The aesthetic appreciation of nature

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 207-222

  Budd, Malcolm ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007371542     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/36.3.207     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. In a different context Hume wrote: 'our answer to this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal'. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, §II).
2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), Vol. 1, §41,
3. and 'On the Metaphysics of the Beautiful and Aesthetics', §212, in Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, trans E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Schopenhauer's thoughts about the aesthetic appeal of natural ensembles of natural objects, rather than the aesthetic contemplation of an individual natural thing, reveal his difficulty in accommodating the insights yielded by his own aesthetic experience within the general framework of his metaphysics and aesthetics.
4. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, §41.
5. See Kendall L. Walton, 'Categories of Art', The Philosophical Review, LXXIX (1970),
6. and Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (London: Harvard U.P., 1983).
7. And he distinguished three positive types (although there are more): the judgement that an item is pleasant, the judgement that an item is beautiful, and the judgement that an item is sublime. (In fact, Kant maintained that we speak improperly in predicating sublimity of a natural item: the natural item is only the occasion of our becoming conscious of our superiority to nature in being moral agents, the experience of which is properly called 'sublime'.) In what follows, I am not rejecting this conception but offering a rather more substantial conception of the aesthetic - or, at least, of an aesthetic response. Jerrold Levinson presents a superior conception of aesthetic pleasure in his 'pleasure, aesthetic', in David Cooper (ed,), A Companion to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992);
8. Kendall Walton presents a superior conception of aesthetic value (and also aesthetic pleasure) in 'How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Summer 1993).
9. 'It is evident, that one considerable source of beauty in all animals is the advantage which they reap from the particular structure of their limbs and members, suitably to the particular manner of life, to which they are by nature destined' (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning The Principles of Morals, Sect. VI, Part II).
10. As Allen Carlson has argued: see, for example, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol 37 (1979),
11. reprinted in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (eds), Arguing about Art (London: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995).
12. The question concerns the misidentification of the natural kind to which the object belongs, not the misidentification of a natural object as a work of art or vice versa. This other question (along with much else, especially significant differences between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and artistic appreciation, about which I have said nothing in this paper) is well dealt with in R. W. Hepburn's seminal essay 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty', in B. Williams and A. Montefiore (eds), British Analytical Philosophy. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966),
13. Kant disallowed such thoughts to enter into the experience of the sublime in nature, but his reason for doing so is not compelling (see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 'General Remark upon the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgements').
14. As Noël Carroll has emphasized, and has illustrated with someone's taking a whale to be a fish, rather than a mammal: see his 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History', in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds), Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1993),