Art and Science: The
Aesthetic Education of the
Emotions and Reason
Angelo Caranfa
Abstract
This paper explores the link between science and
art in Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Paul Gauguin
(1848–1903). More specifically, its aim is to clarify
the relations between science as the investigation
of ‘truths’ that people hold at a particular time, on
the one hand, and art as carrier of these truths into
the ‘emotional’ realm of the people, on the other.
The goal is simple; as is the method. The goal is to
provide a way of teaching the humanities based
on the aesthetic.[1] The method uses the figures
chosen to act as a foil to each other, so that what
seems to be a parallel of contrasts between
Darwin and Gauguin, is, in fact, an equilibrium of
JADE 20.2 ©NSEAD 2001
151
the sensual and the rational. [2] The specific point
that the paper argues is this: if teaching the human-
ities is tied pedagogically to art, then science, as
well as the other disciplines, will join the curricu-
lum in an integral way so as to contribute to the
complete education of the student: physical, intel-
lectual, moral, and spiritual.
The first section of the paper develops the
education of reason or mind in the life and thoughts
of Charles Darwin. My remarks here will be limited
primarily, but not exclusively, to his autobiography.
The second part clarifies the education of the
senses in the thoughts of Paul Gauguin.
152 Science and art are as closely bound together as
Angelo Caranfa lungs and the heart, so that if one organ is vitiated
the other cannot act rightly. True science investi-
gates and brings to human perception such truths
and such knowledge as the people of a given
time and society consider most important. Art
transmits those truths from the region of percep-
tion to the region of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? [3]
Darwin: Seeing Nature through the
Eyes of Reason
In his conclusion to The Descent of Man [1871],
Darwin invites us to look at the world of nature
through the eyes of the natural scientist, not through
the eyes of the ‘savage’. Nature, according to
Darwin, seen through the eyes of the ‘savage’,
yields no connection, no order, no unity; but, seen
through the eyes of the natural scientist, nature
is orderly, connected, unified. To the eyes of the
‘savage’, nature appears unpredictable, irrecon-
cilable, and mysterious; but, to the eyes of the
natural scientist, nature is predictable, reconcil-
able, and explainable. No ‘true’ knowledge of the
natural world, insists Darwin, can be attained
unless the eyes are trained to observe ‘general
laws’ embodied in natural phenomena. These
laws are the domain of natural science; therefore,
concludes Darwin, to look at the world of nature
through the eyes of the ‘savage’ is, in fact, to see
it falsely. [4]
To understand nature in a true way, Darwin
calls upon the mind. As Darwin looks back to his
journey on the Beagle to the South Seas from
1831-1836, he writes:
I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first
training or education of my mind; I was led to
attend closely to several branches of natural
history, and thus my powers of observation were
improved. [5]
The task for which Darwin went to the South Seas
was to observe, understand, and explain facts, to
arrange them in some sort of ‘general laws’. This
passion to do science was Dawin’s greatest plea-
sure; ‘the pleasure of observing and reasoning’,
concludes Darwin, ‘gradually preponderated over
every other taste’. [6]
Apparently, Darwin did have other tastes. Early
in his youth, we are told, he had a ‘taste’ for Sir
Joshua Reynolds, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Milton,
Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare. He also experi-
enced great ‘delight’ in listening to music, in
looking at paintings, and in reading novels which
were ‘works of imagination’. Darwin also derived
great pleasure from looking at the glorious beauty
of nature, as these words written on his arrival in
the Tropics testify:
The glories of the vegetation of the Tropics rise
before my mind at the present time more vividly
than anything else; though the sense of sublimity,
which the great deserts of Patagonia and the
forest clad mountains of Tierra del Fuego excited
in me, has left an indelible impression on my
mind. [7]
However, in his enthusiasm for the systematic
inquiry into the nature of the origin of species,
Darwin abdicates these tastes to the exclusive
pleasure of the mind; ‘concentrated attention…
reasoning and predicting’ [8] were the only things
important to him.
