AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF
NATURJE*
Ronald W. Hepburn
CONTEMPORARY WRITINGS on aesthetics attend almost exclusively to the
arts and very rarely to natural beauty.1
Aesthetics is even defined by some
mid-century writers as 'the philosophy of art', 'the philosophy of
criticism'. Two much-quoted anthologies of aesthetics (Elton's in this
country, Vivas and Krieger's in America) contain no study of natural
beauty.2
Why is this so?
For part of the answer we have to look not to philosophers' theories
but to some general shifts in aesthetic taste itself. Despite appearances
to the contrary (the cult of the open air, caravans, camps, excursions in
the family car) serious aesthetic concern with nature is today rather an
unusual phenomenon. If we regard the Wordsworthian vision as the
great peak in the recent history of the subject, then we have to say that
the ground declined very sharply indeed from that extraordinary summit,
and that today we survey it from far below. The Wordsworthian
nature was man's aesthetic and moral educator: whereas the characteristic
image of twentieth-century man, as we all know, is that of a
'stranger' encompassed by a nature which is indifferent, unmeaning and
'absurd'.
The work of the sciences too has tended to produce some bewilderment
and loss of nerve over the aesthetic interpretation of nature.
Microscope and telescope have added vastly to our perceptual data; the
forms of the ordinary landscape, ordinarily interpreted, are shown up
as only a selection from countless different scales. 'What is nature?' The
question can no longer be answered in terms of macroscopic, readilydiscnminable,
'labelled' objects.
* A substantially longer version of this study is to appear in a volume to be published in
Italian (publisher Lend) introducing current trends in English-speaking philosophy.
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On the theoretical level there are other and distinctive reasons for
the neglect of natural beauty in aesthetics itself, especially in an aesthetics
that seeks to make itself increasingly rigorous. Certain important features
of aesthetic experience are quite unobtainable in nature—a landscape
does not minutely control the spectator's response to it as does a
successful work of art: it is an unframed ordinary object, in contrast to
the framed, 'esoteric', 'illusory' or 'virtual' character of the art-object.
And so the artefact tends to be taken as the aesthetic object par excellence,
and the proper focus of study.
Linguistic or conceptual analysts have been understandably tempted
to apply their techniques first and foremost to the arguments and manifestoes
lying to hand in the writings of art critics. In the case of natural
beauty, however, such a critical literature scarcely exists. The philosopher
must first work out his own systematic account of the aesthetic
enjoyment of nature. And this he has so far been slow—or reluctant—
to do.
Having drawn attention to a neglected topic, I now want to argue
that the neglect is a very bad thing: bad because aesthetics is thereby
steered off from examining an important and richly complex set of
relevant data; and bad because when a set of experiences is ignored in a
theory relevant to them, they tend to be made less readily available as
experiences. If we cannot find sensible-sounding language in which to
describe them, the experiences are felt, in an embarrassed way, as offthe-map—and
since off the map, seldom visited. This is specially unfortunate
if for other reasons the experiences are already hard to achieve.
What, then, can contemporary aesthetics do about the topic of
natural beauty?
II
If I am right that systematic description is one main lack here, I ought
to supply some account of the varieties of aesthetic experience of nature.
But their variety is immense, and mere cataloguing would be tedious. I
shall select a few samples both interesting in themselves and useful for
subsequent arguments.
We have already remarked that art-objects have a number of general
characteristics not shared by objects in nature. It would be useful if we
could show (and I think we can) that the absence of certain of these
features is not merely privative in its effect, but can contribute valuably
to the aesthetic experience of nature.
A good specimen is the degree to which the spectator can be involved
in the natural aesthetic situation itself. On occasion he may confront
natural objects as a static, disengaged observer; but far more typically
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the objects envelop him on all sides. In a forest, trees surround him; he
is ringed by hills, or he stands in the midst of a plain. If there is movement
in the scene, the spectator may himself be in motion and his motion may
be an important element in his aesthetic experience. Think, for instance,
of a glider-pilot, delighting in a sense of buoyancy, in the balancing of
the air-currents that hold him aloft. This sort of involvement is well
expressed by Barbara Hepworth: 'What a different shape and "being"
one becomes lying on the sand with the sea almost above from when
standing against the wind on a sheer high cliff with seabirds circling
patterns below one.'8
We have here not only a mutual involvement of
spectator and object, but also a reflexive effect by which the spectator
experiences himself in an unusual and vivid way: and this difference is
not merely noted but dwelt upon aesthetically.
