A Note on the Weather

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A Note on the Weather

Arnold Berleant

 

It is not often that a book appears that changes the dimensions of a discipline. Madalina Diaconu’s new work, The Aesthetics of Weather[1] extends the aesthetics of environment in new and fascinating directions. Her studies range from the phenomenology of the atmosphere, temperature, and wind to the aesthetic perception of clouds, tornadoes, the wisdom of weather sayings, and still more. Like the photographic artist Todd Watts’ masterly evocation of particular weather conditions at specific dates and locations,[2] Madalina Diaconu has, with equal subtlety, enlarged the scope of environmental aesthetics to include the distinctive presence of weather as a determinative condition of environment. One is struck by Diaconu’s vast erudition and her fecund originality.

It is in the discussion of the para-aesthetic with which Diaconu concludes the book that she summarizes the general movement of aesthetic thought that this book embraces: it is a work in which “an account of the para-aesthetic is a response to the imperative of giving an account of the complexity of the aesthetic experience when it becomes collective and habitual, when it is reintegrated into everyday life, and realistically considered in its materiality”(194). Rather than proceeding by means of logical distinctions, conceptual analyses, and “stringent argumentation,” Diaconu follows heuristic hypotheses to pursue a logic of “relationality, entanglement, and accumulation” (13) to achieve a succession of transformative insights. Her work here constitutes an important expansion of the scope of environmental aesthetics. This is a book that, by its erudition, originality, and scope, is bound to change the contours of environmental aesthetics.

 

Arnold Berleant

ab@contempaesthetics.org

Arnold Berleant is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Long Island University, the author of nine books on environmental aesthetics, and founding editor of this journal.

Published on January 28, 2025.

Cite this article: Arnold Berleant, “A Note on the Weather,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.

 

Endnotes

 

[1] Madalina Diaconu, Aesthetics of Weather (London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

[2] Todd Watts, Blanchard Weather Report (Orono: The University of Maine Press, 2019).