I updated the YouTube playlists for Compressible flow. There are now two version of the class I taught for almost ten years. The first was recorded live in 2024 in front of an in person and online audience. YouTube Playlist – Fall 2024 Recording The original was recorded in one of my offices and edited extensively. YouTube Playlist Link – Original Recording. The original probably has more material. It is interesting to reflect on teaching improvement between the years they were made. Either way, they are available to the public. The notes and supplemental material remain under classes on this website.
Reading the Analects of Confucius (孔夫子)
I have completed reading the Analects of Confucius (Kong Qiu 孔丘, Zhongni 仲尼, Kongzi 孔子, Kong Fuzi 孔夫子) – English translation and commentary by an amazing scholar Annping Chin (2014).
Analects means a collection of selected sayings or short passages, especially sayings attributed to an important person. The original Chinese title is Lúnyǔ (論語), usually understood as something like “discussed sayings,” “conversations,” or “edited conversations.”
What interested me most in the Analects was Confucius’ treatment of learning as a form of self-cultivation. Learning is a continuing process of correcting mistakes, testing judgment, and changing oneself through what has been understood (see 1.14, 2.4, 7.3, 7.8 below). Learning like building a mountain one basket at a time captures this well (9.19). Progress depends upon continuous effort, while completion is always beyond reach – one should “learn as if you will never catch up” (8.17).
Closely connected to learning is humility. Confucius repeatedly distrusts certainty, reputation, wealth, display, and moral accomplishment (1.16, 7.16, 9.4). He does not call himself a sage or a “humane” (a key concept throughout the text) man, but describes himself as someone who continues to work toward these things without becoming satisfied (7.34). He worries instead about whether he practices what he already knows and whether he can recognize and correct his own errors (5.27, 7.3). Integrity exists independently of recognition. A person may speak well without possessing integrity, possess courage without being humane (14.4), or be widely admired without actually deserving admiration (13.24).
Service to government can be honorable in one circumstance and shameful in another (14.1). Withdrawal from society may preserve integrity, but withdrawal itself is not necessarily virtuous. In his encounter with Chang Ju and Jie Ni, Confucius refuses complete separation from human society, asking, “Whom can I be with if not with other human beings?” (18.6). His discussion of the recluses makes the point more explicitly: after describing several different forms of principled withdrawal, he concludes, “I have no preconceptions about what one can or cannot do” (18.8). Circumstances matter, and cultivated judgment is required to distinguish appearance from substance (13.24, 14.4, 20.3).
This is the thread I saw in myself through my chosen passages – Confucius presents moral development as continuous work carried out among people. One learns, observes, makes mistakes, corrects them, helps others, and tries again (4.15, 6.30, 7.3, 9.19). Humaneness goes beyond internal condition, and a person who wishes to steady himself helps others to steady themselves. One who wishes to reach their own goal helps others reach theirs (6.30). One should not seek certainty or perfection, but alignment between knowledge, conduct, and character.
Reference – Confucius, The Analects: Lunyu, translated by Annping Chin. New York, New York, United States of America: Penguin Books, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-698-15351-6.
The following are quotations of Confucius that I referenced above, and additionally, those that caught my attention.
1.14 The Master said, “A gentleman does not try to stuff himself when he eats and is not worried about the comfort of his dwelling. He is anxious about getting things done and careful about what he says. He gravitates toward those who possess moral integrity because he wants to put himself right. One could say that he is someone who loves learning.”
1.16 The Master said, “Do not worry that other people do not know you. But be concerned that you do not know them.”
2.4 The Master said, “At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I found my balance through the rites. At forty, I was free from doubts [about myself]. At fifty, I understood what Heaven intended me to do. At sixty, I was attuned to what I heard. At seventy, I followed what my heart desired without overstepping the line.”
3.24 A border official from the district of Yi asked to have an interview with Confucius, saying, “I have never been denied an interview with a gentleman who has come to this place.” Followers of Confucius arranged a meeting for him, and when he came out, he said, “Why should you worry about [your teacher] not having an official position? The world has been without the Way for a long time now. Heaven is about to use your master as the wooden tongue of a bronze bell. ”
4.15 The Master said, “Can [Zeng Can], my way has a thread running through it.” Master Zeng replied, “Yes.”
After the Master left, the disciples asked, “What did he mean?”
Master Zeng said, “The Master’s way consists of doing one’s best to fulfill one’s humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity.”
5.12 Zigong said, “I do not wish others to impose what is unreasonable on me, and I also do not wish to impose what is unreasonable on others. ”
The Master said, “Si [Zigong], this is not something that is within your power.”
5.26 Yan Yuan [Yan Hui] and Jilu [Zilu] were in attendance. Confucius said, “Why don’t you each tell me what you would like to see yourself accomplish?”
Zilu said, “I would like to share my carriages and horses, my clothes and furs with my friends, and, even if these things became worn, to have no regrets.”
Yan Yuan said, “I would like never to boast of any good points I might have and never to claim credit for work I might have done for others.”
Zilu said, “We would like to hear what you would like to see yourself accomplish.”
