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/

Gardening

Children are fascinated with digging in the earth. It is a process of discovery, finding what lurks beneath the surface, the strange creatures that live there and the comforting texture of the material they live in. It’s fun to hold the soil and examine it, to touch it and feel its cool contents fall between the fingers, a stuff both ancient and as new as last autumn’s decay. It is hard for those of us who live above the soil to imagine life in this dark place.

Photo by Shyn Darkly, Creative Commons 2.0

But digging is also a process of creation, molding the earth into new shapes--carving a valley and building a hill with the excess, as I sometimes did as a child, creating a primeval landscape for my plastic dinosaurs. These miniature landscapes could be the setting for endless battles and more than the normal number of volcanoes. Other dig to create memoirs, burying meaningful objects for their future selves or future generations to discover.

And then, of course, there is the cultivation that begins with digging. Children and adults alike are fascinated by how the simple act of putting a seed or seedling in the ground can lead to a fruit, vegetable, flower, or tree. It should not be surprising that gardening holds a central role in our lives as a practical, everyday activity that rewards so many people not just with products, but with a feeling of well being that provides balance to their lives. Gardening is so embedded in our lives that it even serves as a metaphor for mind (cultivating and planting ideas, burying and uncovering memories, etc., see Coda below) and as providing lessons for living a good life (hard work, patience, attention to detail, delayed gratification, etc.). Cultivation of plants and the modification of landscapes, large and small, are a primal activity for human and animal minds. Ants and other insects mold the earth to make their sometimes extremely complex colonies, and cultivate fungi to feed their populations. Fish and crustaceans cultivate algae and bacteria to enhance their feeding grounds. Beavers build dams that last more than 100 years to do the same. The growth of complex human civilizations is a direct result of their ability to master cultivation to create a stable food supply. Humans are at least partly distinguished by their propensity for cultivation.

All cultivation can develop into an aesthetic experience, but gardening holds a special place. Usually, we think of “gardening” as different from farming--not as a job, but as a craft, avocation, or pastime. Gardening is usually conducted more for its aesthetic qualities than for income and sustenance. The backyard vegetable garden, yielding a few dozen tomatoes and a few squashes, is justified more by the pleasure it brings the gardener and the rewards of the taste of fresh food. Gardens are places created for the experiences that we can have there, and the best of them, such as the ones found at Versailles or Jardin Majorelle, are called works of art.

In his writings on aesthetics, Immanuel Kant linked formal gardening to painting, considering gardens as a visual art, focused on creating scenes that give pleasure in the colors, textures, and spatial relations of their contents. But gardens have a temporal dimension as well, perhaps even dramatic qualities, as plants and their leaves and flowers change throughout the season, or as their soil and stones accumulate snow or change tone under the rain and changing light. Barwell and Powell (2010) liken this dimension to music, with its overlapping rhythms and melodies:

For example, an oak tree grows slowly, its leaves grow and decay relatively quickly, a drift of crocuses underneath the oak appears and disappears at a different rate, and a surrounding lawn is managed so that it looks the same all year round. Such a combination of plants affords visual interest, but at the same time it creates a complex rhythm of life cycles, growth, and decay that may interest, excite, calm, disturb, or reassure an attentive visitor.

For those lucky enough to revisit a garden multiple times during the year, or to cultivate their own, gardens generate a different experience over time than can occur on a single visit. And if the garden is sufficiently large, even a single tour through it may generate a similar effect as one passes from one sub-garden to the next, or as the perspective changes from different viewpoints. I walk the same Jardin Botanique in Geneva at least 3-4 days each week, and the 30-minute path I take offers many changes. Even if the path has become predictable and the walk mostly a meditation, it affords evolving visual rewards, like a pleasant, familiar melody.  

