CHAPTER ELEVEN: GARBETT'S EPISTEMOLOGY
Introduction
Even
in 1850 when he was only 26, Garbett was no newcomer to the world of physics.
Two years before the Treatise
appeared, he published an article on Parhelia in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of
Science. It is the first hint we get of an interest which was to remain
with him throughout his life. Later he was to claim to have invented a method
of colour-photography; during the 1880's he attempted to take out a patent
(which was refused) for a new form of sextant, and earlier he had written to
Charles Babbage about looking-glass signals. In short he considered himself
something of an authority on the subject of science in general and optics in
particular.
The extent of scientific influence on English culture in the nineteenth
century has been dealt with by many historians.
[1] The object
of the next chapter is to place Garbett within that sphere of influence and
will concentrate on an analysis of his distinction between a sensual beauty and
an intellectual beauty as discussed in the early part of the second chapter of
Garbett's Treatise.
Science as a paradigm
Scientists in the
nineteenth century, led by figures such as Lyell, Brewster and Herschel, worked
on the assumption that nature developed in an orderly and purposeful fashion.
They wanted to develop laws which expressed that regularity.
[2]
Garbett wanted an architectural theory in which that regularity was similarly
expressed. He seized on the triumvirate of Vitruvian conditions for
well-building as the foundation on which he would construct a system of
architecture which could answer scientific laws. This was not so difficult if
one separated out two of the three conditions, namely Firmitas & Utilitas,
but Garbett's main aim was to subject all three, including Delight to such
laws. Delight had to be controlled so that it could be reproduced on command.
With the demise of the beau ideal during the late seventeenth
and eighteenth century, such an ambition could at best be called rash.
Aesthetics was now dominated by the nomadic subjectivism of the association of
ideas. To bring that under control Garbett needed a mathematics of psychology which could accurately predict human
responses. The subjection of the psychology of perception to strict laws would allow him to impose a
stringent framework for the perception and production of architectural beauty.
The combination of psychology and optics posited a necessary relationship
between qualities supposedly inherent in the object and the processes of
perception. The raw materials for this idea Garbett inherited from Frances
Hutcheson and John Locke. The philosophical framework they provided for Garbett
was supplemented with the findings as published in Sir David Brewster's Opticks and Sir John Herschel's lectures
on Light as well as Garbett's elaborate critique of the ideas of Archibald
Alison.
The appeal of science during the
nineteenth century had an effect on culture which was anything but
straightforward. In fact it caused many to search out dubious paths towards an
adequate epistemology. One significant side effect of the authority science
enjoyed during the nineteenth century was the increased appeal of its language.
Science's logical conventions lent a biblical authority to almost everything
that was written in that language, characterised as it was by laws and
quantities. Another side effect was that the rigorous and critical methods of
proper empiricism were by some readily cross-bred with the ideas, projections
and hopes derived from preconceived ideas wrapped in the slick language of
science. Many theorists, such as for instance D. Ramsey Hay and to a lesser
extent George Field, let the promise of a beautiful coincidence and the beauty
of Pythagorean harmonies do away with a healthy measure of experimental
control.
Complex psychological and subjective
processes had in 1850 not been sufficiently reduced to their constituent
elements to make a mathematics of psychology possible. When attempts were made
to subject psychological ideas to such a rigid logic, the resultant theories
quickly became rather quaint and even absurd. The explanations which Garbett
forged with regard to beauty in architecture, are made up of a bricolage of
hybrid sciences and occasionally contain strange non-sequiturs. To be
disparaging about that, however, would be to miss the point. The example of
science was to a large extent responsible for Garbett's vigorous and highly
imaginative process of reasoning. Because of his scientific outlook Garbett not
only managed to move the argument of architectural design away from the tired
and shallow battle of styles, it also enabled him to come up with a number of
highly provocative ideas.
Physical preference
The
use of science in Garbett's Treatise
is defended on the grounds of its promise of a rigorous aesthetics based on a
secure phenomenology of subjective processes. An academically inclined art
theory had to be able to project judgements a-priori in order to make possible
the mechanical reconstruction of aesthetic responses. Garbett therefore had to
deal with Alison's psychological explanation of beauty by protecting it against
the arbitrary. The only way to do that was to bind that psychology to physical
laws as stringent as those working solely on the basis of physical forces. He
had done this already to some extent by making a distinction between natural
and acquired associations, i.e. ones which were inherent and therefore
measurable and ones which were the result of cultural pollution and subjective.