The Master said, “To give comfort to the old, to have the trust of my friends, and to have the young seeking to be near me.”
5.27 Confucius said, “It’s hopeless! I have yet to see anyone who could recognize his mistakes and take himself to task privately.”
6.24 The Master said, “With one great change the state of Qi could resemble the state of Lu. With one great change, Lu could embody the moral way. ”
6.27 The Master said, “The gentleman broadens his learning in literature and holds himself back with the practice of the rites. And so he is able not to go beyond the bounds of the moral way.”
6.30 Zigong said, “If there is someone who is generous to his people and works to give relief to all those in need, what do you think of him? Can he be called humane?”
The Master said, “This is no longer a matter of humaneness. You must be referring to a sage. Even Yao and Shun found it difficult to accomplish what you’ve just described. A humane person wishes to steady himself, and so he helps others to steady themselves. Because he wishes to reach his goal, he helps others to reach theirs. The ability to make an analogy from what is close at hand is the method and the way of realizing humaneness.”
7.3 The Master said, “To fail to cultivate virtue, to fail to practice what I have learned, not to direct my steps toward what is right when I know what that is, and to make mistakes and not be able to correct them – these are the things that worry me.”
7.8 The Master said, “I will not give a person a boost or a start if he does not know the frustration [of trying to solve a difficult problem] or the frenzy one would get into when trying [to put an idea] into words. After I have shown a student one corner of a square, if he does not come back with the other three, I will not repeat what I have done.”
7.9 When the Master was eating at the side of someone who was in mourning, he never ate his fill. On a day when the Master had wept, he never sang.
7.16 The Master said, “Eating coarse grain, drinking water, and a bended arm for a pillow – joy could be found in these things, too. Wealth and power unrightfully gained mean as much to me as drifting clouds.”
7.19 The Governor of She asked Zilu about Confucius, and Zilu gave no answer. The Master later said to Zilu, “Why didn’t you simply say that he is the sort of person who forgets to eat when pursuing a question, who forgets to worry when suffused with joy, and who does not note that old age is coming?”
7.24 The Master said, “My young friends, do you think I am hiding something? I am not hiding anything from you. There is nothing I do that I do not share with you. That’s Qiu for you.”
7.26 The Master said, “Since I have no hope of meeting a sage, it would be enough if I could meet a gentleman. ”
The Master said, “Since I have no hope of meeting a truly good man, it would be enough to meet a person of constancy. As for those who
claim to have something when they have nothing, to be full when they are empty, to be comfortable when they are tight, it is hard to expect them to be constant.”
7.34 The Master said, “I dare not call myself a sage or a humane man. What could be said of me is that I work toward it without ever feeling sated and I am never tired of teaching.”
Gongxi Hua remarked, “It is precisely in this that we, your disciples, are unable to emulate you.”
7.36 The Master said, “Being extravagant often means that you lack humility. Being frugal often means that you are shabby. I would rather be shabby than lacking in humility. ”
8.10 The Master said, “If the people love bravery and at the same time are angry about their poverty, this is a formula for chaos. If the people are infuriated with men who are inhumane, this, too, will lead to chaos.”
8.13 The Master said, “Have unshakable trust in [the moral path you pursue]. Love learning. Hold on to the way of the good until you die. Do not enter a state threatened with danger. Do not reside in a state embroiled in conflict. Show yourself when the moral way is evident. Seek reclusion when it is not. When the moral way prevails in a state, being poor and lowly is a cause for shame. When the moral way does not prevail in the world, having wealth and position is a cause for shame.”
8.17 The Master said, “Learn as if you will never catch up, as though you are afraid of losing whatever you have already understood.”
9.2 A villager from Daxiang said, “How great is Confucius! He is vastly learned, and so has not made a name for himself in any particular area.”
The Master, having heard this, said to his disciples, “What should I specialize in? Charioteering? Or archery? I think I will specialize in charioteering. ”
9.4 The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.
Yan Hui said with a deep sigh, “The more I look up at it, the higher it appears. The more I bore into it, the harder it becomes. I see it before me, yet suddenly it is behind me. But my teacher knows how to coax me to move forward, and he does it a step at a time. He expands me with literature and culture and pulls me in with the rites. I cannot stop even if I want to, but having done all I can, it still seems to stand way above me. I don’t know where to start, however much I wish to pursue it.”
9.19 The Master said, “I could use the example of building a mountain. If with just one more basketful of dirt to go I stopped, then I was the one who stopped [and left the work incomplete]. I could also use the example of leveling ground. If I heaped just one basketful of dirt, then progress was made and I was the one who moved the work forward.”
9.28 The Master said, “Only in the deepest winter do we realize that the pine and cypress are the last to shed their leaves.”
11.4 The Master said, “Hui [Yan Hui] is of no help to me. He is pleased with everything I say.”
11.12 Jilu [Zilu] asked about how to serve the spirits of the dead and the gods. The Master said, “You can’t even serve men properly, how can you serve the spirits?”
“May I then ask about death?”
“You can’t even understand life, how can you understand death?”
