The British Journal of Aesthetics Advance Access published February 26, 2013

Contemporary Environmental
Aesthetics and the Neglect of the
Sublime
Sandra Shapshay

Discussion of sublime response to natural environments is largely absent from contemporary

environmental aesthetics. This is due to the fact that the sublime seems inextricably linked to
extravagant metaphysical ideas. In this paper, I seek to rehabilitate a conception of sublime
response that is secular, metaphysically modest and compatible with the most influential theory
of environmental aesthetics, Allen Carlson’s scientific cognitivism. First, I offer some grounds
for seeing the environmental sublime as a distinctive and meaningful category of contemporary
aesthetic experience of nature. Next, from historical and contemporary sources, I reconstruct two
philosophical accounts of what I call ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ sublime response. Finally I show how these
responses are compatible with scientific cognitivism, though the latter more so than the former.

While the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century aesthetic category of the sublime, especially

Kant’s theory thereof, has been an ongoing subject of historical and interpretive discus-
sion, it has not been brought into contemporary discussions of environmental aesthetics to
any significant degree.1 The aim of this article is to show that this aesthetic category ought
to be rehabilitated and brought into contemporary discussion in environmental aesthetics.
I do so by first investigating and contesting some likely reasons why the category of the
sublime has fallen into desuetude in this field. Next, from historical and contemporary
sources, I reconstruct two main philosophical accounts of sublime response: one which
l sees it as a largely non-cognitive, affective arousal, which I call the ‘thin sublime’; and the
e other which understands it as including, in addition to this affective arousal, an intellectual
e play with ideas involving especially ideas regarding the place of human beings within the
environment, which I call the ‘thick sublime’. This twofold conception of an ‘environ-
Y mental sublime’ is roughly equivalent to the views of the sublime articulated by Burke, on
the one hand, and Kant and Schopenhauer, on the other. Next, I shall argue that both of

1 In recent discussions of environmental aesthetics, some philosophers have started to note this lacuna, for instance,
in an article critical of Carlson’s views on ecology and of his insufficient attention to evolutionary biology, Roger
Paden, Laurlyn K. Harmon, and Charles R. Milling write ‘an evolutionary aesthetics … must address the possibility
of experiencing nature as sublime’, in ‘Ecology, Evolution, and Aesthetics: Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetics of
Nature’, BJA 52 (2012), 123–39, at 138. In addition, Emily Brady has sought to rehabilitate a Kantian theory of the
environmental sublime, in ‘Environmental Sublime’, in Tim Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present
(Cambridge: CUP, 2012). My approach differs from Brady’s, however, in that I aim to support the inclusion of what
I term ‘thick’- and ‘thin’-sublime experiences within environmental aesthetics, neither of which depends on the
details of the Kantian faculty psychology or the role of the imagination and reason therein.

British Journal of Aesthetics DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ays067

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2 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

these conceptions of sublime response may be construed as secular, metaphysically mod-

est, and compatible with the currently dominant theory of environmental ­aesthetics—
the scientific-cognitive view of Allen Carlson—though the thick sublime coheres better
than the thin in this regard. Ultimately, I  aim to show that Carlson’s theory ought to
accommodate a family of responses to nature aptly described as sublime.2
As is well known, Carlson’s theory breaks from two main modes of nature appreciation
that had dominated in Western thought: the ‘landscape model’ and the ‘object model’. The
landscape model treats natural environments as scenery, along the lines of the picturesque,
with an eye to whether the natural scenes are fitted to be landscape paintings. In contrast,
the object model recommends that nature be appreciated along the lines of non-representa-
tional art objects, to be plucked from their environments and contemplated for their formal
characteristics. Carlson faults both models for failing to treat nature ‘as what it truly is’,
namely, as natural and as an environment. To appreciate natural environments qua natural and
qua environment, and to do so with an appropriate degree of objectivity and seriousness, an
appreciator should acquire the cognitive background of a naturalist, informed by the relevant natural
sciences. Notably, Carlson’s theory rules out more subjective types of understanding—from
myth, religion, art, and culture—as appropriate background for this sort of serious appre-
ciation, for none of these approaches treats nature for what it truly is.3
The neglect of the sublime in Carlson’s theory and in those of his followers is, on the
face of it, surprising given that eighteenth- to nineteenth-century aestheticians located
paradigmatic cases of sublimity in encounters with raw nature rather than with art: in
beholding vast mountain ranges (especially the Alps); lonesome desert environments
of the American west; the dizzying expanse of the starry night sky; powerful, thun-
dering cascades; calm seas; or raging oceans.4 Broad consensus in this era held that
nature in its grander scales and more powerful phenomena could provoke a genuinely
sublime response, namely, ‘a pleasing astonishment’ (Addison), a ‘delightful horror’
(Burke), or a ‘negative pleasure’ in which the mind is simultaneously attracted to and

2 The definitive statement of Carlson’s theory is his Aesthetics and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2000) and
Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Similar approaches have been defended by Yuriko Saito, ‘Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms’, Environmental
Ethics 20 (1998), 135–49; Marcia Eaton, ‘Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, JAAC 56
(1998), 149–56; Patricia Matthews, ‘Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, JAAC
60 (2002), 37–48; and Glen Parsons, ‘Nature Appreciation, Science, and Positive Aesthetics’, BJA 42 (2002),
279–95.
3 I will not be treat Carlson’s more recent modification of scientific cognitivism in the direction of ‘positive
aesthetics’, as the question of whether the sublime has a place within scientific cognitivism is separate and
prior. Further, I will not be concerned with the experience of the sublime in appreciation of largely human-
made environments or works of art—though I will make use of a poem that attempts to capture and convey an
experience of sublimity—but rather with largely untrammelled natural environments.
4 Certain works of art, especially architecture, such as St Peter’s in Rome and the Egyptian pyramids, were oft-
cited examples of sublime objects, yet Kant expressed doubts as to whether works of art could furnish a genuine
experience of sublimity (Critique of the Power of Judgment §26, 5:252–3). All citations to the Critique of the Power of
Judgment refer to the translation by P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), followed by the Akademie
volume and page number.
 Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 3

repelled by an object (Kant).5 Given this focus on ‘raw nature’, how account for the
neglect of the category of the sublime in contemporary environmental aesthetics?

