Journal of Scottish Thought

Volume 11

Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2019

ISSN 1755 9928 Editor: Endre Szécsényi

This volume of The Journal of Scottish Thought developed from a conference hosted by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen.

The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed, open access journal published annually by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Correspondence should be addressed to The Journal of Scottish Thought, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY. CONTENTS

Editorial Note v

‘Vitality with Repose’: Reﬂ ections on the Romantic-Neo-Platonic Legacy in Hepburn’s Aesthetics Douglas Hedley 1

‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime Endre Szécsényi 20

Wonder Revisited Isis Brook 48

Nature, Aesthetics and Humility Emily Brady 60

Nature, Identity and Meaning: The Humanising of Nature and the Naturising of the Human Subject Fran Speed 75

Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey Yuriko Saito 94

Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence in Hepburn and the New Nature Writing Alexander J. B. Hampton 113

Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh: Hepburn with de Bruyckere Pauline von Bonsdorff 127

Landscapes of Trauma: a Reﬂ ection on Wonder Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson & Arnar Árnason 152 Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography Endre Szécsényi (comp.) 176

Notes on Contributors 186 Editorial Note

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn. The speakers of this event – Arnar Árnason, Guy Bennett-Hunter, Pauline von Bonsdorff, Isis Brook, David E. Cooper, Cairns Craig, Douglas Hedley, James MacAllister, Michael McGhee, Fran Speed and Endre Szécsényi – discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives.1 For the current enterprise, the collection of the revised versions of their papers has been supplemented by the contributions of other scholars who had been unable to attend the symposium. These papers together with a bibliography of Hepburn’s published works amount to two journal volumes: the current issue (vol. 11) contains the second part of our collection, the ﬁ rst has come to light in the previous one (vol. 10).2 Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927, he went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from Aberdeen (1955), his tutor was Donald MacKinnon. He taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. ‘Taken over his career – as Stephen Watt writes –,

1 On the occasion of this anniversary, there was another academic event organized also by Endre Szécsényi: a three-paper panel ‘The Roots of Environmental Aesthetics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: in Memory of Ronald W. Hepburn’ presented by Emily Brady, Cairns Craig and the organizer, chaired by Alexander Broadie, in the 31st annual conference of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society at the University of Glasgow on 21 July 2018. 2 I am grateful to Peter Cheyne and Cairns Craig for their help and support. Hepburn’s work represents an impressive exploration of what remains after the abandonment of a theistic worldview. His work has been seminal in the development of environmental philosophy and in extending the understanding of aesthetics beyond the experience of the art object.’3 Indeed, he has consensually been considered ‘the founder of the discipline’4 of the environmental and everyday aesthetics, based on his papers of the 1960s in which he pioneered these aesthetic approaches. In the most recent historical narrative of modern aesthetics, Paul Guyer devotes a sub-chapter to Hepburn; this one-and-half-page long article in his monumental enterprise undoubtedly expresses the historian’s appreciation (especially, if we consider how many signifi cant theoreticians of the twentieth-century history of modern aesthetics are disregarded). Guyer discusses Hepburn’s contribution to modern aesthetics in the chapter ‘Aesthetics and Knowledge of Nature’ together with Allen Carlson’s and Malcolm Budd’s theoretical achievements. Guyer almost exclusively relies on Hepburn’s most-cited paper ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ of 1966, and concludes that Hepburn’s ‘account of the aesthetic experience of nature seems to draw upon Kant’s analysis of aesthetic experience in general while supplementing it with emphasis upon the possibility of emotional response as part of such experience.’5 Beside Immanuel Kant, of course, Hepburn too exploited insights and ideas that have been presented by Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, Rudolf Otto, Iris Murdoch, John Niemeyer Findlay, Mikel Dufrenne, or the early Romantic poets just to mention a few from amongst the authors who had signifi cant impact on his aesthetico-theological or aesthetico-mystical thinking. Hepburn never dealt with these various fi elds separately, instead, he was deeply interested in their overlaps and mutual impregnations which led to the formation of a characteristic philosophical language and vocabulary. In Emily Brady’s words: ‘In his exploration of the links and boundaries between the aesthetic, moral, and religious, he was drawn to a particular set of ideas: wonder, imagination, the sublime, freedom, life’s meaning, mystery, respect for nature, and the sacred.’6 He was not an expert of a certain philosophical

3 Stephen Watt, ‘Hepburn, Ronald William’ in Stuart Brown (ed.), Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Philosophers (2 vols, Bristol, 2005), I, 404–6, 405. 4 Allen Carlson, ‘Ten Steps in the Development of Western Environmental Aesthetics’ in Martin Drenthen and Jozef Keulartz (eds), Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground (New York, 2014), 13–24, 23. 5 Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2014), III, 587. 6 Emily Brady, ‘Ronald W. Hepburn: In Memoriam’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (2009), 199–202, 200. area, rather he was a philosophos in the ancient Greek sense of the word, his ‘philosophical and personal lives [were] intimately connected, shaping each other signiﬁcantly.’7

Endre Szécsényi University of Aberdeen and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University December 2018

Cover: Ronald W. Hepburn. A detail of a photograph taken by his younger son on the celebration of his 80th birthday in York in March 2007. By courtesy of Mrs Agnes Hepburn.

7 Ibid. ‘Vitality with Repose’: Reﬂ ections on the Romantic- Neo-Platonic Legacy in Hepburn’s Aesthetics

Douglas Hedley

‘Le poète immobilise l’espace ; il tâche de le guérir de sa maladie, qui est le temps.’ Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz

Religion and literature lay at the foundations of Ronald W. Hepburn’s education. Antony Flew and Donald MacKinnon were early inﬂ uences and mentors at Aberdeen: Hepburn was Mackinnon’s assistant for a year. Hepburn studied Divinity at King’s College, Aberdeen after an MA in Philosophy and English and then returned to Philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was on the theme of cosmos and fall in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ (1966), Hepburn insisted that philosophers should not neglect the study of nature in philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, he considered the pre-occupation with artefacts a source of distortion since the aesthetics of nature furnishes a particularly signiﬁ cant model of the interaction between imagination, thought and feeling. Hepburn diagnoses an aesthetic impoverishment that he thinks can only be addressed by considering a metaphysical or religious view of nature. He hints, though they are just hints, that these can be drawn from the seventeenth-century and Romantic tradition of British Neo-Platonism. This strand of thought, from the Cambridge Platonists through Lord Shaftesbury to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, left a profound impact upon Hepburn’s thought. It is the legacy of Christian Platonism and the Romanticism it continues to foster: where the aesthetic always involves awareness of a just-out-of-reach, absent, hinted at, greater beauty and more ultimate reality. Such a mode of experience and mental set are compatible with both theistic belief and with an agnosticism about deity (and about Platonic Forms, for that matter).1

1 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), 96–112, 110. 2 Douglas Hedley

Hepburn’s early training in seventeenth century thought deserves mention because it is pivotal era in western thought, particularly for aesthetics and the emergence of modern notion of sublimity. The Cambridge Platonists are indispensable for a full appreciation of this period.2 The Cambridge Platonists were the ﬁ rst great Platonists to accept modern science. They did not reject corpuscularian science like their Aristotelian contemporaries. But they did recognise what they viewed as the dangerous reductive tendencies of the New Science. The Romantic poets were drawing upon the subtle and metaphysical critique evinced by Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, especially their attack upon intellectual Parnassus of the Radical Enlightenment: mechanistic naturalism. The Cambridge Platonists accepted the Galilean-Cartesian inheritance, unlike the seventeenth century Aristotelian critics of Cartesianism. Yet they were deeply sensitive to the division or rift between mind and nature, spirit and matter, subject and object that pre-occupies Idealist and Romantic thought. The ‘Romantic’ answer to this division is beauty. More was a poet as well as a philosopher and a rough contemporary of John Milton. The view of nature developed by More and Cudworth inﬂ uenced English poets from Thomas Traherne through Alexander Pope to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cudworth would concur with Wordsworth in ‘The Tables Turned’ that:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: – We murder to dissect.

The Wordsworthian vision is presented by Hepburn as a peak in the history of the subject:3

for I would walk alone, In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights Beneath the quiet Heavens; and, at that time, Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form

2 Cf. Ernest Lee Tuveson, ‘Space, Deity, and the “Natural Sublime”’, Modern Language Quarterly, 12 (1951), 20–38. 3 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in Bernard Williams and Alan Monteﬁ ore (eds), British Analytical Philosophy (London, 1966), 285–310, 286. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 3

Or image unprofaned; and I would stand, Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds. Thence did I drink the visionary power. I deem not proﬁ tless those ﬂ eeting moods Of shadowy exultation: not for this, That they are kindred to our purer mind And intellectual life; but that the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, to which, With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still That whatsoever point they gain, they still Have something to pursue.

The Platonic imagery of the shadows and the visionary power of the soul through recollection is clear. The lines of Wordsworth articulate the mood of an unseen world pressing upon the perception of the physical cosmos; the solemn consciousness of archetypal timeless Being in the images of the temporal world. It is well known that Hepburn inspired the development of environmental aesthetics. It is less widely observed that one might view natural beauty as a window of transcendence in the work of Hepburn just as Wordsworth’s poetry arouses a sense of the eternal in nature. This theological dimension in Hepburn’s thought did not vanish in his mature work. I suggest that the philosophy of Hepburn is a kind of late Romantic God haunted aesthetics in which beauty and the sublime sustain a vision that traditional or scholastic metaphysics can no longer sustain.

1 The (metaphysical?) deﬁ cit in contemporary aesthetics

Nature is evidently a source of aesthetic delight. This may not be on a grand scale of magnifi cent scenery of mountains or waterfalls. R. G. Collingwood wrote of ‘the bright eyes of a mouse or the fragile vitality of a fl ower are 4 Douglas Hedley things that touch us to the heart […] with the love that life feels for life.’4 The aesthetic appreciation of nature was a persisting concern for Hepburn, and he was a fervent walker in the Lakes and the Highlands. Philosophy and life coalesced. Artists, Hepburn noted in his ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, have turned from representation to the production of new objects. Characteristically, a broad contemporary account of aesthetic excellence does not refer to the experience or imitation of nature. Indeed, the last widely accepted theory of aesthetics, expressivism (Hepburn is presumably thinking of Benedetto Croce or Collingwood) is a theory best equipped to deal with artefacts rather than nature. The ‘Linguistic turn’, according to Hepburn, has exacerbated matters since analysts tend to concentrate upon the writings of art critics. The neglect of natural beauty has the unfortunate tendency of diverting attention away from signifi cant phenomenological data. Hepburn stresses the refl exive dimension of our aesthetic experience of nature: detachment and involvement. An artwork is ‘framed’ and thus set apart from the environment. Natural items, by contrast, lack such a frame and can furnish perceptual surprises. Hepburn notes that in nature, aesthetic qualities are often provisional and elusive: the initial perceptions may often be corrected by a wider or more focussed perspective. Hepburn further notes that the forms of nature offer rich scope for the imaginative play. Its beauty often requires imaginative engagement. One might think of mountains in this context. In Reformation and Counter Reformation Europe mountains were often associated with the fl ood or the fall, symbolising Divine displeasure.5 Samuel Johnson was blind to the beauties of the Highlands. Yet shortly afterwards, mountains represented the very heights of contemplation to the rapt soul of Wordsworth and the Romantics. Hepburn offers various reasons for the eclipse of the kind of aesthetics of nature common in the eighteenth century. He notes the ‘disappearance of a rationalist faith in nature’s thorough-going intelligibility and its ultimate endorsement of human visions and aspirations’.6 Hepburn’s approach to this eclipse is not, however, a simple endorsement: he is attracted by the idea of theological dimension to the aesthetic, even if he is ultimately sceptical about its cognitive import. He writes: ‘one of my own longest-lasting concerns is to

4 Robin George Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938), 39. 5 Cf. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Inﬁ nite (Ithaca, NY, 1959). 6 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 286. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 5 elucidate the way in which aesthetic experience approaches experience deline- ated in theistic language, without however presupposing or implying that there exists a divine being who possesses the corresponding properties in fullest measure.’7 The idea of God provides a model for an ontological basis or ground for the phenomenological experience of beauty in nature. Furthermore, he notes:

When I say that I am drawn to a cognitivist-realist account of the most fundamental human values, I have the following familiar thoughts in mind: that such values as beneﬁ cence, justice, respect and our commitment to them cannot be adequately accounted for as expressions of feeling or emotion; that our emotions are themselves proper objects of our moral self-monitoring and not ﬁ nal moral arbitrators; and that, besides, there is such a thing as moral authority – not itself reducible to strength of feeling.8

It is signiﬁ cant that Hepburn’s collection The Reach of the Aesthetic starts with the question of the seriousness or trivial in aesthetic appreciation of nature. The neglect of natural beauty, he suggests, may in part be the legacy of Darwinism since this generated a disturbing model of nature.9 Hepburn is clearly attracted to the Romantic idea of visionary moments and as an example uses the wonderful Wordsworth passage in the Prelude about realizing the motion of the earth while skating on ice in darkness.10 Hepburn puts the problem in terms of the trajectory in the history of philosophy from Baruch Spinoza to Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. One might initially think that Hepburn is proposing a Spinozistic espousal of pantheism. He certainly rejects a Kantian dualism of fact and value. Equally, he rejects the Hegelian priority of the realm of art over nature as the privi- leged realm of spirit (Geist):

To put it very schematically, a serious aesthetic approach to nature is close to a Spinozistic intellectual love of God-or-Nature in its totality. It rejects Kant’s invitation to accord unconditional value only to 7 Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’, 104. 8 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 148–65, 153. 9 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 1–15, 1. 10 Ibid., 5. 6 Douglas Hedley

bearers of freedom and reason, and to downgrade phenomenal nature save as it hints at a supersensible, an earnest of which is furnished in nature’s amenability to be perceived, its purposiveness without purpose. It rejects, likewise, Hegel’s downplaying of natural beauty in favour of the spirit-manifesting practice of art.11

Spinoza was a momentous ﬁ gure in the emergence of what we think of as Romanticism. A Spinoza renaissance in the late eighteenth century constituted a key element in the Romantic devotion to nature culminating in Wordsworth. It is not clear, however, that Hepburn wishes to follow the pantheistic path of the Deus sive natura of Spinoza, and it is not the case that Hepburn is proposing a Spinozistic solution to the aesthetic question. There is a duality in our experience of nature, according to Hepburn, which resists the Spinozistic Deus sive natura:

This combination, in our aesthetic perception of nature, of the readily graspable and the opaque, sheerly contingent and alien, merits more than a sentence. The realization that the combination characterizes our aesthetic dealings with nature in general must again count as a mark of seriousness. It is a distinction vital, for instance, to a monotheistic view of nature. If the world of nature were itself divine, then one would expect intelligibility to prevail throughout. If the created world were distinct from God, though the product of his all-rational mind, one would expect a nature with a magniﬁ cently intelligible structure, but with signs of the insertion of divine will – the contingent, the might- have-been-different. Even if we do not hold a theistic belief-system, there can be a parabolic application of this duality, indicating truth- fully enough that the distinction runs very deep in our experience of nature.12

The theistic account offers the advantage of doing more justice to the felt experience of order and beauty in the natural realm while holding on to the opaque and the inscrutable.

11 Ibid., 6. 12 Ibid., 11–12. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 7

2 Joint fashioning or co-operation

Hepburn cites Coleridge approvingly for viewing art as the ‘spiritualizing’ or ‘humanizing’ of nature. It is ‘the power of humanizing nature, of infus- ing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.’13 Yet is this not what critics designate as the ‘pathetic fallacy’, the bestowal of exclusively human emotions to an inanimate world and thereby the crude and narcissistic personifi cation of nature? We see our emotions in nature because we project our feelings onto the world. Hepburn is clearly dissatisfi ed with the view that the human approach to nature is narcissistic. The appreciation of nature is not a mirroring of inner life but a shaping part of interiority. It is not that we merely project our longings onto the canvas of nature. The imagination is an instance of the signifi cance of the productive interaction of mind and world. He quotes the lines of Wordsworth:

By sensible impressions not enthrall’d, But quicken’d, rouz’d, and made thereby more ﬁ t To hold communion with the invisible world.14

Hepburn expounds the relations between the inner world of subjectivity and the realm of physical nature in the following terms:

the life of the mind is, in important measure, shaped by its imaginative annexing of the outer world – that is, by the sensible impressions derived from it, but also imbued with thought. Our topic is not simply the search for the descriptively apt metaphors from nature for the structure and the ongoings of human inwardness, structures and ongoings that would exist or occur identically or independently whether or not the search is successful: but the annexing is also a moulding and making of that inwardness, reﬂ ectively or perfunctorily achieved.15

Hepburn is speaking of an intuition of the power of the soul as renewed by the power of nature itself, inner by outer being. We create as well as discover, according to Wordsworth, in lines that resonate with Cudworth:

13 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (1817; Princeton, 1983), cv. 14 William Wordsworth, Prelude, XIII, 103ff. 15 Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 9. 8 Douglas Hedley

All the mighty world Of eye, and ear? Both what they half create And what they perceive.16

To commune with Nature is to engage with an enigmatic script that both inspires and instructs, while unleashing creative energy.

3 Sublimity, life-enhancement and imaginative play

Hepburn is interested in the idea of sublime, of a greatness beyond human measure.17 Hepburn mentions, but dismisses, views like those of Theodor W. Adorno who thinks of the sublime as a temporary bourgeois aberration. Hepburn shares the view expressed by Rudolf Otto that the sublime has a numinous component, one that is both disturbing and attractive. ‘The gain would be that we screen ourselves off from the natural immensities that daunt us; the loss that we cut ourselves off from “that renewal of our inner being” which the Romantics saw as derived from meditating on the great permanen- cies of nature.’18 ‘Central to sublimity – at least common to many of its diverse forms –– is the idea of a grave difﬁ culty or threat being transformed (through free and sustained effort) into an austere but valued experience.’19 Hepburn could have drawn upon a range of theories of the sublime, but Kant remains central for him. Yet it is associated with a stress in Kant upon the idea of play, or more speciﬁ cally, the ‘play of faculties’. Hepburn writes:

A frequent theme of Kant’s aesthetic writing is his contrast between mere sensuous stimulation (which yields no reliable inter-subjective agreement in response), and the ‘play of faculties’, active and reli- ably constant between subjects. The work of art or beautiful natural object produces a ‘quickening’ or animating of our ‘cognitive powers’,

16 Cf. Eckhard Lobsien, ‘Der Entzug des Schönen: Neuplatonische Ästhetik bei Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ in Verena Lobsien and Claudia Olk (eds), Neuplatonismus und Ästhetik. Zur Transformationsgeschichte des Schönen (Berlin, 2007), 185–212, 188. 17 Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’, 110. 18 Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 10. 19 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Moral: Links and Limits, Part One’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 38–51, 50. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 9

imagination and understanding, ‘to an indeﬁ nite, but … harmonious activity’. The mutually quickening activity of those faculties yields ‘the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgement of taste’. Kant’s emphasis falls on the triggering and animating of the subject’s own activity – self sustained but sharable.20

The playful dimension of the relationship to nature is signiﬁ cant in Hepburn’s account of Kant’s aesthetics. It is a play with a pedagogic dimension: the soul is transformed, educated and inspired through its encounter with the beauties and sublimity of nature.

Kant repeats this account of enlivened or animated faculties, with variations, in his treatment of the beautiful, the sublime and the ‘aesthetic ideas’. Objects are sublime because ‘they raise the forces of the soul’. The huge energies of nature trigger a self-discovery, of our ‘power of resistance of quite another kind’ – different from nature’s, that is. They instigate an autonomous, self-enhancing inner activity. Even the awe- some thought of God as sublime does not crush or humiliate the soul. Active does not shrink to reactive. Rather, the quality of reverence, Achtung, in the sublime is an intimation of our trans-empirical activity, as free, rational and moral beings. The ‘idea of the supersensible … is awakened in us by an object … which strains the imagination to its utmost’. Although imagination cannot ‘lay hold’ of anything positive ‘beyond the sensible world’, ‘still, this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; … a presentation of the inﬁ nite’ which ‘… expands the soul’. As in the case of the pure idea of the moral law, what is ‘quickened’ in us is a pattern of reﬂ ection; but it is not on that account of a ‘cold and lifeless’ meditation on our rational and moral status. ‘The very reverse’, wrote Kant, ‘is the truth’. Not lifeless, but enlivened to the limit.21

Hepburn concludes this discussion by observing: ‘Commentators have often given less attention to this theme of aesthetic “animation”, “quickening” in Kant than it deserves.’22

20 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 63–76, 66. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 67. 10 Douglas Hedley

Kant himself was more inclined to consider the aesthetic properties of nature than aesthetic artefacts. Hepburn argues that the forms of nature furnish a unique sphere for the delight and play of the imagination: ‘it is a kind of exhilaration, in this case a delight in the fact that the forms of the natural world offer scope for the exercise of the imagination, that leaf pattern chimes with vein or pattern, cloud form with mountain form’.23 The mind is stimulated by nature in a way that demands philosophical refl ection, and was the subject of such investigation in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was a pivotal period in the history of western aesthetics. Shaftesbury, in particular, was a decisive fi gure. The question of taste was extensively discussed by British philosophers from Shaftesbury to David Hume. Kant in some respects seems an unlikely candidate as a great aesthetician and his thought bears the infl uence of the British tradition of Shaftesbury and the German rationalist tradition of Alexander Baumgarten. Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) is one of the landmark texts in the fi eld. He claims that ‘every art presupposes rules by means of which in the fi rst instance a product, if it is to be called artistic, is represented as possible.’24 Fine art, for Kant, is founded in the productive power of genius, i.e. a creativity which transcends any rule-determined activity. His stress upon the role of genius exerted a profound infl uence upon subsequent theorizing, defi ning beauty as purposiveness without purpose, targeting utilitarian and reductionist accounts of the experience of beauty. Another key aspect of Kant’s legacy was his stress upon the idea, derived from Shaftesbury, that specifi cally aesthetic judgments are disinterested. Perhaps the most signifi cant Kantian contribution is, however, the claim that aesthetic judgments have universal validity – on the one hand, and yet, on the other, we cannot establish their validity. Aesthetic pleasure has a subjective universality because beauty demands general and not isolated or arbitrary agreement. Yet lacking concepts aesthetic judgments remain suspended between the imagination and the understanding. The ancient adage De gustibus non est disputandum (Tastes cannot be disputed) is fi rmly rejected: The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience becomes too commonplace, and by it remould experience, always indeed in accordance with analogical laws, but yet also in accordance with principles which occupy a higher place in reason (laws, too, which are just as natural to us as those by which 23 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 292. 24 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), 150. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 11 understanding comprehends empirical nature). Thus we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employment of imagination), so that the material supplied to us by nature in accordance with this law can be worked up into something different which surpasses nature:

Such representations of the imagination we may call ideas, partly because they at least strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of concepts of reason (intellectual ideas), thus giving to the latter the appearance of objective reality, – but especially because no concept can be fully adequate to them as internal intuitions. The poet ventures to realise to sense rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc.; or even if he deals with things of which there are examples in experience – e.g. death, envy and all vices, also love, fame, and all the like – he tries, by means of imagination, which emulates the play of reason in its quest after a maximum, to go beyond the limits of experience and to present them to sense with a completeness of which there is no example in nature. This is properly speaking the art of the poet, in which the faculty of aesthetical ideas can manifest itself in its entire strength. But this faculty, considered in itself, is properly only a talent [of the imagination].25

In this passage Kant presents the imagination of the poet as a great power to create another nature, free from the law of association – i.e. what Coleridge named fancy. In this manner, the poet is able to furnish a sensible dimension for the ideas of Reason, and discusses themes and aspects of an invisible world: the poet is a ‘second maker, a just Prometheus under Jove’, as already Shaftesbury said. The poet imitates ideal forms through the imagination.26 Note that ‘such representations of the imagination we may call ideas, partly because they at least strive after something which lies beyond the bound of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of concepts of reason (intellectual ideas).’ Here Kant is linking the imagination to the ideas of Reason: the poet through the imagination makes invisible ideas sensible and presents the transcendent in discernible form. This is a characteristic instance of Kant both insisting upon the limits of knowledge and yet gesturing beyond these limits. Judgment is a faculty that mediates between knowledge and 25 Ibid., 158. 26 Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 295ff. 12 Douglas Hedley morality. Kant nevertheless insists that art bears no evident relation to truth. This apparent subjectivisation of art in Kant has provoked the criticism of many commentators since. Yet, as we have seen above, the status of art for Kant remains ambiguous. The aesthetic is a decisive element in the idealistic dimension of Kant’s philosophy since for him it reveals a link between or bridge across the otherwise great gulf or rift between the realms of theoretical and practical reason. The Imagination is of signal value in this regard. This looks far removed from any philosophical nominalism. On the contrary, the view of the poet as rendering the invisible visible suggests a quasi-Platonism. Kant might be perceived as offering a middle position between the Platonic-Pythagorean realism about beauty and subjectivist accounts. Kant insists upon the irreducibly teleological aspect of nature, albeit in terms of the necessity of viewing the unity of nature as regulative principle of science. It is not clear, however, that this is a sustainable middle ground. It quite reasonably struck Kant’s immediate successors as odd that we should treat the world as exhibiting unity, beauty and purposiveness while denying that we are entitled to the (Platonic) thought that the reality is constituted by unity, beauty and teleology. The laws that govern that intelligibility of the world presumably have their basis in facts about reality per se and not just the mind. That would be to claim, pace Kant, that the ideas are not merely regulative but constitutive.

4 The sacred

Though not avowing theism, Hepburn examines the idea of the sacred, which has a tendency to drive the aesthetic back to the religious source. This is an instance of the signiﬁ cance of the thought of Otto for Hepburn:

Central to Romantic aesthetic theory, for instance, was the conception of imaginative grasp of reality-in-itself, the universe at large, through episodes of heightened experience. In ‘visionary moments’ features of the life-world became, to the poet or other artist, symbols or ‘ciphers’ of the whole or of what transcends the perceptible world: the ‘one life of nature’ or nature’s God.27

27 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 16–37, 35. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 13

Hepburn explicitly rejects John Passmore’s attack on the notion of the sacred in his work Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974) as ‘obscurantist and pre- scientiﬁ c’ and generating a ‘culpable abdication of human responsibility for nature’:28

For the theist, of course, the ultimate background is the pervasive divine (holy) being upon whom the entire world depends. But can we validly argue from the empirical world to such a being? In my own present view, the philosophical critics of the cosmological argumentation to God have not succeeded in refuting it in all its forms, but neither have its defenders succeeded in identifying such a possible Ground of the world with the biblical Deity. It is tempting and indeed plausible to argue that the observable universe, and particularly the regresses of explanation we open and explore some way, cannot be all there is; that not everything and every event can exist and obtain ‘by courtesy of’ something else or some other event; and that the cosmic ‘background’ cannot consist of nothing more than those causal dependencies we trace. But if that is the least that can be said, perhaps it is also the most. Yet there is mystery enough there.29

Neither the theist nor the critic of theism can claim victory. Yet Hepburn is clear that the mystery of the existence of the cosmos cannot be dismissed as a pseudo problem. The reference to ‘mystery’ is telling. It is suggestive Gabriel Marcel’s seminal distinction between a problem and mystery. Marcel gave the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 1949–50, while Hepburn was a student there. These lectures were published as the two-volume The Mystery of Being: Faith and Reality (1950).30 In these lectures, Marcel presents the neo-Romantic view that the modern world, with its obsession with technique and method, characteristically fails to recognise those domains where problem solving is insufﬁ cient. Mysteries require a different form of engagement than the solving of puzzles. The existence of the world could be seen as just such a mystery. And mystery resists simple reduction: ‘My main concern […] is to generalize and clarify the claim in art, as outside it, the subjectivising way can be a cognitive path,

28 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 113–29, 117–18. 29 Ibid., 125. 30 Gabriel Marcel, Le Mystère de l’être (2 vols, Paris, 1951). His ﬁ rst work was on Coleridge and F. W. J. Schelling. 14 Douglas Hedley and that not all enquiry and exploration is reductive and analytical, concerned with the breaking down of complexes to basic elements.’31 Indeed, Hepburn views the sacred as an index of the axiomatic, the normative. The sense of the sacred or the numinous, as evinced by the cross-cultural experience of nature, furnishes an intimation of transcendence. The contrast is between the inanimate and animate, the impersonal and the spiritual:

Normally taken for granted in workaday experience of the world is the emergence – from inanimate matter – of life, sentience, consciousness and self-conscious personal existence. A possible further role for a recovered conception of the sacred can be the dramatizing of these fundamental ‘levels’ of being, in aesthetic realization: the mental and conscious, the personal, the moral and spiritual being made to stand out vividly from the sub-personal and the inert. They then show up as ‘sacred’, in their embodying of high values. Instead of pointing ‘down’ to causal conditions (in analytic and reductionist idiom), the concept of the sacred points ‘up’ to value-realization, whether moral or aesthetic, emphasizing and exulting in the gap bridged or leapt.32

It is evident that Hepburn considers the phenomenon of the sacred and the existence of a normative dimension as issues of decisive metaphysical signiﬁ cance. Moreover, the self-conscious and “personal” dimension of reality cannot be dismissed as merely epiphenomenal. Perhaps, again, Hepburn is pointing – however obliquely, to the great metaphysical exegesis of ‘I AM that I AM’ of Exodus 3.14 in western philosophy and the identiﬁ cation of ultimate Being with the divine I AM in Christian Platonism.

5 Imagination

Hepburn’s account of the religious imagination straddles these two poles. Imagination must provide a means of moving from the ﬁ nite to the inﬁ nite. He presents three key aspects of the imagination. Firstly, the Kantian sense of imagination as synthesizing, as central to perception. Secondly imagination as the capacity to summon ‘alternative orders’. Thirdly, the ability of images to be symbols of a transcendent world: 31 Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’, 33. 32 Hepburn, ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’, 125. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 15

I acknowledge the (roughly Kantian) sense in which, without imagination, we cannot make the basic differentiations essential to awareness of the world and of ourselves as subjects. Its synthesizing role continues to be vital to knowledge at every level: to personal relations, where we seek to interpret disparate pieces of behaviour as manifestations of a single intelligible character; to the scientist and the historian, who seek pattern in their data. And so with religious imagination, seeking some unity in and beyond religious ‘intimations’, hints of transcendence, rather than leaving these as sheer anomalies, discrete individual mysteries. That too must count as a cognitive endeavour.33

We have already noted the presence of Marcel in Hepburn’s thought. The appeal to imagination is a plea for richer sense of the cognitive, as more than tracking empirical facts:

The great vision on Snowdon as the expression of This love more intellectual cannot be Without Imagination, which, in truth, Is but another name for absolute strength And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And Reason in her most exalted mood.34

Yet the appeal to Imagination is driven by the recognition of the limits of problem driven rationalism:

some of the most vivid religiously toned aesthetic experiences are notable not for alleviating a sense of ontological insufﬁ ciency, but rather for initiating and heightening such a sense, a sense of insecurity, loss of everyday bearings, through the dislocation of anticipated, familiar perception, and they are specially valued for doing so. They manifest a power to disturb and to introduce or intensify a sense of ambiguity or mystery in relation to fundamental elements of human experience. They present familiar objects and scenes in a fresh, wonder evoking light, and make us feel very much at home or at ease with them. Perhaps

33 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Religious Imagination’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 77–95, 94. 34 William Wordsworth, Prelude, XIII, 189. 16 Douglas Hedley

we are moved by sensed analogies with dream-experience, rather than being more ﬁ rmly installed in a single incontestably ‘real’ world.35

The imagination serves to awaken a sense of mystery and wonder and a discontent with ‘reality’ in the quotidian sense of the familiar habitat.

6 Coincidentia oppositorum

The contemplation of nature also highlights the polarity in aesthetic judgment between the particular and the universal, the many and the one. Hepburn’s stress upon the signiﬁ cance of unity is uncontroversial, even if one might expect this in a thinker with debts to Neo-Platonism. Yet Hepburn claims the signiﬁ cance of the awareness of vitality and energy as linked to stabil- ity and tranquillity. These paradoxically co-present features are those that link Hepburn to the Romantic-Platonic tradition. He uses Wordsworth and Coleridge’s image of the waterfall:

‘What a sight it is to look down on such a cataract! […] – the wheels, that circumvolve in it – the leaping up and plunging forward of that inﬁ nity of pearls… – the continual change of the Matter, the perpetual sameness of the Form – it is an awful Image and Shadow of God and the World.’36

The idea of the world as the Umbra Dei is one of Neo-Platonic provenance.37 Hepburn refers to the Neo-Platonic model of the coincidence of oppo- sites, the ideal of stillness or tranquillity which ‘at the same time, and essentially in tension with that, is the thought that it is not the stillness of unknowing, not the winding down of vitality and vivid experience but contrariwise their maximal intensiﬁ cation.’38 He quotes Pseudo-Dionysus ‘in his eternal motion, God remains at rest’, Boethius and Meister Eckhart. Wordsworth’s account of

35 Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’, 110. 36 Quotation from Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 130–47, 138. 37 Cf. George A. Craig, Umbra Dei: Henry More and the Seventeenth Century Struggle for Plainness (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1946). 38 Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’, 109. ‘Vitality with Repose’... 17 the Rhine at Scaffhausen as an image of ‘the highest state of sublimity’, items I ‘state of opposition & yet reconcilement’.39 For Nicolas of Cusa employs the Neo-Platonic idea that the fi nite is contained potentially with the infi nite as its implication; and the infi nite is within the fi nite. The world is the explication of the primal transcendent unity, the communication of ineffable transcendent goodness. This is not the invocation of God as an explanatory principle or suffi cient reason but as the ineffable and enigmatic archetype of the physical cosmos. There is a common view of Neo-Platonism as a metaphysics of emanation. This term, ‘emanation’ is a highly problematic and polyvalent term, but it is taken to mean the descent of the fi nite world from the absolute plenitude of unitary perfection. Here the stress is upon the remoteness of the fi rst principle. Yet an equally potent philosophical image among the Platonists is the idea of the unfolding of the Divine Being in the world:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will ﬂ ame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.40

The cosmos as image is both like and unlike its transcendent archetype. This means that the concrete manifestation of the divine is a mirror and a reﬂ ection of its source; not the distance but the presence of the archetype in the image is the key to some of the greatest nature poetry of the western tradition.

7 Conclusion

There is a gentle elegance in Hepburn’s writing that can shroud the profundity of his thought. In an era of widespread scepticism about the value of the aesthetic beyond the conﬁ nes of the art gallery and the museum, he draws aesthetics into the sphere of wider human concerns. The Neo-Platonist likes to pun with the supposed etymology of beauty in Greek (to kalon) as derived from the verb to call kallein): Beauty calls. Hepburn too contends that the reach of the aesthetic extends into the borderlands of philosophy and theology. ‘At its most deeply felt the Wordsworthian experience brought a re-kindling of 39 Ibid., 110. 40 Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur. 18 Douglas Hedley religious imagination for some who found it no longer sustained by the traditional dogmas.’41 Hepburn is making an observation about the Romantic era but it hard to avoid the thought that there is some personal autobiography in this account. Hepburn inspired the development of environmental aesthetics: it is less widely observed that one might view natural beauty as a window of transcendence in his work. Might we call it a rueful late Romantic aesthetics of a Neo-Platonic Deus absconditus? Hepburn writes of expressivism:

Although it is now very much in eclipse, the last widely accepted uni- ﬁ ed aesthetic system was the expression theory. […] The expression theory is a communication-theory: it must represent aesthetic experience of nature either as communication from the Author of Nature, which it rarely does, or else (rather awkwardly) as the discovery that nature’s shapes and colours can with luck serve as expressive vehicles of human feeling, although never constructed for that end.42

Hepburn often expresses sympathy for such an aesthetic that ‘involves awareness of a just-out-of-reach, absent, hinted at, greater beauty and more ultimate reality’.43 The God of traditional western theism is absent in his philosophy but the Neo-Platonic perspective of the world as a theophany, nature as an enigmatic and mysterious image of a transcendent deity, abides in his thought – however cautiously and coyly expressed. In the ﬁ nal words of Dr Faustus: ‘All that is transient is an image [Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis]’. This is a view of the deity that Hepburn imbibed from Coleridge and Wordsworth.44 This theological dimension to his thought did not vanish in his mature work. I do not make this observation in order to diminish Hepburn’s originality. Rather, the philosophy of Hepburn stands as a strikingly original endeavour to avoid the Scylla of a crude empiricism and the Charybdis of theological positivism. Once we remove the veil of late twentieth century erudite professional philosophy, we encounter a thinker who loved to walk the mountains and dales of the Highlands and the lakes, and we stumble across a late Romantic-Neo-Platonic aesthetics in which beauty and the sublime

41 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 286. 42 Ibid., 287. 43 Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’, 110. 44 Cf. Douglas Hedley, The Iconic Imagination (London, 2016). ‘Vitality with Repose’... 19 suggest visions of the transcendent in an aesthetically impoverished and relentlessly materialistic culture.

The University of Cambridge ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime

Endre Szécsényi

‘Open an eighteenth-century work on aesthetics, and the odds are that it will contain a substantial treatment of the beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque in nature.’1 So begins Ronald W. Hepburn’s famous paper of 1966, the repeatedly re-published and frequently cited ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’. This opening suggests that, in his aesthetic thinking, Hepburn attributes great signifi cance to the eighteenth century and to its substantial aesthetic categories; it further suggests that he clearly sees the theoretical priority of nature to arts in this period. Even though he does not provide any reference here, he most probably has in mind Walter John Hipple’s history of British eighteenth-century aesthetics.2 In his 1960 review of Hipple’s book, he wrote: ‘It is not scholarly in the sense of being pedan- tic […] There are numerous shrewd comments by the way on the relevance of aspects of the eighteenth-century controversies to twentieth century aesthetics.’3 Conspicuously, Hepburn shares Hipple’s attitude towards the major eighteenth-century aesthetic issues as having relevance for contemporary theories, and he praises this book as a scholarly enterprise of ‘much more than a purely historical signifi cance’. With this acclaimed feature, Hepburn indirectly expresses his doubts about the values of historical or intellectual historical investigations. He continues this criticism throughout his life, such as when, almost fi fty years later, in his review of James Kirwan’s Sublimity, he detects a ‘tension between Kirwan’s commitments as historian of ideas and as philosopher.’4 Though I would not want to deny the possibility of such

1 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefi ore (eds), British Analytical Philosophy (London, 1966), 285–310, 285. 2 Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, The Sublime, & The Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 1957). 3 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Review of Walter John Hipple’s The Beautiful, The Sublime, & The Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 10 (1960), 188–9, 188. 4 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Review of James Kirwan’s Sublimity’, The British Journal of ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 21 kind of tension, I think that Hepburn maintains too sharp a contrast between live or vivid philosophical interest and mere (and probably insipid) historical (or ‘historicist’) interest. When he discusses authors of the past, basically he treats them as his contemporaries, this way his interpretations and analyses become really breathing. Yet, I think, in certain cases, the discussed theories’ embeddedness in different traditions, their interconnections and their broader historical contexts, may offer more potential for contemporary thinking than Hepburn’s way of interpretation can unravel. Thus my paper has a somewhat apologetic tone in so far as I am suggesting that intellectual history is not of mere antiquarian engagement whose sole aim is to enrich our inventory of past ideas, instead, it can result in new insights even on well-discussed themes such as ‘the beautiful’, ‘the sublime’ and ‘the picturesque’. And that the ‘numerous shrewd comments’ by the way on the historical materials cannot (and must not) substitute for the refl ections upon the historical dynamics or evolution of the ideas in question. Moreover, intellectual historical investigations could cast some light on the scholar’s blind spots and/or unrefl ected prejudices concerning the given topic. When, in the 1960s, Hepburn begins to criticise his contemporaries’ neglect of natural beauty, he implicitly returns to the roots of modern aesthetics. In this, he actually turns back to the theoretical issues of the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the primordial layer of modern aesthetic experience was being shaped in encounters with nature and not, primarily, art. In that period, ‘the aesthetic’ was interwoven with an emerging type of nature- experience, and this is not to deny that there were new, though less spectacular, developments in art theory, rhetoric, or criticism. In the fi rst attempts in this period to formulate and philosophically treat the surprising perspectives of nature, we can fi nd a fertile though sometimes confused mixture of the scientifi c-rational, the sensitive-emotional, the moral, the religious-spiritual, or even the medical-medicinal aspects of the experience of nature – this multidiscipli- nary character can also be found in of Hepburn’s approach to nature. In this paper, I shall focus on the concept of the sublime, its modernity, and its multifarious phenomena, to show the richness of its history in a historical period that is less discussed in Hepburn’s writings. My further aim is to demonstrate that historical investigation can discover strands in the modern tradition of the sublime that could be useful for a contemporary philosopher who deals with this aesthetic-theological complex and its possible signifi cance

Aesthetics, 47 (2007), 217–9, 219. 22 Endre Szécsényi for the present, and also that the historical reﬂ ections can help us better understand and evaluate Hepburn’s philosophical position and achievement on this subject.

