Abstract
Humanistic aesthetics sees beauty only as it stands in proportion to the human, only in its kinship with us, only as we are at home with it, and only in its domestic varieties. But surely an environmental aesthetic must find its proper element not in domesticity, but in wildness; not in what is measured, but in what is unmeasured; not in the homely, but in the strange and uncanny. An environmental aesthetic must be successive to humanism.
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Notes
- 1.
Albert Camus, “Helen’s Exile,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 189.
- 2.
Ibid., pp. 188f.
- 3.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 200ff.
- 4.
Ian Chilvers, Harold Osborne, Dennis Farr, The Oxford Dictionary of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 109.
- 5.
Immanuel Kant, Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960, pp.46f.
- 6.
Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meridith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 110–114.
- 7.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), pp. 114f
- 8.
David Cooper (ed.), A Companion to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 411.
- 9.
J. Baird Callicott, “Leopold’s Land Aesthetic,” in In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
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Foltz, B.V. (2019). Chapter One Strange Beauty: Environmental Aesthetics After Humanism. In: Byzantine Incursions on the Borders of Philosophy. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96673-1_1
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