Trying to Make More Sense

(image source)

There are some things from my previous post titled "On Making Sense" that I would like to look at more closely. In the earlier post, I conjectured that order is not what we see but how we see. This is because the human mind "sees" by coalescing coherent phenomena out of the vast amount of sensory data that is relentlessly available to it. It is, therefore, impossible to see incoherence because the act of seeing is, itself, the act of making coherence in the world. We can, however, see things that do not make satisfactory sense, things that leave us wondering what we have just seen. Some of these things, such as a lamppost in a wood or a talking lion, can be explained if we are able to obtain enough information about how these things came to be as they are. Because we understand lampposts, because we understand woods, talking and lions, we need only expand our worldview enough to include a context in which they are able to exist in a previously unknown relationship to each other.

The ability to experience phenomena is all about the relationships among qualities. The experience of particular qualities (color, texture, flavor, size, etc.) in particular relationships (spatial and temporal) equals the experience of a particular phenomenon. Typically, we encounter a world in which these relationships make it easy for us to form a coherent picture. Sometimes, however, the world seems strange. In addition to the odd and unexpected, an experience that has the potential to make sense eventually, there is another category of incoherence that never settles easily into our minds. It is the kind of incoherence we experience when we look at an M.C. Escher sketch in which we are provided with enough qualitative data to recognize certain objects, such as a staircase, but the spatial relationship is all wrong. In this case we are able to see something without making complete sense of it. We are able to see something that could not exist in the world that we typically inhabit. In this instance, our sense-making abilities let us down. (Cubist paintings and Gestalt images, such as the duck-rabbit do not fall into this category because we are able to see, not an incomplete coherence, but two or more kinds of coherence at the same time. This kind of mental flexibility, in my opinion, allows us a peek behind the veil of every day sense-making into a kind of thinking that is less dependent on rigid spatial and temporal relationships. We are able to make more sense out of the images, not less. It is significant that we can only do this when we learn to relax. Rigid expectations of what we will see prevent us from seeing what we do not expect.)

In my previous post, I also said, in so many words, that we participate in the coming-into-being of our world through the act of seeing (coherence-making). I also suggested that the order that is thus created is the source of all beauty. Later, I would like to explore why I believe that such order is real and not merely an ephemeral product of a mind that exists cut-off from what it perceives. For now, however, I would like to examine this idea of beauty. If beauty is an expression of order and order is the mechanism by which we see everything, why are some things more beautiful than others? Why are some things ugly? It occurs to me that, if we look at the various ways a thing can be unbeautiful then we can begin to understand both what beauty is and what our sensitivity to beauty reveals about the subtle and sophisticated ways in which humans are able to relate to phenomena. I am prepared, therefore, to offer a tentative list of the various kinds of ugliness. Before I do that, however, there is one view of what makes something beautiful or ugly that I need to, if not get out of the way, then at least attempt to address in a way that allows us to look beyond it.

Evolutionary psychologists, such as Daniel Dennett, tell us that we have been wired by evolution to find certain traits attractive because the perpetuation of these traits helps to ensure the survival of our species. We are not drawn to mates with signs of disease because such an attraction would inhibit our ability to procreate. We are drawn to puppies with big eyes, however, because this feature reminds us of infants and the desire to care for big-eyed babies keeps our species afloat. It is possible to extrapolate from this theory (and I am not accusing all evolutionary scientist of extrapolating in this way) to suggest that, when we see regularity and proportion in our environment or even majesty in the big, protective mountain range that surrounds our village, what we are experiencing is a hypertrophy of the instinct that draws us to similar features in our mates and fellow members of our tribe.

No doubt, some of this goes on when we perceive beauty but to reduce all notions of coherence, proportion and loveliness to these drives is reductionist and anthropocentric.  It suggests that beauty is, indeed in the eye of the beholder, that it exists in us and not at all in the world. I believe, however, that there is enough of the world in us and enough of us in the world to allow us to judge the world on its own terms, on terms of kinship that do not reduce us to mere products of the world or the world to a mere product of our presence in it.  This is how we are able to discern the difference between what is simply appealing and what is fully beautiful. This is how we are able to see Michelangelo's David as beautiful in the same way as a snow-capped mountain is beautiful, not just in the way a supermodel is beautiful. 

Having said that, I am now ready to share my "ugly list," or at least as much of it as I have been able to devise. The first category is found in both the human and non-human world. The others are found only in art or artifacts.