1 The modernity of the sublime

If one is interested in the emergence of the modern aesthetic experience of nature, or in how aesthetic experience can offer or even create beauties in nature, as Hepburn was deeply interested, the topic of the sublime seems inevitable. His paper ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has it any Relevance for Philosophy Today?’ of 1988 is Hepburn’s most fully worked out contribution to the topic, but he dealt with the sublime in several other writings, implicitly or explicitly. Most notably, in the last section on the ‘aesthetic aspects’ of wonder in his inaugural lecture of 1980 to the Aristotelian Society,5 in the section ‘Versions of Sublimity’ of his oft-cited article ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’,6 or in his posthumously published ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’.7 As such, the sublime remained integral to his life-long advocacy for the contemporary signiﬁ cance of the aesthetic experience of nature, and he repeatedly criticizes those – from Paul Guyer to Philip Fisher or Kirwan – who doubt the relevance of the sublime nowadays. Conspicuously, the sublime belongs to the core of Hepburn’s crucial concepts including also natural beauty, wonder, the sacred and the numinous. These notions somewhat overlap and are capable of occasionally exemplifying or explaining each other. Hepburn’s interpretation of the sublime is inspiringly complex, he surveys and analyses various versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, natural and artistic, cautious and bombastic, religious and secular, etc.8 In the following quasi-deﬁ nition, he displays it in a narrower historical context:

5 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays (Edinburgh, 1984), 131–54, 151–2. 6 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanized: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 267–79, 276–7. 7 Ronald W. Hepburn, ’The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, ed. Emily Brady, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 273–88. Interestingly, although this paper discusses theoretical problems concerning the ‘immensely diverse’ versions of the aesthetic experience of space, including vast and immense space, the term ‘sublime’ or ‘sublimity’ only ﬂ eetingly arises. (Ibid., 274, 279, 282.) 8 His aim, however, was not to paint a comprehensive picture of the available theories of the sublime, since he does not discuss authors like F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 23

The concept of sublimity was fashioned in response to a need – a need to name a memorable, powerful and perplexing experience (or range of experiences) of undoubted aesthetic value, yet not experience of beauty as understood in neoclassical aesthetic theory. It combined, or fused, dread at the overwhelming energies of nature and the vastnesses of space and time with a solemn delight or exhilaration. Landscapes, notably, could evoke the experience – and Alpine travellers were among the ﬁ rst to struggle to describe it. The exhilaration was hard to account for, and was explained in very different ways, many of which involved an essential metaphysical-imaginative component.9

Despite the historical tone of this passage, Hepburn never reﬂ ects on the emergence of our concept of the sublime as simultaneous with that of modern aesthetic experience. The sublime, however, is a paradigmatic experience of modern aesthetics per se,10 especially, but not exclusively, if we think of the aesthetic experience of nature. Even with its ancient root in Pseudo-Longinus’s Peri hypsous from the ﬁ rst century A.D., it had to be re-born in Nicolas Boileau- Despréaux’s French translation of the Greek text in 1674. This re-birth of the concept made it a crucial category of modern aesthetics. Incidentally, Boileau’s translation gave ‘the sublime’ a special connotation lacking in the incompletely preserved Greek text, namely, a deep interconnection with ‘the marvellous’.11 This ‘marvellous’ is evidently a version of that ‘wonder’ which

Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche (who was just fl eetingly mentioned), Sigmund Freud, Thomas Weiskel, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard or Hayden White – just to mention a few infl uential theoreticians. 9 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204, 201. 10 Or as Lyotard famously put it: ‘Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe this contradictory feeling – pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression – was christened or re-christened by the name of the sublime. It is around this name that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that aesthetics asserted its critical rights over art, and that romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed.’ Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ in idem, The Inhuman: Refl ections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge, 1991), 89–107, 92. Lyotard, however, discusses the sublime only in the realm of art as ‘the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterize the modern.’ Ibid., 93. 11 Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, ‘Addison and Some of His Predecessors on “Novelty”’, Publication of the Modern Language Association of America, 52 (1937), 1114–29, 1125; Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge, 2015), 103–4. Doran suggests that there could be a link between Longinus’s hypsos and Torquatto Tasso’s poetical conception of la meraviglia, the latter also greatly infl uencing on 24 Endre Szécsényi is another key-concept in Hepburn’s thinking. Following Boileau’s translation and preface, modern theories of the sublime proliferated, as did various experiences of it.12 In his 1966 paper,13 Hepburn warns that ‘when a set of human experiences is ignored in a theory relevant to them, they tend to be rendered less readily available as experiences’.14 While, it is also true, growing theoretical interest fosters the relevant experiences. This is exactly what happened in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the sublime. This story had a special feature at least until the 1740s (that is, until the appearance of John Baillie’s and then Edmund Burke’s theories): the relationship between Longinian sublime (frequently called ‘rhetorical’) and natural sublimity was far from being clarifi ed. At the same time, this relationship could have a latent dynamic for such authors as John Dennis and Joseph Addison. They utilised the Longinian-Boileauean term in their literary criticism or poetics, and they were the most infl uential propagators of the new natural sublimity, although they (specifi cally Dennis and Addison) never used the term ‘sublime’ and never cited Longinus in the context of the experience of nature. This Longinian-Boileauean sublime seems crucial for the emergence of modern aesthetics from a different perspective, too, when we consider the new code of social behaviour, self-representation and politeness formulated in the writings of seventeenth-century courtly moralists and certain critics of Neo-Classicism. The keywords of this discourse, like goût, fi nesse and délicatesse, denoted – as Elena Russo writes – ‘a kind of empirical judgements that could be applied not only to the appreciation of aesthetic objects but also to discernment in worldly interactions. The domain of the aesthetic and that of worldliness were coextensive: The same type of rationality informed aesthetic judgement and the capacity to fi nd one’s way through the social labyrinth’.15 On the sublime in particular, discussing poetics (rhetoric) within the category of biensé- ance (decorum) and polite manners, René Rapin – in his Du grand ou du sublime and

Boileau’s sublime. Ibid., 104. 12 It has been noted, however, that a manuscript French translation of Peri hypsous existed from 1645, with a showable reception of Longinus before Boileau primarily in French culture. Cf. Éva Madeleine Martin, ‘The “Prehistory” of the Sublime in Early Modern France: An Interdisciplinary Perspective’ in Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012), 77–101; or Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (London, 2006), 2–4. 13 It was developed from his shorter article: ‘Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 3 (1963), 195–209. 14 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 288. 15 Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment. Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2007), 143. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 25 the appended L’Éloquence des biénséances – relies on the Longinean-Boileauean inseparability of the marvellous and the sublime.16 He claims that, unlike heroism, the sublime in human heart is independent of social rank, being an ideal which has to be accomplished under any social circumstances.17 I would add to this that Baltasar Gracián, in his infl uential Oráculo manual of 1647, already explained how a courtier had to raise admiration in his genuinely hostile social environment to preserve himself and increase his reputation: ‘It is the Pleasure of Novelty [la admiración de la novedad], that makes Events to be valued. There is neither Delight [gusto], nor Profi t, in playing one’s Game too openly. Not to Declare immediately, is the way to hold Minds in suspence […]. We ought therefore to imitate the Method of God Almighty [proceder divino], who always keeps Men in suspence.’18 Nevertheless, this social-cultural approach is beyond the scope of Hepburn’s thinking on the sublime and thus of the present paper, too. Let us go back to nature! The modern ‘aesthetic’ experience of nature seems to be fundamentally different from the classical, poetically or artistically formed or pre-shaped, experience of nature famously manifested in the genre of the pastoral (the world of shepherds) and that of the georgic (the world of husbandmen). In one of his pastoral essays (The Tatler, No. 218), Addison describes the beauties of nature19 during a countryside walk as ‘the pleasantest Scene in the World to one who had pass’d a whole Winter in Noise and Smoak’. He notes how views of fi elds and meadows, the freshness of the dews and the air, fl owers and

16 ‘[C]omme il peut y avoir du Merveilleux en toutes choses, il peut y avoir aussi du Sublime: c’est à dire ce comble de perfection qui saisit le cœur, & remplit l’âme d’admiration.’ René Rapin, Du grand ou du sublime dans les moeurs et dans les differentes conditions des hommes. Avec quelques observations sur l’Éloquence des Bienséances (Paris, 1686), 5. 17 Cf. László Kisbali, ‘Ízlés és képzelet: az esztétikai beszédmód kialakulása a XVIII. században [Taste and Imagination: the Formation of Aesthetic Discourse in the Eighteenth Century]’ in idem, Sapere aude! Esztétikai és művelődéstörténeti írások (Budapest, 2009), 61–72, 68. Rapin’s separation of the sublime as a moral ideal from the heroic values was an important development, especially if we consider how closely Boileau linked Longinus (and the life of the historical Longinus Cassius) to heroism in his preface to his Longinus’s translation. 18 Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Prudence, or, a Companion for a Man of Sense, trans. Mr Savage (2nd edn, London, 1705), 2–3. (In the fi rst edition of this English translation we can fi nd ‘admiration’ in the fi rst line of this aphorism.) 19 Addison explicitly cites the beauty, not the sublimity, of nature, yet the following suggests the overwhelming and mixed (‘agreeable Confusion’) effect of the sublime: ‘I lost my self with a great deal of Pleasures among several Thickets and Bushes that were fi lled with a great Variety of Birds, and an agreeable Confusion of Notes’. Joseph Addison et al, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (3 vols, Oxford, 1987), III, 140. 26 Endre Szécsényi birdsongs, etc. ‘created in me the same Kind of animal Pleasure, and made my Heart overfl ow with such secret Emotions of Joy and Satisfaction as are not to be described or accounted for.’ Then he adds: ‘Those who are conversant in the writings of polite authors, receive an additional entertainment from the country, as it revives in their memories those charming descriptions, with which such authors do frequently abound.’20 Literary erudition, then, can offer ‘an additional entertainment’, but it seems to be independent of the aesthetic experience of nature which concerns some instinctive part in us, and in the case of the sublime this ‘touch’ is even more elementary – as later, in a different context, Burke will also suggest. The counterpart of the ‘original’ state of nature is the immediate and ‘instinctive’ reaction of the human mind to this peculiar object, the discovery of untouched or new-born nature simultaneously uncovers new, yet actually ancient, regions in human soul. As the original state of nature can symbolize its prelapsarian state, so a heightened aesthetic state of mind can have rich spiritual connotations. Addison, now in The Spectator (No. 393), describes an aesthetic, ‘habitual Disposition of Mind’ as a very active consciousness that ‘consecrates every Field and Wood, turns an ordinary Walk into a Morning or Evening Sacrifi ce, and will improve those transient Gleams of Joy, which naturally brighten up and refresh the Soul on such Occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual State of Bliss and Happiness.’21 It is worth noting the series of active verbs in this quotation. With this I am suggesting that the sublime is not universally given, it had to be invented, or at least, re-invented at a certain period of history, when new claims – spiritual, intellectual, emotional – arose, to which sublime experience seemed an adequate reply. The sublime itself directed and further shaped these claims. Hepburn seems to agree with those who discuss the historical signifi cance of the emergence of the sublime: it ‘once helped the imagination to cope with the post-Newtonian cosmos and to deploy religious feeling on a remodelled nature’. However, he calls our attention to the danger if we link this experience too tightly to this historical scene: ‘I think that much of both aesthetic and religious value is liable to be lost if we accept [this historical interpretation] uncritically or resignedly and see the idea of the sublime as long ago snatched from us by historically inevitable change.’22 While I share Hepburn’s

20 Ibid. 21 Joseph Addison et al, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (5 vols, Oxford, 1965), III, 476. 22 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has it any Relevance for Philosophy Today?’, Dialectics and Humanism, 15 (1988), 137–55, 139. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 27 opinion that this ‘historicist claim’ cannot support the view about the unavaila- bility of the sublime experience to us,23 still I think that the historical approach cannot be discredited on this basis. The modern history of the sublime, with all of its fl uctuations, its hopes and engagements, is an inevitable constituent of contemporary sublime experience. When we are having a genuinely sublime experience, actually we are standing at the current end-point of a broad and undoubtedly multifarious modern tradition whose different features enrich or, in a worse case, simply determine our current experience. If we recognise the spiritual connotations in the instinctive reactions to nature’s sublimity and beauties which were fi rst formulated – partly discovered, partly invented – by authors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then the sublime can be conceived (as it really was in this period) as a religious exercise. If we take the religious in a broader sense to embrace even non-theistic spirituality, then we can follow Hepburn and concentrate on ‘thought about the subject-self, and the religious ideas presupposed in certain accounts of the sublime both theistic and non-theistic’,24 agreeing with his reason to ‘doubt if there was ever a “pure” aesthetic version of the sublime, devoid of all religious and ethical elements and to which aesthetics may seek to return.’25 Undoubtedly, this complex experience with its different versions has been embedded in the emergence of our European modernity. There is, then, something intriguingly and radically modern in the aesthetic experience of the world in general, that is also relevant to the self-image or self-defi nition of modern man. It exists in the encounter with a surpris- ingly new otherness of nature, which was also an occasion for redefi ning the beholding self. The sublime does not simply express or somehow human- ize the infi nite and inhuman features of nature as it emerged in new natural sciences including astronomy, biology, geology and geography. Rather, the sublime adds to the experience of individuality by confronting one with some overwhelming yet alluring presence. The fathomless abyss of the individual human mind corresponds to – yet without harmonizing with – the inexpress- ible depth of nature. Thus, the sublime experience transcends both logic and rhetoric in lying beyond the realms of language and the concept, for individuum est ineffabile.

23 Notably, Hegel had already associated the sublime with the ancient age of ﬁ ne arts. 24 Hepburn, ‘The Concept of the Sublime’, 137. 25 Ibid., 147. 28 Endre Szécsényi

2 ‘Versions of Sublimity’

Interpreting the eighteenth-century tradition of the sublime, Hepburn focuses mostly on authors of the last decade, primarily on Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, and he only brieﬂ y brings in earlier theoreticians like Addison, Alexander Gerard, Baillie, James Usher, Burke, and Thomas Reid.26 It is also fair to say that he practically ignores late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century predecessors like Dominique Bouhours, Boileau, Rapin, Dennis, and Shaftesbury. Interestingly, however, he cites other seventeenth- century authors who played important roles in the pre-history of the modern sublimity, even if Hepburn never uses the term in this context. I refer to his ﬁ rst academic writings, in the 1950s, primarily his unpublished dissertation, Cosmology and Value, and the three separate journal articles, developed chapters from that dissertation, on Thomas Traherne, Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill. Here I shall discuss only Goodman’s and Hakewill’s famous debate about the Cosmic Fall and the current metaphysical status of created nature. Hepburn gives us a clear hint at the direct aesthetic consequences of this theological debate in a brief ‘Postlude’ after the chapters on Goodman and Hakewill in his dissertation. Its title is ‘The Aesthetic Fall’:

in the major ity of Cosmic Fall theories [there] is the claim not only that the fertility, orderliness and harmony of the world have been lost, but its beauty also. The Golden Age was unanimously pronounced an age of consummate beauty. The language of declension from the Golden Age frequently implies both loss of power and beauty…27

Hepburn’s concern here is the tradition of Goodman’s Fall of Man (1616)28 and its opposition in Hakewill’s Apologie of the Power and Providence of God (1627), which argued for a cyclic model of the world against the permanent decay model of Goodman, in an age, as Tuveson claimed, that ‘at least equalled, and in many cases excelled the ancient world in achievements.’29 In this ‘Postlude’,

26 Ibid., 140, 142–3. 27 Ronald W. Hepburn, Cosmology and Value: Studies in the Argumentation of Certain Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Works of Philosophical and Literary Concerns (Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1955), 237–8. 28 Goodman’s position otherwise mostly relied on St. Cyprian’s ideas and the authority of the Scriptures. Cf. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Gloucester, Mass., 1972), 71. 29 Ibid., 73. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 29 besides Goodman, Hepburn refers to Jean-François Senault’s L’Homme criminel (1644) and its English translation (1650), Edmund Spenser’s poetry, Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimage (1617), and, fi nally to Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra (1681) and Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism (1652) – the latter two are slightly more familiar from the literature of the pre-history of modern aesthetics. Burnet’s theory is usually an inevitable source of the early history of the sublime, though Hepburn speaks explicitly about beauty throughout these passages.30 In the tradition which emphasizes the fall of man and nature, and that of beauty and harmony in the world, we can, paradoxically, identify the fertile ground for the emergence of the modern sublime. Burnet speaks about the ‘breaking up of the ideally beautiful spherical earth’ of the original Creation and seeing ‘mountains as “nothing but great ruines”. […] But here and there appear defi nite glimpses of aesthetic appreciation also. Mountains are shadows and reminders of the infi nite in their vast size; they can be august and stately.’31 Burnet’s passages on the theologico-aesthetic complexity of the appreciation of mountains, to which Hepburn briefl y refers, became seminal loci for early theories of the natural sublime, such as Dennis’s letters about his tour through the Alps, Addison’s writings including – besides a Latin ode to Burnet – notably a description of mountain landscape by Lake Geneva in his Remarks of Several Parts of Italy (1705), a work deeply infl uenced by Dennis,32 and the famous mountain prospect in Shaftesbury’s Moralists (1709).33 The seminal monograph on this subject written by Marjorie Hope Nicolson34 was fi rst published only four years after the completion of Hepburn’s dissertation, but he does not utilise her book in his later writings, except for two brief referenc- es.35 A gap somehow remained between Hepburn’s late seventeenth-century and late eighteenth-century interests.

30 Even when he later returns to this subject in his article entitled ‘Cosmic Fall’, he insists on this terminology, and though he discusses other authors (but not the ones I mentioned above), the argumentation remains the same. Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Cosmic Fall’ in Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (1968; 4 vols, New York, 1973), I, 504–13. 31 Hepburn, Cosmology and Value, 239. 32 Cf. Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, 127. 33 Lord Shaftesbury, ‘The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody’ in idem Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 231–338, 316. 34 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Inﬁ nite (Ithaca, NY, 1959). 35 The exceptions are: Hepburn, ‘Cosmic Fall’, 513 and ‘Poetry and “Concrete 30 Endre Szécsényi

At the same time, the other side can also be intriguing from the perspective of modern aesthetics and of the sublime, too.36 On Hakewill’s Apologie, Hepburn insightfully writes:

Only in part is [Hakewill’s] aim the communication of information; more important is his invitation to see the old world in a new way – a conversion of attitude, which is the ﬁ nal objective of the entire work. The cumulative effect of images […] builds up … a frame of mind in which the ideas of the world’s fecundity, richness and vigour appear quite incontestable, even uncontroversial.37

This is the very project of the newly elaborated aesthetic experience, in the early eighteenth century, to view the world ‘in another Light’, as Addison will famously say, and foster a new ‘frame of mind’ to discover the charming aspects of the created world. And, more specifi cally, according to Hepburn, to reinforce his thesis on the fecundity and rejuvenation of nature, and ‘to augment confi dence in the future progress of arts and sciences’, Hakewill uses ‘the language of “expansion”, “opening-up” and “the revealing of the hith- erto unseen”’.38 I think that this expansive, exploratory attitude – developed by means of metaphors and tropes, of which Goodman was highly suspicious39 – is one of the major features of that type of sublimity of which Hepburn takes no count. This type is intertwined with novelty, wonder, and a re-shaped beauty, and it was especially prominent in the early eighteenth century. Its most infl uential representative was Addison, who describes his imaginative experience of the sublime as follows:

a spacious Horison is an Image of Liberty, where the Eye has Room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose it self amidst the Variety of Objects that offer themselves to its Observation. Such wide and undetermined Prospects are as pleasing

Imagination”: Problems of Truth and Illusion’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 56–74, 73, n6. 36 In his later article, Hepburn already acknowledges the aesthetic relevance of Hakewill’s position, cf. Hepburn, ‘Cosmic Fall’, 509. 37 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘George Hakewill: The Virility of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16 (1955), 135–50, 147. 38 Ibid., 150. 39 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Godfrey Goodman: Nature Viliﬁ ed’, The Cambridge Journal, 7 (1954), 424–34, 433. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 31

to the Fancy, as the Speculations of Eternity or Inﬁ nitude are to the Understanding…40

This sublime is far from paralysing astonishment, suspension of the soul’s activity, or any terror to be transformed into elevated relief. Having relied on late eighteenth-century theories, Hepburn prefers to apply a two-phase model, for example, in his ‘Wonder’ he writes: ‘sublimity is essentially concerned with transformation of the merely threatening and daunting into what is aesthetically manageable, even contemplated with joy: and this achieved through the agency of wonder.’41 It is quite a good description of the Burkean and even better for the Kantian sublime, but in Addison’s moral essays, published a few decades before Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, the sublime is rather an experience of freedom and an inexhaustible opportunity which enlarges the soul,42 while the imagination is incapable of grasping ‘the Largeness of a whole View’ in total. Human beings are not able to possess the ‘Kenn of an Angel’. Notably, Addison attributes the latter capacity to Satan in his interpretation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Satan, after having long wandered upon the Surface, or outmost Wall of the Universe, discovers at last a wide Gap in it, which led into the Creation, and is described as the Opening through which the Angels pass to and fro into the lower World, upon their Errands to Mankind. […] He looks down into that vast hollow of the Universe with the Eye, or (as Milton calls it in his ﬁ rst Book) with the Kenn of an Angel. He surveys all the Wonders in this immense Amphitheatre that lie between both the Poles of Heaven, and takes in at one View the whole Round of the Creation.43

40 Addison, The Spectator, III, 541. 41 Hepburn, ’Wonder’, 151. 42 It is true, in a later Spectator essay (No. 565), where Addison reports an astonishing encounter with the immensity of nature during a sunset, moonrise walk, he describes the ‘secret Horror’ and ‘mortifying Thought’ of our possible loss amongst the inﬁ nite number of creatures, but then this Pascalian despair is reconciled by the proper conception of the omnipresent and omniscient ‘Divine Nature’ in the subsequent meditation. Addison, The Spectator, IV, 530. This structure may remind us of the Kantian two-phase model of the sublime, though in Addison’s case the complex experience of the walk into the ‘immensity’ of Nature is followed by a meditation on ‘Divine Nature’. 43 Ibid., III, 146–7. 32 Endre Szécsényi

This intellectual (or ‘rational’) sublime exceeds the range of human mind.44 The angelic ‘View’, however, is not truly ‘aesthetic’ at all, for it is not offered by the imagination of a living, bodily human being,45 but by a kind of intellectual intuition in some pure spirit. Thus Addison’s sublimity (i.e. the ‘great’) in his ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ series (The Spectator, Nos. 411–421), despite its undoubtedly optimistic tone, cannot be subjected to the category of ‘heroic’ as Hepburn critically deems it, when the soul seems to extend successfully to the vast size of its object.46 Eventually, Hakewill’s ‘virility of nature’ seems to echo in Addison’s ‘aesthetic’ examples of nature, either in several Spring scenes – such as his dream of Paradise-garden ‘amidst the Wildness’ of ‘cold, hoary Landskips’ of mountains in his Tatler essay (No. 161) and his vernal views of nature (Tatler, No. 218, Spectator, No. 393, and elsewhere) – or in the quasi-erotic examples of the beautiful, also in his ‘Imagination’ papers, or in his descriptions of the natural sublime where the inexhaustible abundance is stressed. In Hakewill’s Apologie ‘we ﬁ nd constant reference to new birth, growth, and virility […]. Compensation or renewal can be counted upon to follow injurious events.’47 Moreover:

44 Henry Grove too remarks in the last essay of The Spectator: ‘But alas! How narrow is the Prospect even of such a Mind [as Isaac Newton’s]? and how obscure to the Compass that is taken in by the Ken of an Angel; or of a Soul but newly escaped from its imprisonment in the Body!’ Ibid., V, 171. 45 According to Addison, neither the imagination of a poet, nor that of a spectator is capable of grasping this view or range, and thus this rational sublime. Addison is very clear that even the beauties of this Miltonic speech is not of poetic nature, stirring, primarily, ‘Thoughts of Devotion’ but not ‘Sentiments of Grandeur’ in the soul. Ibid., III, 141. Interestingly, Hepburn, in his posthumous paper on the aesthetic experience of space, brieﬂ y returning to the seventeenth century, mentions some poems of John Donne and Book II of Paradise Lost in which space is ‘mediated in the arts, and mainly in literature’. His short commentary on this part of Paradise Lost may suggest that Hepburn reads Milton through Romantic glasses. ‘Milton gives an immensity to his representation of space, space between heaven, earth and hell. The emotional quality of this poetry is very rich: astonishment at the vastness, but modiﬁ ed by knowledge of the tragic events being initiated in the imminent Fall of Man – awe, sublimity and foreboding.’ Hepburn, ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, 279. 46 Hepburn criticizes the different forms of ‘soul-expansion’ as a ‘heroic adequacy of the mind (or imagination) to its objects’ in the conceptions of the sublime for Baillie, Edward Young, David Hume, the pre-critical Kant or Arthur Schopenhauer, and characterizes them as ‘wildly optimistic theories’. Hepburn, ‘The Concept of the Sublime’, 142–3. 47 Hepburn, ’Cosmic Fall’, 508. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 33

If fecundity and growth are emphasised by Hakewill, so equally diversity, as a basic positive value. Where his opponents tended to see diversi- ﬁ ed scenery (e.g., mountain-and-plain) as a declension from an original smoother, ‘perfect’, topography, the diversity itself is seen by Hakewill as intrinsically good. The debate over nature’s alleged decay was thus, in important measure, a contest between alternative criteria of aesthetic value.48

The authors of the two theological or theologico-aesthetic sides represented by Goodman (Senault and Burnet, to whom we can add Dennis and Lord Shaftesbury) and by Hakewill (Sir Francis Bacon, Henry Power, John Ray, Pierre Bayle, Henry More and we can add Addison) elaborated ideas and intellectual means which proved necessary for developing the fi rst theories of the sublime. Moreover, these two seventeenth-century streams fed two main river branches within the sublime tradition: the more contemplative, darker version that saw nature as a cosmic ruin beheld in the ‘terrible joy’ of astonishment, and the more active, adventurous, exploratory kind, associated with freedom and nature’s ever-renewing and inexhaustible features. Addison infl uentially connects this newly discovered and theorized experience not to the understanding but to the activity of imagination, a philosophical category which is also seminal for Hepburn’s thought, whose activity is not only productive but even co-creative. This re-modelled imagination can fi rst be grasped – and exercised and thus refi ned – in the experience of the natural sublime, and only by the polite imagination can we discover and enjoy the sublime (and the novel and the beautiful) in nature and in arts. The modern aesthetic has been autopoietic from the outset. Hepburn remarks that ‘for Goodman, those imaginative “fl ights” we are capable of are, properly interpreted, no more than solemn and chastening reminders of the Paradise we have lost’49 – for Addison, we can add, the now aesthetic fl ights of the imagination are opportunities to regain our lapsed innocence and to fore-taste the joys of afterlife. The paradigmatic example of this experience is the landscape in which the three main sources of the pleasures of the imagination – the great, the novel and the beautiful – can easily combine and intensify each other. I think Hepburn follows Addison’s novel path when he claims that viewing a natural prospect requires a special internal faculty, namely, ‘(polite) imagination’, or, for Hepburn, ‘metaphysical imagination’. This imagination 48 Ibid., 509. 49 Hepburn, ‘Godfrey Goodman: Nature Vilifi ed’, 434. 34 Endre Szécsényi transforms the sensory around us into a unifi ed experience which, at the same time, connects, directly or indirectly, to some metaphysics, that is, it leads us beyond the physical or everyday reality without ever transcending the sensory components, which remain indispensable for the ‘landscape-experience’, and are not merely occasions for an elevated spiritual experience.50 Notably, this landscape-experience is a modern invention of Addison, Alexander Pope and their contemporaries. It is already an ‘aesthetic’ experience, that is, it is not a Platonic, Neo-Platonic or Stoic meditation, nor a Protestant occasional meditation cued by some particular physical or material phenomenon, to be left behind as soon as it serves its purpose.51 It seems to me that with the adjective ‘metaphysical’ Hepburn tried preserving or regaining those spiritual connotations of imagination which were still evident for Addison and many of his contemporaries.

3 A ‘delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’

Though Hepburn does not discuss Dennis at all amongst Addison’s contemporaries, his version of the (natural) sublime is highly infl uential and intriguing. 50 ‘[Metaphysical imagination is] an element of interpretation that helps to determine the overall experience of a scene in nature. It will be construed as a “seeing as…” or “interpreting as…” that has metaphysical character, in the sense of relevance to the whole of experience and not only to what is experienced at the present moment. Metaphysical imagination connects with, looks to, the “spelled out” systematic metaphysical theorising which is its support and ultimate justifi cation. But also it is no less an element of the concrete present landscape-experience: it is fused with the sensory components, not a meditation aroused by these.’ Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’ in Sarah Johnson (ed.), Landscapes (Cambridge, 2010), 1–14, 2. Likewise, in the context of the place of values, referring to Karl Jaspers’s ‘immanent transcendence’, Hepburn writes that the values ‘are essentially the result of a cooperation of man and non-human nature’, and by the recognition of ‘the interdependence of man and his natural environment’ we can realize that ‘There is no wholly-other paradise from which we are excluded; the only transcendence that can be real to us is an “immanent” one.’ Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’ in idem ‘Wonder’, 155–85, 181–2. 51 Emily Brady notes that this Hepburnian remark ‘fused with the sensory components’ is a ‘key point for environmental aesthetics, which has wholeheartedly embraced the need to develop theories that value nature on its own terms, in contrast to historical views such as the picturesque, which valued nature through the lens of human artifi ce.’ Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge, 2013), 192, a volume dedicated to the memory of Ronald W. Hepburn. Arguably, not only ‘environmental aesthetics’ but modern aesthetics in general began with this new type of fusion. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 35

Clearly distinguished from the traditional joy of meditation, its sublime transport is explicitly more than ‘a delight that is consistent with Reason, a delight that creates or improves Meditation’.52 Dennis was amongst the early Grand Tour travellers who passed through the Alps and/or the Pyrenees. His letters describing his extraordinary experiences ‘mingled with horrours, and sometimes almost with despair’ in his Alpine tour were published in 1693.53 This journal of 1688 (as I have mentioned above) would greatly inﬂ uence Addison and as well as Shaftesbury’s famous hymn to the Nature-Deity in his Moralists.54 Dennis describes the mountain prospects as ‘altogether new and amazing’, producing in him ‘different motions’, like ‘a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time that I was inﬁ nitely, [sic] pleas’d I trembled.’55 Without mentioning his name, he agrees with Burnet that:

these Mountains were not a Creation, but form’d by universal Destruction, when the Arch with a mighty ﬂ aw dissolv’d and fell into the vast Abyss […], then are these Ruines of the old World the greatest wonders of the New. For they are not only vast, but horrid, hideous, ghastly Ruins. […] [Later we descended] thro the very Bowels as it were of the Mountain, for we seem’d to be enclos’d on all sides: What an astonishing Prospect was there? Ruins upon Ruins in monstrous Heaps,

52 John Dennis, Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (London, 1693), 138. This distinction is highly signifi cant, even if Barnouw convincingly argues that from the perspective of Dennis’s oeuvre as literary critic, this opposition was later overthrown. In his major critical writings, ‘the close connection between transport and meditation, between passion and insight […] in his conception of “enthusiastic passion”’ is crucial. Although Barnouw too acknowledges that it is already ‘a different idea of the sublime […] drawn from the roots of poetry.’ Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘The Morality of the Sublime to John Dennis’, Comparative Literature, 35 (1983), 21–42, 27. 53 According to Thorpe, this is already the second edition, as the fi rst came to light in the previous year. Cf. Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, ‘Two Augustans Cross the Alps: Dennis and Addison on Mountain Scenery’, Studies in Philology, 32 (1935), 463–82, 464, n5. Nevertheless, I could fi nd no hint of an earlier edition in the 1693 volume I consulted. 54 When we fl y over the African deserts by means of imagination, Theocles (Shaftesbury’s mouthpiece) notes that ‘All ghastly and hideous as they appear, they want not their peculiar beauties. The wildness pleases.’ Then, we see the travellers trembling on the brink of a high mountain-path. They ‘hear the hollow sound of torrents underneath and see the ruin of the impending rock, with falling trees which hang with their roots upwards’, etc. They are contemplating ‘the incessant changes of this earth’s surface’, ‘while the apparent spoil and irreparable breaches of the wasted mountain show them the world itself only as a noble ruin’. Shaftesbury, ‘The Moralists’, 315–6. 55 Dennis, Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, 133–4. 36 Endre Szécsényi

and Heaven and Earth confounded. The uncouth Rocks that were above us, Rocks that were void of all form, but what they had receiv’d from Ruine; the frightful view of the Precipices, and the foaming Waters that threw themselves headlong down them, made all such a Consort up for the Eye, as that sort of Musick does for the Ear, in which Horrour can be joyn’d with Harmony. I am afraid you will think that I have said too much. Yet if you had but seen what I have done, you would surely think that I have said too little.56

Already Clarence DeWitt Thorpe detected the peculiarity of Dennis’s sublimity: ‘There is […] quite defi nitely no indication of the later Wordsworthian feeling of kinship and of spiritual communion of nature.’57 – which feeling as a kind of nature mysticism became so signifi cant for Hepburn, too. Dennis’s modern sublime experience has to do with destruction – the potential personal destruction of the spectator on the brink of a chasm and the actual cosmic destruction of the Fall – and devastating power, and not with creation, design and harmony. Elsewhere Dennis claims that, indeed, the ‘Universe is regular in all its Parts, and it is to that exact Regularity that it owes its admirable Beauty. The Microcosm owes the Beauty and Health both of its Body and Soul to Order […]. Man was created […] regular, and as long as he remain’d so, continu’d happy’, and also that the main goal of the noblest art, poetry, is ‘to restore the Decays that happen’d to human Nature by the Fall’.58 All this, however, concerns the world of perfect creation, its restoration and the Neo-Classical beauty of the original, and it has nothing to do with the sublimity in nature, with its complex, mixed feeling, such as his own ‘delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’, Burnet’s ‘pleasing kind of stupor and admiration’, or 56 Ibid., 139–40, my emphases – E. Sz. 57 Thorpe, ‘Two Augustans Cross the Alps: Dennis and Addison on Mountain Scenery’, 468. This remark is interesting even if Thorpe eventually suggests that ‘in certain respects [Dennis’s] experience is probably not so different from Woodsworth’s own’, and fi nally ‘the whole experience led to meditation – refl ections upon creation and re-creation.’ Ibid., 466. Later, Nicolson interprets Dennis’ letters and puts them in the context of Shaftesbury’s and Addison’s conceptions of natural sublimity. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 277ff. At the same time, she suggests that to ‘Shaftesbury the Sublime is the highest Beauty’. Ibid., 322. However, the compatibility of Neo-Platonic rationality and the transparency of beauty with the emerging sublime experience (described by Dennis) is quite problematic. There is a complicated and unrefl ected duality between Dennis the traveller and aesthetic spectator of natural scenes and Dennis the literary critic and philosopher of culture. 58 John Dennis, ‘The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry’ in Edward Niles Hooker (ed.), The Critical Works of John Dennis, vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1939), 325–73, 335–6. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 37

Addison’s ‘agreeable kind of horror’ in the view of mountains around Lake Geneva.59 The newly discovered sublime of mountains, oceans, deserts, vast woods and the like is not a special case of the original beauty of Creation. We are in the presence of something immensely powerful and incomprehensible, the result of a cosmic event which happened ages after the Creation, something in which ‘Heaven and Earth confounded’, as Dennis wrote aptly. Its mixed nature cannot be transcended, its delight or joy does not come from some ultimately rational reconciliation. It is never a tranquillity, not even a balance, but always some vibrant and dynamically changing astonishment. Some strangeness or paradox always remains, either in the darker versions of the sublime like Dennis’s, or in the happier and more liberated versions like Addison’s. Moreover, it is not even the case that these rude and immense aspects of nature would constitute only a dark background for the greater brightness of the foreground beauty. Instead, during the sublime experience, an utmost incompatibility with nature can be felt, the unamendable break of the ancient harmony between the microcosm and the macrocosm – a loss that is not only privation, but an inexhaustible source of astonishment and inspiration.60 In a sense, we can see deeper and can discover amazing new layers by surveying a ruin than by contemplating its original in perfect completion. It is customary to interpret Dennis’s sublime, mingled with terror, as ‘incompatible with beauty and reason’ of the Neo-Classicist kind, and to evaluate his contribution as preparing ‘the way for the aesthetic opposition between the sublime and the beautiful that will be fundamental to Burke’s and Kant’s accounts.’61 Yet this incompatibility has a religious-devotional signiﬁ cance,

59 Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c. In the Years 1701, 1702, 1703 (London, 1767), 261. 60 Tellingly, even Shaftesbury, heir of the Cambridge Platonists, seems aware of the paradoxical experience of the sublime and its signifi cance. In his Moralists, as the last in his series of unsociable natural places, he describes a sylvan prospect where ‘horror seizes’ the spectators: ‘Here space astonishes. Silence itself seems pregnant while an unknown force works on the mind and dubious objects move the wakeful sense. […] Even we ourselves, who in plain characters may read divinity from so many bright parts of earth, choose rather these obscurer places to spell out that mysterious being, which to our weak eyes appears at best under a veil of cloud.’ Shaftesbury, ‘The Moralists’, 316. This gloomy place remains beyond the scope of the bright intellect, meanwhile it irresistibly attracts, makes us feel the presence of that ‘mysterious being’ who is evidently not the ‘forming form’, nor the ‘sovereign beauty’ manifest in ‘the bright parts of earth’. Shaftesbury here implicitly acknowledges the separate realm and signifi cance of another theologico-aesthetics, that is, the claims of modern aesthetics of the sublime. 61 Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, 139. 38 Endre Szécsényi too. As Barnouw rightly claims, Dennis ‘is explicitly antagonistic to deism and natural religion, and the deity fi gured forth in nature for man’s moral benefi t is not the benign and regular god of beauty and harmony so much as the angry, or better, unfathomable god suggested by oceans and mountains.’ In his sublime mountain experience, there is a conspicuous ‘predominance of the god of power and will, hidden or half-revealed in nature, over the divine rationality expressed in the regularity of nature’.62 Linking Dennis to the British tradition from William Ockham through Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes to Milton and William Blake in which there has always been a resistance to natural religion and rational theology, Barnouw fi nds: the ‘religious, poetic, and philosophical-psychological strands of this anti-rationalist tradition intertwine in Dennis.’ Moreover, the ‘intense passion of the sublime does not involve any withdrawal from sense experience for Dennis; rather, it emphasizes the continuity with sense, the positive interdependence of inner and outer.’63 These features together show Dennis’s sublime as the most radically new ‘aesthetic’ quality of nature, whose experience reveals not a benevolent and wise, but a powerful and mysterious (though not mystical) divine being. Hepburn criticizes several eighteenth-century theories of the sublime as mere psychological efforts to make ‘the threatening, menacingly huge external world’ safe, by engulfi ng or internalizing it in fantasy. He adds that even ‘for Kant the real locus of supreme value lies in the subject-self, not in any ostensible object beyond it’, the emphases on human rationality and moral dignity in the experience of the natural sublime eventually degrade nature, and ‘our “superiority” over nature’ triumphs. ‘The resurgent exhilarating moment, the counterweight, may be too effective, losing the note of natural piety, even of respect for the natural world, snapping the tension essential to the continua- tion of a sense of the sublime.’64 If he had considered Dennis’s sublimity – or

62 Barnouw, ‘The Morality of the Sublime to John Dennis’, 29. 63 Ibid. While others, like the Cambridge Platonists and, with the exception of some special loci, Shaftesbury ‘charged that to stress God’s will and power at the expense of his goodness and justice is tantamount to making God the author of evil […]. [Ralph Cudworth] believed Ockham to have been responsible for this unchristian view of God’. Sarah Hutton, British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2015), 143. 64 Hepburn, ‘The Concept of the Sublime’, 143–5. Thus, it seems, ‘Kant has presented us with an “angelic self ”, coping with infi nites and absolutes’, as Hepburn suggests it, referring also to Goethe’s, Schiller’s and Schopenhauer’s Kantian accounts of the sublime. Ibid., 145. I have argued above, relying on the passage from Addison’s commentary on the Paradise Lost, that the rational ‘sublime’ of Satan’s ‘angelic kenn’ cannot be called ‘aesthetic’ at all, in the modern sense of the word. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 39 even Addison’s more seriously –, he could have found an early, infl uential model of sublime experience that did not see nature as essentially degraded, That theory could be interpreted as involving an ‘other-regarding’ experience that, further, provided a new kind of aesthetic piety, too. Moreover, Burnet’s, Dennis’s or Addison’s natural sublime cannot appropriately be described as the succession or oscillation of two distinct phases, i.e. a daunting versus an exhilarating moment, which dualistic structure or process is presented as a more or less general scheme of the sublime in Hepburn’s historic survey, both in religious and in nontheistic accounts of the sublime.65 The non-rational aspect of the sublime and its connotations of power and will also refer to a tradition outside the philosophical subjects in Hepburn’s historical commentaries. Yet this non-rational sublime was highly signifi cant for the emerging modern aesthetic of both nature and art, or the social- cultural. The proto-aesthetic language of the je-ne-sais-quoi (essentially, that of délicatesse) was elaborated in the second half of the seventeenth century, when this popular catch-phrase became a quasi-philosophical term, most famously in the fi fth dialogue of Dominique Bouhours’s Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), before falling into oblivion in the mid-eighteenth century, after Baron de Montesquieu’s posthumous Encyclopaedia article on taste. Yet its major features survived, for example, in the general character of aesthetic experience or in Kant’s concept of the ‘aesthetic idea’ as the production of the genial artist. We cannot, of course, defi ne the je-ne-sais-quoi, the term expressing the very impossibility of conceptual defi nability. This is a kind of a secret, elusive charm which seizes us emotionally, or even subjugates us, that is, our will. Its meaning is rich and inexhaustible; but whose cause is unknowable for us. The je-ne-sais-quoi seems to be a prism through which the beams of the great tradition of beauty – order, design, unity, harmony, symmetry, natural ratios, light and transparency, etc. – converged into the triadic form of the sublime, the beautiful and the novel (in Addison’s division). Consequently, these new, now aesthetic, categories carry the heritage of the je-ne-sais-quoi. It is not therefore surprising to fi nd suggestions in Hepburn’s writings that he too draws from this tradition. For example, in his article ‘From World to God’, he speaks about the analogy between ‘numinous experience and some sorts of aesthetic experience, types of sublimity’,66 and though he considers this analogy as far from unproblematic, his conclusion is interesting:

65 Cf. ibid., 147ff. 66 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘From World to God’, Mind, 72 (1963), 40–50, 49. 40 Endre Szécsényi

I f the situation were not ambiguous, if God were incontrovertibly revealed, then our belief would be constrained, our allegiance forced, and no place would be left for free and responsible decision whether to walk in God’s ways and to entrust oneself to him in faith. Divine elusiveness is a necessary condition of our being able to enter upon properly personal relations with God.67

This ‘divine elusiveness’ seems to show the legacy of the je-ne-sais-quoi tradition in its irresistible effects on human will and in its potential to establish a (new) personal relationship with God, yet still preserving the freedom of will of the subject-self. In his Sublime Poussin, Louis Marin argues that ‘the sublime [of the late seventeenth century] stems from the “je ne sais quoi”, but the “je ne sais quoi” cannot be reduced to the sublime. […] The sublime is a “je ne sais quoi” to the very extent that it appears difﬁ cult, if not impossible, to produce or construct a ‘concept’ of the sublime’.68 Then he adds: ‘A s Boileau writes, [the je-ne-sais-quoi] is not properly “something that is proved and demonstrated but something that makes itself felt.”’69 What I would like to suggest with this approach to the sublime through the je-ne-sais-quoi, which displays it as the ‘presentation of the unrepresentability’ and ‘the pathos of all the passions’, as Marin puts it, is that it was originally a mysterious, meaningful experience, different from Kant’s conception or Rudolf Otto’s Kantian interpretation, which had a great impact on Hepburn’s thought. In his Das Heilige (1917),

67 Ibid., 50. 68 Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, 1999), 210. According to Cronk, however, the case is the other way around, ‘Boileau’s concept of le sublime embraces the ineffability of Bouhours’s je ne sais quoi’. Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime. French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, Va., 2002), 109. Be that as it may, undoubtedly there was a strong connection between the two concepts (Boileau also used the phrase je-ne-sais-quoi in the Preface to his Longinus translation), and I agree with Cronk that both concepts were ‘devised or “invented” in the 1670s’, partly as a response to a certain critical dilemma in Neo-Classicism, as he says, but partly as a response to some metaphysical claims. This is why I disagree with Doran’s view that ‘the je-ne-sais-quoi has nothing whatsoever to do with elevation or grandeur of spirit, an essential element of sublimity […], and it has no necessary relation to the idea of transcendence.’ Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, 106. If we look at Gracián’s despejo and Bouhours’s remarks on the divine grace at the end of the ﬁ fth dialogue on the je-ne-sais-quoi of his Entretiens, or at the long tradition of gustus spiritualis in the theology of divine senses from Origen onwards, we cannot consider the je-ne-sais-quoi as a merely secular, worldly or social concept. 69 Marin, Sublime Poussin, 211. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 41

Otto too speaks about the analogy between the sublime and the numinous, and claims that the concept of the sublime ‘remains [always] unexplicated; it has in it something mysterious, and in this it is like that of “the numinous”’:

[Moreover] the sublime exhibits the same peculiar dual character as the numinous; it is at once daunting, and yet again singularly attracting, in its impress upon the mind. It humbles and at the same time exalts us, circumscribes and extends us beyond ourselves, on the one hand releas- ing in us a feeling analogous to fear, and on the other rejoicing us.70

In the case of the sublime je-ne-sais-quoi, however, we do not necessarily encounter the duality of successive or oscillating extremes – it is more characteristic in Hepburn’s interpretation. Even when something threatening appears in the je-ne-sais-quoi sublime experience, as in Bouhours’s fi rst dialogue of Entretiens, where the subject is the always ‘marvellous’ sea with its ‘immense extension of water’ and infi nite variety of its appearances, the two aspects are mixed, folded down, as it were, into one, rather than moving or fl uctuating from one state to the other. Besides the incomparable ‘I-know-not-what of surprise and strangeness [je ne sais quoi de si surprenant & de si étrange]’ in its ever-changing novelty and the calm and tranquil beauty of its vast and smooth surface, we also read of the stormy sea, with its terrible noise, fury and confusion inspiring ‘an I-know-not-what kind of horror accompanied with pleasure, and offer[ing] a spectacle which is equally terrible and pleasant [tout cela inspire je ne sais quelle horrerur accompagnée de plaisir, & fait un spectacle également terrible & agréable]’.71 Its complex and strong emotion may remind us of Dennis’s mountain experience, yet it also seems a peculiar and strong but single feeling, in which the ‘terrible’ and the ‘pleasant’ are simultaneous and equal. There is no indication of any oscillation or temporal succession between them. The ‘peculiar dual character’ in the je-ne-sais-quoi sublime, as opposed to Hepburn’s mostly Kantian sublime, is only apparent, not real. It stems from the insuffi ciency of our language to express this experience. These phrases demonstrate, rather, that our language is unable to present, only to represent. In other words, they show an inevitable ambiguity of expression, but not the structure of the experience of the sublime. This is why Dennis also ends his mountain experience

70 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford, 1936), 43. 71 Dominique Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, eds Bernard Beugnot & Gilles Declercq (Paris, 2003), 57. 42 Endre Szécsényi account with reﬂ ections on the inadequacy of linguistic expression to this peculiar experience.