11.23 When Confucius found his life under threat in Kuang, Yan Hui fell behind. [Later, when they reunited,] Confucius said, “I thought you were dead. ”
Yan Hui replied, “With you, Master, still alive, how would I dare to die?”
12.8 Ji Zicheng said, “What matters about a gentleman is the stuff he is made of. What need is there for cultural refinement?”
Zigong said, “I am sorry to hear what you have just said about the gentleman. Even a team of horses cannot catch up with [misspoken words] from a tongue. The stuff of a gentleman is not different from his refinement, and his refinement is not different from the stuff he is made of. The skin of a tiger or a leopard, shorn of hair, is not different from the skin of dog or a sheep. ”
12.9 Duke Ai said to You Ruo, “This is a lean year. I don’t have enough to keep things going. What should I do?”
You Ruo replied, “Why not apply the [Zhou] system of che, under which the people were taxed one part in ten?”
“If I don’t seem to have enough if I tax them two parts in ten, how will I manage if I tax them one part in ten?”
You Ruo replied, “If the people have enough, how can their ruler be left without enough? When the people do not have enough, how can their ruler hope to have enough?”
12.19 Ji Kangzi asked Confucius about the way of governing, saying, “In order to realize the moral way, how about if I were to kill those who do not live by it?”
Confucius replied, “As head of the government, why would you need to kill anyone [to bring about moral order]? The character of those at the top is like that of the wind. The character of those below is like that of grass. When wind blows over the grass, the grass is sure to bend.”
13.22 The Master said, “People from the south have a saying, “A man lacking constancy will not make a shaman or a doctor.” Well put, is it not? The Book of Changes says, ‘The person who lacks constancy in upholding his virtue will be met with disgrace.’ The Master said, “It means that there is simply no point for him to have his fortune told.”
13.24 Zigong asked, “What would you think of a person if everyone in the village liked him?”
The Master said, “I still would not be able to tell [one way or another about him]. ”
“What would you think of a person if everyone in the village disliked him?”
“I still would not be able to tell [one way or another about him]. Better if the good people in his village liked him and the bad ones disliked him.”
14.1 Xian [Yuan Si] asked what conduct could be considered shameful.
The Master said, “When the state is governed according to the moral way, one would accept a salary. When the state is not governed according to the moral way, it would be shameful to accept a salary.”
“[If a person] does not insist on winning and is not boastful, begrudging, or covetous, can such conduct be called humane?”
The Master said, “One can call that difficult, but I don’t know whether it measures up to being humane.”
14.4 The Master said, “A person who has integrity is sure to have something to say, but a person who has something to say does not necessarily have integrity. A person who is humane is sure to possess courage, but a person who possesses courage is not necessarily humane.”
18.1 The Viscount of Wei left him. The Viscount of Ji became his slave. Bi Gan remonstrated with him and, because of it, was put to death. Confucius said, “The Shang had these three humane men.”
The Han scholar Xu Gan writes:
In the Yin [Shang] dynasty there were three men who realized humaneness. The virtue of the viscount of Wei was firmer than rock and he acted promptly. Although confronted by adversity, the viscount of Ji was able to keep his aims squarely on course. Bi Gan remonstrated and had his heart cut out. The gentleman [Confucius] considered the viscount of Wei’s behavior as most exemplary, followed by that of the viscount of Ji, and Bi Gan’s being the least so. Hence in the Spring and Autumn Annals, all those counselors who were killed for remonstrating with their rulers are criticized for not using their wisdom to escape death.
18.6 Chang Ju and Jie Ni were yoked together as they plowed the field. [Confucius went past them.] He then sent Zilu to find out where the ford might be.
Chang Ju asked, “Who is that man driving the carriage?”
Zilu replied, “It’s Kong Qiu [Confucius].”
“Is it Kong Qiu of Lu?”
“Yes.’
“Then he knows where the ford is.”
Zilu then tried [the other man,] Jie Ni.
Jie Ni asked, “Who are you?”
“Zhong You [Zilu]. ”
“Then you must be a disciple of Kong Qiu of Lu.”
“I am.”
“[Look at the water,] it keeps on moving forward. Everywhere in the world is the same. So why bother to seek another [ruler] when you have given up this one? Why change? Moreover, why do you want to follow someone who keeps running away from men [who turned out to be the wrong ones to serve]? Why not follow those who have run away from the world altogether?” He then went back to planting his seeds, burying them one by one without stopping.
Zilu went to tell Confucius what these two men had said. Confucius seemed lost in thought for a while. Then he spoke: “We cannot flock with birds and beasts, can we? Whom can I be with if not with other human beings? The world has a moral way, so I will not change places with those two.”
18.8 Men of integrity who relinquished their rightful positions and became recluses include Bo Yi, Shu Qi, Yu Zhong, Yi Yi, Zhu Zhang, Liuxia Hui, and Shao Lian. The Master said, “Unwilling to lower their aim and bring disgrace upon themselves – that would be Bo Yi and Shu Qi. Liuxia Hui and Shao Lian were willing to lower their aim and bring disgrace upon themselves, but their words were morally sound and their conduct never wandered from their thought – this much is true. Yu Zhong and Yi Yi lived in reclusion and said whatever they liked; they were immaculate in character, and in giving up the world they acted with expediency. But I am different from all these men. I have no preconceptions about what one can or cannot do.”
