Thank you, Arjun Sambhi, for another great question.
The natural world is undeniably beautiful. Aesthetically, we appraise majestic mountains as sublime, admire crepuscular rays from a crimson sunset, and appreciate the sound of waves crashing against the rocks. These features of nature are inherently beautiful. By ‘inherently beautiful’, I mean objectively beautiful, which is to say that nature is beautiful independently of whether anyone is around to appreciate its beauty.
Here, I take the natural world to exclude artefacts, that is, things created by intelligent agents with some design plan or goal in mind. If you are fortunate enough to have lived near the countryside during the current pandemic, then you will have realised the therapeutic effect of simply taking a walk. We could, of course, argue that nature is also ugly in places. Take, for example, the various parasites (see Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) and diseases that plague humans and animals alike. But perhaps such suffering is needed in order to preserve the equilibrium necessary for a thriving ecosystem. We could therefore argue that the natural world is beautiful only so long as humans or animals are not suffering. To what extent, then, is the natural world objectively beautiful?
As the philosopher Mark Wynn observes, whereas human artefacts are rarely beautiful (save in cases of artistic intent), nature is uniformly beautiful. This observation together with our experience of beauty in nature gives us reason to regard beauty in nature as objective. What, then, best explains this objectivity?
There are two main explanations. First, non-naturalistic: nature is beautiful to us because there is artistic intent behind it. For example, God has created a beautiful world to reflect his own nature. In this respect, the beauty of the world is grounded in God’s beauty. We could also say that God has good reasons to produce creatures with aesthetic sensibilities, such as ourselves, who can appreciate this beauty and be brought closer to God.
The second explanation of beauty is naturalistic: one that is consistent with the fundamental terms of physics. The most relevant theory is evolutionary psychology, according to which the human brain has evolved for reproductive fitness – to increase the likelihood of an organism passing on their genes. What, then, is the role of our aesthetic sensibilities in reproductive fitness? Are we hard-wired to perceive beauty in places that are conducive to our wellbeing?
One possibility is that we are attracted to environments that are beautiful because they enhance our reproductive fitness. Running waterfalls and lush vegetation are a sign of a landscape rich in resources. However, this type of explanation only goes so far, since we also find harsh environments beautiful — such as deserts, mountains, and arctic tundra. And what about environments in which we did not evolve and could not survive? For example, we find the quantum world beautiful, along with nebulae and stars.
Another possible response is that our appreciation of, say, stars is a by-product of our aesthetic appreciation of another realm. For example, the appreciation for a fine-tuned contrast between colours and light in the dark helps us avoid predators. Or perhaps our aesthetic appreciation serves to fine-tune our senses and cognitive apparatus.
We may of course wonder whether naturalistic and non-naturalistic explanations are mutually exclusive. Could God not have chosen a mechanism such as evolutionary psychology to bring about creatures such as ourselves to have aesthetic sensibilities?
Nevertheless, beauty does strike us as an objective feature of the world. Perhaps any argument against this viewpoint would be a more complex position than the simple acceptance of objective beauty. Given that the simple viewpoint is to be preferred, it may be that objective beauty is always with us.
What do you think? Would nature still be beautiful if we weren’t around to appreciate it? Let us know in the comments.
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I completed a BA Philosophy (Lancaster) and MA Philosophy (Birmingham). I am due to speak on Plantinga and extended mind cognition, at the Tyndale Conference 2021. I have accepted a place on a Ph.D course starting in 2021, in the philosophy of science. My favourite philosophical idea is necessity de re (the necessity ‘about the thing’), which looks at whether things have essences (essentialism). It is surprising that in the 20th century, modal logic, which is the logic of necessity/possibility, has intellectually motivated two areas: God’s existence (with new modal ontological arguments) and human nature. Perhaps the two are connected!