Evaluating Positive AestheticsAuthor(s): Ned Hettinger

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education , Vol. 51, No. 3 (Fall 2017), pp. 26-41
Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.51.3.0026

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics

Ned Hettinger

For in all natural things there is something marvelous.1

—Aristotle

None of nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.2

—John Muir

1. Introduction
Positive aesthetics (PA) is the idea that all of nature is beautiful.3 The more
qualified version supported here claims that nature—to the extent it is not
influenced by humans—is specially and predominantly beautiful. Some
of the most prominent figures in environmental aesthetics and ethics have
defended PA. Holmes Rolston III was an early proponent:

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. . . . This value is often . . . aesthetic, and is invariably so if
we examine a natural entity at the proper level of observation or in
terms of its ecological setting. . . . Should we say that we find all life
beautiful?4
Allen Carlson advocated PA in one form or another for over twenty years,
before heavily qualifying it in a recent book.5 His first formulation was, “The
natural environment, in so far as it is untouched by man, has mainly positive

Ned Hettinger is Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at the College of Charleston. His

specialization is environmental philosophy, including environmental ethics and aes-
thetics. His papers have been published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Environmental
Ethics, Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, Environmental Values, and Eth-
ics and the Environment, among other places. A recent paper is “Defending Aesthetic
Protectionism” in Philosophy: Environmental Ethics (2017).

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, Fall 2017

© 2017 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  27

aesthetic qualities; it is, for example, graceful, delicate, intense, unified, and
orderly, rather than dull, bland, insipid, incoherent, and chaotic. All virgin
nature, in short, is essentially aesthetically good.”6
The idea that all of nature is beautiful is initially as implausible as is the
claim that all art is beautiful. As Stan Godlovitch puts it, “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.”7 It is not surprising, then, that many envi-
ronmental aestheticians have rejected the doctrine. Malcolm Budd, for exam-
ple, argues that, because organisms can be defective instances of their kinds,
negative aesthetic qualities will be manifest in their appearance.8 Emily
Brady thinks it “naive and idealistic” to assume we can “always eliminate
negative aesthetic value” from our experience of nature and argues that PA is
an “incomplete environmental aesthetics, risking an attitude which ignores
the true diversity of characteristics possessed by various natural environ-
ments and animals” and “impoverishes” our experience of them.9 Marcia
Eaton argues that those who claim that “nothing in nature can be ugly . . .
go too far” and thinks there are “some obvious examples of ugly natural
objects,” citing not only deformed animals and plants but “ugly shells . . . left
behind as shellers gather the ones they prefer.”10 T. J. Diffey thinks the idea
“that nature must be beautiful and cannot be ugly” is a “sentimental a priori
thought” and claims that “there is much in nature that . . . is not beautiful.”11
Yuriko Saito rejects the idea that all of nature is aesthetically appreciable,
arguing that some natural events are too psychologically disturbing to allow
for aesthetic appreciation and that moral concerns should prevent us from
appreciating natural events that cause great suffering to humans.12
The idea that all of nature is beautiful is a useful starting point for those
beginning to develop the skills needed for a better aesthetic appreciation of
nature. PA is a principle of charity for the appreciation of nature and perhaps
a hidden assumption for many of the naturalists teaching nature apprecia-
tion. This article identifies versions of PA and the arguments for them. It
assesses their adequacy in meeting four conditions meant to ensure that PA
is a credible thesis that coheres with the intuitions that have drawn many
astute and knowledgeable nature lovers to the doctrine:
1. The negative aesthetics condition: PA should accommodate the exis-
tence of some negative aesthetics in nature (otherwise, it is not cred-
ible).
2. The special aesthetics condition: PA should articulate a conception of
nature’s beauty that cannot be readily adapted to apply to the rest of
the world, including art and humanized environments (otherwise,
nature would not turn out to be specially beautiful).
3. The empirical condition: PA should depend on the contingent char-
acteristics of nature, rather than being stipulated a priori or defended

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 28  Hettinger

on purely theoretical grounds (the actual beauty of nature on earth

should matter to the thesis).
4. The conservation condition: PA should not undermine the role of nat-
ural aesthetics in the conservation of nature (natural beauty should
potentially play a role in decisions about environmental protection).

Note that these adequacy conditions are not offered as truth conditions for
PA. Renditions of the PA thesis that fail to satisfy these conditions could
be true. Rather than providing truth conditions, these adequacy conditions
aim to identify tenable versions of the all-­nature-­is-­beautiful hypothesis that
cohere with the reasons many thoughtful appreciators of nature’s beauty
have been attracted to the thesis. A defense of PA would seem to have lit-
tle value if those who have embraced the doctrine would not recognize it
as what they had in mind when they had the thought that all of nature is
beautiful.
Holmes Rolston’s holistic, context-­sensitive, and knowledge-­infused ver-
sion of PA does the best job of meeting these adequacy conditions and is
considerably more plausible than is suggested by some of the objections that
have been raised against it.

