This brings us to the heart of the relationship between art and emotions: art, by inducing emotions, utilises a faculty by which consciousness finds in and imposes upon the world a greater unity than it has to the uninvolved gaze. An emotion promoted through art, a disinterested emotion triggered by others’ representative experiences, by larger ideas, rather than by our own self-centred preoccupations, has the world-unifying property of emotion without the demeaningly trivial or local origin, and so may correspond to an experience as large as our ideas.
Summer of Discontent,
the Purpose of the Arts Today by Raymond Tallis and Julian
Spalding
We perceive and understand reality through our senses; our sensations are not reality, as most recently argued by XANTHIPPE in Blog 86. Our sense perceptions, however, are a continuous river of information, so full and steady that we only have conscious awareness of but a small percent age of it, and that awareness is fleeting. Art allows us to concentrate and freeze those fleeting sensations in a meaningful way. In the best of Art it confronts us with the great issues of our existence, e.g., why do we exist as we do?
This view is not a simple one. In what sense does Bach’s Goldberg Variations do this? It does not
even have ideas in the normal sense. We think that we can express our thoughts,
our ideas in words normally, but it’s very hard to find words that describe its
ideas or why this string of sounds has impact on the listener it does. Many
minds greater than mine have wrestled with this issue and I have yet to find a
completely satisfying answer.
I keep returning to the idea that we are not merely material creatures, and great art transcends the material, which is why we find it so difficult to put its impact into words unless the art itself is composed of words. It does have “the world-unifying property of emotion,” but the world it unifies is more than material and therefore it appeals to more than our intellect–this is the key point; it addresses the whole of human experience, a world-unifying creation, not just a gathering of sense data.
Blog No. 91, Art as a World-Unifying Creation
This brings us to the heart of the relationship between art and emotions: art, by inducing emotions, utilises a faculty by which consciousness finds in and imposes upon the world a greater unity than it has to the uninvolved gaze. An emotion promoted through art, a disinterested emotion triggered by others’ representative experiences, by larger ideas, rather than by our own self-centred preoccupations, has the world-unifying property of emotion without the demeaningly trivial or local origin, and so may correspond to an experience as large as our ideas.
Summer of Discontent, the Purpose of the Arts Today by Raymond Tallis and Julian Spalding
We perceive and understand reality through our senses; our sensations are not reality, as most recently argued by XANTHIPPE in Blog 86. Our sense perceptions, however, are a continuous river of information, so full and steady that we only have conscious awareness of but a small percent age of it, and that awareness is fleeting. Art allows us to concentrate and freeze those fleeting sensations in a meaningful way. In the best of Art it confronts us with the great issues of our existence, e.g., why do we exist as we do?
This view is not a simple one. In what sense does Bach’s Goldberg Variations do this? It does not even have ideas in the normal sense. We think that we can express our thoughts, our ideas in words normally, but it’s very hard to find words that describe its ideas or why this string of sounds has impact on the listener it does. Many minds greater than mine have wrestled with this issue and I have yet to find a completely satisfying answer.
I keep returning to the idea that we are not merely material creatures, and great art transcends the material, which is why we find it so difficult to put its impact into words unless the art itself is composed of words. It does have “the world-unifying property of emotion,” but the world it unifies is more than material and therefore it appeals to more than our intellect–this is the key point; it addresses the whole of human experience, a world-unifying creation, not just a gathering of sense data.