Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (review)

Arnold Berleant has produced once again a stimulating set of reflections on “vitally important topics” in the aesthetic field. The present book is more a collection than a treatise. This characteristic is the source both of the book’s very real value and of its shortcomings, minor as they may be from the substantive point of view. Berleant’s prior books and articles make up a most impressive scholarly and intellectual achievement, and they clearly inform the discussions and arguments brought forth in this latest installment of his philosophical project. This book continues, recapitulates, reformulates, and extends the analyses of his earlier work. It exemplifies the prime characteristics of all of Berleant’s work: engaged curiosity, scope of interests, depth of concern, and theoretical precision.

Berleant takes up many of the themes that permeate his previous writings. They function both as background to the current discussions as well as goads to new reflections. In this sense the book is retrospective on the one hand and effectively prospective on the other. It is retrospective in that it points back to the themes of practically all of Berleant’s previous work: the notion of an aesthetic field, the core idea of aesthetic engagement, the centrality of perception and its multi-layered structure and development, the extension of the aesthetic dimension beyond art to the environment in all its perplexing fullness, and the use of an aesthetic norm or measure for criticizing and evaluating the values of the experienced world quite generally. It is prospective in that it looks toward ways to deepen and exemplify the theoretical and analytical principles developed over the course of the previous forty years. As a result, we have some creative probes into areas that either were not extensively treated in Berleant’s earlier writings or that break some new ground or give a new twist to familiar topics. These probes make up the greater portion of Parts 2 and 3 of the book dealing with “Aesthetics and the Human World” and “Social Aesthetics.” Berleant has rightly seen, however, that any concrete or applied aesthetics, in whatever mode, has to be informed by a coherent conceptual framework—something that he sketches, with heavy reliance on his previous work, in Part 1, “Grounding the World.”

The conceptual and analytical background to this volume is a general and generalized aesthetic theory based on the idea that “immediate, aesthetic experience . . . is never pure, never simple sensation. Like all perceptual experience, the aesthetic is not only mediated by culture; it is itself inherently cultural. Cultural influences pervade our sensory perceptions” and, by reason of its essential affecting of our values, “the aesthetic has a certain originality” (44–45). It is one of the main goals of his book to show this originality in multiple contexts and formats. The axis around which Berleant’s analysis turns is formulated in the critical, and perhaps problematic and too sharp, distinction between meaning in the cognitive sense and the experience of meaning, which is proper to aesthetic experience in all its range and depth. “Experienced meaning,” Berleant writes, “is both complex and indistinct.” Aesthetic experience, Berleant believes, has two principal aspects: “a sensory one that is primary, and the experience of meanings” (29). The first aspect connects aesthetic experience to its somatic underpinnings, while the second aspect connects aesthetic experience to a specific way of making sense of or of taking the world—and being taken by the world, which certainly involves “knowledge” of some sort, although it is not discursively formulated. Is this not a Jamesian “knowledge by acquaintance”? More generally, in light of Berleant’s confessed reliance on pragmatism, can we any longer frame discussions in terms of a bald contrast between the cognitive and the experiential?

A major strength of Berleant’s book is its use of examples, which combine the descriptive and the critical. On the descriptive side Berleant has exemplary analyses of a vast range of types...