These essays comprise a set of variations on art and culture guided by the theme of the environment. The essays deal with the physical reality of the environment such as the city, the shore, the water and the garden but also with the virtual environment and the social one. Environmental aesthetics is a theme whose variations are as endless as the possibilities of the human performers and conditions from which it is fashioned.

This enticing set of essays testifies to Berleant's special talent in moving easily between both natural and human environments and opens out the contemporary discussion beyond that of the wilderness to the cultural and social environment. Berleant argues that neither the natural nor the human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are coextensive in experience, that one can only speak of environment in relation to human experience. The theme of this book is that such experience suffuses the so-called natural world and shapes the human world. He maintains the idea that in as much as people are embedded in these worlds, relationships, including human relationships, are part of them.The melding of these two worlds leads Berleant to defend ultimately what he has termed 'social aesthetics.'

Table of contents

Preface

I. Environmental Aesthetics

  1. A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment

  2. Aesthetic Dimensions of Environmental Design

  3. Down the Garden Path

  4. The Wilderness City: A Study of Metaphorical       Experience

  5. The Aesthetics of the Coastal Environment

  6. The World from the Water

  7. Is There Life in Virtual Space?

  8. Is Greasy Lake a Place?

  9. Embodied Music

II. Social Aesthetics.

  10 The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic

  11. The Social Evaluation of Art

  12. Subsidization of Art as Social Policy

  13. Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art

  14. Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social         Aesthetics

This book is no longer in print. It can be accessed here as a webpage and here as a PDF.