill justifiably takes issue with Budd’s proclamation of the appreciation of nature as nature, for such a constraint can also be understood as a merely negative determination that nature is everything that is not art. In fact it represents a commandment, a hard task, to appreciate nature as nature, while it is still not clear what this thing is supposed to be (at least in the aesthetic sense). Although I share the dismissive attitude towards formalism, I shall, unlike Carlson, be fairer to Zangwill, who in fact says: “Some things have dependent beauty, in Kant’s sense. Things that are dependently beautiful have a function, and they have a beauty that expresses or articulates that function. If we are accurately to judge the dependent beauty of a thing, we must subsume it under a category that picks out the function it has. But not all beauty is dependent beauty. Some beauty does not express a function, but depends entirely on how the thing is considered in itself. That beauty is free or formal. Dependent beauty is non-formal beauty. … Anti-formalism says that all beauty is non-formal beauty. Moderate aesthetic formalism says that there is much beauty of both sorts. … Both art and nature include things that have dependent beauty, and both art and nature include things that have free beauty”✓ (Zangwill, 2001, p. 209). Zangwill slyly labels him a die-hard opponent of formalism and correctly observes that Carlson demands that natural things be consistently placed in their correct historical and purposive categories. He then adds tellingly: “The question we have to consider is: do natural things have their aesthetic properties qua the natural kinds they are members of?”✓ (p. 210).

The answer to this question, in Zangwill’s view, lies in the weak and strong versions of the “qua thesis” mentioned. According to the strong version, we must classify things into the correct scientific or common-sense natural categories: “We must appreciate a natural thing as the particular kind of natural thing it is. But all the weak Qua thesis holds is that one need only appreciate a natural thing as a natural thing. … Carlson defends the strong thesis. Budd (I think) only endorses the weak thesis. But in my view, both theses should be resisted”✓ (p. 210). Carlson agrees with Zangwill’s claim that he himself defends the strong version, but he by no means agrees with Zangwill’s positions. For Carlson these certainly do not respect Budd’s “as nature” constraint, because they seem to require us in some cases to appreciate nature as something other than natural (Carlson, 2009, p. 42).

Budd’s “as nature” constraint is also confirmed, in his own derivation, by Božidar Kante in the article “Naravna in umetniška lepota pri Kantu: svobodna in zgolj pripadajoča (pogojna, odvisna) lepota” [Natural and Artistic Beauty in Kant: Free and Merely Adherent (Conditional, Dependent) Beauty]. In a detailed analysis he deals precisely with Kant’s relation to aesthetic judgements in art and in nature (see above, in the chapter “Some Reservations about Natural Beauty”). Kant was aware of the difficulty regarding both and reflected in the Critique on the relations between them. Kante explains adherent (conditional, dependent) beauty by saying that, besides non-composite kinds of aesthetic judgement, Kant also recognises the combination of a pure judgement of taste about something with a judgement about the qualitative perfection of that thing, which we said deals with the concept of the kind that the object exemplifies – the kind of thing that it is, or is thought to be. This combination of judgements forms another kind of aesthetic judgement – the judgement that something is a beautiful thing of kind K – that is, an impure judgement of taste, a judgement of adherent (conditional, dependent) beauty (Kante, 2008, p. 87). Kant does not analyse the predicative adjective in the judgement that O is a beautiful K in the sense that O is dependently beautiful (as a K), that is, as a combination of the judgement that O is a K and that it is beautiful. No, rather the opposite! He analyses it as a combination of the judgement that O is a good specimen of kind K and the judgement that the sensible manifold of O has a beautiful form or shape. Put differently, “O is beautiful” (where this statement expresses a judgement of dependent beauty) means “O is a qualitatively perfect K and O is (in the non-adherent sense) beautiful”, where the first conjunct (like the second) is asserted on the basis of O’s look or appearance, so that it is evident in O’s appearing that it is a qualitatively perfect K (p. 87). Kante observes that a judgement of dependent beauty requires us to take into account not merely the form of the object but also what kind of object it is and whether it is a good specimen of its kind. The basic condition for declaring something a dependent beauty requires that in its appearing it must exemplify well, or display, the purpose of the kind of thing of which it is a beautiful specimen. Unless a thing of kind K is a good or satisfactory specimen of that kind, then, even if it is a beautiful thing, it is not beautiful as a K (Kante, 2008, pp. 87–88). Or, in Kant’s own words: “Now this relation, present when an object is characterized as beautiful, is coupled with the feeling of pleasure. This pleasure is by the judgement of taste pronounced valid for every one; hence an agreeableness attending the representation is just as incapable of containing the determining ground of the judgement as the representation of the perfection of the object or the concept of the good. We are thus left with the subjective finality in the representation of an object, exclusive of any end (objective or subjective)–consequently the bare form of finality in the representation whereby an object is given to us, so far as we are conscious of it as that which is alone capable of constituting the delight which, apart from any concept, we estimate as universally communicable, and so of forming the determining ground of the judgement of taste”✓ (Kant, 1999, p. 61). In the tenth section of the third Critique, Kant says of finality that “An end is the object of a concept so far as this concept is regarded as the cause of the object (the real ground of its possibility); and the causality of a concept in respect of its object is finality (forma finalis). Where, then, not the cognition of an object merely, but the object itself (its form or real existence) as an effect, is thought to be possible only through a concept of it, there we imagine an end. The representation of the effect is here the determining ground of its cause and takes the lead of it”✓ (p. 60).

