IPP 507: Environmental Ethics

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Block 1- Foundations of Environmental Aesthetics

	What is Aesthetic Experience?
	The Beautiful
	The Sublime
	The Picturesque

In this first block you are first introduced to different ways in which philosophers have tried to answer the question, What is aesthetic experience? We then look at some influential categories of aesthetic appreciation in the history of philosophy: the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque.

Some helpful overview articles on environmental aesthetics can be found in the following:
Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, ‘Nature, Fine Arts, and Aesthetics’ in Kemal and Gaskell.
John A. Fisher, ‘Environmental Aesthetics’ and Malcolm Budd, ‘Aesthetics of Nature’ both in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson, Oxford, 2003. (Budd can also be found in essay 4 of his book, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Oxford, 2002.)

Further reading:
J.O. Urmson, ‘What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?’ reprinted in Lamarque and Olsen, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art.
P. Ziff, ‘Anything Viewed’, in Feagin and Maynard, Aesthetics.
Diane Collinson, *Aesthetic Experience’ in Hanfling, ed. Philosophical Aesthetics.

What is Aesthetic Experience?

One important foundation for understanding what aesthetic appreciation of nature involves is getting straight just what 'aesthetics' is about in the first place. The main focus of this course is a consideration of how we respond to natural environments and how it is that we find aesthetic value in them. So, we need to begin my asking what the aesthetic response involves, and how it leads to the discovery of value in nature.

Before delving into the various philosophical theories that attempt to answer the question, What is aesthetic experience?, consider how you would answer the question.

What kinds of experiences are those which you would describe as aesthetic? Think of some examples and jot them down.
Are these experiences any different than other kinds of experience?
Do the range of experiences you would want to call aesthetic share any features in common?
Do your aesthetic experiences share any features with other people's aesthetic experiences (of the same object? of different objects?)

Philosophical views of aesthetic experience

The traditional approach

Although it was not until around 1735 that aesthetics became recognised as a philosophical area of study, philosophical discussions of beauty (and ugliness) reach back to Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle in particular is known for putting forward the 'contemplation view', which says that our experience of beauty involves calm reflection on the appearance of the object - a painting, landscape, etc.

The traditional approach to understanding aesthetic experience is exemplified in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790). Here, he pins down several aspects of the aesthetic response, which depend upon both the object's qualities as they are presented to us and our own perception of the object. Our response is distinctive in being a disinterested perception of the appearance of some object. It is not a response characterised by intellectual curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge, or using the object as a means to some end. Our attention simply rests on qualities of the object for their own sake alone. We will learn more about Kant's view when we turn to beauty in the next part of this block.

In the twentieth century, the traditional approach is taken up by Jerome Stolnitz, and modernised in some sense (specifically, it is shorn of the complex philosophical system in which Kant's aesthetic views are positioned).

One thing to notice about Stolnitz's definition is his emphasis on 'sympathetic attention' to the object. This is a feature is the aesthetic response which, I think, most philosophers writing on aesthetics would agree with. The aesthetic response is not about using an object but about appreciating it for its distinctive qualities.

Another thing to notice is that Stolnitz is very open to what counts as the aesthetic object - it can be any object of attention whatsoever. (You will have to get used to 'object' language in aesthetics; 'object' is here understood very broadly to mean single object, set of objects, environment/s, etc.)

Stolnitz's view is also held by one of Stolnitz's contemporaries, Paul Ziff, who has written an influential and entertaining piece, 'Anything Viewed'. The point is that anything may potentially be appreciated aesthetically. This reflects important attention to the fact that our aesthetic experience is certainly not limited to the artworld.

Further reading: Paul Ziff, 'Anything Viewed', reprinted in Feagin and Maynard, eds. Aesthetics, 1997.

The traditional account as set out by Kant and Stolnitz puts a lot of weight in the aesthetic respondent to understand the nature of aesthetic experience.
J.O. Urmson, in his classic paper, 'What Makes A Situation Aesthetic' uses another strategy, by coming at the problem from the point of view of the types of reasons we give for the aesthetic satisfaction we may feel in the aesthetic response. These reasons differ from the reasons we may give for, e.g., moral or economic satisfaction. Aesthetic satisfaction, for example, is based in reasons that refer to how something looks, sounds, feels, etc. These reasons refer to the sensible qualities of objects

Now that you have some idea about how aesthetic experience has been characterised by philosophers, how does your own view compare?

