Factores determinantes de la sostenibilidad territorial

Arnold Berleant proposes a theory of aesthetic engagement with both art and nature, which is in some ways very similar to Bateson’s approach. In “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature” (1993) Berleant sets out this theory, primarily in relation to nonhuman nature, but says little about his earlier development of it in relation to human art forms. I will therefore examine his book Art and Engagement (1991) in order to set out the basis of his thinking and to situate it within the thought of earlier aestheticians, before proceeding to an analysis of the later article and Berleant’s developed understanding of environ-mental engagement.

In Art and Engagement Berleant seeks to correct what he sees as a two-hundred-year-long aberration. He notes the long history of human participation in artistic practices and our consequent attempts to under-stand how the arts function and what they mean. He asks what it means to respond to beauty, what the ethical and healing effects of art may be and, importantly, seeks to understand the “power of art to transform and transcend, leading us into a condition of enhanced perception that may be wondrous, dangerous . . . overwhelming ” (9). Berleant points out that the classical age was a time when art was linked to the individual, to the society, and to cosmic awareness. However, since the eighteenth century, conceptions of art have narrowed, reflecting the wider philosophical change from ontological concern toward a focus on epistemological issues. The attitude to aesthetics that emerged in the work of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, and Kant produced a new way of relating to art objects:

disengagement, the concept of “disinterestedness,” separation of the art object from the viewer and the world, and a consequent “contemplative”

approach to art.

Berleant claims that the older tradition of involvement and active engagement with art is showing signs of revival. He supports this by refer-ence to twentieth-century developments in art that also reject the idea of disengagement and seek to involve the observer as participant. He claims that these recent developments represent a much needed

“renewal ” or return to earlier practice and are not, themselves, freakish or in any way outside the boundaries of legitimate art. He proceeds to examine, in turn, particular fields of artistic practice: landscape painting, architecture and environmental design, literature, music, dance, theater, and film. In each, he shows how an engaged relationship with or in the artwork is possible and desirable in order to fully experience the occa-sion provided by the artistic presentation.

In the case of a landscape painting the viewer can become a partic-ipant by the simple expedient of walking up very close, well inside the points of convergence of the painting’s perspectival lines. One then, liter-ally, has the experience of moving into the depicted scene, becoming a part of the landscape, an inhabitant rather than a viewer. The active viewer is choosing to be interactive with the painting and the consequent process of engagement is enabled by this (53ff.).

When considering architecture and environmental design Berleant points out that we are always, inevitably, active within our physical surroundings and also within our cultural environment. We live in a dynamic field of forces, within which our built environment is an active component. Architecture is centrally important for us and our interac-tive involvement with it is unavoidable. We are actors, performers in our cultural landscape, a “physico-historical medium of engagement.” For instance, how we choose the site for any new building is a “physical state-ment of personal and cultural beliefs about the human place in the world” (76ff.).

Berleant’s discussion hardly penetrates beyond the built environ-ment and there is no concern here for nonhuman organisms. He seeks to justify this by claiming that “since no human habitat is unaffected by our presence, there is no exaggeration in saying that architecture and the human environment are, in the final analysis, synonymous and coex-tensive” (77). Later in this chapter, Berleant asks, “What is environment?”

He sees the common understanding of environment (as that which surrounds a thing or person) as a return to Cartesian dualism. Instead, he claims that there is a whole range of possible interactions and inter-connections between person and place, varying from attitudes quite near to disinterested contemplation to a full and vital cultural and aesthetic assimilation of the person by the dynamics of place.

In considering the aesthetic integration of literature, Berleant invokes assimilation again. He explores the integration of author, text, and reader, claiming that the reader’s involvement is necessary for the

“completion” of the writing. As readers we are members of interpretive communities. The act of reading is at once an activity, a contribution, and an engagement (105ff.).

Turning to the aesthetic engagement possible in music, he concen-trates mainly on music as composition. The composer’s process is one of engagement with the “tonal possibilities,” the musical materials that are available to form into the new work. The performer’s act of engage-ment is to add a personal interpretation of the score, while the listener brings the aesthetic occasion to completion with the aid of musical

memory. Berleant comments on a particular requirement for all partic-ipants in the musical occasion: the need to be totally present in the moment. The listener is inseparable from the music as a whole and “no distinction can hold.” The total engagement of the composer, performer, and listener is focused in the sound (132ff.).

In the chapter on the art of dance (151ff.), Berleant challenges the distinction commonly made between the arts as art objects and the arts as performance. If we accept such a distinction how can we account for poetry, originating in song and still read (even if silently) with an internal ear tuned to the poet’s voice? Indeed, the whole of literature is “an occa-sion for reading.” Plays and other theatrical scripts rely on actual performance or imaginative recreation by the reader. Film can be seen as visual art but involves the dramatic portrayal of dialogue and needs to be “performed” in the presence of an involved audience. Even painting and sculpture require the appreciator to “animate the art object.” Performance is ubiquitous in the arts and all performance requires an activator. To this unsettled middle ground of the arts, dance also belongs. Performance is absolutely central to dance: there is no script and there is no separate art object. The dance, the artist, and the audience are in intimate union. The artwork evolves, is performed and is appreciated in and through the performing. There is, says Berleant, a halo effect: the aura of the occasion encloses choreographer, dancers, audience, set, and music in a synthesis. Turning again to film (175ff.), Berleant suggests that this “purely phenomenal” art engages its audiences more fully than any other. Combining vision, sounds, language, social and physical settings, and mental images into a continuous whole, film manipulates time, space and movement, enforcing the presence of the viewer within the passing moment, engaging both memory and imagi-nation in total involvement.

