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Aesthetic Value and Gardens
David Fenner
Abstract
Gardens as an aesthetic form rank high for their capacity to engage aesthetic attenders fully. ‘Full engagement’ may be thought of in terms of an object’s capacity for constituting an aesthetic world a person can temporarily inhabit, a description used by Alan Goldman as he articulates his theory of aesthetic value, one that focuses on depth of perceptual, affective, and cognitive engagement.
Key Words
aesthetic value; garden; gardens; Alan Goldman; subjectivism
1. Introduction
Many early accounts of aesthetic value specify a recipe of sorts of objective properties where if an aesthetic object possesses them, it may be said to be beautiful.[1] Starting with some of the British taste theorists in the eighteenth century, we begin to see theories focused on a subjective response that is produced or occasioned by the object under consideration.[2] Alan Goldman’s account is in this vein.
The value of such works lies first in the challenge and richness of the perceptual, affective, and cognitive experience they afford. Symbolic and expressive density combines here with sensuous feel. From the subjective side, all one’s perceptual, cognitive, and affective capacities can be engaged in apprehending these relations, even if one’s grasp of them is imperfect or only implicit. These different facets of appreciation are not only engaged simultaneously but are also often indissolubly united, as when formal relations among musical tones or painted shapes are experienced as felt tensions and resolutions and perhaps as higher-order or some ordinary emotions as well… When we are so fully and satisfyingly involved in appreciating an artwork, we can be said to lose our ordinary, practically oriented selves in a world of the work…. [It] can engage us so fully as to constitute another world for us, at least temporarily. [3]
While not the central focus of the view, the “constitution of another world” metaphor is a useful bedrock for thinking about the nature of aesthetic value because it intuitively describes a phenomenon many have experienced who have had high-quality aesthetic experiences. This in turn allows us to think about what should go into the constitution of an aesthetic world and, perhaps more importantly, how what goes into such a constitution can be used to both identify and measure the aesthetic value of objects.
The key to Goldman’s view is depth and breadth of engagement. While the account ultimately is about the aesthetic value of objects, recognition of this value must be understood as it relates to the production of a valuable subjective state because, following Hume and Kant, there appears no possibility of mapping a law-like correlation between particular objective qualities and experienced value. This is what formalists up to and including some of the British taste theorists expected and tried to articulate, but Hume showed the unreasonableness of this expectation, yet without jettisoning its objective contribution to the production of the valuable subjective state. Goldman follows in this same line.
Despite the resurgence of formalism in the mid-twentieth century, following literary New Criticism, at that time there was an assortment of subject-focused theories of aesthetic value, or of aesthetic experience, that in turn grounded a view of aesthetic value. George Santayana held that we are always attracted to beauty, and this attraction can be described as a feeling of pleasure; he believed that beauty is “pleasure objectified.”[4] John Dewey held that it is those experiences that are maximally unified that are truly aesthetic experiences; when a moment is sufficient to itself, is individualized, this is an experience. The most valuable aesthetic objects are those that provide the richest aesthetic experience or create most frequently an experience.[5] While it would be a mistake to say that Monroe Beardsley shared this level of commitment to subjectivism, like Goldman, Beardsley identifies subjective states that are produced through attention to aesthetic objects.[6] The subjective focus of Beardsley’s criteria comes out even more strongly in a revised list, constructed two decades after his original list, that includes such subjectively rich states as “felt freedom,” “active discovery,” and a sense of “wholeness.”[7] Roger Scruton, in the late twentieth century, wrote that “aesthetic appreciation involves enjoyment of, or pleasure in, an object. Enjoyment and pleasure occupy a central place in the aesthetic attitude…”[8] With the possible exception of Dewey, each of these theorists has an objective tether for his account of aesthetic experience and aesthetic value, but each identifies the presence of aesthetic value through subjective states that are produced through attention to objects. It is the tether that makes the accounts productivist. Subjective states are produced, or are the result of, attention to objects; the object may be the possessor of the aesthetic value, but we only know that the object possesses the value it does because of the production of particular subjective states.
