A lucid and convincing reply to all point made from David, including own.
A good distinction David makes, pointing to the way in which mountains (and the like) can have human significance (holy places, fond memories of walking with friends there, the most difficult to climb…), as opposed to how they are in themselves which is essentially meaningless, or better beyond being meaningful or meaningless in themselves, and that being exactly what we find valuable and meaningful. What I think this may point to is two different ways of finding meaning and value immersed in nature. When walking down a country lane one may not be terribly interested in an inventory sense in noting the names of the flowers in the hedgerow – after all they not their names – but rather in soaking up the general ambiance freed of overt and timebound human codifying. It’s not that one way it right and the other wrong; it just depends on one’s sensibilities, what one wants out of it. Rather as with what-to-look-out-for, what-to-see, guidebooks, some people find them invaluable, while others eschew them, rather more enjoying a spontaneous flaneur taking in of happenchance details and atmosphere.
I am grateful for the Comments on my piece on natural beauty, and for the opportunity to respond to those that question points that I made. In this piece, I asked what sense might be made of the venerable idea that natural beauty is meaningful and not simply enjoyable. I argued that linguistic meaning provides a poor model, and that a better analogy is found in the significance we discern in facial expressions. Just as ‘seriously’ beautiful faces are expressive of virtues, such as compassion, so, I suggested, ‘serious’ natural beauty may be expressive of virtues, such as spontaneity and innocence.
One advantage of the expressivist model of significance, I remarked, is that, like a beautiful face, natural beauty ‘naturally’ expresses what it does, rather than, say, as a matter of convention. This point is challenged by Tony Cearns, who writes that what is conveyed by a face is due to ‘shared practices and norms’. I don’t agree. While there are cases – like the Samurai’s scowl that I mentioned, or rolling one’s eyeballs – where the significance owes to cultural conventions, this is not true of basic facial expressions of, say, anger, kindness and fear. Babies learn to ‘read’ their parents’ facial expressions long before they assimilate ‘norms’ of the kind that determine linguistic meaning.
Matt Bianca raises a different concern. While sympathetic to invocations, by Schiller and others, of the ‘deep’ meaning of natural beauty, he worries that these may only register ‘subjective’ feeling and asks whether the significance is ‘truly in the flowers and mountains, or merely in us’. I think this dichotomy is a false one. There is no beauty, in my view, except in relation to creatures like us – ‘subjects’ – capable of appreciating and enjoying it. That does not entail, however, that finding flowers beautiful is a ‘merely’ subjective matter, in the sense of being idiosyncratic or purely personal. Nearly everyone finds certain flowers beautiful, and this shows something about the flowers as well as about us.
The most radical challenge to my position, on the surface, is made by John Shand, who bluntly asserts that nature is ‘meaningless’. I confined my remarks to natural beauty, for the question of meanings in nature more generally is a complex one. I don’t think that John wants to deny, for example, that a mountain or a wild animal may, in a given culture, have considerable meaning – historical, religious, totemic or whatever. Nor, surely, does he want to ban scientists from talking of the significance of, say, bird calls or rising sea temperatures.
What he wants to deny is that natural things, creatures and processes have meaning in the way that human practices, institutions and artifacts do. These owe their meanings to a mixture of conscious intentions, deliberate purposes, conventions and rules. Let’s grant that mountains and flowers, lacking such purposes and not subject to norms, are not meaningful in this sense.
But, as John then remarks, it is not inconsistent with this to hold – despite the passing whiff of paradox – that in the very meaninglessness of nature we find great significance. One is inevitably reminded of a famous passage in which Iris Murdoch writes of a ‘self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees’. And this, she stresses, is a deeply meaningful experience of beauty, for it marks a moment of ‘unselfing’, of liberation from the demands of ‘the fat relentless ego’.
Not only is the ‘meaninglessness’ of nature, in the sense mentioned, compatible with finding significance in the beauty of nature, it is also compatible with my proposal that this beauty is expressive of virtues. For if, as John Shand puts it, we find in nature ‘liberation from all the complex layers of human meaning’, then mountains, flowers and birds become expressive of liberation – and of spontaneity, innocence and other virtues depressingly scarce in human affairs. Something like this experience of what natural beauty may mean to a person is, I suspect, the one that Julia, in her Comment, records when, looking up at the fleecy clouds against a blue sky, ‘the beauty momentarily takes [her] from all earthly reality’.
A typically thoughtful and interesting piece from David Cooper.
