Toward a Sustainable Attitude: Aesthetics, the Arts, and the Environments. Preface to the Special Issue of Contemporary Aesthetics

This special issue of Contemporary Aesthetics is set to investigate the environmental challenges confronting the world from a philosophical and artistic perspective, particularly to overcome the indeterminateness of the term sustainability and its multifaceted nature, which unfortunately falls prey to contrasting world views as evident in climate change denial. So far, the crisis has been addressed primarily with solutions based on technological innovation, rather than those that require significant shifts in attitude and conceptual frameworks. The failure to inspire behavioral change through rigorous scientific communication increasingly fostered interest in the relationship between aesthetics, art, and sustainability, which offers new forms of knowledge production and human action that complement necessary legislative developments and shared international policies. The background of this issue lies in the problematic nature of concepts such as ‘world’ and ‘environment’, as well as in the opposition between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. Considering how human transformations of the Earth system and the climate crisis definitively question the culture/nature and natural sciences/humanities dichotomies, as well as their underlying epistemological paradigms, this issue explores the theoretical and procedural implications of connecting aesthetics and art to sustainability. Two aspects shall be explored, in particular: the first one related to the way sustainability is sensed and understood in different cultural and social contexts, the second one to the way artists may contribute to the debate on sustainability at an experiential and conceptual level.