Positive aesthetics and ugliness

Paris, Panos ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2549-1075 2025. Positive aesthetics and ugliness. Parsons, Glenn, Hettinger, Ned and Shapshay, Sandra, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Nature and Environmental Aesthetics, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, (10.4324/9781003302223-20) Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The view that everything is beautiful has been attractive to philosophers since antiquity. Today, few hold this view—known as positive aesthetics—save in relation to pristine nature. This piece will explore some of the most prominent defences of positive aesthetics with regard to nature, whereby all untouched nature is beautiful, vis-à-vis the allegedly obvious fact that some things in nature are irredeemably ugly. I begin by elucidating the theory of positive aesthetics with regard to nature in Section 1. Section 2 discusses the two most prominent contemporary accounts of ugliness, one based on disgust and one on deformity, and defends a deformity-related theory of ugliness. Subsequently, I explore several defences of positive aesthetics against the objection that some nature is ugly, which fall roughly under two approaches: a cognitive one, discussed in Section 3, and an ethical one, discussed in Section 4. In Section 5, I argue that neither of these approaches succeeds at safeguarding a strong enough positive aesthetics, whereby every individual natural object is beautiful, provided that it is normal, and whereby most cases of ugliness in objects that are either not normal or dead, diseased, etc., can be parts of beautiful processes or greater wholes if aptly contextualised. Instead, I propose and defend a novel, hybrid view—based on a corresponding hybrid version of the theory of functional beauty—which, I claim, can allow for such positive aesthetics.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781003302223
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	5 January 2025
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2025 14:39
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175023

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