Nature and Culture 20/04/2020

Nature: Western Attitudes

Since Ancient Times
Peter Coates, 1998

What is the main argument presented in this piece?

The author provides a history of the understandings of ‘nature’ in

the western world from classical to recent times (1990s), through
changes in the physical environment due to human intervention.
He also analyses the attitudes ‘green’ writers have taken towards
past dealings with nature.

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Cues Notes

Chapter 7: Reassessments of Nature: Romantic and

Ecological

 Late 20th-century attitudes to nature emerge from the 18th

and 19th century: Romanticism and ecological science via
evolutionary theory.

 1960s counterculture can find its roots in Romanticism

p126:
 The Greening of America, Charles Reich (1960s)
compared to ‘The Moralists: A Philosophical
Rhapsody’ Lord Shaftesbury (1709)
 Theodore Rosach quotes William Wordsworth
The Prelude directly
 Criticisms of this view mainly are about differentiating
class (elitism of Romanticism)

The solid ground of nature

 For romantic poets it was all about connecting the

aesthetic experience of the natural world with ‘notions of
order and goodness’ (p127)
 Shelley’s interested in ‘nature’s laws’
(Prometheus Unbound (1818-1820)
 Byron Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
 Understanding of nature depended on distinction between
nature and culture, and valued ‘wild nature’ over human
creative accomplishments (p127)

 Roots in classical stoicism ‘the idea of nature as universal

moral arbiter’ (p127)
 Also idea of man being born free and enslaved by man
(peasant revolts of medieval times and anti-slavery
movements in 1700s)

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 The Romantics and Philosophes upheld Nature as

immutable, universal, good and more powerful than any
human-led institution. (p127)

 Primitivism, Rousseau’s noble savage

Mountain glory

 Attitudes to mountains reveal most strikingly the

‘Romantic re-evaluation of nature’ (p130)
 In pre-romantic times mountains were described as fearful
or offensive, pastoral landscapes were preferred (p130)
 Charles Cotton (1681) ‘Nature’s Pudends’,
‘Devils-arse’

 William Godwin St Leon (1799)

 Inspired by Rousseau’s Alpine works Julie and
Émile (1762)
 ‘The humble cottage and unadorned
mountainside are elevated above the decadent
palace and formal garden’ (p130)
 The swiss mountain as setting for the free man
and ‘Eden’ on earth also upheld by Wordsworth
in 1790. (p130)

 The orthodox Christian view was that the Earth was

smooth and perfect before the Flood made it ugly and
chaotic, related to human sin
 Thomas Burnet (1684) ‘The Sacred Theory of
the Earth’

 Advancements in science during the enlightenment shifted

feelings of awe from art to nature, where before art was
seen as perfection and nature chaotic (p131)

 Attitudes to animal welfare and differences between

humans and animals (p132)
 RSPCA founded in 1836

 The picturesque
 William Gilpin (‘chief theoretician’) ‘not barely
examining the face of a country; but of
examining by the rules of picturesque beauty;
that of not merely describing; but of adapting
the description of natural beauty to the
principles of artificial landscape’ from Gilpin’s
guide to the River Wye (1782)
 He went round assessing landscapes by their
‘frameability’ p132

 The sublime as opposed to the picturesque

 Immanuel Kant (1764) differentiated between
the two:
‘the sight of a mountain whose snow-covered
peak rises above the clouds, the description of
a raging storm… arouse enjoyment but with
horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower-
strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks

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and covered with grazing flocks, the description

of Elysium… also occasion a pleasant sensation
but one that is joyous and smiling’ from
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
and Sublime quoted from (p132)
 Edmund Burke in his younger years ‘delicious
terror’ p133

The limits of Romanticism

Questions

Summary