Conversations: Ethics, Aesthetics, & Complexity

The Conversation Series features excerpts between Michael Rotondi and colleagues in architecture and academia.

With Prof. Michael Benedikt

September 2, 2022

Transcript

Michael Rotondi: I think there's a more fundamental definition of an ethic that's within any system. 

Michael Benedikt: Well, I agree with that. 

MR: And so that's why I started thinking about all the stuff that you write.  

MB: Well, I'm interested, and so, by the way, is Harman, maybe we all are, maybe we all are... you know, is it the aesthetics of ethics, or is it the ethics of aesthetics? It's like, we're all aesthetes. We love beauty. We just love beauty, but we also love goodness. And we somehow wish that they came in the same package with the same gesture, you know, with the same deed. But I think if we had to choose one over the other, we'd probably choose beauty. [laughs] 

MR: But is it possible that there's a...not ethics, I don't know if it's integrity, or there has to be certain...okay, in order to get to beauty. Everything isn't beautiful, that's what I thought was crazy. I was reading a book once that said beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. And what this scientist was using as the measure of that was that the chemistry in your body, regardless of education, language, status, you know, height, whatever it was, it didn't matter because you can show certain things to a cross-section of people and the body chemistry inside of them, it was the same. 

MB: Yeah. We respond to...there are certain universals, like youth, like in the beauty of humans, such as symmetry of features, certain proportions, youthfulness, but mostly it has a lot to do with symmetry, perfectly symmetrical, you know. And there are standards of beauty that seem to be sort of natural. But the people who talk about beauty that way don't have much to say about modern art, and just...there more difficult kinds of beauty than, you know, 16-year-old beautiful girls, which is what everyone agrees is beautiful because that speaks directly to reproduction. Eggs are beautiful, swans are beautiful, sunsets are beautiful. I mean, it takes you straight into greeting card territory. Like, that's where the universals are. And the universals are nearly always banal for true aesthetes such as yourself. You know what I mean? Like, you want...for you, beauty is a more difficult thing, and there's a certain amount of grit that you take with it, and there's a certain amount of...it's a little bit, for me, like food. Have you ever heard of an herb called asafoetida? 

MR: No. 

MB: It's an Indian herb or flavor, which smells a little bit... like if you smell it neat, it smells like dead things. It smells like rotting bodies. And there's fish sauce, which is rotting fish, and there's fermented things. And there are a lot of cuisines where you actually have to have a little bit of that for it to taste good. You know? So, it's like, you want beauty, but you also want a little bit of shit in there. [laughs] Otherwise it's all sugar, you know? 

MR: Well, in the tea ceremony, when I did what for me was the signature tea ceremony, which I was hoping to do.... and the one thing that brought it all together was the bitterness of the matcha and then biting the sweetness of the mochi. And it put me...what it brought to my taste buds, and then all of my other senses that had been responding to the time of the day [which] was changing, day into night, the time of the seasons were changing, it was going from fall into winter, the temperature was changing. I was sitting on a veranda, and the veranda in a Japanese temple is the in-between. Inside and outside. And I always thought about in-between as the place where creativity exists. It's where… the sweetness and the bitterness. And I thought that there was a set of relationships, and maybe ethics is the wrong word, but there's relationships that have to exist in order to find that point of equilibrium, which is really conservation of energy. And survival is predicated on conservation of energy. 

MB: Well, these are things I try to, I think about quite a lot. Did you look at the second essay for Common Edge at all? 

MR: I did. I did. 

MB: So, there's a thing about Catholicism and Protestantism, I don't know if you remember that part. But it ends with a sort of celebration of the complexity of life. And so for me, both ethics and aesthetics are derived from a certain kind of complexity. So what you want, the formula so to speak, if there was going to be a formula for both, it would be: beauty is when you detect new complexity in service to life. You know? It's got to be pro-life, but more complex-ly so than before. And that's when we see beauty. Does that make sense? So, when you're at the tea ceremony and you see the contrast and you link it to in-betweenness and to the moment and to the…you know that it's all in the enhancement of life. That was like a new synthesis. It's like, I used to hate opera because I thought it was just, you know, overblown fat people singing about cliche things. And then I went to La Boheme and I cried my eyes out, and it was just absolutely beautiful. And part of it was I saw a whole new synthesis, something that I had not been open to before. And that the people that were performing the opera would find my critique childish. They would just go, yes, of course that's what it is. But you know, so is abstract expressionism just throwing paint on the canvas. You can always find a dismissive way of describing great art, you know? Like a kid could do it, or I don't like this, I don't like that. But it's like when you get into a great art and you understand its complexity, its gears and wheels, and you see how much there is there, and you see that this is life-affirming, you know? Then that's a very potent mixture. It's a very potent thing. So for me, beauty, goodness and beauty do go together. Well, that's a kind of an aim, if you wish.  

