Poetic destroyers. Vico,Emerson and the aesthetic dimension of experiencing

Introduction

Human beings are poetic destroyers. Through acting on the modification and orientation of the sense of aesthetic intensity, they can create meanings of either sublime beauty or sublime despicableness. To discuss the aesthetic dimension of meaning-making in human conduct, it is necessary to consider the semiotic process in itself and how it can lead to both pleasant and disquieting outcomes. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1670–1744), at the beginning of 18th century, developed the concept of “poetic logic” that is a specific mode of thought typical of the early stages of every civilization. Poetic logic is the first form of collective elaboration of the data of experience, a way of creating universal concepts based on a sensory, affective sense-making and religious thinking. Vico tried to demonstrate how the poetic logic was the cornerstone for the elaboration of whole systems of collective knowledge (poetic economy, science, geography, history, law, etc.) that were crystallized in myths. He claimed that poetic logic, based on imaginative function, was a proper epistemological stance that was overcome by rationality at a later stage of civilization, but wasn’t disappearing and plays an important function in keeping alive the ethical dimensions of collective life against the “barbarism of reflection”. Two centuries later, the American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) tried to develop an idea of poetic and imagination as forms of knowledge. He sometimes echoes Vico’s ideas, but at the same time presents a view expressing the aggressiveness of modernity. I will try to sketch the psychological aspects of the forms of poetic logic and imaginative processes and argue how they contribute to understand the aesthetic dimension of nature of human experiencing, whose creative aspect is in a certain sense axiomatically assumed.

The aesthetic nature of painful and fearful experiences was already known and discussed through the concept of the “sublime” (Burke, 1767/1998). Some special experiences “are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a fort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror” (Burke, 1767/1998, p. 129). What is relevant here is that, according to Burke, the experience of the sublime is not necessarily related to sensation, but can also be vicarious, that is produced by signs, as “many ideas have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words, as God, angels, devils, heaven and hell, all of which have however a great influence over the passions” (Burke, 1767/1998, p. 181). Through words, images and other signs, human beings can create a vicarious experience of sublimity, by evoking things that can seldom occur in reality, like famine, war, etc. This seems to suggest that on the one hand, human beings are able to produce signs under conditions of experiencing the sublime and, on the other hand, they can experience the sublime under the conditions of sign production (Tateo, 2016). This self-regulatory aspect of the relationship between experience and sign is extremely relevant for the rest of my argumentation. It means that humans can turn something into an aesthetic object through signs and some object can produce aesthetic signs (Figure 1). ¹ OPEN IN VIEWER

During an early morning walk on the beach near Recife, in Brazil, I took a photo of a hut made of discarded materials, that was turned by “Nado,” probably the owner, into a “Smile bar” (Bar do Sorriso in Portuguese) and eventually into his own shelter. How one can transform a “hut” into a “bar” through the use of signs? Why one should feel the need to produce an aesthetic meaningful action on such an object? There is nothing inherently “beautiful,” “creative” or “pleasant” in these types of meaning-making. The aesthetic dimension of experiencing has to do with the way humans relate to the world and can lead to very different outcomes for very different motives. So, I will try to analyze a value-laden process that cannot be reduced to one single value orientation, as the strong value-ambivalence embedded in the notion of sublime illustrates.

Overcoming “beauty”

The aesthetic dimension of human action is often understood in terms of sublimation, rather than sublime. There should be some poetic nature of humans that leads us to make poetry out of both happy and sad experiences. Through poetry, we can make our lives better. Unfortunately, human history is filled with examples of aesthetization of evil conducts, whereas is not sublimation that characterizes human aesthetic action, but is rather the sense of sublime, that is the sense of overwhelming feeling that produces a special process of meaning-making (Figure 2). OPEN IN VIEWER

A nice example of how aesthetic experience is related to the sublime is Malevich’s painting “Black Square” (1915). This painting is often referred as the zero point of painting and the starting of modern art, within the current of Suprematism. The author meant to represent the absolute freedom of creative act that stems from emptiness, through the liberation from the constraints of the form and the non-objectiveness. I can see a deep ambivalence in this work. The wrinkled black surface of the canvas represents the emptiness right before creation stems, but its feeling is ambiguous. The very same emptiness is at the same time emerging from the canvas into a pre-semiotic form (Tateo, 2014) and dragging the spectator through the abyss. The tension generated between a centripetal and centrifugal movement is creating the condition for an overwhelming vertigo as experience of the sublime.

