I just had a think

And I think it is a thinky think, so I am going to think it here.

Which "nature" do we appreciate when we appreciate nature aesthetically?

"Nature" is one of the most complex nouns in the English language. The OED lists 26 definitions in 5 categories. Environmental philosophers tend to focus on two definitions, mostly "nature as a physical space unmodified by humans" and "nature as all that is," in other words, the nature that includes us and the one that doesn't. More interesting, though, are the horde of meanings of "nature" that refer to some kind of hidden order, purpose, or structure. When the hidden order is teleological, we get the sense of the word nature used to condemn various sex practices as "unnatural." When the hidden order is physical and causal, we get "nature" as in natural science.

Most of the environmental aesthetics I have read has focused on the appreciation of natural environments, meaning large physical spaces unmodified by humans. There is also some talk of appreciating natural objects, like rocks or trees. I think a more interesting kind of nature appreciation is the appreciation of natural processes, of nature as a hidden order. I know some work has been done along these lines, but mostly I think I'm just remembering seeing "natural processes" in lists of things we can appreciate, along with natural objects and environments.

Of course, appreciating natural processes was very important for nineteenth century romantics. Paintings like Cole's The Ox Bow, above, didn't just show nature, they showed parts of nature where the natural processes were visible. (I think I learned this from Allen Carlson or Gene Hargrove when I was at the Alaska NEH.)

So what happens to the aesthetic attitude when the process is the object of appreciation? Is there a way we can privilege the appreciation of processes over other things? I need to look at Carlson and Hargrove again to see if they've already covered this, along with some others. Focusing on the appreciation of processes would fit a Carlson, science based aesthetic attitude. It also fits with a modern environmentalism, a movement quite different than ancient pastoralisms. It fits with the rational for a lot of Chinese parks, which are geological rather than say wildlife preserves. It also makes sense of the Martian environmentalism of Kim Stanly Robinson's Mars books. (Not that anyone was really demanding that philosophers make sense of this obscure fictional movement.) The process aesthetic has a strange relationship to the Buddhist aesthetic I've been working on. They fit together because they are both so much about time and change. But the process aesthetic is more cognitive, more material.

hmm.

What question am I trying to ask?

So I’m at an annoying place in my research where I not only can’t answer questions, I’m not sure what questions I want to ask. I need questions for mid term student papers in my course on environmental ethics in China, and I need another question for my own paper I want to build from teaching this class.

The broad question which motivated the reading selection for my portion of the class was “What values and nature attitudes are motivating current environmental decisions in China?” A related question I wanted to focus on was “can the growing Chinese environmental movement find its roots in indigenous thought, or is environmentalism fundamentally a Western import?”

These questions are, of course, impossibly broad, which hasn’t stopped people from trying to answer them, especially the latter. The standard approach is to focus on one of the big traditional Chinese philosophies (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) and then enthuse about its rich environmental awareness. People especially love to do this for Buddhism—much better than Christianity with all that dominion stuff. This leads to some easy debunking replies. The last stage in this debate is a constructivist position about a particular tradition: Yes it has environmentally friendly and environmentally hostile elements, but if we just cherry pick the elements that are environmentally positive, we can create the environmental ethic of the future. This sorting process usually involves examining ancient philosophical texts, with occasional references to traditional practices. Baird Callicott’s Earth’ Insightsis essentially an attempt to do this on a global scale.

This is not a useful way to turn an impossibly broad question into a tractable one. The only reason to focus on ancient philosophical texts is that its something we know how to do. I’m quite sure we need to examine Chinese environmental philosophy from a perspective closer to the ground, as it were. But how?

One thing I’ve been futzing with is philology. I’m trying to figure out the relationship between eight terms in a four languages: Fusij, Natura, Nature, Wilderness, zì rán, qì, tiān, and shānshuĭ. This actually leaves me doing the annoying thing we tell the undergraduates not to do: look at dictionaries for philosophical analyses. I'm looking in the OED, Liddell & Scott, and Mandarin Tools, sifting through the definitions and examples of use and trying to see patterns that will help me answer some question whose nature I'm no longer sure of. (BTW, does anyone know a better resource than Mandarin Tools? Does anyone know why the Perseus web page is so damn slow?)

Part of the problem is the basic tension between what the lexicographer's aims and my aim. I don't want to do an armchair analysis of meaning, but I'm not interested in cataloging every use. Really what I'm interested in is what Aristotle in The Categories called a "focal meaning" behind several different uses in several different parts of speech. What I have wound up doing is simply winnowing down OED type definitions: throwing out irrelevant uses, consolidating some meanings, trying to get at an essence of sorts. Is there a more formal method for doing this (one that doesn't revert back to Euthyphro suggesting definitions and Socrates proposing counter examples)?