Although aesthetic concerns are not often accorded much weight in environmental discussions, I believe that the aesthetic dichotomy between the wild and built environments is particularly salient in regard to Light’s concerns, because aesthetic preferences seem to be relevant factors in the determination of patterns of land and transportation use. In the Greater Toronto Area, where I live, the current population of five million is projected to increase by over three million in the next twenty-five years.137 For environmental reasons, it is desirable to concentrate new residents within existing city boundaries, reducing their need for automobile use. This goal, however, is somewhat in tension with the lingering notion that residents of the city are ‘trapped’ in an ‘unnatural’ environment, and that true aesthetic appeal lies in more ‘natural’ areas somewhere beyond the pale of the built environment. More importantly, at the theoretical level, there is room to doubt whether the aesthetic character of nature and that of the built environment are as antithetical as has been believed. To pursue this idea, I need to briefly describe an alternative way of thinking about the aesthetic.
As mentioned, if one regards the aesthetic character of an environment solely in terms of form (i.e., shapes, patterns, and so forth) then nature and the built environment have little in common aesthetically. However, most current approaches to the aesthetic regard such formal elements as only one aspect of an object’s aesthetic character. In addition, background knowledge about the object is thought to play a critical role. To illustrate this approach, it will be useful to discuss first the aesthetic appreciation of artworks. I will then discuss its application to environments, and explain how it opens up the possibility of an aesthetic character that is shared by both natural and built environments.
One well-known version of the view that background knowledge regarding an artwork is an essential element in determining its aesthetic character is due to Kendall Walton (1970).138 His approach can be summarized as the view that possessing certain forms of knowledge about an object allows us to see a certain order in the perceptual qualities of the artwork, thereby affecting its aesthetic character.
When appreciating an artwork, such as a cubist painting, one’s background knowledge about the genre of cubist painting makes a difference, not only to one’s historical appreciation of it, but to one’s aesthetic appreciation of it as well. According to Walton, to appropriately appreciate a particular cubist artwork, for instance, one needs to approach it with the understanding that certain sorts of properties, e.g., containing only geometric shapes, are, by convention, necessary or ‘standard’ for such works. Possessing this knowledge, we perceive the work to have different aesthetic qualities than it otherwise would: instead of looking chaotic and random, for example, the painting might appear calm and serene.
Walton’s model can be applied to the appreciation of natural objects as well; in this case, knowledge about a natural environment can allow us to perceive order amongst its elements (Carlson 1981; 1993; Parsons 2002). For example, the combination of plants and animals in a given environment may strike us as chaotic and random until an understanding of the ecological and evolutionary forces at work in the area reveal the pattern and order obtaining among these various elements (Carlson, 1993, 220). Another example is provided by the biologist Richard Dawkins, who writes about bats that “their faces are often distorted into gargoyle shapes that appear hideous to us until we see them for what they are, exquisitely fashioned instruments for beaming ultrasound in desired directions” (Dawkins, 1986, 24). In each of these cases, knowledge drawn from natural history and ecology, by revealing the visual order manifest in appearances, plays a pivotal role in shaping our aesthetic responses.
Although the aesthetic character of the built environment has received less attention in philosophical aesthetics, Walton’s approach to aesthetic character may also be applied here. Our understanding of which sorts of features ‘belong’ in a certain kind of structure, or in a certain kind of neighborhood, and which do not, is a powerful factor in determining whether a particular built environment looks, for example, ordered or chaotic. A neon sign flashing ‘open’ may look ordinary, until one learns that the window in which it hangs belongs to a church: the scene then takes on an ‘out of place’, somewhat askew character. In many cases, we fail to notice the role of background knowledge in generating sensory order because that knowledge is second nature to us. Power lines, for instance, are a ubiquitous feature of North American cities but, understanding that they are a necessary feature of the landscape, we are able to ‘see through’ them in appreciating urban landscapes. In the same way that we do not assess the aesthetic merit of a painting in light of its being ‘only’ two dimensional, or of its being ‘cut off’ at the edges, we do not focus on the patterns of power lines in our aesthetic assessments of a streetscape.139 As in the case of artworks and natural environments, a set of background beliefs about the built environment allows us to perceive an order in those elements that are manifest to us in sensory experience, and this order is key in determining the aesthetic character of that environment.
If we adopt this conception of the aesthetic, then, contrary to traditional wisdom, the aesthetic appreciation of the natural and built environment may have a significant element in common. For although the built environment lacks objects conducive to experience of the sublime, as well as the sorts of forms characteristic of nature, the sensory ‘order’ revealed by appropriate background knowledge may be similar to that of the natural environment. In this event, one might then claim that there is indeed an important continuity in aesthetic character across built and natural environments. However, one might wonder whether my line of thought really advances this claim, since the possibility of continuity that is opened up here rests on the claim that the natural and built environments are similar sorts of environments, requiring similar sorts of background knowledge for aesthetic appreciation. The advocate of the traditional notion that the built and natural environments are aesthetically divergent is likely to simply deny this. In order to support this claim, then, I must directly consider whether the perceptual orders manifested in natural and built environments are similar.
This concern is, in fact, a pressing one, because discussions of this issue have tended to emphasize the disparateness of the sorts of order manifested by the natural environment and the built environment. The latter is characterized often as possessing a functional order, given that it is composed of elements whose salient feature is their function in some aspect of human life. For example, the appreciation of the visual order in a streetscape, referred to earlier, is thought to take shape because we understand the function, and hence the necessity, of power lines, allowing us to ‘see past’ them. On this view, to see the harmony or chaos that is manifest in a crowded street or an assemblage of buildings, one must understand the purpose that its elements are meant to serve.
However, philosophers have been reluctant to employ the concept of functionality in describing the order manifest in the natural environment. Functionality, like other teleological concepts, such as ‘purpose’ and ‘end’, often have been thought to be conceptually tied to the presence of a designing intellect and thus to fit uncomfortably with a scientific description of the physical world. In light of this, characterizations of the natural order as a ‘functional order’ have been viewed by some as, at best, a lazy anthropomorphism and, at worst, a disguised form of theism. As Larry Wright put it, amongst philosophers, “wherever it appeared, the smoke of teleological terminology implied the fire of sloppy thinking” (1969, 211).
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Related views on the role of background knowledge in the appreciation of art may be found in Dickie (1974) and Danto (1981).
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I do not mean to say that we