Writing for Aesthetic Experience

All written expression--not just fiction and poetry, but also the everyday writing we do for work or personal correspondence in the form of letters, reports, papers, emails, social media posts, or blogging--has the potential to become aesthetic, showing the same general pattern common to all aesthetic experiences. When the process comes together, it begins with (a) a tension, need, or puzzlement that requires communication and is driven by (b) the anticipation of a result that makes the work of expression compelling. The work itself is colored by (c) deep engagement with (d) the immediate act of composition and, perhaps, preliminary research. Composition can be highly immersive, with its both rational and sensual qualities (e.g., opening and framing, structure, word choice, tone and voice, use of metaphors and other signs, phrasing, sentence structure, etc.). Finally, written expression creates gratification when the outcome has (e) a resolution that makes it satisfying to readers and the author. The outcome can at times feel profoundly meaningful and rewarding, resolving deep questions or conflicts, or explaining things in new and more effective ways. This potential for discovering meaning (not just sharing it) might have driven the urge to write.

Admittedly, writing can also be tedious and painful. Unlike most other activities with aesthetic potential, which are largely voluntary, almost all of us are at times forced to write. The pain can come about because what we are writing holds no interest to us, we don’t feel comfortable with our level of writing skill (particularly in a non-native language), or that we don't foresee a value in the result, no matter how skillfully we perform the task. Yet many people find it highly rewarding to tackle almost any writing project because they have discovered its aesthetic potential. Like swimming, which is a lot of work and even frightening to some, writing is avoided as a painful chore by many people. Yet a devout swimmer seeks to increase the challenge by swimming farther and faster, just as a devout writer might feel compelled to tackle a writing task on a topic that is relatively unknown (such as the case of many journalists), requires a lengthy treatment, or takes a unique point of view for the writer.

When it becomes aesthetic, the act of writing can seem to be guided by unconscious or exterior forces, like the collective unconscious, muses, or a private genius, because it is no longer just a goal-driven process, but also one of imagination and surrender to unexpected connections. We may not even recognize the source of our words or ideas, coming from forgotten conversations and readings, or from truly creative places. They might come to us in waves of coherent phrases or growing swells of ideas that seem to break and crash on the page in front of us out of our control. Writing can feel a little like swimming in an unpredictable surf.

At other times, it is only us. We know we are the only agent at work, and writing might draw from the deepest resources we own to meet the challenge. Writing can at times be like solving an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, an arduous but absorbing task of finding the right pieces and fitting them in just the right arrangement to create the effect we are after, or creating new pieces, carving them out of raw materials to custom fit. When we complete the puzzle, the sight can make us ebullient, either as we imagined it and struggled to get to, or something much more than we imagined. But we own it as something that only we could have achieved.

Alternatively, writing might feel like squeezing blood from a stone--each word and sentence a futile effort. We face the task with little hope or expectation for reward, and we surrender, resorting to perfunctory statements just to have something written.

When it is working, though, writing can create an all-absorbing flow, or undertow, not unlike more physical activities in which we lose attention of our surroundings, and we focus only on the growing words and sentences in front of us, considering how to fit them together to further our argument, explanation, description, or story. Writing calls for a variety of fortitudes. Words can be rational, but also emotional, sensual, and even ecstatic--useful for the full range of experience. And we can’t forget that words themselves represent sounds, and are not just characters on a page. They create music in the mind. For some, writing can be as expressive as singing.

Aesthetic outcomes can be achieved in any form of writing and are not reserved only for poets and novelists. However, much of what we write is rote, made up of boilerplate language we have repeated or heard others repeat many times, filled with clichés meaning little to anyone, and just adequate to fulfill the task. Some everyday writing tasks may simply be a gesture, like a thank you note, or a record, documenting a few facts, paying respects, or making an opinion known, and not an attempt at deeper expression. But everyday life offers many reasons to immerse ourselves in the act of writing to create something of richer value with bigger potential repercussions.

Written expression shares a quality that is common to other aesthetic experiences that end with a tangible outcome (e.g., gardening, collecting, taking photos, cooking, etc.)--the product itself is animate and has aesthetic potential for others, making it closer to the world of Art. Since literature is one of the seminal artforms, this is not surprising. Reading a well written work can bring not just new understanding, but deep emotional resonance, and also wonder and enjoyment of the language and text that gets readers there. When we express ourselves in words (or in any other medium for that matter), we create a world of meaning that assumes a life of its own arising from the words themselves, even if we see ourselves as the source. In fact, once we hit “send,” “publish,” or sign off on publication, we have decided to share ownership of those words and the eventual reader becomes owner of a new, proprietary interpretation. This “life of its own” quality is another reason that writing is often seen as collaborating with supernatural entities.

Expression as transaction

Despite common notions, expression is not simply a process of spilling out our thoughts and emotions (or those of guiding spirits) with little care for the reader. Expression is a collaboration, or transaction, with both our readers and the world we experience.

Firstly, expression is always committed toward an audience that demands our consideration, not just for oneself, so it is from the start a sort of transaction. The model reader theory of Umberto Eco suggests that a text is necessarily full of open spaces that the reader must fill in, and the author needs to consider how a typical reader will do this. Not just any reader, but one toward whom the text is directed. Every text “demands cooperation.”

Secondly, in a very real sense, expression does not begin inside us, but in our experience--in the transactions we have with the world. It begins in the world within which we are just one actor (see Dewey, 1925), albeit a critical one. Any expression is first a process of co-mingling with the world (we might call this impression, or, literally, pressing in), and only after this can the work of expression begin (literally, pressing out). Otherwise, we have nothing to express. For a more radical perspective on this, see Manzotti’s (2016) theory of consciousness as existing in the world’s objects, and not just in individual minds (the mind-object identity theory, or “spread mind”).

Actually, Dewey (1934) would say that expression begins with an “impulsion” of the individual (and not an “impression”), a goal or action that receives a response from the world--the response being the impression mentioned above. I prefer to avoid this chicken-versus-egg argument and use “co-mingling” because I believe that it is not only we who have agency to affect the world, but the objects of the world as well. This perspective is useful because it captures the situations when expression is imposed upon us, or is inspired by unexpected observations. The point is that expression doesn’t spring from nowhere, out of nothing, and not just from individuals. It is a lot of work, and collaborative work at that.

Due to the work involved, none of this talk of attribution to the unconscious, collective unconscious, muses, genii, spread-minds, or object-agents, which applies equally to all creative acts, should disempower writers. On the contrary, it is better to take responsibility and know that we can use our minds (spread or not), experiences, and the media of expression to create new experiences that would not exist without our own hard work--experiences that can then profit not only others, but newly enjoyed as aesthetic by ourselves.

The material and tools of written expression

The raw material of written expression is of course language, and what a material it is! Language is sometimes considered the substance of thought itself, even though this is a bias that reflects its predominance in social environments. We swim in our language, and almost forget that it is a medium, just like the fish does not see the water. But language also restricts our expression to live within what words can do. Words inform our thoughts as much as they communication them. Research shows that conceptions of the world can be bound in the language we use. But these restrictions are more like safety ropes and scaffolding, offering infinitely more support than restriction.

