5. Mediation and Depiction

In the introduction to the chapter on mediation and depiction, before defining the concepts of mediation and depiction, I wish first to present my view of the dual role of the body in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Although Berleant, above, draws attention to somatic engagement in the aesthetic field, it seems as if the body has been overlooked in the aesthetics of nature – almost to the point where we live in the illusion that there is in fact no boundary between our consciousness and nature; that there is no mediator of flesh and blood which intervenes in our experiences, stimulates them, determines them and very often also stifles them.

The body plays its first and most obvious role when, in order to experience natural environments, we must move with it through time and space. Within one human life it is physically impossible to devote a considerable share of time and activity to observing and exploring nature, which is why we resort to contemplating natural environments, landscapes, panoramas and phenomena on screens. The natural environments of the Earth are too large, too numerous and, in truth, too dangerous. Thus we observe nature first of all in the safety of our dwellings and the shelter of urbanised spaces, or of controlled experiences. Hepburn, for instance, was already aware that there is a “cult of the open air, the caravans, camps, and excursions in the family car”✓ (Hepburn, 2006, p. 45), from which we develop various, questionable and very often imaginary convictions about nature. In order to be able to observe and judge it on screens, we must first depict it – literally put it into an image. As such it becomes the currency of natural beauty in (today most often) digital form, which we can sell, exchange, share, or use as an illustration or a means of expression for our feelings and experiences. It is also, and above all, in this way that the photograph can be the “’universal equivalent,’ capable of denoting the quantitative exchangeability of all sights”✓ (Sekula, 1981, p. 23). We pass on to one another nature reified in the form of images, which is why we are accustomed to it in this form to such an extent that, even when we actually are in a natural environment, we half-consciously force it into the frame of an image and attach various narratives to it.

The second role of the body in experiencing natural environments shows itself in the fact that our body is the mediator between “outside” and “inside”, while at the same time the translation of sensory impressions between matter and spirit depends both on the state of the spirit and on the state of the “flesh”. Not only the spirit but also the body must be open and willing to receive impressions from nature. Just as the psychological experience of one’s own person and moods is interwoven with chemical processes in the brain, with the glands and with other bodily processes, so the experience of natural environments is interwoven with the physiological state of the body. A person with plenty of dopamine will experience an environment differently from someone who is tired and hungry. How we experience natural environments is very often unconsciously conditioned precisely by the state of “nature” in our body.⁵⁷ The body is the link between reality and the psyche, and at the same time, through its constitution and capacities, it causes much to be lost in the translation of experiences of external nature into the images of our psyche. Far from wishing to defend a dualism of spirit and body, let alone a version of aesthetic naturalism, I merely wish to draw attention to the importance of physiological processes and personal disposition, as well as of the various drives and temperaments in people. We are not born with aesthetic taste and the need for contemplation; we cultivate them in ourselves, and in doing so we must overcome both obstacles in the external world and barriers in our inner landscapes.

Images in themselves are empty. An image must stand for something that we humans understand. Natural phenomena are an ideal stage for storytelling, and so from mute and unresponsive nature we mostly expect stories. Only through stories can we discover it, and it discover us. In the article “Ni naravno” [“It Is Not Natural”], Barbara Zorman uses an analysis of Slovenian film to present the naturalisation of sexual difference through the example of the personification of nature. She finds that Slovenian film, at least in the last century, drew intensively on the domestic literary, above all lyrical, tradition, in which Prešeren’s poetic expression played the dominant role. Among the images of woman and nature that he created, their fusion is deeply rooted in Slovenian cultural memory – he uses parts of nature, above all flowers but also heavenly bodies and phenomena, to illustrate the power of female beauty. On the other hand, nature is usually presented through personification, which often works in such a way that the attributes of fictional characters are mirrored in their environment (Zorman, 2012, p. 207). Zorman highlights the first Slovenian feature film, V kraljestvu Zlatoroga [In the Kingdom of the Goldhorn] (Janko Ravnik, 1931), which shows an excursion prompted by a student’s wish to return to a mountain paradise that supposedly hides a beautiful dairymaid at its heart. What is more, the first Slovenian sound feature film (Na svoji zemlji [On Our Own Land], France Štiglic, 1948) opens with a shot of an Alpine valley and the words of the partisan commander Sova: “Look at it, our gorge!” In the classics of Slovenian cinema, in Zorman’s words, woman is the personification of space, of the territory into which the male subject projects his longing. This pattern, from the first Slovenian feature film onwards, was reproduced over the following three decades in that part of Slovenian cinematography which was officially supposed to represent Slovenian (not Yugoslav!) culture and was based above all on literature and folklore. The representation of nature and of femininity are interwoven in it and determined by the contexts of return, of the ideal, of paradise; they are often expressed as a distant object of longing for a return to a state of (organic) wholeness, primariness, purity, happiness and peace (2012, p. 208).

We encounter an entirely different representation of nature in the Hollywood tradition. On arriving in America, European settlers came upon unfathomable expanses of nature that in fact no longer existed in the Old World. Rapture at the wilderness gave birth to American landscape painting and, with it, to one of the pillars of cultural identity. With the urbanisation of the eastern parts of the continent in the nineteenth century, the image of a mythical, untouched landscape was taken over by the “Wild West”, which at the same time also contained the conquerors’ fear of the incomprehensible, primal, animal impulses of the environment there, and above all represented a source of profit for the urbanised inhabitants of industrialised America. It is therefore not surprising, Zorman observes, that the opposition between wilderness and civilisation is also key to the founding genre of Hollywood film – the western (Zorman, 2012, p. 208). The cowboy in the western is therefore, quite understandably, different from the partisan in the film epic. Using the example of the contemporary Slovenian film Varuh meje [Guardian of the Frontier] (2002) by the director Maja Weiss, Zorman shows a break with this paradigm of representing femininity and nature, and draws attention to the unproductiveness of establishing cultural concepts as natural and therefore normative (Zorman, 2012, p. 214).

