On Jan 16, 2009, at 11:26 AM, William Conger wrote:
You can't think your way to the aesthetic.
What he said.
Otherwise, you're practicing Platonism, projecting an individual
phenomenon (the aesthetic work) from a transcendent ideal (the
aesthetic). I think Platonism is fundamentally, basically, essentially
wrong.
The aesthetic is not reasonable or rational.
Wellll. If Damasio is right, the aesthetic as an emotional experience
participates in reason.
I'm not at all sure why we expect works of art, of any medium, to
produce the aesthetic response, any more than any other experience.
I suspect our expectations arise from two motives. One is simply a
matter of our acculturation: we have learned from our youth that
certain emotions or feelings arise from, and indeed are in some poorly
understood way part of, many things and events of life. The other is
our own individual sensorial and emotional experiences: We have
learned over the years that certain perceptions are accompanied by
certain feelings, typically some kind of satisfaction (a filling up)
or harmony (a pleasing co-occurrence). Some feelings seem intractably
fused with the stimulus, while similar feelings in other context don't
seem that fused or can be separated from the stimulus. Fashion acts in
this way.
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Michael Brady
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