Books by Arnold Berleant
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Popular Inquiry, 2022
On 4 March 2022 Arnold Berleant celebrates his 90th anniversary. Anniversaries are ideal occasion... more On 4 March 2022 Arnold Berleant celebrates his 90th anniversary. Anniversaries are ideal occasions
to take a breath and look back and forward, to revisit memories and make plans for the future. Yet
celebrations imply more, namely, to gather around the celebrated one in a festive atmosphere and
breath in the feeling of togetherness. One looks around for friends and this “lateral view” – to borrow
an expression by Maurice Merleau-Ponty – is what conveys depth or meaning to life. On his anniversary, Arnold Berleant neither has to seek for the traces he has left behind nor look around for
friends. They are already here: his pathways, ineffaceable and deeply ground-in in the field of aesthetics, his friends, innumerable. This mesh of Berleant’s biographical and theoretical trails as seen
by friends and colleagues makes the object of the present liber amicarum et amicorum.
We are grateful to all those who, despite the tight deadline, could respond to our invitation
to celebrate Arnold Berleant’s anniversary. Others would have gladly joined us yet were finally impeded by health reasons. The present contributions build like sonorous and silent sequences the
rhapsodic structure of this volume. The articles, authored by scholars worldwide and belonging to
different generations, demonstrate how Berleant’s wide vision of the aesthetic and lifelong effort of
coagulating communities has strongly shaped the scope, methods and goals of aesthetic theory, as
well as impacted other disciplines. Arnold Berleant himself honored this Festschrift with a paper. In
it, he surprises us once more by reverting the common interpretation of (past) art from the perspective of (contemporary) philosophy and using an “enigmatic” artist of the 20th century in order to raise
doubts on the argumentative “evidence” of an equally famous historical philosopher.
This Festschrift includes articles, memories and birthday wishes. Some texts provide clearly
new knowledge and/or in-depth studies of Arnold Berleant’s work, some work on reflections more
or less based on his lifework, but together they show the richness of Arnold Berleant’s impact, which
ranges from research to establishing Contemporary Aesthetics and functioning as a mentor figure
for many younger scholars. We hope that the issue that we have edited could function as a start for
Arnold Berleant studies. During the process we realized that although we have read a lot of his work,
his publishing resume (included here, too) is more extensive than what we have so far realized. Luckily many authors touched upon issues that have been less discussed, but all and all, the lifework of
Arnold Berleant can support many further studies. This issue, we think, shows it.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
An anthology of essays on urban aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes abstracts and DOI for eac... more An anthology of essays on urban aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes abstracts and DOI for each title.
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An expanded anthology of critical essays on aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes citation... more An expanded anthology of critical essays on aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes citation and DOI for each article.
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An expanded list of essays by Arnold Berleant on the aesthetics of the social and political. Incl... more An expanded list of essays by Arnold Berleant on the aesthetics of the social and political. Includes citation and DOI for each article.
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This document brings together the citation and DOI for essays written by Arnold Berleant on the a... more This document brings together the citation and DOI for essays written by Arnold Berleant on the aesthetics of the social and political.
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This anthology brings together the titles of articles written about music by Arnold Berleant with... more This anthology brings together the titles of articles written about music by Arnold Berleant with citation and DOI information.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
An anthology of critical essays on aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes citation and DOI for e... more An anthology of critical essays on aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes citation and DOI for each article.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhi... more Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms "social aesthetics," which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.
CONTENTS
Preface: Toward an Aesthetics beyond Art
I. The Arts as Experience
1 Judging Architecture
2 What Titles Don’t Tell
3 What Music Isn’t
II. Environmental Aesthetics
4 Art, Nature, and Environment
5 The Re-shaping of Experience
6 Two Ways in the Landscape
7 The Art in Knowing a Landscape
8 Reconsidering Scenic Beauty
9 Forestry Aesthetics
10 Distant Cities
11 Ideas for an Ecological Aesthetics
12 Nature and Habitation in a Chinese Garden
III. Implications
13 Aesthetics without Purpose
14 The Legacy of Dewey’s Aesthetics
15 Evolutionary Naturalism and the Abandonment of Dualism
16 The Aesthetic Politics of Environment
17 The Changing Meaning of Landscape
18 Beauty and the Way of Modern Life
*Available on Kindle
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Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of... more Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth’s surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I GROUNDING THE WORLD
1 Beginning
2 Understanding the Aesthetic
3 The Aesthetic Argument
4 The World as Experienced
II AESTHETICS AND THE HUMAN WORLD
5 A Rose by Any Other Name
6 The Soft Side of Stone
7 An Aesthetics of Urbanism
8 Celestial Aesthetics
III SOCIAL AESTHETICS
9 The Negative Aesthetics of Everyday Life
10 Art, Terrorism and the Negative Sublime
11 Perceptual Politics
12 The Aesthetics of Politics
*Available on Kindle.
