Rethinking Aesthetics

The Role of Body in Design

Ritu Bhatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135014001
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Rethinking Aesthetics is the first book to bring together prominent voices in the fields of architecture, philosophy, aesthetics, and cognitive sciences to radically rethink the relationship between body and design. These essays argue that aesthetic experiences can be nurtured at any moment in everyday life, thanks to recent discoveries by researchers in neuroscience, phenomenology, somatics, and analytic philosophy of the mind, who have made the correlations between aesthetic cognition, the human body, and everyday life much clearer.

The essays, by Yuriko Saito, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Richard Shusterman, among others, range from an integrated mind-body approach to chair design, to Zen Buddhist notions of mindfulness, to theoretical accounts of existential relationships with buildings, to present a full spectrum of possible inquiries. By placing the body in the center of design, Rethinking Aesthetics opens new directions for rethinking the limits of both essentialism and skepticism.

PART ONE

role of aesthetic response in everyday life

1

everyday aesthetics of embodiment

Richard Shusterman

PHILOSOPHY AND THE ART OF LIVING

America’s most important and inspirational transcendentalist thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, have largely been neglected by academic philosophy and relegated to the status of merely literary figures. One reason for this marginalization may be their advocacy that philosophy is more importantly practiced as a deliberate way of life concerned with self-improvement than as a solely academic enterprise. As Thoreau most pointedly put it, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.”¹ Both resisted the restriction of philosophy to a mere academic subject of the pure intellect that is essentially confined to the reading, writing, and discussion of texts. If Emerson recognized that any such “life is not [mere] dialectics” and that “intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity,”² Thoreau later more explicitly explained: “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”³

This insistence on the practical dimension of philosophy was an inspiration for later pragmatist philosophers such as William James and John Dewey, whose exemplary path has guided my own efforts. If Pragmatist Aesthetics and Practicing Philosophy offered arguments for reintegrating aesthetic principles into the ethical, practical conduct of life, these ideas were already prefigured in Emerson and Thoreau’s works.⁴ “Art,” says Emerson, “must not be a superficial talent” of “making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are” but “must serve the ideal” in inspiring and remaking men and women of character.⁵ Thoreau provides a still more explicit formulation:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.⁶

If in Body Consciousness (and prior writings) I sought to establish a field of somaesthetics that included practical bodily disciplines to enhance our experience and performance while increasing our tools for self-fashioning, I could again look to Thoreau as a prophetic forerunner:⁷

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.⁸

In this essay I want to go beyond these points already underlined in my earlier books and instead consider another important way in which Emerson and Thoreau characterize philosophical living that has been largely overlooked in their theories, perhaps because it seems so simple that it appears inconspicuous: to live philosophically means living in a waking rather than sleeping state. To explore what this richly ambiguous idea signifies, I will examine how Emerson and Thoreau deploy it, while noting some of its major uses in the history of philosophy. But to give this idea (which is also an ideal) a more concrete and contemporary exemplification, I will discuss how awakened life contributes both to the aesthetic enrichment of everyday experience, if not also to spiritual enlightenment. I will draw here on my personal experience of awakened living in a Japanese Zen cloister.

First, however, as background to examining the meaning of awakened life to Emerson and Thoreau, and the meaning it had for me in my experience of Zen living, we should recall some of the other major orientations in characterizing and pursuing the philosophical life. At least three key Western conceptions of philosophical living can be traced back to Plato. If the Apology presents Socrates’ philosophical life in terms of the Delphic quest for self-knowledge and for the right way to live an examined life that would benefit both self and society, Plato, in other dialogues, offers other models. In the Crito, Gorgias, and the Republic, he compares the philosopher’s role to the physician’s. As the latter cares for the body’s health, so the philosopher cares for the soul’s. But as the soul is immortal and nobler than the body, Plato argues, so philosophy should be seen as the superior practice. This medical or therapeutic model of caring for the soul’s health was highly influential in ancient philosophy, and has been convincingly explained by Pierre Hadot (among others), who has also highlighted its use of spiritual exercises to serve the soul’s health.

In the Symposium (198c–213d), Plato sketches another model of the philosophical life that I have described as more aesthetic than therapeutic. Love’s desire for beauty is claimed to be the source of philosophy, and the philosophical life is portrayed as a continuous quest for higher beauty that ennobles the philosopher and culminates in the vision of the perfect form of beauty itself and the knowledge to give birth with beauty to “real virtue.” Plato describes this life of beauty as “the only life worth living,” making the philosopher “immortal, if any man ever is.”⁹ To recommend the philosophical life in terms of beauty, harmony, attractive nobility, or innovative creative expression is to advocate what I call the aesthetic model of philosophical living, and in Practicing Philosophy I have elaborated its contemporary expression in the works of philosophers as diverse as Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Dewey. From the passages cited above, we can also see Emerson and Thoreau as endorsing such an idea of an aesthetically noble art of living in which the subject seeks to shape himself and his environment into an attractive form “worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.” Now, however, let us examine their injunction to live not in terms of remaking oneself, one’s experience, and one’s surroundings with greater beauty and attractive nobility, but rather to simply live one’s life in a waking state.