Beauty and good are not exclusive attributes of poetic action. Besides, the aesthetic dimension of experience is related to a kind of tension generated by overwhelming signs (Figure 2; see also Lehmann and Klempe, 2016). This process is described by Burke (1767/1998) through an example from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (2007, p. 140):

where he describes the travels of the fallen angels through their final habitation.

O’er many a dark and dreary vale

They pass'd, and many a region dolorous.

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp.

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death.

A universe of death.

Here is displayed the force of union in

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades;

which yet would lose the greatest part of their effect, if they were not the

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades

—of death.

This idea or affection caused by a word, which nothing but a word could annex to the others, raises a very great degree of the sublime; and it is raised yet higher by what follows, a “universe of death”. Here are again two ideas not presentible but by language; and an union of them great and amazing beyond conception. (Burke, 1767/1998, pp. 181–182)

Depending on which direction becomes salient to the spectator in a specific moment, the emerging feeling will be differentiated into a pleasant or unpleasant. Yet, the tension and the ambivalence are the condition for the potential production of the experience. Let me now address the issue of the production of these kind of signs, drawing on the theories of Giambattista Vico and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The po(i)etic action: Giambattista Vico

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was the first thinker of pre-modernity to develop a general theory of human historical development based on the idea that the realm of culture is the specificity of human beings. He first understood that culture is the human nature. Vico’s philosophical anthropology is based on the idea that humans are essentially “makers” (homo faber), that is they construct and reconstruct their own social world in order to master the uncertainty of life concerning birth, death and the unpredictable forces of nature (Tateo, 2015a, 2017). “Human beings are not mechanically obeying to the laws of nature, they are rather likely to violate them, for the good or for the bad” (Tateo, 2015a, p. 31). According to Vico, civilization is the solution that human beings have phylogenetically developed to cope with the fear and overwhelming feeling of the power and inscrutability of nature (Vico, 1744/1984). Primitive men were governed only by the senses and by the bodily experience, through which they used to experience the world as a series of fearful or pleasant events. Nevertheless, Vico says, there were some overwhelming experiences that could not be accounted only on a sensorial basis. Phenomena like natural powers (e.g. thunders) or death were so overwhelming that humans had to develop a different kind of explanation. Yet, Divine Providence gave those men just few resources: a body and an excitable inventive capability. Thus, those primitive humans began to develop a way of understanding the world based on embodied forms of meaning-making. They started to imagine something that was at the same time different and similar to themselves.

The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. (Vico, 1744/1984, p. 70)

According to Vico, human beings are thus characterized by a differentiation from the pure realm of nature: “a progressive distancing from the senses through the creation of images that allows the construction of abstract concepts” (Tateo, 2015a, p. 34). Imagination, with its creative and poetic power, then becomes the first form of human knowing. Through imagination, human beings distanced the realm of artificial and natural, and at the same time created the premises for the process of cultural mediation: they became homo imaginans (Lapoujade, 2014). What is important here is that according to Vico, imagination is the most powerful tool through which human beings broke the continuity with nature and reconstructed the relationship (with both nature and fellow humans) on a symbolic basis. I want now to discuss the perspective of another thinker who addressed the role of imagination in the relationship between human beings and nature as different realms: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Nature as object: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a very influential American intellectual and leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. I refer to him as one of the most relevant ancestors of American Pragmatism, with a deep influence on scholars like William James. The interest of an “imagined” dialogue between Vico and Emerson resides in their being intellectual points of reference for different approaches to human and social sciences. On the one hand, Vico can be considered a forerunner of the historical cultural approaches (Tateo, 2015a), while Emerson introduced in the American context the cultural premises that informed American social sciences with the ideology of individualism, meliorism and empiricism (Koopman, 2006).

Apparently, Emerson and Vico share some important concepts. They both explore the role of imagination as distinctiveness of human beings and both refer to the relationship between humans and nature as a form of symbolic elaboration (Ross Meehan, 2013). They both claim that poetic knowledge is a special form of relationship between humans and nature, through which the former can make sense of the latter. The first form of knowing is poetic and anthropomorphic, human make themselves the measure of all things, especially of the unknown:

The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. (Emerson, 1968, p. 6)

To exemplify my last statement, I will use as example a 1840 English painting by J. M. W. Turner: “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon coming on”, also known as the “Slave Ship” (Figure 3). OPEN IN VIEWER

Just like Emerson, Turner was active in the abolitionist movement and was extremely impressed by a terrible episode in 1781, when the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 ill slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. Although Turner was a renowned painter, when he first exhibited this work accompanied by some descriptive verses, the reception was terrible. From the point of view of the style at that time, it was considered a messy and indiscernible melt of colors. Yet, I find this painting an incredibly powerful example of the aesthetic of sublime.