If this study were on a larger scale, we should have to analyse in detail
the various senses of 'aesthetic detachment' and 'involvement' that are
relevant here. This could prove a more slippery investigation than in
the case of art-appreciation; but a rewarding one. The spectator is, of
course, aesthetically detached in the sense that he is not using nature,
manipulating it or calculating how to manipulate it. He is both actor and
spectator, ingredient in the landscape and lingering upon the sensations
of being thus ingredient, playing actively with nature and letting nature
as it were play with him and his awareness of himself.
Secondly: though by no means all art-objects have frames or pedestals,
a great many of them share a common character in being set apart from
their environment in a distinctive way. We might use the word 'frame'
in an extended sense to cover not only the physical boundaries of pictures
but all the various devices employed in different arts to prevent
the art-object being mistaken for a natural object or for an artefact without
aesthetic interest. Such devices are best thought of as aids to the
recognition of the formal completeness of the art-objects themselves,
their ability to sustain aesthetic interest.
In contrast natural objects are 'frameless'. This is in some ways a disadvantage
aesthetically: but there are some compensations. Whatever
lies beyond the frame of an art-object cannot normally become part of
the aesthetic experience relevant to it. A chance train-whistle cannot be
integrated into the music of a string quartet; it merely interferes with
its appreciation. But where there is no frame, and where nature is our
aesthetic object, a sound or a visible intrusion from beyond the original
boundaries of our attention can challenge us to integrate it in our overall
experience, to modify that experience so as to make room for it.
This, of course, need not occur: we may shut it out by effort of will if it
seems quite unassimilable. At any rate our creativity is set a task: and
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•when things go well with us we experience a sudden expansion of
imagination that can be memorable in its own right.
And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents . . .
If the absence of 'frame' precludes full determinateness and stability in
the natural aesthetic object, it at least offers in return such unpredictable
perceptual surprises; and their mere possibility imparts to the contemplation
of nature a sense of adventurous openness. In a painting the
frame ensures that each element of the work is determined in its perceived
qualities (including emotional qualities) by a limited context.
Obviously this is one kind of determinateness that cannot be achieved
with natural objects. The aesthetic impact made upon us by, say, a tree
is part-determined by the context we include in our view of it. A tree
growing on a steep hill-slope, bent far over by the winds, may strike us
as tenacious, grim, strained. But from a greater distance, when the view
includes numerous similar trees on the hillside, the striking thing may be
a delightful stippled patterned slope, with quite different emotional
quality—quixotic or cheery. Any aesthetic quality in nature is always
provisional, correctible by reference to a different, perhaps wider context
or to a narrower one realized in greater detail. In positive terms this
provisional character of aesthetic qualities in nature creates a restlessness,
an alertness, a search for ever new standpoints and more comprehensive
unities.
Lastly: we can distinguish between the particular aesthetic impact of
an object, whether natural or artefact, and certain general 'background'
experiences common to a great many aesthetic situations and of aesthetic
value in themselves. With an art-object there is the exhilarating
activity of coming to grasp its intelligibility as a perceptual whole. We
find built-in guides to interpretation and contextual controls for our
response. We are aware of these features as having been expressly put
there by its creator. Now I think that we can locate a nearly parallel but
interestingly different background experience when our object is not
an artefact but a natural one. Again it is a kind of exhilaration, a delight
in the fact that the forms of the natural world offer scope for the exercise
of imagination, that leaf pattern chimes with vein pattern, cloud form
with mountain form and mountain form with human form. Indeed,
when nature is pronounced to be 'beautiful'—not in the narrower sense
of that word, which contrasts 'beautiful' with 'picturesque' or 'comic',
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but in the wide sense equivalent to 'aesthetically interesting' and
'aesthetically excellent'—an important part of our meaning is just this,
that nature's forms do provide this scope for imaginative play. For that
is surely not analytically true: it might have been otherwise.