With regard to Goldman’s “constitution of another world” metaphor, we must realize that no aesthetic object can present a world entirely—worlds are too complex for that—but they can offer subjects the outlines of a world that can then be added to by an attentive subject in ways that seem rich enough to constitute a world the subject might inhabit. Consider experiencing an opera. A complete world cannot fit within the spatial confines of a stage, nor can it fit within the three or four hours of the opera’s duration. Instead, following the suggestions of the contours of the world presented, we fill in what is missing to the extent we need to, so that we can experience the presented world as satisfyingly complete. We do not, for instance, need to see Tosca’s body after she has jumped from the parapet to “know” she has killed herself. We believe the suggested world extends in space beyond the stage, perhaps so far as to constitute a universe. We do not have to imagine that whole universe—we only need to imagine enough of it so that it fits our sensibilities of what is presented being a complete world—and we do not have to invent that universe from whole cloth. Instead, we take cues from the opera and fill in what seems coherent with those cues. The same holds for time. We believe the suggested world exists before the presented libretto, and we believe it exists after.
As technologies advance, artists are able to offer more details of aesthetic worlds, displaying greater realism and filling in what could only be suggested earlier. It might be argued that it is the more adept artist who recognizes that, as technology allows for greater ranges of tools and options, artists have more freedom to instantiate their artistic visions, not less. Yet, on the other hand, one could argue that it is those worlds that require the greatest investment of subjective attention and “filling in” that optimally have the potential of engaging us. In other words, if an artist sketches the contours of a complete world and uses the least amount of suggestion to do it, it could be argued not only that this artist has done a greater thing than the artist who fills in more details but that as one sort of our investment grows—that we must do more work to fill in the detail—then the other sort of our investment grows—that we are more engaged as a result of the first sort of investment.
In the following two sections of the paper, I consider which of these two options seems the more common, finally suggesting that it is the approach that holds that greater engagement—the “constitution of another world”—that is more frequently achieved through the provision of opportunities for greater breadth of engagement that I take to be Goldman’s view. I then go on to suggest that, as aesthetic forms go, The Garden is exceptionally well situated to produce this sort and level of engagement.
2. Less is more
In 1951, Robert Rauschenberg created a series of paintings known as his White Paintings, which are physically simply canvases painted uniformly white. In 1952, John Cage introduced 4’33”, a performance that consists physically of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a group of musicians sitting quietly on a stage.[9] In 1953, Rauschenberg carefully erased a Willem de Kooning drawing, after securing de Kooning’s permission, and called it Erased de Kooning Drawing. In 1963, Ad Reinhardt created Abstract Painting, a canvas painted entirely black with only the smallest variation of hue. In 2021, Salvatore Garau sold his sculpture lo Sono (I Am), a sculpture that despite being (apparently) composed of empty space occupies a five-foot square area. Each of these works presents little with which to engage perceptually—this is apparently the point—and little with which to engage affectively. Most of the attention, if not the whole of it, must be focused cognitively. For those who praise these works—and if these works were not widely discussed and appreciated, they would not have the iconic status they each have—that cognitive engagement is sufficient to make these great works.
Yet the aesthetic world each presents is supremely minimal, if even existent. Descriptions of lo Sono suggest that there may be perceptual aspects to the appreciation of the work; some believe what was left after the de Kooning drawing was erased, the reflective qualities of the various painted canvases mentioned and the ambient noises heard during 4’33” also present some opportunity for perceptual engagement, but these views do not jibe with the bulk of the conversation that has led to these works becoming iconic conceptual works. They are iconic works because they have aesthetic absences, not because they have minimalist perceptualities.[10]
Now, one could make the argument that because these works seem to shun presenting themselves as perceptually engaging that they possess no aesthetic value but only artistic. This may be the case, but to limit aesthetic appreciation to exclusively or primarily appreciation of the perceptual aspects of objects is to sneak some level of commitment to formalism in the back door; given the history of art over the last hundred years, we may not wish to do that. While we may believe that aesthetic appreciation typically starts with appreciation of what is perceptually presented by an object, we may not want to limit our conception of the aesthetic just to that. Each of the examples above present the least suggestion of an aesthetic world; it is easy to argue that the cognitive engagement they initiate can occupy our full attention for some stretch of time. During this time, our focus is largely if not exclusively interpretative—or it is focused on the nature of art, the nature of the world of art, art ontology, the nature of artistic communication, and the like. If we open “aesthetic” to transcend the perceptually-based, we may feel inclined to include these “interpreting-art” experiences as aesthetic.