A Justifiable Neglect?
Perhaps a valid reason for contemporary environmental aestheticians to leave the eigh-
teenth- to nineteenth-century category of the sublime in the dustbin of history is that
the predominant accounts of the sublime from this era focus on discrete natural objects,
whereas one of the key injunctions of Carlson’s theory is to appreciate nature as an environ-
ment, that is, as objects connected ecologically. In the case of Burke, this worry is somewhat
apt, for he generally refers to discrete objects as having either the distinctive properties
experienced as beautiful (smallness, smoothness, brightness or lightness in colour, etc.) or
as sublime (greatness, obscurity, fearsomeness, etc.). Yet this objective focus of aesthetic
attention is more pronounced in the case of the beautiful than in that of the sublime in his
aesthetic theory, for key properties of sublimity, namely, ‘greatness’ and ‘obscurity’, make
it difficult to construe that which provokes the idea of the sublime as a discrete object.
In the case of Kant and Schopenhauer, however, this worry is entirely misplaced, for in
their aesthetic theories there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between a response to nature
called beautiful, which does consist in an attention to discrete objects, and that which is sub-
lime, which manifestly does not. For Kant, it is precisely the purposive forms of objects that
spark a free play of the faculties in which the disinterested pleasure of the beautiful consists,
whereas it is precisely the formlessness, limitlessness, or immense power of sublime environ-
ments or phenomena that call to mind the ‘ideas of reason’, and spark the free play in which con-
sists the painful/pleasurable experience of the sublime. For this reason, no object in nature is
properly called ‘sublime’ for Kant, whereas, a great many objects in nature are properly called
beautiful. Thus, Kant’s account posits the focus of aesthetic attention in the sublime—as
opposed that in the beautiful—as truly environmental without explicitly recognizing this fact.6
Similarly, in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, while the experience of the beautiful consists
in becoming absorbed ‘in a steady contemplation of the object presented, aside from its
inter-connections with any other object’, the experience of the sublime is not focused
on discrete objects in nature, but rather, on an environment as a whole.7 Consider, for
instance, the following description he provides of sublime response:
Let us transport ourselves to a very solitary region [Gegend] with a boundless hori-
zon under a completely cloudless sky, with trees and plants in completely still air,
no animals, no people, no moving water, the deepest calm … [this] environment
[Umgebung] … offers an example of the sublime at a low degree. … The feeling of
the sublime can be occasioned at still higher gradations by the following environment

5 See, respectively, Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, IV (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854),
7, Spectator no. 489; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(London: J. Dodsley, 1867), 257; and Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment §129, 5: 245.
6 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment §129, 5:245.
7 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, trans. J. Norman, A. Welchman, and C. Janaway
(Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 200–1; emphasis added.
4 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

[Umgebung]. Nature in stormy motion; the gloaming through threatening black storm
clouds; enormous, barren, hanging rocks …8
The term Schopenhauer uses most frequently for the focus of attention in sublime response
is Umgebung, which can mean ‘surroundings’, ‘environs’, or ‘neighborhood’ but is also syn-
onymous with the more contemporary Umwelt or ‘environment’. His use of the term repeat-
edly in phenomenological descriptions of sublime response clearly shows that the focus of
aesthetic attention he posits is not on discrete objects, but rather, on a whole environment.
Thus, while one might see Burke’s theory of the sublime as being inappropriate for
contemporary environmental aesthetics as it stands, Kant and Schopenhauer’s theories of
the sublime—by contrast to their theories of the beautiful—do not involve an object-
centred mode of aesthetic attention, but rather one that is focused on a whole environment.
Interestingly, these transcendental accounts do consider the sublime environmentally but
fail to recognize this novel aspect of their theories, whereas, Burke’s account of the sub-
lime must be transformed into one with an environmental focus in order to find a legiti-
mate place within contemporary environmental aesthetics.9
A second possible reason for neglect of the aesthetic category of the sublime is the
thought that there has been a shift in the dynamics of taste in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, such that the category of ‘sublime’ response no longer picks out
a common, distinctive type of aesthetic appreciation of nature. This view is tempting
in light of evidence for the relatively recent vintage of the aesthetic category of ‘natural
sublimity’. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson has argued in her classic study of discourse on
the aesthetic experience of mountains, a profound shift in aesthetic attitudes occurred
in the West between 1660 and 1800: from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, while
there was a notion of the ‘rhetorical sublime’ dating to a treatise by Longinus, there
was no corresponding ‘natural sublime’ response in recorded poetry and literature, at
least with respect to mountainous landscapes. When mountains figured in literature they
were described as ‘“Nature’s Shames and Ills” and “Warts, Wens, Blisters, Imposthumes”
upon the otherwise fair face of Nature’.10 But by the eighteenth-century mountains were
regarded as ‘“temples of Nature built by the Almighty” and “natural cathedrals”’.
Although Nicolson’s study does not treat recorded attitudes to other paradigmatically
sublime phenomena, the shift in attitudes toward mountains provides some evidence to
suggest that the ‘natural sublime’ may not be a perennial human response to vast or pow-
erful nature, but rather, a category of human aesthetic experience that evolved when
beliefs and attitudes about nature helped to enable a response of ‘delightful horror’ rather
than simply horror or repulsion. But if aesthetic responses come into being in time, so
might they disappear in time—could this be a valid reason for leaving this aesthetic cat-
egory out of contemporary environmental aesthetics?

