8. Conclusion
In this dissertation I have defended the thesis that the aesthetics of nature developed as a discipline with the help of reproductions, a fact that has remained largely unreflected in the field. 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, other contemporary media representations of natural scenes as well. For this reason I assumed that most existing models of the appreciation of nature are inadequate. Through historical milestones in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, the research question of the dissertation sought answers to the sub-questions: what kinds of reproductions of nature do we create, to what extent does depicted nature prevail in the aesthetics of nature, and how far into “the thing itself” has the discipline ventured at all? At the same time I considered the consequences of the conquest of space and the consequences that the view of the Earth from a great distance has for the aesthetics of nature. I proposed that an adequate aesthetics of nature must acknowledge that the human living environment has expanded from landscape onwards into space, whereby, in addition to the landscape perspective, we have adopted new perspectives of appreciation.
In the second chapter, “Some Reservations about Natural Beauty”, I addressed the problematic character of the concept of nature. It pretends to be a thing in itself, while at the same time trying to conceal its real, transcendental character. It only looks like an experience of things, whereas in truth it is what first makes that experience possible. In the contemporary world the sharp boundary between nature and artefact is ever more blurred, harder to determine and to discern, and I therefore conclude that natural-scientific knowledge (and with it Carlson’s natural environmental model) sees too much in nature, while the aesthetics of nature faces the difficulty that for it nature is something that in reality it is not. The question of how the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of nature differ cannot be answered by analysing appreciation in art. We must, and here I join Kante, value nature as nature, but not as an intentionally created product – and therefore not as art. I also agree with Parsons that the concept of beauty adds little to the debate on the aesthetics of nature and at most obscures its object, so that it is much better to speak of the aesthetic qualities of natural things. I have taken this into account throughout the dissertation. Although the concept of nature is hard to define and to delimit, I have retained it for the sake of its fruitfulness.
The reservations about the “beauty” of nature were the reason why I compared Hepburn and Adorno in detail, since the canonical literature in the field strongly holds the thesis that the former initiated the aesthetics of nature. Four years after Hepburn, Adorno devoted a separate chapter to natural beauty in Ästhetische Theorie. They were, admittedly, two different philosophers who did not know each other, came from different backgrounds and wrote in different languages. Nevertheless, I wanted to emphasise that almost simultaneously they published texts in which they called for the reintroduction of the aesthetics of nature, which the academic world had until then entirely neglected. It was not Hepburn but precisely Adorno who drew attention to the aesthetic problems of the media mediation of natural beauty, and both uttered the same warning: for a true aesthetic theory of nature we must not use the theory of art.
After a review of established positions, in the third chapter, “Five Conditions for an Adequate Aesthetics of Nature and Their Critique”, I presented and considered the requirements set out by Carlson, which also include and summarise other important authors. I decided to treat the five conditions because the survey accounts in this field are otherwise unclear and hard to understand, and at the same time I was able to test the soundness of my hypothesis as I went. The first condition is Ziff’s “anything viewed” doctrine, which opposes human-chauvinistic aesthetics and rejects the excessive concern that only artefacts are suitable for aesthetic appreciation. The appreciation of nature can therefore be aesthetic even though nature is not an artefact, but at the same time we must be aware of this, which dictates the second condition: Budd’s “as nature” constraint. Natural things actually possess the aesthetic properties they seem to possess only in cases where we perceive them in their correct natural category. Of the third condition, Berleant’s requirement of a “unified aesthetics”, I conclude that it is superfluous and contradicts the other conditions. Berleant is convinced that we do not need an aesthetics that cultivates two kinds of phenomena, one about art and the other about 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. If we take into account that nature is not art, at some point we should in fact let art be art, and let nature remain something other than an intentional creation. Hepburn’s intuition of serious beauty, which represents the fourth condition, holds that certain kinds of aesthetic experience of nature are better – less superficial and of greater worth – than others, which is true. In my view this is also the condition that confirms the correct rejection of the free pattern of the appreciation of nature. With the fifth condition, Thompson’s desired objectivity, it becomes clear, as Thompson points out, that the connection between aesthetic judgement and ethical obligation collapses unless there are objective reasons – which rational, understanding people are capable of accepting – for supposing that something has value. It is the simple fact that if beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, then no general moral duty can be derived from an aesthetic judgement. It is understandable that Carlson, in his survey of the literature, finds that practically none of the current models in the aesthetics of nature succeeds in satisfying all five conditions. We must not overlook that he formulated them in the role of the authority of the field (and, to tell the truth, the only one to have done so), 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 satisfied only by Carlson’s natural environmental model, which relies on natural-scientific categories in the appreciation of nature. In this way the most widespread model is itself already a depiction of nature as a post-Humboldtian utopia of ecosystemness, balance, equal rights and multifunctionality, and it demands that we appreciate nature as a picture painted by science. Nature is aesthetically valuable because it works. Of its own accord. Part of its aesthetic value also lies in the fact that science has recognised a system in it.
