Contemporary environmental aesthetics and the neglect of the sublime

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 53, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 181-198

  Shapshay, Sandra ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84876013750     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/aesthj/ays067     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. In recent discussions of environmental aesthetics, some philosophers have started to note this lacuna, for instance, in an article critical of Carlson's views on ecology and of his insufcient attention to evolutionary biology.
2. Roger Paden, Laurlyn K. Harmon, and Charles R. Milling write 'an evolutionary aesthetics ... must address the possibility of experiencing nature as sublime', in 'Ecology, Evolution, and Aesthetics: Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetics of Nature', BJA 52 (2012), 123-39, at 138.
3. In addition, Emily Brady has sought to rehabilitate a Kantian theory of the environmental sublime, in 'Environmental Sublime', in Tim Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: CUP, 2012).
4. My approach difers from Brady's, however, in that I aim to support the inclusion of what I term 'thick'-and 'thin'-sublime experiences within environmental aesthetics, neither of which depends on the details of the Kantian faculty psychology or the role of the imagination and reason therein.
5. The defnitive statement of Carlson's theory is his Aesthetics and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2000)
6. Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
7. Similar approaches have been defended by Yuriko Saito, 'Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms', Environmental Ethics 20 (1998), 135-49;
8. Marcia Eaton, 'Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature', JAAC 56 (1998), 149-56;
9. Patricia Matthews, 'Scientifc Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature', JAAC 60 (2002), 37-48;
10. Glen Parsons, 'Nature Appreciation, Science, and Positive Aesthetics', BJA 42 (2002), 279-95.
11. I will not be treat Carlson's more recent modifcation of scientifc cognitivism in the direction of 'positive aesthetics', as the question of whether the sublime has a place within scientifc cognitivism is separate and prior.
12. Further, I will not be concerned with the experience of the sublime in appreciation of largely human-made environments or works of art-though I will make use of a poem that attempts to capture and convey an experience of sublimity-but rather with largely untrammelled natural environments.
13. Certain works of art, especially architecture, such as St Peter's in Rome and the Egyptian pyramids, were oft-cited examples of sublime objects, yet Kant expressed doubts as to whether works of art could furnish a genuine experience of sublimity (Critique of the Power of Judgment §26, 5:252-3).
14. Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, IV (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854), 7, Spectator no. 489;
15. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley, 1867), 257;
16. and Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment §129, 5: 245.
17. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, trans. J. Norman, A. Welchman, and C. Janaway (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 200-1;
18. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 228.
19. In the following section, I show how Noël Carroll implicitly does just this.
20. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infnite (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 2.
21. John Muir, The Mountains of California (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifin, 1894), ch. 10.
22. Donovan Webster, 'Inside the Volcano', in Edward O. Wilson (ed.), The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifin, 2001), 253-4.
23. Another possible reason for neglect of the sublime is the notion that the category involves an inextricably theological view of nature. In what follows, I will show that these historical accounts of the sublime are not theological.
24. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 71;
25. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History', in Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (eds), Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 169-87, at 170.
26. Carroll's essay was originally published in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds), Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 244-66.
27. Carroll, 'On being Moved by Nature', 170.
28. I have generally used the Payne translation in this paper, but also cite the more recent Janaway edition when it is more accurate.
29. Carlson, Nature and Landscape, 46.
30. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1901), 69-70.
31. José María Heredia, Torrente Prodigioso: A Cuban Poet at Niagara Falls, ed. and trans. Keith Ellis (Toronto: Lugus, 1997).
32. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 10-11.
33. Ronald W. Hepburn, 'Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination', Environmental Values 5 (1996), 191-204.
34. Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), esp. ch. 7.
35. Thomas Nagel, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?', Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435-50.
36. Facts gleaned from the New York State Parks Services website http://www.niagarafallsstatepark.com. accessed 1 May 2012.
37. 'Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation and Knowledge', JAAC 53 (1995), 393-400.