8 Schopenhauer, Representation, 228.

9 In the following section, I show how Noël Carroll implicitly does just this.
10 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 2.
 Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 5

Although I  shall not attempt to make a case for sublime response as a perennial,
human response to certain natural environments, nonetheless, experiences of being over-
whelmed, humbled, exalted, or at once terrified and exhilarated in the presence of cer-
tain natural environments seems still to be with us and therefore worth recognition and
discussion by contemporary aestheticians. Consider, for instance, John Muir’s description
of his experience of a windstorm in the forest of the Yuba River Valley:
There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of winds in the
woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind, but in their varied water-
like flow as manifested by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers
… The waving of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime
… Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care
to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime, and though they become
at times about as visible as flowing water …. We all travel the milky way together,
trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in
the wind [atop a Douglas Spruce], that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They
make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away
and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.11
Not only does Muir use the term ‘sublime’ to describe his experience of this environment
whipped up by a powerful wind storm, his description includes many of the hallmarks of
the aesthetic category as theorized by Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer: the environment
is experienced as ‘deeply exciting’, ‘indescribably impressive’, and leads Muir to entertain
thoughts, by his report for the first time, concerning the existential similarities between
trees and human beings, namely, that the lives of trees also involve journeys, and that
human journeys ‘away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings’.
More recently in an article for National Geographic, nature writer Donovan Webster
recounts this experience of exploring a volcanic environment on the South Pacific island
of Vanuatu:
I lower myself into the volcano. Acidic gas bites my nose and eyes. … The breath-
ing of Benbow’s pit is deafening … each new breath from the volcano heaves the air
so violently my ears pop in the changing pressure—the temperature momentarily
soars. Somewhere not too far below, red-hot, pumpkin-size globs of ejected lava are
flying through the air. … Yet suspended hundreds of feet above lava up to 2,200
degrees Fahrenheit that reaches toward the center of the Earth, I’m also discovering
there’s more. It is stupefyingly beautiful. The enormous noise. The deep, orangey red
light from spattering lava … It is like nowhere else on Earth.12
Although the author never uses the term ‘sublime’, the phrase ‘stupefyingly beautiful’ seems
synonymous: Webster experiences the volcanic environment as fearsome and recognizes
that one significant slip of the rope would annihilate him, but he is able simultaneously to

11 John Muir, The Mountains of California (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), ch. 10.
12 Donovan Webster, ‘Inside the Volcano’, in Edward O. Wilson (ed.), The Best American Science and Nature Writing
2001 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 253–4.
6 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

acknowledge the fearsomeness and to bracket the personal anxiety to appreciate the envi-
ronment aesthetically. His experience is a mixed painful/pleasurable one, painful from the
threatening nature of the lava, the ‘acidic gas’ that irritates his nose and eyes, and from the
strain on his ears caused by the ‘enormous noise’ and atmospheric pressure, but also exhila-
ratingly pleasurable due to the display of ‘deep, orangey red light’, the play of ‘pumpkin-
sized globs of ejected lava’, and the environment’s other-worldly appearance. Arguably,
Webster is here describing a sublime response without explicitly utilizing the term.
On the basis of the quote from Nicholson above, however, one might wonder whether
people came to appreciate mountain environments as sublime by viewing them through
the lens of art, as ‘temples of Nature’ or as ‘natural cathedrals’. If so, the aesthetic category
of the sublime might depend upon art, specifically, architecture as a model, and this would
make the category of the sublime analogous to that of the picturesque. Accordingly, the
sublime would thus be ruled as similarly inappropriate from the scientific-cognitivist
point of view, as it fails to appreciate nature as nature rather than as or analogous to art.
Yet, as the phenomenological descriptions from Muir and Webster suggest, these more
contemporary writers do not rely on art as a model in their sublime experiences with natural
environments. The comparison Muir draws to illuminate the effect of the wind on the trees
is to another natural phenomenon, a mountain river; and Webster draws explicit compari-
sons only to other natural objects, such as pumpkins and natural environments, calling the
volcano ‘like no other place on Earth’. Such descriptions suggest, therefore, that sublime
responses to natural environments are still with us, and need not be construed as modelled
on an experience of art. In what follows, I shall also dispel this latter worry with respect to
the philosophical accounts of the sublime given by Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer.13

Two Philosophical Accounts—Thin and Thick Sublime

Two main types of philosophical account have been given of sublime response, and I shall
turn now to the question of whether and, if so, to what extent they are compatible with
Carlson’s scientific cognitivism.

The Thin Sublime

Philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focused on the source of sub-
lime pleasure, and offered two main types of explanation of it, the physiological and the
transcendental. The physiological type of explanation is well exemplified by Burke who
sees the pleasure in the sublime as the merely relative, negative pleasure of the release
from pain, anxiety, tension, and terror. When one feels safe but beholds something ter-
rifying, according to Burke, there arises ‘delight’, a negative pleasure deriving from the
lessening of pain such as caused by fear or some other inherently unpleasant emotion.
Although the subject, on this account, must have some cognition of the natural object

