The Philia Proposal continuedI
am using the word “aesthetics” here in both its broad sense: the
relationship to the world through the senses, and its narrow sense:
the Arts. The gap
between ethics and aesthetics is a characteristic of North America. When our ancestors, European for the most part, settled this
land, they brought along their values and traditions: their ethics;
but they left behind the matching aesthetics, the human and physical
environment in which their values and traditions had evolved: the
streets and cities, the churches and fairs, the country landscapes
that reflected age-old patterns of life, all that which supported,
illustrated and reinforced their ethics.
The North American environment was shaped too rapidly for the
long and undirected process of evolving aesthetics to match ethics.
Could this gap be the cause of our restlessness, as if doing
more could compensate a deficit of being, and acts of will replace
the slow shaping of communities to reflect their values? Let
me illustrate the link between aesthetics and ethics with these two
excerpts from Lewis Mumford’s “Culture of Cities”, inspired by
the city of Florence. “This
daily education of the senses is the elemental groundwork of all
higher forms of education: when it exists in daily life, a community
may spare itself the burden of arranging courses in art
appreciation. Where such an environment is lacking, even the purely
rational and significant processes are half-starved: verbal
mastery cannot make up for sensory malnutrition”.
“Life
flourishes in this dilation of the senses: without it, the beat of
the pulse is slower, the tone of the muscles is lower, the posture
lacks confidence, the finer discriminations of eye and touch are
lacking, perhaps the will-to-live itself is defeated.
To starve the eye, the ear, the skin, is just as much to
court death as to withhold food from the stomach...
the town itself was an omnipresent work of art; and the very
clothes of its citizens on festival days were like a flower garden
in bloom.”4 |
