Ambiances

Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain

Varia | 2015

Aesthetic Sensibility
Sensibilité esthétique

Arnold Berleant

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DOI: 10.4000/ambiances.526
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 Aesthetic Sensibility 1

Aesthetic Sensibility
Sensibilité esthétique

Arnold Berleant

Introduction
1 It is common to think of aesthetics as a theory that accounts for the beauty or the
pleasing quality of things. This is not far from the mark. When philosophers speak of
aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, they usually associate it with the philosophy of art
and the special value that the arts and nature possess. Over the past several decades,
however, the arts and aesthetic practices have continued the direction of the past
century in expanding their domain still more rapidly. The application of aesthetic values
to environment is one instance of this expansion, and environmental aesthetics has
emerged as an important part of the enlarged scope of aesthetics1. More recently,
aesthetics has been applied to still other domains of experience, such as the aesthetics of
everyday life, the aesthetics of food, the aesthetics of community, political aesthetics, and
still others (Light & Smith, 2005; Saito, 2007; Mandoki, 2007; Leddy, 2012; Sartwell, 2010;
Berleant, 2010). The understanding of environment itself has grown to include not only
the scenic landscape but the urban landscape and the industrial landscape, including
their negative aspects. Moreover, the growing awareness of other cultures and their
traditions of aesthetic satisfaction have forced our thinking to expand into still other
dimensions.
2 Expanding the scope of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of
appreciation. Traditional accounts of aesthetic appreciation are inadequate to identify
and illuminate the perceptual satisfactions that these new applications evoke. But not
only does an enlarged range of aesthetic appreciation recognize beauties beyond the arts.
It also must account for the range of aesthetic perception into the oneiric, the bizarre,
and the terrible, while the social and political significance of aesthetic values has led to
the recognition of a wide range of such values, not all of them positive.

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3 These challenges to aesthetic understanding have made the task of scholars both more
important and more difficult. For their concerns now include not only art and the beauty
of nature but the full range of life experience, as well, and this has given aesthetics
increased significance and has produced greater confusion. What do these domains of
experience have in common? Is there something that all these modes of experience share
in considering them aesthetic? This is the challenging question for aesthetics in our time.

The domains of aesthetics

4 The key to understanding the aesthetic lies, I believe, in the etymology of that word. The
term “aesthetics” is a transliteration of the Greek aisthēsis, which means perception by
the senses. Alexander Baumgarten kept close to the original Greek meaning when, in the
mid-eighteenth century, he first defined aesthetics as “the science of sensory knowledge
directed toward beauty” and regarded art as “the perfection of sensory awareness”
(Baumgarten, 1750). While the meaning of aesthetics has since then become both vaguely
generalized to signify something whose appearance is attractive and pleasing, its original
philosophical meaning led to aesthetics becoming a technical discipline of philosophy
with its imponderables of definition and ontology.
5 First, however, let us consider more deliberately the various domains of aesthetics. As a
philosophical discipline, aesthetics has centered around understanding beauty in art and
in nature. Whether aesthetics focuses on the one or the other varies with the time and
place. Of course, people appreciated artistically fashioned objects since the beginnings of
human civilization. The earliest surviving artifacts show evidence of workmanship and
decoration that indicates deliberate care in fashioning utilitarian objects beyond
functional necessity (Shiner, 2001). Then there are the seemingly gratuitous petroglyphs
and images that were inscribed prehistorically on stone outcroppings and the walls of
caves in many locations, and ornamental objects and jewelry are typically found in
prehistoric grave sites. These indicate clearly that an aesthetic sensibility has been
present from the beginnings of human social organization, if not among our pre-human
ancestors2.
6 In the history of Western civilization, speculation and theories about the arts occurred
early, too, beginning with the golden age of Greek civilization some twenty-five hundred
years ago. But it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that modern aesthetic
theory began with Baumgarten’s treatise and, at the end of that century, received its
most influential formulation with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Kant, 1790). After two
centuries of commentary, Kant’s views continue to dominate aesthetic query. Let us recall
in brief the main tenets of that understanding. It affirms that our aesthetic judgment of
an object is inevitably subjective and cannot even be subsumed under a concept because
we cannot affirm the existence of the object, which would imply some access to
objectivity and universality. Thus aesthetic judgment is non-cognitive. The problem then
is to establish some connection between our subjective judgments of taste and the object.
Kant attempted this by removing any desire or other interest and emulating the
disinterestedness that has made scientific knowledge possible in the effort to achieve the
semblance of universality by means of a common sense (sensus communis) (Ibid., §2, §8,
§22). This is a specious argument for universality and just as contrived as Descartes’
similar attempt to bridge the distance between subject and object by means of the pineal
gland.

