tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post2435936168983397015..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Natural Beauty and Human ControlRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-15097713686678631942009-04-21T18:20:00.000-04:002009-04-21T18:20:00.000-04:00One reason for thinking that expanding human contr...One reason for thinking that expanding human control would necessarily undermine aesthetic appreciation of nature would be if it's constitutive of something's being beautiful to some degree that it strike us as uncharacterizable to that degree.<br /><br />Something like that seems plausible at least in some cases - Michelangelo's Pieta strikes me as very beautiful, and part of the reason seems to be that I feel like any characterization I could think of for it would feel inadequate. There's always some further, important aspect of it that would seem left out.<br /><br />The strongest sort of human control seems to be the sort where the thing in question can come out just as some human intended - and that seems to imply that there's some psychologically-possible characterization of the object that's truly adequate. Since that would imply that the thing is adequately characterizable, then if necessary unscharacterizability is a constituent of beauty, this would explain why the thought that something is under human control might undermine our sense of its beauty.<br /><br />That's a thought, anyway.Colinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12765107001231063003noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-13009065150541860882009-04-20T08:34:00.000-04:002009-04-20T08:34:00.000-04:00Whenever we talk about beauty, we need to define t...Whenever we talk about beauty, we need to define the meaning of natural. From aesthetic point of view, the line between natural and non-natural is not very clear since human beings are natural ourselves in a good sense. The comaprison between natural and non-natural could be demonstrated very well by comparing an abstract art work with a painting of, say, a forest. Which is more natural? Something metaphysically deep in logic or something apparent?murongqingcaohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08844355265713826909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-61312111787227119332009-04-20T04:36:00.000-04:002009-04-20T04:36:00.000-04:00I don't hold human control of the natural world as...I don't hold human control of the natural world as an ideal, which is to say that I don't regard human control as being the realisation of a perfection, in this case, of the natural world. The applications of the idea that comes to mind are the controls in a vehicle and environmental controls, from air conditioning to a clean room, although you seem to have in mind the living world, our efforts to exclude the weather and dust from our living spaces need not exclude them from consideration. In those cases human control can be, and generally is, regarded as being the realisation of a perfection.RichardEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08722809401567905031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-31919938057823009902009-04-20T03:54:00.000-04:002009-04-20T03:54:00.000-04:00...if, after a marvelous forest walk, I'm told tha...<I>...if, after a marvelous forest walk, I'm told that the forest is only preserved by the government's leave, this will not undermine my recent aesthetic experience (unlike, say, telling me that it is all fake). </I>Landscape painting and photography could perhaps be seen as manipulating nature (what I mean is, they are highly synthetic imitations of nature - near re-creations), but retaining its beauty (perhaps even adding to it). Its 'fakeness' (or 'syntheticness' might be better) does not detract from its value. You would want to preserve a beautiful landscape painting or photo. What *can* make a 'fake' less valuable is not so much to do with what you actually see, but more to do purely with the fact that it is a forgery - we see it as an affront. <br /><br /><I>The only [conditon] that looks to be genuinely problematic is the condition of inauthenticity, or human interference in the actual production of a landscape.</I>Perhaps it isn't that something 'natural' was tainted by the influence of people, but that something beautiful was tainted by the influence of a person who has no right to interfere. This goes for works of art as well as natural objects of beauty (upon learning of someone other than the original artist trying to improve a painting, we would pretty much immediately think its value was undermined). For the most part, anyway. There is hip-hop music (interfering with artistic creations) and bonsai trees (interfering with nature), if you want to call these beautiful (I think they're something like beautiful). <br /><br />In short, we might say that it is people interfering with beautiful things where they shouldn't which undermines aesthetic value. The beautiful thing's being 'natural' is probably not relevant.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com