Aesthetic Education for the Anthropocene
By Nathaniel Williams
Maryline Robinson, Adolf Portmann and Emily Carr
Free Columbia’s M.C. Richards Program is a site of action research, a college level initiative aspiring toward aesthetic education and contemplative inquiry. It is small and as humble as one would expect, and it is a fledgling, just entering its second year. This essay is inspired by the ongoing work in the program toward a contribution to Mary Caroline Richards’ question of whether one can develop “…practices to strengthen and enliven living images, in contrast to mechanical and life-destroying images? And how may thinking itself be taught in ways that promote life, rather than estrange us from it?”.
Who needs aesthetic education? This archaically colored phrase could easily bring up associations of uselessness, or of the aloof enjoyments of a privileged life. It might be associated with the beauty parlor or with art appreciation seminars at liberal arts schools. Aesthetic education can be understood in a much more comprehensive way, as important for everyone. One reason aesthetic has an archaic sound is that it is derived from a term in ancient Greek. The term meant the perception of things with the senses. In the dentist’s chair and the hospital anesthetics are used to block perception and feeling. Aesthetic experience is as common as memory, dreams or thought, we all have it in some measure. It is the foundation for a trusting, open and intimate experience of life. Our ability to live with the wonderful, special forms of sensible experience, to perceive the particulars of life, is aesthetic. It is also connected to our experience of qualities, moods, and intangibles that emerge as we move through life. It is not only sense perception, but en-spirited, en-souled perception and imagination, connecting us to our natural environment and other people. Aesthetic experience unfolds when we watch a friend approach and feel how they might be doing, through how they walk or stand, how they address us with movements of their voice. Sense perception is suffused with soul and mind. We might find ourselves inadvertently staring at someone, at some feature of their face, and the slightest change in the feature suddenly ignites uneasiness as a mere what becomes a who. We look away. We see a deer, ears stretched up, erect and head alert, our presence leads to the sudden cocking of the legs, ears tilting back, breath quickening; another sentient being. Climbing a northern mountain in autumn, the forest’s bronzes and reds fade into many evergreens as do the sounds of insects and birds; bright lichens and mosses fill the forest floor. The stones are loudest in silence. Water has washed the stones clean along stream beds and white waterfalls rush, sounding like light.
Generally speaking aesthetic education is associated with the arts and humanities today. Yet it is easy to see that aesthetic judgement is a central part of our social and political life, our relation with other beings and the various regions of the earth where we live. Our first associations are misleading. Aesthetic education is not necessarily about privilege, aloof art appreciation courses, beauty school, or even of the humanities. It is more foundational. It is connected with our ability to participate in ecological, interpersonal, social, cultural and political life.
Perceiving with our senses is an activity that can be strengthened or atrophied. It may seem odd to suggest that our ability to unfold rich, pictorially constituted understandings is under threat, when we are increasingly surrounded by images from digital devices and inventions. The digital revolution is a watershed that will increasingly deserve careful attention and critique, but in this essay I follow another path.
The Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann suggested a general approach to exploring aesthetic experience that I will contribute to here. In an address he delivered on biology and aesthetic education Portmann differentiates between two core human capacities. He calls these the aesthetic function and the theoretical function. He suggests recent centuries in the Occident have “emphasized the value of scientific rationality and the valorization of the quantitative, shifting qualitative experience to the margins.” The feats of the theoretical function are all around us, they include the technological revolution we are in the midst of. They stand before us with grandeur and power. We also know they are heavily capitalized, at work defining our current lives and immediate future. In this essay the task is to look toward these powerful tendencies and achievements from a critical perspective, focusing on their anesthetic affects. The following characterizations and critiques of the functional capacity are not an argument for irrationalism, but an argument against hyper rationalism.
Portmann characterizes the theoretical as “…{t}he activity that employs above all the capacity of rational thought, that employs and utilizes scientific analysis, and which leverages mathematics in general. This activity quickly leads the thinker beyond the immediately given world of sense experience and especially loves to dwell in the realm of numbers and quantities. This activity involves striving to transform the qualitatively given world into quantity. Once tones are traced back to vibrations and colors are traced back to wavelengths, a certain contentedness sets in, a victory has been achieved. This is said without the slightest irony, as an attempt at a sincere characterization.”
