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AESTHETIC AND SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDES
THE AESTHETIC AND SCIENTIFIC TRADITIONS
Passmore presents an account of the general development of modern
attitudes toward nature that is in disagreement with that of many scholars,
critics, and scientists. Myra Reynolds' timetable is a characteristic scholarly
account. According to Reynolds, attitudes appreciative of nature first
appeared in poetry and landscape gardening between 1725 and 1730 and
about thirty years later in landscape painting, fiction, and travel literature.7
Passmore disregards all of these except landscape gardening. He discounts
poetry on the grounds that although "eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
romanticism, with its nature-mysticism, was responsible for a transvalua-
tion of values. ... That it will persist into the twenty-first century, however,
can certainly not be taken for granted."8 As for painting, fiction, and travel
literature, he makes no mention of them at all. Instead, Passmore makes
the incredible claim that the proper and enduring changes in nature
attitudes began and ended with landscape gardening-specifically, in the
transition from the formal to the nonformal garden.9 In addition, Pass-
more appears to be unaware of the claim of nineteenth-century natural
history scientists both in America and in Europe that science, and not art
and literature, created the conditions permitting the development of
attitudes appreciative of nature. For example, Sir Archibald Geike in
England and William H. Brewer in America both maintained that H. B. de
Saussure's interest in mountains in the eighteenth century led to an aes-
thetic appreciation of mountains and nature in general.'0 Although I do
not claim that either science or the arts alone brought about this transfor-
mation in attitude, I make the weaker claim that it resulted from an inter-
play between them.
Passmore believes that there are three possible stages of development
in the aesthetic appreciation of nature: (1) appreciation of formal land-
scape gardens in which plants are clipped, cut, and planted in geometric
forms and patterns, (2) appreciation of nonformal gardens in which "the
gardener was to take his materials from nature, to treat them reverently,
but to arrange them in a better composition," thus, "improving" rather
than "imposing" form, and (3) appreciation of unimproved, and indeed
untouched, wilderness. He recognizes that the first is unsatisfactory and
completely deplores the third but is happy with the second, which he con-
siders an excellent example of what he means by "the civilising of nature."
Passmore defends his preference for the nonformal garden as follows:
It converts nature into something at once more agreeable and more intelligi-
ble than wilderness; man understands domesticated nature, because he has
helped to make it. He arranges nature in such a way that he "can enter her
world and enjoy our origins." From the wilderness he is always in some
measure alienated; it stands in a relationship to him of pure externality. Yet at81
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Hargrove, Eugene C., 1944-. Foundations of Environmental Ethics, book, 1989; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc52172/m1/93/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Center For Environmental Philosophy.