Chris writes:
"Conversations can only begin when brave souls stick their necks out and
assert that some quality or criteria has special importance or value. -- as
Boris just did with the word 'completeness'.
"The skeptics, like Cheerskep and Derek , will immediately attack it as
hopelessly incomplete or muddled --- We have allowed the skeptics to dominate
and
shut down discussion on this forum -- but we should probably just ignore
those who refuse to offer their own incomplete, diminutive, and muddled
criteria
for a possibly humiliating examination.
"But there is nothing to discuss regarding what Cheerskep finds
"cherishable". He likes to watch football games ---"
On the contrary, Chris, I have again and again tried to get the forum to
grapple with what I think is the central question -- for me, anyway -- in
aesthetics: What is going on when we have the feeling I've termed an "aesthetic
experience".
I use that term in the belief that all of us on this forum have a serviceably
clear idea of what I have in mind with it. We don't all derive "that
experience" from the same objects/works/events, nor is the experience exactly
the same
in any two of us. But when Derek refers to his "response to art", we have a
serviceable notion of the feeling he's talking about.
And recall, over the last year I have cited my response to certain football
games (and other sporting events -- e.g. Kirk Gibson's home run), and to
certain public events -- e.g. the live-on-tv "slow chase" of O.J. Simpson in
the
white Bronco, and the attempt to save trapped miners -- and to certain "nature"
scenes -- including even the way certain graceful people moved across a
landscape -- not simply just because I cherish them. I cited them because of
this
peculiar fact about my experience at those times: my feeling was remarkably
like
my feeling when I was contemplating certain paintings, plays, fictions,
ballets.
Notice: In contrast to Derek and others, I do not believe that anything "IS"
art. The muffled premise behind any assertion that something "is art" is a
belief in a mind-independent, metaphysical status or "category", such that
there
is a "fact of the matter" about whether a given object is or is not art. I
take this to be a profound mistake, and therefore I take any attempt to give
"THE
definition of art", or to cite "THE criteria that determine whether a work IS
of IS not art" to be confused and futile.
I believe, with Brady, that people tend to use the word "Art!" as an
honorific, a kind of "Hurray!" when their response to a painting, concerto,
poem, is
an intense "a.e.". It's a way of asserting there is something special about
this thing. However, they then usually get entangled with notions of the many
varying criteria promulgated by philosophers and artists over the years, and
they
find themselves muddled in inconsistencies.
An example is the wish to accommodate a name or category for the attempts of
earnest hardworking creators who just have no talent. "They're trying hard to
create art!" -- and thus we tend to end up conceding the existence of a
category they call "bad art", which is difficult to reconcile with the notion
of
"art" as a term of praise.
Another example of inconsistency our fuzzy thinking leads us into is this.
People blurrily tend think of the term "art" as being properly applied only to
works created by someone intending to produce an aesthetic response in
contemplators. By a kind of circular thinking, this leads them to believe our
response
to a good "artist's" work -- an "aesthetic experience" -- must be generically
different from our response to "real life" events like a moving sunset, a
sporting event, or even a remarkably engaging piece of driftwood.
Thus all talk of "art" and its necessary criteria strike me as fruitless
nonsense. "That's art!" "It is not art!" "Is!" "Isn't!" But the feelings when I
first saw Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" in Holland, or "King Lear" in London, or
Allegra Kent in "L'Apres-midi d'une Faune" in New York; when I heard Brahm's
"Requiem", or Pavarotti singing "Vincero!"; or when I read certain Dickinson,
Auden,
Keats, Dylan Thomas -- these feelings were/are undeniable. And they are what
I would like to see "explained".
I certainly have never stated on this forum my "crieria" for something's
"BEING" "art", but I have definitely stated the primary criterion of interest
for
me in aesthetics: the aesthetic experience.
And notice: Behind my fuzzy position has been a conviction that such feelings
share a "sameness", that an "aesthetic experience" is, call it, a single
genus of feeling. And indeed that certain "real life" "dramas" occasion a
feeling
"just like" certain stage or film "dramas". But this conviction strikes me as
very shaky. I've mentioned that C.J. Ducasse declines to consider any form of
"drama" in his "The Philosophy of Art" on the grounds that the experience of
the contemplator is a "vicarious feeling", not an "aesthetic feeling".
His position, and that of Spencer and others, is that an aesthetic feeling is
what comes from "aesthetic contemplation", i.e. roughly speaking, where the
intent is solely to "taste" to find out the feeling that will arise. So those
philosophers maintain that one can indeed have an "aesthetic feeling" when
contemplating a sunset or piece of accidental driftwood.
Still, all that stuff is arguing about when to use certain words and phrases.
I still yearn to hear anyone's wise thoughts about WHY such feelings arise
when contemplating some objects but no others. When an object does give me an
a.e., WHY does it do so? What is going on?
I claim I'm sticking my neck out plenty there, Chris. And it's really no more
than I've been saying for some time. I also maintain I'm not a skeptic trying
to shut down discussion; indeed, I'm trying to open it up -- to an
examination of the mysterious core of our subject: aesthetic experience.
Meantime I
join you in saying we should ignore the skepticism that is so extreme it's
non-believable. For example, the kind displayed by Derek when, and I quote, he
said
he has "no idea what" we're talking about when we say "aesthetic experience".
The notion behind the phrase is fuzzy, but so is the one behind 'cancer' --
and yet we know what the other guy is talking about when he uses the phrases.
Derek, in a way he has often done in the past, may now say, "He compares art
to cancer!" No -- I compare the degree of fuzziness of the notion behind the
word 'cancer' to the degree behind 'art'.
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