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7 Movement and change in aesthetic appreciation have occurred, nevertheless, in practice

if not in theory. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave increasing attention to
natural beauty. And while the twentieth century tended to refocus on works of art, recent
decades have witnessed not only renewed appreciation of nature but the enlargement of
that interest. Environment is now understood more broadly to include the city and the
built landscape more generally, as well as wild nature. What is more, aestheticians have
extended their scope to embrace the world of everyday experience. In these domains,
disinterested contemplation is unlikely and different ways of explaining aesthetic
pleasure have been proposed3.
8 These developments in art and aesthetic appreciation have strained the theoretical unity
of traditional aesthetics, which cannot easily accommodate these changes. With over a
century of innovation in the arts and the vast enlargement and complexity of
appreciative experience, the customary rubrics of explanation have become increasingly
inadequate and even irrelevant. Indeed, developments over the past century have
challenged the very conceptual frame of aesthetics: the meaning of art, the condition and
character of appreciation, and the scope and place of aesthetic values. Art and
appreciation have been re-cast, and aesthetic theory must be renewed to accommodate
them. There is a need to return to the etymological meaning of the term “aesthetics” and
Baumgarten's emphasis on perception by the senses. Let us consider how this may go.

From objects to experience

9 It is not surprising that philosophical understanding underlies both traditional aesthetics
and its alternatives. Coincident with the emergence of modern aesthetics at the end of
the eighteenth century was the establishment of the modern scientific world view.
Formulated by Descartes and implemented by Newton and the pantheon of scientific
explorers who followed, the natural world was laid open first to mathematical and then
to empirical investigation. What facilitated this was the ability to study nature
impersonally and objectively. The objectification of nature became the key, and
philosophical aesthetics carried out the Cartesian revolution by objectifying the objects of
appreciation. Art came to mean objects, works of art. Nature, too, was turned into scenery
viewed at a distance, favored by the popular Claude glass that turned landscapes into
reflected, composed images on a mirror.
10 From the hindsight of the present, the succession of disruptive movements that occupied
the world of art from the late nineteenth century to the present day can be regarded as a
rejection of the convention in thinking of art as an object, a distinctive object. The
gradual and increasing emancipation from close representation led, in modern painting,
to ways of giving pictorial form to the perception of light, of movement, of mass, and of
form, transforming them from abstractions into perceptual experience. In the visual arts,
impressionism, cubism, futurism, and dada began a direction that turned the art object
into an occasion for perceptual, sensible engagement. As in the transition in music from
polyphony to tertiary harmony, art has again led theory.
11 This changes our understanding of aesthetics into a descriptive and not necessarily
celebratory study of perceptual experience. It must now accommodate a complete range
of negative as well as positive values. Nor is aesthetic theory confined to the fine arts and
nature only: an aesthetic dimension pervades the human world. What emerges is the

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understanding that aesthetic appreciation is not an object-centered response that

requires a psychological remove and a disinterested attitude. Rather, it is a complex
multi-sensory perceptual engagement by means of a cultivated sensibility.
12 This broad vision of sensible experience must be expanded still further. It must be seen as
a field experience4. Sensible experience is part of an existential context that includes the
geological strata that underlie all activity, the modifications of the earth’s surface and the
structures that result from human activities in fashioning the immediate conditions of
living, the behaviors that promote sustenance and wellbeing, and the social relations and
patterns that constitute the cultural activities of human living under the particular
conditions of time and place. The human organism is infused by the materials and forms
of nourishment that are obtained and shaped through the techniques of food production
and preparation that are available in the social and cultural setting in which people live,
guided by the customs, language, concepts, belief structures, and particular meanings
that are prevalent, and finally by the forms of sensibility that are customary. Living, then,
is a perceptually selective, discriminating process in which everyone receives and
contributes. It is a condition of continuities within which we make distinctions,
separations, and divisions based on need, customary practices, and tradition. The
perceptual factors of this field reflect the full range of sensation and sensible awareness
as it is filtered and discriminated in participatory activities. We inhabit, then, a field of
sensate activity that rests on sensation but as sensible perception infused by and related
to all the conditions that affect and qualify human experience. Let me try to identify and
explore aesthetic sensibility.