It may not be possible to construct a list of aesthetic objects the experience of which is exclusively affective in character. If we skip affect-exclusive experiences of romance tales and horror films, we might think of a particularly moving religious experience set in a great place of worship: Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, Lhasa, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Kaaba. Yet none of these examples is as clean as the cognitive-focused art examples above, since the affective response may be driven largely by the richness of the perceptual aspects of the experience. If we think about a religious experience that has a strong emotional resonance outside of a perceptual context, many will not recognize this as a particularly aesthetic experience at all.
Coming up with perceptual-exclusive examples is easier, although coming up with perceptual-exclusive examples that rise to the same level of regard as the cognitive-exclusive examples may take a little longer. In the history of art, presumably there are some set of works of exceptional beauty, where one could argue that appreciation of that beauty is so encompassing that it blocks out all other connections. I am hesitant to offer concrete examples here, though, because of the evocation of competing intuitions. My personal examples are late works of J.M.W. Turner, the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko, and the Henri Matisse cut-outs. I find pure phenomenal engagement with the color-field paintings entirely satisfying and engrossing, as I do the Matisse cut-outs and the sorts of Turners that are always on display in London’s National Gallery.
It may be argued that cognitive-exclusive and perceptual-exclusive engagement does not fill the brief of “constitution of another world,” but if we take that as merely a metaphor for the sort of total engagement that is the focus of Goldman’s account, we may say that cognitive-exclusive and perceptual-exclusive engagement can be at times total. And we may take another step and praise the artists responsible as their work achieves, as an experiential focus, total engagement with less focal breadth than works that engage all three of the areas Goldman mentions. The absence of breadth is occasioned by a presence of depth, and this depth is occasioned by a greater investment of subjective focus.
There are red leather sofas set before the Turners in the National Gallery. I have found myself seated on these sofas for an extraordinary amount of time as compared to the usual amount of time that gallery visitors spend in front of a particular canvas or set of canvases. Something similar is true of my experiences of the Rothkos in the Tate Modern, and my experience of a special showing of Matisse cut-outs at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Washington. Standing is not an option; this is indicative of the level of attention I invest in looking at these works. I speak anecdotally here, but my experience cannot be different from those of others who invest attention to achieve aesthetic experiential depth.
3. More is more
While this sort of “greater investment leads to greater investment” argument seems to have merit, if we look at real world examples of suggested worlds that maximally engage us, we tend to find more evidence and more examples of greater investment in those works of art that provide thickly rich suggestion of thickly alien new worlds.
In 2001, I took my eight-year-old son to the opening of Peter Jackson’s film version of the Fellowship of the Ring, the first of his films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1954 Lord of the Rings. We watched the film in the afternoon, and when we came out of the theater, there was a long line of people waiting to watch the evening showing. Many were in costume. My son, already well prepared to discuss film criticism at that age, began to critique the film—audibly. I rushed us to the car, as I did not want those queued up to hear his comments; I explained to him that when some of these people had read the novels, they entered Middle Earth and some did not come back out. My son’s primary critique of the film was that Tolkien had stolen a good deal of material from J.K. Rowling. I explained the artistic timeline, and that both Tolkien and Rowling had borrowed from a kind of fantasy archetypal catalog. Elves are magical creatures. Trolls are unpleasant, strong, and not bright. Wizards are wise and resourceful. But the point I want to make here is that both Tolkien and Rowling delivered very detailed worlds, each in a plurality of books, and each in turn has developed followings of fans who are deeply devoted not merely to what they presented in their books (and the films that were made from them) but to the constructed worlds themselves. Similar phenomena can be seen in the Star Trek franchise, the Star Wars franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, and the Supernatural television series. In each of these cases, the presence of so much fan fiction, effectively eroding the line between author and reader and, in such cases, effectively throwing into amorphousness the notion of plagiarism,[11] speaks to the depth of the constitution of another world, where those writing fan fiction feel at liberty to share the richness of their visions of these worlds, and where others are happy to read about those visions and have their own visions of these worlds, initially suggested by the originating artists, amplified by these epiphytic fan-writers.
While there are examples, as we have seen, of works of art that provide opportunities of rich aesthetic engagement through only one sort of modality of engagement, these seem more the exception than the rule. My anecdote of occupying the red leather sofas in London’s National Gallery is punctuated by saying that I occupy them for an extraordinary amount of time. While others may join me on those sofas, I have never had an experience where someone sat with me for the full duration of my visit. Visitors get off their feet and, once rested, get back up. While I am sure I am not the only example of such an investment of attention, I believe across the spectrum of gallery visitors I am an anomaly. How much of an anomaly I am may be ascertained further if we were to ask those occupying the sofas for similar lengths of time what they were thinking and what they were feeling. It would not be surprising to learn that their engagement, while primarily perceptual, was also cognitive and/or affective.
