Allen Carlson S Aesthetics and The Environment Routledge 2000

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Allen Carlson's Aesthetics and the Environment

(Routledge, 2000)
To cite this article: (2002) Allen Carlson's Aesthetics and the Environment (Routledge, 2000),
Philosophy & Geography, 5:2, 213-234, DOI: 10.1080/10903770220152425
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PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 2002
EXCHANGE
Allen Carlson’s Aesthetics and the

Environment (Routledge, 2000)
Carlson and the aesthetic appreciation of

nature
EUGENE HARGROVE
Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas, Denton, TX,
USA
Carlson’s book Aesthetics and the Environment is a fascinating discussion of environmen-

tal aesthetics.1 The main focus, as the subtitle attests, is on aesthetic appreciation,
primarily with regard to nature, but also comparatively with regard to art and architec-
ture. The book is written in a smooth, pleasant style that will make it accessible to the
environmentalists and to the general public. In each chapter, Carlson provides a
nontechnical hook to interest the reader and then proceeds with a more technical
discussion, in the context of the views of other scholars, that is nevertheless easy to
follow. Because of this style, the book has an exploratory feel that will make it usable as
a text on environmental aesthetics at various levels. Carlson does not have a de nitive
system that he is trying to defend. Rather he is working his way through a variety of
issues and giving his best answer for the moment in each case. No doubt Carlson will
eventually change his mind about some of the positions that he defends in the book, if
he has not done so already.
The book is divided into two parts. The rst concerns the appreciation of nature,
the second landscapes, art, and architecture. The second part on the surface appears to
be a set of unrelated subjects, much like an anthology. Actually, however, the chapters
are carefully ordered to promote the examination of speci c themes. For example, a
discussion of environmental works of art (earthworks) is followed by a chapter on
Japanese gardens. The issue in the rst chapter is whether earthworks are an aesthetic
affront. The issue in the second is why Japanese gardens, which involve as much or more
manipulation and domination of nature as earthworks, are considered to be in pleasant
harmony with nature. These chapters are followed by a chapter on the aesthetics of
agricultural landscapes, which are changing from the family farm to the corporate farm,
ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/02/020213-22 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/10903770220152425
214 EXCHANGE
and by a chapter on the urban landscape, where architecture, rather than nature,
dominates.
In this brief discussion of Carlson’s views, I wish to focus on two issues: (1) his
discussion of models of nature appreciation and (2) his discussion of positive aesthetics.
Early in the book Carlson discusses a series of models for nature appreciation,
which I think are especially interesting and helpful. For example, they could be useful
to environmental educators in teaching the aesthetic appreciation of nature. These
models include, in order of their introduction, the object model, the landscape model,
the natural environment model, the engagement model, the arousal model, the mystery
model, the nonaesthetic model, the postmodern model, a pluralist model, and nally a
metaphysical imagination model. It is, I think, appropriate to articulate these models.
However, I doubt that it is useful to select a single model as some kind of a winner. As
Carlson hints near the end of this discussion, it might be most appropriate to conceive
the “correct” model as multilayered, including a number of the distinct models he
discusses as layers. Also, since many of the models represent speci c stages in the history
of nature appreciation, one might be inclined to order them chronologically and
conclude that in nature appreciation, as it has sometimes been said in biology, ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny. There is evidence that at least some of the models played a role
in the history of aesthetic appreciation and today continue to play a role in the
development of aesthetic appreciation in the individual.
Carlson begins with discussions of the object model and the landscape model.
These discussions are then followed by a discussion of the natural environment model,
which he says “accommodates both the true character of nature and our normal
experience and understanding of it … in light of our knowledge of what is, that is, in
light of knowledge provided by the natural sciences, especially the environmental
sciences such as geology, biology, and ecology.”2 It seems to me that it is dif cult to
completely separate these three models, for both the object model and the landscape
models, in their mature states historically, are fully informed by science, or perhaps as
informed as the state of knowledge of any given time permitted. To be sure, there is a
prescienti c version of the object model, both historically and in contemporary aesthetic
development, according to which natural objects are appreciated to the degree that they
accidentally mimic human cultural artifacts or other parts of nature. This model
becomes apparent fairly quickly in tours of caves, when the guides begin showing cave
formations that look like shoes, trousers, and a variety of household items or that look
like a variety of plants and animals— sh, owers, birds, etc. Landscape painting and
picturesque travel also participated in this naive object model with an early focus on
ruins and castellated rocks, rocks that looked like humanly constructed ruins or castles.
An interesting example from the nineteenth century is the Mountain of the Holy Cross
and in the twentieth century various rock formations that look like human faces. This
naive object model is an important rst step in that it provides a basis for appreciation,
misguided though it is, for those unable to bring any other information or context to
bear. To someone with a more developed sense of aesthetic appreciation, these
accidental representations of human and natural objects may actually be a distraction
that interferes with appreciation. It is quickly displaced by scienti c interpretation.
Nevertheless, the object model is not really replaced by a scienti c one, the natural
environment model, since the focus for nearly three centuries in biology, botany, and
geology was often on natural objects. The biological and botanical classi cation of
species, for example, was intently object oriented. This orientation is re ected in
scienti c painting depicting the properties of plants and animals. A contemporary
EXCHANGE 215
descendant is the bird book, which highlights the characteristic features of birds for
identi cation purposes. In addition, the object model plays an important role within the
landscape model. Initially, in landscape painting, natural objects were simply elements
contributing to composition, pleasing formal design that is not actually present in
nature. This formal element is alive and well in tourist appreciation of natural scenery.
The movement of tourists backward and forward, left and right, before taking a
photograph is an attempt to introduce such composition into the nal picture. Although
this formal design has never been displaced, the object model has established a rm hold
within the landscape as the detail, usually in light of scienti c knowledge, the makes up
the painting. In nature appreciation, one switches between the object and landscape
models, depending on the level of observation desired. Close observation will be object
oriented. Broader observation will be landscape oriented, in which the natural objects
are ingredients, related both formally and scienti cally.
In some respects, the interplay of the object and landscape models were developed
in landscape gardening. Initially, the natural objects were placed and altered for formal
reasons. In the informal garden, however, the obvious alteration of the natural objects
was avoided, highlighting a scienti cally informed presentation of the natural objects
and permitting a more ecological rather than formal arrangement and organization. This
shift in gardening, as in painting, points the appreciator in the direction of the natural
environment model.
The next three of Carlson’s models, the engagement, arousal, and mystery models,
lead the appreciator beyond the visual and the abstract. The object and landscape
models are primarily sight oriented. The engagement and arousal models activate the
other senses and react to them. The mystery model curbs the hubris of scienti c
appreciation. The goal of the natural environment model should not be to fully
categorize, analyze, and capture nature. Those who appreciate nature generally want it
to be more than our current knowledge of it. The aesthetic appreciation of a cave is
generally greater if the possibility of additional unexplored passages exists than it would
be if all possibilities were exhausted. The mystery invites new engagement and arousal.
Similarly, the unvisited backcountry in Yellowstone enhances the visited tourist areas
located by the parking lots, even though the tourists will never go to them. If the
backcountry were converted into suburban subdivisions, but in such a way that they
were not visible to those viewing the standard sites within the park, the aesthetic
experience would nonetheless be completely altered. The unknown would be gone,
humanized out of existence, and the opportunities for new engagement and arousal
eliminated.
It seems to me that these models, the object, the landscape, the natural environ-
ment, the engagement, the arousal, and the mystery, go together effectively to produce
a layered model for nature appreciation. However, Carlson goes on to develop still
another model, which he calls the postmodern model. I confess that I do not entirely
understand why Carlson elects to call this model postmodern. According to Carlson, the
postmodern model “focuses attention on the many layers of human deposit that overlay
pure nature” ranging “from the thin lm of common sense, through the rich stratum of
science to the abundant accumulations of culture.” The layers of human deposit, so to
speak, seem to me to have always been there, even and perhaps most obviously in what
I have called the naive version of the object model in which humans nd accidental and
often inappropriate images embedded in the natural. Further, I nd it curious that “the
rich stratum of science” appears in the postmodern, since that stratum is already fully
displayed in the natural environment model. Carlson also speaks of the postmodern as
216 EXCHANGE
including “the rich and varied deposits from our art, literature, folklore, religion, and
myth.” Generally these elements are presented as a kind of storytelling called narrative.
Perhaps the introduction of the scienti c into the postmodern is intended to reconcile
the humanizing of nature with the natural environment model as a humanly constructed
story of nature. If so, I would prefer simply a recognition of the narrative element in the