He had also briefly discussed the idea in the section on taste. But he wanted
to go further. In the passage quoted below he revealed the true extent of the
wealth that science might hold in store for mankind:
The discovery indeed of
a physical reason for these preferences, in the case of two of the senses, sight
and hearing, -the discovery why red is more pleasing than brown, (..) or the
sound of a string than that of a stick,- that is the discovery of some
describable quality common to the red and blue and other colours of the same
class, and to the string and other musical sounds, which quality is not
possessed by the dull colours and the unmusical noises, -must be considered one
of the greatest triumphs of the inductive sciences. It is now perfectly known in
what this difference consists, and, moreover, that it is the same in both
senses.
[3]
This
passage is significant because it reveals that Garbett believed he had
discovered a direct link between psychological processes determining aesthetic
preference and physics. The nature of certain preferences were found to answer
to a measurable reality. The triumph became one of truly Pythagorean
proportions when it was discovered that those measurements were able to
establish correlations between the perceptive processes of two separate organs,
the eye and the ear. Admittedly the reader had to accept as an unprovable axiom
that red is primordially more
pleasing that brown, and that the sound of a string is more pleasing than that of a stick. But once that cultural
hurdle was properly ignored and side-stepped, a conscientious scientific
theorist would be in a position to add and subtract the desires and myriad
contradictory preferences of the human mind and come up with the mother of all
architectural theories. This discovery would not only prevent aesthetics from
degenerating into a slippery and uncontrollable subjectivism but it even held
out the possibility that Taste would one day become a subject as sharply
defined as geometry.
The cogency offered by the logic of
analogy backed up by the measurements of physics was supreme in Garbett's
world. The grand aim of the inductive sciences, as we can see from the passage
above, was to establish such analogies beyond doubt or, alternatively, (as in
the case of harmonic proportions) to explode them. How then could it be proven
beyond doubt that red was more pleasing than brown, that the sound of a string
was more pleasing that of a stick?
Savages and children
Such
supposedly objective preferences were proven by two of the most fascinating and
misused guinea-pigs in the history of speculation: the child and the savage.
Nature was the standard by which man-made products could be valued, that much
is already clear from the title of the Treatise.
Before an evaluation of the natural could properly take place, nature herself
had to be made measurable. This was particularly difficult with regard to
psychological processes. But the problem was easily solved through the example
of science. All one needed was an external standard of purity. The innocent,
the unspoiled, the morally pure and the primitive could be employed to
establish that standard for those who felt that the present civilisation was in
many respects culturally degenerate and its people deadened to the pure and
wholesome.
The use of consensus to establish the existence of truths, referred to in
the previous chapter, is as old as Greek philosophy itself. The Stoics were
convinced of the rightness of that which is universal and identified the true
with that which is universally believed.
[4]
Consensus gave Garbett the authority to reinvigorate the existence of an
absolute if permanently progressive standard of beauty. If one reads the
relevant passages in the Treatise carefully it soon becomes apparent that
Garbett's consensus with regard to certain judgements is presumed rather than
supported by proper experiment. An example of this is when he assumes there to
be a universal preference of curves to straight lines.
[5] Many of
Garbett's so-called scientific hypotheses were never subjected to proper
empirical control. Science turns out to have been a large word, large enough to
incorporate into its meaning even the incidental confirmations of cultural
prejudice. Such as the idea that primitive peoples would be free of cultural
and moral prejudices, that they somehow lack a form of civilisation all their
own.
The use of consensus-monitors as the child and the savage was, of course,
not new. John Locke had relied on the evidence of savages. He used the civilised
elements in Western society, to refute ideas of natural goodness and the
existence of innate ideas.
[6]
He gave, be it pejoratively, quite a significant role to the primitive in
originating principles of morality.
[7]
Children are much older as indicators of unthinking action. They perform in
didactic examples as old as the bible. A significant example of the use of
children's supposedly instinctive behaviour to support an argument is contained
in William Paley's Principles of Moral
and Political Philosophy of 1785:
Amongst the causes
assigned for the continuances and diffusion of the same moral sentiments amongst
mankind, we have mentioned imitation. The efficacy of this principle is most
observable in Children: indeed, if there be any thing in them which deserves the
name instinct, it is their propensity to imitation.
[8]
The main surge in the
use savages and children as monitors came after 1750 with the rise of a
systematic anthropology.
[9]
Adam had been supplanted by a different set of first men, namely the
aboriginals found in the other continents. It is the Western perception of
these men that determined their philosophical relevance.
It is similarly important not to
forget the influence of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe within this context.