We can see that for the aesthetics of art it is entirely normal to visit galleries, exhibitions, museums, cinemas and other urban environments and interiors. Moving with the body from one work of art to another is, to be sure, just as much part of aesthetic experience as moving through nature, but in an enclosed space our body is not exposed to dangers, the elements, temperature, weather and the chance factors of the natural environment. On the basis of conventions for exhibiting works of art and exhibits, we know roughly where to move; we read the title and the year the work was made, and mostly we find a written explanation beside it or listen to an (audio) guide. In the natural environment, the selection from an abundance of impressions depends on chance and on our character traits, which perceive phenomena according to one half-unconscious key or another. In experiencing a natural environment, consciousness behaves rather like a flood in a landscape. In some places it settles; elsewhere it runs for a moment towards this or that end and drains away just as quickly. Just as water is caught in natural obstacles and relief, so consciousness lingers at these phenomena. In some places it can stay; elsewhere it must surge forward and force its way. In natural environments our consciousness is fluid and in constant struggle with countless disturbances that distract its attention.

Most of the time we behave as if nature were actually “out there”: behind the garden fence, in the park below the apartment block, on the edge of town where the allotments begin to spread out and the fields and forests continue, outside our bodies. The dividing lines between culture and nature, body and environment, city and world, park and wilderness, country and continent, and earth and sky are necessary. Without them our life would be rather strenuous. Because of them we can pretend that there is a clear boundary between us and nature. When we turn on the tap and pour ourselves a glass of water, we do not concern ourselves with where it came from or where it will flow away. We do not care where it fell from the sky to the ground, which river caught it, or from where it was pumped into the reservoir of the local water supply. We do not care what we will do with it. Perhaps we will wash the car, or wash a pile of dishes and send it, full of detergents, onward through the water cycle. If we drink it, about an hour and a half later we excrete it into the sewer and the whole journey repeats itself. We do not care that, besides our sewage, the waste waters of factories, schools and office buildings and the filth of entire cities also flow into the rivers. When we open the window, we do not care either that we are breathing the same air as internal combustion engines. An everyday awareness of material flows and ecosystem processes would be too exhausting for a human being.

The sink drain, the toilet bowl or the rubbish bin under the hob are today the most “natural” phenomena of everyday life. In fact they are magical openings between here and “over there”; they are like black holes in the universe that suck the filth out of our dwellings and send it – or so we imagine – into the dimension of the natural, where everything is miraculously purified and available again. If anything, it is precisely filth, rot, digestive excretions, dirt and organic waste that are entirely natural, yet we nevertheless drive them away from ourselves – just as every day we clean, cut, shave, scrub, massage, feed, starve and otherwise deal with the natural that we cannot escape or send “out there” through a magical opening: with our own body. In the case of the self as consciousness in the brain, the dividing line between the body as nature, which influences this same consciousness (or even co-creates it) with hormones, mineral ratios, the amount of haemoglobin, the level of blood sugar, genetic predispositions and other building blocks, is already more blurred. Who is concerned with the aesthetics of nature, if our brains are about as natural as the muscles of horses on the prairie are natural? We humans breathe in what trees breathe out, and trees breathe what we humans breathe out. Who or what, in the aesthetics of nature, observes whom or what? Do humans observe nature, or does nature observe itself in human brains? For the human brain, which is part of nature, the invention of myths or forms is simply the fulfilment of the fundamental gesture of Nature when it invents forms, Hadot (2006, p. 218) does hint, with regard to the Neoplatonist view of mystical nature, but here we are not speaking of mystical eclecticism. Is this question important at all? It is, until we ask whether it is right to ask at all whether we can speak of nature in connection with aesthetic categories, or whether we ought to speak in this way of the human being in connection with nature. The story of the aesthetics of nature can also be read as the story of human consciousness observing itself in the mirror of natural environments. Nature is an ideal interlocutor, since it always tells people what they expect of it – even if it seems to them that it addressed them entirely by chance.

An interesting interjection, or rather “pre-jection”, in the development of the aesthetics of nature could be heard with the publication of Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty⁵⁸ in 1896. There he defined beauty as “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing”✓ (1955, p. 31). The definition pioneeringly hinted at the psychological tendency by which, in the manner of the expressive theory, we attribute our emotions to objects. It was certainly a provocative claim, but with it we do not know quite precisely where the “pleasure” is located. George Santayana explains that beauty is in essence a value, which for him means that it is not the perception of a fact or a relation. It is in fact an emotion, a kind of affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. At the same time, beauty is positive in the sense that in its case something good is always present – or, in the case of the ugly, absent. For Santayana the pleasure in beauty is not even the consequence of the use of an object or event, but lies “in its immediate perception; in other words, beauty is an ultimate good, something that gives satisfaction to a natural function, to some fundamental need or capacity of our minds”✓ (p. 32). It is a positive value also in the sense that it is intrinsic, that it is a pleasure. Santayana reflects that it is precisely this that separates aesthetics from ethics: moral values are (were, in his time) generally negative and remote. Morality has to do with the avoidance of evil and the pursuit of good; aesthetics is concerned above all with enjoyment. At the end of his definition of beauty he draws attention to the way “the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the perception of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from perception”✓ (p. 32). We achieve such a separation through the objectification of the elements and their appearance “as qualities rather of things than of consciousness”✓.