Depth of engagement may be more easily reached when the aesthetic object is actually an aesthetic event, one in which we are required to be present for some significant stretch of time, where investment of attention is less an act of will or decision and rather a matter of convention or rules-following. This is the case with the film and television franchises mentioned above. A work of literature, a film, or a performance, such as an opera, keeps us in our seats. But while this sort of convention might encourage the investment of attention, it cannot guarantee engagement. The properties of the object or event are responsible for delivering that which holds focus.
It is the richness of the detail that makes Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films (1972, 1974, 1990, 2020), Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan (2001) such incredibly engaging films. Each director includes a great deal of detail that might have seemed to some critics to border on the fussy or overwrought, but these films stand the test of time with regard to bringing audiences into their worlds and immersing them there. In all these cases, “more is more.”
While I cannot say categorically that Goldman’s tripartite explication of the sort of aesthetic value that may be characterized by transportation to an alternate aesthetic world is exclusively the case, I am comfortable saying that it typically is. Goldman’s account works particularly well when it comes to the aesthetic appreciation of gardens. That examination is on what the rest of this paper will focus.
4. Gardens as absorbing
It may be important to note that even if some gardens are works of art, it is very likely not all are. But this is no worry, since in this paper we are focused on aesthetic value and not artistic value. It may be equally important to note that the following discussion applies to all gardens, from the backyard kitchen garden to Singapore’s 250-acre Gardens by the Bay. This is the case, even though the discussion will favor, for example, destination gardens, gardens we plan trips to visit and the sort a visit to which might occupy a full day.
Every garden is aesthetically appreciable. There is a trivial way this is true: (at least) every (perceptible) object is appreciable from an aesthetic point of view or describable in terms of its aesthetic properties. But with gardens, there is a more robust way this is true: every garden is designed. What separates gardens from agriculture, says John Dixon Hunt, is the sophistication of their designs.[12] A similar point is made by Mara Miller, who says that every garden is designed beyond “purely practical considerations such as convenience.”[13] The “more robust” point is not to say that every garden will render a high-quality aesthetic experience or possess high-quality aesthetic value. There are poorly designed gardens. But every garden will reward to a certain degree aesthetic attention, or, to put it another way, every garden will to a certain degree be aesthetically engaging.
Thus far, we have discussed aesthetic value, following Goldman’s account, as it relates to depth of engagement. But with gardens, we can go deeper than this. Every garden is designed, but it is equally true that every garden is natural. Gardens are amalgams—inseparable amalgams, according to David Cooper[14]—of nature and design. While some approaches to considering the relationship of humans to nature are still dualist and still hold that humans and nature are distinct from one another in some significant way or ways, these approaches are growing stale. Michael Pollan’s book on gardens, Second Nature, is largely devoted to the theme that such conceptual separation is a large part of the environmental problem today.[15] Humans are animals. We may be special animals (ones with moral agency), but as members of the animal kingdom, we are fully natural creatures. We are born; we breathe; we eat; some of us reproduce; we all eventually die.
All gardens are capable of being physically entered. Not all are open to being physically entered by visitors—some gardens have viewing platforms, are meant to be viewed through portals, or in one experimental case meant to be viewed on a screen[16]—but every garden requires tending and so must be enterable by those who tend it.[17] When we enter a garden, we do not leave our animal nature at the gate. We are, in important and fundamental ways, continuous with the nature of the garden. ‘Engagement’ may be a word that hides some separation between the object of engagement and the engaged. So, with a garden it is better to say that as we enter a garden to appreciate it, we are “absorbed” by that garden. We become a part of it.
Gardens as perceptually absorbing. When we visit a garden, our first connection tends to be visual. We take in what we can see of the garden as we enter. We see the vista and then begin to carve up the view into a variety of visual scopes, all the way down to a single flower or leaf. As we move through the garden, our view changes, reframing and resizing. This is what Karl Heydenreich, as cited by Michael Lee, called a ‘mobile frame.’[18] We notice the garden’s patterns and rhythms, its colors and how they interrelate one with another, the enormous number of shades of green, and the range of textures our eyes pick out. We notice how plants are growing and how that meets or defies our expectations. We see the garden’s structure behind the foliage or, if we are visiting in the winter, we see the structure outright. We notice the space—intimate or open, surface or soaring—and the quality of the light—dim, dappled, or full-on. We may see what lies beyond the garden and whether the potential “borrowed scenery” plays a role in the constitution of the garden.
