Nature, Beauty and Meaning
The beauty of a painting of a flower, mountain or sunset normally owes to how it depicts its object, to its rendering of nature. But what of the flower, mountain and sunset themselves? To what do they owe their beauty? They do not, after all, depict, represent or render anything. A familiar answer is that they are beautiful solely in virtue of pleasure or delight taken in their colours and forms. But, aside from other defects, this answer does little justice to the importance that natural beauty has for many people – an importance far beyond that of, say, a wallpaper whose colours and shapes may be also give a lot of pleasure. Poets do not extol the beauty of wallpaper in the way they do the beauty of nature.
A very different answer is that the beauty of flowers, mountains and so on owes, in part at least, to a meaning or significance they have. And it is this that explains why experience of their beauty matters so much to people. This is the kind of answer given by writers from Plato and Plotinus, through Kant and Schiller, to Roger Scruton and R.W. Hepburn.
It is an answer that is only credible if a distinction is made between ‘serious’ and ‘loose’ or ‘trivial’ references to beauty. ‘Beautiful’, like its equivalents in languages other than English, is often used to record enjoyable experiences – of a cold beer on a hot day, say, or a jaunty tune – that the speaker, if pressed, would concede were not really experiences of beauty. The beer was nice, the tune pretty, but beautiful? In such cases, there is no temptation to invoke the idea of meaning in order to characterise the pleasurable experience. It is a different matter, however, with ‘serious’ uses of ‘beautiful’: here, there is no willingness to withdraw the adjective. In such cases, it is at least credible to think that something the flowers or mountains mean or signify is integral to the experiences of their beauty. For, unlike drinking the cold beer or hearing the pretty tune, these experiences of nature are of great importance to people – ones of a kind that they would find it difficult, even tragic, to be deprived of.
There are, however, problems with ascribing to natural things and environments meaning of a type that is integral to experiences of beauty. (Someone may, of course, find a mountain beautiful and, quite separately, a place of significance: it’s where he nearly lost his life in an avalanche, say, or where he went on honeymoon). Those of us who would like to regard natural beauty as meaningful need to address these problems, and to ask what it could be to regard such beauty as meaningful.
Meanings cannot be located, after all, in the intentions of the flowers or mountains, as in the case of paintings of them. Moreover, and more importantly, when a natural object or place is found ‘seriously’ beautiful, a person is typically absorbed or immersed in the experience. Thoughts about what it might mean are not racing through the mind: if they were, the person would no longer be absorbed in the experience. Nor does the person switch back and forth between admiration of the beauty and reflection on its possible meaning. There is a tension, it seems, between immersed experience of beauty and attention to, or recognition of, its significance.
It looks, then, as if any ascription of meaning to the experience must be post facto, something provided after the experience is over in order to explain it. But it’s hard to see what such an explanation could be that didn’t treat the experience of beauty as an effect or symptom. One thinks, for example, of explanations of why certain landscapes are found beautiful in terms of the evolutionary advantage to our ancestors of enjoying places that afford protection as well as clear views.
But it was surely not its significance as a symptom that people had in mind when proposing that meaning is integral to ‘serious’ natural beauty. When, analogously, I ask why you find a certain poem beautiful, I don’t expect an answer in terms of the social advantages to be gained from enjoying such poems.
Perhaps we should reconsider, then, the alleged tension between immersed experience of natural beauty and simultaneous recognition of its meaning. After all, someone will point out, there seems be no tension between absorption in a beautiful poem and understanding what its words mean. Indeed, this understanding is surely essential to absorbed enjoyment of the poem. It is true, of course, that the reader is not continually thinking ‘This word means X, that word means Y, ….’. Instead, understanding of the words is shown by the facility with which the poem is read, the ability to answer questions, if asked, about the meanings of various words in the poem, and by other criteria familiarly used to ascertain if someone understands what is being read or said.
It is unclear, however, that the case of linguistic understanding casts light on the attribution of meaning to experiences of natural beauty. My understanding of the poem rests on my implicit grasp of rules, semantic and syntactic included, and the deployment of interpretative strategies without which I would not understand the words at all, let alone the metaphorical or allegorical meanings they convey. It is hard to see what it is, in the case of natural beauty, that corresponds to such rules and strategies. To find some rough parallel, one would have to go back to the medieval idea of nature as the Book of God in which natural items – flowers, trees, animals – are all signs that, when properly combined, constitute a kind of language descriptive of the divine.
