CHAPTER ONE – DEFINITIONS

          E-mail your definition of "sorrow, boredom, joy".

                               josephb@yesselman.com 

                      E-mail your definition of "hate, indifference, love".

                                         josephb@yesselman.com

      
      
      The above terms are respectively analogous to "distance", "velocity", and "acceleration".

NOTES: 

From Susanne K. Langer's "Philosophy in a New Key"; 067466503; Pages 258-260.
THE GENESIS OF ARTISTIC IMPORT: Insight, Intuition, Aesthetics,

Anyone who has worked in more than one medium probably can testify to the sameness of the "aesthetic emotion" accompanying creation in the various arts. But I suspect that this characteristic excitement, so closely wedded to original conception and inner vision, is not the source, but the effect of artistic labor, the personal emotive experience of revelation insight, mental power, which an adventure in "implicit understanding" inspires. It has often been stated that it is the same emotion which overtakes a mathematician as he constructs a convincing and elegant proof; and this is the beatitude which Spinoza, who knew it well, called "the intellectual love of G-D." Something like it is begotten in appreciation of art, too, though not nearly in the same measure as in producing; but the fact that the difference is one of degree makes it plausible that the emotion springs from the one activity which the artist and the beholder share in unequal parts—the comprehension of an unspoken {symbolized} idea. In the artist this activity must be sustained, complete, and intense; his intellectual excitement is often at fever pitch. The idea is his own, and if he loses his command of it, confused by the material or distracted by pressing irrelevancies, there is no symbol to hold it for him. His mind is apt to be furiously active while an artistic conception takes shape. To the beholder the work is offered as a constant source of an insight he attains gradually, more or less clearly, perhaps never in logical completeness; and although his mental experience also wakens the characteristic emotion, variously called "feeling of beauty ... .. aesthetic emotion," and "aesthetic pleasure," he knows nothing like the exhilaration and tense excitement of an artist before his pristine marble or clay, his unmarked canvas or paper, as the new work dawns in his brain.  

Perhaps it is inevitable that this emotion which one really has in producing or contemplating an artistic composition should become confused with the content of the work, since that content is itself emotive. If there is feeling in the work, and both artist and spectator experience a feeling, and moreover the artist has more of a feeling than the spectator, would it not take a very careful thinker to refrain from jumping to the conclusion that the emotion embodied in the form is felt by the artist before he begins his work, is "expressed" page 260 in the process of creating as it might be in shouting or weeping, and is sympathetically felt by the audience? Yet I believe the "aesthetic emotion" and the emotional content of a work of art are two very different things; the "aesthetic emotion" springs from an intellectual triumph, from overcoming barriers of word-bound thought and achieving insight into literally "unspeakable" realities; but the emotive content of the work is apt to be something much deeper than any intellectual experience, more essential, pre-rational, and vital, something of the life-rhythms we share with all growing, hungering, moving and fearing creatures {conatus}: the ultimate realities themselves, the central facts of our brief, sentient {having the power of perception by the senses; consciousness} existence.

"Aesthetic pleasure," then, is akin to (though not identical with) the satisfaction of discovering truth {cash Value}. It is the characteristic reaction to a well-known, but usually ill-defined, phenomenon called "artistic truth" - well-known to all artists, creative or appreciative, but so ill-defined by most epistemologists {Those who study a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.} that it has become their favorite aversion {repugnance, or antipathy toward something and a desire to avoid it}. Yet truth is so intimately related to symbolism that if we recognize two radically different types of symbolic expression we should logically look for two distinct meanings of truth; and if both symbolic modes are rational enough, both senses of truth should be definable.  

Here it must be noted that the distinction between dis- cursive and presentational symbols does not correspond to the difference between literal and artistic meanings. Many presentational symbols are merely proxy for discourse; geo- metric relations may be rendered in algebraic terms - clumsy terms perhaps, but quite equivalent - and graphs are mere abbreviated descriptions. They express facts for discursive thinking, and their content can be verbalized, subjected to the laws of vocabulary and syntax. Artistic symbols, on the other hand, are untranslatable; their sense is bound to the particular form which it has taken. It is always implicit, and cannot be explicated by any interpretation. This is true even of poetry, for though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the

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Table 1 - The Key to Understanding °EMOTION & °FAITH
 Table 2 - Variation of °EMOTION 
 Table 3- Variation of °FAITH 

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SPINOZISTIC  INSIGHTS - 1
Chapter 1 - Definitions 
Revised: March 9, 2005 

Chapter 2 - Hypotheses

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