In a message dated 11/17/08 1:37:40 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> the subjective experience cannot be expressed. > I can imagine someone using 'expressed' in this way: we may say a poet has succeeded in expressing her experience if her poem, when read, will occasion in a reader a feeling very like the one she had in mind as she wrote. I certainly agree that we can never know exactly what feeling/notion arises in someone else's mind, but the poet -- or composer, or playwright, or singer, or instrumentalist, or comic -- often has sufficient evidence of a work's effect on a given contemplator to feel she has serviceably achieved what she was after -- at least in some contemplators. This notion of "expressing" does entail it is silly for any artist to insist she has in some absolute way "expressed" her motion. We have reports of writers who shed tears while they wrote of, say, the death of a child. A reader -- who herself may never have lost a child -- may nevertheless be brought to tears as she reads. Another reader may honestly say the piece leaves him cold. The first reader may say, "The poet expressed the emotion powerfully." The second could say, "Not for me." In other words, there is no right or wrong here. If the reader obviously is not experiencing the approximately same emotion as the writer had, it is an error to insist the reader's experience is "wrong". To insist it's wrong would be to take one's arbitrary stipulative definition of wrong as absolutely correct: "I define as wrong any reader's reaction if it does not serviceably replicate what the author in mind." We can imagine a survivior of a small shtetl that was laid to waste in a pogrom tearfully writing about the event, and bringing tears to the eyes of other immediate surviviors of that shtetl. All those readers would have associated memories the writer was stirring. You would not be wrong if those associations were not available to your mind. With the usage of 'express' I describe above, we could reasonably say the writer "expressed" the experience for other survivors, but not for you and me. Notice: I have only put forth here a possible definition of "expressing a subjective experience": If what the poet writes manages to occasion in the mind of a reader a notion/feeling all but identical to the notion/feeling the writer had in mind, one could reasonably say the writer has, for that reader, "expressed the subjective experience". Perhaps we see a more persuasive example when a comic tells a joke. The comic would be unjustified in claiming the joke is absolutely funny and those who didn't laugh are "wrong". Others, who crack up immediately, might say, "Wow, he told that well!" ************** Get the Moviefone Toolbar. Showtimes, theaters, movie news & more!(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212774565x1200812037/aol?redir=htt p://toolbar.aol.com/moviefone/download.html?ncid=emlcntusdown00000001)
