Environmental Aesthetics
The term environmental aesthetics can apply to a variety of quite disparate sorts of cases—aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, of works of art situated in nature, of works of art—for example, landscape paintings—that are of or about nature, of works of art that take nature as their medium, and of gardens, a special category that seems to straddle the divide between culture and nature. In each case the philosophical challenge is the same: to determine the proper object and mode of appreciation. While these issues have not been definitively decided in the case of art appreciation, it remains helpful to use that example as a counterpoint against which an account of environmental appreciation can be constructed.
Nature Appreciation
Nature scenes and natural items figure in our culture's most clichéd examples of aesthetic appreciation. Images of sunsets, rainbows, flowers, and baby animals are the stuff that enrich greeting card companies. But nature appreciation is also addressed by aestheticians and serious philosophers in the Western tradition. Immanuel Kant's examples of free beauty in Critique of Judgment (1790/1987) were natural items—flowers, birds, seashells. Beautiful items, Kant believed, provided a source of disinterested pleasure, their form alone triggering a pleasurable free play of imagination and understanding.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 2,957 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Environmental Aesthetics Access Pass.
