Aesthetics of Nature

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Budd
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetics Of Nature

The long period of stagnation into which the aesthetics of nature fell after Hegel's relegation of natural beauty to a status inferior to the beauty of art was ended by Ronald Hepburn's ground-breaking paper (1966). In this essay, which offers a diagnosis of the causes of philosophy's neglect of the aesthetics of nature, Hepburn describes a number of kinds of aesthetic experience of nature that exhibit a variety of features distinguishing the aesthetic experience of nature from that of art and endowing it with values different from those characteristic of the arts, thus making plain the harmful consequences of the neglect of natural beauty. The subtlety of Hepburn's thought precludes simple summary, and this article does no more than enumerate a few of his themes that have been taken up and developed in the now flourishing literature on the aesthetics of nature (although not always with the nuanced treatment accorded them by Hepburn).

The Aesthetics of Nature and the Art of Gardening in Japan

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 73-81
Author(s):  
Eherhard Ortland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Japanese Garden ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
Japanese Gardens ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetics Of Nature

A Japanese garden is an artistically shaped piece of the environment as well as a representation of nature. In the aesthetic experience of Japanese gardens it is possible to conceive of the relation between nature and art in a way different from anything accessible within the horizon of European aesthetics alone. In a Japanese garden the artificially shaped nature does not suffer a loss of its proper quality of naturalness, but seems to be even more natural according to the criteria underlying the aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of nature itself. These gardens demonstrate human labor as something which does not necessarily collide with natural beauty. Here, a work of art can be experienced as bemg potentially reconciled with the very idea of nature in its most beautiful state of self-realization.

The Impact of the Social Context on Aesthetic Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Mastandrea
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
The Family ◽  
Socio Demographic Factors ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Impact

Not only cognitive and affective processes determine an aesthetic experience; another important issue to consider has to do with the social context while experiencing the arts. Several studies have shown that the aesthetic impact of a work of art depends on, to an important extent, the different socio-demographic factors including age, class, social status, health, wealth, and so on. The concepts of cultural and social capital by Pierre Bourdieu and the production and consumption of artworks by Howard Becker are discussed. Another important aspect of the impact of the social context on aesthetic experience deals with early art experience in childhood within the family—considered as the first social group to which a person belongs.

scholarly journals Dewey After the End of Art

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Roberta Dreon
Keyword(s):  
Summer School ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Common ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Art As Experience ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” (lw 10, 12) in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past.

Literature as Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Robert Stecker
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Cognitive Value ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter has three main aims. The first is to argue for a modest view of the cognitive value of fiction in the context of the arts. This view asserts that we acquire from such works new conceptions or hypotheses that we then can test in the actual world. The second aim concerns the interaction of values. The claim we will make is that the kind of cognitive value typically possessed by representational art arises through the aesthetic experience of the work. The third aim is to argue against both more ambitious and more skeptical views about the cognitive value of fiction in art.

scholarly journals Darwin’s perception of nature and the question of disenchantment: a semantic analysis across the six editions of On the Origin of Species

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bárbara Jiménez-Pazos
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Apparent Contradiction ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
The World ◽  
Colour Blindness ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractThis body of work is motivated by an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, Darwin’s testimony in his autobiographical text about a supposed perceptual colour blindness before the aesthetic magnificence of natural landscapes, and, on the other hand, the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, where he claims to perceive the forms of nature as beautiful and wonderful. My aim is to delve into the essence of the Darwinian perception of beauty in the context of the Weberian concept of “disenchantment of the world”, assumed as a possible conceptual axis that enables the unravelling of the core of this contrast of perceptions. In acknowledging the theory of evolution as one of the most prominent scientific theories likely to have contributed to disenchantment, a number of questions arise: Is disenchantment compatible with aesthetic experience and sensibility before natural beauty? Was it Darwin’s disenchanted conception of the world that led him to believe he was colour blind? To answer these questions, a computer-assisted semantic analysis of lexical frequency and variability, most especially focused on aesthetic-emotional and religious or spiritual adverbs and adjectives, has been undertaken across the six editions of The Origin. The semantic analysis demonstrates that, although disenchanted, Darwin’s descriptions of, mainly, the adaptational excellence of living beings, reflect an aesthetically enriched perception of nature. It is concluded that Darwin’s perceptual colour blindness, then, might be based on a confusion rooted in the equation of equality between aesthetic sensibility in nature and the perception of its beauty as part of the vestigia Dei.

scholarly journals L.S. Vygotsky’s Critique: Between Aesthetics, Publitsistika and Psychology

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
P.N. Marques
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Educational Engagement ◽  
Critical Activity ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Formal School ◽  
Extensive List ◽  
Early Activity

This paper discusses L.S. Vygotsky’s early activity as a critic through an analysis of texts in which the author himself reflects on the task of the critic. Fragments from the essay on Hamlet, Psychology of art and theatrical reviews of the Gomel period (1922—23) are analyzed to provide an overview of how his understanding of the role of the critic has evolved and changed in time. By moving from the reader’s critique to the objective analytic method, Vygotsky has placed the critic in a position of social and educational engagement, a public figure committed to raise the level of the arts and the audience’s capacity optimize the aesthetic experience. His stance to the critical work is also analyzed within the context of Russian critical traditions, particularly some ideas of Boris Eikhenbaum and the Formal School of literary studies. Finally, the critical activity is seen alongside an extensive list of attributes that has been linked to Vygotsky (scientist, methodologist, philosopher etc.) as an equally important and complementary facet of a person fully committed to social transformation.

scholarly journals The Art of Feeling Different: Measuring and Exploring the Diversity of Emotions Experienced During a Museum Visit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Rodriguez ◽  
Anna Fekete ◽  
Paul Silvia ◽  
Katherine N. Cotter
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First Time ◽  
Emotional Balance

The aesthetic experience of a collection of works—such as a sculpture garden, a neighborhood filled with street art, or an afternoon spent wandering in a museum—is not simply the sum of experiences of the individual works. In the present research, we explored visit-level aesthetic experiences in a field study of 298 visitors to a museum of modern and contemporary art. In particular, we focused on emotional diversity: the richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of the emotions that people experienced during their visit. After their visit, participants reported the degree to which they experienced, if at all, 10 emotions, for which we calculated diversity metrics reflecting their emotional variety (the number of emotions experienced) and emotional balance (the relative evenness between emotions or dominance of a single emotion) during the visit. Overall, the sample reported a rich aesthetic experience, but there was wide and predictable variability. Among other findings, emotional variety was higher for people with greater openness to experience and among first-time visitors to the museum; emotional balance was higher among people high in openness to experience and people with greater interest in art. The concept of diversity—the richness and complexity of someone’s emotional experience of the arts—appears promising for understanding holistic aesthetic experiences, such as entire museum visits rather than single works, as well as for many other questions in empirical aesthetics.

scholarly journals A landscape embroiled: experience of nature through experience of art

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Paula Milczarczyk
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Related Method ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetics Of Nature

The article sets out with the theory of “aesthetics of reality” (created by Maria Gołaszewska) and its related method of transferring artistic structures onto non-artistic reality. The resulting construct, which is dubbed a para-artistic structure, becomes the theoretical basis for the aesthetic experience of nature. The so-called “formalization”—a procedure which consists in inserting nature into artistic frameworks—makes natural phenomena acquire a pretense of artwork. Nature as a picture becomes a landscape, while terms connected with the aesthetics of nature gain artistic qualities, enabling use of such notions as picturesque or kitsch. The methodological proposal by Gołaszewska is subsequently compared with the critical perspective of environmental aesthetics.

scholarly journals Art, experience and alterity: reflections in the horizon of ethical and aesthetic education

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (33) ◽  
pp. e15315
Author(s):  
Maria Regina Johann
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Philosophical Hermeneutics ◽  
Artistic Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

Oriented by the theoretical perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, this text addresses the ethical and aesthetic dimension of education, and it has the arts teaching as a reflexive field, emphasizing the artistic experience as a possibility for knowledge and self-awareness beyond the instrumental rationality frameworks. I emphasize, therefore, the artistic experience as an opportunity of (re) approximation among the student, the work and the artist as a way of self-investigation in the field of authorship, with reference to the experimentation of the artistic game and the tensions of the creative process. This creative process triggers a dialogue, which would be in the basis of ethics, since the moral action would be based in the process of co-creation of the aesthetic experience in relation to the work of art.

The Role of Attention, Executive Processes, and Memory in Aesthetic Experience

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Mullennix
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Memory Load ◽  
Cognitive Effort ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Imaging Research ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
And Control

When considering the cognitive processes involved in aesthetic experiences, one approach is to focus on the different components in the cognitive system. In this chapter, research on the roles of dual-mode processing, cognitive effort and control, and memory in the aesthetic experience are reviewed. Automatic and controlled processes, respectively, appear to be engaged at different times when viewing art, with one’s goal (e.g., forming a quick impression of art or closely evaluating an artwork) determining how those processes are utilized. Shifts in cognitive control affect how art is processed, as well as attention and memory load demands at the time art is being viewed. Memory comes into play when considering how knowledge about art and expertise is used. Overall, the growing literature on cognitive processing of art and related brain imaging research is producing numerous exciting findings of interest both to the researcher and to persons working in the arts.

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