Is your view of aesthetic experience like the traditional view or not? What do you think of the traditional approach?

As an alternative to the traditional approach you might like to explore John Dewey's view as set out in his book Art as Experience (1934). There is a short discussion of it on pp. 12-13 of Aesthetics of the Natural Environment.

Aesthetic Qualities

Another way in which philosophers have tried to distinguish the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic in through an analysis of what aesthetic qualities are.

This project involves various questions: What types of qualities are aesthetic qualities? Are they intrinsic, real qualities of objects or are they relational qualities, dependent on the response of a subject? Are they primary or secondary qualities? What are the varieties of aesthetic qualities?

Have a look at the discussion of these questions in pp.16-20 of Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Here, I support the fairly common view that aesthetic qualities are relational, they depend upon an individual perceiving features of some object, and the response they have to that object. As such they are comparable to secondary qualities.

An important, but not undisputed, distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic concepts was made by Frank Sibley (who taught at Lancaster for many years!). He argued that aesthetic concepts such as 'graceful' depend upon non-aesthetic concepts, such as 'thin', 'round', 'light'. We can explain why we use an aesthetic concept in an aesthetic judgment such as 'What a lovely, graceful willow tree', by referring to concepts or qualities it is based in. Here, we call the tree 'graceful' because of various non-aesthetic qualities we perceive, such as the thin shapes of the branches and the light forms of the leaves.

Exercise
Look at the list of types of aesthetic qualities on pp. 16-17 of Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Try to come up with examples of aesthetic qualities and classify them according to the headings there.

Aesthetic Value

Two important points to consider about aesthetic value in relation to environments are:

How does aesthetic value compare to other environmental values?
Is aesthetic value a type of instrumental or non-instrumental value?

As a philosopher working on aesthetics of nature for some time now, one of the most frustrating views I come up against is the belief that aesthetic value is a type of instrumental value, an not only that, it is less serious than other environmental values. It's about seeking out pleasure; using nature for one's own pleasure or recreation, etc.

I think this view is badly mistaken, mainly because it rests on a confusion between aesthetic value and amenity value in the environmental context.
This is where philosophy gets a real look in. The traditional account of aesthetic experience shows that our response is not about wanting to use the object or get pleasure out of it (although of course enjoyment or excitement often characterise our aesthetic experiences). Even on-traditional accounts support this view (but without an emphasis on 'disinterestedness' as such).

Aesthetic value is concerned with picking out aesthetic qualities and valuing them for their own sake. Amenity value is about how some environment may serve as an amenity - for recreation, relaxation, etc. These are not the same thing!

When aesthetic value is taken to be amenity value, it is often seen as less serious. (Compare the fact that the arts are for many people something we 'do' in our leisure time.) However, this jars with the fact that for many people it is the aesthetic impact of an environment that is the first way into appreciating it. Also, our cherishing of landscapes, familiar and strange, very often rests in our aesthetic experiences of them.

Think
Next time you are wandering through the countryside, or some natural area within the city, consider what you appreciate or value in that environment (ask yourself, ‘What do I like or find significant about this environment?’ to get you started).

Jot down what you value and then try to determine what you are valuing from an aesthetic point of view. How easy is it to distinguish aesthetic from other values in that experience? To what extent does aesthetic value overlap with other values (e.g. ecological, ethical, cultural)?

The Beautiful

Further reading:
Kant Critique of Judgment, §1 - §29 (use web version of translation by J.C. Meredith, http://eserver.org/philosophy/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt);

See also relevant entries in the bibliography.

Let’s consider a few views:

Burke: "Beauty is a quality of objects which causes a particular feeling like pleasure"

Edmund Burke in Of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757):
Beauty is a quality of an object (a sensible quality) which by experience we find beautiful, which excites in us the passion of love, or some correspondent affection.

What is the objective quality?:
Burke rejects: proportion = beauty (Aristotle)
But he does say that beauty is associated with smoothness, delicate small things; and contrasts it with the sublime - large, rugged, dark, gloomy things.

Problem: what quality in objects is it? Small things might never cause pleasure; it might be easy to find counterexamples.

Hume: beauty is a sentiment or feeling that we have when beholding beautiful objects

Hume’s view of beauty is not that clear; he sometimes appears inconsistent in his remarks. In the Enquiry into the Principles of Morals (1751) he says:
beauty consists in the effect the object produces upon the mind.
Hume thinks it’s a mistake to ascribe beauty to objects, because he thinks that if there is no observer beauty cannot exist.