Kante paraphrases Kant: nature and the objects in it may be unintentional, while at the same time the explanation of their possibility can be understood only by deriving them from some will (and will, as we said, is a faculty insofar as it acts in accordance with the representation of a purpose/intention). Such an interpretation also allows us to abandon the notion that Kantian beauty is essentially a matter of form (Kante, 2008, p. 89). Kant, then, does not claim that nature is a priori purposive in the sense that an order reigns in it that is attuned to our cognitive faculties. What he really claims is that we are compelled to perceive it as so ordered: for the purposes of its reflection on nature with regard to its empirical laws, the power of judgement presupposes a priori that nature accords in this way with our cognitive possibilities. We therefore need something that, when we judge nature, alerts us to its purposiveness for our understanding. Of course, the accord of nature with our cognitive faculties is merely contingent, even though in this case we feel pleasure (p. 89).

Nevertheless it must be clear that Kant is an adherent of an aesthetic evaluation that consists in our being able to look at nature as if it were art: “nature as mere mechanism being enlarged to the conception of nature as art”✓ (Kant, 1999, p. 86). Or: “Nature proved beautiful when it wore the appearance of art; and art can only be termed beautiful, where we are conscious of its being art, while yet it has the appearance of nature”✓ (p. 146). And later still: the concept originally produced by the power of judgement and peculiar to it is thus the concept of nature as art (p. 336). Kante also elaborates two aspects of Walton’s connection between the aesthetic properties of a work of art and the categories of art. The first is the philosophical thesis that the aesthetic properties a work of art actually has are also determined by the category under which we perceive the work. The second is the psychological thesis, which says that which properties a work of art seems to have is a function of the category in which, or under which, we experience the work. Kante asks what happens if we transfer both theses to nature.

Natural things actually have the aesthetic properties they seem to have only in cases when we perceive them in their correct natural category: it must of course be added that only an aesthetically sensitive and suitably educated observer is capable of this, one who uses the appropriate knowledge of what things in that category usually look like, so that they are perceived in that way (Kante, 2008, p. 95). As regards the psychological thesis, it depends on the natural category under which we experience or undergo it (as which natural thing we experience it) (p. 95). It is clear, of course, that Carlson’s answer to the question of whether the theses can be applied to nature is affirmative. Regardless of the fact that the author adopts Budd’s “as nature” constraint as one of the five conditions of the aesthetics of nature, in Kante’s words it is far from clear and self-evident that knowledge about nature performs the same function as knowledge about a work of art, namely that of separating aesthetically relevant knowledge from irrelevant knowledge (2008, p. 97). Natural categories or natural kinds of course do not function in the sense of partly determining the real aesthetic properties of natural things, as is the case with the aesthetic properties of works of art: the fact that natural things are not designed with the aim of aesthetic appreciation frees them from the constraints that govern the artistic appreciation of works of art: the categories of art prescribe an appropriate way of artistic appreciation, whereas the categories of nature do not prescribe an appropriate way of aesthetically appreciating nature (p. 97). For this reason the aesthetic appreciation of nature possesses a freedom that artistic appreciation does not have: if the appropriate aesthetic appreciation is that appreciation of an object which reveals what aesthetic qualities and value that object has, then in general there is no such thing as the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. There is no such thing as the such-and-such, precisely determined, aesthetic quality of nature in the sense in which there is the such-and-such aesthetic quality and value of a work of art (p. 98). If we do wish to discuss the true value of natural objects, we can understand it as dependent on the time-slice in their natural history, on the sensory mode of perception – or, as Budd himself puts it: “The answer to the question, ‘In the case of nature (i) what is to be aesthetically appreciated and (ii) how is it to be aesthetically appreciated?’ is just this: (i) Whatever is available in nature for aesthetic appreciation (as nature), (ii) in whatever manner or manners it is possible to appreciate it aesthetically (as nature)”✓ (Budd, 2002, p. 147).

3.3. Third Condition: Berleant's Requirement of a "Unified Aesthetics"

Positions such as Zangwill’s defence of (moderate) formalism for both nature and art, mentioned above, are motivated by the desire finally to find a language with which both fields could be described without evading the concepts of “beauty” and “appreciation”. Although Carlson observes that all of them, one after another, violate Budd’s “as nature” constraint, they represent an admirable effort that is important not only for the aesthetics of nature but for aesthetics in general. In the aesthetics of nature, a project of this kind was begun and carried through by Arnold Berleant with the aesthetics of engagement, which he wishes to apply to nature and art.

Berleant is convinced that we do not need an aesthetics that cultivates two different kinds of phenomena, one of art and the other of nature, but an aesthetics of art and nature in which both in fact involve a single, all-encompassing experience that requires a comprehensive theory for its development (1992, p. 161). Carlson observes that the aesthetics of engagement is attractive in a way similar to moderate formalism: moreover, given formalism’s other evident weaknesses – not only does it violate Budd’s “as nature” constraint, but also the superficial character of formalist aesthetic appreciation – it seems that [its] persistent appeal lies also in the fact that it fulfils Berleant’s requirement of a “unified aesthetics” (2009, p. 43). It is precisely because aesthetic theories are unable to satisfy this requirement – which is of course understandable, since they did not come into being with it in mind – that aesthetics in general concerns itself so little with nature. Carlson takes as an example the expressionist theory, in which the essence of the work of art and of its appreciation is the artist’s expression of emotions. It goes without saying that a theory focused on the author cannot cope with nature; the same goes for the institutional theory of art. Danto, for example, reflects that [the Brillo box] “could not have been art fifty years ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal, flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers. The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It would, I should think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on those walls. Not unless there were neolithic aestheticians”✓ (Danto, 2000, p. 24, bold B. M.). In Dickie’s view, the artefactuality of something can be achieved by intentionally using an object as a work of art. For example, the piece of driftwood that became art was picked up, carried and hung on a wall. The piece of driftwood became art because we did all these things to it, and not – as my original claims suggested – because these actions conferred artefactuality on it (Dickie, 2000, p. 33).

