The Aesthetics of Environment

Eleven: The Aesthetics of Art and Nature

The Aesthetics ofArt and Nature Chapter Eleven ~ The title of this chapter masks a deliberate ambiguity, one that is, in fact, its central issue. Few would deny the possibility of obtaining aesthetic satisfaction from both works of art and from nature, customarily in the case of the first and under certain conditions in the other. But what sort of satisfaction is this, and is it the same kind in nature as in art? The usual course, perhaps the most intuitively obvious, is to recognize that aesthetic value exists in both domains but, for historical and philosophical reasons, to find that the kind of appreciation each encourages is essentially different. Another possibility is to associate contemporary environmental art with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gardens, then regarded as a high art, demonstrating a unity of art and nature in both, and implying that they share a common aesthetic. l A third choice, the converse of this, is to take environmental appreciation as the standard and to reinterpret the artistic aesthetic by the natural. The question hidden in my title, then, is whether there is one aesthetic or two, a single aesthetic that encompasses both art and nature, or one that is distinctively artistic and another that identifies the appreciation of natural beauty. This is more than a question in the grammar of number, and it is, in my judgment, more than a minor issue in aesthetics. Rather, it provokes some of its central concerns: the nature of art, the identifying features of aesthetic appreciation, and the larger connections of the theory of appreciation with other philosophical issues. These last include matters that were once regarded as central but are now largely consigned to the margins, such as noumenal and transcendent experience and occasions that seem to test the extent of the aesthetic response, such as extreme environmental conditions.2 It may indeed be that the philosophy of nature is no peripheral matter , either aesthetically or, more generally, philosophically, and that ultimately it engages the very heart of philosophy. The intent of this chapter is, in fact, to suggest this by moving toward a naturalizing of aesthetics, as it were, its association and continuity with other regions of experience, and toward identifying the aesthetic as a critical dimension of the value that binds together the many domains of the human world. Such a large project requires specificity. What will occupy me here is the more limited question of whether aesthetics harbors two dissimilar types of phenomena, one concerning art and another nature, or whether both actually involve a single all-embracing kind of experience, which requires a comprehensive theory to accommodate it. It would be coy to plead uncertainty at this point in the discussion, for it is indeed my purpose to make a case for a general theory, without denying the diversity of individual experience and the divergent cultural factors in our encounters with art and nature. A universal aesthetic must acknowledge these differences, and its ability to do so is the test of its success. For it is precisely the failure of traditional aesthetics to accommodate the enlargement of the objects, activities, and occasions that have characterized much of the art of the past hundred years that has contributed to our present dilemma concerning nature and art. The traditional view ofaesthetic appreciation, we have already observed , is that a special attitude is required, one of disinterested and contemplative attention to an object for its own sake. The watchword is, of course, 'disinterested,' for Kant's legacy in making it central in appreciation has shaped the course of aesthetics over the past two 162 The Aesthetics ofArt and Nature centuries. It is precisely by setting aside interest, "either ofsense or of reason," as Kant put it, that we become capable ofreceiving aesthetic satisfaction. Assuming a disinterested attitude frees us from the distractions of practical purposes and permits us to dwell freely on an object or a representation, which we can then regard as beautiful. This definition ofthe boundaries ofthe aesthetic carries important implications. To aid in achieving disinterestedness it is important to circumscribe art objects by clear borders, and the classical arts exhibit many features that seem designed to accomplish this: the frame of a painting, the pedestal for sculpture, the proscenium arch in theater, the stage for dance, music, and other performing arts. To some extent these were deliberate developments. Shaftesbury, who preceded Kant and actually provided much of...