Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts; Edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell

In my Tutor report for Assignment 4 Robert Bloomfield mentioned that he felt that I had improved my blog but he was unsure about the heading image (at that time a shot from the Lake District complete with rainbow).  "I do wonder about the pastoral image for the header image though.  It screams landscape painting at me, eg Constable and his middle distances, whereas your work is so photographic."  He suggested that I might Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts especially Chapter 2 Natural Beauty Without Metaphysics.

Natural Beauty Without Metaphysics; T.J.Diffey

I found this essay readable and enjoyable with much food for thought.  I list below the points that I felt to be of most relevance to my work:

• Plato and the eighteenth-century British, and especially Scottish, philosophers were interested in the topic of beauty.
• ......whether beauty is a real quality, or whether judgments of beauty are subjective or objective....
• ....extreme subjectivism and relativism must hold sway.
• ...aesthetic subjectivisim......that the beautiful is to be defined as what pleases me. (INteresting that the auther feels there is no objective definition of beauty)
• ....and relativism as what pleases some social group.
• My tastes may be my tastes but they......must be the product of my environment, genes, gender, class, society, education, occupational group or whatever.
• ...disputes rage over matter of taste.....
• For there is held to be no way of getting outside the circle of taste to judge what taste is better. (Who is to judge what is more/most beautiful.)
• First, the popular idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder is itself intended as a philosophical answer to the philosophical question "what is beauty," and as such is not immune from criticism.
• If everyone believes that what is beautiful is what pleases him or her, what possible grounds could there be for denying that if it pleases then it is beautiful. (But how beautiful)
• And yet, for all the implausibility of the suggestion that natural beauty is judged and that some such judgements carry more weight than others, there is a growing institutionalization of natural appreciation, which means that in the question of natural beauty there is now some kind of authority exercised.  For example in Britain we now have officially designated "areas of outstanding natural beauty," and there is now the growing panoply of information offices, tourist trails and the like.......
• It does not follow....that corners of nature not officially noticed cannot be beautiful.
• There is a widespread public agreement concerning the beauty of certain landscapes.
• ....the beauty of some particular place or thing does not seem to depend for its existence upon our having to speak of it.
• Dunster Castle or Castle Comb do not depend for their beauty upon our speaking or thinking of them, though they do depend upon this for their popularity.
• Yet this is not inconsistent with Kant's powerful point that we appreciate the beautiful in virtue of our rationality.  It follows that is animals are not rational in Kant's sense they are incapable of appreciating beauty.
• Are we justified in restricting the appreciation of beauty to human beings?
• Something happened in the history of aesthetics between Burke and Kant.  Beauty got desexualised....
• .....natural beauty is disinterested appreciation by a rational mind.
• ...we can all think readily enough of examples of natural beauty....
• ....undoubtably beautiful.  This is literally true; ......
• How "natural" does this so-called beauty have to be... ....... it is false to take "natural" as meaning the absence or exclusion of human agency...........it is very difficult (in Britain) today to find "unspoiled" tracts of nature.  (Taken to these lengths then there must be no beauty left in Britain!!)
•  ....Even within living memory their (The Downs) look has been much altered by changes in agricultural use and methods and much improved (?) by the addition of such human artefacts as windmills. (Reference Pete Davis whose In Wildwood makes this exact point.  Also, in my extended essay for Contexual studies I argued the point that although a case can be made for the existence of relict wilderness of a sort in Lincolnshire I strongly suggested that with climate change today there is nowhere on planet Earth that remains 'untramelled by man' and, therefore, on wilderness left on the planet in the strictest sense of the word.)
• For a scene to be naturally beautiful is not so much for it to be in an unmanaged state as for it to look as if it were. (And hence we have landscape photography such as that of Ansel Adams and Joe Cornish.  An aquaintance of mine likes landscape photographs to show the world as he would like it to look not as it really is!!)
• To insist that nature has to be "unspoiled" to be regarded as beautiful suggests a sentimental a priori thought at work to the effect that nature must be beautiful and cannot be ugly...........but there is much in nature that, in spite of a sentimental temptation to deny it, is not beautiful.
• So the old adage that God made the countryside and man the town lives on in another guise.
• Nowadays we are less likely to think that some unspoiled stretch of land is a "horrid and awful waste" (such as our forebears thought the Scottish Highlands) and more likely to doubt if it can remain beautiful after the proposed intrusion of (further) human agency.  Does the the building of an atomic power station or the siting of electric pylons or an oil rig make this once-beautiful landscape now ugly? (See also Robert Mcfarlane's Mountains of the Mind where he refers to man's attitude to mountainous regions such as the Alps two or three hundred years ago.  Mountains were wastes to be feared not admired for their beauty.  Also the rash of wind farms on hills and mountains and in my case off the Lincolnshire coast.  Does that make the coast ugly where once it was beautiful, but there again many people might regard salt marsh and mudflats as ugly.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!!)
• The belief that the South Downs, say, are beautiful is something which everybody shares.  Then any proposed change is regarded as a threat to its established beauty.  Natural beauty seems to consist in a general impression, which is no doubt true of a beautiful work of art too (certainly any change to a work of art will be regarded as a threat to its beauty).
• There is a less bland way of taking these instances of accepted natural beauty, however, which is to say that there is a kind of stock natural scenery which turns up time and again in calendars and greeting cards. (Fay Godwin made the comment that she dislikes the postcard/greeting card view.  In Jesse Alexander's Perspectives on Place he makes the point that Godwin was wary of the picturesque to be found on cards i.e. the technically sound and aesthetically pleasing that many aspire to take.)