Carlson points out that the gap between art and nature is widened still further by Walton. He takes aesthetic judgements about art to be objective, or at least partly objective, whereas he is convinced that judgements about nature are relative, dependent on how its appreciation happens to occur. Besides those already listed, Berleant’s requirement of a “unified aesthetics” is satisfied neither by Budd’s free model nor by Fisher’s (1998) (free) aesthetics of the soundscape. Although, as Carlson observes, they contain a kind of intuitive appeal (2009, p. 44), they nevertheless divide aesthetic experience into two separate realities.

Judging by a survey of the field, Carlson simply had to include his colleague Berleant, as a pioneer and one of the fundamental writers, in the set of the discipline’s basic requirements, since the two also collaborated on a whole series of edited volumes. He is evidently himself convinced that his natural environmental model satisfies Berleant’s condition, but the reverse is rather true: Berleant’s idea nicely accompanies Carlson’s model. At some point we should let art be art, and let nature remain something other than an intentional creation. The translation does not work out for Berleant at all, for it is mute. His model of the aesthetics of engagement describes a state of consciousness in which speech is superfluous.

3.4. Fourth Condition: Hepburn's Intuition of Serious Beauty

Budd’s and Fisher’s positions allow a generous measure of freedom in aesthetic appreciation and thus fail to satisfy Berleant’s requirement, but the real difficulties for them begin only with a far more consistent and clear intuition – namely, that “some instances of the aesthetic appreciation of nature are in some straightforward ways better—less superficial and more worth having—than others”✓ (Carlson, 2009, p. 45). Here he of course has in mind Hepburn and his famous article “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty”. As early as 1966, in a well-known and frequently quoted passage about a cumulus cloud, Hepburn reflects on the triviality of everyday aesthetics: at a given moment the outline of a cumulus rain cloud may resemble the outline of a laundry basket, and this may even amuse us. But suppose, Hepburn proposes, that next time we do not concern ourselves with what the cumulus cloud resembles, but instead study its internal turbulence, its winds, its structure and its visible form: “Should we not be ready to say that this latter experience was less superficial or contrived than the other, that it was truer to nature, and for that reason more worth having? … If there can be a passage, in art, from easy beauty to difficult and more serious beauty, there can also be such passage in aesthetic contemplation of nature”✓ (2006, p. 60). He is convinced that an impulse of this kind in this direction exists, since otherwise we could not explain the astonishment of people who bring their aesthetic views of nature into line with the findings of modern science.

Carlson is convinced that, together with Budd’s “as nature” constraint, Hepburn’s intuition of serious beauty represents a requirement that an appropriate aesthetics of nature must satisfy if we wish to avoid the paradoxes and misunderstandings I mentioned in the first quarter of the dissertation. The intuition of serious beauty thus seriously undermines the free models, which also allow a superficial and light – if you like, trivial – aesthetic fascination with nature. With it, at the very beginning of the discipline, Hepburn sets a serious limit to the intrusion of kitsch and of vapid “everyday” approaches.

Important is Carlson’s observation that Hepburn’s intuition also restricts, and defines as inappropriate, an important kind of non-cognitive approach that gives precedence to emotional and more personal responses, since these are paradigms of superficial, easy beauty (2009, p. 46). The attentive reader may therefore be surprised by Carlson’s remark that the intuition of serious beauty shakes the firmness of Berleant’s aesthetics of engagement and of its striving to overcome the traditional dichotomies of subject and object, to abolish the distance between the appreciator and the appreciated. The aesthetics of engagement strives, namely, for a complete – in Carlson’s reading, multisensory – fusion of the two, whether in nature or in art. In the theoretical sense, the aesthetics of engagement would thus respect the requirement of a “unified aesthetics”, but by no means Hepburn’s intuition of serious beauty. Carroll’s arousal model also gives it too little emphasis, since in Carlson’s view it overemphasises the immediate emotional responses that nature does indeed often arouse in us. Carroll of course replies that in cases where the depth of the response is constituted by the intensity of our involvement and its “thoroughness”, there is no reason to suppose that being moved by nature constitutes a shallower form of appreciation than the scientific appreciation of nature … My aim is merely to defend the legitimacy of an already entrenched mode of appreciating nature, which I call the mode of being moved by nature. This mode of appreciating nature can pay the epistemological bill that Carlson presumes every adequate system of appreciating nature must pay (Carroll, 2008, p. 144). The same supposedly holds – Carlson at least is convinced of it – for Cheryl Foster, who in the article “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics” establishes the so-called ambient model: “One of the problems with the ambient aesthetic is the difficulty in giving a succinct sense of it in words. Surely it connotes a feeling of being surrounded by or infused with an enveloping, engaging tactility, but the ambient in all its forms resists discursive formulation”✓ (Foster, 1998, pp. 132–133). The author makes it clear that this is not a matter of fantasising, daydreaming, personal rumination or eccentric observation.

