“Stopping for knowledge”: The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle (original) (raw)
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Engagement With Beauty: Appreciating Natural, Artistic, and Moral Beauty
Diessner, R., Parsons, L., Solom, R., Frost, N., & Davidson, J. (2008). Engagement with beauty: Appreciating natural, artistic and moral beauty. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 142, 303-329. doi:10.3200/JRLP.142.3.303-332, 2008
The Engagement With Beauty Scale (EBS), designed from the aesthetics of I. Kant (1790/1987), G. W. F. Hegel (ca. 1835/1993), and T. Aquinas (ca. 1260/1947) and the psychological work of J. Haidt (J. Haidt & D. Keltner, 2004), measures engagement with natural, artistic, and moral beauty. In Studies 1 and 2, the authors describe scale construction, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, internal consistency, and temporal stability. In Studies 1 and 2, the authors also establish concurrent validity with the Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence subscale of the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (C. Peterson & M. E. P. Seligman, 2004), the Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test (P. C. Watkins, K. Woodward, T. Stone, & R. L. Kolts, 2003), and the Spiritual Transcendence Scale (R. L. Piedmont, 2004). In Study 3, the authors used the EBS Artistic Beauty subscale to differentiate students engaged in the arts from those who were not. for a copy of this paper email diessner@lcsc.edu
2017
An undergraduate senior level course, The Psychology of Beauty, taught within the positive psychology approach, was designed with the aim to increase state and trait levels of engagement with beauty among its students. The course was a service-learning course in which students were paired by the Area Agency on Aging with elders in the greater community as a practicum experience. They studied the moral beauty of the elders, learned from their wisdom, and aimed to fulfill social needs of the elders. Results suggested that in nearly every class session students significantly increased their state levels of engagement with beauty and state levels of engagement with moral beauty during their visits to the elders’ homes, both with moderate to large effect sizes. Trait levels of engagement with beauty, however, did not increase over the span of 12 weeks.
Fleeting Impressions of the Individual
GENERATIVE ART 2018: GA2018, XXI Annual International Conference (Proceedings), 2018
With the three cycles of research/experimental participatory events by Tjaša Bavcon, Katja Burger and Jasmina Ferček of the Oloop Design collective as an example, we will look at alternative approaches to learning and working in the field of design. More importantly, we will look at how to avoid getting trapped within the conventional design process, starting instead from nature’s perspective; a perspective that—as Maria Blaisse, a Dutch designer and artist, reminds us—is also our own. The text presents research that incessantly questions its own results and the results of its experiments in order to transcend the boundaries of the expected. By raising doubt about the established, ordinary notions, it will make us confront the questions about the primary role of design and its purpose. At the same time, our endless exploration will reveal new areas of design potential. By focusing their investigation on perception, emergence, play, learning, action and cooperation, the designers of the Oloop collective sustain the conditions that allow the emergence of a variation of the product or, sometimes, even just a momentary result. The key word here is “variation”: every change in this process, however minor, is immediately reflected in the experiment – in the impression of the individual. This is the richness, the emotion that distinguishes their work from conventionally designed products. They set themselves apart by establishing an alternative approach.
Orpheus’ Glance. Selected papers on process psychology. The Fontarèches meetings, 2002–2017, 2018
One of the most important concepts in process philosophy is that of ‘balance,’ an aspect of which can be explained in the context of aesthetics. In particular, aesthetics represents not only something real out there in the world, but an ideal which we might recognize in it. In some way, aesthetics balances real and unreal (truth and beauty). Moreover, the sense of beauty is often a kind of drive for moral behavior. That is why, perhaps, Whitehead, considered this aspect of reality, such as aesthetics, as central in his philosophy. Whitehead, like the other philosopher-mathematician Leibniz, presumed harmony among all elements in the universe. The concept of harmony which he used in Adventures of Ideas is closely connected in its meaning to the concept of balance in Process and Reality. No philosophical system can be considered complete if any category dominates another. So, without understanding balance we cannot conceive process philosophy as a complete system. The point is that aesthetics can give more than language, for language sometimes brings distortions in which words dominate feelings. That is why it is so difficult to argue about any kind of pre-established harmony or balance. It seems the only opportunity to “explain” balance is to manifest it for both feelings and thought (again, for two opposed concepts at a time). In our view, we cannot metaphysically explain balance in the universe unless we borrow from aesthetics. If so, we have to develop supplementary methods of explanation (visual, tactile etc.) of reasons that lead us towards an ecological civilization that is more equal and just.