Nature and Art

Abstract

Nature and art are the two spheres of aesthetic experiences sanctioned by a tradition of many centuries. This is known by every tourist bureau and every editor of publications of the kind represented by The Beauty of Poland or The Beauty of Normandy, But the beauty of nature in aesthetics plays a completely different role than does the beauty of art. The problems of the beauty of nature take up a relatively limited scope in works devoted to problems of aesthetics. It does have a literature no less rich than the beauty of art, but it has to be sought elsewhere. It is not the scholars but the poets who most eagerly treat of the beauty of nature. In comparison with the wealth of problems which art places before the scholar, nature, as seen by way of aesthetics, appears to him evidently to be meager in theoretical enticements. Nature interests the scholar for a thousand other reasons. Its beauty is rather an enticement to other problems, than a problem itself. This is so not because the beauty of nature evokes in observers aesthetic experiences weaker than those of the beauty of art. Dessoir quoted Wilhelm Heinse (1838) who stated that all the Titians and Rubenses seem to be small children and amusing monkeys as compared to the beauty of nature, and this opinion was by no means an isolated one.1 The intensity of aesthetic experiences which we, at times, derive from nature is not subject to questioning. Nonetheless, nature’s aesthetic values seem to be somehow incommensurate with the values of art. According to views quite common in aesthetics, these are supposed to be values of another kind to which the same name is incorrectly applied.