Abstract

This paper focuses on Martin Seel´s significance of nature as Presence and condition of Freedom. According to the author the human encounter with the world, in its appearing, momentariness and indeterminacy, is an aesthetic encounter. Seel understands the aesthetic perception as a form of being in the world that opens to the representation of life possibilities which, ultimately, leads to ethics. Admitting the contiguity between aesthetics and ethics in the appreciation of natural beauty – exemplary locus of the Man/World encounter –, by the role of aesthetic perception in the individual human’s life as a possibility of a good life, the author asserts that to protect and respect the natural word is a way of protecting and respecting humanity.