The general thrust of Berleant’s discussion and the overall aim of his theory is to widen the understanding of emotions, feelings, meaning, and communication as appropriate within aesthetic activity and to relegitimate the integration of aesthetics and art practice with other aspects of life. In the concluding chapter he asserts that we have come “to the end of aesthetics as we have learned it” (211). Berleant offers his book as a beginning to the development of a new theory of aesthetic engagement starting from the arts and artistic experience rather than from elements of other fields such as public policy or the epistemological or metaphysical presuppositions of philosophy. The development of such a theory, he believes, should not be attempted by a single scholar. Rather, it must be the concern of the whole range of

disciplines and subdisciplines that seek to aid our quest for under-standing of the human position: art history, the psychology and soci-ology of art, music, dance history, the theory of both “fine” and

“popular” arts, cultural anthropology, intellectual and cultural history, and the various elements of philosophy. The contributions of all these and more are needed if a new aesthetics of engagement and involve-ment is to be formed.

Berleant claims that the arts have, in the past, been “obstructed ” because their activity tends to subvert those institutions that attempt to substitute their own truths for the truths of direct perception. Such institutions seek to base themselves on structure. Examples of this would include religious, political, or societal influences that decree what is

“seemly”—suitable for display or performance within the spiritual, moral, or ideological climate of the time. The Russian government’s encouragement of paintings extolling the energy and purpose of “the workers” during the post–World War II years, and it’s simultaneous discouragement of musical composers who were following trends that had originated in capitalist Europe provides an illustration of this tendency.

Berleant insists that the validity of the arts is to be found within their own processes. There are strong links between aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics because experience is basic to all three. These links can yield insights, including ethical and social wisdom. Being rooted in direct experience, the source of perception and meaning, aesthetics can become foundational to more general philosophical and sociological thinking: “The arts bring us closer than any other social form to the immediacy of the human world as we live it” (210). Berleant hopes we can learn to recognize again the engagement that has always been present when “aesthetic encounters” have been effective and fulfilling.

Aesthetic activity is a unified process that joins together the various aspects of art into an experiential whole. When we practice art there is always “something more” that reaches out to life.

Berleant ends his book by claiming that “In an age pervaded by irra-tionalisms, from drugs to deities, from terrorism of the gun to terrorism of the mind, the artist is the ultimate anarchist offering to save us all from such solutions by returning us, with gratuitous benevolence, to our own essential and free place in the human world” (211).

As I write this book (in the spring of 2006), in a world torn and threatened by incipient madness, violence and war, I see that these matters remain as contemporary concerns. Little has changed. Berleant, like Bateson, is seeing engagement in artistic process as promoting sanity and wisdom.

“The Aesthetics of Art and Nature”

By the time he produced The Aesthetics of Art and Nature (1993, 228–43), Arnold Berleant had moved toward a real consideration of natural envi-ronment. He first considers whether the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the aesthetic appreciation of human art are two different types of experience and thus require two separate theoretical approaches, or whether it is possible that a single aesthetic will enable interaction with both. His intention is to argue for a single approach and he starts, as he did in Art and Engagement (and in contrast to Gregory Bateson’s practice), by discussing earlier aesthetic theories of art and nature.

Berleant’s entry point to the discussion is an examination of Kant’s theory of “disinterestedness,” which has been prominent in aesthetic thought for many years. Berleant first examines a paper by Allen Carlson (1993, 199–227). He considers Carlson’s understanding of Stolnitz’s view (1960) that a “special attitude” is required to enable aesthetic appre-ciation. A prime feature of this is Kant’s principle of disinterestedness, which requires that we set aside all interest “either of sense or reason”

before we can experience aesthetic satisfaction and see things as beau-tiful. Kantian disinterestedness requires “borders” around art objects.

They must be isolated by frames, pedestals, proscenium arches, or stages.

Art must be grasped in a single view. Attributes are seen as internal to the object. Aesthetics becomes a separate domain requiring a special type of sensibility to appreciate it. The history of aesthetic appreciation of art during the last two hundred years has been one of attempting to maintain this separateness in order to enable the “contemplative stance.”

Consequent (and, Berleant claims, often implausible) dichotomies have been introduced in order to maintain the separate identity of art works, including distinctions between form and function and between beauty and utility in architecture, with even more isolating divisions being intro-duced in the performing arts and in literature. Berleant believes that the Kantian theory of the arts is applicable only to paintings and sculptures, and that there are problems even there. When such a divisive theoretical approach is transferred to appreciation of nature, there are further diffi-culties. The ideal of disinterested contemplation may be theoretically possible for a scenic outlook or a formal garden but even these, in prac-tice, involve movement and engage us in relational process. We, the viewers, are necessarily in the same space as the natural object.