natural environmental model and the replacement of the postmodern with something
like a cultural relation model, with all of the models integrated into the layers of a
pluralist model, the next of Carlson’s models.3
I nd two of Carlson’s models, the metaphysical imagination model and the
nonaesthetic model, to be less useful than the rest and perhaps not speci cally needed
in the layered pluralist model I recommend in terms of Carlson’s presentation. It seems
to me that the metaphysical imagination model could be appropriately placed within the
postmodern model, especially slightly reconceived as a cultural relation model. As for
the nonaesthetic model of nature appreciation, the short discussion of it seems to me to
be contradictory. While it is true that humans can appreciate nature nonaesthetically, for
example, in terms of a resource model, in which the appreciator looks at a forest as
future lumber in a lumberyard, I do not see that such appreciation needs to be included
as a model for nature appreciation in a book that is really analyzing aesthetic apprecia-
tion. Carlson seems to have two reasons for bringing it up. First, he seems to think that
the nonaesthetic has something to do with the mystery model, which he says “leaves the
realm of the aesthetic altogether,” a weak claim which I have already contested above
on the grounds that mystery usually enhances aesthetic appreciation. His other reason
for bringing up a nonaesthetic model is that “the Western tradition in aesthetics … is
committed to a doctrine that explicitly excludes the nonaesthetic model of nature
appreciation: the doctrine that … anything that can be viewed can be viewed aestheti-
cally.” This view is one of the central discussions in the book. Further, it is a view that
he defends as positive aesthetics. Thus, it is dif cult to imagine that he wishes it to be
a serious contender as one of his various models or even a layer in a pluralist model.
Perhaps Carlson felt the need to make some reference to a nonaesthetic model, given his
later discussion of positive aesthetics, but I really see no need myself.4
Carlson’s discussion of positive aesthetics itself, which is developed primarily in a
chapter that originally appeared in the journal Environmental Ethics, is in my view a very
signi cant contribution to environmental aesthetics and environmental philosophy more
generally. Carlson holds that positive aesthetics grew “from the tradition of such
thinkers as Thoreau and Marsh and [was] fully realized in John Muir.” The view was
associated with a remark by the British painter John Constable: “I never saw an ugly
thing in my life.” Carlson deals with three justi cations of positive aesthetics. The rst,
which he attributes to Robert Elliot, is that all nature can be regarded as beautiful
because it is not subject to aesthetic judgment. On this view, only objects intentionally
created as art objects can be aesthetic. Because nature was not created by an artist, it
is not a work of art and therefore is not subject to aesthetic evaluation. It is beautiful
only because it cannot be judged not to be beautiful. Carlson responds that aesthetic
response can be possible even if aesthetic judgments comparable to those made with
regard to works of art cannot be made.5
Carlson next examines the view that positive aesthetics is related to the sublime—
that “it is a function of the astonishing nature of something that is beyond the limits
of human control.”6 According to Carlson, the justi cations for positive aesthetics in
this context are that it would be pointless to make negative aesthetic judgments
and presumptive given our limited understanding of nature. Carlson rejects these
EXCHANGE 217
justi cations on the grounds that they have not shown that negative criticism is
inappropriate.
The third justi cation is that nature is “not of human making” and “is designed,
created, and maintained by an all-knowing and all-powerful God.” It is therefore
pointless and presumptuous once again to criticize nature. Further, having been created
by a perfect being, nature is itself perfect and therefore not appropriately subject to
criticism unless it is marred by human action. This view makes nature an art object with
God as the artist who provided the design and executed the plan. Carlson rejects this
justi cation on the grounds that “Christianity and the aesthetic appreciation of nature
have been opposing forces to an extent such that the latter could grow only as the former
went into decline.” He adds: “If this is an accurate historical picture, it is not surprising
to nd that positive aesthetics does not prosper under Christian theism.”7
In Carlson’s preferred justi cation for positive aesthetics, his focus is on the
development of a criterion to appreciate nature. He proceeds by analogy with an
imaginary world:
… we can imagine a world different from ours. Imagine one in which “works
of art” are not created at all, but rather discovered; and in which “artists” do
not use their talents and ingenuity to create works of art but rather use them
to create categories in which the discovered works appear to be masterpieces.
Imagine further that the criterion for categories being correct is that they make
the works appear to be masterpieces. In such a world determinations of
categories and of their correctness would be dependent upon considerations of
aesthetic goodness; and (insofar as the artists accomplish their job) all works of
art would in fact be masterpieces.
According to Carlson, “natural objects and landscapes in our world are analogous to the
works to art in [the] imagined world, and scientists in our world are analogous to artists
in [the] imagined world.” Carlson summarizes his justi cation as follows:
The key to the justi cation lies in the kind of thing nature is as opposed to art
and the kinds of categories that are correct for it as opposed to those for art.
Art is created, while nature is discovered. The determinations of categories of
art and their correctness are in general prior to and independent of aesthetic
considerations, while the determinations of categories of nature and of their
correctness are in an important sense dependent upon aesthetic considerations.
These two differences are closely related. Since nature is discovered, rather
than created, in science, unlike art, creativity plays its major role in the
determinations of categories and of their correctness; and considerations of
aesthetic goodness come into play at this creative level. Thus, our science
creates categories of nature in part in light of aesthetic goodness and in so
doing makes the natural world appear aesthetically good to us.8
While I believe that the process by which we develop categories to appreciate
natural objects is largely correct, I think there are some problems with Carlson’s
account. 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. The problem is that the
appreciation is not primarily directed at the appreciation of the natural objects, but
rather at the appreciation of the scientist-artists who invent the categories that render the
objects “masterpieces.” In his book, Environmental Ethics, Holmes Rolston, III speaks of
218 EXCHANGE
the “fallacy of misplaced wonder,” in which humans value (aesthetically appreciate) “the
experience of wonder, rather than the objects of wonder.”9 Here the problem could be
called “the fallacy of misplaced creativity.”
Carlson commits this fallacy, I believe, because he continues to be committed to the
basic presuppositions behind the theistic justi cation, even though he rejects the
account itself. Carlson holds that creativity involves a creator, an artist. Since he rejects
a creator for nature, he ties creativity to the creative activity of the categorizer. An
alternative approach, however, is available. For example, one can simply reject the idea
that creativity requires a creator who makes a plan and carries that plan out. This
alternative is, in fact, historically viable. In the late Middle Ages, philosophers and
theologians pondered whether God created the world in accordance with some preexist-
ing external standard of value. When God saw that the world was good, did He
determine it to be good in terms of some Platonic-like standard of Good independent
from him or did the world come to be good simply because He created it? Because the
existence of an external standard of Good would have diminished or limited God, such
that He would then not be all-powerful, medieval scholars rejected the former and
accepted the latter.
This view was held by René Descartes who expressed it in the following manner in
a letter:
To one who pays attention to God’s immensity, it is clear that nothing at all
can exist which does not depend on him. This is true not only of everything
that persists, but of all order, of every law, and of every reason of truth and
goodness; for otherwise God … would not have been wholly indifferent to the
creation of what he has created. For if any reason for what is good had
preceded His preordination, it would have determined Him towards that which
it was best to bring about; but on the contrary because He determined Himself
towards those things which ought to be accomplished, for that reason, as it
stands in Genesis, they are very good; that is to say, the reason for their
goodness is the fact that He wished to create them so.10
In my book, Foundations of Environmental Ethics, I have borrowed the word indifferent
from this passage and distinguished between artistic creativity, which requires a creator
with a plan developed in terms of preexisting standards, and indifferent creativity, which
proceeds without a plan and without predetermined standards.11
Although I have not de nitely established the link, it seems very likely that positive
aesthetics is a direct consequence of the deliberations in the Middle Ages about God
and good. We know that modern aesthetics began with a philosophical evaluation of the
aesthetic qualities of nature, primarily in terms of the sublime, which were then
contrasted with the aesthetic qualities of art, primarily in terms of beauty, leading
eventually the attribution of beauty to nature, in terms of the picturesque. In the initial
step, with the recognition of the sublime in nature, as Marjorie Hope Nicholson has
noted, attributes that had previously been reserved for God were applied to sublime
objects.12 Instead of mountains simply symbolizing the terrible wrath of God, that
awesomeness came to be evoked by the mountains in their own right. I suggest that the
notion of indifferent creativity was transferred to nature at this time along with the other
attributes of God. If so, then positive aesthetics is not an invention of thinkers in the
nineteenth century, but rather a fundamental element existent in modern aesthetics
from its initial beginnings.
This transfer of indifferent creativity from a Christian God to Nature (with a capital
EXCHANGE 219
N) actually makes the idea of positive aesthetics more plausible. The indifferent
creativity of God presumably requires an unusual state of mind. God must be indifferent
so that He will not be in uenced by some outside standard that will detract from His
“immensity.” He must avoid at all costs letting a plan form in His mind. There are no