20.3 The Master said, “A person will have no way to become a gentleman if he does not understand destiny. He will have no way to find his balance if he does not know the rites. He will have no way to assess people’s character if he does not have insight into words.”
Reference – Confucius, The Analects: Lunyu, translated by Annping Chin. New York, New York, United States of America: Penguin Books, 2014. International Standard Book Number 978-0-698-15351-6.
Avant-Garde and Ugliness
The twentieth century avant-garde presents an interesting problem in the history of beauty. What happens when artists no longer simply represent ugly things, but deliberately try to make art that earlier generations judge as ugly? This is different than painting a battle, an old body, suffering, poverty, or some other unpleasant subject beautifully. Here, ugliness is now the center subject.
Carl Jung, writing on Joyce’s Ulysses in 1932, suggested that ugliness can be a sign of transformations that are still coming. Something that appears distasteful today can later be recognized as important or even beautiful. This observation fits the historic avant-garde of the early twentieth century very well. This introduces an important distinction between ugliness in a subject and artistic ugliness. A painter can represent an ugly face through beautiful painting. A sculptor can represent a wounded or deformed body according to proportion, balance, craft, and order. The avant-garde is important because it broke this relationship. The subject may not be ugly, but the form could be distorted until the public experienced the artwork itself as ugly.
Picasso gives an obvious example through his paintings, where paintings of women were not generally intended as realistic representations. Eyes, noses, profiles, and planes no longer followed the expected structure of a human face. He purposely disrupted the visual order that was expected at the time. Political reactions showed how serious this argument became. Here are two major examples. First, Hitler condemned modern art as degenerate. Second, Nikita Khrushchev, accustomed to Soviet realism, later ridiculed avant-garde painting. Both reactions assume that art has a correct visual language and that departure from this language indicates failure or corruption. Questions were reframed to be political and who has the right to define what is correct.
Futurists like Marinetti famously claimed that a racing automobile was more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace. This is an extraordinary aesthetic claim. The classical statue represented beauty through proportion, restraint, the human body, and a connection to antiquity. The Futurists replaced this with a mechanical engine. They also criticized museums and libraries because these institutions represented the authority of the past. The problem for Futurism was that reverence for the old prevented a new industrial civilization from discovering its own aesthetic language. A world of automobiles, factories, electricity, airplanes, steel, and mass production could not simply continue pretending that the highest form of beauty remained an ancient marble sculpture.
There is something valuable in this argument, that machines do possess forms of beauty. Speed, force, repetition, engineering efficiency, and structural are their own kind of order. Yet the Futurist celebration of force also moved easily toward celebration of violence as many Italian Futurists became associated with Fascism. Destruction of an older aesthetic order did not produce a better moral order.
German Expressionism used ugliness for a different purpose. Artists such as Kirchner, Nolde, Kokoschka, Schiele, Grosz, and Dix represented bodies and faces through exaggeration and distortion, often as criticism of the society around them. Their people can look exhausted, corrupt, diseased, unpleasant, damaged, or spiritually empty. It became a means of describing social ugliness. If the society being represented is itself corrupt, then making it beautiful can be dishonest. Harmony in the painting may conceal disharmony in the world.
Cubism attacked another assumption, that European ways of representing the body and object were somehow natural rather than inherited. Braque and Picasso looked toward non-European art, including African masks. What had been categorized as ugly became a source of new form. This reveals that judgments of ugliness contain history. A person may believe they are simply looking at an ugly object, when in fact they are measuring the object against conventions they have inherited and rarely examined.
If anything can become art through selection and context, then craftsmanship, beauty, subject, and even direct manufacture by the artist are no longer necessary conditions. This created enormous freedom, but new unresolved problems. If almost anything can be art, then how can we now judge what is excellent art?
Surrealism moved the physical world toward the subconscious. Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 called for forms of thought less restricted by rational control. Dreams, automatic writing, free association, disturbing combinations, and apparently irrational images became sources for art. Ernst, Dali, Magritte, and others created situations in which familiar objects appear in unfamiliar relations. An ordinary object placed into an impossible relation damages our expectation of order. Nature continues to look almost normal, but something within it refuses the rules. The Surrealists played games such as the exquisite corpse, where one person would draw part of a figure, fold the paper, and pass it to another person who continued the drawing without seeing what had come before. The figure’s structure came through an irrational combination.
Lautreamont had earlier given one of the great images for this new aesthetic, the accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. Beauty can emerge through an encounter that reason would never have organized. Bunuel’s Un chien andalou deliberately shows disturbing images. Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty sought an art capable of breaking through ordinary psychological restraints.
Later movements extended this interest. Pop art brought the ordinary objects and images of commercial civilization into art. Warhol did not need to rely on academic painting, but on consumer products and repeated commercial images which had already become part of the visual environment of modern life. Adorno gives this development a larger social meaning. If society itself contains injustice, repression, ugliness, and alienation, then an art devoted only to harmony can become false. Art can take into itself what society considers ugly and use it as accusation. What has been hidden, excluded, or rejected is given visible form.
