Abstract
Alfred North Whitehead recognizes different strata or layers of beauty, some of them being trivial and some of them important. The main aim of the paper is to show how to recognise and differentiate trivial forms of beauty and the serious ones.
The paper shows the stratification of beauty based on Whitehead’s principle of “contrast under identity” (Process and Reality, The Free Press 1978, p. 280). In the second part of the paper, the Whiteheadian stratification of beauty is exemplified on the problem of aesthetic appreciation of nature as developed by the founder of environmental aesthetics, Ronald W.
Hepburn in his article “Trivial and serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” (1993).