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Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Arnold Berleant

Extract

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Environmental aesthetics has become a matter of concern to many different groups in recent years—to conservationists, to legislators, reluctantly to industrialists, and indeed to the public at large. This interest seems to have a clear purpose. It is regarded as an effort, belated and desperate, to save the resources and beauties of our natural world from the possibility of complete and irrecoverable exploitation, and from the disfigurement and loss that must follow. It is an attempt to change the atmosphere from a toxic medium that is often impossible to escape back to one that is fresh and invigorating. It is a proposal to rebuild our cities before they become unredeemable wastelands of physical and social decay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 26 , Issue 103 , September 1978 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

Footnotes

1

This is an expanded and revised version of a paper presented at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics at the University of Minnesota, 24 October 1974. I should especially like to acknowledge the valuable assistance given me by Profs. Elfie Karner Stock and David Lowenthal.

References

2 Cf. Henry Moore, "The Sculptor's Aims," in Modern Artists on Art, ed. R. L. Herbert, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1964.

3 Cf. Piet Mondrian, "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art," Ibid., esp. pp. 127-130. "This consequence brings us, in a future perhaps remote, toward the end of art as a thing separated from our surrounding environment, which is the actual plastic reality. But this end is at the same time a new beginning. Art will not only continue but will realize itself more and more. By the unification of archi tecture, sculpture, and painting, a new plastic reality will be created. Painting and sculpture will not manifest themselves as separate objects, nor as ‘moral art' which destroys architecture itself, nor as ‘applied' art, but being purely constructive will aid the creation of a surrounding not merely utilitarian or rational but also pure and complete in its beauty."

4 These brief observations on the continuities between the arts and the ordinary world and their significance for aesthetics are intended to be suggestive rather than demonstrative, and clearly warrant extended development in their own right. To do so here would lead us into a digression that would be more fascinating than essential to the main objective of this essay. I have treated this question at greater length in several other places. Cf. my "Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXIX, 2 (Winter 1970), 155-168; "Aesthetic Function," in Phenomenology and Natural Existence, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1973, ed. D. Riepe; "Art and Intuition, or Pygmalion Rediscovered," and "The Intuitive Impulse in Literary Performance," unpublished.

5 Cf. David Lowenthal, "The American Scene."

6 Cf. my "Aesthetic Function."

7 Cf. Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England, Penguin, 1963, pp. 33-38, 156-169, 219-225.

8 Cf. my "Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts" and The Aesthetic Field, Springfield, Ill., C. C. Thomas, 1970.

9 "Aesthetic Function," supra.

10 Horatio Greenough, "Structure and Organization" and "American Archi tecture," in Form and Function, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1966.

11 Ibid., pp. 60-61.

12 One would do well to be cautious here, however. We may well be mistaken about what we, as observers from outside, regard as the experiential units of an environment, especially when we cannot participate in it as part of the social milieu in which it has meaning and value. Cf. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, London, Chatto and Windus, 1973.

13 We may marvel at the isolation, perhaps the desolation, of the open ocean, but we can never actually encounter the truly open ocean, for we are always present as observers. In true Berkeleyan fashion, there is no perceptual environ ment from which people are absent, and conceptualizing about such a place never deals with the actual environment as it is experienced but only through our speculative imagination.

14 Experience and Nature, 2nd ed., New York, Dover, 1958, p. 361.

15 "Why We Want Our Cities Ugly," in The Fitness of Man's Environment, Smithsonian Annual II, New York, Harper & Row, 1968, p. 157.

16 For Quasimodo the cathedral had been successively "egg, nest, house, country and universe… One might almost say that he had espoused its form the way a snail does the form of its shell. It was his home, his hole, his envelope… He adhered to it, as it were, like a turtle to its carapace. This rugged cathedral was his armor… It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally the figures of speech that I am obliged to use here to express the strange, symmetrical., immediate, almost consubstantial flexibility of a man and an edifice." Notre-Dame de Paris, Bk. IV, § 3.

17 Cf. Kevin Lynch, What Time Is This Place?, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1972.

18 The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1960. This entire book is an insightful development of this experiential aspect of the urban environment.

19 Politics, Bk. I, Ch. 2.

20 "Two Points of Philosophy and an Example," in The Fitness of Man's Environment, p. 32.

21 Wolfgang Braunfels, "Institutions and Their Corresponding Ideals," in The Fitness of Man's Environment, p. 74.

22 The axis mundi was the Australian nomadic tribal pole that was carried along and set up wherever the tribe would encamp. According to legend, the god Achilpa ascended to the sky by means of this pole, which thus became a cosmic bond to those believing in it.

23 Cf. Gill's perception of Chicester and E. M. Forster's comparison of Venice with India, quoted in K. Lynch, op. cit., pp. 137-8.

24 Cf. Margaret Mead, "Values for Urban Living," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, 1957, Vol. 314, Nov. 1957, pp. 10-14.

25 Cf. Marston Bates, The Forest and the Sea, New York, Vintage Books, 1960, Ch. 16, esp. pp. 253, 257, 261, 262: "Ethical, esthetic and utilitarian reasons thus all support the attempt to conserve the diversity of nature. It is morally the right thing to do; it will provide, for future generations, a richer and more satisfying experience than would otherwise be possible; and it provides a much needed insurance against ecological catastrophe." (262). Cf. also Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Berkeley, Rampart Books, 1971.

26 "…man is remarkably adapted to life in highly urbanized and industrialized societies; his populations in such societies continuously increase and spread urbanization and industrialization to more and more of the earth. Granted that modern man increasingly falls victim to chronic disorders resulting from his ways of life, and that technological achievements may not contribute significantly to his happiness, these failures of modern life are of little importance from the purely biological point of view… The problem of happiness is relevant only when attention is shifted from the purely biological aspects of life to the far more complex problems of human values. In applying the concept of adaptation to man, we must therefore use criteria different from those used in general biology.'' René Dubos, "Man and His Environment: Adaptations and Interactions," in The Fitness of Man's Environment, pp. 234-235.

27 Ibid., p. 240. Also, "cultural homogenization and social regimentation resulting from the creeping monotony of technological culture, standardized patterns of education, and mass communication will make it progressively more difficult to exploit fully the biological richness of our species and may constitute a threat to the survival of civilization. We must shun uniformity of surroundings as much as conformity in behavior and strive to create diversified environments…" (p. 240). According to David Lowenthal, "it is a paradox of planning that even while praising diversity planners create uniformity. Also, they build occasional models that are so successful they are copied ad nauseam, and in the wrong places. Cf. Vicenza." (In a letter to the author, August 1976).

28 John Burchard, "The Limitations of Utilitarianism as a Basis for Determining Urban Joy," in Man and the Modern City, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963, ed. E. Geen, J. R. Lowe, and K. Walker, p. 12.

29 Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

30 "Cities take a long time to make, and order or consistency are not the only ways to a fine urban aesthetic; they may indeed offer the most limited way." John Buchard, "The Urban Aesthetic," in The Annals…, p. 116.

31 Piet Mondrian, "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art," in Modern Artists on Art, ed. R.L. Herbert, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 130. Cf. also p. 121: "Art and life illuminate each other more and more; they reveal more and more their laws according to which a real and living balance is created."