Foster approaches the problem by comparing the narrative and the ambient approach. As regards narrative approaches, in appreciating aesthetic value we can easily distinguish between competing narratives and can, to a certain extent, assess factual correctness and social appropriateness. “The ambient dimension of aesthetic value, however, does not rely in practice upon any standards, frameworks, or narratives external to the experiencing individual”✓ (p. 133). Regardless of the fact that the narrative dimension of aesthetic value, too, cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge and goes beyond the communicative function – Foster is convinced that Berleant shows this excellently in his theory of descriptive aesthetics – it nevertheless retains explicit ties with fields of knowledge and thought that extend beyond the individual’s (bare) encounter with the sensuous surface of the environment. Foster is cautious here, since she knows she is slowly closing herself into a kind of aesthetic solipsism, which, let us be clear, is entirely acceptable in itself but useless for any discipline “of this or that”. She does not want her model to be understood as a pattern of appreciation in which the individual loses him- or herself in aesthetic encounters with nature, “any references to external bodies of knowledge or thought remain implicit or in the background of consciousness”✓ (p. 133). If we understand the narrative dimension of aesthetic engagement in nature as the selection and choice of individual objects, events or groups of objects, and as a kind of “a sort of mental dissection of space through time, then the ambient dimension of aesthetic value emerges when we resist such conscious epistemological organization and open ourselves to the immensity of what has been, most of the time and for many of us, elsewhere”✓ (p. 133).

Carlson’s dismissive attitude towards such models is understandable: multisensory immersion in nature, emotional arousal and ambient feelings of nature are an interesting aspect of human experience and undoubtedly constitute some dimensions of our aesthetic experience of nature. Each [of these] states is also at the easy end of the spectrum that stretches from superficial to serious beauty (Carlson, 2009, p. 46), which means that by placing them at the centre of the aesthetic appreciation of nature we would simply fail to heed Hepburn’s intuition of serious beauty.

3.5. Fifth Condition: Thompson's Desired Objectivity

The fifth condition for an appropriate and tangible aesthetics of nature relies to a large extent precisely on Hepburn’s idea. The philosopher Janna Thompson is convinced that aesthetic value is something people readily identify with and also appreciate. Thus it seems that “the appeal to the beauty of nature can provide a more satisfactory and defensible ground for preservation than do appeals to an inherent value that is independent of the human point of view”✓ (Thompson, 1995, p. 292). She points out, namely, that a concept of the value of nature that transcends and excludes the role of human interest leaves unanswered the question of what, after all, it is in nature that should be valuable in itself. Relying on a supposedly inherent aesthetic value of nature means relying on extremely flimsy foundations for practical ethics and environmental protection. The appreciation of nature must contain a satisfactory measure of objectivity: “The link that Moore and Hargrove want to make between aesthetic judgment and ethical obligation fails unless there are objective grounds—grounds that rational, sensitive people can accept—for thinking that something has value”✓. Thompson (1995, p. 292) points to the simple truth that if beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, then no general moral duty can be derived from an aesthetic judgement. “A judgment of value that is merely personal and subjective gives us no way of arguing that everyone ought to learn to appreciate something, or at least to regard it as worthy of preservation”✓ (p. 292).

Most positions that lean towards non-cognitive approaches and emphasise more personal and emotional responses to nature find themselves in difficulty with the fifth condition. This is no surprise, since Berleant’s multisensory immersion in nature, Carroll’s arousal model and, for instance, Foster’s ambient feelings are “notoriously subjective and by themselves do not seem to be adequate foundations for objective judgments of the aesthetic value of nature”✓ (Carlson, 2009, p. 48). Carroll’s attempt to resolve the predicament could also be understood as recourse to the so-called cognitive theory of emotions. No one wishes to deny that our responses to nature are emotionally coloured, but they can be described as appropriate or inappropriate according to the cognitive assessment of what caused them. Carroll points out how easily we mistake a non-venomous snake for a venomous one and are therefore unjustifiably frightened of it. Let us compare, say, the adder and the smooth snake. When we see a snake, fear is an appropriate response if we have correctly judged that we are in the vicinity of a venomous and deadly adder. In other words, we have cognitively assessed that we have crossed the path of a snake whose venom is four times stronger than that of the nose-horned viper. Placing emotional responses in this way allows the assumption that in such and similar cases we are dealing with entirely justified and, we may say, objective emotional responses. Nevertheless, Carlson is convinced that these only half satisfy Thompson’s desired objectivity, for, as he puts it, “although it accounts for how our emotional responses may be assessed as appropriate or inappropriate in light of our cognitive appraisals, it does not provide resources for establishing the objectivity of the appraisals themselves”✓ (2009, pp. 48–49). In other words, we can be mistaken. An untrained eye, in a quick and panicked response, may not notice that what is before us is in fact a non-venomous smooth snake, which the lay public can easily misidentify as an adder.