The avant-garde wanted to scandalize the public, and eventually the public purchased the avant-garde. For example, Picasso entered museums, Duchamp is in undergraduate textbooks, surrealism became household knowledge, and Expressionist paintings became enormously valuable. What was ugly became beautiful. The avant-garde achieved something that is almost contradictory. It attacked the authority of beauty so successfully that many of its forms were eventually absorbed into beauty. However, ugliness can become as empty as beauty. Breaking a rule is not an accomplishment as once the violation becomes expected, it can become another convention. Ugliness can expose something hidden, correct a false harmony, or reveal that an inherited rule was never a law of nature.
References
- Jung, C. G., “Ulysses: A Monologue,” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 15: Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1932.
- Marinetti, F. T., “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Le Figaro, Paris, France, 1909.
- Breton, A., “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Paris, 1924.
- Artaud, A., “The Theatre and Its Double, Paris, 1938.
- Adorno, T. W., “Aesthetic Theory” University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
The Eiffel Tower and Industrial Beauty
The Eiffel Tower rises above Paris with such familiarity that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Its lattice of iron has become part of the visual order of Paris, alongside the stone facades, the river, the bridges, and the great monuments created from earlier centuries. Yet, when the tower was proposed in the 1880s, many of the most distinguished artists and writers in France regarded it as an assault upon the city.
This disagreement is more interesting than the familiar lesson that critics sometimes fail to recognize great art. The Eiffel Tower belonged to a much larger nineteenth century argument about machines, cities, industry, and beauty. It challenged those critics to accept engineering as an aesthetic order of its own.
The Industrial Revolution altered Europe before anyone had quite learned how to understand it aesthetically. Mechanical looms, steam engines, trains, factories, and systems of production transformed labor. It also created (or was driven by the motivation) to create extraordinary wealth. As a byproduct, it created crowded industrial cities, dangerous working conditions, smoke, noise, poverty, and forms of human organization that seemed increasingly distant from the scale of the individual craftsman. The machines of the industrial revolution are more than one can observe in museums of industry today (for example the Henry Ford museum in Michigan).
Giosuè Carducci captured something of this ambiguity in his `Hymn to Satan,’ 1863. The steam locomotive appears simultaneously as beautiful and terrible. An emblem of technological progress advancing against an older religious-medieval order. The machine possessed power, speed, heat, smoke, and movement. It frightened those first observing because it was impressive as it cut a dividing line through the countryside.
Other contemporaries observed the transformation and saw degradation. Marx and Engels interpreted the industrial system primarily through labor, capital, and class. John Ruskin approached it through another direction. Industrialization represented a problem of beauty, craft, and human dignity, and not just an economic transformation. His admiration for Gothic architecture was connected to this viewpoint. For example, a medieval cathedral contained irregularity because it contained the work of many individual artisans. Then craftsman work was observed in the stone, unlike the repeated industrial operations on assembly lines. Ruskin identified a problem that remains with us as efficiency does not necessarily produce meaning.
The nineteenth century city made the conflict readily visible. Factories, rail yards, warehouses, chimneys, crowded housing, and new transportation networks altered the structure of London, Paris, Berlin, and other rapidly growing cities in the early industrial revolution. Writers and artists responded accordingly. For example, Dickens made industrial poverty part of the moral landscape of Victorian England. Doré showed a London of darkness, crowds, bridges, smoke, and disparities of wealth. Zola used mechanisms of the new industrial society as machinery in his novels.
For the Universal Exposition of 1889, Gustave Eiffel proposed a tower of iron rising approximately 300 meters above Paris. Nothing comparable had ever been constructed. Unlike previous building efforts, it was not a classical monument. The internal structure was almost entirely visible. The static force balance was visible to the eye from all angles.
In 1887 a group of prominent writers, painters, musicians, and architects protested the tower publicly. Among them were Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Charles Gounod, and Charles Garnier – architect of the Paris Opera. They imagined the tower as an enormous factory chimney imposed upon a city whose beauty had been produced through centuries of stone architecture.
Imagine Paris without knowledge of what the Eiffel Tower would be. Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the churches, bridges, and ordered facades all belonged, however differently, to architectural traditions. Into this city would suddenly rise an exposed iron framework taller than any structure ever built.
Eiffel’s viewpoint relied upon a different conception of beauty. Engineering, he argued, was not outside harmony. A structure could possess elegance because its form followed physical necessity. Beauty in this viewpoint relied on strength, proportion, efficiency, and boldness. Its visual form and its structural form are intimately connected.
A bridge can be beautiful because the path of its loads is intelligible. An aircraft wing can possess beauty because its form reconciles lift, drag, structure, weight, stability, manufacturability, and countless practical constraints. A turbine blade, a ship hull, or even the internal geometry of a fluid passage may contain an order that is almost invisible to someone who does not know the problem being solved.
One cannot always say that what functions well is beautiful. Factories could operate efficiently while producing miserable surroundings. Cities could become economically productive while becoming physically degrading. A machine may solve one problem while creating another. Ruskin’s criticism remains even with the survival and celebration of Eiffel’s tower.
