The Aesthetic Enchantment Approach: From “Troubled” to “Engaged” Beauty

Abstract

Aestheticians routinely wrestle with the asymmetry between aesthetic appreciation and “natural” beauty. In these pages, I develop the “Aesthetic Enchantment Approach” (AEA), which aims to reduce “aesthetic disillusionment” and to augment aesthetic enchantment, even for “degraded” sites. Its main claim is that stakeholders who work alongside scientists to reclaim environments cultivate environmental melioration, while boosting their wellbeing. AEA thus improves upon scientific cognitivism, since it inspires people to protect degraded sites ordinarily “deemed ugly or unsightly.”