"I consider that the natural biological manner of living is constitutively aesthetic and effortless, and that we have become culturally blind to this condition. In this blindness we have made of beauty a commodity, creating ugliness in all dimensions of our living, and through that ugliness, more blindness in the loss of our capacity to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, and to understand, the interconnectedness of the biosphere to which we belong. We have transformed aesthetics into art, health into medicine, science into technology, human beings into the public, ..., and in this way we have lost the poetic look that permitted us to live our daily life as an aesthetic experience. Finally, in that loss, wisdom is lost. What is the cure? The creation of the desire to live again, as a natural feature of our biosphere, the effortlessness of a multidimensional human living in a daily life of aesthetic experiences."
— Humberto R. Maturana, from The Biological Roots of Reality and Humanness:
An Invitation to Freedom
Maturana hits THE nail. I've recently seen exactly this with a bunch of "artists in nature". The blindness, the stupidity, oh horror. They want to live "outside", but can't stand the sight of unspoilt nature and need to put garbage (art they call it) in all 6 directions, even in the tree above the hammock...
ReplyDeleteBut I can't find this book of Maturana. Any link?