The first element that captures attention is an enormous deep-red sunset over a stormy sea, by the approaching typhoon. Then one can discern that the painting is divided into three different sections. Looking closer, one can identify a ship sailing off into the distance on the left side of the canvas. In the lower right part, defined by the light of the sunset, one can see a number of slaves’ bodies floating in the water, probably thrown overboard from the ship. The waters are full of fish and sea monsters approaching like to eat the slaves, and sea gulls circling overhead above the chaos. The figures are blurred and almost melting in the powerful tones from the yellow of the sun to the deep-red, almost bloody of the sea. How can an artist render the deep horror of such a slaughter? How can poetry intervene in describing such an enormous act of inhumanity? This is the question that almost all artists from the 20th century on and the horrors of the World Wars, extermination camps and atomic bombs had to answer (Rowland, 1997). Although Turner was a contemporary of Emerson, his way of expressing the aesthetic dimension of horror is based on a different poetic (Figure 3).

Turner’s overwhelming astonishment to such violence cannot be expressed but producing an intense emotional expression through color. What matters in the painting is not the precision of the lines defining the different objects, but the different expressive power of the dominant colors. The bright yellow of the sunlight, that splits the canvas in two sub-sections, is contrasted with the blood-red of the ocean, an ocean of blood, in which seems to drown any hope of humanity. Slavery is a sea of blood, Turner seems to suggest, and there is no rationality, no linearity in such an abjection. As in the Malevich’s “Square,” there is a tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces (Figure 3). On the one hand, the painting is divided horizontally, by the horizon between light and darkness, yellow and red-brown, the sun and the sea. In Turner’s painting, the nature (as in Milton’s poem mentioned by Burke) is indifferent to the human vicissitudes, and the feeling of sublime emerges with a specific sign produced in combination with the natural elements: the floating and desperate bodies of the slaves, which correspond to the sign “of death” that Burkes identifies in Milton’s verses.

Another division is vertical, from left to right. On the left, the ship is fading away with its masts of an intense red, which merge with the color of the sky, but at the same time recalls the blood. It seems to be completely indifferent and alien to the suffering of the human beings floating on the right side of the canvas. There are at least three different aesthetic experiences of the sublime here. First, there is the overwhelming grandiosity of the sun and the coming storm, secondly, there is the crude expressivity of the slaves condemned to death, and, finally, there is the overall feeling of the observer to be helpless spectator of such an unbelievable act of inhumanity. The spectator could in fact experience the ambivalence between the feeling emerging from the signs (color and shapes) that direct the affect towards the center (the sun) and those signs directing the affect in a centrifugal direction, towards the complete alterity between the victims and the perpetrators. The two directions generate together the aesthetic experience of sublimity that allows the spectator to empathize with the scene. It is worth noticing that such an intense poetic experience is hardly achievable through the kind of images that we are accustomed to watch on media. It would deserve more attention the role of media in inhibiting such experience of the sublime, creating the conditions for “an-aesthetic” rather than “aesthetic” dimension of experiencing (Lapoujade, 2014), when we watch the images of the modern slaves shipped on precarious means of transport risking drowning at every moment.

Constructing aesthetic orientation through manipulation of the context

Human beings can experience an aesthetic dimension of both creative and disruptive actions. They can produce acts of manipulation upon the context in both creating and destroying, in loving or hating. There seems to be an orientative constrain and control of the aesthetic dimension even in the most heinous crimes that human beings can perpetrate (Figure 4(a)). To illustrate this claim, I will now try to describe my experience during the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex. I will reflect upon my experience of walking through that context, where I found some specific configurations of the environment that I think are made to orientate the cognitive, affective and ethic experience of the people involved in that tragedy. OPEN IN VIEWER

It is estimated that the SS and police deported at least 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex between 1940 and 1945. Of these, about 7000 persons included in the Nazis camp authorities murdered approximately 1.1 million. The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex are: Jews (1,095,000 deported to Auschwitz, of whom 960,000 died); Poles (147,000 deported, of whom 74,000 died); Roma (23,000 deported, of whom 21,000 died); Soviet prisoners of war (15,000 deported and died); and other nationalities (25,000 deported, of whom 12,000 died) (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016).

