“We See Beauty Now Where We Could Not See It Before”: Rolston's Aesthetics of Nature

Abstract

Holmes Rolston’s substantial and significant research in environmental philosophy is most commonly associated with environmental ethics. In this chapter, I consider his contribution to environmental aesthetics. I argue that his reflections on our aesthetic experiences of the natural environment constitute a deep and important dimension of his thought. I investigate the ways in which this aesthetic dimension is implicitly present in a number of his discussions of environmental values and comes to fruition in an explicit and comprehensive theory of the aesthetics of nature. I thereby make clear how Rolston, in addition to being one of the founding fathers of environmental ethics, is also a pivotal figure in the development of environmental aesthetics. I follow a more or less chronological order in my presentation and consideration of Rolston’s aesthetics of nature. In the first main section, I briefly demonstrate how the aesthetic dimension in Rolston’s thought manifests itself in some of his very earliest work in environmental philosophy. In this section, I not only introduce Rolston’s deep appreciation of the beauties of nature, but also show that Rolston’s approach stands in line with the naturalist tradition of philosophizing about nature, a theme that resurfaces at various points throughout my discussion. In the next section, I turn to the account of natural value that Rolston advanced in a series of articles published throughout the 1980s and comprehensively presented in his 1988 volume Environmental Ethics: Duties and Values in the Natural World. 1 Since aesthetic values are not the main focus of this account, I bring out the fact that aesthetics does nonetheless play a significant, even if frequently overlooked, role in Rolston’s thought. I do this by considering the ways in which aesthetic values function in Rolston’s treatment of three problems, the is/ought problem and what I call the new problem of evil and the after-Darwin problem. In light of this backdrop, I next consider Rolston’s main contribution to environmental aesthetics, the comprehensive theory of the aesthetics of nature that he introduces in Environmental Ethics and develops in subsequent writings. I elaborate his theory as involving versions of the positions that have become known in the aesthetics literature as scientific cognitivism and positive aesthetics. In this section, I also consider some philosophical objections to Rolston’s theory of the aesthetics of nature, suggesting ways in which these objections may be addressed. In the last main section of the chapter, I follow up some of Rolston’s concerns about the possible subjectivity of aesthetic value, arguing that his account lends itself to a more objectivist treatment than might be initially thought. I conclude with some general observations about Rolston’s contributions to the aesthetics of nature.