McMansion Hell Does Architectural Theory (Part 4): Empiricism & the Picturesque (Part 1)
Hello Friends! Today we continue our very fun foray into the 18th Century with some dudes who were like what if, like, we don’t have any innate ideas at birth? Dude, what if – hear me out – our ideas are but a product of our sensations and our later reflections on said sensations?
(I promise there won’t be anymore gifs in this article)
These ideas about the philosophy of our minds are the core basis for what was known as empiricism, a philosophy originating with everybody’s favorite life liberty and property (honestly, mostly property) dudebro from Civics class, John Locke.
My mother must be so proud of me for making this.
Locke’s 1700 essay An Essay Concerning Human Understanding laid out the foundations of his philosophy and set the context for which beauty is understood within said philosophy.
Locke’s ideas were founded on the concept that humans are not born with innate thoughts - that they were in fact a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) at birth, upon which thoughts become inscribed via a process of sensation: the external information which we receive from our senses - hearing, sight, taste, etc. These sensations are followed by the operations of our minds in reaction to external stimuli including such acts as: “perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing…”
Of course we don’t go through the world blinded by our senses. Locke finishes his idea with the concept of Reflection, which is exactly what it sounds like - the mind’s reflecting on its own thoughts and experiences.
Another core idea of Locke’s was the idea of associationism - an observation that thoughts that are not alike at all somehow become inextricably linked in the minds of human beings. When linked, Locke argues, these ideas can seem impossible to separate.
We’ve all surely experienced such a thing. For example, some of us can’t listen to My Bloody Valentine ever again without thinking about a bad relationship, or eat Papa Johns pizza without thinking about that weird guy in college who framed a picture of Papa John (carved from an old pizza box) in a fit of boozy glee.
Of course this philosophy has huge implications for aesthetics.
Until this time, aesthetics (and by corollary architectural theory) was pretty much entirely based on the Platonic idea of innate absolute beauty based on mathematical proportions, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. our friend, Perrault)
However, Locke’s ideas presented a problem to this idea: how can there be an absolute beauty innately known to all if we are born a blank slate without innate thoughts?
Importantly, Locke’s ideas of sensation and reflection offered an explanation for a phenomenon Platonic aesthetics could not or did not explain satisfactorily: why human beings find untamed nature, which certainly does not follow a rigid proportional framework, so breathtaking and inspiring.
This idea was first formally explored through the field of landscape architecture, which, even before Locke’s writings, was expressing exasperation with the Platonically inspired, highly manicured gardening style the British had adopted from the French tradition.
The whole purpose and ideology of these French gardens was to make order out of nature, to tame it and subject it to a mathematical, proportional scrutiny.
Orangerie at the Palace of Versailles Photo by Urban (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
At the end of the 17th century, several British diplomats and writers visited China, several of whom wrote in depth about the gardening style found there and how shockingly different it was from the traditions back home.
The most notable of these gardening diaries was “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening in the Year 1685″ by William Temple, a diplomat to Charles I and an amateur gardener. In his essay, Temple marveled at Chinese gardens and their use of “contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed…”
It was upon these ideas of beauty being “great and strike the eye…without any order” that the English Landscape Garden was born, and through it, gardening became divorced from the rigorous proportional rules of architecture, and could exist instead as an idealized portrait of nature.
Garden at Rousham House (1737) by the great English landscape designer, William Kent. Photo by Grahamec (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
This idealized view, later rooted in the ideas of Locke’s ideas of sensation, was called the picturesque - wherein beauty (at least in nature) is judged by “the picture one sees” and the mental/emotional reaction to it.
Even our staunchly Palladio-obsessed friend, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, pounced on this ideology. In his famous 1709 dialog “The Moralists”, Shaftesbury waxes poetic about how much better nature is than any dumb ugly people garden:
“I shall no longer resist the passion growing in me for things of a natural kind, where neither art nor the conceit or caprice of man has spoiled their genuine order by breaking in upon that primitive state. Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a magnificence beyond the formal mockery of princely gardens.”
Shaftesbury, being a notorious tastemaker, set the stage for a discussion amongst writers and artists that would span most of the 18th century.
While the ideas of sensation and reflection were easy to grasp within a landscape design framework, they proved to be much more slippery from an aesthetic theory standpoint.
It was the writer (and close acquaintance of Shaftesbury) Joseph Addison who, in a series of essays from a short-lived journal called The Spectator, would link Lockean empiricism to aesthetics. Addison would also go on to write a play, (Cato, a Tragedy) that would p much end up being the literary inspiration for the American Revolution.
Back to his 1712 essays on art, Addison describes beauty as a sensation: “The very first Discovery of [beauty] strikes the Mind with an inward Joy, and spreads a Chearfulness and Delight through all its Faculties.”
Addison drifts into uncharted territory when he proposes that “There is not perhaps any real Beauty or Deformity more in one Piece of Matter than another”, citing the common phenomenon of hating something and then coming to like it as time goes on. However Addison cannot deny that there are some things “which the Mind, without any previous Consideration, pronounces at first sight Beautiful or Deformed.”
This is the heart of the philosophical debate behind empiricist aesthetics: if we are not born with innate thoughts, why, then, do so many human beings find beauty in the same things, especially when experiencing these things for the first time?
It is the answers to this question that we will explore in next Monday’s installment: Empiricism & The Picturesque Part 2. If you like Burke, Hume, and some really dank fights about how our brains work, you’re def in for a treat.
To keep you occupied until then, be sure to be on the lookout for Thursday’s Maryland McMansion, which is guaranteed to be devastatingly dank.
Have a great Memorial Day!
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