comparable dif culties for Nature (with a capital N), since it has no mind and therefore
cannot form a plan or attend to an external standard. In this context, indifferent
creativity makes perfectly good sense. With regard to nonliving natural objects, we call
this creative process uniformitarian geology. With regard to living natural objects, we
call it biological evolution, a special case of uniformitarianism.
According to Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, evolution “involves the
development of enduring harmonies of enduring shapes of value, which merge into
higher attainments of things beyond themselves. Aesthetic attainment is interwoven into
the texture of realisation. The endurance of an entity represents the attainment of a
limited aesthetic success.” Rather than value being the product of a plan, “Value is the
outcome of limitation.” There could be no value in nature in Whitehead’s sense if the
outcomes of interactions were merely the product of physical/chemical principles. If they
were, then everything would be the same everywhere. In actuality, however, the same
physical/chemical principles produce different results in different places, making the
nal achievements unpredictable.13
Rolston’s notions of projective nature and natural project are helpful here.14 For
Rolston, river basins are natural projects. On this planet, Earth, physical/chemical
processes mindlessly produce complex structures involving the joining of tributaries into
a main channel which ultimately empties into an ocean. The structure is the same all
over the planet. If there is an uplift that obliterates the system, activity begins immedi-
ately that will produce a new river basin. This type of natural project, nevertheless,
occurs almost exclusively on this planet. There are indications that it occurred in the
past on Mars, but, as far as we know, on no other planet or satellite in our solar system.
Given the regularity and success of such projects on this planet and the absence of such
activity on other heavenly bodies, even though the same physical/chemical processes
work the same way on all of them, it seems reasonable to conclude that states of affairs
at one location favor or limit speci c outcomes, producing different results propelled by
the same forces. This indifferent activity, fueled by otherwise predictable processes,
produces a wide range of guided, but unplanned results, which are consistent with the
indifferent creative activity characterized by Descartes.
With the addition of living entities and biological mechanism, we can add a layer
of subjective choice, primarily nonhuman. Although neither godly nor human artists
played a role, individual members of species made choices, to mate with one particular
individual rather than another, moving the evolution of each species in a particular
direction and shaping the aesthetic properties of that species in a speci c way. Thus, at
the geological level, we have an indifferent creativity that corresponds to the indifferent
creativity of God. Yet, at the biological level, we have individuals subjectively making
individual decisions that eventually produced the common sun ower, the mockingbird,
the lion, and the horse.
Although Rolston argues fervently throughout Environmental Ethics that there is
something out there that is valuable that the human mind discovers, with regard to
natural beauty, Rolston writes, “With beauty we cross a threshold into a realm of higher
value; the experience of beauty is something humans bring into the world. Just as there
is no creature with a world view and an ethic before humans arrive, nothing has any
sense of beauty.”15 On this matter, I believe Rolston to be wrong. To the contrary, I
220 EXCHANGE
hold, with Nathaniel Shaler, that owers represent the subjective (perhaps unconscious)
preferences of insects and each species of birds the subjective preferences of the
individuals in that species.16 In this view, a sense of beauty is part of evolutionary
heritage of life on this planet, not something that humans bring forth out of the blue at
the end of the evolutionary sequence.
It seems to me that Carlson’s view is closer to Rolston’s than my own. Although
humans discover natural objects, they become beautiful by humans creatively inventing
standards that thereby make them beautiful. By doing so, they bring beauty to a world
that would otherwise have no beauty at all. I argue to the contrary that in the case of
living things, we discover not just their form, but also discover the point of view of the
individuals of each species by which they collectively over millions of years made
themselves and other entities ( owers) beautiful to them. In accordance with this
position, creativity is in the creation and not simply in the development of categories to
appreciate that creation.
My position with regard to living organisms is perhaps the easiest to accept,
since it still posits artists, the individuals making up species. There is not, however, a
clear plan being followed. Individual choice is an ingredient along with such factors as
climate change, the creation of species barriers, and the effects of new predators and
disease. The handling of nonliving entities is somewhat more problematic since there is
no artist of any kind. Here I argue that many organisms, including among others insects,
birds, and humans, have an evolutionarily related sense of beauty and that this sense
of beauty operates within the context of the geological and biological state of affairs at
any given point in evolutionary history. For humans, what exists is the starting point
not only for natural beauty, but also artistic beauty. We appreciate mountains because
we happen to live on a planet that generates mountains. If we lived on a planet on
which mountains did not form, we would most likely have no aesthetic appreciation
of mountains. Likewise, artistic beauty is derived from this natural history as well,
for, as Hume reminds us, all of the shapes, colors, textures, etc. out of which human
art emerges is from impressions of natural phenomena. Even though art frequently
adopts an anti-nature stance, it does not free itself from natural beauty, for even as
a reaction against natural beauty, artistic beauty is still tied to natural beauty as its
source.
In the nal chapter of part one, “Appreciating Art and Appreciating Nature,”
Carlson divides his subject into four areas: design appreciation and order appreciation
with regard to appreciating art and design appreciation and order appreciation with
regard to appreciating nature. In his discussion of design appreciation with regard to art,
Carlson writes that “appreciation of art qua art must be appreciation qua creation by an
artist.” The key to design appreciation, according to Carlson, is that whatever else it
might be, it must still be “designed by its creator.” “To be designed” means that there
is a creator who carries out a plan or a predetermined design.17 This discussion parallels
my view in part if “creation by an artist” is the same as what I call “artistic creation.”
However, in my terminology, it lacks a conception of “indifferent creativity” such that
“appreciation of natural beauty qua natural beauty is appreciation qua indifferent or
natural creation.”
Carlson does deal with this issue to some degree. He contrasts designed art with art
that is not designed or planned in advance. The example he gives is what he calls “action
painting.” In such painting, “there does not seem to be an initial design that becomes
embodied in the object.” The result is not the achievement of a design, but rather “a
resultant pattern.” Those patterns worthy of aesthetic appreciation are those that reveal
EXCHANGE 221
an order. The pattern or order is not the result of a designer, though it is the result of
an artist as a propelling force.18
In my view, the resultant pattern produced by an artist trying not to be a designer
does not match up very well with the patterns produced by the biological and geological
forces that are shaping natural creation. The artist’s intentions are still a more determi-
nate element than, for instance, the individual choices of the members of a species in
selecting mates over the natural history of that species. Likewise, the undesigned
interactions of the materials involved are dependent upon choices made by the artist that
are not analogous to aesthetic situations in nature. Finally, an “action painting” created
by an artist having an unclothed human randomly covered with blobs of paint roll about
on a canvas for a few minutes does not seem to be analogous in any signi cant way to
the creation of a species of ower through botanical evolution. When we admire the
painting, we admire a single, largely chance event that by the design (or intention) of an
artist has been designated as an art object. When we admire the ower, we admire a
living process culminating in the ower admired that has resulted from an uncountable
number of events over an immense period of time (a history) involving a multitude of
biological and geological factors, both deterministic and stochastic.
Carlson also draws on what he calls anti-art in two respects. The rst is the random,
spontaneous, and chance creation of poetry. The humorous example of this type of art
is normally portrayed as a great novel written by a group of monkeys pounding on
typewriters. This type of art once again stresses the absence of a creator. The other is
what Carlson calls “found art.” Examples of this kind of art includes Marcel Duchamp’s
selection of “a urinal, a bottle rack, or a typewriter” and displaying it as an art object.
In this case, we return to the idea of the creation of categories by which to aesthetically
evaluate the found objects.19
In his discussion of design appreciation of nature, Carlson immediately presents it
as “appreciation of nature” assimilated to “the appreciation of art.” According to
Carlson, in this view, “Art appreciation and nature appreciation collapse into one.” In
this section, Carlson deals once again with “the problem of how to understand such
appreciation given that paradigmatic art appreciation is analyzed as design appreciation,
and yet nature is not to be construed as the creation of a designer.”20
The key issue is whether God can create creation without a plan. As I have
indicated above, that is the of cial conclusion of philosophy and theology at the end of
the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Period. I would like to argue that
there is design in nature and that it is more than what would be created by a group of
monkeys typing without knowing what they are doing and more than simply nding
order and establishing humanly created categories of appreciation. There is order in that
physical/chemical principles are operating in a predictable manner. There is, however,
novelty—spontaneity and chance—in that local states of affairs are unpredictably
creating limitations to these forces which may produce results rarely found elsewhere in
the solar system, if not the universe.
In his discussion of order appreciation of nature, Carlson provides the following
model:
An individual qua appreciator selects objects of appreciation from the things

