Out of the many extraordinary artists whose works are represented in this exhibition, I would like to focus on one watercolor by Joseph Mallord William Turner – not simply because this year marks the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth, but because Turner’s The Lake of Zug (1843) speaks to us today with an urgency that we can hardly afford to overlook. The philosophy of nature that informs this watercolor allows us to view it not as a relic of Romanticism but as a prophetic meditation on the ecological crisis that defines our time. Painted nearly two centuries ago, The Lake of Zug contains within its quiet radiance a profound ecological philosophy: a vision of nature that recognizes interdependence, vulnerability, and the divine immanence of all matter. To view it now, in an age of environmental catastrophe, is to encounter not nostalgia but warning; not idealization, but instruction in how to see again.
In The Lake of Zug, Turner offers a world poised between presence and disappearance, a lake whose stillness seems eternal yet whose light is vanishing as we look. The image’s beauty lies in its evanescence: the trembling reflection, the mist that both conceals and reveals, the air itself turned to light. In this fragility, Turner anticipates a world where visibility is inseparable from loss. Today, as glaciers melt and skies burn, his vaporous landscapes appear less as Romantic reveries than as premonitions of dissolution – the world rendered as atmosphere, the solid becoming spectral. Yet Turner’s aim was not to mourn but to teach reverence. His art insists that to see the world truthfully is to perceive its contingency, to understand that its radiance depends upon our capacity to attend, to behold without dominion. The philosophy of nature implicit in The Lake of Zug thus stands opposed to the instrumental logic that has served to bring about the ecological crisis we are presently facing. Against a mechanistic conception of nature as mere resource (inert, quantifiable, endlessly exploitable) Turner reveals nature as subject, as self-articulating process. His landscape is not a stage upon which human history unfolds, but a living continuum of which humanity is only one vibration. The lake, the mist, and the mountains are not backdrop but participants in the same field of being. To witness this is already to practice an ecological consciousness; one grounded not in management or mastery, but in what the philosopher Hans Jonas would call responsibility for the fragile otherness of being itself.
Indeed, the watercolor can be read as a visual argument for ecological humility. Turner’s refusal of hard outlines, his fusion of sky and water, his dissolution of form into atmosphere – these are nothing less than aesthetic refusals of domination. They enact, in pictorial form, a moral position: that separation is an illusion, that control is a form of blindness. The same Cartesian dualism that Turner’s art dissolves – the division of mind and matter, subject and object – underlies the technocratic worldview that treats the Earth as external and subordinate to human will. Turner’s luminous monism, by contrast, imagines a world in which the divine and the material, the human and the elemental, exist within a single, interpenetrating continuum. This vision has direct ethical consequence. In the twenty-first century, to recover a Turnerian sensibility is to learn to see again in a world of exhaustion, to recognize that beauty is not ornament but relation. The watercolor’s serenity is not escapist; it is what the theologian Paul Tillich would call “the courage to be,” an affirmation of being’s holiness even amid transience. Turner’s light, delicate yet overwhelming, reminds us that every anthropogenic ecological crisis is first a crisis of perception: indeed, a failure to experience the world as living, sacred, and shared. The Lake of Zug eloquently prefigures the phenomenological insight that the world is not something we stand apart from but something we inhabit and co-constitute through perception. The self does not master the scene; it is the scene in the act of unfolding. This immersion aligns closely with later phenomenological accounts of vision, especially in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who held that the perceiving body is “of the same flesh as the world.” Turner’s fusion of air, water, and radiance gives pictorial form to this intuition: vision is not a mirror but a membrane through which the world and consciousness breathe into one another. The lake’s surface, shimmering and unstable, becomes the very site of this reciprocity. Turner’s philosophy of nature is rooted in the intuition that nature is not a collection of inert objects but a self-generating process, a dynamic continuum of forces whose essence is light. In The Lake of Zug, light functions not as a condition of visibility but as the substance of being itself. The sun’s illumination does not fall upon the lake from an external source; rather, lake, mountain, and air seem to emanate light, as if matter were self-luminous. This conception undermines the Cartesian dualism of matter as passive res extensa and spirit as active res cogitans. Turner’s light is spirit incarnate in flux; it is the self-disclosure of being within appearance. The result is a metaphysical monism where the visible and the invisible interpenetrate, a sensuous ontology that visually complements Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, in which nature is understood as “the visible mind,” and mind as “the invisible nature.”
This is why The Lake of Zug feels simultaneously mournful and beatific. The mountains are half-veiled in vapor, the water a trembling mirror; but in that indistinction, Turner discovers revelation. The divine does not thunder from beyond nature but shimmers within it, diffused across atmosphere. His theophany is immanent: God is not separate from the world but immanent in its ceaseless becoming. The shimmering ambiguity of The Lake of Zug thus becomes an argument in watercolor for the goodness of being itself. Aesthetically, this metaphysical generosity manifests as a renunciation of mastery. Turner’s handling of watercolor (fluid, unstable, dissolving at the edges) mirrors the theological humility at the painting’s core. To paint the divine in nature requires surrender: not the assertion of control but participation in nature’s own unfolding. The artist, like the world, becomes a vessel for illumination. Thus, The Lake of Zug becomes newly urgent: it is a painting not of Romantic transcendence but of ecological immanence. It calls us to abandon the fantasy of detachment, to recognize that the atmosphere we behold is the same air we breathe. The shimmering threshold between mountain and reflection, between being and dissolution, mirrors our own precarious position in the Anthropocene. The earth, like Turner’s Lake, is radiant yet vanishing; its survival depends on our ability to see its light not as resource but as revelation.
In this sense, Turner’s watercolor is an act of ecological prophecy. It offers a theophany suited to our time: a vision of divinity diffused through the very fragility of the world, a sacredness inseparable from the material. To heed that vision is to understand that salvation, if it exists, will not descend from beyond nature but will arise from the reverence we recover within it. Turner teaches us that light is not the opposite of darkness but its inner illumination — and that our task, in the face of ecological collapse, is not to dominate the world, but to dwell in it gratefully, to let its fading glow transform how we live, act, and see.
Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.
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