The beauty of a painting of a flower, mountain or sunset normally owes to how it depicts its object, to its rendering of nature. But what of the flower, mountain and sunset themselves? To what do they owe their beauty? They do not, after all, depict, represent or render anything. A familiar answer is that they are beautiful solely in virtue of pleasure or delight taken in their colours and forms. But, aside from other defects, this answer does little justice to the importance that natural beauty has for many people – an importance far beyond that of, say, a wallpaper whose colours and shapes may be also give a lot of pleasure. Poets do not extol the beauty of wallpaper in the way they do the beauty of nature.
A very different answer is that the beauty of flowers, mountains and so on owes, in part at least, to a meaning or significance they have. And it is this that explains why experience of their beauty matters so much to people. This is the kind of answer given by writers from Plato and Plotinus, through Kant and Schiller, to Roger Scruton and R.W. Hepburn.
It is an answer that is only credible if a distinction is made between ‘serious’ and ‘loose’ or ‘trivial’ references to beauty. ‘Beautiful’, like its equivalents in languages other than English, is often used to record enjoyable experiences – of a cold beer on a hot day, say, or a jaunty tune – that the speaker, if pressed, would concede were not really experiences of beauty. The beer was nice, the tune pretty, but beautiful? In such cases, there is no temptation to invoke the idea of meaning in order to characterise the pleasurable experience. It is a different matter, however, with ‘serious’ uses of ‘beautiful’: here, there is no willingness to withdraw the adjective. In such cases, it is at least credible to think that something the flowers or mountains mean or signify is integral to the experiences of their beauty. For, unlike drinking the cold beer or hearing the pretty tune, these experiences of nature are of great importance to people – ones of a kind that they would find it difficult, even tragic, to be deprived of.
There are, however, problems with ascribing to natural things and environments meaning of a type that is integral to experiences of beauty. (Someone may, of course, find a mountain beautiful and, quite separately, a place of significance: it’s where he nearly lost his life in an avalanche, say, or where he went on honeymoon). Those of us who would like to regard natural beauty as meaningful need to address these problems, and to ask what it could be to regard such beauty as meaningful.
Meanings cannot be located, after all, in …
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