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

Examples of superstitions, myths, folklore (versus natural history)

Powell account: 374

Natives warned Powell not to go down the canyon; a god had built a trail there for a mourning chief to go visit his wife in a heaven and then flooded the trail with water and forbade anyone to go there. Would draw the god's wrath

Paul Bunyan

Scientific under is not necessary for aesthetic appreciation

He's acknowledging the natives experienced this, when he says I too had religious experience with my science
His parents (and Daniel Boone) had an appreciation of landscapes (a keen sense of place) even though it was not science-based.

But knowledge of some type is required: Can't appropriately appreciate what one doesn't understand
- A (partially) "cognitive" approach to aesthetic appreciation
Lived participatory experience on the land can provide understanding necessary for aesthetic appreciation

Can teach us much about landscapes too
Those who have to cope in world already have some understanding of it; they have to have some knowledge to survive

Those w/o a scientific understanding can gain sensitivity to the land; they can know existentially what it is like to live on the land (something a Ph.D. may never know)
- Might have a sense of place
Scientific understanding can be part of and heighten aesthetic appreciation (e.g., the sublime) and/or religious experience;
- Examples
  - Rolston's scientific understanding that ground on which he stood created by volcanic lava a few month's ago part of his aesthetic appreciation and heightened it
  - Example at end of predator kill and how science made that aesthetically stimulating (p. 170)
  - U-shaped and V shaped valley carved by glaciers and rivers respectively.
Science is necessary (required), but not sufficient (no guarantee) for the most adequate understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature

We do not need science to teach us what happens on landscapes, but scientific enriches that story

Daniel Boone, being uneducated and ignorant of ecology, saw only the surface of things as he explored wild Kentucky landscapes says Leopold

Intricacies of plant and animal community were invisible to him

Scientific knowledge can go along with lack of aesthetic app; can make us callous; science is no guarantee that one will see what is there either

A PhD can make you callous to the landscape
"Much as an undertaker is callous to the mysteries at which he officiates"

Science is not enough for appropriate app of nature (for this must be religious too?)
Must go beyond science in two ways: (1) find a new scientifically compatible "myth" of spectacular natural history and (2) need participatory experience

First:
Science should demythologize these superstitions, but also find a new myth that encourages appropriate aesthetic responses to nature, including sublime and numinous
Science can be objective about landscapes
But full story of natural history is too spectacular to just be scientific about
It is a sacrament of something deeper (noumenal)
Second:
Science-based landscape aesthetics is urgent, but also need a science-transcending aesthetic of participatory experience

Richest aesthetic exp comes from combining participatory experience in natural history with natural science

One: Participatory experience in natural history: Aesthetic experience must be participatory (relating a person to a landscape); a participatory encounter, being embodied in landscapes (this is what pre-scientific peoples had, Boone, natives, his parents)
Science alone does not give you a regional identity with a landscape and such identity qualifies for aesthetic experience
A scientist w/o love for the earth is disqualified
Two: Natural science: The appreciator must objectively know the landscape via science
Aesthetic perception needs to be science based as well as participatory

Science must banish false, superstitious beliefs/myths for an appropriate aesthetic experience
- These superstitious beliefs are false and science provides truth

Superiority of scientific account
Superstitions flower/food offering to goddess in volcano to stop flow, lacks scientific under of tectonic plates, magma, etc and is an inferior account of what is going on; Rolston knows better
But the natives must have had enough truth to get by on landscape, metaphysical fancy has to be checked by pragmatic functioning
Science must banish these myths before we can understand in a corrected aesthetic
Science can educate us to what is really taking place and banish mistaken interpretative frameworks that blind us and create illusions and leave us ignorant

Argument for superiority of scientific account
Accepts the objectivity of science

Rejects idea that science-like Japanese taming of their landscapes-is just another way of culturally framing the landscape
Science teaches us what is objectively there
Extends our capacities for perception, allows us to know deep time (geological or evolutionary history) and multiple scales
Science allows us to see the landscape as free as possible from our subjective human preferences.
It corrects for truth

To know the Grand Canyon for what it really is need to know geology

No one experiences the Grand Canyon for what it really is unless helped by geology to know about it;
Geology/science provide the definitive interpretation

Argues (in agreement with Carlson): For an appropriate (serious, best?) aesthetic app the object of app must be appreciated for what it really is

Cloud not a wash basket but a thunder head
Appreciating something for what it is not, appreciation based on a false belief (how Canyon was formed according to the natives), is improper, less serious, false
Carlson's examples: Cute woodchuck or massive rat?

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

Is Rolston assuming that only science tells us what nature truly is?

