learning experiences inspired by a meditation on the meaning of Beauty

Beauty (and Attraction)

Success, Power, Money.
Truth, Knowledge, Wisdom.
Autonomy, Independence, Freedom.
Spirituality, Sustainability, Simplicity.
Order, Morality, Justice.
Friendship, Communion, Love.
But Beauty: does it find a home in this pantheon of values?

Dismissing Beauty as surface instead of substance makes it easy to wave it away as nothing of consequence. If we prioritize it, it is often to monetize it. Beauty just mulches our mania for money. It becomes a disguise designed merely to attract. However, if we understand Beauty as a profound evolutionary alignment, as Quality, as Truth, as something essential, then I believe we might better appreciate its utility in school.

We will find that a keen aesthetic sense and a lust for Beauty is a powerful driver of discovery and innovation. By disentangling Attraction and Beauty, we may also begin to understand the emotional push and pull they inspire. We begin by asking what Beauty is, then examine the effect it has on us and how we may employ it, finishing as all useful essays should, by asking after the meaning of life.

a. Evolution (…is driven by strength, beauty, guile, invisibility, and sheer quantity)

What is Beauty? Once, before we were romantically involved, before we were even friends, I found my future wife pretending a certainty that her posture belied. We worked together in the same office, and she responded to a hostile question from our spectacularly hateful boss with a definitive answer that I could see she was making up on the fly. I could not believe no one else could see the pretense, but even more absurd, I felt an immense attraction to this besieged individual pretending confidence. Her beauty I’d found daunting, but this dishonesty I found fetching. It would be five years and massive intercontinental machinations to finally bring us together, but this enduring feeling of love and appreciation that I have to this day started with that piece of pretend, uncertainty and insecurity: with a “flaw”.

What kind of evolutionary error is this, that I am attracted not to perfection but to flaw, to striving and not to attainment? Would this not mean evolutionary doom? Or, is it no error at all, because “striving” has an evolutionary advantage over attainment, the insight behind Tortoise versus Hare, effort and guile trumping over-confidence? Possibly, or perhaps evolution is more complicated than we think.

We commonly understand evolution as “survival of the fittest”, with an underlying assumption that not just traits or behavior, but the genetic foundation for those traits and behaviors is being advantaged in a dog-eat-dog world beyond human caprice. We understand Beauty in this scenario as an “honest signal” of some greater underlying fitness. Beauty must be a sign of general durability in other words, and simply evidence of other traits driving selection.

It may be worth considering:

Flaw or perfection: what attracts you and hold your attention?

b. Survival (Beauty offers evolutionary advantage)

Human behavior suggests otherwise though, and even Darwin in his observations of animals in the wild recognized that:

Beauty endures in other words as a commodity in the mating dance, and often at the whim of the female. It traces an independent evolutionary path by inviting or inciting procreation, a gene survival mechanism no less powerful than fitness (the strong survive) or overwhelming quantity (one in a million progeny will survive) or camouflage (invisibility) or guile (the sneaky will triumph). Beauty inspires procreation; it is a useful asset to assure evolutionary survival.

It may be worth considering:

In surveying the development of your field or concentration, do you see Beauty as an evolutionary force?

c. Important (If it’s beautiful, it’s….)

Is that the complete picture though? Beauty is sexy? It is a survival mechanism of the weak? Surely, this does not win Beauty a spot in your curriculum? Take flowers, for example. They are a vital component in the propagation of plant species, they attract bees and have a symbiotic relationship with them, and we humans find them beautiful. We have been enlisted, in other words, in the survival of flowers. It seems ludicrous, except that our own survival is linked to the survival of both flowers and bees (UN News, 2011). Our attraction to flowers is self-serving. Beauty here is a key systemic trait, a key component of a pattern upon which our survival depends. Biologist E.O. Wilson tells us:

Importance need not be universal, but personal. Marvin Minsky (1981) focused on artificial intelligence and came to define the mind as “a society of agents”, each functionally unique and hierarchically situated in our brain. He makes the point that we define ourselves through decisions that are ultimately aesthetic:

When we sense Beauty then, we might sensibly ask: what makes this beautiful thing important to us?

