The Cosmology of Beauty; Or, Confessions of a Recovering Modernist

The following remarks were presented at the NESEA Building Energy Conference, March 15th 2007 Boston

§1. In a time of staggering, endless industrial growth, new breakthroughs in our scientific understanding of nature, value, meaning, and consciousness are creating a conceptual revolution—a revolution in how we understand and answer the fundamental and timeless questions about human existence: What is true? What is just? What is wealth? What is real? What is beautiful? As a full-scale scientific and philosophical revolution, sustainability is also overturning our ideas about knowledge, stirring up our ideas about the relationship between natural science and religion, between economics and ecology, and between art and engineering. Except for extreme gadget lovers, everyone involved with the movement believes that technology is not enough, that a cultural transformation is also required to ameliorate our current path of environmental catastrophe, a systematic change in behavior mediated by a new understanding of our relationship to nature and natural systems.

§2. Beauty is a concept especially ripe for transformation by this paradigm shift in knowledge. This is because our perception of beauty is related closely to our understanding of nature, of reality, of what it means to have a mind or be conscious, and to our ideas about what value is and where it comes from. As such, anyone feeling that clean energy technologies need to be presented to conventional culture within a new vision of nature and mind could benefit from rethinking their ideas about beauty. I what follows, I offer a few ideas for doing just that.

§3. E. F. Schumacher has described modernism as having an autistic understanding of nature. What I would like to do is to point out several key assumptions we make in thinking about our experience of beauty from a modernist perspective, and then to suggest how these assumptions are being undermined by new breakthroughs in the scientific understanding of form and nature. This will allow me to sketch out a new view of the nature of beauty that I personally find to be very exciting.

§4. Consider the aesthetics of wind farms. These structures elicit sharply contrasting aesthetic responses from viewers. The nimby response (not-in-my-back-yard) to wind farms asserts that they are a) ugly, and b) are so because of their industrial look. The aesthetic response to wind farms asserts that they are a) beautiful, and b) are so due to their ecological rationality. Are these simply subjective preferences, or are they conflicting perceptions of the nature of form? The question is important, because if what is at stake is simply the pleasure or displeasure of human spectators, then there is no objective truth of the matter. From that perspective, the experience of beauty is scientifically meaningless, in the sense that it offers us no deeper information about environmental structure. On this view, beauty is something in the head, in the ‘eye of the beholder’ as we habitually say, and therefore tells us nothing about the world, only about how the world affects our visual system about mind-brain. In contrast, if these aesthetics responses are in fact perceptions of different aspects or levels of structure, they can be understood as important sources of information about the larger significance of what we are looking at. Then there is something objective to argue about regarding the appearance of the wind farm, something to rationally discuss and to attain consensus on.

§5. In a straightforward way, these two possibilities (beauty as internal, subjective, unreal versus beauty as metaphysical, objective and subjective both, and realer than real) and how we understand their relationship, is mirrored in the words cosmetic and cosmological. The etymological connection between the words cosmetics, cosmos and cosmology reveals a continuous semantic slide, from the least to the most metaphysical understanding of beauty, from the concept of adorning to giving order to the world, to the idea of an ordered whole of world, to the idea of a study of that wholeness of the world. The cosmology of beauty tries to better understand the connections between these concepts. It understands ornamentation as a higher elaboration of a universal process of becoming. Vice versa, it considers evolution as a process of increasing harmonization through the working out of patterns of relatedness. Ornamentation is a way in which the relations intrinsic to different aspects of space/time are drawn in, made explicit, made self-aware.

§6. When we believe that beauty is just about cosmetics, and that cosmetics is trivial because it is about making things look nice, we are saying that beauty does not really exist, because it is really just ‘in the eye of the beholder.’ And if all I mean when I say ‘The tree is beautiful’ is that I like the tree or that my perception of the tree gives me pleasure, we understand beauty to have no objective relationship to the tree. It is something mental, something in my head, not a part of the tree like bark or leaves. Why do we assume that the beauty of the tree is as much a part of the tree as its bark or leaves? If you say that the beauty is not a part of the tree because it depends on my eyes seeing it, then you would have to deny that the tree’s leaves are a part of the tree since they depend on sunlight in order to exist.

