* This is the third installation of “Problematica.” It is written by Max Dresow…
Hugh Miller (1802–1856) is nowadays little remembered, but for a time he was a literary sensation admired by authors as diverse as Tennyson and Carlyle. An expert on the geology of his native Scotland, his fame was built rather upon his talents as a writer. In Miller’s hands, geology was mingled with spectacle and transmuted into poetry. Consider the following passage, which describes a vision that came upon him while he was examining a seaside cliff near Oban. At this place, a mass of slate was overlain unconformably by the rock known as Old Red Sandstone. Evidently, “[in] the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base of the [sandstone] was formed,” the slate had been upturned, “and the sweep of water, mingled with broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges” (Miller 1858, 21). From here, Miller launches into a kind of reverie in which the meaning of the rocks is unfolded with prophetic intensity:
There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive… than those which… are to be found in stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras, —the monuments of consecutive creations… [;] and, as in a sea-scene in nature… the distance seems not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects—we borrow a larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of the measured periods that occur between. (Miller 1858, 21–22)
Why resurrect the memory of Hugh Miller over 150 years after he died by his own hand? Simply put, I think Miller causes problems for the position known as “historical cognitivism” in aesthetics (so named by Derek Turner and previously discussed on this very weblog). I will say what these problems are in a moment. First, it will be useful to have a primer on historical cognitivism, and this means digging into Turner’s Paleoaesthetics and the Practice of Paleontology.
Turner’s starting point is the claim that scientific knowledge enhances our aesthetic engagement with natural objects. It does this by attuning us to the “aesthetic qualities” of these objects: qualities that inspire wonder in appropriately situated subjects, say. Turner does not say that only scientific knowledge can attune us to these qualities. His cognitivism “stops short of making [scientific knowledge] a necessary condition for proper aesthetic engagement” (Turner 2020, 23). Still, he seems to think that people with scientific knowledge are always “better positioned to appreciate landscapes, fossils, and other things in nature” than those without it. Indeed, I read Turner as claiming that scientific knowledge is a privileged source of aesthetic engagement with nature, although none of my comments hinge on this particular reading.
Turner calls his position historical cognitivism because he is interested in how our aesthetic engagement with natural objects is enhanced by “knowledge of the history of those things” (Turner 2020, 20). But ironically, Turner’s own position faces a challenge from history. This arises because he does not just say that knowledge of the past “deepens and enhances our engagement with [natural objects].” He also claims that ignorance of history limits aesthetic engagement and that false beliefs corrupt it. Grant for a moment that all this is true. My question is: what should we then make of old Hugh Miller?
A portrait of Hugh Miller with stonemason’s tools taken in 1843. Miller was trained as a stonemason and later suffered from silicosis, which may have been implicated in his death by suicide
Let me explain. At first blush, Miller seems to be grist for Turner’s mill. Certainly he does not resemble those figures Turner conjures as foils: the unscientific romantic, fully immersed in his immediate experience, and the contemporary creationist, blithely indifferent to scientific consensus. But there is a problem. Miller’s geology, while respectable for its time, is seriously out of date. It is not that it contains no truths, but judged by twenty-first century standards, these are mingled with all manner of half-truths and outright fictions. The question is whether this undermines Miller’s aesthetic experience, or to use Turner’s language, prevents him from achieving the same level of aesthetic engagement as a twenty-first century geologist. Historical cognitivism suggests an affirmative answer. False beliefs undermine aesthetic engagement, so Miller should be incapable of achieving the same level of engagement as his modern counterparts (all else being equal). But this conclusion sits uncomfortably with the historical record. Past geologists do not seem to have been systematically impaired in their aesthetic engagement with nature. To the contrary, geologists like Miller were marvels of aesthetic sensibility whose exploits have scarcely been matched in the recent history of science.