Images, sounds, and physical gestures also represent thoughts, sometimes with more fluency. Buildings are thoughts rising into the sky, using a language of visual impression, space and time and physical relationships. Films are thoughts that flow in a montage of suggestive images. Sculptured gardens are thoughts that grow and age in pre-visioned fashion. Thought is manifest in all the materials we manipulate. But none offer the same malleability and precision of words to represent the flow of rational and poetic thought--its development, its connections, its missteps, its contradictions, its digressions, its emotional underpinnings. This opinion is highly arguable, and I suspect painters and filmmakers would be the first to challenge it.

Language is the raw material, but written expression offers myriad tools to work the material, some obvious, and some less obvious. Among the obvious: word choice, paragraph and sentence structure, grammar, tone (all of which offer levels of formality and impacts on meaning). Among the less obvious: treatment of time and sequence, such as pacing; use of signs like metaphors, similes, and symbols; choice of voice (authoritative, questioning, cautious, reserved, angry, objective, etc.); degree of sensuality versus abstraction. The list could go on and on.

Our goal in cultivating aesthetic experiences in any of their forms in our lives is to create meaning. Ultimately, aesthetic qualities are not about the surface of things, but the potential for meaning behind the surface, reflected there but born out in our experience. Written expression, and all expression in fact, also has at least three levels of meaning, corresponding roughly to why, how, and what. These are gesture, word, and text. How much we are aware of and address these levels of meaning determines the final impact of what we write.

• Why we write is the gesture level of meaning. We may write to persuade, to honor, to clarify, to explain, to teach, to assert, to confront, to irritate, to console, to placate, to impress, to show appreciation, etc. The gesture might not always be explicit, or might even be hidden. But the writer, at least, should be aware.
• The word is the next level of meaning, the exegesis, the meaning emanating from the choice and structure of the words, taking into account the use of all the tools of expression. Because meaning is never purely literal, the word is not exactly what the translator translates, but what the translator must understand about the the intended meaning of words in order to translate the text accurately.
• The text is the meaning behind the work as a publication, its relationship to other texts, and its actual impact upon publication and over time. “Publication” does not imply only books and articles. Web pages and blog posts and emails are also publications with a multiple levels of meaning. And they can go viral, have more cultural impact, even more than a best-selling book. The textual level of meaning is not fully under the influence of the author, but also previous and contemporary authors, publishers, and the audience.

Whether writing a note of apology, a project report, a job recommendation, a news article, a “white paper” to influence a strategic decision, a blog post, or sharing a holiday experience with a family member, remembering to exploit the tools and levels of meaning of written expression can lead to more aesthetic experiences with writing, and less anguish squeezing blood from stones.

Taking Photos

Each second, over 41,000 photographs are taken. Based on recent trends, it is estimated that worldwide the number of non-professional photos alone that will be taken in 2017 is 1.3 trillion. Nearly 80% of these can be attributed to the rapidly growing use of smartphones, which make cameras available to most people all day, everyday. The number of photos taken has tripled each year since 2010 from a mere 80 billion. This growth is enabled by technology, but not driven by it. It is driven by the human desire to make experience aesthetic, for which taking photos is a particularly common avenue.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Long before digital photography made such growth possible, the sound of the mechanical camera shutter had become one of the distinctive sounds of the 20th century. Already by 1930, 1 billion photos were taken each year, and number of shutter clicks continued to grow exponentially. However, this click/sliding noise of the moving mirror still fills our soundscapes because digital cameras reproduce it artificially, as a comforting reminder of cameras past and, more practically, as assurance that we did indeed take a photo.

Photography as Art

Few question any longer whether photography is an art form, but when it was a young medium, like film, it was considered simply a means of mechanical reproduction of what we see, and not equal to painting the same scene, for example. During the second half of the 19th century, its primary purpose was documentation, portraits of people, places, and events, such as the famous battlefield photos of the American Civil War, or Edward Muybridge’s photosequence studies of people and animals in motion. In fact, the artistic uses of photography remain secondary to this day.

Eadweard Muybridge, 1872, Public Domain

That photographs could also be Art was recognized only over time. But by the first decade of the 20th century, one could find both many more consciously artistic documentation photos and photos that were created purely as Art. One early photo of a young woman dying of turbuculosis with her worried family, is a famous example that shows early realization of photography’s dramatic potential. Due to the limits of the technology at the time, the photo is made of multiple exposures carefully planned and artfully arranged.

Henry Peach Robinson (1958), Public Domain

Arguments persisted that photography was a lesser art because it WAS mechanical reproduction after all, and was soon widely open to amateur use, but any serious reflection saw that image choice, composition, image settings, and manipulation during processing could turn it into “high” art (we can use “Art” with the capital “A”) as much as any other medium. But the dominant use has always been taking photos that are meant to just document what we see. We might make a distinction between “making photos” (using the tools available for artistic manipulation) and “taking photos” (what we do quickly in our everyday use). However, the premise of this article is that even everyday photos are taken with an aesthetic intent (although some, like Sontag, 1977, wrongly belittle this intent, comparing most everyday photography to “aesthetic consumerism”).

Like so many other forms of everyday aesthetics, the line between taking everyday photos and artistic activity is blurred, perhaps even unnecessary. Nonetheless, this post is focused on the aesthetic aspects of everyday photography done without the primary intent to make Art.

Photography as Life

Then why will non-professionals take 1.3 trillion photos this year? While we are all concerned to some degree with how everyday photos look, and while many of the millions of photos shared each day on social networking sites can be quite artistic, for most people how the photos that they share look is usually less important than what they show, and that they show something meaningful about us.

Everyday life is made meaningful, lifted above the ordinary, when we delineate it somehow, give it borders or shape, or stamp it in a personal, effortful way. It can slip between our grasp unless some effort is made to mark it in this way, or to dramatize its events and our experiences of them. All the ways mentioned in this blog, including preparing food, decorating homes, gardening, collecting, storytelling, sports, mental achievements, and many others, function to set off experience as aesthetic. Taking photos is yet another way to give shape, dramatize, and set off our experience for aesthetic appreciation. Capturing a scene within the boundaries of a photo immediately creates an object of appreciation above the blur of the ongoing events that pass in front of our eyes. We might take a photo to preserve a moment to share with others, whether the moment denotes a major accomplishment, a milestone, or just that we are alive here and now. This is what millions, or billions rather, do via social media sites. We might otherwise preserve the photo primarily for ourselves, so that we can recall what we and those around us were like on this day, to be appreciated on another day in the future. Photographic preservation can provide a sense of control over time and intransigent nature. On the contrary, some suggest that it can kill the vibrancy of the moment by calling out the fact that change and eventual decay make the captured moment already a dead one (which is also a valid aesthetic response if you think about it), Sontag (1977). This rather negative view, while potentially in the background, does not often come to mind. But taking a photo can steal our attention from an experience, in effect deadening it, if we are overzealous with our cameras instead of our naked eyes.

