Creating one's own reality through aesthetics

Constrained, Unconstrained and Surprised in a Global Context (Part #11)

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Reality creation by elites: Increasing credibility is given to the ways in which individuals and groups are able to create their own reality, notably following the arguments of  Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge, 1966). As a feature of Buddhism, this has been emphasized metaphorically in terms of creating the path on which one walks by Francisco Varela, and colleagues (Laying Down a Path in Walking, Semantic Scholar, 18 January 2018).

Such considerations are now understood problematically in a global context, as argued by Julien Charles (We Create Our Own Reality, OffGuardian, 2 June 2022):

Given that elite interests are largely out of step with the interests of the vast majority of Americans, we often find ourselves living in an alternate reality... Our current experience -- in which we are terrifically afraid of a mild seasonal respiratory virus and terrifically xenophobic toward Russians -- is reminiscent of the heyday of the Bush administration, when the neoconservative believers were riding high on a surfeit of manufactured intelligence.... George Bush's svengali Karl Rove, educated a stunned reporter about what reality truly meant at the Metropole, in the imperium itself:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

That reality is what Henry Giroux called, …the deadening unity and totalizing narratives that now marks dominant neoliberal and instrumental ideologies of the West.

Reality creation for all: Charles focuses on the manner in which elites craft and curate a reality for themselves and others -- focused to a degree by the Davos Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other such bodies.

By contrast, for Varela and colleagues, a degree of freedom is to be found by anyone (or any group) in creating their own reality. Religions and cults can be explored in this light -- as with disciplines, and science in particular. Metaphorical reference is then frequently made to "bubbles", inviting a critical reaction (Pricking the Bubble of Global Complacent Complicity, 2017).

Does any conference participant "write the story" -- or does it write him, or her? Is this dilemma reflective of a larger reality? Should people frame their reality according to convention -- or are they free to explore a fantastic reality, as separately argued (Reinventing Your Metaphoric Habitat, 1992)?

Aesthetics connectivity essential to reality creation: There is a curious contrast between magic squares (as exemplifying a pattern that connects) and patterns appreciated from an aesthetic perspective (as typical of rhyme, etc). Paradoxically it could be said that the "mechanical magic" of the former reflects the constrained cognitive mode characteristic of its appreciation by mathematicians, whereas the latter is more in accordance with the unconstrained appreciation held to be associated with the turtle of the fable. The irony of the paradox is that both are embodied in the Lo Shu turtle pattern.

Missing from the magic square pattern is the aesthetic dimension highlighted in Gregory Bateson's own quest for a degree of correspondence between an ecology of mind and that of nature -- culminating in his post-humous Angels Fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred (1987). As appropriately expressed by Paul Andersen and David Salomon (The Pattern that Connects (Australian Humanities Review, 35, 2005, June):

Bateson went even beyond this notion of interactive pattern derived from the necessities of survival: beauty may lie in the abstractions of perception but in the longer term, beauty is also an outcome of co-evolution... He refers here to co-evolution as an outcome of relations between species, not only in the tense of past evolution but in the present tense of "co-eval" relations. There is a sort of meta-pattern that emerges through interactive patterning and feedback in evolutionary time, which connects humans to lobsters and crabs, and that this meta-pattern differs qualitatively from that presented in a materialist explanation of adaptation....

What Bateson was asserting was that symmetries, contrast, colour and other types of branching pattern that we see in flowers, in some way relates to our own nervous system, the interaction of the two being typical examples of his notion of "mind". I must confess to being puzzled and failing to grasp the connection the first time I came across this particular example of coevalness of "mind". Yet consider the very evident notion that our own human sense of form and symmetry draws our attention to flowers, and that we frequently discuss particular forms of symmetry in flowers...

If we humans trace a pattern of connection with species as remote from us as bees, insects and flowers, and in such an abstract realm as formal components of beauty, then how much closer must the same pattern of connection exist between human cultures, despite the very diversity of aesthetic expression. 

Arrays of metaphors: In explaining why "we are our own metaphor", Bateson pointed out to a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation that:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity. (Cited by Mary Catherine Bateson, 1972, pp. 288-9)

That comment featured in an argument for the relevance of poetry to policy (Poetry-making and Policy-making: Arranging a Marriage between Beauty and the Beast, 1993). Rather than the mathematical magic of a square, the question is then the form with which the magic of aesthetic experience is associated. Arguably this is experienced by some through the concentric circular complexity of mandalas of Eastern religions, segmented into a variety of imagery -- and typically a focus for meditation.