I have been arguing that certain important differences between natural
objects and art-objects furnish grounds for distinctive and valuable
types of aesthetic experience of nature. These are types of experience
that art cannot provide to the same extent as nature, or cannot provide
at all. Supposing that a person's aesthetic education fails to reckon with
these differences, supposing it instils in him the attitudes, the tactics of
approach, the expectations proper to the appreciation of art-works only,
such a person will either pay very little aesthetic heed to natural objects
or else will heed them in the wrong way. He will look—and of course
look in vain—for what can be found and enjoyed only in art. Furthermore,
one cannot be at all certain that he will seriously ask himself
whether there might be other tactics more proper and more fruitful for
the aesthetic appreciation of nature.
Ill
Accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature have sometimes
focused upon the contemplating of single natural objects in their individuality
and uniqueness. They have centred upon the formal organization
of such objects or their colours and textures. Other writers, with
greater metaphysical daring, or rashness, have spoken of the aesthetic
enjoyment of nature as leading to the disclosure of 'unity' in nature,
or as tending towards an ideal of 'oneness with nature'. The formulations
vary greatly and substantially among themselves: but the vocabulary of
unity, oneness as the key aesthetic principle, is the recurrent theme.*
There are strong influences in contemporary British philosophy that
prompt one to have the fullest sympathy with a particularist approach
to natural beauty—as the contemplating of individual objects with their
aesthetically interesting perceptual qualities; and to have very little
sympathy for the more grandiose language of 'oneness with' or 'in'
nature. None the less, it seems to me that we do not have here one good
and one bad aesthetic approach, the first sane and the second absurd.
Rather we have two well-separated landmarks between which lies a
range of aesthetic possibilities: and in the mapping of this range those
landmarks will play a valuable role.
We must begin by frankly denying the universal aesthetic need for
unity, unity of form, quality, structure, or of anything else. We can
take pleasure in sheer plurality, in the stars of the night sky, in a birdsong
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without beginning, middle or end. And yet to make 'unity' in some
sense one's key concept need not be simply wrong-headed or obscurantist.
I want to argue that there are certain incompletenesses in the
experience of the isolated particular that produce a nisus towards the
other pole, the pole of unity. But there is not a single type of unification
or union: several notions are to be distinguished within the ideal.
We have already noted the nisus towards more and more comprehensive
or adequate survey of the context that determines the perceived
qualities of a natural object or scene. Our motives are, in part, the desire
for a certain integrity or 'truth' in our aesthetic experience of nature:
and of this more shortly. We know also that in all aesthetic experience
it is contextual complexity that, more than any other single factor,
makes possible the minute discrimination of emotional qualities; and
such discrimination is accorded high aesthetic value. It is largely the
pursuit of such value that moves us to accept what I called 'the challenge
to integrate'—to take notice of and to accept as aesthetically relevant
some shape or sound that initially lies outside the limit of our attention.
The expansion of context does not have to be a spatial expansion.
What else can it be? Supposing I am walking over a wide expanse of
sand and mud. The quality of the scene is perhaps that of wild, glad
emptiness. But suppose that I bring to bear upon the scene my knowledge
that this is a tidal basin, the tide being out. I see myself now as virtually
walking on what is for half the day sea-bed. The wild glad emptiness
may be tempered by a disturbing weirdness. Thus, in addition to spatial
extension (or sometimes instead of it), we may aim at enriching the
interpretative element of our experience, taking this not as theoretical
'knowledge-about' the object or scene, but as helping to determine the
aesthetic impact it makes upon us. 'Unity' here plays a purely 'regulative'
role. Nature is not a 'given whole', nor indeed is knowledge about
it. And in any case there are psychological limits to the expansion process
; a degree of complexity is reached beyond which there will be no
increase in discrimination of perceptual or emotional qualities.
A second movement away from contemplation of uninterpreted particulars
is sometimes known as the 'humanizing' or the 'spiritualizing'
of nature. I shall merely note its existence and relevance here, for there
have been a good many accounts of it in the history of aesthetics. Coleridge
said that: 'Art i s . . . the power of humanizing nature, of infusing
the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the object of
his contemplation.'6
And Hegel, that the aim of art is 'to strip the outer
world of its stubborn foreignness'.9
What is here said about art is no less
true of aesthetic experience of nature itself. Imaginative activity is
working for a rapprochement between the spectator and his aesthetic
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object: unity is again a regulative notion, a symbol of the unattainable
complete transmutation of brute external nature into a mirror of the
mind.
