Quote of the month

" It seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is related...And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of a non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it.... And it is a strange thing that most of the feelings we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but a profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things - a plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time."

Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1941 

in Kellert & Wilson (eds.), 1991 -The Biophilia Hypothesis, p. 55

Quote of the day

 Today, a guest:

"I found myself lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but a small aspen tree against a blue sky. Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it and as I drew; the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, without weariness. More and more the beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they 'composed' themselves, by finer laws than any known to man. At last the tree was there and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere."

John Ruskin, Praeterita

Quote of the day and a short exploration of Jung's ideas on mental structure

About studying and describing the human mind:

"[We] have ... to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar, we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found, and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure. We live in the upper story, and are only dimly aware that our lower story is somewhat old-fashioned. As to what lies beneath the superficial crust of the earth we remain quite unconscious." (Jung, 1928)

Following this metaphor, Jung goes on to explain that human mind is divided in three levels: consciousness, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is characterized as "more or less superficial"(1959) and

" made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness having been forgotten or repressed."

The collective unconscious is the most interesting, for Jung as well as for me. Indeed it contains informations and ideas that "have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity" (1959). These ideas and informations are then known as "archetypes", are shared by all individuals and are then similar to instincts.

Jung suggests (1959): " there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour."

 According to Bourassa (1988), the collective unconscious thus described by Jung would be the locus of archetypes "which are images of the instincts coming into play in man's experience of landscape."

This vision is particularly interesting as it encompasses the evolutionnary assumptions (according to which we prefer organic environments for their potential resources and shelter that would satisfy our instinctive needs and therefore promote our survival), as well as the recognition that a part of our mental structure is strictly human, with our own activities and tastes and our ability to enjoy art.

 BOURASSA S.C, 1988 - Toward a Theory of Landscape Aesthetics. Landscape and Urban Planning: Vol.15 (pp 241-252).

JUNG C.G., 1928 - Contributions to Analytical Psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace.

JUNG C.G., 1959 - The Archetypes and the Collecitive Unconscious. New York: Pantheon..

Quote of the day

Isn't it amazing where you find a quote that says exactly what you would like to say?
Like this one:

Porteous (1966) In Hartig and Staats, 2006:

“Yet it would seem especially important to discover if scenes that are ‘good to see’ are simply good aesthetically (i.e good to think or good to feel) or whether such aesthetic satisfactions have deeper implications, such as the promotion of physical well-being and mental health."

HARTIG T. & STAATS H., 2006 - Linking preference for environments quality. In: B. Tress, G. Tress, G. Fry & P. Opdam (Eds.), From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning (pp. 279-293). Dordrecht, Pays-Bas : Springer. (p.2)