• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.303-308
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• 2021

This paper deals with the meaning of seeing in John Ruskin's aesthetic theory. For Ruskin, seeing is the essential key to define moral insight. To consider the relationship between the education of sight and the delight from experience of seeing in nature within Ruskin's moral thought, I analyse Ruskin's various lectures and texts, including Modern Painters, The Story of Halcyon, Of the Science of Light, Proserpina, and Praeterita. The first section of the body investigates the relations among pleasure, thought, sight which compose Ruskin's moral ecology, and then the second section traces the theoretical logic formed the concept of seeing as moral perception of human being. The third section demonstrates correspondence between aesthetic experience of pleasure and the way of seeing as an education for the mystery of Nature and God. After these theoretical processes, this paper finally insists that seeing is the factor of formation of an ecological sensibility corresponding with development of moral perception generated within the hierarchical structure of human-nature-god.