By developing and qualifying the 'humanization' ideal we can come
to see yet a third aspect of the nisus towards unity. A person who contemplates
natural objects aesthetically may sometimes find their emotional
quality is describable in the vocabulary of ordinary human moods
and feeling—melancholy, exuberance, placidity. But not always. A particular
emotional quality can be roughly analogous to a nameable human
emotion—let us say, desolation: but the precise quality of desolation
revealed in some waste or desert in nature may be quite distinctive in
timbre and intensity. Aesthetic experience of nature may be experience
of a range of emotion that the human scene by itself, untutored and unsupplemented,
could not evoke. In Barbara Hepworth's remark, once
more, to be one with nature in her sense was to realize vividly one's
place in the landscape, as a form among its forms. And this is not to
have nature's 'foreignness' or otherness overcome, but rather to allow
that otherness free play in modifying one's everyday sense of one's own
being. In this domain, again, we need not confine ourselves to the contemplating
of uninterpreted particulars. In a leaf-pattern I may 'see'
also blood-vessel patterns, or the patterns of branching, forked lightning:
or all of these. In a spiral nebula pattern I may see the pattern of swirling
waters or whirling dust. I may be aware of a network of affinities,
analogous forms, spanning the inorganic or the organic world or both.
My experience has a quality of multum in parvo. If, with Mr. Eliot, one
sees 'The dance along the artery/The circulation of the lymph' as
'figured in the drift of stars', something of the aesthetic qualities of the
latter (as we perceive them) may come to be transferred to the former.
This is not necessarily a humanizing of nature; it may be more like a
'natunzing' of the human observer.
A fourth class of approaches to ideals of 'unity' is concerned with
what we have called the 'background' quality of emotions and attitudes,
common to a great many individual experiences. Here the background
is a sense of reconciliation, suspension of conflict, and of being in that
sense at one with the aesthetic object. This particular sort of'at-one-ness'
could hardly be present in art-experience, since it requires that the
aesthetic object should be at the same time some part of the natural
environment. This is the same environment from which we wrest our
food, from which we have to protect ourselves in order to live, and which
refuses to sustain our individual lives beyond a limited term. To attain,
and sustain, the relevant detachment from such an environment in order
to savour it aesthetically is in itself a fair achievement, an achievement
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which suffuses the aesthetic experiences themselves with that sense of
reconciliation. The objects of nature may look to us as if their raison
d'etre were precisely that we should celebrate their beauty. As Rilke
put it: 'Everything beckons to us to perceive it.'7
Or the dominant stance
may be that of benediction:' the Ancient Mariner 'blesses' the watersnakes
at his moment of reconciliation.
This fourth type of unity-ideal could arise in the contemplation of
what is itself quite ««-unified in the other senses, the night sky again, or
a mass ofhills with no detectable pattern to unite them. It is more strictly
a concomitant, or a by-product, of an aesthetic experience that we are
already enjoying, an experience in which there may have been no
synoptic grasping of patterns, relating of forms or any other sort of
unifying.
I suspect that someone who tried to construct a comprehensive
aesthetic theory with 'unity' as its sole key concept would obtain his
comprehensiveness only by equivocating or punning over the meaning
of the key expression, only by sliding and slithering from one of its
many senses to another. When one sense is not applicable, another may
well be. The fourth sense in particular can be relevant to vivid aesthetic
experience of any natural objects whatever.
So much the worse, we may conclude, for such a theory qua monolithic.
But to say that is not to imply that our study has yielded only
negative results. This is one of several areas in aesthetics where we have
to resist the temptation to work with a single supreme concept and must
replace it by a cluster of related key concepts. In searching out the relevant
key concepts, the displaced pseudo-concept may yet be a useful
guide—as it is in the present case. It is not, however, adequate for all
explanatory purposes.