We might question what kind of order machines produce, and what they ask human beings to surrender in obtaining function. Today the Eiffel Tower’s structure, once denounced as an industrial monstrosity, became inseparable from Paris itself. What was ugly is now beautiful, and what was alien became familiar.
Perception changed as well, and people learned to see and live with iron differently. Industrial construction introduced another vocabulary, based on iron, steel, glass, tension, compression, repetition, and increasingly large spans.
The nineteenth century suspicion of the industrial city never disappeared. Twentieth century writers and thinkers continued to describe the metropolis as both liberation and imprisonment. Alfred Döblin’s `Berlin Alexanderplatz’ presents the modern city as a harsh system of crowds, machines, commerce, violence, and chance. Adorno viewed much of modern mass culture with suspicion. Joyce turned Dublin into the immense human landscape of Ulysses, where the modern city becomes simultaneously comic, vulgar, intimate, frustrating, and magnificent – a simultaneous inferno and paradise.
This is the lesson of industrial ugliness. Technology changes the conditions in which beauty can be recognized. A civilization should not judge its machines only by whether they work, or its cities only by whether they grow. Technical accomplishment is real, and sometimes beautiful. Yet the final measure remains human. What sort of world has been created around the machine, and what sort of life is possible within it?
References
- G. Carducci, A Satana. Pistoia, Italy: Società Tipografica Pistoiese Carducci, Bongiovanni, 1867.
- K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. London, U.K.: Office der Bildungs-Gesellschaft für Arbeiter, 1848.
- J. Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice, vol. II, The Sea-Stories. London, Smith, Elder and Co., 1853, pp. 151-230.
- C. Dickens, Hard Times: For These Times. London, U.K.: Bradbury & Evans, 1854.
- G. Doré and B. Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage. London, U.K.: Grant & Co., 1872.
- É. Zola, Germinal. Paris, France: G. Charpentier et Cie, 1885.
- E. Meissonier et al., “Protestation des artistes contre la tour de M. Eiffel,” Le Temps, pp. 3–6, Feb. 14, 1887.
- G. Eiffel, Interview by P. Bourde, Le Temps, Feb. 14, 1887.
- A. Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. Berlin, Germany: S. Fischer Verlag, 1929.
- M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Querido Verlag, 1947.
- J. Joyce, Ulysses. Paris, France: Shakespeare and Company, 1922.
Literature – Cheng Yaotian
Its (literature) influence can be more inspiring than being in the presence of a great man because it calls upon us to articulate our ideas and it beckons us to draw analogies. And so what literature offers is more than just something to rely on: it takes us by the hand and bolsters us up; it holds us by the arm to get us on our way.
Cheng Yaotian (1725–1814)
United States 250 – July 4th ‘For the Nation’
For the Nation
Twelve score and ten years ago,
the British settlers of this abundant land
took matters into their own hands
and demanded that King George leave them be
and set them free.From the Massachusetts Bay to Georgia’s red clay,
from Philadelphia’s philosophers
to Virginia’s founding elites,
cries of freedom were everywhere
like a relentless drumbeat.Common sense and self-evident truths
were the language of the day.
Tyranny and intolerable acts
would no longer hold sway.The settlers along the Atlantic coast
were dismayed by British rule.
They were ready to govern themselves,
to build something entirely new:
a form of government
that would benefit both the many and the few.One quarter of a millennium ago,
when the settlers first yearned to be free,
the native tribes who were born on this land
were already practicing democracy.Those indigenous caretakers of this amazing place
could not help but wonder
how the settlers with their calls for freedom
would change the lives of the native peoples.And watching too in manacles and chains
were the Africans brought here enslaved,
who questioned in marginalized voices
whether this freedom would also make them free.Now looking back over the arc of time,
we all can plainly see
that the promise of those opening years
is slowly coming to be.It has not been a simple, uncomplicated course.
It has taken wars and marches and civil discourse
to get from where we started from
to the times in which we live,
where the essential promises of the American way
are becoming more accessible day by day.Thus, we the people have molded ourselves
into what we had hoped to be:
a people who live with liberty
and who are happy being free.We have made those words that inspired the world
the core values of our philosophy.So now in 2026,
we can glimpse that ideal place
that America still aspires to
and hopes someday to fully embrace.That place where all of us can be
all that we were meant to be,
and unite with our fellow citizens
to preserve this fragile democracy.We must recall as we celebrate
what Ben Franklin reminded us of:
that this republic is ours to keep,
but only if we can lift it high,
ensuring that freedom does not die.Then we who now uphold the torch
can pass it on yet again
in one long, continuous, unbroken chain
that will ensure that freedom continues to reign
in this land of the free
and home of the brave.
Source: John Charles Thomas, “For the Nation,” performed during America Made in Virginia: 250 Years Together, PBS and Virginia’s American Revolution 250 Commission, July 4, 2026.