• There are those places by shore, by river and in hills which we find immediately beautiful, but much that is obviously beautiful to us was for our ancestors a case of "difficult beauty".  The point is often made that it took the poets and painters to make available to us all the aesthetic quality of "horrid wastes" such as mountains. (See my points re Mountains of the Mind above.)
• ....a parallel question arises: namely, whether the distinction between 'natural' beauty and 'artistic' beauty is tenable.
• The moral is that we cannot understand the idea of natural beauty with considering certain concepts more restricted in scope such as landscape, view or prospect.
• To identify something more determately than a 'nature', as for example a 'view', 'prospect', 'landscape' or whatever is to conceptualize it in such a way as to imply that the terrain in question has already been recognised aesthetically.  To ask if a prospect is beautiful is as odd as asking whether murder or lying are wrong.
• And yet other aesthetic subject-terms, such as 'wilderness' may the subject of political controversy. 
• It is no longer so commonly represented that I like the heathland as I like ice-cream, but that its preservation may have something to do with the survival of the planet Earth and plenty of people may have an interest in that. (The survival not of planet Earthbut the human species is a hobby horse of mine.  Mankind seems hellbent on destroying his/her environment through climate change, pollution (especially plastics THE pollution of the moment), war industry, oil exploration, especially in the Arctic.  However, man needs his environment and planet Earth much more than they need him.  Man maybe the first species to orchestrate its own destruction, but even if he wiped himself out with a nuclear holocaust the planet would survive.  Enough life forms would survive to repopulate the Earth and evolution could begin again.)
• If the popular belief that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is taken reductively to mean that beauty is nothing but personal fancy, this is inconsistent with other popular beliefs such as that natural beauty is a source of spiritual sustenance.
• The philosophical issue here is what does it mean to think of natural beauty as a source of spiritual sustenance.  This is a more important question than any in the traditional metaphysics of beauty but it goes undiscussed because of the hostility it provokes in intellectuals.
• More surprisingly, at least one Christian has denounced the spiritualisation of nature on the grounds that it makes an idolatory of the earth for heaven, not earth is divine. (This despite the fact that 'God created heaven and earth'! As a Christian I find this surprising and blinkered!)
• ....modern philosophy, impressed by a materialist interpretation of the science of nature, is hostile to religion.
• In a secular society it is not surprising that there will be hostility towards any religious veneration of natural beauty and at the same time nature will become a refuge for displaced religious emotions.
• But has beauty disappeared?...........Beauty, of course, has not disappeared, not the word nor the idea nor the phenomenon.  On the contrary the love of beauty is ubiquitous: in mass tourism, kitsch, the growing concern for the environment and sexual beauty.
• To say that beauty has disappeared for intellectuals is to mean that it is not taken as having any intellectual relevance, that it does not figure in our understanding of anything.
• In this respect popular opinion agrees with the intellectuals.  Beauty explains nothing.  It is only a matter of appearances; it lies in the eye of the beholder.
• If it is the fate of beauty to have been reduced to the status merely of what is personally pleasing, the fate of art has been more complex.  For one thing art has been freed from service to the ideal of beauty..............one is the determined campain mounted in aesthetics in the nineteenth century to drive out beauty as the criterion of art.
• Thus beauty seems to be a contestable ideal for art whereas there is nothing controversial in finding a particular landscape beautiful.
• In a secular society art, like natural beauty, remains a last refuge for religious and noumenal truth and it retains something of this power even for the secularly and aesthetically minded and not merely for those who remain religiously inclined. (Noumenon in Kantian philosophy a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.)
• Can nature give intimation of the transcendent?  Is this what makes spiritual communion with nature, which many have felt possible, the sense that in nature and through the senses paradoxically one is in the presence of something supersensible? (I think this is so.)
• Of course something grander than the beautiful, namely the wild and the sublime, seem to have provoked this sense of the transcendent in nature. (Muir, Thoreau, Emerson.)
• The modern world, I suggest, does not permit us a Wordsworthian faith in the divinity of nature. (?)
• ....in these references to Wordsworth, we seem to have slipped from the subject of natural beauty into that of the sublime without noticing the difference.
• ....so far as nature goes we do not nowadays pay much attention to any significant distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.  The sublime in nature is a species of the beautiful, the beauty of wild and grand places, but is no further significant.
• ......it seems clear that art, by contrast with nature, can manage without beauty, at least the beauty of the more obvious sorts.
• I am more willing to consider what the expression, a truthful work of art, might mean, than what a truthful landscape or prospect might mean or be.
• Art speaks, or is like a language, whereas beauty and, therefore natural beauty is dumb. (I can see where he is coming from here.)  Historically the idea that nature is a language or book that we can read has been particularly powerful in the development of western science but to my mind is now no more than an archaic and merely beautiful figure. (?)
• I have been critical of certain traditional answers but have offered no contemporary solution.  Is this because the idea of natural beauty is untenable and so as philosophical interest in beauty weakened it mad no provision for the idea of natural beauty or is it that we have been blind to the problem?  I prefer to believe the latter.

I found this essay interesting and thought provoking.  It touched on several areas of particular interest to me, but I am sure that it has helped with my choice of website header image, however, I have changed it to one more fitting for my final body of work.