Crusoe had to unlearn civilisation to survive. There was, however, nothing
particularly noble about the savage which Garbett used as his scientific
instrument. Garbett's monitoring savage had little if anything in common with
either Robinson Crusoe or Laugier's highly sophisticated savage. Garbett's monitoring
savage is wild and instinctive, closer to the popular contemporary assessment
of the aboriginal tribes of British colonies, who were perceived as being
childishly eager for brightly coloured beads and pretty little mirrors. That
apparent childishness in their
behaviour, was considered truly primitive.
Laugier's savage, with his
miraculous foresight as a rational designer, his easy and instant understanding
of la simple nature, is conceptually
far closer to the thoughtful genius of Garbett's mythological architect Dorus,
the first and greatest architectural rationalist and the sole inventor of the
most impressive of the Greek orders. (See Chapter 17) Indeed, Laugier's savage
is more like Garbett's projection of a super-civilised class, designated as the thinking few. That class forms an
aesthetic nobility which developed their intellectual maturity, like Robinson
Crusoe and like Rousseau's Emile, by unlearning the
prejudices cultivated by society.
[10]
They had gone full circle, achieving a sublimated savage- or child-like state
by going beyond civilisation. The label super-civilised,
although not used by Garbett, is in this sense peculiarly appropriate. They had
supposedly succeeded in transcending the narrowing effects of the prejudices
pervading contemporary English society. Those prejudices were caused by the
contingent as well as habit-driven connections of acquired associations. By
being able to distinguish consciously between the natural and the acquired, the thinking few were in a position to
appreciate complex, higher, poetic truths and beauties with the same directness
with which the child and savage were thought to prefer bright colours and
simple melodies subconsciously.
To
return to the empirical role of the child and the savage in Garbett's theory we
find a rather crude system of intersubjective proof rigged up to support the
desire for a mechanical aesthetics. A phenomenology based on the empirical or
rather quasi-empirical authority of the fresh and unpolluted minds of the child
and the savage. That projection rested on the implications inherent in Locke's tabula rasa. The minds of children
started off clean. Gradually their brains would become smudged with the baser
aspects of culture and civilisation during the process of growing up. The mind
of the savage on the other hand remained suspended in ignorance, itself a form
of intellectual cleanliness.
As primordial organs of sensual
perception, both the child and the savage were able to serve as monitors of a
certain level of aesthetic response; a level which was physiologically separate
and therefore unaffected by mind. The
child and the savage were supposed to have the ability to perceive directly,
without the interference of mind,
what the normal Western gentleman could only perceive through a haze of
culturally determined prejudice. The reason for this was that the former lived according to nature, reacting to things
wholly instinctively rather than intellectually. On this basis, if the response
was consistent, they could prove the distinction between things natural and
artificial, things necessary or inherent and things acquired. Those who had acquired
the stains of culture could only respond through the film of their cultural
accretions. Being arbitrary and bound only by habit and custom such responses
could tell us little. The Child and the savage, being clean, were uniquely
qualified to function as accurate and reliable scientific instruments whereby a
civilisation could measure its value against a zero, a fixed standard. That is
the essence of empirical science.
But why do they play such an
important role in Garbett's theory of perception? What were they able to prove?
Mind over matter
At the basis of
Garbett's theory lies the apparently unshakeable dichotomy between mind and
matter. The dichotomy is represented by the difference between intellectual and
sensual processes. These were processes differentiated according to the
traditional division of the brain into its several functions of sensory
perception, memory, imagination and intellection. These were all functions which
had as their goal the increasing spiritualisation of matter into mind. As a
result they were arranged in a hierarchy whereby the processing of raw sensory
percepts of matter stood on the lowest rung.
[11]
The hierarchical classification of
the brain, itself a variation of the chain of being, also determines the
arrangement of Garbett's chain of beauty. Superimposed on that arrangement are
a series of oppositions, or conceptual symmetries which exist because of a
seemingly inherent desire for duality. These oppositions are forced to cohabit
in a paradoxical relationship to each other. They exist exclusively by virtue
of their ability to destroy each other. This means that in Garbett theory the
projected perfection of a certain aesthetic quality is achieved through the
internecine balance of extremes.[12]
The nature of principles such as unity
amidst variety as adopted from Hutcheson or contrast and gradation as developed from the ideas of Hogarth and
Jopling as discussed in the next chapter are cases in point.
The first step in that process of
opposition, however, is the dualism calling into life a sensual as opposed to an intellectual
beauty.
Frances Hutcheson
There
can be no doubt that Frances Hutcheson's influence on Garbett was much larger
than the latter admits to. While he quotes Alison extensively, Garbett mentions
Hutcheson but once and that is in connection with the idea of beauty being the experience of pleasure upon the discovery
uniformity amidst variety, a principle discussed in the next
chapter. Hutcheson's definition of beauty, however, is one that Garbett
certainly took to heart. Beauty, according to Hutcheson, consists in the
experience of pleasure upon finding a relation in perceived sensible ideas
accompanied by their concomitant intellectual ideas.