On holiday travels in popular destinations, the most common sight is not a monument or beautiful scene, but one person being photographed by another.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Travels are a time to step away from everyday life, an aesthetic experience in themselves, but also a perfect opportunity to have our images preserved during a heightened moment, a time when we might feel we are at our best. Travel photos of people are often taken at famous sites, but are just as often taken at any representative location that says we are somewhere else than in our normal location, because the important subject is the person, not the place. Depending on the person, posing for such shots is either a dilemma or a delight. Some are happy to shout their presence with a glamour pose or with arms raised in real or pretend joy. Others remain uncomfortable, struggling to achieve an awkward smile, hoping the image will not look unnatural, but knowing it will anyway, because posing is always posing.

Richard Shusterman (2012) explores the interplay between the photographer and subject during a professional photo session, comparing it to theatrical performance. He mentions the complex interpersonal exchange needed to achieve the artistic goals of the portrait, whether mutual or owned only by the artist. The subject needs to feel comfortable enough to let themselves be seen for who they are, and the photographer needs to negotiate to expose who the subject really is, or who she wants him to be.

This performance aspect of taking a photo exists also in any non-professional photo portrait, even if it is less intentional or impactful. Each portrait, even the one almost lost within the crowd marveling a historical location, is a micro-drama outside the normal flow of events during those moments that lead up to the shutter snap, and both the photographers and persons being photographed usually enjoy this artifice. The act of taking the photo might even become one of those moments of feeling fully alive, even if it is a balance of pretense and genuine emotion.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Of course we also take photos of the places and things we visit, not just people in front of them, but similarly, it is our being there and the act of taking the photo that is often the most important subject. An uncountable number of photos are taken each year at places like Ayer’s Rock, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. No one really needs to document these sites yet again, but they do need to document that they were there, and maybe to attempt a photo with that personal touch that demonstrates it. Perhaps a thousand photos each day are taken of the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre. None of these photos lives up to the painting, and most are not even worth looking at, taken along with the accompanying tops of heads of complete strangers who were lucky enough to get closer. But the photo is still special because it is proof that we were there.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Other than travels, milestones and special events are another favorite time for taking photos. Weddings, graduations, birthdays, group lunches and dinners, and parties of any kind are mandatory times for photos. It is almost as if the event did not happen unless there is at least one photo taken. These photos are certainly about the people in them, but also about the event and the implied time that precedes and follows it, and photos are even one of the things that makes the event special. A wedding without a photo is almost unthinkable. In many weddings, the photographer is one of the most prominent people after the bride and groom.

Special events come in all sizes, and even a new haircut, a well prepared meal, a new dress, or a rainbow, sunset, or moonrise might demand a photo to mark the occasion.

Photography as Artful Life

With the explosion of smartphone ownership, we now have cameras at our fingertips to document not just special moments, but everyday observations that interest us. Before smartphones, the effort to find a ready camera might leave many rainbows uncaptured, but no longer. Today, the creative eye might capture special images each day--an interesting play of light, a subtle pattern or geometric arrangement of objects, a dramatic closeup, an interesting tableaux, or something seen frequently but this time in a new way, maybe due to how it is framed, angled, juxtaposed, or zoomed in or out. A daily walk, the commute to work, or the evening’s closing minutes on the balcony can all provide photo opportunities. Anything can be the source of a moment of beauty worth capturing in a photo.

Barcelona, Spain, Photo by Maja Kuna

While most everyday photos are intended to document something, some do more. Representation, which is one of the most traditional roles of Art, is the the role that Socrates railed against, feeling that art as an imitation of life hid the truth from us. Had the technology been around, I suspect Socrates would have hated photos of all kinds. But photos, both everyday and artistic ones, can also be used to create a new experience, and not just a representation. Photos necessarily borrow from the visual materials of life, but they can also transcend it, and the result might be like nothing at all in our daily experience, nothing like what the naked eye usually senses, at least consciously. Photos allow us to manufacture something personal, mystical, or just indefinable, which can be another one of photography’s aesthetic rewards--a means to the creation of new meanings.

Bytom Musuem, Poland, Photo by Maja Kuna

Representation is not a dead end, but it is a limited one. It impossible to capture experience itself. We might want to hold onto the feeling, the flow of thoughts, the evolution of sensations over time, the entire field of view along with its sounds and smells and textures and our internal responses to them. But we can never catch it all. Even the best works of literature and films, with their richer source material, struggle to do this. What we capture in photos, when we are lucky, is always a synecdoche of the experience, a piece that we accept to remind us of the whole. When we find that small piece that is powerful enough to suggest the total experience, this is when we approach the realm of Art. But it happens everyday too, in those lucky moments when we are especially attuned. When a photo might just be enough.

Taking photos reflects a fundamental drive, an everyday aesthetic activity with the goal to make life special, to give it meaning, and to help us connect to others, the world and the transient moments that comprise a life.

References

Newhall, B.  (1964) The history of photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Shusterman, R. (2012) Thinking through the body: Essays in somaesthetics. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography. New York: Picador.

Is life an unfolding story?

One of the most common and fundamental forms of aesthetic experience is when life takes clear shape as a story with a narrative logic, and not just a series of unrelated events. This story can relate to the pursuit of a goal; following a chosen, imposed, or slowly revealed path; confronting a conflict or adversity; solving a problem or uncovering an unknown; or discovering oneself and those around us. Whether the story is one we impose or discover ourselves or is one imposed by others is a key factor for the potential degree of aesthetic reward. The question is, does a life-story just disguise a more mundane truth--that life is really just episodic, a series of disconnected moments?

Photo by Patrick Parrish

We are surrounded by stories. Parents read and tell stories, friends and family tell stories, we tell stories to others and to ourselves. TV and movies show us stories (nearly 10,000 movies each year are released), and hundreds of thousands of works of written fiction are published each year. Stories come in many other forms as well--in songs, in poetry, and in the openings and asides of good essays and editorials. News is stories--who, what, when, where, how, and tabloid news fills some heads with morality tales of the faulty rich and famous. Good public speakers include stories to help make their points more accessible and less academic. Commercials sell products by telling mini-stories about their benefits. Stories are fundamental to communication, and in fact, to knowing and understanding. We crave stories, and we create them, large or small, each day. But what is behind this craving?

Photo by Parker Knight, Creative Commons 2.0

Even though we intuitively know a story when we are presented one, it is probably useful to have a definition of a story, or more generally, a narrative. Like aesthetic experiences in general, they are more pervasive than you might think. Kenneth Burke (1945) attempted a basic definition of a narrative in his work to create a Grammar of Motives. His premise and conclusion was that a narrative is fundamentally a way of attributing motives to actions, and that the result always contains the following five components, at least implicitly:

An ACT: What took place in thought or deed.
A SCENE: The background of the act, the context or situation in which it occurred.
An AGENT: The person, or protagonist, who performed the act and received its repercussions.
AGENCY: The means or instruments of the act, how it was undertaken.
A PURPOSE: The reason, or reasons, why the act was undertaken.