It may be worth considering:

Do you find Beauty in the most important things that you teach?
Are you able to articulate to your students what that Beauty is?
By linking Beauty to Importance, can you enhance appreciation of your curriculum?

d. Quality (Beauty is Quality is Truth)

Joseph Brodsky, the late Russian poet, in a 1991 address to the Library of Congress said:

Beauty is an engine of truth? I understand this to mean that evolution culls the inefficient, the false, and the crude. Beauty here is akin to Quality: some ultimate but ultimately undefinable conception of rightness or durability or expressiveness or…truth. I believe this is what Robert Pirsig meant when he wrote, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

If Beauty is another word for Quality, can we then say that Beauty is our Sun or our Source?

Beauty motivates us to make choices, change circumstances, and remake our world.

It may be worth considering:

Does “Quality” figure into your presentations to your students?
In comparing ideas, designs or processes, do you overtly consider “Quality”?
Do you dedicate yourself and your students to finding or achieving “Quality”?

e. Sustainability (Beauty is Durable)

Beauty also inspires us to protect what we love. In this sense, Beauty is durable. In architecture, we are all too familiar with the spasms of urban renewal and cycles of demolition and construction in corporate building in particular. Some buildings escape the wrecking ball, however, even in the face of overwhelming financial arguments. We list and we protect buildings and districts of powerful emotional relevance. We decry those unfortunately still common desecrations of the public realm, in which the opportunity to score a financial windfall trumps a neighborhood’s affections. We may not always succeed in preserving objects and spaces of Beauty, but we surely invest in the enterprise. Beauty is therefore Sustainable: it endures as we preserve and repurpose if necessary the objects of our affection.

The impulse to protect is not just architectural of course. More vocally than ever, we raise the flag of preservation over natural resources and natural landscapes in the face of corporate and political predations, aware that the cause of Beauty may appear weak but the cause of cultural and physical self-preservation surely carries some polemic and political weight.

It may be worth considering:

As Sustainability becomes existential, does Beauty seem more or less frivolous?
Can you see Beauty instead as a vital tool in promoting sustainability?
Do you understand and teach Beauty as an evolutionary advantage?

f. Attraction (A nose for Beauty is a prerequisite to innovation)

Henri Poincaré, renowned philosopher and mathematician, wrote a century ago that mathematics and particularly mathematical discovery was not just an operation of logical thinking but an act of filtering through possible relationships to focus on those that offer a sense or scent of Beauty:

Poincaré writes of a presentiment or intuition, a feeling of imminent Beauty, of potential harmony, that guides the mathematical adventurer towards relationships or “combinations” of high potential. This aesthetic sense was for him a prerequisite for innovation. It should be teachable. Without it we wander blindly in a forest of infinite possibilities, the chances of useful discovery infinitely small.

This aesthetic sense is what William Beveridge in his treatise The Art of Scientific Investigation (1950) called “Scientific Taste”.

Intuition.

Decades later, Jonah Lehrer in Wired magazine calls the perception of Beauty: “a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity”. Neuroscientific studies of music found “that our favorite moments… those sublimely beautiful bits that give us the chills – were preceded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate, the same brain area involved in curiosity”. Lehrer suggests that:

So Beauty is attraction to something missing or imperfect? Perhaps we should distinguish between “Beauty” and “Attractiveness”, as Psychologist Vivian Diller does so powerfully in her article “Beauty vs. Attractiveness: A Matter of Semantics?” (2011):

If we accept Diller’s distinction, then we understand Lehrer differently. When he writes that “Beauty is a motivational force”, Lehrer is actually discussing Attractiveness or Attraction.  Poincaré too writes of mathematical explorers seeking Beauty in a jungle of possible relationships, their only guide Attraction.

Beauty admits to no flaws or incompleteness, but Attraction demands them. Beauty projects perfection, Attraction romances us with foibles. We hold up Beauty as the goal, the paragon, the end condition, but it is Attraction that inspires action, curiosity, humor, and that essential human need to improve or discover. When we seek to nurture action we do well to focus on gaps and flaws, even as we hold Beauty as our goal.

It may be worth considering:

How might you employ attraction to inspire curiosity?
What are the gaps and foibles of your curriculum that might inspire your students to engage?
How might you inspire your students to define Beauty, and hold it as a motivating force?

