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THIS WEEK – A short section finishes some of the detailed discussion, including pictorial composition, before next week’s FINAL summation.  D. Composition The real work of surpassing the material world is done not through a preferred abstraction, which can vary, but by a discipline named severally “design,” “composition,” or “visual organization,” whose ground rules never vary. If the tasks of composition were always as badly carried out as they are poorly understood, we should suffer a scarcity of well-done work even greater than we now endure. But our burdens of misunderstanding are real, and work their share of damage. The study of visual composition is closely similar to learning Rhetoric in language. If Rhetoric is the study of how to say something persuasively, then Composition in a picture becomes the study of how to show it beautifully.
We should un-learn, as best we may, our socially acquired prejudices, but the instinctive operations of the aesthetic sense we have to study, observe, and seek to understand. 4. Tinkering with my demonstration pictures, I shall not try to establish balance. Already the impressionists learned by the snapshot photograph and the Japanese woodblock print that this may be a dubious rule. A double portrait may require balance. But, as we saw, the profile drawing of a head must prefer the character of facial features to the skull in back, and would suffer damage if a rule of balance were applied. Nor shall I tell you that your eye will move from one point to another. Perceptual researchers can – with the assistance of a suitable appliance, show any scan path with precision. And it will not often match the claims of artists. 5. Rather, my examples try to demonstrate how the screeching may be silenced and the music played. But the music sounded here is visual, and the screechings are visual distractions, that is, demands for an attention not justified by any optical appeal. A distracting “noise” will not be nearly so interesting as it may be loud – but not “loud” necessarily. For whispering too can be an emphatic bother and distraction. My process of fitting and adjusting can – to some degree – be duplicated by sequential slide transparencies. But, for a most persuasive showing, it must be demonstrated live. E. The Action of the Paper Snippets Relationships differ from place to place. Thus, only within a given setting can we visually judge and mend what is too big by shrinking, too small by making larger, too bright by making duller, and too dull by causing it to shine. Also, what seems shapeless needs to become form-full, and what is vague – and therefore puzzling – be made clear.
Coherent unity, the desired outcome of this effort, means the best works are best because they have become themselves – that is, without distraction – the full embodiment of all their theme and striving.  
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In the early 1990s this was given first as a speech to a class at the Lancaster County Art Association, and in briefer form afterwards on a couple of other occasions. Some of the illustrations come from the text, others from references to physical works that Johannes brought with him, and one from live demonstration. (3rd of eleven sections)  II The Transmission of Knowledge A. Dexterity Training Today objects of utility are products of industrial virtuosity and “know-how,” and the machines that shape them are the vastly powerful offspring of the classical tools designed for manual use. The computer may permit a parallel industrial development also in the Fine Arts toward which, at present, there is both skepticism and enthusiasm. We must admire the sheer technical magnificence that the computer has made so readily available. But the seeing eye is subtler than we easily observe and may find eventually something bleak and arid in endless repetitions of computer “fireworks.” It would be a sad result, if all the love and adulation lavished today on the computer, brought to us tomorrow a nostalgia movement for the second time around, because our prevailing culture of that day will be too sterile and too feeble to nurture our souls.
2. Skill Training in Calligraphy and Drawing: I have known only a single Drawing Course prescribing exercises, in the form of drills, for manual control. Instead, Calligraphy has generally taken up that task to much good purpose, so that, even in my drawing courses, I have included letter forms for dexterity instruction. Dexterity improves to varying degree with any art work we perform – but only over time, so that, in the present series of four speeches, I cannot help you to become more skillful. But I may attempt to add a little to what we understand.  B. Intellect and Will Will, Intellect and Intuition are used as words so confidently that it is easy to be unaware how little we were ever taught about them. Though the will cannot determine what the knowledge of a subject is, this knowledge cannot constitute itself without the energy of the will.
2. The Will: Not all feelings are emotional. For we can receive them in happy timespans of fulfillment while emoting nothing.
us how frivolously one may employ both intellect and will. The emoting Will can enslave and put the Intellect to work for any cause. 3. Education: In youth our unattached emotional energy surges in every direction. And through education – not by the schools alone, but in the sense of an ancient wisdom out of Africa that it takes an entire village (a whole society) to raise a child – we must hope to reach that vast reservoir and powerful potential.
one of requirements – though we meet them badly – and not just personal bent and impulse. Eventually, self-expenditure can help youth to cherish the good products of their labor more than any ready pleasures falling unearned into their empty lives, and to cherish also in a little way themselves as people who have worked faithfully to learn to behave properly and labor thoroughly and well. And so the personality begins to grow into an enduring likeness of the way we live and work.