Not clear this is Rolston's view

Why assume science is the one true story about nature (everything?)
Rolston's says: No lonely places: "there are no lonely places, thought there are arid landscapes with little life"-things need to be appreciated in the right categories

True w/o humans/animals, no lonely places for a lonely place is a place that typically makes people lonely.
But why does that mean there are no lonely places?

Why assume that what is "really" there is only what is there apart from the an appreciator/interactor?

Why isn't the canyon just as much a place Kelly really learned to guide river boats?

Although this relates the canyon to a particular individual, it is a true statement from anyone's perspective

Seems clearly aesthetically relevant to Kelly (not to others)

A place wild mustangs live (common sense, not science)

A place god makes his presence felt/nature's power is evident/nature's magnificence becomes manifest

Where National Park politics is at its worse?

Science gives us a causal account of origins, but why assume this is the only explanation or type of understanding that tells us what something really is?

Is a tree more of an oak than a playhouse or beautiful? Perhaps.

How false (scientific?) beliefs distort aesthetic app

Rolston's seems to think that superstitious beliefs make it impossible to appropriate appreciate real nature

E.g. Rolston's Christian ancestors who believed that God originally made earth a smooth sphere and then because of human sin warped the earth for punishment

This does make false scientific claims

John Donne's claim that mountains and valleys were "warts and pock-holes in the face of the earth"

This is only false scientific if it's based on the above rather than expressing an attitude w/o the false factual claim above

Paul Bunyan and blue ox babe made Minnesota lakes

E.g. Chinese animistic belief that a life force flows through landscape and affects where we should locate our homes or what we should do in the field or that we should avoid building in straight lines.

But it is not clear false scientific claims here

Worry: Important to distinguish between beliefs that contradict science (which are thus false, if the science is right) and beliefs that really don't make scientific claims at all and thus could also be true along with science;

True of the above Chinese claims?

Rolston accepts idea there are better/worse, deep/shallow, serious/trivial, more or less appropriate (or inappropriate) aesthetic appreciations

Hepburn's cloud example
Outlines of clouds as resemble a basket of washing
Trivial, shallow appraisal of a freakish element
Focus on inner turbulence and 250 mile wind speeds in cloud that determine its structure
Less superficial experience, more worth having

Relativism in aesthetic app of nature There is a relativity in the aesthetic appreciation of landscapes, Japanese liking tamed manipulated landscapes and folks like Rolston liking wild lands.

Some relativism in the aesthetic app of nature is compatible with better and worse aesthetic app of nature
You'll love the Rockies example 166-167 (368)

Walter had the wrong scientific categories
He should not have expected a homey landscape
If one understood the harshness of an arid or alpine climate, you will be aesthetic stimulated when you find plants clinging to life, appreciate life hunkered down low to the ground or bent and twisted trees in their cold and windblown environments

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

DOES HUMAN AES APPRECIATION OF ENVIRONMENTS HAVE SURVIVAL VALUE?

Humans who find their environments congenial, even beautiful flourish; those who find their environment stressful or ugly, might do less well
Could be cultural or genetic or both
Some argue that humans prefer savannah landscapes, as these are the type of landscapes in which humans evolved

ROLSTON'S POSITIVE AESTHETIC?

Misguided to think Hawaiians and southwest Indians and Chinese and European theologians found nothing aesthetically positive in their landscapes
Despite the aspect in their worldviews that introduced apprehension and prevented an adequate appreciation

Is he saying that an apprehensive attitude toward nature can't be part of an adequate appreciation? Can't be, because the sublime includes elements of fear

Rolston's claim that science will make us appreciate nature positively

Wordsworth's claim that they were manifestations of "types and symbols of eternity"
We know better than Donne; after science much more likely to agree with Wordsworth
This goes beyond science, but it must go through science to go beyond
I don't think he here is really claiming science is necessary for aesthetic app, only that an aesthetic app that goes beyond science must go through it, not that all must go through it; though perhaps the best aesthetic app must go through it

Why assume that science-based appreciation is only right one?

This is a fair question and to claim it is not, doesn't entail the claim he next makes:

Nature as seen by science only way Westerner's constitute their world, no reason to think it is the privileged view

One could claim that science tells us the way the world is (and isn't' just a way we constitute our world) but also deny that it is a privileged view.

Aesthetic is not discovered on landscapes by science or objectively, is an experience that emerges as people react to landscapes
What is the difference between

The Japanese taming an manicuring their landscapes, artfully pruning their trees and being uninterested in pristine ecosystems or geological formations
A scientific interpretation of landscapes?
Both are not cultural ways of framing landscapes