Having explored what Beauty is, I want to now consider the effect it has on us, and how we may use it to our advantage in school.

g. Centrifugal/Centripetal (How are we moved?)

Beauty is a gift (a call to appreciation), Attraction an invitation (a call to action). Beauty is what you want to be, Attraction signals what you want to be with. Beauty can be daunting, but Attraction is irresistible. Beauty projects energy outward from the source, while Attraction is centripetal. Attraction to the incipient, to what might be if we but persevere, that is what Poincaré wrote about and what drives evolution. It is also what drives culture: it is what moves us. Beauty is just the final note, the last piece of the puzzle, the pattern finally discerned, resolution achieved. Beauty is attainment.

In this distinction we might begin to understand two ways we experience art. If Brancusi beguiles us with glimpses of some essential with “L'oiseau dans l'espace” (1928), for example, and so demands very little of the viewer except kinesthetic enjoyment, we see the opposite in Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937): a piece less pretty, but one that calls us to wrestle with it both emotionally and intellectually. The Brancusi, in my experience, solicits admiration, and activates greed (I want it!), while the Picasso invites exploration, and demands conversation (What are you trying to tell me?). “L’oiseau dans l’espace” is emotionally centrifugal and keeps me slightly at a distance, while “Guernica” is emotionally centripetal and draws me in close. In this distinction lies an important lesson in student engagement.

  It may be worth considering:

Are your presentations to your students centripetal or centrifugal?
Do you invite participation by offering enticing gaps, enigmas and mysteries, or do you present irreducible truths?

h. Need (Beauty signals…)

I find Beauty in work that does a lot with a little, that projects wholeness, and that communicates ideas and deep understanding, and I am attracted to situations that hint at their possibility. I am a stingy and somewhat studious author and architect enthralled with adventure and profound experiences: to me economy, wholeness, meaning and action are gifts. When I experience something that I crave, I call it Beautiful. What is Beauty to a scientist? What is it to an artist? To an architect? To a dentist? To a teacher? To a lion? To a bee? Perhaps there is no definition except to say that Beauty is what feeds us. It is whatever we are missing. We might ask then, when we find something beautiful: “What is it here that I need to feel fulfilled”?

We might teach Beauty then as a signal to examine ourselves instead of an invitation to acquire something new.

It may be worth considering:

How do you define your role as “teacher”?
Do you concern yourself with your students’ individual fulfillment and self-actualization?
Could Beauty offer your students a window into their own preferences and beliefs?
Could Beauty offer you a window into your students’ worldview?

i. Pleasure (Beauty is a Buzz)

Beauty may not be judged universally, but it turns out that it can be measured. Neuroaesthetics, the study of the visual brain, specifically identifies the medial orbitofrontal cortex as that part of our brain engaged when we experience Beauty: the more beautiful the experience, the higher the activation of this part of the brain. According to Dr. Semir Zeki, a British neurobiologist, mathematical beauty, visual beauty, musical beauty and even moral beauty all activate the same pleasure center (Louis, n.d.). Perhaps we cannot teach a specific Beauty, but we can surely teach our students to pay attention to the feeling of Beauty: to recognize that little buzz in the brain, to let it be their guide, and to honor and protect the source.

It is not enough to proclaim something “Beautiful”, or even to ask if someone sees the “Beauty”. That proclamation and that question cannot inspire the feeling. Only a meditation on that object of beauty will bring the spark to life. It takes time, and comparison and self-examination. We can discuss Beauty, but it remains in the eye of the beholder.

It may be worth considering:

Do you give your students the time and space to meditate on what you present as beautiful?
Do you give your students a venue to present what they think is beautiful?
Do you help them to understand why they hold something as beautiful?
Do you help them to apply that knowledge to your curriculum?

j. Abstraction and Possibility (Perfection is a double-edged sword)

Beauty in life can be an abstraction: nothing is really that perfect. It is in that sense always a disguise, a shell, a cover, a mask. If it inspires curiosity, it is to find the hidden flaws. It is useful in Science to believe in the Beauty of our models and theories, if only to inspire critique and the search for inconsistencies.