Historical cognitivism, then, faces a historical challenge. According to cognitivism, the capacity for aesthetic engagement ought to increase as scientific knowledge increases—at least roughly, and assuming people have not changed in their innate ability to achieve aesthetic engagement or in their willingness to seek out aesthetic experiences. But this does not seem to be the case. So historical cognitivism is fishy.
A second example will sharpen the critique. In 1858, the future director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, Archibald Geikie (1835–1924), published a book called The Story of a Boulder. It was intended as an introduction to geology for a lay audience, and focused on the explanation of an “erratic block”: basically, a hunk of rock found somewhere it isn’t supposed to be. Geikie begins with a vivid landscape description that reveals him to be, in historian David Oldroyd’s words, a “romantic aesthete”:
Three miles to the south-west of Edinburgh… there is a ravine, overshadowed by a thick growth of beech and elm, and traversed beneath by a stream, which… winds through the rich champaign country of Mid-Lothan. It is, at all seasons of the year, one of the most picturesque nooks in the country. I have seen it in the depth of winter—the leafless bough doddered and dripping, the rocks dank and bare save where half-hidden by rotting herbage… The last time I visited was in the heart of June. The beech trees were in full leaf… ; festoons of ivy, with here and there a thread of honeysuckle interwoven, hung gracefully from the cliffs overhead… (Geikie 1858, 1–2)
Geikie continues in this vein for several pages until we meet the eponymous boulder, which at first appears to be just a rock in the forest. “It had an irregularly oblong form, about two or three feet long, and half as high. Ferns and herbage were grouped about it, the wood-sorrel clustered up its sides, and little patches of moss and lichen nestled in its crevices” (Geikie 1858, 4). So far, this is standard boulder stuff. And yet, Geikie claims, “there was something about it that… riveted my attention.” “The more I looked the more did I see that interested me; and when, after a little labour, some portions of its upper surface were detached, my curiosity was abundantly gratified.”
But what can be “remarkable in such a grey stone, hidden in a wood[?]” The question takes Geikie 250 pages to answer. Not the least surprising thing we learn along the way is that the stone was once embedded in an iceberg during a time when the entire area was covered by a shallow sea. This accounts for its dissimilarity from the surrounding rock; the stone was carried to its resting place from afar, “[like] a sculpted obelisk transported from the plains of Assyria to the streets of London” (Geikie 1858, 258). Geikie proceeds to imagine “a wide arctic sea, studded with icebergs that come drifting from the north. Here and there a bare barren islet rises above the waste of waters, and the packed ice-floes often strand along its shores, while at other parts great towering bergs… keep rising and falling with the heavings of the surge” (259). The imagery is arresting: icebergs above Edinburgh! And yet it is wrong. The hypothesis was discredited around the time Geikie’s book appeared, replaced with a theory of giant overland ice sheets that remains broadly credible to this day. Geikie soon accepted this (see Geikie 1863, 74), and we can imagine him returning to the same ravine years later and having a rather different aesthetic experience.
“William Walker’s Stone,” a glacial erratic in West Yorkshire. This is much larger than Geikie’s boulder, but it gives an idea of how such an object might stand out from its surroundings “like a sculpted obelisk transported from the plains of Assyria to the streets of London”
Still, does this mean that something was lacking about his earlier aesthetic engagement with the landscape? Again, a historical cognitivist must answer “yes.” False beliefs undermine aesthetic engagement and Geikie mistakenly identified the boulder as something other than a glacial erratic. But it isn’t clear how Geikie’s engagement with the landscape was undermined by his belief that the rock arrived via an iceberg rather than an overland ice sheet. Geikie’s false belief seems to have oriented him perfectly well to the aesthetic qualities of the boulder: things like its overall composition and morphology, its position in the ravine, and its difference from the underlying rocks. Sure, an advocate of the ice sheet hypothesis would have explained these features differently, but it seems unlikely that such a geologist would have alighted on features that Geikie failed to identify. This suggests that the falsity of the iceberg hypothesis was irrelevant to Geikie’s aesthetic engagement. His false belief served him just as well as a true one would have. But if this is right, then historical cognitivism needs a tune-up. At least it does not seem to be the case that false beliefs always undermine aesthetic experience or produce shallower engagement than true beliefs, all else being equal. (Adrian Currie has reached a similar conclusion based on a thought experiment, which leads him to reject the “factive” component of Turner’s position.)
