ESSAY

Essays

Essays

Introduction

David Abram is an odd combination of anthropologist, philosopher and sleight-of-hand magician. Though he worked as a magician in the United States and Europe for a number of years, he attributes most of what he knows about magic to the time he spent in Indonesia, Nepal and Sri Lanka learning from indigenous medicine people. Performing magic is not simply about entertaining, he points out in this interview. "The task of the magician is to startle our senses and free us from outmoded ways of thinking." The magician also plays an important ecological function, he says, by mediating between the human world and the "more-than-human" world that we inhabit.

Virginia Postrel (pron. PAH-STRELL) is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She is currently writing a book on glamour for The Free Press and is editor-in-chief of DeepGlamour.net. Writing in Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus described Postrel as "a master D.J. who sequences the latest riffs from the hard sciences, the social sciences, business, and technology, to name only a few sources." Camille Paglia has called her "one of the smartest women in America." She is a contributing editor for The Atlantic, where she formerly wrote the "Culture & Commerce" column.

Postrel is a popular speaker at business, design, and academic groups. She is represented by the Leigh Bureau and has spoken at a wide range of venues, including TED 2004, the World Luxury Congress, the Naval War College, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, the Mont Pelerin Society, Pop!Tech, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Urban Land Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institute's Millennium on the Mall celebration. Her corporate speaking venues have included Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target, Liz Claiborne, Sony, and IDEO.

Some recent discussions on the aesthetic appreciation of nature suggest that some aesthetic appreciations of nature are more appropriate than others from the aesthetic point of view. This claim is often supported by two reasons. First, just as some responses to a work of art are aesthetically improper, so there is also a distinction between appropriate and in appropriate appreciation of nature. Second, our ecological interest in preserving nature suggests that certain aesthetic responses toward nature are improper, because they do not help justify the preservation of nature.

Discussion

I support the view that aesthetic education concerning nature should incorporate the contributions made by scientists and naturalists so that our attitude toward nature will develop with ecological sensitivity. In this paper, however, I shall argue that this conclusion can be supported neither by the proposed aesthetic argument based upon the analogy between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and art appreciation, nor by the proposed ethical consideration. I shall instead offer another ethical argument for the ecological value of nature and show how the proposed appropriate appreciation of nature that incorporates scientific facts helps us become more ecologically sensitive.

Some recent discussions in philosophical aesthetics suggest that the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art necessarily involves various cognitive considerations ...