Michael: You raised a split between intellect and emotion in the minds of
moral philosophers (as I recall). I wonder if that has occasioned Chris'
inquiry.
Geoff C
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Brady" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 8:03 PM
Subject: Re: Enough "taste
On Dec 23, 2008, at 7:33 PM, William Conger wrote:
Why would you want to regard them separately anyway? All the old views
regarding categories of mind are not so helpful anymore. That's why I
like the new neuroscience. It points to new orientations (with evidence)
for our thinking about thinking.
I brought it up, but the dictionaries did also make the same emphasis on
"intellectual" faculties.
I was thinking of works of visual art that seem on first glance not to
observe the standards of conventional pictorial beauty. Hockney's
swimming pools, for example. They engaged me intellectually, first, more
so than by immediate visual recognition. I saw them as patterns and
arrangements, initially, as "cool" and aloof, as fundamentally detached
from their referents by the linear abstractions. I liken that to
intellectualizing the image, to Hockney's repositioning the mode of
perceiving the scene from the almost immediately pictorial to the
analytical abstraction into flat color areas and schematic proxies for
the reflections in the water, etc. Compare Mondrian's early paintings,
where the portrayal of natural forms seems more natural, to the later
rectilinear grids of pure color and black lines. The change that occurs
shifts the way one grasps the image, again, from a more immediate reading
of tree to a more abstracted, more schematic, and thus more
"intellectual" reading. Also, compare Broadway Boogie Woogie or other
late Mondrian's to Motherwell's Elegies. For me, there is no "reading" of
the structure of the "Elegy." It's all immediate.
I don't believe that one's viewing of a WoA engages separate or discrete
kinds of perception. All of what I know and remember comes into play
during every experience, including looking at paintings. It's just that
in the process of seeing, I realize that I attend to a picture more with
one kind of understanding, let's say, intellectual and analytical, than
another, say, color and emotions.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