More than just visual beauty, research shows that visiting and viewing gardens, and vegetation in general, offer mental health benefits that cannot be attributed simply to beauty, as broad as that concept is. The experience of natural environments mitigate fatigue, calm the mind, improve cognitive function, stimulate creativity, and improve mental disorders, such as depression, attention deficit disorder, and alzheimer's. Perhaps as much as beauty, we have a craving for natural environments embedded deep in our psyches. 

However, what I am most concerned with here is the experience of the gardener, the fruits of the process. Considering the criteria for an aesthetic experience described in previous posts, gardening seems to hit all the bases with exceptional ease. The planting creates an immediate tension (in the pleasant sense) that draws us into the drama of survival and potential flourishing. This tension is further driven by the anticipation of growth and beauty. The process of gardening is touted as good physical and mental exercise because it requires deep engagement with immediate actions and sensual details. Gardening is hard work, and rewarding in and of itself, without constant regard for its extrinsic purposes. Finally, gardens offer a natural conclusion or resolution, a blossoming that rewards the gardener for all the effort, and these rewards can be ongoing, lasting years. In fact, a garden can be an ongoing aesthetic experience, running through this cycle on multiple scales in multiple evolutions, like a never ending piece of music.

Coda

Consider this aphorism, drawn from a letter to a friend:

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero was not speaking of two different forms of nourishment, for mind and for body, but a common form of nourishment that is supported by their mutual presence.

You open a book (or a digital tablet), hold it in your hands, scanning the contents for its potential rewards. Your fingers turn or swipe the pages, your eyes burrowing, digging, at times pulling and tossing the weeds to focus on the promising sprouts. You take in the words, digesting the images, ideas, and emotions they arouse. They bring you down to earth to confront the common ground, or up toward the sky for a treetop view. Reading cultivates the mind, works like a hoe to weed and refresh spaces for growth, sowing seeds that may grow to fruition in experience. Gardening does the same, both literally and figuratively.

The connection between reading books and gardening is a lasting metaphor. This connection is at least partly because the book and the garden are themselves useful metaphors for mind. Today, reflecting our current state of technology, we tend to see the mind as a computer, with its information processing and storage capacity. But the garden and book metaphors still hold power. Like the best of minds, a productive, healthy garden and a well written book are valuable repositories that require cultivation, and which can involve all the senses and emotions in the process. They are also much more than repositories, they are engines for growth, in all the ways described above.

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Barwell, I. & Powell, J. (2010) Gardens, Music, and Time, in Gardening--Philosophy for Everyone: Cultivating Wisdom (Ed., Dan O’Brien). Wiley-Blackwell, UK.

What makes an experience aesthetic?

All the time we are awake life is marked by experience. The world gives us sensations and situations to respond to, we react, and the world reacts back. This ongoing transaction fills our days.

But some experiences are more rewarding than others. Experiences tend to run the spectrum from boring and barely worth our attention—to scattered, incomplete and unsatisfying—to routine (whether mindless routine or pleasantly familiar routine)—to busy and focused (with various levels of challenge and satisfaction)—to those that are the most engaging, even radiating with meaning and purpose, lifting you up, making you feel truly alive. These are the kind you want to keep with you.

The experiences filled with meaning are the ones we can refer to as aesthetic. These set the bar. In fact, they inspire the practice of art (which, fundamentally, is our way of distilling experience), inspire people to strive for the highest achievements in all domains, and keep us going through the routine, hard work, or boredom we inevitably experience along the way. Just knowing aesthetic experiences are out there to be had can be inspiration enough to resisting slipping into the doldrums.

The connection of engaging everyday experiences to art and aesthetics was made most famously by philosopher John Dewey in his 1934 work, Art as Experience. There, he explored the question of the source of art in human behavior, and saw it as originating in everyday experience, ranging from “how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the on-looking crowd; . . . the delight of the housewife in tending to her plants . . .; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals.”

Photo by Lukas Riebling

What can these everyday experiences have in common with the David of Michelangelo, Picasso’s Guernica, Debussy’s Preludes, Malick’s Days of Heaven, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina? The answer has to do with a few critical qualities of experiences that drive us toward the reward of meaningful engagement.

