Environmental Aesthetics Beyond the Dialectics of Interest and Disinterest Deconstructing the Myth of Pristine Nature

Abstract

In this paper I want to scrutinize one of the key ideas within modern Western aesthetics. Beauty is often considered to derive from a virtuous disinterested attitude towards nature. This kind of view has been advocated by thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Kant in the beginning of the so-called aesthetic turn in philosophy. The problem with this view is that it presupposes that nature exists by itself before human intervention in a kind of ideal pristine state. My hypothesis is that this ideal of pristine nature constitutes one of the underlying problems of many contemporary environmental discourses. keywords Pristine nature, culture, natural beauty, disinterestedness, sublime, picturesque 'Things which have a nature in themselves' -a dogmatic idea, which must be absolutely abandoned. -Friedrich NietzscheIn two chalk drawings German artist Jürgen Stollhans expresses a dichotomy in our attitudes toward natural and urban landscapes. In the first drawing we see a forest grove and the caption Orientierungsphase (orientation phase). In the second one we see an urban view with a sidewalk, a façade of a house, an iron fence and the caption Leitsystem (guiding system). What comes to my mind when thinking about these images and captions is a categorical divide between the natural, un-designed environ ment and the urban designed and predetermined space. A natural environment is a place where our movement is dependent on orientation. There is no predetermined way in which to move about. For each new place we have to decide how to move forward, which turns we can take, how to cross streams, cliffs or thick groves etc. Our relationship to such an environment is of course also dependent on our experience. Some people have a more thorough knowledge of the natural environment and a more direct contact with it and dependency on it than others. But still, nature is unique in the sense that it is not designed by us. By contrast, a designed environment is in this respect already predetermined. A fence is built in order to hinder our entry and the street-plan of a city is drawn according to a certain logic of movement. In this way we are, at least to