Linguistic understanding, then, does not offer a promising analogy with the recognition of meaning in experiences of natural beauty. More promising is an analogy with finding beauty in a person’s face in virtue of what the face expresses. The Buddha, according to the hagiographies, was a conventionally very handsome man, but the great beauty of his face praised by his followers resided in its expression of compassion, tranquillity, wisdom and other virtues.
Certain points about this example should be noted. First, what is expressed by the Buddha’s features is not inferred from them. Rather, his followers see compassion, tranquillity and so on in those features. They show in his face. Because of this, no extra feat of thought or interpretation is involved that might compete with absorbed attention to the Buddha’s face. Appreciating the beauty of the face and recognising the virtues expressed by it are of a piece.
Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). From: Wikipedia.
Second, the significance of the facial features – what they express – is a good reason for regarding their beauty as ‘serious’. Suppose the Budha had an identical twin brother, whose conventional good looks would also have been admired. But since, let’s suppose, the brother was an evil fellow, people would not have found in his features an expression of compassion and other virtues. And for this reason, appreciation of the brother’s good looks would not have been an experience of a ‘seriously’ beautiful face. (If the brother were an actor able to simulate compassion, this would simply indicate that we can, unsurprisingly, be mistaken in attributing to people a quality that their faces nevertheless express.)
There is another reason why the expressively beautiful face is a promising analogy for meaningful natural beauty. An English sentence expresses a certain proposition in virtue of rules and conventions of the language. That a face expresses anger or compassion is not similarly due to rules and conventions, and the ability to recognise what is expressed does not require a mastery of these. Faces ‘naturally’ express what they do, one might say. Likewise, what ‘seriously’ beautiful flowers or mountains express is not due to artifice and rules. Natural beauty is ‘naturally’ expressive.
I put ‘naturally’ in scare quotes, since one should concede that cultural factors might sometimes have a limited effect on what faces and natural things are taken to express. Perhaps you needed to be Japanese to identify precisely what was expressed by the ferocious look adopted by Samurai warriors. But, Japanese or not, you knew that this was not an expression of tenderness or humility. Equally, whatever the cultural influences on how mountains are experienced, no one could authentically experience the Matterhorn as expressive of weakness, gentility or jollity.
But how far can the analogy with beautiful faces be taken? So far, the analogy has remained at a formal or structural level. We were looking for a kind of experience of meaningful beauty in which there was no tension between absorption in something’s beauty and recognition of its significance. We found this kind of experience in that of faces whose ‘serious’ beauty owes to the qualities and virtues they express.
I have said nothing, however, about what might be expressed by the ‘serious’ natural beauty of flowers, sunsets, mountains and so on. The form, one might agree, of experience of natural beauty is analogous to that of experiencing beautifully expressive faces. But what of its content? This is a large, difficult issue – the topic for a further discussion.
My own inclination, briefly, is to say that what ‘serious’ natural beauty communicates – what it signifies – turns out to be the same as what ‘seriously’ beautiful faces express. These are the virtues, understood in a broad sense that goes beyond what are ordinarily regarded as ‘moral’ virtues. By virtues, I mean roughly those qualities that belong to a good or flourishing human life. They will include compassion, wisdom, humility, courage, strength, energy, spontaneity, resilience, restraint, a sense of belonging or being ‘at home’, love, innocence, equanimity, tranquillity… The list is long. If this proposal is right, it would explain why ‘serious’ natural beauty matters to people so much. It is expressive of just those qualities that make for a good life, and hence of what should surely matter to us all.
You can try out the proposal for yourselves, next time you are hiking in the mountains, walking through a meadow by a river, or picnicking in a cove by the edge of the ocean. Ask yourselves whether, in being immersed in the beauty before or around you, you are also in the presence of expressions of, say, innocence, spontaneity and quiet strength. And then, when back home, ask yourselves how important these expressions are to your love of natural beauty, to why it is that nature matters to you.
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David E. Cooper on Daily Philosophy:
