Arts, Religion, and the Environment

Front matter

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PART 3 Connecting

7 The Black Wood: Relations, Empathy and a Feeling of Oneness in Caledonian Pine Forests 117 Reiko Goto and Tim Collins

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CONTENTS

Cultivated and Governed or Free and Wild? On Assessing Gardens and Parks Aesthetically 149 Arto Haapala

Where Embodiment Meets Environment: A Meditation on the Work of Hans Breder and Ana Mendieta with an Accompanying Interview with Hans Breder 166

J. Sage Elwell

Conclusion: The Aesthetic Roots of Environmental Amnesia The Work of Art and the Imagination of Place 186

Forrest Clingerman

Index 213

Notes on Contributors

Whitney Bauman

is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He teaches and lectures on science and religion, religion and nature, and religion and queer theory. His books include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (Columbia University Press 2014), Theology, Creation and Environmental Ethics (Routledge 2009), with Lucas Johnston Science and Religion: One Planet, Many Possibilities (Routledge 2014), and with Kevin O'Brien and Richard Bohannon, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (Routledge 2010; revised and updated edition May 2017). He is currently working on a manuscript that examines the religious influences on Ernst Haeckel's understanding of the natural world.

Sigurd Bergmann

holds a doctorate in systematic theology from Lund University and is Professor in Religious Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. His previous studies have investigated the relationship between the image of God and views of nature in late antiquity, the methodology of contextual theology, visual arts in the indigenous Arctic and Australia, as well as visual arts, architecture and religion. He has initiated the European Forum on the Study of Religion and Environment, and ongoing projects investigate the relation of space/place and religion and 'religion in climatic change. His main publications are Geist, der Natur befreit (rev. ed. Creation Set Free); God in Context; Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (ed.); Theology in Built Environments (ed.); In the Beginning is the Icon; Så främmande det lika (on Sami visual arts, globalisation and religion); Raum und Geist: Zur Erdung und Beheimatung der Religion; and Religion, Space and the Environment. Bergmann was a co-leader of the interdisciplinary programme "Technical Spaces of Mobility’ (2003-07) and co-edited The Ethics of Mobilities; Nature, Space & the Sacred; Religion, Ecology & Gender; Religion and Dangerous Environmental Change; Religion in Environmental and Climate Change, and Christian Faith & Earth. 201-12 he was a visiting fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Miinchen. He is editor of a book series, board member of several international journals, and former leader of the section for philosophy, history of ideas and theology/religious studies in the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

VIII NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Forrest Clingerman

received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in Modern Religious Thought. He is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Ohio Northern University, where he teaches classes in contemporary theology, ethics, and the history of Christian thought. He is co-editor of Placing Nature on the Borders of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (Ashgate, 2011), Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering (Lexington, 2016). Clingerman has published a number of journal articles and book chapters in the environmental humanities. His recent publications have focused on the meaning of place in environmental philosophy and theology, the relationship between nature and the arts, and theological responses to climate change and climate engineering.

Reiko Goto Collins

was born in Japan and is an environmental artist and researcher. Her creative practice is concerned with empathic relationships with living things for over twenty years. Reiko is currently focused on the development of new work dealing with empathic relationships, sentience and collaboration with a horse, a philosopher and an animal behavior scientist. She has been a participant in the womer's group, the Council for Uncertain Human Futures at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

Tim Collins

is from the us and is an artist, author and planner and an honorary research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works across science and philosophy to develop projects related to nature, culture and public space. He is currently collaborating with an anthropologist and a social scientist. Together Tim and Reiko are principals in the Collins and Goto Studio in Glasgow. They are currently focused on developing new work around the Centre for Nature in Cities (CNC). The first project The Caledonian Decoy will be an installation and a series of programs that play with the time and space of a forest in an urban setting. It is scheduled for exhibition in the Intermedia Gallery at cca, Glasgow, in 2017. Other recent exhibitions include Future Stratigraphy at the University of Sydney, Australia; plans are underway to exhibit a touring version of Plein Air in USA in 2018.