Living into this orientation we can make some observations ourselves. In the theoretical tendency one can make out a sense for an absolute, calculable coherence. It is a kind of lawfulness that we sense as “behind” normal experience. When we turn toward this coherence, however, it is peculiar in the way it is static and immobile. We feel changes can be made to a part that superficially effect the overall frame. There is a weighted sense of sameness, and a diluted sense of particularity. Re-ordering the whole is of no significance. It is different, but the coherence is the same. The victory that Portmann characterizes above, when qualitative particulars are transformed into the calculable, culminates in a wholeness of this type. It is a certain sense of comprehensive judgment. Perhaps the most important observation we can make, however, is that we are not a unit in the equation, that we ourselves are excluded. This need not be articulated to have an effect on us. There is a widespread subtle, general cognizance of this. We feel we are privy to a phantom of wholeness. How can anything be whole that excludes our being? This exclusion marginalizes the felt value and gravity of much of daily existence. Think of our experience of the vivid connections or tensions with people, ethical energy that animates our actions and goals, or an exquisite impression of the spiders web covered in dew, lit by the morning sun. Our theoretical function engages to transport all of these into quantitative models of coherence and pattern. Generally we sense this process of translation is the process of knowledge, and first person, qualitative judgment as rightfully marginalized along the way. But we feel on this journey of knowledge, we arrive with our theoretical vehicle but we have lost ourselves along the road. Spookily the engine of transport delivers a vehicle with an empty cockpit. Marilyne Robinson offers this characterization in The Absence of Mind, “A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires. And – an important corollary- certain well-qualified others do know them. I have spoken of the suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness and experience among us, and this is one reason it has fallen silent. We have been persuaded that it is a perjured witness.”
The contentedness described by Portmann will be familiar to all of us. In this essay we are not focusing on the joy and achievement accompanying it, instead we can focus on this subtle lonesome hue. Its basic character tends towards defined functions and units that can never correspond with a being who is able to respond and relate to us, or a world in which we could actually live. It excludes our basic experiences of both selfhood and life. This is why there is an unconscious feeling that comprehensive translation of existence into theory of this type cannot result in reconnection. While sensing theoretical interconnection of this type on a sublime scale (say the universe) can awaken reverence and awe, this reverence is at the same time tinny, for its finitude is always only slightly veiled to the heart.
This quasi-wholeness is an engine. If our lives are weighted toward the theoretical, the isolation it can produce makes us thirst for movement, variety and speed. It is the internal combustion of a schism. This spark can lead us to high velocity, high definition images in games, movies and series, social media, general surfing or digital sex sites. Yet in the end, we feel we are building bridges with air. The schism can also lead us to drugs and religion as pathways to escape our one-sided mental life. Drugs take us somewhere blindfolded, only to dump us out sometime later in a ditch with no idea how to make the journey again, bruised and weaker than when we set out. Religion opens up spiritual visions and images for us giving meaning to existence, and often aesthetic ritual, yet it is the rarest of occurrences to feel oneself able to travel from the alter to the forest, and certainly not to the “prestigious” halls of the university. Drugs seem to give us what we want on the terms of the loan shark, while religion often treats us as orphans, even though they cannot take full custody, nurturing us only on Sundays while demanding we renounce our natural parents, with whom we spend the rest of the week.
Despite this discontent, we often sense that our theoretical work is objective, neither good nor bad, actually neutral. This feeling is not arbitrary. It reveals important characteristics of the theoretical function and quantification. Still, when we look at the theoretical function in context we see it is not neutral, that it does privilege certain values. The theoretical function unfolds through quantification, calculation and functional manipulation, and in turn we shape the world in this spirit.