4 Wonderous sublime

In his inaugural lecture, Hepburn outlines three fi elds of wonder: there is ‘general’, philosophical wonder, the fundamental stimulus of philosophy and science (from Plato and Aristotle to Gabriel Marcel); he next cites ‘a religiously toned wonder’, a kind of substitute of the mystical and the numinous, still available to those who reject the ‘traditional background of metaphysical beliefs’ (this religious wonder can be directed to either particular things, events in nature, or to the ‘sheer existence of a world at all’); the third is ‘the aesthetic fi eld’, where wonder is the central concept of Christian, Platonic or Romantic artists – it is also dominant ‘in theories of the sublime’.72 Having acknowledged the wide range of diverse opinions concerning the objects of wonder and the proper attitude to it, Hepburn affi rmed that his own conception combines these three: ‘Undeniably wonder can stimulate a person to enquiry […], equally undeniably, wonder can also be highly valued as a form of human experience, overlapping with both the aesthetic and the religious’.73 His main concern is to fi nd some inexhaustibility for this wonder, that is, he wants to save it from the vulnerability of being accustomed or being known. In his interpretation, therefore, wonder cannot appear as a relative or fl eeting experience: ‘many of us are no more happy with the thought of the universal displaceability (even if only in principle) of wonder’.74 Here he refers to Kant’s distinction between Verwunderung and Bewunderung, that is, between ephemeral astonishment and steady wonderment, at §29 of the third Critique’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, and to the oft-cited passage from the conclusion of the second Critique, about the ‘Bewunderung und Ehrfrucht’ raised from ‘the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’75 Then, relying on Kant, again, and Martin Heidegger, he develops the distinction between curiosity and wonder (or marvelling at, thaumazein76), saying that ‘curiosity-knowledge is seen as a kind of possession […]. Wonder

72 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 131. 73 Ibid., 132. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 133. 76 Cf. Plato, Theaetetus, 155cd. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 43 does not see its objects possessively: they remain “other” and unmastered. Wonder does dwell in its objects with rapt attentiveness.’77 In this closing section, having argued that intersections between the aesthetic and the religious have been inherent and inseparable elements of modern aesthetic experience from the outset, I would like briefl y to show that it is not the case that wonder merely has an aesthetic aspect (among others), as Hepburn suggests, but rather that wonder, in Hepburn’s sense, which I characterize as the ‘wonderous sublime’, is a genuinely aesthetic or aesthetic- religious phenomenon.78 That is, the general conception of wonder cannot rightly be applied (and specifi ed) to the aesthetic fi eld, because this wonder itself originated as an aesthetic (or aesthetic-religious) invention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, creating a new admiration before the sensible, visible world, before ‘The Grand Theatre of the Universe’.79 Simultaneously, it was considered as a spiritual look: the regard of the fi rst

77 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 134. 78 It is telling that the distinction between Verwunderung and Bewunderung, which to Hepburn seems so enlightening, appears in an eminently aesthetic context of the third Critique. Moreover, Sherry rightly calls our attention also to Kant’s pre-critical Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764) and claims that ‘Kant associates wonder especially with the sublime: to be more specifi c, he says that the “noble sublime” arouses wonder, the “terrifying sublime” dread or melancholy, and the “splendid sublime” has a “beauty completely pervading a sublime plan”.’ Patrick Sherry, ‘The Varieties of Wonder’, Philosophical Investigations, 36 (2013), 340–54, 341. 79 This is the title chapter two of Gracián’s allegorical novel, El Criticón, which I suggest is one of the main sources for Addison’s metaphor of theatrum mundi: ‘the whole Universe is a kind of Theatre fi lled with Objects that either raise in us Pleasure, Amusement or Admiration.’ Addison, The Spectator, III, 453. Gracián’s hero, Andrenio, who has lived in a cave before, now seeing the created world for the fi rst time in proto-aesthetic wonder (explicitly linked to the privilege of Adam) may remind us of Addison’s spectator of ‘polite imagination’ and his or her ‘innocent pleasures’. Moreover, there is an interesting prototype of Andrenio’s cave and his fi rst reactions to the world outside the cave in his essay No. 465, in which Addison referred to Aristotle’s lost treatise via Cicero’s De natura deorum: ‘should a Man live under Ground, and there converse with Works of Art and Mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open Day, and see the several Glories of the Heav’n and Earth, he would immediately pronounce them the Works of such a Being as we defi ne God to be.’ Addison, The Spectator, IV, 144. When men from beneath the earth would fi rst see ‘the earth and the seas and the sky’, they would realize ‘the size and beauty’ of these natural prospects, and (mostly) they would come to know their fi xed eternal order as the clear proof of the existence of gods, cf. Cicero, De natura deorum; Academica, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 215. There is a signifi cant difference, however, between this sober and basically intellectual reaction which can establish a natural theology and Andrenio’s astonishment and emotional-instinctive responses which result in a proto-aesthetic attunement to the created world. 44 Endre Szécsényi man. This wonder comes from – or is in a sense identical with – that complex experience which was characterized in the early eighteenth century as sublime (great) or novel (uncommon), and its attraction owes a lot to the mysterious je-ne-sais-quoi. Hepburn was very close to grasping it in his early scholarly publications, especially in his refl ections on the seventeenth-century tradition of the virility (fecundity, variety) of nature (Hakewill, Bacon, Ray, More, et al.). He dropped this line, however, picking up the thread only with Kant and Schiller in the late eighteenth century, when the paradigmatic model of the aesthetic was built on the artistic genius and moral signifi cance of aesthetic education and no longer on nature and its aesthetic-spiritual experience. Hepburn’s oft- cited Romantic authors already enjoyed a re-spiritualized nature by utilizing the Kantian language. In other words, when Hepburn begins to refl ect on the neglected beauty of nature in contemporary aesthetic theories in the 1960s, he too does it through the prism of the philosophy of art that emerged in the late eighteenth century onwards, instead of returning to his seventeenth-century theologico-aesthetic topics of the 1950s. Later, in 1998, he writes:

If we are […] concerned to identify an aesthetic attitude to nature which is indeed directly and unqualiﬁ edly centred upon nature itself and does not smuggle in the human subject so as to mirror, or metaphysically (or mythologically) transﬁ gure him, then, I think, by far the most likely candidate is wonder.80

This is very like the ‘wonderous sublime’ – the astonishingly great, the uncommon and the mysteriously alluring beautiful – as emerged in the late seventeenth century. In his review of Philip Fisher’s Wonder,81 Hepburn remarks that ‘Fisher’s dominant concept of wonder […] is dynamic: it is the glad, exhilarating sense of insight newly attained, or of being on that enlivening “horizon” between the overfamiliar and the altogether ungraspable. It is to be in motion – in the exploration of a painting or a phenomenon of nature.’82 But Hepburn wants to add other modes of wonder to this ‘vivid description’ – ‘less dynamic, and more contemplative’ ones, ‘whether appreciatively attentive to nature’s colours,

80 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 277. 81 Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 82 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Review of Philip Fisher’s Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2000), 282–5, 284. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 45 textures, forms, familiar as they are, yet renewably evocative of wonder; or to the mysterious fact of the sheer existence of a world, a cosmos, at all’ which ‘from time to time stun some of us with wonder’, while it does not offer any new metaphysical insight.83 If I wanted to apply Hepburn’s distinction to the period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, I could say that his criticism is an aesthetic, or more exactly a theologico-aesthetic one, because he seems to refer to the substantive meaning of novelty or wonder which was elaborated already by Addison, Richard Steele and Henry Grove, not only to the dynamic-relative meaning mostly exemplifi ed in scientifi c discoveries. At the same, Hepburn’s dynamic–contemplative distinction is a little bit misleading. For while the delight prominent in scientifi c discovery could be conceived as already included in aesthetic experience by Addison, George Berkeley and Francis Hutcheson and his followers, it was also commonplace that the providential aim of the pleasure of novelty is the scientifi c openness to the world. More importantly, Addison somehow appropriates even to thaumazein in the pleasures of the imagination, that is, in the aesthetic experience which is not less dynamic than scientifi c discovery. The paradigmatic models of the modern aesthetic experience always involved some kind of motion: exercise, walking, expatiation in space and time, experimenting. The ‘gentle exercise’ of the imagination can be dynamic and contemplative simultaneously. David B. Morris rightly emphasizes discussing The Spectator (No. 489 on how imagination is affected by ‘the Sea or Ocean’: there Addison ‘is comparing two ways of knowing the Deity: through rational analysis and imaginative perception.’84 Indeed, examining other essays, such as No. 393, which I have discussed above, it may seem imagination or the active mental disposition of cheerfulness can be still more signifi cant – spiritually and pragmatically – than understanding. Hepburn sharply, and I think rightly, refuses Fisher’s rather schematic and rigid dichotomy between the pleasing wonder of philosophy and the fearful sublime of religion: ‘sublimity can itself involve delighter wondering astonishment […]. And a plausible account of religious development can make quite central the superseding of fear by awe and love’.85 I would add to his criticism that vividness and dynamism are perfectly compatible with the more contemplative features of this experience.

83 Ibid. 84 David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth- Century England (Lexington, Ky., 1972), 137. 85 Hepburn, ‘Review of Philip Fisher’s Wonder’, 284. 46 Endre Szécsényi

In the newly emergent experience of aesthetics in the early eighteenth century, people could foretaste the heavenly bliss of future life and regain something of the original enjoyments of the fresh creation. The ancient charms of the created world could be felt again as ‘innocent pleasures’. In one of the last and most beautiful essays of The Spectator, Grove, the nonconform- ist minister and theologian, inspired by Addison’s ‘Imagination’ series, writes about the ‘Force of Novelty’, saying that this love in human beings has been adapted to our present (metaphysical) state as a kind of insatiable appetite (this would be the ‘superﬁ cial’ level86 for Hepburn). Its preﬁ guration, however, is that perpetual employment with which ‘the Blessed’ search into nature, and:

to Eternity advance into the fathomless Depths of the Divine Perfections. […] After an Acquaintance of many thousand Years with the Works of God, the Beauty and Magnifi cence of the Creation fi lls them with the same pleasing Wonder and profound Awe, which Adam felt himself seized with as he fi rst opened his Eyes upon this glorious Scene…87

Only from this ‘serious’ level we can appreciate rightly the ‘force of novelty’, that is, the mysterious charm of wonder. Sherry is right: ‘Ronald Hepburn suggests that wonder goes with humility, compassion and gentleness, and contrasts it with dread or a sardonic attitude.’88 Which means, I suggest, that this Hepburnian wonder owes a lot to pre-Kantian theologico-aesthetic ideas. Finally, I would like to offer an – artistic – example to illuminate an aspect of the experience of the wonder – of the wonderous sublime – which is available to us, and I hope that this example would not be against Hepburn’s taste. Nowadays, if a celebrated concert pianist recites, say, Ludwig van Beethoven’s

86 Cf. ‘Occasions of wonder can, I think, be ranked on a scale from superfi cial to serious: the superfi cial depending simplistically upon the sudden and unexpected – quickly worn out; and the more serious presenting the familiar itself in renewably new lights and perspectives, and setting it against as background of mystery, from which it (and we ourselves) are perceived as emerging.’ Hepburn, ‘Review of Philip Fisher’s Wonder’, 284. 87 Addison, The Spectator, V, 140. Tellingly, this spiritual connotation completely disappears from Kant’s famous lines on the ‘ever new and increasing admiration’: ‘Two things fi ll the mind with ever new and increasing admiration [Bewunderung] and awe [Erfucht], the oftener and more steadily we refl ect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1956), 166. 88 Sherry, ‘The Varieties of Wonder’, 348; cf. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 144–6. ‘Pleasing Wonder and profound Awe’: On the Sublime 47

Für Elise as an encore, it is almost inevitable that the audience begins to laugh on ﬁ rst recognizing the tune, yet, having quickly realized that the pianist is not joking, they will then be able to listen to the performance in deep and astonished silence inasmuch as they have a great pianist capable of rendering even this ‘worn-out’ piece as newly born, to wonder at it, and to make the audience wonder at it too.89 He or she can convey this now hackneyed piece with vitality and spirit – as the air (pneuma) was able to enter the ‘pores’ of ‘the mighty mass’, ‘impregnating the whole’ in Shaftesbury’s long declama- tion to the Nature-Deity: ‘both the sun and air conspiring, so animate this mother earth that, though ever breeding, her vigour is as great, her beauty as fresh and her looks as charming as if she newly came out of the forming hands of her creator.’90 This spiritual-aesthetic interpretation of wonder was elaborated in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries. Such wonder is not the surprise of the novel; rather it is the ever-renewal of the deeply familiar, the ‘soul of sweet delight’, or – as Hepburn writes in his article ‘Aesthetic and Religious’ – the disturbing and provoking power that can present ‘familiar objects and scenes in a fresh, wonder-evoking light, and make us feel very much less at home or at ease with any of them.’91 To recall Steele’s wise observation: ‘There is no life, but cheerful life’.92 Both versions are inherently aesthetic in the modern sense of the word, and both bring the wonder of cheerful life: what we should ‘taste and see’ until our last moments.93

University of Aberdeen and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University

89 This is also the case with other talented musicians, actors and actresses, dancers, etc. who interpret well-known, classical pieces in concert halls, theatres, opera-houses and art halls worldwide. 90 Lord Shaftesbury, ‘The Moralists’, 311. 91 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), 96–112, 110. 92 Addison, The Spectator, II, 65. 93 I am grateful to Peter Cheyne for improving the readability by ﬁ nessing the language of this paper and for his lucid comments. Wonder Revisited

Isis Brook

This chapter begins with some basic defi nitions of wonder. These will prompt the main question that I want to address: can an experience of wonder be revisited, and not just in memory – can the same phenomenon rekindle an experience of wonder? I will look at four ways this could be possible. Throughout this paper I will draw on Ronald W. Hepburn’s work. His seminal essay ‘Wonder’1 of course, but also papers where wonder is an important aspect of, for example, the metaphysical imagination.2 Also, my own writing on aesthetics has been infl uenced by Hepburn’s skilful use of examples, although I would not claim to come up with such evocative pictures as his. The sense that to talk of aesthetics is to talk of aesthetic experiences, pertinently chosen and richly described, is an aspect of Hepburn’s work that contributes a great deal to the fi eld.

1 Deﬁ nitions of wonder

What is meant by the term ‘wonder’? Do just take a moment to dwell on your own experience. There is much to be gained by simply recalling an experience of your own that seemed to be one of wonder. What prompted it? What did it feel like? What followed on from it? The Oxford English Reference Dictionary deﬁ nes wonder thus: ‘1 an emotion excited by what is unexpected, unfamiliar or inexplicable, esp. surprise mingled with admiration or curiosity etc. 2 a strange or remarkable person, thing, speci- men, event, etc. 3 (attrib.) having marvellous or amazing properties, etc. (a wonder drug). 4 a surprising thing (it is a wonder you were not hurt)’.3 It also gives ‘wonder-

1 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 131–54. 2 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204. 3 Oxford English Reference Dictionary (Oxford, 1996), 1663. Wonder Revisited 49 struck – reduced to silence by wonder’. The latter perhaps most clearly links wonder to ‘awe’ which itself is defi ned as ‘reverential fear or wonder’, with ‘awe-inspiring’ as ‘causing awe or wonder, amazing, magnifi cent’. From these basic defi nitions it would seem that surprise, curiosity and the unexpected are part of what is usually meant by ‘wonder’. This would suggest that once a phenomenon is no longer a surprise or is familiar it must lose its wonder inducing power. If we look to older formulations and uses, this sense is reinforced. René Descartes points to wonder as a ‘surprise of the soul’, and in his description of the passions outlines wonder in this way: ‘Whenever the fi rst encounter with an object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we knew before or even what we had supposed it to be, we are caused to wonder at it and are astonished [étonnés] at it.’4 For Baruch Spinoza the opposite seems to apply; where wonder is a state in which the mind is incapable of making connections and is thus not being mind-like at all.5 This would cast wonder as a defective, or at least sub-optimal, mental state. Hepburn’s essay ‘Wonder’ touches on historical fi gures and their interpretations, such as Adam Smith seeing wonder as something to be eliminated by extending our understanding.6 Also, and this is much more helpful for my thesis, he discusses Immanuel Kant’s distinction between Verwunderung, a kind of astonishment at some novelty, and Bewunderung, ‘an astonishment which does not cease when the novelty wears off ’.7 His dismissal of pure novelty as an unworthy aspect of wonder brings Hepburn to Martin Heidegger’s distinction between real wonder and curiosity; the latter jumps from one novelty to another and wants to know in order to be known. Hepburn agrees that real wonder ‘does dwell in its objects with rapt attentiveness’.8 That essay goes on to look at the conditions for wonder, but for Hepburn’s own defi nition of the state I turn to his 1998 paper ‘Nature Humanized: Nature Respected’ where he says:

4 René Descartes, Passions of the Soul, quoted by Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 45. 5 Cf. Benedictus Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, referred to by Fisher, Wonder, 46. 6 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 132. 7 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1952), 125 (§29). 8 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 134. 50 Isis Brook

Although it is elusive to analysis, wonder is an utterly familiar, simple response, seeming surely neither to presuppose nor to generate chal- lengeable theory. In its aesthetic mode, it is related to, but not identical with, surprise, astonishment. It is an appreciative-contemplative delight in its object. It is self-rewarding and self-perpetuating: a glad and serene inner celebrating of the actuality of these items, those processes of nature.9

Here we see Bewunderung and Heidegger’s ‘dwelling’ in an interpretation of wonder that is rich and does not overplay the surprise element. To bring us up to date I want to give one more characterisation from a 2015 book of popular nature writing (it also proposes an initial answer to my question). This is from Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm: ‘I would say wonder is a sort of astonished cherishing or veneration, if you like, often involving an element of mystery, or at least, of missing knowledge, but not dependent upon it; for true wonder remains when the mystery is no more, or when the missing knowledge is supplied.’10 For McCarthy it seems the mark of true wonder is that it resists erosion by knowledge. He also introduces to these various characterisations the term ‘cherishing’ which does seem lacking in those that emphasise surprise, but is implied in so much of Hepburn’s treatment of the subject.

2 The perceived problem of revisiting wonder

The problem of revisiting wonder is most starkly posed by Philip Fisher in his book Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. He talks about the paradox of wonder needing to stand out as a fresh experience against a backdrop of the ordinary: the ordinary is required for the standing out to occur. However, by the time we are old enough to have a backdrop of the ordinary in place we are running out of new things to experience.11 This seems a false paradox as there are so many permutations of things, particularly in nature, they can be seen freshly. Moreover, the seemingly ordinary can still strike us with wonder time and again.

9 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanized: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 267–79, 277. 10 Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm (London, 2015), 195. 11 Fisher, Wonder, 19–20. Wonder Revisited 51

For example, the intricate folds and interlocking patterns revealed on slic- ing open a red cabbage causes me to stop and wonder at this almost every time. Perhaps if it were a daily chore the impact would dwindle to nothing, but Fisher’s claim and the prominence of surprise in those fi rst few defi nitions above seem to overemphasise this aspect. (Alternatively you might think me over susceptible to wonder.) Would greater botanical knowledge about the growth and formation of cabbages drive out the experience of wonder? In the case of red cabbage, I do not think so, there is no great mystery here. Revealing that overlapping of white meanders outlined in purple red with a sheen of silver/magenta on any leaf surfaces glimpsed in the folds is a fresh sight each time and yet in many ways the same each time. It is what it is but also speaks to the complexity and intricacy of even simple everyday aspects of nature. The very ordinariness of cabbage heightens the wonder at its freshly revealed beauty. Wonder can undoubtedly drive a desire for knowledge. Socrates believed that wonder is the origin of philosophy.12 Hepburn combines his own thoughts on knowledge and wonder succinctly when he says: ‘Undeniably wonder can stimulate a person to enquiry: it may be intensifi ed when enquiry succeeds and the enigmatic in nature becomes intelligible. But it may thereafter dwindle, as its object becomes assimilated and commonplace knowledge. The question, then, arises must it always be so?’13 To answer Hepburn’s question of ‘must it always be so’ I want to turn to different ways that the ordinary or the fully explained can be experienced with a freshness that allows wonder to be experienced again. There are many ways that this can happen (even without perception-enhancing substances – the Aldous Huxley route) and I will look at four in the following successive sections.

3 Through the eyes of a child

The ﬁ rst way to revisit wonder that I will discuss is ‘through the eyes of a child’. Introducing a child to something that we have experienced with wonder but has now become commonplace allows for a refreshed experience. Rachel Carson explores this in her, posthumously published, short book The Sense

12 Socrates as portrayed by Plato at Theaetetus, 155d. 13 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 132. 52 Isis Brook of Wonder.14 Here she takes her nephew into the woods and to the seashore at night and through his experience of wonder her own is rekindled. This would not fall under Hepburn’s criticism of ‘stupid wonder’15 – we have not lost our understanding of natural phenomena we just see the wonder of them freshly. Taking our time to allow the child to discover something, we ourselves wake up to the ‘it is!’, ‘it exists!’ of the experience. There is something inherently childlike in the experience of wonder. We are taken out of ourselves and absorbed into something greater. For Carson this ability to step back from the facts and dwell in wonder was not only important for education, but also for science itself. For her we temper the hubristic tendencies of science by retaining an ‘attitude of piety and humility [to] wonder at the world around us’.16 The child’s wide eyes at the working of a leaf cutter bee allows us to see it outside of our acquired attitudes or preferences, and to take time to observe its deft progress. Children’s amazement at a recently extinguished candle being relit without touching the wick with a ﬂ ame renews our pleasure at the phenomenon even when we know the reason. The world is full again of instances of potential wonder, not from mystery or surprise, but now enhanced by the reasons or explanations that usually point to phenomena beyond the single instance. But for that moment with a child, or with our own childlike openness, the single instance speaks predominantly of itself as we stand in wonder and humility before it.

4 The temporal gap between occurrences

The second way to revisit wonder I will discuss is when we experience something that we perhaps know well but it is not an everyday occurrence. The archetypical form of this kind is the rainbow. We know it well but each occurrence is slightly different and when it is particularly clear or striking the rainbow can be experienced afresh with wonder. As Fisher points out it was an important phenomenon to Descartes as its description in scientifi c terms could release it from the category of miracle but still use the rainbow’s capacity to invoke wonder now informed by science.17 The surprise element is there 14 Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder: a Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children (New York, 1965). 15 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 134. 16 Lisa H. Sideris, ‘Fact and Fiction, Fear and Wonder: the Legacy of Rachel Carson’, Soundings, 91 (2008), 335–69, 338. 17 Fisher, Wonder, 47. Wonder Revisited 53 with the rainbow and its transience helps to make it special. However, there is, I believe, also a recurring wonder at some seasonal events – utterly predictable and yet set apart from the ordinary. I will outline two examples. Picture the situation: in the depths of winter on a cold morning, seemingly like many previous mornings, you open the curtains and are captured by the wondrous scene of everything transformed by the fi rst snowfall of the season. Whether a light dusting sparkles from all surfaces or a heavier fall has piled up on even small twigs, transforming everyday objects such as dustbins or bicycles into mysterious shapes, the snow creates a dramatic change across the whole landscape and brings about a strange muffl ed silence. You have experienced this before, in exactly this way, but doesn’t it still take your breath away? Another seasonal occurrence of wonder for me is the experience of a wood carpeted with bluebells and the haunting lilac-blue that seems to fl oat above them. Although the scene and the individual bluebells are instances of beauty, that atmospheric fl oating hue that occurs when the fl owers are experienced en masse transforms the experience into wonder again and again. Seasonal occurrences can be weighted with meaning. The meanings can be stereotypical and registered without full engagement with the phenomenon or they can, even when typical, still bring an enhanced aesthetic engagement. Hepburn discusses the way, for example, a falling leaf can be viewed with increased poignancy if we consider it alongside: ‘a summer gone, its symbolising all falling, our own included’.18 It is a common thought but in Hepburn’s schema of trivial and serious appreciation it retains seriousness because the shared aspects of the leaf and the human are experienced through a deep connection with nature not through a trivial resemblance. Similarly, McCarthy’s treatment of the fi rst snowdrops brings together cultural associations such as Candlemas and the personal experience of joy at the sight of a fi rst clump of snowdrops poking through the leaf litter. Analysing the experience later he says: ‘Here was the earth fi rmly under the lock and key of winter; here was I huddled inside my coat, adjusted to the cold hard season as if it would last forever; and here were they, the fi rst visible sign of something else. They were unexpected but undeniable notice that the warm days would come again, and I realized what it was that made me smile: here

18 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), 1–15, 3. 54 Isis Brook against the dead tones of the winter woodland ﬂ oor was Hope, suddenly and unmistakably manifest in white’.19 In these seasonal recurrences we have the ‘unexpected’ not as strange or curiosity provoking, but the occurrence – though it is not rare and could be easily anticipated – strikes us afresh. It invokes a sense of wonder not at the strangeness but at the familiarity of the thing itself seen in this fresh light and perhaps tinged with a kind of gratitude for its loyal return. It can give us, as Hepburn says: ‘an odd sense of the gratuitousness of the object and its qualities. Its existence strikes us as a gift undeserved’.20

5 Deepening knowledge

The third way to revisit wonder that I want to explore is that of deepening knowledge. Wonder is well recognised as a prompt for learning in science education.21 A phenomenon that initially prompts wonder is intriguing and one response to that intrigue is to want to know more, we want to understand it better. Sometimes with the mystery revealed the phenomenon might be taken into the commonplace and no longer have that impact. Perhaps it was not wonder after all but simply curiosity, it was Verwunderung and not Bewunderung. However, deepening knowledge can also deepen the wonder. As each new aspect is revealed, each intricacy or connection seen or understood with greater clarity, the wonder intensiﬁ es. This is certainly Richard Dawkins’ position when he counters John Keats’ evocative line in the poem Lamia, about unweaving the rainbow, to point out that the opposite is the case. He says: ‘The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the ﬁ nest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living’.22

19 McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm, 133. 20 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 135. 21 See for example: Yannis Petros Hadzigeorgiou, ‘Fostering a Sense of Wonder in the Science Classroom’, Research in Science Education, 42 (2012), 985–1005; Philo H. Hove, ‘The Face of Wonder’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 28 (1996), 437–62; Per- Olof Wickman, Aesthetic Experience in Science Education (New Jersey, 2006); Mark P. Silverman, ‘Two Sides of Wonder: philosophical keys to the motivation of science learning’, Synthese, 80 (1989), 43–61. 22 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Harmondsworth, 1999), xii. For a balanced and wide-ranging discussion of this point see Patrick Sherry, ‘The Varieties of Wonder’, Philosophical Investigations, 36 Wonder Revisited 55

In my last extended example, I want to explore this experience of wonder increasing as knowledge deepens. When I was a child I loved the Ladybird books about nature, with their densely packed illustrations of, for example, woodland animals in their setting.23 In one picture there might be all the mammals who might share a woodland space: badger, fox, squirrel, dormouse, and so on. I grew up in the New Forest (Hampshire) so I knew that nature was not quite like that. On a walk one might catch a glimpse – a white fl ash – of a deer’s disappearing rump and on another occasion a fox in the distance or the splash of a water vole taking to the river. The rarity made these encounters special moments where I would hold my breath in astonishment at sharing the space with this other being. One of my favourite pictures though was one where the landscape included a cross section of soil. Unlike my childhood paintings the grass did not go to the bottom of the page, there was a band of brown earth in which there were burrows of rabbits, tree roots, a mole, worms, beetles and ants. The picture revealed something of the mystery of the underground. I could lie on the grass and imagine this teeming realm of activity. I probably thought it might be like the other pictures and there was just a mole here and an ant there and a lot of plain brown soil or rocks in between. Even so, that there was an underneath to the world induced a sense of wonder even though it was unseen. Children come primed to wonder and then something happens, we become accustomed and things seen regularly and named are no longer seen with that same freshness. Adults experience phenomena as coming along with responses of usefulness or not, liking or not liking, associations and well-worn tramlines of thought. However, my encounter with soil wonder returns because of new information. Here we can bring together that expansion of mind that Bewunderung is related to with increasing knowledge that allows a recapturing of the initial wonder and a building on it through deepening appreciation given by additional knowledge. Encountering soil science at a recent ‘Regenerative Agriculture’24 event I was introduced to the activity of fungi in the soil. My Ladybird book would have refl ected a time when its simplifi ed version of dead brown stuff making up the medium in which the soil creatures moved around was not so far from a scientifi c picture of soil at that time. Fungi would still have been classifi ed as plants and their (2013), 340–54. 23 The artist for many of these early Ladybird books was Charles Tunnicliffe. 24 This is an organisation who organise events for farmers and smallholders for information: Regenerative Agriculture, United Kingdom, https://www.regenerativeagri- culture.co.uk/index.php, accessed 26 October 2018. (At time of printing, this site is out of date and crashed.) 56 Isis Brook role was not understood.25 To give a snapshot of this new picture of the soil food web that created a revisit of the wonder I experienced as a child, I will outline the role of mycorrhizal fungi. I choose this because the details are not widely known and thus it could allow some readers to experience some aspects of that ‘Wow!’, ‘really!’ sense that I experienced just hearing about it. Ninety-fi ve per cent of plants form relationships with fungi to help them acquire nutrients and water from the soil. There are many different types but eighty-fi ve to ninety per cent of plants, including most of those important for agriculture, are assisted by Arbuscular mycorrhizae. These multicellular organisms are comprised of masses of fi laments called hypha. Hyphal tubes are between two and ten micrometres wide. For purposes of visualisation, a human hair is approximately one hundred micrometres wide. A single teaspoon of soil from around the roots of a rye plant will contain about three miles of mychor- rhizal fungi.26 The fi neness of the hyphal tubes also means that the fungi can spread out in the soil and transport water and nutrients back to the plant roots, where there is a mutual exchange of water and nutrients for carbohydrates such as glucose, which the fungi need but cannot create for themselves in the way plants can. Moreover, the fungi are the means by which plants transmit warning signals when under attack from pests, allowing neighbouring plants to produce chemicals that will deter the specifi c insect pest ahead of being attacked. The fungi will also introduce toxins into the soil to prevent plants with which they have no benefi cial association from moving into an area and competing with those they do benefi t from. They also help, for example, a tree with plenty of light and nutrients to pass those through to other trees in the same network who are in less favourable conditions or have been damaged.27 The more we look into these processes that take place out of normal view – underground, the more we see connections and complex interactions. For me the childhood wonder was revisited because soil could no longer be visu- alised simply as a medium containing living things, as in my Ladybird book – a brown background against which worms and beetles could stand out – for much of this medium is itself composed of living things. Now, if I lie on the grass and think of the soil below it has to be reimagined as alive through

25 Soil science is moving on at a pace now and it seems strange that it has taken so long for the available scientifi c advancement to be applied to this realm. Consider that the fi rst Moon landing (and all that was necessary to make that happen) was in 1969 and, for example, the sticky material, Glomalin, that helps to give soil its structure (and is implicated in how the soil can provide food) was not discovered until 1996. 26 Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Fungi (Portland, 2017), 36. 27 Ibid., 65. Wonder Revisited 57 and through. The soil food web, of which fungi are a part, requires a fl uid- ity of imagination to shift from thinking of components with edges or even networks in a medium to something more like a living fabric of the world. We experience this not only in the sweet pungency of rich soil and the fl ourishing of healthy plants but also in language. The linguistic relation of soil – humus – to both human and humility adds an additional layer of meaning, that of our own return to the fabric of the earth.

6 Self-transcendence

In the three ways to rekindle wonder discussed so far there has been an associated phenomenon mentioned here and there but not fully articulated. This is the accompanying sense of being de-centred: of sharing in something and being aware of its ‘is-ness’ and thus moving away from a more customary self-absorption. For a fourth way I want to touch on an aspect of wonder that is most closely related to awe, which itself carries notions of reverential fear or veneration. Hepburn thought deeply about religious experience and the boundaries and overlaps between the aesthetic and the religious. His imagery often suggests a sincerely held spiritual resonance, although he is careful to retain a questioning stance about the ontology of beings as represented in religion. Nevertheless he is critical of the inappropriate or overuse of religious language in aesthetic accounts. See for example, his discussion of the terms ‘sacred’ or ‘reverence’. These terms can be used to suggest deep meaning when none of the work of religious faith or theology is actively standing behind their use. In a sense the power implied has been usurped. Hepburn says his own strategy: ‘must be neither to use the language of “sacred” in such a way as to ignore or lose too much of its special force and signiﬁ cance, nor to exploit its full religious force without owning the beliefs that alone make it legitimate’.28 Indeed, he questions whether we can experience awe as dread mingled with veneration if we have no belief in external beings worthy of veneration.29 To return to my central question about revisiting wonder, I need to look at moments when we experience some spiritual insight or manifestation and ask, ‘can it happen again’? Having touched on something beyond understanding

28 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 113–29, 124. 29 Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imaginati on’, 201. 58 Isis Brook and retained an echo of that experience, can it be experienced again with the same sense of awe or wonder? Whereas my previous examples were purposely commonplace, I want to address this question of revisiting the experience of wonder when it is an experience of something that could be construed as religious or, in Rudolf Otto’s term, as the numinous. On the coast of Dunfanaghy (on the north coast of the Republic of Ireland), I walked a path sprinkled with daisies that wound around the sand dunes towards the sea, my consciousness shifted from enjoying the beauty of this place and vague botanical musings about the daisies that only grew between the sand dunes to suddenly experiencing no separation between what had been me and the place. Its presence was suddenly powerfully there, its nature – its essence – suddenly evident and nothing else, nothing to grasp its essence or do anything other than experience its being. A feeling of expansive softness and gentle power pervaded the landscape and all that was part of it. Then the feeling shifted and ‘I’ was gradually re-coalescing. Though shaken, thought returned to try to examine the residual feelings and what had been imprinted by that occurrence. Language falls short and I was left with the sense of being touched by something beyond my understanding. The experience of being de-centred, of the ego dropping away and something else being fully present, is open to religious or spiritual interpretation. Certainly one aim of spiritual practice that appears in most of the world’s religions is directed towards such a dropping away of the ego and an opening to something beyond oneself. With practice the experience can come again and again although each time with its own tenor and there is a sense that the residue of one experience opens the way for another. The awe or wonder is returned to, but in this forth way the strength of the de-centring poses the question, who is doing the experiencing, who is the wonder returned to?

7 Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe these four ways: through the eyes of a child; having a temporal gap between occurrences; through deepening knowledge; and by actively seeking to de-centre one’s habitual self, give us grounds for accepting the claim that wonder can be revisited. By connecting to our childlike openness to phenomena, we can slow down and experience the roiling sea, a slither of shining moon, a murmuration of starlings or even just a frog, and fall into a silent wonderment at its ‘is-ness’. By meeting phenomena we know but have Wonder Revisited 59 not met for a while, we can be caught unawares and experience them with a freshness as we share their world with familiarity and renewal. Exploring the detail that is not known to us can become a journey of recurrent wonder, as the workings of nature are revealed and the object becomes environed and connected as part of a larger whole, we wonder at it from a deeper knowledge. Profound experiences, sought out or just received, that leave our egoic self behind are perhaps never the same, but like the other experiences can be invited and perhaps pave the way for more occurrences. As with all four ways, this is a journey without end.

Crossﬁ elds Institute, Stroud Nature, Aesthetics and Humility

Emily Brady

In this essay, I discuss how environmental (or “nature”) aesthetics offers ideas for thinking through humility towards the natural world. While various forms of aesthetic responses to nature may support an attitude of humility, the exalting yet humbling effects of encountering the sublime in nature will constitute my main focus. With respect to the concept of humility, I consider both epistemic and moral forms, and I ask how particular features of aesthetic experience and response can function to set limits on human knowledge and power. To explore this topic, I develop a conversation between eighteenth- century aesthetics, a rich source for thinking about the aesthetics of nature as well as the sublime, and the contemporary writings of the late philosopher and inﬂ uential environmental aesthetician, Ronald W. Hepburn.

1 Humility

In the eighteenth century, humility had, arguably, different meanings than we see in philosophical discussions today. Commonly, the term was used in discussions of the virtues, and in David Hume’s philosophy, for example, humility meant being humiliated, a painful experience contrasted with the pleasure of pride1 – rather than an attitude of humbleness and a recognition of the limits of human knowledge, which is how many philosophers understand the concept today. Somewhat in contrast to Hume, Adam Smith’s conception of the ‘prudent man’ speaks more to humility:

1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (1740; Oxford, 1978, 2nd edn), 286 (II, I.v). Hume is also known for including humility among the ‘monkish virtues’, and went so far as to call it a vice. See Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby- Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (1777; Oxford, 1975, 3rd edn), 270 (IX, I); and Mark Button, ‘“A Monkish Kind of Virtue”? For and Against Humility’, Political Theory, 33 (2005), 840–68, 847. Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 61

The prudent man, though not always distinguished by the most exqui- site sensibility, is always very capable of friendship. But his friendship is not that ardent and passionate, but too often transitory affection, which appears so delicious to the generosity of youth and inexperience. It is a sedate, but steady and faithful attachment to a few well-tried and well-chosen com- panions; in the choice of whom he is not guided by the giddy admiration of shining accomplishments, but by the sober esteem of modesty, discretion, and good conduct. But though capable of friendship, he is not always much disposed to general sociality. (My emphasis – E. B.)2

Contemporary discussions of humility are diverse, ranging from philosophy of religion to moral philosophy and environmental ethics. Nancy Snow’s study of the concept of humility provides some general insight on the idea: ‘To think too much of yourself and too little of values extending beyond the self is to lack proper humility’.3 In environmental ethics, Simon James, inﬂ uenced by Buddhism, has discussed humility as incompatible with self-aggrandize- ment, and argues:

[the humble person] will not tend to exaggerate his [or her] role in human history. […] Considering the fate of a particular endangered species, he [or she] will be acutely aware of the vast evolutionary history that produced it, the accumulated effects of countless tiny changes in the genetic composition of the relevant populations. And he [or she] will therefore realize how momentous an event it would be if we late- comers to the evolutionary scene were to bring about its extinction...4

Edward Relph takes a similar approach with his concept of ‘environmental humility’, which describes different ways of ‘treating the world’. These ways have in common ‘only an inclination to work with environments and circumstances rather than trying to manipulate and dominate them’.5 For his part, Hepburn does not discuss humility at length, however, there is a prominent

2 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfi e (Oxford, 1976), 213 (vi.i). 3 Nancy Snow, ‘Humility’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 29 (1995), 203–16, 209. 4 Simon P. James, Introduction to Environmental Philosophy (Cambridge, 2015), 88. 5 Edward Relph, Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (Lanham, 1981), 162. More recently, see Matthew Pianalto, ‘Humility and Environmental Virtue Ethics’ in Michael W. Austin (ed.), Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics (London, 2013), 132–49. 62 Emily Brady theme throughout his work that the aesthetic subject ought to show respect for the natural world as part of any aesthetic experience. Respect plays a role in his discussions of the sublime, wonder, serious and trivial aesthetic appreciation of nature, and the overlaps and boundaries between aesthetic, moral and religious experience. Why, then, is the concept of humility one we should care about in this conversation between eighteenth-century aesthetics and Hepburn’s writings? In this conversation, I am less concerned about whether or not various philosophers have discussed humility explicitly. Rather, my interest is focused on a constellation of concepts and ideas which embody what moral philosophers today would call ‘other-regarding attitudes’. Specifi cally, I want to know where these concepts and ideas are located with respect to the aesthetic subject and response, how they help us to think through humility, and how that term functions as a kind of ideal virtue or attitude with regard to nature and environment. On a more general level, this essay seeks to contribute to broader philosophical concerns in both historical and contemporary contexts: fi rst, to highlight the role of aesthetic appreciation of nature as a counterbalance to the celebration of humanity and reason in the Enlightenment; and second, in light of the declared age of the ‘Anthropocene’ – the pervasive and often damaging effects of humanity on the earth – to explore just how environmental aesthetics might contribute to understanding humility as the appropriate response.

2 Self- and other-directed admiration in the natural sublime

A common theme emerges in the history of the sublime that the greatness of some external object in the world enables the mind or soul to become aware of its own greatness. This is evident, for example, in the writings of John Dennis, John Baillie, Alexander Gerard, and Thomas Reid, to mention but a few.6 The idea can be traced back to Ps. Longinus’ sublime, which is mainly conveyed via a treatise on style in language. He ties the sublimity of great or lofty language to its uplifting effects on both the mind and our emotions: ‘For the true sublime naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud

6 Depending on the analytical framework, the idea has been criticised as a claim to superiority (or power) over other classes of people, colonised peoples, women, or nature. See Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature (Cambridge, 2013). Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 63 exaltation, we are ﬁ lled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing heard.’ 7 Centuries later, in 1696, Dennis writes that, ‘the soul is transported upon it, by the consciousness of its own excellence, and it ‘is exalted, there being nothing so proper to work on its vanity […] if the hint be very extraordinary, the soul is amazed by the unexpected view of its own surpassing power.’8 Later, in the eighteenth century, in his An Essay on the Sublime (1747), Baillie deﬁ nes the idea in this way:

Hence comes the name of sublime to every thing which thus raises the mind to ﬁ ts of greatness, and disposes it to soar above her mother earth; hence arises that exultation and pride which the mind ever feels from the consciousness of its own vastness – that object can only be justly called sublime, which in some degrees disposes the mind to this enlargement of itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers.9

Gerard, inﬂ uenced by Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Addison and Hume, among others, echoes these ideas when he says that: ‘from this sense of immensity, [the mind] feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity’.10 In response to ideas about the sublime such as these (and including Immanuel Kant’s), Hepburn has pointed to how they diminish ‘nature’s contribution in favour of the onesided exalting of the rational subject-self,’11 and ‘the natural, external world may come to be seen as of value in the sublime experience, only because it can make a person feel the capaciousness of his soul. Intensity of experience may become the solely prized value.’12 In my book, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, in opposition to these views, I have argued that many theories of the sublime – from those of the Scottish Enlightenment to many others of the period – also emphasise the

7 Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 179 (sect. 7). 8 John Dennis, ‘Remarks on a book entitled, Prince Arthur (1696)’ in Andrew Ashfi eld and Peter De Bolla (eds), The Sublime: a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, 1996), 30–1, 30. 9 John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London, 1747), 4 (sect. I). 10 Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London, 1759), 14 (I, 2). 11 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204, 202. 12 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has it Any Relevance for Philosophy Today?’, Dialectics and Humanism, 1–2 (1988), 137–55, 143. 64 Emily Brady ways in which the natural sublime creates a feeling of insignifi cance in the subject, where the subject feels humbled by the natural phenomena of soaring mountains, stormy seas, vast deserts, and the night sky.13 The sublime aesthetic response is, in many theories, and perhaps in actual experiences too, both self- and other-directed, in so far as the power or great scale of natural phenomena enable one to grasp both how small one feels, but also how humanity fi ts – or fi nds a place in – the natural world. The natural world was central to eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, even if the arts also played an important role. James Beattie, Gerard’s student, sums up many of the ideas found in eighteenth-century theories, including the essential role of nature:

The most perfect models of sublimity are seen in the works of nature. Pyramids, palaces, fi reworks, temples, artifi cial lakes and canals, ships of war, fortifi cation, hills levelled and caves hollowed by human industry, are mighty efforts, no doubt, and awaken in every beholder a pleasing admiration; but appear as nothing, when we compare them, in respect of magnifi cence, with mountains, volcanoes, rivers, cataracts, oceans, the expanse of heaven, clouds and storms, thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, and stars. So that, without the study of nature, a true taste in the sublime is absolutely unattainable.14

The sublime experience of nature can be said to consist in dual admiration that is both internally and externally directed. Hepburn would seem to agree with this, because he has also written that, ‘It does seem to me that some experiences of sublimity are very thoroughly other-directed, celebrating, wondering at astounding features of the world, a world with which we certainly interact that which is also irreducibly over-against us.’15 This provides an opening for Hepburn’s philosophy to show the way for building a stronger case for sublime aesthetic experience as both self- and other-directed. If this case can be made sufﬁ ciently well, it serves my aim of showing how aesthetic experience supports an attitude of humility toward

13 Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, esp. chapter 8. 14 James Beattie, ‘Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783)’ in Ashﬁ eld and De Bolla, The sublime, 180–94, 186. 15 Ronald W. Hepburn, Review of Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics by James Kirwan, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 47 (2007), 217– 219, 219. Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 65 the natural world. To this end, I now turn more fully to an examination of Hepburn’s work.

