Natural Beauty, Fine Art and the Relation between Them

Abstract

We defend three principal claims concerning natural beauty, artistic beauty and the relation between them. 1) Aesthetic pleasure in nature is typically and paradigmatically occasioned by the spatial form of natural kinds. 2) Breaking with a long-standing tradition, Kant claims that the presentation of such beautiful natural forms is not the end of the representational visual arts. Most art presents aesthetically the idea of humanity in our person. This is Kant’s Copernican revolution in the philosophy of fine art. 3) Although the representation of nature is not a sufficient condition of beauty in the representational visual arts, it is nonetheless a necessary condition of it.

Rethinking Kant's distinction between the beauty of art and the beauty of nature

“…1 1 A similar distinction has recently been argued for, however, in Reiter and Geiger (2018). Reiter and Geiger correctly identify that Kant puts forward two different understandings of beauty and do an excellent job of distinguishing these two fields in the appendix of their paper.…”

“…The pleasure we experience in this process of reflection and express in a judgment of taste is thus dependent upon an idea of reason. (Reiter and Geiger 2018, p. 91) 8 These “aesthetic presentations of ideas of reason” are what Kant calls aesthetic ideas: “that representation of the imagination which occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.” (KU, 5:314) Great works of art are great insofar as they give us a kind of asymptotic access to the supersensible. They are exhibitions of the supersensible in concrete particulars.…”

“…The pleasure we experience in this process of reflection and express in a judgment of taste is thus dependent upon an idea of reason. (Reiter and Geiger 2018, p. 91) 8…”

“…My main thesis in this paper depends on the claim that Kant actually presents two quite different accounts of beauty in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: The pure judgment of beauty requires no concepts at all, whereas we judge art to be beautiful only by recognizing the idea(s), or concept(s) of reason, that the work of art expresses. Although I noted above that the view that Kant puts forward two different notions of beauty has recently been argued for by Reiter and Geiger (2018), it is actually an older view, argued most clearly and forcefully in 1967 by Gotshalk. Gotshalk views Kant as presenting incompatible statements about beauty and therefore argues that Kant presents two, incompatible accounts of beauty, probably due to his own confusion.…”

Aesthetic properties of geological heritage landscapes: Evidence from the Lagonaki Highland (Western Caucasus, Russia)

“…Natural/scenic beauty is a complex idea (e.g., Han, 2010;Schirpke, Tasser, & Tappeiner, 2013;Earle, 2015;Chen, Sun, Liao, Chen, & Luo, 2016;Reiter & Geiger, 2018), which also creates an aspect in geological heritage studies (Zhang, 2006;Mikhailenko et al, 2017;Gordon, 2018). With regard to natural/scenic beauty, two terms are in use, namely "aesthetic properties" and "aesthetic attractiveness".…”