Ecological Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Engagement

Arnold Berleant's The Aesthetics of Environment (1992) proposes what he calls the "aesthetics of engagement" as an alternative to both the Kantian tradition of disinterested contemplation and Carlson's scientific cognitivism. Berleant argues that environments, unlike framed artworks, surround and envelop the perceiver on all sides, engaging sound, smell, touch, temperature, and bodily movement simultaneously, so that the detached, distanced spectator posited by traditional aesthetic theory is simply the wrong model for how environments are actually experienced; appreciation of an environment, for Berleant, is inherently participatory rather than merely contemplative, and the perceiver is always already inside the aesthetic field rather than standing outside it as an observer.