J. Sage Elwell is Associate Professor of Religion and Art at Texas Christian University. He is author of Crisis of Transcendence: A Theology of Digital Art and Culture. He also

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS IX researches and publishes in the areas of suffering and embodiment, religion and film, modern art, atheism, and humanism. He also works as an artist in digital media, photography, sculpture, and book art. Dr. Elwell holds a Ba in Religious Studies from William Jewell College, an MA in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Kansas, an M. Litt in Philosophical Theology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and a PhD in Religion, Culture, and the Arts from the University of Iowa.

Arto Haapala

received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and his M.A. in Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. He has been Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki since 1995. He has been a visiting Professor at Temple University, Philadelphia, Lancaster University, UK, Universities of Murcia and Málaga, Spain, and a visiting researcher at Universities of Freiburg and Bochum, Germany. He has done research in different problems in aesthetics, particularly in ontology and interpretation, as well as in environmental aesthetics and Martin Heidegger's philosophy. His most recent interests are in the aesthetics of everyday environments and urban aesthetics. His publications include What Is a Work of Literature? (1988), The End of Art and Beyond (ed. with Jerrold Levinson and Veikko Rantala, 1997), City as a Cultural Metaphor: Studies in Urban Aesthetics (ed. 1998); Interpretation and Its Boundaries (ed. with Ossi Naukkarinen, 1999), Aesthetic Experience and the Ethical Dimension: Essays on Moral Problems in Aesthetics (ed. with Oiva Kuisma, 2003), Paradokseja paratiiseissa: näkökulmia urbaanin luonnon kysymyksiin (Paradoxes in Paradises: Issues in Urban Nature, ed. with Mia Kunnaskari, 2008). Ympäristö, estetiikka ja hyvinvointi (Environment, Aesthetics, and Well-Being, ed. with Kalle Puolakka and Tarja Rannisto, 2015). In 2010 he founded a journal entitled Aesthetic Pathways together with Gerald Cipriani, and the journal was relaunched in 2014 under the titleJournalof Aesthetics and Phenomenology (Routledge: http://www -tandfonline.com/loi/rfap2o).

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he went on to establish the UK’s newest Department of Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on the

X NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, and on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. He has subsequently explored the links between environmental perception and skilled practice, with a view to replacing traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission with a relational approach focusing on the growth of skills of perception and action within socio-environmental contexts of development. These ideas are presented in his book The Perception of the Environment (2000). In more recent research, Ingold has followed three lines of inquiry that emerged from his earlier work, concerning the dynamics of pedestrian movement, the creativity of practice, and the linearity of writing. These all came together in his book Lines (2007), along with three edited collections: Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (with Elizabeth Hallam, 2007), Ways of Walking (with Jo Lee Vergunst, 2008) and Redrawing Anthropology (2011), and in his collected essays, Being Alive (2011). Ingold has gone on to write and teach on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, leading to his book, Making, published in 2013. He is currently directing the project Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design (201318), with funding from the European Research Council. Ingold's latest book, The Life of Lines, was published in 2015.

Karolina Sobecka

is an artist and designer who has been working at the intersection of art, science and technology, examining social arrangements that exploit, resist or accommodate technological change. Karolina's recent projects are centered on experimentation in the fields of climate engineering and synthetic biology, considered in the larger context of climate disruption. Karolina's work has been shown internationally and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, Rhizome, NYFA, Princess Grace Foundation, Eyebeam, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards and Japan Media Arts Festival.

George Steinmann is a visual artist, musician and researcher based in Bern, Switzerland. He studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Basel, as well as painting, sound and Afro-American culture at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work focuses on the relationship between contemporary art and science and the interconnectness of art, culture and sustainability. He has completed transdisciplinary projects and conceived multimedia-based exhibitions at the Helmhaus Zürich, Salo Art Museum, Kunsthaus Interlaken, Kunstverein Kassel, Villa Elisabeth Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, Kunsthalle Bern, Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, The Contemporary Arts

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS XI

Centre Cincinnati, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Centre Pasquart Biel, Lokaal o1 Breda, Centre for Contemporary Art and Architecture Stockholm, Gallery Heike Strelow Frankfurt/M., Pori Art Museum, Centre for Contemporary Art Nairs, and the ERES Foundation München. Steinmann also works as a musician, and his concerns include solo performances and tours (including many jazz festivals) with his own band and African-American artists such as Grammy Award winner Johnny Clyde Copeland. In recognition of his multidisciplinary work and lectures, Steinmann was awarded an honorary doctorate by the philosophical-historical Faculty of the University of Bern. His books include Blue Notes (Nürnberg/Zürich 2007), Komi—A Growing Sculpture (Bern 2007) and Art without an Object but with Impact (Basel 2012).

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Exploring Nature's Texture Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman

Humans are meaning-making animals. This introduction explains how this insight can serve as a starting point for explorations into the connections between art, nature, and spirituality.

environmental aesthetics — nature — theology — ethics

From the Either-or to the And

Now that we are on the threshold of the Anthropocene epoch, how should humans envision and understand their place in the world? Do humans possess the necessary cultural tools to imagine new possibilities and relationships with the natural environment at a time when our material surroundings (the very system that supports us physically and spiritually) is under siege? To answer questions like these requires more than scientific explanation. Resolution will come from knowledge formation that takes seriously the moral, philosophical, and aesthetic perspectives human beings implicitly rely on to engage with the world. The answers, in other words, will come through the human community opening itself to an interdisciplinary — and even spiritual — exploration.

In that vein, this book addresses the imaginative possibilities of addressing the breakdown of the human relationship with the environment through the visual arts. Bringing together contributions from artists, theologians, anthropologists and philosophers, it investigates the arts as an important contemporary bridge between culture and nature, as well as between the human and more-than-human world. This bridge is nearly elemental, insofar as the visual arts highlight the perceptual and affective dimensions of our knowledge of the world. Visual art furthermore cultivates society's capacity to connect letters and sciences with the complex layers of the public square: with social

© SIGURD BERGMANN AND FORREST CLINGERMAN, 2018 | DOI:10.1163/9789004358980_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

movements, political constellations, economic power holders, other cultural actors such as media, and the like. In the context of the emerging environmental humanities, the arts act as the strong substantial force of what Wassily Kandinsky called the connecting ‘and’ in his famous 1927 essay of that name (1973). For Kandinsky, connecting is the task of the arts, with the aim of overcoming our current social time of 'either-or.

Underlying the work of the present book is a simple but important claim: humans are ‘meaning-making animals. Within a biological framework, humans organize and interpret experience, and through this process human reflection transcends biology. The human encounter with the world might be described as an attempt to intertwine the many facets of existence in a meaningful way. As the vibrant field of environmental aesthetics has shown, this intertwining is not simply a passive operation. We are creative beings as well: we construct and create works of meaning that re-imagine and re-interpret our sense of the world. To encounter the world, therefore, is a profoundly aesthetic experience, at least when we take the term 'aesthetic' in an embodied way that acknowledges the word's rootedness in perception.

But unlike what early modern philosophers of aesthetics suggested, our perceptual encounters cannot not reside solely in disinterested observation. Rather, environmental artists, philosophers and theologians see how closely connected sensing and acting are. Indeed, Arnold Berleant's call for an "aesthetics of engagement" (1992) in relation to the environment is a forceful reminder of how the active human perception of the world — the activity of aesthetic engagement — provides the much-needed groundwork for how we act and react to our physical, intellectual, and spiritual location. Insofar as perception is not mere reception, but equally an active engagement and possible transformation, we seek an aesth/ethics. Specifically, the essays collected here point toward an aesth/ethics of nature and culture that constitutes an intertwining of both theory and practice; it seeks a union of reflection and action in the space of being.

Certainly the connection of thinking and acting happens in all spheres of existence. But there is something unique about the realm of human artistic creation. The authors here argue that an interconnecting aesth/ethics is nowhere more apparent than in the human creation of artworks. Artworks are not mere decoration, but endeavors to interrogate the meaning of being human. Artworks distill and intensify the aesthetic engagement with the world; they also challenge our preconceptions. Acknowledging the intertwining of nature and culture that exists in the work of art thus raises other questions: How might the work of art facilitate our interpretation of the meaning of environments? When humans seek meaning, how do the arts provide a reflexive way of perceiving the meaning of the world? Can artworks offer a way to transcend the power of other forms of human artifacts — especially technological ones — found in-between humans and environments? The authors in this collection of essays reflect on these questions in order to show the interconnection between the human urge to create meaning and the natural world that serves as our surroundings.