We began our study by referring to the contemplation of uninterpreted
individual natural objects in their particularity. This was not a
mere starting-point to be left behind in our pursuit of the 'unities'. On
the contrary, aesthetic experience remains tethered to that concern with
the particular even if on a long rope. The rope is there, although the
development and vitality of that experience demand that it be stretched
to the full. The pull of the rope is felt when the expanding and complicating
of our synopses reaches the point beyond which we shall have not
more but less fine discrimination of perceptual quality. It is felt again
when we risk the blurring and negating of natural forms as we really
perceive them in an anxious attempt to limit our experience of nature
to the savouring of stereotyped and well-domesticated emotional qualities.
It is even relevant to our fourth type of unity-ideal: for the sense
of reconciliation is not an independent and autonomous aesthetic ex-
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perience, but hangs entirely upon the occurrence of particular experiences
of particular aesthetically interesting natural objects.
IV
Although recent aesthetics has been little concerned with natural
beauty as such, yet at crucial points in its analyses of art-experience it has
frequently made comparisons between our aesthetic approach to artobjects
and to objects in nature. In the light of our reflections so far we
may wish to ask at this point whether the comparing has been fairly
done. We have room to examine one example only.
An important part of current controversy is the assessment of the
Expression Theory. The Expression Theory saw the artefact as the
middle link in a communication from artist to spectator. Its critics see
the artefact first and foremost as an object with certain properties,
properties which are, or should be, aesthetically interesting and which
in their totality control the spectator's response. This is an aesthetic
approach that reduces the gulf between art-object and natural object.
Both are to be approached primarily as individual, self-contained entities,
exciting to contemplate by virtue of their perceived qualities. But how
far can we accept this comparison? Critics of the critics have pointed out
some deficiencies. They have insisted upon the irreducible relevance of
linguistic and cultural context to the interpretation of a poem. Identical
words might constitute two poems, not one, if we read them in two different
historical contexts.8
We could extend this criticism as follows. Suppose we have two perceptually
identical objects, one an artefact and the other natural. They
might be a 'carved stone' of Arp and a naturally smoothed stone; a
carving in wood and a piece of fallen timber. Or they might be identical
in pattern, though not in material; for example, a rock face with a particular
texture and marking and an abstract expressionist painting with
the same texture and the same markings. If we made the most of the
rapprochement, we should have to say that we had in each of these cases
essentially one aesthetic object. Yet this would be a misleading conclusion.
If we knew them for what they are—as artefact or natural object
—we should certainly attend and respond differently to them. As we
look at the rock face we may realize imaginatively the geological turmoils
that produced its pattern. The realizing of these need not be a piece
of extra-aesthetic reflection; it may determine for us how we see and
respond to the object itself. If we interpreted and responded to the
abstract painting in the same way, our interpretation would this time
be merely whimsical. If we arbitrarily restricted aesthetic experience of
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both nature and art to the contemplating of uninterpreted shapes and
patterns, we could, of course, have the rapprochement. But we have seen
good reason for refusing so to restrict it in the case of nature-experience,
whatever be the case with art.
Take another instance. Through the eyepiece of a telescope I see the
spiral nebula in Andromeda. I look next at an abstract painting in a circular
frame that contains the identical visual pattern. My responses are
not alike, even if each is indisputably aesthetic. My awareness that the
first shapes are of enormous and remote masses of matter in motion
imparts to my response a strangeness and solemnity that are not generated
by the pattern alone. The abstract pattern may indeed impress by
reminding me of various wheeling and swirling patterns in nature. But
there is a difference between taking the pattern as that sort of reminder
and on the other hand brooding on this impressive instantiation of it
in the nebula.
A more lighthearted but helpful way of bringing out these points is
to suppose ourselves confronted by a small object which, for all we
know, may be natural or may be an artefact. We are set the task of regarding
it aesthetically. I suppose that we might cast upon it an uneasy
and embarrassed eye. How shall we approach it? Shall we, for instance,
see in its smoothness the slow mindless grinding of centuries of tides,
or the swifter and mindful operations of the sculptor's tools? Certainly,
we can enjoy something of its purely formal qualities on either reckoning;
but even the savouring of these is affected by non-formal factors
that diverge according to the judgement we make about its origin. To
sum up: the swing, in some recent aesthetics, from 'intention' to 'object'
has been healthful on the whole, delivering aesthetics and criticism from
a great deal of misdirected labour. But it has countered the paradoxes of
expressionism with paradoxes of its own. Differences between object
and object need to be reaffirmed: indiscernibly different poems or carvings
become discernibly different when we reckon with their aesthetically
different cultural contexts; and the contextual controls that determine
how we contemplate an object in nature are different from those
that shape our experience of art. In other words, we have here a central
current issue in aesthetics that cannot be properly tackled without a fullscale
discussion of natural beauty.