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The essays collected in Aesthetics and Environment comprise a set of variations on art and cultur... more 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 the human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are coextensive in experience, 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. He 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 as termed 'social aesthetics.'
CONTENTS
I ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS
1 A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment
2 Aesthetic Dimensions of Environmental Design
3 Down the Garden Path
4 The Wilderness City: A Study of Metaphorical Experience
5 The Fluid Environment
6 The World from the Water
7 Is There Life in Virtual Space?
8 Is Greasy Lake a Place?
9 Embodied Music
II SOCIAL AESTHETICS
10 The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic
11 The Social Evaluation of Art
12 Subsidization of Art as Social Policy
13 Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art
14 Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics
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The essays in this volume express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics:... more The essays in this volume express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, insight, force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Art and the Future of Aesthetics
I THE FOCUS OF AESTHETICS
1 Re-thinking Aesthetics
2 The Historicity of Aesthetics
3 Beyond Disinterestedness
4 Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts
II ICONOCLASTIC IMPLICATIONS
5 The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics
6 Aesthetic Embodiment
7 Intuition in Art, or Pygmalion Revisited
8 Art without Object
9 The Art of the Unseen
III RE-THINKING THE ARTS
10 Death in Image, Word, and Idea
11 Brancusi and the Phenomenology of Sculptural Space
12 The Verbal Presence: An Aesthetics of Literary Performance
13 The Intuitive Impulse in Literary Performance
14 A Phenomenology of Musical Performance
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Living in the Landscape develops an aesthetic critique of environment in both concrete and theore... more Living in the Landscape develops an aesthetic critique of environment in both concrete and theoretical directions. It provides an introduction to environmental aesthetics, identifying the kinds of experience, meanings, and values it involves, and describing its historical sources and the areas and issues with which it is concerned. The book develops an extended critical analysis of Disney World and elaborates a theoretical basis for the negative aesthetic criticism of environment. Living in the Landscape extends the scope of environmental values to include aesthetic education, body and environment, the aesthetics of community, environmental creativity, and sacred aesthetic environments. Underlying these discussions is the idea of environmental continuity, through which the book explores the forms of environmental interconnections from the body to architecture, place, the educational process, and community.
CONTENTS
1 Aesthetics and Environment
2 An Emerging Aesthetics of Environment
3 Deconstructing Disney World
4 The Human Touch and the Beauty of Nature
5 Aesthetic Function
6 Environment and the Body
7 Architecture and the Aesthetics of Continuity
8 Education as Aesthetic
9 Aesthetics and Community
10 Reflections on a Reflection: Some Thoughts
on Environmental Creativity
11 Sacred Environments
"
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Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of env... more Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but is fully integrated and continuous with us, The Aesthetics of Environment explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environmental continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to countryside to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place.
CONTENTS
1 Environment as a Challenge to Aesthetics
2 The Aesthetic Sense of Environment
3 Descriptive Aesthetics
4 Scenes from a Connecticut Landscape: Four Studies in Descriptive Aesthetics
5 Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology
6 Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic
7 Designing Outer Space
8 The Museum of Art as a Participatory Environment
9 Environmental Criticism
10 Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm
11 The Aesthetics of Art and Nature
12 Reclaiming the American Landscape
*Available on Kindle.
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A bold alternative to the eighteenth century aesthetic of disinterestedness, aesthetic engagement... more A bold alternative to the eighteenth century aesthetic of disinterestedness, aesthetic engagement makes the appreciative experience of both the traditional and contemporary arts more intelligible. After considering the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the idea of engagement, successive chapters demonstrate its importance in landscape painting, architecture and environmental design, literature, music, dance, and film. Emerging from these original studies of the arts is the recognition that the different arts involve experiences that possess their own claim to reality.
