The Aesthetics of Environment

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Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but fully integrated and continuous with us, Arnold Berleant explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environment continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. Insisting on the need to reconceptualize environment and recognize its aesthetic implications, he pursues a variety of topics and approaches to environmental aesthetics. Aesthetic experience, maintains Berleant, is always contextual. There is no inside and outside, person and environment, human being and external world. Recognizing that humans, along with all other things, inhabit a single intraconnected realm, he speaks of environment as "a seamless unity of organism, perception, and place" that is suffused with values. The foremost characteristic of environmental perception, then, is the quality of engagement. Berleant moves from natural to non-natural environments, suggesting that the aesthetic aspect of any human habitat is an essential part of its desirability. After explaining the concept of environment and the possibilities of describing our aesthetic responses to various sorts of environments, Berleant applies his phenomenologically descriptive aesthetics to a broad range of issues and situations. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to countryside to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place.