Understood otherwise, and rather than numbers, aesthetic magic can then to be understood as associated with an array of metaphors forming a contrasting pattern that connects, as noted above ("Magic" as aesthetic connectivity, 2015). Cultural insight enables people to walk the pathways along aesthetic associations -- the songlines -- most obviously enabled by rhyme. Metaphors may then be recognized as vehicles for traversing the noosphere (Metaphors as Transdisciplinary Vehicles of the Future: science and tradition, 1991; Noonautics: Four modes of travelling and navigating the knowledge "universe"? 2006; Magic carpets as vehicles for noosphere travel, 2010).

A primary characteristic of the set of major Chinese classics is the manner in which any "mechanical" encoding of their insights is complemented by an array of metaphorical interpretations, as with the Yi Jing, the Tao Te Ching (Dàodé Jīng) and Tài Xuán Jīng. (9-fold Magic Square Pattern of Tao Te Ching Insights -- experimentally associated with the 81 insights of the T'ai Hsüan Ching, 2006).

This suggests the need for a more systemic approach to the embodiment of metaphor into strategic discourse, explored separately as a means of transcending divisiveness (Metaphorizing Dialogue to Enact a Flow Culture: 2019). Arguably this is a response to metaphoric entrapment by which the frog-in-the-well might be characterized (Metaphoric Entrapment in Time -- avoiding the trap of Project Logic, 2000). Given occasional reference to some conferences as "magical" -- in marked contrast to others -- there is a case for exploring how "meeting magic" is engendered, as argued separately (Conference Transformations: maturing the reflective, focusing and transformative power of large-group conferences, especially in response to conditions of social upheaval, 1982).

Zhuangzi versus Confucius? Tao Jiang's commentary makes very clear the deprecation by Zhuangzi of the Confucian ritualistic perspective -- framed as frog-like. It is therefore a valuable coincidence to explore the alternative perspective of the Confucian deprecation of the Zhuangzi perspective -- associated with the turtle of the fable. This alternative commentary to that of Tao Jiang, by Alan Jay Levinovitz, featured in the same journal   a week later (How to set yourself free with ritual, Psyche/Aeon, 8 June 2022):

When I first read Confucius, I was disappointed. He seemed like a stick-in-the-mud, obsessed with enforcing the status quo....But for me, in the 21st century? I preferred living freely like the iconoclastic Daoist sages who mocked Confucius.... Central to Confucius's teachings was submission to li ..., typically translated as "ritual". I wrote it off as more stale traditionalism. But then, while preparing a course on classical Chinese thought, I re-read the foundational collection of Confucius's teachings known as the Analects.... Li wasn't about fastidiously obeying fusty old rules....

No, this was a different kind of ritual. My default understanding of the word had misled me. What Confucius taught was life-as-ritual, the transformation of everyday actions into sacred activity.It was a revelation.

As emphasized by Levinovitz, the Confucian perspective argued for a life of harmonious ease through finding the rhythm in the everyday -- making one's world a temple and submitting to its sacred ritual. As described by Wikipedia:

The rites of li are not rites in the Western conception of religious custom. Rather, li embodies the entire spectrum of interaction with humans, nature, and even material objects. Confucius includes in his discussions of li such diverse topics as learning, tea drinking, titles, mourning, and governance. Xunzi cites "songs and laughter, weeping and lamentation...rice and millet, fish and meat...the wearing of ceremonial caps, embroidered robes, and patterned silks, or of fasting clothes and mourning clothes... un spacious rooms and very nonsecluded halls, hard mats, seats and flooring" as vital parts of the fabric of li.

Whilst the two perspectives can indeed be experienced as incompatible, even incommensurable, this could be recognized as a consequence of superficial reification and misplaced concreteness, or what Magoroh Maruyama helpfully describes as "subunderstanding" (Peripheral Vision: polyocular vision or subunderstanding? Organization Studies, 25, 2004, 3; Metamorphosis: authenticity in institutions and organizations, Metamorphosis: a journal of management research, 1, 2002, 1). Their compatibility -- their reconciliation -- necessarily eludes conventional modes of articulation (Engaging with Elusive Connectivity and Coherence: global comprehension as a mistaken quest for closure, 2018; Comprehension of Unity as a Paradoxical Dynamic: metaphors reframing problematic engagement with otherness, 2019).

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