In the third chapter I also addressed whether the dividing line between the cognitive and the non-cognitive camps makes sense. Maskit points out that a mere division into, for instance, advocates of science and advocates of imagination is losing its fruitfulness. 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 put in the analytic drawer and the minority in the continental one, although many authors in the latter group would not recognise themselves as continental. Maskit defends the view that the minority perspective is worth emphasising as a necessary corrective to the excessive influence of majority universalism. These are echoes of debates that have already surfaced in environmental aesthetics, and above all in philosophy in general – for instance, the warning that nature is a concept with a social-constructivist background. Such “echoes” have faded, 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, pointing to a truly banal detail. Even if someone disagrees with cultural historicism, it is, after Kant and his successors, simply untenable for them to defend the view that we can at any time have an unmediated experience of nature.
Even more important is the subchapter on the deficient general history of the aesthetics of nature, in which I join the assessment that the concepts of the picturesque and the sublime 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, landscapes can rarely be called beautiful, since for the most part they are neither symmetrical nor ordered. It is not true that aesthetics before the eighteenth century took no interest in nature. What really happened is that aestheticians shifted their attention from individual natural objects to landscape. The current general history of the discipline is thus concerned with the division into the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of nature. If we take into account an expanded, somewhat corrected history, it ought to be concerned with the dividing line between the aesthetics of natural objects and the aesthetics of landscapes and environments.
In the fourth chapter, “Why Must Aesthetics Not Interest Ecologists?”, I take up a theme of exceptional importance for the hypothesis. I ask whether aesthetics has the argumentative power with which nature could be preserved and protected. I examine the demands that environmental ethics places on aesthetics as the older discipline. For aesthetics actually to have this power, it would have to be as acentric as possible, not anthropocentric; focused on the environment, not burdened with scenes and views; serious and deep, not shallow and trivial; objective instead of subjective; and, not least, morally engaged, not neutral or even morally indifferent. Regarding the charge concerning objectivity, to which I devote the most space of all in the subchapter “Objectivity, Not Subjectivity”, I find that in the appreciation of nature a similar kind of random quasi-interpretation and quasi-religious experience is entirely possible, which has nothing to do with nature and which we ought somehow to name in order to distinguish it from the other models of the aesthetics of nature. In the case of nature I do not wish to open merely the representational problem between picture and object – I take a step further: nature itself must represent the picture; if it cannot, so much the worse for nature. Most people are unable to see trees, shrubs, birds and wolves, because they bring their cultural preconceptions to them. Kante, too, in explaining conventionalism, points out that pictures often involve conventions or codes. Carlson’s natural environmental model, which relies on natural history and science, is clear, but in everyday life the aesthetics of nature remains a rather subjective act that returns again and again to free patterns of appreciation. With the examples of elves in Iceland, elemental beings and the lithopuncture art interventions of Marko Pogačnik, and an analysis of his design of the Slovenian coat of arms, I present a way of appreciating nature that I call the projection pattern. Nature is thus worth more than it is in itself, which is why its appreciation constantly flows into the aestheticisation of a taboo – whether it is a matter of supernatural beings, the symbolism of a coat of arms, or the conviction that nature has some unfathomable capital, a store of value, because of which we ought – without being entirely clear why – to preserve and protect it.