Another way to explain this is to say that the present authors have gathered together to explore nature’s texture in and through the cultural work of the arts. The notion of texture emphasizes not the alleged deep and unseen part of a natural phenomenon or artwork, but instead invites us to gaze on the surface. Talking about nature's texture forces us to stay in touch with the material appearance of life, rather than speculating about its inherent qualities. Indeed, placing nature's texture into conversation with the unseen air and the atmospheric — areas more frequently discussed in environmental humanities — is one of the more thought-provoking questions that results from this collection. Experiencing nature's texture is in that way regarded as an essential skill of “being alive" through “perceiving the environment" (the titles of two of Tim Ingold's influential works).

Throughout this book, nature's texture is encountered in different ways. While texture in the sciences refers to different qualities of the surface of material and geological phenomena, textures in the arts are qualities that lead the eye to what happens visually on the canvas, textile, or other medium. The texture of an artwork represents the elementary sphere wherein meaning can arise. Necessarily, it allows the unseen to take place and shape, and bodily it allows senses, the sight and the touch, to start to interact. Talking about nature's texture in this context overcomes the reduction of simply seeing (and interpreting) nature and expands human bodily-being-in-touch with life and its carrying forces. Several of the artistic processes that are presented here allow for such a synesthetic mode of approaching the environment. Touching, seeing and interpreting nature, as well as experiencing the atmosphere and our weather lands in flux, will hopefully in this way also be encouraged through this volume. Exploring nature's texture through ethics, the arts and faith can then turn into a rich tool to manifest what Goethe had in mind by claiming that “only in the world she becomes aware of herself" Only within nature and the world the human can become aware of herself.

The Context of Exploring Nature's Texture A focus on embodied perception recognizes the ways that context and perspective informs reflection and engagement. It is only fitting, then, to acknowledge the context from which these essays emerged. The work of this collection originated in a seminar workshop held at the Ernst Haeckel Haus in Jena, Germany, in the Spring of 2014. The director of the Ernst Haeckel Haus and distinguished theoretical biologist, Olaf Breidbach, was pivotal in hosting this event (tragically at the time of the seminar itself Breidbach was battling a severe illness, and he has since passed away). This project was unique in drawing together well-established scholars and artists to show the ways that the arts foster distinctively human capacities of imagination, empathy, and creativity. Throughout this project, the collaborators have seen how the visual arts exercise our abilities to see the world in new and hopeful ways. The workshop in Jena in 2014 made it also possible to continue and deepen an earlier initiated cooperation of artists, biologists, scholars of religion and philosophers in the same thematic field with a certain focus on landscape. This earlier event took place on the island of Hiddensee in the German part of the southeastern part of the Baltic Sea in May 2010, and its results have been published in 2013.

While this volume directly emerged from workshops in Hiddensee and Jena, it also has roots in larger interdisciplinary conversations around the environment. Especially since the 1970s, environmental challenges have led to a process of several relatively interconnected, valuable responses in previously autonomous disciplines: the environmental sciences and climatology, social science research on the environment, and the increasing synergy of disciplines in the so-called environmental humanities. This mobilization in the sciences and humanities has gone hand-in-hand with the emergence and development of environmentalism in the sphere of social movements, which again has had an impact on society and culture, especially including politics — from local to global — as well as the economy. An important insight comes out of these discussions: "spaces-in-between" are of specific interest as "nature" always takes place between people, and between humans and other beings. This "in-betweenness" exists because we are caught in the tensions between multiple levels of relationality. “[T]hese tensions become productive only when our political encounter with nature finds a unity amidst the differences in our interpretations of space" (Clingerman 2015: 135). Therefore it should not be surprising that the artists and scholars in this volume explore the complexity of the spatial in-betweenness with and within nature.

Undoubtedly, the invention of the notion of environmental humanities, to which also this volume intends to contribute, has done much good in starting to heal the asymmetry between the faculties in the global academy.

1 Fora discussion of how the ecological turn and the spatial turn are interconnected see the special issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2016) on the theme of "Spatial turns in religion and the environment," edited by Sigurd Bergmann.

