Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture

by Yi-Fu Tuan

Conventional wisdom suggests that aesthetic experiences - those moments when the senses come to life - are important only after more basic needs have been met. In this inspiring wealth of provocative ideas, Yi-Fu Tuan demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential parts of life and society. The aesthetic is shown to be not merely one aspect of culture but its central core - both its driving force and its ultimate goal. Beginning with the individual and the physical world, the author's exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. Tuan starts by examining the building blocks of aesthetic experience - sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste - and gradually expands his analysis to include the most elaborate of human constructs, including art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and landscape. This leads him to the realm of politics, where he grapples with the fundamental question of the relationship between goodness and beauty, and of how the aesthetic can become a moral force within society. To guide the reader along this journey, the author describes how the aesthetic operates in four widely disparate Australian aboriginal, Chinese, medieval European, and modern American. Yi-Fu Tuan, one of our most influential and original thinkers, brilliantly conveys the profound fascination of multisensory reality, and in so doing enables us to make connections among even the most diffuse elements of our lives. While Tuan does not ignore human folly, Passing Strange and Wonderful is a celebration of the world around us, our experiences, and our creations.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Geography, Essays, Sociology

304 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

About the author

Fu Tuan (Traditional Chinese: 段義孚, born 5 December 1930) is a Chinese-U.S. geographer.
Tuan was born in 1930 in Tientsin, China. He was the son of a rich oligarch and was part of the top class in the Republic of China. Tuan attended University College, London, but graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955 respectively. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

A friend gave me this book in February. I don't know if she read it or not, but she said that she thought it would be an interesting read. While towards the middle of the book, I looked to the acknowledgments in the back and noticed that a mutual friend was one of the editors of this book.

What I did like is that there was some synchronicity between this book and two others which I had brought along to read, Enrique Vila-Mates' NEVER ANY END TO PARIS, and Chris Kraus' ALIENS & ANOREXIA. There were mentions of Marguerite Duras to Simone Weil... in different contexts.

I wanted to like the book but felt that the author would bring something up and only go so far with a subject, and then move on to something else. It felt like a meal with plenty of dishes but very small portions.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aesthetics are shaping culture all around us in subtle ways and this philosopher/urbanist takes apart some obvious narrative concepts that shape different cultures to show us their simple parts. I don’t highlight books for destruction aversion reasons but this copy came with sloppy ill chosen highlights for just the first 20 pages so I felt liberated to highlight with impunity, and this was such a great text to mark in this way for my future self. There is much unsung wisdom here waiting to support your own personal relitigation of all that came with your place of birth and education. Is the patriotic American constitution finish the best closing idea for a book this brilliant? I think not, but at least it’s couched in shadows and darkness and adjacent to the symphony of ideas of human goodness put forth by this tender and luminous scholar.

[Bryn]

I have not read much on aesthetics so I don't know where this falls in the world of writing about it, but this was too much inside that weird realm of 'here is how my personal taste proves these universal truths' for me to really engage with it -- I kept wanting to argue with the author about his examples.