Emotional experience of art

Σημερινό απόκτημα: ένα βιβλίο - διδακτορική διατριβή - εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον, όπως καταλαβαίνει κανείς αμέσως μόλις αρχίζει να το ξεφυλλίζει.

Damien Freeman, "Art's Emotions. Ethics, Expression and Aesthetic Experience", Routledge (2012) 2014.

3 μικρά αποσπάσματα από την αρχή και το τέλος του βιβλίου, πολύ γοητευτικά, νομίζω.

"In China, art that combine poetry, calligraphy and painting is known as a work of the three perfections. The three perfections have long been regarded as the highest arts on account of their expressive qualities, and Shih-t'ao (1642-1707) was regarded as a master of all three expressive arts. His masterpiece, Returning Home, is a book of twelve pairs of leaves, each consisting of a poem written in calligraphy on one leaf and a painting on the facing leaf. A pair of leaves such as "Gathering Lotus Flowers" is conceived of as a single entity. What makes this a single entity? What is the sense in which the poetry, calligraphy and painting are unified to form a whole?" (p. 1)

"What do our experiences of poetry, calligraphy and painting have in common that is distinctive and valuable about them as experiences of the expressive arts? There is something that the experience of reading a poem about a man in a boat has in common with the experience of looking at a painting of a lotus flower, but which is lacking in the experience of actually seeing a man in a boat. Understanding the expressiveness of the three perfections is a matter of understanding what our experience of the painting of the flower has in common with our experience of the poem about the man, and which distinguishes both of these from the experience of seeing the actual man. In other words, there is something about the emotional experience of art that differs from other emotional experiences, and it is this difference that we must analyse in the following chapters." (p. 3)

"Human possibilities have been a theme in this book. It is possible to perceive emotion in the world around us in two different ways. It is possible to experience perceived emotion differently: by feeling what we perceive; by emotionally responding to what we perceive; by comprehending our own feelings. It is also possible to experience art in different ways: disinterestedly, hedonistically, emotionally. That we are able to experience emotion in different ways, and that we are able to perceive different kinds of emotional properties in a work of art, enables us to have plenary experiences of emotion. That the plenary experience is one of a number of possible ways of experiencing art, but a way that makes a special contribution to our flourishing, tells us something about the importance of this possibility for human life and, hence, about the place of art in life as a whole and, ultimately, about how we ought to approach the practice of life." (p. 170)