To suggest a different idea. On nature, as opposed to faces or language, it’s not unusual to suggest that it is in the meaninglessness otherness, devoid of human connotations of meaning, that the qualities that draw us to contemplate nature reside. If it’s not too contradictory, though it may be paradoxical, the meaning is the meaninglessness. Indeed this is not as contradictory as it may first appear, as it only by because we can generate meaning that perspectivally nature can be meaningless. Therein lies it’s delight for many – it’s freedom, a liberation, from all the complex layers of human meaning which often feel like a complex burden.
Just a thought on the virtues as such...the virtues: I can't think of a single putative virtue that cannot in the right circumstances be a vice. Virtues seem a nice easy way of talking about how we should be. But one may be doubtful that talk of virtues is very helpful in ethics. All they do is denote qualities or characteristics of character, and then you have to discuss the moral circumstances of that attitude or behaviour anyway, so you are no further on morally speaking in talk of the virtues alone.
The problem is that if we are to claim that natural beauty holds meaning in itself, then we must grapple with the question: what kind of meaning could that be? It cannot be linguistic or propositional, nor always symbolic in a clear way. Rather, it seems to be a kind of felt significance, something more like a resonance or presence. This is why philosophers like Plotinus or Schiller often invoke metaphysical or quasi-spiritual language: the beauty of nature seems to point beyond itself, suggesting a deeper order, harmony, or even moral truth.
Yet, as critics might note, such claims risk becoming subjective or mystical. Is this sense of significance truly in the flowers and mountains, or merely in us? Are we uncovering something real, or layering our own longing onto the world?
We see a face and it seems that we know the emotion expressed without deciphering the face's contortions. Nothing is conveyed by the face. The expression comes from our attunement to shared practices and norms. If I understand Cooper's argument correctly, he takes a different view: that the face does express a serious beauty. The ability to distinguish what is 'serious' is itself a skill from shared practices. I guess that would be the sceptic's line?
Thank you. Dr Cooper for your exposition on natural beauty. Walking my dogs, the clouds in the sky unwittingly capture my attention causing me to look at their fleecy, white formations against the stark blue sky. Their ineffable beauty momentarily takes me from all earthly reality, seizing me in its sway.
A lucid and convincing reply to all point made from David, including own.
A good distinction David makes, pointing to the way in which mountains (and the like) can have human significance (holy places, fond memories of walking with friends there, the most difficult to climb…), as opposed to how they are in themselves which is essentially meaningless, or better beyond being meaningful or meaningless in themselves, and that being exactly what we find valuable and meaningful. What I think this may point to is two different ways of finding meaning and value immersed in nature. When walking down a country lane one may not be terribly interested in an inventory sense in noting the names of the flowers in the hedgerow – after all they not their names – but rather in soaking up the general ambiance freed of overt and timebound human codifying. It’s not that one way it right and the other wrong; it just depends on one’s sensibilities, what one wants out of it. Rather as with what-to-look-out-for, what-to-see, guidebooks, some people find them invaluable, while others eschew them, rather more enjoying a spontaneous flaneur taking in of happenchance details and atmosphere.
I am grateful for the Comments on my piece on natural beauty, and for the opportunity to respond to those that question points that I made. In this piece, I asked what sense might be made of the venerable idea that natural beauty is meaningful and not simply enjoyable. I argued that linguistic meaning provides a poor model, and that a better analogy is found in the significance we discern in facial expressions. Just as ‘seriously’ beautiful faces are expressive of virtues, such as compassion, so, I suggested, ‘serious’ natural beauty may be expressive of virtues, such as spontaneity and innocence.
One advantage of the expressivist model of significance, I remarked, is that, like a beautiful face, natural beauty ‘naturally’ expresses what it does, rather than, say, as a matter of convention. This point is challenged by Tony Cearns, who writes that what is conveyed by a face is due to ‘shared practices and norms’. I don’t agree. While there are cases – like the Samurai’s scowl that I mentioned, or rolling one’s eyeballs – where the significance owes to cultural conventions, this is not true of basic facial expressions of, say, anger, kindness and fear. Babies learn to ‘read’ their parents’ facial expressions long before they assimilate ‘norms’ of the kind that determine linguistic meaning.