But of course the perceptual experience does not stop there. We hear others talking. We hear birds, bees, frogs, and cicadas. We hear water cascading or babbling. We may hear the “borrowed scenery” of city noises if we are in a garden like New York’s Battery. As we walk, we feel the path: concrete, mulch, uneven steppingstones, gravel, or sand. We feel its straightness or its lack, and the speed of our progress as dictated by the composition and straightness of the path. We feel the flatness of the garden or its rises and falls. We catch our balance as we experience the unsteady ground. We smell the flowers and the foliage, the perfumes of fellow visitors, the spray of water, the scent of food from carts or restaurants, and occasionally the odor of animal scat or decaying wood. We taste the saltiness of a drop of sweat. We sample the produce from the garden (with permission!). We taste the tea, beer, or food being served. Gardens are real places, existing in three spatial dimensions and in time, and so they present the full array of sensory stimulants.
Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay is an excellent case in point.[19] While in this garden, there is nowhere one can be that does not provide sensory stimulation that may border on overload. Not only is there an incredible array of plants, but the human-made structures in the garden that frame and support the plants are in their own right worthy of sustained attention. While it may be that Gardens by the Bay’s central mode of engaging is visual, the facts that it is set in the heart of Singapore and is visited annually by millions means there are plenty of sounds to be heard. And the available smells are certainly augmented by the number of dining opportunities around the Gardens and the fact that it is adjacent to a marina.
Gardens as affectively absorbing. While it is possible to take in a garden without emotionality, this is the exception rather than the rule. It is abundantly more common to feel calm and tranquil as we move through a destination garden, to feel pride as we survey our own gardens, and to feel jubilant as we catch a frisbee or kick a ball. Every garden has a range of purposes it serves. Some of these purposes are definitive of the garden—conservation and study in a botanical garden; production of consumables in a kitchen, “physic,” or allotment garden; respite and escape in an urban civic garden. Some of these purposes are planned, such as strolling or jogging in St James’s Park, and some are incidental to what visitors bring with them—catching up on texts, chatting with friends, feeding the ducks. Each purpose presents some occasion of instrumentality or utility; as visitors achieve their goals, they naturally take satisfaction in doing so. It is odd to find someone unhappy in a garden. Certainly, one can be preoccupied or dealing with bad news, but these are not events caused by gardens (typically—I suppose getting bit by a snake may be a garden’s fault, so to speak). It is much more common to find in a garden a set of affects that are contributory to mental health.[20]
The amount of green space in central London is astounding, as are the number of large-scale parks that make up the bulk of that green space. Even though there may be no absolute way to express its size—are we talking central London, the City of London, greater London?—there is no question that London is a bustling city. Yet if one is in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, or Green Park, the tranquility afforded by the open, uncrowded spaces, dotted with flower beds, sculptures, and ice cream vans, provides a near-perfect escape from urban bustle. While walking their long paths, one may pass another person with the frequency experienced in a village, while the vast lawns in each reinforce the feeling that one is not being tricked into believing they have escaped the city. The tranquility of these parks is real; the effect is the encouragement of tranquility in the garden visitor. There is a tube station in Green Park (or at its edge), and the difference between the experience of being in the Park and the experience of being in the station are worlds apart. While many gardens encourage tranquility, London’s parks and squares achieve this in breath-taking ways.
Gardens as cognitively absorbing.
- Some gardens have representational aspects: The classic Persian garden (the chahar bagh) represents paradise (earthly and heavenly). Japanese-style stroll gardens (kaiyū-shiki-teien) may be said to represent “nature perfected.” And the French gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte may be said to represent “nature controlled.” The gravel or sand in a Japanese-style dry landscape garden (a karesansui garden) may represent water and the standing stones islands. A knot garden of the sort found in the Filoli gardens in northern California may be said to represent a knot.[21]
- Some gardens have expressive aspects: The Gardens at Versailles express the grandeur, majesty, and power of the French monarch. A Capability Brown landscape expresses the paternal relationship of the British gentleman with his land. The karesansui garden at the Daisen-in Buddhist Temple complex in Kyoto expresses, for some, transcendence.