Some do not even trouble themselves with objectivity, but an explicit attempt to satisfy the fifth condition is made, for instance, by Emily Brady. I note that the English term “imagination” is as a rule translated into Slovenian as domišljija (fancy), but I am myself convinced that the author had in mind not so much fancy as the aspect of representation (predstavnost), of imagining and mentally processing what has been beheld. Brady also points out that hers is a non-scientific model in which she assigns a role not to emotions but to the capacity of imagination, and which therefore relies on perceptual and imaginative capacities. It is precisely these that are to provide the foundation for the appreciation of nature, and the model, in her words, is “loosely Kantian”✓ (1998, p. 142), since one of its guides is also disinterestedness. The aesthetic response begins with perception and continues with recognition and interpretation: “With a natural environment, such as a seascape, my perception is not directed by what an artist has depicted, but it is nonetheless directed by the recognition and enjoyment of perceptual qualities. I focus on the foreground of the seascape, the perfect curve of the wave and the white foam which coincides with the spectacular crashing sound of the waves hitting the sand. … Such perceptual attentiveness is intimately linked to imagination”✓ (p. 142). It is imagination that, with perceptual presence in the natural environment, encourages various perceptual perspectives and in fact enriches the aesthetic response, Brady is convinced – and she of course asks to what extent we can give it free rein. What if too much imagination banalises and trivialises aesthetic objects? Her answer is simple: “Such trivial treatment emerges with irrelevant imaginings by the percipient, imaginings which cannot be tied to the perceptual properties of the object, or those which indulge the percipient in a personal fantasy”✓ (p. 144). Brady is clear that imagination, or representation, can be described as expressly unreliable, since it can quickly turn into fantasy or free-floating daydreaming; at the same time she herself writes that this is in fact already signalled by the very principles of the natural environmental model (which she rejects as too restrictive). Carlson, too, acknowledges that Brady herself points out that the appropriate role of imagination is one that plays an appropriate role. “With art, the narrative of a novel or characterization determines the imaginative response to some extent. With natural objects such explicit guidance is absent, so on what grounds is it possible to distinguish imaginings tied to the object from those which are not?”✓ asks Brady (p. 144), to whom in some cases this seems an impossible task even for art. The author has an answer, which she names with the expression “imagining well”. This is “spotting aesthetic potential, having a sense of what to look for, and knowing when to clip the wings of imagination”✓ (p. 146). Clipping the wings is meant to prevent shallow, naive and sentimental imaginative responses, which impoverish rather than enrich appreciation.

Nevertheless, Brady categorically rejects models such as those defended by Marcia Eaton and Allen Carlson. She does not agree with the warnings that imagination must be guided by knowledge and learning, since only in that way could the aesthetic response be objective. Partly for this reason, it is not entirely clear to Carlson how “imagining well” – especially when set alongside common-sense knowledge – is to ensure an acceptable measure of objectivity. Someone may judge that a certain aesthetic judgement is entirely justified and appropriate for them, someone else otherwise. But, as Carlson points out, they do this too on the basis of some knowledge, whatever it may be: therefore, although Brady’s account is one of the more resolute attempts to satisfy Thompson’s desired objectivity, it does not seem to succeed (2009, p. 49).

It is understandable that Carlson, in his review of the literature, finds that practically none of the models presented and listed in the aesthetics of nature manages to satisfy all five conditions. We must not overlook that he formulated them, in the role of the field’s authority (and, to tell the truth, the only one), above all as the author of the natural environmental model. It is therefore not surprising that Ziff’s “anything viewed” doctrine, Budd’s “as nature” constraint, Berleant’s requirement of a “unified aesthetics”, Hepburn’s intuition of serious beauty and Thompson’s desired objectivity are fulfilled only by Carlson’s model. We can hardly reproach him with arrogance, since he set out these orientations long before the articles and books of authors whom Carlson does not read as sources of an appropriate aesthetics of nature were published. As early as 1984, in the article “Nature and Positive Aesthetics”, he wrote some thoughts which in his view sum up all five conditions: “In the account sketched here, however, our appreciation of nature is aesthetic and is analogous to that of art in both its nature and its structure. The significant difference is that while, in art appreciation, categories of art and the knowledge given by art criticism and art history are relevant, in nature appreciation, the categories are natural categories and the knowledge is that provided by natural history—by science. But this difference is not unexpected; nature is not art”✓ (Carlson, 1984, pp. 27–28).

The author is convinced that the natural environmental model satisfies Ziff’s “anything viewed” doctrine by claiming that the appreciation of nature is aesthetic, and at the same time acknowledges that because nature is not art, we must appreciate it as nature and not as art. With the latter he fulfils Budd’s “as nature” constraint. Where the ground becomes somewhat slippery is the point at which Carlson insists that the appreciation of nature as nature is ensured by faithfully following scientific categories and science, which acquaints us with the nature of nature itself (2009, p. 50). Since natural science plays the same or a similar role in the aesthetic appreciation of nature as art theory does in the appreciation of art, such appreciation is analogous to that of art, which is supposed to mean that the natural environmental model meets Berleant’s requirement of a “unified aesthetics”. It is now also gradually becoming clear that, by placing natural science at the centre of the model, this kind of appreciation of nature ensures that it is serious rather than superficial, thereby respecting Hepburn’s intuition of serious beauty. It is almost superfluous to add that Thompson’s “desired objectivity” is the essence of science, that is, of the paradigm of objectivity – whereby, Carlson believes, the natural environmental model endows our aesthetic judgements about nature with a solid degree of objectivity (p. 51).

3.6. Whether the Divide between the Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Camps Makes Sense

Before we conclude this survey of the field, it must be pointed out that the divide between cognitive and non-cognitive responses to nature represents a long-drawn-out battle between two rather tired camps. Jonathan Maskit points out that a mere division into, say, advocates of science and advocates of imagination is losing its fruitfulness (Maskit, 2014, p. 43). Positions in environmental aesthetics can certainly also be divided into a majority, which is universalist and individualist (and in which historical and cultural factors play no role), and a minority, for which receptiveness to the influences of culture and history is essential. The majority can be filed in the analytic drawer, the minority in the continental one, although many authors in the latter would not recognise themselves as continental. Maskit holds that the minority view is worth emphasising as a necessary corrective to the excessive [influence] of majority universalism (p. 43). In his view the disagreements between the analytic and continental camps, at least in environmental aesthetics, are misunderstood, and precisely the differences in approach could be very useful for understanding in which direction we should head in environmental aesthetics (p. 43).

