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Show 374. Muir thought of aesthetic distance, which is synonymous with disinterested aesthetic judgment, as a reprehensible habit in Ruskin, whom he characterized as superintending and reporting on Nature "with the conceit and lofty importance of a factor of a duke's estate." "You can never feel that there is the slightest union betwixt Nature and him." Since beauty was what mortals called something which was really eternal, so too all aesthetic categories told one about humans, about Man's limitations. When men began to organize their observations of Nature into categories, they ceased to wonder. Emerson had said as much to Muir, while wandering with Muir in Mariposa Grove: "The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more!" This is a philosophical position directly opposed to that of the humanist, particularly the new humanist, who argues, (1) that philosophical assumptions are unavoidable, (2) that the essential quality of experience is not natural but ethical, (3) that there is a sharp dualism between human beings and Nature, and (4) that human will is free. Unlike Emerson, the humanist could not say enough for Man's wonderful capacity to wonder. For a humanist there is a real distinction between what men call sublime and what men call beautiful in Nature. For him, the aesthetic categories of men are more important than the seamless whole of the universe. In this sense, aesthetic categories, when applied to a landscape, become part and parcel with men's desire to dominate Nature, since such categories divide and conquer by reducing Nature to human-sized |