See may post re love. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, February 28, 2010 3:25:19 PM Subject: Re: "What is happening during an 'a.e.'?" William writes: "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." I wouldn't describe my quest that way. The phrase "the description of the aesthetic experience that always applies, both to him and all others " suggests things I don't believe. Much of what I've said in the past few days has been intended to convey that I see immense variations in the sorts of experiences that I and others would call "aesthetic". They vary in several ways. For one, many objects and events occasion a.e.'s in others but not in me, and vice versa. For another, there is great variety in those experiences of mine that I have, perhaps too loosely, called "aesthetic". They vary so greatly - by genre, for example - it's questionable how long I could defend calling them all by the same name. For example, I mentioned earlier on the forum that C.J. Ducasse in his book "The Philosophy of Art" asserts that the experience occasioned by witnessing a drama is not aesthetic at all; it's vicarious. And in the past week I've been pondering the degrees of difference in what I've called the cerebral and the visceral character of an a.e.. I grant the distinction there may be questioned, but I entertain it because, say, when I get a back rub or have an orgasm, the experience feels generically different from when I do a mathematical problem or construct a syntactically tricky sentence. Somewhat similarly, the a.e. that I get from DeBussy and the a.e. from reading a Shakespeare sonnet differ -- though (so far) not so much that I shrink from calling them both a.e.'s. Perhaps the distinction most of us entertain between a passive and an active experience applies. This has always been one of the values of the forum: It gives us a chance to put forth an inchoate, far-from-thought-out idea to see if it can survive the pressures of criticism at all, and if so how it can be improved. Ideally, though, we who criticize should keep this in mind: Most ideas are multiplex; we should try to discern not just their fatal flaws but the aspects, if any, that are worthy. There's a part of me that wishes Obama in his meeting with the Republicans about the health care bill had started out by asking the others in the room what in the proposed bill they approve of. I became suspicious before the meeting when I heard opponents insist that the whole thing be thrown out. An entirely different reason why I'm not looking for "the description of the aesthetic experience that always applies, both to him and all others " is touched on by my earlier postings on the forum about the IIMT nature of notion: all notion is indeterminate, indefinite, multiplex and transitory. Not only are the chances nil of my perfectly replicating in my mind the experience in anyone else's mind, it's doubtful that I could ever summon a perfect replica of a notion that I myself had at some time in the past. For all that, there seem to be sui generis elements common to many of experiences we call "aesthetic". What? What's going on?
