The aesthetic field: Arnold Berleant's philosophy as a new understanding of experience

Abstract

The essay aims to identify the original matrix of Berleant’s aesthetic thought by deepening his initial research on the notion of “field”. Berleant analyzes the “aesthetic field” by considering it as a dynamic texture that stands outside the dualisms that have characterized modern philosophy. At the core of this analysis is the fruitful convergence between different traditions from which Berleant draws for laying out his philosophical program. In particular, if phenomenology leads him to thematize the connection between experience and judgment, pragmatism leads him to establish the cornerstone of the experiential (and above all perceptual) character of the aesthetic as such. Thanks to this, the perspective developed by Berleant since the seventies of the twentieth century still proves to be largely vital, as it is capable of delineating an anthropological horizon centered on the analysis of the “environmental” practices of the so-called “aesthetic engagement”.