That, however, is not the only current issue about which the same
can be said. It can be said also (and this introduces our final topic) about
the analysis of such expressions as 'true', 'false', 'profound', 'shallow',
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'superficial', as terms of aesthetic appraisal. These have been studied in
their application to art-objects but scarcely at all in connection with
nature. It might indeed be contested whether they have any meaningful
use in the latter connection.
I think it can be shown that they have. We can best approach the topic
by way of some analysis of an expression which we have used already
but not explained. It is a sense of the word 'realize'. Here are some
examples of the use. 'I had long known that the earth was not flat, but I
never before realized its curvature till I watched that ship disappear on
thehorizon.' Here 'realize' involves making, or becoming, vivid to perception
or to theimagination. Auxiliaryimagings may attend my realizing of
the earth's curvature, the image ofmy arms stretched out,fingersreaching
round the sphere; and the realization ofloneliness mayinvolve imagining
myself shouting but being unheard, needing help but getting none.
In some cases to realize something is simply to know or understand,
where 'know' and 'understand' are analysable in dispositional terms.
But our present sense of 'realize' has an essential episodic component:
it is a coming-to-be-aware. In the aesthetic setting it is an experience
accompanying and arising out of perceptions—perceptions upon which
we dwell and linger. I am gazing, say, at a cumulus cloud when I realize
its height. I do not discard, or pass beyond, the experience, as if I were
judging the height of the cloud in flight-navigation (or the loneliness of
the moor in planning a murder). This sort of realizing is obviously one
of our chief activities in the aesthetic experiencing of nature. It has been
central in earlier illustrations, the contemplation of the rock face, the
spiral nebula, the ocean-smoothed stone.
But my suggestion that realizing is 'episodic', occurrent, may properly
be challenged. Suppose that I am busy realizing the utter loneliness
of the moor, when suddenly I discover that behind sundry bits of cover
are a great many soldiers taking part in afield-exercise.Could I, without
illogic, maintain that I had been realizing what is not in fact the case?
Hardly. 'Realize' contains a built-in reference to truth. It has episodic
components, but it cannot be exhaustively analysed in that way. I
cannot be said to have realize thed strength and hardness of a tall treetrunk
if, when I then approach it, it crumbles rotten at a touch. But
surely I was doing something: my experience did occur; and nothing that
subsequently occurs can alter it.
Now this experience was, of course, the aesthetic contemplation of
apparent properties. That they turn out not to be also real properties
may disturb the spectator, or it may not. For some people aesthetic experience
is interested not at all in reality—only in looks, seemings:
indifference to truth may be part of their definition of the aesthetic. If
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the soldiers appear or the tree crumbles, the aesthetic value of the prior
experiences is (to those people) not in the least affected. Others take a
different view. One could agree that a large range of aesthetic experience
is not concerned about truth but yet attach a peculiar importance to the
range that is. I am not sure that the gulf between this and the contrasted
view is wholly bridgeable by argument: but some reflections can be
offered along the following lines.
If we want our aesthetic experiences to be repeatable and to have
stability, we shall try to ensure that new information or subsequent
experimentation will not reveal the 'seemings' as illusions. If I know
that the tree is rotten, I shall not be able again to savour its seemingstrength.
I could, no doubt, savour its 'deceptively strong appearance';
but that would be a quite different experience from the first.
Suppose the outline of our cumulus cloud resembles that of a basket
of washing, and we amuse ourselves in dwelling upon this resemblance.
Suppose that on another occasion we do not dwell on such freakish
aspects, but try instead to realize the inner turbulence of the cloud, the
winds sweeping up within and around it, determining its structure and
visible form. Should we not be ready to say that this latter experience
was less superficial than the other, that it was truer to nature, and for
that reason more worth having? If there can be a passage, in art, from
easy beauty to difficult and more serious beauty, there can also be such
passages in aesthetic contemplation of nature.