Problems:

i. It doesn’t make sense to say ‘I feel beautiful’ when beholding beautiful object
ii It is not contradictory to say object can be beautiful w/o an observer there
iii. This sounds all too subjective: beauty becomes dependent upon observer, so no spectator no beauty.

Also, there is the problem of the idea that beauty is in eye of beholder.

Hume must have subsequently recognised problems with this view because he puts forward a different view, a causal theory of beauty, in his essay On the Standard of Taste (1757).

Beauty is a sentiment, but it will be caused by certain qualities in the object.
Idea is that object is fitted to give pleasure: certain qualities of the object can be predicted to cause feeling of beauty in us. This is determined empirically; test of time; competent judges etc.

Kant: Beauty is dependent upon both object and subject

Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to offer a philosophically sophisticated theory of aesthetic appreciation of nature. His Critique of Judgment (1790), the third of his three ‘critiques’, examines the nature of aesthetic judgement (and also teleological judgements, which are less relevant to aesthetic theory).

Although in this text he is also interested in our aesthetic judgements of art, he begins with examples from nature, and there is good evidence that he viewed nature as the paradigm of an object or set of objects which evoke the aesthetic response. For this reason, as well as his significant impact on philosophical aesthetics, his analysis of both aesthetic experience and judgement is particularly relevant here.

Kant wants to solve the problem of how aesthetic judgements, or what he calls ’judgements of taste’, are possible. He begins with an analysis of the nature of this type of judgement, and then proceeds to discover and defend the grounds for such judgements.

Through his analysis and argument, an aesthetic theory emerges which shows what is distinctive about aesthetic experience, and how we can make aesthetic judgements that are not merely subjective.

What is the judgement of taste?

The ‘judgement of taste’ (or ‘aesthetic judgement’) is expressed in utterances like, ‘This jasmine flower is beautiful’, or ‘That seascape is beautiful’.

The judgement of taste is the judgement in which we judge something to be either beautiful or ugly (but Kant says very little about judgements of ugliness).

Kant analyses this type of judgement by setting out its distinguishing qualities. In the following these points are set out, along with important points about his view of beauty.

First, aesthetic judgement is contrasted with cognitive judgement because it is not grounded in knowledge of the object, but rather in a feeling of delight or liking in the appreciator. The jasmine is judged as beautiful not in virtue of my concept of it as a particular type of flower or because of my knowledge that it is the source of essential oil used in many perfumes. I call it beautiful because the jasmine evokes an immediate feeling of pleasure, which is a response unmediated by the concept of what jasmine is.

The immediacy of the aesthetic response identifies a second feature of aesthetic judgement. If my judgement does not stem from knowledge of the object, then what is the basis of it? I find the jasmine beautiful in virtue of an immediate response to its perceptual qualities: the soft creamy white colour, combined with its delicate petals.

But although my enjoyment of these qualities underlies my aesthetic appreciation of it, Kant does not believe that beauty is an objective quality of the flower. Beauty cannot be identified with the colour or forms, or its symmetrical design, and these qualities do not alone cause the aesthetic response.

That I find the flower beautiful is a direct consequence of an accordance or attunement between the perceptual qualities of the flower and the mental powers which Kant calls the imagination and the understanding.

This attunement is characterised as a harmonious ‘free play’ of imagination and understanding. Freed from conceptualisation, the mental powers engage with the perceptual qualities of the object in a pleasurable activity which is directed at appreciating the object for its own sake.

Kant characterises beauty as the appreciation of something through an immediate encounter between an appreciator and a particular object. For this reason, we have no pre-determined concept of beauty; it is something that arises in a relationship between subject and object.

Disinterestedness: another important feature of aesthetic judgement is ‘disinterestedness’. In this context, disinterestedness does not mean indifference, or lack of interest. Kant uses the concept to characterise aesthetic interest as distinct from interest in an object as a means to sensory gratification, and an interest in using it as a means to some utilitarian end. The disinterestedness which characterises aesthetic judgement issues in a type of appreciation which appreciates the aesthetic qualities of an object apart from any end.

EX: My appreciation of a seascape is aesthetically disinterested, according to Kant, when it rests on valuing its aesthetic qualities.

For example: the graceful underwater movement of seals against a striking blue backdrop, rather than valuing it as a place to refresh myself after sunbathing (for sensory gratification), or as a mineral resource (where it serves a utilitarian end).

