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Aesthetic Engagement, Descriptive Aesthetics, and the Reformation of Aesthetics: Responses to Mäcklin, Ryynänen, and Vassiliou
Arnold Berleant
It is a rare opportunity in the lengthy course of my scholarly efforts to have the privilege of considering the candid reflections of three such talented scholars. And it is my good fortune that the three commentators are not only familiar with my work but articulate and sober in their reflections. Reviewing their texts, I am impressed by their erudition, balanced constructive appraisal, and philosophical and linguistic skill. I am beholden to Professors Mäcklin, Ryynänen, and Vassiliou[1] for their thoughtful study of my work and the candor of their judgments. They have provided me with an opportunity to reflect on some of the leading ideas that have preoccupied me for over half a century.
From their comments I learn that I have largely succeeded in communicating my insights, if not always in convincing others. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that my ideas have been considered carefully. What would happen to productive reflection if a philosopher were to evoke universal agreement? The history of philosophy exhibits some answers to this question.
The observations of my commentators have provided much of the historical and intellectual context in which I have worked, a backdrop against which the freshness of my proposals is dramatically evident. I have explained and illustrated those ideas in multiple contexts; all I can do here is offer some further clarification and elaboration.
I recall that soon after my first book, The Aesthetic Field, was published in 1970, a contemporary at the American Society for Aesthetics observed to me that my proposal was uniquely important in giving prominence to performance as a central feature of the aesthetic situation. This was Rolf-Dieter Herrmann, a German-American scholar who died much too young, but for whose early insight I have always been grateful. The significance I gave this feature of aesthetic experience was undoubtedly influenced by my early devotion to musical performance and composition, and it only now seems clear to me that the experience of performance lies behind the central importance I have placed on engagement. I do, in fact, think that aesthetic appreciation involves a performative activity, an activity that is implicit in the concept of engagement. Perhaps here I may broach the tantalizing idea of appreciation itself as a kind of performance, so that when one is fully engaged aesthetically, one activates the aesthetic occasion, one, so to speak, “performs” the aesthetic object, be it a painting, an architectural structure, a poem, a novel, or even a landscape. How this is manifested in particular cases is a task for criticism to reveal and which a descriptive aesthetics can articulate. But let me return now to the specific task at hand and continue my response.
* * *
Because my commentators’ observations are distinctive and quite dissimilar, I am led to make very different responses. In Prof. Mäcklin’s critical reflections I encounter the common reaction to my challenges of the generally unquestioned pieties of conventional aesthetic thought. What Mäcklin calls “Berleant’s problems” are not my problems, but problems with the conventional accounts of aesthetic value and appreciation that are usually assumed without question. I object to key elements of the common view, one that emerged from a long history in Western philosophy originating in the metaphysical assumptions of classical Greek thought, achieving its developed form, as Mäcklin notes, in Britain in the early eighteenth century, and its full articulation in the late eighteenth-century theory of Kant.
Mäcklin presents the conventional understanding in phenomenological terms, a formulation that, of course, was not Kant’s, but that followed from the same subjectivistic tradition from which Kant’s ideas were formulated. And Mäcklin wonders whether aesthetic engagement can accommodate some forms of isolating the aesthetic object from its surroundings that is assumed to be necessary for appreciation. This would seem to be a fair question, but a response is impossible, since it would require that I reconceptualize my terminology and context into the very terms I reject.
For, to begin, I consider my account of aesthetic engagement to be phenomenological, not in the subjectivistic tradition of Husserl but in a naturalistic one. Going “back to the things themselves” does not require a reduction to the phenomena of consciousness or the identification of an “aesthetic object” but a return to empirical situations, to immediate perceptual experience in context. Rather than isolating an object for examination, the classical scientific model that Kant made the underpinning of his contemplative aesthetics, I pursue a more genuinely phenomenological course by returning “to the things themselves” in perceptual experience.
