He seems to have spent most of his working life in the United States.
-----Original Message----- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Dec 12, 2013 5:55 pm Subject: Re: Aesthetic feelings and other things I'm reading an essay by the Chinese philosopher Li Zehou (b. 1930) who has an influential aesthetic theory based on what he calls 'sedimentation' Fascinating. Are people here familiar with his work? I'll try to summarize his view a little when I digest it better. Meanwhile, any help will be appreciated. wc ________________________________ From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2013 4:20 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic feelings and other things On Dec 11, 2013, at 9:30 PM, [email protected] wrote:
One of the differences between
Cheerskep's football game and a
Shakespeare play is that the play was
planned, is a description of
something as Shakespeare imagined it, and the
football game is an event
whose occurrence was not planned, was not imagined
by a coach or
player and in some respects is a matter of chance, where the
writer of
the play may consider chance as a force but doesn't use its
actual
self in his play. Either thing, play or game, may have a sad or
happy
outcome, and may reveal facets of character in the players or actors.
I don't disagree with any of what Kate says here. (Except possibly her notion behind her line "where the writer of
the play may consider chance as a
force but doesn't use its actual
self in his play." With that one I'm
unsure just what she's thinking; but I sense it's not essential to the point she wants to make with the paragraph. I myself might speak of "chance" as a FACTOR but not a FORCE, but for all I know Kate would have the same notion behind either use. Many a non-fiction writer has attempted to describe a "real life" occurrence realistically and accurately, because the writer is convinced it's a wonderful "story". More than once as an editor I encountered such a description so effectively done I found myself experiencing a feeling that was indistinguishable from the "aesthetic" feeling I might get from an "imagined" story in a novel or play. Indeed, part of the power of the non-fiction tale came from one's realizing that the events it presented were not planned, but still unfolded in a form that achieved "dramatic" impact -- "aesthetic" impact.
