Environmental Aesthetics

Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground

Martin Drenthen, Jozef Keulartz, Martin Drenthen, Jozef Keulartz

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823254514
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Environmental aesthetics crosses several commonly recognized divides: between analytic and continental philosophy, Eastern and Western traditions, universalizing and historicizing approaches, and theoretical and practical concerns. This volume sets out to show how these, perspectives can be brought into conversation with one another.The first part surveys the development of the field and discusses some important future directions. The second part explains how widening the scope of environmental aesthetics demands a continual rethinking of the relationship between aesthetics and other fields. How does environmental aesthetics relate to ethics? Does aesthetic appreciation of the environment entail an attitude of respect? What is the relationship between the theory and practice? The third part is devoted to the relationship between the aesthetics of nature and the aesthetics of art. Can art help "save the Earth"? The final part illustrates the emergence of practical applications from theoretical studies by focusing on concrete case studies.

PART

I

Coming of Age

CHAPTER

1

Ten Steps in the Development of Western Environmental Aesthetics

Allen Carlson

Introduction

In 1967 Richard Rorty published a seminal collection of essays called The Linguistic Turn.¹ The volume has a masterful introduction in which Rorty told the story of the obsession with language that had developed within Western analytic philosophy over the previous thirty years or so. However, Rorty’s introduction is no simple historical account. Rather Rorty focused on the interrelationships among the major figures, the key publications, and the accompanying theoretical commitments that gave shape to the linguist turn, thereby making evident how it was not simply a series of philosophical Ideas and theories but rather a movement within philosophy. I intend the following observations to help make clear in a similar, although much more modest and simplistic manner, the way in which the development of environmental aesthetics within Western analytic aesthetics over the last forty years has likewise not been just a series of ideas about aesthetic appreciation, but rather a progression of stages in the growth of an area of research that has gradually evolved into an important subdiscipline of philosophical aesthetics. I identify and discuss ten such stages.

The Neglect of Natural Beauty

The first step in the development of Western environmental aesthetics is Ronald Hepburn’s classic 1966 essay, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” for this article helped to set the agenda for much of the later work in the field.² Hepburn was the first to bring attention to the extent to which analytic aesthetics had virtually ignored the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world throughout the twentieth century, essentially reducing the discipline of aesthetics to the philosophy of art. Moreover, he noted that although the aesthetic appreciation of art frequently provides misleading models for the appreciation of nature, there is nonetheless, in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, as in the appreciation of art, a distinction between appreciation that is only trivial and superficial and that which is serious and deep. He furthermore suggested that for nature, such serious appreciation may require new and different theoretical approaches that can accommodate not only nature’s indeterminate and varying character but also both our multisensory experience and our diverse understanding of it. By focusing attention on natural beauty, Hepburn thereby demonstrated that there could be significant philosophical investigation of the aesthetic experience of the world beyond the world of art. In this way, he not only generated interest in the aesthetics of nature, he also laid the foundations for environmental aesthetics in general.

Issues with Empirical Environmental Aesthetics

Hepburn’s essay can be seen as the first philosophical move in the development of environmental aesthetics. However, the next stage in that development had a slightly different starting point. Although, as Hepburn had observed, philosophical aesthetics continued to ignore the aesthetic appreciation of nature in the second half of the twentieth century, the same was not true beyond the siloed world of academic philosophy, where there was a growing public concern about the apparent aesthetic degeneration of the environment. The initial response to this concern was a proliferation of empirical research designed to identify and thereby make possible the preservation and the management of “environmental aesthetic quality.” As a result, the next stage of environmental aesthetics focused on the theoretical problems generated by this new interest in the aesthetic quality of environments. In the first half of the 1970s, theoretical problems were addressed in general terms in two ground-breaking articles by philosophers Francis Sparshot and Mark Sagoff.³ At the same time, geographer Jay Appleton argued that the empirical work in particular was being conducted in what he called a “theoretical vacuum.”⁴ These critical discussions were followed by a series of articles by Allen Carlson in which he argued that the aesthetic quality assessment and management approaches developed in the empirical research were not only obsessed with the idea of quantifying aesthetic value but also—in part due to being unduly influenced by traditions such as that of picturesque landscape appreciation—fixated on scenery, “scenic beauty,” and formal aesthetic properties, while overlooking expressive and other kinds of aesthetic properties.⁵ This critical work made clear that if progress is to be made in addressing the aesthetic degeneration of the environment, what is required is not only empirical research but also the kind of philosophical attention to the aesthetic experience of the natural world that Hepburn had called for a decade earlier. Needless to say, since the 1970s progress has been made concerning the pressing aesthetic problems of both natural and human environments, in part because the empirical work on the aesthetic appreciation of environments has become increasingly more sophisticated, effective, and constructive, due to some extent to the sustained consideration of it by environmental aestheticians.