C. The Three Ways of Seeing as Three Ways of Learning The Three Ways of Seeing would be: Naturalistic Seeing – through Observation; Derivative Seeing – from Experience; and Original Seeing – as a Creative Vision. This last inclusion is owed to John Howard Benson’s course. When we call these three divisions the Three Ways of Learning, some of them may gain a little ground.
2. Derivative Learning is a discipline of Prudence, or Right Doing, as well as of Right Knowing, gained from our teachers rather than from Nature. It is the Learning transmitted through an education based on past experience, and its value is two-fold:
the most up-to-date, at the time of teaching, is confirmed. So, if he masters it and learns to work with it, the student cannot really fail. 3. Original Learning: To profit as abundantly as possible from listening to others, we must listen also to the voice of our personal understanding – that is, to ourselves. A self-created pattern of sensible, experimental forecasts must now provide the guidance to a deeper understanding and a more useful, nobler product. That achievement is the work of intuition that I must now describe in some detail. Useful intuition comes mostly to the well-prepared. D. The Pathway of a Partly Failing Intuition
 2. An intuition is easily mistaken for a feeling, because the well-familiar information from which it is descended is taken much for granted and hence no longer paid attention – and also because hope, even anticipating joy, attend promising intuitive perceptions. An anticipation – no longer perceived against the background of its origins, and attended by strong feeling – will easily itself appear as a feeling. But we can no longer so mistake intuition if we keep in our sight the preparatory knowledge which brought the intuition within the range of our speculations.
3. Intuition is precognitive (foreknowing) in its character, and does its work by leading us to knowledge – that is, to full cognition. Given their rational foundation, its forecasts have to be of intellectual substance – not as a solid certainty – but as an intellectual probe. Thus I rely upon my intuitions all the time. For without its capabilities, there are no advances. But an intuition can only serve us well if we treat with skepticism every result it urges and then express our distrust by a thorough work of testing. This is truly most important – that you must distrust your intuitions in order to obtain from them all the benefit they have to give. 4. Were I to be your teacher, perhaps daily over many years, I could help you to improve your skill and show you how you might proceed, with prudent discipline, to achieve the results for which my teaching aims. But I could do no more – and it is a most uncertain game – than hope to stimulate your intuition. And you might not like me very much for trying. For Stimulus is Latin for a cattle-prod, and who could welcome the sort of treatment such a tool implies? Important intuitions must instead result always from lighting one’s own fires. But useful knowledge – as we have clearly seen – can provide the kindling spark. And I may share with you, perhaps, some useful knowledge even in these few short hours we can have together.  Comment:
Have you ever encountered a course like The Philosophy of Design taught in the 1950s by John Howard Benson? We begin this series with the early essay which gives its name to this column - written in 1959. (Final of six sections)  Summation – The Principle of Meaning At last, I hope I have been able to clarify some aspects of the principle of meaning. I have presented my theme by discussing meaning as the content of all identities. I have done this without insistence, beyond illustrative example, upon a specified meaning belonging to a specific thought or object. And I have collected the being of all, however variedly distinguished entities, under one name – meaning – and tried to show what principle rules the nature of all things under this generalization. Here at the end I wish to summarize the conclusions that perhaps have been reached. Meaning is the content of being. This content, that has been named “meaning in the absolute,” includes the potential power to contribute its meaning to the content of another being under the term “meaning in the relative,” for which meaning in the absolute is the presupposed condition. When man has reached the limit of knowledge accessible to his mind, he can yet relate to the remaining unfathomable existence or void by faith in an omnipotent, infinitely wise and just deity. I believe that, even without a living God, the act of faith would be valid and meaningful – for faith is included in the endowment of our identity. And because we desire to know ourselves, we must experience our own power of faith, not necessarily because in faith we believe correctly, but because perceiving ourselves in the act of faith enlarges our self-knowledge. To know himself and the role of his entire being, man must use his power to relate. This is absolutely his sovereign possession and, by employing it, he gives evidence of himself to himself. God, however, all-knowing, needs no such demonstration of his creator identity. His self-knowledge of it would be complete without the test of creation. In the end I have written this paper as a personal guide in my own endeavor to distinguish and separate meaning from non-meaning, sense from non-sense. The meaning contained in our being, and in other existences, becomes perceivable to us mainly in the relation of ourselves to the environment. In such a manner, the search in these pages may, over the years in a small measure, help to reveal the content of my own identity. This seeking, rewarded at best with only partial finding, is the task of our lives. We are committed to it because insight into the nature of our identity from within is the required condition for insightfully relating to the world without. By so seeking we acknowledge ourselves, in the realization that being is the vessel which holds all the meaning we can ever hope to find.   