Aesthetics and Environment

Variations on a Theme

Arnold Berleant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138618763
• eBook ISBN: 9781351163347
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The essays collected in Aesthetics and Environment comprise a set of variations on art and culture guided by the theme of environment. The essays deal with the physical reality of environment such as the city, the shore, the water and the garden, but also with the virtual environment and the social one. Environmental aesthetics is a theme whose variations are as endless as the possibilities of the human performers and conditions from which it is fashioned. This enticing set of essays testifies to Berleant's special talent in moving easily between both natural and human environments and opens out the contemporary discussion beyond that of the wilderness to the cultural and social environment. Berleant argues that neither the natural nor human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are in experience coextensive, that one can only speak of environment in relation to human experience. The theme of this book is that such experience suffuses the so-called natural world and shapes the human world. It maintains the idea that in as much as people are embedded in these worlds, relationships, including human relationships, are part of them. The melding of these two worlds leads Berleant to defend ultimately what he has termed 'social aesthetics' .

Part I
Environmental Aesthetics

Chapter 1
A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment¹

The Visual Influence on Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetics, as a discipline, retains a bond with its origins in the eighteenth century, when it was named the ‘science of sensory knowledge’.² Much has come to supplement this sensory base – factors such as meaning, memory, metaphor, symbol, and history – but it is important to reaffirm the central place that sense perception holds in aesthetic experience, for the senses are essential and indeed central to the study of art and natural beauty. Of course, the early emphasis of aesthetics on beauty has changed with the evolution of the arts, and today the field embraces a wide range of qualities and features of perceptual experience that may be termed, in some fashion, ‘aesthetic’. These include the ugly, the grotesque, the comic or playful, as well as the conventionally pleasing. In fact the concept of beauty may itself be extended to cover such as these, in so far as they enable us to have experience that is both positive and aesthetic.

The nature of such experience has understandably been the subject of much discussion. Aesthetic experience has been approached from the naturalistic standpoint by Dewey, Prall, and Langfeld, from the analytic by Beardsley and Aldrich, from the phenomenological by Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne. In fact, so important has the notion of experience been in theories of art that it may be taken as the seminal concept in modern aesthetics. Drawing from some of these sources, I shall develop here some ideas that have significant implications for an aesthetics of environment.

Aesthetic perception is usually described in visual terms: we are given not an aesthetic of experience but an aesthetic of appearance. The sense of sight has a long history in Western cultures and, throughout the twenty-five hundred years of its philosophic tradition, it is well known how visual perception has been dominant and sight has been associated with cognitive activities. This is seen clearly in the standard stock of visual metaphors that provide the usual vocabulary for denoting acts of thought and cognition. These are familiar, from Descartes’ ‘inspection by the mind’, which confirms the truth of ideas that the mind perceives as ‘clear and distinct’ in ‘the light of nature’, to the multitude of metaphorical commonplaces reflected by the many ordinary expressions denoting comprehension. This convention has been transferred readily to the arts, so that sight, along with the other distance receptor, hearing, are the only senses traditionally admitted as legitimately aesthetic. For Plato proposed early on that only the pleasure apprehended by sight and hearing is aesthetic,³ and this conviction has been reiterated until recently without serious question.

I shall not review here the long history, from classical times to the present, during which visual perception reigned as a cognitive standard for art and aesthetic experience. It is a history that describes a multitude of diverse forces directing our understanding of the arts by standards other than those that derive from our perceptual experience. Religious, metaphysical, historical, and epistemological criteria provided the governing principles by which art was to be made, understood, and judged. When the study of art finally achieved its emancipation and identity late in the Enlightenment, this intellectualist, visual model was not abandoned. It became instead the governing metaphor for the explanation of aesthetic experience, which emerged as a contemplative attitude for appreciating an art object for its own sake alone. Only in the last century was this account challenged by explanations such as those based on empathy or pragmatic functionalism.

