Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
Beyond number-based and word-based knowledge, it is essential to our well-being to achieve aesthetic literacy. An aesthetically literate person is fluent in alternative modes of knowing and thus capable of learning from life experiences. Possessing aesthetic-literacy, one utilizes images to imaginatively unlock essential wisdom of ancestors and enter into diverse cultural designs and indigenous teachings that form the signposts of many peak artistic and cultural experiences along the human adventure. Without the noetic capacity to ‘read’ images, we remove ourselves from the great conversations of humanity begun in primeval times.
Images are the primary units of awareness giving form and substance to our concepts, feelings – to our very mind. Images are not simply metaphors for ideas. Because images are ultimately related to how we acquire, organize, retrieve, and use information, aesthetic literacy is an authentic mode of learning. Today’s general loss of our image-reading intelligence threatens us with dire consequences. It diminishes an audiences’ ability to find generative, life-enhancing meanings in theaters or concert halls; It deadens citizens’ capacity to perceive veiled messages and truths in political campaigns; it clouds the spiritual seekers’ discrimination among sacred, iconic artifacts; it makes communities vulnerable to manipulation by lobbyists, special interests, or hate groups; it strangles the organic form of our implicate selfhood.
However, reading extensively through the imagistic products of the cognitive imagination offers us a powerful antidote to the literal, reductionist mind, fixated on a hegemonic program of interpretation. We need to discern the rich epistemic value of images in stories, songs, paintings, poems, scientific systems, and more. Since images populate the mind and all the senses, the literacy advocated here envisions integration of somatic with rational understandings. Image literacy means one is fluent in the ‘languages’ of everyday life, discerning integral meanings to help us responsibly engage human and more-than-human others in complex personal, socio-political, aesthetic, and environmental contexts.