While most might read the Daodejing from beginning to end, perhaps focusing on interests might reduce cognitive load.
… there is a greater degree of coherence to the Daodejing than a first reading might suggest. Chapters are sometimes grouped around specific themes and subjects. For example,
* chapters 1 and 2 are centered on the theme of correlativity, * chapters 18 and 19 contrast natural and conventional morality, * 57 through 61 all begin with recommendations on proper governing of the state, * 67 through 69 are about prosecuting war, * chapters 74 and 75 deal with political oppression and the common people,
and so on. We have appended a thematic index that reveals at least some of such editorial organization.
Ames and Hall (2003), p. 8, editorial paragraphin added
Those looking to the Daodejing for answers may be disappointed, because it only presents more questions to be considered, perhaps like listening to a song.
… when we turn to reflect on how the selected wisdom sayings of the Daodejing function, we can assume that they, like the repertoire of songs, have a kind of unquestioned veracity that comes from belonging to the people and their tradition. We can further observe that this veracity is made corporate by a reading strategy that co-opts the reader.
Two often remarked characteristics of the Daodejing are palpable absences: * it contains no historical detail of any kind, and * it offers its readers no doctrines in the sense of general precepts or universalistic laws.
The required “framing” of the aphorism by the reader is itself an exercise in nondogmatic philosophizing where the relationship between the text and its student is one of noncoercive collaboration. That is, instead of “the text” providing the reader with a specific historical context or philosophical system, its listeners are required to supply always unique, concrete, and often dramatic scenarios drawn from their own experience to generate the meaning for themselves.
This inescapable process in which students through many readings of the text acquire their own unique understanding of its insights informed by their own life experiences is one important element in a kind of constantly evolving coherence. The changing coherence of the text is brought into a sharpening focus as its readers in different times and places continue to make it their own.
Ames and Hall (2003), p. 8, editorial paragraphin added
There are a variety of translations and commentaries on the Daodejing. Ames and Hall rely on the 1982 version by D.C. Lau, that is based on the Wang Bi text.
The Daodejing comes down to us today in several different versions. How do we decide which text to take as a master for our translation? [1]
[1] In this discussion of the text, we have relied heavily upon the research and sometimes speculative insights and conclusions of D. C. Lau (1982) and Robert Henricks (1989, 2000), and would refer the reader to their fuller accounts.
Lau, D. C. (1982). Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.
Henricks, Robert (2000). Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. New York: Columbia University Press.
Henricks, Robert (1989)). Lao-tzu Te-Tao Ching. New York: Ballantine.
Ames and Hall (2003), p. 73
In the Glossary of Key Terms, there is a major insight that the Daodejing should be read a processual, i.e. think verbs, not nouns!
There is one general point that we would make in our interpretation of this classical Chinese language. Above we have argued for a processual understanding of classical Daoist cosmology. If this account is persuasive, it means that the vocabulary that expresses the worldview and the common sense in which the Daodejing is to be located is first and foremost gerundive. Because “things” in the Daodejing are in fact active “processes” and ongoing “events,” nouns that would “objectify” this world are derived from and revert to a verbal sensibility. The ontological language of substance and essence that is sedimented into the English language tends to defy this linguistic priority, insisting upon the primacy of “the world” rather than the process of the world “worlding” and the myriad things “happening.” It is a fair observation that a careful reading of the introduction and this glossary are made necessary by the fact that our European languages can only most imperfectly “speak” the world being referenced in the Daodejing.
Towards a non-anthropocentric view of aesthetics, we explore the legacy of work in the aesthetics of nature. The collection of essays in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (2004), edited by Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant, illuminates some of the issues and debates on this perspective.
In the Acknowledgements for the 2004 book is a trail back to work published in 1998.
We especially thank the authors for agreeing to contribute their essays.
Moreover, we thank Philip Alperson, editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, as well as the journal’s editorial board, for inviting us to edit a special issue of the journal (Volume 56, number 2, spring 1998) on environmental aesthetics. Several of the essays reprinted here first appeared in that special issue, the editing of which was our initial collaboration and eventually led to the publication of this volume [p. 9]
Philosophical works can develop slowly!
The Introduction chapter is a sequential exposition, working through the history, into prospects for research. The philosophy of aesthetics is not limited to works of art!