13 Another possible reason for neglect of the sublime is the notion that the category involves an inextricably
theological view of nature. In what follows, I will show that these historical accounts of the sublime are not
theological.
 Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 7

as a threatening kind of thing which, however, poses no immediate threat, the pleasure of
the sublime does not result from something like a chain of reasoning or free play of ideas
concerning the object of delight and its relationships to the subject. Rather, according
to Burke, it results from a basic but unreflective cognitive appraisal of the situation and the
resultant physiological experience of the lessening of the subject’s pain. Burke explicitly
contrasts his theory of delight taken in experiences of both the sublime and the tragic
from more cognitive accounts of this feeling. In a related discussion of the problem of
tragedy, for instance, he writes,
I am afraid it is a practice much too common in inquiries of this nature, to attribute
the cause of feelings which merely arise from the mechanical structures of our bodies, or from the
natural frame and constitution of our minds, to certain conclusions of the reasoning faculty on
the objects presented to us; for I should imagine, that the influence of reason in producing
our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.14
Burke deflates two aspects of sublime phenomenology which had appeared in many of the
discussions at the time: first, the notion that the experience of sublimity crucially involves
a reflection on or revelation of God or the ‘infinite’ more broadly; and second, that the
feeling of the sublime involves a sense of ‘elevation’ or ‘exaltation’ of the spectator.
Recently, Noël Carroll has theorized, though neither explicitly nor intentionally, a
category of Burkean thin-sublime response as a part of what he calls ‘being emotionally
moved by nature’ in a ‘visceral’ and ‘less intellective’ kind of fashion. Advocating the
experience of ‘being emotionally moved’ by nature as a supplement to Carlson’s view,
Carroll holds that one may have genuine, aesthetic appreciation of nature by ‘opening
ourselves to its stimulus, and to being put in a certain emotional state by attending to its
aspects’ even in the absence of bringing scientific categories and knowledge of nature to
bear on the experience.15 For instance, ‘we may find ourselves standing under a thunder-
ing waterfall and be excited by its grandeur; or standing barefoot amidst a silent arbor,
softly carpeted with layers of decaying leaves, a sense of repose and homeyness may be
aroused in us’.16 Although there is indeed a cognitive dimension to being thus moved by
nature insofar as there is a cognitive component to emotion in general, Carroll seeks to
defend as appropriate a less-cognitively informed, more visceral-instinctual type of aes-
thetic experience of nature. While he is not attempting to defend the experience of the
sublime specifically, the first of the putatively aesthetic experiences described above—the
perception of grandeur and the feeling of excitement from a thundering waterfall—
approximates what many would take to be paradigmatically sublime experience in what
I have called the thin vein.

14 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 71; emphasis added.

15 Noël Carroll, ‘On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History’, in Allen Carlson and Sheila
Lintott (eds), Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), 169–87, at 170. Carroll’s essay was originally published in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds), Landscape,
Natural Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 244–66.
16 Carroll, ‘On being Moved by Nature’, 170.
8 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

Also implicit in Carroll’s discussion is a subtle reformulation of the Burkean sublime in a

manner that steers away from focus on discrete objects and toward focus on an environ-
ment as a whole:
Earlier I conjured up a scene where standing near a towering cascade, our ears rever-
berating with the roar of falling water, we are overwhelmed and excited by its gran-
deur. People quite standardly seek out such experiences. They are, pretheoretically,
a form of appreciating nature. Moreover, when caught up in such experiences our
attention is fixed on certain aspects of the natural expanse rather than others—the pal-
pable force of the cascade, its height, the volume of water, the way it alters the sur-
rounding atmosphere, etc. This does not require any special scientific knowledge.
Perhaps it only requires being human, equipped with the senses we have, being small,
and able to intuit the immense force, relative to creatures like us, of the roaring tons
of water. … That is, we may be aroused emotionally by nature, and our arousal may
be a function of our human nature in response to a natural expanse.17
The appreciator in Carroll’s description above is attending to a ‘natural expanse’, though
‘certain aspects of that expanse rather than others’ are more salient. While ‘our attention
is fixed’ in such an experience on ‘the palpable force of the cascade, its height, the volume
of the water, [and] the way it alters the surrounding atmosphere’, this further focusing
simply requires ‘being human, equipped with the senses we have’. Although Carroll’s
intent here is to make a point against Carlson, namely, that being aroused emotionally by
nature sans scientific background knowledge seems a perfectly legitimate form of aesthetic
appreciation, in the process he unwittingly but fortuitously characterizes a version of the
Burkean thin sublime that is more serviceable for contemporary environmental aesthetics
insofar as it is environment- rather than object-focused.

The Thick Sublime

The second kind of explanation for sublime pleasure, the ‘transcendental approach’,
involves, as one would expect, a greater contribution from ‘the reasoning faculty’ and
endeavours to capture a sense of the subject’s feeling of elevation in the experience. One
might wonder why such a feeling would require explicit or rational reflection, any more
than does that of the feeling of ‘lessening of the subject’s pain’. The reason for this, for
the partisans of this approach, is that the feeling of elevation involves something akin to
respect for one’s own rational nature and vocation (Kant) or for one’s own attitudinal
freedom (Schopenhauer). And such a feeling of respect involves more reflective, cognitive
content than does a simple lessening of pain, and consequently, a greater contribution
from the cognitive faculties.
Kant and Schopenhauer understand sublime response as a complex process wherein the
subject oscillates between feelings of pain and exaltation. For Kant, nature is experienced
as sublime insofar as (1) it appears threatening to us existentially (dynamical sublime) or
frustrating to us cognitively (mathematical sublime), and (2) and this perception of nature