Including the encounters with works of art that we love, but definitely not restricted to these, aesthetic experiences have a coherence—a beginning, middle, and end—that sets them apart from the normal flow of experience. This begins with an intention based on (a) a need, desire, tension, or puzzlement that stimulates attention, an attention that is further driven by (b) the anticipation of a meaningful outcome that makes the experience compelling—winning the game, a garden full of flowers, a warm fire. These experiences are also colored by (c) deep engagement and concern for (d) immediate actions and sensual details, and not just thoughts about reasons and purposes, which may in fact be temporarily forgotten, like time itself. Finally, unlike much of our experience, which can feel incomplete or lacking in some way, an aesthetic experience includes (e) a conclusion or consummation, a resolution that ties all the moments of the experience together--gives it coherence--and makes the effort (which often includes hard work) worth it. Moreover, the resolution often feels profoundly meaningful. Nearly all good narratives have such a pattern, and non-narrative art can create the same experience within us, but many everyday experiences show this pattern as well.

Each of these qualities require more unpacking and exploration, as does the overall quality of coherence, and might be the subject of future posts. But for now, let’s conclude by examining a couple experiences to show how one is aesthetic, and one is definitely not, and also look at the contributing factors.

It would be easy to choose two highly contrasting situations, like climbing a mountain and washing windows, for example, but let’s choose very similar situations in an environment where where experiences tend to exhibit a wide range of aesthetic engagement—the workplace. The situations described below are fictitious, and any resemblance to real situations, current or past, is purely coincidental.

1.
You are asked to take on a new work assignment. You have no lack of work, so at first you wince at the request. But you trust the person asking for it (manager or client, take your pick), know that the assignment is not a whim, and as you study the details, you agree it has value and will bring multiple benefits. You also see some interesting challenges that will offer you an opportunity to learn new things, so you say yes. Your first task is to decide on the approach you will take, which will require buy-in by the stakeholders. Through careful examination of the goals, the stakeholder needs, the constraints, and similar assignments taken on by colleagues, you are able to develop both a good plan and a good argument for it. The buy-in is achieved after a series of challenges that force you to defend the approach. As you begin to implement the plan, you become convinced that the outcome would be improved if you adapt your approach, and this creative problem solving is enjoyable enough to compel you to work late many nights. When you deliver the final result, it is well received, but not without some additional modifications. You think back to when you were first given the assignment and how it has evolved, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment to know that you were able to see it through this evolution. You also look forward to seeing how what you learned during the project will help you in future efforts, and perhaps win you additional interesting and challenging assignments.

I hope this scenario was not too unfamiliar, but certainly most workplace experiences don’t reach this level. Let’s rewind and look at the other end of the spectrum.

2.
You are asked to take on a new work assignment. You have no lack of work, and so you wince at the request. The person asking you (manager or client, take your pick) has a reputation for quickly responding to upper management requests with half-baked ideas for the sake of quick compliance. You feel that this might be one of those black-hole assignments, one that will take excessive time and energy, but give back little and have little chance of success. You are told the plan and given little leverage to adapt it with your own ideas, so you cannot help but feel a lack of conviction when you have to present it to the stakeholders. Predictably, it is shot full of holes by the skeptics who offer no alternatives, and equally so by supporters who have completely different (and better) ideas that might have more impact. Trying to please everyone, you allow the plan to become a mélange that will hopefully address everyone’s input. Before the plan can be implemented, management stalls, unable to see how it could address their original goals, which have changed anyway. No one cancels it, but no one pushes for it either, and so it withers away and is eventually forgotten. You move on to hopefully better projects.

I suspect we have all had such experiences in our work, unfortunately. Aesthetic experiences are hard to come by, especially when critical contributing factors are lacking. What are these factors?