[13]
Beauty consists in the discovery of uniformity amidst variety, or, conversely,
the discovery of variety amidst uniformity. To arrive at that idea Hutcheson,
like Garbett, subscribed to the standard division of the brain into three
distinct processes: sensation; imagination; and pure intellection. A sensation
perceived by a sense organ cannot by itself effect a sensation of beauty. The
imagination retains in memory an impression of a previously perceived sensation
and is able to juxtapose and integrate different sensations. The process of
intellection concerns itself with ideas without images which are acquired by
reflection and comparative abstraction.
The idea of beauty then is an idea
of internal sensation (i.e. of the mind, rather than a proper sense-organ) and
antecedent to the moral sense in that it formulates the icons to which the
moral sense aspires. The sense of beauty is excited by reflection on an
attitude of the mind. Beauty has to be deduced from a number of indirect
presences. Hutcheson defines beauty as being the idea raised in us. A sense of
beauty, or taste, is our capacity to receive that idea. The perception of
beauty is an intellectual process, incapable, according to Hutcheson, of being
raised in us by a simple or solitary sensation. Beauty is always complex:
The proper occasions of perception by the
external senses occur to us as soon as we come into the world. It is
probably some time before children reflect upon proportion and
similitude.
[14]
Sensual versus ocular beauty
This
sentence might have suggested the possibility of an ocular beauty to Garbett.
New-born
babies may not be capable of perceiving the relations on which the idea of
beauty depends, but children are incontrovertibly attracted to bright colours!
Hutcheson, though directly contradicting Garbett's rather naive ocular beauty,
may have partly provoked the idea in Garbett to account for this supposedly
instinctive attraction.
Sensual perception then, according
to Hutcheson's view, can only be part of a larger process of perceiving beauty.
The child who is attracted to bright colours is starting out on a development
with only a rudimentary sense of beauty, foetal but not fragmented. Ocular or sensual beauty, writes Garbett, is independent of
memory and imagination; it is physical and directly present, deriving its
philosophical basis from a peculiar physiological understanding of epistemology
whereby the senses and the initial processing of sensory perceptions occurs
independently of the mind.
[15]
In Garbett's system a simple percept
can be beautiful at all sorts of levels, even on the mechanical level of
sensory perception which precedes the muddling tricks which the imagination and
other intellectual processes perform at a later stage. A sensual beauty is
thought to need no, or very little translation by the brain to achieve its
effect; it is a beauty which soothes the senses physically. Very bright light,
which is sensuously injurious, is therefore also sensuously ugly. The
disturbing optical illusions of closely set parallel lines and the moiré effect
are also sensuously ugly. Bright and cheerful colours, on the other hand may be
classed as sensuously beautiful. Garbett's aesthetics at its most elementary
level, is based on the physiology of the traditional pain/pleasure principle
popular in contemporary utilitarian philosophy. Pain in this system is equal to
ugliness.
The dirt of associationism; object versus
subject
Garbett's
aesthetics is based on a necessary correspondence between qualities inherent in
the object and the processes of perception. To stem the fluidity of
associationism and give beauty a physical basis, Garbett needed to identify a
level of beauty which was independent of mind and therefore independent of
association.
Associationism, even for Garbett who made much use of the theory, had
attached to it still some of the dirt with which Locke had plucked the idea
fresh from the ground, using it to illustrate the worst effects of arbitrary
connections and intellectual habit.
[16] Addison, Hartley and Alison had succeeded in playing down Locke's fears
or at least using them to good effect.
[17]
Nevertheless Garbett felt that if associationism was allowed to have its way,
it would have given aesthetics over to the uncontrollable contingencies of the
mind, those processes of the imagination and habit which caused the
encrustation of the worst cultural norms such as copyism in architecture etc.
Such contamination would seriously undermine the usefulness of definitive
axiomatic laws in design. It was essential to separate the arbitrary from the
necessary and prove that beauty at its most elementary level had a physical and
measurable cause.
To dispose of the implied
subjectivism in associationism then, to protect beauty against the arbitrary,
Garbett leaned towards the common sense doctrine. He decided that the processes
governing the mind had their foundation in a mechanical reality. Every person
was born with an instinctive or rudimentary aesthetic sense which was
subsequently educated or perverted by the acquisition of cultural norms and
values. That aesthetic sense originated in the physiological mechanics of the
most rudimentary sensory perception.