§7. We are so accustomed to thinking of value as subjective, as a mental entity in the head, that it is very difficult to take our experiences of beauty at face value. How could beauty be part of the world rather than a subjective quality that is somehow projected onto the world by my human interests? How indeed! Like the Copernican Revolution which started the modern scientific revolution, the ecological revolution we are currently living through involves a jarring breakdown of human egoism. With Copernicus, we lost the idea that we inhabited the cosmological center of the universe, that everything revolved around us. With the sustainability movement, we are being disabused of the idea that the only kind of value, meaning and purpose are human value, human meaning and human purpose. This is a very fortunate development, since the assumption, for example, that land (or natural resources generally) only has value if it is valued by a human being for human purposes is a root cause of our environmental calamity and genocidal cultural tendencies. Theoretically and psychologically motivated self-centeredness in western accounts of value and ethical significance has tended to blind thinkers to the reality that value and ethical meaning are intrinsic to the natural world itself, albeit in ways which are deeper and more mysterious than human experience often assumes.

§8. For instance, it is a modernist assumption about value that human needs and interests are the basis for politics and supply the necessary normative content to guide economic development. This is coded within our American political philosophy as the idea that the purpose of government is to secure the rights of individuals, defined as human beings, and the idea can be traced back at least 10,000 years to the beginnings of totalitarian agricultural practices that launch the project of western civilization. But ecological science, together with the evolutionary perspective on life, have now started to reveal deeper conditions for the flourishing of life. Human beings cannot flourish and survive on earth by systematically sacrificing the long-term viability and coherence of the natural systems upon with all life depends.

§9. There is a coherence to natural systems, a deep process of unfolding wholeness perceivable at every level of scale within the natural world, that it is good for us to support. The more we understand the processes within nature that maintain and extend the wholeness of the world, the more do we understand the larger ecological meaning of purpose, of meaning, of value and of consciousness. To make this more specific, what I would like to do is to discuss what I think is wrong with the modernist view of beauty, from the standpoint of some new views about what life is and what form is that are emerging from reflections on our environmental condition and the epistemological failures that have given rise to it – failures of knowledge. A new metaphysical system – a radically innovative scientific theory of form - has been developed by the complexity scientist and architect Christopher Alexander is extremely helpful in thinking through these issues and the following discussion of wholeness is borrowed from his framework.

§.10. So consider the wind farm again, and distinguish – as modernists are trained to do – the subjective from the objective side of the experience. On the subjective side, there is the experience inside the mind-brain of the perceiver. On that side is all of the good stuff: the meaning, the value, the judgment, the consciousness of the wind farm, the interest in whether the wind farm is beautiful or exists at all. The self is located on the subjective side. On the objective side, there is the physical structure of the wind turbines, their color and shape, the surrounding earth, trees, power cables, whirling blades, wind, solar energy, carbon emissions, steel and oil. All of this objective stuff has no soul, no inherent value or purpose or awareness. In the objective world, there is no self, there’s nobody home there. This makes the modern world a very lonely place, often felt as alienation, a craving for belonging, but for a kind of belonging that is metaphysically ruled out by basic modern assumptions about what it means to be real.

§11. So if we consider the objective side of wind farms, we find these highly functional, industrially-looking creations. Some people love them because they look like modernist sculptures: pure, stripped down, exhibiting a machine-like efficiency of form. Others hate them because they look like modernist sculptures. But not just modernist sculptures, but modernist artifacts generally; that is, industrially-produced structures embodying a functionalist aesthetic.