The act is the WHAT, and the rest help to demonstrate motive. This brilliantly simple analysis of a narrative’s components describes almost any narrative, from the story of why we were late to work yesterday, what we chose to cook for dinner, our choice of careers, how we met our significant other, or the complex interwoven stories to be found within a great novel like Anna Karenina. We can use this five-part analysis to reflect on our own lives to help us understand our motivations to shape our self-image and future actions.

Pioneering cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, who calls the self “the greatest work of art we ever produce” (Bruner, 2002), describes a similar set of qualities of a story, but his are more closely related to traditional literary theory: (a) a cast of characters who are free agents with (b) expectations about the normal state of the world, confronted by (c) a breach of this expected state. The story continues with (d) their efforts to cope or come to terms with this breach, and (e) an outcome or resolution. Note that Bruner adds the element of conflict, a breach of the normal, that must be overcome. This is the element that elevates a simple account of events to a real story, something worth paying attention to, an aesthetic experience, perhaps. But most interestingly, and most importantly, Bruner adds that the final component is (f) a narrator, a reason for narrating, and a particular perspective on the story. The narration, or the act of telling a story, is another layer of motive on top of the story itself, and can in fact can contain its own story: Why was the story told? What is the context of the telling? Who it telling it? How is the telling constructed? Given this final quality in particular, we are compelled to ask why we tell the stories in our lives to ourselves and those around us.

Assuming we agree that we all do tell stories about our lives, the question remains whether is this a good thing. Is life a naturally a story, or is this quality artificial, perhaps even detrimental to our ability to experience life for what it truly is? Is viewing life as a story simply a form of lying, hiding from the truth, or wishful thinking? Can a storied life bind us, make us prisoners of it? Can it set us up for disappointment when the bar it sets is too high for the constraints of our situations or abilities? The answer to these questions can on occasion be a definite Yes. How detrimental a life story can be depends on our active engagement in the process of telling it (accepting that we are, in fact, Bruner’s narrator when it comes to our own stories). It depends on our flexibility in allowing ourselves to grow with the unfolding story rather than remain closed-minded, and our willingness to actively reshape the story components while it also unfolds on its own.

Bad outcomes can result from sticking to a story. Atrocities are conducted based on the self-convincing stories that justify them. Lives can be ruined due to obsessive adherence to dangerous self-stories. Bruner outlines the famous and particular sad story of Christopher McCandless, the 23-year-old who died of starvation in the Alaska wilderness (see the book and film, Into the Wild) after convincing himself that he should live in complete self-sufficiency away from the world of people. His inspiration was a story he derived from the writings of American author Henry David Thoreau, whose call to “simplify, simplify” led him to isolate himself to the edge of Walden Pond, a full 2.6 kilometers from the town of Concord, Massachusetts--far enough to inspire an important philosophical book, but not self-destructive by any means. Much more common negative self-stories are those of victimization, low self-worth, or an unbreakable streak of bad luck. The success many achieve by practicing meditation stems from its goal to help us let go of our stories, if even for only 20 minutes at a time, as a way to relax and re-energize, and release new creative energy that might otherwise remain locked up in a fruitless self-story.

However, a life-story can be extremely positive too. It can be the driver behind our goals and hard work, our rewarding relationships, our connections to life, society, and nature. The narrative basis of ethics has been discussed by both Bruner (2002) and John Dewey (Fesmire, 2003). Bruner points out the intertwined nature of stories and law, the prevalence of stories about courtroom drama, and how stories are the basis for legal decisions, not just coded laws, because for each potential infraction a motive must be assigned. Dewey spoke our use of “dramatic rehearsal,” how we construct a story of potential outcomes to help us make moral decisions (or perhaps any decision for that matter). Stories are serious business. They are not just for entertainment.

By Unknown -
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042462/1905-01-01/ed-1/seq-4/
(Los Angeles Herald), Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36561822

As for the question posed in the title of this post, Is life an unfolding story?, most of those who have ponder it have concluded positively that our fundamental experience of life is founded in narrative. Some have even proposed that the near universal grammar of our languages, with their subject-verb-object structures, and the myriad ways of modifying those with adjective and adverb phrases, show that we think in narrative terms. Story is an important way of knowing, not just a pleasant veneer we impose. As Bruner (2004) puts it, “There is no such thing as life itself.” We naturally discern a narrative structure in the events we experience, attribute motives, and take actions based on those motives. Humans seem particularly good at this, but the famous four-year Gombe Chimpanzee War suggests that apes also maintain a historical, narrative view of their experience, and act on it.

This life story seems to have two levels (Breen & McLean, 2017). One is a generalized, master narrative that is culturally based, and which exists as a standard to which we measure the value of our own lives. There are many of these master narratives we might relate to--one about redemption for a past misdeed, or one regarding rising from rags to riches, for example. The personal narrative is the second level, and it is based on our lived experience interpreted through or in opposition to the master narrative. The master narratives can be seen as forming the basis of fictional genres as well. How much agency we assert in confronting master narratives is a good part of how well we use our aesthetic potential. Do we follow blindly, or do we take personal responsibility for composing a meaningful story of our own?

However, some have claimed that life as a story is not just a dangerous idea, but also incorrect. Strawson (2004) argued that life is in fact episodic, and that its narrative qualities are something that we (some more than others) impose on it. After all, a story does not account for the little bits of life that take up so much of our time--waiting for the train, having your teeth cleaned, filing taxes, washing the dishes. How can one feel part of a story while enduring these? So perhaps a story is just a facade imposed on the flow of mundane occurrences and habitual actions.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

A life without a story is hard to imagine, if not frightening. Freeman (2017) describes his mother’s decline due to Alzheimer's disease, and the revealing stages of its effects. At first, the confusion caused by her growing inability to connect events was terribly frustrating. Her own self-story was becoming disassembled, no longer was she the independent, self-sufficient person she had been (she could no longer live up to the master narrative). Then, as the disease progressed, she became more peacefully accepting of the moment, which was all she had. Freeman even recounts his feeling of envy in her ability to enjoy simple pleasures, the sights and sounds around her, without the clutter of needs to think about. Finally, however, her state collapsed into one of near constant terror. She was unable to understand where she was or why. Not only was the master narrative gone, but any degree of personal narrative had become impossible. The aesthetic rewards of creating a life story appear to be not only rewards, but necessary to our being.
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Breen, A.V. & McLean, K. C., 2017. The intersection of personal and master narratives. In Schiff, B., McKim, A.E., and Patron.S. (Eds), Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience. Oxford University Press.

Bruner, J. (2002) Making stories: Law, literature, life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bruner, J. (2004) Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691-710. (Originally published in 1987.)

Burke, K. (1945/1969) A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fesmire, S. (2003) John Dewey and Moral Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Freeman, M. (2017) Narrative at the limits (Or: What is “life” really like?). In Schiff, B., McKim, A.E., and Patron.S. (Eds), Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience. Oxford University Press.