]
Short exercise:

Explain what Kant means by the ‘judgment of taste’.

Kant’s definition of beauty at end of the Third Moment in the Critique of Judgment:

‘Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose.’

So, for Kant:
BEAUTY = form or perceptual appearance as experienced by a subject feeling disinterested pleasure. There is specific range of things that have such form, in particular, natural beauty.

BEAUTY is not a sensation, and not an objective quality.

If it’s not objective quality, and its not totally from subject, then wherein does it lie? BEAUTY seems to be a disposition for some object to produce a certain response (free play between imagination and understanding) in us, and it thus does not place any definite restrictions on the properties through which objects may have what Kant calls the ‘form of finality’.

think
What do you think ‘the beautiful’ involves? How would you try to explain what beauty of a natural landscape is (or an object within a landscape)? How does your own view compare and contrast with Kant’s?

Is beauty limited as a category of aesthetic value? For art? For the natural environment? What other categories of aesthetic value might there be? You should contribute your thoughts on this to the discussion site.

The Sublime

In her study of changes in landscape tastes, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), Marjorie Hope Nicolson points to the important change in aesthetic attitudes toward mountainscapes prior to the eighteenth century:

‘During the first seventeen centuries of the Christian era, “Mountain Gloom” so clouded human eyes that never for a moment did poets see mountains in the full radiance to which our eyes have become accustomed. Within a century – indeed, within fifty years – all this had changed.’

Before this dramatic change in aesthetic taste, a taste for the calm tranquillity of pastoral beauty dominated art and literature, as well as aesthetic taste in general. But with a new interest in wild nature, philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke and Kant took more seriously the need for an aesthetic category which could explain how wild and great things could evoke an aesthetic response which was not displeasure (as associated with ugliness), but pleasure mixed with fear.

The Kantian Sublime

Kant’s theory of the sublime reflects Burke’s ideas, but it moves forward and offers a more thorough and defensible theory of this second important aesthetic category.

For example, while Kant supports in part Burke’s claim that the sublime is associated with large things which excite pain rather than pleasure, he refines these points and qualifies them, distinguishing two categories of the sublime and setting out in more detail the nature of our appreciation of the sublime in nature.

Kant offers a deeper philosophical treatment of the sublime than Burke, and one that has implications for an understanding of ourselves as free, moral beings.

It is a FEELING in us - this means it is NOT identified by Kant as a quality in objects.

HOWEVER, it is a feeling of negative pleasure because it may involve fear, risk, threat, anxiety, insecurity - which results in excitement associated with the sublime.

This feeling is to be contrasted with the delight of our response to the beautiful

It is, specifically, a feeling of negative pleasure in our ability to rise above what is threatening to us and ungraspable by the senses. (It is ungraspable because of the limitlessness or formlessness of object.).

In an experience of the sublime we recognise our capacity to rise above the vastness and power of nature despite our vulnerability to it as human beings. Our inability to take it in using the senses and imagination reveals to us the power of reason that can in fact enable us to take it in.

Sublime Objects

Kant writes mainly of things like volcanoes, avalanches, lightening, thunderclouds, mountains, rivers, ocean, ‘threatening rocks’

Notice all of these things are and environments that may cause a feeling of the sublime. Kant makes only brief mention of artefactual objects causing a feeling of the sublime, e.g., St. Peters Basilica in Rome and the pyramids of Egypt. He mentions sublimity in art, but he does not appear to believe it is significant or in fact even possible.

Further reading:

Why not have a look at the Yi Fu Tuan's discussion of extreme environments in 'Desert and Ice: Ambivalent Aesthetics' in Kemal and Gaskell.

Similarities and differences between the beautiful and the sublime for Kant

Similarities

1. Judgements of the sublime and the beautiful are both aesthetic, reflective judgements (The sublime is, for Kant, a subclass of aesthetic experience.)

2. Both experiences do not involve application of determinate concepts; they do involve abstraction from ‘real existence’ of the object

3. Both involve free play of imagination as the subjective source of pleasure in the experience

4. Both beautiful and sublime judgements claim universal validity.

5. Both experiences are marked by disinterestedness: (a) appreciated for own sake; (b) appreciated free from desire, personal taste, etc.