CONTENTS
I AESTHETICS AND EXPERIENCE
1 Experience and Theory in Aesthetics
2 The Unity of Aesthetic Experience
II ENGAGEMENT AND THE ARTS
3 The Viewer in the Landscape
4 Architecture as Environmental Design
5 The Reader's Word
6 Musical Generation
7 Dance as Performance
III ART AND REALITY
8 Film and Other Realities of Art - I
9 Film and Other Realities of Art - II
10 Conclusion: The End of Aesthetics
*Available on Kindle
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The Aesthetic Field develops an account of aesthetic experience that distinguishes four mutually ... more The Aesthetic Field develops an account of aesthetic experience that distinguishes four mutually interacting factors: the creative factor represented primarily by the artist; the appreciative one by the viewer, listener, or reader; the objective factor by the art object, which is the focus of the experience; and the performative by the activator of the aesthetic occurrence. Each of these factors both affects all the others and is in turn influenced by them, so none can be adequately considered apart from them. Thus aesthetic appreciation, for example, has creative, objective, and performative aspects. This situation of four factors, together with social, cultural, technological, and historical influences on them, is called the aesthetic field. Although the factors are theoretically distinguishable, they are experienced as a unity. It is important, therefore, not to confound the theoretical explanation of aesthetic experience with the experience, itself. The aesthetic field has important implications for understanding the various individual arts, new developments in the arts, and the critical appraisal of the arts. Moreover, the concept transforms traditional issues in aesthetics.
CONTENTS
1 Aesthetic Theory as a Cognitive Discipline
2 Surrogate Theories of Art
3 The Aesthetic Field
4 Aesthetic Experience
5 Art Criticism and Aesthetic Value
6 Toward an Empirical Aesthetics
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Papers by Arnold Berleant
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2009
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Environmental Values, 2010
Attempts to justify the objectivity and universality of aesthetic judgment have traditionally res... more Attempts to justify the objectivity and universality of aesthetic judgment have traditionally rested on unsupported assumptions or mere assertion. This paper offers a fresh consideration of the problem of judgments of taste. It suggests that the problem of securing universal agreement is false and therefore insoluble since it imposes an inappropriate logical criterion on the extent of agreement, which is irrevocably empirical. The variability of judgments of taste actually forms a subject ripe for inquiry by sociologists, psychologists, historians and anthropologists, as well as by aestheticians. Scenic beauty provides a vivid test for the variability of these judgments.
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BRILL eBooks, 1998
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Contemporary Aesthetics, 2003
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Books by Arnold Berleant
to take a breath and look back and forward, to revisit memories and make plans for the future. Yet
celebrations imply more, namely, to gather around the celebrated one in a festive atmosphere and
breath in the feeling of togetherness. One looks around for friends and this “lateral view” – to borrow
an expression by Maurice Merleau-Ponty – is what conveys depth or meaning to life. On his anniversary, Arnold Berleant neither has to seek for the traces he has left behind nor look around for
friends. They are already here: his pathways, ineffaceable and deeply ground-in in the field of aesthetics, his friends, innumerable. This mesh of Berleant’s biographical and theoretical trails as seen
by friends and colleagues makes the object of the present liber amicarum et amicorum.
We are grateful to all those who, despite the tight deadline, could respond to our invitation
to celebrate Arnold Berleant’s anniversary. Others would have gladly joined us yet were finally impeded by health reasons. The present contributions build like sonorous and silent sequences the
rhapsodic structure of this volume. The articles, authored by scholars worldwide and belonging to
different generations, demonstrate how Berleant’s wide vision of the aesthetic and lifelong effort of
coagulating communities has strongly shaped the scope, methods and goals of aesthetic theory, as
well as impacted other disciplines. Arnold Berleant himself honored this Festschrift with a paper. In
it, he surprises us once more by reverting the common interpretation of (past) art from the perspective of (contemporary) philosophy and using an “enigmatic” artist of the 20th century in order to raise
doubts on the argumentative “evidence” of an equally famous historical philosopher.
This Festschrift includes articles, memories and birthday wishes. Some texts provide clearly
new knowledge and/or in-depth studies of Arnold Berleant’s work, some work on reflections more
or less based on his lifework, but together they show the richness of Arnold Berleant’s impact, which
ranges from research to establishing Contemporary Aesthetics and functioning as a mentor figure
for many younger scholars. We hope that the issue that we have edited could function as a start for
Arnold Berleant studies. During the process we realized that although we have read a lot of his work,
his publishing resume (included here, too) is more extensive than what we have so far realized. Luckily many authors touched upon issues that have been less discussed, but all and all, the lifework of
Arnold Berleant can support many further studies. This issue, we think, shows it.