Interdisciplinary collaboration centered in the humanities is significant for facilitating a more holistic reflection on human inclusion in the environment. Since the theoretical and methodological limits of earlier models of (environmental) science still represent a hindrance for in-depth and integrated cooperation in some ways, one can almost intuit the beginning of a new, alternative mode of scholarly exploration of the world. For example, due to their global success climatologists have begun to confront the limits of empirical analysis and computer-based simulations — discovering, in effect, that human beings are not as easy to predict and include in simulations as initially hypothesized. Facing a question, such as how much suffering a human can take and how he or she might respond, leads scientists intellectual tools of the environmental humanities. The study of religion plays a unique role in this: religious belief systems are veterans in dealing with suffering and uncertainty. Religious traditions provide values, as well as skills of empathy and compassion, for the path to a new sustainable and ecojust world.

Seeing, Wondering, and Connecting

This volume contains nine chapters, placed in such a way as to elicit links across the authors' reflections, as well as with awareness to the unique conversation that emerges in the volume between artists and scholars. In fact, the theme of connections is pivotal: connections about the relationship between aesthetics, nature, culture, and the work of art. But before we can fully engage the connections made, it is important to show how rooted our experience of art and nature is in perception (in the case of visual arts, this is particularly the sensation of sight). We also must acknowledge the affective and reflective dimensions of wonder. In the case of both nature and art, wonder is a nearly liminal state, found between thinking and sensing, interpreting and encountering. Through the themes of seeing, wondering, and connecting, the chapters raise different discussions surrounding the experience of art and nature, as well as the entanglements between them. Themes and motifs raised by the authors include such things as empathy, imagination, ethics, science and technology, wildness versus cultivation, and our interpretation of both art and nature. The first two chapters orient the reader to provide the reader with an venue to explore human perception and seeing. In Chapter 2, theologian Sigurd Bergmann reformulates one of the book's central questions — “how might the work of art facilitate our interpretation of the meaning of environments?” — into something more spatially focused: What does art do to me as the space and spirit where I am? For Bergmann, space is understood as an essential all-embracing quality of life. To better grasp this, a phenomenological understanding of atmospheres assists to overcome dichotomist modes of perceiving, thinking and acting. Time is in such a view not homologous to space but rather integrated in an overarching way; art is regarded as a skill of encountering the future by compressing the past.

Following Marcuse's understanding of the critical function of art, art appears as a place of a manifested utopia where the future and past encounter each other, a place that transfigures “the space where I am" Theologically regarded the production of art, and the reception of artifacts as a place-within-nature reveals the skill of humans to fabricate meaning and to experiment creatively with modes of existence which are able to manifest authentic utopia based on reminiscence. Reflecting about the Triune Spirit as a liberator of nature, the Spirit appears as a “being-of-the-one-in-or-with-the-other.’

What is true for theology might also become true for environmental arts: Not propositional knowing but prepositional knowing is at core. Art works might then be regarded as products from human skills to manifest how the one lives within and for the other and how past and future encounter each other. Environmental art, departing from the intrinsic value of nature and sometimes also from a neo-animistic understanding of its spiritual life, rather advocates empathy and respect than commodification and utilitarian usage. Can art, in comparison with technology, assist in placing the artifact at the nexus between the material reproduction of our daily life, our relationship to nature, our social relations and our world view and belief, and serve as a critical and constructive mediator? Can its erotic beauty and its capacity for neo-animating produce a countervailing power that resists and overcomes commodification and alienation? After an analysis of Aboriginal Art in Australia, which inspires such a view about the continuum of time in space, the chapter ends with a reflection about weather. The connection weather and religion is depicted historically and J[. M.W. Turner's paintings are studied as inventions of ^weather" in the modern sense. Being alive now means to be exposed to a continuous flow of change and not to command any certainties. Weather teaches us to accept to be at the mercy. Turner and his color paintings therefore offer an outstanding place where one can become aware of being within the world, and to discover and accept the world with all its power of change within oneself.