Maskit digs a spade into the ground for a new trench between the camps, by way of a kind of thought experiment, aware of how fruitless such debates can also be. In his view nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy was marked by a dispute that he calls the dispute between universalists and cultural historicists. The former speak of human beings and nature as firm, almost stable concepts. Although we still have much to learn about both, it is supposed to be perfectly clear what we are talking about when we talk about the “human being” and “nature”, and it is likewise supposed to be clear what Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Russell and others, for instance, understood by these two concepts. The case of the cultural historicists is entirely different. For them both concepts are considerably more fluid, and in a double sense. First, historical fluidity comes to the fore. In the twenty-first century, by the concept “nature” we need not mean anything like what the Greek philosophers had in mind with physis or medieval thinkers with natura, just as today’s concept of the “human being” need not in itself be connected with the terms anthropos or homo. Some cultural historicists can discover developmental steps between the concepts, which tell us how we got from one concept to another; others acknowledge only their change. Besides historical fluidity we must also take cultural fluidity into account. Although we Europeans of today are different from our ancestors, in most cases we can weave historical connections with them, which we cannot do for cultural traditions in other parts of the world. Maskit is of course aware of globalisation and the boom in intercultural exchange in recent decades, but he cites three countries as examples: Japan, India and Morocco. In these societies the understanding of concepts that universalists cite as self-evidently universal differs greatly. Because of differences in philosophical outlook, universalists tend towards monism and individualism, whereas historicists more often turn out to be pluralists, observes Maskit (2014, p. 48), who attributes the phenomenon to the historical circumstances of continental philosophy and to the differences between Kant and Hegel.³⁸

If, then, we tried to classify authors according to Maskit’s “divide”, we would find Carlson, Brady and Berleant in a group that would hold that an appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature exists (although they disagree about what it is supposed to be). Once we have established what it is supposed to be, this philosophical problem can, in their view, be ticked off as solved. At the same time, such a group would hold that the aesthetic appreciation of nature is an individual and solitary activity taking place between one subject and some object, or a series of objects, in the environment. In any case, Maskit argues, we also find in the aesthetics of nature authors – though they would adopt a defensive posture at the mention of a “partly continental approach” – who could safely be described as cultural historicists. These authors are concerned less with the question of “pure nature” than with the relations between nature and culture: given the importance the cultural-historicist approach attributes to culture, we should not be surprised that such aestheticians are committed to the idea that nature itself is a cultural concept – in other words, that it can differ in sense and meaning (p. 51).

Maskit holds the mirror up to the discipline even more plainly and adds that some, such as Saito, cannot be firmly labelled either universalists or cultural historicists. His reading of her works reveals that she is much more inclined towards cultural pluralism than other authors. Saito does agree with Carlson, as mentioned above, that science is an appropriate starting point for treating nature, but it cannot be the only one if we wish to approach nature “on its own terms”. At one point Saito also glances in the direction of the claims of social constructivism and of the Cartesian and Baconian legacy of control and manipulation. For an appropriate aesthetic approach to nature she also admits the respective tales of traditional cultures. Particularly valuable is her warning that science, too, in the end uses our language and our concepts, even though it tries to put into words nature’s story in place of nature. Maskit concludes his fresh view of the debates between the camps in the aesthetics of nature with the remark that reviewing the literature through the prism described above reveals echoes of debates that have already surfaced elsewhere in environmental aesthetics, and above all in philosophy in general – such as, for instance, the warning that nature is a concept with a social-constructivist background. Such “echoes” have faded away, not because the universalists silenced them by the force of argument, but for a simple and banal reason: because there are many more of them than there are cultural historicists, Maskit adds, and he points to a truly banal detail: even if one disagrees with cultural historicism, it is to me, after Kant and his successors, simply untenable to maintain [the position] that we can ever have an unmediated experience of nature (Maskit, pp. 57–58). In keeping with the thesis of the dissertation, I add that I agree with this, but I am convinced that by adding “mediators” such as representations and depictions we can only increase the “damage”. Maskit points out that the universalists should thoroughly examine the weak points of their own positions, which, however, is possible only if they take alternative positions seriously from the outset. To acknowledge the influence of institutions on the appreciation of nature, while claiming at the same time that only scientific institutions are such, is not exactly a debate with depth. For a cultural historicist, defining nature as a non-cultural category is incomprehensible. How, then, are we to understand the widespread position in the aesthetics of nature that there is such a thing as a direct experience of nature? It is clear, of course, that it is we humans, with our senses, our language and our concepts, who speak about nature and put it into concepts. At the same time it is clear that senses, language and concepts have their own history and differ from culture to culture. After all, who else but aesthetics teaches us that our senses are the fruit of cultural upbringing? Maskit is right when he says that we have to learn to see, listen to and taste things that at some point we did not even think could be appreciated. It is a fact that a certain taste for a thing can be acquired or learned – consciously, unconsciously, wilfully, historically conditioned, sometimes also as the victim of pop-cultural manipulation. Might it be the same, at the outset, with the appreciation of nature?