CONTENTS
Preface: Toward an Aesthetics beyond Art
I. The Arts as Experience
1 Judging Architecture
2 What Titles Don’t Tell
3 What Music Isn’t
II. Environmental Aesthetics
4 Art, Nature, and Environment
5 The Re-shaping of Experience
6 Two Ways in the Landscape
7 The Art in Knowing a Landscape
8 Reconsidering Scenic Beauty
9 Forestry Aesthetics
10 Distant Cities
11 Ideas for an Ecological Aesthetics
12 Nature and Habitation in a Chinese Garden
III. Implications
13 Aesthetics without Purpose
14 The Legacy of Dewey’s Aesthetics
15 Evolutionary Naturalism and the Abandonment of Dualism
16 The Aesthetic Politics of Environment
17 The Changing Meaning of Landscape
18 Beauty and the Way of Modern Life
*Available on Kindle
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I GROUNDING THE WORLD
1 Beginning
2 Understanding the Aesthetic
3 The Aesthetic Argument
4 The World as Experienced
II AESTHETICS AND THE HUMAN WORLD
5 A Rose by Any Other Name
6 The Soft Side of Stone
7 An Aesthetics of Urbanism
8 Celestial Aesthetics
III SOCIAL AESTHETICS
9 The Negative Aesthetics of Everyday Life
10 Art, Terrorism and the Negative Sublime
11 Perceptual Politics
12 The Aesthetics of Politics
*Available on Kindle.
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 the human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are coextensive in experience, 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. He 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 as termed 'social aesthetics.'
CONTENTS
I ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS
1 A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment
2 Aesthetic Dimensions of Environmental Design
3 Down the Garden Path
4 The Wilderness City: A Study of Metaphorical Experience
5 The Fluid Environment
6 The World from the Water
7 Is There Life in Virtual Space?
8 Is Greasy Lake a Place?
9 Embodied Music
II SOCIAL AESTHETICS
10 The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic
11 The Social Evaluation of Art
12 Subsidization of Art as Social Policy
13 Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art
14 Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Art and the Future of Aesthetics
I THE FOCUS OF AESTHETICS
1 Re-thinking Aesthetics
2 The Historicity of Aesthetics
3 Beyond Disinterestedness
4 Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts
II ICONOCLASTIC IMPLICATIONS
5 The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics
6 Aesthetic Embodiment
7 Intuition in Art, or Pygmalion Revisited
8 Art without Object
9 The Art of the Unseen
III RE-THINKING THE ARTS
10 Death in Image, Word, and Idea
11 Brancusi and the Phenomenology of Sculptural Space
12 The Verbal Presence: An Aesthetics of Literary Performance
13 The Intuitive Impulse in Literary Performance
14 A Phenomenology of Musical Performance
CONTENTS
1 Aesthetics and Environment
2 An Emerging Aesthetics of Environment
3 Deconstructing Disney World
4 The Human Touch and the Beauty of Nature
5 Aesthetic Function
6 Environment and the Body
7 Architecture and the Aesthetics of Continuity
8 Education as Aesthetic
9 Aesthetics and Community
10 Reflections on a Reflection: Some Thoughts
on Environmental Creativity
11 Sacred Environments
"
CONTENTS
1 Environment as a Challenge to Aesthetics
2 The Aesthetic Sense of Environment
3 Descriptive Aesthetics
4 Scenes from a Connecticut Landscape: Four Studies in Descriptive Aesthetics
5 Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology
6 Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic
7 Designing Outer Space
8 The Museum of Art as a Participatory Environment
9 Environmental Criticism
10 Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm
11 The Aesthetics of Art and Nature
12 Reclaiming the American Landscape
*Available on Kindle.
CONTENTS
I AESTHETICS AND EXPERIENCE
1 Experience and Theory in Aesthetics
2 The Unity of Aesthetic Experience
II ENGAGEMENT AND THE ARTS
3 The Viewer in the Landscape
4 Architecture as Environmental Design
5 The Reader's Word
6 Musical Generation
7 Dance as Performance
III ART AND REALITY
8 Film and Other Realities of Art - I
9 Film and Other Realities of Art - II
10 Conclusion: The End of Aesthetics
*Available on Kindle
CONTENTS
1 Aesthetic Theory as a Cognitive Discipline
2 Surrogate Theories of Art
3 The Aesthetic Field
4 Aesthetic Experience
5 Art Criticism and Aesthetic Value
6 Toward an Empirical Aesthetics
Papers by Arnold Berleant
to take a breath and look back and forward, to revisit memories and make plans for the future. Yet
celebrations imply more, namely, to gather around the celebrated one in a festive atmosphere and
breath in the feeling of togetherness. One looks around for friends and this “lateral view” – to borrow
an expression by Maurice Merleau-Ponty – is what conveys depth or meaning to life. On his anniversary, Arnold Berleant neither has to seek for the traces he has left behind nor look around for
friends. They are already here: his pathways, ineffaceable and deeply ground-in in the field of aesthetics, his friends, innumerable. This mesh of Berleant’s biographical and theoretical trails as seen
by friends and colleagues makes the object of the present liber amicarum et amicorum.
