The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (review)

Often, coeditors collaborate in assembling a collection of works precisely because they share a common perspective. Sometimes, however, diverse approaches may spawn genuinely productive discourse on issues of common interest. As Thomas Jefferson mused, there are times when 'difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth.' In this case, the coeditors certainly share a deep interest in environmental aesthetics, but it is also the positive tension of their divergent perspectives – one more cognitivist, the other more engaged and 'non-conceptualist' – that ensures a breadth and richness of dialogue that is essential to a genuine collection of works.

The introduction to this volume is, by itself, a worthy preamble to the emerging field of environmental aesthetics as a whole. It begins with a discussion of how the earlier eighteenth-century 'scenic' models of aesthetics – disinterested and formalistic in nature – have come to be challenged by a new, expressionist paradigm of art as a richer, emotionally charged engagement with cultural artifacts and critical practices. While artists have increasingly affirmed 'the continuity of art and life in their works,' the editors point out that the natural world has been 'left behind' in this paradigm shift – an oversight which has only recently begun to be addressed by philosophers.

Both Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant see the aesthetics of natural environments as encompassing more than a strictly formalistic analysis of picturesque-like scenery. Carlson is critical of the 'object' model of aesthetic appreciation that isolates the sensuous design qualities of an object from its surroundings, and he is equally critical of the 'landscape or scenery model' which, like a painting, represents a prospect 'from a specific standpoint and distance.' In his view, reducing nature to either emotion or abstract, calculated representation fails to do justice to the natural world as empirically understood by geology, biology, and ecology. Carlson advances a cognitivist approach, insisting that rational, scientific knowledge is a condition of an informed environmental aesthetic – 'one in which knowledge and intelligence transform raw experience by making it determinate, harmonious and meaningful.'

Berleant is similarly critical of the 'distanced contemplation paradigm' that aims to describe the natural world as a picturesque object. Contrary to Carlson, however, he does not explicitly advocate for a primary role of rational, scientific understanding but, rather, argues for a phenomenological 'participatory aesthetic' as a more appropriate paradigm for the appreciation of the natural world. According to Berleant, cultural forms, traditions, and social constructs mediate our understanding of the world, whether natural or cultural. It is the task of environmental aesthetics to explore regions of experience that reveal 'the essential poetry of the natural world' and, through the 'aesthetics of engagement,' lead us to better appreciate 'nature in all its cultural manifestations.'

Many of the authors in this book come back to these tensions between Carlson's 'cognitive' emphasis and Berleant's 'engaged' aesthetic. Noël Carroll, Stan Godlovitch, Emily Brady, Cheryl Foster, John Andrew Fisher and Donald W. Crawford explore alternatives to Carlson's position. Thomas Heyd advocates a postmodern approach; Yuriko Saito and Yrjö Sepänmaa explore the importance of mythological narratives to our appreciation of nature while Ronald Hepburn and Brady reflect upon the importance of the 'metaphysical imagination' to our experience of the natural world. Crawford uniquely defends the 'legacy of the picturesque' in this volume, and Holmes Rolston iii advocates a respect for both scientific understanding and lived experience, not unlike that advanced by Berleant. Ronald Moore tries to mediate between extremes in what he names a 'syncretic aesthetics.'

In the end, Marcia Mueler Eaton provides a cogent summary of these multiple positions when she argues that 'the task for all of us is to develop ways of using the delight that human beings take in flights of imagination, connect it to solid cognitive understanding of what makes for sustainable environments, and thus produce the kind of attitudes and preferences that will generate the kind of care we hope for.'

This highly informative and readable book will be of interest to philosophers...