3 Hepburn on environmental aesthetic appreciation

A common theme running through Hepburn’s thought is that there are two main components of environmental aesthetic experience (generally understood, not just in the sublime). He writes:

We need to acknowledge a duality in much aesthetic appreciation of nature, a sensuous component and a thought-component. First, sensuous immediacy: in the purest cases one is taken aback by, for instance, a sky colour-effect, or by the rolling away of cloud and mist from a landscape. Most often, however, an element of thought is present, as we implicitly compare and contrast here with elsewhere, actual with possible, present with past.16

These components can be simultaneously present, and each component is appropriate and aesthetically valuable, opening up space for a wide range of appropriate responses and different aesthetic frameworks. Why? He says that this will ‘ensure an inexhaustible diversity in the resultant aesthetic experience.’17 Now, the thought-component has a special place in aesthetic experience for Hepburn, for it constitutes the autonomous contribution of the subject, that is, the subject’s capacity to freely imagine, create, improvise within aesthetic experience by bringing the subject’s thought components to bear on perceptual particulars. Importantly, these thought components are ‘not separable, added-on reveries, but are integrated with the perceptual component as we experience them.’18 Moreover, the thought component enables an opening out of aesthetic experience towards ‘some background awareness, whether

16 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), 1–15, 2. 17 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Untitled paper’ read to the British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference, Oxford, September 2007. See also, Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience’, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 3 (2006), http://www.pjaesthetics.org/index.php/pjaesthetics/article/view/42/41, accessed 6 October 2017. (At time of printing, PJA is moving to a new online location.) 18 Hepburn, ‘Untitled paper’. 66 Emily Brady autobiographical, scientifi c, historical, metaphysical, cosmic – to move increasingly far from the particularised.’19 The thought component is where the freedom afforded by aesthetic experience occurs. The idea is also, most likely, an outcome of infl uences by Kant and Romanticism on Hepburn’s work, for both emphasised the place and value of imagination in aesthetic experience and beyond.20 However, it is useful and interesting to consider earlier work in aesthetics which emphasises the free play of imagination. For example, Addison’s remarks on the sublime from very early in the eighteenth century anticipate the free play we later fi nd in Kant’s aesthetic theory: ‘such wide and undetermined prospects are as pleasing to the fancy, as the speculations of eternity or infi nitude are to the understanding’.21 The aesthetic subject refl ects on an image of their own freedom, as instantiated in experiences of the sublime in nature: ‘a spacious horizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the immensity of its views’.22 Now, Hepburn does not seem entirely comfortable with this feature of freedom in aesthetic experience. Throughout his philosophical work there is a tension between what he refers to as ‘human freedom’ and ‘human fi nitude’, which he describes in different ways depending on the focus. For example, in the article, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, a duality operates between aesthetic attention to particulars and ways that aesthetic experience enlivens the self. When environmental aesthetic appreciation is serious rather than trivial, there is, ‘on the one side, a respect for its structures and the celebrating of these, and on the other, a legitimate annexing of natural forms for articulating our own inner lives.’23 It should be clear by now that human freedom is expressed through the thought component. On the other side, a reasonable interpretation is to identify human fi nitude with the sensuous component of aesthetic experience or attention to aesthetic qualities in nature, themselves. It is that aspect of aesthetic experience in which one takes up an other-directed form of attention,

19 Ibid., 5. 20 See also Hepburn’s remarks on the Kantian sublime in ‘Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience’, 2. 21 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (London, 1712), No. 412. 22 Ibid. Cf. Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays on Aesthetics (New York, 2005), 25. Guyer also argues for the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of feeling and imagination as key aspects of aesthetic thought. See Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014). 23 Hepburn, The Reach of the Aesthetic, viii. Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 67 outwards from the self. In the sublime, this might happen by focusing attention on the vast starry sky, or the subject might be drawn out of themselves by a thunderous clap during a storm, or a brilliant, crooked fl ash of lighten- ing in the sky. Here, we fi nd that such attention can constitute a ‘respect’ and ‘celebration’ of aesthetic qualities in nature because the subject exercises not freedom, but the capacity to limit self-attention, consider, and value the ‘more- than-human’ through the aesthetic response. Why does Hepburn not express such a stance as humility, and why do we not see more mention of the term in his work? He was deeply infl uenced by fi gures such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (both were infl uenced by Kant), and he shared with them an interest in aesthetic experience of the particulars of nature as linked to metaphysical experience in the subject. For example, Coleridge remarks that the sublime is vast unity, ‘boundless or endless allness.’ 24 When describing the complexity of a mountain range, he characterizes the impression of formlessness, which is reminiscent of themes in Kant: ‘too multiform for Painting, too multiform even for the Imagination.’25 The movement from some particular of nature to the metaphysical realm was a hallmark of Romanticism, but it was not one that was fully directed at nature itself, as if nature fully absorbed the subject to the exclusion of everything else. It should also be clear that such movement was active rather than passive aesthetic experience. Hepburn put it best, I think, when he wrote that aesthetic experience of nature is refl exive, the subject is ‘involved in the natural aesthetic situation itself […] [as] both actor and spectator, ingredient in the landscape […] playing actively with nature, and letting nature, as it were, play with me and my sense of myself.’26 This type of involvement can mean experiencing oneself in ‘an unusual and vivid way; and this difference is not merely noted, but dwelt upon aesthetically. […] [W]e are in nature and a part of nature; we do not stand over against it as over against a painting on a wall.’27 As such, a kind of relationship may be formed: ‘Nature and ourselves are indissolubly co-authors, for instance, of our aesthetic experience’, but ‘the task is to avoid

24 Samuel Taylor Coleridge quoted in Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, ‘Coleridge on the Sublime’ in Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), Wordsworth and Coleridge (Princeton, 1939), 192– 219, 196. 25 Coleridge quoted in Thorpe, ibid., 201. 26 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 9–35, 12–13. 27 Ibid. 68 Emily Brady self-diminishing without lurching to the opposite error of exaggerating our creative role.’28 I interpret Hepburn’s remarks here as attempting to capture the mutual interaction, maybe even agency, of each part of the human–nature relationship. I would also suggest that he is expressing, implicitly, a concern that sometimes goes along with the attitude of respect. Respect is potentially over distancing, an other-regarding attitude that can sometimes, in one’s effort not to manipulate or to interfere, put the other at too great a distance. What we fi nd, then, is not humility toward nature in the form of kneeling before the beauty, wonder and sublimity of nature – or indeed a kind of nature worship. Rather, Hepburn celebrates imaginative and poetic responses to the natural world, and where a relationship with nature shapes the individual and leads to life-enhancement. In this way his conception of the human role here is one that sees the aesthetic subject as active, responsive, improvisational and, importantly, receptive. In this mode, the aesthetic subject adopts a stance that is also ‘other-acknowledging,’ where we seek to grasp that other, even if we cannot do so fully. The natural world is not passive either here, consisting in ecological, geological, dynamic phenomena and particulars that activate imagination and encourage participation. Hepburn explicitly says that he is not interested in a single notion of respect, and that various notions of the concept will be relevant in our attitudes toward the natural world. Also, he remarks that we need a cluster of concepts to shape the right attitudes, ‘respect, wonder, compassion’.29 Although Hepburn is most likely less interested in a narrow idea of humility in environmental aesthetics, we can see that his views do at least share the spirit of the attitude, in the way that Snow describes it as concerned with ‘values extending beyond the self’. Maybe, for Hepburn, humility does not fully capture the feature of freedom that is such an important component of the aesthetic mode of human experience for him. Indeed, this has been a common, historical criticism of Christian humility and even non-religious notions of humility, that the subject may become overly passive, and humility potentially causes inaction in the face of injustice. Perhaps on Hepburn’s approach, this would translate into aesthetic experience that is overly receptive, and preventing a proper relationship to develop, that is, the interplay of human and nature in the aesthetic response and a sense of where each member in that relationship stands. It would be amiss not raise discussion of wonder with respect to experience of the natural world, though the essay by Isis Brook in the present collection 28 Hepburn, ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’, 162. 29 Ibid., 161. Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 69 treats the topic in the proper detail that it deserves. Hepburn wrote one of the few early papers on wonder by a contemporary philosopher, and it remains a classic.30 I agree with his assessment that wonder and aesthetic experience are fi elds and experiences which overlap, but they are not to be identifi ed with one another.31 As with the aesthetic response, it is an easy transition from wonder to humility; wonder is commonly said to involve being receptive to otherness, sensitive to the world, and open to its diversity and majesty. Wonder has also been linked to epistemic fi nitude, that is, becoming aware of what one does not know, perhaps discovering not answers, but mystery in the world. It is also an easy transition from aesthetics to wonder, but the two ways of relating to the world are not one and the same. There are overlaps to be sure; my response to a snowfl ake glistening on the sleeve of my winter coat mixes aesthetic delight at the complex, delicate forms, with a reaction of “Wow! Look at how intricate that snowfl ake is; it looks so different up close, and that’s just one snowfl ake among all the tiny snowfl akes in the snow fl urry around me!” However, wonder is very much a way of relating characterised by curiosity and wondering how and why. In the moment of marvelling at the incredible patterns of the clouds above or the apparently orderly actions of thousands of worker ants tending to their nest, we are at the same time struck by questions: “What’s going on up there in the atmosphere that makes the clouds those incredible shapes? What are those ants doing? Oh, I see they’re moving food and working together to move it to particular place, but where and why?” So, wonder may integrate an aesthetic reaction like sublimity, for example, but it is accompanied by a questioning attitude. Wonder commonly stirs intellectual curiosity and a desire to know, which is not always the case in aesthetic responses. Wonder is relational also, in the often unconscious comparison – the contrast – between ourselves and that which is astonishing. Wonder is an attitude where we attempt to grasp what is different from our human selves – fascinating and wonderful at least because of that. Hepburn writes that wonder has a life-enhancing character which is ‘appreciative and open, opposed to the self protective and consolatory’, and:

30 See Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays, 131–54. See also Sophia Vasalou, Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, 2015). While noting similarities, Philip Fisher contrasts wonder and sublimity by referring to them respectively, as an ‘aestheticization of delight’ and ‘an aestheticization of fear’. See Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, 1998), 2. 31 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 147. 70 Emily Brady

The attitude of wonder is notably and essentially other-acknowledging. It is not shut up in self-concern or quasi-solipsistic withdrawal. […] [T]he task and distinctive point of view of morality are obscured until the otherness of one’s neighbour is realized, and realized with it is the possibility of action purely and simply on another’s behalf.32

Via the ‘close afﬁ nity’ between attitudes of wonder and ‘attitudes that seek to afﬁ rm and respect other-being’, he notes a close connection between wonder and compassion, and from here he adds ‘gentleness – concern not to blunder into a damaging manipulation of another.’33 He then goes on to make a direct connection between wonder and humility (also citing the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss):

From a wondering recognition of forms of value proper to other beings, and a refusal to see them simply in terms of one’s own utility- purposes, there is only a short step to humility. Humility, like wonder, involves openness to new forms of value: both are opposed to the attitude of ‘We’ve seen it all!’34

Hepburn was clearly interested in the ways that aesthetic appreciation of the natural world – the experience of aesthetic richness of particular things – set off a host of imaginings and thoughts. His philosophical ideas suggest a deep concern about how aesthetic, quasi-aesthetic and moral experience shape the self – but also, importantly, point beyond the self to ‘other-being’, whether that is in terms of wondrous or sublime things, or simply metaphysical possibility. The receptivity of aesthetic experience, wonder, and humility, point to the importance of a life in which we certainly have not ‘seen it all’. In Hepburn’s later work, there are two papers which speak directly to this sense of the cosmic unknown: ‘Mystery in an Aesthetic Context’ and his very last, posthumously published paper, ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’.35 In the former, he offers some interesting ways to understand mystery in aesthetic appreciation of both art and nature. While he does not align it explicitly with the sublime, the category of cosmological mystery, and its sub-category of 32 Ibid., 144–5. 33 Ibid., 145–6. 34 Ibid., 146. 35 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Mystery in an Aesthetic Context’, paper read to the research seminar of the Philosophy Department, Durham University, 2003; ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, ed. Emily Brady, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 273–88. Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 71

‘indeterminate mystery’, describe a feature of Romanticism which Isaiah Berlin characterised as ‘the absence of a structure of the world to which one must adjust oneself.’36 More recently, Stan Godlovitch has adopted the idea of ‘mystery’ to characterise his ‘acentric theory’ of aesthetic appreciation of environment, which has also been called the ‘mystery model’.37 The acentric perspective places the aesthetic subject in a position of radical de-subjectivity where all cultural, and even scientifi c knowledge, is removed. In a position of being acutely aware of nature’s independence from us, and lying beyond our knowledge, he argues that our only appropriate aesthetic response is a sense of mystery.38 With respect to the sublime, scientifi c knowledge can enable us to understand many things greater than ourselves, like the incredible atmosphere and landscapes of Mars. Nevertheless, a feeling of the ungraspable may remain, and that feeling is part of the metaphysical aspect of sublime experience which goes along with being overwhelmed.39 Although Hepburn and Godlovitch helpfully articulate how aesthetic experience involves a sense of the unknowable, the concept of ‘mystery’ carries too much terminological and cultural baggage for my liking. We have seen that the sublime functions – within aesthetic experience – to place limits on the human, to unseat humanity from its common anthropocentric position with respect to the rest of the natural world. The sublime, in this way, could be said to produce a cosmological shift from a sense of confi dence and ability to one in which the greatness of other things forces us to re-examine our place in the cosmos. This provides an opening for epistemic humility through sublime, aesthetic experience. ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’ was delivered posthumously at the Celestial Aesthetics conference held at Valamo Monastery in eastern Finland in 2009. Conference participants, including myself, marvelled at the vast starry night in a dark sky/low light pollution setting on the edge of a frozen lake. The extent to which human beings can aesthetically experience cosmological phenomena with the naked eye, let alone telescopes and the like, provides a supreme case of sublimity. Sublimity is not the main concern of his paper,

36 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (London, 1999), quoted in Hepburn, ‘Mystery in an Aesthetic Context’. 37 As described by Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment (New York, 2000), 8. 38 Stan Godlovitch, ‘Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 11 (1994), 15–30, 26. 39 On the role of science in the sublime, see Sandra Shapshay, ‘Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53 (2013), 181–98. 72 Emily Brady although it is perhaps implicit in much that he says. In exploring just what an aesthetics of sky and space might look like, he returns to a familiar theme in his work – how human freedom is afforded by and discovered through aesthetic experience, and what happens in the wake of that:

don’t we have a choice between two views of ourselves: on the one hand, as hugely diminished by our full realisation of the dimensions and numbers of the galaxies in comparison with our ‘own’ planet and solar system, and the total loss of any analogical or symbolic ‘placing’ of humanity in the cosmos […], and, on the other hand, seeing ourselves as quite extraordinarily ‘favoured’ in another way. We can see ourselves as the place where the impersonal becomes personal, the unconscious conscious, and the un-free free. Not only are consciousness and freedom essential features of humanity, conferring dignity– far more so than would greater physical size or cosmic centrality or other physical enhancement. But we have also the extraordinary capacity for concern about other sentient individuals and in some cases the capacity to love. No less notable is the use of our freedom to make the aesthetically un- appreciated become progressively appreciated and enjoyed.40

At the same time, the aesthetic encounter with the cosmos can be existen- tially disorienting, ‘with handrails gone, we may have vertiginous moments too – and wish that our freedom were less.’41 Once again, Hepburn reminds us how aesthetic experience of the natural world evokes a feeling of both human freedom and human ﬁ nitude.

4 Conclusion

Let me draw this essay to a close by bringing some of these ideas back into discussion with eighteenth-century thought. What can we learn from Hepburn’s philosophy for understanding other-directed admiration in the natural sublime? Hepburn lived in a time of rising environmental awareness, environmental protection and conservation. We live in that same era now and face the greatest yet global environmental catastrophe in the form of climate change. While the likes of Dennis, Hutcheson, Addison, Hume, 40 Hepburn, ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, 285. 41 Ibid., 286. Nature, Aesthetics and Humility 73

Gerard, Baillie, Reid, and so on were not environmentalists, they were living in a time when landscape tastes opened up direct appreciation of the beauty, sublimity, and wonder of nature and the cosmos. Concurrently, scientifi c discoveries of the time moved beyond theistic understandings of the natural world. Within this context, the sublime, as well as wonder, provided aesthetic and quasi-aesthetic experiences and forms of aesthetic appreciation that were other-directed, potentially valuing aesthetic qualities of the non-human world for their own sake. In various accounts from the period we fi nd a kind of ‘descriptive aesthetics’ which describes a whole range of cases of sublime objects and phenomena. Such descriptions are used to underpin discussions of aesthetic valuing of nature, the arts, architecture, and so on. We fi nd that various philosophers point to particular natural qualities for aesthetic appreciation. For example, Addison favours the natural to the artistic sublime: ‘There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art’.42 Note the quotation from Beattie above and, later, we see Archibald Alison describing a sublime eagle as ‘expressive […] of liberty and independence, and savage majesty’.43 Do these kinds of remarks suggest a genuine valuing of nature, an other- regarding moral (not merely aesthetic) attitude within the sublime response? It is diffi cult to be sure. It is worth raising the point, however, that a ‘moral sublime’ surfaces in some theories via discussions of admiration for universal benevolence. Although directed towards human virtues, such admiration nevertheless suggests how the sublime can involve respect – perhaps even humility – beyond the subject. In this regard, Adam Smith extols the virtue of self-command as ‘great’, ‘Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary […]. The awful and respectable, in that degree of self-command which astonishes by its amazing superiority over the most ungovernable passions of human nature.’44 It is also instructive to situate these ideas within the broader context of the close relationship that was drawn between aesthetic, moral, and religious experience in eighteenth-century philosophy by the likes of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and others (even as philosophy became more secular during the Enlightenment). Such affi nities are, interestingly, refl ected in Hepburn’s

42 The Spectator, No. 414. 43 Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (London, 1871; 5th edn), 139. 44 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6 (I.i.5). 74 Emily Brady long-standing philosophical views and in his own theories, which often examined the overlaps and boundaries between the aesthetic, moral, and religious, exemplarily in his essays of The Reach of the Aesthetic. In the sublime, we have found that there is human freedom expressed in the expansion of imagination and an uplifting of the self, but there is also engagement with the very qualities of greatness in nature. If the interpretation here is a reasonable one, then the conversation opened up in this essay shows that there is room for humility in eighteenth-century conceptions of the sublime, as well as in Hepburn’s own contemporary understanding of environmental aesthetic appreciation. What, however, is at stake here with regard to humility? Why is this sort of moral attitude relevant aesthetically and environmentally-speaking? Above, I mentioned that Hepburn thinks we need a cluster of concepts to shape the right attitudes, ‘respect, wonder, compassion’. As I see it, the stance of humility has the potential to address the problem of overly-distanced forms of respect, as long as that stance is not too subservient or passive. The close attention to and appreciation of the natural world that often comes through aesthetic valuing has the potential to support right attitudes. With this in mind, humility may be said to bring more feeling into the aesthetic-ethical picture, with the possible advantage of dampening the hubris of human dominance of the earth.

Texas A&M University Nature, Identity and Meaning: The Humanising of Nature and the Naturising of the Human Subject

Fran Speed

Over recent decades it has become clear that aspects of our relationship to nature pose signifi cant problems, not only for us, but for nature itself. Thus, it has imparted an urgency amongst environmental philosophers as incumbent upon them to consider the ways that we relate to nature and to ask what exactly each involves. Consequently, the concept of “nature” has become a central theoretical concern, not least in attempts to establish criteria for its moral consideration and subsequent preservation. What is surprising, however, is that although the catalyst for the preservation of nature is generally thought to have been instigated by aesthetic concerns, and is thought by some, therefore, to provide a natural foundation for its future fl ourishing, the irony is that aesthetic considerations do not achieve the kind of recognition or reputation that one might have expected.1 Indeed, rather than embracing the role that aesthetic experience and value can play, the opposite tends to be rather more the case. A major problem for those of a ‘foundationalist’ persuasion, for example, is that aesthetic value is irredeemably anthropocentric.2 On this view it is not nature in itself that is valued, rather it is a value that is projected onto nature in an inescapably biased, preferential and utilitarian fashion. Even ostensible ‘pragmatists’ in the fi eld, by which I mean those who advocate the essentiality of human experience and value, fail to acknowledge aesthetic experience in anything but a superfi cially ‘thin’ sense; that is to say, in the way they assume it to concern mere visual appearance or some use value, recreational for example, when it fi ts their ethical agenda.3

1 See for example Eugene C. Hargrove, ‘The Historical Foundations of American Attitudes’, Environmental Ethics, 1 (1979), 209–40. 2 I am referring here to those philosophers who seek to establish some objective ontological basis for justifying, what they view to be, nature’s ‘intrinsic’ value. See for example Eric Katz, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Lanham, 1997) and Keekok Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy (Oxford, 1999). 3 I am referring here, for example, to Alan Holland, Andrew Light and John O’Neill, 76 Fran Speed

A similar situation can be identifi ed in the recent increase of concern within environmental ethics for what are termed ‘appeals to nature’; that is to say, claims that nature or a natural state of affairs possesses some signifi cant value such that it should be weighed in moral decision-making and perhaps protected in public policy. These appeals are frequently raised by objections to the proliferation of certain biotechnological interventions – for example, the modifi cation of genetic material, the practice of crossing species boundaries and cloning. What is noteworthy is that while objections to such interventions are regularly couched in aesthetic language (when they are condemned as violating the sanctity of nature, or as being unnatural) the question of what normative force, if any, these ‘thick’ aesthetic expressions may involve remains, largely, unexplored in aesthetically critical ways.4 What is perhaps more surprising is that in the discipline of environmental aesthetics itself, a fi eld of endeavour dedicated to promoting an aesthetic agenda within environmental philosophy, there is, with notable exceptions, a prominent stance, known as scientifi c cognitivism, which takes the view that the only appropriate approach to the appreciation of nature is that provided by relevant knowledge about it, namely, that supplied by the natural sciences.5

1 The humanising of nature

The general signiﬁ cance of Ronald W. Hepburn’s contribution to the aesthetics of nature resides in his timely and insightful grasp of the need for a different kind of aesthetic approach to nature from that of art. The basis for Hepburn’s ideas here ostensibly established him as the founder of environmental aesthetics and what we now refer to as a ‘contextually thick’ aesthetic approach, which stands in stark contrast to those mentioned earlier. Hepburn recognised that a serious appreciation of nature requires an approach that

the authors of Environmental Values (London, 2008). 4 An example that illustrates my claim here is the approach taken by Alan Holland in his investigation of the term ‘unnatural’. Alan Holland, ‘Unnaturalness’, Ludus Vitalis, 22 (2014), 205–25. 5 A notable proponent of this stance is Allen Carlson. Carlson has recently revised his views, however, since he now concedes that both aesthetic subjectivity and scientifi c knowledge can be accommodated in the appreciation of nature. Allen Carlson, ‘Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation and Knowledge’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (1995), 393–400. A notable exception to this stance is Emily Brady’s non- cognitivist stance in ‘Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (1998), 139–47. Nature, Identity and Meaning 77 accommodates both nature’s indeterminate and varying character as well as our multisensory and diverse understanding of it. Thus, and in contrast to art’s limited and determined context, the appreciation of nature is always provisional – always contingent on some ‘wider context’ of human experience. This wider context, as Hepburn illustrates, emerges through the subjectivising of nature, or, what he chooses to call, the ‘humanising’ of nature, where our aesthetic capacity for ‘metaphysical’ and ‘cosmic’ imagination can extend our perception in ways that allow for deeper and more nuanced insights. Of particular signifi cance, however, is Hepburn’s grasp of a paradox set up by the very notion of humanising itself, since in the humanising of nature, as he recognises, the reverse may happen: it may be more like a ‘naturizing’ of the human observer as he puts it.6 It is Hepburn’s notion of our being ‘naturised’ that is especially compelling in the way it reveals a nature that is an intuitive source of self-understanding; a nature, in other words, with which we identify and to which we relate in ways that are self-affi rming. On the account that Hepburn provides we not only constitute the nature that we experience but the perspective that it offers can be construed as the wider context to which we look for meaning in making sense of our lives. While it is clearly metaphysical, it offers, nonetheless, a deeply penetrating and insightful grasp of nature as it exists in itself. Although Hepburn considers the infl uence that this wider context of experience can have on the attitudes we take towards nature and the value we attribute to it, my aim here, while by no means exhaustive, is to consider some specifi c ways in which we become naturised and the meaning that this self-identifi cation with nature can exert upon our lives.

2 The naturising of the human subject

Hepburn identiﬁ es three kinds of ‘nature’ relationship.7 The ﬁ rst nature relationship places emphasis on ourselves. In this Wordsworthian relationship,

6 Ronald W. Hepburn ‘Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 5 (1963), 195–209, 201 and ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 9–35, 21. 7 The defi nition of ‘nature’ assumed by Hepburn throughout his work is stated in footnote 1 of his ‘The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 3 (1963), 195–209. He writes: ‘By nature I shall simply mean all objects that are not human artefacts. I am ignoring the many possible disputes over natural objects that have received a marked, though limited, transformation at man’s hands.’ 78 Fran Speed as Hepburn refers to it, we see ourselves as ‘over-against’ nature and regard nature as our aesthetic and moral educator from which we seek ‘messages’ of instruction or inspiration. The second is the kind of relationship where the emphasis is upon nature. Nature here is distinctly ‘other’ and separate from us; it is understood as ‘other regarding’ and can be a source of ‘wonder’. The third type Hepburn identifi es, and the nature relationship I consider here, is one where we seek a ‘oneness’ with nature. In this relationship we create as well as discover that we partly constitute the nature we experience and come to know. Although this relationship has several variants, it is one where we become aware that our situation is not properly described as being over- against or as distinct from nature but is concerned with a need to unify, a need for reconciliation and a suspension of confl ict.8 This nature relationship is to be distinguished, however, from one of ‘mystical union’ of a spiritual or religious kind where the subject–-object distinction is overcome.9 In the nature relationship proposed here, while we retain the subject–-object distinction (while we retain a clear sense of the boundaries and differences that exist between ourselves and the natural phenomenon that we apprehend), it is one where we come to identify with nature in ways that can be self-affi rming.10 As Hepburn explains:

an aesthetic appreciation of nature, if serious, is necessarily a self-exploration also; for the energies, regularities, contingencies of nature are the energies, principles and contingencies that sustain my own embodied life and my own awareness. […] The human inner life has been nourished by images from the natural world: its self-articulation and development could hardly proceed without annexing or appropriating forms from the phenomenal world. They are annexed not in a systematic, calculating, craftsmanlike fashion, but rather through our being

8 Ibid., 199. Hepburn illustrates that there is not a single type of uniﬁ cation or ‘oneness’ with nature but that several notions can be distinguished. While the formulations vary greatly and substantially among themselves the vocabulary of oneness, as the key aesthetic principle, is a recurrent theme. 9 Ronald W. Hepburn ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204, 198. 10 In the context of environmental ethics, the distinction I make here is thought to be an important one since ideas concerning identiﬁ cation with nature can prove problematic with a tendency to default into two opposite extremes. For an informed discussion, see David W. Kidner Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity (New York, 2001), 245–56. Nature, Identity and Meaning 79

imaginatively seized by them, and coming to cherish their expressive aptness, and to rely upon them in our efforts to understand ourselves.11

In this nature relationship, as Hepburn posits, we seek out patterns, analogous forms, affi nities, connections, consistencies, inconsistencies, congruities and incongruities that span both the organic, inorganic, animate and inanimate world. Hepburn sees this imaginative activity as playing a regulative role in the way that it allows us to relate natural phenomena to our own stance and setting as human beings, thereby allowing us to see ourselves in distinct and unfamiliar ways. Hepburn offers the paradigm case in aesthetic experience of a falling autumn leaf to illustrate this. We could, he says, merely observe the falling autumn leaf as a small, fl uttering, reddish-brown material object. But if we simply watch it fall without any thoughtful contemplation, it must be robbed of its poignancy, ‘its mute message of summer gone, its symbolising of all falling, our own included.’12 Or we might compare the veins in the leaf to the veins in our own hands and view them as symbolising a sense of continuity in forms of life. Thus to contemplate natural phenomena in this way can prompt in us a sense of shared vulnerability, a sense of the transience and brevity that distinguishes all living things including ourselves. I want to emphasise here, however, that we do not simply, or necessarily, seek out physical similarities or attributes in the natural phenomena under contemplation but rather identify with its comportments (its modes of being) even though the given phenomenon may be quite distinct and different from ourselves.13 Given the foregoing Hepburn, nevertheless, thinks that there can be an ‘incompleteness’ about the contemplation of the ‘particular’ thing and that ‘metaphysical’ or ‘cosmic’ imagination can persistently prompt us to reckon with, or take account of, the wider context or setting of human life. To illustrate this view, he relates his experience as a lone tarn walker as dusk falls in the Lake District. While enjoying the contrasts between the undulating landscape and the smoothness of the water, the tiny addition of the moon’s refl ection on the tarn prompts what he describes as ‘a momentous change’ in his perception.14

11 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), 1–15, 5–6. (My emphasis – F. S.). 12 Ibid., 3. 13 Of course, we also identify comportments in nature that are perceived to be distinctly different from human behavior, but I do not consider these in this essay. 14 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 80 Fran Speed

No longer a lone tarn walker, he describes his aesthetic experience as one who now walks the surface of the planet suspended in a space that it shares with other heavenly bodies, planets, satellites and stars. He now sees his sense of bodily size, scale and position as determined by his relationships with these things. Compared to the immensity and seeming timelessness of the celestial bodies that surround him he comes to see planet Earth as a ‘temporary’ home. Indeed, as he suggests, should we take the perceptual standpoint offered by ‘terrestrial evolution’, importing even rudimentary evolutionary knowledge, we might come to recognise the sheer chanciness, randomness even, in which all entities and beings have come into existence including the planet itself. The outcome of Hepburn’s perceptual experience here is clearly one that emerges as a consequence of his metaphysical imagining triggered by the sudden appearance of the moon’s refl ection on the tarn. Of course, this is not to suggest, as Hepburn would agree, that his aesthetic experience of the landscape could not have remained a purely sensory one, delighting, as he clearly does earlier in his experience, in the distinct and ambient qualities of his physical surroundings. While we often do experience natural surroundings in this purely sensory way, delighting in the sheer beauty of its forms, colours, scales, ambiance and so on, throughout his work Hepburn is concerned to show that our aesthetic experience of the natural world is not limited to the merely sensory. Indeed, he thinks we need to acknowledge a duality in our aesthetic appreciation of nature, a sensuous component and a thought component. There is fi rst a sensuous immediacy; we may be taken aback, for instance by the rolling away of cloud or mist from a landscape. Most often, however, an element of thought is present as we implicitly compare the here with elsewhere, actual with possible, present with past and so on. As Hepburn emphasises we are not mere detached, passive viewers since we carry with us the whole of our experience and not just what is experienced at any given moment. Thus he distinguishes between the ‘trivial and the serious’ in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. We want our experience to be of nature as it really is, not merely to consist of agreeable sensory stimuli or reverie: ‘an aesthetic approach to nature is trivial to the extent that it distorts, ignores, suppresses truth about its objects, feels and thinks about them in ways that falsify how nature really is.’15 Nevertheless, he asks, does it follow that in the interest of ‘depth’ one must cancel out, or at least qualify, every response of simple delight to beast, bird, lake or meadow? There is certainly confl ict here he thinks. While to seek out (1998), 267–79, 273. 15 Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 4. Nature, Identity and Meaning 81 depth would seem to rule out optimistic falsifi cations, we surely cannot claim that a consciousness of nature’s dysteleology, or the threat of impending harm from industrial pollution or climate change, or from a recognition that nature may be drastically altered or destroyed in the more distant future, must always predominate in any aesthetic experience. He thinks it is a disturbing proposal if taken literally. Would it not be a self-sabotaging of aesthetic enjoyment as such? And, of course, such thought components do not always destroy or sabotage aesthetic experience. But if we are tempted to abstract from, attenu- ate or mute the disturbing thought content in any such case, is that not to move some way towards the trivial end of our scale? Can nature be made aesthetically contemplatable only by a sentimentalising, falsifying selectivity that ignores such realities? Hepburn believes that a serious aesthetic appreciation of nature necessarily falls between these extremes. If, for instance we can celebrate nature’s overall animation, its vitality creative and destructive in indis- soluble unity we may be able to reach a refl ective equilibrium that balances vitality against melancholia, disillusionment or repulsion. Hepburn invites us to consider another aesthetic example that illustrates the kind of refl ective equilibrium of which he speaks. He asks us to consider the fresh green potential of early summer with the vitality of its bird song, its teaming insect life and its warming sun. Even in this positive perceptual frame we may yet come to see it as no more than a short interlude between the inertness of winter and the decay of autumn. It is easy to suppose how this latter ‘thought component’ can turn into a more metaphysically imaginative one. Set this landscape in the wider, perceptual, context of space and time, and the reality presents a perspective where life’s resurgence may be perceived as ephemeral and fragile. Indeed, when contemplated in the wider cosmic context, it may prompt one to see that life cannot be sustained except in conditions of the utmost rarity. So poignancy – a threatened even doomed quality – may be imparted to the setting. If, however, we allow our imagination to become increasingly metaphysical we might, more optimistically he suggests, come to see nature as revealing its true self as it always is, as fundamentally fecund, its wintry inertness no more than a period of inactivity, the contingent condition for ever more resurgence. Thus we may come to realise how the vastness of an expanding universe with its hugely dispersed occu- pants is the necessary, contingent and, therefore, benign condition of the life we now enjoy and contemplate in this early summer setting.16 What Hepburn

16 Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, 196. 82 Fran Speed is spelling out here is ‘ingredient in his experience’, as he puts it, ‘not proposi- tions of scientifi c cosmology or metaphysical theory’ but what he calls the ‘posture of consciousness’ to which they condense.17 To speak of nature is to speak of the only ultimate source of all creativity, of all potentiality, evidenced by the diversity, complexity and uniqueness of the beings and entities that the planet supports. As noted earlier, however, this ‘creative’ aspect of nature’s persona stands in stark contrast to its ‘destructive’ persona which can be seen, for example, as indifferently destructive of long evolving species through climate change, earthquake, volcanic eruptions, vast tidal surges, in competitive defeat or the impact of bodies from beyond the Earth. While these aspects of nature’s destructive persona may remain elusive to many of us, nature’s destructive persona can be patently grasped, for example, in the everyday experience of predation of one form or another. It can be seen, for example, in witnessing the fox’s steely-eyed stare at the unsuspecting rabbit and the fi nality with which it is despatched; or the spider poised to spring upon the hapless fl y held fast by its web; or the decimation of long established trees by pathogens of various kinds. Or to use Hepburn’s example, the snapping up by a bird of a brilliantly coloured butterfl y newly emerged from its chrysalis before it has barely tried out it wings. Such experiences may prompt thought on how the well-being of each particular entity depends upon its preying successfully on others. But it can also prompt us to see the destruction of the huge potentiality that exists in nature; the potentialities of individual beings and entities started and quickly brought to a frustrated end; as well as the suffering infl icted endlessly by one entity upon another including our own species. The notion of suffering would seem to be a distinct characteristic of nature’s destructive persona. As Arthur Schopenhauer attests:

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless afﬂ iction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.18

17 Ibid. 18 Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On the Suffering of the World’ in idem, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London, 2004), 3 (Aphorism §1). Nature, Identity and Meaning 83

While Schopenhauer sees suffering as an inevitable constituent of existence, he thinks that human suffering is the greater by virtue of our capacity for thinking and refl ection, qualities that he claims are limited in non-humans. Nevertheless, all beings and entities, including human beings, infl ict, and are affl icted by, suffering of one kind or another. Like non-humans we are subject, not only to all manner of parasitic entities – mosquitoes, fl eas and ticks to name but a palpable few – but to predatory beings of various kinds. Although in contemporary life we may be less prone to the threat posed by wolves or bears, lions or sharks should we fi nd ourselves thrust unexpectedly into some wilderness area, Alaska for example, like the characters portrayed in the fi lm The Edge (1997) we might, to avoid starvation, be driven to hunt for any prey available to us or be forced, as they are, to snare and kill the Kodiak bear that stalks and threatens to devour them. In contemporary life, of course, this is a far cry from everyday experience. We may choose, for example, to be vegetar- ian thus avoiding infl icting suffering on non-humans beings but for the most part this choice is conditional on a vast, plentiful and ready supply of fresh vegetables, pulses and grains. In an environment limited or devoid of such ready staples the harsh reality is likely to be the case of ‘eat or be eaten’. As Hepburn recognises, although the suffering infl icted by such predatory entanglements can prompt a ‘disquiet’ in us that is hard to reconcile in aesthetic experience we can, nevertheless, capture and accept nature as it is ‘on its own terms’ – the ‘real work’ of nature ‘of beak, tooth and claw.’ As bleak and diffi cult as we may fi nd such experiences when we contrast the diversity and fecundity of life forms in, say, a tropical rainforest, with the sheer scope and scale of the mutual predatoriness of the beings and entities that inhabit it, we come to realise the contingency of nature’s creative and destructive modes of being which, although seemingly ambiguous, we can yet identify with and relate to in our attempt to understand ourselves.

3 Nature’s ‘otherness’

As the foregoing suggests, although we can experience a sense of self accord even in disquieting moments of aesthetic refl ection, such experiences can on occasion, nevertheless, be dashed, confronted or frustrated by the sudden perception of nature as somehow ‘other’ – as somehow ‘different’, as ‘separate’, from ourselves. This fl uctuation in perceptual experience can lead to 84 Fran Speed the kind of ambiguity evident in much theoretical thinking on the concept.19 While Hepburn recognises this diffi culty, he rejects the idea that nature is categorically ‘other’; that the aesthetic attitude should be a sense of ‘being outside’, of ‘not belonging’; a nature that is ultimately ‘unknowable’ of which we were never a part as one theorist proposes.20 A sense of nature’s otherness, nevertheless, can prove something of a paradox and is diffi cult to dispel in aesthetic experience.21 Citing Marcel Proust, Hepburn draws on a familiar, intimate object to illustrate this seeming paradox:

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognise that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.22

Since our body is the most familiar case of taking up the impersonal into the life of personhood, Hepburn feels it is a good starting point for illustrating the ambiguity that perception of this kind can create in our aesthetic experience. ‘The body is both that through which our purposes and discoveries of meaning are achieved and expressed, and that whose failures can not only frustrate particular purposings and searchings for meaning, but also bring down the organism as a whole.’23 Disorder in our body’s functioning quickly shows us the limits of our power over it; instances, for example, where we are brought down by indeterminate malignancies or where our body presents some inherent malformation, deformity or disﬁ gurement of some kind. Such occasions not only provide the sharpest reminders of the vulnerable and temporary nature of human life but, as Hepburn suggests, may prompt a resentment in us, if an unreasonable one, that ‘my body’s fate has to be my fate.’24 Thus to perceive our body in this

19 For example, see Steven Vogel, ‘Why “Nature” Has No Place in Environmental Philosophy’ in Gregory E. Kaebnick (ed.), The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment (Baltimore, 2011), 84–97 and idem, ‘Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature’, Environmental Ethics, 24 (2002), 23–39. 20 I am referring here to Stan Godlovitch, ‘Ice Breakers, Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics’, The Journal of Applied Philosophy, 11 (1994), 15–30. 21 Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 5. 22 Quoted in Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 155–85, 155–6. 23 Ibid., 156. 24 Ibid. Nature, Identity and Meaning 85 way, as Proust clearly does, might indeed be to see it as somehow ‘foreign’ or ‘other’. Even if nature may appear other to us, we are no less connatural with it. We do not ‘simply look out upon nature as we look at the sea’s drama from a safe shore: the shore is no less nature, and so too is the one who looks.’25 Thus, according to Hepburn, it is not to have nature’s foreignness or otherness overcome; rather, if we allow ourselves perceptual freedom, we may come to see how our body’s sense of otherness is not best understood as strange or foreign as Proust would have it. It is merely the way in which, on occasion, we perceive our relationship to it – in the way we perceive it to possess an authority over which we have no agency or ultimate control. It is to recognise, in other words, the ineffable and contingent forces responsible for our physical existence and is thus a comportment of nature with which we identify and relate in a self-afﬁ rming way. Aesthetic reﬂ ection on a familiar feature of our anatomy may illustrate this. Consider if you will that puckered bodily indentation, or protrusion, depending on which type you may have, located on the abdomen, that collects lint and even, so we are told, is home to an entire ecosystem of microbes, namely the navel or bellybutton. Notwithstanding our recognition of it as the physical remnant of our connection to our birth mother it may yet strike us as a curious anomaly. But should we dwell upon it in perceptual experience we might come to see how possession of this curious feature implies a contingency of an ineffable kind since to be born of another human being, who was also born of another human being and so on leaves us without an intelligible end. But as Hepburn, albeit in a different context, suggests maybe we force an end, or maybe we are forced to an end by the thought that ‘not everything can owe its existence to something else that there must exist some radically different, non-contingent mode of being, not contingent but necessary, “necessary being”: but one that quickly fades into near total mystery.’26 Thus mystery here, as Hepburn implies, is seen as the only intelligible conclusion. In his morphology of plants, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reaches a similar conclusion referring to the inexplicable aspect of a plant’s ontology as its ‘immaterial power’.27 Indeed, it is a claim that is correspondingly supported

25 Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 5. 26 Although of equal relevance here the context in which Hepburn makes these comments is to be found in his posthumous paper titled ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, ed. Emily Brady, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 273–88, 286. 27 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Preliminary Notes for a Physiology of Plants’ in Goethe’s Botanical Writings (Hawaii, 1952), 92. Goethe’s immaterial power is the ‘morphotype’ which is not reducible to the constituent physical parts of an organism’s 86 Fran Speed by David Cooper who argues that the ineffable – the mysterious – constitutes what he describes as the ‘measure of all things’.28 Thus mystery, on this view, can be seen as constituting a fundamental characteristic of all evolved beings and entities without which nothing that exists, as Goethe claims, can be properly understood.

4 Mystery and the unbidden

An aspect of nature’s creative persona that illustrates this feature is its capacity for spontaneous resurgence or renewal. Should we perceive this capacity, however, in a way that goes beyond its ability to restore or renew, namely, its capacity to ‘overcome’, as it were, we may be prompted to see this faculty in a different light, in ways that can have some deeply disturbing inferences. In the fi lm Jurassic Park (1993), for example, we might come to view nature’s capacity to overcome in the way that Jeff Goldblum’s character Dr Ian Malcolm does when, in response to a scientist’s absolute certainty that a population of only female dinosaurs can never reproduce, Malcolm retorts that we cannot doubt nature’s ability ‘to fi nd a way’.29 It is perhaps this notion of nature fi nding a way that can prompt in us the sense of ‘promethean fear’, the ‘holy dread’, of which some writers speak,30 since it can strike home to us, not only the contingency of nature’s ineffable, mysterious forces but the absolute unpredictability of these forces, not least in the potential of nature, should it be tested, to ‘bite back’ in unforeseen and potentially apocalyptic ways.31

development no matter how apparently archetypical this stage may seem. 28 David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (Oxford, 2002). 29 ‘Life fi nds a way’, as he says. Although this claim is made by a fi ctional character about fi ctional creatures, it has some credence in reality. A recent incidence of nature ‘fi nding a way’ for example is evidenced in the case of the ‘virgin birth’ of wild Sawfi sh in Florida for which scientists remain baffl ed since the incidence of parthenogenesis is a rare phenomenon in the wild. Cf. Hannah Devlin, ‘Sawfi sh escape extinction through virgin births scientists discover’, The Guardian, 1 June 2015. 30 I refer here to Bernard Williams, ‘Must a Concern for Environment be Centred on Human Beings?’ in idem, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge, 1995), 233–40, 239 and David Wiggins, ‘Nature, Respect for Nature, and the Human Scale of Values’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 100 (2000), 1–32, 27. 31 The phrase is often used by those who oppose industrial agriculture for example in the way that they view it as defying the laws of nature. See for example Michael Pollan, ‘Our Decrepit Food Factories’, Sunday New York Times, 16 December 2007. Nature, Identity and Meaning 87

Although mystery lies beyond our awareness in every direction, Hepburn believes that even if it proves difﬁ cult to articulate, it can be integrated within our life world rather than be allowed to obliterate it.32 Indeed, in our attempt to overcome the inarticulate nature of the ineffable, we reach for metaphors that provide the ability to speak of it in concrete ways, for example, when we refer to it as ‘source’, ‘font’, or ‘spring’. One metaphor that Hepburn employs is to see nature as ‘gift’.33 To see nature in this way is to see it as something unreservedly given and can be likened, therefore, to the material gifts we receive in the way that they are often neither sought nor welcome, like those day-glow socks from that well-meaning aunt. In this regard the metaphor of nature as ‘gift’ not only captures the contingency of the ineffable but it also captures a related idea that I ﬁ nd particularly penetrating, namely, what is described as an ‘openness to the unbidden’, to the unpredictable potentialities and outcomes mentioned earlier.34 Of course, as in the case of the day-glow socks, what nature bestows upon its beings and entities can often be unsought, unwelcome and, what is more, beyond our agency to predict or control. Although an openness to the unbidden necessitates, an openness to the unpredictable it also implies an openness to all possible potentiality including the rare and astounding capabil- ities evidenced by the diversity, complexity and distinctive uniqueness revealed by the vast and varied forms of life that populate our planet including our own species.

