When I ask Is it art? I am presuming that an artwork is a cultural object, designated by one or many people according to known or unknown assumptions. That doesn't mean it is really mind independent, but is instead a purported exemplification of those assumptions.
When Cheerskep says the mixture of feelings and cerebral responses are "a matter of degree" he is using an analytical approach to identify what he says is not analytical but instantaneous. Further, to say it's a degree....well, of what? Does he mean in terms of a ratio between the felt and the cerebral? If so then he is retaining a separate quality for each when it is commonly recognized that the old Cartesian duality is actually wrong and that what we called feeling and reason are actually one thing. Our language and traditions are steering us away from reality in this case. If he means a degree of intensity then we are still at a loss since no one can know the intensity of another's feeling-cognition. To answer Cheerskep's question What is the aesthetic experience? we can turn to the accumulated answers over history. All of them answer the question in metaphorical terms and thus none is truly descriptive but imaginatively suggestive. In other words, many, many metaphors may do equally well in answering Cheerskep's question. However we are not sure if they can be ranked for appropriateness (his "degree" issue). Let's turn our attention to the metaphors and ask if there is a single metaphor that can stand for my aesthetic experience as well as Cheerskep's and Michael's and Miller's and Imago's all the others here. I strongly suspect we will not discover one. Furthermore, I suspect that each instance of aesthetic experience may evoke a different metaphor for each person. That means I conclude that there are no commonalities (is Cheerskep asking for mind-independent qualities here?) for feelings and the cerebral -- however mingled -- and thus no basis for assigning degrees to them. Cheerskep's quest for a reductive description of the aesthetic experience that always applies, both to him and all others, is a vain one since it excludes the subjective and is, in fact, a search for that which he denies, a mind independent phenomena. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, February 27, 2010 2:14:23 PM Subject: Re: "What is happening during an 'a.e.'?" Some brief thoughts stirred by the recent postings from William and Michael: 1. A crucial difference between William's interest and mine: Basically, his question is: Is it art? Mine is: Does it give me an a.e.? I believe there is no mind-independent category of "works of art". 2. I am with Michael when he suggests one's aesthetic reaction to a work is immediate. Once I reached adulthood, if a work did not immediately bring me a degree of a.e., no amount of study of and reflection on the work thereafter ever resulted in an a.e.'s arising. I might grow to "admire" a work more, but the experience it occasioned in me would never be an a.e. 3. Michael's theory that all "emotions" are of either fear or safety strikes as of little worth. For very basic openers, he does not try to convey what his notional criteria are for calling a feeling an "emotion". (Notice that underlying all this is my ontological conviction that to ask if a feeling "is" or "is not" an "emotion" is to be misguided. There is no "absolute" quasi-Platonic mind-independent category of "emotions".) Further, his argument that things that do not pose a threat to us thus appeal to our feelings of safety and security is unpersuasive to me. If I take a walk in Central Park I observe many things to which I am effectively indifferent--"a tree, a rock, a cloud". I'm not aware of observing a cloud and finding my sense of vulnerability to a heart attack or terrorist assault or to death - immediate or ultimate -- is at all reduced by that observation. I register as a tiny nuisance someone else's grammatical error, but I deny that it increases my sense of threat one whit. You may construct a specious argument to the effect that I subliminally infer a threat to "civilization as we know it", but I simply deny feeling even a hint of that fear. 4. When Michael writes: "I think you are offering us a false distinction. The "cerebral" experience should be just as open to an emotional dimension as any other experience," he is evidently forgetting my emphatic statement that all such things are "a matter of degree". When I bask in DeBussy's "La Mer" I may fleetingly reflect on the instrumentation -- a reflection that I'd term 'cerebral' - but the degree of cerebrality I bring to bear as I Iisten to 'La Mer' is far less than the degree when I read a Shakespeare sonnet. Similarly, when Kate quotes my phrase, "cerebal-vs-visceral", and comments: "I thought it had to do both," she's right and wrong: Agreed, it always has to be both, but the point I was trying to stress, the fact I'd never sufficiently focused on in the past, was that the relative proportions vary greatly; the degree of cerebrality called on by some works can far less than it is in others. And yet they can both occasion an a.e.. 5. Remember: My initial interest here was in coming to "understand" better what's going on when we have an a.e.. When pondering this question a while back, I was surprised to find I was having trouble distinguishing the "aesthetic" feeling occasioned in me by certain "real life" moments from my feeling as I contemplated certain so-called "works of art". That seemed to complicate the question a bit. During these last few days, my summoning up in my mind a clearer realization of the variation in degrees of "cerebral vs visceral" seems to add yet more complexity to the question of "the nature of a.e.", and just what is going on when we have one of those a.e.'s. Even my hoped-for "understanding" of "what is happening when we get an a.e." will be a matter of degree. The multiplex of factors and related questions is comparable to those entailed by the question, "What is happening when we have an orgasm?" If I were to ask, "Why is it a pleasurable event?" the interpretations of what's on my mind would vary: One line of answers will assume I'm inquiring after the function of its being pleasurable, and it will describe the usefulness of its pleasurability in the propagation of the species. Another will focus on the immediate physiology of orgasm and say such things as, "It is pleasurable because (in a male) it relieves the engorgement of the epididymis and vas deferens," etc . At which point I might ask, "Yes, but why is THAT pleasurable? I can see the function, the utility, of the pleasure - not altogether unlike the relief of discomfort when we empty a full bladder - but what precisely is happening in our neural system such that the pre-orgasm stimulation and the orgasm itself come to consciousness as pleasure?" I could imagine some reasonable people staring at me, wondering what more of an "explanation" I could be after. Similarly, I can imagine bafflement when I ask, "Why does listening to Beethoven Ninth, or looking at Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", or reading Dickinson give me pleasure?" I can imagine my audience saying, "Are you asking about the substance and structure of the work, or about why that particular structure occasions the feeling it does?" I'm asking both. And I'm prepared to accept that the satisfactoriness of the answer will always be a matter of degree, never one hundred percent. Nevertheless I'm sure I could understand a great deal more than I do right now.
