The missing sublime of nature

Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at my perfectly groomed holiday.

You can find the companion article here: “Live deliberately”: The origin of America’s first philosophy

It was the kind of holiday where you pay a month’s salary to get back in touch with nature. There’s a big swimming pool for the kids, adventure activities for the restless, and thousands of ancient redwoods for the tree-lovers.

“These trees can grow as old as 2,000 years,” the sign said, “but ours are 175 years old.”

One morning, as the cabin slept, I went for a sunrise stroll along the Cascade Way — a long gravel trail that ran alongside a stream. It was early enough and shaded enough to be perfectly cool, and about halfway along, as I turned a corner to see an especially handsome waterfall, I had a moment. I was stopped by the beauty of the scene. I gave a contented sigh. I felt myself falling into a warm, blanketed bed of absolute serenity. As far as I am concerned, just that single moment was worth the month’s salary.

But then, as I tend to do, I took it too far.

“I want to move to the woods,” I excitedly told my wife as I got back. “I want to live among the trees. I’m done with this exhausting choke of civilization. Take me to The Wild.”

A blank stare.

“See, look at this house.” I waved my phone in her face. “It’s got a lake! It’s got woods!”

“It’s in the middle of nowhere, Jonny.”

“But nature, babes. Nature.”

I’ve done this before. When I was 18 years old, I went on my first ever horse ride. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and, as countries go, Middle-earth is a great first place to start horse riding. But for months and months afterward, I harbored unvoiced fantasies about living in a cabin off in the wild. Jonny the Homesteader, living a life of bucolic purity. No one to bother me and no worries to have when you’re out riding in the woods.

But my holiday was not really nature. My horse riding was not really wild. And so, this week we look at the multilayered aspects of the wild.

Go well,
Jonny

In the mid-19th century, the American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau led the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism was a kind of mystical philosophy that argued religious truths are more often intuited than rationalized. We can feel the divine in many ways because we all possess a filament of that divine. But one of the best ways to do this is to be around nature. Go out into the woods, and you will find forces you cannot find in traditional worship. God is not easily found in temples, mosques, and churches. God is in chalky cliffsides, white-rushing rivers, and the frost-peaked mountains of the wild. So, get your hiking boots on. Get outside. Find God.

The problem is that when Emerson and Thoreau talked about “the wild,” they really only meant the closely manicured version most of us grew up with. Even in their own day, people pointed out that when the transcendentalists talked about “nature,” they really meant “park” or even “garden.” For example, when Thoreau wrote Walden, he lived a short walk away from his parents’ house. “We need the tonic of wildness,” he wrote, “…we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.” And then he’d pop home to have his mother wash his clothes.

This isn’t to say that Thoreau is wrong. Just as my semi-mystical experience along the Cascade Way was very real and important, Thoreau’s celebration of nature is absolutely spot on. Being around nature is good for us. Studies consistently show that even a tiny green pot plant can lighten your mood and that spending sustained time outdoors makes you happier. So yes, we do need “a tonic” of nature, but the point is that there is a difference between nature and the true wild.

The kind of nature most of us experience is different from the one our forebears knew. Unless you really go out of your way to live in an abandoned bus in Alaska, most of our nature is at least slightly maintained and mostly defanged. People dive into nature like a summer pool and hop right out when they’re done. Even if you like to sleep under a bivouac in the cold of February with an amber warning of passing bears, you sleep knowing that a good hospital is not far away. You know you’re a phone call away from help. Even during his three-week rainfalls, Thoreau knew he could get out and get warm if he wanted to.

To many living today — especially those of us living in towns and cities — nature is beautiful. It’s restorative and calming. We can get outside and sip our coffee to the pleasing chirping of birds. I’m sure this gentle, soft appreciation was true thousands of years ago, as well. An ancient Greek could just as much appreciate the Sun twinkling along the sea as I can. But to pre-modern people, nature wasn’t just beautiful. It was also sublime.

Edmund Burke was one of the first to make the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, but then Kant took the idea and pushed it along with Prussian rigor. The beautiful is what we enjoy. It’s the buds of spring, the wash of an ocean, and the dog’s sleeping head in your lap. It’s pleasant. Most importantly, it’s safe. The sublime is what we dread or, perhaps, revere. It’s the heavy sheet of a winter blizzard, the crashing waves of a storm, and the distant howling of wolves. The sublime is both awesome and awful. It’s a great, terrible power that can utterly annihilate you. We are drawn to the sublime, and we even enjoy it a bit, but we enjoy it with a kind of morbid or masochistic frisson.

My woodland holiday was a beautiful nature retreat. It was a break from sirens and smoggy traffic. I saw more squirrels than I did pigeons for the first time in forever. But there were still roads and bikes zooming about. The Lakeside Shop sold microwave pizza, and the trees had signs.

I have never experienced the true sublimity of nature. I’ve never known the very real possibility that I could be maimed or killed by forces far bigger than me. I’ve never known the true fear that no one is out there to help me if worst comes to worst. I’ve never been battered or humbled by nature. In my leafy Oxfordshire bubble, humanity has hacked nature into a pretty and well-groomed country estate.

The myths and stories of old spoke about the wild in a way I no longer can. The religions and philosophies of a thousand years ago knew a nature with real depth — a nature that could awe you, humble you, swallow you whole. I have the beautiful, and they had the sublime. And I can’t, for the life of a newsletter, work out who’s better off.

What do you think?

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.