We begin this series with the early essay which gives its name to this column - written in 1959. (Fourth of six sections) Power of Implication The linkage, then, of one fully recognized fact to the identity of another is an exploitation of the relative powers contained in each. In so linking the implications of facts to one another, we achieve a highly mobile process that we know on the intellectual level as thinking. On this basis I must describe thinking as a moving from the acknowledgment of one identity to further assessments, prescribed and directed by the relative energy of the identity already recognized. Thus our thoughts insist on conceiving themselves, as soon as the location of our interest has determined the theme. Once before I have touched on this peculiar insistence of things made by man for taking their fate in their own hands and permitting us to see in our products not invention, but only discovery. Whatever we begin to validly conceive or make is contained already in its potential nature as part of the condition of worldly being, and is well able to direct us by its demands. Our most fruitful activity in thinking and making is bound to insight and recognition, not to a willful burst of egotism. Potential Meaning The potential being of all our concepts and works must, however, be recognized in its difference from an existence in perceivable reality. For the potential is not its realization in the actual until potentiality is turned to fulfill its implied assignment. In the potential, then, is the contributive power to be relatively involved that we find included in the identity of all things. These, from their own actuality, may be extended to seize the relative endowment of another equally real existence and enter a union with it. The resulting compound would possess the sovereignty of the actual and be endowed in its turn with ability to extend relative energy in the direction of a still further independent identity. Evidently the human being, too, is self-contained in a unit of meaning that, in the absoluteness of identity, possesses gifts of relative implication in the ability to recognize and conceive intellectually and to make physically. A number of disks, designed to rotate around their axes, and a box-like framework or structure each own the properties of their identity, including the potential relative functions of wheel and chassis. But the acknowledged identities, with their recognized relative implications, do not in themselves constitute a carriage. The powers of intelligent insight and physical making, contained in the identity of man, are extended as a contribution that renders the potential actual. Now in its own right this offers the relative powers that its new compound identity possesses to allow further speculation in the direction, for instance, of motorization and diverse transport services. Intellectual insight and the will and capacity for work based on that insight are the contribution which man is empowered to make to the contribution already offered by his environment. Wheels and chassis as a carriage are not a heap of accumulated junk. They are the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, greater to the precise extent of human collaboration in terms of wisdom and work. The Human Potential for God Insight and thinking, as well as physical making, are among the relative abilities included in the essence of the human being. But so are faith and believing. If we accept the existence of God, we give recognition to an inexplicable presence, to a being whom we understand to surpass all comprehensible limits, whose content is “meaning in the infinite.” The capacity for rational thought is no avenue to God, unless its logic compels the insight that faith and believing are fitting for those to whom it is not given to know. Instead of the light to see, there is the will to believe and, because willing is an act of sovereignty, surrender in faith does not diminish the human stature. By approaching God as His identity and our inability to understand requires, namely in faith, we are not submitting to some sort of tyranny, but on the contrary, exercising the prerogative to give or withhold ourselves. As no gift is reduced or altered by the change of hands from giver to receiver, so the gift of ourselves to the majesty of God suffers no reduction in meaning. And its unique identity remains intact, for we must possess as property what we offer as a gift. In the act of faith we hold the strength to find function and purpose in the void. This emptiness would cancel all meaning beyond the limits of humanly possible knowledge if we were not fashioned to relate meaningfully to the inexplicable, by the will to believe where the insight to know is withheld. And so it appears that, by way of faith, we are committed, in a catechismic sense, to the doing of good and the surrender to God’s will. For we cannot, in all the essence of realism, ignore our gift to believe, where we meet cause to make use of it.  |
A Blog containing longer text selections from essays by Johannes, on art, philosophy, religion and the humanities, written during the course of a lifetime. 
Artists are not art historians. People who write are not all learned scholars. This can lead to “repeat originality” on most rare occasions. When we briefly share a pathway of inquiry with others, we sometimes also must share the same results.
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