Sensibility
13 The historical and theoretical development I have outlined culminates in the insight that
aesthetics is, at its base, a theory of sensibility. This illuminates the arts of the past as well
as of our time, and it recognizes aesthetic value as an often hidden feature of all
experience. Such a generalized aesthetic enables us to recognize the presence of a
pervasive aesthetic aspect in every experience, whether uplifting or demeaning, exalting
or brutal5. It makes the constant expansion of the range of art and of aesthetic experience
both plausible and comprehensible. How, then, can we understand sensibility?
14 By sensibility I mean perceptual awareness that is developed, guided, and focused. It is
more than simple sensation, more than sense perception. Perhaps one can consider it
educated sensation. It requires the perceptual knowledge and skills that we are
continually enhancing in and through our encounters and activities. Aesthetic sensibility
develops and uses this capacity at the deliberate center of conscious experience. In
Western cultures, the arts have been the primary medium for promoting such awareness,
and we can consider changes in artistic style, the emergence of new movements, and even
entire historical periods in the arts as fundamentally changes in sensibility. Looking at
culture change more broadly, we can regard fashion, etiquette, and behavior patterns in
general as part of the prevailing sensibility of a place and time. So while sensibility is not
a term common in the literature of aesthetics, what it denotes is not new or unfamiliar.
Indeed, one could write a history of aesthetics around this idea, ranging from contexts in
which sensible experience was impeded, repressed, or hidden behind conventions of
acceptability, to arts and artists whose work developed out of its limitless possibilities.

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15 Human activities seem always to have exhibited qualitative interests in fashioning craft
objects, as well as decorative and ornamental ones, together with those we now call
artistic. All of these display an attention and delight in features and qualities we now call
aesthetic, such as the tactile appeal of surfaces; the attraction of pattern, regularity, and
coloration. These characteristics often join with signs of care, precision, and formal
coherence that are sometimes related to practical or functional requirements but often
stand quite apart from them. And, of course, there are those features of objects that are
superfluous for practical purposes but are nevertheless valued and deliberately included.
In addition to craft objects there are ceremonial and ritual activities and the narrative
skills of bards, all of which display a sensitivity in their production beyond simply
accomplishing a given task. The senses are multiply involved and are distributed non-
exclusively throughout all these activities. For no art activity relies on a single sense
while, at the same time, sensory experience is suffused with meaning and associations,
often implicit or hidden. A developed sensibility responds to all of these.
16 The multiple facets of life experience become strata that the fine arts often draw on and
extend. From the start, sense experience was not isolated or channeled, and later
appropriations of sensation as “subjective”, mechanical, or purely physiological are
aberrations rather than purifications. Sensibility, informed by sensory experience, is
therefore not purely “subjective,” mental, or exclusively private but a characteristic of
awareness by living humans in a context that is seamlessly natural, social, structural, and
cultural.
17 A heightened sensibility, however, while essential, does not in itself fully describe the
finely-honed perceptual engagement that strives to fulfill the possibilities of aesthetic
appreciation. Human sensibility enters into every region of experience and a distinctively
aesthetic mode is widely recognized. A theory of aesthetic sensibility, however, needs to
recognize and discriminate its nuances. We can begin by identifying some of the most
important contributing dimensions.
1. Perceptual acuteness. Sensibility involves sensory awareness that exhibits sharp, focused
attention to all perceptual aspects of an aesthetic situation. This is the primary condition of
aesthetic appreciation.
2. Perceptual discrimination. This recognizes the multi-sensory and synaesthetic nuances in
sensible experience, such as its subtle, shifting palette of tonalities, its multiple layers, and
its textural qualities.
3. Focus. Aesthetic sensibility is not simply general perceptual sensitivity; it is centered.
Attention may be on a particular object or it may be on a region of varying breadth. In
addition, the sensible aspect of the focus may vary by emphasizing different sensory
combinations and degrees of intensity.
4. Intensity. Perception may range in intensity from the barely conscious to fully acute
awareness. The degree of intensity may be the closest correlate to its vividness and force.
5. Emotional sensitivity. The somatic reception and response to perceptual stimuli are an
essential part of aesthetic sensibility. Reception that is mistakenly understood as subjective
or mentalistic does not recognize the essential, constitutive, affective contribution that the
perceiver makes to the aesthetic situation as an embodied being who is at the same time
conditioned by physical, historical, and cultural influences.
6. Atmosphere6. Every perceptual situation has a general quality that may elude clear
identification. It is an ineffable but nonetheless distinctive tone or character of the field of
experience: magical, tiresome, depressing, enhanced, exalted. Such words are only
approximate and inadequate identifiers of what poets are best at evoking. Atmosphere is not