- And some gardens reward interpretative attention with the discovery of meaning: Piet Oudolf’s High Line is populated with perennial plants that echo the wild grasses that took root naturally along the stretch of abandoned train line that today forms the central structure of the garden. The High Line joins many of Oudolf’s designs that celebrate the New Perennial Movement, a movement that focuses on understanding and appreciating the “naturalness” of gardens, their diversity, their constancy, and their movement through the life cycles of their plants. Oudolf’s gardens are rich with meaning in this way.
But, in general, gardens that possess such traits are exceptional. Most gardens are modest in these regards. This does not mean that they do not or cannot be cognitively engaging. Every garden has a design that can be contemplated. Every garden’s various elements can be understood within a form common to all gardens,[22] and so every garden can be “read” interpretatively. We can ponder how the various elements of any garden cohere into a unified whole; the account we might articulate of this unification can be thought of as an instance of discovery of meaning. We take this form-focused approach to works of art when beginning to interpret their meaning(s)— the natural first step in acts of interpretation is considering the interrelations of the object’s properties—and we can adopt this same approach with the garden. The interpretation itself consists of the account or story we tell that linguistically captures the coherence of the garden’s various elements. On occasion, perhaps on many occasions, this story takes the form of mental re-creation of (our best guesses about) the decisions that went into the garden’s design.
As all gardens are natural, they can be understood through science. Cognitivists in environmental aesthetics have been calling for such an approach, at least to wild land, for years.[23] It is not only wild land that may be understood scientifically; it is all of nature, even designed nature. The dynamic properties of gardens—growth, seasonal change, climatic response, flowering-and-fruiting, fading and death—are only perceptible through time. To know these properties, both as properties themselves and as the properties of a particular garden, is to identify their patterns. Science, so claim cognitivists, is the preeminent means, and contemplation of a garden through this lens can occupy one’s full attention for as long as one wishes to attend, or until the garden ends. Yet even if the patterns we observe do not rise to the level of being “science,” we may still appreciate discovery of these patterns and appreciate the expectation of the events the patterns encompass. In these ways, and in the form-focused interpretative way mentioned above, gardens can be fully cognitively absorbing.
Scotland’s thirty-acre Garden of Cosmic Speculation, designed, created, and owned by Charles and Maggie Jencks, is open to the public only one day a year.[24] Charles Jencks, now deceased, is well known as a postmodern architect, and in the Garden he incorporates a variety of designs that cannot but richly and deeply engage his annual visitors. These designs engage perceptually, but what makes them special is the cognitive engagement they engender. Like an M.C. Escher drawing, Jencks’ three-dimensional sculptural and natural forms fascinate the mind. This fascination is sustained as garden visitors work out the meaning of these objects.
5. Conclusion
Those who may claim that gardens cannot be aesthetically appreciated because, if the absorption description is correct, one cannot maintain a disinterested or detached attitude (or psychic distance) from a garden rely on a variety of aesthetic formalism that was last widely embraced in eighteenth-century Europe. But, for those folks, I can retreat to the trivial sense in which at least every perceptible object is aesthetically appreciable. If one must adopt a dualist position of human versus garden, this is of course possible. That is, it is possible to take a disinterested attitude toward a garden for the sake of experiencing it or judging it aesthetically. But why would one want to? Why would one want to settle for a potentially lackluster aesthetic experience when, with but a little openness to the opportunity for absorption, one might have a much more robust experience of an object that is significantly more aesthetically valuable than the object held at arm’s length? Goldman’s aesthetic value account and the “constitution of another world” metaphor that I rely on to characterize deep and meaningful aesthetic value implicitly would counsel us to jettison those approaches that limit the potential of such transport for the sake of a theory.
While it seems possible to develop a depth of engagement with an aesthetic object that is so great it allows us to occupy temporarily the world suggested by this object through attention simply to the object’s perceptual properties, it seems much more likely that depth of engagement as characterized by the constitution metaphor is more commonly and more effectively achieved when, following Goldman, we are engaged not merely perceptually but also affectively and cognitively. Because gardens do not merely engage us but absorb us—natural creatures becoming one with a natural environment—the capacity of a garden to achieve the promise of the constitution metaphor is abundantly heightened.