Everyday Divination

Divination, as a method of envisioning our potential futures, is different from straight fortune-telling, even though some use the terms interchangeably. The difference is one of intention and our presumed ability to take action to affect outcomes. Divination, literally, is to be inspired by the gods (or some other omniscient power, like the natural world) to gain insight into the truth of a current situation (“soothsaying”), as well as the likely future(s) that might result. This is done to guide our decisions and actions. It is not about discovering an inevitable fate. In this sense, divination is an aesthetic act--a way to gain a degree of control over the seemingly random events of life by giving them meaning.

Some of the most famous stories about divination mislead us about its true uses. For Macbeth and Oedipus, for example, the divination performed by the witches and the Greek oracles offers what look like impossible statements of fortune that at first make the characters overconfident, and in the case of Macbeth, willing to commit murder. The drama in both cases is watching the stories unravel to show that even the impossible predictions were unavoidable truths after all. This sort of divine detective-story has fascinated audiences again and again, a clever narrative genre that has its own aesthetic rewards, but it is not at all what everyday divination is about.

Divination usually includes a process of uncovering the portentous signs latent in random events. Mechanisms for generating random signs can include laying out an array of tarot cards, throwing coins for an I Ching reading, reading smoke, wax drippings, or patterns in tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, counting flower petals, or, in older times, discovering the arrangement of the insides of an animal. The mechanisms are almost endless. Natural phenomena such as weather, flight paths of birds, and, especially, astronomical events are also particularly valued as sources of divine signals. It is through such random acts that it is presumed that the gods can speak to us. A more down-to-earth but still spiritually infused explanation is that we naturally impose our subconscious influence over the physical world. We (or the gods) influence which side of the coin turns up, which tarot card is drawn from the deck, which flower we pick, or the shape taken by wax poured from a candle into a bowl of water. Some Tibetan Buddhists believe that the world is created in the mind, but even non-buddhists harbor beliefs that the mind influences what happens in the material word. Sports fans’ magical thinking can make them believe that they must watch a game to help their favorite team win.

Many otherwise traditionally rational people appreciate divination, even if they do not accept it with blind faith. This is because it works in ways that have little to do with conversing with gods. Divination practices provide a structure that allows us to use our creativity and intuition to interpret the state of our world by considering how a sign or symbol might indicate truths about our current lives and potential futures. Divination, which begins with a question to stimulate the process, helps us to create the story that lets us make sense of our life. It encourages us to reflect about the turbulent present, with its many confluent forces, gives us a structure in which to tame it, and then a direction to consider the outcomes that might make narrative sense of this complexity and guidance toward a justified outcome.

Consider a typical Tarot card reading. The core of a deck of Tarot cards are the 22 cards known as the “major arcana,” the ones that depict an archetypal character, force, or situation (the Sun, Moon, King, Emperor, Empress, Death, Justice, Lovers, etc.). In response to a question, each of these symbolizes a category of task, goal, and potential risk, but also an attitude toward life, which together helps one envision an answer or set of potential answers to the question. The major arcana have been used for centuries, and have been interpreted in both mystical and psychological terms (most effectively, in Jungian terms), but also in simpler dramatic terms--as key elements of a basic narrative, typically one centered on a journey. But nearly any narrative can be seen in terms of a journey, including those of internal struggle or growth, which are journeys of knowledge growth. (See Learning is an Aesthetic Experience.) The remaining cards, the minor arcana, which resemble the common numbered cards of a modern poker deck, are sometimes ignored, but also have symbolic importance in providing tone or means to the narrative. Most consider these as an historically later addition to the core, Major Arcana.

The reader, either an individual doing a self-reading, or a person reading for a friend or client, lays out the “spread”--and arrangement of cards that gives each card a different influence in the reading. There are many popular spreads, and the choice is up to the reader, perhaps depending on their level of experience in using it. Each requires a slightly different brand of symbolic thinking, and practice helps. The Celtic Cross is one of the most popular layouts, but others have similar components. All are based on helping to answer a question, not providing a general statement of the future or current conditions. In the Celtic Cross, the first and central card is the Significator (literally, the one who creates significance or meaning), or the question asker who we will assume is you. The second card is the Crosser, laid across the first, and represents the person or thing that is opposing you. Note the narrative already forming with just two cards--we have a person with a question, you, and a conflicting force. The next two cards describe the present, Foundation, or the motivation for the question, and the Recent Past, the most immediately pertinent backstory. Only in the 5th and 6th cards does the future come into the picture--the Crown, or significant issues that may only now be emerging, and the Future, what lies ahead. Cards seven, eight, and nine come back to the present, current emotional states, external forces, and hopes or desires. Not until the 10th card do we come to the Outcome. But it is not a predetermined outcome, just one that is likely based on the current path and influences. It is an outcome ripe to change if that is what you want.

The Tarot cards in each position of the layout, whether divinely chosen or a random occurrence, can trigger surprising revelations through their potent archetypal symbolism. Aided either by any of the many published guidebooks or by the developed connoisseurship of a seasoned Tarot reader, almost anyone can recognize elements of truth about their present situation, and twinges of excitement or concern about the future. This is a human reaction, and an aesthetic experience--the process of reaching a satisfying culmination through a concerted analysis of an indeterminate situation (the triggering question). (See What Makes and Experience Aesthetic.)

The I Ching, another very old (perhaps older) but still very popular system of divination, offers another approach, but contains many of the same core elements. An I Ching reader, in this case most often an individual performing his or her own reading, first asks a question or considers an upcoming event or just the day or week ahead. The reader then throws three coins six times to determine the whether each of the six lines of a vertically stacked hexagram is either solid or broken. The result is a potential of 64 hexagrams, made up of an upper and lower trigram symbolically named for the archetypal forms of Lake, Fire, Wind, Earth, Mountain, Water, Thunder, Heaven. The I Ching is itself a book of interpretations of these 64 hexagrams, filled with wisdom about the changing nature of life and the virtue of qualities like modesty, restraint, perseverance, patience, tolerance, balance and independence. In fact, the title “I Ching” can be translated as the Book of Changes, viewing life as transient and composed of a series of decisions leading to either successful or dangerous outcomes. A reading helps the reader to take a coherent outlook toward a question about the present or future by consider how things have changed and will change.

Photo by Ross Griff, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0

Myriad other forms of divination with much less structure and bodies of literature exist in every culture. Any random event, particularly dramatic ones like natural disasters or powerful forces of nature, are felt as omens an open to interpretation. A list of other random, but purposefully generated, outcomes was provided above. Some require a visual imagination to find symbols in abstract shapes like clouds, smoke, and tea leaves. Others require discernment into how passages of words, found perhaps by flipping through a text or overheard from passing strangers, can be interpreted to provide answers to a current situation.

Science was invented to replace practices like divination for foretelling events. It is based on rigorous and systematic observations of cause and effect, and determinedly works to avoid creative interpretation. Yet tremendous amounts of data are generated by scientific or pseudo-scientific studies for which solid theoretical foundations are lacking, or which contain suspect causal assumptions that can mislead interpretation. In the end, much of what is offered as scientifically sound, particularly in these days of big data, may be considered a modern form of divination.

