Transcript All nature beautiful?

Holmes Rolston, “Is
All Beauty in Nature?”
Env. Ethics 1988
Is All Of Nature Beautiful?
Elk bottom
John Muir’s Positive Aes
• “None of nature’s
landscapes are ugly so
long as they are wild”
• 19th century naturalist,
writer, founder of
Sierra Club
Positive aesthetics thesis not plausible
for art
•
Implausible to say artworks never
badly done
– Museum of Bad Art
– http://www.museumofbadart.org/
•
Yet positive aesthetics claims this for
natural objects
•
One rationale for the difference:
– Can be no failures in nature (whereas
there can be in art), as no artistic
intention
– Nature, unlike artist, can never fail as
never tried
– False assumption only failed
art/nature can be poor aesthetically?
– There are failures of a sort in nature
Rejections of Positive Nature
Aesthetics
• “Just as there are rotten violinists,
so there must be pathetic creeks;
just as there is pulp fiction, so there
must be junk species; just as there
are forgettable meals, so there must
be inconsequential forests”
– Stan Godlovitch, “Evaluating Nature
Aesthetically,” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 56, 2 1998, p. 121
• Photo of Aye-Aye ( a endangered
mammal from Madagascar)
Bear scat aesthetically positive?
Rolston Positive Aesthetics:
•
The Matterhorn leaves us in awe, but so does the fall foliage on any New England hillside, or
the rhododendron on Roan Mountain. Those who linger with nature find this integrity where it
is not at first suspected, in the copperhead and the alligator, in the tarantula and the morel, in
the wind-stunted banner spruce and the straggly box elder, in the stormy sea and the wintry
tundra. . . . This value is often aesthetic and invariably so if we examine a natural entity at the
proper level of observation or in terms of its ecological setting. . .The humus from a rotting log
supports an exquisite hemlock. . . . Should we say that we find all life beautiful?” (COFN, p.
44-45)
Rolston’s Positive Aesthetics
• Rolston embrace a type of holistic positive
aesthetics: Nature as a whole is aesthetically
positive, even if some individual items are
not.
• Rolston’s overall judgment about nature is
that it has substantial beauty (nature, he
often says, is “a wonderland”).
Rolston accepts presence of some
ugliness in nature
• Some items in nature are ugly when
viewed from certain perspectives (in
isolation)
• Inoculates him against obvious
counterexamples
• Although Rolston allows “itemized
individual ugliness in nature,” he
argues that we should accept “these
ugly events as anomalies challenging
the general paradigm that nature’s
landscapes without fail have an
essential beauty”(243 EE).
Contrast Rolston’s positive
aesthetics with
• Allen Carlson’s individualism
– “Each natural thing, either with appropriate appreciation or at many, if not
almost all, levels and conditions of observation, has substantial positive
aesthetic value and little, if any, negative aesthetic value.”
– Not just natural kinds, essential beauty, or minor beauty
– Each individual thing is aes positive
• Eugene Hargrove’s no negative qualities
– “According to positive aesthetics, nature, to the degree that it is natural
(that is, unaffected by human beings), is beautiful and has no negative
aesthetic qualities” (Foundations of Environmental Ethics, 177)
– Nature is itself its own standard of goodness and beauty, making ugliness
impossible as a product of nature’s own creative activity” (184)
Rolston is a master at articulating
disvalue in nature
• Surprising given his defense of positive aesthetics
• “Once as a college youth I killed an opossum that seemed sluggish and
then did an autopsy. He was infested with a hundred worms! Grisly
and pitiful, he seemed a sign of the whole wilderness, . . . too alien to
value” (1986, p.128-29, quoted in Carlson 2007, p. 107).
• “The wilderness teems with kinds but is a vast graveyard with
hundreds species laid waste for one or two that survive. Wildness is a
gigantic food pyramid, and this sets value in a grim death bound
jungle. All is a slaughterhouse, with life a miasma rising over the
stench.” (10 From Values Gone Wild).
Rolston powerfully expresses the
idea that seeing only beauty in
animals is Pollyannaish:
•
The critic will complain against admirers of wildlife that they overlook as
much as they see. The bison are shaggy, shedding, and dirty. That hawk
has lost several flight feathers; that marmot is diseased and scarred. The
elk look like the tag end of a rough winter. A half dozen juvenile eagles
starve for every one that reaches maturity. Every wild life is marred by
the rips and tears of time and eventually destroyed by them (1987, p. 192).
Rolston denies equal or perfect
beauty in nature
“Like clouds, which are never ugly, only more or less beautiful, so too,
mountains, forests, seashores, grasslands, cliffs, canyons, cascades,
and rivers. . . [Positive aesthetics] does not find all places equally
or perfectly beautiful; it maps them on a scale that runs from zero
upward but has no negative numbers (EE, 237).
Lenticular clouds
Ordinary clouds
Negative judgments about
landscapes are mistaken
• “Never called for to say such places are bland,
dull, boring, chaotic.”
• Unfailingly generate favorable experience in the
suitably perceptive
• Obviously, some don’t like swamps, deserts,
prairies, but
• “To say of a desert, the tundra, a volcanic eruption
that it is ugly is to make a false statement and to
respond inappropriately.”
Rolston’s advocates nature’s “systemic
beauty,” a tendency toward beauty that
turns ugliness into beauty
•
“Virgin nature is not at every concrete locus aesthetically good: consider a
crippled fish that has escaped an alligator. Those who are not programmatic
nature romantics will admit this and go on to recover what beauty they can.
But ugliness, though present at times in particulars, is not the last word. . .
regenerative forces are already present. . . nature will bring beauty out of this
ugliness . . . this tendency is already present and aesthetically stimulating now.
