Aesthetic Contemplation: Finding Meaning in Natural Beauty
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Having identified aesthetic interest as essentially contemplative, Kant was naturally inclined to describe its characteristic object as something not made but found. With artefacts our practical reason is often too vigorously engaged, he seemed to think, to permit the stepping back that is required by aesthetic judgement. And he made a distinction between the 'free' beauty that we experience from natural objects, which comes to us without the deployment of any concepts on our part, and the 'dependent' beauty that we experience in works of art, which depends upon a prior conceptualization of the object. Only towards nature can we achieve a sustained disinterest, when our own purposes – including the intellectual purposes that depend upon conceptual distinctions – become irrelevant to the act of contemplation.
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There is something plausible in the idea that the contemplation of nature is both distinctive of our species and common to its members, regardless of the social and economic conditions into which they are born; and something equally plausible in the suggestion that this contemplation fills us with wonder, and prompts us to search for meaning and value in the cosmos, so as with Blake,
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower...
From the earliest drawings in the Lascaux caves to the landscapes of Cézanne, the poems of Guido Gezelle and the music of Messiaen, art has searched for meaning in the natural world. The experience of natural beauty is not a sense of 'how nice!' or 'how pleasant!' It contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be – a home in which our human powers and prospects find confirmation.
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This confirmation can be obtained in many ways. When, on some wild moor, the sky fills with scudding clouds, the shadows race across the heather, and you hear the curlew's liquid cry from hilltop to hilltop, the thrill that you feel is an endorsement of the things you observe and of you, the observer. When you pause to study the perfect form of a wildflower or the blended feathers of a bird, you experience an enhanced sense of belonging. A world that makes room for such things makes room for you. Whether we emphasize the comprehensive view or the individual organism, therefore, aesthetic interest has a transfiguring effect. It is as though the natural world, represented in consciousness, justifies both itself and you. And this experience has a metaphysical resonance. Consciousness finds its rationale in transforming the outer world into something inner – something that will live in memory as an idea.
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It is not the knowledge of nature that carries this transforming effect, but the experience. Scientists appreciate the intricacies of the natural world. But science is not sufficient – nor is it necessary – to generate the moments of transfiguration that Wordsworth records in The Prelude, or the joy expressed by John Clare in his poems. In the experience of beauty the world comes home to us, and we to the world. But it comes home in a special way – through its presentation, rather than its use.