To summarize, divination is a set of methods to:

• Understand the present through interpretations of random outcomes.
• Consider our lives as a coherent, well conceived narrative, following established paths of wisdom, some of which were established centuries ago.
• Help us make decisions that will lead to positive outcomes, based on analysis of the forces at work in our current situations, including our own motivations.
• Enhance our agency by providing the confidence to make good choices.

Divination works because everyday we are building our futures. Every decision we make affects our tomorrow, and the attitudes we take lead us in the directions they will. Divination is a way for us to take a degree of control, even if it appears to be granting control to outside forces and random events. It provides aesthetic rewards through the justification and closure it brings. Whether or not you agree that divine spirits can send us messages through these events, our interpretation of them and our resulting decisions are our own.

Ten reasons for examining everyday aesthetics

Photo by Bruce Muller 

Life is filled with opportunities, as well as their accompanying risks, uncertainties, and inevitable pitfalls. If we do not accept them, life is not worth living. We can jump in and make life an adventure, risking the challenge of overcoming setbacks or potential failure, or we can step back and live a safe and anaesthetic life. The problem is, anaesthesia brings the deepest pitfall of all, an apathy that swallows opportunity and breeds monotony.

At times the choices we make, even when they at first seem good and rewarding, lead to situations that dissipate our spirit. They can leave us feeling burned out--an idiom that recalls the hollowness of a charred and empty home, with only the walls and open window frames remaining, vulnerable to the wind and whatever it brings. Investment in life has this risk if we are not equipped with the required resilience.

Burnout can result from many things: endless demands, a pace that leaves no time for thoughtful reaction, lack of appreciation for our efforts, unnecessary roadblocks and detours, effort without challenge, and meaningless or futile tasks. These situations can seem as inescapable as monotony, perhaps leading us to seek anaesthesia in the many addictive forms available--chemical alteration, excessive consumption, media overload, closed-minded beliefs for the sake of belonging, or mindless routine.

Photo by cmiper, copyright Creative Commons

This is where art and everyday aesthetics can help.

The opposite of anaesthesia, aesthetic experiences help us avoid and build resilience against burnout and monotony. They offer an outlet for our expressive energy and an infusion of meaning. Aesthetics is often thought of as applying to objects or events that we engage with just for pleasure, not needful and productive activities. But it is more useful, and more cohesive, to think of aesthetics as describing those particularly engaging and rewarding types of experience that can emerge in almost any realm-- those that are optional and primarily pleasurable, or those absolutely necessary. (For a larger discussion, see the post, What makes an experience aesthetic?) Art is a special case--a refinement of the everyday. As explored in the post, The Purpose of Art, some of the key values of art that have been identified by philosophers over the centuries relate to its potential for therapeutic cleansing, healing, celebrating, distracting, instructional, or transcendent qualities. These values relate to everyday aesthetic experiences as well.

Engaging in an activity as simple as a vigorous walk, tending the garden, creating a photo album, or preparing a special dinner can bring meaning lost during the more mundane efforts of the day. Taking an extended trip to an exotic destination can provide a lifetime of resilience through the memories gained and things learned. Completing a marathon that was long trained-for can bring a new sense of power and the will to do more with life. Learning to play a musical instrument, writing a book or completing a PhD can do the same. These are special not just for the final products, but for the experience as a whole, from initial frustration, to learning, to challenge, and to culmination.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Resilience to burn out comes not by relaxing and dropping out, but by going through experiences that engage us, challenge us, and push back, but also finally give back and reward us with the realization that we can have an effect on our lives and on the world. Art is evidence of that need. Art is the distillation of life experiences, and experiences in and of themselves, helping us to see the aesthetic potential around us. We seek art in its many forms for the wide variety of reasons already mentioned (cleansing, healing, celebrating, distracting, learning, transcending), and we seek everyday aesthetic experiences for exactly the same reasons. This blog is devoted to short essays demonstrating how everyday experiences can do this.

This rest of this post will expand on the reasons for this line of study, which is currently rising in popularity among philosophers. For example, see Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics (Malecki, Ed., 2014) and Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Shusterman, 2000). But the discussion is wasted if it stays within the discourse of philosophers. It is a useful topic for all of us.

Why bother examining the aesthetics of everyday life? Why not just enjoy them without trying to dissect or classify them? I will offer a few reasons below.

1. Increased acceptance: Art is both idealized and berated for being so idealized. The same is true for many everyday aesthetic activities like team sports, gourmet cooking, extreme sports, and others. Those who aren’t interested do not understand how others might be so enthusiastic about activities that they feel are pretentious, shallow, or reckless. So, one reason to examine these phenomena together is to embrace the varieties of aesthetic experience, to know that aesthetics is not an elitist concern, but something we all engage in everyday, each in our own ways. It is OK to be disinterested in some forms, but we should realize that the reason we enjoy our own chosen experiences is fundamentally the same reason others enjoy theirs. All should be admired as human expressions arising from the same needs.
2. More engagement: Understanding and accepting the similar foundations of aesthetic experiences might encourage us to engage in more of these life-enhancing activities. We might see more opportunities, and these might bring us more power to affect our lives in positive ways to resist burnout, even bringing increased happiness by avoiding pitfalls or helping us climb out of them more easily.
3. New sensitivities: Routine binds us, but aesthetic experiences open our doors of perception. They ask us to see with new eyes, listen with new ears, taste and touch with new sensitivity. They expand the abilities of our senses, allowing us to notice things we would otherwise miss. They help us find beauty where we might otherwise miss it. Conscious practice of aesthetic activities can expand the powers of our senses. Logic and analytical understanding are particularly valued in most societies today, but aesthetic experience, while often built upon these, also reveals that sensory experience is also an important source of knowledge on its own (Baumgarten). This expansion of knowledge into the sensory realm helps us to bring more to bear.
4. Deeper learning: Aesthetic experiences are also learning experiences. They teach us about the world through deeper examination of its many aspects, including what we can offer to it. They build knowledge about the world through greater exposure, and can bring insights that build perspective on our roles in the world. They help us to grow, and to develop the skills to be more resilient in life. The provide new strategies to give and receive more.
5. Expanding viewpoints: Life is full of non-obvious qualities that stay that way due to our habits of compartmentalizing, rather than synthesizing. Exploring everyday aesthetics is a synthesis that can bring new qualities to light by exercising our synthesis capabilities.
6. Connection to others: Even though aesthetic experience is in some perspectives personal, we all share in having them. The experiences we engage in are more often than not collective ones--things done in teams, groups, or with partners, or as part of an audience. Connecting with others with similar interests helps us to be more connected to life in general, and to grow from what we learn from one another.
7. Connection to our environments: Moreover, aesthetic experiences connect us to the natural and built environment as well. One of their properties is developing the power to interact in our environments--to build, climb, hike, travel, throw, fly, represent, qualify, quantify, collect, explain, etc. They help us appreciate our surroundings for what they can offer, and give life new meaning in these ways as well.
8. Curiosity: Understanding brings power. Understanding is a fundamental path to, or at times synonymous with, finding meaning. Any knowledge is empowering, but more so when it challenges our status quo. Knowledge of everyday aesthetics, which tells us about the common source of art and so many everyday activities, brings an especially deep cutting knowledge about life. The pursuit of a deeper understanding of this pervasive aspect of human experience is in itself, like all other ventures into the unknown or not-well-understood, an aesthetic experience.
9. Appreciation of art: Art surrounds us, and it can be empowering to know that art enhances experience, not by lifting us above or distracting us everyday life (although it can be used this way), but by distilling life to uncover its essences. In the end, art is not an escape, but a confrontation of life. It can bring a particularly powerful aesthetic experience.
10. Designing experiences for others: The final reason is perhaps the most important for many of us. Aesthetic experience brings change, and those engaged in professions that aim to change others, help them grow, overcome personal challenges, make decisions, and overcome oppressive circumstances, can use a knowledge of aesthetic experience to ensure that happens. Whether you are in marketing; a teacher, trainer, coach, or mentor; a manager, politician, or social activist; a therapist, a preacher, … a parent, … or an artist, you have the potential to use a knowledge of aesthetic experience to support your work.

