From Sacrifice to Gift: Aesthetic and Moral Aspects of the Experience of Awe for the Natural Environment

Writing about the ethics and aesthetics of the natural environment, authors like Berleant, Plumwood, Becker, Gschwandtner, Brady, and Scruton share a number of insights with historians of religions (Mauss, Otto, Eliade) over the connection between humanity and nature. These insights are the attention given to human awe in the face of majestic landscapes, a distinctive agency operating through nature’s intentionalities, the sacred character given to this agency of nature, and a feeling of guilt for human destiny diverging from nature’s path or for trespassing the limits humanly imposed that separate the space of artificial human dwelling from natural environment. I argue that reflecting on the awe of the archaic human mind, in the form of both tremendous fear and positive fascination for the mystery of nature, has potential for a contemporary aesthetic and ethical perspective of a symbiotic approach regarding nature’s fate in the context of a human technological destiny.