Differences

1. FORM v. FORMLESSNESS

the judgement of beauty is a response to FORM, or the structured appearance of some object.
we can perceive form, and take delight in our perception of it in some object
we can take in form of object; it is FINITE, all there - this makes for restful contemplation of form

By contrast, the sublime:

the sublime is a response to FORMLESSNESS or LIMITLESSNESS of objects
we may perceive a sublime object, and apprehend its totality, but our judgement arises from the feeling in response to the sheer magnitude or power of the object, and this is a response to its formlessness or limitlessness.

2. Source of pleasure

the beautiful pleases on account of its form - a form which displays a purposiveness without purpose - that it seems to have been created for our delight - the mind is in a ‘restful contemplation’
thus beauty is also connected with form, and we speak of the beautiful ‘as if’ it resides in the object.

By contrast, the sublime:

the sublime pleases on account of being a challenge and outrage to our perception and imagination
the sublime pleases because it presents an obstacle to the senses and to the imagination (the obstacle being the object’s formlessness or limitlessness)
imagination is stretched to its limits and in the end it fails to fully grasp or take in the object......the mind is set in motion - into a kind of conflicting, straining activity
the sublime is a feeling through and through and Kant emphasises that it makes no sense at all to speak of the sublime as residing in the object (esp. because no form, only formlessness.)

3. Activity of imagination is different

the beautiful involves the free play of imagination and understanding which gives rise to the pleasure expressed in a judgement of taste.
here imagination is free - free from its role in cognition - in both beautiful and sublime - they are both disinterested

By contrast, the sublime:

the free play is instead between imagination and the faculty of REASON; it is a harmonious free play between imagination and the ideas of reason
REASON is the faculty that does not issue in objective judgements based on sense experience and the categories.
It is the faculty that we use to attempt to know the ‘supersensible’ - the noumenal world, or the world as it is apart from the mental framework through which we grasp it.
It is the faculty that is demanded by the sublime because sublime objects are those which cannot be grasped by the senses. Reason indicates our desire to reach beyond what we perceive in the world (although Kant thought we could never know the supersensible.)
So, our pleasure arises through the EXPANSION of imagination to grasp the object but through feeling that REASON can make sense of the object and enable us to apprehend its totality (where perception and imagination are unequal to the task)

4. The feeling of pleasure is different

with the beautiful the feeling of pleasure is simple, according to Kant.
it is associated with joy, delight, and it is life-enhancing.

By contrast, the feeling of the sublime is:

a complex feeling
it is complex because it involves both displeasure (threat, fear, risk, challenge, anxiety, etc.) and pleasure
it is also complex according to Kant because it involves a complex psychological state: frustration of failure of imagination to grasp object in its totality - to provide TOTAL image or representation of it for the understanding; can’t take it in as an absolute whole.
But this frustration GIVES WAY to pleasure in that it reveals the capacity of another faculty - REASON, which is up to the task of taking in the totality of the object.
SO this means that in the end it is a pleasurable experience but for different reasons than with the beautiful. The pleasure is expressive of a kind of admiration or respect for the object rather than joy or delight. It is a respect for the wonder or power of nature.

Study questions: Do you think that the experience of the sublime is different from the beautiful?

Do you think the sublime is still a relevant category of aesthetic value?
Post your answer to this second question to the discussion site.

The Picturesque

A third aesthetic category of both art and landscape was developed slightly later than the categories of the beautiful and the sublime, in part because it was felt that these two categories were not exhaustive. As a quality in nature, the picturesque lies between, as one writer has put it, the ‘stupendous vastness of the sublime and the overly smooth, gentle tameness of the beautiful’.

The concept of the picturesque was developed mainly by William Gilpin and Sir Uvedale Price, during the eighteenth century.

Have a look at some of the resources on the picturesque in the online resources site

The picturesque is essentially a theory of landscape design and appreciation, whether landscapes of art or nature.

Its enthusiasts were keen to mark it out in its own right, identifying its qualities in paintings by Claude (Lorrain) (1600-82) and Salvator Rosa (1615-73). In literature, the picturesque was associated with gothic novels, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The theory of the picturesque originates in the view that landscapes may be appreciated according to the criteria of a picturesque painting. Price cites Gilpin’s definition which states that picturesque objects are those ‘which please from some quality capable of being illustrated in painting’ or ‘such objects as are proper subjects of paintings’ (Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 1792).

Price argued that this definition was too vague and too general, since other objects could satisfy the definition which were not actually picturesque. In response, he develops a more careful theory, one that provides a good understanding of the picturesque for us here.