We are grateful to all those who, despite the tight deadline, could respond to our invitation
to celebrate Arnold Berleant’s anniversary. Others would have gladly joined us yet were finally impeded by health reasons. The present contributions build like sonorous and silent sequences the
rhapsodic structure of this volume. The articles, authored by scholars worldwide and belonging to
different generations, demonstrate how Berleant’s wide vision of the aesthetic and lifelong effort of
coagulating communities has strongly shaped the scope, methods and goals of aesthetic theory, as
well as impacted other disciplines. Arnold Berleant himself honored this Festschrift with a paper. In
it, he surprises us once more by reverting the common interpretation of (past) art from the perspective of (contemporary) philosophy and using an “enigmatic” artist of the 20th century in order to raise
doubts on the argumentative “evidence” of an equally famous historical philosopher.
This Festschrift includes articles, memories and birthday wishes. Some texts provide clearly
new knowledge and/or in-depth studies of Arnold Berleant’s work, some work on reflections more
or less based on his lifework, but together they show the richness of Arnold Berleant’s impact, which
ranges from research to establishing Contemporary Aesthetics and functioning as a mentor figure
for many younger scholars. We hope that the issue that we have edited could function as a start for
Arnold Berleant studies. During the process we realized that although we have read a lot of his work,
his publishing resume (included here, too) is more extensive than what we have so far realized. Luckily many authors touched upon issues that have been less discussed, but all and all, the lifework of
Arnold Berleant can support many further studies. This issue, we think, shows it.
CONTENTS
Preface: Toward an Aesthetics beyond Art
I. The Arts as Experience
1 Judging Architecture
2 What Titles Don’t Tell
3 What Music Isn’t
II. Environmental Aesthetics
4 Art, Nature, and Environment
5 The Re-shaping of Experience
6 Two Ways in the Landscape
7 The Art in Knowing a Landscape
8 Reconsidering Scenic Beauty
9 Forestry Aesthetics
10 Distant Cities
11 Ideas for an Ecological Aesthetics
12 Nature and Habitation in a Chinese Garden
III. Implications
13 Aesthetics without Purpose
14 The Legacy of Dewey’s Aesthetics
15 Evolutionary Naturalism and the Abandonment of Dualism
16 The Aesthetic Politics of Environment
17 The Changing Meaning of Landscape
18 Beauty and the Way of Modern Life
*Available on Kindle
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I GROUNDING THE WORLD
1 Beginning
2 Understanding the Aesthetic
3 The Aesthetic Argument
4 The World as Experienced
II AESTHETICS AND THE HUMAN WORLD
5 A Rose by Any Other Name
6 The Soft Side of Stone
7 An Aesthetics of Urbanism
8 Celestial Aesthetics
III SOCIAL AESTHETICS
9 The Negative Aesthetics of Everyday Life
10 Art, Terrorism and the Negative Sublime
11 Perceptual Politics
12 The Aesthetics of Politics
*Available on Kindle.
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 the human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are coextensive in experience, 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. He 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 as termed 'social aesthetics.'