In the subchapter I also analytically dissected the attempt at the aesthetic preservation and protection of the environment. It turned out that the first depiction of nature is in fact the supposed power of its aesthetic value and greatness, best exemplified by the claim of positive aesthetics. An aesthetics favourable to environmental ethics strongly favours positive aesthetics: all natural things and areas have at least some relevant aesthetic value. In nature there is a kind of essential aesthetic goodness, while ugliness is almost impossible. We can even supplement this untenable position by recognising in nature, on account of aesthetic experience itself, an omnipresent (aesthetic) instrumental value, which on the other hand cannot be set alongside other, entirely vital instrumental values. We may decide that, since nature has no interests, we will preserve natural environments for the sake of the interests of living beings. When we speak of the aesthetic value of nature, then, the conviction that nature is aesthetically good as a whole, and that we are capable of grasping or encompassing this whole, is, in Godlovitch’s view, a matter of aesthetic faith. We may also opt for a version of the identical aesthetic value of natural things, but again we run into the difficulty of how to compare the value of a river pebble and a blue whale. Perhaps positive aesthetics should treat natural things as Kant treats persons and attribute to them, to each and every one, an inestimable value, but this is an impossible task even in the case of people. I tried to support the argument for preserving nature on the basis of aesthetic value with the idea of aesthetic welfare – that is, the premise that the aesthetic value of natural environments contributes to general well-being – but I am in fact convinced that it would diminish it. Because of national parks, most people will not think that their needs and concerns are being seriously addressed. The concept of aesthetic welfare is perfectly respectable, but useless for nature. As long as the “stock” of aesthetic welfare consists of a multitude of artistic artefacts, architecture, urbanism and the aesthetic solutions of everyday life, everything proceeds normally. When we supplement it with the “capital” of natural beauty, the aesthetic value of natural environments and more besides, a problem arises. If the imperative of aesthetic welfare is consumption, aesthetic “delight”, the imperative of the aesthetics of nature is in fact the renunciation of pleasure. The capital of general aesthetic welfare is (at least for the most part) clear, predictable and known. The capital of natural aesthetic value is static and frozen. Its essential value is that we do not touch it, but contemplate it miserly. I doubt that contemporary welfare can be increased by renouncing interventions in nature. Aesthetic arguments for preserving nature cannot rid themselves of their moral burden and are hard to separate from ethics. To preserve nature because it is natural and thus absolutely better than the artefactual is not an aesthetic argument. For the sceptic, nature has no aesthetic value to begin with, so such an appeal will not increase his affinity for it. What goal are we pursuing? The preservation of nature, or of aesthetic pleasure? The use of aesthetic arguments is, at the present level, similar to the use of photographs and other media images of devastated landscape, with which we affect people’s emotions rather than their reason. Parsons is aware that the aesthetic shock of such images is, in the first moment, a much more effective mechanism for influencing people’s opinions and conduct than listing bare facts or abstract moral concepts. As such, however, it is merely a rhetorical figure, which in my view has also proved true of the aesthetics of nature as an advocate of environmental ethics. Aesthetic arguments on their own, as I showed in the fourth chapter, are not strong enough for natural environments to be preserved with their help.
In the fifth chapter, “Mediation and Depiction”, I took up the modes of mediation and the sources of depiction. I drew attention to the overlooked bodily limitations of the appreciation of natural environments. First and foremost, the human body turns out to be a phantom limb, an intermediary between nature and our experience of it of which we are not aware. It can be compared with the experience of a painter’s canvas. The body is the bearer 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. John V. Kulvicki draws attention to a characteristic of pictorial experience that he calls “twofoldness”. It 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. A difficulty arises when we try to explain how it is possible to have a visual experience of a (painted) object when in reality we are observing an entirely different object – say, a painter’s canvas. In the perception of nature, the human body participates in a similar way as a “canvas”. An individual in good psychophysical condition and with a sufficient measure of romantic disposition will perceive nature quite differently from someone who can barely climb a nearby hill. In appreciating nature we do not in reality experience nature, but the sensations of our own body. It is physically impossible for an individual to behold most of the landscapes or phenomena on Earth with their body. Of course this is not needed, nor necessary, but at the same time it is precisely the enormous quantities of visual material of terrestrial landscapes that have shaped, cultivated and tailored the contemporary person’s taste for nature. In order to appreciate nature aesthetically at all, we must, because of (bad) weather, geographical reality and also the general danger to our existence, contemplate it with the help of reproductions. The contemporary aesthetics of nature would not be possible without the contemporary online social and media infrastructure; at any rate, I cannot imagine how it would have spread 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 television sets. For us to be able to mediate it through various media, we must, as has been said, first depict it. In the same chapter, using the example of visits to Postojna Cave and Križna Cave, I also show the “ongoing” depiction of nature. In addition to the thesis of the development of the discipline through depictions, which we cannot shake off – nor could it be otherwise – I show with both examples that we cannot shake off depiction even when we are in direct contact with nature.