The first part, on the nature of beauty, is followed in the second part by a consideration of its materials. “All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty. Our task will now be to pass in review the various elements of our consciousness, and see what each contributes to the beauty of the world”✓, writes Santayana (1955, p. 35). He is convinced that this happens whenever they are inextricably associated with the objectifying activity of the understanding: “Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which we call beauty”✓ (p. 35). What is more, Santayana claims that there is hardly a function of human nature that could not contribute something to this effect. The pleasures of the eye and ear, of the imagination and memory, are the most easily objectified and merged in ideas, but they are certainly not the only materials of beauty. “For the five senses and the three powers of the soul, which play so large a part in traditional psychology, are by no means the only sources or factors of consciousness; they are more or less external divisions of its content … The nature and changes of our life have deeper roots, and are controlled by less obvious processes”✓ (p. 35).

Regardless of who observes what, it is still here – this body, which I must care for and maintain. I myself compare the role of the body in the aesthetics of nature with that of a painter’s canvas or some other pictorial medium. Whenever we observe an image, a painting or a photograph, we simultaneously contemplate its support as well. The painting is on canvas; the photograph is on paper or a screen. The body is the support of the experience of nature: of the near environment through the senses, the skin and other bodily sensations, and of distant landscapes first through sight and later in the form of mental images. In his book on the contemporary understanding of images, simply titled Images, John V. Kulvicki opens the discussion by presenting the fundamental predicament we encounter in contemplating images: the challenge is to articulate the way in which experiences of pictures encompass both the picture [itself] and what is pictured. We shall call this feature of pictorial experience its “twofoldness” (Kulvicki, 2014, p. 13). This is an interesting phenomenon, since in contemplating pictures we encounter two sets of qualities. The first set belongs to the picture and its surface, the second to the depicted object. The difficulty arises when we try to explain how it is possible to have a visual experience of a (painted) object when in fact we are observing an entirely different object – say, a painter’s canvas. One might claim that at any point in time we experience either the picture and its qualities or the pictured object and its qualities, but never both, Kulvicki adds (p. 31) about a well-known philosophical problem that has received numerous interpretations and (unfortunate) solutions. Ernst Gombrich remarked of this kind of experience of pictures that it “oscillates” between the one and the other, in a way similar to how our attention oscillates when observing the perceptual loop in the famous duck-rabbit drawing of the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow. Similarly, with a picture of a distant landscape we find that it has incredible depth, but when we look at it from the side we realise that we have been contemplating a flat surface all along. Of course, nothing in this world is flat and has depth at the same time, so we can also say that we look at a picture in different contexts, and that it is “flat” in one and “has depth” in the other.

We humans are like bubbles of consciousness that move with the body through the environment, through space or landscape, and choose different angles of view. We must always take up a standpoint and assume a viewpoint. In order to see a landscape, we must at least conquer a nearby hill or climb to the upper floors. We must therefore move through it. We live in the illusion that we know all the landscapes of the Earth in detail. The truly vast majority of people, for instance, have never seen the landscapes of Antarctica and other natural environments that are somewhat less interesting and attractive to tourists other than in photographs, documentary films and articles on the World Wide Web. Contemporary literature has neither analysed nor raised this question, but in light of the above reflection we may conclude that in the aesthetics of nature the body is an important limitation, if not indeed an interesting problem. Physically, physiologically, financially and socio-economically it is impossible for an individual to behold with his body the majority of the landscapes or phenomena on Earth. Of course, this is neither necessary nor essential, but at the same time it is precisely the vast quantities of visual material of the Earth’s landscapes that have shaped, educated and tailored contemporary humanity’s taste for nature. In order to be able to appreciate nature aesthetically at all, because of (bad) weather, geographical reality and also the general danger to our existence, we must contemplate it by means of reproductions. Even if we consider a single individual, he or she sees precious little nature in his or her own environment, and sooner or later it repeats itself. The aesthetics of nature would not be possible without contemporary online social and media infrastructure – or rather, I cannot imagine how it would have flourished and developed.

And precisely this is the meaning of mediation in the title of the dissertation. We mediate nature first and foremost through images on the screens of smart devices, tablets, computers and receivers. In order to mediate it through various media we must, as has been said, first depict it. It rarely happens that we take someone to a place and show it to them. And almost never does a group of aestheticians of nature, while philosophically pondering appropriate appreciation, go to the place under discussion. Once, the role of mediator was performed by storytellers at the evening fire; today impressions are transmitted by digital images and attached comments. Just as in prehistoric times not all members of the tribe could go with us on an expedition into the savannah or the forests, and experiences had to be shared in the form of narratives, so in today’s societies the near and distant circles of relatives, friends, acquaintances and colleagues cannot be physically present in our lives, but we can (if they so wish) inform them at every moment of what we have experienced by means of social networks and constant connectivity. Every individual can be a medium that acquaints the world and connected fellow humans with news from their own lives. If in traditional media the image was a witness of an event and a peculiar carrier of additional information accompanying a television report or a newspaper article, in the age of social networks, on which media houses compete for our attention, it has become merely one of a set of signs which, amid the flood of links and advertisements for articles and content, catches our gaze and invites a click or a touch. Online, alongside content summarised or copied for the third time, there are “symbolic photographs” drawn from millions upon millions of images in photographic stock libraries.⁵⁹ We no longer actually expect an image to convey precisely that event from precisely that place, but rather that it should at least roughly illustrate the content. It is similar with content. Online, in many cases it is an end in itself, when it concerns “generic content”, such as questions about relationships, wealth and health advice – very often in the case of environmental topics as well. An interesting reversal has taken place. A piece of news about personal life on a social network is today often a more credible report of an event than the news in the media. The agency news industry too often delivers staged “stories” about global events: for instance, the repetition of old footage while speaking of “the latest events”.