Alongside with the mass-slaughter of innocents, a semiotic struggle took place in that context. On the one side, the Nazis were committed in producing specific killing environments to orientate meaning-making. On the other side, the victims were producing counter-actions to resist the dehumanization. When visiting the infamous extermination camp of Birkenau near the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German language), one can find an unexpected care for symmetry and order, even in a structure that was built with the purpose of serving the scope of mass extermination for a limited amount of time. In fact, while the first smaller concentration camp of Auschwitz was established by former army barracks of red bricks, then turned into a prison, Birkenau camp was mostly made of wood barracks and few brick shacks. Visiting the two camps, it very clearly appears that Birkenau was not built to last. It was built to serve as a slaughterhouse for the highest number of people in a limited time and then to be burned down to ground in order to delete any trace of the misfits. Nevertheless, the buildings are constructed in shape to provide a specific orientation towards a sense of distanced symmetry and order, mixed with the cold practicality of mass killing (Marcuse, 1995). The setting of the camps was build to produce a specific orientation in the aesthetic experiences (the whole of cognitive, affective and ethical dimensions at a non-reflective level) for the different persons. Persecutors should experience a sense of rational efficacy, distancing and neutralization of the violent actions, while victims should experience the inevitability and helplessness of the suffering. A first-person example of the role of the place in producing a specific experience is provided by Primo Levi, when he describes the Buna synthetic rubber factory in which the prisoners were occupied as slave workers:

The Buna is not: the Buna is desperately and essentially opaque and grey. This huge entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers or letters, or by weird and sinister names. Within its bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and slaves and the former are more alive than the latter. (Levi, 1959, p. 81)

In this sense, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a very important specimen of this process of manipulation of the environment, that one can find also in contemporary places of mass-violence and repression (Foucault, 1979), from jails to concentration camps in war zones. The capability of orientating the aesthetic dimension of human action can thus also participate into acts that produce extermination. I think this is a crucial psychological and political issue that must not be overlooked in any discourse about the aesthetic dimension of human psyche. Psychology often focused on the use of aesthetic and artistic devices for political propaganda, as in the case of Nazis parades and gatherings. I am instead claiming that there is a more general psychological phenomenon at stake. The aesthetic generalized dimension of experience can be oriented through specific semiotic processes also for political, aggressive or domination purposes. It is what I call the administration of fear.

Since the dawn of human civilization, the act of killing has been semiotized with an overproduction of aesthetic meanings: weapons and other killing devices have been covered with sophisticated decorations. Killing has often been the source for poetic production, as in the example of a Greek lyric poet from Sparta Tyrtaeus (around 7th Century B.C.):

Let a man learn how to fight by first daring to perform mighty deeds,

Not where the missiles won't reach, if he is armed with a shield,

But getting in close where fighting is hand to hand, inflicting a wound

With his long spear or his sword, taking the enemy's life.

(fragment 11, lines 27–30, Barron and Easterling, 1985, p. 132)

Rowland (2011), discussing the production of poems by the Second World War soldiers, shows how still the act of killing could be clothed by some aesthetic meaning. He provides “examples of perpetrator testimony”, in which even Second World War Allied Soldiers give “their celebration of the aesthetics – and deadly results – of longrange artillery and the latter’s description of abject Italian peasants, killed and piled like ‘forked parsnips’” (Rowland, 2011, p. 368).

Yet, the aesthetic dimension of human action is also the arena and the battlefield of a semiotic resistance. To say that human beings are poetic destroyers means that creative and destructive actions are related to the aesthetic dimension of experiencing. Depending on the position of the sign producer (victim, perpetrator, bystander), the meaning will be oriented in specific directions by semiotic artifacts, as for instance self-exculpatory reasons (Rowland, 2011). If there is the aesthetic production of signs on a destructive device as Birkenau, there can be the aesthetic production of a counter-sign that provides the destructive device with a different meaning (Figure 4(b)). Visiting the first Auschwitz camp, one can find some drawings on the wall of the prisoners’ rooms, lavatories, etc. Some of the prisoners were artists and artisans who tried to humanize those places through small artworks. It is an aesthetic act of simple creation that carves a space for humanity and (minimal) relief within a place of death. The production of these kind of signs changes the meaning of the place, trying to counter-act the process of dehumanization and eschatology that the Nazi persecutors were imposing upon the victims. There is here a semiotic struggle at stake, in which the aesthetic dimension of experiencing and the poetic use of signs in the process of meaning-making are used by human beings for very opposite purposes: on the one hand, an ignominious mass killing, on the other hand, a courageous attachment to life. Victor Frankl provides several examples of such a semiotic struggle when accounting for episodes of use of humor and minimal forms of art among the prisoners or instead the use of semiotic devices by the perpetrators to control and orient victims feelings (Frankl, 1992).

