The paper will deal with Jan Patočka’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s remarks on the character and significance of the aesthetic experience of nature.
First, the paper will focus on Patočka’s reflections from his manuscript “Eternity and Historicity”. He speaks of the “alluring spectacle of nature”, of the “immensity” of nature’s “elements”. Everything in nature is a manifestation of “beauty, majesty, grandeur and sublimity”. But in this “rejuvenating, reviving experience” of nature, there is a kind of “emptiness and expectation”. Patočka points out that this attraction to the empty depths of nature is felt very strongly in some situations, especially when observing the eternal cycles of nature, the great theatres of the rhythmic movement of the universe.
Next, the paper will discuss the remarks on the enjoyment of nature that Levinas offers in his book “Totality and Infinity”. In nature, interiority is bathed in quality, but quality manifests itself as a determining nothing. The element is utterly anonymous; it is “wind, earth, sky, air, sea”. On the one hand, Levinas conceives the indeterminacy of the element, however, is not equal to infinity transcending boundaries. However, on the other hand, the enjoyment of the element is without security; it refers to the instability of happiness. Enjoyable qualities come by “a happy chance”.
It is remarkable that the way of characterising the double action of nature is almost identical in Patočka and Levinas. Both emphasise the negativity in the experience of nature, the indifference and “nocturnal” anonymity that speaks from nature despite the pleasures that nature provides. Both authors also conceive of the experienced anonymity and indifference of nature as prompting a movement of transcendence. In particular, the paper will point out that both authors promote the holistic character of the experience of nature. From this perspective, the paper will deal with the relation of Patočka’s and Levinas’s views to the contemporary theory of aesthetic atmospheres put forward by Gernot Böhme.