2. Easy Beauty, Knowledge, and PA

PA is useful in combating a prevalent and harmful tendency in nature appre-
ciation toward easy beauty, a lazy type of nature appreciation that limits
itself to “nature’s show pieces” (for example, the Grand Canyon) and finds
“the scenically-­challenged” parts of nature (for example, plains and deserts)
boring.13 The insistence on easy beauty is manifest in a preference for cute
animals like panda bears and a dislike for superficially unattractive species
like bats. Subtle natural beauty—as in a drab tundra plant or the monoto-
nous prairie—gets ignored because it is more difficult to appreciate. One of
the major goals of education in nature appreciation should be to check this
tendency.
An important consideration in favor of PA is that, as we learn more
about nature, we find more to appreciate. Aesthetic education about nature
is in large part possible because of the extensive aesthetically-­relevant
knowledge of nature that can be acquired. According to Rolston, beauty in
unscenic nature “is not so much viewed as experienced after one reaches eco-
logically tutored understanding. It is not so much a matter of sight as of
insight into the drama of life.”14 PA is thus typically allied with a cognitive
focus in the aesthetics of nature whereby knowledge of nature is used to
improve our appreciation of it. In the case of nature, knowledge tends to
undermine negative aesthetics. It can transform the boring and the ugly into
something aesthetically valuable. For example, when we learn that it is hun-
dreds of years old, withstands eighty-­mile-­per-­hour winds, and survives

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  29

thirty-­degree-­below-­zero temperatures, the drab tundra plant becomes a

stalwart centurion. Similarly, with the right knowledge, the hideous vam-
pire bat becomes a marvelous sonar flying machine.
Does knowledge about nature, supplemented by appropriate imagina-
tive and emotional response, do away with all negative aesthetics? Saito
seems to think so, suggesting that “[n]o matter how seemingly insignificant,
uninteresting, or repulsive at first sight, natural history and ecological sci-
ences reveal the marvelous works of every part of nature. . . . [E]very part of
nature is aesthetically positive for its storytelling power.”15
We can distinguish between two types of counterexamples to PA in
nature: the boring or uninteresting and the ugly. I am inclined to accept
that knowledge of nature will invariably turn tedious, aesthetically neutral
nature into something aesthetically positive.16 With ugly nature, however,
it is less clear that the addition of an interesting scientific story integrated
into the perceptual experience does away with (or outweighs) the nega-
tive aesthetics involved. Brady suggests this about scabs: “The scab is ugly,
evidence of a wound, and although part of a healing process with positive
value, this doesn’t convert the scab itself into something beautiful.”17

3. No Negative Judgment Thesis

PA might be understood as the idea that negative aesthetic judgments about
nature are not possible. Carlson, in his first formulation of PA, claims, “The
appropriate or correct aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is basi-
cally positive and negative aesthetic judgments have little or no place.”18
One important class of negative aesthetic judgments is clearly ruled out
for nature. As Budd explains, nature “is immune to all the many defects
to which art is liable in virtue of being the product of intelligent design.”19
Nature cannot be trite, sentimental, crude, derivative, or shoddy—as can
artworks or other objects of human design—because nature was not inten-
tionally designed. One might argue that, because there is no intentional
design in nature to assess critically, then no negative aesthetic judgments of
nature are possible.
But why assume that aesthetic evaluation only assesses intentional
design? Clashing colors, for example, can be aesthetically evaluated without
assessing design. Furthermore, this argument would seem to make positive
aesthetic evaluation of nature impossible as well; thus, it is useless as sup-
port for PA.

4. The Equal Beauty Thesis

Differential judgments of the aesthetic value of natural items are common-
place and intuitively plausible. For example, the bright-­red male cardinal

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 30  Hettinger

is more attractive than his drab female companion, and a common carp in
a canal cannot compare to the sleek and powerful Chinook salmon on its
thousand-­mile, seven-­thousand-­feet journey to its spawning grounds. The
equal beauty thesis rejects such comparative aesthetic ranking: all of nature
is equally aesthetically valuable.
Although not conceptually tied to PA, the equal beauty thesis is often
associated or conflated with it. For example, in his critique of PA, Budd often
takes aim at the equal beauty thesis. He builds the thesis into what he calls
“the most ambitious version of positive aesthetics—that each individual natu-
ral item, at each moment of its existence . . . has roughly equal positive overall
aesthetic value.”20 Brady once tied the two: “Because I do not follow positive
aesthetics, I believe that some natural and modified environments or objects
will be judged to have more value than others. One waterfall is more dra-
matic than another.”21
Most contemporary philosophical defenders of PA accept degrees of nat-
ural beauty. Carlson writes, “Positive aesthetics . . . holds not that all natural
things have equal aesthetic value, but only that all have only positive aes-
thetic value.”22 Rolston claims that “[l]ike clouds, seashores, and mountains,
forests are never ugly, they are only more or less beautiful; the scale runs
from zero upward with no negative domain.”23
What reasons can be given for the equal beauty thesis? Might the scien-
tific understanding required for improved aesthetic appreciation render all
of nature equally aesthetically valuable? But scientific stories can be more
or less aesthetically stimulating, and there are more or less exciting areas
of science. For example, Pluto’s story is limited to physics, astronomy, and
geology, while Earth’s story not only additionally includes biology, but its
geology is much more fascinating. Earth’s scientific story, thus, has greater
aesthetic value than does Pluto’s.
Another argument for equal beauty is that acceptance of degrees of
natural beauty will undermine protection for less beautiful nature. Areas
of outstanding natural beauty will be protected, while plainer areas will be
destroyed, and charismatic megafauna will be saved while creepy crawlies
are left to extinction. Godlovitch argues:

If . . . Positive Aesthetics accepts the notion of “degrees of beauty” . . .

the effect of such discrimination is tantamount to the denial that things
all have positive value. . . . Where not all can be saved—and that is
the practical reality—that which is the least worth saving is indistin-
guishable, for all intents and purposes, from that which is not worth
saving.24
But all that follows from degrees of natural beauty is that things of lower
aesthetic value are not as worth saving (on aesthetic grounds). Natural items
of lower aesthetic value are still worth saving (on aesthetic grounds). The

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  31

way to respond to the practical worry that, once we allow degrees of natural
beauty, the less beautiful parts of nature will get left out of consideration
is not to deny that there are differential amounts of beauty in nature but to
advocate PA and to educate people about the beauties in all natural items,
including the less beautiful ones. In teaching the aesthetic appreciation of
nature, significant attention should be paid to the more modest natural
beauties.
Additionally, differential judgments of natural aesthetic value are impor-
tant if aesthetics is going to play a significant role in conservation where pri-
orities must be set. While not violating the conservation condition outright,
the equal beauty thesis weakens the role that aesthetics of nature can play in
conservation.

5. Hargrove’s No Negative Aesthetic Qualities

and the Negative Aesthetics Condition
Some versions of PA are individualist and others holistic. Individualistic ver-
sions claim that each natural property or each natural thing is aesthetically
positive. In contrast, holistic versions claim that nature as a whole—and on
the whole—is substantially aesthetically positive, while some anomalous or
isolated individuals may not be.
The most comprehensive PA in the literature is Eugene Hargrove’s indi-
vidualistic version. Hargrove’s PA denies the presence of negative aesthetic
qualities in nature entirely. He writes, “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.”25 Hargrove’s PA explic-
itly rejects the negative aesthetics condition. Why accept such a condition?
Plausible examples of ugly nature are numerous and diverse. Some natural
items (or dimensions of natural items) are brutal, clumsy, chaotic, danger-
ous, disgusting, destructive, grotesque, painful, putrid, spoiled, or terrify-
ing. It is unlikely that the negative aesthetics of an oozing sore on a lion’s
nose could be entirely eliminated by the addition of knowledge, contextu-
alization, or anything else. Rolston suggests that seeing only beauty in ani-
mals is Pollyannaish:

The critic will complain against admirers of wildlife that they over-
look 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. . . . Every wild life is marred by the rips and tears of time.26
The implausibility of the claim that nature has no negative aesthetic
qualities becomes even clearer if one allows that nature appreciation, unlike
much art appreciation, should be multisensory.27 Improving one’s aes-
thetic responses to nature involves not only acquiring knowledge but also

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 32  Hettinger

deepening one’s sensuous engagement. Such awareness is not always posi-

tive. Brady mentions “slimy textures, rotting stenches, or bizarre sounds.”28
Consider the pungent odor of a rotting elk carcass, or worse, its sour rub-
bery taste. Perhaps strong instinctive reactions of disgust are not aesthetic
because they do not allow sustained attention to the perceptual object, but
then we can simply focus on somewhat less extreme sensations.29 The hot,
sticky, buggy August weather deep in the American South is an encounter
with negative aesthetic qualities in nature. It is just not credible to think that
all of nature, viewed from any perspective, is invariably aesthetically posi-
tive in every detail. A well-­educated nature appreciator will acknowledge
some negative aesthetic dimensions in nature.