During our daily rounds aesthetic experience flares up, with sustenance, important contours are washed out and alive on the edges, with fissures bubbling with interiority and life. Portmann suggests this is connected to the “… striving of many humble people toward joy and happiness. As educators we have to take most seriously that the most simple and genuine sources of joy are drying out for countless people. The natural foundation for joy, the ability for rich and spontaneous experience, is eroding.” These indigenous capacities do not require techno-prosthetics or chemical crutches. Adolf Portmann characterizes the aesthetic function as, “… leaving the primary impressions of the senses intact, retaining the original, unique, qualities of form and line, color and sound, smell and touch … all spiritual/mental activities have their point of departure in these primary experiences. Whereas the theoretical function works to transcend these qualities and to replace them with measurable units, the aesthetic function engages these primary sources of spiritual/mental life with trust, building on them, creating images and truth.”
Acts of qualitative embodied judgment are minor miracles not based on calculation. In these judgments impulses, melodies and movements are moving. The aesthetic capacity is present in our naïve, attentive, embodied surrender to perception, feeling and understanding. It is an orientation we adopt when we listen to someone through words, tone and body language while suspending definitions. It is hospitable to surprise and revelation, it waits and listens, it anticipates singularity. A bronze rose color on a book cover opens into a space of contentment, warmth and kindness while the dark brown of the decaying black walnut shell in late August opens into a vast, sublime and earnest field. The white pine, surrounded by maples and oaks, makes an impression combining ocean spray and feathers, light and delicate, festive and noble. The Silhouette of the cedar trees in the north country suddenly reveal a gentle and introspective atmosphere set against the bodies of hemlock. These dynamic perceptions can be intensified into works of art. Charles Burchfield was want to compose word pictures on the back of his paintings. On August 12, 1917 he wrote, “THE AUGUST NORTH: In August, at the last fading of twilight, the North assumed to the child a fearful aspect (that colored his thoughts even into early manhood). A Melancholy settles down over the child’s world; he is as if in a tomb. He thinks all his loved ones are gone away, or dead; the ghostly white petunias droop with sadness; un-named terrors lurk in the black caverns under bushes and trees. As the darkness settles down the pulsating chorus of night insects commences, swelling louder and louder until it resembles the heart-like beat of the interior of a black closet.”
There is something epiphanic about this form of judgment, wherein the distinct feeling of comprehension unfolds and flashes up with a sense of unbounded life. There is a tendency toward wholeness, yet one that is open and qualitatively mobile. Compared to the quasi-wholeness of the theoretical function, these strike us with life, subtle delicacy and sublime drama. Art can possess these tendencies in an intensified portion. If we are accustomed to moving through with a theoretical attitude, we pass by so many possibilities of judgment. We may, however, find ourselves deeply struck at some point by a simple work of art. Works of art have traditionally been shaped with a special care for perception and pictorial power. Images, moods and ethical movements are invited and tended to as active presences. The artist greets them with hospitality, and makes room for them.
Kanō Tan'yū, Landscape in Moonlight 166
Water emerges, foreground, yet a movement moves from top to bottom. The light of the sky is also a broad field of moving moisture and clouds, and the moisture opens the back of the mountain that threatens to close itself off. A boat is on the water where we float. The parts of this world transform into one another, all receiving themselves from the greater whole. The parts are not strictly separated and defined, yet they are specific. They pass into one another in an imaginative circulation of transformation. When we focus on a part, it is never severed from the whole. Art, as illusion, is lifted out of the “real” yet it feels intimately connected to reality. Cheng, the Sinologist, suggests a painting teacher leads a student to “… the creation of an organic composition in which the full embodies the substance of things and the empty the circulation of the vital forces thereby joining the finite and the infinite, as in Creation itself.” Chan art is not a definitive orientation, we can find kindred approaches in Burchfield’s practice and in the works of Cezanne and Emily Carr. These artists participated with their living environments toward the emergence of these vital artifacts and images.
There is an epiphanic dimension to aesthetic judgment, yet images are connected through rhythms; they can make a strong impression and then recede, only to come again changed. One can feel one “knows” a work of art after one encounter, but this is a habit taken over from the theoretical attitude that possesses truth. We may dwell on a dazzling echo, but we will find that the notion of our possessing a picture empties it. This is a remarkable characteristic of being alive, of making visitations. We can think of Cezanne’s attempt to capture his living motif, which he could never capture but only encounter, leaving traces of a face as a result.