Some have to do with things that are mostly outside our control, the Situational qualities, and some have to do with the ones we bring to the experience, our Individual qualities. The diagram below depicts a rather good day/week/month without boredom or scattered activity, and lists the qualities that make it good. But note that, as novelists since modernist times have shown us, experience is not really a timeline, and aesthetic experiences are not just moments we can mark in time. Sometimes only with time does it dawn on us how meaningful an experience has become, perhaps even long after the events have concluded.

From Parrish, Wilson, and Dunlap (2010)

Qualities of Situations

Immediacy. Some situations absorb us their details--not just sights and sounds to perceive, but also ideas to comprehend, emotions to feel, and tasks to accomplish. Immediacy takes our focus away from ourselves and to the world itself.

Malleability. Some experiences allow give and take–the opportunity for us to color the experience, to shape it with the tools we bring to it, and to contribute to its unfolding. The most powerful situations are provisional, with the final meaning and outcomes to be determined at least partly by us.

Compellingess. A compelling situation contains intrigue and uncertainty. It makes us curious about what happens or can happen next. We are reluctant to let it go.

Resonance. Some experiences both connect to our present lives and leave a residue of thoughts and feelings that have an impact on future experiences. Sometimes they recast the past with new understanding. Aesthetic experiences create reverberant echoes in all directions.

Coherence. When life moves from one thing to another without connection, the disjointedness is unraveling. Coherence, on the other hand, is almost synonymous with meaning, and it is most powerful if it emerges when we are following through on an intention. In fact, the most rewarding kind of coherence is one that is not just given--like an easily perceived symmetry, but one that requires a struggle before being revealed.

Qualities of Individuals

Intent. Each of us has individual goals and interests, as well as unique attitudes, values, hopes, beliefs, likes, dislikes, and assumptions about our role in the world. All of these are subsumed by the concept of intent by phenomenologists like Husserl (1982/1999). While our intentions exist in any case, when we are aware of and honest about our intentionality, we are also more open to the influence of experience and more able to gain from it. This is perhaps especially when it challenges us.

Presence. As Woody Allen aptly put it, 80 percent of success is showing up. I agree, but to achieve an experience that reaches aesthetic proportions we need something beyond physical and mental presence. The other “twenty percent” includes empathy and being genuine, which are a little bit harder to achieve. These three types of presence are called being-there, being-with, and being-one’s-self by philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962). Presence makes us more responsible, able to draw on our pasts and utilize our will to imagine and change our future.

Openness. In American politics, openness is called being a flip-flopper, as if it is shameful to admit you can still learn from experience. Aesthetic experiences, if we want them, demand an openness to submit to the challenges offered and draw upon the opportunities of the situation and the perspectives and support of others to learn new things. This is not flip-flopping, this is integrity.

Trust. To fully engage in a situation, we need to trust that it has something to offer. This includes faith that positive outcomes can occur – along with the willingness to suspend disbelief when these outcomes are in doubt – and forgiveness when the experience falls short of expectations, knowing that with effort, it can be turned around.

This list of aesthetic-potential qualities is probably not exhaustive, and the qualities are certainly not independent of each other. But hopefully they are compelling and coherent enough to keep this line of inquiry going, which is all that is needed. Do your favorite works of art have these qualities? When you enjoy them, do you bring your individual qualities to the experience? Does your work ever rise to this level?

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Portions of this post are based on Learning Experience as Transaction: A Framework for Instructional Design (Parrish, Wilson, and Dunlap, 2010)

Cooking and Eating

Last night, my wife was going to arrive home late for dinner due to her French class. That could have been an excuse for preparing a simple snack or leftovers, but we almost always choose to avoid that kind of eating after a long work day because it makes us feel a little depressed, to be honest. Like many people, we enjoy taking time to cook, to prepare something significant, perhaps simple, but still elegant, even when time is not in our favor. In some way, the day just does not feel complete without it. On weekend nights, with more time, even if it never seems to be a luxurious amount, the options are wide open, and on occasion we might spend two hours or more in preparation of something more special.

