Learning is an aesthetic experience

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Do you recall when you learned to ride a bicycle? At first, accomplishing the feat may have seemed impossible—the balance required, the embarrassing and potentially dangerous threat of falling, the frighteningly unfamiliar speed required to stay upright (a lot faster than walking, and even faster than running). Riding in a car was faster, but completely different. On a bike, it was just you and the simple but still amazing contraption beneath you, completely under your control. Your legs did the peddling, your arms did the steering, your sense of balance—that finely tuned sensation of how your body was positioned within gravity, kept the both of you vertical, at least until the speed took over. Then some magical gyroscopic synthesis took over, but only gradually did you discover this synthesis.

Photo by C.Schubert, copyright Creative Commons

While you learned, at least after the training wheels were removed or your parent stepped back, you fell. Probably more than once. But each time you got on the bike, it felt a little more comfortable. You gained a little more confidence, greater balance, and the distance before you crashed increased. Eventually, you wondered what the big deal was, why it seemed so hard. It became second nature, just another one of the growing number of skills that increased your opportunities. The world became bigger now that you could get places faster. Even if your parents insisted you stay in your neighbourhood at first, you could now navigate it like never before. You felt invigorated!

Now think about your mastery of your mother tongue or tongues. You probably do not remember mastering speech and understanding your parent’s speech. It was too much a part of your growing consciousness to be separated from you becoming you. Your speech and your awareness in general came about together. But you probably do remember learning to read and write.

This was much harder than learning to ride a bicycle. It took much more time to feel any sense of mastery. In fact, like most of us, you are probably still learning new reading skills, new subtleties of language that increase your mastery—new words, things about usage you overlooked, differences in dialect, etc. At first, you learned how to spell single, common words, and the association between the letters L-O-O-K and the word that describes the intentional act of seeing was perhaps a revelation even greater than balancing a moving bicycle.

Learning to read and write took concerted effort, and for many of us, external motivation in the form of a demanding parent or teacher. But once you had mastered the basics, like being able to read the children’s books that up to that point had to be read to you by another, you may have experienced a profound curiosity, knowing that all those books surrounding you on bookshelves in your home, at the library, and in bookstores represented new worlds to explore. So you pushed yourself to be able to explore them. There were newspapers, magazines, novels, and works of non-fiction. For many there were also religious texts, more difficult with their archaic language. There were the notes left to you by your parents and teacher or passed to you by friends in class. Slowly, you developed the skills to enjoy the classics or just the more advance works covering your hobbies or other areas of interests. With effort came rewards.

Photo by Lynn Friedman, copyright Creative Commons

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Can such learning experiences be considered aesthetic? What do they have in common with the things that typically come to mind when we hear that word? Well, consider your favorite books or movies, and although it might take more effort, also think about your favorite paintings. While your experiences with them might have felt effortless, it was deep engagement that made them feel that way. Learning and the effort it entails is an essential aspect of any aesthetic experience, even if the learning sometimes has a subtler and abstract nature, and is not related to developing practical skill or knowledge.

Most of these experiences with fine arts, if not all, were also acts of learning. The content they offered represented processes of learning, and your experience of enjoying them was also a process of learning. This might be most obvious in the popular mystery and detective fiction genres, where the act of discovery is an explicit plot device. Just consider the lasting popularity of Sherlock Holmes, due in large part that we learn as Sherlock learns, with his special powers of deduction guiding us and encouraging us. It is also obvious in much older forms, like fables and fairy tales, with the moral and practical lessons they offer. And consider the enjoyment we get from learning about foreign places and historic times (or speculations of the future) from other genres.

Let’s also consider some less obvious examples. Narratives are often diagrammed by the use of an incline that depicts rising action or rising plot complication, building through three acts (based on Aristotle’s Poetics). This rising action is almost without fail also accompanied by, or created by, increasing knowledge. For Aristotle, a prime example is Oedipus Rex, the story of an overconfident king who slowly learns how his pride or hubris is a large contributor to the playing out of his fate.


But the incline is just as apt in explaining more contemporary works, like the international best-seller, The DaVinci Code (Brown, 2003). There is a clear, rising complication in Act One as the main character, Langdon, becomes the key suspect in a mysterious murder and he and his colleague, Sophie, begin following puzzling clues to get at the truth. In Act Two (the “Acts” are being defined by me, not the author), the complication deepens as the purpose and machinations of a conspiracy become apparent. In this act, the protagonists must work to protect themselves, but also find proof of the unexpected story of the Holy Grail. In Act Three, an even deeper conspiracy is revealed, and the protagonists learn they have a critical role to play in resolving the situation. The plot of The DaVinci Code is carried forward by a series of revelations—the supposed truth of the Holy Grail, the existence of a conspiracy (at two levels), and the truth of Sophie’s identity. In other words, increasing knowledge drives the action as much as outward events.

		Act 3
		The conspiracy is foiled. The Sophie and Langdon learn a final truth about the Grail in Scotland, and decide not to reveal it.
	Act 2
	Further clues are discovered in London. A larger conspiracy is revealed. We learn of Sophie’s potential link to the Grail.
Act 1
A mysterious and gruesome murder is discovered at the Louvre. The protagonist, Langdon, is the main suspect, but escapes to follow clues in search for the true murderer.

Now, it might be argued that The Da Vinci code is merely detective fiction in disguise, but consider a more subtle work of fiction. In another recent novel, Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro, 2005), the author uses a first-person narrator whose initial naiveté allows a satisfactory understanding of the situation to be only slowly revealed. There are no dramatic moments of revealed truth as there are in The DaVinci Code—only a growing and never complete understanding of truth. This is probably a more realistic depiction of how we come to answers to the big questions of life, and it is what gives the novel its surprising power and narrative sophistication. The narrator’s knowledge grows during three parts, separated chronologically by several years, and if the novel engages us, this process of deepening knowledge deepens our appreciation.

Most theorists, critics, and creative writing instructors would argue that without some growth in the characters, meaning some increasing knowledge about themselves and/or the world they live in, a narrative is flat. The most exciting action-laden plot does not make up for a lack of character development. Even clichéd character growth pasted onto to an otherwise shallow, action-laden plot can sometimes work with audiences. Can you think of a successful narrative plot that does not involve learning of some sort, or at minimum, an explicit accusation of the failure of a character to learn?

Finally, let’s consider a work of visual art with much less obvious connections to learning. Monet’s series of haystack paintings provide a good example. Monet was fascinated with how the changing quality of light during the day and across seasons changes the colors we see. He and the other Impressionists learned through experiment that what we see (physically) and what we perceive are not exactly the same. We might not register the color changes of a scene through the day, but they are there. His paintings, especially those like the haystack series helped to demonstrate this, beautifully. He also noted that we do not see pure colors, but distinct colors mixed to form the final colors we perceive. Grey is never grey exactly, but can be a mixture of many colors that our eyes perceive together as grey, so artist are free to create the perception of a color by juxtaposing very different colors. Monet learned about colors by making the paintings, and we learn about colors by observing them.

Every good painting or work of visual art is in a way an experiment designed for learning. This might appear especially true in today’s era of conceptual art, but even commercial portraitists learn about their subjects’ appearances as they work. A landscape painter is exploring the landscape and her perception of it through painting, not just reproducing it. We begin to see our world in new ways based on the work artists show us. Our opinions of what makes a beautiful landscape are influenced largely by the works of art we have seen.

In a similar way, music provides many of the rhythms of our lives, and we learn pacing at least partially from which music we choose. Melodies, like narratives, let us know how to find closure. Music also teaches us emotion, and maybe not always the reverse, as is assumed.