Abstract

Beauty's joining of meaning and configuration involves a concrete universality exhibiting the logic of self-determination distinguishing the reality of rational agency. Consequently, natural beauty presents a challenge to aesthetics. An examination of the ordering principles commonly ascribed to nature (the abstract universality of efficient causality, the generic universality of species being, and the reciprocal functionality of organic unity) shows that they all lack concrete universality, establishing that aesthetics must be the philosophy of art and that natural beauty has aesthetic value only as a derivative projection of artistic beauty