Aesthetics beyond the Arts: New and Recent Essays

What do we mean by the aesthetic? And to what should aesthetic theory apply? These seemingly basic questions shape Arnold Berleant’s recent collection of essays. Berleant’s text does exactly as his title suggests: the cornucopian selection of essays traces his aesthetic thought from its origins in the arts, through the rise of environmental aesthetics, and to his current preoccupation with the ethical obligations of aesthetic theory. While the text does not break new ground for Berleant, a better introduction to his work would be difficult to find. The importance of an aesthetics beyond art is illustrated by Berleant’s claim that ‘the complex experience we call aesthetic is not only important but central’ (vii). This experience extends beyond artworks—especially those which challenge the traditional boundaries of appreciator and appreciated—into the environments which characterize our everyday lives. Likewise his aesthetic purview includes not solely traditional notions of beauty but rather the more mundane, incomplete, and even negative experiences we undertake; aesthetics, here, is not disinterested or unified, but simply ‘a theory of sensibility’ (viii).