Why this is so I described in the chapter on the Claude glass, which early enthusiasts for natural beauty carried with them on walks and excursions in order to conjure up in its reflection the images of landscape painters. One would therefore expect a self-evident and natural transition between the Claude glass and photography, but this is not the case. 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 the views reflected in a black mirror. In the general history of photography, the use of the Claude glass is regarded as the founding gesture of photography as regards framing as a compositional technique, but there is no unambiguous connection between the mirror and photography. Crary points out that the birth of photography has nothing to do with earlier optical devices.
In the sixth chapter, “Faking: The Renaturation of Škocjanski Zatok”, I set out the case of the renaturation of an area in the immediate vicinity of the Port of Koper, which has become a first-rate bird reserve. I used the lagoon to reflect on whether nature can be faked and what aesthetic problems arise as a result. I find that in the officially proclaimed age of the Anthropocene and of biotechnology, debates about the faking of nature are not especially fruitful. The faking of nature itself can be ranked from extreme artefactuality to human assistance to natural areas in (re)realising themselves, and Kante thinks the same. At the same time I find that renaturation projects are once again a depiction of nature. They are a living picture of a human vision. I have thus supplemented Kreft’s reflection on the painterly artistic search for spaces of authenticity outside the urban areas of the nineteenth century with the idea that landscape painting has today been replaced by renaturated areas. It is no longer enough to depict nature on canvas or in a photograph in order to arouse a national landscape identity; today, with the perspective of the view of the Earth from space, it is necessary to create and foster the identity of a global citizen who allows a reserve for birds – global travellers – to be established in Koper, and sees added value in it.
I presented the contemporaneity of the aesthetics of nature in the seventh chapter, “Space: Apollo on the Moon Discovers the Earth”, which focuses on photography. That no clear transition from the Claude glass to photography can be found in history, and that at the same time the birth of photography has no clear connection with earlier optical devices, is in my view a question of technology. More important is what the users of the glass were trying to achieve, and with a little imagination we can see a similarity with contemporary smartphones, which, with the help of preloaded filters, can instantly tint a captured photograph of anything in various hues and furnish it with every conceivable effect. Photography is only one of the depictions of nature, but it is constitutive for the aesthetics of nature. I demonstrated the effect of the aesthetic empire of images with the example of the Family of Man exhibition. I continued the seventh chapter with the period 1950–1972, in which exceptionally important images came into being. Besides the globalising effect of The Family of Man, humanity could for the first time see nuclear explosions a few moments after detonation, when the shock wave had the shape of a sphere – the shape of what could be destroyed, namely the whole planet. Look magazine, while preparing an article on the International Geophysical Year of 1954, created small plaster models of the Moon and the Earth, which it showed on its cover. In 1968 NASA released the image Earthrise, and four years later The Blue Marble. Everything was ready for humanity to become aware of the ultimate environment – the cradle Earth. Astronauts experienced the overview effect, and the horizontal perspective of landscape expanded into the view from above and onwards into space. This unsettled the concept of the sublime in nature, since the experience of viewing the Earth from space [sic: “from nature” in the original], although thrilling and moving, is by definition not sublime. The view further into space, however, is possible through telescopes only at the level of images. Exposures of the sky lasting several days show phenomena that no longer exist and are merely light afterimages of the history of nature. Photographs of space are entirely artefactual, and without the mediation of technology no one would ever have viewed them. Following Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, I therefore employed the theoretical concept of environmental imagination, which Klaver presented with the help of the Earthrise photograph. The photograph of the Earth rising from the Moon made possible, among other things, the imagined community of humanity.