CONTENTS
I ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS
1 A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment
2 Aesthetic Dimensions of Environmental Design
3 Down the Garden Path
4 The Wilderness City: A Study of Metaphorical Experience
5 The Fluid Environment
6 The World from the Water
7 Is There Life in Virtual Space?
8 Is Greasy Lake a Place?
9 Embodied Music
II SOCIAL AESTHETICS
10 The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic
11 The Social Evaluation of Art
12 Subsidization of Art as Social Policy
13 Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art
14 Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Art and the Future of Aesthetics
I THE FOCUS OF AESTHETICS
1 Re-thinking Aesthetics
2 The Historicity of Aesthetics
3 Beyond Disinterestedness
4 Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts
II ICONOCLASTIC IMPLICATIONS
5 The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics
6 Aesthetic Embodiment
7 Intuition in Art, or Pygmalion Revisited
8 Art without Object
9 The Art of the Unseen
III RE-THINKING THE ARTS
10 Death in Image, Word, and Idea
11 Brancusi and the Phenomenology of Sculptural Space
12 The Verbal Presence: An Aesthetics of Literary Performance
13 The Intuitive Impulse in Literary Performance
14 A Phenomenology of Musical Performance
CONTENTS
1 Aesthetics and Environment
2 An Emerging Aesthetics of Environment
3 Deconstructing Disney World
4 The Human Touch and the Beauty of Nature
5 Aesthetic Function
6 Environment and the Body
7 Architecture and the Aesthetics of Continuity
8 Education as Aesthetic
9 Aesthetics and Community
10 Reflections on a Reflection: Some Thoughts
on Environmental Creativity
11 Sacred Environments
"
CONTENTS
1 Environment as a Challenge to Aesthetics
2 The Aesthetic Sense of Environment
3 Descriptive Aesthetics
4 Scenes from a Connecticut Landscape: Four Studies in Descriptive Aesthetics
5 Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology
6 Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic
7 Designing Outer Space
8 The Museum of Art as a Participatory Environment
9 Environmental Criticism
10 Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm
11 The Aesthetics of Art and Nature
12 Reclaiming the American Landscape
*Available on Kindle.
CONTENTS
I AESTHETICS AND EXPERIENCE
1 Experience and Theory in Aesthetics
2 The Unity of Aesthetic Experience
II ENGAGEMENT AND THE ARTS
3 The Viewer in the Landscape
4 Architecture as Environmental Design
5 The Reader's Word
6 Musical Generation
7 Dance as Performance
III ART AND REALITY
8 Film and Other Realities of Art - I
9 Film and Other Realities of Art - II
10 Conclusion: The End of Aesthetics
*Available on Kindle
CONTENTS
1 Aesthetic Theory as a Cognitive Discipline
2 Surrogate Theories of Art
3 The Aesthetic Field
4 Aesthetic Experience
5 Art Criticism and Aesthetic Value
6 Toward an Empirical Aesthetics
I call this talk "Distant Cities" because I want to inquire into urban experience from a different, perhaps unfamiliar direction, urban experience as encountered from the outside, from a distance, as it were. How is the city seen and understood not by its inhabitants but by an outsider who may occasionally enter into the urban sphere for visits of limited duration?
The question of urban experience is as complex, intricate, and elusive as its material condition, the city. Here we encounter massiveness – the physical mass of the urban conglomerate of skyscrapers, institutional edifices, commercial monoliths; urban regions, districts, and neighborhoods. We not only encounter massiveness; we face spatial extent, as the urban consumption of the landscape spreads across whole geographical regions, such as the megalopolis of the eastern seaboard of the United States stretching from Boston to Washington or the amoeba-like spread of construction across huge distances and often overlapping state lines, as in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis urban conglomerates.
Moreover, we encounter social mass, as well, in teeming populations with their associations and organizations both formal and informal, official and subversive. And, related to this, mass culture is replete with the mass marketing and consumption of goods, entertainment, and anything that can be controlled and on which a value can be placed. Consumption also overwhelms the ambient environmental resources that, until recently, people took for granted, such as air, water, quiet (the absence of intrusive sound), and even in cities of a human scale, visual space and easy distance. This is more than mass culture; it is more a mass world. How can we understand this world?
From this uncommon external perspective on urban experience, I want to consider what it can tell us about the possibilities of an aesthetic of urbanism. In particular, I want to recover the humane and civilizing possibilities of the city. This leads me finally to an unabashed sketch of how a responsible environment might be now understood.
Confusion often surrounds those committed to the idea of environmental aesthetics. It is like discord in a family in which everyone loves everyone else but no one can say anything without misunderstanding and discord. In neither case is this inevitable. Let me take the easy task and talk about environmental aesthetics.
Like so many disagreements, profound as well as trivial, people with environmental concerns share many of the same interests and values but don't know how to talk about them with one another. clearly and understandably. Much of the difficulty comes from a confusion about what is understood by 'aesthetics.' Philosophers and other scholars see aesthetics as a branch of philosophy concerned with understanding the intrinsic values we ascribe to works of art and to natural beauty. What does appreciation consist of here? Where is the value located that we recognize in appreciation? How do other values bear on aesthetic value? In what ways do our knowledge and understanding play a part in recognizing these values, values not only aesthetic but others, such as moral, economic, and historical?