DIFICULTADES DEL ALUMNADO DE INFANTIL PARA LA REALIZACIÓN DE LAS SESIONES DE

In the Received Wilderness Idea, wilderness environments are defined as the place of pure, pristine, primordial nature, existing in ontological contrast to artificial human or human modified environments, where nature in this sense—nature in itself—does not exist. But in

this thesis, I am arguing that there really is a thing called wilderness, it‘s just that it is not this. People only tend to get passionate about a false idea of a real thing when they have some experience of that thing, and often, the more intense the experience, the more passionately the false idea is entrenched. But we need not go far to see what kind of experience of wilderness might be connecting with this false idea and triggering this passion, for in chapter Three we found that wilderness, according to many of its proponents from Thoreau to Turner, seems to have the potential to trigger a profound experience of the sacred and sublime, and with it, a radical sense of freedom and potential. Critics of the Received Wilderness Idea like William Cronon and John Brinckerhoff Jackson have also related it directly to an idea or experience of the sublime.

It is worth recalling some of the different ways in which the sublime has been conceptualized that might relate to this experience. Firstly, there is Burke who sees the sublime directly in the forces and dimensions of nature as something that gives us an aesthetic thrill, an enjoyable terror beholding something which can overwhelm us but won‘t, whilst Kant sees it as something within our subjectivity that these forces and dimensions only reminded us of— its ability to think of something greater than its own limits when confronted with them. For Schopenhauer, this idealism remains, but the sublime can be experienced in the face of real danger and death, the very experience of being as what Heidegger called ―a running forward into death‖ that allowed one to identify with being itself. Julian Young, in his analysis of Schopenhauer‘s view, puts forth what he calls Heidegger‘s magical realism as a better formulation of what is truly sublime in the self-presencing and self-concealing of Being itself, in Heidegger‘s concept of Ereignis which is the ekstasis – ―transport and enchantment‖

experienced within the apprehension of involvement in being, in the being of some phenomenon arising. Within the possibility of experiencing awareness of this, for Heidegger, is also the essence of human freedom, and its manifestation as the presencing of place.

We recall that ekstasis is the term used by Longinus, in his book on the sublime power of nature and certain works of art to affect us that triggered interest in the subject in its 17th century translation. Thoreau, in his love of the wild, gives us exquisite descriptions of its particular details such as the patterns in the melting ice on the bank of the lake, and at the same time tell us that sublime wildness is what makes the works of Shakespeare great, gives them their genius, echoing Goethe. For Iris Murdoch, it is love, which she defines as the act of imagining the unutterable particularity of each other and nature that is sublime, and that gives Shakespeare‘s work its genius. And we recall that for Kant, genius is the free play of the imagination with its intuitions unbound by, transcending any concept, whereby ―nature‖ gives the rule to art (where nature is in reality the transcendental ideal of our own subjectivity). Finally, this was related back to the interpretations of Bataille, Benjamin and Smith of the Lascaux painting known as Scene of a Dead Man, where it was posited that the human/wild nature encounter, even as the human being is in the act of seizing power over the wild through sympathetic magic, is also a scene in which the human is sacrificial. This is

revealed in a way that still strikes us in the immediacy of its image, that human identity and existence itself is still defined in terms of its sympathy with and difference from the particularity of the wild other. The place of the cave and its art, as with the rock art for Jack Turner, both conceals and reveals the sublime place of being wild other.

It is also worth recalling what related possibilities the experience of wilderness has been identified with by some of its proponents. We found in chapter one that the contemporary experience of wilderness has been directly related to speculations as to what a Palaeolithic experience of wilderness might have been like, and linked also to anthropological accounts of more recent indigenous communities. For Oelschlaeger, in the experience of wilderness is an experience of nature as a reconnection with the feminine, a nurturing within the cycle of life and death, which he speculates constituted the Magna Mater mythologies of Palaeolithic wilderness experience. For he, Duerr, Abram and Shepard, this also represents a radically different experience of time as a cyclic unfoldment of identity in the differences of place and the wild other beyond human life that establishes a human experience of wild being beyond any fixed rational conceptualizations. For Abram, radicalizing the late phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this involves the sensuous embodiment of the landscape itself as animate, intentional, the realization that it is the earth itself that speaks and breathes through us

ecstatically, intelligently establishing the wildness of time, place, body, horizon. Only in the direct embodied experience of wild nature, argues Abram, can the fullest potential of human existence and freedom be realized by embodying the subtle, elusive, ecstatically wild intelligence around us that constitutes us and that we cohabit with. Everything that surrounds us has the power to transport and enchant us, but what has come to dominate is the spell the written word has over us, and the associated forms of life and their own magic that make us forget this spell. For Abram and all of these thinkers, the experience of wild nature stands in contrast to the experience of modern industrial civilization, which traps us in falsely fixed concepts and behaviours that alienate us from our true wild existence and the wild other, and leads us on a nihilistic and unconscious path of environmental and self-destruction.