5 Uniqueness and selfhood

Indeed, we might allow that a being or entity’s uniqueness is perhaps one of nature’s most notable characteristics. Notwithstanding the collective unity of a given species, its individuals are unique amongst their kind and this is most evident amongst human beings. A person’s singular uniqueness is frequently, and perhaps most patently brought home to us, in their dying. An individual life lived but once, and one that will not be repeated, makes the end of that life

32 Cf. Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 130–47, 145. 33 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 113–29, 117. 34 The notion of ‘the unbidden’ is used by Michael Sandel who attributes it to the theologian William F. May. Cf. Michael J. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). 88 Fran Speed prodigiously poignant such that in honouring its passing we often reach for language that acknowledges its unrepeatable uniqueness, for example, when we speak of the person as holding a ‘sacred’ memory for us. The sense of a thing’s individual uniqueness is related to its sense of selfhood, its sense of self-determination, its sense of autonomy. In establishing justiﬁ able criteria for nature’s moral consideration recognising the ‘autonomy of nature’ is something that several environmental theorists feel to be of primary importance.35 But as in the sense of nature’s ‘otherness’ as I have illustrated, the sense of nature’s autonomy is not a distinction that separates the human from the non-human; rather it is a mode of being which we identify as a constituent of both human and non-human beings and entities. While John Duns Scotus called a thing’s uniqueness its ‘thisness’, Gerard Manley Hopkins chose to call the absolute selfhood of a thing its ‘inscape’.36 According to Hopkins a thing’s ‘inscape’ is found, not by analysis, but by a balance between attention and receptiveness. He reasoned that if you attend to things with wonder they will reveal something of themselves:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: […] myyself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.37

Similarly, in relating her encounter with a cock pheasant, Kathleen Raine illustrates how she comes to recognise its selfhood in a particularly intense way:

The fear that I felt at the otherness of his life was part delight in his beauty, part awe in the presence of his touch-me-not, his ‘I am that I am’. Every creature has a measure of power peculiar to itself and to its kind.38

Immanuel Kant presents a similar view in his proposition that a bird’s song if imitated by man would strike us as wholly destitute of taste.39 Kant’s supposi- tion is that the bird’s song is not beautiful in some purely auditory sense since

35 Thomas Heyd, Recognising the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice (New York, 2005). 36 Cited in Michael Mayne, The Sunrise of Wonder: Letter for the Journey (London,1995), 219–27. 37 Ibid., 223. Mayne cites from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ As Kingfi shers Catch Fire. 38 Ibid. Mayne cites from Kathleen Raine’s Farewell Happy Fields: Memories of Childhood. 39 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (1790; Oxford, 1952), 89. Nature, Identity and Meaning 89 if it were humanly replicated it would cease to be so. Rather the implication is that its beauty is a measure of the bird’s unique and ineffable power. As the foregoing examples illustrate, sustained attention to the physical features and attributes of natural beings and entities can prompt insights of selfhood that resonate within us as ‘selves’, as persons, as identities. Although by no means an exhaustive account, I have illustrated how in our being ‘naturised’ we come to recognise and identify with nature’s creative and destructive comportments in a self-affi rming way. I have shown how our capacity for imaginative engagement can not only allow for the aesthetic integration of disparate and disquieting modes of nature’s being, but also how it reveals a nature that is of ineffable contingency, of seemingly unlimited potentialities of creation, re-creation and renewal. I have also shown how it reveals a nature that is fraught with unpredictable and destructive possibilities and outcomes; of disease and affl iction, of transience and untimely death, of precarious struggle and untold suffering. You will recall that in the naturising of the human subject Hepburn claims that our motives are in part the desire for a certain integrity or truth; for a sense of coherence or unity, in other words, for a sense of meaning. Given the latter account of nature presented here some might ask where the meaning for which we seek is to be found.

6 Context and meaning

Although Hepburn recognises that some critics would argue that this latter view of nature can be self-defeating, destructive to meaning, and can lead to a sense of futility and despair, in truth, he mostly rejects this.40 The outcome need not lead to a ‘thoroughgoing pessimism’ but can instead make us aware that meaning is derived from recognising, even if tragic, the limitations and constraints of our material world, of our ‘limited intelligibility and the unalter- able contingency of value.’41 Indeed it is Hepburn’s view that to deny that we

40 To illustrate Hepburn’s anticipation of this situation, I draw your attention to some relatively recent philosophical exchanges on the subject between Alan Holland, John Cottingham and Robin Attfi eld. Alan Holland, ‘Darwin and the Meaning in Life’, Environmental Values, 18 (2009), 503–18; John Cottingham, ‘Reply to Holland … The Meaning of Life and Darwinism’, Environmental Values, 20 (2011), 229–308; Alan Holland, ‘What Do We Do about Bleakness?’, Environmental Values, 20 (2011), 315–21; and Robin Attfi eld, ‘Darwin, Meaning and Value’, Environmental Values, 20 (2011), 309–14. 41 Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’, 172. 90 Fran Speed can properly be concerned in aesthetic experience with ‘how things actually are’ would be to leave us with an unacceptably ‘thin’ version of aesthetic experience. Nature need not be misconceived in order to furnish ways for self–understanding. The more serious our engagement, the more earnest will be our regard for the integrity, ‘the proper modes of being’, as he puts it, that distinguish natural phenomena for us. What is more, our ability to engage with nature in this way is not arbitrary, pointless or self-destructive since the insights gained can be an irreducible source of self-understanding. Although the most meaningful life is not necessarily ruled by a single aim or inspired by a single unifying ideal, Hepburn sees the search for meaning as deeply concerned with a struggle to unify. In our search for meaning – as Hepburn and several other writers suggest –, we tend to look outside ourselves, to seek some wider context that provides a sense of pattern to our lives.42 I have proposed elsewhere that it is nature as Hepburn reveals it here that likely constitutes this wider context of human experience, indeed I go so far as to propose that it could be construed as constituting a fundamental dimension of our collective identity which, although innate in our consciousness, can exert signifi cant infl uence on our attitudes and values.43 It is a view that Hepburn would seem to imply in his suggestion that this wider context of experience plays a regulative role ‘pulling a life away from the fragmenta- tion that can threaten to destroy its identity.’44 The well-integrated life, as he maintains, shows consistency and does not suffer from what he terms ‘crises of self-identity’.45 The nature that Hepburn presents here, while clearly metaphysical, bears a remarkable likeness in its creative and destructive comportments to the nature that Charles Darwin documented. Yet throughout his account of nature, Hepburn rarely mentions the term ‘ecology’ or makes any attempt to describe it in ecological terms. Rather, as I have illustrated, his account emerges in our aesthetic experience and perception of natural phenomena which, amongst

42 See, for example, Robert E. Goodin, Green Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 40 and Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 40. 43 Although we tend to identify ourselves as ‘human’ beings, my contention is that we also, fi rst and foremost, identify ourselves, as ‘nature’ beings, that is, as ‘natural’ beings which I argue can exert signifi cant infl uence in shaping our attitudes and values. Fran Speed, ‘Nature qua Identity: Nature, Culture and Relational Integrity’ in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice, (Amsterdam, 2012), 67–89. 44 Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’, 160. 45 Ibid., 158–9. Nature, Identity and Meaning 91 other things, involves the importing of components external to, and quite distinct from, anything actually present in the reality apprehended. But do we doubt that Hepburn’s aesthetic account of nature constitutes anything less than Darwin’s account? Do we doubt that it presents a nature as it exists ‘in itself ’? Are we obliged to accept, as the scientifi c cognitivists would have us believe, that the only appropriate approach to appreciating nature ‘on its own terms’ is through knowledge provided by the natural sciences? Although Hepburn does not reject the idea that information provided by scientifi c instruments and data can enhance aesthetic experience, he feels that we are not obliged to ‘think in’ what threatens to fragment or overwhelm the experience itself. The qualities that we appreciate aesthetically do not, as Hepburn states, appear in the scientist’s inventory of what fundamentally exists in nature. Indeed, the scientist’s own understanding is itself expressed in terms known to be metaphorical- like wave, particle, black hole and string. These terms are drawn from life experience although scientists know well enough that these do not simply map on to the features of nature itself. It follows that nature–in-itself is still not being directly described. To realise this, as Hepburn says, is to grasp how much greater is the gap between aesthetic perception and the nature we think we perceive. What is more we do not create and project aesthetically relevant properties onto nature as some foundationalists claim; rather our perceptual apparatus gives us the sensitivity to discriminate and apprehend them as features of our world. ‘The fact that these do not show themselves when we explore reality in the objective manner by the methods of science tells us not that they must be the product of our “projection”, but only that those are not the methods and instruments which reveal them.’46 Human experience, Hepburn urges, is as much a part of reality as a galaxy or a stream of photons. Nature as it is in itself cannot exclude what we realise in our perceptual experience of it. The choice is not between reality and illusion; reality is not in question since we start with reality and it is never abandoned or betrayed. Rather, our choice determines how reality will differentiate itself for us.47 To move towards greater subjective intensity need not correlate with movement away from the truth to illusion, but towards a fuller grasp of the truth. Whatever the causal relations between the known and the unknown, these dependencies do not entitle us, Hepburn urges, to judge the phenomenal, ‘unreal’ or to place it low in a scale of degrees of reality. ‘All we perceive

46 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 16–37, 28. 47 Ibid., 27. 92 Fran Speed from our own perceptual standpoint is actual, is nature, is being. […] So understood, it remains a proper object of aesthetic concern.’48

7 Conclusion

In establishing criteria for justifying nature’s moral consideration, as I stated in my introduction, the concept of nature has proved to be of particular theoretical concern in environmental philosophy. You will recall, however, that while the task has given rise to a variety of theoretical stances and approaches, they tend to undervalue aesthetic considerations or employ them in a superfi cial way; while a notable stance in the discipline of environmental aesthetics itself largely rejects the kind of subjective, or humanising, approach that Hepburn advances in favour of one that relies, almost exclusively, on scientifi c knowledge. The signifi cance of Hepburn’s ideas rests not only on his insightful recognition of the need for an aesthetic approach that is contextually thick but is one where he recognises how our self-identifi cation with nature can provide a source of profound meaning. What is more, the nature that his approach reveals while not limited to scientifi c explanation alone is one, nevertheless, that we inherently recognise as a nature as it is in itself. While my aim here has been to consider some specifi c ways in which we become naturised and the potential meaning that our self-identifi cation with nature can afford, I have noted how Hepburn, throughout his account, touches upon many of the criteria with which several environmental theorists take issue in their attempts to justify nature’s moral consideration. It is my view, therefore, that Hepburn’s account not only offers a perspective that illustrates how many of the legitimate concerns that these theorists raise can be overcome or reconciled but provides a valid basis for considering what normative force, if any, the concept of nature and its derivative expressions may involve. I want to add that it is a source of continued wonder to me that although it was Hepburn’s concern for the neglect of natural beauty that prompted the eventual establishment of environmental aesthetics as a discipline, his seminal contribution to the aesthetic appreciation of nature has not achieved the degree of infl uence in environmental philosophy that one might have hoped 48 Hepburn, ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Mis- understanding’, 145–6. Nature, Identity and Meaning 93 for, or indeed, expected. It would be of considerable loss, if the discipline continued to underestimate the potential insight that Hepburn’s humanising account of nature offers both aesthetic and ethical enquiry.

London Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey

Yuriko Saito

One of the central concerns in Ronald W. Hepburn’s aesthetics is the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral. While being sympathetic to the notions of a beautiful soul and a beautiful life, he points out that they must be subjected to an ultimate moral appraisal. In addition, while aesthetic considerations are indispensable to a good life and society, they alone cannot secure values such as justice, fairness, and duty. He thus recommends that the aesthetic and the moral be set neither too close to nor too far from one another.1 However, Hepburn’s oeuvre makes clear that for him an aesthetic experience is ultimately a moral practice of cultivating one’s self in interaction with the world. I shall explore several ways in which he characterises aesthetic experience as an educational journey.

1 Aesthetic experience of the other

Hepburn is often credited with opening the subject matter of art-dominated twentieth century Anglo-American aesthetics to include nature.2 In a number of writings, he stresses the similarity between art and nature as objects of aesthetic experience that help us develop moral sensibilities. Whether art or nature, the object of aesthetic experience constitutes ‘the other’ and the sort of aesthetic experience we have regarding it determines not only its aesthetic but also its moral worth. In general, we tend to experience the world, the other, by taming its unfamiliar aspects and making it conform to the worldview familiar to us. This way of experiencing the other on our terms is reassuring and comforting because it does not require much effort. Speaking of art as the other, Hepburn observes 1 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Moral: Links and Limits Part One’ and ‘Aesthetic and Moral: Links and Limits Part Two’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), 38–51 and 52–76. 2 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighboring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 9–35. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 95 that we all-too-often apply ‘simplifying clichés, lazy stereotypes of character, stereotyped expectations’.3 However, a genuine aesthetic experience of art requires attention to its singularity, as well as to details and subtleties that cannot be captured by a generalized stereotype or category. The experience needs to be directed toward this painting with its specifi c confi guration of colours and shapes and that novel with its unique style, plot, and character development. Full immersion in a work of art is possible when we ‘think as well as feel our way into aesthetic particulars’.4 That is, ‘we show respect for a work of art when we refuse to see it as a disposable message to be read and discarded; when we see it instead as an inherently valuable, irreplaceable arte- fact, whose message, if any, is individualized by its embodiment in that unique object’.5 Failure to capture the singularity of an art object by applying stereotypes and clichés is not only an aesthetic but also a moral failure. Rather than listening to its message on its own terms, we are using art to extend our own world; hence, not giving it due regard and only exacerbating our self-centred orientation. When an art work is experienced this way, it ‘acts only as a stimulus to the reader’s or viewer’s personal desires, appetites, ambitions, and offers some substitute-gratifi cation of them’.6 Respecting the otherness of art, in contrast, is challenging because it demands accepting the ‘invitations to release one’s hand from the banisters of familiar meanings and to leave familiar pathways of perception’.7 Grasping the work’s individuality and originality, therefore, according to Hepburn, ‘takes much effort, sometimes courage’.8 If the other is nature rather than art, we often experience it through sentimentalizing, anthropomorphizing, or humanising, essentially for our enjoyment or amusement. As Hepburn puts it: ‘the sentimental response is crude and undiscriminating and wilful. Its affective repertoire is eager and it wallows in easily-aroused, generalized emotion’ that will ‘let us “fi nd” in nature no more (or little more) than we project into it – that is to say, features of our

3 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 267–79, 270. 4 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Values of Art and Values of Community’ in Leroy S. Rouner (ed.), On Community (Notre Dame, 1991), 27–55, 46 (my emphasis – Y. S.). 5 Ibid., 42 (my emphasis – Y. S.). 6 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 63–76, 72. 7 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 16–37, 18. 8 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 270. 96 Yuriko Saito own life that we (substantially) know already’.9 In short, we only experience ourselves without going out to meet the other and to grow and develop as a person. The ‘getting out of our comfort zone’ that is necessary in our aesthetic experience of art and nature is the same as the requirement for our interactions with other human beings: ‘such exercises of reason – attentive, fl exible, empathizing – are of course equally necessary to the moral context of our understanding of self and others’.10 An individual person’s specifi c personhood cannot be adequately captured by her age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, marital status, ethnicity, political affi liation and work. While these categories are relevant, she is not merely their sum total. Understanding and appreciating her for who she is and gaining a holistic grasp of her requires fi rsthand experience of interacting with her. In both art and persons, ‘we look for meaning in their movements, gestures, and presentations’.11 Hepburn’s concern with this moral dimension of our interactions with objects and people is particularly clear in the following passage:

Fantasy falsiﬁ es through its overriding desire to minister to pre-existing, pre-formed wants and cravings: shirking the task of helping to re-form desire to a better-grasped reality. It smoothes out the recalcitrant individuality of things and people, making them more compliant to desire, whereas it is often these recalcitrances that prompt moral growth, elicit compassion and a turning away from egoistic ruthlessness, and compel us actually to believe in the full personhood of others.12

The importance, as well as the challenge, of appreciating the other on its, rather than on our, own terms is a theme Hepburn shares with other thinkers. Iris Murdoch, for example, calls this notion ‘unselﬁ ng’. Concerned with the fact that ‘our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self- preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’, she claims

9 Ibid., 268, 269. The same point is made regarding experiencing the other simply to satisfy one’s curiosity, which Hepburn distinguishes from wonder. Experiencing an object to satisfy curiosity amounts to ‘a kind of possession, a tick on the tourist’s place-list’ because once curiosity is satisfi ed or novelty wears off, we close the chapter on the object instead of dwelling on it and savouring the experience. Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 131–54, 134. 10 Hepburn, ‘Values of Art and Values of Community’, 46. 11 Ibid., 42. 12 Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’, 72. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 97 that ‘anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfi shness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue’.13 Consequently, she regards the appreciation of good art as the reward for successful unselfi ng, which helps one ‘transcend selfi sh and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility’.14 Also, consider John Dewey’s claim that ‘the moral function of art […] is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive’.15 Specifi cally, ‘works of art are means by which we enter, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own’.16 In order for good art to take me out of my own familiar world, however, I must be able and willing to practice aesthetic engagement. The invitation of good art for me to enter its world, in the words of Joseph Kupfer, places ‘the burden of entering into an open-ended, indeterminate creative process’ without any rules to follow.17 I gain ‘responsive freedom’ but it also comes with an ‘aesthetic responsibility’.18 That this other-regarding stance applies not only to art but also to nature is recognised by other thinkers as well. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan states that ‘one kind of defi nition of a good person, or a moral person, is that that person does not impose his or her fantasy on another. That is, he’s willing to acknowledge the reality of other individuals, or even of the tree or the rock’.19 A Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, Dōgen (1200–1253), characterises this ethical stance regarding the other as overcoming, forgetting, or transcending one’s self and as a process necessary for enlightenment.20 Specifi cally, the respectful engagement with the other, predominantly natural objects like a rock or a tree, in Zen discipline, requires me to experience its raw individuality or Buddha nature, without applying the usual categorisations and classifi cations

13 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London, 1970), 82. 14 Ibid., 85. 15 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1958), 325. Note the same metaphor of ‘veil’ is used by both Dewey and Murdoch. 16 Ibid., 333. 17 Joseph Kupfer, Experience as Art: Aesthetics in Everyday Life (Albany, 1983), 71. 18 Ibid., 73 and 77. 19 Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Yi-Fu Tuan’s Good Life’, OnWisconsin Magazine, 9 (1987). 20 The best primary text is Dōgen’s major work, Shōbōgenzō (The Storehouse of True Knowledge). The most important chapters are translated and compiled by Thomas Cleary in Shōbōgenzō: Zen Essays by Dōgen (Honolulu, 1986). 98 Yuriko Saito of normal experience. I make myself ‘slender’ and enter into the object and become one with it, experiencing its ‘thusness’ or ‘suchness’.21 The favoured vehicle for Zen discipline is artistic practice that aims not so much at acquiring skills, but rather at becoming a person whose mode of being in the world is other-regarding and ethically grounded. Commenting on Japanese artistic training, Robert Carter points out that ‘ethics is primarily taught through the various arts, and is not learned as an abstract theory, or as a series of rules to remember’.22 Thus, whether the notion is called unselﬁ ng, respecting the other, appreciating the other on its own terms, or transcending one’s own horizon, these thinkers together highlight the moral dimension of aesthetic experience, succinctly put by Hepburn as ‘the aesthetic-moral value of respect’.23

2 Aesthetic experience as creative engagement

However, we gain such aesthetic experience never passively by nullifying our selves and simply taking in whatever the other offers us, as if we were ‘sitting ducks’. Our aesthetic experience also requires us to actively engage with the other. We have seen that Hepburn argues against facile humanising and sentimentalizing attempts in nature appreciation that from the outset impose on the object what we want to experience. This will exacerbate the limitation of our own perspective. However, according to Hepburn, not all kinds of humanising should be rejected. What he calls more serious anthropomorphizing of nature encourages us to be actively affected by ‘the dispositional power of the object […] to evoke human emotion and mood, without the mediation of a falsifying anthropomorphic interpretation.’24 Here, Hepburn’s view is shared by John Dewey who characterises the receptive stance and the active engagement required in aesthetic experience as ‘undergoing’ and ‘doing’. It is a dynamic process constituted by the

21 The notion of ‘making oneself slender’ so that one enters into the object was advocated by Matsuo Bashō in the art of making haiku. See Hattori Dohō’s record of Bashō’s teaching in ‘The Red Booklet’, trans. Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu in The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan (The Hague, 1981), 159–67. 22 Robert Carter, The Japanese Art and Self-Discipline (Albany, 2008), 2. I explore this aesthetic approach to nature in my ‘Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms’, Environmental Ethics, 20 (1998), 135–49. 23 Hepburn, ‘Values of Art and Values of Community’, 43. 24 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 272. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 99 object affecting a person who in turn affects the object through activating her imagination. Thus, aesthetic experience as a full, authentic, and respectful engagement with the other has a creative dimension. Hepburn states that it is an activity ‘that is partly responsive, and partly creative, both receptive and formative. It is improvisatory and in important measure free’.25 Elsewhere he characterises the optimal aesthetic appreciation of nature as ‘a grateful acceptance of nature’s “co-operation” […] in the joint-fashioning of what neither the subjects themselves nor nature left to itself can bring into being’.26 This characterisation of aesthetic experience as a collaborative experience can be compared to the notion of aesthetic engagement advocated by Arnold Berleant, despite the disagreement between Hepburn and Berleant over the notion of disinterestedness.27 Disinterestedness for Hepburn is important for aesthetic experience insofar as it refers to open-mindedness and willingness to meet the other on its own terms. For both Hepburn and Berleant, this open-mindedness paves the way for a reciprocal exchange and a collaborative effort to bring about an aesthetic experience. This process often enables me to discover new connections and a vision of the world different from my own. In this way, my aesthetic engagement is also a moral engagement with the other. Thus, the ethical stance needed for successful interaction with the other is the outcome of the requirements of aesthetic engagement put forward by Berleant: open-mindedness, acceptance, humility, respect, and mutual collaboration.28 What exactly then is included in the creative engagement with the object? According to Hepburn, one kind of association that our imagination should ‘fuse’ with the object are facts about it. Without activating imagination and engaging creatively, ‘the falling autumn leaf becomes a small, ﬂ uttering, reddish-brown material object – and no more: the swifts only rapidly ﬂ itting

25 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 130–47, 137. 26 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 275. 27 Arnold Berleant and Ronald Hepburn, ‘An Exchange on Disinterestedness’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 1(2003), https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=209, accessed 4 April 2019. 28 Although the ethical dimension of aesthetic engagement was always present in Berleant’s early works, it is made more explicit in his recent works on social aesthetics. See Arnold Berleant, ‘Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics’ in idem, Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme (Aldershot, 2005), 147–61; Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter, 2010); ‘Objects into Persons: The Way to Social Aesthetics’, Aesthetics Between Art and Society: Perspectives of Arnold Berleant’s Postkantian Aesthetics of Engagement, Espes, 6 (2017), 9–18. 100 Yuriko Saito shapes’, the starry heavens are experienced as a black canopy above us with white spots, and the spiral nebula in Andromeda merely as an abstract pattern.29 Such strictly formalist appreciation does underscore the aesthetic importance of the sensuous, but it is not being fully present to what the object is. The leaf is more than a reddish brown object, and the aesthetic experience of celestial bodies is incomplete and misleading without considering the enormous distance between here and there. The respectful attitude required in aesthetic experience thus includes awareness of facts associated with the object. Speaking of nature, Hepburn claims that ‘one way to seriousness in our aesthetic dealings with nature involved a respect for truth – more accurately, for truth such as the sciences pursue’.30 Thus, the geological activity that shaped a particular rock formation ‘need not be a piece of extra-aesthetic refl ection: it may determine for us how we see and respond to the object itself’.31 The realization that what at fi rst appeared to be only an open expanse of beach is actually a tidal basin may cause ‘the wild glad emptiness [to] be tempered by a disturbing weirdness’, thereby determining the affective character of the experience.32 Although, as I shall discuss shortly, Hepburn’s incorporation of scientifi c facts in the aesthetic experience of nature differs from Allen Carlson’s cognitivist aesthetics of nature, he does value them as facilitating a truer, more serious, appreciation.33 Scientifi c facts help us to attend more fully to the object’s sensuous appearance, compared with fanciful, and often amusing, associations based upon fortuitous resemblances that our imagination may bring to the experience. His examples include a stalagmite in a limestone cave seen as the Virgin Mary and a cloud seen as a basket of laundry.34 This latter

29 The reference to the leaf is from Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 1–15, 8; starry heaven from idem, ‘Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience’, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 3 (2006), 7; spiral nebula from ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 25. 30 Hepburn, ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 14. 31 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 25. 32 Ibid., 19. 33 Allen Carlson’s works on environmental aesthetics are too numerous to list, but the best summaries can be found in his Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (New York, 2009) and ‘Environmental Aesthetics’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmental-aesthetics/, accessed 4 April, 2019. 34 The reference to Virgin Mary is from ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, 11 and basket of laundry from ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 29. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 101 case can be contrasted with imagining ‘the inner turbulence of the cloud, the winds sweeping up within and around it, determining its structure and visible form’.35 These two ways of appreciating a cloud are characterised as going from ‘easy beauty to diffi cult and more serious beauty’, the latter ‘less superfi - cial or contrived than the other, […] truer to nature, and for that reason more worth having’.36 Enjoying the fortuitous resemblance does not take us further than amusement, just as in the case of taking pleasure in novelty and satisfying curiosity, which runs its course too quickly without generating further experiences or revealing heretofore unrecognised dimensions of the object.37 However, we should not too quickly consider Hepburn as embracing the cognitivist nature aesthetics developed by Allen Carlson. Carlson has steadily maintained that the appropriate appreciation of nature is based upon scientifi c understanding of what it is, although this can include common sense knowledge and does not have to be the specialized kind available only to professionals. Hepburn seems hesitant to commit to a strong form of cognitivism that favours scientifi c facts over other associated facts, because for him cognitive components can be of many kinds: historical and literary, as well as scientifi c. More importantly, scientifi c facts are relevant to the aesthetic experience of nature for Hepburn only insofar as they stimulate our emotive engagement with the object. Too much emphasis on scientifi c considerations may compromise the nature of aesthetic experience, and make it more like a scientifi c project. Instead, we open ourselves to the possibility that ‘the cognitive factors themselves may generate new, distinctive emergent emotional qualities’ and ‘encourage and foster emotional responses to the items or scenes of nature, responses in terms of human wants and fears, exultations and shrinkings of spirit’.38 Finally, Hepburn seems to allow freedom when creating an aesthetic experience by deciding ‘whether to admit this, to soft-pedal or exclude that’ associated fact.39 He recognises the increasing awareness of ecological concerns in our experience of nature and he does not deny their relevance, but he also cautions against such concerns dominating the aesthetic experience because they would ‘displace the luxury of “fi ne-tuning”’.40 I shall explore this point in the last section. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 For his discussion on curiosity and novelty, see ‘Wonder’. 38 Hepburn, ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics’, 137 and 138. 39 Ibid., 137. 40 Ibid., 142. 102 Yuriko Saito

3 Aesthetic experience as an educational process

Aesthetic experience described by Hepburn is thus a process that does and should take time. This process is important not just for the outcome, which is often pleasurable. He invites us to consider a thought experiment where an electronic device can recreate ‘an identical state of excitation to that aroused by a work of art’.41 Such an experience will not be a substitute for the genuine aesthetic experience because it does not include our experience of becoming aware of ‘how […] a represented world emerges from the use of a visual medium in a particular way, and how thought is guided by factors inside and outside the canvas itself’.42 In other words, ‘the synthesizing of levels, the spectator’s guided and animated exploration of the work, are all part of the total, valued aesthetic experience, not disposable means to it’.43 Hepburn’s overall view can be summarized as ‘aesthetics as experience’, adapting Dewey’s ‘art as experience’ to a wider application. It is like a journey, according to Hepburn, that is not simply a spatial movement that changes one’s location continuously, but more importantly a process in which the previous experience informs and transforms the present experience, which in turn directs the subsequent experience. He characterises this process as many- levelled, layered, improvisationary, exploratory and creative. It is an open process whereby we are receptive to whatever we encounter in our journey, but at the same time we are not passive recipients simply absorbing whatever comes at us. We are the creators of the aesthetic experience while being faithful to the object of that experience. It is the process of aesthetic engagement with undergoing and doing. As we practice making aesthetic journeys, the nature of our experiences develop and mature, from trivial and superfi cial to profound and rich. Despite promoting exercising freedom of the imagination in aesthetic experience, Hepburn does not advocate the ‘anything goes’ stance. We have examined trivial and superfi cial experiences that are not suffi ciently object-centred. They include a strictly formalist approach and using the object for one’s fantasy, reverie and amusement. He also discriminates between different emotive responses. Sometimes they are cheap sentimentality typical of greeting cards and generate experiences that are easy. In a passage in On the Aesthetic Education

41 Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’, 74. 42 Ibid. (my emphasis – Y. S.). 43 Ibid. (my emphasis – Y. S.). Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 103 of Man, Friedrich Schiller describes such easy attraction, part of which is cited by Hepburn:

we see crude taste ﬁ rst seizing on what is new and startling, gaudy, fantastic and bizarre, what is violent and wild, and avoiding nothing so much as simplicity and quiet. It fashions grotesque shapes, loves swift transitions, exuberant forms, striking contrasts, glaring shades, pathetic songs. In this age beautiful means simply what excites a man...44

Perhaps the experiences that Schiller describes are those with which we embark on our life-long journey of practicing aesthetic education, just as children start with appreciating colourful images, simple story lines and amusing movements. However, parents and educators expose them to a wider variety of visual arts, music, theatre and literature with increasing diffi culty and sophistication. Aesthetic education aims at cultivating a capacity to appreciate monochrome images, complex stories without happy endings, music with a different tonal structure, and subtle actions on the stage. This process of developing an increasingly sophisticated aesthetic sensibility is also emphasised by Aldo Leopold in his land aesthetics. He observes that ‘the taste for country displays the same diversity in aesthetic competence among individuals as the taste for opera, or oils. There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through “scenic” places; who fi nd mountains grand if they be proper mountains with waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes. To such the Kansas plains are tedious’.45 Education in land aesthetics sharpens our power of perception that is informed by natural history and ecology so that we recognise that ‘a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches’.46 According to Leopold, this development of sensibility in land aesthetics can be compared to aesthetic education regarding arts: ‘Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language’.47 Engaging in aesthetic education requires effort on my part as it mobilises imagination while focusing fi rmly on the object itself. But by doing so, my aesthetic life becomes richer and more rewarding with ‘the deepening and 44 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New York, 1977), 135. Part of this passage is cited by Hepburn in ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics’, 134. 45 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1966), 179–80. 46 Ibid., 180. 47 Ibid., 102. 104 Yuriko Saito diversifying of feeling’ and ‘wonderfully complex aesthetic interactions’.48 Furthermore, I gain a fuller understanding and appreciation of the other, develop a more discriminating sensibility, and nurture open-mindedness and respect toward the other. Delicacy of taste thus cultivated parallels sensibility toward others, including humans and non-humans, that is indispensable in our moral interactions with them based upon respect, humility, compassion and gentleness. Suppose a person refuses to engage in aesthetic education and remains wholly content with greeting cards and soap operas because they provide immediate gratifi cation without requiring any work. I think we are justifi ed in being critical of such a person not simply for her impoverished aesthetic life but also for an implied moral failing. Her attitude signals a refusal to get out of her comfort zone and to truly meet the other on its own terms and to look at the world from a different point of view. Such effort is required for a moral life, not just for gaining a satisfying aesthetic experience.

4 Objects worthy of respectful aesthetic experience

Thus far, in discussing the moral dimension of aesthetic experience, the assumption has been that the object of aesthetic experience is worthy of attention and appreciation. That is, it rewards my effort toward unselﬁ ng, focusing and engaging in a creative act by exercising my imagination. However, there are works of art that fail to meet me halfway when I make an effort. If the object is a case of what Kupfer calls ‘cheap’ or ‘vulgar’ art, it ‘dulls the sensibility, inhibits imagination, and disposes toward intransigence’ because it merely presents a world all-too-familiar and all-too-comfortable to me and exacerbates my complacency and lethargy.49 Murdoch also condemns bad art for providing forms that are ‘the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selﬁ sh day-dream’.50 Or the work of art may be too esoteric, elitist or idiosyncratic to be capable of inviting me to enter its world. As a result, my readiness and willingness to engage with the object are not responded to and I may have to decide that it is not worth the effort. It may also be the case, as Hepburn points out, that the work lacks artistic merit or is dominated by theorizing: ‘If no intelligible story

48 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 268. 49 Kupfer, Experience as Art, 68. 50 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 84. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 105 whatever can be offered, we are entitled to suspect that a work is empty. If much is said about it, yet little or none of that can be read back into the look or the sound of the work itself, but remains external to it, we are entitled to suspect that theorizing has supplanted art’.51 Thus, some works of art simply do not measure up to our attempt to develop an aesthetic experience. However, despite the different degrees of worthiness of our respect, the default assumption is that works of art are one kind of thing that merits our respectful attention and handling. When it comes to nature, a stronger case can be made that every part of it, even if unat- tractive or (seemingly) useless, is worthy of respect because it is not ‘ours’.52 Particularly today, we are painfully aware of the negative consequences of the anthropocentric attitude toward nature, which regards nature as ‘It’ rather than ‘Thou’ in Martin Buber’s formulation, that is, as resources to be utilised.53 Hence, with the development of environmental ethics, the domain of things worthy of moral respect has expanded to include non-human animals and arguably natural objects and eco-systems. In contrast, in the Western philosophical tradition, artefacts are often characterised as ‘mere things’, a quintessential ‘It’ to which we owe no moral consideration. There is no moral problem with using objects merely as a means to our ends, with possible exceptions like historically signiﬁ cant objects and structures, national ﬂ ags and gravestones. This is why we are not supposed to treat other humans and nature as if they were objects, implying such handling of objects is morally acceptable. Accordingly, there seems to be no moral consideration necessary for our aesthetic experience of these objects, unlike in the cases of art and nature. It appears then that our aesthetic experience of artefacts allows complete freedom where ‘anything goes’. However, I believe that we need to examine this commonly-accepted relationship with things and our aesthetic experiences of them, particularly regarding consumer products. It is widely agreed that today’s consumerism is driven by the aesthetic appetite for the new, the fashionable and the up-to- date, although these aesthetic ideals are largely manufactured and imposed on consumers by industries. It is a well-known secret that industries have shifted their commercial strategy from planned obsolescence regarding functionality

51 Hepburn, ‘Values of Art and Values of Community’, 48. 52 For this view, see the essays included in the section on ‘Nature and Positive Aesthetics’ in Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (eds), Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York, 2007). 53 Cf. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1970). 106 Yuriko Saito to perceived obsolescence, sometimes referred to as aesthetic obsolescence. We consumers are caught in the never-ending search for the most stylish and fashionable. The speed with which we buy and discard various objects discourages us from cultivating any meaningful relationship with them, as they are considered disposables. Needless to say, this treatment of material goods exacts a heavy toll on the environment caused by resource extraction, manufacturing processes, transportation and disposal. Moreover, it results in the egregious violation of the rights of workers in factories and at disposal sites and endangers the wellbeing of those who are affected by environmental harm. The most tragic example is the 2013 garment factory collapse in Bangladesh with 1,134 deaths and roughly 2,500 injured.54 One may agree that the damage caused by global production systems and consumerism is problematic and needs to be addressed, but one may also question the relevance of this to our aesthetic experience of material goods. For example, Jane Forsey claims that the fact that objects were made ‘in a third-world factory under dismal condition’ should affect ‘our moral judgements of the objects […] but not our aesthetic judgements of their beauty’.55 However, even if it is possible to separate the aesthetic and the moral and thereby protect the autonomy of the aesthetic realm, I believe that doing so is morally problematic particularly regarding consumer goods with which we directly interact by purchasing, using and throwing away. My research on everyday aesthetics convinces me that, whether we like it or not and whether we recognise it or not, aesthetics does exert a considerable infl uence on our decision-making that results in actions with consequences. This fi nding leads me to two conclusions. First, I am sceptical about our ability to act as good Kantians by making morally consequential decisions solely on the basis of rational deliberation regardless of, or sometimes despite, our sensible nature, namely our feelings. Second, if aesthetic is a powerful motiva- tor for action, its power should be harnessed, rather than denied.56 Regarding the fi rst point, I fi nd support from those who are inspired by the notion of aesthetic education advocated by Schiller. Schiller is sceptical of the

54 I explore aesthetics as the primary engine behind today’s consumerism and its relationship to environmental ethics in ‘Consumer Aesthetics and Environmental Ethics: Problems and Possibilities’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,76 (2018), 429–39. 55 Jane Forsey, The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford, 2013), 186. 56 In Part III: ‘Consequences: Everyday Aesthetics and World-Making’, I explore aesthetics’ role in directing our decisions and actions in everyday life, cf. my Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford, 2017), 141–224. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 107 practical applicability of Kantian ethics based solely on reason, arguing for the efﬁ cacy of the emotive power to compel us to act morally:

Reason has accomplished all she can in discovering and expounding Law; it is the task of courageous will and lively feeling to execute it. If Truth is to gain the victory in the struggle with Force, she must ﬁ rst become herself a force, and ﬁ nd some impulse to champion her in the realm of phenomena; for impulses are the only motive forces in the sensible world.57

In short, Schiller declares that ‘the way to the head must lie through the heart’ and what is most pressing is ‘training of the sensibility’.58 Contemporary versions of Schiller’s aesthetic education are many, particularly among those who are concerned about environmental problems. A classic case in point is Leopold’s land aesthetics that was developed on the basis of his conviction that ‘we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love’, and that it is ‘inconceivable […] that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value’.59 David Orr also advocates environmental education based on aesthetics when he states: ‘we are moved to act more often, more consistently, and more profoundly by the experience of beauty in all of its forms than by intellectual arguments, abstract appeals to duty or even by fear’. Therefore, he continues, ‘we must be inspired to act by examples that we can see, touch and experience’, toward which we can develop an ‘emotional attachment’ and a ‘deep affection’.60 It is noteworthy that practitioners concerned with sustainability, namely designers and architects, also argue against addressing the issues only as environmental concerns and invoke aesthetic considerations as an indispensable ingredient.61

57 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education, 48. 58 Ibid., 50. 59 Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 251, 261. 60 David Orr, The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002), 178–9, 185, 25 and 26. 61 See Joan Iverson Nassauer, ‘Cultural Sustainability: Aligning Aesthetics with Ecology’ in Joan Iverson Nassauer (ed.), Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology (Washington, D. C., 1997), 67–83; Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reﬂ ections on Technology, Agency, and Design, trans. Robert P. Crease (University Park, Penn., 2005); Stuart Walker, Sustainable by Design: Explorations in Theory and Practice (London, 2006); Lance Hosey, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Washington, D. C., 2012). 108 Yuriko Saito

5 Ethically-grounded aesthetic experience of mere things?

What does this mean for our aesthetic experience of material objects? What would be Hepburn’s position? Unfortunately, he never got a chance to address what, if any, would be expected of our aesthetic experience of mere things. However, let me explore his possible response based upon some passages and examples he offers, as well as his view on the ethically-grounded aesthetic experiences of art and nature that I have discussed. In the following passage, Hepburn seems to indicate that we should separate the aesthetic appeal of an object promoted by advertising and its moral implications:

There is no necessary link between imaginative power and moral (or metaphysical) acceptability, although the exhilarating shock of aesthetic response to a vivid image can readily be mistaken for justiﬁ ed conviction of the truth-claim, empirical-factual or moral – that it purports to make. On the everyday level, this happens often enough when adver- tizing materials bowls over susceptible readers and viewers […]. In a word, we need both to cherish successful and memorable fusions of moral and aesthetic, and to be on the alert for deceptive ones, where for all their attractive pull, it is extrication of the moral from the allurement of the aesthetic that is necessary, and not contentment with their fusion – and confusion.62

Insofar as this passage is concerned, he seems to leave open the possibility that the ‘attractive pull’ and ‘allurement of the aesthetic’ of the object can remain intact, although we need to question the moral implications of the object and at times resist the aesthetic attraction. This passage is the only place where Hepburn comes close to addressing consumerism. However, two other examples, although admittedly not regarding consumer goods, indicate a more nuanced consideration. The only speciﬁ c examples of artefacts he discusses are wind turbines that are becoming increasingly familiar in landscapes world over. Although not a consumer product, the fundamental issue is the same: whether or not the environmental effect (in this case positive, while in the case of consumer goods negative) should be part of the aesthetic experience. The general populace’s primary

62 Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Moral: Links and Limits, Part Two’, 60. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 109 objection to wind turbines is aesthetic, as they are typically considered eyesores that destroy landscapes and seascapes. At the same time, wind power is also regarded as a form of alternative energy with little environmental harm, in comparison with conventional forms of energy, such as hydro, coal, oil and nuclear.63 Hepburn formulates the challenge to aesthetics as follows: ‘how the sense-perceptual and the contribution of our freedom-and-reason can be in tension or confl ict, as well as mutually enhancing and enriching’.64 Specifi cally, in the case of wind turbines, ‘is the benign thought component here powerful (authoritative?) enough to achieve this transformation?’ or, instead, ‘are we left with two non-merging items of experience, aesthetic appraisal (negative) and welfare appraisal (positive)?’65 Hepburn’s own response to this question is tentative: ‘in such cases the options for decision can be several, defying simple appeal to rule or principle, and requiring case-by-case appraisal’.66 Here, his emphasis on the singularity of the object of aesthetic experience regarding art and nature discussed previously is paramount. The design of wind turbines, at least currently, is fairly uniform consisting of a tall pole with three whirling blades at the top. However, their placement, arrangement and geographical context (regarding not only the topography but also the surrounding area’s character and cultural/historical signifi cance) vary from project to project. Locations range from oceans and deserts to mountains and farmland. Sometimes the site is next to an historically signifi cant place or a residential area and other times it is in the middle of an industrial zone. I agree with Hepburn’s case-by-case approach because I believe it is unwise to have a hasty, knee-jerk reaction either for or against the aesthetics of wind turbines, based, in one case, upon their presumed eyesore effect and, in the other, upon their environmental value. In the fi rst case, we can be justifi ably accused of being close-minded. When the aesthetic harm is not too blatant, I believe it is reasonable to allow some room for the environmental value to be

63 I am aware of the possible harm to birds and to human hearing but for the purpose of discussion here I am only addressing the environmental benefi t of renewable energy. I explore various issues related to the aesthetics of wind turbines in my ‘Machines in the Ocean: The Aesthetics of Wind Farm’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 2 (2004), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID= 247&searchstr=Yuriko+Saito; and ‘Response to Jon Boone’s Critique’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 3 (2005), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=321&searchstr=Yuriko+Saito, both accessed 4 April 2019. 64 Hepburn, ‘Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience’, 12. 65 Ibid., 11. 66 Ibid., 12. 110 Yuriko Saito fused with the structure’s appearance, such as its movement in the open air, to render the structure aesthetically positive, or at least aesthetically benign. At the same time, no matter how environmentally valuable the structure may be, the aesthetics of its relationship to the surroundings may be too negative to make incorporation or fusion of environmental benefi t possible. In such a case, we should uphold the centrality of the sensuous and not let the environmental value dictate the aesthetic value. In some cases, the fusion of the environmental considerations and the aesthetic surface of an object may be easier. The environmental harms of the American obsession with weeds-free, smooth green lawns as the ideal domes- tic landscape are well documented.67 They include the use of toxic fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, an inordinate amount of water, gasoline for power- ing lawn mowers and other machineries. What at fi rst appear to be factors that cannot be integrated into the appearance of the green carpet may help us notice things that had not been noticed before. For example, because of the toxicity of the chemicals applied, birds and butterfl ies seldom fl ock to the green lawns, while the alternative, environmentally healthier gardens with wildfl owers and edible plants are alive with these creatures. Furthermore, the rich diversity of colours and textures of the alternative landscaping makes the appearance of green lawns pale in comparison. As a result, the green lawns start looking eerily sterile, lifeless and monotonous. But the case of consumer goods remains challenging because the environmental harm and the human rights violations often occur half the world away. Unlike in the case of the lawn, the associated facts cannot be fused with the perceptual features of the objects. There is indeed a disconnect between the objects and the various associated harms. As Orr points out:

the problem is that we do not often see the true ugliness of the consumer economy and so are not compelled to do much about it. The distance between shopping malls and the mines, wells, corporate farms, factories, toxic dumps, and landﬁ lls, sometimes half a world away, dampens our perceptions that something is fundamentally wrong.68

67 See Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (Washington, D. C., 1994); F. Herbert Bormann, et al., Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony (New Haven, 2001); and Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York, 2006). 68 Orr, The Nature of Design, 179. Aesthetic Experience as an Educational Journey 111

Does this case then mark the limit of how far we can take the ethical considerations to affect the aesthetic experience? Although it concerns nature aesthetics, consider the following discussion by Hepburn of the predation necessary for animals in an otherwise pleasurable landscape. I am assuming that the phenomenon of predation is not available to the sense experience in this case. Hepburn wonders whether the freedom of imagination can legitimately extend to wilfully ignoring this fact about the landscape. ‘I may employ my improvisatory freedom in being self-indulgently selective of only the benign aspects of the animal relationships in a landscape. Then I may sense a measure of “bad faith” in my screening out thoughts that would jeopardize the overall agreeable tone of my aesthetic experience’.69 We are then confronted with the challenge of incorporating disharmonious or disconcerting associations into an overall synthesized aesthetic whole, what he characterises as ‘self-correction, to “retune” towards a manageable aesthetic experience’, or to decide ‘to leave the aesthetic mode’ if the disharmonious associations overwhelm the fragile aesthetic whole.70 If we pursue the educational process and value of aesthetic experiences regarding art and nature that is emphasised by Hepburn, we could claim that the initial attractiveness of the object needs to go through modifi cations or ‘retuning’ with further knowledge we gain and that ignoring or excluding it amounts to not fully supporting and practicing this educational process and is indeed a case of bad faith. Insofar as a material object also constitutes ‘the other’, our aesthetic experience needs to attend to its singularity and wholeness. Specifi cally, in today’s global economy, we tend to view consumer goods simply as objects on the store shelf with no story or history. Far from being story-less, however, such an object has often gone through quite a journey with its production process and will continue the journey into its so-called ‘afterlife’ in the junkyard. The story of its journey is often dark with various environmental problems and human hardships. A more holistic aesthetic experience of the object with its own story may make the content of the experience less harmonious and more complicated and messy, but one could argue, following Hepburn’s discussion of art and nature aesthetics, that it is a ‘truer’ or richer experience, although not pleasant or comfortable. Its sensuous appeal will be felt as more fragile and precarious. Feeling the weight of its dark history would encourage a more respectful interaction with the object by cherishing it, caring for it, prolonging its longevity by repairing it when 69 Hepburn, ‘Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience’, 8. 70 Ibid., 9. 112 Yuriko Saito needed, rather than throwing it away at the fi rst sign that it no longer satisfi es our aesthetic appetite. Ultimately, the kind of aesthetic experience we develop toward the material world determines our mode of being in the world.