§12. Modernist aesthetics is fixated on the idea of functionality. There is a famous story about Marcel Duchamp seeing an airplane propeller at a Paris Air show, falling in love with its form and proclaiming the end of modern sculpture. Form follows function means: beauty is a quality that indicates a utility or efficiency of the form as a means to an end. Functionality is enhanced by maximizing efficiency. That is why the enemy of functionalism is ornamentation. Functionalism is the aesthetic of the tool and of the machine, and it embodies something good (humanism) and something evil (anthropocentrism) about our modernity. Given a functionalist perspective, industrial structures are often perceived as beautiful. So why is it that our view of them changes when we start to experience the devastating consequences that industrial structures and processes are having on natural systems? I used to think that some cars were beautiful, largely for functional-modernist reasons, but now that I understand the ecological calamity of automobility as a global mass transit system, I can only perceive them as ugly, despite their precision engineering.

§13. My view is that what is going on with the clash between nimbys and aesthetic appreciators of wind farms is that each one is caught up in certain modernist ideas but also has a deeper sense of what is at stake. The nimby doesn’t like to see industrial structures in otherwise untouched nature, while the aesthetic appreciator either doesn’t mind so much or even likes the look. But each side is also affected by a feeling that there is another kind of order in the world, and that industrial infrastructure can have positive but also hugely negative interactions with nature. While the nimby wind appreciator is sensitive to the local wholeness which the wind farm might be displacing and de-centering, and also sensitive to the symbolic meaning of industrially-produced artifacts like wind turbines, she is plausibly blind to the larger wholeness that the wind farm is serving to enhance by moving away from reliance on dirty fuels. The aesthetic appreciator plausibly sees beyond the industrial image to the ecological
context which constitutes the visual meaning. As having a restorative affect, the wind farm appears beautiful for the way that it works with the larger natural systems of Gaia.

§14. For these reasons, functionalism cannot explain why the wind farm is beautiful for ecological reasons. It can only explain why it is beautiful as an industrial tool (or symbolically, as a modernist sculpture.) What is truthful about the nimby response is: modernist functionalism is an egocentric (or anthropocentric) aesthetic of the machine, but nature is not a machine. It is egocentric because it equates value with human interests, and it is mechanistic because it sees natural systems as mechanisms to be mastered, rather than as dynamic, non-linear systems which cannot be controlled. Functionalism looks at form within the tightly circumscribed context of discrete human purposes, without being able to see those purposes within a larger ecological context. But it is just those assumptions about value, as merely a human mental projection, and of nature, as a machine to be mastered, which make up the cultural roots of global ecological collapse.

§15. The study of wholeness offers a solution. Wholeness is difficult to study because it has no internal structure. It is the unity for form and experience, the underlying metaphysical relatedness of things in space and time. The theory of wholeness – developed most fully but still only in a preliminary form by Christopher Alexander – is not the same, but akin to the ecological study of interdependency between organisms, nutrient and energy flows and biogeochemical systems, it is the more basic study of form as a geometrical property of space.

§16. Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness. Wholeness is an objective property of nature and natural systems. This is a very deep quality of a place, a work of art, an organism, that affects us deeply. For a neighborhood, it is a sense of belonging, a sense that everything feels right, natural, stable, alive – most especially a feeling of life, and a feeling of being yourself.

§17. Industrial structures and processes rupture wholeness with impunity. According to the theory of wholeness, the ugliness we see and feel about that destruction is a keen perception into the order of a certain region of space. It is the prevailing assumption of Modernist science and architecture that what is going on in the world is too often a nearly random aggregation of simple mechanical processes, with no special coordination or behavior as a whole. Within that view, there is little to be learnt from studying wholeness. It is just number crunching, without new insight. From the standpoint of Cartesian science, wholeness is just a cognitive artifact, something that our own thinking about the world places into our perception. There is empirical and conceptual evidence, however, that profound coordination of the whole is occurring. This coordination is not “merely” the effect of multiple random events and effects. There are strong reasons to think that this aggregation of apparently random events is, instead, a very highly organized larger structure- preserving process, in which the process in the large, does progressively pay attention to the whole, reflect the whole, and extend and make more beautiful the whole.