In my view the most important problem of the aesthetics of nature is not the question of whether we can appropriately appreciate nature and what correct appreciation is. Throughout the text I did indeed question the capacities of this relatively young discipline to the extreme, but with one single purpose: I chose the present structure of chapters because they best illustrate the thesis that when we speak of the aesthetics of nature, we are in fact speaking of our perception of natural environments. The aesthetic fascination with nature is a story of its depiction, of how we think nature, and above all of how we think ourselves within it. Nature is a hyperobject in the sense that we simply cannot truly encompass and grasp it. Nature is the whole biosphere on Earth and nature is the whole universe, while the human being, with a body, is a finite being within it. Because of their “infinite finitude”, hyperobjects cannot be grasped otherwise than in the form of diagrams, graphs, pictorial representations and codes. The abundance of detail and the immeasurable fluidity of nature withdraw it from true comprehension, which is why, for instance, aesthetics cannot justify environmental protection efforts. In order to appreciate nature, the human being must necessarily visualise it, and, as we have seen above, this visualisation takes place at the level of images, myths, natural history writing, the models of appreciation themselves and even renaturation. Carlson’s natural environmental model is the heir of this tradition. When Alexander von Humboldt set out on his travels around the world, on which he measured, sketched and recorded discoveries about nature, he did so with the means and language of science. In different corners of the planet he discovered similar phenomena and regularities, which he passionately presented to his Enlightenment colleagues in the exchanges of the “global republic of letters” and in public lectures. He sent numerous geological and atmospheric measurements and thousands of sketches and plant specimens to other scientists, because he believed that knowledge must be shared. He was the first to realise how inappropriate management of nature causes environmental degradation, and he was one of the first to grasp that the natural environment is an ecosystem. Von Humboldt invented “nature”. He was the first to draw the outline of this new hyperobject. In the end, therefore, I no longer even ask what is natural and what is artefactual. With the examples above I have shown that the contemporary concept of nature represents above all a functioning global system connected with the solar system, the galaxy and the evolution of the universe.
My criticism of the natural environmental model is that with it, too, depiction takes place even in the direct appreciation of nature. To put natural phenomena into natural-scientific categories means constantly forcing them into the depictions of the current language. It is true that the categories themselves are correct. It is true that we recognise a correct and factual “system” of natural laws, but what does this really have to do with appreciation? We do not appreciate nature, but its scientific depiction. From the first cave paintings, the first mentions of nature in philosophical and religious texts, and landscape painting, to the first survey exhibitions about the “global democratic citizen” and photographs of the planet from space, the aesthetics of nature is the story of how we humans are part of this immeasurable living environment, which in truth we cannot grasp and think without proper visualisation. After the Cold War, with the partial declassification of satellite photographs of the Earth’s surface, it was precisely the planet’s biosphere that took the place of identification of the global community. In 1996 the American intelligence agency partially lifted the classification of satellite images of the northern hemisphere from the second half of the Cold War period. The partial declassification consisted in the images being made available only to selected “patriotic” environmental scientists working on the new problem of climate change. An unexpected turn occurred, since the availability of the images – especially those showing the shrinking of the polar ice sheets – gave scientists a form of environmental visualisation that proved crucial in gathering empirical evidence for a general scientific consensus on global climate change (Carruth and Marzec, 2014, p. 205). The declassification project was called Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis, or MEDEA. By silently displaying environmental images, the project outlined a planet turning against its own children (p. 206) and announced a new danger far worse than the previous ones: climate change. If we look at any historical turning point that is supposed to have brought about shifts in the appreciation of nature, it is clear that it was triggered by an image or by systems of depiction. We have always first appreciated the image or its depiction; only then did nature have its turn.
I therefore propose85 that environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of nature, following the example of environmental ethics, in which the concept of deep ecology resonated for some time, introduce for a certain period the concept of a deep aesthetics of nature. Less than a decade after Hepburn’s article, the debate on deep ecology (Naess, 1973) was already helping to develop the thought of what “true” ecology should actually be. The approach of shallow ecology and shallow environmental ethics, for instance, advocates the technological purification of air and water, the even distribution of pollution and legally permitted levels of pollution. Deep ecology, on the other hand, views pollution solely and exclusively from the standpoint of the biosphere. We humans must transform ourselves into the ecosphere and think on its behalf, not only with regard to the effect it has for us and on us, but on life in general (Naess, 1993, p. 441).
