11–14 of 14 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be so sure about speaking figuratively. This particular author might be, however, there are profound philosophies that do not.
For example, "all of us" are literally the same entity viewing itself using a variety of perceptions.
> If after the death of the last living thing on earth, there remained a radio playing the Adagio over and over again among the ashes of civilization, there would still be sadness in the world. That is a very strong claim I would love to see substantiated. What is an emotion (like sadness) without an animal capable of experiencing that emotion? Does the author claim that emotions like sadness are metaphysical, or at…
Suppose you were to distinguish some subset of the Universe, labeling it "sadness"; what sets of things would belong in that subset?
Some might consider "sadness" to be a subset of "emotion experienced by a human", which seems pretty reasonable.
The things perceived by the sad person, the things enacted by the sad person--these things are hard to cleanly cut/isolate from the experiencing of emotion of sadness.
The persons experience of sadness is definitely the center of "sadness", but I could imagine expanding "sadness" to include also the inputs and the outputs of that moment, e.g. a sad story. If there were no people left to experience the Adagio, the Adagio would be what was left of the people; I feel comfortable considering it a part of that "sadness"-branch of the human event.
If we find some thing A not really related to "sadness", I can still call thing B as "sadness"
If you consider soul, will, life to be attributes only of humans, you are distinguishing us to be super special. Is my reading a text that changes the way I cycle/move through spacetime so innately different from the collision of two masses? If we allow soul, will, life to apply to the other things that move, we can find the parallels that show humans as an emergent part of nature, whose behavior fits the general scheme of things.
If I am conscious of a flashing light when I register it in my mind, my mind/brain responding to it some regular way, then is not a rock conscious of the earth when it accelerates towards it? Maybe the rock isn't conscious of its own consciousness of the Earth, but it's definitely conscious of the Earth.
Consciousness has connotations of the complexity of human thought, but the crux of it is interaction/cause-effect/perception-action.
I'm pretty sure humans are made of the same stuff as everything else, stuff that we perceive patterns in, but that ultimately transcends our interpretation of it.
> If after the death of the last living thing on earth, there remained a radio playing the Adagio over and over again among the ashes of civilization, there would still be sadness in the world. That is a very strong claim I would love to see substantiated. What is an emotion (like sadness) without an animal capable of experiencing that emotion? Does the author claim that emotions like sadness are metaphysical, or at…
> Does the author claim that emotions like sadness are metaphysical, or at least, transcend human physiology? It is not a claim on the nature of emotions, but rather a claim about the nature of existence itself. In other words, he's speaking figuratively, not literally.
Figuratively = as humans interpret it. The idea of a desolate planet with Adagio playing is sad to us. Life elsewhere may not care. Rocks and stars certainly don't.
I guess what I'm saying is that any time an essay about art uses terms like "genuine art" in an evaluative way, especially when the works being written about are so old, and quotes people like Berger (who is great, but also 1972), it's an essay that has an extremely limited scope in terms of what it can say about art itself.