Journal of Scottish Thought Volume 9 Garden, Landscape, Natural Environment Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen Journal of Scottish Thought Volume 9 Garden, Landscape, Natural Environment Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2017 ISSN 1755 9928 Editor: Endre Szécsényi © The Contributors 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 and part-funded by the European Commission by virtue of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship held at the University of Aberdeen by Endre Szécsényi. 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 Gardens, Nature and Culture David E. Cooper 1 The Garden and the Landscape Sándor Radnóti 13 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience Endre Szécsényi 39 Shakespeare and the Garden-Path of Method in Early British Aesthetics Veronika Ruttkay 75 Botanic Gardens and the Aesthetics of Artifi ce Cairns Craig 95 Arthur Young’s Study of Landscape Gardens and Parks for his Publication ‘A Tour of Ireland 1776–1779’ Finola O’Kane 110 Henry David Thoreau, Walden Woods, and an Aesthetics of Garden Laura Smith 124 The Idea of Gardening and Landscape Restoration in Iceland Anna Kuprian – Arnar Árnason 139 Ecological Landscapism on the Horizon: Introducing Wilderness into Human Landscape Wangheng Chen – Pingting Hao – Jun Qi 160 Notes on Contributors 175 Editorial Note In the essay No. 89 for The Tatler of 1709, Richard Steele wrote: ‘What we take for diversion, which is a kind of forgetting ourselves, is but a mean way of entertainment, in comparison of that which is considering, knowing, and enjoying ourselves. The pleasures of ordinary people are in their passions; but the seat of this delight is in the reason and understanding. Such a frame of mind raises that sweet enthusiasm which warms the imagination at the sight of every work of nature, and turns all around you into picture and landscape.’ This is one of the fi rst formulations of the modern aesthetic consciousness (or ‘frame of mind’) which can offer higher pleasures than the mere delights of everyday diversion, and can re-shape the whole world around us, can trans- form indifferent or even ominous natural prospects into enjoyable landscape. At the same time, this aesthetic activity is an opportunity for the beholder to improve or to re-create her mind in order to be in harmony with herself and with the whole, natural and social-cultural, world. It is a dynamic and complex experience of nature which has inspired several interpretations and theories, and led to the invention of new conceptions in gardening, new considerations on the relationships between nature and art in general, and new refl ections upon the human attitudes to natural environment. Considering this histori- cal process from the early modernity onwards, several intriguing questions can be raised. How can a natural prospect become a landscape in a historical, theoretical or practical sense? How can the model of the landscape and garden experience be applied to the aesthetic and/or moral perception of nature and to other arts? How can the complicated interrelationship between landscape or garden design and fi ne arts or literature be interpreted? What can be the lessons of the modern theories of landscape and garden for contemporary landscape restoration and environmental aesthetics? Five of these papers presented here were originally delivered in the symposium Garden – Landscape – Landscape Garden: From Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theories to Environmental Aesthetics held at the University of Aberdeen on 27–28 May, 2016.1 This event was meant to be a brainstorm- ing meeting where academics of different fi elds (like philosophy, aesthetics, 1 It was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Research Fellowship Scheme (held at the University of Aberdeen by Endre Szécsényi) of the European Commission within the Seventh European Community Framework Programme. intellectual history, anthropology, cultural and art history, architecture, human geography) and also a garden professional could share their ideas about the given broad subject. The current collection ranges from philosophical and intellectual historical approaches to literary criticism and to the contemporary problems of nature restoration and environmental aesthetics. Of course, it cannot exhaustively map the whole territory of ‘landscape – garden – land- scape garden’ from the dawn of modern aesthetics onward, still, at least, it can exhibit the wide trajectory of most of the associated discourses. As a kind of motto to this collection, it is quite appropriate to quote from Ronald W. Hepburn’s seminal article of 1966. Professor Hepburn graduated and got his doctorate from Aberdeen, and taught moral philosophy there and later at Edinburgh until his retirement in 1996; and with his articles of the mid-60s, he established environmental aesthetics. ‘We have not only a mutual involvement of spectator and [natural] object, but also a refl exive effect by which the spectator experiences himself in an unusual and vivid way; and this difference is not merely noted, but dwelt upon aesthetically. The effect is . both more intensely realized and pervasive in nature-experience [than in art, especially in architecture] – for we are in nature and a part of nature; we do not stand over against it as over against a painting on a wall . Some sort of detachment there certainly is, in the sense that I am not using nature, manipu- lating it or calculating how to manipulate it. But I am both actor and spectator, ingredient in the landscape and lingering upon the sensations of being thus ingredient, rejoicing in their multifariousness, playing actively with nature, and letting nature, as it were, play with me and my sense of myself.’2 Endre Szécsényi University of Aberdeen and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University October 2017 Cover: The plate after p. 92 of Powerscourt Waterfall from the extra-illustrated copy of Arthur Young’s A Tour of Ireland, with General Observations on the Present State of that Kingdom, Made in the Years 1776, 1777, and 1778, and Brought Down to the End of 1779 (London, 1780). National Library of Ireland LO 10203. © National Library of Ireland 2017 2 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, 13. Gardens, Nature and Culture David E. Cooper 1. Gardens and discourses of hierarchy Gardens have long fi gured in two seemingly distinct discourses of nature and hierarchy. The fi rst of these discourses addresses hierarchies within the natu- ral order. Distinctions have been made between, for example, ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ animals, or between ‘living’ and ‘barren’ landscapes, or ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ aspects of nature. A nice and familiar example of a hierarchical conception is the idea, prevalent in the Christian West until well into the eight- eenth century, that mountains were blemishes on nature that should never have been there. A second discourse – or better, set of discourses – concerns hierarchical relationships between nature and what is deemed to be ‘Other’ than nature. In several religions, for instance, the natural world has been conceived as occu- pying a place on a scale with hell at the bottom and heaven at the top. More germane to the topic of this paper, there is a long-standing debate over the relative positions of nature and culture. From the Daoist sages of ancient China to Rousseau, Thoreau and Robinson Jeffers, there have been those who have elevated the natural condition over culture and civilization. Equally there have been those, from Confucius and Socrates to J. S. Mill and Bertrand Russell, who would agree with Matthew Arnold that [M]an hath all which Nature hath, but more, And, in that more lies all his hopes of good . Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends.1 One of many things that makes the garden a place of philosophical and cultural interest is the way it is situated in both these themes or discourses of nature and hierarchy. That it is so situated owes to the claims made by makers 1 Matthew Arnold, ‘In Harmony with Nature’ in G. Cotter (ed.), Natural History Verse: An Anthology (London, 1988), 321. 2 David E. Cooper and admirers of gardens alike about the expressive powers of the garden. Gardens, it has been held, are able to express and communicate the ‘essence’ or ‘truth’ of nature. Equally, it has been maintained, they are able to represent or exemplify important aspects of the relationship between nature and what is Other than nature – the divine, for example, or the realm of culture. It is diffi cult to see how the garden could achieve any of this without making or presupposing hierarchical distinctions – between, for example, ‘authentic’ and ‘superfi cial’ features of nature, or between the value and status of nature rela- tive to those of divine being and human artifi ce. The garden then is a good place to explore in order to refl ect upon the themes of hierarchy, for it is a place in and through which men and women have communicated their conceptions of nature and of the relationship between nature, culture and the divine. There is good sense in the encourage- ment, in Chinese and Japanese traditions of garden making, to ‘regard the universe as a garden’ and the garden as ‘the world in miniature’.2 Experience of the garden may aid, as well as refl ect, people’s understanding of the cosmos and of their place within it.