Beauty is a Fact under Siege: John Ruskin as Critic in a State of Ecological Emergency

Abstract

Abstract Some of Ruskin’s aesthetic positions become more comprehensible, if not defensible, when viewed in terms of a response to Victorian Britain’s environmental degradation. By his insistence on truth in controversies concerning the beautiful, Ruskin sets himself at variance with the aesthetic tradition that treats the beautiful as a topic of open-ended debate in which different opinions are weighed up and the authority of experts is never final. What Ruskin puts forward in support of his factual account of beauty is the urgency of protecting beauty against the depredations of industrial capitalism. Since the public sphere of aesthetic debate, as he perceives it, is in the nineteenth century too fragmented and, more generally, too jealous of the aesthetic’s distinctness from other areas of human existence to take up arms to save the beautiful, aesthetics has to be overhauled if it is to play its part in meeting modernity’s ecological challenges. Ruskin presses for factual witnessing as the appropriate mode of aesthetically appreciating natural beauty. Yet it can be asked whether what has become of witnessing today – the eternalizing images uploaded to the biologically safe space of the internet – does not in its own manner contribute to the problem by denying the destructibility of the environment. Ruskin’s objection to the relationship between traditional aesthetics and ecology remains in force even as the question of an appreciation of natural beauty fit for the times has yet to be answered.