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apprehended by direct sensory perception but is rather apprehended as a general bodily

awareness capable of degrees of intensity.
7. Perceptual engagement. The cornerstone of the perceiver’s contribution lies in the liveliness of
appreciative perception. Appreciation activates the perceptual possibilities of the situation.
It is a unique contribution that each person makes through the distinctive capacities
(physical, cognitive, and mnemonic) the perceiver activates in the occasion.
8. Perceptual meaning. Meaning comes last so as not to overshadow or blind the perceptual
force that is the substance of aesthetic appreciation. Appreciation is not a cognitive act but
often involves embodied meaning. Meanings that are bound up in perception, meanings that
are experienced, do not replace perception but may reinforce and enhance it.

Aesthetics and sensibility

18 Let us look now at how sensibility illuminates some factors in aesthetics. The aesthetic
object occupies the center of perceptual attention. It may take the form of an art object,
such as a painting, sculpture, musical composition, literary work, or any other object of
artistic fashioning. As an art object it is the product of some activity; it is something
made. As an aesthetic object, it is the object as it works in perception. Here sensibility
consists in a complex focused attention on every perceptual feature or aspect of the
object, at how it interacts with other factors in the aesthetic (perceptual) field, and at its
varying strength and stability. Considering the art object as an aesthetic object
emphasizes its sensory qualities in their complexity and interrelationships. Sensible
appreciation lies in apprehending how the object exhibits and works through its
perceptual qualities. It is a process of engaging perceptually with the object, not
regarding it distantly and dispassionately. Any judgment that is arrived at rests on this
perceptual foundation, enhanced by knowledge and past experience. Such perceptual
openness enables us to recognize experientially how well the object functions in that
situation and, if desirable, to form a judgment about its success. Such a judgment is the
product of a complex perceptual process and can provide a clear grounding for assessing
the object’s success. We have, then, the possibility of positive and negative aesthetic
judgment along a multi-dimensional scale, for no object is an undifferentiated whole.
Perceptual success, then, is the criterion for a positive and negative aesthetics, the
negativity being based on perceptual failure.
19 Aesthetic sensibility, then, can clarify the various arts and art objects, each through its
distinctive perceptual capacities. Art today has moved to abandon the fixation on object-
centered experience in such developments as performance art, community art,
improvisational dance, improvisation theater, and reality art. In dialogical or relational
art, the artist may invite the audience into a process that shares the responsibility and
authorship of the work. This turns the work into more of a process, performance activity,
or duration than a fixed object. It can illuminate nature whether perceived as landscapes,
scenes, or discrete objects. Similarly, aesthetic sensibility has particularly rich
possibilities for enhancing our perception of the built environment through multi-
sensory bodily engagement. Such aesthetic engagement transforms our environmental
perception of space, mass, and density when apprehended not as abstractions but in the
lived acute sensory experience of everyday life. It is important to include in the domain of
sensibility what may be called virtual sensibility, perception in literature and imaginative
perception, more generally.

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Conclusion
20 No experience is value-free, for everything we encounter and undergo is colored by our
interests, responses, and attention. Thus the search for the satisfaction of sensible
experience comes from a thirst for positive perceptual value, which we find can be
fulfilled by the perceptual satisfactions of the arts, natural beauty, and the immensely
rich perceptual forms and details of the world of human life. This account of a
perceptually-based aesthetics returns the meaning of aesthetics to its origins and
reaffirms the critical place of sensation and sense perception. And this is but the start,
since sense perception is never simple sensation or pure perception but a complex, multi-
faceted field experience. When such experience centers around the occasions of art and
beauty, sensation is focused, dwelt on, cultivated. This is what is meant by sensibility, and
it leads to considering aesthetics as the theory of sensibility.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1750. Aesthetica. Vol. I. Frankfurt a. O.

Benjamin, Walter. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Illuminations
(edited and introduced by Arendt, Hannah). New York: Schocken Books. p. 217-252.

Berleant, Arnold. 2001 [1970]. The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience.
Cybereditions, http://www.cybereditions.com/webc/runisa.dll?
sv:CYVIEWSUMMARY:1812269799:10009.

Berleant, Arnold. 1992. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Berleant, Arnold. 2005. Aesthetics and Environment, Variations on a Theme. Farnham, UK &
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.

Berleant, Arnold. 2010. Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World.
Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.

Berleant, Arnold. 2012. Aesthetics beyond the Arts. Farnham, Surry: Ashgate.