PHILOSOPHY AS AWAKENED LIFE

If Emerson, the older mentor, leads the way with richly poetic suggestiveness, Thoreau is more detailed and systematic in elaborating this model of philosophical living as wakefulness. Emerson’s famous essay “Experience” begins with this theme: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.”¹⁰ Emerson’s message is not addressed to the few literal sleepwalkers but to the majority of us whose conduct of life (our steps in the series that constitutes our path in life) is done not in a properly wakeful state, so that when we do wake at a particular step in time, we do not really know where we are and where we are going. Living in a state of sleep is a potent metaphor for the unexamined life that Socrates opposed to the life of philosophy. Even when we think we are awake “now at noonday” when the light is brightest, Emerson continues, “we cannot shake off the lethargy” of our somnolent consciousness.¹¹ “Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception.”¹² Thoreau echoes this complaint in his critique of common sense, asking, “Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.”¹³ We fail to see things as they really are with the rich sensuous resplendence of their full being because we see them through eyes heavy with conventional habits of viewing them and blinded by stereotypes of meaning. Such habits of seeing, like other habits, have certain advantages of efficiency and are thus useful at certain times. But if we allow these habits to overwhelm and displace real seeing (as they will tend to do, since habits are inclined to reinforce themselves), then they will miserably impoverish perception and experience while substituting our vision of the truth with illusory stereotypes that common sense takes for the ultimately real. “By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows,” Thoreau complains, “men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.”¹⁴ Philosophy, however, can provide a means of reawakening us so we can see things more clearly, experiencing them more fully than we can in a state of slumber in which our eyes are closed, our senses dulled, and our minds either blank or obscured by dreams.

The concern with breaking humankind out of a slumbering dream state is a familiar topos in philosophy, both East and West. As the ancient Chinese Daoist Zhuangzi wondered whether he was a philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was the philosopher Zhuangzi, so Descartes just as famously raised the illusion of dreams in the skeptical argument of his “Meditation I,” arguing that though seemingly awake, and moving his body parts, he has often been deceived by dreams so that he feels “there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.”¹⁵ Still later, and in a different register than dreams, we find Kant praising Hume for arousing him from his dogmatic slumbers and thus prompting him to develop his critical philosophy. Here sleep is not so much a dream state but a state of uncritical belief and action that is usually identified with a waking state but which is not truly or fully awakened to a condition of perceptive, critical acuity. The notion of awakening to a clearer, critical awareness of the nature of things is also extremely central to the philosophy of Buddhism. The name Buddha in fact means “the awakened one” in Sanskrit (derived from the root “budh,” denoting to awake, arouse, or know), and it was given to Siddhartha Gautama to express not only the fact that he too awoke from the dogma and illusions of our conventional beliefs to a clearer awareness of the human conditions of suffering, of false ego consciousness, and of impermanence, but also to express the ways to escape from this suffering through precisely such heightened awareness of those conditions. Here being awake means being more aware than one normally is in one’s waking hours, and the theme of mindfulness or intensified awareness remains extremely central to the Buddhist tradition.¹⁶

Thoreau pursues the same idea in his advocacy of early rising and his praise of morning because it is “the awakening hour.”¹⁷ In morning “there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.”¹⁸ Awakening means waking up to a higher consciousness than we have in ordinary daily and nightly thought and action; it is awakening “to a higher life than we fell asleep from.”¹⁹ Night, Thoreau explains, has its value in preparing us for such awakening. “After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.”²⁰ Quoting the Vedas that “All intelligences awake with the morning,” Thoreau insists that this morning atmosphere of awakening is not a matter of chronological time but can and should be kept in one’s spirit at all times. For the mind “whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say … Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”²¹

Emerson, in his essay on “History,” praises the artist for “the power of awakening other souls” while likewise affirming that ethically “nobler souls” perform the same function, because a noble character “awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses.”²² Echoing the claim that art and ethics have the power to awaken us to higher life, Thoreau links this power to the spirit of morning: “Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes … are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise,” in the spiritual (rather than merely chronological) sense of morning that Thoreau urges.

“Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep,”²³ Thoreau further insists, as the idea of awakening suggests the ethical effort of overcoming the agreeable lethargy or comfortable laziness associated with sleep and its reclining position. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, makes this point quite clear, likening his stubborn habit of fleshly lust to a seductively pleasurable sleepiness that is difficult to shake off.

I was held down as agreeably by this world’s baggage as one often is by sleep; and indeed the thoughts with which I meditated upon You were like the efforts of a man who wants to get up but is so heavy with sleep that he simply sinks back into it again. There is no one who wants to be asleep always—for every sound judgment holds that it is best to be awake—yet a man often postpones the effort of shaking himself awake when he feels a sluggish heaviness in the limbs, and settles pleasurably into another doze though he knows he should not, because it is time to get up. Similarly I regarded it as settled that it would be better to give myself to Your love rather than go to yielding to my own lust; but the first course delighted and convinced my mind, the second delighted my body and held it in bondage.²⁴

Intellectual achievement, Thoreau maintains, likewise requires awak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Image Credits
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Role of Aesthetic Response in Everyday Life
• 1 Everyday Aesthetics of Embodiment
• 2 Dewey’s Big Idea for Aesthetics
• 3 Attention and Imaginative Engagement in Marcel Breuer’s Atlanta Public Library
• 4 From Buildings to Architecture: Construing Nelson Goodman’s Aesthetics
• 5 The Extended Self: Tacit Knowing and Place-Identity
• Part Two Modes of Aesthetic Response: Tacit Perception and Somatic Consciousness
• 6 Somatics and Aesthetics: The Role of Body in Design
• 7 The Moral Dimension of Japanese Aesthetics
• 8 Traditional Knowledge for Contemporary Uses: An Analysis of Everyday Practices of Self-Help in Architecture
• 9 Environmental Embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, and Bill Hillier’s Theory of Space Syntax: Toward a Phenomenology of People-in-Place
• 10 Mental and Existential Ecology
• Index