* * *

This paper is a journey in pursuit of some possible consequences of Hepburn’s work on the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral, particularly regarding its application to the aesthetics of mere things. Aesthetic experience plays an indispensable role in cultivating an ethically-grounded interaction with the other, whether it be other people, art, nature, or, as I argue, the material world in general. As such, developing aesthetic experience not only enriches our lives but also improves our way of being in the world and of interacting with ‘the other’.71

Rhode Island School of Design

71 I thank Allen Carlson for vastly improving the ﬁ nal text of this paper with meticulous editing and suggestions for clarity and effectiveness. Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence in Hepburn and the New Nature Writing Alexander J. B. Hampton

Ronald W. Hepburn’s seminal ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ (1966) is widely acknowledged as renewing interest in the aesthetics of nature, and setting the agenda for the development of environmental aesthetics in the latter part of the twentieth century.1 The importance of this fi eld has only grown over the past two decades with the development of the now burgeoning interdisciplinary fi eld of the environmental humanities, whose fundamental aim is to reconceptualise nature and the place of humans within it.2 This fi eld, which naturally incorporates environmental aesthetics, seeks to address the long-running and increasingly-acute environmental crisis. The environmental humanities reject any characterisation of humanities- based approaches to nature as being of lesser value than those of the natural 1 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefi ore (eds), British Analytical Philosophy (London, 1966), 285–310; Isis Brook, ‘Ronald Hepburn and the Humanising of Environmental Aesthetics’, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 265–71; Allen Carlson, ‘Ten Steps in the Development of Western Environmental Aesthetics’ in Martin Drenthen and Jozef Keulartz, (eds), Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground (New York, 2014), 13–24; idem, ‘Environmental Aesthetics’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/ entries/environmental-aesthetics, accessed 1 October 2019; Yuriko Saito, ‘Future Directions for Environmental Aesthetics’, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 373–91; Yrjö Sepänmaa, ‘From Theoretical to Applied Environmental Aesthetics: Academic Aesthetics Meets Real-World Demands’, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 393–405; Emily Brady, ‘Ronald W. Hepburn: In Memoriam’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (2009), 199–202. 2 Prominent initial publications in the environmental humanities include: Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, Feminist Studies, 1 (1972), 5–31; Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris, 1991); William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History, 1 (1996), 7–28; Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martí nez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London, 1997); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientifi c Revolution (San Francisco, 1990); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1991). 114 Alexander J. B. Hampton sciences, and instead argues for their fundamental importance in setting the context in which technical and scientifi c knowledge is deployed.3 A quarter of a century before the development of this fi eld, Hepburn had already argued for the legitimacy of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and made the claim that metaphysics and the imagination ‘delineate the wider context in which science itself has its place’.4 Given Hepburn’s importance in both establishing the discipline of environmental aesthetics, and his prefi guring of the development of the environmental humanities, it is surprising that his work has not been applied in aiding our understanding of the present-day renaissance in British nature writing, known as the new nature writing. Equally surprising is the fact that new nature writing itself has not sought to employ Hepburn in the context of its own creative non-fi ction, to articulate its own aims. The context of the environmental humanities, therefore offers a fortuitous framework to carry out this comparative project between Hepburn and new nature writing. This has the benefi t of both illustrating Hepburn’s aesthetic philosophy in action, and of bringing the key elements of new nature writing’s implicit philosophy of environmental aesthetics, expressed in its aesthetic output, into relief. This examination will apply a range of elements from Hepburn’s aesthetic writings to the analysis of new nature writing. In particular, it will focus upon two key themes in Hepburn’s work on aesthetics and nature. First, Hepburn argues for the legitimacy of what he calls a humanised understanding of nature, which has often been dismissed as subjectivism, and therefore incapable of rendering an accurate depiction of nature. Hepburn defends humanisation on the basis that it allows for the dispositional power of natural objects to be appreciated yielding insights otherwise unavailable to the discursive natural sciences. New nature writing also asserts the legitimacy of this aesthetic form of appreciation through a defence of the fi rst-person account of the individual in nature. Second, Hepburn offers a defence of what he calls the metaphysical imagination, an aesthetic form of understanding nature with the ability to disclose how the world actually is. New nature writing also works

3 Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Intro- duction (Cambridge, Mass., 2017), 7–11, 71–92; Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London, 2002), 38–61; Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer and Chris Haufe, ‘Anthropogenic Mass Extinction: The Science, the Ethics, and the Civics’ in Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (Oxford, 2016), 427–37. 4 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204, 194. Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence... 115 to legitimise the importance of the imagination, arguing that it allows us to understand and ﬁ nd a place within nature. However, before exploring how new nature writing illustrates Hepburn’s aesthetics of nature in action, and how the environmental aesthetics of new nature writing is brought into relief by Hepburn, this consideration will ﬁ rst offer a brief characterisation of the movement known as new nature writing.

1 New nature writing

The past decade has witnessed a fl ourishing in the genre of non-fi ction nature prose in the United Kingdom. In 2008 Granta: The Magazine of New Writing published an issue titled ‘The New Nature Writing’, recognising the development of a movement that has since grown exponentially.5 The year before marked the founding edition of the occasional literary magazine Archipelago, which has acted as an organ for many of the movement’s contributors. Numerous contributions to new nature writing have appeared upon UK best- seller lists. In 2014 the Wainwright Prize was established in association with the National Trust to acknowledge this emergent genre. The movement has many contributors, among whom its most-recognised writers are Kathleen Jamie, John Lewis-Stemple, Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. Collectively their contributions have been acknowledged within the wider literary scene by garnering awards such as the Samuel Johnson Book Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and the E. M. Forster Award for Literature. To describe new nature writing as a genre is problematic. One can fi nd contributions to the body of its work classifi ed under natural history, travel writing and geography. Foremost, however, in its most popular expression as creative non-fi ction, its form is the memoir, and one of its defi ning characteristics is the voice of the author in nature.6 Numerous and diverse contributions have been made to new nature writing as it has emerged over the past decade, and although the variation is wide,

5 Jason Cowley, ‘Editors’ Letter: The New Nature Writing’, Granta, 102 (2008), 7–12; Claire Armistead, ‘Happiness to Mindfulness, via Wellbeing: How Publishing Trends Grow’, The Guardian, 14 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/booksblog/2016/mar/14/happiness-to-mindfulness-via-wellbeing-how- publishing-trends-grow, accessed 1 October 2019. 6 For a more extensive description of the movement see Alexander J. B. Hampton, ‘Post-secular Nature and the New Nature Writing’, Christianity and Literature, 67 (2018), 454–71. 116 Alexander J. B. Hampton it is possible to group them into four broad categories which can provide an overview of the movement. The ﬁ rst of these categories expresses a singular sensitivity and awareness of place that leads to detailed and diligent articula- tions of natural experiences.7 Of central concern to the works in this category is the way we know places, not just the places themselves. As such these works often include human geography, history, folklore and etymology, interwoven with natural history. The second category is similar, but is rooted more ﬁ rmly to a single place.8 These works depict an intimate relationship between the writer and a location, and cultivate a deep connection for the reader as well by describing the overwhelming complexity and depth of a single place. A third category is similarly concerned with the re-integration of the self into nature, but its active ingredient is not the disposition to embark on an excursion, or discover a single place anew. Rather, in these works, the natural world provides a way for individual authors to deal with the experience of crisis. In these instances nature is not the place for the projection of one’s emotions, but instead the space whereby depression is overcome through a restored sense of participation in a nature greater than the self, yet in which one belongs.9 Finally, the forth category of new nature writing tells its story by focusing on a particular animal species.10 These texts, through the experience of the author, introduce readers to curious, fascinating and often unknown aspects of everyday wildlife. These works argue for a renewed kinship with nature by illustrating how certain species impact human lives in complex and seemingly mysterious ways.

7 Roger Deakin, Waterlog (London, 1999); Kathleen Jamie, Findings (London, 2005); idem, Sightlines (London, 2012); Robert Macfarlane, Wild Places (London, 2007); idem, The Old Ways (London, 2012); Philip Marsden, Rising Ground (London, 2014); William Atkins, The Moor (London, 2014). 8 Stephen Moss, Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (London, 2010); John Stempel-Lewis, Meadowland (London, 2014), idem, The Running Hare (2016); Mark Cocker, Claxton (London, 2014); Rob Cowen, Common Ground (London, 2015); Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Dublin, 2006); idem, Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness (Dublin, 2008); idem, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (Dublin, 2011). 9 Richard Mabye, Nature Cure (London, 2005); Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London, 2014); Amy Liptrot, The Outrun (London, 2015); Katherine Norbury, The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream (London, 2015); Michael McCarthy, Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (London, 2015). 10 Mark Cocker, Crow Country (London, 2008); Tim Dee, The Running Sky (London, 2009); Miriam Darlington, Otter Country (London, 2012); Patrick Barkham, Badgerlands (London, 2013); Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tail (London, 2013). Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence... 117

2 The aesthetics of humanisation

One of Hepburn’s main concerns is the dismissal of the aesthetic appreciation of nature as subjective. In his article ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’ (1998), Hepburn writes that the legitimacy of nature’s aesthetic appreciation is often considered as failing to offer a true description of nature because it involves a range of reactions that are considered to be subjective.11 These reactions include ‘sentimentality’, ‘anthropomorphism’, ‘narcissism’, and ‘emotionality’.12 The natural sciences, on the other hand, engage in a process of resolutely stripping away these elements. Though its depiction may seem to lack emotional resonance and fi gurative satisfaction, the representations of natural science can nevertheless claim a kind of analytic objectivity. Accordingly, we are left in a position where there is only one defensibly accurate depiction of nature itself. Hepburn’s goal is to defend our aesthetic non-scientifi c interactions with nature as a legitimate form of knowing nature. This generalised account offered by Hepburn bears itself out in the development of British nature writing in the twentieth century, which increasingly moved away from fi rst person accounts of nature, and evermore toward a supposedly reliable scientifi c account.13 In opposition to this, the new nature writing seeks to recognise the value and legitimacy of personal aesthetic accounts of nature. Mabey, one of the main fi gures of the movement, expresses this aim:

It’s become customary, on this side of the Atlantic, stifﬂ y to exclude all such personal narratives from writings about the natural world, as if the experience of nature were something separate from real life, a diversion, a hobby; or perhaps only to be evaluated through the dispassionate and separating prism of science. It has never felt like that to me […] it’s seemed absurd that, with our new understanding of the kindredness of life, so-called ‘nature writing’ should divorce itself from other kinds of literature, and from the rest of human existence.14

11 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 267–279. 12 Ibid., 267. 13 Richard Mabey, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), Second Nature (London, 1984), ix–xix. 14 Richard Mabey, Nature Cure (London, 2015), 22–3. 118 Alexander J. B. Hampton

Prior to the twentieth century, Romantic and Victorian nature writing centred upon the individual’s experience of nature as described by Mabey. Popular fi gures such as William Wordsworth, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, all offered fi rst-hand, fi rst-person, accounts of their experiences in nature. However, this perspective became increasingly unfashionable in the twentieth century. Novels such as Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm (1932) and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938), respectively offered a devastating pastiche of countryside charm, and a mawkish portrayal of the dilettante naturalist.15 This refl ected a changing public attitude to what was increasingly regarded as amateur naturalism, imbued with more fanciful anthropomorphism and emotional trivialities, than it was with accurate observation and dispassionate description. W. G. Hoskins, author of the infl uential The Making of the English Landscape (1955), expressed this senti- ment when he wrote that his aim was to move beyond the ‘sentimental and formless slush which affl icts so many books concerned only with superfi cial appearances.’16 As a result of these trends, by the mid-twentieth century the voice of the individual interacting with nature in popular British nature writing had virtually become silent, replaced by the disembodied, objective, impassive voice of the professional naturalist who offered an all-seeing abstract view from nowhere. Both Hepburn’s aesthetic theory and the practice of new nature writing seek to restore legitimacy to the individual voice, and challenge the accusation of its subjective inaccuracy. Hepburn argues for a more nuanced understanding of our non-scientifi c relationship to nature. Whereas all of what he calls our expressive responses to nature involve a human element, not all of these involve a form of subjective projection that obscures nature.17 To this end, Hepburn introduces the term ‘humanising’, which aims to describe a human relationship with nature, as opposed to a human imposed re-construction of it.18 Hepburn describes how humanisation is capable of yielding forms of understanding and appreciation toward nature that cultivate a greater respect for it:

15 Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (London, 1932); Evelyn Waugh, Scoop: A Novel About Journalists (London, 1938). 16 W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955). 17 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 268–71. 18 Ibid., 267. Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence... 119

We may respond to a savannah as an expansive, exhilarating openness, or enjoy the comforting enclosedness of an ancient path between high hedges. Without categorising or seeing a mountain animistically as a reclining giant, or enormous lion, we can apprehend it, on our approach, as a majestic, serene presence evoking a solemn joy. Doubtless, this kind of mental disengagement allows all sorts of normally unconscious responses to resonate… there need be no illusion here, nor self-decep- tion: rather, an opening to levels of response not often accessible. We are experiencing the dispositional power of the object (the mountain) to evoke human emotion and mood, without the mediation of a falsify- ingly anthropomorphic interpretation. We humanise, yes, but without illusion, or loss of respect for nature itself.19

The process Hepburn describes here, where we disengage our subjective imposition upon the natural object of consideration, allows that object’s own ‘dispositional power’ (i.e. its inherent character) to evoke an aesthetic response within us as observers. We can, Hepburn explains, excise what he calls ‘inap- propriately human’ impositions upon nature in our observations, but we should in no way engage in a reductionist refusal to allow any subjective feeling or affect to shape our interactions with nature.20 The result of such a denial of subjectivity, he argues, would be the impoverishment of our understanding of nature, and undermine the source of our respect for it. New nature writing engages in a similar critique of the impoverishment of our intellectual and emotional relationship to the natural world. Throughout the literature, one ﬁ nds concern over the loss of communion with nature, and its deleterious replacement with the utilitarian, instrumentalist view that is incapable of expressing wonder. This is expressed in Robert Macfarlene’s Landmarks (2015), a book concerned with the loss and recovery of our nature vocabulary:

Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We ﬁ nd it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework. We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us […] This is not to suggest 19 Ibid., 271–2. 20 Ibid., 270. 120 Alexander J. B. Hampton

that we need adopt either a literal animism or a systematic superstition; only that by instrumentalizing nature, linguistically and operationally, we have largely stunned the earth out of wonder.21

What Macfarlane describes is the loss of our ability to hear the dispositional power in nature that concerns Hepburn. Instead of the conversation with the natural world that occurs when we humanise nature, in Hepburn’s terms, we are left with the monologue that Macfarlane describes. The result is a relationship incapable of the understanding and respect cultivated through humanisation. Hepburn describes this state of affairs as a failure of respect and empathy that results from our inability to appreciate nature as it is. He writes:

If we are having any relationship with nature, it should be with nature as it is and not as we selectively, distortingly imagine it might be or might have been. For instance, to project inappropriate human emotional and social life on to a non-human animal – outside the storybook, that is – is a failure of respect for the actual animal: a failure to empathise with its own proper way of being. We are failing to give it its due recognition for what it is – for its own nature. We would be using the animal, here, as a prop to our own fantasising.22

In opposition to this, Hepburn identifi es two essential characteristics to a good humanising relationship with nature. Distance and affi nity, he explains, make it possible to establish a relationship with nature that avoids the fantasisation and failure described. In terms of distance, Hepburn argues that there exists a never fully bridgeable gap between ourselves and the nature we observe. This does not mean that we are not fully part of nature. Rather, it means that nature is so possessed of its own distinct identity that it will always resist our attempts to fully comprehend it.23 Alternately, in terms of affi nity, he describes a relationship that allows us to recognise a kinship with nature, and the possibility of a dialogue with it.24 The challenge is to achieve a balance between these two orientations. Hepburn offers the following description, which refl ects both our distance from, and affi nity to, nature:

21 Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London, 2015), 25. 22 Hepburn, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, 271. 23 Ibid., 269–71. 24 Ibid. Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence... 121

Certainly, we humanise still: as we make a more ‘truthful’ attempt to grasp or realise (still through aesthetic experience) nature as it is, but without seeking to overcome the working of analogies between nature’s life and our own, we open ourselves, again, to a diversifying and deepening of the range of our emotions. […] In a word, we move (for truth’s sake) away from familiar forms of trivialising and distorting anthropomorphism towards recognition of the otherness of nature in a stronger and more stable sense than before; yet, that done, we still ﬁ nd human enrichment – in self-understanding or self-constructing – in the inward appropria- tion of nature’s sights and sounds.25

There can be no fast rule, Hepburn goes on to explain. Rather, there can only be a constant exercise of cognitive constraint that mediates the interaction between the self and the natural object.26 A number of new nature writers describe a dynamic of distance and affi nity with nature, yet one of the best representations of this is found in Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014). The book describes a year the author spends training a goshawk following the death of her father. Consistently, Macdonald fi nds herself struggling with the raptor’s resistance to the meaning she attempts to impose upon it. This occurs whilst she trains the animal, but it is also dramatically captured when the would-be owner fi rst meets the bird of prey. The moment the breeder opens the box in which the hawk has been transported occasions a description which expresses her encounter with the hawk’s distance from, and resistance to, the imposition of subjective meaning:

Concentration. Infi nite caution. Daylight irrigating the box. Scratching talons, another thump. And another. Thump. The air turned syrupy, slow, fl ecked with dust. The last few seconds before a battle. And with the last bow pulled free, he reached inside, and amidst a whirring, chaotic clatter of wings and feet and talons and a high-pitched twittering and it’s all happening at once, the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great fl ood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. The hawk’s wings, barred and beating, the sharp fi ngers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porpentine. Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She 25 Ibid., 272. 26 Ibid., 271. 122 Alexander J. B. Hampton

is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.27

Here, the style of the sentence structure, which moves from past tense to present, from sentence fragment to run-on sentence, communicates the affective immediacy of her encounter with nature. The hawk is represented as an experience that neither Macdonald nor the reader can subsume into their own subjectivity. As Macdonald Struggles to train the goshawk she ﬁ rst attempts to impose herself upon its nature. However, with time and through much trial and error, she comes to diversify and develop the emotions through which she relates to the hawk in manner similar to the process described by Hepburn. Later in the book, she compares the way wild animals are usually represented to her own real experience of them:

There is a vast difference between my visceral, bloody life with Mable [the hawk] and the reserved, distanced view of modern nature-appreciation… I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me…28

Of the hawk, Macdonald goes on to write: ‘She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give to her.’29 Here we can ﬁ nd at play the dynamic between distance and afﬁ nity that Hepburn describes as essential to the proper humanisation of nature. When this dynamic correctly functions, we are left open enough to realise that nature contains its own meaning, which, as Macdonald explains, is capable of both resisting and equally teaching us.

3 The aesthetics of the metaphysical imagination

In ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’ (1996), Hepburn offers a further defence of our aesthetic appreciation of nature. Though the argument made in this consideration is focused upon the experience of landscape, its considerations can easily be extrapolated mutatis mutandis to include nature

27 Macdonald, H is for Hawk, 53. 28 Ibid., 181. 29 Ibid. Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence... 123 in general. Hepburn’s aim is to defend the imagination against what he calls ‘a one-sided, science-dominated approach of nature’, which abstracts the emotional and value-suffused aspects of our experience of nature to arrive at an abstract representation.30 Imaginative representations of nature fail to fi t within this established pattern of discourse because they invoke notions of sublimity and transcendence. Such notions, Hepburn explains, are the cause of signifi cant embarrassment ‘because this is taken to express a religious experience whose object is very indeterminate, whose description virtually fails of distinct reference, and which may lack adequate rational support’.31 This embarrassment is, however, unwarranted, Hepburn explains, and to attempt to have an aesthetic experience of nature free of any metaphysical element ‘would be self-impoverishing’.32 New nature writing also defends the legitimacy of an imaginative relationship capable of integrating us within nature. Mabey writes ‘I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it’.33 Macfarlane describes the impact of the imagination in terms of a lost language of childhood, which we all once spoke, but have since forgot. There is a way, he explains, for ‘all landscapes to be seen childishly, such that a wood – or a fi eld, or a garden, or a hou se – can hold infi nite possibilities in a single unfolding place’.34 Lewis-Stemple in Meadowland (2014), also offers a defence of an imaginative relationship with nature, that establishes a personal connection to it. In this vein he argues for the validity of an anthropomorphism of kindredness:

I have never known a sow badger to be anything but an ‘old girl’, and when the gender of an animal is unknown it is always ‘he’, and never ‘it’. And I wonder, is it really so difﬁ cult to enter, in some slight degree, into the mind-frame of an animal? Are we not all beasts?35

He also defends the use of imagination more broadly in nature writing:

Some science Puritan will aver that British nature writing is diseased by ‘species shift’ […] the placing of the author inside the head and body 30 Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, 194. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Mabey, Nature Cure, 23. 34 Macfarlane, Landmarks, 327. 35 Lewis-Stemple, Meadowland, 113. 124 Alexander J. B. Hampton

of the being described. The same lab-coated lobby invariably sign off with the dig that ‘nature writing’, and by extension, ‘nature reading’ are the habit of metropolitans detached from the real Nature of the red teeth and claws…36

In opposition Lewis-Stemple makes the argument that the imagination is capable of opening one’s eyes to moments of beauty, complexity and wonder. This is something he captures in a prose diary of closely rendered observations of his Herefordshire farm’s meadow:

16 Under the hazels in the copse a fox (the vixen, I think) sits washing its front legs, a small red ember in the dying sun. Ten yards away a rabbit sits on top of an anthill, wholly in the view of the fox. The rabbit is also washing itself, pars to face. They ignore each other. And the lion shall lie down with the lamb, the fox and the rabbit on this fantastic honeysuckled evening.37

This description of a moment when nature is at peace with itself challenges a non-imaginative picture, which would render the same scene morally content- less, and operating under a survival-of-the-fi ttest logic that would fail to appreciate the beauty of a balanced ecosystem. The imagination in new nature writing is a faculty of re-integration, and an invitation to fi nding inherent meaning and value in nature without having to fear embarrassment. The argument for the imagination’s legitimatisation as an irrepressible part of our own animal nature is probably a key reason for the popularity of the movement. Hepburn describes the imagination as having ‘a refl ective cognitive element’ that distinguishes it from an a priori, idealist subjectivism.38 As a result of this our imaginative experience of landscape is, Hepburn writes, ‘no less an element of the concrete present landscape-experience: it is fused with sensory components, not a meditation aroused by these’.39 Furthermore, what is realised through the metaphysical imagination applies to the whole of experience, such that it is to be understood as ‘some indication, some disclosure of how the world ultimately is’.40 Hepburn connects this to the notion of transcend-

36 Ibid., 111–12. 37 Ibid., 165–66. 38 Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, 191, 39 Ibid., 192. 40 Ibid., 191. Nature’s Beauty: Legitimacy, Imagination and Transcendence... 125 ence that manifests itself in both particular and ultimate forms. In the case of the ﬁ rst, an unfamiliar landscape may reveal something that is ultimately true, that familiar landscapes do not. We ﬁ nd a case of this in Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), in her description of a movement when she and a group of tourists stand upon a silent Greenland shore:

Slowly we enter the most extraordinary silence, a radiant silence. It radi- ates from the mountains, and the ice and the sky, a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off. It’s deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose. I want to quell my mind, but I think it would take years. I glance at the others. Some people are looking out at the distant land and sea; others have their heads bowed, as if in church.41

The moment of silence that Jamie describes is one where the experience of place brings her beyond particularities to an elemental experience of both herself, and herself in nature. A similar experience is recorded in Chris Yates’ Nightwalk (2012) in relation to time, in what he describes as a moment of ‘perfect solitude’ observing the dawn: ‘Normally, the present is just a transitory point, a bit of blur between one thing and the next, yet in the untroubled and mostly revealing dark past and future have less relevance and I can ﬁ nd myself in a place of endless immediacy, a place known to every wild animal, a timelessness’.42 Here, the daybreak experience brings Yates beyond time, but even more intriguingly, beyond his species’ particularity, to what he describes as the temporally immediate perspective of the wild animal that underlies our own human nature. In the second, ultimate form of transcendence, the experience goes even further. Hepburn describes an experience that ‘may speak of a transcendent Source for which we lack clear words and concepts’.43 We ﬁ nd such a passage in a remarkable moment in Tim Robinson’s Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006):

Once when I was lying on the terrace of our house overlooking the bay, listening to music from the room behind me and watching a summer night subvert the scale of all things, I felt I could raise my hands and

41 Jamie, Sightlines, 4 42 Chris Yates, Nightwalk (London, 2012), 181–2. 43 Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, 191. 126 Alexander J. B. Hampton

spread my fi ngers over the mountain range, solidly dark against the still wine-fl ushed sky, as if over the keyboard of a piano, and produce one tremendous, defi nitive Connemara chord. But Connemara tends to undefi ne itself from minute to minute, and this Beethoven moment quickly passed. The range of peak became sheet iron, two-dimensional, a serrated rim to the fl oor of the world, dangerous to the imagined touch.44

Here, the area which Robinson describes in exacting detail through three volumes on the Connemara landscape, reveals itself as a single musical cipher that subverts human scale, only to withdraw almost immediately into a form too dangerous to touch. This is what Robinson elsewhere describes as ‘the boundary region between established truth and unstable imaginings that is my preferred territory.’45

4 A legitimised aesthetics of nature

Central to the environmental humanities is the task of reconceptualising nature and our place within it. This urgent task is predicated not merely on the realisation of the present anthropogenic crisis, but the reality that this cri sis has been recognised for the better part of a century. Our inability to successfully address it indicates a problem that goes far beyond any technical or scientiﬁ c knowledge, bringing up questions of existential and metaphysical import. Both Hepburn and the new nature writing see the dismissal of our aesthetic appreciation of nature as a key element of this problem. By bringing both together we are better able to recognise the resources each offers. The aesthetic production of new nature writing demonstrates in practice what Hepburn describes in theory. Equally, the implicit claims of new nature writing’s philosophy of environmental aesthetics are brought into relief by the concepts Hepburn develops in his defence of an aesthetics of nature appreciation. Together, both realise the aim of the environmental humanities, which is to argue for the legitimacy of an aesthetic understanding of nature in the context of the urgent task of reconceptualising nature and the place of humans within it. University of Toronto 44 Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind, 362. 45 Ibid., 374. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh:

Hepburn with de Bruyckere

Pauline von Bonsdorff

1 Introduction

On the day I received the invitation to contribute to the symposium on Ronald W. Hepburn’s legacy, I was invited to give a talk at the opening of an exhibition of the contemporary Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere.1 My intuition was that it might be fruitful to explore them together. De Bruyckere’s art is about violence, death, war, passion, love and sexual- ity; informed and inspired by classical myths and the Christian tradition. As I will show later, her work suggests a strong analogy between humans and the animate world, both animals and plants. On the other hand, there are strong paradoxes in her work. One is between the apparent violence and suffering in many of her works and the tenderness they communicate. Another is the fusion of life and death, where creatures that in one way are undoubtedly dead at the same time look expressive and alive. These paradoxes stimulate our imagination, perhaps realizing what Hepburn termed ‘necessarily incomplete’ ‘aesthetic transcendence’.2 An important shared quality of Hepburn’s philosophy and de Bruyckere’s art is their existential nisus. Hepburn explored issues of continuing importance in human life, and recognised that the thinking individual is part of a larger setting of nature. Second, while he is widely known as a pioneer of environmental aesthetics, as he describes the aesthetic experience of nature and of art, there are more and more fundamental similarities as compared to differences. In both cases, aesthetic experience is a synthesising, multileveled and reciprocal activity where imagination plays an important part. And when Hepburn writes about imagination, whether metaphysical, cosmic, religious,

1 The exhibition was at the Sara Hildén Museum in Tampere, Finland, 10 February – 20 May 2018. 2 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Time-Transcendence and Some Related Phenomena in the Arts’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 108–30, 127–8. 128 Pauline von Bonsdorff or concrete, he typically gives aesthetic experience a central role. Similarly, de Bruyckere brings art and nature together: hers is in many ways an art of and with nature, suggesting our belonging among and similarities with other creatures. Third, both Hepburn and de Bruyckere work with religious and cultural traditions in exploring existential issues, but without confessing any particular faith.

No Life Lost II (2015). Horse skin, wood, glass, fabric, leather, blankets, iron, epoxy, 237.5 x 342.9 x 188 cm. By courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © S. Hildén Museum and Jussi Koivunen

The metaphysical imagination that I want to address deals, to speak with Hepburn, with ‘how the world ultimately is’3 in a sense which includes both the structure of the world and values. Because it is imagination, it does not build a theory, but rather constitutes an open-ended chain of refl ection and contemplation. I argue that de Bruyckere’s art opens a space exactly for such imagination. It is metaphysical ‘in the fl esh’ in a literal sense, because fl esh plays a central role in her work. However, fl esh has a wider sense as well, developed by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his later

3 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204, 191. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 129 work,4 where he speaks of the fl esh of the world and refers to the dynamic and elemental structure of the life-world. The dynamic of visible and invisible indicates a depth dimension of our life-world, one where meanings, values, experiences are on hold (in the invisible) rather than actually present to us in a particular moment of focused awareness. Imagination, as a reciprocal movement between human being and world, feeds on this fl esh and is nourished by it. In this paper, I explore affi nities between Hepburn, Merleau-Ponty and de Bruyckere, whose art raises the initial questions. Her works highlight analogies between animals, plants and humans – in suffering but also as subject to care. They are cultural artefacts constituted as much by their physical forms and materials as by the narratives that support them and that they transform. Moreover, the works suggest reversibility and interdependence between observer and work. Having presented de Bruyckere’s recent art, I discuss fl esh in its literal, religious and philosophical sense from an agnostic and existential standpoint. I then move on to an analysis of the varieties of metaphysical imagination in Hepburn, and suggest that our predicament – to be ‘in nature and part of nature’5 – has gained more urgency today as a context for metaphysical imagination. Flesh and metaphysical imagination provide the background for addressing the paradoxical and moving character of de Bruyckere’s art. Here Hepburn’s ‘life-enhancement’ is a key concept. It encompasses both the vitality of aesthetic experience and how art can ‘prompt’ us to act in ways that serve life beyond personal interests.6

2 An art of suffering

De Bruyckere’s art comprises three-dimensional works (installations or sculptures) that either use or mimic organic materials, such as horses, cowhides, trees, or recycled waste from the cultural realm, including horse collars and old wallpaper, but also delicate drawings, often of human fi gures, skin or fl owers. A striking feature is the intimate interlacing of life and death. Among the works are representations of human bodies without heads or faces, images 4 See, in particular, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (1964; Paris, 1991); translated as The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, 1968). 5 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 9–35, 13. 6 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic. Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Edinburgh, 2001), 16–37, 18. 130 Pauline von Bonsdorff of separate body parts, stacked animal hides, or trunks and branches of trees severed from their site. At the same time, the works seem to be alive: an impression that arises from the delicate use of colour or the expressive postures of the creatures, often at rest but sometimes in positions that suggest experiences of pain and violence. Importantly, the moments conveyed by the works are part of historical or mythological narratives. For this reason, the suffering we perceive is individualised and has meaning as part of that narrative, which is not to say that the suffering is deserved or legitimate. In addition, despite the apparent violence that has hit the fi gures an overall atmosphere of peace, tenderness and dignity surrounds them. In 2000, de Bruyckere was commissioned to do work for the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres.7 Earlier she had exhibited representations of tormented and mutilated human bodies but realised that this would be too much in a context that commemorated the vast sufferings of the First World War. Instead, she created an installation that foregrounded the horses that were killed and injured in the war. In preparing the works, she co-operated with a horse clinic. When a horse had to be put to death, she had arranged with the clinic and the owner to get the body. The animal was arranged in an expressive posture; a cast was made; and, fi nally, the individual horse’s hide, mane and hoofs were used in the work. The horse sculptures have a certain similarity with death masks, although the artist created the situations they evoke. Like the death mask, the horse sculptures are imprints of a particular individual that just died. The death mask preserves the moment when someone has just passed away, which is also the time of the wake. To address agony and suffering through the animal rather than the human is common in many cultural traditions, and the horse possesses particular cultural resonance. In myths and narratives from around the world, it is known as a wise, valiant and loyal companion to human warriors and workers.8 It carries the human and pulls the baggage, but there is nothing aggressive about this prey and herd animal as such. On the contrary, horses are inherently

7 The museum includes in its mission to ‘present the story of the First World War in the West Flanders front region’, Flanders Field Museum’s Mission, http://www. infl andersfi elds.be/en/practical/discover, accessed 18 January 2019. 8 A sign of the horse’s importance is that we know by name many historical horses, such as Alexander the Great’s Bukefalos, Napoleon’s favourite stallion Marengo, and The Marshal of Finland’s (Gustav Mannerheim’s) mare Kate. Among literary horses, the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels deserve special mentioning since they were by far the wisest of the peoples he met. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 131 co-operative and kind; and they are completely innocent victims of war while humans, as a species, are not. In some of the installations, the animal bodies are placed in cabinets. On the one hand, this reminds one of a lit de parade, exhibiting the corpse for a last farewell. Yet, in de Bruyckere’s works, the bodies are not lying dead, rather they are caught in movement, seeking or holding a position, sometimes reminding of still images of dance. In addition, the piece of furniture frames the creatures within the world of the household: linen and blankets have been kept in cabinets, and such textiles often appear in de Bruyckere’s work.9 In one work, the horse is transformed into a dog-like animal, possibly a Kerberos in chains, where the chain appears to both support and fetter the animal: it keeps it in place and preserves it as it is at that moment. Overall, the shining pelt and expressive postures make the creatures look alive, although they also look dying or dead, evidently because they lack some body parts. However, there are no open wounds even in the mutilated bodies. Thus, while the works bring mutilation into mind, they also invoke handi- capped or just deviant bodies. The perception might also be of creatures that died but were sewn together in an act of love for the dead and for the living: a body shown for those who mourn, with respect for the sorrow. These interpretations do not compete, rather they alternate, deepening and enlarging what the works are about. The series Vanwege een Tere Huid (because skin is sensitive) continues the theme of the death mask but takes it in a collective, anonymous direction. De Bruyckere observed how workers at the slaughterhouse carefully and almost solemnly stacked the hides of slaughtered cows on top of each other. What then appears, in a shadowlike way, is one version of the form of the animal body. In her works, however, there is no real skin: the heaps have been re-created with iron, steel, epoxy, wood, leather, textile and wax: the presentation is mediated rather than straightforward. De Bruyckere has described her work as translation: the rendering of the feeling of an experience in another form. In the non-human natural world, mammals are closest to us. As a rule, we are able to communicate on a basic level with companion and production animals like horses, cows and dogs who grow up in close contact to humans. In a series of works originating in her contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2013, Cripplewood, de Bruyckere suggests an even more fundamental 9 There is an affi nity to Joseph Beuys, who likewise approached war through animals and organic materials, including woollen blankets. 132 Pauline von Bonsdorff connectedness of humans and the rest of nature; one that goes beyond the animal kingdom.10 She used a fallen elm tree as a model, cast a copy, and assembled it from parts painted with wax colours.11 The branches now appear like human or animal limbs, with skin, fl esh and bones (but no cover of hair or clothes) transparently perceivable in their precise combinations. We recognise them as limbs although there are no recognisable body parts. The limb- and fl esh-like quality of de Bruyckere’s arboreal works is further emphasised by how the tree is nursed and mended. Dirty rags are clumsily tied around the joints, as on a body coming out of a war zone where the best nursing materials are not at hand. Whether the body is still alive or dead is, again, not clear.

Embalmed – Twins II (2017). Wax, fabric, leather, rope, wood, iron, epoxy, 190 x 145 x 570 cm. By courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Mirjam Devriendt

10 The Belgian pavilion was curated by the 2003 Nobel laureate for literature, J. M. Coetzee. He describes de Bruyckere’s art in these terms: ‘her sculptures explore life and death – death in life, life in death, life before life, death before death – in the most intimate and most disturbing way. They bring illumination, but the illumination is as dark as it is profound.’ Designboom ‘berlinde de bruyckere cripplewood at venice art biennale’, http://www.designboom.com/art/berlinde-de-bruyckere-cripplewood- at-venice-art-biennale/, accessed 7 May 2018. 11 De Bruyckere describes her work with wax, from the late 1990s, as being primarily about painting. Among her inﬂ uences, she mentions Lucas Cranach the Elder. In the studio of Berlinde de Bruyckere, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZotDGJONHJM, accessed 18 January 2019. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 133

The analogy of the human and arboreal is further explored in Inside me II (2011), also modelled on tree branches and painted with wax colours. This time the branches suggest intestines, while the title could refer to our inner- most being or subjectivity. There is a hint of irony here, perhaps directed at the Romantic tradition and its cult of the self. 12 Nevertheless, the work is not materialist. There is indeed something inside me: the metabolism that sustains us in intimate interdependence with the natural world, our source of life.

Inside me II (2010–11). Wax, rope, cotton, wool, wood, iron, epoxy, 82 x 225 x 88 cm. By courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Mirjam Devriendt

De Bruyckere’s works on animals and trees are kin to her work on human ﬁ gures. She has explored themes, narratives and imagery particularly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but also from the Christian tradition. A series of works take their point of departure in the story of the Cumaean Sibyl, who refused the love of Apollo. The god took revenge by condemning her to a slow death: she withered away and shrunk slowly, then was put into a jar until the only thing left of her was her voice. The original jar was probably a clay ampulla

12 In his ‘The Arts and the Education of Feeling and Emotion’, Hepburn pointed out that the ‘traditional view of emotions as inner feelings is inadequate.’ In idem, ‘Wonder’, 88–107, 88. 134 Pauline von Bonsdorff while the one used by de Bruyckere is of glass.13 In her series of Sibyls, what remains is not a voice but a piece of tormented fl esh – the remnant of a mutilated body that again seems oddly alive. That the passions can burn and destroy is emphasised by the literally fi re-burnt materials in some of the Sibyls and in drawings of faces where black holes replace the eyes. Flesh is however more than vulnerability, fragility and fi nitude: it is eroti- cism and playfulness as well. De Bruyckere’s art includes drawings of fruit- or fl owerlike genitals, bringing out the affi nity between human embodiment and natural forms in a more playful way. These tender sides of fl esh are important since positive sensations, perception and enjoyment, in their many varieties, contribute as much as experiences of pain and effort to the fi rst-hand knowledge we have of the fl esh that is ours and a shared predicament with fellow natural creatures. Positive, negative and ambiguous experiences, further moulded by cultural and religious imagery, create the ground for our immediate reactions, imaginations and refl ections in the face of fl esh such that it appears in de Bruyckere’s art.

3 Flesh

Flesh is an ambiguous word. On the one hand, fl esh is the living tissue of humans and other mammals; on the other hand, it is fl esh as in the butcher’s shop, the fl esh of slaughtered animals.14 These two instances of fl esh – where the second is still very close to the fi rst – present themselves simultaneously and as inseparable in de Bruyckere’s works: the fl esh of a living body or a body that was alive just a little while ago. In addition to animals, fl esh in de Bruyckere’s art, however, extends towards plants. Moreover, we perceive the works as of fl esh precisely because they look alive: blood seems to fl ow, or has recently fl own, through veins in the branches. On a physiological level, this underlines the affi nity among everything that is alive. Hepburn acknowledged the ‘network of affi nities, of analogous forms, that spans the inorganic or the organic world, or both.’ And he pointed out that ‘[t]his is not necessarily a “humanizing” of nature; it may be more like a “naturizing” of the human

13 Glass resonates, whether intentionally or unintentionally, with Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963). 14 De Bruyckere’s father kept a butcher’s shop and was a hunter. In an interview, she recalls her dread of having to help him move the catch when he returned from hunting trips. In the studio of Berlinde de Bruyckere. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 135 observer.’15 In animals and plants, cells breathe; renew themselves and die; and blood or sap and other fl uids fl ow through the tissues that constitute us as living creatures. Flesh is matter in movement: a movement from within, a constant change. In his late work, Edmund Husserl made a point of the existential fact that our bodies are not objects among objects, but intimately part of us as lived bodies: bodies that we both have and are.16 There is a unique word for the lived body in German: Leib, which resonates with life, das Leben, while Körper can refer to all kinds of bodies, abstract or concrete, and in fact often refers to objects or bodies as dead.17 Husserl wanted to make a fresh start of phenomenological philosophy from our actual, situated existence. The life-world, die Lebenswelt, is the world as experienced by us, in relation to us; historically formed by cultural and societal practices and personal experiences.18 This is the actual ground of our being, the one that provides the conditions for thinking and acting, the place from which we think and act. The idea of the lived body was radicalised by Merleau-Ponty in his last, unfi nished work, Le visible et l’invisible, where fl esh becomes a central fi gure for thinking existence in its constantly evolving imbrication with the world.19 Not only does Merleau-Ponty suggest that we are fl esh; the world is fl esh as well. Here is an example of how he describes the relationship between body and world: ‘the sensible mass that it [i.e., the body] is and the mass of the sensible [i.e., the world] wherein it [i.e., the body] is born through differentiation and towards which, as seeing, it remains open.’20 The relationship is not given fi nally; instead, there is an ongoing exchange in the living tissue or ‘element’ that constitutes our world and us – in fl esh.

15 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 21. 16 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (1970; Evanston, 1997). 17 DWDS Das Wortauskunftssystem zur deutschen Sprache in Geschichte und Gegenwart, https:// www.dwds.de/wb/Leib, https://www.dwds.de/wb/K%C3%B6rper, accessed 11 January 2019. 18 Husserl ﬁ rst used the term around 1918–20; at the same time as his student Martin Heidegger; Dermot Moran, ‘From the Natural Attitude to the Life-World’, in Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (eds), Husserl’s Ideen (Dordrecht, 2012), 105–124, 114– 15. 19 Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, particularly the last chapter, ‘L’entrelacs – le chiasme’, 172–204. 20 Ibid., 179. The translation by Lingis, in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 136, is slightly changed. 136 Pauline von Bonsdorff

Sibylle II (2015–16). Wax, leather, iron, wood, glass, epoxy, 59 cm x 23 x 46 cm. By courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Mirjam Devriendt

Among the senses, Merleau-Ponty privileges vision and touch,21 which does not mean that he excludes other senses.22 One reason to privilege vision is that it has a special role for how we humans explore the world.23 Another is the link between vision and cognition. The visible stands for what we are aware of, for where our attention is located, in a particular moment. That objects only become visible from a ground of the invisible therefore has a more general meaning: what we consciously perceive stands out from a larger

21 Merleau-Ponty’s approach to perception can fruitfully be compared to Gibson’s ecological theory of perception, cf. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966). 22 Vision has a special position throughout Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, from the early works on perception until his last phase. But alongside painting the temporal arts of music, ﬁ lm and language play a central role in his thinking from the 1950s. See, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression (Genève, 2011). Moreover, we should remember that perception in his thinking is a process, in other words primarily a verb, not a noun. 23 Compared to many other mammals, our hearing and our sense of smell are rather poor. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 137

fi eld of peripheral awareness.24 Nevertheless, although this insight about the nature of perception may have been one starting point for the late Merleau- Ponty, he extends and elaborates the idea, and takes it far beyond its original context. The invisible is not only what we cannot see at a particular moment; it is the fecund elemental being of any structure of life, understanding or culture; it is where such structures are at home and from where we construct them. There is reciprocity and exchange between the visible and the invisible: the relationship is fl exible and contingent on many things. In addition, the invisible engenders and supports the visible, which inhabits the invisible and is dependent upon it. Without the invisible there would be no visible, and no dynamics, change, development or life. Furthermore, the dynamic and reciprocal interdependence between the visible and the invisible holds true for all our expressive and symbolic practices, including language, where meaning arises from the tension of said and unsaid.25 On a fundamental level, the relationship between visible and invisible is also the one between culture and nature. Flesh refers to this dynamic totality. The historical and cultural constitution of both body and life-world is highly relevant for de Bruyckere’s art. Merleau-Ponty often refers to the process of constitution, and to its results, as sedimentation. Layers of meaning are hidden as in the ground, invisible, yet affect the whole even when we do not know them. De Bruyckere, as I pointed out earlier, cherishes the individuality of a horse or a tree; and extends the sacredness of fl esh as living matter to the natural world in its cycles of life and death, beyond the privilege of the human. The historical concreteness, including contingency, of the lifeworld is relevant also when contemplating other works by her, where she recycles old materials, such as furniture or tools. She draws on the reverse side of pieces of maps or tapestry, reminding the viewer that there is a material history even when it is unknown. Temporal depth is part of the fl esh of the world. Finally fl esh in de Bruyckere’s art resonates with the Christian tradition, its narratives and imagery; merged and infl uenced by mythological sources that deal with passion and fi nitude. She does not, however, emphasise the theological interpretations of her art but presents its tragedies as existential and universally valid reminders of the fatal risks we face in life. Religion provides 24 Among Merleau-Ponty’s infl uences is Gestalt theory, which he discusses at length in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; Paris, 1992) and some earlier works. 25 See also Pauline von Bonsdorff, ‘Emotion and language in Merleau-Ponty’ in Ulrike M. Lüdtke (ed.), Emotion in Language (Amsterdam, 2015), 99–112. An excellent discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s late thinking in relation to the ‘image’ is Mauro Carbone, La chair des images: Merleau-Ponty entre peinture et cinema (Paris, 2011). 138 Pauline von Bonsdorff imagery and practices. In an interview, de Bruyckere concurs with the fi fteenth century Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, whose paintings offered churchgoers comfort and the opportunity to cry.26 Similarly, Merleau-Ponty uses terms such as spirit and fl esh that resonate with the religious tradition, but frees them from any particular Christian connotations and carries them instead in a secular or agnostic direction.27 For both, the key question is one of life rather than after-life, in a treatment that defi es dualism.