around him or her and focuses on the order imposed on these objects by the
various forces, random and otherwise, that produce them. Moreover, the
objects are selected in part by reference to a general nonaesthetic and non-
artistic story that helps make them appreciable by making this order visible and
222 EXCHANGE
intelligible. Awareness and understanding of the key entities—the order, the

forces that produce it, and the account that illuminates it—and the interplay
among them dictate relevant acts of aspection and guide the appreciative
response.21
This account is similar to Carlson’s discussion of positive aesthetics, but differs in that
the appreciator instead of creating categories, views the natural objects in light of an
appropriate story. While at rst this emphasis seems to be independent of the design
discussions, it turns out that the possible stories are alternatives to the “theist view of
nature as designed,” presumably the primary story. Yet the designer concept continues
at another level to be the primary difference between artistic beauty and natural beauty.
Carlson writes that the stories “illuminate nature as ordered and in doing so give it
meaning, signi cance, and beauty—qualities that those who create the stories nd
appealing. Thus, unlike design appreciation that focuses on aesthetic qualities that result
from embodying an initial design in an object, order appreciation focuses on aesthetic
qualities that result from applying an after-the-fact story to a pre-existent object.”22
It seems to me that Carlson’s problems in justifying positive aesthetics, and indeed
determining that nature is beautiful at all, derives from an assumption that appreciation
of art is the primary mode of aesthetic appreciation and that appreciation of nature must
somehow be reconciled with it. Art appreciation is the appreciation of the design
intended by a designer. Because there is no designer in nature, humans must nd a way
to “give [nature] meaning, signi cance, and beauty.”23 Nature is an aesthetic failure
requiring a special tap dance to make it worthy.
This assumption seems to be unwarranted for three reasons. First, as noted above,
modern aesthetics began with a study of nature aesthetics and philosophy of art was
developed in juxtaposition to it. Thus, originally nature and art had parallel and equal
status. The problem of natural beauty has arisen only because art has been elevated
above nature. Nature becomes inferior because it is not a work of art. This claim,
however, is not well supported, for it is just as reasonable to say that art is inferior
because it is not natural. As Carlson notes, a human chauvinistic aesthetic seems to be
involved. The superiority of art is presumably justi ed on the grounds that it is the result
of activity that is similar to the creative activity of God. Humans are like God, and
therefore their works are superior. As I have noted above, nonetheless, philosophy in the
past has characterized God’s creative activity very differently than this model assumes—
as indifferent rather than planned—and this characterization is more consistent with the
creation of natural beauty than with artistic beauty. Although I know the argument for
God as an indifferent creator, I have yet to see a speci c argument for God as an artistic
creator. It seems to be an unjusti ed assumption made by those who confuse the image
of God with the image of humankind.
Second, indifferent creativity appears to be a kind of activity that humans are not
normally capable of undertaking, at least within human time frames. Usually, humanly
created objects are readily identi able as not being natural. Human representations of
nature are generally simpler and lack the detail of an original. Action painting is an
example of the great disparity between the natural and the artistic. While the
materials in action painting used may re ect some physical/chemical order, the materials
themselves do not usually interact, restrict, and limit to produce structures of the
kinds that Rolston calls natural projects. I do not doubt that humans can produce
natural beauty indifferently, but it is not on the model of artist and art object. The most
likely example is the geometrical scarring of the Earth which humans have been engaged
EXCHANGE 223
in for centuries. If you look out the window of an airplane, you will see giant rectangles
and squares, and occasionally circles (from irrigation systems) spread out across the
surface of our planet. This scarring is certainly not aesthetically planned; it has emerged
out of human activity indifferently; yet, it is now an enduring feature of our planet which
will likely be a major characteristic visible to possible future visitors, long after humans
are extinct. It would likely be regarded as part of the natural beauty of Earth by any such
alien visitors.
Third, as I have indicated above, natural beauty is the source of the elements that
make up artistic creations, either through direct copying or through reaction against
natural form. As Hume put it long ago: “The creative power of the mind amounts to
no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the
materials afforded us by the senses and experience.” While some might want to claim
that the reorganization of the materials of the senses is rendered superior in art, Hume
disagreed: “All the colors of poetry, however splendid, can never paint natural objects
in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landscape. The most
lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.”24
These criticisms of Carlson’s justi cation of positive aesthetics may in some
respects be regarded as a quibble, since I do not quarrel with much of his account. As
we become more familiar with natural objects and scenery, we do establish categories by
which we aesthetically appreciate these entities collectively and individually. We also
come to appreciate them in terms of stories about them, which in some sense we create.
These stories, however, seem to me to be no different in kind from stories about
individual artists or particular artistic movements. My only serious objection is that
positive aesthetics should not be justi ed in such a way that the beauty and creativity of
the natural is reduced to something that is merely attributed to nature. My suggestion
that beauty and creativity is preexistent in nature is an adjustment which I think can
easily be incorporated into Carlson’s wonderful book.
Notes
1. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art, and Architecture (London,
New York: Routledge, 2000).
2. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 6.
5. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 12, 72, 76.
7. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 81, 84.
8. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 92, 93–4.
9. Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988), 131.
10. René Descartes, Meditations, Objections VI, and Replies.
11. Eugene C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Denton, Tex.: Environmental Ethics Books,
1996), 182–4.
12. Majorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the
Iin nite (New York: Norton, 1963), 71, 143, 215.
13. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 94.
14. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 192–201.
15. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 233.
16. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Man and the Earth (New York: Duf eld & Company, 1910, 172–7.
20. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 114, 115, 116.
224 EXCHANGE

24. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 2.
Hargrove, positive aesthetics, and

indifferent creativity
ALLEN CARLSON
Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
Eugene Hargrove’s discussion of my Aesthetics and the Environment is insightful and

thought provoking. I appreciate his attention and his efforts. He raises interesting
questions about certain aspects of my position, as well as making illuminating sugges-
tions as to how these questions might be addressed. He focuses primarily on two issues:
rst, a set of models for appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature that I outline early
on in the volume and, second, my discussion of positive aesthetics that is contained
mainly in Chapter 6 and to a lesser extend in Chapter 7.1 He has certain speci c
concerns about each of these matters, but he also has a more general worry that surfaces
at various points throughout his discussion. The more general worry is roughly that I
consider aesthetic appreciation of art to be basic and aesthetic appreciation of nature
derivative. I address this general worry rst and then turn to his concerns about my
models for appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature and my discussion of positive
aesthetics.
Hargrove’s worry that I consider aesthetic appreciation of art to be basic and that
of nature in some sense derivative is suggested at a number of points in his discussion.
However, the strongest statement of it comes near the end of his article:
It seems to me that Carlson’s problems in justifying positive aesthetics, and
indeed determining that nature is beautiful at all, derives from an assumption
that appreciation of art is the primary mode of aesthetic appreciation and that
appreciation of nature must somehow be reconciled with it.2
Hargrove cites three reasons for thinking this assumption unwarranted. The rst is that
modern aesthetics began with the aesthetics of nature and initially granted nature and
art equal status, suggesting that the later elevation of art above nature as the paradigm
object of aesthetic appreciation is mistaken. The second focuses on Hargrove’s notion
of “indifferent creativity,” which I discuss below. The third is that “natural beauty is the
source of the elements that make up artistic creations, either through direct copying or
through reaction against natural forms.”3
In order to assess Hargrove’s worry, it is useful to draw a distinction between, on
the one hand, the aesthetic appreciation of art and, on the other, the aesthetics of art
EXCHANGE 225
appreciation. The former refers to the way in which we aesthetically appreciate works of
art, while the latter to the philosophical investigation of the nature of such appreciation.
In the above quote, Hargrove frames the assumption that he believes is unwarranted in
terms of the former, the aesthetic appreciation of art. If, therefore, the assumption in
question is that aesthetic appreciation of art is primary and that aesthetic appreciation
of nature must be reconciled to it, I agree with Hargrove that this assumption is
unwarranted and problematic. If, however, the assumption concerns the latter, the
aesthetics of art appreciation, and the assumption is that the philosophical investigation
of the nature of art appreciation is primary and that the investigation of appreciation
of nature must be in some ways reconciled to it, I think that the assumption may be
not only warranted, but perhaps even methodologically necessary for properly doing
contemporary aesthetics.
Part of the point of drawing this distinction is to make clear that the rst
assumption, that aesthetic appreciation of art is primary and that that of nature must be
reconciled to it, is not only, as Hargrove and I agree, unwarranted, but, more to the
point here, not an assumption that I make. For example, consider what I call the object
and the landscape models, two of my models for aesthetic appreciation of nature that
Hargrove discusses. Each of these models, in that each assimilates nature appreciation
to a certain mode of art appreciation, explicitly takes aesthetic appreciation of art as
primary and reconciles that of nature to it. However, I call these models into question
in large part just because they make this assumption. I argue that neither of them “fully
realize serious, appropriate appreciation of nature for each distorts the true character of
nature. The former rips natural objects from their larger environments while that latter
frames and attens them into scenery.”4 Ironically, Hargrove is more sympathetic to
these models than I, noting that, although “misguided” the object model “is an
important rst step in that it provides a basis for appreciation … for those unable to
bring any other information to bear” and that the landscape model “is alive and well in
tourist appreciation of natural scenery.”5 To be fair, Hargrove’s remarks about both
models are more descriptive than normative, but his tone yet suggests that he is more
open than I to the assumption that, at least in some cases, aesthetic appreciation of art
is primary and that that of nature must be reconciled to it.
My rejection of the assumption that aesthetic appreciation of art is primary and that
aesthetic appreciation of nature is to be reconciled to it is also implicit in both the
natural environmental model of nature appreciation (sometimes called cognitive natural-
ism or scienti c cognitivism) and my discussion of positive aesthetics. In fact the
rejection of this assumption, together with the rejection’s connection to the natural
environmental model, is widely recognized in the literature on the aesthetics of nature.
For example, Yuriko Saito relates the basic idea to the natural environmental model and
characterizes it as “appreciating nature on its own terms.”6 Likewise, Malcolm Budd,
although he nds dif culties with both the natural environmental model and positive
aesthetics, accepts himself and attributes to me the idea that:
… just as the aesthetic appreciation of art is the appreciation of art as art, so
the aesthetic appreciation of nature is the aesthetic appreciation of nature as
nature. For, given that the natural world is not anyone’s artifact, the aesthetic
appreciation of nature as nature, if it is to be true to what nature actually is,
must be the aesthetic appreciation of nature not as an intentionally produced
object (and so not as art).7
Nick Zangwill labels this idea the weak “Qua thesis,” which he distinguishes from what
226 EXCHANGE
he calls the strong “Qua thesis.” The latter is the central claim of the natural
environmental model: that in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature we “must
appreciate a natural thing as the particular kind of natural thing it is.”8 Zangwill rightly
attributes both theses to me and only the weaker thesis to Budd, although he himself,
mistakenly I believe, attempts to reject both.
If it is now clear that, contrary to what Hargrove suggests, I reject the assumption
that aesthetic appreciation of art is primary and that aesthetic appreciation of nature
must be reconciled to it, what of the second assumption that I distinguished above: the
assumption that the philosophical investigation of art appreciation is primary and that
the investigation of appreciation of nature must be in some ways reconciled to it? I
suggested above that this second assumption might be not only warranted, but even
methodologically necessary for properly doing contemporary aesthetics. The justi cation
for this suggestion is simply that, correctly or not, contemporary philosophical aesthetics
has focused mainly on aesthetic appreciation of art and not on that of nature.9
Consequently, within contemporary aesthetics there are a number of clearly articulated
and widely accepted views about aesthetic appreciation of art. And, although these views
are neither beyond challenge nor directly transferable to consideration of aesthetic
appreciation of nature, it would yet be methodologically foolhardy to attempt to
investigate aesthetic appreciation of nature either by atly contradicting such views or by
completely ignoring the insights that they contain. For example, I employ this method-
ology in my basic argument for the natural environmental model, arguing that questions
of what and how to aesthetically appreciate in nature are “to be answered in a way
analogous to similar questions about art.”10 This is the sense in which the investigation
of aesthetic appreciation of nature must be reconciled to that of the investigation of
aesthetic appreciation of art. Moreover, in the last analysis the reconciliation must work
in both directions. For example, Arnold Berleant argues that we require not an
aesthetics that “… harbors two dissimilar types of phenomena, one concerning art and
another nature …” but rather an aesthetics of art and of nature in which “… both
actually involve a single all-embracing kind of experience, which requires a comprehen-
sive theory to accommodate it.”11
Although unintended by its author, this reference to the need for comprehensive
theory gestures toward Hargrove’s discussion of the rst of the two major issues that he
addresses in his essay: the set of models for appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature
that I outline in Aesthetics and the Environment. These models are designed to capture
different positions that are represented in the current literature on the aesthetics of
nature. Consequently, the models are frequently, although not in every case, in con ict
with one another. Although Hargrove nds these models interesting and helpful, he,
however, takes them to be by and large compatible with one another, suggesting one
comprehensive, multilayered model. He states:
It is, I think, appropriate to articulate these models. However, I doubt that it

