Beauty in nature

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I'm trying to understand this from a strict materialist standpoint and I'm having some trouble with it. Typically, when you see some of the most beautiful places on earth, they typically aren't places people would survive well in. What has us ohh and ahh at a beautiful National Geographic photograph thinking "Ohhh my God.... how beautiful! I'd be dead within a day from either dehydration of hypothermia....just think, to be there...". Lol, seriously, its an impulse that doesn't exactly add up well. Its something I got to thinking about maybe a month or so ago when I was coming back from New Zealand and flying over the Bad Lands and Grand Canyon. Occassionally yes, we're find places strikingly beautiful that would make good farmland or have tons of natural game and wild fish but....why deserts, mountains, and moonscapes?

I think it's because places that are inhospitable to live are the only places left where nature is untouched and therefore beautiful. Places that are built over probably used to be just as beautiful before people lived there. And people live just about everywhere that it's possible for people to live.

Unpaved nature is inherently beautiful. But these days you have to be looking into a canyon or a desert or a freezing mountaintop to see it.

That's interesting.

It does seems like there is a sort of minimalistic appeal to deserts, or the Antarctic, and other "National Geographic"/you-would-die-here-in-10-minutes type places.

OTOH, lush tropical places with wild papaya growing everywhere can also be beautiful -- though is there a difference in the character of that beauty?

And the opposite is also interesting -- why are man-made environments (that aren't planned by architects) usually ugly?

...But then that also gets complicated because some dilapidated houses and such can have a kind of beauty, too...

I have no answers, but the idea is sure creating a lot of interesting questions in my mind...

To me it's because the creation of a man-made enviroment requires wrecking nature at least to some extent. Trees must be cut down. Ground must be plowed up. Natural features must be obscured by concrete or other building materials. I guess that's why your "that aren't planned by architects" caveat is important. A really good architect can minimize the wreckage of nature (like Frank Lloyd Wright), disguise it by adding gardens back in (Versailles Palace) or make it so beautiful that you are willing to overlook the paved-over nature (Taj Mahal). That's a short list. Lots of other man-made enviroments that are well designed are also beautiful.

But most man made enviroments are nowhere near so well designed and so what they showcase most is how much nature has been destroyed to make them possible (most of Los Angeles and suburban areas and slums all over the world).

amen

Many of the completely lethal planets in our solar system can also be described as beautiful. Venus, the gas giants, etc. The stars, as mere points of light, are beautiful, yet they also would be as lethal as the sun if one were dumb enough to attempt contact. But, there are aspects to nature, like forests, plains, seas, etc, which are not lethal if you know how to survive within such environments.

That's a good point. It does seem like the 'war against nature' is the ugly part. And it does seem like architechts aim toward making things "organic" and "natural," and intergrated into the surrounding environment. (Where I live, I've driven by the Marin Civic Center many times, and the shape of it does blend right in with the surrounding hills.)

I suppose the abandoned/dilapidated/decaying houses (not all, but some, anyway) are similar, in that nature is re-asserting itself upon the man-made structure, which in a way also integrates it into the natural environment.

You mean stuff like this...

Mmm....yeah but..... are city metroparks really that opulant? Out here near Cleveland you will find parks, just like all over Ohio, drive 30 miles, there are plenty of places you can go where you can surround yourself 360, overhead and below with nature and be in a woods or something like that and yes, I suppose that's beautiful for avid outdoor enthusiasts but, its still not the same as seeing Ayers Rock, the Scab Lands, the colors and textures of the southwest, the pillars that line one of the beaches in Australia (somewhere I didn't go but would be nice maybe next time), Red Center, mountains like the Himilayas, Mt. Mckinley in Alaska, etc., none of that counts for good farming. Milford Sound was beautiful, I guess that counts perhaps for good fishing but its so windy that you can't even hear yourself think! Let alone cold even in the summer!

The reason why I ask about this, I've been an agnostic for a long time and have many points where my agnosticism starts leaning much more atheistic. My problem with pure materialism, even if I went full atheist, is that there's still too much that doesn't make a lot of sense regarding us and how we function or how the universe functions even in the face of that. Just like getting to know Christianity or Buddhism means clearing away organized religious hoodoo, I feel the need to do that with the atheist outlook as well because, I still can't pallet something that I find to be maybe 60 or 70%, it needs to be pretty close to 100% to really commit.

Yeah - that, the American southwest, the Sahara desert, the Serengeti, Himalayas, Rockeys, the Kelly Outback, etc.. Jungles also are beautiful although if you bump into a mosaic of catarpillars on the wrong tree you'll be itching for years, you could have insects burrow under your scalp, siafu trying to make a meal of your pipes - perhaps some things you can eat but almost places you're either an extreme sports nut with a backpack full of nylon ropes, hooks, and Kashi bars, or you're Bear Grylles and its places like the Kelly Outback or the Amazon, or the Baja Peninsula, where the only two people crazy enough to attempt it are him and his camera man.

I would suppose that the same goes for us not minding a walk through a woods full of fallen branches, pine needles, and leaves but the idea of walking through a field covered with hair and rotting human bones would disturb us. I suppose the later is more an association of danger and sickness just based on what feeds on that kind of stuff or what (or who more often) could make something like that happen. As for litter, I guess we just don't like seeing our own waste. I'm sure finding where the bear crapped in the woods in any literal sense isn't always pleasant, just like having that bad fish smell hit your nose when something in the area died, guess its more relative to us and our health.

Hmm..... my guess is that the mind has certain aesthetic triggers, and that these aesthetic triggers aren't strongly associated with these other values. I suppose the real question is where the aesthetic trigger came from, which... the only thing I can think of at the moment is that aesthetics is in some form or fashion just a means to another end, or just a side-effect of a desired variation.

Interestingly enough, I was actually slightly curious what I could find if I did a quick search on the matter, and one paper put forward the idea that we actually do tend to favor as a general rule the healthy environments, as opposed to favoring the unhealthy ones. http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetics_& ... hology.htm (relevant data in section 3)

That being said, I don't find that source as definitive on everything.

Right, I feel the complicatedness, as honestly, I can find some of these things very interesting.

All the beauty in nature is in the eye of the beholder.

How did I know?

Of course the eye must be sighted.

And of course the mouth does not have to give assent.

What you describe is the sublime and not the beautiful.

Beauty gives us ideas of pleasure...i.e. tropical beaches, rolling plains, flower gardens.

The sublime suggests infinity, grandeur, power and in some ways death, i.e. stormy seas, deserts, mahoosive mountain ranges. The Sublime exalts the mind rather than pleases it. The sublime in nature puts humans in their place. It makes you realise how small you are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_sublime