This divergence in approach lies in the very focus of inquiry. In traditional phenomenological accounts, inquiry is presumed to lie in identifying an “aesthetic object.” This already structures the problem by searching for an “object,” thus abstracting and hypostatizing the fluidity of perceptual experience. I believe that recurring to experience means turning to the dynamic course of experience as a perceptual process. This requires not a subjective turn but an embodied one, a vital engagement in an aesthetic situation that is guided by the working of the art in aesthetic terms as directed by the art and the artist. This demands a turn from object to experience, a turn from ontology to perception, from discerning an object on which to direct one’s focus to a perceptual process of participating in an aesthetic field. This is what is meant by aesthetic engagement: it changes aesthetic appreciation from being object-oriented into perceptual experience. I am indebted to Mäcklin for identifying key elements of divergence in my view from customary phenomenological ones and for providing the opportunity for me to articulate how aesthetic engagement stands free of the subjective and ontological presuppositions that hamper conventional phenomenological understanding. The goal of aesthetic inquiry is not to locate and articulate an aesthetic object but to identify and describe the perceptual experience we deem aesthetic. Going “back to the things themselves” becomes a return not to objects but to perceptual experience, to descriptive aesthetics.
* * *
There are several themes in my work that Prof. Ryynänen has chosen to explore. One is the central idea of the implicit presence of a participant. This is something of which artists are sometimes aware: that we are always present as participants in our aesthetic experiences. It is a wonderfully rich topic to explore, and Ryynänen refers to my essay on Descartes and Duchamps—especially the latter’s ready-mades that conjure up the implicit presence of a user.[2]
But Ryynänen develops more fully another idea that has also worked its way through much of my writing: the idea of descriptive aesthetics. In fact, he concluded his talk with a striking example of the effectiveness of such a description, both historically and personally. For Ryynänen, at the same time, both illustrates and evokes the rhetorical force of aesthetic descriptions, their importance, and their value.
It is perhaps in descriptive aesthetics that the contributions of the critic and the philosopher can combine most fruitfully. Just as illuminating criticism in the arts comes out of a highly educated and developed sensibility to the perceptual processes through which that art fulfills itself, theorizing in aesthetics is properly based on a similarly informed perceptual sensibility. These are different but complementary contributions: the one illuminating the particular and specific; the other discerning the patterns, relationships, and meanings that underlie them.
So Ryynänen’s comments are both about descriptive aesthetics and exemplify descriptive aesthetics, thus illustrating the practical utility of doing aesthetics. His remarks are both personal and instructive, delightful and significant. They illustrate how philosophy can enhance our lives at the same time as it illuminates our experience. Ryynänen ends evocatively and brilliantly with an aesthetic description of his PhD defense. It is not science; its object is not cognition, valuable as this may be in its own sphere in gaining historical or technological knowledge. And it is not criticism, with which it is often confounded, isolating, analyzing, comparing, and evaluating the workings of the arts as sociohistorical objects. Important avenues of scholarship though they be, these procedures do not reveal art’s distinctively aesthetic gift. This, I believe, lies in aesthetic description that can only take place from inside the art, not from outside, the view from inside, so to speak, from inside the aesthetic field.
One must sit in Mark di Suvero’s “Ride ‘em” sculptures and move with them and stand in relation to his other massive works.[3] One must enter Yayoi Kusama’s immersive mirror rooms and be surrounded on all sides by multiple self-images extending to infinity. Other mirror room artists explore these experiences in imaginatively different immersive environments. These experiences of sculpture can be supplemented by comparable ones in painting, music, poetry, and music.[4]
What I most admire in Ryynänen’s observations on my work is his sensitivity to the various ways in which the experience of art, and of the aesthetic more generally, implicates and involves the participant. Aesthetic engagement is not only a sensory phenomenon; it may involve bodily participation and a psychological process, together with sensory perception. One contribution writing aesthetics can make is to assist in guiding and articulating aesthetic experience through aesthetic description. Aesthetics has too long focused on the normative; it has been obsessed with judgment. The aesthetician does not have the function of complementing or judging the critic but rather of learning from perceptive criticism and supplying an appropriate conceptual framework to support the critical enterprise. The end point of both criticism and aesthetics is to enable and promote the rich complexity of aesthetic experience, experience that enhances and illuminates the human world.