Gardens as real places provide a full array of opportunities for sensory engagement, so much so that unlike the case with many art and aesthetic objects, we must choose what to focus on, how to set our sensory frames, and to reset them again and again as we move through the space of the garden. Gardens are also typically affectively engaging, with emotional responses appropriate to the purposes of the garden, both designed and accidental, as the garden meets our needs and wants. We typically feel good in gardens, not merely because they meet our desires but because the connection to nature they afford, the aesthetic appreciation of design they engender, and the safety they contextualize these connections within all contribute to our mental and physical well-being. Whether through interpretative activity focused on understanding how the various formal elements of a garden cohere into a unified whole; through taking a scientific view of the garden and its natural elements and processes; through imaging what the garden will look and feel like in the next season, year, or decade; or through allowing ourselves to indulge in fantasies about the garden—imagining the presence of fairies, identifying with the perspectives of the squirrel or ladybug, lying on one’s back and staring at the clouds through the canopy of trees that connect the land with the sky—gardens provide incredible opportunities to lose oneself in cognitive attention.
Few other aesthetic forms—I can think of none—can achieve this breadth of engagement or the depth of engagement as we substitute the arguably more relevant notion of absorption for engagement than can the great garden. A great garden need not be a work of art to present such a level of opportunity for engagement, although perhaps some are, and those that are may interpretatively engage us in the way a Piet Oudolf garden may. A modest garden or a poorly designed garden may not present such opportunities, or not as well, but as a general aesthetic form, gardens present new worlds—real and tangible, virtual and aesthetic—brilliantly.[25]
David Fenner
dfenner@unf.edu
David Fenner is Professor of Philosophy and Art at the University of North Florida. With Ethan Fenner, he is co-author of The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Published June 23, 2024.
Cite this article: David Fenner, “Aesthetic Value and Gardens,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 22 (2024), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Objectivist theories include those of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anthony Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson, with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson becoming more conscious of the role of the subject.
[2] Such as Archibald Alison—with David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Leo Tolstoy closely following.
[3] Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 150-151.
[4] George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York, NY: Collier Publishing, 1961).
[5] John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, NY: Perigee, 1934).
[6] Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981 – originally published in 1958), 527-529.
[7] Monroe Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithica, NY: Cornell University, 1982), pp. 288. This list of aesthetic experiential qualities was first presented in Monroe C. Beardsley, “In Defense of Aesthetic Value,” in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (Newark, DE: American Philosophical Association, 1979), 723-749.
[8] Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London, UK: Methuen and Company, 1974), 134-136, 154.
[9] There is some controversy about whether the performance is about the venue’s ambient sounds or about the performers’ silence. Stephen Davies, “John Cage’s 4’33”: Is it Music?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75:4 (1997), 448-462; Julian Dodd, “What 4′33″ Is,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96:4 (2018), 629-641;
Erik Anderson, “Aesthetic Appreciation of Silence,” Contemporary Aesthetics 18 (2020).
[10] David Fenner, “Aesthetic Absence and Interpretation,” Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 60:2 (2023), 162-175.
[11] Thanks to Linda Howell for her insights here.
[12] John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 9, 14-15.
[13] Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 15.
[14] David Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[15] Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York, NY: Dell, 1991).
[16] A telegarden is a small garden remotely accessed and horticulturally tended by controlling a robotic arm; the first of these appeared at the University of Southern California in 1995.
[17] A point made by Miller.
[18] Michael Lee, The German “Mittelweg”: Garden Theory and Philosophy in the Time of Kant (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 110.
[20] Isis Brook, “Gardening and the Power of Engagement with Nature for Mental Wellbeing,” Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics, 2023.
[21] Filoli | Historic House & Garden | Filoli.
[22] David Fenner and Ethan Fenner, The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024).
[23] Allen Carlson, “Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Objectivity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40:1 (1981), 15-27; Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000); “The Requirements for an Adequate Aesthetics of Nature,” Environmental Philosophy 4:1 (2007), 1-12; Holmes Rolston, “Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature Need to be Science Based?” British Journal of Aesthetics 35:4 (1995), 374-386; Glenn Parsons, “Nature Appreciation, Science, and Positive Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42:3 (2002), 279-295, and “Theory, Observation, and the Role of Scientific Understanding in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36:2 (2006), 165-186.
[24] Garden of Cosmic Speculation – Garden of Cosmic Speculation.
[25] I am very grateful to Contemporary Aesthetics’ anonymous referees for their assistance in improving this article.