The Uncanny and the Failure of Order
Let us journey back to the time of Dr. Freud in 1919 – A lamp sits on a table in an ordinary room. The lamp rises, but there is something wrong about the lamp. This is the peculiar force of the uncanny, where it is not an ugly event. It is ugliness of situation, which represents a defect in order. Here, the lamp remains a familiar object, but its place in the world has shifted. We are disturbed because the world still asks to be trusted, while one event inside it refuses the natural law by which we understand rooms, objects, and ourselves.
Dr. S. Freud, writing in 1919, gave this disturbance its modern psychological form. The uncanny, for him, was the strange. Many strange things do not frighten us. The uncanny is stranger than strangeness because it feels half remembered. It is the return of something hidden, something that should have remained buried but has come back into view. Schelling had already defined the uncanny in this way. Ernst Jentsch called it a form of “intellectual uncertainty,” a condition in which the mind cannot decide what it is seeing. We can see this in the art movement of the surreal.
That uncertainty often appears at the boundary between the living and the lifeless. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ gives Freud his central example – the adult enchanted by Olimpia, a beautiful woman who is really an automaton. The doll that may be alive, the face that may be human, the body that may be a machine, all unsettle us because they occupy two categories at once. The mind wants a border, and the object refuses one. Such themes are reemerging in 2026 with the rise of so-called AI language models.
Fairy tales show many more examples. A wolf in a story may not frighten a child. But a wolf imagined at night, just outside the window, is another matter. The marvelous belongs to worlds where supernatural events are accepted as part of the order. The fantastic appears where the order is rational, where miracles are no longer expected, and where the impossible therefore enters as a violation. A puppet that speaks inside a fairy tale belongs to its world. A puppet that speaks in our room wounds ours.
The same logic governs ghosts, doubles, vampires, and haunted houses. The ghost is not terrifying simply because it is dead. If the shroud moves, if the face flickers in uncertain light, if the dead seem to carry some remainder of life, then the boundary breaks. The ghost becomes a defect in the understanding between life and death.
The double is perhaps more troubling. In ancient images, the double could promise survival, a form by which the self endured. In modern literature, from Gogol and Poe to Dostoevsky, the double becomes a warning. Another person bears our form, occupies our place, perhaps knows something about us that we do not know ourselves. We are not frightened by difference alone. We are frightened by resemblance that has become uncanny.
Kafka showed this in Metamorphosis. The terror is not only that Gregor Samsa wakes as an insect, it is that his family adapts to the violation with an embarrassed practicality. The impossible has occurred, yet the household continues. The scandal is absorbed into routine, the world does not collapse, and it accommodates the grotesque.
That is the deepest form of the uncanny. Not the scream, not the apparition, not the supernatural event, but the discovery that disorder can enter ordinary life and be treated as normal. The uncanny begins when the lamp rises from the table. The uncanny becomes serious when everyone in the room decides, quietly, that this is how lamps have always behaved.
References
- Jentsch, E., “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906),” R. Sellars, Trans., Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 7–16, 1997.
- Freud, S., “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, J. Strachey, Trans. London, U.K.: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 217–256.
- Windsor, M., “What is the Uncanny?,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 51–65, 2019.
- Schlipphacke, H., “The Place and Time of the Uncanny,” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 163–172, 2015.
- Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. and Clasen, M., “Creepiness and the Uncanny,” Style, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 322–349, 2023.
- Gray, K. and Wegner, D. M., “Feeling Robots and Human Zombies: Mind Perception and the Uncanny Valley,” Cognition, vol. 125, no. 1, pp. 125–130, 2012.
- Rosenkranz, K., Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition, A. Pop and M. Widrich, Eds. and Trans. London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Copernicus’ Dedicatory Letter to Pope Paul III
I began myself to consider the movement of the earth. It seemed an absurd notion. Yet I knew that my predecessor had been granted the liberty to imagine all sorts of fictive circles to save the celestial phenomena. I therefore thought that I would be similarly granted the right to experiment, to try out whether, by assigning a certain movement to the earth, I might be able to find more solid demonstrations of the revolutions of the celestial spheres than those left by my predecessors.
To Save the Phenomena, English ed. 1969, University of Chicago Press, p. 63
Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism
On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the same limits. Poetry can move through violence, describe horror, and pass onward before the mind is forced to remain before one unbearable image. Sculpture and painting, unlike poetry, occupy space. They show one instant or moment. A distorted face, fixed forever at the extremity of agony may become not tragic, but repellent. The artist can choose and represent suffering without allowing suffering to abolish beauty. This distinction is more than a technical point about the arts, and it marks a moral tension in representation of society.
The eighteenth century changed the terms of this question through the idea of the Sublime. Beauty was often discussed as order, proportion, harmony, and measure. The Sublime turned attention toward experiences that overwhelmed measure: storms, cliffs, abysses, darkness, silence, ruins, rough seas, and boundless spaces. Sublime in the arts is terror held at a distance, and terror converted into reflection.
Burke understood the power of this difference. A storm at sea can terrify the sailor and delight the spectator on shore. The difference in perceptions is within our relation to it. When danger cannot possess us, fear becomes an aesthetic experience – we are shaken, grown, challenged, yet not threatened. Kant help identify and gave this experience a philosophical structure. For example, the starry sky suggests a magnitude that the senses cannot comprehend. A storm suggests a power before which the body is small. In both cases, the Sublime humbles our sensible nature and also reveals an inward freedom.