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In describing the conceptual climate from which my work emerged, Prof. Vassiliou has documented both its independence and its inclusiveness. I have deliberately avoided the temptation to seize on a single distinguishing mark of the many proposals for identifying the aesthetic and of assigning it a unique locus in the artwork. With extraordinary clarity, she discerns the openness of my approach. In my view, the aesthetic is not limited to art, even though I am widely familiar with modes and works of artistic creativity and respond deeply, even passionately, to artworks in various media and from diverse cultures and periods. Because aesthetic value and experience have had such central importance for me, I realized that they are not confined to the arts, but that they are realized in other contexts and conditions. Nature, wild or tamed, is probably the most common setting in which to experience the aesthetic, and certainly from a young age I delighted not so much in gardens and flowers, with which I was not particularly acquainted, as in excursions in the countryside. How, then, to recognize their resemblance in perceptual experience to the arts, along with the distinctiveness and uniqueness of each occasion? That emerged as the overpowering challenge.
This commonality could not be found, I believed, in a single mark, be it form, feeling, attitude, or uniqueness of perception. I was much taken with the openness and primacy of Dewey’s idea of experience and with the refinements introduced by both Husserl’s epoché, that set aside considerations of existence, and the directness of Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with the flesh of the world. The challenge was how to combine these diverse aperçus in an aesthetic of inclusiveness and full-bodied experience. For me, the idea of aesthetic engagement incorporates (if I may say) these features in a way that is open, flexible, and inclusive.
I admire Vassiliou’s historical reconstruction of late twentieth-century aesthetics. She has provided the historical context in which my ideas developed, against which they reacted, and to which they responded. Such historical analysis is invaluable in gaining perspective on work that so diverges from the prevailing fashion, and I am indebted to her for depicting with such insight and clarity the intellectual climate in which I was working. Such vision is possible only in retrospect. Working in the conditions of the times and without clear perspective, one can respond only to the inadequacies one perceives in the work being done. I encountered personally many of the foremost aestheticians to whom she refers, and some I knew. All I respected, to all reacted, and from many I have learned.
It is in describing and characterizing my ideas that I am especially gratified by Vassiliou’s commentary. She has a wide and clear grasp of the historical and conceptual context in which I have worked. It is, at the same time, gratifying to find this background combined with a remarkably accurate and inclusive understanding of the diverse aspects of an alternative aesthetics that is distinctive and even idiosyncratic. Vassiliou recognizes the breadth of an understanding of aesthetics that not only identifies experience that is both distinctive and widespread but at the same time recognizes the breadth of its relevance: its artistic inclusiveness, its social importance, and its political implications. She realizes that aesthetic engagement is equally illuminating in contexts and with objects on different levels of sophistication, accessibility, refinement, and diversity and in diverse cultural contexts. One can hope for nothing more in a commentator.
* * *
It was my good fortune that these three commentators are fine scholars, not only closely familiar with my work but articulate and direct in their reflections. Sometimes in philosophical forums speakers succumb to the opportunity to engage in unbridled criticism, giving vent to their venom. This was farthest from the case with these scholars. Reading their texts, I am deeply impressed by their erudition and by their balanced, constructive appraisals expressed with exceptional philosophical and linguistic skill in a language that is not native. For all this I am deeply grateful.
Arnold Berleant
ab@contempaesthetics.org
Arnold Berleant is Professor Emeritus at Long Island University, the author of nine books in aesthetics, and the founding editor of this journal.
Published on November 14, 2025.
Cite this article: Arnold Berleant, “Aesthetic Engagement, Descriptive Aesthetics, and the Reformation of Aesthetics: Responses to Mäcklin, Ryynänen, and Vassiliou” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Editor’s note: Berleant’s response is based upon the presentations given at the meeting of International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, June 2025. Since Vassiliou presented her comments at the session, Berleant’s response here refers to Vassiliou, although the published paper in this symposium is co-authored by Vassiliou and Bantinaki.
[2] Arnold Berleant, “Duchampian Reflections on Descartes,” in The Social Aesthetics of Human Environments: Critical Themes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 33-42.
[3] See Jonathan Lippincott, “Sculpture in the Landscape: The Art and Life of Mark di Suvero,” The Paris Revie, May 16, 2016. “When you are close to di Suvero’s larger works, standing near or under or within them, they envelop you. From afar, you appreciate the drawing, the architecture, and in a surprising way, the lightness and delicate touch. The sculptures don’t look heavy or straining; they sit gently on the land.”
[4] See “The Reader’s Word,” in Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Temple University Press, 1991), 105-131.