On the Marginalization of Natural Beauty in the Western Aesthetics under the Context of Modernity

Abstract

Abstract: This paper aims to analyze from the perspective of modernity the causes of the marginalization of natural beauty in modern and contemporary Western aesthetics, after pointing out that aesthetic studies have been increasingly focusing on arts instead of nature as its object. The marginalization of nature in aesthetics is closely related with modernity, as the philosophical foundation of modernity is the rationalization of subject-centeredness. The highlighting of the subjecthood under the Enlightenment rationality was significant in defying God's sovereignty, but with its development and its turn to instrumental rationality, Enlightenment rationality had gradually evolved into a form of power or even violence that is exclusive and even despotic. Aesthetic modernity, on one hand, redeems rational life in the field of cognition and moral practice in social structure, and, on the other hand, being a branch of modernity project, upholds the exclusive nature of the subject rationality. When beauty-appreciation follows the representational rationality centered on the subject, nature with its rough materiality is discarded as the other of reason, which leads to the close interrelation between aesthetics and arts.

Key words: modernity, aesthetic modernity, natural beauty, marginalization

Zhou Zedong. On the Marginalization of Natural Beauty in the Western Aesthetics under the Context of Modernity[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2014, 34(5): 146-153.

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