3.7. The Deficient General History of the Discipline

Besides the question of whether the divide between the cognitive and non-cognitive camps makes sense, reservations have in recent years also begun to accumulate about the so-called general history of the aesthetics of nature. In the article “Philosophical Histories of the Aesthetics of Nature”, Paden, Harmon and Milling challenged the (in fact highly generalised) history of the aesthetics of nature. They are convinced that it has had too much influence on the development of the field and is even misleading. In their joint text they called into question the origin of the field in aesthetic theories of art, and both the concept of the picturesque and that of the sublime. The basic thesis of the article is that these concepts were not borrowed from the philosophy of art and inappropriately applied to nature, but were developed precisely for the appreciation of landscapes. Unlike natural objects, these can rarely be described as beautiful, since for the most part they are neither symmetrical nor ordered.

In the volume The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant write of Hepburn’s article on the neglect of natural beauty that it establishes a new paradigm of the aesthetic appreciation of nature (2004, p. 15). Hepburn does indeed begin it with the sentences: “Open an eighteenth-century work on aesthetics, and the odds are that it will contain a substantial treatment of the beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque in nature. Its treatment of art may be secondary and derivative, not its primary concern. Although the nineteenth century could not be said to repeat these same emphases, they certainly reappear in some impressive places, in Ruskin’s Modern Painters, for instance … 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”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 45).

Above, I too presented the story of the decline of the aesthetics of nature and the dominance of the philosophy of art, but it seems to me necessary to devote some space to the reservations of Paden, Harmon and Milling. They point out that it is characteristic of this way of presenting the “philosophical history” of the aesthetics of nature that it appears in sketches that are quite similar to one another. “Unfortunately, because these histories are very brief and, to a degree, misleading, the effect they have had on the field has not been beneficial”✓ (Paden, Harmon and Milling, 2013, p. 58). For precisely this reason they sought out the negative effects and proposed an expanded and revised version of the general history.

The most elaborate and detailed “general history of the aesthetics of nature” was presented by Carlson in the book Nature and Landscape (2009, pp. 1–21), and it is interesting that, like Hepburn, he completely neglects aesthetic developments before the eighteenth century and begins with associationist theory and the concept of disinterestedness. The latter enabled nature to become an object of appreciation rather than of utilitarian aims, and at the same time it could begin to be placed in the categories of the beautiful (gardens and parks), the sublime and – most importantly – the picturesque. It is well known that in Carlson’s view the picturesque (because of the congruence of the appreciation of nature with the appreciation of art) had the most important influence on the development of the aesthetics of nature. We already know the story: since nature is not art, such an approach to the aesthetics of nature is inappropriate, and the lifetime of the picturesque runs out in the nineteenth century with Hegel.

Particularly interesting is their remark about the North American tradition, which in my opinion is transferred into the Slovenian context without proper context. In the nineteenth century, namely, the aesthetics of nature remained alive in America. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir were connoisseurs of science and natural history, not professional philosophers. They belonged to the American tradition of nature writing (Carlson, 2000, p. 4), and not to any of the philosophical schools. Carlson describes in the book Aesthetics and the Environment how all three rejected the aesthetic theories of the eighteenth century and began to develop an aesthetics of nature on the foundations of scientifically grounded aesthetic concepts. Besides a nature-centred aesthetics, they are characterised by political engagement, through which they achieved the establishment of national parks in the United States of America.³⁹ Eugene Hargrove, too, begins his outline of the history of this field with the eighteenth century and takes issue with the fact that the picturesque and the sublime are not found in contemporary arguments and only very rarely in nineteenth-century debates. He calls them transitional concepts, which were replaced by a broader understanding of beauty and by “a new aesthetic or quasi-aesthetic category arising out of the natural history sciences - the interesting”✓ (Hargrove, 1979, p. 222).

The general history, then, persuades us that the aesthetics of nature, with the concept of disinterestedness (because of which people first turned their eyes to nature), experienced a false dawn. False because it was eclipsed by approaches and theories based on art. One such example is the picturesque, which requires us to appreciate nature as if it were art. The general history also claims that interest in the aesthetics of nature died out in the nineteenth century and was reawakened in the twentieth. To prevent anything like this from happening again, the discipline must avoid the mistakes of the past and develop aesthetic concepts based on a clear and distinct understanding of nature. It must therefore fight against the picturesque and the sublime and, as Hepburn demanded, develop a new concept of natural beauty. The authors of the article of course agree that the philosophy of art eventually prevailed and that reflection on the aesthetics of nature almost died out, but they do not agree about how this happened.

Władysław Tatarkiewicz described the prehistory of the moment we are inquiring into as the persistent Great Theory of the beautiful. Already in antiquity a general theory of the beautiful was known, which was based on the beautiful as a proportion of parts. More precisely, beauty rests on the choice of proportions and the appropriate arrangement of parts or, more precisely still, on the size, quality and number of the parts and on their relation to one another … There are reasons to call this theory the Great Theory, since in the history of aesthetics, and even of European culture as a whole, there have not been many theories so lasting and so generally accepted, nor any that embraced so wide a field and mastered the whole extent of the beautiful (Tatarkiewicz, 2000, p. 98). He traced it from the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics to Vitruvius, the Neoplatonists and the Renaissance. If we simplify history somewhat, we can say that the Great Theory prevailed from the fifth century BC to the eighteenth century AD (p. 102). The stubborn leading theory lost its charm only in the eighteenth century, which happened under the influence of empiricist currents in philosophy and Romantic currents in art. Kreft thus observes that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there came to an end the hegemony, lasting some two thousand five hundred years, of a more or less unified conception that did not distinguish between the various skills other than by the criterion of spirituality versus craftsmanship, and that therefore ascribed beauty to objects themselves (2005, p. 13). For the new age beauty became something subjective, Kreft adds, that arises in a particular human relation to objects, and art became a beautiful creativity in which the rules are laid down by geniuses without their themselves following any rules (p. 13).

