Curriculum for Wholeness: Aesthetic Rationality, Gestalt Awareness, and the Skill of Being Human

How, then, can an aesthetic rationality overcome such limitations and guide us towards the idea of a whole, an identity of self and world that involves the self in an open, progressive and subtle engagement with reality? Specifically, what sort of curriculum could promote such engagement? I believe the answer to this question lies, in the first place, in an understanding of the quite distinct sense of wholeness that arises from the aesthetic mode of awareness, one which embodies the full sense of the Gestalt notion of the whole being "other than" the sum of its parts.

The otherness arises because we are no longer ‘adding’ the parts to the whole: it is not a question of our attempting to find or our looking back on a summarising, static commonality; rather, the parts in their differences are the essential aspects of a movement forwards in our appreciation of the whole: the story, dance, or painting, demand our attention, our availability towards them, in the same way that that we take the point of view of the other person in a continuing social interaction: in aesthetic appreciation we understand and respond to points view that provide clues as to the different ways of being human. This is the movement towards self-knowledge.

What is of additional significance, however, are those episodes, characterised, not as "movement towards", but as decisive in themselves, as indicative of a condition that requires no further work to grasp its universal nature. Prosaically, it is "the other condition", in religious thought it the presence of grace, a revealing of the world in its sympathetic unity. It is Lawrence and the snake at the water-hole, the death-bed vision of the Lampedusa’s Prince, or Wordsworth’s "surprised by joy". The parts, says Musil, are no longer separate from one another; they have lost their egotism to become inwardly, "truly fondly”, related to one another. In short, the experience is not the immediate result of a self-consciously and deliberately striving for an effect.

On the contrary, it is the self that has given itself over to pure availability in a relaxation of its own possessive intentionality to the world. In this sense, the authority of what is experienced appears to derive, not from our making it, but from a return to the experience of a world prior to and beyond a reflective intentionality, an origin that is also a goal, being before and beyond the division of self and world. In this respect it is William Blake who is the phenomenologist’s poet. We find in Blake that same urgency for the priority of an awareness of things in and for themselves - he named it "cleansing the doors of perception" - to discover and respect the life-forms of nature’s creatures: he writes in ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern”.

Plato’s cave dwellers, also, could only perceive through an impoverished light. They could glimpse some parts, but the whole was not conceived. A person who had gained the chance to see the world in its full light has a duty to return to the cave to educate its inmates; that person was the philosopher, who would bear witness to the constants of human life - its ideals of love, beauty, and the good. Of these three, it is love that is fundamental, since beauty and the good can only be founded on love, the ultimate marriage which embraces all. There is a tendency to define Platonic love as purely spiritual, that is, opposed to the physical, so that it exists in an entirely different domain from the necessary physicality and contingency of human relations.

But we need not make this interpretation. The good is good in the doing of good. It is, like all such ideas, an orientation to life, which must always test itself against a challenging reality. It remains good when it tests itself and fails within particular situations; there is no contradiction between love and circumstance in pragmatic love, for each retains its independence in the metaphorical union of an identity that qualifies itself through its own negation: the assertion of the self’s identity in acts of love and its negation in our humility.

The Platonic virtues may, then, be understood as joining with the active orientation and the "doing” of learning, an integral aspect of the intentional- ity of consciousness in its progression towards fulfilment, its "hold" upon the world. Once we understood how the aesthetic and the ethical are part of the essentially directional nature of consciousness, we see that they are not isolated from the practice of learning to be human but an essential part of the task. Just as one exercises a skill in learning to ride a bicycle or reading an X-ray, so learning to be human requires aesthetic and ethical skills concerned with how to think and act in a variety of situations. This was surely Vico’s view of how the ideal divine unites with the pragmatic self.

Platonic love, on this interpretation, is not the assertion of the spiritual against the physical, the ideal ‘against’ the real, but the winning of their joined significance as one is tested against the other. It is the exercise of a skill and a skill is a self-related activity. In Michael Polanyi’s terms, a skill requires a focus upon an achievement - an objective criterion (riding a bicycle, reading an X-ray, playing chess) - together with an immersion in the task in which the various subsidiary components of the task relate to form the skill: a focal awareness supported by a tacit knowing. For example, while the skill involved in riding a bicycle can be summarised in a quite complex physical law, you don’t learn to ride one by learning the law. Skilled learning is personal, self-related discovery. Perhaps the skill of relating virtue to circumstance has a similar structure, the virtues existing tacitly in the exercise of wisdom - a sort of dynamic framework in your desire to play chess well or to read X-rays. After all is said, what is the desire for such ends but the love of the inherent activity.

In her first novel, Under the Net, Murdoch, a modern Platonist, has this to say:

"No really, Jake”, she said. "This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It’s not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was”.

This seemed to me to very foolish talk. "But love is concerned with possession”, I said, “If you knew anything about unsatisfied love, you’d know this”.

“No”, said Anna strangely, “Unsatisfied love is concerned with understanding. Only if it is all, all understanding, can it remain love while being unsatisfied”. (i960, p. 40)

Love that is understanding, or the quest for understanding, is the love that tolerates its own incompleteness. The understanding that is "all” is not damaged by the incomplete, since the ground of its being is the total faith in itself as a universally human ideal. But that faith exists both as ideal in the sense of the whole and as work to be done in the circumstances that define actuality. The work is the work of wisdom, of understanding the whole - of ideal and circumstance - in order to find that balance we call wisdom, which is the skilful orientation to circumstance. But the task of finding ways to be human is essentially an ethical skill.

An aesthetic rationality is attained through the guidance of those moral qualities of love and understanding which in themselves are neither possessive nor divisive. Great art, I suggest, enacts such a synthesis, as does the morality of love and understanding. In each, you enter a world, the one of beauty, the other of goodness, for both of which, as Musil says, "the details are now fraternally and fondly, truly inwardly, linked with one another”. Both depend upon a paradigm shift in perception, one that goes beyond the abridgement of consciousness that defines mundane normality. Only then can you understand Keats’s much maligned aphorism that "beauty is truth, truth beauty”, for it points to a form of truthfulness beyond the objective or the pragmatic to the truth of identity in which what is becomes what it is in the self’s engagement with the world. That identity can only be understood as a flexible but certain orientation to circumstance, the testing of love, for its survival requires a commitment to a continuing vigil of imagination and assessment.