William writes (his entire posting is below):
"If aesthetics is the study of feelings and emotions, then as a distinct
subject it is replaced by either psychology and cognitive sciences, or by
cultural
studies. If we really want to know about feelings, emotions, reflectivity,
and preferences for ordering information, we need to pursue neurology first,
and cultural patterns second."
I don't believe this, and in some important ways I can't believe William
altogether does either. Many of us have, in a classroom or in our writings,
"taught" aspects of an "art".
I know that I as such a teacher was trying to enhance the likelihood that the
would-be "artists" would achieve their goal, which very often was this: to
reach a level of craft and "art" that would enable them to choose and arrange
their "material" in ways that would produce the feelings they were after --
i.e.
"aesthetic experiences" in the contemplators of their work. This, I want to
believe, is what all teachers-of-the practice-of-an-art are regularly about.
But the only thing we have to work with in teaching is the stuff of
consciousness. Everything we can talk about or point at is conscious images and
sounds.
We say the likes of, "Try to see why I claim this scene is too long, this
sentence too brief; this event should be dramatized, not just reported." Or we
talk about colors, composition, the accuracies and fruitful distortions of
anatomy, and so forth. We can't project on a screen an MRI of the student's own
brain and say, "Move this neuron closer to that one, create a neural link
between
this cluster of synapses and that one."
I have definitely seen the aesthetic impact of a work improved by the
reshaping and arranging of visual and aural elements -- i.e. conscious
elements. The
teacher is certainly reshaping the student's neural elements as he advises
him, but what the teacher is working with is always sensed or sensible stuff.
In fact, all teaching, not just that of an art, is a matter of wielding
sights and sounds.
I'm certain William never thought it would be wise for him to tell all the
members of the faculty he supervised at Northwestern to quit his department,
take their students with them, and go take courses in psychology. Or, rather,
not
psychology but neural physiology.
Underlying this discussion is one of the great mysteries of the philosophers'
famous mind-body problem. It's daft not to recognize that one's consciousness
is in some way deeply dependent on what's going on in the meat of his brain.
(Hell, just get real high on pot and go to a familiar museum and notice how
differently you respond to familiar works.) And yet it certainly does seem that
our conscious experience, what we hear and see, what we consciously observe,
can change what we thereafter feel and even the way we think -- which suggests
that the neural part of us is being molded by conscious notion.
In sum, I won't concede what art teachers have been doing for centuries --
addressing the visual and aural sensations of their students with the aim of
ultimately affecting those sensations we tend to call an "aesthetic experience"
-- has been an uninformed and feckless waste of time.
William's post:
If aesthetics is the study of feelings and emotions (reflectivity) of
information ordered in a certain manner then it lies within the domain of
psychology,
neurology, and cognitive science. In that case aesthetics is a subset of
science or it does not exist as a valid inquiry. But since "information
ordered
in a certain way" is a projected structuring of information, we must ask what
cognitive, cultural, and idiosyncratic patterns induce it. Presumably, the
cultural inducements may have priority over the cognitive since cognition seems
to be much more variable than cultural patterns (more flexible and more
"fanciful").
So then, it seems to me that aesthetics as a distinct subject is either
replaced by psychology and cognitive sciences or it is replaced by cultural
studies. Art history, and its objects, and art are quaint relics of a
pre-scientific investigation of mind and culture. They are necessary forms of
responsive
human endeavor but if we really want to know about feelings, emotions,
reflectivity, and preferences for ordering information, we need to pursue
neurology
first, and cultural patterns second.
Aesthetics does not exist anymore. it has been absorbed into bigger, more
revealing inquiries.
WC
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