This is all too easy with art. We need not fight to recognize these experiences. We still look at them like Nietzsche’s leafy oasis in the desert, they make life tolerable. But what of the desert? The all-powerful habits that relegate aesthetic judgment to the arts and humanities and theoretical judgment to the sciences need to be challenged. Aesthetic judgement, a misfit figure in science, has increasingly been shown the door when trying to attend the academy. Portmann describes how the naturalist who approaches the world aesthetically has come to be seen as an awkward ancestor of today’s scientist. This is deeply concerning when we think that it is the sciences that we increasingly turn toward to establish our connections to our natural environments. “The natural forms that surround us are a treasure chest of riches, yet how few sense the joy awoken by the variations of autumn’s colors, joy that can be ignited by one single maple in a city. How few know of the source of joy that is generally available in the fullness of leaf forms, of fruits, the flight of birds and their song? Who notices that every mother of pearl setting of the sun is a festival, every glance through the sunlit yellow leaves of the beech tree into the cool blue sky a drama, that from these simple joys of perception it is possible to ascend to dizzying imaginations of worldly experience?” Do we practice science in a way that we can experience the earth as a treasure in this sense? Or is it simply a “natural resource” to be understood and used in the spirit of calculation, control and domination? What kind of natural science might counteract this anesthetic tendency?
J.W. v. Goethe, Mary Caroline Richards and Craig Holdrege
Throughout his prolific career Portmann pioneered a research method to expand empiricism using aesthetic judgment in biology. He realized that if you are always looking for functions when you try to understand elements of an organism mysterious facets of their existence are rendered invisible. To look at the forms and movements of animals as expressive, pictorial presentation, requires suspending the functional approach and employing aesthetic apprehension. This reveals what he called the “expressive display” in nature. Aesthetic judgment reveals interiority and sentience. He articulated a distinction between the open and visible formations of the body that required this approach, as opposed to the internal and hidden, such as internal organs. This empirical approach moving between the dynamic of the physical and interiority has the effect of reclaiming a portion of those experiences that aesthetic judgment can offer us with full consciousness. The gravity and reverence of Portmann’s writings on animal’s leads to a realization that sentience is a foundational and observable mystery of our existence. Through this aesthetic method animal sentience is imbued with the gravity of the real and brought out of the epi-phenomenal shadows (or perhaps it is us who are brought out of our abstracted separation). It ushers the sentient life of animals back into the universe, and shows how mysteriously sentience is interwoven with the formation of certain facets of the physical body.
More recently Craig Holdrege has developed filial investigations in biology, building on Goethe’s delicate empiricism. These culminate in aesthetic ties to organisms through the method of “portrayal”. Holdrege’s studies involve careful empirical tending to the parts of organisms with an eye for how they express the life of the whole. Each part is not closed off as a fixed function that is thought of as a specialized wheel in a machine, but expresses the whole in a unique way. What is remarkable in Holdrege’s work is how he turns towards parts without losing the background of context and wholeness. He shows that just as we can focus on an element in a painting, or a refrain in a piece of music, while sensing its embeddedness in a whole, there are biological research methods that attain the same. These methods are disciplined and distinct even while related to artistic appreciation and creativity.
Both Portmann and Holdrege draw significantly from Goethe and his orientation in science. Goethe, famous for his literary achievements, saw his scientific work as more significant. He occupies an important position in the history of phenomenology. The foregoing may prepare us for a glimpse of Goethe’s importance. But we have to push back against the conventions and habits of the “two-cultures” that seem to place the natural sciences and the humanities in opposing worlds. Without effort on our part to understand aesthetic knowledge practices in the natural sciences we are bats in the midday sun. Goethe’s work did not lead to “theoretical” explanation in the sense we have described above as theoretical, but to aesthetic theorems. His search for “primal phenomena” involved developing aesthetic judgment into scientific insight. Unlike artistic activity, Goethe’s scientific orientation involved creating long series of sense perceptible observations and experiments that culminated in phenomenal theory, or in the words of Arthur Zajonc, facts as theory. Theory’s culmination was perceptible, yet not as a case to be explained by a general rule. In physics his color theory still stands out as a watershed moment, where a science that can lead to understanding while cultivating qualitative connections to our own experience emerges. Georg Maier’s research in optics offers a more recent example of this scientific culture in physics.
