Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form

A central debate in recent posthumanist theory concerns the question of how to regain access to our natural surroundings or, in Quentin Meillassoux’s memorable formulation, “the great outdoors.” Some thinkers propagate a new approach to nature by undoing the Kantian transcendental turn and thus severing the correlation between subject and object, thinking and being. Doubting the viability of this suggestion, others have instead proposed a renewal of aesthetics. In their view, the constitutive intertwinement of thinking and being in aesthetic experience undoes the correlation from within. Against such speculative realist aesthetics, my essay maintains that a minimal difference and thus a correlation between subject and object irreducibly persists even in aesthetic rapture. Could not the great outdoors be conceived in terms of Kantian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s “surroundings,” the objective, but inaccessible totality of the world? Within it, every organism projects its own subjective “environment” that contains all features that are accessible to the subject. The interruption of routines suspends a subject’s habitual reliance on its perception, which is recalibrated in the process. Perhaps we ought to understand the experience of natural beauty, as described by Kant, as widening our human environment in consequence of being touched unexpectedly by entities that we habitually encounter as mere objects in the world. Only in such fleeting moments do we get a sense of the great outdoors that surrounds us.