The relationship between form and natural expression had already been
shown to be intrinsic to the object and the viewing subject alike. As Hume had
said, the structure of the creation was likely to bear a close analogy to human
intelligence, thus doing away with the need to distinguish between an objective
and subjective aesthetics wherever the two could be shown to behave according to
the same or correlated scientific laws, and where the one could be seen as a
confirmation of the other.
[18]
The mind, after all could only perceive that which is in some way analogous to
itself, that which corresponds to its own structure:
...if it be the mind
that sees, -the mind that is pleased with a fine building, or displeased with
the reverse, -how can it be pleased or displeased with any qualities but mental
ones?
[19]
If
the child or the savage could perform adequately by responding visibly to
bright colours in preference to dull ones, then that automatically provided
Garbett with proof that the appreciation of colours in the abstract was an ocular beauty, that is not an intellectual one; the assumption being
that children and savages appreciate certain levels of beauty immediately,
without the interference of mind:
Children and Savages,
who, in the choice of colours, consult nothing beyond the immediate
gratification of the eye, invariably prefer a certain class of colours -those
termed crude or positive- to another class, those which we term dull colours or
tones. Now, that the preference shown to the former is purely a matter of
sensation, with which the mind has nothing to do, will be plain from the fact
that the mind has, in these and most other cases, no knowledge whatever of what
constitutes the difference between these sensations: it knows nothing of any
physical resemblance that may exist between the colours included in each of
these classes.
[20]
This
is a highly complex but dubious piece of reasoning. How does he mean to
distinguish between sensation and mind? What does he mean by the immediate gratification of the eye?
Garbett's idea was that the child does not think, it just responds directly to
a physically soothing sensation in the eye. The way the evidence is presented
makes one suspect, however, that no experiment has actually taken place and
that the evidence supposedly provided by the child and the savage is part of a
body of accepted cultural beliefs loosely confirmed by selective experience.
The behaviour of the child and the
savage, even on the basis of contemporary premises, does not prove the
existence of an ocular beauty in which the mind plays no role. It is dubious to
talk of a preference in the response
of a child to bright colours as there is no evidence of a clear choice in the
matter. He may not even perceive dull coloured objects properly. And even if it
was a case of preference, that would certainly not prove that the child responds
only to the physical sensation itself without that response having been
subjected to some form of intellection, however rudimentary. Preference implies
a process of intellection, as it necessitates choice. Ocular beauty as it was
defined by Garbett was a misnomer, a mistake of category.
The positing of a sensual beauty as
something fundamentally separate from the process of intellection was unsound.
Nor would it help him to say that he did not mean to use the word sensation as a form of sub-conscious
reasoning. That would have been inconsistent with his definition of a feeling,
prerequisite to complex and higher beauties, which, we may remember, was a
process of reasoning so much abbreviated and made so quick by habit that we are
not able to reconstruct its exact path. Therefore he does here mean sensual
beauty to be distinct from the processes of the mind, physiologically separate
that is.
It was essential for
Garbett to establish that perception was a matter of physics, because proof of
such between science and aesthetics would help to extend the cogency of his
arguments elsewhere. Once a correlation between the preference for red and the
measurement of its frequency was established the possibilities were endless. But
the dualism between sense and mind disappeared almost as soon as it was invoked.
Ocular beauty dissolved before any unacceptable demands which would expose its
difficulties could be made upon it. Garbett himself to some extent anticipated
the logical problems he was courting by saying that the mind starts involving
itself with the judgement of beauty even at a very low level.
[21]
Even colour when it is no longer pure, must, in order to excite beauty, be
liable to contamination by the intellect.
The idea of an ocular beauty was not
just a non-sequitur, it was something of a non-starter. It did however have an
important function. It became a logically extended extreme to impose an
acceptable sequence on the rest of his theory. Whether it actually existed or
not, was not really relevant to the subject of architecture. An ocular beauty
became, quite simply, a beauty of the lowest order. The spectrum separating
ocular and intellectual beauties ranged from those which came nearest to being exclusively ocular,
i.e. those which need least reasoning to be able to feel them, colour, spacing
etc. to such things as the beauties of truth, unity and poetry, beauties, that
is which needed the aesthetic nobility to appreciate fully. The move up the
ladder was determined by the gradual and progressive infiltration of mind in
the evaluation of increasingly complex percepts.
1.
The
principal work I have used to gain an insight into the pervading influence of
science upon thinkers of the nineteenth century is Cannon (1978) which, by its
treatment of the general preoccupations of the participating scientists shows
their connections with general thinking of the period. Apart from that I have
used Levine (1990): Heyck (1982); Ball (1972); Brett (1986); Levere (1981);
Nicolson (1956); Paradis & Postlewait (1981); Stafford (1984).