There is little doubt that science is solely
controlled by empirical facts, attentive or method-
ical observation, and reason to uncover or discover
truth, the basic unity that underlies the various
phenomena, the general laws that govern the
whole of nature. Darwin points out that reason
alone came into play in his activities of collecting
fossils and animals, of observing how each of the
islands contained slightly different species, of
relating them to each other, of investigating the
geology of the places he visited, of predicting
what he would find in other places. Everything
Darwin observed and did during his five years in
the South Seas was directed to the task of
reasoning from facts, that is, inductively. In its
synthetic capacity, reason gives Darwin an under-
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
standing of facts by relating them to each other;
it gives him the vision that everything in the
natural world is connected. But reason also
forbids Darwin to be concerned with feelings,
because, as he himself states, ‘generalizations’
based on feelings are ‘worth (no) thing’. [9]
Worth, for Darwin, comes from generaliza-
tions based on some sort of analogical thinking.
For example, Darwin tells us that he had read in
the first of a three volume work entitled Principles
of Geology (1830–1833) by the Scottish geologist
Charles Lyell that the earth had not changed
substantially over time; but gradually, individual
places became extinct, only to be replaced,
equally gradually, by new places. From this,
Darwin reasoned that what he had observed and
collected in the South Seas could be understood
and explained on the assumption that ‘species
gradually become modified’, [10] as does the
earth we should add emphatically. I say emphati-
cally, because Darwin makes this connection by
means of analogy or metaphor, which is more an
aesthetic or poetic tool than a scientific means.
Moreover, here Darwin uses deduction rather
than induction. But once Darwin had found the
way to make sense of the facts by linking them
metaphorically or deductively into an idea, then,
the only conclusion that he could draw was that
the modified species he saw on the various
islands could not have been the work of separate
acts of creation by God.
Darwin further tells us that he was also
acquainted with the idea of the French zoologist,
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck [1744–1829], that
organisms adapt to their environment, and
because the environment changes, so must the
organisms. Anatomical and behavioural changes,
Lamarck believed, are reinforced by continuous
use or exercise. Thus, the more an organism uses
its organs, the more likely it will be able to adapt
to a new environment, and the more likely it will
survive, whereas those organisms that do not
use them will gradually die out. From this, Darwin
reasoned or concluded that ‘natural selection’
could explain his facts, ‘(b)ut how selection could
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
be applied to organisms living in a state of nature 153
remained for some time a mystery to me’. [11] Angelo Caranfa
The veil of mystery, however, was soon lifted
from his mind when he began to investigate the
‘domestication’ of plants and animals, and when
he read an essay on the principle of population by
the social philosopher Thomas Malthus.
In Malthus’ essay, Darwin came ‘to appreciate
the struggle for existence’ [12] which goes on in
the world of plants and animals, as it does in the
social world, again, we should add emphatically.
For Darwin carries this notion of ‘struggle for exis-
tence’ into the natural world from human
intercourse in the social world, as he carries ‘grad-
ual modification of species’ from the geological
world, and the notion of adaptation by ‘inheri-
tance’ from the domestication of animals. These
analogous facts enabled Darwin to see or under-
stand or synthesize what he had observed into
the general principle ‘(t)hat the modified offspring
of all dominant and increasing forms tend to
become adapted to many and highly diversified
places in the economy of nature’. [13] This conclu-
sion was arrived at independendly by Alfred
Russell Wallace who, while on a journey to the Far
East, had arrived at exactly the same theory as
Darwin. After consulting with his friends, Lyell and
Hooker, Darwin went ahead with the publication
of a single volume that dealt with the under-
standing and explanation or interpretation of the
facts that support his theory of the origin of
species by natural selection. The book was
published in November 1859 under the title of
The Origin of Species.
This insight into humanity’s origin must have
filled Darwin with an intense feeling of joy; twenty
years of observation, collection of facts, verifica-
tion, and generalization finally made it possible for
him to ‘take a place among scientific men’, as he
put it. What an ecstatic moment this must have
been for Darwin when he finally came to see the
order, the unity, the connections that underlie the
natural world: the reason for the way things are
as they are. He claimed:
154 My chief enjoyment and sole employment
Angelo Caranfa throughout my life has been scientific work; and
the excitement from such work makes me forget,
or drives quite away, my daily discomfort…. I can
remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my
carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to
me. [14]
However, Darwin’s excitement over the solution,
his passion to do science, became also a journey
into sadness. He laments the fact that his life of
reasoning, though it drove away discomfort,
alienated him from his life of feelings, leading him
in his later years to a sad and unhappy existence.
Thus he writes:
My mind seems to have become a kind of
machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts, but why this should have
caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone,
on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot
conceive… If I had to live my life again, I would
have made a rule to read some poetry and listen
to some music at least once every week; for
perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied
would thus have been kept active through use.
The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and
may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and
more probably to the moral character, by enfee-
bling the emotional part of our nature. [15]
These words are indeed tragic; for, to say that by
the ‘use’ of the brain, Darwin could have kept alive
the ‘higher tastes’ is, in fact, to say that by ‘nature’
Darwin possessed or inherited these ‘higher
tastes’. But the fact is Darwin admits that ‘(t)he
passion for collecting which leads a man to be a
systematic naturalist… was very strong in me,
and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or
brother ever had this taste’. [16] Therefore, for
Darwin to say that he could choose, or to say that
he didn’t know why that part of his brain respon-
sible for the ‘higher tastes’ was atrophied, is to fail
to apply his own theory to himself. Darwin should
have known that tastes that are naturally weak
would fail to survive in their struggle against those
tastes that are stronger. It is truly sad to see in his
autobiography how Darwin weakened his emotional
life by strengthening his life of the mind, thus injur-
ing his intellect as well as his psychological and
moral life, as he himself correctly states. ‘The
mind’, writes Herbert Read, ‘maintained within
blank walls, turns sour and stale; it ferments in its
own unhappiness, turns to self-disgust and insi-
pidity. Deprived so long of sensuous enjoyment,
it awakes to find itself no longer capable of new
interest and keen appreciations’. [17]
Nevertheless, we appreciate Darwin for his
use of analogy or metaphor in his theory and,
thus, for his bringing to our attention the aesthetic
aspect of science. In fact it can be argued, as
does Robert M. Young, that without the metaphor
of ‘natural selection’ Darwin’s inquiry would not
hold. [18] Nor would his theory hold without the
metaphors of ‘struggle for existence’ and ‘gradual
modification of species’. Facts are not there,
concludes Barry G. Gale, to demostrate convinc-
ingly the principle of evolution by natural selection.
[19] John D. Barrow also concurs when he states:
‘Changes can occur that are not governed by
natural selection. Changes can occur in a popula-
tion because of purely random functions in the
genetic make-up of organisms’. [20]
Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Darwin’s
ingenuity, which is his originality, lies in his ability
to bridge two different systems. The beauty of his
theory is in the interpretation of facts by means of
analogy or metaphor to produce a simple, coher-
ent, unified, elegant, and intelligible whole, similar
to what a poet or an artist does. Darwin came to
understand evolution by natural selection by link-
ing or liking what he saw and collected with what
he already knew through analogies or metaphors.
Mary B. Hesse argues that science also employs
metaphors and analogies as a chief means for
understanding and explaining the natural world.
[21] Now, to employ analogies and metaphors
calls for the imaginative, not the rational faculty.
‘By this faculty’, writes Darwin, ‘[one] unites
former images and ideas, independently of the
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
will, and thus creates brilliant [vivid] and novel
results’. [22]
That Darwin himself had a highly developed
imagination is not very clear from his autobiogra-
phy. Yet Darwin’s notebooks, Howard E. Gruber
informs us:
are full of powerful images as well as descriptions
of himself as a person with strong visual imagery…
The images of the notebooks are not merely arid
records of objective facts useful in inductive
reasoning. On the contrary, Darwin’s images are
full of feeling and show beyond question that
when he observed nature he did so with full range
of human emotions. [23]
Indeed, Darwin does tell us in his autobiography
that he ‘took much pain in describing carefully
and vividly all that I had seen’. [24] Darwin was
conscious of the fact that images do appeal to
the emotions and, therefore, it seems that he
was just waiting for the most ‘vivid’ images or
metaphors to use in his theory so as to captivate
both our eyes and mind. It is in his use of ‘vivid’
images that Darwin gives us the aesthetic dimen-
sion of science. In short, what I am suggesting is
that Darwin’s The Origin of Species is as much a
work of art as it is a work of science; its appeal is
both to the senses and to the intellect, to the
beauty that derives from the instinctive pleasure
of looking at the world and, at the same time,
from the rational pleasure of seeing it unified,
orderly, intelligible. Darwin’s vision of the world
reveals both the rational and the imaginative
aspects of scientific thinking, even though reason
dominates or rules the senses, causing Darwin’s
own unhappiness.
Gauguin: Listening to Nature with the Eyes
that Dream
To turn from Darwin to Gauguin is to go from ratio-
nal to instinctive seeing, from phenomena or
facts to mystery, from explanation to the unex-
plainable, from sound to silence, from mutability
or change to the permanent or the unchangeable,
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
from the physical to the spiritual, from science to 155
mythology or religion, from induction to deduc- Angelo Caranfa
tion, from reason to the imagination. Gauguin, like
Darwin, also visited the South Seas. Unlike
Darwin, Gauguin simply delighted in the silent
and mysterious beauty of the Tropics; he instinc-
tively appreciated the presence of the sacred in
the midst of nature, as he also appreciated the
calmness of nature. The South Seas impelled
Gauguin to dream of rhythms, of harmonies, of
unity, of order not, as in Darwin’s case, to discover
them through reason. In response to an article
written by Fontainas, Gauguin writes in March
1899 from Tahiti:
Here, near my hut, in complete silence, amidst
the intoxicating perfumes of nature, I dream of
violent harmonies. A delight enhanced by I know
not what sacred horror I glimpse in the infinite. An
aroma of long-vanished joy that I breathe in the
present. Animal figures rigid as statues, with
something indescribably solemn and religious in
the rhythm of their pose, in their strange immobil-
ity. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an
unfathomable enigma. [25]
What is attractive to Gauguin’s eyes is the rhythm,
the immobility, the solemnity or religiosity, the
mystery of Tahitian people, as well as the perfumes
and the deep silence of nature, as though everything
around him is harmonious, tranquil, adding to the
feeling of both joy and sacred horror. It is this inde-
scribable feeling of divinity that compels Gauguin to
close his eyes and to dream, without the mediation
of reason or understanding, of infinity and, thus, of
the divine, of God, of the Mystery, of Silence itself.
For Gauguin, dreams alone, not reason or logic, can
penetrate to the very origin of things: ‘God does not
belong to the wise, to the logician… he belongs…
to dream’. [26] Unlike Darwin, who observed nature
with concentrated attention, Gauguin is totally
absorbed in, or enraptured by, the silent contem-
plation of nature; he is not concerned with laws
that govern nature, as he is with the sensation of
silence that nature evokes in him.
156 Complete silence… only the noise of water crying
Angelo Caranfa against rock, monotonous as the silence… From
this perfect harmony with nature which surrounded
us, there emanated a beauty, a fragrance (noa noa)
that enchanted my artist soul. [27]
But Darwin, too, saw unity or harmony in the vari-
ations of living forms. However, Darwin’s unity or
harmony is a function of logic or reason, of the
synthetic intellect, whereas Gauguin’s harmony
is a function of dreams, of nature’s silence before
which people remain forever in a sort of divine or
sacred repose: ‘Always this silence. I understand
why these people can remain seated for hours,
days at a time, without saying a word, gazing
sadly at the sky’. [28]
The conflict between phenomenon and
mystery, sensations and reason, was acutely
experienced by Gauguin. As early as 1887, he felt
that he could resolve this tension by going to the
South Seas to live the life of a ‘native’. Gauguin
believed that his ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ nature
had to be absorbed into his art if he were to be
successful as an artist, and this could not have
been done, so he tells us, unless he totally freed
himself from the encroachment of academic rules
and norms that dominated nineteenth-century
French art. Unlike the Impressionists, who sought
‘only the eye and neglect the mysterious centre of
thought, thus falling into merely scientific reason-
ing’, [29] Gauguin wanted to express in his art ‘(t)he
instant when extreme feelings are merging in the
deepest core of one’s being … the instant when
they burst and all one’s thoughts gush forth like
lava from a volcano… Reason’s cold calculations
have not led to this eruption’. [30] To Gauguin, the
Tropics would ensure the ‘eruption’ of these feel-
ings, and thus his art would embody the mystery,
the silence of things. ‘There in Tahiti, in the silence
of the beautiful tropical nights, I will be able to
listen to the murmuring music of the movements
of the heart in the lovely harmony with the myste-
rious beings that surround me’. [31]
As Gauguin listens to nature, his imagination
begins to paint. Hence, his definition of art as ‘an
abstraction. Abstract it from nature as you dream
in front of nature’. [32] As abstract, art is a metaphor
for what Gauguin calls the ‘music of painting’, the
belief that art can reveal or capture the mystery, the
silence of things, but only if it absorbs the viewer
both emotionally and intellectually. Gauguin
believes that this can be accomplished through the
harmonious arrangement of colours, light, and
shadows. For, according to Gauguin, if there are no
pure colours, there are no equivalents; if there are
no equivalents, there is no abstract art; if there is
no abstract art, there is no musicality of the work of
art; if there is no musicality, the work of art could
not give rise to thinking. [33]
By arranging lines and colours, with the pretext of
borrowing a subject from life or nature, I obtain
symphonies, harmonies that have scarcely anything
to do with the real…and do not directly express any
ideas, but make you think as music does, without
recourse to ideas or images, simply by the mysteri-
ous affinities that exist between our mind and those
arrangements of colours and lines. [34]
Gauguin’s reference to the musicality or harmony
of the painting not only invokes a notion central to
Symbolist art [35] but, and more importantly, it
also links him with the Platonic vision of the
world: [36] that arrangements, or connections, or
relationships are contemplated by the mind. Thus
Gauguin’s colours, light, and shadows have no
connection to natural colours, to visible light and
shadows. Instead, harmonies are created by the
imagination so as to make us think imaginatively,
as music does. Gauguin explains that Rembrandt
makes him think as music does: ‘What a rich
imagination… and what mystery in that cave’,
writes Gauguin of Rembrandt’s The Entombment
of Christ. [37] For Gauguin, this musical thinking also
underlies the art of the Egyptians, the Greeks,
Giotto, Raphael, Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Bonnard,
Serusier, and Vuillard. [38] These artists, in Gauguin’s
view, are composers, in that they follow a pattern
for arranging or combining colours, as though
each colour is born of the other, and all possible
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
colour combinations are born from the basic divi-
sion of black into white. This arrangement of
colours parallels the order in which nature places
them and thus art, in Gauguin’s view, offers a
‘wealth of means by which to enter into intimate
contact with nature!’ [39]
Art, then, brings us not only into an intimate
contact with nature, but it also offers us the
means to reflect or think imaginatively. This kind
of thinking is carried out according to colour
combinations, relationships between light and
shadows, lines and space, movements and static
poses all of which are, for Gauguin, symbolic
notes or elements that constitute his idea of the
musicality of painting. In identifying his art with
music, Gauguin is suggesting that his art makes
visible what otherwise cannot be grasped by the
rational intellect, or it cannot be seen by the phys-
ical eyes, or it cannot be mediated by language:
silence, the mystery, God himself. At the same
time, Gauguin insists that his art is also represen-
tational, in that it participates in the meaning
which is symbolized. Gauguin argues that his art,
which is both symbolic and representational, is
similar in method to the way the Bible explains
creation: on the one hand, he writes, there is ‘the
literal, superficial, figurative, mysterious meaning
of a parable. And on the other hand, there is the
spirit of the parable: not its figurative but its repre-
sentational, explicit meaning’. [40] It is this
harmonious interplay between the ‘figurative’ and
the ‘explicit’ aspects of his art that shapes our
visual thinking.
As Gauguin observes the immense creation of
nature in the South Seas, he sees and hears
harmonies which are inextricably linked to the
sensations and thoughts of his soul or heart as he
contemplates the mystery, the silence which
surrounds him from everywhere. It is this mystery,
this silence that Gauguin wants us to reflect on,
to think about, as we look at his art of colour
harmonies. ‘Colour, which is vibration just as music
is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the
same time most elusive in nature: its inner force’.
[41] According to Gauguin, scientific reasoning
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
cannot by itself attain to this ‘inner force’. But art, in 157
its musical or symbolic form, can; for Gauguin sees Angelo Caranfa
art as more than an empirical or representational
vision of reality; for him, it is also a figurative way of
seeing and understanding the world.
This contrast in method between science and
art is most clearly expressed by Gauguin in these
words about the merit of perspective in painting:
What is actually the fruit of deep meditation, of
deductive logic derived from within myself and
not from any materialistic theories invented by the
bourgeois of Paris, puts me seriously in the wrong
… Any receding perspective would be an absur-
dity. As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and
untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets
aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give
my figures a suitable setting. It is indeed the out-
of-door life… yet intimate at the same time, in the
thickets and the shady streams, these women
whispering in an immense palace decorated by
nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to
offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous
colours, this subdued and silent glow. ‘But none
of this exists!’ ‘Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of
the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti’. [42]
There is, therefore, a ‘reason’, a ‘logic’, according to
which Gauguin orders colours, lines, light, shad-
ows, movements, and poses, and which attains or
embodies nature’s ‘inner force’, its mystery or
silence. However, this is the logic or reason of the
‘deductive’ mind, not that of the ‘inductive’ intellect;
it is the logic or reason of the mutual harmonious
relationships of the various elements of the work of
art, rather than the logic or reason of the ‘receding
perspective’. In short, it is the logic or reason of the
‘savage’ that wants to show the ‘untamed nature’
of the Tropics, rather than the logic or reason of
civilized humanity. ‘A savage will never see in his
dreams (a logical or rational explanation of
nature)’, [43] concludes Gauguin.
Gauguin did not journey to the Tropics to look
for links that connect the whole world of nature,
as Darwin did. He went there alone, away from
158 everyone, including his family, to give his art its
Angelo Caranfa ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ context. Unlike Darwin, who
did not personally experience the struggle for exis-
tence, Gauguin did. In fact, everything Gauguin
saw filled him, in his own words, ‘with a sensation
of struggle for survival, of melancholy and acqui-
escence in implacable laws’. [44] Herein lies the
ultimate difference between Darwin and Gauguin:
whereas Darwin did not submit himself to the
laws of nature, Gauguin did. Gauguin’s art is the
manifestation of humanity’s acquiescence before
the ‘implacable laws’ that govern the world. But
however different Gauguin is from Darwin, both
attempt to make sense, to understand the world,
to look for order in the chaos or variations of forms.
We are thus left to conclude with Gauguin’s
own words on the meaning of ‘Where do we
come from? What are we? Where are we going?’,
which, in a way, parallels Darwin’s The Origin of
Species. Gauguin writes:
To go back to the panel (Where do we come
from?): the idol is there not as a literary symbol, but
as a statue, yet perhaps less of a statue than the
animal figures, less animal also, an integral part, in
my dream before my cabin, of the whole of
nature, dominating our primitive soul, the conso-
lation of our sufferings to the extent that they are
vague and incomprehensible before the mystery
of our origin and of our future. [45]
Thus Darwin’s descent of man becomes in
Gauguin humanity’s ascent to the silent mystery
of the world, as Gauguin’s silence becomes in
Darwin the understanding of the phenomenal
world; ‘and their insights’, concludes John D.
Barrow with respect to the relationship between
science and art, ‘are linked in ways that make
them look less and less like alternatives’. [46]
Conclusion: The Aesthetic Way of Education
From the above discussion, we can see that there
is one point at which science and art coincide: the
aesthetic. There is much in Darwin’s autobiogra-
phy that supports an education based on the
aesthetic. Firstly, however passionate Darwin was
in his love for science, and however rational or
systematic he was in the pursuit of truth, never-
theless, he was not immune to the ‘sense of the
sublime’ that seized him as he observed nature in
the Tropics. Secondly, Darwin recounts that he
took much pain in describing ‘vividly’ what he saw.
Thirdly, he was attracted to, and took great plea-
sure in, literature, painting, and music, because he
found in them, especially literature, the ‘works of
the imagination’. Fourthly, he insists that an educa-
tion based on logical reasoning alone might be
‘injurious to the moral character’. Fifthly, Darwin
admits that the lack of aesthetic assimilation in his
life brought him ‘loss of happiness’. If he had to
live his life again, he exclaims, he would cultivate
the ‘higher tastes’, for they alone console and
render us happy.
But if Darwin appreciated the works of reason
as he did those of the imagination, if he realized that
moral development and happiness are as much
connected with reason as with the emotions, and
if he recognized that the relationship between us
and nature is as much rational as it is sensual,
Gauguin is convinced that the opposite is true. Thus
he first proposes the notion of the ‘eyes that dream’
as a way of viewing the world, interpret its objects
or forms, and evaluate its phenomena. Secondly,
Gauguin insists that these forms or objects must
be expressed in harmonies of colours, if art is to
give rise to thought. This thought, however, is not
the thought of the rational intellect; rather, it is the
thought of the eyes that dream, the thought of
feeling. [47] Thus Gauguin maintains that in art the
‘emotions first, and understanding after’. Thirdly,
Gauguin believes that art can serve as a way to
the spiritual, the transcendent, God himself. The
Mystery, the Origin, Silence, is what nourishes
Gauguin’s forms and colours; silence, the begin-
ning, the hidden, both animates and makes his
works still. Absorbed by the silence of the begin-
ning of time, Gauguin’s figures seem conscious
of another time and space, as though they are
delivered from this heavy and burdened exis-
tence into the world of a sacred existence.
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
 Aesthetic education thus distinguishes itself
from other kinds of education by the harmonious
relationship between reason and the emotions,
which seeks to cultivate in the student both logi-
cal reasoning and habits of aesthetic appreciation.
‘There is no substitute for the direct perception of
the concrete achievement of a thing in its actual-
ity’, writes Alfred North Whitehead. ‘We want
concrete fact with a highlight thrown on what is
relevant to its preciousness. What I mean is art
and aesthetic education… What we want is to
draw out habits of aesthetic apprehension… The
habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values’. [48]
References
1. Tolstoy, L. What is Art? p.201
2. For an excellent discussion on the role of
aesthetics in humanities instruction, see Abbs,
P. (Ed.) [1989] The Symbolic Order. New York:
Falmer Press
Beardsley, M.C. ‘The Humanities and Human
Understanding’, in Stroup, T.B. (Ed.) [1996] The
Humanities and the Understanding of Reality.
Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press
3. For a complete account, see Best, D. [1985]
Feeling and Reason in the Arts (London:
Allen & Unwin
4. Darwin, C. [1936] The Descent of Man.
New York: The Modern Library, pp. 909–20.
5. Darwin, F. (Ed.) [1959] ‘Autobiography’, in The
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. New York:
Basic Books, Inc. pp. 51–52.
6. Ibid. p.53
7. Ibid. p.54
8. Ibid. p.52
9. Ibid. pp.61–62
10. Ibid. p.67
JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001
11. Ibid. p.68 159
Angelo Caranfa
12. Ibid. p.68
13. Ibid. p.69
14. Ibid. pp.65, 69
15. Ibid. pp.81–82
16. Ibid. p.26
17. Read, H. [1956] Education through Art. New
York: Pantheon Books Inc. pp. 252–53.
18. Young, R. M. [1985] Darwin’s Metaphor.
New York: Cambridge University Press
19. Gale, B.G. [1982] Evolution Without
Evidence. Albuquerque. University of New
Mexico Press
20. Barrow, J.D.[1995] The Artful Universe. New
York: Oxford University Press, p. 22
21. Hesse, M.B. [1966] Models and Analogies in
Science. South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame
University Press; idem. [1980] Revolutions and
Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press;
Leatherdale; W.H. [1974] The Role of Analogy,
Model and Metaphor in Science. Amsterdam:
North-Holland Publishing Company
22. Darwin, C. Op. cit. pp. 452–53. The role
which the imagination plays in science is clearly
and brilliantly discussed by Holton, G. [1978]
The Scientific Imagination. New York:
Cambridge University Press. In the same spirit
Roger Scruton examines the aesthetic dimen-
sion of the imagination. See Scruton, R. [1998]
Art and the Imagination. South Bend, Indiana:
St. Augustine’s Press, Inc.. That the imagination
lies at the core of both science and art, is also
treated by Bronowski, J. [1978] The Visionary
Eye. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp.
6–32, 133–52. The use of the imagination in
both science and art carries a risk, says John D.
Barrow: ‘The use of the imagination to enlarge
our picture of reality without, at the same time,
160 subverting it is a delicate enterprise’ Barrow, J.D. Objects cannot have value more than objects as
Angelo Caranfa Op cit. p. 5 such. They can appear to him only as signs”
p. 90. In this regard, see also Cheetham, M.A.
23. Gruber, H.E. [1981] Darwin on Man. (2nd ed.)
[1991] The Rhetoric of Purity. New York:
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 237
Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–39
24. Malingue, M. (Ed.) [1946] Lettres de Gauguin.
36. Thomson, B. (Ed.) [1993] Op cit. p. 118
Paris: Grasset, p. 288. Readers who might be
interested in seeing how Gauguin defines silence 37. Ibid. p. 275
along the lines of Auguste Rodin and Marcel
38. Ibid. p. 33
Proust, as opposed to the way Paul and Camille
Claudel understand it, see Caranfa, A. [1999] 39. Ibid. p. 266
Camille Claudel: A Sculpture of Interior Solitude.
40. Ibid. p. 262
Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, Chap.
5; idem. [1989] Claudel: Beauty and Grace. 41. Ibid. p. 257
Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; and
42. Ibid. p.107
idem. [1990] Proust: The Creative Silence.
Lewsisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press 43. Ibid.

25. Guerin, D. (Ed.) [1974] Gauguin, Oviri, ecrits
d’un sauvage. Paris: Gallimard, p.199
26. Thomson, B. (Ed.) [1993] Gauguin; by himself.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, p. 190
27. Ibid. p.167
28. Guerin, D. (Ed.) [1974] Op cit. p. 172
29. Thomson, B. (Ed.) [1993] Op cit. p. 259
30. Guerin, D. (Ed.) [1974] Op cit. p. 61
31. Ibid. p. 40
44. Ibid. p. 262
45. Barrow, J.D. [1995] Op cit. p. 4
46. See, for instance, Scheffler, I. [1991] In Praise
of the Cognitive Emotions and Other Essays in
the Philosophy of Education. New York:
Routledge, for an exploration of the emotions as
functions of cognition. See also Abbs, P. [1987]
The Symbolic Order: A Contemporary Reader
on the Arts Debate. London: Falmer Press,
where he argues that the senses are directly
related to reason.

32. Ibid. p. 177 47. Whitehead, A.N. [l928] Science in the Modern
World. New York: Macmillan, pp. 286–87.
33. Ibid. p. 138

34. Smith, E.L. [1972] Symbolist Art. New York:

Thames and Hudson, p. 61

35. For a discussion of Gauguin’s connection to

Plato’s philosophy of Ideas or Forms, see
G.-Albert Aurier, ‘Symbolism in Painting: Paul
Gauguin,’ in Chipp, H.B. (Ed.) [1971] Theories of
Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California
Press, where he writes: “Indeed, in the eyes of
the artist… objects are only relative beings, which
are nothing but a translation proportionate to the
relativity of our intellects, of Ideas, of absolute
and essential beings.

JADE 20.2 © NSEAD 2001