Classical Chinese Landscape Painting and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

Abstract

Where should we look for an aesthetic experience of nature? Many are drawn to grand scenery. The American national park system is a testament to our preference for such natural phenomena, as the great parks are organized around such natural features. The sequoias of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Yosemite Valley, and the Grand Canyon are all natural features to which tourists flock in order to have some kind of experience. But what kind of experience is this? The answers are diverse: some seek aesthetic experience, some seek religious experience, some seek a kind of cognitive experience and other kinds of experiences that are as diverse as human purposes (and for some, not all unrelated). My purpose in this essay is to focus on the element of aesthetic experience. Recently there has been a significant amount of work done in philosophical aesthetics regarding the aesthetic appreciation of nature.1 Such work has focused on the criteria for the proper aesthetic experience of nature, as well as the extent to which aesthetic judgments of nature can be objective or not. Here there is an embarrassment of riches: there has been such a wide range of suggested possibilities that it is difficult to fault the general direction of the research or fault it for failing to be comprehensive. However, I believe that there is a domain within these accounts regarding the aesthetic experience of nature that, though often alluded to, has not yet been fully addressed. We know what could count as the object of an aesthetic experience of nature it would have to be something natural, of course, and our first suggestion would be either scenery or some other suitably determined natural setting: a forest, a park, a meadow, etc. There are good grounds to take this route as well, for it is clear that our practice of appreciating the natural environment consistently brings us to these kinds of