Arnold Berleant

The Aesthetics of Natural Environments is a collection of essays investigating philosophical and aesthetics issues that arise in our appreciation of natural environments. The introduction gives an historical and conceptual overview of the rapidly developing field of study known as environmental aesthetics. The essays consist of classic pieces as well as new contributions by some of the most prominent individuals now working in the field and range from theoretical to applied approaches. The topics covered include the nature and value of natural beauty, the relationship between art appreciation and nature appreciation, the role of knowledge in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, the importance of environmental participation to the appreciation of environments, and the connections between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and our ethical obligations concerning its maintenance and preservation. This volume is for scholars and students focussed on nature, landscapes, and environments, individuals in areas such as aesthetics, environmental ethics, geography, environmental studies, landscape architecture, landscape ecology, and the planning and design disciplines. It is also for any reader interested in and concerned about the aesthetic quality of the world in which we live

Ecology has become a popular conceptual model in numerous fields of inquiry and it seems especially appropriate for environmental philosophy. Apart from its literal employment in biology, ecology has served as a useful metaphor that captures the interdependence of factors in a field of research. At the same time as ecology is suggestive, it cannot be followed literally or blindly. This paper considers the appropriateness of the uses to which ecology has been put in some recent discussions of architectural and environmental aesthetics, and develops a critique of the differing ecological aesthetics of Jusuck Koh and Xiangzhan Cheng.

Stone represents the firmness and intransigence of the world within which we live and act. But beyond the perception and appropriations of stone, diverse meanings lie hidden between the hardness of stone and its uses. At the same time meaning must be grounded in the stabilizing presence of a common world. Yet if all that can be said is not about stone simpliciter but only an aesthetics of its perception, uses, and meanings, have we not gained the whole world but lost its reality? The underlying issue is therefore not aesthetic but ontological.

Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from an initial centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. Traditional accounts are inadequate in their attempt to identify and illuminate the perceptual experiences that these new applications evoke. Considering the range of environmental and everyday occasions aesthetically changes aesthetics into a descriptive and not necessarily celebratory study of sensible experience, for it must now accommodate a complete range of negative as well as positive values. Th is paper develops an analysis of the multiple dimensions of environmental sensibility

Arnold Berleant gilt als einer der Gründerväter der environmental aesthetics, zu der er seit den 1970er-Jahren veröffentlicht hat und weltweit Vorträge hält; er war jahrelang Präsident der International Association of Aesthetics und ist emeritierter Professor der Long Island University. Sein Aufsatz in dieser Polylog-Ausgabe nimmt zunächst seine Grundgedanken zur Ästhetik als Sinnlichkeitslehre wieder auf. Daraufhin gründet Berleant die »ästhetische Politik« auf der Idee eines »Gemeinguts der Wahrnehmung«, zu dem etwa Luft, Wasser oder Raum gehören; jeder Mensch hat Anspruch auf die Wahrnehmung dieser natürlichen Ressourcen, die sauber bleiben sollen, um seiner Gesundheit und seinem Wohlbefinden zu dienen. Aus dieser Perspektive wird die »Kooptation der Sinnlichkeit«, anders gesagt: die kommerzielle und profitorientierte Aneignung dessen, was im öffentlichen Raum wahrzunehmen ist, scharf verurteilt. Die Ästhetik als Wahrnehmungslehre ist nicht von einer engagierten Ethik und demokratischen Politik des Gemeinwohls zu trennen.

Interest in aesthetics has grown in recent years, yet since Virgil Aldrich’s Philosophy of Art appeared in 1963, there has been no small, general survey that could be joined with primary sources to introduce students to the field. Several such books are now emerging on the scholarly scene, with Professor Eaton’s Basic Issues in Aesthetics the first to appear. This is a helpful development, for the teaching of general aesthetics has subsisted in large part on various collections of primary materials and on a very few extended comprehensive works, most notably Beardsley’s Aesthetics, Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, and it has prospered mainly from the ingenuity of teachers of aesthetics.

From the earliest times art has been integral to human culture. Both fascinated and perplexed by the arts, people have tried, since the age of classical Greece, to understand how they work and what they mean. Philosophers wondered at first about the nature of art: what it is and how it relates to the cosmos. They puzzled over how art objects are created, and extolled human skills that seem at times godlike in their powers. But perhaps the central question for such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle concerned our involvement with art: the response we have to beautiful things, the moral and salubrious powers of art, and perhaps most of all, the power of art to transform and transcend, leading us into a condition of enhanced perception that may be wondrous, dangerous, and at times overwhelming. The classical age displayed a richness of discussion that centered on art as an activity: an activity that is at once cosmic, social, and individual; an activity that brings understanding of a sort; an activity that may be salutary and even exalting, as in Aristotle's celebrated discussion of tragedy and its cathartic effects. Since the eighteenth century, however, this has changed. Questions about art have shifted to the idea of experience, paralleling the great change in the focus of philosophy from matters of ontology to those of epistemology. In place of starting from an examination of the nature of the universe and moving to the human position in the order of things, we have come to realize, since Descartes and Kant, that all inquiry has its inception in a human locus. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we have finally recognized that the human factor in every kind of awareness and knowledge is structurally unavoidable. Art has become both a symptom of this change and a standard for grasping it.

This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces and factors, and that considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants.