Unbalanced Magnitudes in Design and Meaning: Why Beauty Seems Harder to Find

Image: Newton depicted by William Blake around 1795

This is the topic I keep finding myself getting back to over and over again (please also check The Mind Between Reason and Insight: Logic, Intuition and Universal Patterns post talking about the logic and creative split with some insights on the origins of creativity). So whilst my previous post attempts to answer questions such as where art is coming from and how some art resonates with millions of people across different cultures and times, in this post I try to think why the quality of it seems to be going down and why I think it is the case.

Design, art, beauty mediates the relationship between the inner and outer worlds and shapes how we move through space, how we feel within it and how we recognise ourselves in what surrounds us. In much of the Western world this relationship has thinned quite a bit in recent years. Since the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution life has been pulled further from the rhythms and textures of nature into a rapid crescendo. Living at this speed sensitivity to beauty as a form of connection as much as decoration has been lost. Earlier generations of artists often worked at the intersection of disciplines guided by intuition as well as pattern, proportion and meaning that were shared across art, science and cosmology, their curiosity extended equally towards the measurable and the immeasurable, towards both quanta and qualia - creation was an attempt to participate in a larger order.

Over time these domains began to separate. The idea emerged that one must choose - artist or scientist. By the late twentieth century particularly after the 1960s a time where spirituality was thriving alongside art - ‘Fine Art’ education moved into institutions replacing older systems of apprenticeships, guilds and embodied learning. As curriculum narrowed subjects that once grounded creative work - mythology, religion and ancient history were removed and in their absence interpretation become increasingly self-referential without strong theoretical foundations. When forms are no longer rooted in enduring structures of meaning they risk becoming transient shaped primarily by immediacy and market logic - in contemporary visual culture speed and novelty often override reflection. The UK for example once recognised for its distinctive voice in advertising and visual storytelling now often recycles familiar formulas which are so uninspiring and even cringe to witness. Even architecture long anchored in theoretical and philosophical frameworks is more and more governed by cost, engineering demands and the necessary but often dominating focus on sustainability.

Modern design can be understood as having lost both its sensory depth and its structural continuity. As Juhani Pallasmaa argues contemporary environments privilege vision at the expense of embodied experience resulting in spaces that are visually striking yet emotionally and sensorially impoverished (Pallasmaa, 2012). Christopher Alexander suggests that the disappearance of shared patterns, traditions and slow adaptive processes has severed design from the deeper frameworks through which meaning and harmony once emerged (Alexander, 1979). Both of the perspectives point to a broader erosion of resonance where the felt experience of space and its underlying order have become fragmented.

At the same time the tools of creation have become widely accessible - with a smartphone anybody can become filmmaker, musician or designer pretty much overnight. This definitely has opened doors allowing voices from diverse and previously excluded backgrounds to emerge yet it also shifts the emphasis away from process and lineage and the long continuity of knowledge - historical, symbolic and craft-based begins to fade from view.

From a more psychological perspective this erosion mirrors a broader disconnection. When design loses its dialogue with history, myth and nature it also loses part of its capacity to resonate with the psyche. Symbols no longer carry the same weight and forms no longer feel inhabited - the external environment becomes flatter and so does the inner experience of it. Wellbeing is not only about physical health but about the presence of meaning and encountering a world that reflects something back to us.

This is not to say that contemporary art has lost its capacity to reflect universal patterns entirely, that can still happen and is happening yet the conditions in which it must emerge have become increasingly unfavourable to the cultivation of genuine beauty. The volume of content now produced and consumed obscures what is meaningful making it difficult for more resonant work to be seen within a culture driven largely by attention, metrics and profit. At the same time when one is no longer surrounded by forms that embody harmony, proportion or depth the inner impulse to create them begins to weaken too - the psyche draws nourishment from its environment and without encounters with beauty especially those rooted in the natural world it becomes harder to access the imaginative and symbolic richness required to bring something truly enduring into being.

I have always found profound beauty in the act of seeking. There is a particular joy in the slow quest for understanding and the thrill of stumbling upon truths that have been waiting for you - knowledge and wisdom when earned through effort and reflection carry a resonance that is difficult to replicate when it is handed to us on a silver platter. In a Jungian sense this is the essence of the path of individuation - the active engagement with the unconscious, the courage to navigate the unknown and the reward of integration. When knowledge or experience is effortlessly accessible it risks losing the depth and sacredness. Patience is not longer required. Authenticity is still present but finding it requires discernment and willingness to navigate a sea of superficiality.

A helpful thing here I believe could be individuation and integration. In Jungian terms the ego often enters this scene unprepared - we begin with a desire for growth and transcendence but the challenges, distractions and pleasures of life can distort our trajectory. Sacred practices whether breathwork, meditation or plant medicine act as mirrors reflecting the unintegrated aspects of the psyche back into awareness and without integration the unconscious floods the surface and the persona expands to protect itself. Integration from a Jungian perspective is the process by which unconscious content - repressed emotions, disowned traits, latent potentials is drawn into conscious awareness and assimilated into the personality allowing the individual to grow towards wholeness (individuation).  In this process one does not destroy or reject the unconscious ‘shadow’ but rather recognises its material (both ‘negative’ and creative aspects), reflects on its origins (personal history, social conditioning, archetypal patterns) accepts it without moral condemnation and finds ways to express or redirect its energy constructively thus transforming what was hidden into a source of vitality, creativity and psychological resilience. Seen through this lens integration is a dynamic and lifelong inner alchemy - as unconscious contents arise (through dreams, life‑crises, repetitive emotional patterns, synchronicities), the individuating psyche through introspection, active imagination, therapeutic dialogue or mindful awareness dialogues with them, discerns their meaning and weaves them into an ever more inclusive, balanced and flexible self. This enables a deeper connection with the symbolic, existential and collective dimensions of human experience.

To return to this through a Kantian lens what we are witnessing could be understood as a condition of unbalanced magnitudes. For Immanuel Kant negative magnitudes are real opposing forces whose tension makes equilibrium and thus coherence possible. When in dialogue with Carl Jung this takes on a psychological dimension - the conscious and unconscious, the rational and symbolic, the surface and the depth must actively counterweigh one another to produce a meaningful whole. Contemporary culture however amplifies one side - production over reflection whilst diminishing its necessary counterpart and the result is an imbalance - a flattening of experience where forms no longer resonate because the forces that once gave them depth have been neutralised. So to restore meaning then is to recognise ‘the negative’ as a vital structuring presence - one that must be held in tension if design and the psyche that encounters it are to recover their capacity for depth, beauty and coherence.

References

Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. Oxford University Press.

Kant, I. (1992). Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into philosophy (D. Walford, Trans.). In D. Walford (Ed.), Theoretical philosophy, 1755–1770 (pp. 203–241). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1763)

Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1966). Two essays on analytical psychology (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses (3rd ed.). Wiley.