Holmes Rolston, Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscapes Need to be Science-Based? November 8, 2004

• Examples of superstitions, myths, folklore
• Read opening account? (374-75) Myths and folklore (versus natural history)
• Powell account: A64
• Natives warned Powell not to go down the canyon; a god had built a trail there for a mourning chief to go visit his wife in a heaven and then flooded the trail with water and forbade anyone to go there. Would draw the god's wrath
• Paul Bunyan
• Sci under is not nec for aesthetic appreciation or religious exp. or exp of sublime (type of aes appreciation) or exp of awe
• He's acknowledging the natives experienced this, when he says I too had rel exp with my science
• His parents had an appreciation of landscapes (a keen sense of place) even thought it was not science-based.
• But knowledge of some type is required: Can't appropriately appreciate what one doesn't understand
• Lived participatory experience on the land can provide under nec for aes app
• Can teach us much about landscapes too
• Those who have to cope in world already have some understanding of it
• They know context, if not origins; have to have some knowledge to survive
• Those w/o a sci understanding can gain sensitivity to the land, can know existentially what it is like to live on the land (something a Ph.D. may never know)

• Scientific under can be part of and heighten aes appreciation (e.g., the sublime) and/or rel experience; Examples
• Rol's sci understanding that ground on which he stood created by volcanic lava a few month's ago part of his aesthetic appreciation and heightened it
• Example at end of predator kill and how science made that aesthetically stimulating (p. 170)

• Science is necessary (required), but not sufficient (no guarantee) for the most adequate understanding and aes appreciation of nature
• We do not need science to teach us what happens on landscapes, but sci enriches that story

• Daniel Boone, being uneducated and ignorant of ecology, saw only the surface of things as he explored wild Kentucky landscapes says Leopold (not Rolston?)
• Intricacies of plant and animal community were invisible to him
• Scientific knowledge can go along with lack of aes app; can make us callous; science is no guarantee that one will see what is there either
• A PhD can make you callous to the landscape
• "Much as an undertaker is callous to the mysteries at which he officiates"

• Science is not enough for appro app of nature (for this must be religious too?)
• Must go beyond science in two ways: (1) find a new scientifically compatible "myth" of spectacular natural history and (2) need participatory experience
• First:
• Science should demythologize these superstitions, but also find a new myth that encourages appropriate aes responses to nature, including sublime and numinous
• Science can be objective about landscapes
• But full story of natural history is too spectacular to just be scientific about
• It is a sacrament of something deeper (noumenal)
• Second:
• Science-based landscape aesthetics is urgent, but also need a science-transcending aesthetic of participatory experience
• Richest aes exp comes from combining participatory experience in natural history with natural science
• One: Participatory experience in natural history: Aes experience must be participatory (relating a person to a landscape); a participatory encounter, being embodied in landscapes (this is what pre-scientific peoples had, Boone, natives, his parents)
• Science alone does not give you a regional identity with a landscape and such identity qualifies for aes experience
• A scientist w/o love for the earth is disqualified
• Two: Natural science: The appreciator must objectively know the landscape via science
• Aes perception needs to be science based as well as participatory
• Science must banish false, superstitious beliefs/myths for an appro aes experience
• These superstitious beliefs are false and science provides truth
• Superiority of scientific account
• Superstitions flower/food offering to goddess in volcano to stop flow, lacks sci under of tectonic plates, magma, etc and is an inferior account of what is going on; Rolston knows better
• But the natives must have had enough truth to get by on landscape, metaphysical fancy has to be checked by pragmatic functioning
• Science must banish these myths before we can understand in a corrected aesthetic
• Science can educate us to what is really taking place and banish mistaken interpretative frameworks that blind us and create illusions and leave us ignorant

• Argument for superiority of scientific account
• Accepts the objectivity of science
• Rejects idea that science-like Japanese taming of their landscapes-is just another way of culturally framing the landscape
• Science teaches us what is objectively there
• Extends our capacities for perception, allows us to know deep time (geo or evo history) and multiple scales
• Science allows us to see the landscape as free as possible from our subjective human preferences.
• It corrects for truth
• To know the Grand Canyon for what it really is need to know geology
• No one experiences the Grand Canyon for what it really is unless helped by geology to know about it;
• Geology/science provide the definitive interpretation

• Argues (in agreement with Carlson): For an appropriate (serious, best?) aesthetic app the object of app must be appreciated for what it really is
• Cloud not a wash basket but a thunder head
• Appreciating something for what it is not, appreciation based on a false belief (how Canyon was formed according to the natives), is improper, less serious, false
• Carlson's examples: Cute woodchuck or massive rat?