A nice, round, ten reasons. Enough to keep us going in the exploration.

John Muir, the famous naturalist, has been quoted as saying that “when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” The exploration of aesthetic experiences, a natural phenomenon certainly, has this potential. Once we know what we are looking for, we see how pervasive aesthetic experiences actually are. Today during my hike, a large and dripping wet dog ran up to me with a large stick in his mouth, his lips pulled back into a grin. He had just been retrieving thrown sticks from the Versoix River and was proud of his accomplishments, so I congratulated him with a pat on his head. As I walked on up the trail, I found a short stick on the ground similar to the one the dog was carrying. I picked it up and threw it as far as I could up the trail, for no immediately apparent reason.

Aesthetics of Sports, Part 1: Smashing assumptions

While researching a post on the aesthetics of baseball, I began to realize that a lot of assumptions were being used that might require some background work. Therefore, this is Part 1 of what is probably a series about this important segment of everyday aesthetics.

Photo by Keith Allison. Copyright Creative Commons

Here are some assumptions to address that make the connection of sports to the arts, which is the point of this post, arguable:

1. The goal of sport is not beauty, but winning. 
2. The outcome of sport is unpredictable, unlike most art forms, which are scripted or crafted.
3. Arts represent life, but sport is just for fun. Sport does not have a “plot.”
4. While bodily skills are mastered by players of sports, higher mental skills like insight into life and appreciation of beauty, are secondary.
5. High levels of emotion are apparent in both, but emotions in sport are raw, not subtle or refined.
6. Appreciation of sport requires no skill or discrimination. Nothing so popular, appreciated by almost anyone at whatever level of education or life experience, can be an art.

I hope that for many of you these statements seem ploying, just baiting an argument. But statements like this are not uncommon. In an influential article on the aesthetic of sports, philosopher Paul Ziff argues that while sports have aesthetic “by-products” or “epiphenomena,” such as skillful maneuvers or “stunts” that can be beautiful to watch, these should not in themselves be considered aesthetic because they have “an inconsequential ancillary role to play in the sport.” The point of sports, he says, is scoring points. Studies of sports like “Moneyball” emphasize the importance of this aspect, although even here there is an aesthetic in the use of statistical analysis to predict success, and the success of the movie is proof of this. But Ziff’s stance has been argued with by others, as I intend to do.

1. The goal of sport is not beauty, but winning.

I toured the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires recently, and I was lucky enough to be able to visit the grand theater during a rehearsal of the La Bayadera ballet. Like any rehearsal, including a pre-game warm up for a baseball game, the activity was fascinating, but disjointed and fragmented. Difficult movements practiced, but out of context. The flow of action interrupted for coaching or a performer’s decision to correct a mistake. Yet the skill was impressive, and the marvel of watching talented people practicing was rewarding, if not beautiful, in itself. I was compelled to purchase a ticket to the ballet, one of the few remaining, and I saw the actual performance one week later. I can report that the experience was deepened by having seen the rehearsal.

Winning in the arts has to do with selling out performances or other products. But the artists cannot focus on that--they are working to master their craft, landing that ballet leap, hitting that note, nailing the dialogue with the right emotional pitch. After all, these are the things that sell. The same is true for sports to various degrees. In gymnastics, form is already accounted for in the point system, but it is also an obvious intent whose outcome is appreciated more than points by spectators. In other sports, catching the ball is more important than HOW you catch the ball. Nevertheless, for the spectators, HOW can be what makes a game magical. Consider the drama of a successful or failed strategic coaching decision, like positioning players on the field, choosing which play pattern to execute, or changing one player for another, as well as skilled player maneuvers like runs, catches, and kicks--can such well--crafted execution make up for a losing game? Sometimes, almost, and enough to keep fans coming back to watch. But what is certain is that without this beauty, one might as well read the newspaper report of the game.

Photo by ken yee. Copyright Creative Commons

Beauty in sports is also manifested in the pageantry of a game, but more intrinsic is the well implemented movement or strategy, not to mention the cumulative sublimity of watching a team or athlete performing at the top of their form over a critical series of contests. No matter the outcome, these elements make a significant contribution to the aesthetic experience of a sport.

2. The outcome of sport is unpredictable, unlike most art forms, which are scripted or crafted.

A sport, by nature, is unpredictable. While some athletes seem unstoppable, the rules of a sport are in place to balance the odds. The dimensions of the playing field, restrictions on movements, time limits, time-outs, predictable limits to physical endurance, rapid pacing that necessitates quick decisions, the size and composition of equipment--all these place constraints and even the odds. Fans are sometimes upset when rules are changed, at times to enhance excitement or bring it under control (like more or less baseball hits). But the rules, for better or worse, are what make the sport function.

This unpredictability within constraints is built in, and is what gives sports its drama. Time limits, or numbers of rounds or attempts, in particular, establish a beginning and end that builds tension in good contests. In most games, those that are not completely lopsided, as the end approaches the drama rises. The chance for clinching, the chance for a come-back, or the tragic failure to do these can be explosive for spectators, visibly and audibly affecting an entire stadium. In fact, sports are not without scripts--the rules themselves are a form of script, crafted constraints with sufficient open space to ensure drama.

Photo by PaulMLocke. Copyright Creative Commons

Unpredictability might seem counter to art, but particularly in late modern and contemporary art, unpredictability frequently has been built into the process and products. From the Happenings of the 1960’s, which were events triggered by the simplest of scripts (or perhaps “rules” is a better term) of just a few paragraphs or sentences (often ending with a statement that key decisions left up to participants), to the music of John Cage, the tape loops of Brian Eno, and improvisational jazz, randomness has been built into art as a natural quality of experience. In fact, in most performance art, unpredictability, including the potential for a grand or failed performance, has always been a factor and part of what continues to draw people to live performances when recordings could offer predictable quality instead.

