However, that is not my experience, and I would challenge the idea that a city-dweller who has never seen or heard of the mountains would experience no unusual psychological response from teleporting to the top of Mont Blanc on a clear summer day. — TJO

I'd say from experience it goes both ways. These days I live in a small city surrounded by awesome mountains. So taking a trip back to one of the world's big cities is pretty awesome as a contrast.

Psychologically, I think you are only talking about the sense of arousal we get from something "high contrast", something that is out of scale with the familiar. The arousal can be read as frightening or exhilarating depending on our mindset. It depends upon whether we are judging the situation as something to approach or avoid.

So there is no necessity that the top of a mountain, or the busy centre of London, be either frightening or awesome. That bit of the feeling is down to some further judgement. But if the environment has a high contrast with your familiar environment, it is going to be arousing in some way. You will be feeling like wanting to make some sense of its novelty.

Another quick point about the aesthetics of nature. I would argue we are also aesthetically tuned to the recognition of symmetry. We like highly regular shapes that approach some ideal limit. But that explains the appeal of cubes and spheres, not the roughness and jaggedness of your typical spectacular landscape.

However a spectacular landscape does have a perfect fractal symmetry. It has an ideal balance in its self-similarity or scale-free shape. So a tree or fern is lovely because it has a self-similar branching structure - completely regular in the irregular way it forks. Same with river networks or eroding mountains and coastlines.

We can of course appreciate this natural symmetry in a fern or tree quite easily. But to see the fractal nature of a landscape, we do have to have a big vista. We have to step back far enough to see nature over a lot of the scales all at once. Hence another reason why mountain climbing is an aesthetic experience.

TJO the human reaction to dramatic landscapes - which we distinguish from beautiful, peaceful ones - is generally filed under the category of the 'Sublime'. There has been much written about this in aesthetics. It is contrasted with beauty, because the sublime is associated with things that can be frightening - eg dark, craggy, dangerous looking mountains or ferocious seas.

One of the most influential writings on this was by Edmund Burke. I haven't read it, but there is an episode of the Partially Examined Life podcast where they discuss it here.

Sublimity and its partly opposite twin Beauty were much discussed in the 18th century. I'm pretty sure Kant wrote about it in his Critique of Judgement. Turner's oil paintings of stormy seas are a classic instance of trying to capture the sublime. But of course nothing can reproduce the full feeling of being physically in the landscape.

When I saw the title of your thread, for some reason, my mind turned to the fantasy landscapes painted by Roger Dean in the seventies, appearing in some cases as cover designs for albums of the band Yes, but also being popular as posters on the walls of teenagers and college students. They are not real landscapes, but I do wonder whether they appealed because they catered to people's fascination with the strange, the awe-inspiring and the unknown.

I've spent 70 years in the more or less flat midwest. A dramatic feature is the 500 foot deep Mississippi gorge, or maybe a large limestone rock quarry. A nice grass covered hill. This is hardwood territory and in the fall the trees turn bright colors, and in the winter the first heavy snow brings another transformation.

Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco... are all pretty impressive. It isn't just the size; it's the intense energetic vitality and urbanity of these places. Seeing the ocean for the first time is pretty grand too. I was 45 before I saw real mountains (the Rockies, Banff), the Grand Canyon, and the SW American desert.

Soaring rough (because they are geologically new) mountains, the red rock of the SW states around the Grand Canyon, Devils Tower, Yellowstone, It puts the prairies in perpetual shadow.

I would almost go as far as geographic determinism. Port cities seem to have a cultural fertility advantage over inland flyover towns like Minneapolis, Kansas City, or Omaha. Inland towns are not wastelands (Madison, Wisconsin used to be a midwestern outpost of Boston and New York), but port cities are usually not as insular, parochial, or as socially conservative stolid as inland cities. Chicago is something of an exception, having been the national railroad hub and port of entry for the midlands.

Are people that live in the Rockies different than people who live east of the mountains, on the plains? Don't know. I suspect there are some differences, owing to the geography of those places.

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I would almost go as far as geographic determinism. Port cities seem to have a cultural fertility advantage over inland flyover towns like Minneapolis, Kansas City, or Omaha. Inland towns are not wastelands (Madison, Wisconsin used to be a midwestern outpost of Boston and New York), but port cities are usually not as insular, parochial, or as socially conservative stolid as inland cities. Chicago is something of an exception, having been the national railroad hub and port of entry for the midlands. — Bitter Crank

I grew up in southern Delaware, a pretty flat place. As a young adult, I moved to New England and I've spent a little time out west. When I've been in hilly or mountainous places, I think about what would be the difference between a society that grew in the mountains as opposed to one that grew in flat areas. I wonder whether living in a three dimensional landscape gives one a better intuitive perspective on how things fit together. When I look down on the world from a mountain, building, or airplane, I feel more objective, more contemplative. There is so much pleasure in holding the world in your hand.

I wonder if that has something to do with the sublimity we're talking about.

The good news for you is that you don't need any papers, textbooks, research or any other body of "information", to understand what causes the positive response in the body when out in nature or viewing scenery.

Nature is benign (even a tornado, yes); it is simple; it does not impose upon you the way the artificial world does. Nature accepts you for just the person you are and doesn't require you to be anyone or anything else. It accepts you unconditionally, much like your dog does at home.

Nature is one with the present moment; it does not complain, and it does not require anything to be different. Nature is fresh and original; it is free and unconstrained.

