Environmental Aesthetics. Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics
Published in Martin Drenthen & Jozef Keulartz (eds.). Environmental Aesthetics. Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014
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, such as the inclusion of everyday artifacts, human activities, and social relations. 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.
A Diamond In The Rough: Art, Science, and Politics in the Search for an Environmental Aesthetics.
In light of people’s generalized enjoyment of natural beauty, it is rather surprizing how pitifully underworked the topic of environmental aesthetics is within philosophical aesthetics. This thesis retraces the meandering path that the field has taken over the years at the periphery of other philosophical debates, and thus analyzes four different conceptual stages in the historical development of environmental aesthetics, from its birth in the eighteenth century to its revival in the latter half of the twentieth. My hope here is to show that by critically deconstructing and reconstructing environmental aesthetics’ historical and philosophical commitments along the lines of art, science, and politics’ diverse influences, we can gain a much more solid theoretical foundation on which to build a stronger environmentalist aesthetics going forward into the twenty-first century.
The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1998
The natural world has long held aesthetic attraction, but environmental aesthetics is only now emerging as a discipline in its own right, with distinctive concepts, issues, and theories. In the last two decades, scholars have begun in earnest to develop the field from scattered beginnings that predate the current environmental movement. For environmental aesthetics does not stand apart from other kinds of research. It draws from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literary theory and criticism, cultural geography, architecture, and environmental design, as well as from the arts. It is also related to philosophy, in particular, for ontology, ethics, and the theory of art. Moreover, environmental aesthetics has implications as well for governmental policy and social practice. Like environment itself, the field of environmental aesthetics extends broadly and on many levels. This article will explore this field in several directions: historical, conceptual, experiential, and practical.
Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2004
The environment raises basic questions about many of the fundamental concepts and doctrines in aesthetics and the arts. Including new work by the leading international contributors to environmental aesthetics, this is the first book to deal with the relations between the arts and environment, directed towards a non-philosophical audience of practitioners and critics, as well as theorists. Introducing many for the basic ideas and issues in the theory of the arts, particularly as they bear on environment, this book addresses the special concerns of an aesthetics of environment and explores the implications of environmental aesthetics for understanding both aesthetic theory and the aesthetic of individual arts. Environment and the Arts provides an introduction to some of the most intriguing and compelling questions about understanding and appreciating the arts and environment, setting a mark for the field and opening the topics to a wider audience.
The Aesthetic Politics of Environment
2018
This essay develops the final chapter in my recent book, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2010). I acknowledge with appreciation the similitude of my title and subject to Jacques Rancière's Le partage du sensible; esthétique et politique, although the inquiry here is independent of his. I also want to acknowledge with gratitude the valuable assistance of Yuriko Saito and Riva Berleant in refining this essay.
Aesthetics and the Environment: Repatriating Humanity
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2007
If aesthetics is to claim its place among the fundamental philosophical disciplines, it must adequately deal with the ecological challenge, that is, the need to explain the continuity-relation between human and non-human environments. To that effect, Arnold Berleant's aesthetics of engagement constitutes an attractive proposal. Its critics (Allen Carlson and others) seem to miss its point and attack it on the basis of a particular understanding of Kantian aesthetics (mainly the disinterestedness thesis). But not only can Berleant's aesthetics meet the ecological challenge; it is also possible that it encourages a re-evaluation of traditional aesthetic categories (like disinterestedness) without necessarily precipitating a need to jettison their deeply entrenched significance.
Re-Envisioning Nature: The Role of Aesthetics in Environmental Ethics
The discussion of environmental aesthetics as it relates to ethics has primarily been concerned with how to harmonize aesthetic judgments of nature’s beauty with ecological judgments of nature’s health. This discussion brings to our attention the need for new perceptual norms for the experience of nature. Hence, focusing exclusively on the question of whether a work of “environmental art” is good or bad for the ecological health of a system occludes the important role such works can play in formulating new perceptual norms and metaphors for nature. To illustrate this point, the work of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy presents us with a different perception of time that is ethically useful.
Environmental Values, 2015
Recent years have seen a proliferation of environmental aesthetics anthologies. Do we really need another? This collection makes a strong case that we do. It does so by establishing linkages between scholarship in mainstream Anglo-American environmental aesthetics and in other traditions and regions. Its aim is to rethink the issues that have traditionally divided analytical from continental aesthetics, empirical from speculative issues, Eastern from Western worldviews, and universalising from historical perspectives, fostering a fresh dialogue among them all. It is an admirable objective, and this volume takes an impressive first step in the right direction. Its chief impeding constraint is that of capacity; with only twelve papers, the opportunities for genuine dividecrossing and groundbreaking are limited.
Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (introduction)
With this poetic and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, Nathaniel Stern argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently entwined, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. An ecological approach, says Stern, takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans, matter, concepts, things, not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And aesthetics are a style of, and orientation toward, thought—and thus action. Ecological Aesthetics is a plea for us to continuously think- and act-with the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; to orient ourselves in ways that we might find and express what our environments, and what they are made of, want; and then to decisively help and continue those thoughts, wants, and actions toward novel aims and adventures. Free introductory chapter included here. Full book at https://amzn.to/2MJPDNG