*First, there is what I would like to call the sublimely ugly. The French expression is belle-laide or "ugly beautiful." (In French, the phrase is usually applied to women who are interesting to look at but not conventionally beautiful.) A phenomenon that is ugly-beautiful may strike terror in our more primitive selves but, if we are sensitive enough, there will be no denying that it has been formed just as it should have been and that a magnificent example of such a phenomenon is magnificent indeed, even if it will not be winning any beauty contests. I recently had a thrilling experience of sublime ugliness while watching an exotic lobster (at least I think it was a lobster) in a fish tank. I could not help shuddering but neither could I look away, so true did the creature and its alien movements seem to its own nature.

*Second, there is the meretricious. The meretricious, the cheap and the tawdry, is not meant to be appreciated but to be used. (It may be objected that religious icons are meant to be used as an aid to contemplation rather than to be appreciated for their own sake and, while in my opinion, this does distinguish icons from other kinds of art, this is a topic for another discussion). Borrowing from the aesthetics of James Joyce (echoed in Joseph Campbell's "The Way of Art"), I can say that a creation of this kind (always human-made) is by its nature either pornographic (designed to awaken avarice or lust in the audience) or didactic (designed to arouse hatred or disgust). Such depictions are poorly rendered. Little sensitivity is applied to the relationships among qualities. Certain features are exaggerated in an effort to stimulate (or over-stimulate) the baser instincts of the user. You might find an example of art in a video game but its presence will be incidental to the game's purpose. You might find an artist who believes he has created something fine when what he has created is, in fact, rather cheap. Such a person has failed to understand that the human relationship with art is not manufactured but ordained. Art does not do what we want it to do. It is what it is.

It should be noted, however, that, just as it is possible to see two images in a gestalt figure, it is possible to use art in such a way that the beautiful is reduced to the meretricious in the mind of the beholder. It is also possible to use the meretricious in a way that encourages a desire for the beautiful. An adolescent, hungry for a sense of something greater, may begin with pulp fantasy novels but make her way to the much finer work of George Macdonald or even Shakespeare when the original material no longer feeds her growing mind. Perhaps this category, more than any other, tends to be mixed and open for debate. We are animals, after all, and we are much more.

*Finally, there is the surreal. In surreal works of art, some relationships among the qualities are deliberately distorted so that we begin to doubt our perceptions. These pieces function as a kind of experiment in our relationship with the qualities that make-up phenomena. Like an Escher drawing, they test the limits of our coherence-making abilities, leaving us with a feeling of deep uneasiness. The surreal fails as art when the audience concludes that all coherence-making is suspect, that if everything does not make sense then nothing does and there is no sense to be made. In all cases, the surreal should be approached with caution. Remarking on the "aberrations of the formally representational arts," Owen Barfield writes that…

in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way experienced the world that he represents [such as when Dali recorded an image that was present in his mind as he woke from a dream]. And, in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move toward seeing the world in that way and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.

Two kinds of beautiful that are sometimes confused with the surreal (and to a lesser extent with the sublimely ugly or the meretricious) are the fantastic and the absurd. The genuinely fantastic and genuinely absurd are not ugly. Such art is true to nature in the sense that the phenomena depicted have what Tolkien called "an inner consistency." The fact that the relationships are unexpected but nonetheless natural (meaning that it seems to us that they could exist), forces us to reach beyond our thought habits to find a deeper order. For those familiar with the Harry Potter stories, it makes it possible for us to become muggles who are able to recognize wizards and witness their magic. 

In the medium of drama, this quality of inner consistency explains why reading Pinter can feel more disturbing than reading Pirandello. A Pirandello play is typically true to its own world, even if the audience (and the characters) are left with the task of figuring out what that truth is. We know that we are in the process of making sense and, even if we never completely manage it, we are not caused to doubt that there is sense to be made. In a Pinter play, on the other hand, the story proceeds as one might expect until an inconsistent element is introduced to make us wonder if we had been right about what we thought had been going on all along.  With Pirandello, we unconsciously assume that inductive reasoning is required to discover the laws of the world of the play.  With Pinter, our minds are set on automatic until they are jarred into conscious activity by an absurd surprise.

I am certain that there is much more to be said about beauty and ugliness and much more to discover about all of the subtle ways we can participate in the beauty of the cosmos. For now, I hope that, if nothing else, it has become clear that beauty is truly present for us only when we begin to wake-up to all that passes before our senses, when we begin to watch ourselves watching. The more we improve our reliability as witnesses to beauty, the more Beauty becomes alive in the world.

 

Suggestions for Further Reading:

"The Way of Art" by Joseph Campbell, available in Inner Reaches of Outer Space
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

"On Fairy-Stories" or "Tree and Leaf" by J.R.R. Tolkien available in The Tolkien Reader