6. Parson’s On-­Balance Individualism, the Beauty-­Making

Argument, and the Conservation Condition
More defensible, individualist versions of PA have been embraced by Par-
sons and Carlson. These versions of PA allow for the existence of negative
aesthetic qualities in nature but claim that any natural object will also have
positive aesthetic qualities whose value is greater, ensuring that the natural
object is aesthetically positive on balance.30 Parsons describes the view this
way: “I take positive aesthetics to be, roughly, the claim that any natural
object, appropriately aesthetically appreciated, is on balance aesthetically
good.”31
Parsons argument for this view is that appropriate aesthetic appreciation
of natural objects maximizes their beauty. He advocates adopting a “beauty-­
making” criterion that has us choosing categories for appreciating natural
objects that “maximize their aesthetic merit.”32 His main rationale for this
beauty-­making criterion is that it avoids the problem of conflicting aesthetic
qualities of natural objects that could potentially result in indeterminacy of
aesthetic value for natural items. There are multiple categories under which
to view any natural item (even if we limit these to scientifically correct cat-
egories, as does Parsons), and the aesthetic qualities and judgments result-
ing from these different categorizations may conflict. A Venus Flytrap whose
jaw-­like features appear grotesque (Parsons suggests) when appreciated as a
plant does not appear grotesque when we categorize and appreciate it more
specifically as a carnivorous plant.33 So, is the Venus Flytrap grotesque or
not?34 Parsons’s beauty-­making criterion solves this indeterminacy by stipu-
lating that appropriate aesthetic appreciation of a natural object would have
us “view the object under the scientific categories in which it truly belongs
and which maximize the aesthetic appeal of the object.”35 Because the jaw-­
like features of a Venus Flytrap look grotesque when conceived as a plant,
we should instead conceive it as a carnivorous plant. Thus, Parsons builds
PA into a theory of appropriate appreciation of nature. “The essential and

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  33

universal beauty of nature” is no longer a “dubious,” shaky, and “implau-

sible empirical hypothesis” but “part of the intuitive data that we use in
constructing our theories of appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature.”36
Parsons’s innovative argument for PA raises a host of concerns. While
beauty maximization is a frequently mentioned and sometimes used theory
for art interpretation, it is a highly problematic one.37 Consider a movie that
has superlative special effects but poor acting. A beauty-­making categoriza-
tion would have us aesthetically evaluate it as a “movie with excellent spe-
cial effects,” rather than as a “movie with poor acting but some great special
effects.” Such an evaluation is not just partial but inadequate. The beauty-­
making criterion applied to nature would similarly lead to inadequate
appreciation. Our goal for the aesthetic appreciation of nature should not
be to maximize aesthetic value of natural objects but to appreciate them in
a rationally justified way. A well-­trained nature appreciator does not ignore
information or categorizations of natural objects because they lower its aes-
thetic value. For example, our positive appreciation of wolves in Yellow-
stone might be diminished when we learn that their return has decreased
the coyote population by approximately 50 percent. But if our goal is appro-
priate appreciation of wolves, we should not refuse to categorize them as
“coyote killers” and insist on thinking of them solely in positive ways. It
is unreasonable to focus only on positive aesthetic characterizations rather
than to attempt to integrate them with the negative.
Furthermore, a plausible argument for using a beauty-­making criterion
in art interpretation is lacking in nature interpretation. If we do not know
the intentions of the artist, then a principle of charity suggests that we inter-
pret the artwork in a way that makes it as aesthetically rich as possible, for
we can assume the artist was trying to maximize the aesthetic value of the
artwork. Unless we take the view that God created the earth as an art object,
this argument makes no sense for nature appreciation.
Parsons’s beauty-­making defense for PA also undermines the role nature
aesthetics has in environmental policy, thus violating the conservation con-
dition. Natural beauty is a major motivation and justification for preserv-
ing nature. The energy and rationale for protecting natural areas come in
large part from their significant aesthetic value. For example, if Yellowstone
National Park lacked its faithful geysers, thundering waterfalls, and bub-
bling mud pots, people’s interests in and reasons for protecting the park
would be seriously weakened. If the aesthetic value of such natural phe-
nomena is stipulated based on considerations in aesthetic theory, it becomes
hard to see how this value could motivate or justify their protection. Policy
makers wondering about the aesthetic value of a natural area considered for
preservation will balk at the idea that we must think of the area in a way that
maximizes its aesthetic value when other correct ways to appreciate it give
it lower or negative aesthetic value. Developers and antienvironmentalists

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 34  Hettinger

will justifiably claim bias: why not require that appropriate appreciation of
natural areas conceive of them in (scientifically correct) ways that minimizes
their aesthetic value (so they can be more easily exploited)? Thus, another
reason to reject Parson’s beauty-­making defense of PA is that it is not com-
patible with the role nature’s aesthetic value does and should play in envi-
ronmental policy.

