Transcript Rolston Holmes’ Environmental Ethics

Is All Beauty in Nature?
Ugliness Transformed in Ecosystemic Perspective
Beyond Beauty to the Sublime
Shannon Maylath
 Defense of a particular form of aesthetic positivism: a
system where not every individual aspect of nature is
necessarily positive, but essentially is as a larger whole.
 This is in contrast to a more extreme aesthetic positivism,
where everything in nature is beautiful precisely because it is
natural.
 “Telescoping System” where natural phenomena can be
considered as Items, Systemic Processes or Scenic
Wholes. Proper categorization will be key in
understanding a positive aesthetic world picture.
 Natural aesthetics is fundamentally different from
aesthetics of man-made objects.
 Nature cannot fail in the way man-made objects can.
 Intuition: “Aesthetic properties ‘call for’ appropriate
aesthetic experiences, and it is never ‘called for’ to say
that such places are bland, dull, boring, incoherent,
chaotic.”
 “Wild”
 Distinguishes beauty from instrumentality/utility.
 Shows the importance of experiencing a landscape on its
own terms, sensitive to its integrity.
 One sense in which aesthetic properties are always
good:
 “There can be no failures in nature because nothing is to
be judged in the light of aesthetic intention.
 He goes on to acknowledge that apart from the easy
answer, there do seem to be instances of failure
(negative situations) in nature. These “failures” can be:
 Items
 Systemic Processes
 Scenic Wholes
 Death and destruction examples show that there are
ugly aspects of nature, but....
 Widen the scope of the natural
phenomenon that is being
appreciated:
 “Every item must be seen not
in framed isolation, but
framed by its environment,
and this frame in turn becomes
part of the bigger picture we
have to appreciate...”
 Characterization of beauty that
is most conducive to this sort of
appreciation.
 Not “Disney World” but a
struggling, somber, serious
beauty.
 Rolston discusses four ways
of understanding or
approaching this program
for natural aesthetic
appreciation:
 Appreciating what is not
present.
 Dead wood, underground,
decay, predation
 Appreciating what is
marred, for the greater
whole
 Jigsaw puzzle, bitten apple,
damaged leaf
 Appreciating nature as
part of “something
greater”
 “Ugliness is in the eye of
the beholder,” - Rolston
“Beautiful in the Eyes of
God,” -Muir
 Appreciating natural
phenomena in a larger
timeline
 “Ugliness mellows-though
it does not disappear-and
makes its contribution to
systemic beauty and to
beauty in later-coming
individuals...”
 So, for Rolston, the end of the individual is never the
end of the story.
 Itemized ugliness within a systemic process does not
subtract from, but enriches the whole.
 The ugliness is contained, overcome, and integrates into
positive, complex beauty.
 “Not so much a matter of sight, as insight into the drama
of life”
 So what about ugly
systemic processes? i.e.
lava flows, tsunami,
forest fires
 Our understanding of
the greater good these
events provide may not
have caught up to the
magnitude of the
negativity we associate
with these sorts of
natural occurences.
 Aesthetic properties push the beholder to the
experiences of the sublime
 This reinforces the move Rolston is making from item 
systemic process  scenic wholes / the sublime
 To Appreciate the sublime aspects of nature:
 Be aware of nature’s specific individuality (it is not
agriculture, it is not art)
 Appreciate it appropriately, allow it to overwhelm (this
means immersion, not experience through car window)
 Appreciating its enormity and projection (this means
considering entire ecosystems, and our place in them)
 A Criticism: People accuse
Rolston of having an aesthetic
blindfold due to Nature
Romanticism
 “One stretches and twists
‘beauty’ to fit all the available
evidence, some of which would
by usual criteria be interpreted
as repulsive.”
 His Reply: this is not self-
centered manipulation of the
system, but rather an insistence
on context. The goal:
 Finding an appropriately
inclusive paradigm
 Finding a holistic over partial
aesthetic view
 It is not the case that nature is invariably aesthetically
positive in immediate detail, but that it is essentially
so when even the ugliness is embraced by the sublime.
 “As always with trends, one needs not only to evaluate
the particulars in space and time, but also to see the
system.”
 Essential motif: the conquest of constructive over
destructive forces, resulting in positive aesthetic
experience.