Böhme, Gernot. 2013. The art of the stage set as a paradigm for an aesthetics of atmospheres.
Ambiances [online], Rediscovering. Available online at: http://ambiances.revues.org/315 (consulted
on December 05, 2014).

Brady, Emily. 2003. Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Carlson, Allen. 2000. Aesthetics and the Environment. New York: Routledge.

Carlson, Allen. 2009. Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Carlson, Allen & Berleant, Arnold (eds.). 2004. The Aesthetics of Natural Environments.
Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview.

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Kant, Immanuel. 1790. Critique of Judgment.

Kemal, Salim & Gaskell, Ivan (eds.). 1993. Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts. Cambridge and
New-York: Cambridge University Press.

Leddy, Thomas. 2012. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.
Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview.

Light, Andrew & Smith, Jonathan M. (eds.). 2005. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Mandoki, Katya. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities. Aldershot
and Burlington: Ashgate.

Moore, Ronald. 2008. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics beyond the Arts. Peterborough, Ont.:
Broadview.

Naukkarinen, Ossi. 2007. Art of the Environment. Helsinki: Okka.

Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sartwell, Crispin. 2010. Political Aesthetics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Sasaki, Ken-ichi. 2012. The Faculty of Feeling. Diogenes. vol 59, n° 1-2, p. 21-31.

Seamon, David (ed.). 1993. Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology.
Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.

Sepänmaa, Yrjö. 1993. The Beauty of Environment: A General Model for Environmental Aesthetics.
Denton, Tex.: Environmental Ethics Books.

Shiner, Larry. 2001. The Invention of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

NOTES
1. A large literature has grown in environmental aesthetics. See Berleant, 1992; 2005; 2012. Other
important work includes: Brady, 2003; Carlson, 2000; 2009; Moore, 2008; Naukkarinen, 2007;
Seamon, 1993; Sepänmaa, 1993; Kemal & Gaskell, 1993. An extensive bibliography up to its date of
publication can be found in Carlson & Berleant, 2004.
2. Animal behavior in courting often exhibits what we consider aesthetic attributes similar to
those we recognize in dance, architecture, and design. The behavior of male birds is a common
example, as in the Australian bower bird and the peacock.
3. This has been a principal preoccupation of my own work in which I have proposed the unity of
perceiver and object in an aesthetic field, and have developed aesthetic engagement as
characterizing appreciative experience. The present essay carries this effort still further by
developing aesthetic sensibility as the central factor in appreciation.
4. The concept of an aesthetic field describes the complex context of which appreciative
experience is a part. See Berleant, 1970, 2001.
5. I have developed the idea of the normative range of aesthetic value in Berleant, 2010. In
writing of sensibility, Ken-ichi Sasaki notes that the Japanese word “kansei” literally means the
faculty of feeling (Sasaki, 2012).
6. See Böhme, 2013; see also Benjamin's use of “aura” (Benjamin, 1969).

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ABSTRACTS
Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from
centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding
the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation.
Traditional accounts are inadequate to identify and illuminate the perceptual experiences that
these new applications evoke. Considering the range of environmental and everyday occasions
aesthetically changes aesthetics into a descriptive and not necessarily celebratory study of
sensible experience, for it must now accommodate a complete range of negative as well as
positive values.

L’esthétique est fondamentalement une théorie de l’expérience sensible. Son champ s’est
largement développé, depuis le centrage initial sur les arts et les paysages pittoresques, jusqu'à la
prise en compte de l’ensemble des expériences appréciatives. Ce développement du champ de
l’esthétique soulève des questions fondamentales sur l’expérience de l’appréciation. Les cadres
traditionnels ne sont pas adéquats pour identifier et clarifier les expériences perceptives portées
par ces nouveaux questionnements. Prendre au sérieux la dimension esthétique de notre
environnement quotidien transforme l’esthétique en une approche descriptive, et plus
nécessairement laudative, de l’expérience sensible, en ce qu'elle doit désormais tenir compte de
toute une gamme de valeurs négatives autant que positives.

INDEX
Mots-clés: esthétique, sensation, perception sensorielle, sensibilité
Keywords: aesthetics, sensation, sense perception, sensibility

AUTHOR
ARNOLD BERLEANT
Arnold Berleant is Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at Long Island University (USA). His work
ranges over aesthetics, the arts, ethics, and social philosophy, and he has lectured and written
widely in these areas, both nationally and internationally. Berleant is the author of numerous
articles as well as eight books on aesthetics, the arts, and especially the aesthetics of
environment. He is also the founding editor of the on-line journal, Contemporary Aesthetics.
[email protected]

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