7. Carlson’s On-­Balance Individualism, the Science-­Is-­Aesthetic

Argument, and the Empirical Condition
Carlson has also embraced an on-­balance individualistic version of PA: “Each
natural thing, at many, if not almost all, levels and conditions of observation,
has substantial positive aesthetic value and little, if any, negative aesthetic
value.”38 Carlson’s defense of PA is his science-­is-­aesthetic argument. Carl-
son is well known for articulating and defending scientific cognitivism, the
view that appropriate appreciation of nature must be informed by science
or natural history (just as appropriate appreciation of art must be informed
by art history). Carlson argues that science uses aesthetic criteria: “A sig-
nificant consideration in the creation and selection of scientific descriptions
is whether or not they make the natural world appear aesthetically bet-
ter . . . more unified, orderly, or harmonious.”39 “Science reads its values
into nature; in describing the facts, it does so in such a way that positive
aesthetic values are necessarily present.”40 In short, if nature is scientifically
intelligible, it is positively aesthetically appreciable.41
Carlson’s argument construes PA in a way that fails to satisfy the empiri-
cal condition, namely, that PA be a proposal dependent on the actual charac-
teristics of nature. PA might be an a priori thesis or an empirical one. Verify-
ing or falsifying a priori versions of PA does not require actual experience
of the natural world or a knowledge of the particulars of natural history.
Empirical versions depend on such experience and knowledge. Carlson’s
version is importantly a priori, and it virtually guarantees the truth of PA
whatever the empirical nature of our world. As long as nature is such that
science can render it intelligible, it will have positive aesthetic value. On
Carlson’s account, the truth of PA does not depend on the existence of sun-
sets, mountains, rivers, forests, flora, or fauna. Yellowstone would be posi-
tive aesthetically, with or without its geysers, waterfalls, or mud pots. Carl-
son’s argument for PA would work just as well for a lifeless, colorless, and
geologically inert nature.42
I contend that arguments for PA should render the theory empirical in
nature. The contingent characteristics of our world should matter to the
truth of PA, just as the contingent facts of our sensory world are essential to
aesthetic education about it. Because of their actual experiences of beautiful
objects and places, people have been drawn to the positive aesthetics thesis.

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  35

Nature’s substantial positive aesthetic value is special in part because it need

not have been so: nature could have been relatively boring, significantly
chaotic, and generally unappealing. For example, insect/flower coevolution
could have produced putrid smells and dull colors, rather than delightful
aromas and spectacular colors. An argument for PA that ignores the impres-
sive beauty of our world and guarantees that any intelligible world is aes-
thetically positive fails to do justice to the intuitions and motivations that
underlie the thought that our natural world is specially and predominantly
beautiful. PA should be an empirical thesis that is supported inductively by
descriptions and evaluations of the natural world rather than by conceptual
arguments about the nature of science (as with Carlson) or theoretical con-
siderations about the nature of aesthetic appreciation (as with Parsons).

8. Parsons and Carlson on Functional Beauty and PA

In their book on functional beauty, Parsons and Carlson explicitly reject
PA applied to all pristine nature.43 They argue that natural beauty comes
from appreciating the fitness for function of natural things, both living and
nonliving. We can appreciate the selected fitness for function of a cheetah
whose thin, powerful legs and narrow shoulders show that it is built for
speed and also the causal role function of mud and water that makes wet-
lands fit to function as wildlife habitat, pollution filters, and flood buffers.
Because organic nature can malfunction, living things can be aesthetically
negative: “Damaged, diseased, and malformed organisms are aesthetically
displeasing in virtue of their apparent unfitness for function. Thus, ugli-
ness in nature seems to arise when damage or some kind of insult causes
an object to appear dysfunctional.”44 Although they argue for functions of
inorganic nature, they do not believe that inorganic nature can appear dys-
functional. For when the causal powers of an inorganic system are absent,
so is the causal role function of the system; thus, the system is not “malfunc-
tioning” (for it no longer has a function that it could be failing to perform).
They argue that a rock formation that functions to divert a river is not mal-
functioning when it ceases to divert the river; it simply no longer has that
function. In contrast, a bird’s broken wing continues to have its flying func-
tion even when it can no longer carry it out. Parsons and Carlson conclude
that, although “the counter-­examples of damaged, diseased, and malformed
living things show that Positive Aesthetics does not hold as a general thesis
about the natural world,” their explanations about the impossibility of mal-
functioning of nonliving nature show “that Positive Aesthetics does capture
something true about the natural beauty of inorganic things.”45
While this argument may show that we cannot find inorganic nature
aesthetically displeasing in virtue of it malfunctioning, there can be other
reasons for finding inorganic nature aesthetically negative. Even if aesthetic

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 36  Hettinger

displeasure cannot be based on the “malfunctioning” of inorganic nature,

it might well be appropriately based on its failure to perform a function it
once had. For example, we might appropriately judge a slow-­moving, silt-­
clogged creek as pathetic, given that, in its former glory, it flowed rapidly,
transporting sediments and oxygenating the water for aquatic organisms.
Other examples of aesthetically negative abiota include Eaton’s “unattract-
ive” seashells and Brady’s “deformity in rocks (particularly crystals).”46
While Parsons and Carlson’s revised version of PA allows for some negative
aesthetics in nature, it fails to meet the negative aesthetics condition with its
account of the aesthetics of abiotic nature. A plausible version of PA must
acknowledge negative aesthetics in both biotic and abiotic nature.