Were there not a strong nisus in that direction, how could we account
for the sense of bewilderment people express over how to bring their
aesthetic view of nature into accord with the discoveries of recent
science? Because of these discoveries (as Sir Kenneth Clark puts it):
'the snug, sensible nature which we can see with our own eyes has ceased
to satisfy our imaginations'.9
If the aesthetic enjoyment of nature were
no more than the contemplation of particular shapes and colours and
movements, these discoveries could not possibly disturb it. But they do:
they set the imagination a task in 'realizing'.
An objector may still insist that reference to truth is aesthetically
irrelevant. To him the only relevant factors are the savouring of perceptual
qualities and formal organization. But a formalist might at least
be reminded that a major element in his own enjoyment is the synoptic
grasping of complexities. A particular colour-patch may be seen as part
of an object, as modifying the colour of adjacent patches, and as cpntributing
to the total perceived pattern—all simultaneously. One could
argue that the striving to 'realize' should be taken as adding to our
powers of synopsis and that for the exclusion of it no good reason could
be given.
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But a more searching anxiety might be expressed. Sometimes indeed
such realizings may enhance an aesthetic experience, but may they not
sometimes destroy it? When I see the full moon rising behind the
silhouetted branches of winter trees I may judge that the scene is
more beautiful if I think of the moon simply as a silvery flat disc at no
great distance from the trees on the skyline. Ought I to be realizing the
moon's actual shape, size and distance? Why spoil my enjoyment?
There may be cases where I have to choose between an aesthetic
experience available only if I inhibit my realizing and on the other hand
a different aesthetic experience available if I do some realizing. In our
example, the first experience is of beauty (in the narrow sense); and we
could not count on the alternative experience being also one of beauty,
in the same sense. It might, of course, be still aesthetically exciting: that
is, of beauty in the widest sense. But, the objector might press, even that
cannot be guaranteed in all cases. And this is exactly the difficulty we feel
about the bearing of present-day science on our vision of the natural
world. Sometimes our attempts at realizing are aesthetically bleak and
unrewarding; or they may fail altogether, as perhaps with some cosmologies
and cosmogonies. Compromises, the balancing of one aesthetic
requirement against another, may well be inevitable. One may say in
a particular case: 'this is the nearest I can come to making imaginatively
vivid what I know about that object. My realizing is still not quite
adequate to my knowledge; but if I were to go any further in that
direction, I should lose touch altogether with the sights, sounds and
movements of the visible world seen from the human point of view.
And that would impoverish, not enrich, my total aesthetic experience.'
What we should be feeling again is the tug of the rope that tethers
aesthetic experience to the perception of the particular object and its
perceived individuality.
To be able to say anything more confident about this problem one
would need to hold a metaphysical and religious view of nature and
science which denied that the imaginative assimilating of scientific
knowledge could ultimately lead to aesthetic impoverishment. That
possibility we can only take note of in this essay without being able to
explore it.
We may recall at the same time, and in conclusion, that some important
accounts of natural beauty have, historically, been closely allied
with various sorts of nature-mysticism. I have argued that there are in
fact not one but several unity-ideals; that it is most unlikely that any
single aesthetic experience can fully and simultaneously realize them all;
and I believe that with certain of them the notion of full attainment
makes dubious sense. Yet the idea of their ever more intense and com-
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prehensive attainment is not without value, and the link with naturemystical
experiences need not be severed.10
Very tentatively, I suspect that no more materials are required than
those with which we are already furnished in order to render available
certain limited varieties of mystical experience, and logically to map
them. Those materials provide us, not with affirmations about a transcendent
being or realm, but with afocus imaginarius that can play a regulative
and practical role in the aesthetic contemplation of nature. It sees
that contemplation as grounded, first and last, in particular perceptions,
but as reaching out so as to relate the forms of the objects perceived to
the pervasive and basic forms of nature; relating it also to the observer's
own stance and setting, as himself one item in nature—a nature with
whose forces he feels in harmony through the very success of this contemplative
activity itself.