So I prepared a meal last night anyway, but I needed to keep it light since we would be eating so late. I tried something common to many people, Baba Ghanoush (that wonderful paté common in Middle Eastern cuisine), but which I not have prepared more than a couple times, so the novelty was motivation. It is also somewhat simple, but the process takes time and attention. I peel and roast 2 small eggplants (or aubergine as they are known here in Geneva), drenched in extra virgin olive oil and salted, to begin. While the eggplants relax and enrich their flavor in the oven, with only minimal attention required to turn them periodically, it is time to prepare the additional ingredients. Skipping the traditional tahini, which I did not have, I dice capers and spring onions (or szypior, as Maja is used to naming them in Polish) to add some bite. The process of chopping and dicing is quite enjoyable once one gets comfortable with the knife, in fact. The focus and skill required to avoid injuring the fingers and making even cuts is worth developing. The rest of the dish was roasted garlic (we prefer this over raw garlic), fresh lemon juice, parsley and cumin powder (fresh ground in this case). After the eggplant is soft, I blend all these things together in a food processor until it is very smooth, heavier than whipped cream, but similar. Then I just have to prepare a simple side salad and slice some bread.

Photo by young shanahan, copyright Creative Commons

One of the enjoyable and rewarding things about cooking is the potential for endless variation and creative opportunities, as well as the pleasure of using the materials at hand efficiently and to interesting effect. Even one ingredient substituted, or a vegetable sliced thinner or thicker, might have a noticeable effect on the final dish. When trying a new dish, we on occasion use a recipe religiously, but that is rare. Personalization is a key to getting the full enjoyment out of the experience.

We like going out to restaurants for a different kind experience, but we sometimes come away feeling we can do better. Maybe this is true, but maybe it is also just that we miss the process of preparation. After a long day of email communication, meetings, drafting documents and plans, and the inevitable general bureaucratic steps (and crevasses) required to work within the international organizations we are part of, cooking is almost a form of meditation.

It was a warm night, so we ate on the balcony, overlooking the lake, with candles, nice place settings, the sound of soft waves hitting the rocks, and also the background noise we have learned to overlook, the parade of evening planes from countries all over the world heading for the Geneva Airport to land. We see an Emirates plane, and wonder if they ate Baba Ghanoush during their journey as well, and whether it was as good as ours.

The qualities of cooking mentioned above--infinite creative options, requisite dexterity, a focus on process, a body of jargon, specialized tools, visceral enjoyment of the final product--surely qualify cooking as a high craft. And experts chefs are given the recognition that high level craftsman deserve. But does food deserve to be called an artform?

 As mentioned in a previous post, I don’t feel this question is profitable. It leads to many strange arguments. One is that the fact that food is ephemeral makes it unlike most art forms. But isn’t this also true of musical and dance performances? And many visual arts as well, such as Tibetan sand paintings and the outdoor natural arts of Andy Goldsworthy. Another is that food is consumable, for sustenance and not pure enjoyment, so it lacks the “enjoyment for its own sake” that other arts demonstrate. But then there is architecture, and the point that enjoyment is also a useful purpose. Food, and its preparation, offers the opportunity for aesthetic experience, and this is the point, not whether we can call it art. We can anticipate its pleasures, we can become highly engaged in the processes of preparation and eating, it can generate curiosity due to its variety, it is immediately experienced and not just something for intellectual thought, and it can bring about a profound feeling of closure, one felt even in the body as the stomach is satisfied. It is these things that make cooking and eating aesthetic.

Preparing food for oneself and for family and friends provides several levels of nourishment. First is the aesthetic pleasure of crafting a good meal. Second is the physical nourishment of the meal, but also, thirdly, its aesthetic appreciation when eaten. And finally, there is the joy in sharing what one has prepared with others.

Learning is an aesthetic experience

1

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

2

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.