Nature as Landscape: Dwelling and Understanding

Patrick Colgan is associate director of programs at the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

Where to begin? This book is certainly not about where to plant your
roses (gardens are considered only as “mirrors of paradise”) or
about the personal or social value of wildlife. The author, a professor
emeritus of biology at Dalhousie University, is familiar with botany,
German philosophy, and literature critical of the positivist tradition
within which science has prospered. Accompanying his attack on
positivism is a call for the development of an approach to the world
that does not artificially estrange humans but draws on perceptual
experience in which nature provides landscapes.

The flavor of the book’s presentation is seen in such non-German
sources as Buber, Eliade, J.J. Gibson, Levy-Bruhl, Merleau Ponty, Ortega
Y Gasset, Michael Polanyi, and several semioticians. The material cited
is broad but unintegrated and lopsided, with apparently germane issues
and contributors missing. The narrative darts among topics and sources
with little discernible logic. Some statements are false or contestable
(e.g., “If we are to attain an objective view of the world, the
subjective world must be eliminated”), while others are
incomprehensible (e.g., “[Nature and humankind] are linked in an
extraordinary manner in becoming what they not yet are”). There are
plentiful dichotomies, such as gnostic and pathic, but their values are
unclear. Each chapter concludes with a summary, but these repetitions of
mystical obscurities do not help. Reproductions of a few paintings are
apparently intended to illustrate some point about a knowledgeable
perspective.

Certainly there are many interesting issues at the intersections of
epistemology, aesthetics, values, and psychopathology, but no advances
are given in this book, which instead seems cognitively affiliated with
the old joke “The riddle of the universe? 47!” Nature as Landscape
will make an excellent gift for the folks who like to do jigsaw puzzles
without the picture.