I wrote, I did a talk which came out as an essay, and I still give it today, called Love and Beauty, and I talk about the Roman versus the Judeo-Christian approach. So you have a kind of a two-by-two matrix. The one pair is beautiful and ugly. The other pair is, what was the other pair? Beautiful and ugly, lovable and unlovable. So that gives you four conditions. Right? And the double positive is something that's lovable and beautiful, okay? Which is, yeah, everyone signs up for that. Lovable and beautiful, what's not to like, right? Then you get the unlovable and ugly. No one goes for that unless they're like pervs of some kind. So it's the two cross conditions that are interesting. That is, lovable and ugly, and beautiful and unlovable. So this lecture, there's dozens of images that I show of lovable ugly things, like pug puppies, babies, certain car designs, nearly all the work of Venturi, Robert Venturi, is lovable and ugly. And then I show a lot of work that I say is beautiful but unlovable, like everything Mies Van der Rohe did probably is beautiful but not lovable. And I say that there's two basic systems here. One is the Judeo-Christian, which says, if you are confronted with something that's unlovable and ugly, your first move should be to make it lovable, or find some way to love it, or find some way to ethically improve it, and then you can think about making it beautiful. But the Roman way says, no. The Romans believed that something deserves to be loved based on its beauty. So you first fix its beauty, and then you find a way to love it. So there are two competing strategies for ending up in the same spot, which is to make things that are both lovable and beautiful. But the priorities are different because of one's belief about, you know, which to apply oneself, to come first. And I think you find that even now, if you speak to kind of a community of architects and participatory design...and you know, all those guys working with the poor and they want to do good, and then, oh, you know, then they'll make it beautiful. Like, step one is to do the right thing for the right people, with the right motivations, and help out and do all this stuff. They're not against beauty, but they just think, you know, we'll get to that. We'll make some nice colors and we'll make some arches and then everyone's going to be happy. Whereas I think you and I would go, no, no, no. Step one is we have to do something beautiful. Then we'll see. Then we'll try very, very hard to make it also be lovable and, you know, have people think it's a good thing and so on and so forth. So I think the goal is the same, but I think the ways up the mountain are different. That's all. 

MR: But there's a difference between outer and inner. Like there's, well, there's two aspects. Outer, it's like things that might be beautiful on the outside or ugly on the inside. And the other way around. 

MB: Yeah, it does complicate things. It adds a third axis. It's now a two by two by two. 

MR: I just finished a book called Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I never read any of his stuff and a couple of people were telling me they started reading him in college. So anyways, there's a number of characters in there. Almost all the characters, there's some major flaw that is evident, but when the characters get to know each other, some of them, they are very attracted to each other because there's a kind of, they see a kind of, I don't know if the word is beauty. But back to the architects or people that do things for the so-called right reasons. My experience with that is that we were attacked, and I guess it was the 80s, you know, when the whole energy thing started happening in the 70s and the 80s. It was: if you made things that were beautiful, you were suspected that you were not interested in solving problems. And then, we always felt that the lack of beauty in most of that work was okay with these people, because they used their social concerns as an alibi for not being very talented otherwise. 

MB: Yeah, well, I think both parties are wrong and both parties are right. I think for me, if you just realize it's at least a two by two and that everyone wants something that's good and lovable and beautiful, then we can just argue about which is the right way up the mountain. But I think we can agree on the mountain. I should probably Zoom you that lecture because you'll love the images, because I actually managed to find 10, 20, 30 representatives of each box in that two by two. 

But anyhow, I guess what I'm trying to say is my way of unifying ethics and aesthetics is to cast them both in terms of a kind of complexity, a life-enhancing complexity. So in other words, they're both in the service of more life. Greater variety, length, and quality of life. And I think at that level of abstraction, they're the same thing. 

MR: You know what? I was listening [for] the second time this morning to a book on-- it's mycology. It's basically all on mycelium and fungi. It's called Entangled Life. And the one thing that is standing out the second time I'm listening to it is, the difference between looking at people as…or looking at anything,  they're talking about mycelium, but let's say, looking at a fungi as an object or a thing, but it's actually a system that matter moves through. And it's the same thing with us, we're basically a system. And basically, energy and matter is moving through us. And it just happened to come out in this particular shape. 

MB: Why does this idea help you? Or make you think to do something? 

