The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 03

     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.

1. The Parallel Good of different skills: The skills of the computer artist may differ partly from those of workers like myself trained in the use of hand-held implements applied directly to the materials. But the computer artist also has to learn to suit his instruments and his materials to the purposes he strives to gain. That universal rule can be demonstrated by any skill employed towards however disparate aims.

        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.

1. A Drafty Place:  The intellect appears to be a drafty place in which incoherent thought particles or fragments of awareness would blow at random in and out if they ignited no curiosity or interest – that is, emotion – urging us to develop and advance them.

      2.   The Will:  Not all feelings are emotional. For we can receive them in happy timespans of fulfillment while
              emoting nothing.

• The Mutual Enablement of Will and Reason:  When an awareness triggers our curiosity – that is, the incipient will to know and comprehend – and thus sets us on a path of intellectual pursuit, we can say that emotion here reacts to a stimulation and, in its turn, stimulates and drives this mental action. Reason and Emotion are therefore not antagonists forever locked in combat, but can be mutually enabling and sustaining.
• The Emoting Will:  Besides a seed of thought, Will can be set in motion by greed, compassion, hatred, affectionate attraction and so on. That is, an emotion can stimulate emotion. For, the will shares with these specific passions the trait of seeking to express itself through striving for an outcome. That is to say, the will emotes, and only an emotion is capable of that.
• The Alliance of the Will and Reason:  While the Intellect is but a drafty chamber, the will resembles most of all a shark in feeding frenzy. It is at all times in pursuit. And, given their unprepossessing separate natures, it is no surprise that Will and Intellect together may be conscripted for every class of evil and of folly as well as for the good.

             Solely our fads and fashions – inspiring annually prodigies of drive and clever planning, should persuade
             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.

• Compulsory Instruction and Self-Expenditure:  Early instruction aimed at propriety and learning is, as well as it ought to be, a series of compulsions that require youth to invest their work in Right Knowing – thus to honor signal truths – and in Right Doing, to learn the value of good will as our source for just as well as prudent conduct.

             We do not like to hear this anymore; but, much as this pill is at present being sugared, the reality is still
             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.

• When we are thus prepared to walk on our own a path of proper action, we have from time to time rich periods that take us further than the reach of any pedagogic guidance.

 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.

1. Naturalistic Learning is Right Knowing gained through personal observation.

      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 transmission of knowledge far beyond the scope any human being owns years enough to assemble for himself, and thus an admirable saving of man’s time, descended as an offspring.
• The teaching that we have, in any line of work, no actual freedom to accomplish what we wish to do, except by our unstinting and precise obedience to the conditions which render our wishes possible. Thus, by endless object lessons, our will is schooled to welcome prudent discipline as the path of our freedom for gaining our purpose and desire.

             Good Education will always help the student to succeed, because the material is already proven – even
             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

1. The page I offer here following records one of my intuitions in the act. Whether intuition succeeds or fails, the advancing paces of its operation remain, in principle, forever constant.

• Figure 1 sets down the perspective knowledge I owned already at the start. From there I ventured the intuitive prediction that I might delineate all forms by perspectively gaining and reducing particles.
• The sphere and cube of Figures 2 and 3 are readable results and were, by odd coincidence, utilized close to the same time in paintings by Victor Vasarely, who had no idea my prototypes existed.
• Figure 4 aims at the top view of a cone, but does not yield a fully legible construction.
• The more I change the angle of regard to approach the apex to the distant outline – Figure 5, the less space remains for graphic treatment; and, with increasing complexity of volume combinations, the method utterly breaks down, so that – in this pure form – I made no further use of it.

 

     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.

• Perspective, the knowledge I had already at the outset of the above example, begins with the true proportions of an object, such as ground and elevation plans – not shown here – could readily supply. From there we note how distance alters the proportions through foreshortening and diminution.
• This beginning gave me more than the literal extent from the start of true proportions to the achievement of perspective. For, these composed a pathway of direction and emotional momentum of stimulation or eagerness to aid my venture into the unknown.
• That my gains had not so long a reach as I desired lies in the experimental nature of an intuition by which it always paces some lengths in advance of our well-secured acquirements from earlier effort and experience.
  

      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?