• Ned's worries that Rolston limits nature of nature to what science says:

• Is Rolston assuming that only science tells us what nature truly is?
• Not clear this is Rolston's view

• Why assume science is the one true story about nature (everything?)
• Rol says: No lonely places: "there are no lonely places, thought there are arid landscapes with little life"-things need to be appreciated in the right categories
• True w/o humans/animals, no lonely places for a lonely place is a place that typically makes people lonely.
• But why does that mean there are no lonely places?
• Why assume that what is "really" there is only what is there apart from the an appreciator/interactor?
• Why isn't the canyon just as much a place Kelly really learned to guide river boats?
• Although this relates the canyon to a particular individual, it is a true statement from anyone's perspective
• Seems clearly aesthetically relevant to Kelly (not to others)
• A place wild mustangs live (common sense, not science)
• A place god makes his presence felt/nature's power is evident/nature's magnificence becomes manifest
• Where National Park politics is at its worse?
• Science gives us a causal account of origins, but why assume this is the only explanation or type of understanding that tells us what something really is?
• Is a tree more of an oak than a playhouse or beautiful? Perhaps.



• How false (sci?) beliefs distort aes app
• Rol seems to think that superstitious beliefs make it impossible to appropriate appreciate real nature
• E.g. Rolston's Christian ancestors who believed that God originally made earth a smooth sphere and then because of human sin warped the earth for punishment
• This does make false sci claims
• John Donne's claim that mountains and valleys were "warts and pock-holes in the face of the earth"
• This is only false sci if it's based on the above rather than expressing an attitude w/o the false factual claim above
• Paul Bunyan and blue ox babe made Minnesota lakes
• E.g. Chinese animistic belief that a life force flows through landscape and affects where we should locate our homes or what we should do in the field or that we should avoid building in straight lines.
• But it is not clear false sci claims here
• Worry: Important to distinguish between beliefs that contradict science (which are thus false, if the science is right) and beliefs that really don't make scientific claims at all and thus could also be true along with science;
• True of the above Chinese claims?



• Rolston accepts idea there are better/worse, deep/shallow, serious/trivial, more or less appropriate (or inappropriate) aes appreciations
• Hepburn's cloud example
• Outlines of clouds as resemble a basket of washing
• Trivial, shallow appraisal of a freakish element
• Focus on inner turbulence and 250 mile wind speeds in cloud that determine its structure
• Less superficial experience, more worth having
• Relativism in aes app of nature There is a relativity in the aes appreciation of landscapes, Japanese liking tamed manipulated landscapes and folks like Rolston liking wild lands.

• Some relativism in the aes app of nature is compatible with better and worse aes app of nature
• You'll love the Rockies example 166-167 (368)
• Walter had the wrong sci categories
• He should not have expected a homey landscape
• If one understood the harshness of an arid or alpine climate, you will be aes stimulated when you find plants clinging to life, appreciate life hunkered down low to the ground or bent and twisted trees in their cold and windblown environments







• ROLSTON'S VIEW OF OTHER THEORIES OF ART
• Expressionism in art (the idea that aesthetic appreciation is an emotional response to the appreciated object) is relativistic
• Formalism only cares about form (how landscape is framed, color, line, texture) and does not care about how landscape originated (natural history, science)
• The Picturesque: This is a narrow view of natural beauty; for there is aes appreciateable stuff besides pretty scenery; the rotted long, or humus or burned trees, prairies swamps tundras and deserts



• DOES HUMAN AES APPRECIATION OF ENVIRONMENTS HAVE SURVIVAL VALUE?
• Humans who find their environments congenial, even beautiful flourish; those who find their env. stressful or ugly, might do less well
• Could be cultural or genetic or both
• Some argue that humans prefer savannah landscapes, as these are the type of landscapes in which humans evolved



• ROLSTON'S POSITIVE AESTHETIC?
• Misguided to think Hawaiians and southwest Indians and Chinese and European theologians found nothing aesthetically positive in their landscapes
• Despite the aspect in their worldviews that introduced apprehension and prevented an adequate appreciation
• Is he saying that an apprehensive attitude toward nature can't be part of an adequate appreciation? Can't be, because the sublime includes elements of fear
• Rolston's claim that science will make us appreciate nature positively
• Wordsworth's claim that they were manifestations of "types and symbols of eternity"
• We know better than Donne; after science much more likely to agree with Wordsworth
• This goes beyond science, but it must go through science to go beyond
• I don't think he here is really claiming science is nec for aes app, only that an aes app that goes beyond science must go through it, not that all must go through it; though perhaps the best aes app must go through it

• Why assume that science-based appreciation is only right one?
• This is a fair question and to claim it is not, doesn't entail the claim he next makes:
• Nature as seen by science only way Westerner's constitute their world, no reason to think it is the privileged view
• One could claim that science tells us the way the world is (and isn't' just a way we constitute our world) but also deny that it is a privileged view.

• Aes is not discovered on landscapes by science or objectively, is an experience that emerges as people react to landscapes
• What is the difference between
• The Japanese taming an manicuring their landscapes, artfully pruning their trees and being uninterested in pristine ecosystems or geological formations
• A scientific interpretation of landscapes?
• Both are not cultural ways of framing landscapes



• Quiz: Which individual people lacks sci knowledge, but still has aes app according to Rolston (Boone, his Mom and Dad)