But even if something of the intensity and momentousness of mystical
experience can be reached along such lines, this would be a mysticism
without the God of theism. And surely the absence of belief in transcendence
would make this quite different from a mysticism that centres
upon it. Different, indeed, in the quality of available experience and in
expectations aroused both for the here-and-now and the hereafter:
but not so radically different as to make 'mysticism' a misnomer. Belief
in a transcendent being means that, for the believer, the 'focus' is not
imaginary but actual—in God; and it is doubtless psychologically easier
to work towards a goal one believes to be fully realizable than towards a
focus one suspects to be imaginary. Rather similarly, in ethics a student
may experience a check to his practical moral confidence when he
discovers that 'oughts' cannot be grounded in 'is's'. Yet it is seldom that
he indulges for this reason in a permanent moral sulk. Perhaps, if I am
right, it is no more reasonable to indulge in a nature-mystical sulk. But
I begin to moralize: a sign that this paper has come to its proper end.
REFERENCES
1
By 'nature* I shall simply mean all ob- also H. Osbotne's Theory of Beauty
jects that are not human artefacts. I am (1952), which likewise confines its inignoring
the many possible disputes over vestigation to art-experience. M. C.
natural objects that have received a Beardsley's Aesthetics (1958) is subtitled
marked, though limited, transformation Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism.
at man's hands. Mr. Osborne defines beauty as the
s
W. Elton (ed.), Aesthetics and Language 'characteristic and peculiar excellence
(1954): Vivas and Krieger (eds.), The of works of art'. Professor Bearsley's
Problems of Aesthetics (1953). Compare opening sentence reads: 'There would
208
RONALD W. HEPBURN
be no problems of aesthetics, in the
sense in which I propose to mark out
this field of study, if no one ever talked
about works of art.'
8
Barbara Hepworth. Carvings and Drawings
(1952), chap. 4.
* (a) Graham Hough's Image and Experience
(i960) contains some suggestive
reflections stemming from his discussion
of Ruskin and Roger Fry. 'By intense
contemplation of . . . experiences of
form and space we become conscious of
the unity between ourselves and the
natural world' (p. 175). 'It is Ruskin's
special distinction to show . . . how the
experience of the senses can lead directly
to that unified apprehension of nature,
and of ourselves as a part of nature,
which can fairly constantly be recognized,
under various mythological disguises,
not only as that which gives
value to aesthetic experience, but also as
one of the major consolations of philosophy'
(p. 176).
(b) The nature-mystical interpretation
of unity-with-nature is briefly stated by
Evelyn Underhill in her Mysticism. In
moments of intense love for the natural
world 'hints of a marvellous truth, a
unity whose note is ineffable peace,
shine in created things' (4th ed., 1912,
p. 87).
W. T. Stace, listing the common
characteristics of 'extrovertive mysticism'
(to which nature-mysticism belongs),
includes the following: 'The One
is . . . perceived through the physical
senses, in or through the multiplicity of
objects.' 'The One [is apprehended more
concretely] as being an inner subjectivity
in all things, described variously as life,
or consciousness, or a living Presence.'
He adds: "There are underground connections
between the mystical and the
aesthetic . . . which are at present
obscure and unexplained.' (Mysticism and
Philosophy, i960, pp. 79, 81.)
(c) Coleridge wrote: 'The groundwork
. . of all true philosophy is the
full apprehension of the difference between
the contemplation of reason,
namely that intuition of things which
arises when we possess ourselves as one
with the whole . . . and that which
presents itself when ... we think of ourselves
as separated beings, and place
nature in antithesis to the mind, as
object to subject, thing to thought, death
to hfe.' (The Friend, Bohn Ed., p. 366.)
These brief quotations, culled in nearrandom
fashion from very diverse historical
contexts, may suffice to show at
least the existence of some of the tendencies
with which we shall be con-
cerned.
8
Biographia Literaria, vol. II, 'On Poesy
or Art'.
• Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine
Art (trans. Bosanquet, 1886), p. 59.
7
Later Poems (ed. Leishman), p. 128.
8
See H. S. Eveling, 'Composition and
Criticism', Proc. Arist. Soc, 1958-9.
9
Landscape into Art (1949), Pelican Books,
1956, p. 150. Sir Kenneth Clark is
writing of art and artists, but his points
are no less relevant to a contemplation
of nature that never passes into the constructing
of art objects.
10
Compare, once again, Graham Hough,
Image and Experience (i960), pp. 174 f.
209