is useful to select a single model as some kind of winner. As Carlson hints near
the end of this discussion, it might be appropriate to conceive the “correct”
model as multilayered, including a number of the distinct models he discusses
as layers.12
Given this conception of the models as ordered or layered, Hargrove goes on to suggest
that the models could “play a role in the development of aesthetic appreciation in the
individual” and “could be useful to environmental educators in teaching the aesthetic
EXCHANGE 227
appreciation of nature.”13 I mention these ideas in part because I think that in those
cases in which the models are not in con ict, Hargrove’s remarks are insightful and
signi cant.14 They emphasize the importance of a much-needed program in aesthetic
education for appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature.15
Nonetheless, in spite of the importance of the idea of using the models as a set of
aids in aesthetic education, it is yet essential to note that this idea can only be pushed
so far. Hargrove seemingly conceives of the models simply as models for aesthetic
appreciation of nature, whereas I consider them to be models for appropriate aesthetic
appreciation of nature. The notion of appropriate aesthetic appreciation restricts the
applicability of some of the models that, although they do indeed model certain kinds
of aesthetic appreciation of nature, yet promote modes of appreciation that are in some
way inappropriate, incorrect, or mistaken. For example, as noted above, I think that
artistic models such as the object and the landscape models frequently contribute to
inappropriate appreciation of nature in that they promote, for example, the appreciation
of nature as art rather than as nature. And, therefore, I am much less sympathetic to
these models than is Hargrove. Much the same may be said of what I call the mystery
model, which Hargrove nds especially attractive. I, on the contrary, worry that this
model tends to move beyond the realm of aesthetic appreciation altogether and into that
of what might be termed religious veneration of nature.16
The centrality of the notion of appropriate aesthetic appreciation in my account
also helps to explain Hargrove’s apparent confusion concerning each of what I call the
postmodern model and the nonaesthetic model. Hargrove seemingly nds the former
redundant since it features layers of all the modes of appreciation promoted by the other
models and is thus similar to his general conception of the models as multilayered.
However, since some of these models are incompatible with one another, the post-
modern model in virtue of its all-inclusive nature necessarily denies the idea of
appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. Thus, it constitutes a distinct position
concerning appreciation of nature, which is, in my judgment, problematic, for I think
that the idea that virtually anything counts as aesthetic appreciation of nature trivializes
such appreciation.17 The other model Hargrove nds especially puzzling is what I call
the nonaesthetic model, for, as he says, “I do not see that such appreciation needs to be
included as a model for nature appreciation in a book that is really analyzing aesthetic
appreciation.” 18 What Hargrove fails to appreciate is that this model is the limiting case:
the model that captures the position that our appreciation of nature, as opposed to that
of art, is never aesthetic. It thus rejects not only the idea of appropriate aesthetic
appreciation of nature, but the idea of any aesthetic appreciation of it whatsoever. In this
way it constitutes the denial of all the other models. As I argue, this position is
counter-intuitive, so much so that this probably explains Hargrove’s failure to appreciate
its signi cance. It is nonetheless represented in the literature.19
I now turn to the heart of Hargrove’s discussion: his consideration of the view that
is in one sense completely antithetical to the nonaesthetic model. This what is called
positive aesthetics: the position that typically only positive aesthetic judgments are
involved in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. Hargrove is in fact sympathetic
to my account of this view, describing it as “a very signi cant contribution to environ-
mental aesthetics and environmental philosophy more generally.”20 Moreover, he has
made an important contribution to the understanding of positive aesthetics in his
Foundations of Environmental Ethics.21 Nonetheless, he is concerned about the way in
which I attempt to explain the plausibility of this position. He concisely states his
concern in his concluding remarks:
228 EXCHANGE
My only serious objection is that positive aesthetics should not be justi ed in

such a way that the beauty and creativity of the natural is reduced to something
that is merely attributed to nature. My suggestion that beauty and creativity is
preexistent in nature is an adjustment which I think can easily by incorporated
into Carlson’s wonderful book.22
To fully appreciate both Hargrove’s concern about my attempt to, as he puts it,
justify positive aesthetics and his own alternative suggestion that “beauty and creativity
is preexistent in nature,” it is necessary to provide some background. First, it is essential
to clearly distinguish between, on the one hand, the natural environmental model or
cognitive naturalism and, on the other, positive aesthetics, for, at least in Aesthetics and
the Environment, I consider them two distinct positions.23 The former is the view that
knowledge provided by natural science is necessary for appropriate aesthetic apprecia-
tion of nature, and the latter the view that typically only positive aesthetic judgments are
involved in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. Second, it is necessary to
understand that the relationship between them is such that the former is utilized to
justify, or as I prefer to put it, partially explain the apparent plausibility of, the latter. It
is this kind of justi cation of or explanation of the plausibility of positive aesthetics that
Hargrove nds troublesome.
How then is the natural environmental model or cognitive naturalism meant to help
explain the plausibility of positive aesthetics? The line of thought may be summarized
as follows:
1. When seen under different descriptions (or in different categories), objects of

aesthetic appreciation appear to have different aesthetic properties.
2. The aesthetic properties that objects of appreciation in fact have are those they
appear to have when seen under correct descriptions.
3. The correct descriptions of natural objects are the (correct) scienti c descriptions of
such objects.
4. A signi cant consideration in the creation of (correct) scienti c descriptions is
aesthetic goodness.
5. Given 1 and 4, (correct) scienti c descriptions tend to make natural objects appear
aesthetically good.
6. Given 2, 3, and 5, (correct) scienti c descriptions tend to make natural objects in
fact aesthetically good.
7. Given 6, the plausibility of positive aesthetics is somewhat explained.
Before turning to Hargrove’s concern about this line of thought, a few remarks are
needed to explain and support the premises of the argument. First, although premises
1 and 2 are simply baldly asserted here, they are, I believe, intuitively plausible.
Consider just one example: We observe a person making abrupt, angular movements of
her arms, legs, and torso. We initially see the person as experiencing a convulsive t, and
the movements appear jerky and awkward to us. But then a friend suggests that the
person is performing a new modern dance, and seeing it as such, we nd the movements
smoother and even graceful. What are the aesthetic properties that the movements in
fact have? Are they awkward or are they graceful? It depends on the correct description
of the movements. Are they in fact the results of a convulsive t or are they the elements
of a modern dance? The general view implicit in this example and summarized in
premises 1 and 2 is more fully elaborated in Aesthetics and the Environment and is well
supported in the literature.24 Second, premises 1 and 2 should not be understood as
EXCHANGE 229
necessarily applying to all the aesthetic properties that any given object might have.
Some objects may have some aesthetic properties, perhaps simple sensory aesthetic
properties, such as being shiny or glistening, that are independent of the descriptions
under which we see such objects.
Concerning premise 3 a few remarks are also necessary. This premise asserts that
the correct descriptions of natural objects are the (correct) scienti c descriptions of such
objects. First, “natural objects” in this premise should be understood broadly to include,
as well as natural objects, things such as natural ecosystems, environments, and
landscapes. Second, this premise should not be mistakenly taken as asserting that
scienti c descriptions are the only correct descriptions of natural objects nor the only
descriptions that may be relevant to determining the aesthetic properties that such
objects in fact have. For example, many natural objects are also cultural objects and thus
cultural descriptions of such objects may be both correct and aesthetically relevant.25
Third, the “correct” in brackets in this premise is necessary in order to make clear that
not every scienti c description is necessarily a correct description and even that many
current scienti c descriptions may not be completely or even partially correct. If the
latter is the case, it simply means that we cannot now know many or even any of the
aesthetic properties that natural objects in fact have.
Premise 4, that a signi cant consideration in the creation of (correct) scienti c
descriptions is aesthetic goodness, is, of course, both vague and controversial. It is worth
noting that it is commonplace to assert that positive aesthetic factors, such as simplicity,
unity, orderliness, and elegance, play a role in the construction of scienti c theories.
And recently it has been argued that aesthetic factors also have a signi cant place in
other dimensions of the scienti c process, such as scienti c experimentation.26 How-
ever, if premise 4 is to give substantial support to conclusion 5, that (correct) scienti c
descriptions tend to make natural objects appear aesthetically good, then the premise
must be taken as asserting that in the creation of and the selection among competing
scienti c theories or sets of scienti c descriptions a signi cant consideration is not only
the aesthetic goodness of the sets of descriptions themselves but also the aesthetic
goodness that the descriptions tend to bestow on the natural objects that they describe.
This is to claim that a signi cant consideration in the creation and selection of scienti c
descriptions is whether or not they make the natural world appear aesthetically better,
or, at the very least, make it appear, for example, more uni ed, orderly, or harmonious.
I nd this claim somewhat plausible in part because science aims at human understand-
ing and, by in large, we humans nd more understandable that which appears to us to
have properties such as unity, order, and harmony.27
However, the plausibility of premise 4 in the above-outlined line of thought need
not be further discussed at this point, since Hargrove’s concern is not about the
plausibility of this premise, but only about its role in the explanation of the plausibility
of positive aesthetics that the line of thought purports to provide. And enough back-
ground has now been supplied to make this clear. Hargrove’s concern is that given this
line of thought the ultimate source of the aesthetic goodness of the natural world, as it
were, appears to be not the creative processes that brought that world into existence, but
rather the creative processes that bring into existence our descriptions of that world. In
line with Holmes Rolston’s discussion of the “fallacy of misplaced wonder,” Hargrove
labels this the “fallacy of misplaced creativity.”28 He characterizes it as follows:
While I believe that the process by which we develop categories to appreciate