My purpose here, however, is not historical – a task I have undertaken elsewhere.⁴ I should like instead to elaborate three models of aesthetic experience, two of which have appeared after aesthetics emerged as a discipline and the third of which is still nascent. These ideas are a central theme in this book and their range and complexity extend well beyond the scope of this chapter. At the same time, environmental perception offers an especially rich opportunity for illuminating aesthetic experience.

The Contemplative Model

The contemplative model of aesthetic experience is so securely established as to be assumed the official doctrine. Resting on a philosophical tradition that extends back to classical times, it appears to many as the very foundation of modern aesthetics, axiomatic and unchallengeable. First formulated in the eighteenth century in the writings of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and others of the British school and embodied in a systematic philosophical setting later in that period by Kant, the doctrine emerged that identifies the art object as separate and distinct from whatever surrounds it, isolated from the rest of life.⁵ Such an object requires a special attitude, an attitude of disinterestedness, that regards the object in the light of its own intrinsic qualities with no concern for ulterior purposes. Disinterestedness thus became a tenet echoed regularly through the halls of academe by such phrases as Bullough’s well-known notion of psychical distance and Ortega’s less gracious ‘dehumanization’. More recently the interest in the formal properties of art objects, in their distinctive nature, in the definition of art in terms of these properties, and in psychologistic theories of aesthetic perception that develop distinctive ways of looking at art are all theoretical manifestations of the same impulse to disengage art from the social experiential matrix and assign it to a removed and elevated position.⁶ Stolnitz summed up two centuries of discussion when he defined the aesthetic attitude as ‘disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone’.⁷

The history of landscape painting offers numerous examples that clearly reflect this doctrine of separation and distance. Such paintings characteristically derive from a conception of space modelled on the space of the physicist, more specifically the eighteenth-century physicist. Space here becomes an abstraction, a medium that is universal, objective, and impersonal, independent of the objects that are situated in and move through it. Such an objective space leads to the objectification of things in it, which are then regarded from the stance of an impersonal observer. What is common to landscapes conceived through this notion of objective space is the depiction of a scene as seen from a particular vantage point. The observer is removed from the scene and contemplates it from a distance. Such paintings illustrate the usual definition of a landscape as ‘a picture representing a section of natural, inland scenery’ that reflects the conception of a landscape as ‘an expanse of natural scenery seen by the eye in one view’.⁸

Pictorial features characteristic of these works present an objectified space and encourage an attitude of disinterestedness. The space of the painting is separated sharply from the space that surrounds it, including that of the observer, by a frame and sometimes a physical barrier. The landscape space is also discontinuous with the viewer. It often begins abruptly in the foreground, originating at the picture plane. While it may lead the eye into the space of the painting, that space is itself usually divided into separate, uncommunicating areas, the objective and divisible space of classical physics. And indeed, the desideratum seems to be to regard the painting as a totality, visually objective and complete. Division, distance, separation, and isolation are equally the order of the art and the order of the experience, for the features of the painting shape the character of our perception.⁹

So philosophically coherent a position is formidable and remains the dominant view to this day. Custom and frequency, moreover, give it great weight. One is reminded here of Laurence Sterne’s ironic observation of the use we commonly make of such ideas:

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.¹⁰

This objectification of art is the predictable product of an intellectualist tradition, one that grasps the world by knowing it through objectifying it, and that controls the world by subduing it to the order of thought. Such a strategy may have secured the assent of philosophers but it has not won over the ranks of artists.¹¹ Wallace Stevens’ response, in the last of his ‘Six Significant Landscapes’, is as eloquent as it is explicit: ‘Rationalists wearing square hats / Think, in square rooms … / If they tried rhomboids, / Cones, waving lines, ellipses – /As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon – / Rationalists would wear sombreros’.¹²

Much in the modern arts, however, moves deliberately contrary to this tradition. Furthermore, one can reconsider much of the art of the past and discover that it lends itself to quite different modes of experience and to different explanations. Landscape paintings, in particular, provide telling examples, as we shall see later in this chapter.¹³ But let us now explore some different accounts of aesthetic experience.