Amid the many opinions, comments, photographs and news items, we can also wade into a flood of images of nature.⁶⁰ It does not matter where they come from, what they represent and how many digital filters they have been through. Many of them follow the general “standards” of computer desktop backgrounds. The enthusiasm for so-called background images (“wallpaper”) can be understood somehow at the beginning of the 1990s, when the Web was in its infancy and such pictures of natural environments were very rare. We can also understand the enthusiasm for an image that filled the entire cathode-ray computer screen, since it was something (technologically) new and above all larger than a fifteen-by-ten-centimetre photograph on paper. At the time it was a new colour phenomenon that stimulated the imagination and acquainted people with panoramas and landscapes of nature that most had never seen before. Today these images are kitsch from the factory of generic-symbolic content. For the most part it does not matter when and where they were made, or whether the scene even still exists, and so it is no longer so important whether they are real or not. They lie on the servers of the World Wide Web and, together with countless other files, form a global virtual world of natural scenes, through which we can travel with the help of search engines or online maps that show more and more: from various altitudes of satellite images of the planet’s surface, the outlines of continents and mountain massifs, to landscapes, rivers, trees, parks, cities and a first-person view on the pavement of streets. Contemporary infrastructure makes it possible, with the help of video devices and cameras, to view any part of the planet at any time. A webcam with live image transmission can be found even at the South Pole.⁶¹ Satellite images of the Earth’s surface, public amateur and professional photographs, and Google’s advancing project of capturing all data and documenting everything and everyone create a parallel world with a false impression of “reality”. We cannot deny that in some way it has its reality, but this has little to do with the reality of the material world. In truth we live in two worlds: the real one we increasingly forget, while the virtual one is so easily accessible and extensive that it is becoming – in its own way – sublime.⁶²

In an instant, then, we can look on screens at whatever we please, but in truth we are viewing something in a particular spatial cross-section and a temporal slice. It seems more desirable to see “that thing” in the form of an image than in actual contact. The existing thing in the actual world is still raw, since it demands the effort of depiction: a natural or cultural landmark experienced live we must judge in vitro. We must take responsibility for possible disappointment or for the absence of the elements of spectacle, and face reality. In the case of images, we dispose of such disappointment with a touch of the screen or a click of the mouse and immediately forget it. Perhaps in a few decades the original file of a “charismatic”, widely circulated and beloved image of a natural wonder will be protected by “digital conservation”, while we will not care about the natural wonder itself? Will we speak of the “digital” heritage of the original bit record and colour compression for future generations? Will we quarrel over whether the “original” must be stored in a virtual vault of the heritage of humanity, because copies are simply “not it”? Images of nature on servers today immediately take on an emancipated life of their own. They are exposed to replication, reproduction, exchange and consumption. They tear themselves away from any curation and run wild through the fields of virtual worlds, as mustangs once did on the prairies.

The more of them there are, the more firmly the awareness takes hold that in countless images of landscapes, animals, natural environments and other phenomena we all coexist and participate together. If you saw it and sent it to me, and I beheld it too, then we have both seen it, and this image is our virtual environment. The more images repeat themselves, the more we have the impression that our virtual gaze reaches into every corner of the planet. We are also somehow half aware that so and so many other circles of connected people are viewing the same image. Faith in the transparency of images is humanity’s newest religion. We believe that the image of a natural landscape on the Web is still the same as the landscape in the real world, regardless of whether we came across it by chance and do not even know it, or someone directed us to the image of a famous landscape. In either case we cherish this unfounded trust.

If our ancestors went out into the landscape and brought back stories, today the landscape comes to us by means of screens – into the consciousness of so and so many dozens of friends on a social network. Because we have all seen it, we have all, in some way, been there. Almost as when listening to stories by the evening fire. Precisely because, in order to experience nature and space, we are compelled to move our body through the world, we are prepared so readily to accept images and acknowledge them as authentic when, in one way or another, they travel to us of their own accord. We experience them with the rich feelings of natural environments actually beheld, yet at the same time, because of the limitations of our own bodies, we are beggars of experience. Nature on a screen or on paper lacks the experience of the elements and of ambiences. The image is an approximation, a sign and a substitute – merely a signpost, not the destination. Screens perform a role similar to the canvas of the imagination. Images fly past us as fast as we can flick through them with a forefinger. The real difference between the imagination that is (was) at work in listening to stories and the new-age flicking through images is the absence of mental effort. Thus it is in every sense easier, faster, cheaper and safer. In truth, none of us was there. Only a great multitude of tiny pixels on several different screens, following the instructions of an image file, coloured themselves in the same – specific – colour combination.

5.1. The Body as a Phantom Limb

We may ask whether we are placing an equals sign between consciousness and body, and are then in fact speaking of the Kantian mediation of experience by the transcendental structure of consciousness, by the forms of sensibility and understanding. What are we really talking about? In the light of Kantian subjectivism, our experience of the world is of course mediated by all of the above, but in between there is also the fact of bare corporeality – an aggregate of flesh and bone that represents the battlefield on which the impulses of our will and the influences of the elements of nature clash. In the aesthetics of nature, when speaking of “pure cognition”, we quickly find ourselves in a predicament. In Jesen [Autumn], in the chapter on phenomenology, Uršič points out that Husserl in fact nowhere defines his Lebenswelt explicitly, but speaks of it as the original “foundation” or “sense” above all in relation to scientific and/or “idealist” cognition (Uršič, 2010, p. 120), and so he too asks what our life-world actually is. After all, the whole world can be our life-world. How can we include corporeality in this relation?