MR: I guess I was always-- I've always been interested in things constantly changing. And I'm interested in, well, complexity. Complexity, instead of it being a stable condition, it's a dynamic condition. So things are always trying to get back to a state of equilibrium, which is where the most energy is conserved. And so, you know, everything becoming more complex isn't...it's not about complication. It's about looking for more things to connect to, and incorporate. 

MB: And more states to be in. But complexity is a very particular combination. Complexity itself is not a simple idea. So if you open up the Pandora's box of what is complexity, then you realize, well, it's not order and it's not chaos. It's a particular blend of order and chaos. Because if it's too orderly, things are rigid and nothing changes. If it's too chaotic, there's no organization to it.  

MR: That's what fascinates me. It's trying to visualize that middle path, down the line. 

MB: Down the line. 

MR: Yeah, that line. 

MB: And not only is that a line, it's a ridge on a mountain. So you're going up a mountain, and there's a drop off to either side. The drop off to one side is into the valley of chaos, and the drop off to the other side is the valley of rigidity. And so you're going up a slope of more and more complexity by not falling to either side. So it's not that once you've balanced chaos and rigidity, you've got complexity. You do. But now, even that can increase. So if you think of a musical example, a chaotic melody would be like, you know, the cat walking on your piano, or just random notes, right? On the other side, there's playing the same note over and over and over and over and over, like stuck, you know? So music will always be somewhere between those two things. It'll have repetitions, but it'll also surprise you all the time, you know? But given that, you can still say, okay, I'll accept that principle. But there's music like simple folk songs, and there's music like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and they both are on that same middle ground. Except one has a handful of notes as its total option, and the other has, you know, two hours, 100 instruments, 15 keys, 25 themes, and it's still on the ridge. Like, it still stays there on that perfect balance of rigidity and chaos. And I think that's the role, is to get up the fucking mountain, and it’s to take the art that you're practicing and move it up the mountain. You know, and I think that's both...I think that's what life wants. And I think it produces both beauty and goodness. That's my take on that. 

MR: Maybe what you’re describing, what pops into my head, is improvisation. 

MB: Yeah, jazz. 

MR: Yeah, I was...when I listened to, over and over again to learn from it, to get inspired by it... 

MB: Listened to what? 

MR: Keith Jarrett, the Koln concert in particular. And in that piece, there are times when he's just moving. And then there's times when he basically works himself into a corner, and he repeats it over and over again while he's trying to figure out how to get it out of the corner. And then all of a sudden something like that [gestures] begins to happen, and he makes a path and then he takes off again. There are moments when he's on the ridge, and he starts to fall off the ridge, and then he stops in order to figure out how to get back on the ridge. So...if equilibrium is also connected to change, it's dynamic. There's no way to predetermine what the next thing is that you're going to have to contend with. Generally, maybe.

MB: Yeah. But I do think, again, I don't think we're completely lost in that. Because I believe that when an artist makes a work of art, and I think it's true of architecture as well, you're offered two things. Number one is, can you tell what the rules of the game are? Like, what's not permissible? You have to pick up what the rules are. It's like watching a game of chess and you don't know anything about chess. If you watch long enough, you will figure out what the rules of chess are just by watching the game, right? And if you watch long enough, you can tell when someone's made an illegal move or has broken the rules. So I think when you do a composition or a work of art, you're not just presenting a thing, you're also presenting a game. And the viewer has to know what the rules are. Then they can judge how well you're playing the game. But if you change the rules in the middle of the game, you've really got to do some persuading that this is a good change. So I think the same is true with sort of jazz and all styles of music. It's like, you've got to come into it knowing what the parameters are, and then the virtuosity is: watch how I play. Or like going to a circus act. If you're going to walk across a wire, you can't suddenly have a harness that prevents you from falling, because that breaks the rules. So it's like, you can make the game more complex by expanding the number of rules, by expanding the number of players, by saying, here's what's possible. But it has to end. Otherwise, you can't tell whether someone's playing it well. So even there are laws of harmony that Beethoven had to obey. There were laws of symphonic structure, which he was following. And everyone who follows that understands how incredibly he performed that game. And I think with Keith Jarrett too, there's like, jazz is not totally free. Jazz has shape. It has parameters. It has a certain sound, has rules of rhythm and so forth. And the beauty of listening to someone like Jarett, or my favorite guy, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, is just how endlessly inventive he is within the rules, and within the rules that he makes, you know? So, I don't know. I mean, it's difficult. Obviously, we're both teachers grappling to convey this sort of stuff to students, which makes us constantly question how we do it. Oh, you constantly question how you do it, because you make notes all the time about what you're thinking, what you're doing.