Brené Brown extols the Gifts of Imperfection (Brown, 2010), but Perfection nonetheless inspires us. The possibility of perfection inspires us. We speak from both sides of our mouth, exalting paragons and perfections at the same time that we demand authenticity with the admonition to “be yourself”. Which is it: be ideal, or be real? Perhaps the dialectic is contrived. Our quest is for Truth, and to find it we need both: Perfection and Possibility, Beauty and Attraction. If we are to nurture student engagement then it will be by inspiring Attraction. Attraction, that Wabi-Sabi (Wikipedia, n.d.) seduction by imperfection, pulls us out of our lethargy and complacency into the present, inspiring us to action. Beauty pulls us even further, into the future toward the ideal. Attraction captures our attention, but Beauty inspires us to strive. It gets frustrating sometimes to find Beauty ever slipping through your grasp, but to believe in it is much, I imagine, like believing in the Garden of Eden. You have this niggling feeling that such perfection couldn’t exist, but the possibility…ahhh, the possibility.

A century ago, poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer renounced Beauty entirely, (but I don’t think he meant it):

In luring you to the chase, Beauty will make you a moth to its flame.

Beauty is dangerous to an architect, artist or maker of any sort because craving the ideal will ultimately demoralize you: you will reject anything less than perfection. If your intention is to make or design or invent, then you will never get past your initial efforts, those tentative hypotheses and half-baked ideas that may or may not yield productive results. All of those preliminaries are ugly and easily rejected. This mindset, this desire for ultimate Beauty, is the death of productivity. As architecture students we were admonished to “suspend disbelief” and trust our early efforts no matter how ugly, but I needed something to believe in: some idea, some possibility, some ray of truth. Painful indeed proved the lesson to seek not some divine light, but instead, iteratively, some earthly approximation. Icarus, Icarus, Icarus.

Evolution is just a more practical approach to making things, with Attraction the motivation and Beauty the measure. I generate some possible solutions to a problem, decide this is more beautiful than that, and choosing among a number of early efforts, I favor, I cull. Attraction is the engine of selection and Beauty is my goal. Not just: ”this is prettier than that”, but much deeper: “this addresses so many more issues with less fuss than that”, or even more simply, “this moves me more”, or even more simply: “this rings true”. This moves me from a condition of high pressure, a problem, to fill the vacuum of a missing solution. This moves me from the banal solution to the unexpected or more completely satisfying alternative. Simplicity, wholeness, harmony, truth, connection, a palpable relaxation, a reduction of tension, of stress: these are promising portents. I get a peculiar feeling in or just below my intestines, between composting and reproduction, when I begin to believe that Beauty beckons. After decades as an architect, I have finally honed an intuition.

This is the essence of Beauty as a learning experience: it is a kick in the pants. It is possibility. Beauty is Quality and Attraction is Engagement. The deeper we can teach our students to go, the better their questions, the more critical their thinking, the more discerning their choices, then the deeper their Engagement and expectation of and attainment of Quality: of Beauty. The more their work will move us. Such a simple and penetrating question: “Is this more beautiful than that”? It was never asked in my 12 years of public school. It was never even asked in architecture school! The problem was this: Beauty was poorly defined as “exceptionally pretty”. It was understood as superficial: as eye-candy, as surface, as mask. We mistook Beauty for something false instead of something true.

It may be worth considering:

What are your beliefs around Beauty?
Do you see the value of Beauty as an ideal in your own area of concentration?

Do you celebrate perfection as an inspiration, or condemn it as subjective, prejudicial or disheartening?
How might you use Attraction to motivate your students?
Even if perfection is not universally defined, do you help your students to personally define it?

k. The Deep (Beauty is profound)

Better to understand Beauty as a shimmering pool or boundless ocean, inviting us to dive deep and cleanse ourselves of the banal. If we are to succeed in teaching critical thinking, than Beauty will be our goal and Attraction will be our guide. If we are to inspire innovation and critical thinking, then it will be by igniting lust: lust for better, for more true, for more expressive, for more beautiful. That deep dive is curiosity. We will know in school that we have succeeded when the experience is not just intellectual but physical, when the dopamine rush of desire and attainment becomes a physical craving, when Beauty becomes the drug of choice.

This is Beauty as a learning experience: It is an invitation to appreciate (to love), to understand (to be moved ourselves), and then to express (to move others). Beauty is Quality.