The body was exhaustively addressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who renounced Husserl’s “eidetic reduction” and the transcendental purification of consciousness; what is more, in Phenomenology of Perception he develops the idea of an entirely fleshly bodily perception. When we reflect on being, we forget the perspectivism of our experience and treat our experience as an object. We deduce it from a relationship between objects: “I regard my body, which is my point of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world. My recent awareness of my gaze as a means of knowledge I now repress, and treat my eyes as bits of matter”✓ (2006, p. 90). From then on the eyes take their place in the same objective space in which we are trying to situate the external object. And it is precisely this to which we tried to draw attention above. Merleau-Ponty offers the famous example of the phantom limb – the phenomenon in which people feel their extremities and limbs even after amputation – and in this connection he rightly asks: is my body not, just like external bodies, an object that acts on receptors and ultimately makes possible a consciousness of the body? Besides the “reception of stimuli from the external environment”, is there not also a “reception of stimuli from the internal environment”? … Thus the consciousness of the body and of the soul is repressed; the body once again becomes this well-maintained machine which, because of the ambiguous notion of behaviour, we had almost forgotten (pp. 94–95).

5.2. Unmediatedness: From Postojna Cave to Križna Cave

Mediation and depiction do not take place only through photographs. As an example of simultaneous mediation and depiction I chose visits to two karst caves that could not be more different. The first is the tourist cave of Postojna; the second is the strictly guarded and protected Križna Cave. In the first, by arrangement with the management, I was allowed to enter⁶³ with various groups of visitors and could record their responses and the very dramaturgy of the experience; about Križna Cave I wrote an extensive feature entitled “Iz jame, z ljubeznijo” [“From the Cave, with Love”]⁶⁴ (Mazi, 2009). The example of the cave is intriguing because it negates aesthetic patterns in the landscape, while at the same time offering an opportunity for an examination of the five conditions for an adequate aesthetics of nature (see Chapter 3). In a cave it becomes obvious that the aesthetics of nature in the landscape is something other than the aesthetics of nature in the darkness of the underground.

A visit to Postojna Cave is a curated experience, similar to a visit to an art gallery. The ride into the underground on the little train is carefully thought out; I noticed that the lighting increases gradually and slowly, since too many details at once would disturb visitors. The light sources are hidden in crevices and behind stalactites, so that the light is everywhere and carefully emphasises the sights the managers want us to see. We get the impression that the light is a natural part of the cave, which is the most unnatural thing of all. The whole cave has concreted paths, railings and infrastructure that is not there to enable the experience but to mediate it. The design of Postojna Cave is a story we listen to whether we want to or not: the Great Mountain, the cave salamander,Translator’s note: “jamska kokoška”, the colloquial name of the olm, Proteus anguinus. the asparagus and spaghetti, the Leaning Tower of Pisa … In the White Hall even the white light is emphasised, and as we approach the Red Hall we see in the distance shades of warm orange light.

Križna Cave is entirely different. Even to enter it one must wait on a special list, since the number of visitors per year is limited. It lies near Cerknica and is among the Slovenian caves that began to be visited very early. It was first described in an article in 1832, while the water section, which is also the most beautiful part of the cave, was explored by Slovenian cavers only after 1926. Visitors must put on caving equipment and, through a carefully locked rock crevice, in groups of at most four people led by a guide, with lamps on their heads, paddle into the interior, which hides more than 40 underground lakes. In 2009 New Križna Cave attracted the attention of the Slovenian public through a series of chain e-mails because of the Barefoot Passage, which was said to be so beautiful that its discoverers walked through it barefoot. Well, actually at the beginning of the passage we walked in socks; only at the last little lake did we go barefoot, because we had run out of clean socks, said Matej Kržič, the discoverer of the Barefoot Passage and president of the caving society of the friends of Križna Cave, at the time (Mazi, 2009, p. 17). New Križna Cave is so beautiful and vulnerable that it was closed with the permission of the state. Kržič confirms that the stories of almost three-metre-long stalactite “spaghetti” and of calcite crystals on the floor of the cave are true. In New Križna Cave the cavers therefore even renounced the most sacred of caving tasks – surveying and mapping with compass and tape measure. They left the work to the Karst Research Institute ZRC SAZU in Postojna, which surveyed the cave with a theodolite with the least possible damage. The guide, Alojz Troha, strictly watched our every step and raised his voice when someone inadvertently turned in the wrong direction. He lifted the rubber dinghy onto his shoulders and carried it over the flowstone barriers. At the same time he determined for each of us where we could step, so as not to cause too much damage in Križna Cave.

Entry into New Križna Cave is possible only with the permission of the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning. Such permission was obtained, for the purposes of preparing a doctorate within postgraduate study at the University of Nova Gorica, by Mitja Prelovšek, who carried out measurements there of the deposition of flowstone on the barriers between the lakes. Because the water is supersaturated with calcite, it is deposited from the water. This happens above all on the flowstone barriers that dam the outflow of water. That is precisely why the underground lakes came into being. The faster these barriers grow, the longer and deeper the lakes are. Downstream of the first lake they grow at a rate of a tenth of a millimetre a year, while at the higher lakes they grow more than ten times more slowly, which is connected with the chemical composition of the water and the winter draught in the cave. These are extremely low rates of growth, which is why Križna Cave, and even more so New Križna Cave, is exceptionally sensitive. The problem with tourist visits is that by inappropriately guiding visitors through the cave these barriers could be destroyed, and with them the lakes as well, said Prelovšek (Mazi, 2009, p. 18), who discovered a surprising phenomenon – that in mild winters the barriers hardly grow at all.

