ABSTRACT
To study aesthetics is to explore, examine closely, and interrogate our experiences of feelings such as beauty or ugliness and the value we ascribe to them. Aesthetics as a discipline has been entangled with philosophy of art for many centuries. If we
are exploring the nature of the experience of an artwork such as a symphony, play, or painting, then our aesthetic response to it is an important component. However, that entanglement has meant that aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, the everyday world, and of our cultural landscapes came to be either ignored (Hepburn 1966) or examined through the framework of the arts. In this chapter on the aesthetic appreciation of landscapes I will focus primarily on the landscape as place and the aesthetic, taking its Greek root in aesthesis, as concerned with our sensory engagement and enjoyment, or otherwise, of place. Whether the aesthetic resides mainly in the response of the experiencer or mainly in the
qualities of that which is experienced is a complex question within aesthetics. Historically the shift has been from thing to person with an important turn taking place during the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century. The emphasis on the thing reached its culmination in Hogarth’s 1752 objective ‘line of beauty’, which represented a rather formalized consolidation of Francis Hutchinson’s ideas about the pleasingness of unity in variety. If there were a perfect serpentine line with the right degree of unity and variety it could dictate exactly how a landscape feature (or anything else) should be designed or how a landscape feature would be correctly judged against that objective measure such that persons of taste could be in agreement (Moore 2008). Around the same period, though, the aesthetic is coming to mean the inner response or affect of that which is experienced. The internalisation of the aesthetic can be identified by a number of theoretical developments and changes in worldview including the coining of the term ‘aesthetics’ by Baumgarten in 1735 and the rise of the role of imagination, first advanced by Addison in 1712 (Moore 2008). The development of most interest for us is the appreciation of the sublime in landscape. This, as we shall see, most clearly relied on an internal response to particular types of landscapes that had previously been seen as holding no positive aesthetic value. Internalisation could be seen as opening the way for an extreme subjectivity in which all views on aesthetic quality are equally valid, but this is not what is usually
meant. The aesthetic experience is one that is felt personally and relies on both our normal experiencing of life and particular qualities of attention, but it also claims some normative force such that it makes sense for one person to try to bring another to their way of seeing, to point out why they feel the way they do, and to get them to share that experience.
