Natural Beauty

A potential complication for some Aesthetic Theories is the phenomenon of natural Beauty. On the one hand, it seems difficult to argue that sunsets, landscapes, the night sky, etc. are Beautiful. But, on the other, how a Theory is to accommodate such phenomena, if it defines Aesthetic Theory as both the study of Beauty and a Theory of Art, is problematic. For, the synthesis of those implies that natural Beauty is the production of an Artist, which seems impossible to explain without some Theological premise. Thus, though Kant does not explicitly address Theology in the Critique of Judgement until his discussion of Teleology, his association of Purposiveness with the enjoyment of natural Beauty is implicitly Theological. Natural Beauty is also problematic for Mimetic theories of Art, i. e. that are based on the thesis that Art is essentially an imitation of Nature. For, while natural visual Beauty seems exemplary for artifactual visual Beauty, such superiority is not generalizable to the other Arts. As charming as bird song is, it hardly matches the power of human Music; Architecture seems to have no analog in Nature; and, perhaps, most tellingly, certain Natural events are described as 'Poetic Justice', i. e. are interpreted on the basis of artifactual dramatic Art. What such considerations demonstrate is that Aesthetics and Poietics, i. e. the Theory of Art, are not coextensive, insofar as the former is the study of Beauty, Natural and artifactual. On the other hand, if the criterion of the assessment of Art is Creativity or Vitality, i. e. the extent to which an Artwork has a life of its own, then Art can be said to imitate Nature, but only Nature without some traditional Theological assumption.