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Chapters from the paperback
- Introduction
- Ecocriticism
- Optimisation
- Grounded Economic Awareness
- Advertising Awareness
- Transition Skills
- Commons Thinking
- Effortless Action
- Permaculture Design
- Community Gardening
- Ecological Intelligence
- Systems Thinking
- Gaia Awareness
- Futures Thinking
- Values Reflection and the Earth Charter
- Social Conscience
- New Media Literacy
- Cultural Literacy
- Carbon Capability
- Greening Business
- Materials Awareness
- Appropriate Technology and Appropriate Design
- Technology Appraisal
- Complexity, Systems Thinking and Practice
- Coping with Complexity
- Emotional Wellbeing
- Finding Meaning Without Consuming
- Being in the World
- Beauty as a Way of Knowing
- Citizen Engagement
- Re-Educating the Person
- Institutional Transformation
- A Learning Society
- Additional chapters
- Interviews
Home » The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy » Chapters from the paperback » Beauty as a Way of Knowing
Beauty as a Way of Knowing
Beauty as a Way of Knowing: the redemption of knowing through the experience of beauty. Barry Bignell, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
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Progress in human affairs is most often gauged by the expansion of knowledge. Yet despite the enormous expansion of knowledge in the twentieth century, it is fair to say that we are more than ever aware of what we do not know, if knowledge can be defined as the relation of human beings to themselves and to the world.
There has been in recent decades a growing concern for the fate of the natural world; a fate, it would seem, that is contingent on the direction taken by human intelligence. What kind of intelligence, and what direction? The question begs the whole point of this chapter, which is, that the same intelligence that gave rise to an ecological crisis of unprecedented magnitude will prove spectacularly impotent in grappling with the crisis it has created and, that to avert the crisis it must learn to know itself, a different thing from knowing about itself.