9. Rolston’s Nature Aesthetic Holism

For Rolston, the richest aesthetic appreciation of nature combines a scientific
appreciation of natural history with participatory experience in nature.47
Rolston’s account of nature aesthetics provides for nature’s special and pre-
dominant beauty. He embraces PA in a holistic manner: nature as a whole,
and on the whole, is substantially beautiful (it is a “wonderland”). Its beauty
is systemic and pervasive. For some kinds of natural objects, each instance of
them is aesthetically positive. He agrees with Muir that “landscapes always
supply beauty, never ugliness.”48
Rolston’s PA meets each of the four adequacy conditions. He explicitly
endorses the special aesthetics condition when he contrasts PA for nature
with art: “It would seem implausible to say of human works of art that
they are never badly done, yet here the positive thesis claims that virgin
landscapes are always (more or less) well formed aesthetically.”49 Rolston’s
account satisfies the negative aesthetics condition because it “does not deny
that some items in nature are ugly when viewed from certain perspec-
tives.”50 He argues that “[t]hose who are not programmatic nature roman-
tics will admit” the existence of “itemized, individual ugliness in nature.”51
Rolston embraces nature’s predominant beauty overall by arguing that,
when individual ugly items are appreciated contextually, as they should be,
their ugliness typically diminishes. Such contextual appreciation interprets
the individual natural entity in light of a scientific understanding of its ori-
gins, future role, and surroundings. According to Rolston, nature has “sys-
temic beauty,”52 by which he means, a tendency toward beauty that turns
ugliness into beauty. He writes:

Virgin nature is not at every concrete locus aesthetically good: consider

a crippled fish that has escaped an alligator. . . . But ugliness, though
present at times in particulars, is not the last word. . . . [N]ature will
bring beauty out of this ugliness. . . . [W]hen the point event, which
is intrinsically ugly, is stretched out instrumentally in the process,

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  37

the ugliness mellows—though it does not disappear—and makes its

contribution to systemic beauty and to beauty in later-­coming indi-
viduals. . . . There is ugliness, but even more, there are transformative
forces that sweep toward beauty. . . . [N]ature is a scene of beauty ever
reasserting itself in the face of destruction.53
Note that Rolston’s argument for systemic beauty and his defense of PA gen-
erally involve empirical claims about how the natural world on our planet
in fact operates. In defending PA through a rich description of the actual
character of the natural world, Rolston’s version satisfies the empirical con-
dition. It also is abundantly clear that Rolston’s account of nature’s beauty
is compatible with using that aesthetic value as a rationale for preserving
nature, thus satisfying the conservation condition.54
What shall we make of Rolston’s suggestion that nature on earth has
a beauty heading? Rather than dismiss it as rosy romanticism, there are
reasons to take this idea seriously. One important consideration comes in
response to Parsons and Carlson’s idea that ugliness in nature is due to
damaged, diseased, or malformed living creatures. There is a clear drive in
nature against this type of ugliness. Damage to living things (for example, a
wound or broken limb) tends to be resisted, repaired, or regenerated. Organ-
isms fight disease and sickness and strive to heal themselves. Predation, a
fundamental feature of nature, also works against this type of ugliness for
predators tend to cull sick and crippled prey, while the healthy, strong, and
well-­formed escape. More generally, natural selection works against ugli-
ness in nature by editing out malfunctioning organisms and tending toward
an aesthetically pleasing functional fit between organisms and their envi-
ronment. It also promotes aesthetically rich, biological diversity. Not only
do earth’s biological systems promote beauty, but, geologically, the earth has
beauty tendencies as well. Earth builds mountains, promotes seasons, and
has a water cycle that generates waterfalls, rivers, lakes, snow, and thun-
derstorms. All these add significantly to the positive aesthetic value of the
planet. If earth’s fundamental natural systems promote aesthetic value, then
the idea of a systemic beauty heading on earth gains plausibility. Environ-
mental aesthetic education should also include these larger-­scale perspec-
tives of ecology, evolution, and geology.
Prominent criticisms of Rolston miss their mark. Budd has criticized
Rolston’s PA for committing the fallacy of division: “The idea that each
ecosystem (or other natural system) has a positive overall aesthetic value
implies nothing about the aesthetic values of the natural items it contains
considered in themselves—in particular, that these are always positive.”55
This criticism ignores that Rolston’s PA is holistic, not individualistic, and
does not defend the positive aesthetic value of each individual natural item
considered in isolation. Rolston readily embraces the negative aesthetics
condition and allows for “individual isolated ugliness.” Saito alleges that

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 38  Hettinger

Rolston’s insistence on contextualization—“Every item must be seen not in

framed isolation but framed by its environment”56—results in the unappeal-
ing conclusion that “the only legitimate object for our aesthetic experience
of nature is the global ecosphere.”57 Defending his claim that ugliness can be
“transformed in ecosystemic perspective,” Rolston writes,