Picturesque Qualities

In showing what the picturesque is, Price follows Burke’s objectivist aesthetic theory. Beauty was found in objects with qualities such as smoothness, uniformity of surface, regularity, smallness, delicacy, symmetry, coherence, pleasing colours, calmness, order, gradual variation, elegance, simplicity.

But there is an important contrast between the two aesthetic categories. The picturesque is associated with three main qualities: roughness, sudden variation, and irregularity.

Roughness indicated rough surfaces, as of rough-hewn stone, but also to the general feature of ruggedness in a landscape.

Sudden variation indicates asymmetry of lines and contours, which cross each other or are broken in unexpected ways, and other surprising elements such as sudden ‘protruberances’.

Irregularity comes through intricacy and variety, but perhaps most noticeably in the effects of the passage of time, ‘weather stains, partial incrustations, mosses’. And also in the variety of tints on surfaces (as compared to perfectly even colour and smooth surface),

Whereas the beautiful is an expression of peacefulness and tranquillity, the picturesque is ‘splendid confusion and irregularity’ - tumbled masses, with everything overgrown.

These qualities were exemplified in particular objects, a number of which typically featured in picturesque paintings, or indeed in landscapes themselves.

Picturesque scenery is described as broken and undulating with variety, including water, for example a lake with ‘savage banks’ and a surface broken rather than smooth, perhaps with a pattern in the water from the wind, or the fast flowing water of waterfalls and whitewater.

Even picturesque trees are included: trees with rugged or strongly variegated bark, especially from age. In picturesque landscapes trees are not placed evenly but in more irregularity and in clumps.

Picturesque landscapes often included buildings. In predominantly natural landscapes, like the parks built by Brown, it was common to build a ruin, for this expressed the passage of time, the mystique of the past, through the irregular qualities of weathered stone, overgrown with ivy and the like.

Beauty was associated with classical temples, the picturesque with temples that had collapsed and decayed. Asymmetrical or intricate buildings were also favoured, including Gothic architecture with its variety of forms, and the rough-hewn character of mills, cottages, and old barns.

So, we get from this these distinctions:

Beautiful objects:

scenes: ‘nicely trimmed walks and shrubberies’, ‘smooth level banks’, or ‘´open downs’
trees: smooth young beech, fresh and tender ash
water: perfectly calm, smooth, clear
buildings: Grecian architecture
animals: fine, smooth horse (sleek and pampered), smooth spaniel or greyhound
Music: Handel, Corelli

Picturesque objects:

water: savage banks, where surface of water is broken, motion abrupt and irregular, ‘rapid and stony torrents and waterfalls’, ‘waves dashing against the rocks’,
Trees: rugged old oak, knotty wych (rough and mossy, with a character of age and sudden variations in their forms), limbs ‘shattered by lightning or tempestuous winds.
Animals: ass, wild and rough forester horse, worn-out cart horse, Pomeranian dog, shaggy goat
Buildings: Gothic architecture (variety in its turrets, etc.), ruins, mills, hovels, cottages, destruction of symmetry, insides of old barns and stables,
Music: Scarlatti, Hayden

Think
Can you think of other examples from art and nature that have picturesque qualities? Try searching the net to find pictures from Rosa and Claude.

Judging landscapes through the picturesque

The picturesque was not just an aesthetic theory but foremost a movement in aesthetic taste and design.

The Picturesque and design

Handbooks were available for guidance on designing landscapes, parks and gardens according to the principles of the picturesque, giving such detailed instructions as to how to group park animals in a picturesque manner and how best to develop ruins.

Picturesque planners were considered to be ‘improvers of nature’ (see Gilpin).

There were also recreational guides for viewing natural scenery from a picturesque perspective. The appropriate approach was defined according to the standpoint we take to landscape paintings, where we stand back and behold the design, forms and colours of the picture.

A Critical Look at the Picturesque

The picturesque is important because it takes a significant step toward appreciating nature ‘in the raw’, nature enjoyed for qualities of its own.

Prior to the picturesque, nature’s imperfection was ‘corrected’ through neo-classicist art which sought to idealise nature’s beauty. And although nature was appreciated formally through the categories of the beautiful and the sublime, for the first time landscape appreciation became a formal and recreational activity.

Identifying and enjoying picturesque landscapes became the practice of upper and middle class picturesque travellers who sought out these landscapes. The picturesque is not unproblematic in its approach to nature, as we shall see, but its attention to natural qualities increased the range of aesthetic positively valued aesthetic qualities in nature and added new points of interest from an aesthetic perspective.