* * *
So far this discussion has resounded with the “dull thud of conflicting intuitions.” Is there any way of getting around this to gain some real traction on the matter? One option is to examine Turner’s examples of aesthetic engagement gone awry and see whether they really support his conclusions. Doing so suggests that Turner may have been misled by their apparent simplicity to claim more than they warrant. For example, Turner relates the story of a wealthy collector who paid a large sum of money for a coprolite (a fossil turd) that turned out to be just a lumpy stone. In Turner’s words, “The buyer is a bit like the creationist who goes to the Grand Canyon and marvels about how Noah’s flood could have carved out such a quantity of rock” (Turner 2020, 22). In both cases, “[there] is some aesthetic engagement going on, but it is misfiring badly.” Yet the only reason Turner gives for thinking that something is wrong with the buyer’s aesthetic engagement is that “[our] aesthetic appreciation of [an] object depends on what we believe it to be. And our beliefs can turn out to be false” (21). Granted. But this only shows that false beliefs, if a subject comes to regard them as false, can alter the subject’s aesthetic appreciation of an object. More is required to show that false beliefs corrupt aesthetic engagement while they are sincerely believed, or that true beliefs are always more conducive to aesthetic engagement than false ones.
What the cognitivist needs is an account of how true beliefs direct us to the aesthetically relevant features of natural objects. Without this, it is hard to see why scientific knowledge should be especially conducive to aesthetic engagement or why false belief should corrupt it. Turner mentions that rocks and fossils can “connect us” to places, which presumably means they can change our experience of a place by revealing features of its history that are invisible to naïve observers (Turner 2020, 9). But this fails to explain why false beliefs about the past are aesthetically problematic. Are false beliefs incapable of fostering a sense of place or connecting us to the places we inhabit? To answer “yes” is to deny myth and tradition any role in these matters except insofar as they converge on historical truth. This strikes me as problematic (but, ya know, thud thud).
My own way of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and aesthetic experience focuses on the kind of attentiveness knowledge makes possible. I agree with Turner that scientific knowledge is not necessary for a “proper” appreciation of something like a landscape. But as Helen Gordon points out, “if you do have this [knowledge], something changes about the way you exist in that space.”
A named landscape thickens. It’s to do with history and context but also… with the quality of attention. To assign something its [scientific] name, you need to take the time to pick out identifying features. You look for longer. And the more you know, the more things stop being a backdrop… and become somehow more present in view, more insistently themselves, the way a familiar face stands out in a crowd. (Gordon 2021, 273)
This is Geikie before the boulder. What an ordinary person would overlook Geikie found riveting. It was because he (thought he) knew what he was looking at that he knew it didn’t belong. It stood out like an obelisk on the streets of London. But geology showed how it hung together. The rock, the ravine, the heavings of ancient icebergs—history resolved the discordance into a greater harmony. It scarcely matters that the most important part of the story turned out to be false. What mattered for his aesthetic engagement was that his attention was fixed on that boulder, which led him to trace out a chain of implications in an ever-widening circle.
Knowledge, then, is a thickening agent. It is one of several things that gives new hues and textures to experience, focusing attention on otherwise unremarkable features and providing pointers for the imagination. For Miller, geology turned an eroded contact between rocks into a magic portal, giving onto the vast sea of time. This vision was not precluded by those elements of his thought that turned out to be false. Arguably it was even facilitated by them. In Miller’s writings, sacred and geological history were superimposed in a way that imbued his subject with a heady mix of religious and quasi-mythical overtones (O’Connor 2007). This was a potent source of aesthetic engagement, and I gather a key part of his appeal to the public that clambered for his books. But—I would like to suggest—it was only possible because of the limitations and distortions of his geological knowledge. It is difficult to imagine anything resembling Miller’s reveries emerging from the geology of today, and in this sense, at least, false beliefs served his aesthetic engagement better than true ones ever could have.