natural objects is largely correct, I think there are some problems with
230 EXCHANGE
Carlson’s account. I am troubled by Carlson’s claim that the creativity involved

in aesthetic appreciation of natural objects is in the human activity producing
aesthetic categories, not in the activity that produced the natural objects
themselves. 29
My initial response to Hargrove’s concern is that it may involve what we might call
the “fallacy of misplaced fallacy,” for it seems to me that Hargrove has been mislead by
Rolston’s fallacy in his understanding of the problem he nds in my line of thought.
Rolston’s fallacy, the “fallacy of misplaced wonder,” has a slightly different structure
than the problem that Hargrove describes in the above quote. Rolston is worried about
a “misplacement” concerning the actual object of aesthetic appreciation, about mis-
takenly taking as the object of our appreciation, for example, our own human experience
of wonder rather than a wonderful object itself. Hargrove is concerned rather with the
ultimate source of that which we aesthetically appreciate in an object of aesthetic
appreciation: Is that source the creativity that creates the natural world or is it the
creativity that creates our descriptions of that world? The fact that Hargrove has been
misled by Rolston’s fallacy is evidenced by how he goes on to (mis)describe his concern:
“The problem is that the appreciation is not primarily directed at the appreciation of
natural objects, but rather at the appreciation of the scientist-artists who invent the
categories that render the objects ‘masterpieces.”’30 What Hargrove describes here is a
mistake concerning the actual objects of appreciation, which, were it involved in my line
of thought explaining the plausibility of positive aesthetics, would indeed be a fallacy.
But it is not involved; on my account the natural world and its objects remain the actual
objects of aesthetic appreciation. My line of thought places within human creative
activity and experience not the objects of aesthetic appreciation but only the ultimate
source of that which we nd aesthetically appreciable in such objects. And that, I think,
is not a fallacy, but rather the correct account of the beauty of the natural world.
Nonetheless, although I think my account is essentially correct, Hargrove’s alterna-
tive account is well worth considering, for it is both thought provoking and illuminating.
He suggests that rather than nd the source of the beauty of the natural world in human
creative activity and experience, we should nd it in a creativity that is independent of
humanity and perhaps uniquely characteristic of the natural world. He uses a splendid
quote from Descartes to introduce his idea:
… God … [is] … wholly indifferent to the creation of what he has created. For
if any reason for what is good had preceded His preordination, it would have
determined Him towards that which it was best to bring about; but on the
contrary because He determined Himself toward those things which ought to
be accomplished, for that reason, as it stands in Genesis, they are very good
… 31
Hargrove takes the word “indifferent” from this passage and distinguishes between
“artistic creativity, which requires a creator with a plan developed in terms of preexisting
standards, and indifferent creativity, which proceeds without a plan and without
predetermined standards.”32
After introducing the notion of “indifferent creativity” Hargrove elaborates how it
came to be transferred from God, of whom it is predicated by Descartes, to the natural
world, where, he suggests, it “makes perfectly good sense.” I agree with Hargrove that
indifferent creativity is a useful way to characterize the natural processes that create the
natural world. However, I do not see how such a notion can be employed to explain the
EXCHANGE 231
beauty of the natural world, that is, to account for the positive aesthetic properties
attributed to the natural world by positive aesthetics. According to Hargrove this beauty
is the product of the natural processes that create the planet and a corresponding “sense
of beauty is part of the evolutionary heritage of life on this planet.”33 Now it is clear that
the nature of the natural world, whatever that nature is, is the product of natural
processes, but whether or not its beauty is also the product of such processes, is, as
Hargrove contends, at least dependent on something like a sense of beauty that is also
the product of natural processes. Moreover, although I think it is plausible enough to
claim that our sense of beauty, whatever that is, is in some sense the product of the
natural process of evolution, just as are our normal senses such as our sense of sight, this
still does not justify Hargrove’s realist conclusion that “beauty and creativity is pre-
existent in nature.”34 After all, the fact that our particular human sense of sight, together
with the color vision it involves, is the product of the natural process of evolution does
not prove that colors are “preexistent in nature.”
This issue is too large and too dif cult to even begin to resolve here, but
consideration of one example in Hargrove’s account will at least highlight some of the
dif culties with it. Hargrove considers the case of owers and insects. Illustrating his
idea that beauty is the product of the natural processes that create the planet and a
corresponding “sense of beauty is part of the evolutionary heritage of life on this planet,”
he suggests, following Nathaniel Shaler, that “ owers represent the subjective (perhaps
unconscious) preferences of insects” and further that we can “discover the point of view
of the individuals of each species by which they collectively over millions of years made
themselves and other entities ( owers) beautiful to them.”35 Now let us grant that
owers look the way they do at least in part because of the activity of insects and also
that we can in some sense discover the point of view of individual insects (even if this
may be at least as problematic as knowing what it is like to be a bat). But even granting
these two somewhat vague and problematic assumptions, it not only does not follow that
but in fact seems highly unlikely that if we were to discover the point of view of insects
and to view owers from that point of view, they would appear beautiful to us. Even
setting aside lesser worries such as the difference in size between insects and us, there
are yet major problems having to do with the differences between our respective
conceptual and perceptual equipment. For example, I am told that many species of
insects do not see colors as we do, and much (but not all) of the beauty we nd in
owers would be lost if we saw them only in black and white.
Nonetheless, in spite of the apparent dif culties in Hargrove’s attempt to utilize the
notion of indifferent creativity to establish that beauty is “preexistent in nature,” the
notion yet has considerable relevance to positive aesthetics. As noted, positive aesthetics
is the view that typically only positive aesthetic judgments are involved in appropriate
aesthetic appreciation of nature. And, although indifferent creativity is seemingly of little
help in explaining the existence of the positive aesthetic properties attributed to the
natural world by positive aesthetics, that is, in accounting for the beauty of nature, it
may yet help to justify the positive aesthetics position. This is because the plausibility of
positive aesthetics depends not only on an explanation of the positive aesthetic proper-
ties of the natural world, but also on an explanation of the lack of negative aesthetic
properties. In short, if positive aesthetics is plausible, not only must the natural world
be beautiful, it must also not be ugly, or at least not very ugly. It is in this respect that
the notion of indifferent creativity helps to support positive aesthetics. Rather than
provide an alternative to the explanation of the plausibility of positive aesthetics outlined
above, the notion of indifferent creativity gives a way to augment that explanation by
232 EXCHANGE
providing an explanation of positive aesthetics’ implication that negative aesthetic