I. Introduction
The aesthetics of nature is the initiating and central focus of environmental aesthetics, one of the two or three major new fields of aesthetics to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. Environmental aesthetics considers philosophical issues concerning the aesthetic appreciation of the world at large and, moreover, the world as constituted not simply by particular objects but also by larger units, such as landscapes, environments, and ecosystems. Thus the field extends beyond the confines of the artworld and our aesthetic appreciation of works of art. Its scope covers the aesthetic appreciation of non-artistic artifacts and natural objects, as well as the appreciation of both natural environments and our various human-influenced and human-created environments.1
This collection of essays, however, focuses on only that part of environmental aesthetics that considers the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. It concerns philosophical issues about the appreciation of nature, addressing matters such as the exact nature of both the natural world and the modes of aesthetic appreciation appropriate for it. This renewed interest in the aesthetics of the natural world has developed only recently. Nonetheless, it has historical roots in earlier work on the aesthetics of nature. To fully appreciate the recent and contemporary research in this area, it is useful to briefly examine this historical background and the developments that follow from it.2 [p. 11]
There’s a companion volume on The Aesthetics Of Human Environments (2007), that “investigates philosophical and aesthetics issues that arise from our engagement with human environments ranging from rural landscapes to urban cityscapes”. For now, we’ll focus on natural, acknowledging the artifactual as separate.
This volume is oriented towards Western philosophies.
II. The Background to the Current Interest in the Aesthetics of Nature
The historical roots of the interest in the aesthetics of nature lie in the ideas concerning aesthetic appreciation developed in the eighteenth century by British and Scottish philosophers, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke, and Alison, and solidified by Kant.3 Central to this approach is the concept of disinterestedness.4 The basic idea of disinterestedness is that aesthetic appreciation requires appreciators to abstract themselves and the objects of their appreciation from their own interests, such as the personal, the possessive, and the economic. Coupling the concept of disinterestedness with the eighteenth century fascination with the natural world resulted in a rich tradition of landscape appreciation. With the aid of disinterestedness, not only could domesticated, rural countrysides be seen as beautiful, but even the wildest of natural environments could be appreciated as sublime. Moreover, between the two extremes of the beautiful and the sublime, disinterestedness made space for the emergence of an even more powerful mode of landscape appreciation, the picturesque.5 The picturesque mode, although initially tied to particular sorts of landscapes, ultimately developed so as to facilitate the aesthetic appreciation of other kinds of environments by means of focusing attention on the picture-like properties of sensuous surface and formal composition. The upshot was an eighteenth century aesthetic synthesis having disinterestedness as the central theoretical concept, landscapes as the paradigm objects of aesthetic appreciation, and formalistic, picturesque appreciation as the favored mode of appreciation. [pp. 11-12] [….] Although lacking the natural world as their main focus, the other key elements of the eighteenth century synthesis — disinterestedness and the formalistic mode of appreciation — nonetheless survive into the twentieth century. [p. 12]
[….]
The relevance of the early twentieth century re-entrenchment of disinterestedness and formalism to the current interest in the aesthetics of nature is to be found somewhat ironically, in the fact that a major theme of mid-twentieth century philosophical aesthetics involves the rejection of both disinterestedness and formalism. The rejection begins with the development of the expressionist theory of art and reaches its climax in the institutional theory of art.8 [pp. 12-13]
[….]
This paradigm shift results in a problem that directly impacts the development of the aesthetics of nature. The problem is that the new paradigm is a paradigm for the aesthetic appreciation of art. Moreover, it is a paradigm seemingly exclusive to art appreciation, for few, if any, of the resources introduced to replace those inherent in the doctrines of disinterestedness and formalism have application to the appreciation of anything other than art. This is no surprise, for the new paradigm is developed explicitly within the context of philosophy of art, and the rejected Bulloughian and Bellian reincarnations of the old doctrines were especially tailored to accommodate works of art. The upshot is that the resources of the new paradigm — designing intellects, art historical traditions, art critical practices, the artworld itself — appear to have little relevance to the world beyond the artworld. Thus, the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is left behind, seeming to involve at best only distanced contemplation of sensuous and formal properties. [p. 13]
Hmmm …. “Disinterestedness” and a “formalistic, picturesque appreciation” doesn’t seem very compatible with 21st century thinking!
Moving forward in time, research into aesthetics hasn’t been oriented towards nature.
III. The Rise of the Renewed Interest in the Aesthetics of Nature
In the second half of the twentieth century, this problem finds expression in two developments that constitute the immediate background to the renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature.
The first is that, in developing and defending the new par- adigm of aesthetic appreciation, analytic aesthetics apparently abandons any remaining interest in the aesthetics of anything other than art. The abandonment is institutionalized by virtually equating philosophical aesthetics with philosophy of art. [p. 13, editorial paragraphing added]
[….]
The second development constituting the immediate background to the renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature involves the real world beyond both philosophical aesthetics and the artworld. It relates to the public awareness of the aesthetic quality and value of the natural environment that begins to evolve, especially in North America, early in the second half of the twentieth century. 13 This awareness causes a difficulty, since, given the developments in philosophical aesthetics, individuals concerned about the aesthetics of the natural environment are left with few theoretical resources other than the old neo-picturesque paradigm of distanced contemplation of scenic views. [p. 14]
[….]
The renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature is in part a response to these two developments. This is evident in the title of the essay that almost single-handedly initiates the renewal: Ronald Hepburn’s groundbreaking 1966 article, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty.”17 Reacting to the treatment of the appreciation of nature within analytic aesthetics, Hepburn argues that those features that other philosophers have seen as aesthetic deficiencies in the natural world and thus as reasons for deeming its appreciation subjective, superficial, and even non-aesthetic, are actually sources for a different kind of, and potentially very rich, aesthetic experience. He emphasize the fact that, since it is not constrained by things such as designing intellects, art historical traditions, and art critical practices, the natural world facilitates an open, engaging, and creative mode of appreciation. Moreover, he argues that, as in the appreciation of art, there is in the appreciation of nature a movement from shallow and trivial to deep, serious aesthetic experience, and thus the open, engaging, creative mode of appreciation should be guided by our realizations about the real nature of the natural world. [pp. 14-15]
Recognition of the overlooking of the asthetics of nature has spurred two directions: (i) a more cognitive, science-oriented approach; and (ii) a more culture-based approach.
IV. Recent and Contemporary Research in the Aesthetics of Nature
[….] The call to fill this [theoretical] vacuum results in two kinds of responses: on the one hand, attempts to provide sociobiological underpinnings for the aesthetic appreciation of nature, such as Appleton’s own prospect-refuge theory,20 and, on the other, a wide range of theoretical models of aesthetic response grounded in, for example, developmental and environmental psychology.21 In general, this kind of research is beyond the scope of this collection, but there are a number of overview articles concerning it 22 as well as some useful anthologies.23 [p. 15]
[…..]
The former of the two initial developments stresses the role of the cognitive in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. This cognitive line, as noted, is in part a response to the old appreciative paradigm’s obsession with sensuous and formal properties. [….] [Analogous] to the way in which the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of art is cognitively informed by art history and art criticism, the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature must be cognitively informed by natural history and scientific understanding. Thus Carlson finds a central place in the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world for the knowledge provided by sciences such as geology, biology, and ecology.26 [p. .16]
The second of the initial philosophical developments in the aesthetics of nature involves a reaction against the traditional concept of aesthetic appreciation as disinterested contemplation and an endorsement of the idea that the natural environment facilitates an open, engaging, and creative mode of appreciation. Consequently, it parallels some of the developments that helped to clear the ground for the new paradigm of art appreciation, primarily analytic aesthetics’ attack on both the Bulloughian and other more recent reincarnations of disinterestedness, such as the aesthetic attitude theory.29 [p. 17]
This leads to V. Directions for Future Research … which is what the rest of the book is about.
Who speaks for the bears? Sometimes scientists do. How does a bear cross the road in Canada? Emily Badger writes:
Beautiful Banff National Park in Canada began to install the first of several dozen underpasses and overpasses across the Trans-Canada Highway inside the preserve’s boundaries in the 1980s. They connect on either side of the four-lane road to no sidewalks or trails. [….]
The park originally installed the crossings to protect motorists. A thousand-pound elk can wreck your car. On one 15-kilometer stretch of the highway, there used to be an average of a hundred elk-vehicle collisions every year. “I think the park realized sooner of later, they’d have a human fatality in some of these accidents,” Clevenger says, “and they were going to be taken to court.”
But over the years, critics and transportation planners, even some environmentalists have groused about the idea: Taxpayer money, building overpasses for bears? Is that really necessary? Would they even use the things? Researchers have been methodically studying the crossings since 1996 to answer this. And it turns out that, yes, animals deterred by fencing that now runs the full 70-kilometer length of the highway in the park actually cross the road an awful lot like a rational pedestrian would. It takes them a while, though, to adapt to the crossings after a new one is constructed: about four to five years for elk and deer, five to seven years for the large carnivores. [….]
To put this notion to rest, Clevenger and colleagues with Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute recently concluded a three-year study of the DNA from 10,000 hair samples of bears non-invasively snagged from the crossings and other areas around the park (the collection technology is not very sophisticated: this requires a little piece of barbed wire). DNA from bear hair is pretty amazing. It can reveal not just the difference between a black bear and a grizzly, but the identity of the individual bear, its gender, its relationship to bears of the same family.
he study found that about 20 percent of the bears in the geographically broad sample population were using the crossings, and with the same activity patterns they exhibit in the back country. These bears were not, for instance, making a run for it in the middle of the night when traffic volumes were low. And all of this means that this infrastructure is doing much more than protecting motorists. It has enabled the free flow of mama bears and bear genes across four lanes of high-speed traffic.
In brief. David Ing. 