Under so strict a regime, what happens in Postojna Cave is entirely different. The guides animate visitors with questions. One of the guides told me that Americans, Canadians, Australians and Britons are the most enthusiastic, since they mostly visit other caves around the world as well and know what to expect. Asian groups have packed schedules and literally run through the cave, and as a rule all groups immediately pull out their phones and shoot videos and take photographs. The most interesting experience of all was the visit with Asian groups who use audio guides, while the accompanying staff point out to them with laser pointers the sights named after other anthropomorphic shapes.

The cave as a space for philosophical reflection is empty. In Postojna Cave, at a certain moment of the visit, the lighting is switched off and the guide calls out that this is what the cave really looks like; in Križna Cave the group is invited to switch off their head lamps. The cave is a space of a virtual world. Without light, neither site would be what it is. Even in virgin Križna Cave we find anthropocentric names for stalactites and phenomena, such as the Pirate Ship, the Venetian Harbour and the Underground Island. The chairman of the management of Postojna Cave, Marjan Batagelj, explained to me in a personal conversation that in renewing the lighting they try to preserve the colour tones and warmth that the cave had in recent decades. Different lighting would change the character of sights such as the Brilliant and the Pillar, the cave’s best-known stalagmites.

Križna Cave may seem better and more beautiful, more unmediated, but in my experience this is not so. For the feature, the Dnevnik photojournalist Jaka Adamič and I carried into it several rucksacks of photographic equipment and powerful floodlights, with which three of us created a single photograph with long exposures over several attempts, lasting half an hour or even an hour. The photographs from Križna Cave literally had to be “drawn” with light. I stood in a rushing stream holding a floodlight, and Adamič, like a conductor, directed the beams while the camera on a tripod, its shutter open, captured his creation. The experience of the cave with head lamps is entirely different from the one in the carefully created photographic masterpieces.

What I want to show with the two examples is that in neither of the caves can we speak of an aesthetics of nature, since both experiences are mediated and depicted. The experience of Postojna Cave approaches the experience of an amusement park. On one of the rides into the cave I sat with an Indian family, who explained to me that the whole thing was much better than Jurassic Park, which they had visited the month before. The experience of Križna Cave approaches the experience of a genuine adventure, overdetermined by the care not to destroy millimetres of flowstone deposited on the barriers between the lakes. When we want to mediate this experience to readers, mediation begins – the creation of a representation that is not honest, since Križna Cave by no means looks the way it looks in photographs with exposures of several minutes and assistants waving powerful floodlights across its walls. The mediation and depiction of Postojna Cave lie in its controlled dramaturgy of anthropomorphic shapes and little stories; with its arrangement of paths and “viewpoints” it has become an artefact of an art gallery of nature, to which we go for a permanent exhibition arranged by enterprising managers. The depiction of Križna Cave lies in its untouchedness, purity, exclusivity and supposed unmediatedness. Both experiences must be carefully curated in order for us to experience them at all. Otherwise they are empty, mute and rather uninteresting.

In the hypothesis of the dissertation I argue, after all, that the aesthetics of nature as a discipline developed with the help of reproductions. The main object of the aesthetics of nature was in fact not nature but its photographs, and, with the development of the Web and social networks, also other contemporary media depictions of natural scenes, which is why most of the existing models of the appreciation of nature are, by all indications, not appropriate. With Postojna and Križna Caves I want to show that what is in play is not necessarily only the representation of nature as an image, but that (in not so extreme cases) we apply the medium of the image to nature. A cave cannot be experienced unless we mediate and depict it, unless we make an artwork of nature out of it and put it on display. Yuriko Saito observes that psychologists, educators, makers of propaganda and advertisers are aware of the power of aesthetics, of which, interestingly, aesthetics is not. I therefore propose that environmental aesthetics should include not only an analysis of what “is” the case with our aesthetic response, but should also undertake to explore the possibility of an “aesthetic ought” (2014, p. 32). Of course we may immediately begin to object that an aesthetic ought threatens the freedom we otherwise ascribe to aesthetic experience, to the imagination and to the play between factual and moral discourse. The demand that the aesthetics of nature and environmental aesthetics should be more normative may be surprising, but this is precisely what I am trying to show with the example of the two caves. “The ‘aesthetic ought’ may indeed sound dogmatic and inflexible, but I don’t think the normative dimension is unique to environmental aesthetics”✓ (Saito, 2014, p. 32). In the case of art there is of course no single way in which a work of art can be interpreted, which is why misunderstandings often arise. In any case, in these debates we clearly distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate appreciation of art. Except for stubborn relativists, Saito adds, there seem to be some minimal conditions for the interpretation and appreciation of works of art, without thereby threatening the freedom of the imagination and creative expression. Why can we not in the same way recognise the importance of cultivating a better-informed way of appreciating the environment? (2014, p. 33). Even Hepburn (2001, p. 11) mentions a stalagmite in a karst cave in which most visitors (with the kindly prompting of the guides, of course) see the Virgin Mary – a distorted perception that suppresses the truth of the object and encourages a way of thinking that falsifies the truth about what nature really is.

