Engaging Berleant: A Critical Look at Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme

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Notes

Notes

1.  As Berleant puts the point: ‘In this view, the environment is understood as a field of forces continuous with the organism, a field in which there is a reciprocal action of organism on environment on organism, and in which there is no sharp demarcation between them. Such a pattern may be thought of [as] a participatory model of experience’ (Berleant, 2005, p. 9, emphasis added).

2.  Thanks to Andrew Light for suggesting a great example of just such a case of chemically altered engagement with art. Light reports that in the 2001 James Tobak film Harvard Man, Alan (a young student) is pictured in one scene as mesmerized by a poster of one of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings after taking LSD. Slightly later in the scene, one of the Tahitian women actually steps out of the painting to stroke his hair. Now that's engagement!

3.  As Ronald Moore puts it, ‘the inherent limitlessness of the non-conceptual [entails that] … there can be no bounds on what we make of’ objects of perceptual experience (Moore, 2004, p. 224).

4.  That is, Berleant and I appear to disagree about when a person can correctly be said to be having an aesthetic experience, not about what might count as an appropriate object of aesthetic experience. So my worry here is not that Berleant delimits the objects of aesthetic engagement, because I agree with him (and others) that anything—under suitable perceptual conditions—can be an aesthetic object.

5.  I have heard Allen Carlson make a similar point about Berleant's view on several occasions, although he typically couches it in terms of Ronald Hepburn's distinction between ‘easy beauty’ and ‘difficult beauty’ (see Hepburn, ch. 1).

6.  In The Critique of Judgement, Kant claims that judgments of beauty are the product of taking a disinterested perspective on the objects of experience, that is, one in which we are not concerned about their instrumental value or even their existence. Many philosophers have adopted modified versions of Kant's account of disinterested appreciation as a necessary condition of aesthetic experience. See, for example, the work of Jerome Stolnitz.

7.  Coplan made this point in a panel discussion on film given at the 2006 Pacific ASA conference in Pacific Grove, CA.

8.  Many thanks to Allen Carlson, Andrew Light and Ronald Moore for the opportunity to both explore and share my thoughts regarding Berleant's work. Special thanks to Arnold Berleant for his unqualified generosity at the Eastern division meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in 2006 where this paper was originally presented.

1.  A longer version of these comments is published as a critical notice of Berleant's Aesthetics and Environment in the British Journal of Aesthetics, 46 (2006), pp. 416–427. The author thanks the BJA for the use of some of this material.

1.  Much of the controversy around Allen Carlson's work is on this issue (see Carlson, 2000). One thoughtful critic is Emily Brady (see Brady, 2003).

2.  Hume's characterization of the true judge of art may have more lasting validity than the best judgments: ‘Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice …’ (Hume, 1757).