Another difficulty is the Kantian requirement that we must appre-ciate the skill and creativity used in making the art object. This, says Berleant (with Carlson), cannot apply to nature where there is no creator. Carlson’s alternative is to value nature in terms of its order.

Such approaches depend on objectification, which Berleant questions, claiming that much modern art, as discussed above, is best understood as an invitation to involvement, even physical involvement. It invites

“somatic engagement.” Conventional aesthetics, he claims, impedes our encounter with both art and nature. We need an aesthetic that is appropriate to the environment. The nature/culture division itself misrepresents nature. Again, Berleant claims that nature unaffected by humans has almost disappeared: little wilderness remains and all of this is affected to some extent by human activity, flora and fauna are located far from their original habitats, the surface, climate, and atmosphere of Earth are all changed. The natural world has become a cultural artifact, pervasively altered. Furthermore, it is seen differently in different cultures and at differing times; our socially constructed understanding of nature is historically based.

By this point in his own theoretical development, Berleant had discov-ered a way in which nature can be reconciled with the theoretical demands of aesthetics. The aspect of nature that Kant called “the sublime” can pro-vide a link between human process and nature. This is “the capacity of the natural world to act on so monumental a scale as to exceed our powers of framing and control . . . to produce . . . a sense of overwhelming magni-tude and awe” (234). Berleant is about to say that we cannot choose to distance nature from ourselves. Separation is not possible but Berleant finds, in the sublime, a clue to a potentially new aesthetics of nature, one that “acknowledges the experience of continuity, assimilation, and engagement that nature encourages.” We should, if we utilize it at all, reserve disinterestedness for art objects. Kant’s understanding of the sub-lime as being in our minds, capable of being comprehended by intellect and enjoyed as contemplation from safety, is no longer available. Nature breaks out to engulf us; our illusion of separateness is specious.

We must start, writes Berleant, by recognizing our connectedness.

The sublime, as a model for our aesthetic experience of nature, provides for feelings of awe mixed with humility. The natural world does not surround us, it assimilates us. The “cognitive relation” is possible for us but it is not the only relationship we can inhabit. Our proper response is awe: of magnitude, of power, but also of mystery. As in a work of art, we are confronted with “the essential poetry of the world” and with

“terror.” Nature is revealed to us as overwhelming force and power and Berleant believes that terror is an appropriate response for us now because, with the aid of our scientific technology, we have made ourselves into the victims of our own actions in nature (234–35). Aesthetic plea-sure is not possible in these circumstances except by accepting the sublime as the model for aesthetic experience. The qualities of

experi-ence that are dominant when such aesthetic appreciation is taking place are sensory acuteness, the perception of unity, the awareness of inextri-cable involvement and simultaneous understanding, awe, and humility.

Looking at environment from within, says Berleant, looking not at it but in it, it is transformed. We live as participants: “intensely and inescapably aesthetic,” not only during dramatic and fearful experiences but in gentler times also. What is possible is “not disinterested contemplation but total engagement . . . sensory immersion that reaches the still uncommon experience . . . of unity” (237). All this applies not only to occasions that involve “the sublime” but also to smaller and more gentle natural beauties: to profusion, continuity, and gratuitousness. What we can have is a participatory aesthetics (238).

It will be seen that Berleant has extended to nature all the ways in which humans can engage with art, discussed above in the section on Art and Engagement. He now goes further, suggesting that the aesthetics of nature can serve as a model for appreciating art. Engagement is about continuity and perceptual immersion. For instance, in environmental art much meaning rests on ties with the perceiver’s experience. There is order in art as there is in nature. Both nature and art are appreciated aesthetically and function reciprocally with the appreciator. For instance,

“the beauty of the beloved” can, in engaged appreciation, be aesthetic as well as sexual.

Moving to consideration of nature and the transcendent, Berleant claims that attempting to reach the sacred, the divine or God by using nature as a tool for that purpose would be to forego aesthetic experience in favor of a mystical transcendence. However, by retaining aesthetic engagement we may, in a sense, transcend the self. Berleant hints at the possibility of extending the self in ways comparable to Arne Naess’s

“Deep Ecology,” to be discussed below in chapter 7. Berleant writes (240): “Perhaps the truth approached by transcendence lies in the quality of unity with nature which aesthetic engagement encourages. The perceived sense of continuity of our human being with the dynamic forms and processes of the natural world is a central factor in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and it accounts for a touch of the sublime in the feeling of awe which accompanies that occasion. . . . We still retain the quality of numinousness in the sense of immanence we sometimes obtain in nature and art.”

He still sees nature as a cultural construct. Art and nature, he claims, are both culturally constructed, and a single aesthetic applies.

An active, engaged aesthetic reopens, to aesthetic appreciation, many experiences that have been closed by aesthetic theories of exclusion. In his closing sentences, Berleant approaches the question of normative