My intention was to show the problematic nature of two extreme cases in which we create a live or a carefully crafted image out of nature. To tell the truth, it must be admitted that Križna Cave could not be mediated in any other way; caves in general could not be mediated without capturing the sights in them in images because of the darkness. But this is no longer nature; it is our depiction. And with the depiction of a cave lamp or of a multi-minute exposure of a professional camera, something comes into being that is no longer nature. It is its representation, and it is this that we in fact appreciate. At the same time, the aesthetic approach in both caves satisfies none of the five conditions for an adequate aesthetics of nature.

5.3. The Claude Glass

Why must nature, in our appreciation, constantly reflect something? The beginnings of the general aesthetics of nature have a somewhat unpleasant history connected with the use of a special optical device – a pocket mirror.Translator’s note: The Claude glass is named after the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée, c. 1600–1682), whose idealised landscapes travellers hoped to see in its tinted reflection. The mirror appears in philosophy from Plato to Lacan, but in the aesthetics of nature it has a particularly important role. In Arnaud Maillet’s study of the history of the black mirror in Western art it becomes clear that the Claude glass is inseparable from the whole field of eighteenth-century English aesthetics (Maillet, 2009, p. 137). The vocabulary alone says a great deal about the second half of the eighteenth century. Besides hunters pursuing prey, there appeared “hunters of images” (2009, p. 167), who literally stalked magnificent natural scenes and views. “And shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?”✓ asks Gilpin as well (1792, p. 48). Admiring a view was similar to taking photographs today. The view was a portrait of a natural scene. Captured in a portrait, it was a trophy that one could show to others who could not see such a scene live. The picturesque way of looking was the one that could be depicted, turned into an image – at that time into a landscape painting. The selection of scenes that could be illustrated on canvas is a problem that goes beyond the picturesque movement, since it concerns all landscape painting … In fact a reversal takes place, since until then the landscape had conditioned the painting; then, with the fashion of the picturesque and of landscape painting, the painting begins to condition the landscape and with it our view of nature (Maillet, 2009, pp. 138–139). The general recommendation of the time demanded that nature be admired at dusk. Daylight, namely, has a raw, anti-aesthetic effect, while the Claude glass, because of its darkened surface, was able to stem the flood of natural light, which was essentially the last obstacle on the way to spectacular depictions of nature as painting understands them. It effectively removed the excess of detail and irregularities in the landscape and emphasised the ideal of beauty. The Claude glass does not try to reproduce nature in a picture; rather, with it the artist tried to project the picture onto nature.

After 1820 the significance of the picturesque dissipated⁶⁵ – the picturesque represented not so much the aesthetic appreciation of nature after the model of one of the famous landscape painters as the aesthetic appreciation of scenes: and when the walker possessed neither the painter’s eye nor much money, he could rely on the Claude glass to give him directly and precisely the view that a painter would have created (2009, p. 141). This was the democratic dimension of the device: aesthetic pleasures for everyone and at a relatively low price. Claude glasses and Claude spectacles with lenses of various colours offered walkers and landscape tourists in nature views for which they would otherwise have had to wait, or which were entirely beyond their reach. Spectacles with blue or grey glass conjured up in the landscape in the middle of the afternoon the light otherwise created at night by the moon. Yellow spectacles were meant for “creating” sunrises and sunsets, since they quickly turned the scene into a reddish twilight without the morning mists suffering any “damage” … The professional photographer of natural scenes and phenomena Sean Arbabi mentions the golden or magic hour, the half hour before and after sunset or sunrise. It is golden or magic because of the wonderful qualities of light … Colours appear that we do not see at other times of the day; colour tones appear that touch people’s emotions … Sometimes these colours are hard to see with the naked eye, but the camera vividly records them in the near darkness (Arbabi, 2011, p. 113).

It is similar in the aesthetics of nature today. The Claude glass and landscape paintings have been replaced by photography. The hunters of images in Claude glasses have been replaced by hunters with digital cameras, who can immediately view their trophies on a small liquid-crystal screen. With the spread of digital photography, natural scenes have won a place in popular culture. Although the great majority of people do not observe nature in the natural environment, we are flooded with a multitude of photographs of natural scenes – and with them a very particular kind of “natural” kitsch. The photographer Sean Arbabi describes how once, laden with lenses and dressed in a photographer’s vest, he met a hiker in the middle of the wilderness. What are you doing? the man asked him. He explained that he photographed nature, and the hiker began to grin in his face. Puzzled, he asked what was wrong, and the man replied: because of you nature photographers everything looks so beautiful, but in reality it is never that beautiful. On the one hand this is entirely true; on the other it does not hold, Arbabi replies: as a photographer I strive to make the places I photograph look their best. That is what my clients want, and that is what I want and expect too. I believe that it takes a keen eye and a positive mind to be able to see beauty everywhere (Arbabi, 2011, p. 55).