If hikers come upon the rotting carcass of an elk, full of maggots, they
find it revolting. . . If we enlarge our scope . . . we get further catego-
ries for interpretation. The rotting elk returns to the humus, its nutri-
ents recycled; the maggots become flies, which become food for the
birds; natural selection results in a better-­adapted elk for the next gen-
eration. . . . The momentary ugliness is only a still shot in an ongoing
motion picture. . . . The clash of values, pulled into symbiosis, is not
an ugly but a beautiful thing. The world is not a jolly place, not a Walt
Disney world, but one of struggling, somber beauty. The dying is the
shadow side of the flourishing.58
Here Rolston rightly insists on the importance of context in aesthetic appre-
ciation, something that environmental educators also need to embrace. Just
as sophisticated art appreciation requires that we appreciate the artwork
in its context in art history, so too a sophisticated appreciation of natural
items requires that we consider them in light of their role in the system of
which they are a part. Aesthetically appreciating a rotting elk carcass in a
zoo is very different from appreciating it in its context in the wild. Insist-
ing on the importance of contextualization of the aesthetic appreciation of
a natural item is not the same as changing the subject of appreciation to the
system that provides the context (as Saito’s criticism suggests). Note again
that Rolston is not denying the isolated ugliness but suggesting that a better
aesthetic response appreciates that ugliness in its broader context.

10. Conclusion
That all of nature is beautiful is a provocative thesis worthy of serious con-
sideration and a useful starting point for environmental aesthetic educa-
tion. While initially unlikely, it becomes more plausible when one sees how
knowledge tends to undermine negative aesthetics in nature. This essay has
assessed the cogency of influential versions of PA. Much of this evaluation
has relied on four adequacy conditions: the negative aesthetics condition,
the special aesthetics condition, the empirical condition, and the conserva-
tion condition.
While often conflated with PA, the equal beauty thesis has been rejected
by PA’s main proponents. It also flies in the face of common sense compara-
tive aesthetic judgments of natural objects and weakens the role natural aes-
thetics can play in conservation decisions. Hargrove’s suggestion that nature

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  39

has no negative aesthetic qualities should be rejected because it contravenes

the negative aesthetics condition: examples of “ugly” nature are too numer-
ous, diverse, and plausible for such a universal version of PA to be defen-
sible. While accommodating the negative aesthetics condition, the idea that
each natural thing has overall positive aesthetic value on balance has been
given up by its proponents (Carlson and Parsons) and is challenged by the
existence of diseased, damaged, and malformed living things whose aesthet-
ics are arguably sometimes overall negative. Parsons and Carlson’s attempt
to rescue PA by limiting its application to abiotic nature fails due to an overly
narrow conception of the grounds for negative aesthetics in nature. Carlson’s
science-­is-­aesthetic argument for PA ignores the actual contingent beauty of
our world, thereby violating the empirical condition, while Parsons’ beauty-­
making argument for PA makes judgments about the aesthetics of nature
ineffectual for conservation (transgressing the conservation condition).
I have argued that Rolston’s version of PA is the most persuasive of any
developed in the literature. Better than others, it meets the adequacy con-
ditions I set out for a plausible version of PA that coheres with intuitions
that have drawn many astute and knowledgeable nature lovers to the doc-
trine. By allowing individual isolated ugliness while embracing a holistic
and systemic beauty in nature, Rolston satisfies the negative aesthetics con-
dition. Because he thinks nature systematically turns ugliness into beauty
(and because an analogous idea would not make sense for art or other
human constructs), his account of PA meets the special aesthetics condition.
Rolston’s defense of nature’s predominant beauty employs a rich descrip-
tion and analysis of the actual characteristics of earthen nature, and, thus, it
also satisfies the empirical condition. Finally, Rolston’s version of PA does
not undermine the role of natural aesthetics in conservation decisions. I
conclude that a holistic version of PA along the lines developed by Rolston
makes a strong case for the idea that nature—to the extent it is not influ-
enced by humans—is specially and predominantly beautiful.

Notes

For helpful comments, I thank David Clowney, Don Maier, Glenn Parsons, and espe-
cially John A. Fisher for his generous and insightful help with the ideas developed
here.
1. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. by James G. Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1981), 645a16–17.
2. John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 4.
3. I use beauty to refer to the entire range of aesthetically valuable properties, rather
than for a particular type of aesthetic merit that contrasts with ugliness.
4. Holmes Rolston III, Philosophy Gone Wild (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986),
44–45.

