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Abstract There are two opposing aesthetics positions in the field of contemporary environmental aesthetics, namely, positive aesthetics represented by Allen Carlson and Holmes Rolston, as well as negative aesthetics represented by Arnold Berleant and Emily Brady. Since 2010, there has been a fierce debate between the two regarding the aesthetic characteristics, aesthetic values, aesthetic approaches, aesthetic judgments, sublime of nature, and so on, which has become an important academic event in the field of environmental aesthetics.
Firstly, positive aesthetics expands the scope of natural aesthetic view by using the concept of aesthetic characteristics and provides a dialectical interpretation of natural ugliness from the perspective of aesthetic value, emphasizing that all nature is beautiful, which greatly expands the scope of natural appreciation. However, this approach has been questioned by negative aesthetics. Arnold Berleant and Emily Brady emphasize that natural ugliness is real and that positive aesthetics beautifies nature, failing to take nature as it is seriously.
Secondly, positive aesthetics and negative aesthetics differ in answering whether all nature is beautiful due to their different approaches to the appreciation of natural beauty. Positive aesthetics argues that natural appreciation is based on scientific cognition, as scientific knowledge includes the consideration of the goodness of aesthetics and the function of transforming ugliness into beauty in ecosystems, which results in the opinion that all nature is always aesthetically good. Negative aesthetics, on the other hand, emphasizes that senses and imagination are the foundation of natural appreciation, thus natural aesthetic experience is diverse and cannot always be positive.
Thirdly, the dispute over the approaches to natural appreciation involves deeper issues of whether aesthetic judgment precedes or follows aesthetic experience. Positive aesthetics, under Parsons’ revision, has become a priori proposition with aesthetic judgment placed before aesthetic experience, so positive aesthetics is not a conclusion but a premise, which stipulates that people must make positive aesthetic judgments about nature to ensure that all nature is inevitably beautiful. Negative aesthetics, on the contrary, argues that aesthetic experience precedes aesthetic judgment, hence negative aesthetic experience cannot be excluded, which proves the reality of negative aesthetics.
Finally, sublime is also an important discourse resource for both positive aesthetics and negative aesthetics. Positive aesthetics shifts the evaluation standard of sublime from humans to natural ecosystem, in which death in nature is part of the ecosystem and can be transformed into ecological sublime, thus dissolving natural ugliness into positive experience of ecological sublime. Negative aesthetics, in contrast to that, proposes negative sublime, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and environmental pollution, which does not contain positive aesthetic experience but only evokes fear, and cannot be transformed into positive aesthetic experience.
Positive aesthetics is a relatively radical proposition that emerged in the early stages of environmental aesthetics, while negative aesthetics timely corrects the radical stance of positive aesthetics. The essence of their debate is how to properly appreciate nature on its own terms? In the face of this fundamental problem, the “Great Beauty” claim of Zhuangzi offers us more than just the enlightenment to wander between positive aesthetics and negative aesthetics, as Feng Peng does, but it inspires us to transcend the dispute between positive aesthetics and negative aesthetics. The dispute over the beauty and ugliness of nature is caused by “viewing nature from humans’ perspective”. In the viewpoints of ecological aesthetics, humans, as the core of the universe, are the aesthetics agents of nature. Humans not only have the ability to engage in aesthetic activities as the human species, but also have the possibility of engaging in aesthetic activities representing other species. That is, people can “speak on behalf of mountains and rivers” and achieve cross-species aesthetic appreciation, reaching the realm of “viewing things as things” to ultimately transcend the dispute over the beauty and ugliness of nature, and embracing the great beauty of nature.
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Published: 05 April 2026
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