This semiotic struggle can also assume unexpected and sometimes astonishing forms. For instance, right in front of the main entrance of Auschwitz Memorial, there are nowadays restaurants, outlets and even a dance school. Adriani and Manning (2010) report how the project of in a building, which was formerly utilized by Nazi Germany during Second World War in Oświęcim, became a catalyzer of collective debates, with people of the Polish town caught in the middle the tension between the need of memory and the need of moving forward in the future.

When I mention humanity, I shall explain that the different types of signs are expression of human activity and its fundamental aesthetic dimension. The paradox is that both the persecutors who built extermination camps with a care for symmetry and the prisoners who decorated the walls were producing signs to orient the experiencing of their world. Both examples express the human condition: poetic destroyers precisely.

Limitations of the study and potential future directions

I am fully aware that this theoretical-historical exploration in a very controversial territory could raise a number of issues. My scope is to discuss a general aspect of psychological experience: meaning-making is characterized by an aesthetic dimension, in which the cognitive, affective and ethical aspects are experienced as a totality. This aesthetic dimension is regulated through the constant production, maintaining and demolition of signs. I have tried to provide a number of specimens from very different contexts. One critique could be of course that my examples are anecdotic. This could be a legitimate critique, but it does not hinder the development of the idea, until my theoretical reflection is not falsified theoretically or empirically. The second potential limitation is that my arguments are based on a kind of auto-ethnography and on the analysis of artifacts without referring to data produced by an autonomous “participant.” As the scope of this article is to develop a theoretical argumentation, I think that any product of human activity is a legitimate object of analysis. I provide examples of potential objects for further empirical studies (e.g. auto-ethnographic accounts, analysis of “secondary literature” like novels, biographies, etc. analysis of work of arts, field observations, you name it). We need to “refocus general psychology on the study of experiencing as a whole, including multiple dimensions” (Tateo, 2015b). Finally, I am aware to touch some very sensitive and controversial issues, such as the Holocaust. Only a superficial reading could lead to understand that I am attributing any kind of “poetic” to atrocities and perpetrators. The scope of my theoretical argument is to show that sign-regulated aesthetic dimension is a fundamental feature of psychological experience. Thus, my theoretical concept to be valid should be able to understand different phenomena in different conditions, even the most terrible and extreme.

In this basic process, I see the potential developments of my idea. If we can understand the aesthetic dimension at stake in meaning-making, we could better understand contemporary phenomena, such as the use of specific semiotic devices to regulate both collective and individual conducts. I am personally developing a new research line about the administration of fear, that is the production of signs which are meant to orient collective conducts and produce not “fear” as an emotion, but fear as a stable societal condition. Another potential line of investigation could be that of identifying the examples of “semiotic struggle” based on the sign regulation of aesthetic dimensions. On the theoretical and methodologic side, I propose to use the concept of aesthetic dimension to reconsider the Gestalt psychology under a different light. Since the beginning, Gestalt was related to the aesthetic function, but was lately reduced to a perceptive-cognitive dimension. It could be fruitful to reconceptualize Gestalt principles by the light of the aesthetic dimensions of meaning-making rather than the a priori of perceptual field organization. Finally, I think that the exploration of the method of art as a legitimate way of accessing psychological experience and meaning-making could be a very productive source for innovation in the methods of psychological sciences.

Precarious conclusions

Let me now try to draw some reflections about the ambivalent nature of human aesthetic experience I have so far presented. First, human action always implies an aesthetic dimension. No matter if human beings are acting to build a work of art, to kill or to pollute nature, there is always a po(i)etic aspect, as far as humans are producers of meaningful actions oriented towards a future condition (Tateo, 2017) yet to be realized. Nothing consolatory or ethic, nothing inherently good or bad in poetry, as it is a necessary condition of experiencing of the homo imaginans. To understand the process, we must put the outcomes in brackets. I have tried to discuss the ideas of Burke, Vico and Emerson in order to reflect upon the nature of the aesthetic dimension of every meaningful human action upon the world. The po(i)etic nature of human action implies that, according to Vico, every form of human experience is “artifact” (Tateo, 2017). From Burke, we learn that some combinations of signs produced in the encounter with the world can become so overwhelming to create the experience of sublime. Finally, from Emerson we learn that such po(i)etic action is always an act of domination and violence (Figure 5). OPEN IN VIEWER

Human beings create special places to dwell, like the skyscrapers on the shore of beautiful Brazilian towns, from which special and privileged people can benefit of the invention of the “seascape.” According to Emerson, this is one of the greatest achievements of mankind:

Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones, the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean, and the eternal sky were painted. (Emerson, 1968, p. 12)