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 40  Hettinger

5. Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
6. Allen Carlson, “Nature and Positive Aesthetics,” Environmental Ethics 6, no. 1
(1984): 5–34, reprinted in Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The
Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000), 72.
7. Stan Godlovitch, “Evaluating Nature Aesthetically,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 56, no. 2 (1998): 113–25, at 121. Note that Godlovitch is not endorsing
this claim.
8. Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of
Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 126.
9. Emily Brady, “Ugliness and Nature,” Enrahonar 45 (2010): 27–40, at 39.
10. Marcia Eaton, “Beauty and Ugliness in and out of Context,” in Contemporary
Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2006), 39–65, at 47–48.
11. T. J. Diffey, “Natural Beauty without Metaphysics,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty,
and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 43–64, at 48.
12. Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 56, no. 2 (1998): 101–11.
13. These phrases are from Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature.”
14. Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 241.
15. Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature,” 105.
16. I do not think an analogous case can be made for the claim that additional infor-
mation will invariably turn boring artworks or monotonous track housing into
aesthetically positive human artifacts. In part, this is because we will often dis-
cover that inept or morally dubious behaviors underlie the aesthetically negative
products of humanity.
17. Brady, “Ugliness and Nature,” 30.
18. Carlson, “Nature and Positive Aesthetics,” 72.
19. Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, 9n6.
20. Ibid., 126–27; italics in original.
21. Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 214.
22. Allen Carlson, “Budd and Brady on the Aesthetics of Nature,” Philosophical
Quarterly 55, no. 218 (2005): 106–13, at 111–12.
23. Holmes Rolston III, “Aesthetic Experience in Forests,” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 56, no. 2 (1998): 157–66, at 164.
24. Stan Godlovitch, “Valuing Nature and the Autonomy of Natural Aesthetics,”
British Journal of Aesthetics 38, no. 2 (1998): 180–97, at 195.
25. Eugene Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1989), 177.
26. Holmes Rolston III, “Beauty and the Beast: Aesthetic Experience of Wildlife,” in
Valuing Wildlife: Economic and Social Perspectives, ed. Daniel J. Decker and Gary R.
Goff (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 187–96, at 192.
27. Emily Brady stresses the importance of multisensuous aesthetic responses to
nature in Aesthetics of the Environment, 123–28. In Aesthetics and Nature (New
York: Continuum, 2008), Glenn Parsons limits aesthetic responses to sight and
sound because the pleasures of the other senses are not sufficiently “disembod-
ied.” See, especially, Chapter 6. But this rules out a paradigm of the aesthetic
appreciation of nature: the enjoyment of the wind in your face, the sun on your
back, the strain in your legs while hiking in the mountains on a beautiful sum-
mer day.
28. Brady, “Ugliness and Nature,” 35.
29. Ibid., 33.

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 Evaluating Positive Aesthetics  41

30. On-­balance individualism must specify how to individuate these aesthetically

positive objects: are all noses and hillsides examples of individuals that are over-
all aesthetically positive?
31. Glenn Parsons, “Nature Appreciation, Science and Positive Aesthetics,” British
Journal of Aesthetics 42, no. 3 (2002): 279–95, at 288.
32. Ibid., 295.
33. Ibid., 288.
34. Kendall Walton solves this problem by adopting a category-­relative view of
nature’s aesthetic value: natural objects have different aesthetic qualities depend-
ing on which way we categorize them, and (unlike art objects) there is no correct
way to categorize them for aesthetic purposes. See Walton, “Categories of Art,”
Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (1970): 334–67. Parsons is not willing to accept such
a special relativity for nature aesthetics.
35. Parsons, “Nature Appreciation, Science and Positive Aesthetics,” 292.
36. Ibid., 294.
37. Walton uses beauty maximization as one of his criteria for correct categorization
of art. See Walton, “Categories of Art,” 357.
38. Allen Carlson, “‘We See Beauty Now Where We Could Not See It Before’:
Rolston’s Aesthetics of Nature,” in Nature, Value, Duty: Life on Earth with Holmes
Rolston, III, ed. Christopher Preston and Wayne Ouderkirk (Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 103–24, at 122–23n62.
39. Allen Carlson, “Hargrove, Positive Aesthetics and Indifferent Creativity,” Phi-
losophy and Geography 5, no 2 (2002): 224 -­34, at 229.
40. Carlson, “‘We See Beauty Now Where We Could Not See It Before,’ 115.
41. For a discussion of developments in the science of ecology that are trouble for
this Carlson defense of positive aesthetics, see Jason Boaz Simus, “Aesthetic
Implications of the New Paradigm in Ecology,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education
42, no. 1 (2008): 63–79.
42. Compare Eugene Hargrove’s criticism: “I am troubled by Carlson’s claim that
the creativity involved in the aesthetic appreciation of natural objects is in the
human activity producing aesthetic categories, not in the activity that produced
the natural objects themselves.” Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic Apprecia-
tion of Nature,” Philosophy and Geography 5, no. 2 (2002): 213–24, at 217.
43. Parsons and Carlson, Functional Beauty, 133.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 136.
46. Brady, “Ugliness and Nature,” 35n24.
47. Holmes Rolston III, “Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscapes Need to be
Science-­Based?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35, no. 4 (1995): 374–86.
48. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 237.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 240.
52. Ibid., 241.
53. Ibid., 240–41.
54. See Rolston, “From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental
Ethics,” in Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, ed.
Arnold Berleant (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 127–41.
55. Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, 106.
56. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 239.
57. Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature,” 104.
58. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 238–39.

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