…and Tragedy…

l. Ephemeral (Beauty is…)

We bemoan the plunder of Beauty at the hands of Politics and Commerce and Greed and Despair, but let’s face it: we often don’t appreciate Beauty until it is threatened or ravaged. We take it for granted. Deep down, we know that Beauty is ephemeral: that we will change and so our judgements of Beauty, or what we judge beautiful will fade or age or die, or even worse, begin to bore. Our appreciation is heightened, made poignant, when we accept it won’t last. It becomes love.

m. Epilogue (learning to love)

Love.

Perhaps not what you recognize as love, if you understand it as some grand passion; more like opening a door and finding a cloth and constructing a coat (insulation and security and identity and gift to yourself all wrapped in one), and then slowly breaking it in only to find that it has changed you in the process. That kind of love you might call a calling.

So much happens in the search for a calling though, between a tentative “hello” and a definitive “I love you”: introductions and seductions, flirtations and false starts, misunderstandings and bad blind dates. With every possibility, we strive to believe without being naïve.  Perhaps there are two roots of this love: one that grows out of attachment to a problem, and one that grows out of attachment to an identity. School then is that patient friend who keeps setting you up with problems and possibilities, no matter how disastrous that last date went. That would be something I think: a public institution devoted to Love, teaching an appreciation of Beauty.

Let’s get students hooked on Beauty: not surface pretty but deep, structural simplicity, harmony, wholeness and truth. They will develop an aesthetic sense, an intuition indispensable to innovation. They will discover the difficulties and rewards of seeking truth. They will stop swimming on the surfaces of life to dive deep. They will discover the importance of evolution as a habit of creation, as a way of working. They will learn to recognize and honor the tug of Attraction, and begin to seek or imagine the possibility of Beauty. They can start a Quest for Quality. They will learn to Love.

Beauty cries for expression and defies definition. I know it as an addict knows his drug, not in words but as an ecstasy flushing through my molecules. I know no other reason for life than the gradual perfection of being. Confront then your swarms of students with this simple truth: you may cease your seeking. The meaning of life is no mystery at all.

It is Beauty.

References

Becker-Phelps, L. (2016, February 9). Love and the Fear of Loss. Psychology Today.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-change/201602/love-and-the-fear-loss

Beveridge, W. (1950). The Art of Scientific Investigation. Norton, New York.

Brodsky, J. (1991, October). An Immodest Proposal [speech]. https://www.scribd.com/document/46913137/Brodsky-an-Immodest-Proposal

Brown, B. (2010) The gifts of imperfection. Hazelden.

Daniel, S. (n.d.) Delia 1: Unto the boundless ocean of thy beauty. Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50420/delia-1-unto-the-boundless-ocean-of-thy-beauty

Diller, V. (2011, November 17). Beauty vs. Attractiveness: A matter of semantics? Huffpost
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivian-diller-phd/beauty-attractiveness_b_841300.html

Dobbs, D. (2017, September 18). Survival of the prettiest [Review of the book The Evolution of Beauty by R. Prum]. The New York Times.

Horton, R. (n.d.) Before the beauty .or. how could u forget? Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/141956/before-the-beauty-or-how-could-u-forget

Kellert, S. (2012). Birthright: People and nature in the modern world. [Quoting E.O.Wilson]. Yale University Press. p3

Lehrer, J. (2011, July 18). Why does beauty exist? Wired science.

Louis, A. & Malone, D. (n.d.) Why are we here? [Interview with Dr. Semir Zeki]. https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/semir-zeki/

Minsky, M. (1981, Fall). Music, mind, and meaning. Computer Music Journal 5 (3).

Pirsig, R. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. William Morrow and Company, New York.

Poincaré, H. (1914). Science and method [F. Maitland, Trans.]. Thomas Nelson and Sons, New York.

Rilke, R. M. (1923) The Duino Elegies: The First Elegy [A. S. Kline, Trans.] Poetry in Translation. www.poetryintranslation.com

UN News (2011, March 10). Humans must change behaviour to save bees, vital for food production – UN report. https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/03/368622-humans-must-change-behaviour-save-bees-vital-food-production-un-report#.WBrx-ndh3Vo

Untermeyer, L. (1916) Beauty. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13418

Wikipedia (n.d.) Wabi-Sabi: In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world-view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)

“Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer.” Serge Gainsborough

Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!