Cheerskep.
maybe this will help:
Working on a sculpture, is done by pure subjectiveness, but once it
is finished,
It becomes an object, which even I perceive it subjectively, as if
done by
someone else.
mando
On Nov 17, 2008, at 12:13 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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!"
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