§18. There is a structure, visible in any given part of the world, which we may call the wholeness. The wholeness is an abstract mathematical structure, existing in space. It captures what we may loosely consider as the global structural character of a given configuration, in itself and in relation to the world around it. If we learn to see wholeness as a real feature of the world, then we not only deepen our ordinary experience profoundly, we can start building houses and neighborhoods and economies that do not hinder, but rather maintain and enhance the wholeness of a particular place. This is the metaphysical principle underlying leading principles of ecological design, such as to design something that mimics the life-enhancing features of stable natural systems, as well as definitions of sustainability such as that the earth belongs to the living.

§19. Wholeness is a function of the coherence of a region of space, in the sense of the high degree of relatedness of the entities within that space to each other. We know that ecosystems naturally tend towards greater harmonization of beings, hence higher degrees of biodiversity and lower entropy. The experience of beauty makes us feel related to the world, makes us feel at home with something, that we can find our self within it, that we feel centered in the presence of it. Is this just a feeling?

§20. This brings us to the subjective side of modernist aesthetics. Wholeness is difficult for us moderns to perceive because our cosmological picture and understanding of material reality. We make the assumption that what is truly real – physical matter – lacks meaning, purpose, subjectivity, self. If you make this assumption, then the feeling of relatedness between your personal self and the universe is mere illusion and scientifically meaningless. The science of complex adaptive systems however is revealing that nature is not a machine (reactive, reducible and constructed) but rather an active self-organizing and evolving system. The concept of perception is coterminous with the concept of life, in the sense that to be alive is to have an inside and an outside and so a need to perceive what to let in and what to keep out. The study of wholeness expands considerably our idea of what life is, and therefore what can be said to perceive, to be sentient, have purposes. The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has. The more life a thing has, the more wholeness it has, and it is the metaphysical tendency of things in nature to enhance their life.

§21. Degree of life in a structure has to do with the ways it embodies the geometrical properties of stable natural systems. Ornamentation can often increase the life of a structure, and hence contribute to its wholeness. In this sense, ornamentation is essential and ‘functional’. But that just shows that modernist functionalism is wrong, or that it is only partially correct as a theory of beauty.

§22. This is changing the concept of beauty by changing our understanding of life itself. The difference between living and non-living form has to do with the process through which the form came to be. One can see, just by looking, that something with living form came to be by way of a process of unfolding, where each step of the growing grew out of the prior steps, and where each development enhanced the structure (the wholeness) that already existed. What lacks living form has the look of something that was put together. Its structure did not unfold out of itself. Frankenstein is the symbol of monsterousness because of his put-together look. Suburban sprawl has this look, this feel, as do many architectural icons of modernity.

§23. According to Alexander, the feeling of being grounded and centered which people often experience when finally alone with nature is not ‘subjective’, but rather a keen cognitive awareness of the geometry of the wholeness of living processes. And the only hypothesis that explains the depth of that experience, and which allows us to pursue the deeper springs of meaning we sense that it contains, is to accept the startling, and yet ancient, belief, that the sense of relatedness we find in nature, in all beautiful things, things exhibiting wholeness, is that we are rediscovering a deeper identity of Self. To find the world beautiful and to feel that you belong there is to experience the limitations of your identity as an ego and to sense your deeper identity as a moment of the Self as a ground of the world.

§24. At first, we believed – that is, our ancestors believed – that all life was worth living. Then some things changed, and we started to believe that only life that examined itself was worth life – that is, only self-conscious life had a value. Then some things changed and we started to believe that only a godly life was worth living: creatures with souls needed to become aware of a special relationship that they had with the being or principle which created the world, in order for their lives to be worth living. Then some things changed and we started to believe that passionate, embodied engagement with the world, through the economic-spiritual development of our own unique ego-defined individuality was the only way to have a live worth living. Then some things changed and we started to believe that all life is worth living.