When you're out in nature, hopefully without your laptop and cell phone, you are taken away from your conditioned human state of existence that is incessantly demanding to a primordial state of existence that requires absolutely nothing of you. You can sit under a tree for 30 days and do absolutely nothing, and be in total peace, at least until another human being comes along. You are allowed to be you. What could be better than that ? What does anyone want more than that ?

Sure, you may find a particular type of landscape, scenery, or natural phenomenon interesting, and that may depend on your conditioning ... if you studied meteorology or astronomy, you may find the Aurora Borealis phenomenon particularly awe-inspiring or stimulating, but the underlying reason for why people find nature generally pleasant has very little to do with science or research or knowledge or information, and everything to do with one's state of consciousness.

I must quote Thoreau:

It is not obvious to me why there should be some causal link between natural features and such sensations of awe in this way. It is also perhaps surprising that such landscapes enjoy an almost universal ability to bring about such feelings - film and poetry have so often relied upon this idea by using location as a means to convey drama / wonder.

The sense of awe at power, tremendous force of nature is not confined to mountains. The idea that mountains provide ample opportunity was put forward by Kant and then was taken up primarily by the British on their Grand Tour to Italy as a way to have a peak aesthetic experience as part of the trip.

This conception of "awe" experienced of nature's immense power, which pushes man's sensibilities beyond their imaginative capability (Kant). It can't be conceptualized, but it can be felt as a kind of negative pleasure, which moves vision to the visionary.

Whether the landscape is thrilling or depressing probably has something to do with the immediate task at hand. If one has to move people and their burdens on foot over a mountain range, it is probably less thrilling than if one is on vacation in Banff (the Canadian Rockies). Crossing the Great Plains by foot and wagon train was and was not thrilling. Unending flatness, tall prairie plants (not just grass), wind and sun made it a mixed experience. Grandeur on the one hand, endlessness on the other.

Storms present something similar. Experiencing an Atlantic gale on the coast, in a warm building, would be a rather different experience than being in a boat (if one survived it). A tornado is an amazing experience if one isn't in it's immediate path. A blizzard is awe inspiring if one isn't stuck somewhere and slowly freezing to death.

As a hiker and (very amateur) philosopher, this question is one that has resonated with me a great deal. As well as hoping to spark discussion on the topic, I'm really hoping for guidance on existing literature and suggestions as to other debates in philosophy that may overlap with some of the themes. — TJO

It is conscious experience of 'beauty' that in contrast can only occur when you experience genuine love where there is no social influences that change how you perceive the world around you. It just is and it is beautiful.

These 'moments' or experiences that the landscape offers I find to be an enabling force that assists with you becoming conscious of something as it is. When you become conscious that you love someone, you suddenly experience genuine happiness, the hurt becomes immeasurable, the memories all come flooding back that when you look at them you see a completely different person, a raw reality. It can happen in the reverse too, when you become conscious that you never loved the person at all and there you are in a relationship suffering each day trying to make it work and holding onto memories or moments from other people just to justify the fact that you are with them, that in the end you are in a relationship with other people and not the actual person. It contrasts with what you actually are subjectively to the external world; love does this, but so does the landscape in a different way.

The daily drudge in the concrete jungle creates a sort of blind wall between yourself and reality, perhaps an unconscious survival mechanism. When I go shopping, for instance, I like to put on my headphones and shut off, but I am still present, I still move around and do what is necessary, but I am not consciously present.

Why is it that I feel whole, at peace and incredibly happy when I am in a rain forest with the smell of ferns and the sound of my boots pressing against the wet mud? In Italy, I did the Dolomite mountains and felt belonging as though I was able to escape the hurt I experienced back at home at the time and so began to actually heal from that hurt while there. The Napali Coast, the Negev desert, all these landscapes offered me some contrast that exposed the truth and this consciousness is beautiful..

I was reading this autobiography just a few days ago while on the plane and this just perfectly explains it:

"I reached the hill in the mid-afternoon. For the first time in my life I was really alive to beauty, receiving a kind of shock from it. I had absorbed my father's attitude to the countryside, especially to its scraggy trees, because he talked so often of the beautiful trees in Europe. But now, for me, the key to the beauty of the native trees lay in the light which so sharply delineated them against a dark blue sky. Possessed of that key, my perception of the landscape changed radically as when one sees the second image in an ambiguous drawing. The scraggy shapes and sparse foliage actually became the foci for my sense of its beauty and everything else fell into place - the primitive hills, the unsealed roads with their surfaces ranging from white through yellow to brown, looking as though they had been especially dusted to match the high, summer-coloured grasses. The landscape seemed to have a special beauty, disguised until I was ready for it; not a low and primitive form for which I had to make allowances, but subtly and refined. It was as though God has taken me to the back of his workshop and shown me something really special."

@Aurora
This is our cover page on The Philosophy Forum Facebook page. I have been following this photographer for years and obtained written permission from him to post his work with credit given, which is such a deal I cannot tell you how in awe I am of him. His name is Sean Parker and he runs photography clinics around the world to photograph the Aurora Borealis and star trails. Mind blowing images and in so many you can see the Phoenix that rises from the ashes in the colors in the sky.

And yes, there is plenty of snow for frolicking in.

Very nice. Thanks for sharing :) I will have to look him up.

It is all interconnected and interrelated.

You can't do justice to any part of the landscape by taking it out of its larger contexts.

Where you are right now may be "flat". But if that is all that you think and feel then your response will be distorted.

Try thinking and feeling things like how glaciers, colliding plates, etc. made the place flat. Then see what your response to it is.