To Study Art is to Study Humanness
“The study of art is an indispensible part of the study of man.
“Our experiences and ideas tend to be common but not deep, or deep but not common. We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses.
Our penchant for the facts (what can be counted or measured for distance, speed, time, or weight) has left us with a paucity of ideas for dealing with images and the meaning of those images; “we seek refuge in the more familiar medium of words¦The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened¦This limitation, however, applies not only to art, but to any object of experience
Words can and must wait until our minds distill the categories of living that are revealed to us through our body in the process of experience. “Language cannot do the job directly it has no direct avenue for sensory contact with reality; it serves only to name what we have seen or heard or thought.
“Unchecked self-analysis can be harmful, but so can the artificial primitiveness of the person who refuses to understand how and why he works. Modern man can, and therefore must, live with unprecedented self-awareness. Many decades ago I asked a professor philosophy ‘what is philosophy about’; he replied that it is about radically critical self-consciousness.
Gestalt psychology has a kinship with art. Gestalt is a common German noun for shape or form derived mainly from experiments in sensory perception. “Artistic vision of reality was needed to remind scientists that most natural phenomena are not described adequately if they are analyzed piece by piece. That a whole cannot be attained by the accretion of isolated parts was not something the artist had to be told.
“Far from being a mechanical recording of sensory elements, vision proved to be a truly creative apprehension of reality—imaginative, inventive, shrewd, and beautiful¦The mind always functions as a whole¦all perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
Gestalt experiments made it clear that an examination of reality requires interplay between the object and the nature of the observing subject. The objective element in experience justifies the distinguishing between what is an adequate and an inadequate conception of reality. Adequate conceptions must contain a common core of truth that will permit the art to be potentially relevant to all individuals.
Quotes from “Art and Visual Perception by Rudolf Arnheim, Professor Emeritus of Psychological of Art at Harvard University. His books include “Film as Art 1957, “Visual Thinking 1969, “The Dynamics of Architectural Form 1977, and “The Split and the Structure: Twenty Eight Essays 1996.
To Study Art is to Study Humanness
To Study Art is to Study Humanness
How does this view interact with a philosophical viewpoint that would hold, for example, that there is no objective reality for us to observe, and that therefore, the inputs we gather from the senses are subjective, easily falsified, and don't actually reflect a true reality of objects?
I'm thinking primarily of things like Kant's categories of understanding, claiming that we all have a fixed set of filters for lack of a better term, that all sensory input has to pass through to make what we intake via the senses into something we can actually comprehend and understand.
The potentiality that we are individually and via common consent manufacturing an objective reality out of whole cloth simply for our minds to be able to function suggests that subjective concepts like art, music, etc (All things experienced pretty much wholly sensually) are even more subjective than we ever thought they were. What's the point of sharing such things in the first place, when we'll either have to tell someone else exactly what they were supposed to draw from it, or basically count on them manufacturing a completely unintended conclusion from what you had explicitly intended to communicate?
I'm thinking primarily of things like Kant's categories of understanding, claiming that we all have a fixed set of filters for lack of a better term, that all sensory input has to pass through to make what we intake via the senses into something we can actually comprehend and understand.
The potentiality that we are individually and via common consent manufacturing an objective reality out of whole cloth simply for our minds to be able to function suggests that subjective concepts like art, music, etc (All things experienced pretty much wholly sensually) are even more subjective than we ever thought they were. What's the point of sharing such things in the first place, when we'll either have to tell someone else exactly what they were supposed to draw from it, or basically count on them manufacturing a completely unintended conclusion from what you had explicitly intended to communicate?
To Study Art is to Study Humanness
Devonin
Classical metaphysical realism, which is both the common sense view and the view of objectivist philosophy will no longer "cut the mustard".
Cognitive science has introduced a new way of viewing the world and our self by declaring a new paradigm which I call the embodied mind. The primary focus is upon the fact that there is no mind/body duality but that there is indeed an integrated mind and body. The mind and body are as integrated as is the heart and the body.
The human thought process is dominated by the characteristic of our integrated body. The sensorimotor neural network is an integral part of our mind. The neural network that makes movement and perception possible is the same network that processes our thinking.
The unconscious categories that guide our human response to the world are constructed in the same way as are the categories that make it possible of other animals to survive in the world. We form categories both consciously and unconsciously.
Why do we feel that both our consciously created and unconsciously created categories fit the world?
Our consciously formed concepts fit the world, more or less, because we consciously examine the world with our senses and our reason and classify that world into these concepts we call categories.
Our unconsciously formed categories are a different matter. Our unconsciously formed categories fit our world because these basic-level categories “have evolved to form at least one important class of categories that optimally fit our bodily experiences of entities and certain extremely important differences in the natural environment.
Our perceptual system has little difficulty distinguishing between dogs and cows or rats and squirrels. Investigation of this matter makes clear that we distinguish most readily those folk versions of biological genera, i.e. those “that have evolved significantly distinct shapes so as to take advantage of different features of their environment.
If we move down to subordinate levels of the biological hierarchy we find the distinguishing ability deteriorates quickly. It is more difficult to distinguish one species of elephant from another than from distinguishing an elephant from a buffalo. It is easy to distinguish a boat from a car but more difficult distinguishing one type of car from another.