If the dividing line between a shallow and a deep aesthetics of nature existed, a shallow aesthetics of nature would permit the aesthetic appreciation and evaluation of nature through images, photographs, videos and other media. A deep aesthetics of nature would require direct experience of natural environments, animals, plants and places. It would call for going bodily out into nature. In a shallow aesthetics of nature mediation is always at work; we “imagine” and represent the natural environment, as we shall see below, with the help of generic images of nature. In shallow aesthetics we appreciate nature, the environment, plants and animals aesthetically through analogue and digital media, which is today the generally prevailing form of aesthetic approaches to nature. The proposal for a deep aesthetics of nature seeks to show that the so-called “shallow” aesthetics of nature is in reality not an aesthetics of nature at all, but an aesthetics modelled on aesthetic models in art, since its material is images (and depictions), not nature. With such a position I wish to draw attention to the difference between the appreciation of depictions of nature and the appreciation of nature itself.
In connection with the movement for a deep environmental ethics, we can set out a few emphases for a deep aesthetics of nature. Since the aesthetics of nature has tried to free itself from aesthetic models taken from art – the static contemplation of protected and unchanging art objects in the safe shelter of the gallery, museum or exhibition – it will not achieve this goal without reflecting that in many cases it is an aesthetics of depictions of nature in photographs, videos and other media. If it wishes to be a new and distinctive aesthetics, a deep aesthetics of nature must renounce the contemplation of images of nature and natural scenes. How an appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature itself – which is what we are above all concerned with – should proceed remains to be investigated. So, if the deep ecologist was guided by a resistance to modernity (Ferry, 1998, p. 107), the deep aesthetician must be guided by a resistance to Romanticism, which so strongly marks the aesthetics of nature even today.
The proposal for a deep aesthetics does support Carlson’s natural environmental model, but at the same time several decades have passed since the publication of Hepburn’s article, and our knowledge of and categorial apparatus for “nature” have changed. The changes that deep aesthetics tries to take into account in using the concept of nature are best seen in the concept of nature/wilderness. Before the appearance of humans on Earth we could call it pre-Anthropocene wilderness, which we can imagine as truly untouched nature. In the Anthropocene and the age of hyperobjects there is no longer either wilderness or nature. Some parts of the Earth’s surface are called that, but they are in reality environments polluted by humans. A third case is areas in which environmental engineers re-create natural processes and, from natural materials, in a relatively short time build environments, such as the Škocjanski zatok nature reserve for birds, which look “natural” but are in reality once again a depiction of nature. A fourth case is landscape parks and gardens, which a deep aesthetics of nature would call depicted nature. It may seem at first sight that deep aesthetics falls into an even deeper Romantic trap, the very one it tries to point out at the outset, but this is not so. A deep aesthetics of nature is aware that its object is something other than the scenes we can view in the images of various media.
To a certain extent the uncompromising position of deep ecology, which despised shallow environmental ethics, was mistaken. The idea that there exists an untouched, self-owned and self-regulating biosphere fed on a Romantic illusion about nature and on a need for radicalism. In the aesthetics of nature, as we have seen, only a shallow aesthetics of images is possible in space. In photographs of space we can see only the impressions of the light traces of objects that may no longer exist. If we really want to observe the universe, we need various telescopes, computers and computer programs. Compared with the deep aesthetics of nature on Earth, which is bodily, multisensory and full of interest, we observe photographs of the landscape on Mars with a great measure of disinterestedness. Because of its distance from our “sphere of influence” we experience it as separate, almost unreal. On the other hand, an aesthetics of nature that we wish to extend from the Earth to the whole universe has a future only as an interweaving of shallow and deep aesthetics. The same holds if we descend from the macro level to the level of microscopic images.
In the end we are left with the question of why we should bother with a deep aesthetics of nature at all, and whether its hidden purpose is the knowledge of “true” nature. Perhaps the most important stance of a deep aesthetics of nature is precisely the realisation that our concept of true “nature” is dead. Only when we stop observing it through Romantic spectacles and in the mirror of Romantic perfection can we begin to develop fruitful aesthetic approaches in the aesthetics of nature. A deep aesthetics of nature cannot begin with the image and end in nature. Yet it is also true that we will probably never be able to escape from depictions and visualisations.