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A New Aesthetic for Environmental Awareness: Chaos Theory, the Beauty of Nature, and Our Broader Humanistic Identity

Ruth Richards, M.D., Ph.D.

Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco

Can beauty help us adapt, evolve, and cope with environmental crisis? This article challenges the longstanding Kantian view that beauty is "disinterested," while linking Kant’s view of the sublime with chaos theory and the fractal forms of nature. We humans participate in beauty as open systems in ongoing process, coevolving with all of existence. Beauty offers us conscious awareness and resonance with deeper life patterns. We sense our interconnection and the "bounded infinities" of potentialities related to chaotic "strange attractors." A study of aesthetic preference not only supports preference for the fractal forms of nature but suggests, tentatively, that creative persons prefer forms of even higher "dimensionality." Beauty can open up our vision in an endangered world—while yielding intimacy and delight, not isolation and fear. Caring can become natural for the greater whole we all cocreate. As humanistic psychologists, we can be concerned with no less than this totality.

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 41, No. 2, 59-95 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/0022167801412006
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