• Against 'Framelessness' in Environmental Aesthetics

Environmental aestheticians, from Hepburn to Carlson, routinely deploy a distinction between ‘framed’ and ‘frameless’ objects of aesthetic experience, associating framelessness with nature and using this association to justify separate methodological approaches to natural and non-natural aesthetics. This paper argues that the framed/frameless distinction should be abandoned entirely.

The central argument is simple but general: to aesthetically appreciate something is necessarily to single it out as distinct from everything else, and in doing so to draw a boundary around it. Any object of aesthetic appreciation is therefore necessarily framed. ‘Framelessness’ is not a property that any object of aesthetic appreciation can possess.

This conclusion is tested against the most intuitively compelling candidates for framelessness. Storms, landscapes, and vast natural expanses are shown to be framed on any plausible conception of boundaries, whether objective or subject-dependent. Nature-as-a-whole, the most resistant case, is shown to be either framed or not genuinely aesthetically appreciable: if finite, it is framed as any other object; if infinite, it cannot be the object of aesthetic appreciation at all.

The dissolution of the framed/frameless distinction undermines the ‘Twin Distinction’ between natural and non-natural aesthetics that depends on it. Environmental aestheticians should abandon framelessness as a theoretical category, and with it the justification for treating natural and non-natural objects of appreciation as methodologically distinct.