John Martin’s “The Great Day of His Wrath,” painted between 1851 and 1853. Apocalyptic spectacle like this was a potent source of associations for early geologists and their readers, not least because it mingled concrete details with broader themes and generalities (see O’Connor 2007, especially Ch. 7). This particular work was inspired by the Book of Revelation, with its geological overtones: "... and, lo, there was a great earthquake and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together and every mountain and island were moved out of their places"
In closing, let me consider a response available to Turner. The historical cognitivist might grant that aesthetic engagement has to do with quality of attention, while still maintaining that there is something special about true belief. All this requires is that true beliefs be especially good at highlighting the aesthetic qualities of objects, such that a person in the grips of a false belief is unlikely to alight on the relevant features. As I have indicated, the cognitivist lacks a well-developed account of how this is supposed to work, but my examples are not incompatible with this interpretation. Take Miller standing before the unconformity at Oban. There is much about Miller’s geology that is false, but Miller was not wrong to think that angular unconformities represent large stretches of elapsed time. His reverie was accordingly sparked by a correct observation. He took himself to be looking at an angular unconformity and indeed he was. With Geikie the situation is different. Geikie did not realize that his boulder was a glacial hitchhiker, but he did realize that it was an erratic block, which means he caught part of the truth. What the cognitivist must insist is that, in these and similar cases, the quality of aesthetic engagement is responsive to whatever share of the truth a person manages to lay hold of. False beliefs are the “idle wheels” of aesthetic experience or worse. They never contribute to aesthetic engagement and frequently, or perhaps always, detract from it.
Still, to reiterate my central concern, I see no reason to think that true beliefs are especially good at directing us to the aesthetic qualities of objects, or that false beliefs thwart aesthetic engagement. The creationist at the Grand Canyon is wrong, but they commit no aesthetic sin in marveling at the awesome force of past diluvial action, the magnitude of God’s wrath, and the geological consequences of human wickedness. In the same vein, Miller’s aesthetic experience was not debased for regarding rocks as “hieroglyphic characters” telling of “the Creator’s journeyings of old… —of earth gulfs that opened… [and] fiery plagues that devastated the dry land, and of hosts more numerous than that of Pharaoh, that ‘sank like lead in the mighty waters’” (Miller 1858, 87). One finds no trace of these “sublime revelations” in modern geology, nor of the “vivid imagery they conjure up.” But are they less sublime for this? I think not.
References
Currie, A.M. 2021. Epistemic engagement, aesthetic value & scientific practice. British Journal for Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/714802.
Geikie, A. 1858. The Story of a Boulder: or, Gleanings from the Note-Book of a Field Geologist. Edinburgh: Constable.
Geikie, A. 1863. On the Phenomena of the Glacial Drift in Scotland. Glasgow: John Gray.
Gordon, H. 2021. Notes from Deep Time: A Journey through our Past and Future Worlds. London: Profile Books.
Miller, H. 1858. The Cruise of the Betsey: or, a Summer Holiday in the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist. Edinburgh: Constable.
Miller, H. 1859. Sketch-Book of Popular Geology; Being a Series of Lectures Delivered Before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society. Edinburgh: Constable.
O’Connor, R. 2007. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Oldroyd, D. 1980. Sir Archibald Geikie (1835–1924), geologist, romantic aesthete, and historian of geology: the problem of whig historiography of science. Annals of Science 37:441–462.
Turner, D. 2019. Paleoaesthetics and the Practice of Paleontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.