17 Ibid., 174; emphasis added.

 Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 9

awakens in us a feeling akin to respect for our moral or rational vocation, which is felt
to be nonetheless indomitable in the face of even the most vast and fearsome phenom-
ena in nature. Similarly, for Schopenhauer, one experiences nature as sublime inasmuch
as it occasions an overcoming of one’s natural ego-driven responses to it (i.e. to find it
threatening and to flee it) and instead remains in disinterested contemplation of it for
what it is essentially.18 The exalted pleasure of the sublime, on his account, derives from
the recognition of human beings as both a fragile part of nature and yet also as powerful
epistemological supporters of the world of representation and beings who have the power
to turn away from egoistic interests in the face of threat.19
Leaving aside the particular metaphysical and systemic links between these views of
the sublime, one can take away a second type of sublime response from these philosophers
which I call the thick sublime: an aesthetic response to vast or powerful environments or
phenomena in nature that is emotional as well as intellectual and involves reflection upon the
relationships between humanity and nature more generally. The main contrast between
thin- and thick-sublime experience is that the former involves an emotional response to
vast or threatening nature without the further intellectual component of reflection on the
relationships between human beings and nature in general; the further involvement of
a play of ideas concerning humanity in relation to nature is characteristic of the thick
sublime.
One might wonder why this intellectual involvement in the experience of the thick
sublime should be characterized as involving a ‘play’ of ideas, especially as the content of
these ideas in Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s theories seems quite sober. Indeed, while the
ideas themselves seem hardly playful, the mode of arriving at them in such aesthetic responses
is, for the way in which one arrives at ideas concerning the relationships between human-
ity and nature in sublime experience is akin to (without being modelled on) the activity
of interpreting a metaphor. In engaging a metaphor such as ‘Juliet is the sun’ one does
not take the ‘is’ of identification literally, but rather imaginatively entertains various con-
nections and contrasts between the items being identified. In this process, insights may
be suddenly glimpsed, rather than arrived at by following a thread of logical entailments
(as I hope is the case for the person reading this article). Such aesthetic-cognitive play
seems to be responsible for the insight Muir gained through his sublime experience of a
windstorm in the Yuba River Valley. Before that experience, he writes, ‘it [had] never
occurred to me … that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many jour-
neys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are
only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.’ Muir’s insight into the
similarities between the journeys of trees and those of human beings, and the error in
assuming that our human journeys amount to so much more than ‘tree-wavings’ in the
grand scheme of nature seems to have been gained not via a process of rational argument,
but rather by way of an aesthetic-reflective play with vectors of similarity and difference

18 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, 3rd edn, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover,
1966), 204. I have generally used the Payne translation in this paper, but also cite the more recent Janaway edition
when it is more accurate.
19 Ibid., I, 205.
10 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

between trees and human beings. In this way, one may justifiably characterize thick-sub-
lime response as involving a ‘play’ of ideas concerning the relationships of human beings
and the environment.

A Place for the Sublime within Carlson’s Theory?

Prima facie, scientific cognitivism seems incompatible with both types of sublime
response: while the thin is too non-cognitive and thus does not sufficiently treat nature
for what it is, the thick seems to involve a play of metaphysically extravagant and/or
overly subjective ideas, and thus commits the same error. In what follows, I aim to show
that even with such a scientifically oriented theory of nature appreciation, (1) there is an
important place for the experience of the thick sublime, when understood as I would urge
in a secular, non-metaphysically extravagant manner, that has gone completely unrecognized;
and (2) the thin sublime coexists with scientific cognitivism though it constitutes a less
serious mode of sublime experience within the theory.

Carlson and the Thin Sublime

Thin-sublime experience is compatible with the main tenets of Carlson’s environmental
aesthetics: first, the response does treat nature as natural, rather than as a work of art.
Further, the thin-sublime response does not treat an environment as a potential work of
art—by utilizing art as a model or lens for nature appreciation—as in the picturesque
tradition, nor does it treat nature as God’s artifice. Second, it does not approach nature
through a particular subjective lens, for the experience (in Carroll’s cascade example,
for instance) relies on the arousal of emotion which is typical of contemporary Western
human beings and does not involve specific cultural lenses such as myth or religion.
Third, its focus is on an environment rather than on discrete objects isolated from their
surroundings.
Recognizing some of these compatibilities, Carlson maintains nonetheless that some
ways of appreciating nature aesthetically are simply better than others because they are
‘truer to nature’ and less superficial, and he holds that such arousal experiences are more
superficial given that they revolve around the subject’s more instinctual affect and attend
less to what nature truly is.20
Indeed, there is something to Carlson’s retort. Take Carroll’s account of emotional
arousal in the presence of a cascade. The subject’s attention is focused on ‘the palpable
force of the cascade, its height, the volume of water, the way it alters the surrounding
atmosphere, etc.’ From this kind of attention, she feels ‘overwhelmed and excited by [the
cascade’s] … grandeur’.21 As described, the experience does not sound like a particularly
rich one, for two main reasons: first, the subject sticks to the surface of engagement with
the waterfall; and, second, the subject sticks to the surface of engagement with the self in
relation to the waterfall.

20 Carlson, Nature and Landscape, 46.

21 Carroll, ‘On Being Moved by Nature’, 174.
Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 11

To elaborate on the first reason, the person who responds to the waterfall emotionally
à la Carroll attends solely to the obvious perceptual features of the waterfall (the roar-
ing sound, the volume and force of the water) and responds instinctively with emotional
arousal to these features. But the person who attends to these perceptual features with
emotion and also brings to bear a greater understanding of the scientific phenomenon—
for example, with the naturalist’s understanding of the geological processes which shaped
the terrain and led to the formation of the cascade—would, prima facie, have a richer and
more sustained affective-cognitive experience of the cascade, and would treat it more for
what it is.
It may be argued, however, that bringing to bear natural-scientific understanding
in appreciating nature may detract from, or make impossible, an experience of ‘being
moved’ by the phenomenon or even of finding it aesthetically pleasing at all. Carroll does
not argue for this claim, but one could. In an oft-cited passage from Mark Twain’s Life on
the Mississippi (1883), Twain describes his coming to have greater scientific understanding
of the river:
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead
language to the uneducated passenger … Now when I had mastered the language of
this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river
as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.
But I had lost something too … All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of
the majestic river!22
If, as Twain’s memoir suggests, aesthetic appreciation and the acquisition of scientific
understanding are in tension or perhaps even mutually exclusive, then the experience of
solely ‘being moved’ by nature without the addition of natural-scientific understanding in
the experience need not be more superficial than an experience which combines emotional
arousal with natural-scientific understanding, rather, it might be precisely the kind of
response which allows those positive aesthetic qualities to be experienced at all. But if aes-
thetic-emotional experience and cognitive background are not necessarily or at least not
often in tension, then Carlson’s point stands, and the thin-sublime response indeed seems
less valuable than a more scientifically informed response. Since the question of whether
scientific background knowledge is in tension with the perception of aesthetic qualities
like ‘beauty’, ‘grace’, or ‘sublimity’ will depend on the particularities of the spectator and
the experience, I ask the reader to check her own experiences against these possibilities.
In what follows, however, I shall adduce some reasons why the acquisition of scientific
understanding and an experience of thick sublimity, in particular, are not in tension.
More decisive is the second reason why Carroll’s experience of being ‘emotionally
moved’ by the cascade seems prima facie less valuable than an experience informed by
greater scientific-cognitive background: being ‘emotionally moved’ à la Carroll sticks to
the surface of engagement with the self in relation to the waterfall. It is important to note
that this is not a criticism that Carlson has made of Carroll’s view; rather, it is one that