Science and the Aesthetics of Nature

In the third step of the development of environmental aesthetics, Carlson built on both his previous critique of empirical research and Hepburn’s insights. Although he continued to argue that certain art-influenced models of the aesthetic appreciation of nature—such as that based on the idea of the picturesque—are misleading, he also held, as Hepburn had pointed out, that there is a fundamental similarity between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and that of art in that in both there is a distinction between appreciation that is superficial and that which is serious. He therefore suggested that the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood as analogous to that of art and, consequently, that art appreciation can show some of what is required in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. In the case of art, appropriate aesthetic appreciation is informed by art history and art criticism. For example, appropriate appreciation of a work such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937) requires that we experience it as a cubist painting. Thus Carlson argued that, since in serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation of works of art, it is essential that they be experienced as what they are and in light of knowledge of their true natures, the same is the case for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. However, since nature is nature and not art, although the knowledge given by art criticism and art history is relevant to art appreciation, in nature appreciation the relevant knowledge is that provided by natural history, by the natural sciences, especially geology, biology, and ecology. This position that appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature requires that it be appreciated as it is characterized by science, although initially labelled the natural environmental model, later became known as scientific cognitivism.⁶ Carlson also argued that the position is conceptually related to the view called positive aesthetics, the idea that untouched natural environments have only, or at least mainly, positive aesthetic properties.⁷

The Aesthetics of Engagement

The next pivotal stage in the development of environmental aesthetics jelled in the early 1990s with the publication of two books by Arnold Berleant—Art and Engagement and The Aesthetics of Environment, the latter of which articulated another major position in the area of research.⁸ Berleant had published several essays on environmental aesthetics prior to this time, but it was with the appearance of these volumes that his position attracted general attention.⁹ In the former volume, Berleant developed his position in regard to works of art and in the latter applied it directly to environments. Consequently, the position, which is known as the aesthetics of engagement, has relevance not only for nature but also for art. In developing this position, Berleant rejected much of traditional aesthetic theory, arguing that the concept of disinterestedness, for example, involves a mistaken analysis of aesthetic experience and that this is most evident in the experience of natural environments. According to the engagement approach, disinterested appreciation, with its isolating, distancing, and objectifying gaze, is out of place in the aesthetic experience of nature, for it wrongly abstracts both natural objects and appreciators from the environments in which they properly belong and in which appropriate appreciation is achieved. Thus Berleant stressed the contextual dimensions of nature and our multisensory experience of it. Viewing the environment as a seamless unity of places, organisms, and perceptions, he challenged the importance of traditional dichotomies, such as that between subject and object, beckoning appreciators to immerse themselves in the natural environment and to reduce to as small a degree as possible the distance between themselves and the natural world. In short, appropriate aesthetic experience is held to involve the total “sensory immersion” of the appreciator in the object of appreciation. Berleant’s work, like Carlson’s, helped to advance environmental aesthetics as a discipline in that it articulated an explicit position on the aesthetic appreciation of environments that became a focus of discussion and debate by other researchers in the area.

The International Conferences on Environmental Aesthetics

Like the work of Berleant and Carlson, the fifth step in the development of environmental aesthetics did much to help weave the diverse strands of research on the aesthetic appreciation of environments into a discipline of its own. The step was due to the initiative of Finnish aesthetician Yrjö Sepänmaa. Sepänmaa’s first major contribution to the field was the publication of his doctoral dissertation, The Beauty of Environment: A General Model for Environmental Aesthetics, which was published in Finland in 1986, making it the first book-length treatment of environmental aesthetics to appear since Hepburn first brought attention to this area of research. However, Sepänmaa’s wide-ranging and important investigation of the topic did not attract general attention until it was reprinted in the Environmental Ethics book series in 1993.¹⁰ Shortly after its North American publication, Sepänmaa launched his second major contribution to the discipline, which was the first of what was to become a series of prestigious international congresses on environmental aesthetics. The first of these, known as the Koli conference, was officially titled The First International Conference on Environmental Aesthetics and took place in Koli, Finland, in June of 1994. The conference was especially significant in regard to building the discipline in that it was the first time that early researchers in the field—such as Hepburn, Carlson, Berleant, and Sepänmaa—all came together to exchange ideas and debate the major issues, both with each other and with more recent North American contributors, such as Cheryl Foster, Marcia Eaton, Mara Miller, Holmes Rolston, Yuriko Saito, and Barbara Sandrisser, as well as with scholars from Europe and as far away as Korea. The Koli conference was followed by six other international conferences on environmental aesthetics organized by Sepänmaa, each focusing on a different dimension of the subject: forests, bogs and peat lands, water, agricultural landscapes, rock and stone, and skies and space. Over the fifteen years of their tenure, these conferences, as well as the sumptuously illustrated proceedings volumes that followed them, have been a major force in the development and the unification of the discipline. During this time, development and unification was also promoted by an increasing number of sessions on environmental aesthetics at other conferences, especially the meetings of the American and the Canadian Societies of Aesthetics.

