Abstract:
This article explores Arnold Berleant’s environmental aesthetics with a focus on his innovative use of music as a model for aesthetic experience. Berleant challenges the dominant Kantian framework of disinterested contemplation by proposing an aesthetics of engagement – an immersive, participatory, and multisensory approach rooted in the everyday. Music, in Berleant’s theory, does not exist as a fixed object but as an event of experience that resonates within a perceptual field. The paper examines his critique of aesthetic objecthood, the role of titles in music, the concept of the aesthetic field, and the phenomenology of musical performance. It concludes by evaluating the universality of Berleant’s model and its applicability to both contemporary and historical works of art.
Keywords:
Arnold Berleant, environmental aesthetics, aesthetics of engagement, music philosophy, aesthetic experience, phenomenology, musical performance, Kant, art theory
How to cite:
Żerańska-Kominek, Sławomira, “Music as a Model of Aesthetic Experience in Arnold Berleant’s Environmental Aesthetics.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 9, no. 4 (2025): 141-157. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2025.0038.
Author:
Sławomira Żerańska-Kominek
Institute of Musicology, University of Warsaw
Krakowskie Przedmieście 32, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9329-1446
s.kominek@uw.edu.pl
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