Sunday, June 5, 2016

On "nature" and ontology

"[A]n aesthetic appreciation of nature, if serious, is necessarily a self-exploration also; for the energies, regularities, contingencies of nature are the...[same] that sustain my own embodied life and my own awareness. Nature may be "other" to us, but we are no less conatural with it. We do not simply look out upon nature as we look at the sea's drama from a safe shore: the shore is no less nature, and so too is the one who looks."

(from article "Trivial and serious in aesthetic appreciation of nature," R.W. Hepburn in the book "Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts," Kemal and Gaskell editors, Cambridge UP 1993, pg. 69)

As John Muir said, "I found that by going out, I was also going in."

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