We know today that this is not only about personal joy or a “romantic” view of nature. Our moment reveals countless ways we are destroying the foundations of life and we quickly come to ask how far the ecological crisis is at root a cultural crisis? I am convinced an expanded notion and movement for aesthetic education is one part of the solution we require. I once took an undergraduate level class in Environmental Science wherein the author referred to ecology and the “Wisdom of Nature”. In the context of the textbook, that contained nothing but models of “mechanisms”, the sad impression this term made on me is unutterable. While there are obvious reasons that theoretical culture is most at home in the natural sciences there are increasingly obvious dangers to its hegemony. We understand that we are interdependent as beings and we share a moment on this planet that requires a wisdom of the particularities and existential interdependence of our existence, which our theoretical culture cannot offer.
Aldo Leopold, of particular importance to the ecological movement in the USA, once wrote: “All I am saying is that there is also drama in every bush, if you can see it… When enough men know this, we fear no indifference to the welfare of bushes, or birds, or soil, or trees… We shall then have no need of the word conservation, for we shall have the thing itself.” Here Leopold presents the idea that our ethical action is connected to the quality of our connection to our habitats. Our awareness of our natural environment, largely informed by our theoretical culture and muted by our technological life circumstance, is knowledge numb to the terrestrial that can be held dear. In a decisive moment for our limited and interdependent planet we live in thoughts of infinite translation as calculation. We find ourselves at the peak of a legacy of a theoretical culture that can be traced back at least 500 years to the continent of Europe. It has worked for centuries to translate qualities of experience into quantitative fields of calculation, subtly tending toward domination, control and alienation. This is now our superpower, looming over our increasingly atrophied aesthetic capacity, when it is the latter we need more than ever in natural science and our practical ethical lives. If the ecological crisis is going to be faced voluntarily and collectively, and not through ecological or public health tyrannies and dictatorships, there is a significant task at hand- The expansion of the notion of aesthetic education to include the natural sciences, and its energetic and widespread implementation.
1 Adolf Portmann, “Biologie als Aesthetische Erziehung” in Biologie und Geist. (Suhrkamp, 1968). His address has only grown in significance. In this essay I follow his lead in making a general distinction between theoretical and aesthetic capacity, though I develop this along different paths.
2 Ibid. 250.
3 Ibid. 248.
4 Rudolf Steiner develops a powerful characterization of this unconscious feeling in an address given on January 19th, 1924, published in the collection Anthroposophy and the Inner Life: An Esoteric Introduction (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2015).
5 Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Yale University Press, 2010), 60.
6 See the first part of Hans Jonas’s Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Prentice-Hall, 1974)
7 Adolf Portmann, “Biologie als Aesthetische Erziehung”, 256.
8 Ibid. 246.
9 François Cheng, The River Below (Welcome Rain, 2000), 109.
10 Adolf Portmann, “Biologie als Aesthetische Erziehung”, 256.
11 See Craig Holdrege, “Doing Goethean Science.” Janus Head 8, no. 1 (2005): 27–52, The Flexible Giant: Seeing the Elephant Whole (Perspectives 2. Ghent, New York: The Nature Institute, 2005) and The Giraffe’s Long Neck: From Evolutionary Fable to Whole Organism (Perspectives 4. Ghent, New York: The Nature Institute, 2005).
12 Arthur Zajonc. “Facts as Theory: Aspects of Goethe’s Science.” In Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, edited by Frederick Amrine and Francis J. Zucker, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub. Co, 1987).
13 Georg Maier, An Optics of Visual Experience (Adonis Press, Hillsdale, NY. 2011)
14 Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God: And Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 263.