. . when the point event, which is intrinsically ugly, is stretched out
instrumentally in the process, the ugliness mellows–though it does not
disappear–and makes its contribution to systemic beauty and to beauty in latercoming individuals. . . There is ugliness, but even more, there are
transformative forces that sweep toward beauty . . . disorder and corruption are
the prelude to creation, and in this perpetual re-creation there is high beauty.
Nature’s beauty can be costly and tragic, yet nature is a scene of beauty ever
reasserting itself in the face of destruction.
Negative aesthetic qualities
properly contextualized
become positive
• “If hikers come upon the rotting carcass of
an elk, full of maggots, they find it
revolting. Here is a bad example of its kind,
disharmony, a putrid elk” (EE 238).
• Later he writes:
Ugliness in nature contextualized
recovers (some?) beauty
• Once, tracking wolves in Alberta, I came upon a wolf kill. Wolves had
driven a bull elk to the edge of a cliff, cornered it there, before a great
pine, itself clinging to the edge. It made a good picture; the mountains
on the skyline, the trees nearer in, the fallen elk at the cliff’s edge. The
colours were green and brown, white and grey, somber and deep. The
process, beyond the form, was still more stimulating. I was witness to
an ecology of predator and prey, to population dynamics, to
heterotrophs feeding on autotrophs. The carcass, beginning to decay,
was already being recycled by microorganisms. All this science is
about something vital, essential, and also existential about living on the
landscape. In the scene I beheld, there was time, life, death, life
persisting in the midst of its perpetual perishing. My human life, too,
lies in such trophic pyramids. Incarnate in this world, I saw through
my environment of the moment into the Environment quintessential,
and found it aesthetically exciting (Science based, 384-85)
Possible counter-examples to
positive nature aes?
• “Failures in nature are omnipresent, all
organisms and ecosystems are finally
ruined” (e.g., they die/come to an end)
• Tourists take no pictures of these “eye
sores”
• They are not picturesque
Ugliness diminished/overcome
when viewed in proper context
– Seen from a landscape and ecosystem perspective,
these are not simply ugly
• Ugliness transformed in ecosystem perspective
• “Ugliness mellows—though it does not disappear”
• “Ugly parts do not subtract from but enrich the whole”
– Momentary ugliness a still shot in an ongoing
(aesthetically positive) motion picture
– From an informed, systemic perspective only get
positive aes response
– Each item must be seen in environmental context
• Judgment of ugliness is like looking at piece of a jigsaw puzzle
and saying pieces are misshapen
Humans selected to find some things
repulsive (rotting carcasses,
excrement)
• But not ugly in the system of nutrient
recycling
• Systemic beauty of body decaying
• Rotting elk returns to humus and is
recycled; maggots become flies, food for
birds; natural selection leads to better
adapted elk
Cognitive (i.e., knowledge)
dimension of aes important to
Rolston’s defense of positive aes
• Such beauty is not so much viewed as experienced
after ecological understanding gained
• Many of life’s richest aes experiences can not be
put on a canvas or have a picture taken of them
• Natural history/science allows aes appreciation of
what might otherwise be aes negative
• Allows us to move beyond scenery cult
Fall Color
Scenery cult as a bad reason for
rejecting positive aes
• That nature isn’t picturesque, doesn’t mean
it is not beautiful
• Nature’s positive aes value transcends
scenic beauty
• Inappropriate to drive through a park and
harvest scenic resources only
• “As if nature that can’t serve us must please
us”
Is predation in nature ugly?
• “It was a spotted hyena, the kind people think of when they hear the
word “hyena”–a dirty, matted creature, dripping with blood. It must
have made a good kill. The prey must have been large enough for the
hyena to thrust its whole head in, up to the block like shoulders. This
must be why the hyena has such a snake of a neck–so it can delve deep
into a dying animal and eat the best parts...I saw other hyenas...They
were all dipped in blood...One could see which animal had gnawed at a
leg, cheek pressed to bloody flank, or which had held a piece to its
chest and embraced it there as it chewed...A crowd of vultures pounced
on and squabbled over pieces of skin ripped free when the hyenas
pulled off their parts, and a few insects had already stripped clots of
blood from the soaked grass.” Joanna Greenfield, The New Yorker
1996
• Lamb killed by Bobcat
Coyote: A bloodthirsty killer?
• “Fierce and cruel they
appear to us, but
beautiful in the eyes of
God”
John Muir on Alligators
Rolston’s reply
• Local disvalue to prey
is value to predator,
value to the prey
species, and is
systemically valuable
• “Ugliness here is only
a projection; like the
big bad wolf”
Forest fires aesthetically negative?
Amazon Burning
• Recovery
from forest fire
• Releases nutrients,
resets succession,
helps regenerate shade
intolerant trees.
Worrisome counterexamples to
positive aesthetics
Three-Headed Frog
Disfigured monstrous animals
Nature’s failures?
Mt. Saint Hellens (before)
Mt. Saint Helens (after)
Infrequent catastrophes
• Nature can’t adapt and evolve in response to
them, so not clear they lead systemically to
good/beauty
• Rolston sees “Ugly events as anomalies
challenging general paradigm of nature’s
landscapes w/o fail having essential beauty”
• Helens recovery
Worries about Rolston’s strategy
• Reinterpret local intrinsic ugliness as systemic
instrumental beauty
• Rolston shifting object of appreciation to the whole?
– Saito: Rolston’s views imply that “The only legitimate object for
our aesthetic experience of nature is the global ecosphere”
(Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature 104)
• No; Rolston is insisting on importance of context for
aesthetic appreciation of nature
– Tiger in a zoo (or on the moon) vs in the jungle
– Appreciate the particular in light of the whole
• Other worries:
– Ecology makes these intelligible, but not beautiful?
– How get from instrumentally valuable/necessary to aes positive?