Art moralizes Nature; Nature demoralizes Art
There is no harmony, no discord, no visual balance, no fugual order, no split complementaries in Nature. There is just what is there. The small bits of red flowers against the broad swaths of green foliage are not ’arranged’ for pleasing effect.
The ‘babbling’ brook doesn't offer ‘soothing’ sounds, but just water sounds. The disparities in size between elephant and eland don’t demonstrate an assymetrical equilbrium. They are just the facts of life on the savannah.
The density or sparseness of trees, of raindrops on the slate slab, of whitecap waves on the water are all random and have nothing to do with evenness, texture, tension or pull.
Aesthetic properties are all human inventions that describe relationships that are pleasing or unpleasing, approved or disapproved, sought for or repudiated. Harmony is one such aesthetic property.
Because aesthetic properties are disembodied, are abstracted, are removed from their original ”context,“ they are entirely arbitrary. We assert their value by fiat: ”This is good. That is not good. This is to be cherished. That is to be avoided.” In this, aesthetic properties share a lot with moral declarations, which tell us which behavior is approved and which is disapproved.
Thus, aesthetic claims of harmony are fundamentally one of the ways Art moralizes Nature. From the fields and streams, we abstract relationships of sound and sight, and we establish an order and canon in which we describe these relationships. We thereby ’moralize‘ Nature, in which none of these relationships occurs intentionally.
But perversely, Nature demoralizes Art. For every image or sound that has been carefully refined according to the laws of aesthetics, Nature dispassionately ignores it. No sound is unpleasant; no smell is discordant; no combination of colors is unwelcome; no surface touch is out of place in Nature. And the combinations of these things, unexpected as they may seem, shows us that for Nature, there is no moralizing. Nature de-moralizes Art.
© 2001
