Return to Beauty

Return to Beauty: Restoring the Ecology of Imagination explores how we have repressed beauty, and how this repression has left us estranged from our proper place in the world. Without the ordering power of beauty, individuals, society, and the environment all suffer. Return to Beauty is both a history of ideas and a call to action. It explores religious, philosophical, and scientific traditions that separate us from nature, that claim non-human animals are not conscious beings, and that reduce beauty to a handmaiden of natural selection within evolutionary thought. Return to Beauty challenges these ideas and proposes ways to reconnect with nature through our aesthetic sensibilities. It breathes new life into old ideas like imagination, love, soul, and myth. But foremost is beauty. The beauty of this book cannot be reduced to prettiness or pleasure but is instead understood as foundational to our very existence. We are Homo aestheticus before we are Homo sapiens.