Environmental Aesthetics Beyond the Dialectics of Interest and Disinterest: Deconstructing the Myth of Pristine Nature

In this paper I want to scrutinize one of the key ideas within modern Western aesthetics. Beauty is often considered to derive from a virtuous disinterested attitude towards nature. This kind of view has been advocated by thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Kant in the beginning of the so-called aesthetic turn in philosophy. The problem with this view is that it presupposes that nature exists by itself before human intervention in a kind of ideal pristine state. My hypothesis is that this ideal of pristine nature constitutes one of the underlying problems of many contemporary environmental discourses.