Nature and landscape

Summary

Dominique Pagani distinguishes nature from landscape. He reserves the word nature for what the human hand has not touched. He calls landscape the compromise between what nature gives and what humans have shaped, and draws for this on the history of the words campagne and paese1. He takes up Hegel's formula that nature copies art. He dates the invention of natural beauty to the end of the eighteenth century: the Industrial Revolution then pushes back a nature that stops being threatening, whereas Madame de Sévigné still fled the sight of mountains2. Between Poussin's ordered nature and Friedrich's night, he places the French Revolution1. For him, even raw nature is never looked at immediately, and the rigorous concept is that of matter. Starting from Rousseau's Emile, he links the beauty of landscape to freedom and property: the Romantic alienates in nature a freedom of which the relations of production deprive him. With regard to Wagner's Ring, he notes that the beauty of landscape and erotic beauty can exchange their functions3.

1. 1#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?25 Jan 2019
2. 2Education: can beauty be learned?20 Jul 2018
3. 3#9.13 How can sciences of history be real?29 Jan 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.