Romanticism inherited this discovery and altered the history of beauty. Beauty was no longer the ruling category of art. The ugly, the grotesque, the irregular, the demonic, the ruined, and the deformed became more than failures of form, and grew in material through modern art could communicate. Friedrich Schlegel saw the shift with likely unease. He preferred the classical ideal, and he associated modern ugliness with a decline from the ancient order. Yet, even in his resistance, he recognized something essential. Modern art was drawn to the interesting, the characteristic, and the individual. Modern art sought the particular being, marked by defect, history, desire, and contradiction. This is why Shakespeare mattered so much to the Romantics (romantic thought). His view did not separate beauty from ugliness in a clean philosophical diagram. Kings are foolish, fools are wise, lovers are ridiculous, villains are intelligent, and bodies carry appetite, ambition, frailty, and decay. The beautiful is no longer pure, and it resides among impurities.
By the nineteenth century, ugliness had become an emergent stand-alone subject. For example, Hegel treated it as a necessary moment in the life of beauty, which collides with beauty and forces it to become conscious of its own limits. Later writers made this even more explicit. One example is of Karl Rosenkranz, in his Aesthetics of Ugliness, developed a wide taxonomy of unseemly, repugnant, horrendous, empty, nauseating, criminal, demonic, witchlike, and caricatural. This represents an artistic structure that emerged in art in the period.
Victor Hugo made the strongest Romantic claim for this enlargement of art. In the preface to Cromwell, he placed the grotesque at the center of modern aesthetics. The grotesque, for Hugo, was the counterweight to the beautiful, the force that brought art down from ideal abstraction into the mixed condition of human life. Christianity, the Middle Ages, cathedral monsters, carnival laughter, Shakespearean drama, and the modern novel all belonged to this field.
The grotesque destroys the neat order of the world and not in a nihilistic way. It reveals that the world is not as neat as the classical ideal portrayed – it reminds us that the human being was not a statue, a proportion, or an untouched marble form. The human being can be comic and tragic, noble and ridiculous, luminous and damaged – all at the same time. Ugliness in art can become a cheap instrument and used to startle, degrade, flatter, cynicism, or to mistake obscenity for truth. Violation of beauty is not normally profound and can be careless.
The danger to society – There is a societal danger, that a culture that permits only beauty is dishonest. It polishes the wound until the wound disappears under the surface of a scar. Proportion is preserved at the cost of wisdom and experience. Excellent art, today, does not worship or remove ugliness. It holds ugliness within form long enough for judgment to occur.
References
- “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” Wikipedia. Link
- “Laocoön and His Sons,” Wikipedia. Link
- “Sublime,” Wikipedia. [Link]
- J. Shelley, “18th Century British Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- H. Ginsborg, “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- “Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- A. Speight, “Friedrich Schlegel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- Hugo, V. , “Preface,” Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, University Press of Florida. [Link]
- “Romanticism,” Wikipedia. Available: [Link]
- “The Birth of Tragedy,” Wikipedia. [Link]
Excerpts from Magnifica Humanitas of Pope Leo XIVON – Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence
There are many sources in the field of ethics in engineering and of artificial intelligence. Recently, in the press it was noted, that the Vatican and Pope Leo the Fourteenth wrote on artificial intelligence. The article is on much more than AI, and the best material is outside this subject. It is noteworthy that the organization wrote on this impactful emergence of technology that is transforming ourselves and society. I have extracted some context here, that I believe could be kept in mind for students, professionals, and practitioners alike in the digital arts. There are so many good tidbits and thought that it is impossible to choose. I predict this document will be highly cited in the coming decades as our society is changed by AI. Other parts of the document, perhaps, could be kept in mind with the wider impact of AI, which we have not yet felt or understood at this time. Here are some of my favorite excerpts focused on AI …
99 – AI and humanity – … So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.
100. – On objectivity and deception – … The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them, with all their strengths and limitations. The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance.
102 – The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. …
103 – On responsibility – … entrusting an algorithm in practice with the power to select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment, is to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities. In this process, political responsibility is also lost, not just empathy toward those excluded, which can, after all, be simulated. The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes difficult to raise objections. In this way, injustice goes unnoticed, and compassion, mercy and forgiveness — understood not as mere appearances but as real political actions — gradually disappear from view.
111 – A message to developers of AI – I wish to address a special appeal to those who develop artificial intelligence. In one sense, technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation. Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. Just as the creator of an artistic or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.
114 – On civilization and quality – The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function…
125 – The importance of unseen … Above all, it is visible in the “martyrs of everyday life” who care for, educate, accompany and comfort without fanfare, such as parents, nurses, doctors, volunteers and those who remain alongside an elderly person or an outcast. Their testimony demonstrates that goodness does not advance automatically, but requires the perseverance, memory and interior conversion necessary to begin anew, even after defeat.
Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery – 173. … Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people. A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labeling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material. In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. … This reality deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time. It is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden. If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity.
References
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#CHAPTER_THREE – Accessed June, 1, 2026.