Some "things' cause an a,e, feeling in our body,
on first or after many encounters ( music for one)
Repeated encounters usually diminish the a,e's
to a "yes I know you " to a "what else is there?"
How much ice cream can we eat until we say.
"enough already,save it for another day"
I think a,e's are just personal fleeting aberrations.
mando
On Feb 27, 2010, at 12:14 PM, [email protected] wrote:
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.