Artist Karolina Sobecka complements the theoretical and aesth/ethical meditations of Bergmann by calling for an atmospheric turn in design, environmental aesthetics and cultural theory in Chapter 3. She focuses on the air and its non-visuality that prevents it from capturing our imaginations. According to her, the unseen has to be invoked conceptually, and this requires distance. However, the imperceptibility of the air is in part due to the fact that it is everywhere: if it disappeared, we would notice its lack instantly. So what are some strategies to bring the atmosphere into focus, to wrestle a bit of tangibility out of the vastness, invisibility and complexity of this abstraction? What could be some experiments on the materiality of the air that would help us shape its imaginary? The author's reflections are anchored in her art work, for example, the performative pieces that she has called “CloudServices,” as well as a recent workshop with artists, scientists and geoengineers on the descriptions of experiments on the atmosphere. At the hands of Sobecka, the notion of atmosphere overcomes dichotomies between nature and culture, and the transition to an atmospheric worldview follows what might be described as modernity's shift from a solid to a fluid worldview. Sobecka explores the atmospheric turn in different artistic experiments which are inspiringly described in detail in the chapter, and she interconnects them to different philosophical elaborations, revealing the exciting potentials of an atmospheric turn. Her chapter concludes with a thought provoking inspiration of a new way of approaching change: "As we're experiencing the atmospheric turn, internalizing uncertainty and change as inherent aspects of our reality, we can start discerning not only what change means, what continuity and curvature mean, but also start to understand nuance about how various rates of changes of different entities interact and synchronize, start building our ways of seeing differently premised on uncertainty and variability.’

The next three chapters form a tryptich on a sense of wonder, which is elemental in human encounters with religion, nature, and art. Indeed, the topic of wonder pervades the origins of this volume, insofar as Ernst Haeckel’s work was paradigmatic for a transdisciplinary and imaginative view of the world. Visiting the impressive Ernst Haeckel House in Jena, one cannot only dive into the laboratory, library and working rooms of the influential biologist and inventor of modern “ecology” in the house that Haeckel himself built as his living and working space, but one will also find strongly expressive and colorful paintings on the walls. Beside his career as a scientist Haeckel had also developed his arts of painting where mythology and biology are intertwined in quite a peculiar artistic mode (Breidbach 2006).

In Chapter 4, theologian Whitney A. Bauman develops a deeper reading of Haeckel’s work in the context of spirituality, nature, and art. Bauman departs from a central quote in Haeckel’s writings which misleadingly has led to an understanding of the ecologist as some type of precursor to contemporary mystical environmentalists: “The whole marvelous panorama of life that spreads over the surface of our globe is, in the last analysis, transformed sunlight.’ (Haeckel 1900: 139). However, nothing could be further from the truth, at least based upon his own self-understanding. Haeckel was arguing for a monistic, materialistic understanding of the world against what he perceived as the dogma of theology and the wrong-headedness of German idealism in philosophy. He thought the emerging scientific method — relying on sensory observations and experimentation — would provide the new framework for understanding everything, including all things human. What we see as ‘wonder' in his art works and in his writings were to him attempts at explaining this monistic, evolutionary 'scientific' view of the world. Of course, such a reading to him was ‘wonder-filled’ in the sense that wonder is that which continuously keeps the observer focused on the new and unknown. Haeckel was, like Alexander von Humboldt before him, engaged in bringing together what were at the time disparate sciences: geology, evolution, zoology, embryology, physics and cosmology, and his newly coined ‘ecology’, in the construction of a new, naturalistic worldview that brought all of these things together into a single explanatory story. He argued that the guiding principles for such a story would be the old Greek trinity of: goodness, beauty, and truth. Many of the connections he made between various plant and animal organisms, and between the various sciences, were depicted in a number of his paintings and sketches. The most well-known of these can be found in his Kunstformen der Natur. He sought in these drawings to sketch out the similarities in forms across many very different and very diverse species and in doing so challenged the dominant theological aesthetics of the Christian west at the time. Bauman's chapter analyzes some of Haeckel's sketches and paintings and the way that he challenged three primary aesthetic categories through them: that between biotic and abiotic things in the world, that between plant and animal life, and that between humans and the rest of the animal world. It was from within these curious borders and crossings that Haeckel wondered most about constructing a naturalistic worldview that would fundamentally shift how we understood humans within the rest of the evolving planetary community.