4 Metaphysical imagination

Both de Bruyckere and Merleau-Ponty use elements that are rooted in the Christian tradition – motives and narratives in de Bruyckere’s, concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s case – without emphasising the theological dimension. Still, in de Bruyckere’s art, the Christian elements evoke universal and topical conditions of the life of humans, animals and larger nature in the twentieth and twenty-ﬁ rst centuries. The stories and their artistic transformations enable us to imagine and contemplate experiences which, without some such treatment, would remain beyond our grasp, but which address us beyond any particular faith. In Merleau-Ponty, spirit and especially ﬂ esh are key notions in the new ontology he tried to articulate, and saw coming in the philosophy, arts and sciences of his own time. This ontology emphasises the inseparability of spirit and matter, imagination and reality, activity and passivity, to name some themes that are relevant here, and the dynamic, temporal and transformative relationships within them. It acknowledges life and nature as elemental conditions of human existence: not just encompassing but also constituting us from the very core of our being. In philosophy, it is more common to treat metaphysics and ontology separately from imagination. Not so, for Hepburn, who approaches metaphysical, cosmic and religious thinking precisely in terms of the imagination, which ‘as such’ plays a central role ‘in the very construction of our perceived world, the Lebenswelt.’28 Imagination is indispensable as a synthesising activity, which in

26 In the studio of Berlinde de Bruyckere. 27 Carbone points out that fl esh in Merleau-Ponty is by no means just a Christian notion, cf. La chair des images, 62. 28 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Religious Imagination’ in Michael McGhee (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge, 1992), 127–43, 127–8. Other papers that address imagination include his ‘Poetry and “Concrete Imagination”: Problems of Truth and Illusion’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 56–74; ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 139 relation to everyday perception has the function of offering spatial, temporal, historical, cultural, etc. contexts of what is directly present, making a ‘world’ from a ‘sense-manifold’, to use Hepburn’s terms.29 As the character of the imagination is to go beyond or transcend the immediately here and now, there is an affi nity between imagination and metaphysics, cosmology or religion.30 On the other hand, as discussed by Hepburn, imagination in any of its varieties is close to the structure of aesthetic judgement as we know it from Kant: it is a free, refl ective play of our mental faculties, which does not end in deter- minate judgment.31 Hepburn often explores the varieties of imagination either through the arts or through landscape experience, with confl uence between the aesthetic experience of nature and of art.32 Hepburn analyses the varieties of metaphysical imagination in a series of papers with a fi ne eye for the nuances and the overlaps between different thematic foci in addressing ‘how the world ultimately is’. Broadly, one can say that metaphysical imagination has two sides. On the one hand, there is the cosmic-scientifi c dimension and, on the other hand, the religious (or existential) dimension. While the cosmic-scientifi c and the religious-existential have different emphases, they also connect and overlap, partly because of their themes and partly because they are varieties of imagination’s synthesising activity. For this reason, metaphysical imagination is more than the sum of two sets of concerns. How does Hepburn address cosmic and religious imagination? First, while metaphysical imagination, especially as cosmic-scientifi c, is checked by its relationship to what we can plausibly hold to be true about nature or the universe, this does not mean that it is a realm of certainty and knowledge. Here one could add that despite the rapid growth of scientifi c knowledge, the amount of what we do not know is still much bigger than what we know. Moreover, to synthesise what we know, to form one picture from the specialised fi elds of knowledge, is perhaps more demanding than ever, due to the increasing

Imagination’; and ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 148–65. There is a phenomenological undercurrent in Hepburn’s thinking, manifested by his interest in and respect for actual experience. 29 Hepburn, ‘Religious Imagination’, 130. 30 Ibid., 129–30. However, Hepburn repeatedly points to the possible fallacies of imagination when left to itself. 31 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Hamburg, 1990), §§ 6–9. 32 ‘[T]here are important networks of interconnections between aesthetic experience of natural objects and works of art.’, Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Nature in the Light of Art’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 36–55, 36. 140 Pauline von Bonsdorff complexity of both the manifold pictures within such a picture, as well as of the whole picture.33 Second, while the cosmic dimension of metaphysical imagination comprises nature as a system and the universe as studied by the natural sciences, Hepburn points out that it is also about values. Cosmic imagination is ‘the mental appropriating of objects, events, processes or patterns perceived in nature-at-large […] so as to apply them in articulating our own scheme of values […] and in our quest for self-understanding.’34 Cosmic imagination is, then, inseparable from the person who imagines. It is about the world; yet as an activity, it is ﬁ rmly in the world. The other dimension of metaphysical imagination is the religious. In his ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’, Hepburn describes how humans ‘attempt to relate themselves and their projects to a much wider context. Human rationality and the religious imagination persistently prompt us to reckon with, or take account of, the cosmic setting of human life.’35 Seen ‘in non-theistic terms’, religious imagination is part of a larger complex of issues that have no ﬁ nal answer, at least in terms of what an individual can grasp. In his ‘Religious Imagination’, Hepburn describes the work of the imagination, in the religious context, in these terms:

To hold to, not to betray, the unconceptualizable, unimageable trans- ﬁ gurations of experience […]: this can be seen as faithfulness to an inner religious logic, not an expression of scepticism. It is the logic that negates all substantializing and localizing of transcendence.36

He characterises this kind of thinking as ‘undogmatic, religious-agnostic faith’.37 Michael McGhee’s observation that there are important distinctions between ‘religion’, ‘religious belief’, ‘belief in God’ and ‘belief in the existence of God’

33 Climate change is a good example of this. There is, for example, scientifi c evidence for the impact of many human activities on carbon emissions but no full knowledge about all the mechanisms that impact climate change. 34 Hepburn, ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’, 148. In addition, it refers to ‘the synthesizing activity of the mind in our appraising of items in wider nature itself or as a whole’. 35 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 155–83, 171. 36 Hepburn, ‘Religious Imagination’, 132–3. 37 Ibid., 133. He adds, in a characteristic manner, ‘if it is to have any content […] it can have no claim to exemption from philosophical criticism.’ Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 141 is illuminating here.38 Hepburn and McGhee agree that the meaningfulness of religious imagination and refl ection is not ousted by a positive or negative answer to its rationality, especially if rationality means a strictly cognitive perspective, where questions of the certainty of knowledge and its criteria have priority. Faith is also practice and commitment, reminds McGhee.39 For Hepburn, the central concept is imagination. He describes a religious-agnostic stance as one where, in religious imagination, the ‘transcending gesture’ is ‘endlessly’ repeated without ever becoming fi xed in ‘dogma, which we would not immediately know to be deceptive’. The religious-agnostic option is one where we ‘live with the ambiguities’.40 Metaphysical ambiguity is common in art that addresses existential themes and, as Hepburn shows, it can be part of the aesthetic experience of landscape. Overall, religious imagination is meaningful beyond any particular religion, as a way of nourishing our engagement with existential themes. It confronts questions that religions address, often through narratives and the arts, about ultimate issues and fundamental values, and it reminds us of our responsibility, fi nitude and fragility. These are part of our existential situation. Religions still provide the richest source for refl ections on them, also for non-theists, since material and immaterial religious culture includes a legacy of narratives and imagery about suffering, evil, love, birth, death and life, and moral values; as well as the idea that we are not the sole arbiters of good and evil. This is the kind of material de Bruyckere uses in her art, and it is part of the fl esh of the world as suggested by Merleau-Ponty. In addition to metaphysical imagination with its two emphases, the cosmic and the religious, Hepburn discusses a third type, namely ‘concrete imagination’. This is not an additional category, but an additional take on imagination, typical for the arts, and it shows how imagination for Hepburn, through its ‘nisus for going beyond’ seems always to have a metaphysical aspect. ‘If we are to appropriate the insight, the “truth” [of a work of art], our minds have to make leaps […] to larger and different realities, and to discern the bearing of the one upon the other. Such leaps are pervasive in experience of the serious arts.’41 Thus in aesthetic experience of some magnitude we reach beyond the

38 Michael McGhee, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life, 1–8, 1. 39 Ibid. 1–4. This is most evident in Buddhism but holds for other religions as well. Thus, ‘Abrahamic faith […] is not dependent upon prior rational deliberation about real existence’ (ibid., 3). 40 Hepburn, ‘Religious Imagination’, 131. 41 Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’, 18. 142 Pauline von Bonsdorff immediate life-world: the experience is sensuous, emotional and intellectual. Transcendence, however, by no means implies that we lose touch with the concrete life-world. As Hepburn emphasises elsewhere: ‘[i]t is only as dwellers among the objects of the world that we come to have the value-experiences we do have.’42 We might now ask what metaphysical imagination in its existential, moral, and scientifi c dimensions, and as ‘religious-agnostic’, might be about today. What do we think about when we turn towards ‘how the world ultimately is’, to our own place in the universe, and our responsibility for ourselves, and our co-inhabitants on earth? How does metaphysical imagination today resonate with the world, as we perceive it? While this is a complex question, it is both possible and meaningful to address it from the particular position, in space and time, where we are. The perception of the role of humans on our planet has changed radically during the last decades. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was introduced in 2000 to indicate that the impact of human activities on the earth have reached a scale which is geologically signifi cant, and might signal a new geological epoch. It includes erosion and sediment transport, changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soils, and altered environmental conditions throughout the biosphere.43 In this situation, many intellectual and cultural currents – such as new materialism, post-humanism, animal rights movements, and veganism – turn away from a humanistic and anthropocentric worldview towards recognising the interdependence of humans with other species. Instead of focusing on the differences between homo sapiens and other species, similarities between humans and other creatures rise to the fore.44 The ecosystem now appears as consisting of many overlapping systems, without a fi xed order of priority.45 One could argue that many urgent contemporary

42 Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’, 181. 43 Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’, http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working- groups/anthropocene/, accessed 28 January 2019. The Working Group belongs to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is part of the International Union of Geological Sciences. 44 See, e.g., Yuval Noel Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, trans. the author with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (London, 2014), which opens by pointing out that our own species, homo sapiens, was originally one of at least eight species of humans. Research on the cognitive and social competence of non-human animals is growing all the time, and so does our insights into how plants communicate. 45 Compare here Markus Gabriel’s argument, in Warum es die Welt nicht gibt (Berlin, 2013), that ‘the world’ does not exist: we should stop conceiving the world as one totality, Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 143 problems, such as climate change and the mass extinction of species, are ultimately consequences of misperceiving the position of humans in relation to other species and life on earth. From a moral or ‘religious-agnostic’ perspective, fundamental questions are about how to live and act in a way that contributes to steering the course of things towards less devastating consequences, or redressing the balance towards a healthier state. Among the most important forms of metaphysical imagination today is the imagination about nature. Hepburn, who could not foresee its present urgency and the growing awareness of it, in fact suggests this, as his work testifi es to the existential and metaphysical relevance of the aesthetic experience of nature. The landscape is a concrete setting, here and now, but also a cosmic setting for aesthetic refl ection that comprises elements of both the beautiful and the sublime – with elements of enjoyment and harmony between subject and world as well as awareness of aspects that are beyond our grasp.46 Nature is present to us on many levels and scales, from tiny details to large vistas, including temporal and dynamic elements such as approaching thun- derclouds, and alternating standpoints, ‘gestalts’, and contexts.47 Moreover, while the refl ective experience of pondering one’s own position in the larger whole often preoccupies Hepburn, he emphasises that ‘we are in nature and part of nature’; ‘earth-rooted’; ‘connatural’ with nature.48 Yet he also describes the viewer as ‘completing the world’, for example by perceiving a landscape with grazing wild animals in a way where ‘their visible forms, sounds, the course of their lives, are brought together, synthesized by our imagination, understood, grasped, and valued.’49 There is an intimate connection between perception and imagination, and the synthesis appears as a joint creation of an individual and a particular landscape. This is like Merleau-Ponty’s fl esh in two respects: fi rst, the dynamic and reciprocal, co-creative character of the relationship of human being and world, and, second, the complex and intertwined relationship between humans and nature.50

because reality appears in manifold ways, in ‘ontological provinces’ or ‘ﬁ elds of sense’. 46 See, e.g., Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’. 47 Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, 15. 48 Ibid. 13; Hepburn, ‘Optimism, Finitude and the Meaning of Life’, 182; idem, ‘Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 1–15, 5. 49 Hepburn, ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’, 163. 50 For the latter, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris, 1995) Merleau-Ponty ’s thinking is, among other things, a continued dialogue with the life sciences. 144 Pauline von Bonsdorff

5 Life-enhancement

Let us return to the central mystery and challenge of de Bruyckere’s art: how does it communicate a sense of life despite death, of life that defi es death aesthetically and as art? Above I described the fi gures’ expressiveness and postures, the colouring that evokes living fl esh, and the signs of nursing and support. Yet we also perceive that the fi gures cannot be alive, for they are mutilated, headless, uprooted. There is a paradox in what these works suggest to us. Hepburn’s notion of ‘life-enhancement’, in its several meanings, is useful here. I start with life-enhancement as part of the structure of aesthetic experience, and art’s capacity to enliven the mind despite its at times gruesome subject matter. A second meaning, not explicitly discussed by Hepburn in the context of life-enhancement, is how art enhances life through providing occasions and company for emotional, existential or indeed metaphysical experiences. A third meaning points to how our beliefs, values, and behaviours can change through engaging with the arts. In the last case, it is not primarily the mind that is enlivened, but the larger setting of life is understood in new ways and reorganised, which may lead to enhancement in how we live and affect others. It is however important to remember that the different meanings and aspects of life-enhancement are simultaneously present and penetrate each other. In his ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’, Hepburn discusses the vivifying effect of aesthetic experience, as ‘the aesthetic object initiates a self-sustaining, “vital” activity on the part of the spectator’.51 He quotes Kant, who described Geist or spirit ‘“in an aesthetical sense” as “the animating [belebende] principle in the mind”: it works upon material that “sets the mental powers into … a play which is self-maintaining”’.52 Hepburn describes a progression in Kant from ‘particular enlivenings’ of beautiful objects over ‘sublime enlivenings’ (with the realization of our freedom against phenomenal nature) to ‘aesthetic ideas’, where creative imagination ‘puts reason “into motion […] towards an extension of thought that … exceeds what can be laid

51 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’ in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic, 63–76, 66. In his ‘The Arts and the Education of Feeling and Emotion’, Hepburn refers to the ‘emotion-revivifying power’ and the ‘imaginative vitality’ of art, in idem, ‘Wonder’, 88–107, 95, 101. 52 Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’, 66. Double quotation marks indicate Hepburn’s quotations from Kant. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 145 hold of in that representation or clearly expressed”’.53 Moreover, ‘[i]magina- tion is given an “incentive to spread its fl ight over a whole host of kindred representations, that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words”, once more “animating the mind by opening our for it a prospect into a fi eld of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken”’.54 Importantly, in works of art with ‘qualities initially discouraging to appreciation’, the intensity of engagement is, according to Hepburn, often enhanced because of the appreciator’s imaginative efforts. The resulting feeling can then be one of strong participation and co-creation, ‘as if the music were emanat- ing from the hearer’s own imagination, his or her own creativity’.55 Apparently, the ‘initially discouraging’ qualities can be of various kinds, from unexpected metaphors and unfamiliar stylistic features to representational or narrative content that challenges habitual patterns of thought or systems of value – as with works that may fi rst seem everything but life-enhancing. Hepburn however points out that works which deal with ‘agony, despair, death’ can treat these themes in ways that are ‘not depressive but zestful: the art-work is not itself crushed, defeated, extinguished by the defeat and extinction it contemplates. Art […] shows most impressively its powers of life-giving, when it manages to “animate” even our imagination and anticipation of death’.56 Not any kind of animation will do, however. Hepburn emphasises art’s capacity to convey a truer picture of its subject matter, ‘a less stereotyped and better- focused view […] than we can normally manage’.57 Hepburn’s analysis of the vivifying character of imagination as set in play by encounters with works of art, and how art can modify and enrich our understanding of the most sinister themes, illuminates the expressive dynamic of de Bruyckere’s art. There is indeed a productive paradox around her work: no fi nal concept, or answer, is reached. No meaning is given to suffering. The ideas and emotions that circulate in and around the work address our existential condition as fi nite beings, foregrounding how we share this earth with other fi nite creatures and plants; historical tragedies, especially the atrocities

53 Ibid., 67. 54 Ibid. Hepburn describes the ‘temporal adventure’ of the mind when it engages ‘with the sensuous and the material’ in music. ‘Time-Transcendence and Some Related Phenomena in the Arts’, 115–16. 55 Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’, 69. This may be a key to why we experience some works of art as ‘real’ or ‘true’. 56 Ibid., 69–70. 57 Ibid., 73. 146 Pauline von Bonsdorff of war, myth and religion, their narratives and images of passion, death, and the contingencies that affect our choices. Another meaning of life-enhancement through art is based on the relational aspects of aesthetic experience. Hoping that her works might offer comfort and consolation, and the opportunity to cry, de Bruyckere suggests that we can share feelings with art, whether in the company of other people or alone with the work. There are several aspects to this. One is related to the character of feeling, another to the work as a companion, and a third to the presence of the artist in the work. As for the fi rst aspect, Hepburn is critical of the ‘traditional view of emotions as inner feeling’.58 He points out that ‘what we call the “inner” life is substantially constituted by the images, metaphors, analogies we draw from external nature and re-apply to the articulating of our emotions, feelings, attitudes’.59 The circulation of images between self and world, where the world (nature, works of art) is likewise perceived-and-imagined is congenial with Merleau-Ponty’s fl esh: a fl esh of the world, in the world, that we partake in and modify through perceiving, communicating, thinking and acting.60 Our self or subjectivity is imbricated in the world. Consequently, we can see feelings and emotions as relational and even spatial.61 To entertain a feeling or emotion, especially with a work of art or a landscape, is a dynamic process where we also modify, modulate, perhaps deepen, or expand the emotion, and thereby forge a relationship to how things are in a certain respect, in a certain place, whether fi ctional or real. Second, works of art offer company to the person who contemplates them. Mikel Dufrenne characterised the work of art as a ‘quasi-subject’, a characterisation close to Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’.62 From the point of view

58 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Emotions and Emotional Qualities’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 75–87, 80. 59 Hepburn, ‘Nature in the Light of Art’, 43. 60 The creative, expressive and imaginative aspect of perception is discussed by Merleau- Ponty especially in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. 61 For an approach from environment to self, see Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). 62 Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (1953; Paris, 1992), 487–8; Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1936) in idem, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1973; London 1992), 211–35, 214–18. Merleau-Ponty mentions the feeling, typical for painters, of being ‘looked upon by things’. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 183. (When I fi rst met Hepburn, in 1994, he asked me what philosophers I liked to read in aesthetics. When I mentioned Dufrenne, he responded, ‘I keep coming back to him.’) Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 147 of experience this indicates how art, like landscapes and, of course, persons, appear inexhaustible to us, and how we invest ourselves in engaging with them. Returning to a work is like returning to see a friend, someone who sustains us, and where we feel that we can recognize part of what makes us who we are. At the same time, there is a reciprocity and an interweaving of appreciator and work, where both are transformed in the experience. De Bruyckere’s works often have a strong fi gural presence, a heightened degree of the kind of (metaphorical) personhood Dufrenne and Benjamin suggested. This is related to their themes and subject matter: after all, they represent living or once-living individuals. In addition, these works have an individual history that even surpasses what Benjamin referred to with the aura: the creature was once a particular horse; the cowhides suggest the past presence of individual, slaughtered cows; the trees represent trees that were growing in particular places. Their history extends beyond the moment of artistic creation, and this contributes both to their inexhaustibility and to how they parallel our own existence. These creatures regard us although they cannot look at us.63 A third aspect of relationality in art is the companionship it offers through the felt presence of the artist. In de Bruyckere’s oeuvre, this presence has a caring character, which modifi es and softens the violent aspects of what the artworks present to the viewer. Dufrenne’s distinction between the represented and the expressed world of the aesthetic object is helpful here.64 In de Bruyckere’s art, the represented world, consisting of the fi gures we see, and their histories and myths, is violent, passionate, tragic, while the expressed world is one of witnessing, caring and tenderness. As Dufrenne writes, the expressed world stems from the artist as she appears in her art, and has the unity of an atmosphere or a worldview. He points out that the expressed world is ‘not a doctrine but rather the vital metaphysical element in all humans, the way of being in the world which reveals itself in a personality’.65 In de Bruyckere’s art, we are aware of the care and the craft that have gone into the making of the works, in processes of dialogue with materials that carry a history of their own. This suggests respect for the integrity of the individual creatures. Alongside what we see, other histories, which we do not know, are evoked, although they remain hidden. This awakens an awareness of the

63 Hepburn recognised the animal, ‘a sentient other’, as a ‘real object of direct moral concern’. ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’, 155. 64 Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l´expérience esthétique, 221–57. 65 Ibid., 234. 148 Pauline von Bonsdorff invisible strata of our shared life-world: alongside what we see and know, there is so much more that we do not know. Her art does not generalise; it is not about life in general or ‘bare life’; it is about the particular life of human beings, mythical characters, animals or trees in their individuality. While this may make the art even more tragic, its recognition is part of what we might call the artist’s gesture, suggesting the similarity among living beings, and inviting us to contemplate these themes. The gesture of invitation is in the careful arrangement of creatures and objects that protects them in a more than physical way, gives them integrity and provides the company of the artist. This becomes at the same time an invitation to the viewer, suggesting that we can join into this, that we are not alone. The arrangement of the body makes its fate bearable through introducing a tenderness that is not in the subject matter as such, but in its presentation. This gesture of invitation brings us to the third meaning of life-enhancement, the one related to values. Hepburn discussed the relationship of art and values in many of his essays, and emphasised that life-enhancement by no means refers to hedonistic enjoyment only, but includes reﬂ ections ‘on the world in which we stand’.66 Writing on art as a concrete image, Hepburn points out how art in some cases ‘“teases” life. It sets life tasks for feeling and for reinterpreting, reorientating’.67 In addition, through a work of art, the spectator may be ‘prompted not only to react, but also (importantly) to act’.68 Hepburn’s point is akin to Dufrenne’s notion of the world of expression in acknowledging the importance of the subjective element of art: ‘The adopting of a perspective, again an amalgam of value-judgement and set of beliefs, is urged or thrust upon us by the presenting of a concrete situation’.69 The gesture of invitation implied in the artwork’s world of expression or perspective, recognised as the presence of a subjectivity, is crucial for a deep and personal engagement with the work’s themes and subject matter. Art provides company; it draws us in, takes us by the hand. But it also teases. Ultimately, Hepburn seems to agree with the Romantic imagination, which ‘sees the objects of its memorable experiences not just as being but also as pointing, as prompting a going-beyond

66 Hepburn, ‘Life and Life-Enhancement as Key Concepts of Aesthetics’, 74. 67 Hepburn, ‘Poetry and “Concrete Imagination”’, 72. Teasing takes place when it is not clear whether the artwork primarily discloses or creates. 68 Hepburn, ‘Truth, Subjectivity and the Aesthetic’, 18. 69 Ibid. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 149 the individual occasion of experience’. This ‘essentially incompletable intimation’ can have ‘deep repercussions upon the subject’s system of values’.70

6 Conclusion

One aim of this paper has been to discuss recent art by Berlinde de Bruyckere, focusing on the apparent paradoxes of presenting life and death simultaneously, and violence and suffering in ways that signal tenderness and consolation to the viewer. Through ‘life-enhancement’ and related themes, Hepburn’s thinking has provided important resources for elaborating on how these paradoxes work – without becoming resolved – in aesthetic experience. However, we cannot answer the issue of how art such as de Bruyckere’s addresses us merely by looking at the dialogue between the appreciator and the aesthetic object, as I have done in the previous section. The paradoxes also call for perspectives that address why we want to engage at length, and repeatedly, with works of art with such painful themes. Hepburn’s elaborations on metaphysical imagination provides such a perspective. Metaphysical imagination in whatever of its versions is about how the world ultimately is – in terms of its fundamental structure but also, necessarily, in terms of values. The conviction that art regards us, that it is about real and important matters, arises when we recognise perennial or topical themes in addition to artistic quality. I have suggested that de Bruyckere’s art is of this kind. It helps us dwell on complex and challenging issues without either demanding or offering straightforward answers. Rather, as Hepburn put it, the ‘transcending gesture’ is ‘endlessly’ repeated. In order to engage us in metaphysical imagination, a work of art needs to have something that we recognise as important to us. In de Bruyckere’s recent works, human suffering is extended towards the realm of nature in its double role, as the nature that we are and the nature that surrounds us. This makes her art particularly topical. As we have seen above, concerning the relationship of humans to wider nature, Hepburn, Merleau-Ponty,71 and de Bruyckere are on the same side. Hepburn describes ‘a network of affi nities, of analogous forms, that spans the inorganic or the organic world, or both.’ Moreover, the affi nities – that are more than outer likenesses – do not regard physiological constitution only. Criticizing the idea of emotions as inner feelings, he 70 Ibid., 35–6. 71 See especially Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. 150 Pauline von Bonsdorff suggests that our very personality develops in dialogue with phenomena in the world. Yet the role of humans is by no means passive: ‘we create as well as discover in our cognitive relation with wider nature […] we partly constitute the nature we experience and come to know.’72 Nature as we know it, then, is not just an amalgamation of biological facts, it is always also a historical and cultural construct. Art contributes importantly to its constitution. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of fl esh provides a novel ontology and a ground for ‘metaphysical imagination’ freed from religious dogma, yet cherishing the spiritual as referring to the principle of life and cognition beyond the human. It also recognises nature’s relevance for humans beyond physical wellbeing, and foregrounds our predicament as fi nite, embodied creatures. Although Hepburn’s theory of imagination recognises the important role of feelings and emotions, he does not very much address the embodied or material side of imagination.73 In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of fl esh comple- ments Hepburn’s theory of metaphysical imagination. As Carbone shows, Merleau-Ponty’s fl esh is a fl esh ‘of images’.74 It pinpoints how our life-world is a dynamic, animate fi eld, which we are dependent upon but which we also transform, in thought and action. The material side of imagination draws attention to its character as a more than mental, more than conscious activity; one where we are subject to the play of images as much as players. However, our predicament as carnal creatures by no means diminishes our mental or spiritual side, and while fl esh has a literal application in de Bruyckere’s art, its cultural and religious resonance is equally important. Thus, her works thema- tise fl esh in its full Merleau-Pontian richness: in its carnal, corporeal delicacy; in the experiential breadth it provides; and in how it animates and is in dialogue with predecessors and traditions that it also re-creates.75 There is an additional point of general signifi cance for how we conceive of art’s meaning in the approach that I have developed in this paper – guided by Hepburn, Merleau-Ponty and others. We can juxtapose an emphasis on imagination and dialogue with art, on the one hand, with approaches that

72 Hepburn, ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’, 161. 73 On this, see Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris, 1942); Pauline von Bonsdorff, ‘The sorcerer’s hat and the carpenter’s hands: Material imagination in Pietilä’s architecture’ in Aino Niskanen, Sirkkaliisa Jetsonen and Tommi Lindh (eds), Hikes into Pietilä terrain, Taiteentutkija, 4 (2007), 9–21. 74 Carbone’s title, La chair des images, literally means ‘the fl esh of images’. 75 In the essay quoted earlier, Benjamin writes: ‘The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded [sic] in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.’, ‘The work of art’, 216. Metaphysical Imagination in the Flesh 151 conceive of art’s meaning as a product of interpretation, on the other. In the latter, the work is an object of analysis, and the task of the critic or researcher is to unravel the meaning it harbours. The meaning then becomes an object as well. In comparison, imagination foregrounds the signifi cance of our very engagement with art as an open-ended affair. The essential is how it functions in our life. Ambiguity – for Merleau-Ponty an ontological rather than an epis- temological concept76 – is not to be resolved: it is an irreducible dimension of art and life. As Hepburn discusses them, metaphysical questions, including questions of truth and value, become actual and address us in imaginative and refl ective experience. His rich use of examples is not accidental, as there is an essential link between a close analysis of experience and the metaphysical themes. To acknowledge the existential value and potential of art, we need to recognise this link. In its respect for our actual, engaged and refl ective experiences, Hepburn’s approach to aesthetics and the arts could be characterised as phenomenological. In a way not unlike Merleau-Ponty, he engages with philosophy and the arts as ways of trying to come to terms with human experience and to articulate it on different levels. His patience in studying topics from several angles, with a keen eye for ‘overlaps’ and ‘intrusions’ is compa- rable to the explorative persistency of Merleau-Ponty. A fi nal similarity, which wraps up the themes of this paper, is the role of aesthetics. Even beyond his explicit discussion of art, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is thoroughly about the aesthetic realm, exploring ‘the logos of the aesthetic world’.77 And Hepburn’s aesthetic, for its part, indeed reaches out, surpasses its boundaries, goes into ‘neighbouring fi elds’.

University of Jyväskylä

76 See especially Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception. 77 Ibid., 490–1. Landscapes of Trauma: a Reﬂ ection on Wonder

Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason

1 Introduction: on a cold, dark night – as it were

On 23 January 1973, in the middle of the sub-Arctic night, the volcano Helgafell on Heimaey, the only inhabited island of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago off the south coast of Iceland, suddenly erupted. The eruption came without any warning. The residents of the island were immediately and hurriedly evacuated to mainland Iceland. Making their escape in fi shing boats overnighting in harbour at the time and small airplanes arriving from the capital, Reykjavík, to aid in the rescue effort, many were later to express gratitude to various protective forces, that the eruption had coincided with calm weather rather than a violent winter storm. In the January darkness of such a northerly location, albeit lit up somewhat by the spewing volcano and the rolling lava, the inhabitants watched as their familiar environment was engulfed with smoke and covered with ash. The day of the eruption, only a few hours after the islanders had been evacuated, the newspaper Vísir, an afternoon rather than a morning paper, described the events of the night past and people’s reactions to them. According to the paper, Constable Birgir Sigurjónsson was the fi rst person to arrive at the scene of the eruption itself. He says, in an interview with the paper: ‘I wasn’t so shocked when I saw the eruption […] although it is diffi cult for me to say now what I was thinking. I thought the eruption was majestic [tignarlegur, the dictionary form] but undeniably terrifying [ógnvekjandi, the dictionary form] at the same time’.1 The English translation of the Icelandic terms gives a fair indication of their ordinary meaning in everyday use in Iceland. The noun tign, from which the adjective tignarlegur derives, is majesty and is, on the rare

1 Vísir, 23 January 1973, 8. All newspaper stories referenced were accessed on 10 September 2018. The anthropologist Gísli Pálsson, who is from the island, has written a wonderful account of the eruption and its aftermath. So far, that account only exists in Icelandic. Gísli Pálsson, Fjallið sem yppti öxlum: Maður og náttúra (Reykjavík, 2017). Landscapes of Trauma: a Reﬂ ection on Wonder 153 occasion that this might be necessary, used to refer to royality. Tignarlegur may occasionally be used to characterise a person, something like statuesque in English then, but is used much more frequently to describe landscape features, in particular mountains, waterfalls, the northern lights and maybe glaciers. The adverb ógnvekjandi refers to something or someone that awakens or evokes great fear or terror, ógn being the noun for threat in Icelandic. The following day, 24 January, the same paper notes the changes that the eruption had already then, wrought upon the island. In language that at times evokes the poetic Edda account of the end of the world, Ragnarök, it says:

Few Vestmannaeyingar [i.e., the people of Vestmannaeyjar sometimes also referred to as Eyjamenn] would likely recognise the landscape on Heimaey where the volcano has brought the most destruction […]. [Where] the verdant ﬁ elds of the farmers’ [iðgræn tún bændanna] were before, one can now only see the ﬁ eld of ash […], the roofs of the houses and the streets are covered in this disgusting product [viðbjóður, the dictionary form] of the volcano.2

Another newspaper, Morgunblaðið, in an almost unprecedented special afternoon edition, describes the town as ‘dark [drungalegur], people had left their houses, only ambulances and police cars could be seen driving the streets.’3 The same paper refers to the evacuees as refugees, and headlines its report on their reactions, by quoting one who says: ‘I only hope we can go home as soon as possible’.4 In another piece in the same paper, the journalist reads the mind of one evacuee and offers the reading as accompaniment to a photograph:

Although safely on the mainland, the thoughts are with Heimaey. That is clear from this photo of the old lady; head in her hands she can only think of when fortune will turn in her favour so that she may again stand in her living room at home, where, perhaps, ﬂ owers await in the window.5

The descriptions above speak of landscapes changed, homes abandoned, sometimes destroyed as it turned out, and now longed for. The ﬂ ower in the

2 Vísir, 24 January 1973, 8. 3 Morgunblaðið, 23 January 1973, 11. 4 Ibid., 2, 3. 5 Ibid., 8. 154 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason window stands as a stark, if imaginary, contrast to the black carpet of death the volcano has unrolled over the small town. Still, the descriptions speak of the sense of awe, the wonder that overwhelming natural events can evoke too, even as they reveal in that the unexpected otherness of nature. Who would have thought, the islanders from above may have wondered, that the mountain Helgafell, that had been their beloved neighbour for so long, would suddenly erupt and bring those who loved it both destruction and mortal danger.6 In this paper, we seek to describe the reactions of the islanders, particularly in the longer aftermath of the eruption, a bit more fully, drawing in the process upon the work of Ronald W. Hepburn. The conference, out of which this paper arises, made clear the rather unusual place that Hepburn occupied in British philosophy during his career. Hepburn’s concerns and his general philosophy mark him out as having closer kinship with Continental philosophers than most of his British colleagues at the time. This is evident in Hepburn’s best known and most enduring work. In his essays on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, on one hand, and on wonder, on the other, Hepburn appears to assume a fundamental grounding of humans, and their various identities, in the environment – in the landscapes in which they live and may call their own, their home. This grounding is of the kind, it seems to us, that British analytical philosophers of the twentieth century would generally have been sceptical of precisely because the translation of it into propositional form would betray its essential quality as Hepburn saw it. The grounding appears in Hepburn’s work as something that is almost beyond words, as a necessary prior placing in landscape on the basis of which language based reﬂ ections, perhaps in propositional form, can then happen.7 Illustratively, in one place Hepburn speaks of the detachment that may be the condition for contemplating nature aesthetically as an object of beauty, as something that needs to be achieved, worked at, rather than something given, such is our ordinary involvement, our immersion in the world.8 What Hepburn draws our attention to here, is the kind of being

6 Ibid. Pálsson was at this point a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He recounts how he dismissed his colleagues’ reports of an eruption in Heimaey as misunderstanding, the only volcano there being long extinct. See Pálsson, Fjallið sem yppti öxlum, 102. 7 See Ronald W. Hepburn ‘“Being” as a Concept of Aesthetics’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 138–46, where Hepburn adopts a position somewhat at odds with his British colleagues. 8 Cf. Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 9–35, 21. See also idem, ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 267–79 and ‘Landscape and the Landscapes of Trauma: a Reﬂ ection on Wonder 155 at home in the world, the kind of dwelling in pre-objective landscape, that the resurrection of Martin Heidegger’s work towards the end of last century has popularised. In this, Hepburn’s argument in some ways anticipates insights articulated more recently in both geography and anthropology. Speaking to the question of how collective, speciﬁ cally national, identities are created and maintained, the eminent geographer Stephen Daniels writes:

National identities are co-ordinated, often largely deﬁ ned, by ‘legends and landscapes’, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised home- lands with hallowed sites and scenery. The symbolic activation of time and space […] gives shape to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.9

While Daniels places emphasis on the relation between humans and nature, or landscape, in the constitution of identity in a way that may recall Hepburn, the relationship is for Daniels most importantly, it seems, symbolically mediated. Closer to Hepburn’s work and the sense of immersion in landscape that his notion of aesthetic appreciation of nature and of wonder carry, are the ideas of another Aberdonian, the anthropologist Tim Ingold. Ingold has argued that: ‘Landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them’.10 The geographer John Wylie notes how many recent writings on landscape, often inﬂ uenced by Ingold, have in turn been informed by phenomenology and the ideas of embodiment and performance. Recent work on the phenomenology of landscape that draws amongst other sources on Ingold’s philosophy, Wylie says, ‘has sought to deﬁ ne landscape in terms of presence in various forms’.11 The emphasis here, Wylie continues, is on how ‘self and world come close together, and touch each other, and then go beyond even that, and become part of each other’.12 Such accounts, Wylie adds, that speak ‘of landscape in terms of human dwelling and being-in-the-world commonly emphasise, and ground their arguments through, the evolving co-presence of self and

Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values, 5 (1996), 191–204. 9 Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, 1993), 5. 10 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London, 2000), 193. 11 John Wylie, ‘Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love’, Transactions of the institute of British Geographies, 34 (2009), 275–89, 278. 12 Ibid., emphasis removed. 156 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason landscape, with this self–landscape nexus being understood in terms of rami- fying bodily engagements, encounters and inhabitations’.13 These are insights we want to use to formulate the key question we seek to address in this paper, a paper that otherwise for us serves the purpose of articulating early thoughts on landscape and trauma. Accepting the importance of landscape in processes of identity formations, that Hepburn, Daniels, Ingold and Wylie speak of, as accurate of the feelings of the evacuated islanders,14 we would like to ask about the consequences of seeing that landscape so violently changed, your home practically destroyed, in a process that while horrendous may nonetheless be recognised as spectacular. What is it like, we ask, when the environment in which you see your identity, your being both grounded and nurtured, suddenly turns majestically violent and threatening? What is it like, furthermore, when the past disruption is brought to the surface again some forty years after the fact in a process of active remembrance? In his book, Gísli Pálsson develops the theoretical notion of jarðsamband (Earth relations) in itself an ordinary word which in everyday Icelandic use would be the equivalent of the English ‘grounded’. In English publications, he has used the term ‘geosociality’ to refer to the same idea: the fundamental mutual relational constitution of humans and the Earth.15 While our focus here is somewhat different, we build fundamentally on Pálsson’s work. Still this paper has a particular point of origin, a reason for coming into being now. In 2014, the museum Eldheimar (Fire world) was opened after a long process of preparation.16 The opening of the museum occasioned much reﬂ ection and discussion amongst the islanders about the experiences they had undergone all those years before. What became evident during this period of reﬂ ection, is that some islanders have come to understand their experiences in terms of trauma.17 We will seek to draw links here between the idea of trauma and Hepburn’s account of wonder as that helps us to articulate the experience of seeing the grounding of your being violently destroyed in a process that

13 Ibid. 14 Pálsson’s book speaks to this powerfully as do the newspaper accounts we related above. 15 Gísli Pálsson & Heather Anne Swanson, ‘Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics’, Environmental Humanities, 8 (2016), 149–71. 16 The fi rst author of this paper has been carrying out research into Eldheimar since before its opening. 17 The fi rst public reference to trauma in Vestmannaeyjar that we have been able to fi nd is from the early 1990s. It speaks about the effects of accidents at sea, a common hazard in fi shing communities, of course, but does not even mention the possible effects of the eruption twenty years before. Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 157 despite that, may inspire awe. We want to link this account of Hepburn’s to his notion of metaphysical imagination in relation to the understanding of nature. For Hepburn ‘metaphysical imagination […] [is] an element of interpretation that helps to determine the overall experience of a scene in nature. It will be construed as a “seeing as …” or “interpreting as …” that has metaphysical character, in the sense of relevance to the whole of experience and not only to what is experienced at the present moment’18 – it is a notion that, with wonder, we bring to the idea of trauma.

2 Wonder

Hepburn discusses wonder in relation to the quest for knowledge, as an ‘attentive, questioning, bafﬂ ed but appreciative stance’.19 Indeed, Hepburn’s treatment of wonder is tied in with questions of curiosity, knowledge and understanding. He notes that while the experience of wonder can clearly spur on inquiry, the sense of wonder may consequently diminish as the object of wonder becomes ever more intelligible. Hepburn asks if this must always be so, if wonder is ‘always expendable, consumable, displaceable through the very attaining of some superior cognitive viewpoint?’20 He answers the question by pointing to the different ways in which knowledge and wonder relate to their object. Unlike curiosity-knowledge, wonder ‘does not see its objects possessively: they remain “other” and unmastered. Wonder does dwell in its objects in rapt attentiveness.’21 To dwell in objects in rapt attentiveness – such a wonderful phrase – speaks of a fundamental immersion in the other while retaining the sense of otherness that sustains wonder. It is this quality of otherness of the objects of wonder that we draw attention to and seek to retain, later drawing links between this idea and the idea of trauma and to do so we wish to mention brieﬂ y the work of Michael Scott

18 Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, 192. 19 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’ in idem, ‘Wonder’, 131–54, 131. 20 Ibid., 132. 21 Ibid., 134. In his ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, Hepburn says similarly: ‘For instance, to project inappropriate human emotional and social life on to a non- human animal – outside the storybook. that is – is a failure of respect for the actual animal: a failure to empathise with its own proper way of being. We are failing to give it its due recognition for what it is – for its own nature. We would be using the animal, here, as a prop to our own fantasising’ (271). 158 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason who recently has articulated an anthropology of wonder.22 Scott notes the enduring interest in wonder in western philosophy. Beginning his account with Descartes, Scott singles out difference, unknown otherness as the source of wonder for Descartes. Scott points out that if wonder is evoked by novelty or difference, then that invites the question: difference, novelty in relation to what. ‘It is only relative to expectations conditioned by some sense of what there is and of what is possible that something can provoke wonder. Wonder is inextricably linked not only to alterity but also to people’s ontological premises,’23 their fundamental assumptions about the make-up and nature of reality. This Scott links to the task of the anthropologist. While Scott does not refer to Hepburn he adds, in language reminiscent of Hepburn, that philosophers who link wonder and ontology, see wonder as a response not simply to the new, or different but to the inexplicable:

The inexplicable, they emphasize, casts seemingly unquestionable axioms about the way things are into radical doubt and suggests new realities. Playing on the possible etymological relationship between English ‘wonder’ and ‘wound’, philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein observes that wonder responds to ‘a destabilizing and unas- similable interruption in the ordinary course of things, an uncanny opening, rift, or wound in the everyday’.24

Hepburn notes, in a related fashion, occasions of wonder that link distant, early childhood experiences with senses of wonder experienced later in life. He says that there are ‘a broad range of cases that can plausibly be held to rise from the linking of present experience with memory-traces of very early experience’.25 Hepburn defends these cases as grounds for wonder, as a source of wonder, suggesting an element of delay, a latency rather, is possibly important for certain experiences of wonder. There are qualities of wonder that Hepburn states one might associate with the sublime. Hepburn reminds us of the close association between the sublime and tragedy and the role that can be afforded to wonder in relation to both. He concludes:

22 Michael Scott, ‘To be Makiran is to see like Mr Parrot: the Anthropology of Wonder in Solomon Islands’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22 (2016), 474–95. 23 Ibid., 476. 24 Ibid., 477. 25 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, 135. Landscapes of Trauma: a Reﬂ ection on Wonder 159

It is true of many highly valued tragic dramas that we are prevented from seeing the tragic events as no more than grim, desolate and crush- ing. Some positive value is afﬁ rmed, even in a rare and intensiﬁ ed form, precisely in and through the human response to the revelation of the dysteleological side of the world. That value should be thus realized in the very shadow of its imminent annihilation – there, of course, lies the ground of wonder.26

Here we pause to set down markers for our future discussion. First, we want to use this juncture to invite reﬂ ection on the link between how Hepburn formulates the aesthetic evaluation of nature and his account of wonder as a human experience. The otherness of objects of wonder is, to some extent, in contrast to the way in which we ordinarily dwell in the world but linked to the detachment that Hepburn speaks of in relation to nature as an object of aesthetic contemplation. The otherness maybe related to the metaphysical imagination as a moment that seems to reveal in the otherness the sheer nature of being. Second, we make tentative steps here to link Hepburn’s notion of wonder, with the idea of trauma as discussed in recent, largely humanities, literature. The question of otherness, the eruption of otherness into the familiar, is important here. We want to come to a point where we can wonder whether the ideas of trauma and wonder can help us speak to the events described above, and the events that followed, to be described a little later in this paper. Our tentative suggestion is, that unlike what Hepburn describes above, the people we have worked with on Heimaey, have not, at least not as yet, mobilised wonder to turn the terror of the eruption into a positive value. Rather, the recent opening of the Eldheimar Museum seems to have brought the trauma back to the surface, opened a wound that remains open, remains a wonder rather than having afforded healing as yet. However, to establish more clearly and ﬁ rmly the connections we seek to make here and to give some support for our albeit tentative suggestion, we need to say something about trauma.

