1841 EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson: THE NECESSARY

 "Arising out of eternal reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary. Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty that it has been taken for it. The most perfect form to answer an end is so far beautiful. In the mind of the artist, could we enter there, we should see the sufficient reason for the last flourish and tendril of hi work, just as every tint and spine in the seashell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. We feel, in seeing a noble building, which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic, that is, had a necessity in nature for being, was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. (...) We see how each work of art sprang irresistibly from necessity, and, moreover, took its form from the broad hint of Nature." (106-107)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Thoughts on Art.” In The Literature of Architecture: The Evolution of Architectural Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Don Gifford. 98-119. New York: Dutton, 1966.

COMMENTS TO 1841 EMERSON 

c1: A functional theory of aesthetic value. Emerson ought to be mentioned in connection with the FFF-formula because he, together with Horatio Greenough represents a position which, some half a century before Sullivan, contains all the central thoughts launched by Sullivan, and summarized in his FFF-dictum. The above quotation, published in 1841, outlines a functional theory of aesthetic value which could have been written by Sullivan – had he been able to write as matter-of-factly as Emerson.

c2: The necessary. Emerson‘s observations about the necessary in art feel to be very right, perhaps thanks to his masterly language. But the theme of the necessary which he helped to introduce, can be said to have started an epoch of radical confusion by feeding unrealistic visions of objective design. Architects and designers embraced the notion of necessity as a pretext for redefining their heteronomous profession, the applied art of architecture and design, into an autonomous, fine art.

c3: Mimicry. Emerson’s matter-of-factly mention of “mimic plumage of the insect” side by side with “the necessary and ... the useful” appears to create a logical problem. If mimicry, as the resemblance of one animal to another, evolved as a means of protection came to be called since 1860s (cf. *Bates 1863, Martin 1996), is defined as an expression of necessity, that is as something natural, why should not the historicist and eclecticist architecture of the last century, which gave modern buildings resemblance of Greek temples or Gothic town-halls, be on the same logic considered unnatural and arbitrary? -- Also Sullivan bumped into the phenomenon of mimicry in nature (without calling it so) but he argued, typically, that the phenomenon was an exception to the rule, the rule being that in nature everything visually reveals rather than conceals its own intrinsic essence. In his Kindergarten Chats ch.XII Sullivan wrote: “Now, it stands to reason that a thing looks like what it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like. I will stop here and make exception of certain little straight, brown canker-worms that I have picked from rose-bushes. They look like little brown, dead twigs at first. But speaking generally, outward appearances resemble inner purposes” (cf. Sullivan 1965: 43). By asserting that mimicry was an exception to the rule Sullivan avoided Emerson’s logical catch. But in contrast to Emerson, Sullivan wrote his text some 40 years after Darwin’s theory of natural selection was launched; far from seeing it as an exception, Darwin considered mimicry a wonderful illustration of the working of natural selection (cf. Darwin 1929, ch. 14). Sullivan who mentions Darwin as one of the authors in which he “found much food” (cf. Sullivan 1956) was either not familiar with Darwin’s view of mimicry, or he , together with the majority of the biologist  in the decades around 1900, had considered Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection  a more or less refuted theory (cf. Rádl 1930; Gould 1982; Bowler 1983). Besides, the American Darwinism was of a special brand; the most important American Darwinian and Darwin’s contemporary, Asa Grey, remained within a religious framework, being “a theistic Darwinian”, i.e.  a believer in natural theology (cf. Dupree 1959). This may throw some light on why Sullivan considered mimicry an exception. -- As to the semantic implication of Sullivan’s sentence “Now, it stands to reason that a thing looks like what it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like.”, see my comments on what I propose to call ‘semantic automatism’, in c1 to 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ; see  also 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1954 VAN DOREN: c1; 1984 FRIEDLANDER; 1990 KRIPPENDORF •