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Two: The Aesthetic Sense of Environment
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
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The Aesthetic Sense of Environment Chapter Two ~ Perceiving environment occurs in many ways and on many different levels. It moves from the fleeting recognition of cues that provide practical information to the specialized study of natural phenomena. It includes the objects of environmental interest in design , architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and ecology. In its simplest form environmental perception is mere sensory awareness , the precondition for everything else. From this it can extend to different purposes, many of which leave the perceptual order to pursue cognition and action for practical ends, scientific investigation , social interests, or economic goals. Simply apprehending environment is the precondition for experiencing it aesthetically, but apprehension alone does not yet secure that mode of awareness. When we appreciate environment, we do not leave the perceptual realm but engage with it in ways that intensify and enlarge our awareness . Deliberate attention to perceptual qualities is a central mark of the aesthetic, and in environmental appreciation there is a deliberate focus on the direct grasp of environmental features within a setting or field that we join with as participants. The physical senses play an active part, not as passive channels for receiving data from external stimuli but as an integrated sensorium, which equally accepts 14 and shapes sense qualities as part of the matrix of perceptual awareness . This is not just a neural or psychological phenomenon but a direct engagement ofthe conscious body as part ofan environmental complex. It is the experiential locus of environmental aesthetics. When we attempt to formulate our aesthetic experience of environment in explicit terms, however, many difficulties obtrude. Explanations can never be direct and straightforward, whatever be our intentions. Every account filters unavoidably through cognitive presuppositions, perceptual habits, and cultural and philosophic traditions . It would be unproductive to locate the issues here in definition , the quicksand of so much recent philosophical discussion, not only for its quixotic prospects but because the problem is not primarily a conceptual one. The issue is really broadly theoretical and ultimately pragmatic: How well does an account illuminate and explain our aesthetic experiences of environment? And the complement of this: How effectively does a proposal promote an increase in the range, quantity, and refinement of aesthetic perception, three not irreconcilable objectives? We need not invent or justify such experience; its occurrence and identification are our starting point. By expanding the scope oftheoretical aesthetics to include nature as well as art, the city as much as the countryside, the range of aesthetic experience increases enormously. Yet with that enlarged sensibility comes greater vulnerability. We may have learned to protect ourselves from offenses against the aesthetic quality ofour world by the anodyne of sensory anaesthesia, even though the subliminal influence of these intrusions continues to work its unhappy way. The selective blindness ofrestrictive ideas may also have a protective effect, but as we cast offtheir limitations on acceptable experience we forgo the safety of a narrow aesthetic. Open experience and tolerant theory go hand in hand. Yet at the same time it is essential to recognize their clear difference . Experience and theory may be complementary and reciprocal, but they are not the same thing. As with the distinction between morals and ethics when the first concerns practices and the second principles, the aesthetic appreciation of environment is quite different from the concepts that explain and help us understand that [52.91.177.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:50 GMT) 16 The Aesthetic Sense ofEnvironment experience. Mutually influential in practice, they must be kept conceptually distinct. Still, by continuing to probe the ways in which environment can be said to have an aesthetic dimension, the meaning ofan aesthetics ofenvironment will not only become clearer, but we may find that our experience of environment will also change.' We can best grasp the aesthetic sense of environment by pursuing the question in stages. Beginning with surface, we shall look briefly at aesthetics as perception and expand the discussion of aesthetic environment begun in the previous chapter. The studies that follow this chapter collectively elaborate an environmental aesthetics in both its theoretical development and its application to specific issues and particular environments. All contribute to the rich significance of an aesthetics of environment. It might seem theoretically pure and etymologically straightforward to identify aesthetics with surface qualities. After all, tradition tells us, this is what our senses bring us: a direct grasp of the sights and sounds of the world, an immediate apprehension of its tastes and smells, the textures and resistance of...