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

• Examples of superstitions, myths, folklore (versus natural history, science)
• John Wesley Powell story ( 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 as would draw the god's wrath
• Rolston's Christian ancestors who believed that God originally made earth a smooth sphere and then because of human sin warped the earth for punishment
• John Donne's aesthetic response to mountains and valleys as "warts and pock-holes in the face of the earth"
• Scientific under is not necessary for aesthetic appreciation or religious experience or experience of sublime (a type of powerful, majestic, almost fearful aesthetic experience)
  • He's acknowledging that the natives experienced these types of appreciation, when he says I too had religious experience with my science
• His parents 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
  • Is this true? (See discussion below)
• Lived participatory experience on the land (not just science) can provide understanding (knowledge) 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 know context, if not origins; 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)
• 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)
• 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 Aldo Leopold (not Rolston?)
    • 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 appreciation of nature
• Must go beyond science in two ways: (1) find a new scientifically compatible "myth" of spectacular natural history (religious story) and (2) need participatory experience
• First: (religious dimension?)
  • Science should demythologize these superstitions, but also find a new myth that encourages appropriate aesthetic responses to nature, including sublime and numinous (i.e., presence of holy in the world)
  • 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: (participatory dimension)
  • Science-based landscape aesthetics is urgent, but also need a science-transcending aesthetic of participatory experience
• Richest aesthetic experience comes from combining participatory experience in natural history with natural science (and a religious appreciation as well?)
• 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 (a sense of place, or love for the land) 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
  • Most adequate 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
  • Example: Superstitions flower/food offering to goddess in volcano to stop flow of lava, lacks scientific understanding of tectonic plates, magma, etc and is an inferior account of what is going on
    • 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
  • Carroll: Can feel awe at the size and grandeur of a blue whale even if one thinks it is a fish (rather than a mammal)
    
• 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 aesthetic response to mountains and valleys as "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?

• 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, one needs 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 for an appropriate ("richer") aesthetic appreciation, the object of appreciation 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
• Allen Carlson's example of how incorrect category leads to mistaken aesthetic response: Cute woodchuck or massive rat?
• But Emily Brady's example of appreciating a ancient narled tree with deep ridges as if it were a wise old man


• 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 (we must go beyond Science too)
  • 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 assume that relational predicates (e.g., descriptions that relate people with nature) aren't real?
• 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 perspectiveSeems 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.