Mountain Gloom And Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite

"You asked for my five book choices about the philosophy of travel, but the philosophy of travel doesn’t exist in a coherent way. So, I’ve simply picked books about travel which engage with various philosophical issues. They are, if you like, thoughtful books about travel. My first choice is a book by Marjorie Hope Nicolson called Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. It was written in the 1950s and it was the very first book, as far as I’m aware, that makes the argument that the philosophy of space had a huge impact on mountain tourism. “In theory she was a professor of literature, but in reality she delved into science and philosophy and anything else that she fancied” Nicolson was a literary scholar at Columbia University. In theory she was a professor of literature, but in reality she delved into science and philosophy and anything else that she fancied. This book is highly readable. She has a very pleasant, direct style. She makes it seem effortless, the way she weaves together the science and the philosophy and poetry. She explores the ideas around absolute space we discussed earlier, and also absolute time. This is the idea that time is an infinite, eternal container, identified with God. People were also beginning to shrug off biblical ideas of creation as happening four to six thousand years ago. So she argues that people were getting a sense of geological time for the first time and she thinks that that also feeds into this fresh appreciation of mountains. They’re giving you a sense of the timescales that God is working at. This stuff actually comes first. The way that Nicolson describes it is that these philosophers of space and time are laying the foundations for an aesthetics of the infinite, for an appreciation of infinite-seeming things, like mountain ranges. The sublime comes quite a bit later. These absolute theories of space and time are all invented from 1650 to 1690 and she thinks they began to seep through into poetry and literature and then into travel around the early 1700s, so in the early 18th century. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She picks on Thomas Burnett, who was a philosopher and a scientist. He wrote an amazing book called The Theory of the Earth that seeks to explain everything in the universe. It starts with the way our Earth was created and the way geology works, how mountains and seas form. She thinks that Burnett was a transitional figure. On the one hand, he’s picking up these ideas about absolute space and time and he seems to be applying them to mountains. He talks with awe about how big they are, how they are God’s handiwork on Earth. On the other hand, he’s still a bit repulsed by them. She thinks that he is a midway point between these absolute theories of space and what would become the full-blown aesthetics that you get in poets like Byron, who are describing mountains as cathedrals. Yes! For these guys, the emphasis is what’s out there, not their reactions to it."