22 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1901), 69–70.
12 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

I seek to motivate in order to show later on why thick-sublime experience is more valuable
within Carlson’s theory.
Contrast Carroll’s thin-sublime experience with a thick-sublime experience such as
that which Romantic Cuban poet José María Heredia attempts to capture and evoke in
Niagara (1825 version). Here, the lyric voice expresses that he ‘yearned for the extraor-
dinary and the sublime’, and sought it out in vain until he experienced North America’s
most famous cascade:
The furious hurricane unleashed,
or the thunderbolt booming over my head,
my heart raced with joy. I saw the oceans,
lashed by howling southern winds,
rage against my ship and open
chasms before me, and I loved the danger,
the fury I loved. But all that fierceness
did not move me
as does this your grandeur.
You flow serene, majestic, and then
crashing onto sharp rugged rocks,
violently you dash forward, relentless
like destiny, irresistible and blind.
What human voice could describe
the terrifying spectacle
of those roaring rapids? My mind
is lost in vague thoughts,
reflecting on the seething current
that my clouded vision vainly tries
to follow as it sweeps to the wide edge
of so high a cliff. A thousand waves,
moving rapidly like thoughts,
clash in wild fury;
another thousand, and yet another rush to join them,
and amid foam and clamour they disappear.23
While in the thin sublime the subject brings to bear only a basic cognitive appraisal of
the cascade as both powerful and large, in the thick-sublime experience as captured in
this poem the subject engages in a play of ideas concerning the relative size and power of
the waterfall to a human being. The flow of the water is ‘relentless/ like destiny, irresist-
ible and blind’; the ‘human voice’ is inadequate for describing the ‘terrifying spectacle’
and the poet’s ‘clouded vision’ is also inadequate to the task of following the ‘seething
current’. The spectacle leads the poet’s mind to be ‘lost in vague thoughts’ mirrored
in the ‘thousand waves, moving rapidly like thoughts’. A few stanzas further, the poem

23 José María Heredia, Torrente Prodigioso: A Cuban Poet at Niagara Falls, ed. and trans. Keith Ellis (Toronto: Lugus, 1997).
Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 13

continues ‘Free, generous, strong spirits approach,/ observe you, and are amazed;/
henceforth they spurn frivolous delights and feel uplifted at the mention of your name’,
and the lyric voice here expresses an oscillation between human limitations both cogni-
tive and existential within this environment, and also the feeling of being ‘uplifted’ by
Niagara’s grandeur. Cognitive engagement along these multidimensional lines, that is,
reflection on the relationship between a powerful natural phenomenon and the human
subject who contemplates it, would constitute a deeper engagement with the place of the
human being within this environment.
It might be objected, however, that Carlson and his followers need not take the appre-
ciating subject into account in the way of the thick-sublime response, for while they must
surely grant that the human spectator is a part of the environment and that by directing
her attention here (and not there) the appreciator does frame the environment in some
way, nonetheless it seems they may still reject the notion that reflection on the place of
the framer in the environment should be an integral part of that experience. However,
it is actually a consequence (though an unacknowledged one) of Carlson’s injunction to
appreciate nature as an environment rather than as a discrete object that invites and even
sometimes demands subjective reflection in experiences of the environmental sublime.
While objects obviously tend to have pretty determinate contours, natural environments
have much hazier boundaries and are in need of more subjective framing. Further, and
crucially, sublime environments tend to be vast or to contain overwhelmingly powerful
forces that bring the issue of the human appreciator/framer right to the fore. Thus, espe-
cially with respect to sublime environments, the environmental focus enjoined by scien-
tific cognitivism implicates the subject in the aesthetic experience in a manner that has
gone largely unnoticed by this theory. I will revisit this issue in what follows, but the main
point I wish to make is that the thick sublime, because of its inclusion of reflection on the
place of the human spectator in nature, better meets the directive to treat nature as both
natural and as an environment than the thin sublime, insofar as environments (as opposed to
discrete objects) are in need of subjective framing, and sublime environments in particu-
lar make the acts of framing and appreciating disinterestedly especially salient.

Carlson and the Thick Sublime

In his work, Carlson has not specifically addressed the kind of thick-sublime experience
I have described, but from what he has written concerning other, similar approaches to
nature appreciation it seems an implication of the theory that it would brand the response
as aesthetically inappropriate. The closest he has come in his work to addressing some-
thing like it is what he calls the ‘metaphysical imagination model’,24 which he finds in
Hepburn’s work and describes as follows:
According to this view, our imagination interprets nature as revealing metaphysical
insights: insights about the whole of experience, about the meaning of life, about the
human condition, about humankind’s place in the cosmos. Thus, this model includes

24 Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 10–11.

