The beauty of nature

In the history of aesthetics, there is no theorist who, to one degree or another, has not touched upon the problem of the beautiful. And not only touched upon it. If the theorists who developed aesthetics in the form of classical poetics (Aristotle, Horace, Boileau) have encountered the problem in passing and as if by the way (although they have nevertheless expressed sentences of astonishing depth), then the theorists of traditional philosophical aesthetics - the English of the 18th century and mainly the Germans of the 18th-19th centuries - have unequivocally placed the beautiful at the center of their scientific research. The scope of philosophical aesthetics includes a significantly larger number and significantly more diverse objects of study - this fact alone naturally leads to a search for points of contact, common moments, unifying principles and criteria with the help of which these diverse objects will be brought into unity, into a system. It is well known what role systematic research played in the classical Philosophy of the Germans - as if the German philosophical spirit was permeated by the need for systematicity. In the systems of Western European and mainly German aesthetics - from Baumgarten through Kant, Schelling and Hegel - the beautiful occupies a central place. And this fact is not the result of the adventures of speculative thinking, but the natural fruit of the search for unity in the overall aesthetic experience of man, expressed, on the one hand, in the aesthetic contemplation of nature, and on the other - in conscious and free artistic creation. Thus, Kant's "Analytics of the Beautiful" includes both moments, because according to Kant, the selfless delight in pure form necessary for everyone" is derived from both nature and art. Hence all the analogies that Kant makes between nature and art - sometimes art turns out to be a model of nature, sometimes the artistic instinct of genius makes him carry out the laws of nature, thus he turns out to be a part of nature itself.