在线词典

If beauty were merely subjective, only in the eye of the beholder, it would indeed be frivolous to focus on beauty in a time of extraordinary, planetary crisis and difficult to claim a substantial role for beauty in our efforts to sustain the world. But these are judgments rooted in the metaphysics of modernity—a metaphysics that denies intrinsic value to the natural world because it maintains that the natural world is simply a machine. Now, as we struggle with the vast ecological legacy of this way of thinking about nature, we must consider anew the role of beauty as a value belonging to life. To return beauty to the world, not simply as “our experience” but as “a part of the structure of life,” is consistent with the turn toward an ecological worldview and the effort to develop an ecological civilization. Understood in this way, aesthetics and beauty are not trivial matters to be left to beauty salons and fashion magazines.