judgments are typically not involved in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature.
How does indifferent creativity support the claim that negative aesthetic judgments
are typically not involved in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature? The line of
thought may be summarized as follows:
1. When creativity is indifferent the possibility of negative aesthetic judgments typically
does not arise in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of an object so created.
2. Natural objects are the products of indifferent creativity.
3. Given 1 and 2, the possibility of negative aesthetic judgments typically does not arise
in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of natural objects.
4. Given 3, the plausibility of positive aesthetics is somewhat explained.
In this argument the only signi cant claim is premise 1, since premise 2 is granted
by Hargrove, and given premises 1 and 2, conclusions 3 and 4 follow without dif culty.
However, premise 1 easily follows from the de nition of indifferent creativity, which
Hargrove de nes as creativity “which proceeds without a plan and without predeter-
mined standards.” When an object is created with neither a plan nor standards, there
is little in terms of which to legitimately negatively aesthetically judge the object created
in such a fashion.36 Therefore, as premise 1 states, when creativity is indifferent the
possibility of negative aesthetic judgments typically does not arise in appropriate
aesthetic appreciation of an object so created.
In summary, Hargrove’s insightful and through-provoking discussion of Aesthetics
and the Environment does not simply raise interesting questions about my position. It
also provides the key to what is seemingly a powerful line of support for one aspect of
that position.37
Notes
1. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London:
Routledge, 2000), 3–15, 72–125.
2. Eugene C. Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Philosophy and Geography, 5,
no. 2 (2002): 222.
3. Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 223.
4. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 6; see also 42–7.
5. Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 214–15.
6. Yuriko Saito, “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms,” Environmental Ethics, 20 (1998): 135.
7. Malcolm Budd, “The Aesthetics of Nature,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 100 (2000): 138.
8. Nick Zangwill, “Formal Natural Beauty,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 101 (2001): 210.
9. This point has been clear ever since Ronald W. Hepburn’s classic essay “Contemporary Aesthetics and
the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, eds, Bernard Williams and Alan
Monte ore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310.
11. Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 161.
14. For example, there is seemingly no necessary con ict between the natural environmental model and what
I call the arousal model. The latter model (as well as the claim that it is not in con ict with the former)
is defended in Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved By Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in
Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, eds, Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 244–66. I discuss this model in detail in Allen Carlson, “Nature, Aesthetic
Appreciation, and Knowledge,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (1995): 393–400.
15. I have proposed a program for aesthetic education similar to that suggested by Hargrove in Allen Carlson,
“Education for Appreciation: What is the Correct Curriculum for Landscape?” Journal of Aesthetic
EXCHANGE 233
Education, 35 (2001): 97–112; reprinted in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, eds, Andrew Light and J.M.
Smith (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002).
16. The mystery model is developed in Stan Godlovitch, “Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural
Aesthetics,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 11 (1994): 15–30. I discuss the mystery model in Allen Carlson,
“Appreciating Godlovitch,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1997): 55–7 and in Carlson,
“Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation, and Knowledge.”
17. Compare Ronald W. Hepburn, “Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in Landscape,
Natural Beauty and the Arts, 65–80.
19. One version of the nonaesthetic model, under the name “the human chauvinistic aesthetic,” is outlined
in Don Mannison, “A Prolegomenon to a Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic,” in Environmental Philosophy,
eds, Don Mannison, Michael McRobbie, and Richard Routley (Canberra: Australian National University,
1980), 212–16. A similar position is defended in Robert Elliot, “Faking Nature,” Inquiry, 25 (1982):
81–93. I discuss this kind of approach in detail in Chapters 6 and 7 of Aesthetics and the Environment.
21. Eugene C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Denton: Environmental Ethics Books, 1996),
especially the concluding chapter.
23. How sharp a distinction between the two positions should be maintained is open to question. Glenn
Parsons persuasively argues that “positive aesthetics is not a thesis that stands independent of our account
of appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature, something that we have to show follows from that
account.” Rather he proposes that “positive aesthetics be made ‘internal’ to the theory of appropriate
aesthetic appreciation.” See Glenn G. Parsons, “Nature Appreciation, Science, and Positive Aesthetics,”
British Journal of Aesthetics (forthcoming).
24. I elaborate and explicitly apply the general view to nature appreciation in Chapter 5 of Aesthetics and the
Environment. The view as applicable to art appreciation is implicit or explicit in much literature in
aesthetics, although my favorite version is the concise presentation in Kendal Walton’s seminal article
“Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review, 79 (1970): 334–67. I elaborate the view utilizing Walton’s
general framework. For an excellent account of my view in terms of its Waltonian underpinnings, see
Parsons, “Nature Appreciation, Science, and Positive Aesthetics.”
25. I discuss the role of cultural descriptions of natural objects in Chapter 14 of Aesthetics and the Environment
as well as in Allen Carlson, “Heyd and Newman on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” AE: Canadian
Aesthetics Journal/Revue canadienne d’esthetique, 6 (2001) and in Allen Carlson, “Nature Appreciation and
the Question of Aesthetic Relevance,” Environment and the Arts, ed., Arnold Berleant (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2002), 61–74.
26. See, for example, Alexander Rueger, “Experiments, Nature and Aesthetic Experience in the Eighteenth
Century,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 37 (1997): 305–22; and Glenn G. Parsons and Alexander Rueger,
“The Epistemic Signi cance of Appreciating Experiments Aesthetically,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40
(2000): 407–23.
27. Malcolm Budd argues that the above-outlined line of thought is “unconvincing” if positive aesthetics is
interpreted as the doctrine that “all natural things have equal positive aesthetic value” and its “scope is not
just kinds but also instances of them.” I am inclined to interpret the doctrine as having the broader scope,
but not as attributing equal positive aesthetic value to all natural things. In Chapter 7 of Aesthetics and the
Environment, I follow up Hans Arp’s claim that “in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance
to the clouds and the stars” and consequently misleadingly imply Budd’s interpretation by saying that all
natural objects “seem equally aesthetically appealing” or are “more or less equally appreciable.” However,
I suggest that these remarks be read as claiming only that all natural objects, since all have positive
aesthetic value, are equally worthy of appreciation, and not that they all are actually equal in positive
aesthetic value. I think the latter claim would be dif cult to justify with any argument. Given his view that
aesthetic appreciation of nature is “endowed with a freedom denied to artistic appreciation,” Budd nds
more plausible a version of positive aesthetics maintaining “that each natural thing, at some level of
observation, has a positive aesthetic value.” This version seems plausible enough, but is, I think, too weak.
It does not accommodate what seems to me undeniably true: that, whether we maintain a notion of
appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature or grant Budd’s promiscuity concerning not only “levels of
observation” but also “conditions of observation and time,” 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. See Budd, “The Aesthetics of Nature,” 147–8,
155–6.
234 EXCHANGE
28. Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 218. Hargrove’s reference to Rolston is
to Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1988), 131.
31. René Descartes, Meditations, Objections VI and Replies, quoted in Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic
Appreciation of Nature,” 218.
34. For a recent powerful defense of realism concerning aesthetic properties, see Eddy M. Zemach’s Real
Beauty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). For a critique of some of Zemach’s
arguments, see Glenn G. Parsons and Allen Carlson, “Critical Notice of Zemach, Real Beauty,” Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, 29 (1999): 635–54.
35. Hargrove, “Carlson and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 220. Hargrove’s reference to Shaler is
from Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Man and the Earth (New York: Duf eld & Company, 1910), 172–7.
36. In Chapter 7 of Aesthetics and the Environment, pages 120–1, I develop a similar line of thought, arguing
that concerning nature the lack of “a designer and an initial design” makes certain kinds of negative
aesthetic judgments “not an aspect of its appreciation.” In so far as this argument for positive aesthetics
depends on the absence in nature of things such as “predetermined standards” or “an initial design,” it
seemingly allows for certain exceptions to the claim that pristine nature is never the object of appropriate
negative aesthetic judgments. The most obvious of such exceptions are perhaps genetically deformed
creatures, which can be viewed as “failures” or “mistakes” in terms of a preexisting genetic “design” or
“blueprint.” A number of other kinds of putative exceptions are also discussed in the literature. For
example, Yuriko Saito considers a spectrum of cases ranging from “ eas, ies, cockroaches, and
mosquitoes” to “natural disasters of massive scale and power, such as a hurricane, earthquake, tornado,
avalanche, tidal wave, volcanic eruption, ood, and the like.” She argues that many of such cases are not,
in the nal analysis, true exceptions, but that the most extreme are such that positive aesthetic
appreciation may be neither psychologically possible nor morally appropriate. See Yuriko Saito, “The
Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; Special Issue: Environmental
Aesthetics, eds, Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, 56 (1998): 106–7, 109. For a follow-up discussion, see
Robert S. Fudge, “Imagination and the Science-based Aesthetic Appreciation of Unscenic Nature,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (2001): 275–85. Malcolm Budd considers cases of living things
with a condition that is “diseased or malformed or indicative of approaching death.” I think Budd’s cases
are closer to true exceptions, or at least the second of the three conditions is, in that “grossly malformed
living things,” more so that either diseased or dying ones, might be viewed as “nature’s mistakes.” See
Budd, “The Aesthetics of Nature,” 147, 149.
37. A version of these remarks was presented at the Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in
December, 2000. I thank the members of the audience, and especially my co-symposiumists, Eugene
Hargrove and Yrjö Sepanmaa, for helpful comments.

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