关键词: 自然审丑, 环境, 理性信仰, 人化自然, 审美价值

Abstract:

In contrast to beauty, ugliness has long been unduly marginalized in aesthetic studies. The revival of natural aesthetics has afforded new perspectives to re-appraise ugliness in nature and its appreciation. Seen from a rational belief perspective, the conventional appreciation falls into two types of cancellation and transformation. A further investigation into the history of both the philosophy and the aesthetics, however, reveals three instead of two modes. The mode of practical value prevailed when early human beings easily succumbed to natural forces. But it is also a time when humans began to use their rational power to control the hostile forces and grew increasingly confident, despite that their aesthetic freedom was still severely impeded by the ugliness in nature. The mode of rational belief intends to find a unity between aesthetic pleasure and natural ugliness by resorting to a rational belief which strives unremittingly to prove, either through induction or through deduction, that a deity has created natural ugliness simply to make the beautiful even more so. The mode of aesthetic value holds that the natural objects, be they ugly or otherwise, constitute an ecosystem within which all have their intrinsic aesthetic value. Therefore, the appreciation of nature shall go beyond the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness and readily delve into those intrinsic values. Finally, a retrospect of nature as rendered in art or rearranged by humans gives new insights into the appreciation of natural ugliness.