The picturesque signified a new approach to nature in three significant ways.

1. It recognised the temporality of nature, its organic character. Instead of attempting to freeze nature in an ideal of classical beauty, the picturesque showed nature in stages of growth and decay – in the craggy bark of an old oak, the swayed back of a worn-out cart-horse, or in picturesque ruins we see the passage of time.

2. In its temporality we also see nature’s imperfection. In the stained and rough surfaces of stone or the overgrown, gnarled banks of a river; nature is not neat and tidy, or symmetrically perfect. Nature is viewed as disordered, but the more aesthetically interesting for it.

3. Expressiveness in nature became an important part of aesthetic appreciation. While the beautiful and the sublime pointed to nature’s sensible qualities, the picturesque identified many natural properties with expressive properties, a trend which reached its height in the Romantic movement which followed in the 19th century.

Rather than idealising nature or fictionalising it through myths or allegory picturesque art began to take nature more on its own terms through an attempt to portray its expressive qualities.

In both art and nature, imagination no longer serves to sentimentalise nature, but rather to make connections between natural qualities and expressive features. For example, the roughness characteristic of picturesque landscapes is associated with the affective qualities of spirit and animation. The intricacy of gothic architecture is associated with a feeling or mystery or uncomfortable surprise.

All three of these new ways of aesthetically valuing nature represented a softening of the predominant attitude which saw nature as ugly and uncontrollable, as something to be tamed and perfected by through human ideals. With the picturesque (as with the sublime) came a valuing of change, disorder and the mystery of nature.

Set against all this, the picturesque retained the human chauvinism endemic to that attitude. Value was accorded to landscapes based on how well they met the standard set by picturesque paintings, and picturesque planners were viewed as improvers of nature.

There are both aesthetic and ethical grounds underpinning the picturesque’s failure to appreciate nature on its own terms:

Problems from an aesthetic point of view:

From the picturesque standpoint, landscapes were appreciated as if they were paintings, the Claude glass representing a literal framing of nature. This may be one way to appreciate a landscape, but it is an extremely narrow basis for aesthetic appreciation.

First, this model of appreciation assumes, mistakenly, that nature is appropriately appreciated in the category of pictures, as if landscapes were two-dimensional, fixed images on canvas. This impoverishes appreciation, for it focuses solely on pictorial qualities found in a landscape, such as colour and the appearance of design.

Such a focus makes some sense as far as it provides criteria for landscapes which are in fact designed: a Brown landscape is correctly judged in the category of the picturesque, since picturesque principles guided his plans.

Also, we can and do put a ‘perceptual frame’ around some of the natural landscapes we enjoy. However, to judge more natural landscapes by these criteria, as was the fashion for picturesque travelers, amounts to judging nature according to the artistic criteria. Nature is not (predominantly) an artefact, and as an environment it demands a very different appreciative framework.

Nature, as environment, is a three dimensional, dynamic space with multi-sensible qualities. The picturesque model limits sensory attention to the visual, the main sense used in the appreciation of paintings, and fails to capture the possibility of sensory immersion in the environment, as three dimensional space.

The picturesque creates some distance between human and nature in the context of aesthetic appreciation. Appreciators of the picturesque were spectators to the nature’s canvases, rather than part of it – set apart from it through an artistic perspective, rather than enjoying it from a more everyday, perspective as inhabitants, integrated into that environment.

Problems from an ethical point of view:

The view that nature has aesthetic value only when it is framed by art points up some ethical problems in the picturesque approach. This approach does not recognise that nature is worthy of appreciation totally apart from the role of human design, and thus lacks respect for nature.

Picturesque designers do not sentimentalize nature, but their designs (and the preferences for actual natural landscapes which follow) manipulate nature, re-creating it to look as it were wild and uninhabited, to be viewed with the outside, usually from a privileged position, as the estate owners of eighteenth century England would have viewed the property.

Nature was appreciated for its irregularity and disorder, but only in the safe context of nature as humanly appropriated, either by re-designing it, or by viewing it as if it were the work of an artist. Nature is wild but only on human terms.

Think:
What exactly does it mean to appreciate nature on its own terms? How would we define those terms? Is it presumptuous to say that we could define those terms, given that they are, afterall, nature's terms?

	What is Aesthetic Experience?
	The Beautiful
	The Sublime
	The Picturesque

Emily Brady, September 2003