In my analysis of the fundamental texts in the field of the aesthetics of nature I did not find that greater emphasis had been given to this phenomenon in treating the aesthetic relation to nature. In its debates, contemporary aesthetics of nature refers to photographs and other depictions of nature, such as poetry. The aesthetics of nature is very often in fact an aesthetics of depictions of nature. With works of art, a photograph or reproduction of the work is not as problematic for a dialogue between two philosophers about its aesthetic features as it is for a dialogue between two aestheticians about a natural scene that both have seen only in a photograph. Just as in art we cannot all go to all the galleries of the world, in the aesthetics of nature we cannot go to all the ends of the earth. Even if we take into account all the models listed above and the contemporary positions in the aesthetics of nature, I wonder whether their material, too, is not (unintentionally) precisely photographs.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the use of the Claude glass died out. It was accused of darkening colours and obstructing light, which in the neoclassical sense is a crime. Various spectacles were still acceptable, since they allowed a direct view of nature, whereas the Claude glass, besides showing an inverted image, presented second-rate nature, since the user had to turn his back to it (Maillet, 2009, p. 150). Nature in the mirror is fictitious and imperfect, but the purpose of the mirror was not imitation but idealisation. To assume that there is an identity between the glass and the landscape painting would be mistaken: the reflection is the equivalent of a picture: it is described as a picture, but it is not a picture (2009, p. 159). With it the landscape painter could lay a veil of perfect harmony over imperfect reality.

We cannot, of course, pass over Roger Scruton’s famous argument that photography is not a representational art form. In the article “Photography and Representation” he takes as his example the ideal photograph: one in which something is photographed that actually exists and that is (or was at the time it was taken) really such as it is in the photograph. If any photographs are ideal, it is precisely photographs of nature and natural scenes. Does this mean that photographs of nature have no aesthetic value? Scruton draws an interesting distinction between a painted canvas and a photograph: “Here it could not be said that the painting is being treated as a surrogate for its subject: it is itself the object of interest and irreplaceable by the thing depicted. The interest is not in representation for the sake of its subject but in representation for its own sake”✓ (Scruton, 2011, p. 336). Ideal photographs, in Scruton’s conviction, are not representations, and so we cannot have a genuine aesthetic interest in them – so runs the argument in a very truncated form. Are photographs of nature, then, not representations?

In the decade after its publication numerous critiques followed. Of great interest to us is a recent response by Peter Alward, who draws a distinction between “the pictorial object and the pictorial subject, that is, what a picture is of and what it is about”✓ (Alward, 2012, p. 13). Our aesthetic responses are mostly focused not on objects themselves but on the features they have at a certain time and under certain conditions. Ideal photographs, unlike painted canvases, are transparent: when we look at a photograph we observe the actual object in the real world. How, then, can a photograph have a pictorial subject and at the same time an object? Alward presents two ways of producing representations: creation and selection.⁶⁶ Creation is the combination or modification of various raw materials, as we can witness, for instance, in painting and sculpture. The effectiveness of representation is limited by the properties of the medium and the inspiration of the artist. It was precisely the lack of this kind of freedom that so bothered Scruton that, in the case of ideal photographs, he equated pictorial subjects and objects. In doing so we overlook the possibility of representation by selection. Instead of creating something new, in selecting we pick from a set of already existing objects (Alward, 2012, p. 13). As an example he offers the casting of actresses and actors for a film or a play: “given a large (and diverse) enough collection of actors to choose among, the casting director can have as much control over how the character (or subject) is represented as does a painter or sculptor”✓ (2012, p. 13). Photographs can become representations, Alward is convinced, and he points to the fact that photographers nowadays take enormous numbers of photographs, from which they choose only a handful for printing and exhibition. They thus have great control over the presentation of various photographic subjects, whereby photographs “they can be representations in Scruton’s sense. In fact, photography can be fruitfully understood as an art of representational casting”✓ (2012, p. 14).

Why is this important? Because of the photography of nature, landscape, natural scenes and natural objects. Scruton’s argument could also charge photographs of nature with an absence of aesthetic qualities, but in the light of Alward’s thesis of selection as a way of producing representation it cannot do so. We can think of composition as the creative arrangement of the world around us, the selection of elements we would like to keep in our final rendering, explains the professional nature and landscape photographer Sean Arbabi (2011, p. 56), and he draws attention to the National Geographic Photographer’s Field Guide, in which photographers are reminded that the image does not begin with the camera – that is where it ends (p. 58). The best photographic tool of our time is still the eye.

We would therefore expect a self-evident and natural transition between the Claude glass and photography, but this is not so. According to Maillet’s research, the first direct comparison between the black mirror and photography took place on 8 June 1839, when Sir John Robinson, a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, frustrated by his unsuccessful attempts to explain what daguerreotype images (photographs on a special metal plate) were like, declared that they were almost the same as views reflected in a black mirror (Maillet, 2009, p. 117). In the general history of photography, the use of the Claude glass is regarded as the founding gesture of photography as far as framing⁶⁷ as a compositional technique is concerned, but there is no unambiguous connection between the mirror and photography. Jonathan Crary is even convinced that the birth of photography is not connected with earlier optical devices. The reorganisation of the observer in the nineteenth century, namely, “occurs in the nineteenth century before the appearance of photography. What takes place from around 1810 to 1840 is an uprooting of vision from the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura”✓ (Crary, 2012, p. 15). If the camera obscura, as a concept, subsisted as an objective ground of visual truth, in the early nineteenth century “a variety of discourses and practices – in philosophy, science, and in procedures of social normalization – tend to abolish the foundations of that ground”✓, and visual experience is given “an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent”✓ (p. 15). A transition takes place from geometrical to physiological optics, a step from classicism to modernism. Between the camera obscura – which provided the model for classical theories of knowledge and representation – and the appearance of photography there yawns a noticeable epistemological rift. Before this rift the image was independent of the subject; afterwards it becomes a product of visual experience, which is henceforth located in the body of the observer (Maillet, 2009, p. 177). If the image is created in the body, the body itself becomes part of the representation. But what about when a “natural” environment is in play into which we cannot go with our body? Such as outer space? Then we put the models, patterns and “approaches” of the aesthetics of nature to an extreme test.