Tatarkiewicz, on the other hand, points out that although the Great Theory was focused on the arts, beauty was held to be primarily a quality of nature. One would expect that, in the history of European thought, the theses that the beautiful is the fundamental aesthetic category and the property by which art distinguishes itself would have been kneaded together with the classical theory. But this is not true, for we shall not find such claims in older texts, nor were they possible until there was a science of aesthetics and a conception of art such as fine art, which appeared only in the eighteenth century. Only from then on was the beautiful seen as the aim or “purpose” of the arts, that which defines them and connects them with one another – in contrast to the past, when the beautiful and art were only loosely connected and the beautiful was seen rather as a property of nature than of art (Tatarkiewicz, 2000, pp. 104–105).

The chronicler of the history of the beautiful describes the onset of the crisis of the Great Theory merely with the words that taste changed because late Baroque and later Romantic art and literature appeared, which attracted more and more people, and both were entirely non-classical (p. 110). In her book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Marjorie Hope Nicolson tries to explain the change of taste as regards nature. An important change takes place, namely, in the way mountain landscape, or nature, was viewed before the eighteenth century: “During the first seventeen centuries of the Christian era, ‘Mountain Gloom’ so clouded human eyes that never for a moment did poets see mountains in the full radiance to which our eyes have become accustomed. Within a century – indeed, within fifty years – all this had changed”✓ (Nicolson, 1959, p. 3).⁴⁰ Before this dramatic change in the aesthetic attitude towards nature, a taste for calm serenity and the pastoral idyll prevailed in art and literature, Kante observes. With the increased interest in wild nature, however, there arose the need for an aesthetic concept suitable for explaining how wild and great things can arouse a response that is not mere displeasure (as in the response to beauty), but pleasure interwoven with horror or fear (Kante, 2009, p. 158). Nicolson is convinced that the change of view was the consequence of shifts in theology, philosophy, geology and astronomy. Changes in these disciplines are said to have made it possible to extend appreciation to the vast expanses of nature as well.

The authors of the article thus argue that with the picturesque and the sublime the aestheticians were merely catching a wave of change and trying to adapt to a new epoch. What is more, they criticise the general history of the aesthetics of nature because the aestheticians did not turn from the analysis of works of art to the analysis of the beauty of nature – quite the opposite: “aestheticians had always been interested in the beauty of nature and, indeed, natural objects provided them with their paradigm examples of beauty”✓ (Paden, Harmon and Milling, 2013, p. 65). Tatarkiewicz had of course already “noted” this in passing in a paragraph, but the authors of the article on the deficient general history observe that the leading authors in the aesthetics of nature simply disregard him. They simply canonised the belief that “aestheticians” before the eighteenth century took no interest in nature. This is of course not true; what actually happened is that aestheticians shifted their attention from individual objects to the landscape. It is precisely landscapes that are not symmetrical, ordered and harmonious, which is why it was difficult to ascribe beauty to them. We must thus be aware that “the new aesthetic categories of ‘the picturesque’ and ‘the sublime’ were not originally used to describe works of art and then imported from the philosophy of art into the aesthetics of nature; instead, they were developed precisely in order to understand the aesthetics of landscapes: they were, that is to say, from the beginning, concepts native to environmental aesthetics”✓ (p. 65).

It is also worth mentioning that it is not true that philosophers and environmental thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took no interest in them. The general history of the aesthetics of nature calmly overlooks Kant and Schopenhauer. The latter devoted a great deal of attention to the sublime. He described the difference between the feeling of the beautiful and that of the sublime as follows: “In the case of the beautiful, pure knowledge has gained the upper hand without a struggle, for the beauty of the object, i.e., that property which facilitates the knowledge of its Idea, has removed from consciousness without resistance, and therefore imperceptibly, the will and the knowledge of relations which is subject to it, so that what is left is the pure subject of knowledge without even a remembrance of will. On the other hand, in the case of the sublime that state of pure knowledge is only attained by a conscious and forcible breaking away from the relations of the same object to the will, which are recognised as unfavourable, by a free and conscious transcending of the will and the knowledge related to it. This exaltation must not only be consciously won, but also consciously retained …”✓ (Schopenhauer, 2008, pp. 221–222). Moreover, in the American context the sublime occupied Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir alike.

Paden, Harmon and Milling conclude their call for reconsidering an expanded history of the aesthetics of nature with the observation that the current general history of the discipline is concerned with the division into the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of nature. If we take into account the expanded, somewhat corrected history, it ought to be concerned with the divide between the aesthetics of natural objects and the aesthetics of landscapes and environments. “With its emphasis on the importance of rejecting arts-based aesthetics, the received history obscures that last distinction, in effect, leading some aestheticians to disregard the distinction between an organism and its environment, and this disregard in turn leads them to apply aesthetic concepts, in particular ‘beauty,’ which were originally developed to appraise individual objects, to environments. This pernicious ‘category mistake’ is particularly clear in Hepburn’s call for a theory of ‘natural beauty’ which would be applied to environments and in Carlson’s theory of positive aesthetics, which is based on the claim that environments possess a degree of order and harmony generally thought present only in individual organisms”✓ (Paden, Harmon and Milling, 2013, p. 76).

In truth, it is not that the divide between the aesthetics of individual natural objects and that of landscapes and environments was unknown. It is that, because of the deficient general history, it has not been appropriately incorporated into contemporary theories of the aesthetics of nature.