14 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature those abstract meditations and specu-

lations about the true nature of reality that our encounters with nature frequently
engender in us.25
The main problem with this model for Carlson is that it involves an unacceptable degree
of subjectivity. In inviting us to ‘entertain in our aesthetic appreciation of nature deep
meditations and possibly wild speculations’,26 the metaphysical imagination model wel-
comes potentially idiosyncratic meditations which have no real relation to the natural
environment being appreciated. Insofar as the model gives us no reliable criterion by
which to separate the meditations which focus on and reveal nature for what it is from the
ones which are ‘only trivial and fanciful’, it invites an overly subjective approach to the
appreciation of nature.27 But does this objection hold for the model of the thick sublime?
The thick-sublime response I have theorized must be seen as overly subjective if and
only if reflection on the place of the subject in the natural environment is banished from
appropriate aesthetic experience altogether. But it would be a mistake for the environ-
mental aesthetician to banish from appropriate appreciation such reflection on the subject
within the natural environment, for four main reasons. First, as discussed above, the human
being who beholds the natural environment is obviously a physical part of the environ-
ment. Second, the human being does not experience the natural environment ‘from
nowhere’; insofar as the human being appreciating the environment inevitably does some
framing of the natural environment as a condition for the possibility of experiencing it
at all, it seems quite appropriate to reflect at least in part on the framer and the activity
of framing. Third, the environmental focus of scientific cognitivism itself invites a cer-
tain attention to the framing subject insofar as the boundaries of an environment are
more subjectively imposed than in an experience with a discrete object. Fourth, a sub-
lime environment, precisely because of its vastness or fearsomeness fairly demands that
the aesthetic appreciator take some notice of the relationships between the subject who
frames and appreciates aesthetically and the environment to which she attends. Thus,
in attending to a natural environment it seems perfectly legitimate, even in some cases
required, to appreciate the fact both that the subject is part of that environment physi-
cally and provides the frame for her experience of the environment. Ultimately, the key
question for environmental aesthetics then becomes what sort of subjective reflection is
appropriate, not whether any subjective reflection at all is appropriate.
In order to answer this question, scientific cognitivism may look to science for guid-
ance. What our best science may very well rule out as inappropriate is a reflection on the
human subject as having dominion over God’s creation within this environment—such
reflection is fanciful insofar as infused with non-scientific, religious speculation; or sci-
ence may, for example, rule out reflection on the human being as wholly discontinuous
from other animals in nature—insofar as evolutionary biology tells us otherwise. But it

25 Ibid., 10. See Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values 5 (1996),
191–204.
26 Ibid., 10.
27 Ibid., 11.
Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 15

remains consistent with scientific understanding to reflect on the oddness of the human
being’s feeling of free will; the apparent ability to act in a non-egoistic fashion, say, even
in the face of an existentially threatening storm; or the strangeness of a human being’s
desire to fathom nature in its totality, as well as the recognition of the difficulty (and per-
haps impossibility) of this goal. In short, some subjective reflection seems perfectly con-
sistent with what our best science tells us about the relationship between human beings
and nature—call this ‘intersubjectively valid reflection’—while some does not. Science
does not explain many of the oddities of the human condition—the feeling of freedom,
the phenomenon of consciousness, the relation of the mind and the brain, the nature of
normativity in general, and whether there is a purpose or meaning to human life, among
many others, nor does it rule out reflection on these and other very old, philosophical
questions.28
Another sort of subjective reflection ruled out by Carlson’s theory is any reflection
that compromises the disinterestedness of the aesthetic experience. Thus, appropriate
aesthetic appreciation of the environment of Niagara Falls, for instance, may include a
moment when the appreciator considers her relative power to that of the cascade, but not
a moment of personal terror and vertigo, as this sort of experience lacks sufficient disin-
terestedness to be environment-focused.
One might raise another worry, however, about the compatibility of thick-sublime
experience with scientific cognitivism: as in Twain’s river experience quoted above,
greater scientific understanding of certain natural environments and phenomena may
threaten to rob a person of the experience of awe, wonder, and being overwhelmed by an
environment. Is this the case with the thick sublime?
Just the opposite seems to me more likely for the case of the sublime (both thin and
thick), for no matter how much one knows about the geology and ecology of Niagara, the
cascade will always present a physical power much greater than the individual and will
likely make a spectator feel overwhelmed by comparison. Second, understanding more
about the ecology and natural history of Niagara—for instance, that 3,160 tons of water
flows over the falls every second; that the water hits the base of the falls with 280 tons
of force; that four of the five Great Lakes drain into the Niagara River; and that the falls
formed at the end of the last Ice Age when glaciers two miles thick melted—is likely to
deepen a sense of awe and wonder at this phenomenon.29
Similarly, the experience of finitude and reflection on the place of humanity in the
environment will likely persist no matter how much scientific background one brings to
the sight of the starry night sky. Given the vastness of the phenomenon, the long duration
of the stars, and the mind-boggling scale of the universe, it seems likely for a subject’s
experience of the thick sublime to be deepened by scientific understanding, by prompting

28 For a well-motivated account of how certain philosophical problems such as the mind–body problem seem
completely intractable given the kinds of cognitive faculties human beings have, see Colin McGinn, The Mysterious
Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), esp. ch. 7. And before him, Thomas
Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435–50.
29 Facts gleaned from the New York State Parks Services website <http://www.niagarafallsstatepark.com> accessed
1 May 2012.
16 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

