Aesthetics and Environmental Obligation: A Strong and Useful Bridge

Abstract

The field of human experience is like a magnetic field, it has two poles, with categories at one pole, and the unique at the opposite pole. Both are necessary to experience. These poles have the effect of framing and composing. Framing and composing are fundamental aesthetic descriptors. Thus defined, the domain of the aesthetic is necessary to all possibilities of experience. Thus defined, the aesthetic domain is necessary to all civic moral obligation, including environmental obligation. I choose to define the aesthetic domain thus in order to build a strong and useful cross-cultural bridge for doing environmental ethics. I thus find problematic those definitions of the aesthetic as autonomous developed in the far west since the late eighteenth century.