Your vision of infinite time might have been due to to your having seen time-lapse movies. I wonder if people could have such imaginary visions before the era of movies. I wonder if bodily sensation is thought to be aesthetic -- and ineffable-- and then becomes something else when it is explained or described. That would be at least two separate aesthetics.
wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, December 7, 2012 5:43:14 AM Subject: Re: Should an aesthetic experience be revelatory? On Dec 7, 2012, at 6:05 AM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > Could an ideal aesthetic experience be indescribable? Describe the taste of a banana. I bet you can't do it. Gustatory language is limited to mentioning the four sensations on the tongue and then ... what? The millions of aromas that form the basis of a distinctive taste sensation? The best (only?) way to do that is to say, "Here, eat one. It tastes like that." Ideals don't survive description, they don't survive being limited to the particular. (That's Plato's point.) Moreover, are you asking about *an ideal experience* (of an aesthetic character)? Or are you asking about *an aesthetic experience* (of an ideal expression)? I assume the latter. One cannot experience an abstraction, one cannot sense an insensible idea. One experiences things that are tangible and material, which one might describe as "perfectly proportioned" or "an incredibly nuanced harmony" or the like. But those are descriptions of particular things. Many years ago, I happened to be thinking of the concept "infinity," and most of what I thought about was mathematical (infinite number of points between two other points, infinite extension of a line, etc.). Then, for some reason, I happened to imagine a savannah in Africa back when hominids began to come down from the trees and live on the land. I imagined a grassland growing, receding, the tree line advancing and pulling back, day, night, repeatedly in very fast fashion. All of this happened in a mere second or two, but I felt I experienced the passage of millions of years of time. Not quite infinity, but much longer than any other range of time I have ever felt I "experienced." Then it was gone, but I was profoundly impressed by the imaginative embodiment I gave to the idea of a long time. Every now and then I try to recreate it, without the shocking success of the first time. Mostly, I recreate how I remember feeling afterwards. Memorable "aesthetic experiences" are like that, I believe: Profound, irreproducible, and particular. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
