Embodied Aesthetics in Latin American Urban Places — Epoche C1
Introduction: a barrio path, and what the standard vocabulary cannot say about it Climb one of the stepped concrete paths that run up the hillsides above Caracas into a barrio — one of the self-built neighbourhoods, raised incrementally by residents themselves outside any approved plan — and the standard vocabulary of environmental aesthetics runs out within fifty metres. There is no vantage point: the path turns every few steps and the sightline ends at the wall of the next house. There is no frame: nothing separates what is appreciated from the person appreciating it, since she is inside it, adjusting her footing, being greeted. And there is no moment of apprehension: what the place is like accumulates over minutes of walking, in smells of frying and diesel, in music arriving from three directions, in the changing resistance of the ground underfoot. Environmental aesthetics — the branch of philosophical aesthetics concerned with the appreciation of environments rather than of works of art — has for most of its short life described appreciation as something done by an eye at rest before a scene. That description does not fit the walk. This essay argues that it should not be made to fit: that appreciation of such places is properly described as multi-sensory, embodied and embedded — carried out by a body moving within what it appreciates rather than standing before it — and that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) supplies an argument for this and not only a vocabulary. One correction is due at the outset, since the case is often overstated: it is sometimes said that the reorientation breaks with the whole tradition of environmental aesthetics, and it does not. The field's founding paper, Ronald Hepburn's 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty' (1966), already insisted that the appreciator of an environment stands in the midst of it rather than before it, and Arnold Berleant built a position on that insistence — the 'aesthetics of engagement' — in The Aesthetics of Environment (1992). What the Latin American material adds is not the idea but the hard case: an environment that cannot be assimilated to the pictorial model even as a courtesy, and that therefore forces the general claim to become specific. Where the picture frame came from, and why it stuck The position being displaced deserves a fair statement first, because it is a doctrine with reasons rather than an oversight. Those reasons descend from Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), which holds that the judgement of taste — the judgement that something is beautiful — is disinterested : it takes no satisfaction in the object's existence or in what the object might do for us, attending only to how the thing presents itself. The constraint does real work in separating beauty from the merely agreeable and from the useful, but it carries a practical consequence for environments, since indifference to a thing's existence is easiest when one is not standing in it, depending on it, or at risk from it. Distance is the natural posture of disinterest. In practice the doctrine took a characteristic shape, which Allen Carlson named the landscape model in Aesthetics and the Environment (2000): the habit of appreciating an environment as though it were a picture — from a fixed station point, in a single sweep, judged by qualities that survive being flattened onto a plane, such as composition, colour balance and outline. Carlson's objection is not that pictures are bad but that the model misdescribes its object: an environment has no frame, no correct viewing distance and no single station point, so appreciating it as a picture is appreciating something else. His own remedy was to seek the right categories in natural science. The argument here takes the other branch: if the frame is the problem, describe instead what a moving, situated body actually does. What Merleau-Ponty actually argues about the body Invoking Merleau-Ponty is easy and usually empty, so his claim and its evidence should be set out. The undergraduate version of the thought, familiar from perceptual psychology, is that perception is active rather than passive: we sample, attend and move, and what we perceive depends on what we do. Merleau-Ponty's claim is stronger — that the body's repertoire of possible movements is not a cause of the perceptual field but part of its constitution: things show up with the properties they have because a body with these capacities is there. A stair is perceived as climbable, a slope as punishing, by a perceiver for whom climbing and toiling are live options. He compresses this into the claim that consciousness is not in the first instance a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can', and that the body is our general medium for having a world at all. Two terms carry the argument. The body schema ( schéma corporel ) is the non-observational awareness of one's own posture and limb position, and of the reach and clearance they afford, which one has without looking — the knowledge by which a person ducks under a low lintel without measuring it. Motor intentionality is his name for the directedness at objects already contained in that schema: the hand goes to the handle with no intervening representation of where the handle sits in a coordinate system. His evidence is clinical, and worth naming, because the claim is not merely a preference among descriptions. The neurologists Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein studied a patient known in the literature as Schneider, who had suffered an occipital brain injury from a shell splinter in the First World War. Schneider could still perform concrete, habitual actions fluently — taking out a handkerchief, working at his trade — yet could not, on command, point to the part of his body just touched, or execute an abstract movement with no practical purpose, without first setting his whole body in motion to find the position. The inference is this: if all motor action