Embodied Environments: Reconstructing Agency in Aesthetic Appreciation — Epoche C1
Environmental aesthetics is the branch of philosophical aesthetics that asks how we appreciate not artworks but environments — forests, mountains, gardens, weather, whole landscapes. As a distinct field it is young: its founding document is usually taken to be Ronald Hepburn's 1966 essay "Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty", which pointed out that twentieth-century aesthetics had become, almost without noticing, a philosophy of art alone, and that natural beauty raises problems art does not. Chief among them: a natural environment has no frame. A painting ends at its edges and we stand before it; a fell walker stands inside the object of appreciation, is surrounded by it, and alters the view with every step. Within this young field, a dominant perspective — epitomised by Allen Carlson — holds that environmental appreciation hinges on objective properties of natural environments, and requires a scientific understanding of the environment as a given external object. This view offers a robust framework for judging appreciation correct or incorrect, but it inadvertently reinforces a subject-object divide in which the human observer stands apart from the environment they contemplate. This essay argues that such objectivist approaches, by presupposing a pre-given, external environment, overlook the role of phenomenological embodiment in constituting the very "environment" that appreciation is about — and that taking embodiment seriously forces a reconstruction of the concept of agency in environmental aesthetics. What Carlson actually claims, and why The common belief is that an ancient forest or a majestic mountain possesses inherent aesthetic qualities that we, as observers, perceive and judge. Carlson turns this belief into a philosophical position by borrowing an argument from the aesthetics of art. In a much-cited 1970 paper, "Categories of Art", Kendall Walton showed that which aesthetic properties we perceive in a work depends on the category under which we perceive it: the same canvas looks dynamic if seen as an impressionist painting and inert if seen as a piece of photorealism, because each category carries its own expectations against which the work's features register. Correct appreciation therefore requires perceiving the work in its correct category — the one it was actually made in. Carlson's move is to extend this claim to nature. Natural things too have correct categories, he argues; but since nature has no artist, those categories are supplied not by art history but by natural history — by science. His own example makes the point vividly: a whale perceived in the category "fish" looks clumsy, bloated, somehow a failed specimen; the same whale perceived in the category "marine mammal" looks powerful and graceful. Since the whale is a mammal, only the second perception gets its aesthetic character right. This is Carlson's "natural environmental model": proper aesthetic appreciation of nature requires knowledge of scientific classifications and ecological functioning, just as proper appreciation of a painting requires knowing what kind of painting it is. A mountain, then, is appreciated as a geological formation, a habitat for specific flora and fauna, an outcome of tectonic processes. Carlson arrives at this model by eliminating rivals, and the eliminations matter. The "object model" treats a natural item — a piece of driftwood, say — like a sculpture, appreciable in isolation; Carlson objects that this rips the item out of the environment that made it and continues to sustain its character. The "landscape model" treats the environment as scenery, a view to be contemplated as if it were a landscape painting; Carlson objects that this freezes a three-dimensional, enveloping, changing surrounding into a static two-dimensional picture — it appreciates nature precisely by ignoring what makes it an environment. Whatever else one says about Carlson, this second objection should be kept: it is the strongest argument in his corpus, and its premise — that an environment envelops a moving appreciator and changes with every step — points beyond his own conclusion. What the objectivist model leaves out The trouble begins with what the natural environmental model implies about the appreciator. While the intellectual engagement Carlson demands is undoubtedly valuable, it risks reducing aesthetic experience to a cognitive exercise — an act of correct classification performed by a knower upon a known — detaching it from the immediate, lived experience of being in and with the environment. The model inherits, without examining it, the stance of the spectator that modern aesthetics has carried since the eighteenth century: Kant's third Critique (1790) made disinterested contemplation — pleasure taken in an object without any stake in its existence or use — the mark of the genuinely aesthetic, and the appreciator correspondingly a detached judge. Arnold Berleant's The Aesthetics of Environment (1992) mounts the frontal attack on this inheritance: environments, he argues, cannot be contemplated from outside because there is no outside; the appreciator is continuous with the environment, engaged through movement, touch, temperature, sound and orientation, and the disinterested spectator is a fiction sustained only by the gallery wall and the picture frame. Berleant calls the alternative an "aesthetics of engagement". Notice that Carlson and Berleant agree on the diagnosis — the landscape model falsifies environments — and split on the cure: Carlson replaces the picture frame with scientific categories, Berleant with the participating body. The phenomenological bridge: how a body constitutes an environment To say the environment is "constituted" through embodiment sounds, at first hearing, like the claim that mountains depend on us for their existence. It is not, and the distinction comes from phenomenology — the philosophical tradition, founded by Edmund Husserl, that studies