3. Arts represent life, but sport is just for fun. Sport does not have a “plot.”

Arts can represent life with a high degree of verisimilitude. A novel or drama can explore complex situations with deep scrutiny of the thoughts and emotions of the characters depicted. Some even speculate that books, and more specifically, the growth of the modern novel as an art form, has led to new understandings of consciousness. An artful tragedy captures, through its playing out of falling pride and lost opportunity, the human condition of living in a difficult world with unfair human limitations. Basketball, on the other hand, amounts to “watching a bunch of pituitary cases stuff a ball through a hoop.”

Photo by Keith Allison. Copyrights Creative Commons

Well, contrary to this connaisseur attitude, sports DO connect to the deeper experiences of life. And while the plot of a sport is not the same sort of narrative as a drama, it is dramatic. Francis Keenan saw that an athlete must show a “display of courage in the face of adversity (that) reflects something beautiful about man--the spirit with which he enters marvelous combat with an overwhelming and unpredictable world.” That describes both tragedy and sport, and suggests the lasting power of both. An athlete, as exceptional as he or she is, is reduced to being a common human facing the rules, constraints, and physical challenges of a sport. Again and again, the best of athletes fail, show their tragic flaw of hubris, and are brought down by the odds and either forced to leave the game or left in only to see it fall into a shamble of defeat around them. This can happen in the form of a traditional peripeteia or reversal, most dramatic in the last minutes of a game (or in a relentless second half, as we saw in the 2017 Super Bowl). This reversal can bring a form of catharsis, or emotional cleansing for spectators. Even in the individual sports, like track and field or gymnastics, distance or speed records are always eventually broken, and exceptional maneuvers are improved upon by the next generation, if not by the next olympic games.

The length of a game or athletic performance is established to be long enough to develop drama and to resemble the human predicament, but usually short enough to be appreciated by the average spectator. Exceptions exists, such as marathon races and cricket matches, but the same is true in the arts, and the current trend of serial TV dramas with endlessly developing plots is a perfect example. Even for the sporting events that average 2-3 hours, the drama also develops over games and seasons, or even over the career of a player. These begin to resemble not just episodes of life, but life.

4. While bodily skills are mastered by players of sports, higher mental skills like insight into life and appreciation of beauty, are secondary.

Arguments like this are hard to defend. The subtle and complex strategies of playing a sport, the “inner game,” the psychology of reading (and sometimes deceiving) the opponent, the physical beauty (elegance, precision, style, grace, rhythm) of the perfected skills exhibited, and the appreciation of these that both precede their perfection by the athlete and observation by the spectator--these are all quite enough to make the argument sound silly.

Photo by Maja Kuna-Parrish

Add to this the strength of character required to be sportsmanlike under pressure and to appeal to a restless, demanding crowd and you can see the rather high level of social skill that is asked of athletes as well. However, the long effort required to achieve extreme mastery of skills and the desire to be ranked above others can lead to narcissism. This is dangerous, and is not tolerated for long by fans or teammates in team sports, nor by fans and the press in individual sports. Narcissism is more tolerated in the arts, and is even accepted as a stereotypical character trait, but it does not make it pretty. Some question whether the goal to win detracts from the potential beauty of a sport, but I suspect it only magnifies it. It no doubt creates pitfalls to navigate, which if done well, lead to an admirable grace, which is a form of beauty.

5. High levels of emotion are apparent in both, but emotions in sport are raw, not subtle or refined.

Emotions in sport can be raw. Hockey games have resembled battles at certain points. The physical exertion required of sports can naturally lead to physical expression of emotions. However, we shouldn’t forget that even greater violence in novels, drama and films are considered essential elements of masterworks. The emotions that can be shared during a sporting event are certainly not as raw and also no less refined than the ones felt by King Lear or Willy Loman.

Almost all of us enjoy physical struggle, and we are rewarded when we achieve mastery over our bodies by taking a longer walk or run than usual, staying up later than we normally can to complete an important task, and even more so by learning a new skill, like skiing or playing tennis. It might be difficult to decide to enter the struggle, but once engaged, we can be captured by it, addicted even.

Athletes are our role models in this way. They have mastered skills we cannot imagine ourselves achieving. Interestingly, spectators do more than watch, it has been shown that they actually can have an empathetic mirror experience, feeling what the athlete must feel as he leaps to catch a ball or is crushed beneath a pile of opponents. The squirming and jumping of spectators is evidence of this, although we have probably all felt it, if only the sympathetic pain we feel for a child who shows us her skinned knee.

Photo by Keith Allison. Copyright Creative Commons

But more than kinesthetic empathy, it is emotional empathy that pulls us into a game of sports. We share the frustration of the player that strikes out with the bases loaded, the joy of a pitcher who strikes out three batters in a row, the ecstasy of the runner who crosses the finish line victoriously. This vicarious participation can be overwhelming. Fans wear the jerseys worn by their favorite teams, argue with the umpires that make bad calls against their favorite players, and speak in the second person when they pronounce that “we” won or lost the game. In some sports, there are rituals that draw fans further into the game--the chance to catch the errant ball or puck, or even making the first ritual pitch.

6. Appreciation of sport requires no skill or discrimination. Nothing so popular, appreciated by almost anyone at whatever level of education or life experience, can be an art.

I once sat through a game of cricket during a visit to Barbados, lost in my attempt to understand the strategies being used by the teams -- the fielders shifting their positions over the large field as each new batsman took his position at the plate, and also before almost each pitch; the strange, immense circumferences made by the arms of the bowlers pitching toward the wicket. There were some obvious connections to the game of baseball, which I knew better, but it was still hard to fathom. A sport can be bewildering to the non-initiated. It is not only the complex rules, like those of baseball and cricket, that befuddle novice spectators, but also what it is that is supposed to constitute excitement and skill. If you don’t know the game, the crowd can be roaring while you sit chewing your popcorn. The pace of cricket matches (some forms lasting up to five days) is even slower than baseball, and it moves at a snail’s pace compared to the don’t-blink paces of basketball and hockey, let alone fencing. There are many scales and paces to aesthetic experiences.

Photo by ferhat_culfaz. Copyright Creative Commons

Arts sometimes get a bad rap from their long association of being produced for wealthy or over-intellectual patrons, not for common persons. Critiques of the arts dive into philosophical topics that many would not see arising from the primitive or violent mash-up artworks in front of them. Art can be an insider thing, an “art world” to itself. But it is somewhat the same for sports. Only the well-initiated truly appreciate a sport, even it if might take a short time, in some cases, to become initiated.
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Ziff, Paul (1974) "A Fine Forehand," Philosophic Exchange: Vol. 5 : No. 1 , Article 11. Available at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/phil_ex/vol5/iss1/11

Keenan, Francis (1972) "The Athletic Contest as a "Tragic" Form of Art," Philosophic Exchange: Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 14. Available at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/phil_ex/vol3/iss1/14/