The Active Model

There have been attempts since the eighteenth century to develop alternatives to the classical view of aesthetic experience. Some romantic theories stressed the sympathetic feeling of the appreciator while others proposed an empathetic identification with the object.¹⁴ These interpreted the experience of appreciation primarily in psychological terms, emphasizing an attitude of absorption rather than separation. During the last century, however, even though the classical theory continued its dominance, some proposals appeared that went well beyond the psychological locus of the common nineteenth-century alternatives. These offered to overcome the passivity and separation of disinterested contemplation by depicting the aesthetic perceiver more as a multi-sensory, active agent than through the disengaged vision of the traditional position. These inclusive accounts offer a promising direction and have been developed in various forms. Let us consider two of them here.

We may call the first the ‘active model’. One version of this may be found in the aesthetics of pragmatism, especially in Dewey’s Art as Experience, and in the phenomenological aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty. What is common to the various forms of the active model is the recognition that the objective world of classical science is not the experiential world of the human perceiver. Thus there is a sharp difference between space as it is presumably held to be objectively and the perception of that space. A theory of aesthetic experience must derive from the latter rather than the former, from the manner in which we participate in spatial experience rather than from the way in which we conceptualize and objectify such experience.

Dewey emphasized this dissimilarity. He argued that ‘the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience’, a condition that makes art difficult to understand. Aesthetic experience must base itself on ordinary experience, experience that is ‘determined by the essential conditions of life’. Foremost among these conditions is that ‘life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it … The career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way.’ Dewey insisted that just as life goes on through interactions of an organism with an environment that engages all the senses, art requires the full capacities of the organism to restore ‘the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature’. Art stirs those inherent dispositions into activity with an intimate relation to the surroundings that the human being has acquired through evolutionary and cultural development. Such activities come as an impulsion of the organism and appear in art as an act of expression.

This activity is central. Indeed, such an act constitutes the work of art, an act in which there is a simultaneous transformation of materials and feelings. A work becomes artistic to the extent that two transformations take place, one of the materials of the artist’s medium and a second of the artist’s ideas and feelings. There is, moreover, a difference for Dewey between the art product – a painting or statue – and the work of art. The work of art is the object working, interacting with the energies that emerge from the experience. Thus, Dewey holds, the work of art in its actuality is perception. It is clear in this portrayal of the experience of art that the organism activates the environment and perception is not exclusively visual but rather somatic: the body energizes space.¹⁵

One can discover a curious resemblance between these ideas of Dewey, ideas that share something with the radical empiricism of William James, and the phenomenological aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty and others.¹⁶ Merleau-Ponty argued for synaesthesia as a unified collaboration of all the senses, including touch, in a manner in which they are undifferentiated from one another. Like Dewey, perception starts with the body, and the presence of the body as here is the primary reference point from which all spatial coordinates must be derived. Thus the perceived object is grasped in relation to the space of the perceiver. It is not a discrete material object. ‘Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences.’ There is, so to say, an ‘intentional arc’ that supports consciousness, through which we are situated temporally, physically, socially, and in the realms of meaning. The subject who perceives ‘is my body as the field of perception and action’. Indeed, ‘the perceived thing … exists only in so far as someone can perceive it’.¹⁷ The human body occurs through a blending of sensing and sensible, a blending in which vision is not just of but in things. Further, space is not, as it was for Descartes, a ‘network of relations between objects’ that can be seen from the outside by an impartial observer. ‘It is, rather, a space reckoned starting from me as the zero point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me.’¹⁸

O. F. Bollnow offered a similar account of space.¹⁹ Like Merleau-Ponty, he rejected the mathematical conception of space characterized by a pervasive homogeneity. For then all points and all directions would be of the same importance; none is distinctive and non...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS
• PART II SOCIAL AESTHETICS
• Index