On Mar 3, 2009, at 8:58 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Let's back up. I said some people believe there is such a thing as
"art"
because they have experiences when they contemplate certain music,
paintings,
poems, dramas that they claim are sui generis, of one kind. They
call them all
"aesthetic experiences".
Cheerskep,
You seem to be the person pushing the claim that all a.e. are "sui
generis." Previously, I made the point that, if I can discern that
several things share a common property (the result of the truth-test,
i.e., I don't require them to be truthful), the I can call them WoAs.
*Then* after I discern that part, I notice that the responses they
provoke seem to be similar enough to each other--and different enough
from my responses to other things (or my responses to the same thing
viewed in a different light, namely, taking the "WoA" as a map, or
whatever the DaVinci Code is all about)--that I can make rather
general observations about them. (And, for the record, this all
happens very fast: What is that? Looks like a painting. It makes me
feel ______.)
Consider how you literally feel when you get an "ice-cream headache."
Compare that to how you feel when you cut you hand or hit your shin
against a coffee-table, or have an acute stomach-ache, or muscle-
soreness from exercise or a cold and fever, etc.
We typically say of each one of these hurts. They share a common
quality, namely, producing very pronounced physical discomfort. We
say, "Oh, man, what a pain! I banged my shin against the table." Or,
"I ate that ice cream too quickly and now I've got a really painful
headache." Etc.
Isn't this just the normal uses of language?
When asked about where I hurt, I'll be more specific and describe the
kind of pain and something about its nature (throbbing, sharp, dull,
etc.). Isn't this how people reply when they're asked about the "a.e."
they get from a WoA? They begin to describe the "aesthetic" part in
some particulars. This is just the natural way of speaking--in fact,
of knowing. The inverse relationship between extension and definition,
the problem of mapping: A map (representation) is less than what is
referred to, so the representer has to categorize, approximate, and
aggregate details in such a way to preserve the salient differences
and merge the not-so-salient ones.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