3 Trauma

Pálsson notes that in the eruption the geosociality between the island and the Eyjamenn was disrupted.27 He reports that some Eyjamenn say that the 26 Ibid., 152. 27 Pálsson, Fjallið sem yppti öxlum, 165. ´Rofnuðu jarðsambönd Eyjamanna´ as he says 160 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason eruption ruined their lives. That is not an overstatement. Many experienced trauma although it was not referred to as trauma until later. Some people heard the roar of the eruption whenever they went to sleep, even many months after it stopped. They knew this was their imagination, but that did not matter. There are reports of grown men, who had not shed a tear for decades, crying uncontrollably as they watched their houses being consumed by the lava. Watching the eruption people often did not understand what they saw, it was as if they were watching incomprehensible events at odds with the laws of nature as they knew them. Something, of course, had to break within people watching this, as Pálsson concludes.28 The experiences described above, fi t well with symptoms of trauma as it has been often characterised. Pálsson uses the word ‘tráma’ here, an Icelandic version of the English trauma, rather than an established Icelandic word in itself. The word currently in vogue in Icelandic is áfall. That word appears, for example, in the Icelandic for PTSD (post-traumatic-stress-disorder), áfallastreituröskun, a singularly ugly word. Still áfall is a word than can be used to describe relatively minor mishaps, whereas tráma very clearly is intended to spell the gravity of the experience it covers. In a powerful, critical account, Roger Luckhurst traces the history of the idea of trauma and the extent to and the ways in which trauma has emerged as prism through which people fi nd themselves increasingly interpreting and acting upon their and other people’s experiences.29 Ruth Leys similarly opens her genealogy of the notion of trauma, by drawing attention to the very serious and sometimes seemingly quite inconsequential experiences the idea of trauma is now applied to. Leys notes that trauma ‘was originally the term for a surgical wound, conceived on the model of a rupture of the skin or protective envelope of the body resulting in a catastrophic global reaction in the entire organism’.30 Luckhurst notes that trauma is a ‘piercing or a breach of a border’, a wound, we might add following Scott following Rubinstein, that provokes wonder. Luckhurst adds that trauma as now understood not only signals a breach of boundaries but rather ‘puts inside and outside into a strange communication. Trauma violently opens passageways between systems that were once discrete’31, reminiscent of the ways in which a volcanic eruption simultaneously consumes the previously evocatively in Icelandic. 28 Ibid., 165–6. 29 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London, 2008). 30 Ruth Leys, Trauma: a Genealogy (Chicago, 2000), 19. 31 We want to highlight this description for its aptness in relation to the turning inside out that both a volcanic eruption and indeed the excavation we speak of later. Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 161 stable surface of the Earth while replacing it with the Earth’s insides. Trauma, Luckhurst concludes, ‘leaks between mental and physical symptoms […], between victims and their listeners or viewers who are commonly moved to forms of overwhelming sympathy, even to the extent of claiming secondary victimhood.’32 Leys reminds us helpfully that:

Post-traumatic stress disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory. The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, ﬁ xed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reexperienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present. All the symptoms characteristic of PTSD-ﬂ ashbacks, night- mares and other reexperiences, emotional numbing, depression, guilt, autonomic arousal, explosive violence or tendency to hypervigilance are thought to be the result of this fundamental mental dissociation.33

Leys formulation here is standard and would, we believe, be accepted as accurate by most scholars in the fi eld of trauma studies. Still, the formulation hides quite fundamental differences about the precise nature, causes and consequences of trauma. Before addressing those differences allow us to make two observations here: Leys description, it would seem, clearly applies to the account given by Pálsson of the experiences of Eyjamenn related above. The perpetual reexperience of the roar of the eruption, for example, is a case in point. Second, this characterisation of trauma echoes the sense of otherness in which one may be rapt, that Hepburn speaks of in relation to wonder. A constitutive element of the experience of trauma is the inability to master that experience, to overcome its otherness by making it part of ordinary narrative memory. That said, we now want to draw on Luckhurst and Leys and make a distinction between some different approaches to trauma. In a moment we will go to theories that suggest that cultures, societies, maybe ethnic groups, generations 32 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 3. 33 Leys, Trauma: a Geneology, 2. 162 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason or genders can suffer trauma as collectives and not simply as collections of individuals. Staying for now with individual trauma, Leys’ account, which we follow closely, stresses an ongoing tension between mimetic and anti-mimetic approaches to trauma. According to mimetic explanations of trauma, the victim of trauma, the self or the subject identifi es with and fi xates on the scene of the trauma. Because of this identifi cation the trauma is beyond representation, that is to say, the victim cannot distinguish between itself and the traumatic experience as such, to bring that experience into its narrative past. Anti-mimetic accounts, on the other hand, assume that the trauma comes to the victim, the self, the subject from outside, shattering the boundaries the self, before the traumatic experience, was able to maintain between itself and the outside world.34 Leys notes that the current neurobiological defi nition of PTSD (for many the contemporary manifestation of trauma) draws explicitly on ‘a physiological-causal theory of shock’.35 This current neurobiological defi nition of PTSD is then a manifestation of a class of ideas that locates the origin of trauma fi rmly in an external event that, in turn, leaves an imprint on the psyche or the brain of the affected individual. These are ideas that in their fi rm anti- mimetic stance are what Leys characterises as ‘literalist’.36 She takes the very infl uential work of Bessel van der Kolk as the key current example of these ideas. His ‘central claim [is] that traumatic memory involves a literal imprint of an external trauma that, lodged in the brain in a special traumatic memory system, defi es all possibility of representation.’37 Leys fi nds this ‘literalist view of trauma’ theoretically simplistic and ‘poorly supported by the scientifi c evidence.’ The basic problem with van Kolk’s approach, and the class of ideas it represents, is that it suggests ‘a causal analysis of trauma as fundamentally external to the subject’, says Leys, a subject that is furthermore ‘poorly formulated’.38 Leys, effectively places the infl uential work of Cathy Caruth, one of the key fi gures in the humanities’ study of trauma, in the same category as van Kolk’s. Leys does this on the basis of Caruth’s theorisation of the link between trauma and the victim. Thus Caruth draws ‘an absolute opposition

34 Patricia Ticineto Clough, ‘Introduction’ in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (London, 2007), 30. 35 Leys, Trauma: a Geneology, 19. 36 Ibid., 16. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 163 between external trauma and victim’ suggesting a literalist understanding of the origin of trauma as outside and independent of the victim.39 In contrast to this literalist view, Leys evokes the complex history of Sigmund Freud’s engagement with trauma. Freud stressed the importance of ‘latency’ in relation to trauma; that trauma should not in fact be understood to be caused as such by the original event of ‘trauma’ but its later recall as memory.40 For Freud, trauma is brought about through the dialectic between two events, two experiences, ‘a fi rst event that was not necessarily traumatic because it came too early in the child’s development to be understood and assimilated, and a second event that also was not inherently traumatic but that triggered a memory of the fi rst event that only then was given traumatic meaning’.41 Trauma, for Freud, was fundamentally linked to a ‘temporal delay or latency through which the past was available only by a deferred act of understanding and interpretation’.42 This brings to mind Hepburn’s suggestion of the dialogue between early childhood experiences and later experiences in the generation of a sense of ‘wonder’.43 Here a certain undoing of time is suggested, even required in a way that Freud hints at with the importance of latency in the history of trauma. Leys emphasises the complex and often contradictory history of Freud’s treatment of and engagement with trauma – his is a case where mimetic and the anti-mimetic approaches both fi gures. Still, Leys stresses the central role of the idea of imitation, identifi cation and mimesis in the constitution of the idea of trauma and in much of Freud’s work on the topic. Imitation played a key role in the initial conceptualisation of trauma ‘because the tendency of hypnotized persons to imitate or repeat whatever they were told to say or do provided a basic model for the traumatic experience.’44 In this way trauma was understood as a situation of ‘dissociation or “absence” from the self in which the victim unconsciously imitated, or identifi ed with, the aggressor or traumatic scene in a condition that was likened to a state of heightened suggestibility or hypnotic trance.’45 This approach does away with any clear distinction between the outside and the inside, between an event that is the

39 Ibid., 17. 40 Ibid., 20. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Cf. Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth-Century Theology (New York, 1968), 46–7. 44 Leys, Trauma: a Geneology, 8. 45 Ibid. 164 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason cause of trauma and trauma as the experience thereof. Further, this approach places the subject itself, ego if you prefer, in doubt. As Leys argues: ‘[t]rauma is thus imagined as involving not the shattering of a pre-given ego by the loss of an identiﬁ able object or event but a dislocation or dissociation of the “subject” prior to any identity […] the traumatic “event” […] strictly speaking cannot be described as an event since it does not occur on the basis of a subject-object distinction.’46 Again, we want tentatively to draw links with Hepburn’s formulation of wonder. Hepburn stresses how the object of wonder remains ‘other’, how wonder ‘dwells’ in the object of wonder. This does not, of course, amount to the dissociation of the subject, as Leys speaks of in relation to trauma. Still, the similarities and the differences here will become important to our discussion about the aftermath of the eruption. To mine them for the insight we are after, we need to turn to collective trauma.

4 Collective trauma

Luckhurst writes a history of the idea of trauma, Leys a genealogy. Pálsson notes that the idea of trauma was not common in Iceland at the time of the eruption, it was not readily available to people to understand their experiences in its terms. Do we not need to take this history into account, recognise trauma not only as a universal, (un)natural psychological process but rather a cultural, social and political one? Such is indeed the argument made by Luckhurst and Leys. Above we have discussed brieﬂ y theories of trauma as an experience affecting the individual. These ideas can be contrasted with notions of collective trauma. Jeffrey Alexander has offered a useful deﬁ nition of cultural trauma: ‘[c]ultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.’47 Alexander’s formulation of cultural trauma forms part of an effort to articulate an approach to

46 Ibid., 33. Leys notes in relation to this: ‘Hence the ambiguity of the term “trauma”, which is often used to describe an event that assaults the subject from outside, but which according to the theme of mimetic identifi cation is an experience or “situation” of identifi cation that strictly speaking does not occur to an autonomous or fully coherent subject.’ (Ibid.) 47 Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’ in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (London, 2004), 1. Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 165 collective trauma as distinct from individual trauma. In this, Alexander draws approvingly, if not without reservations, on the celebrated work of Kai Eriksen. He famously drew a distinction between individual and collective trauma:

By individual trauma I mean a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defences so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively […]. By collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of commu- nality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associated with ‘trauma’. But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared…48

Alexander suggests that Eriksen’s approach is somewhat diminished in what he calls its ‘naturalistic fallacy’.49 This is largely the same ‘fallacy’ as Leys refers to as literalist, one that locates trauma naturally in external events. Alexander continues: ‘First and foremost, we maintain that events do not, in and of themselves, create collective trauma. Events are not inherently traumatic. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution.’50 Here Alexander then draws a distinction between social crises and cultural, collective trauma. He says:

For traumas to emerge at the level of the collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises. Events are one thing, representations of these events quite another. Trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity. Collective actors ‘decide’ to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go.51

48 Ibid., 4. 49 We might point to how Eriksen here assumes a self that might be compromised through the unravelling of community ties signalling an anti-mimetic stance, a self whose boundaries are breached by an external event, in turn suggesting a literalist stance in Leys terms. 50 Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, 8. 51 Ibid., 10. 166 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason

A volcanic eruption of the kind we speak of here, is a social crisis, in Alexander’s terms, but it only becomes trauma if it becomes part of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity. As Pálsson notes above, the idea of trauma was not readily available to people in Vestmannaeyjar, or indeed Iceland more generally, in 1973. Still, the experiences that some people relate individually echo clearly those now regarded as symptomatic of trauma. This was not least the case, as the example from Pálsson above attests to, when people’s familiar surroundings suddenly appeared both alien and dangerous, when the being at home in one’s environment that Hepburn speaks about was so radically undermined. This formulation brings the notion of the ‘uncanny’ immediately to mind, the home that suddenly becomes unhomely, the safe haven that is suddenly threatening was central to Freud’s formulation of the uncanny (das Unheimliche). We would of course not be the fi rst to draw attention to a certain correspondence between the idea of trauma and that of the uncanny. Freud famously, or infamously depending on one’s point of view, spoke of the uncanny as the return of the repressed, either that which humanity in its evolutionary history has ordinarily surmounted, or that which the individual has consigned to their unconscious. It is the return of this repressed that echoes the notion of trauma and indeed the idea of wonder as formulated by Hepburn. With these thoughts in mind, we now turn to the aftermath of the eruption, particularly the recent opening of the Eldheimar Museum that revolves around the eruption. It seems clear, for example from Pálsson’s book, that remembering of the eruption has become fundamental to the local identity in Heimaey. Much of the public remembrance that takes place emphases the resilience and the heroism of the people locally in overcoming such an event and rebuilding a vibrant community. Still, that leaves some people who express a sense of trauma, a thorough unmaking of their being, made all the more acute, arguably, because of the public emphasis on resilience. This a sense of trauma that has come to them belatedly, specifi cally in relation to the establishment of the Eldheimar Museum and the excavation work related to the museum. As such, we are not here discussing a situation like the one Alexander speaks of, where a community comes collectively to a sense of trauma. Rather we are speaking of a more complex situation marked by some people understanding their experience in terms of trauma, doing so belatedly and in the face of public emphasis on resilience and heroism. They feel this in a landscape that is simultaneously their ground of being and one of absolutely otherness, an otherness they are again now, as consequence of the excavation Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 167 work and the opening of the museum, utterly rapt in. This is what we seek to explore now.

5 The eruption and its (long) aftermath

In the days and weeks following the beginning of the eruption on Heimaey, it became clear that numerous residents had lost their home, buried under the glowing stream of lava and the black sandy pumice. Other residents, while their homes still stood, had lost many of their personal belongings. The impact of the eruption was more widespread still. Vestmannaeyjar are – and became again – home to one of the most important fi shing harbours in Iceland, its closure was a signifi cant if temporary hit for the country’s economy. The eruption, moreover, required the relocation of nearly 5000 people, not a small task for a nation of only about 250,000 at that time. The eruption on Heimaey lasted fi ve months, coming to an end on 3 July 1973. Comprehensive operations began quickly after that with the aim of rebuilding infrastructure on the island and cleaning the thick layers of volcanic ash and pumice that covered the town. No effort was to be spared in allowing the evacuated residents to return home. The cleaning-up effort was aided by personnel from the US military. The US military, at this time, had a station in Kefl avík not far from the island of Heimaey, the town Kefl avík in fact having been the temporary home to many of evacuated islanders. Various volunteers from around the world joined the American soldiers and residents. Many evacuees moved back to the island after the eruption had ended while others were incapable of returning for a variety of reasons, and still others refused to return and live where such a catastrophe had taken place. Individuals whose property had been damaged in the eruption received compensa- tions. Many of the houses were cleaned and repaired soon after, however, the clean-up work was abandoned for buildings that had been deemed not worth salvaging. A great housing shortage emerged which deterred many from moving back to the island. A year after the eruption had ended, in the autumn of 1974, a local newspaper wrote that while many people had returned to the island, the social life in the town had been ‘rather quiet’. Decades have passed since the eruption came to an end. How do people now recall the events? One of our informants noted that the eruption was ‘a sensitive topic for many and very few of those that experienced the event have come to terms with it. It is simply set to one side and life goes on. […] I have heard that a visit to the island will stir up strong emotions in those who were 168 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason there.’ The Eldheimar Museum seems to have dramatized these reactions. It has given rise to mixed emotions in those residents who experienced the eruption. There are those who have decided against visiting the museum, and then those who have visited but have sworn never to go again. Ever since the eruption ended in 1973, the inhabitants of Vestmannaeyjar have made various efforts to keep the memory of the event alive. On 3 July 1974, a specifi c commemorative programme was advertised which called for people to gather around the foot of the volcano where the mayor delivered a talk, followed by a parade leading to the local sports fi eld. From that day onwards, a festival called Goslokahátíð (the End of Eruption Festival) has been held annually. In 1993, the Westman Islands Folk Museum opened an exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary of the end of the eruption. And during a local festival, held every year to coincide with a general national holiday at the beginning of August, the eruption is remembered. Monuments have been erected: in 1993, for example, the mayor of Vestmannaeyjar unveiled a glass sculpture titled Máttur Jarðar (The Power of Earth) by the celebrated Icelandic artist Leifur Breiðfjörð. This process of remembrance is for the islanders usually framed in terms of relief and joy over the eruption’s end. The current mayor captured this point perfectly in an interview, where he claimed that: ‘The eruption literally came up under people’s feet. […] This was not seen as a cause for celebration, being forced to leave your home not knowing when or whether you would be able to return. However, witnessing the end of the eruption brought much joy.’ The joy, evoked here, can be construed as simply the version a town offi cial is required to express. At the same time, we are of course not suggesting the end of the eruption was not an occasion for joy. Rather, what we are suggesting is that more recently there has been a change, as expressed by our interviewee above, and that remembering the eruption has become more problematic for islanders. This change, we think, is linked to the establishment of the Eldheimar Museum.

6 The village of memory

While there has been a great deal of continuity in how islanders have remembered the eruption, a shift occurred in the collective remembrance of the event when, in 2005, a project was commissioned which involved digging up a section of the town that was still buried under lava and pumice. First, volumi- nous layers of pumice were dug from above seven to ten houses that had been Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 169 submerged soon after the eruption began. The clean-up project began by the house of Suðurvegur 25 and the plan was to move from house to house on the same street, where the houses would be steadily revealed until they were fi t to be displayed, standing under the open sky as an example of the impact molten volcanic lava has on buildings. The idea was that ‘in time there would arise a kind of village of memory that would create a powerful impression of how nature swept through people’s homes.’ The project was dubbed ‘Pompeii of the North’, referring to the fact that the town shared a similar fate to that ancient city in Italy. It became clear soon after the 2005 excavation project had begun, that Suðurvegur 25 was not well suited for preservation, given that the house was badly damaged from heat exposure and was near collapse. However, the excavation had revealed another house, Gerðisbraut 10, located not far from Suðurvegur 25. The house on Gerðisbraut was in a better condition, there was still paint on the walls, inside and outside, and part of the roof was still in place. A decision was made to preserve this house, which would become the central piece in the new museum. In spring 2014, Eldheimar opened its doors to the fi rst visitors, promoting itself as ‘a museum of remembrance.’ On the top fl oor, there is an exhibition dedicated to the eruption on Surtsey, which took place not far from the Vestmannaeyjar and lasted from 1963 to 1967. There is also a cafeteria on the same fl oor where guests can enjoy refresh- ments after viewing the exhibition and take in the view which looks over the town through an expansive window. From its founding, Eldheimar has aimed to preserve the memory of the eruption, present the geological history of southern Iceland, educate visitors about the dangers of natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions and earth- quakes, and attract and promote tourism. The museum received funding from various sources, such as the Icelandic government, the town of Vestmannaeyjar, the Icelandic Tourist Board and the cargo transport company Eimskip. The project had received two awards before it was formally completed: the 2006 Scandinavian Travel Award, for one of the ten most interesting innovations in Scandinavian tourism, and the 2007 Icelandair Pioneer Award Winner, awarded for innovation with regard to positively promoting the country’s image and creating appeal for tourists. 170 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason

7 Remembering trauma: covering and opening the wound

Before going on to describe the issues that have arisen in relation to the museum, we want to acknowledge how the diffi culties of remembering the eruption and its consequences have manifested themselves outside of the museum. A key example here is the documentary fi lm Útlendingur heima (Foreigner at Home) which tells the story of a man who grew up in the part of town that was entirely buried under the lava. He explains how he feels like he cannot return to his childhood home, because it is ‘just lava that I have to clamber over and look at some signs where the streets are marked.’ Another interlocutor in the fi lm describes how she was incapable of visiting the lava fi eld even after she had moved back to the island. ‘I did not even want to walk over the lava fi eld, for a long, long time. My childhood was buried under there. All the beautiful green and the hill below. So much was taken away from me. And from all of us.’ Husband and wife Arnór and Helga, who both experienced the eruption, opened a café in 2010 which they named Vinaminni in honour of one of the 400 houses that were consumed in the fl ow of lava. The café was, according to promotion material, intended as a ‘collection of information about the neighbourhood that was buried under lava during the eruption.’ Inside the café there were photographs on display, the stories of the people who had lived in the area were exhibited, as well as tableware from the houses buried under the lava and other connected souvenirs produced for the café and sold there. The couple based the project on data which Helga began gathering in 1999. Helga’s motivation for the project came about as a result of being haunted by memories of the ‘neighbourhood under the lava’, in relation to which she claimed that not ‘a day went by without a memory carrying [her] through the lava wall and in her mind’s eye looking […] over east side of town.’ The description that Helga offers recalls elements from the defi nition of trauma provided by Leys as we have discussed. There is the sense here of repetition, almost compulsive revisiting. The café appeared like a memorial to the vanished houses, streets and people that thrived there before the volcano erupted. As such, we might say, the café can be seen as an effort to move beyond the repetition that the trauma entails. The café was closed in 2015 and all the the material that they had accumulated was posted on a website that collects information concerning the islands. The organisers of the ‘Pompeii of the North’ project were aware of the feelings that were associated with the establishment of the café, how those Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 171 feelings were echoed by many in the community, and knew from the onset that they would have to tread carefully. Irrespective of the fact that the individuals who had lost their homes in the eruption had received fi nancial compensation, the consensus was that they should be consulted about the excavation project and the project organisers sought permission from the former homeowners, even if their ownership had come to an end. What was the unease that the museum project provoked? We have reit- erated above the words of one of the interlocutors in the documentary Útlendingur heima, referring to ‘all the green’ vanquished by the lava. Why is this signifi cant? Clean-up operations on the island began almost immediately after the eruption ended. The inhabitants of Vestmannaeyjar made considerable effort to conserve the soil of the new land that had formed in the process of the eruption, and not least, to create green areas everywhere they could as if in response to the blackness of the ash and the cooling lava. However, the ‘Pompeii of the North’ project entailed digging up some of the green spaces that had been created, which revealed the pumice underneath, turning inside out as Luckhurst had it in relation to trauma. This process proved diffi cult for some. For example, one of the individuals involved in the work told us:

It felt great when everything had become so green and the soil was ﬂ ourishing again. It was on the verge of becoming what it used to be like […]. It was very frustrating to see all that black stuff come back to the surface. I just wanted to forget all about that time. We were digging up the past. It was terrible to reveal all that ash and then to see all that grass that we had planted disappear. It’s frustrating.

Another person we interviewed claimed that this experience was the most difﬁ cult time in the whole process that lead to the opening of Eldheimar. She added that she was relieved when she saw the houses that had peered out of the black pumice buried once again. During the formal opening ceremony of Eldheimar in spring 2014, the former owner of the house that is now on display in the museum, was invited to address the guests. In the talk, she described:

[how] thirty-eight years later [she was invited] to see the fi rst remains of the house and [crawled] in through the window with a small fl ashlight. The desire to go in and explore outweighed reason and fear. When I entered the house, in complete darkness, fl ashlight in hand, I was 172 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason

overcome by emotions. Various objects were still in their places. I was overwhelmed. It was a difﬁ cult moment.

Overwhelming emotions and memories washed over her, an experience she struggles with. However, in the talk she emphasized the pedagogic aspect of the story that Eldheimar tells, which she hopes will become useful for coming generations. ‘We are gathered here today, and I am proud to witness this milestone for Vestmannaeyjar, and I sincerely hope that our house will tell a fantastic tale and offer a vision that will live on for years to come.’

8 The Experience of Eldheimar

Eldheimar underlines the importance of documenting memories of those who experienced the eruption ﬁ rst hand. On the photograph below, you can see the space that is set to preserve these memories. Here, visitors at Eldheimar will be offered the opportunity to document their memories of the event. In this space, Eldheimar will work with people’s histories. The space is still undecorated at this stage and awaits the time when visitors are ready to bring their own memories. This moment will perhaps have to wait indeﬁ nitely, since many islanders are not prepared to take that step, to document their experience in public and thereby making it accessible to others.

The intended memory space at Eldheimar Museum. A photograph by Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson. Landscapes of Trauma: a Reﬂ ection on Wonder 173

We recently talked to a woman who stated that:

I think it is very important that our countrymen are aware of what we went through. […] I have been there twice, and I do not want to return. It’s a lot to take in and I have heard people talk about how overwhelming it is. You leave your house, and all the doors and all the shelves and all the lights are shaking. We were close to the volcano. It’s a bit of a nightmare, so I think that people are not very willing to discuss it.

These are the conditions in which Edheimar arose. The eruption and its consequences left a number of wounds; in the community and in the individuals, who were forced to live with the experience. It is interesting to wonder now that the museum has been properly established, how it is for people who harbour diffi cult memories of the disaster to walk through the museum. Many of the numerous individuals that we interviewed agree with the sentiments communicated to us shortly after the ‘Pompeii of the North’ idea had surfaced, and later, at the onset of the Eldheimar project, namely, that it was ‘complete nonsense.’ Another individual, who experienced the eruption and lost his home and personal belongings, told us that they ‘just want to forget.’ It is no surprise therefore that visiting Eldheimar is for these individuals an ambivalent undertaking. A woman in her sixties for example described that she had made three attempts to walk through the museum. After she fi rst walked through the museum doors, she felt a stir of ‘emotions, a sense of loss, and so on. [The third time] I started looking at it and [felt] that the museum was well designed. At fi rst you enter the shock, which is the house and the story about the eruption.’ In another interview, we asked why the memories in Eldheimar were so diffi cult, and our respondent said it had to do with the kind of memories that the museum chooses to recollect. The people, he claimed:

[have] their entire life under there. And all their belongings and all their memories and everything. The family photos and god knows what. Everything they owned. [My friend] lost his house and everything was buried underneath. It was a newly-built house, he had lived there only for a short time. I can easily understand that people feel a pain in their stomach when they go to the museum and experience this.

In Vestmannaeyjar, the residents generally talk about life ‘before and after the eruption’, which underlines the extent to which the disaster impacted on the 174 Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson – Arnar Árnason local society. There is a sense in which Eldheimar stands as a monument to the changes that took place, a point noted in a few of the interviews carried out for this project. These same individuals are however not convinced that this monument was useful for their own process of recollection, and for residents in Vestmannaeyjar in general. As one of them put it: ‘These events would not be forgotten regardless of whether Eldheimar had been built or not. This is probably more for outsiders who want to know what happened. While the rest of us, who know deep down and remember everything, have no need for this monument. Not at all.’ These thoughts were echoed by another person we interviewed, who said that it was good that people knew what the inhabitants of Vestmannaeyjar were forced to go through, however, at the same time he told us that he had twice visited the museum but had no desire to return. For him, the eruption was a ‘horror’ and his visit to the museum was so overwhelming that leaving the premises had brought him immense relief.

9 Conclusion

In Hepburn’s work on the relationships that people have with nature, with their environment, we fi nd an interesting and fruitful tension. Hepburn on the one hand seems to emphasise the human immersion in landscape, the way in which our being is grounded by our relations with the world around us. Such an account suggests an ordinary, relatively unrefl ecting stance towards nature. At the same time Hepburn suggests the utter otherness of nature, or indeed simply utter otherness, irreducible otherness, as a fundamental source of wonder as experience, often enough thrilling and terrifying at the same time. We have, tentatively and sketchily, sought to link these ideas with the understanding of trauma, in particular as formulated by Leys. The traumatic experience, as Leys notes, suggests the simultaneous overcoming of the self by the event to such an extent that the distinction between self and other becomes meaningless, and the separation of the self from the environment that has become other because of the self ’s inability to master the experience itself. This can happen powerfully through latency, through the meeting of an initial experience and its later recall, its triggering by later events. This is precisely what has happened, we have sought to document, with the excavation work in preparation for and later the opening of the Eldheimar Museum. What we have here, then, is not cultural, collective trauma as Alexander formulates it. Rather, what we have is a more complex, and we would like to Landscapes of Trauma: a Refl ection on Wonder 175 think more interesting, scenario where some individuals have belatedly come to understand their experience as trauma, as the grounds of those experiences have literally been dug up. Moreover, they have come to understand their experiences as trauma in face of the public celebration of the stoicism and heroism, the resilience of the local people that the public remembrance of the eruption plays on. Many residents locally were at fi rst opposed to the idea of building Eldheimar. For those who seem to struggle the most with memories of the eruption, Eldheimar summons a myriad of diffi cult emotions. It might seem paradoxical but despite these emotions and experiences, the islanders, even those that suffered the most, seem to agree that Eldheimar is a step in the right direction. The events should be remembered and publically discussed, by inhabitants of the island, Icelanders in general and others, such as tourists. It is a well-known idea that museums are sometimes intended to heal wounds, create collective memories and transmit them to others. To what extent does this hold in the context of Eldheimar, and in the minds of those asked to share these memories with the museum? We should ask, what kind of signif- icance does the process of sharing these memories carry for both current residents and the islanders who evacuated during the disaster and never reset- tled? People in Vestmannaeyjar have long stressed a strong self-image based on resilience, hard work, stoicism. The arrival of Eldheimar, however, frames the self-image in a slightly different manner, a frame that captures diffi cult memories that have previously lain dormant and ultimately unveils the collective trauma rooted in the disastrous eruption of 1973. Hepburn, as noted above, suggested that a sense of wonder might be the mechanism through which tragedy can become positive. We suggest that this has not happened yet in Heimaey. For that trauma has too recently been brought to the surface. At the same time, we wonder if Eldheimar Museum may in time foster such sense of wonder that the tragedy will produce something more positive still.

University of Iceland & University of Aberdeen Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography

Preliminary remarks: several of Ronald W. Hepburn’s papers were published more than once in different academic journals and anthologies. The following bibliography provides details of his works only in their last published locations, with the date of the ﬁ rst appearance in square brackets wherever applicable. This bibliography does not provide his unpublished conference talks, nor the translations of some of his papers.1 Hepburn’s two collected volumes mostly comprise earlier published essays (some of them were reprinted as revised versions). I mark with * those papers which came to light again in his ‘Wonder’ of 1984, and with ** that reap- peared in The Reach of the Aesthetic of 2001.2

Books

1. The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001), xvi + 170 pp.

2. ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 192 pp.

3. Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth-Century Theology (1958; New York, 1968; revised edn), ix + 217 pp.

4. Cosmology and Value: Studies in the Argumentation of Certain Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Works of Philosophical and Literary Concerns (Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1955), 438 pp [approx. 100,000 words].

1 For a bibliography with the here omitted data, see Endre Szécsényi (ed.), Ronald W. Hepburn and his Legacy, https://ronaldwhepburn.hcommons.org, accessed on 10 December 2018. 2 For my bibliographic investigation, I was assisted by a list of publications that Hepburn drew up himself, probably in 2007. I am grateful to Emily Brady for having let me know that document. Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography 177

Papers

1. ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, ed. Emily Brady, Environmental Values, 19 (2010), 273–88.

2. ‘Freedom and Receptivity in Aesthetic Experience’, The Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 3 (2006), 1–14, http://www.pjaesthetics.org/index.php/pjaesthetics/article/view/42/41, accessed 6 October 2017.3

3. (With Arnold Berleant) ‘An Exchange on Disinterestedness’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 1 (2003), https://contempaesthetics.org/ newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=209, accessed 22 November 2018.

4. ** ‘Values and Cosmic Imagination’ in Anthony O’Hear (ed.), Philosophy, The Good, the True and the Beautiful (Cambridge, 2000), 35–51. [1999]

5. ** ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’ in Pauline von Bonsdorff and Arto Haapala (eds), Aesthetics in the Human Environment (Lahti, 1999), 166–85.

6. ‘Knowing (Aesthetically) Where I Am’, Department of Philosophy, Lancaster University, 1999, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/ philosophy/awaymave/onlineresources/hepburn.pdf, accessed 18 December 2018.

7. ‘Nature Humanised: Nature Respected’, Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 267–79.

3 At time of printing, The Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics is moving to a new online location. 178 Endre Szécsényi (comp.)

8. ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’ in Sarah Johnson (ed.), Landscapes (Cambridge, 2010), 1–14. [1996]

9. ** ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding’ in Arnold Berleant (ed.), Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics (Ashgate, 2002), 23–38. [1996]

10. ** ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries, Overlaps and Intrusions’ in Yrjö Sepänmaa (ed.), Real World Design (Lahti, 1995), 42–8.4

11. ** ‘Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in Timothy D. J. Chappell (ed.), The Philosophy of Environment (Edinburgh, 1997), 65–77. [1993]

12. ** ‘Religious Imagination’ in Michael McGhee (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge, 1992), 127–43.

13. ‘The Values of Art and the Values of Community’ in Leroy S. Rouner (ed.), On Community (Notre Dame, 1991), 27–55.

14. ‘Art, Truth and the Education of Subjectivity’, Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 24 (1990), 185–98.

15. ‘The Problem of Evil’ in Philip T. Grier (ed.), Dialectics and Contemporary Science: Essays in Honor of Errol E Harris (Lanham, 1989), 111–24.

16. ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has it any Relevance for Philosophy Today?’, Dialectics and Humanism, 15 (1988), 137–55.

4 The essay is signiﬁ cantly enlarged in The Reach of the Aesthetic (Ashgate, 2011), 96–112. Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography 179

17. ‘Attitudes to Evidence and Argument in the Field of Religion’ in Roger Straughan and John Wilson (eds), Philosophers on Religion (London, 1987), 127–46.

18. ‘Findlay’s Aesthetic Thought and its Metaphysical Settings’ in Robert S. Cohen, Richard M. Martin and Merold Westphal (eds), Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay (Albany, 1985), 192–211.

19. ‘Literature and the Recent Study of Language’ in Boris Ford (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 8, The Present (London, 1995), 494–508. [1983]

20. * ‘Optimism, Finitude, and the Meaning of Life’ in Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland (eds), The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon (Cambridge, 1982), 119–44.

21. * ‘The Inaugural Address: Wonder’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 54 (1980), 1–23.

22. ‘The Moral Strengthening of the Individual’ in Alfred White Franklin (ed.), The Challenge of Child Abuse (London, 1977), 219–28.

23. ‘Remarks’ in Stuart C. Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 72–7.5

24. * ‘Time-Transcendence and Some Related Phenomena in the Arts’ in Hywel David Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy, Personal Statements (4th series; London, 1976), 152–73. 5 Reﬂ ections on the two papers of Part 1 (‘The Intelligibility of the Universe’) by Hugo Meynell and Harry V. Stopes-Roe. 180 Endre Szécsényi (comp.)

25. ‘Morality and Religion’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 2 (1976), 93–4.

26. ‘Transcendental Method: Lonergan’s Arguments for the Existence of God’, Theoria to Theory, 7 (1973), 46–50.

27. ‘Method and Insight’, Philosophy, 48 (1973), 153–60.

28. * ‘Nature in the Light of Art’ in Godfrey Vesey (ed.), Philosophy and the Arts (London, 1973), 242–58.

29. * ‘The Arts and the Education of Feeling and Emotion’ in Robert F. Dearden, Paul H. Hirst and Richard S. Peters (eds), Education and the Development of Reason (London, 1972), 484–500.

30. * ‘Poetry and “Concrete Imagination”: Problems of Truth and Illusion’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 12 (1972), 3–18.

31. ‘Hobbes and the Knowledge of God’ in Maurice William Cranston and Richard S. Peters (eds), Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1972), 85–108.

32. ‘Moral Philosophy’ in Richard J. Hirst (ed.), Philosophy: An Outline for Intending Student (London, 1968), 93–131.

33. ‘“Being” as a Concept of Aesthetics’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 138–46.

34. ‘Questions about the Meaning of Life’, Religious Studies, 1 (1966), 125–40. Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography 181

35. * ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (eds), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Peterborough, Ontario, 2004), 43–62. [1966]

36. ‘The Gospel and the Claims of Logic’; ‘Humanist religion’ in [Hubert Hoskins, (ed.),] Religion and Humanism (London, 1964), 11–18; 74–90.

37. ‘A Critique of Humanist Theology’ in Harold John Blackham (ed.), Objections to Humanism (Philadelphia, 1965), 29–54. [1963]

38. ‘From World to God’ in Basil Mitchell (ed.), The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, 1971), 168–78. [1963]

39. ‘Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’ in Harold Osborne (ed.), Aesthetics in the Modern World (London, 1968), 49–66. [1963]

40. * ‘Emotions and Emotional Qualities: Some Attempts at Analysis’ in Frank A. Tillman and Steven M. Cahn (eds), Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics: From Plato to Wittgenstein (New York, 1969), 561–71. [1960– 61]

41. ‘Aesthetics and Abstract Painting: Two Views’, Philosophy, 35 (1960), 97–113.

42. ‘Particularity and Some Related Concepts in Aesthetics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 59 (1958), 189–212.

43. ‘Literary and Logical Analysis’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 8 (1958), 342–56. 182 Endre Szécsényi (comp.)

44. ‘Poetry and Religious Belief’ in [Alasdair C. MacIntyre (ed.),] Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essays (1957; London, 1970; 2nd edn), 75– 156.

45. (With Iris Murdoch) ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ in Ian T. Ramsey (ed.), Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (1966; Eugene, Oregon, 2011), 181–218. [1956]

46. ‘Demythologizing and the Problem of Validity’ in George L. Abernethy and Thomas A. Langford (eds), Philosophy of Religion: A Book of Readings (London, 1962), 319–30.6 [1955]

47. ‘George Hakewill: The Virility of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16 (1955), 135–50.

48. ‘John Spencer’s “Discourse”’, Notes and Queries, 200 (1955), 384–87.

49. ‘Godfrey Goodman: Nature Viliﬁ ed’, The Cambridge Journal, 7 (1954), 424–34.

50. ‘Thomas Traherne: The Nature and Dignity of Imagination’, The Cambridge Journal, 6 (1953), 725–34.

Entries

1. ‘Religious Experience’ in Adrian Hastings et al. (eds), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Moral Horizons of Christianity (Oxford, 2000), 606–8.

6 Only in the ﬁ rst edition of this collection. Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography 183

2. ‘Art and Morality’; ‘Autonomy and Heteronomy’; ‘Cosmology and Religious Belief ’; ‘Comedy’; ‘Courage; Duty’; ‘Egoism and Altruism’; ‘Emotive and Descriptive Meaning’; ‘Ethical Relativism’; ‘Emotive Theory of Philosophical Practice’; ‘Expression’; ‘Guilt’; ‘Hedonic Calculus’; ‘Holy’; ‘Numinous’; ‘Integrity’; ‘“Is” and “Ought”’; ‘Moral Judgement’; ‘Moral Realism’; ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’; ‘Non-Natural Pro- perties’; ‘Ought’; ‘Poetry’; ‘Practical Reason’; ‘Religion and Morality’; ‘Scepticism about Religion’; ‘Religious Language’; ‘Sublime’; ‘The- ology and Philosophy’; ‘Ugliness’ in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995; Oxford, 2005; 2nd edn).

3. ‘Nature’ in Collier’s Encyclopedia with Bibliography and Index (24 vols, New York, 1995), XVII, 212–15.

4. ‘Clive Bell’; ‘Theories of Art’ in Stephen Davies, et al. (eds), A Com- panion to Aesthetics (1992; London, 2009; 2nd edn), 172–4; 565–70.

5. ‘The Philosophy of Religion’ in G. H. R Parkinson (ed.), The Ency- clopaedia of Philosophy (1988; London, 2008), 857–77.

6. ‘Cosmic Fall’ in Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (1968; 4 vols, New York, 1973), I, 504–13.

7. ‘Agnosticism’; ‘Cosmological Argument’; ‘Moral Argument’; ‘Religious Experience’; ‘Mysticism’; ‘Creation’; ‘Bultmann’; ‘Ideas of Nature’ in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (1967; 8 vols, New York, London, 2005; 2nd revised edn). 184 Endre Szécsényi (comp.)

Reviews

Between 1953 and 2007, Ronald W. Hepburn published approximately forty reviews of books written by, for example, M. C. Beardsley, A. Berleant, F. C. Copleston, D. Cupitt, N. Cusanus, Ph. Fisher, É. Gilson, M. Heidegger, W. J. Hipple and D. D. Raphael in different academic journals like The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy, Scottish Journal of Theology, Religious Studies, Mind, The British Journal of Aesthetics, etc. In his above-mentioned list of publications (see footnote 2), he presented the following tight selection:

1. James Kirwan, Sublimity (London, 2005). Reviewed in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 47 (2007), 217–19.

2. Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense (Oxford, 2003). Reviewed in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 45 (2006), 445–7.

3. Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (Oxford, 2002). Reviewed in The European Journal of Philosophy, 11 (2003), 435–9.

4. Barry Miller, From Existence to God (London, 1992). Reviewed in Mind, 102 (1993), 674–6.

Broadcasts

1. ‘Wonder’. Recorded as a talk for an Open University Philosophy Course, Milton Keynes, 1980.

2. ‘Is There a Future to Religious Belief?’ One talk in a series, 1970.

3. ‘Down to Earth’. A contribution to a series of programme on attitudes to nature, 1970. Ronald W. Hepburn’s Works: A Bibliography 185

4. Two talks on philosophical problems in the concept of Eternity, 1968.

5. Discussion programme on the teaching of philosophy, 1967.

6. ‘Humanist Religion’. Two talks, 1964.

7. ‘The Gospel and the Claims of Logic’. 1963.

8. ‘Problems of Perspective’. With Antony Garrard Newton Flew, 1955. Notes on Contributors

Arnar Árnason is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He co-edited the volumes Comparing Rural Development: Continuity and Change in the Countryside Western Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) and Landscapes Beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), and he was co-author of Death and Governmentality in Iceland: Neo-Liberalism, Grief and the Nation-Form (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2018).

Pauline von Bonsdorff is Professor of Art Education at the University of Jyväskylä. She earned her doctorate at the University of Helsinki with Ronald W. Hepburn as her public examiner: The Human Habitat. Aesthetic and Axiological Perspectives (Lahti: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, 1998). In addition to Environmental Aesthetics and Theory of Architecture, her research topics include Theory of Art and Art Education, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, embodiment and beauty. Her current research is on aesthetic communication and imagination in childhood.

Emily Brady is Professor of Philosophy and Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair and Director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. Previously, she was Professor of Environment and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She works in the areas of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Humanities and Animal Studies. She has authored or co-edited six books, most recently, Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modiﬁ ed Environments (London: Rowman & Littleﬁ eld, 2018).

Isis Brook is Research Fellow at Crossﬁ elds Institute. She is a philosopher who has published in the area of Environmental Aesthetics, Phenomenology and Place. Her research has centred on questions to do with the human being’s relationship to nature and to the world. She has published in journals such Notes on Contributors 187 as The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Ethics and the Environment, Landscape Research and Ethics, Place & Environment. She has written extensively on cultural landscapes. In 2010, she edited a special issue of Environmental Values (vol. 19, no. 3) under the title ‘Environmental Aesthetics’ that focused on Ronald W. Hepburn’s contribution to the ﬁ eld.

Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson is Professor of Museology at the University of Iceland. He has authored Phallological Museum (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2014) and was co-author of Death and Governmentality in Iceland: Neo-Liberalism, Grief and the Nation-Form (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2018).

Alexander J. B. Hampton is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He holds degrees from Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford and Toronto. He specialises in the relationship between metaphysics, poetics and nature. He is the author of Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is also co-editor of Christian Platonism: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is currently writing a study of nature and transcendence, and editing the Cambridge Companion to Religion and the Environment.

Douglas Hedley is Fellow of Clare College and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion in the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. He read Philosophy and Theology at Keble College, Oxford. He wrote his doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is Principal Investigator on the AHRC grant The Cambridge Platonists at the Origins of Enlightenment: Texts, Debates and Reception (1650–1730).

Yuriko Saito is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design. She works in the areas of Everyday Aesthetics, Environmental Aesthetics, and Japanese Aesthetics. In addition to a number of articles and book chapters, she published Everyday Aesthetics (hardback 2008; paperback 2010) and Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (2017), both from Oxford University Press. She is also Editor of an open access, peer- reviewed journal, Contemporary Aesthetics.

Fran Speed is a philosopher and independent scholar based in London. Formerly a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London she has published book chapters in the area of Environmental Aesthetics. Her 188 research centres on the relational dimension of ethical and aesthetic merit in human nature–culture relations. Her current research explores the concept of nature as identity and the normative implications that this raises for appeals to the ‘natural’, the ‘unnatural’ and the ‘sacred’ in public discourse.

Endre Szécsényi is currently Visiting Professor in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and Professor of Aesthetics at the ELTE Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. His books include Sociability and Authority: The Aesthetic Dimensions of Politics in Eighteenth- Century Britain (Budapest: Osiris, 2002) and Beauty and Freedom: Studies in Intellectual History (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2009) both in Hungarian. He is also co-editor and co-author of Aspects of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Politics, and Religion (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2004).