Matt Bianca raises a different concern. While sympathetic to invocations, by Schiller and others, of the ‘deep’ meaning of natural beauty, he worries that these may only register ‘subjective’ feeling and asks whether the significance is ‘truly in the flowers and mountains, or merely in us’. I think this dichotomy is a false one. There is no beauty, in my view, except in relation to creatures like us – ‘subjects’ – capable of appreciating and enjoying it. That does not entail, however, that finding flowers beautiful is a ‘merely’ subjective matter, in the sense of being idiosyncratic or purely personal. Nearly everyone finds certain flowers beautiful, and this shows something about the flowers as well as about us.
The most radical challenge to my position, on the surface, is made by John Shand, who bluntly asserts that nature is ‘meaningless’. I confined my remarks to natural beauty, for the question of meanings in nature more generally is a complex one. I don’t think that John wants to deny, for example, that a mountain or a wild animal may, in a given culture, have considerable meaning – historical, religious, totemic or whatever. Nor, surely, does he want to ban scientists from talking of the significance of, say, bird calls or rising sea temperatures.
What he wants to deny is that natural things, creatures and processes have meaning in the way that human practices, institutions and artifacts do. These owe their meanings to a mixture of conscious intentions, deliberate purposes, conventions and rules. Let’s grant that mountains and flowers, lacking such purposes and not subject to norms, are not meaningful in this sense.
But, as John then remarks, it is not inconsistent with this to hold – despite the passing whiff of paradox – that in the very meaninglessness of nature we find great significance. One is inevitably reminded of a famous passage in which Iris Murdoch writes of a ‘self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees’. And this, she stresses, is a deeply meaningful experience of beauty, for it marks a moment of ‘unselfing’, of liberation from the demands of ‘the fat relentless ego’.
Not only is the ‘meaninglessness’ of nature, in the sense mentioned, compatible with finding significance in the beauty of nature, it is also compatible with my proposal that this beauty is expressive of virtues. For if, as John Shand puts it, we find in nature ‘liberation from all the complex layers of human meaning’, then mountains, flowers and birds become expressive of liberation – and of spontaneity, innocence and other virtues depressingly scarce in human affairs. Something like this experience of what natural beauty may mean to a person is, I suspect, the one that Julia, in her Comment, records when, looking up at the fleecy clouds against a blue sky, ‘the beauty momentarily takes [her] from all earthly reality’.
A typically thoughtful and interesting piece from David Cooper.
To suggest a different idea. On nature, as opposed to faces or language, it’s not unusual to suggest that it is in the meaninglessness otherness, devoid of human connotations of meaning, that the qualities that draw us to contemplate nature reside. If it’s not too contradictory, though it may be paradoxical, the meaning is the meaninglessness. Indeed this is not as contradictory as it may first appear, as it only by because we can generate meaning that perspectivally nature can be meaningless. Therein lies it’s delight for many – it’s freedom, a liberation, from all the complex layers of human meaning which often feel like a complex burden.
Just a thought on the virtues as such...the virtues: I can't think of a single putative virtue that cannot in the right circumstances be a vice. Virtues seem a nice easy way of talking about how we should be. But one may be doubtful that talk of virtues is very helpful in ethics. All they do is denote qualities or characteristics of character, and then you have to discuss the moral circumstances of that attitude or behaviour anyway, so you are no further on morally speaking in talk of the virtues alone.
The problem is that if we are to claim that natural beauty holds meaning in itself, then we must grapple with the question: what kind of meaning could that be? It cannot be linguistic or propositional, nor always symbolic in a clear way. Rather, it seems to be a kind of felt significance, something more like a resonance or presence. This is why philosophers like Plotinus or Schiller often invoke metaphysical or quasi-spiritual language: the beauty of nature seems to point beyond itself, suggesting a deeper order, harmony, or even moral truth.
Yet, as critics might note, such claims risk becoming subjective or mystical. Is this sense of significance truly in the flowers and mountains, or merely in us? Are we uncovering something real, or layering our own longing onto the world?
We see a face and it seems that we know the emotion expressed without deciphering the face's contortions. Nothing is conveyed by the face. The expression comes from our attunement to shared practices and norms. If I understand Cooper's argument correctly, he takes a different view: that the face does express a serious beauty. The ability to distinguish what is 'serious' is itself a skill from shared practices. I guess that would be the sceptic's line?
Thank you. Dr Cooper for your exposition on natural beauty. Walking my dogs, the clouds in the sky unwittingly capture my attention causing me to look at their fleecy, white formations against the stark blue sky. Their ineffable beauty momentarily takes me from all earthly reality, seizing me in its sway.