more-informed reflection on how infinitesimally small she is in the universe, how short a
human lifespan is, and even how brief the human species has walked this planet, in com-
parison with the spatial and temporal vastness of the night sky.
Earlier, I cited two phenomenological descriptions of sublime experiences by Muir and
Webster, both of whom brought tremendous scientific knowledge to their experiences of
those environments. In neither case did that knowledge prevent them from experiencing
those environments as sublime; just the opposite seems to have been the case. Thus, the
Twain objection seems to pose no significant threat to experiences of sublimity within
Carlson’s scientific cognitivism.
It might be objected, however, that at least some experiences of the thick sublime
depend on the sense of human cognitive limitation, and insofar as scientific understanding
diminishes or eliminates that feeling of cognitive limitation in response to a natural envi-
ronment, then, a thick sublime response is no longer appropriate. Indeed, this may be the
case with some phenomena, like rainbows, which have for some numbered among sub-
lime natural phenomena. While rainbows were not well understood before the eighteenth
to nineteenth centuries, contemporary science has adequately illuminated the phenom-
enon. Given the requisite background of scientific-cognitive understanding, in the face of
such a demystified phenomenon, it is inappropriate to respond to it in a thickly sublime
way with reflections upon the limits of human knowledge and place of the human being in
the natural world. The experience of the rainbow as beautiful is thus more of an appropri-
ate aesthetic response by the lights of scientific cognitivism. However, there may still be
room for a legitimately sublime response to a rainbow’s vast size or perhaps in aesthetic
reflection on the complexity of the forces that brought it about. I wish only to point out
that awe at the cognitive limitations of humankind in the presence of a rainbow is misplaced
within scientific cognitivism.
Yet, while our best science has certainly illuminated many natural phenomena which
were former mysteries, it has also highlighted the fact that there are persistent, though not
necessarily intractable, scientific mysteries. Take again for instance a paradigmatically
sublime phenomenon—the starry night sky—which, for Kant was one of the two main
phenomena which ‘fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the
oftener and more steadily we reflect on them’.30 While the nature of the stars and the
planets is much better understood now than 200 years ago (through the fields of astron-
omy and physics), the night sky still affords plenty of scientific mystery. Is the universe
expanding or contracting? What kinds of matter ultimately make it up? Is the universe
such a complex, open thermodynamic system that the human mind has very little chance
of fathoming it in its totality?
Imagine gazing up at the night sky and bringing to bear a great deal of scientific under-
standing. One might take pleasure in the perceptual features of the dark sky, the vastness
of the vault, and the luminosity of its numerous points of light. In reflecting on what
science tells us about the nature of the universe, about the make-up of the stars, and
the length of time it takes for light to travel to Earth, for instance, one might therefore

30 Carlson himself refers to Kant’s famous phrase approvingly in his ‘Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation and Knowledge’,
JAAC 53 (1995), 393–400.
Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime | 17

justifiably respond to the night sky with some feeling of human respect in being able to
fathom so much (so much more than humans were able to fathom 500 years ago, for exam-
ple), but one might also feel, with equal justification, how limited our human understand-
ing really is. And this kind of experience of being moved by nature in a highly intellectual
fashion, with reflection on human cognitive advances and limitations, does not violate
the main tenets of Carlson’s environmental aesthetics, for this experience does attend to
what science tells us the starry sky really is. With respect to such a natural environment,
however, one of the things that our best science tells us is that the night sky is still full
of scientific mystery. Science thus gives us a new, informed appreciation for the depth of
these mysteries; in such a case, it supports thick sublime experience rather than diminish-
ing or eradicating it.
Further, it should be noted that in the above reconstruction of a thick sublime experi-
ence with the starry night sky, the appreciation does not treat the environment as a work
of art or as even a potential work of art, such as a landscape painting, as would be the case in
the picturesque tradition. Thus, as in thin-sublime response, thick sublime response need
not model environmental appreciation on an appreciation of art, and thus does not violate
the injunction to appreciate nature as natural.
In sum, feelings of awe and wonder, reflection on cognitive and existential limitations,
as well as reflection on human powers and our humble yet  also strangely exceptional
status within nature, have been and can be for many people, awakened through aesthetic
experience with vast or threatening natural environments, and it seems perfectly appro-
priate—by the lights of our best science and by the lights of scientific cognitivism—that
at least for some natural environments, this should be the case.

Conclusion
There is a legitimate though secondary place within Carlson’s environmental aesthetics
for an experience of the thin sublime, and there is a legitimate and important place within
it for the thick sublime with respect to many natural environments. I have endeavoured
to show that the thick sublime has a greater claim to being serious, worthwhile aesthetic
experience than the thin sublime because the former is truer to ‘what nature is’—namely
natural and an environment in which the spectator lives, and which the appreciator frames.
The natural environments that seem perfectly appropriate to experience aesthetically
in this thick sublime way are, first, those which our best science does not wholly ‘de-
mystify’ (unlike the case of the rainbow) or those for which scientific understanding is
liable to increase our wonder and awe (such as the night sky). Second, they are those
environments such as volcanic mountains, storms at sea, powerful cascades, or expanses
of desert which are rightly perceived to be physically threatening kinds of places to the
spectator, and which are liable to spark a play of ideas about human power and place in
nature. Third, they are those environments which are spatially and/or temporally vast,
such as mountain ranges, the ocean, the night sky, and primeval forests, as such places are
likely to awaken a play of ideas concerning the relative smallness and finitude of human
beings within nature. Such thoughts concerning human finitude and dependence, but
also human power and significance within nature, are intersubjectively valid rather than
18 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

merely idiosyncratic. Thus, one may bring quite a lot of scientific understanding to bear
on one’s aesthetic appreciation of nature and still legitimately respond aesthetically to cer-
tain environments as thin or thickly sublime. Provided that these responses are informed
by what our best science tells us, and are not idiosyncratic but rather intersubjectively
valid, they do not run afoul of the directive to appreciate nature for what it truly is.
There are a number of questions for further investigation that I hope will be taken up
by environmental aestheticians. What sorts of contemporary, metaphysically modest ideas
beyond those identified by Kant and Schopenhauer might contribute to the experience of
the thick sublime? Is an experience of the thin or thick sublime compatible with positive
aesthetics? And if the experience of the sublime is the distinctive pleasure of tragedy, as
Burke and Schopenhauer thought it was, might some facets of nature be appropriately
experienced as tragic from the standpoint of scientific cognitivism?31

Sandra Shapshay
Indiana University, Bloomington
sshapsha@indiana.edu

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