“Consider the categories chair and car which are in the middle of the category hierarchies furniture—chair—rocking chair and vehicle—car—sports car. In the mid-1970s, Brent Berlin, Eleanor Rosch, Carolyn Mervis, and their coworkers discovered that such mid-level categories are cogently “basic—i.e. they have a kind of cognitive priority, as contrasted with “superordinate categories like furniture and vehicle and with “subordinate categories like rocking chair and sports car (Berlin et al 1974 “Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification; Mervis and Rosch 1981 Categorization of Natural Objects, “Annual Review of Psychology 32: 89-115))
The differences between basic-level and non basic-level categories is based upon bodily characteristics. The basic-level categories are dependent upon gestalt perception, sensorimotor programs, and mental images. “Because of this, classical metaphysical realism cannot be true, since the properties of categories are mediated by the body rather than determined directly by a mind-independent reality
In humans basic level categories are developed primarily based upon our bodily configuration and its interrelationship with the environment. For other animals almost all, if not all, categories are basic-level categories.
Quotes from "Philosophy in the Flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson
Classical metaphysical realism, which is both the common sense view and the view of objectivist philosophy will no longer "cut the mustard".
Cognitive science has introduced a new way of viewing the world and our self by declaring a new paradigm which I call the embodied mind. The primary focus is upon the fact that there is no mind/body duality but that there is indeed an integrated mind and body. The mind and body are as integrated as is the heart and the body.
The human thought process is dominated by the characteristic of our integrated body. The sensorimotor neural network is an integral part of our mind. The neural network that makes movement and perception possible is the same network that processes our thinking.
The unconscious categories that guide our human response to the world are constructed in the same way as are the categories that make it possible of other animals to survive in the world. We form categories both consciously and unconsciously.
Why do we feel that both our consciously created and unconsciously created categories fit the world?
Our consciously formed concepts fit the world, more or less, because we consciously examine the world with our senses and our reason and classify that world into these concepts we call categories.
Our unconsciously formed categories are a different matter. Our unconsciously formed categories fit our world because these basic-level categories “have evolved to form at least one important class of categories that optimally fit our bodily experiences of entities and certain extremely important differences in the natural environment.
Our perceptual system has little difficulty distinguishing between dogs and cows or rats and squirrels. Investigation of this matter makes clear that we distinguish most readily those folk versions of biological genera, i.e. those “that have evolved significantly distinct shapes so as to take advantage of different features of their environment.
If we move down to subordinate levels of the biological hierarchy we find the distinguishing ability deteriorates quickly. It is more difficult to distinguish one species of elephant from another than from distinguishing an elephant from a buffalo. It is easy to distinguish a boat from a car but more difficult distinguishing one type of car from another.
“Consider the categories chair and car which are in the middle of the category hierarchies furniture—chair—rocking chair and vehicle—car—sports car. In the mid-1970s, Brent Berlin, Eleanor Rosch, Carolyn Mervis, and their coworkers discovered that such mid-level categories are cogently “basic—i.e. they have a kind of cognitive priority, as contrasted with “superordinate categories like furniture and vehicle and with “subordinate categories like rocking chair and sports car (Berlin et al 1974 “Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification; Mervis and Rosch 1981 Categorization of Natural Objects, “Annual Review of Psychology 32: 89-115))
The differences between basic-level and non basic-level categories is based upon bodily characteristics. The basic-level categories are dependent upon gestalt perception, sensorimotor programs, and mental images. “Because of this, classical metaphysical realism cannot be true, since the properties of categories are mediated by the body rather than determined directly by a mind-independent reality
In humans basic level categories are developed primarily based upon our bodily configuration and its interrelationship with the environment. For other animals almost all, if not all, categories are basic-level categories.
Quotes from "Philosophy in the Flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson
To Study Art is to Study Humanness
The very first line of this response was an actual response directed at me, once again I thank you. *sigh* once AGAIN, the entire rest of your post was copy/pasted from your existing thread "“Classical metaphysical realism cannot be true”"
You know, if all you're going to do in response to someone's post is copy/paste something else you've already copy/pasted into the forum, could you at least just say something like "I think you'll find that I've addressed this point in my thread "
All repeatedly copy/pasting the same text into multiple places in the forum does is make the forum's otherwise excellent search function less useful.
As to the response, I'm not wholly convinced that such a system as you describe has actually been -proven- to exist so much as "is strongly theorized by many scientists to exist" which is not the same thing. If nothing else, I know that the mind/body problem is still one commonly discussed in philosophy, which you'd think wouldn't be the case if it had actually been proven to be solved with any kind of certainty. Philosophers tend not to spend their time thinking about what might be with regard to things where we already know what they are.
I mean, we've already shown that we can run a body without the mind actually being there. All the basic functions required to keep you "alive" can be provided by machines whether there's a mind in there or not.
Whether we can run a mind without a body remains to be seen, but they don't seem to be so intrinsically linked that the death of one directly causes the death of the other, so I think it is still up in the air.
You know, if all you're going to do in response to someone's post is copy/paste something else you've already copy/pasted into the forum, could you at least just say something like "I think you'll find that I've addressed this point in my thread "
All repeatedly copy/pasting the same text into multiple places in the forum does is make the forum's otherwise excellent search function less useful.
As to the response, I'm not wholly convinced that such a system as you describe has actually been -proven- to exist so much as "is strongly theorized by many scientists to exist" which is not the same thing. If nothing else, I know that the mind/body problem is still one commonly discussed in philosophy, which you'd think wouldn't be the case if it had actually been proven to be solved with any kind of certainty. Philosophers tend not to spend their time thinking about what might be with regard to things where we already know what they are.
I mean, we've already shown that we can run a body without the mind actually being there. All the basic functions required to keep you "alive" can be provided by machines whether there's a mind in there or not.
Whether we can run a mind without a body remains to be seen, but they don't seem to be so intrinsically linked that the death of one directly causes the death of the other, so I think it is still up in the air.