The Cambridge Volume and Some New Positions

The next step in the growth of environmental aesthetics was another major publication, which, like the North American publication of Sepänmaa’s volume, appeared in 1993. This was the first collection of essays in the field, Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell’s Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, which appeared in the prestigious Cambridge series, Studies in Philosophy and the Arts.¹¹ The volume has a forty-two page introduction to the field; position papers by Hepburn, Berleant, and Carlson; and essays by other scholars who had previously contributed to the area, such as T. J. Diffey, Yi-Fu Tuan, Stephanie Ross, and Donald Crawford, as well as by some new contributors, such as Noël Carroll. Carroll’s essay was especially important since it presented another major position on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, what is called the arousal model. Carroll held that we may appreciate nature simply by opening ourselves to it and being emotionally aroused by it, which he contended is a legitimate way of aesthetically appreciating nature without invoking any particular knowledge about it.¹² In addition to Kemal and Gaskell’s collection, the early 1990s also saw the publication of the first major reference volume entry on environmental aesthetics, in David Cooper’s A Companion to Aesthetics.¹³ Following quickly on this activity in the now increasingly recognized discipline of environmental aesthetics were two other significant developments: the publication of Stan Godlovitch’s influential “Icebreakers” essay and prominent environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston’s first essay explicitly addressing issues in environmental aesthetics. Godlovitch’s view, sometimes called the mystery model of nature appreciation, constituted another new position in the field. He contended that neither knowledge nor emotional involvement yields appropriate appreciation of nature, for nature itself is ultimately alien, aloof, and unknowable, and thus the appropriate experience of it is a state of appreciative incomprehension involving a sense of mystery.¹⁴ Rolston, by contrast, supported a position endorsing the importance of both scientific knowledge and emotional engagement in appropriate aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, a view that has affinities with those of both Carlson and Berleant.¹⁵ Godlovitch’s and Rolston’s contributions were especially significant in being among the first to bring attention to the connections among environmental aesthetics, environmental ethics, and environmentalism.

The JAAC Special Issue and Some Additional Positions

The publication of another important collection of essays constituted the next stage in the development of environmental aesthetics. This step marked the formal recognition of the area within the discipline of analytic aesthetics, since it was a special issue of the mainstream Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the 1998 Special Issue on Environmental Aesthetics.¹⁶ The special issue was edited by Berleant and Carlson and contained ten original essays by both old and new contributors to the field. Previous contributors Foster, Eaton, Godlovitch, Rolston, Saito, and Sandrisser were joined by Emily Brady, John Andrew Fisher, Sally Schauman, and Kevin Melchionne. Concerning the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, this volume brought a number of important issues to the fore. For example, Brady introduced a new position that emphasizes the role of imagination in the appreciation of nature and, by appealing to the notion of “imagining well,” responded to concerns that imagination introduces subjectivity.¹⁷ Brady’s view was challenged by Eaton who argued that in aesthetic appreciation of nature, we must carefully distinguish between facts about nature and fictions, since while knowledge of the former is necessary for appropriate aesthetic appreciation, the latter can often lead us astray and pervert appreciation.¹⁸ Saito further developed her view, which emphasizes, in addition to factual knowledge, other kinds of information and contends that appreciating nature “on its own terms” may involve experiencing it in light of various local, folk, or historical traditions.¹⁹ A more subjective-leaning position was defended by Fisher, who, focusing on the sounds of nature, argued that, unlike the case with art, many of the most significant aesthetic dimensions of natural environments are extremely relative to conditions of observation, and thus the aesthetic appreciation of nature allows for considerable freedom.²⁰ A more conciliatory position was defended by Foster who attempted to find a middle ground between what she called the narrative and the ambient approaches to environmental aesthetics, essentially cognitive positions such as Carlson’s and less cognitive ones such as Berleant’s.²¹ The essays in the JAAC Special Issue that addressed the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments were later included, along with others, in the anthology The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, edited by Carlson and Berleant in 2004.²²

The Aesthetics of Human Environments

Much of the most significant work in environmental aesthetics published during the first thirty years of its development focused on natural environments. The next s...