Aesthetic normativity and the expressive perception of nature

Abstract

Abstract The notion of a correct appreciation of nature, like the one put forward in Carlson’s environmental account, has been rejected by many other authors in the aesthetics of the natural environment. Their critics challenge the idea that only scientific categories can ground the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature, and they hold that there is not a correct way of appreciating nature. However, they may share with Carlson the idea of correctness under an objectivist paradigm of aesthetic appreciation, according to which correctness means the adequation of the experience to properties of the object. My aim in the article is to claim that it is necessary to endorse an aesthetic standard of correctness that takes into consideration the subjective character of aesthetic appreciation. An aesthetic standard of correctness implies universal assent, or validity for everyone in Kantian terms, in place of an objectivist notion. This notion of correctness permits the inclusion of expressive perception of nature as an essential form of aesthetic appreciation.