Exploring the Aesthetics of Ruin and the Philosophy of Nature

An interview with Prof. Susan Stewart

Susan Stewart is a poet, scholar, occasional translator, and the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, emerita, at Princeton University. In this period, Prof. Stewart finishing a new book of poems and a book based upon four recent lectures on “poetry’s nature.” Her book The Ruins Lesson : Meaning and Material in Western Culture was published by University of Chicago Press. A native of Philadelphia, Prof. Stewart currently resides there.

How did you first become interested in this area?

I have been interested in ruins since childhood, when I often played in an abandoned farmhouse with the other children in my extended family. In adulthood I traveled a great deal and visited many ruins sites in Britain, Europe, the Levant, and the Western U.S., so I have a strong tactile and visual memory of the experience of ruined spaces and forms. But the greater influence on my work was studying Western aesthetics and thinking about the relations between making and destruction in that tradition. In my lifetime, greed and  “creative destruction” have culminated in the environmental crises that surround us. My book is meant to be a history of aesthetic responses to ruin and ruination and an exploration of alternatives to both dreams of monumentality and fantasies of decay and violence.

What are the most important concepts or ideas that you teach others?

Many concepts such as a life of reason, social justice, democracy, respect for others, for other cultures, and for living beings are important to me and part of the ethos of my world, yet I'm not sure these concepts can be "taught" so much as revealed through experience. As a teacher of literature and art, however, I strive to convey two important stays against the proliferation of mere information: the practices of the imagination, rooted in a deep and personal engagement with the whole range of the history of aesthetic forms, and the critical and synthesizing powers of philosophy.

Do you have a favorite quote that you use?

I have many quotes that are favorites; teaching in universities for forty years can in fact lead to too many favorite quotes! But a quote I treasure for its acceptance of change and its sense of the inter-relatedness of our being with nature, is from Heraclitus

For souls it is death to become water, for water death to become earth, but from earth water is born, and from water soul.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to learn more about what you do?

The best way to know my work is to find my books of poetry and prose in a library or independent bookstore.  I do not have a website or blog, or use social media. I ask not to be recorded or have my image posted, although not everyone respects that request. I find online ventures like yours, along with the many wonderful sites devoted to knowledge of nature, make the internet worthwhile. But thought happens in the lived, vividly shared, world. I prefer face to face exchange and all the pleasures and struggles of presence.

Suppose you were able to give a talk or workshop at the original location of Plato’s Academy, in Athens. 

In true Socratic style, I would rather be part of a dialogue.

What question would you like to leave us to think about?

I believe the most important dialogue we can have right now would regard the question of our nature. Are we the suicidal species we seem to be, bent to perpetual war and the destruction of the nature that surrounds us? Or can we imagine and know ourselves as human animals and find a just and sustainable means of life?