“No Pain and No Consciousness”

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-94
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Material World ◽  
Physical Discomfort ◽  
Embodied Consciousness ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Alice James

This chapter examines pain’s importance to the sensitized, embodied consciousness valued by William, Henry, and Alice James. All three siblings disdained what Henry once called “the odd numbness of the general sensibility.” Yet William insisted that an individual’s higher capacities along with a more profound reality could best be accessed while physicality was numbed and waking consciousness was suppressed. For him anesthesia provided a gateway to the higher reaches of consciousness that his two siblings typically anchored in the feeling, suffering body. Henry and Alice repeatedly represent pain as comparable to an intense aesthetic experience in that it arouses the senses, increases responsiveness to stimuli, and heightens consciousness while still tethering the sufferer to the material world. They both count themselves among the rare few who possess this capacity for an aesthetic aliveness to suffering, which distinguishes them from purportedly less animate humans who in their assessment suffer less and hence invariably live less. Both siblings simultaneously stage the reconciliation of physical discomfort with material comfort at a time when their peers tended to view the two conditions as fundamentally antagonistic.

O Ceticismo de George Berkeley na Leitura de Thomas Reid

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (57) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Vinícius França Freitas ◽  
Keyword(s):  
George Berkeley ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Senses ◽  
In Virtue Of

The paper advances two hypotheses concerning Thomas Reid’s reading of George Berkeley’s immaterialist system. First, it is argued that, on Reid’s view, Berkeley is skeptic about the existence of the objects of the material world, not in virtue of a doubt about the senses but for his adoption of the principle that ideas are the immediate objects of the operations of mind. On Reid’s view, that principle is a skeptical principle by its own nature. Secondly, it is argued that Berkeley really accepts in his system the notion of ‘idea’ such as Reid understands it, namely, as an entity distinct from mind and its operations.

The Natural History of Aesthetics

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-239
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Material World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Histories

Art has been crucial for Western philosophy roughly since Kant – that is, for what is becoming known as “correlationist” philosophy – because it has so often had assigned to it a singular ontological status. The artwork, in this view, is material being that has been transfigured and shot through with subjectivity. The work of art, what art does and how it works have all been understood as mediating between the otherwise irreconcilable opposites of historical spirit and the mute material world, between communicative thought and the unresponsiveness otherness of nature. I revisit this aesthetic tradition from the perspective of the Anthropocene, the proposed name of the new geological epoch of the present, distinguished by the fact that collective human action has now acquired the scale of a world-shaping natural force. The Anthropocene is at once a geological epoch and a historical period. What forms of narrative might possibly relate these two temporal orders together? What other aesthetic categories might help us think through the conceptual impasse of the Anthropocene present? How might aesthetic experience illuminate the history of Anthropocene? What natural histories might artworks tell today? My speculative endpoint: the Anthropocene globe is the universal artwork of the contemporary moment.

The Avant-Garde and Technology: Toward Technological Fundamentalism in Turn-of-the-Century Europe

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Trommler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Material World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Technology ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Art Works ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe

The ArgumentThe avant-garde's fascination with technology around 1900 grew out of several motivations: to shock the antitechnological bourgeois public; to experience a sense of mastery toward the material world, especially with cars, airplanes, and other machines; and to overcome the nineteenth-century separation of art and technology. The article highlights the radical shifts in the perception of technology that correspond with the emerging hands-on encounter with technological objects in homes, cities and at the workplace at the turn of the century. This technological fundamentalism differed sharply from the anxious and symbolically mediated approach to the “materialism” of the machine in the nineteenth century. It was accompanied by a concept of liberation through technological purity which is reflected by the fact that Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier did not just design functional objects but also made special efforts to accentuate their functionalism as part of the aesthetic experience of modernity. As French and Italian artists, especially the Futurists, incorporated speed, virility, and the experience of the elementary in the metaphoric construction of technology, they even expressed a kinship with those painters and sculptors who shifted their focus to the rediscovery of the “primitive” magic in the art works from Africa and Polynesia

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Johannes Riquet
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Material World ◽  
Global Space ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
The One ◽  
Fictional Representations

Drawing on (post-)phenomenological and geopoetic perspectives, the introduction explains the book’s interest in considering islands at the intersection of material and poetic production on the one hand, and aesthetic experience of the phenomenal world on the other. It suggests that the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space, and that fictional and non-fictional representations of islands negotiate these perceptual challenges. It thereby explains how The Aesthetic of Island Space complicates the common account of islands as discrete shapes, geometrical abstractions, and easily understandable images. Instead, it foregrounds the importance of water, mobility, and a range of dynamic geo(morpho)logical and poetic processes in the figuration of islands. The introduction ends by discussing the significance of considering islands in relation to an ‘aesthetics of the earth’ (DeLoughrey and Handley) and a poetics of the material world.

The Role of the Senses in Aesthetic Experience

1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Francis J. Kovach ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Senses

scholarly journals 'I am someone who's supposed to be me': The identity of a (post)human subject in Don DeLillo's 'Zero K'

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Nataša Milojević
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Material World ◽  
Embodied Consciousness ◽  
A Site

The isolated space which the protagonists of Don DeLillo's novel Zero K inhabit proves to be a site where the (re)configuration of human evolution takes place, therefore providing the grounds for the analysis of the concepts of both human and posthuman subject. The analysis of the novel in reference to the posthuman theories, which prove to be as divergent and multiple as the posthuman subject itself, serves to examine the essence of the posthuman subject's identity formation, given that the plot portrays two different conceptions of the modern human subject. The examination of the relevance of technology in the interaction between humans and machines serves to corroborate the claim that the technologically generated isolation of cryonically suspended subjects does not necessarily imply the birth of a posthuman subject. Given that its roots can be traced within the Cartesian tradition, the transhumanist vision portrayed in the novel reconstructs the hierarchically structured framework. The posthuman thought, therefore, emerges out of the interconnected, unremitted game generated by the never-ending quest for the image of a unified self. The aforementioned posthuman thought, however, does not arise from the amalgamation of the material world and a genderless, bodiless, numb statue, but it emanates as a blend of materiality and a dynamic, intertwined, embodied consciousness.

Strange Objects, Counterfeits, and Reproductions

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-108
Author(s):  
Filip Mattens
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Material World ◽  
Perceptual Presence ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Material Things ◽  
The Way

Our different senses put us in contact with the same world. In this paper, I use unusual objects and situations to bring out structural dissimilarities in the way our senses relate to the same world of material objects. In the first part, I briefly discuss the perceptual presence of spatial and material things. Using uncommon objects allows me to treat this issue without any need to invoke what it is like to have visual experiences. What comes to the fore in these analyses, however, seems less obvious in experiences of the other senses. Therefore, in the second part, I propose a strategy, invoking unusual situations, to weed out the multisensory associations that enrich our normal relation to objects, in order to get a better grip on the perceptual correlate of the different senses. Although the actual correlates of the senses may not be material objects in each case, I explain why they are nonetheless occurrences in a spatial and material world.

scholarly journals Powtórzenie niemożliwe. O estetycznym doświadczeniu przeszłości w Pannach z Wilka Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irena Górska
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Favourable Attitude ◽  
The Past ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Past Experiences

The author attempts to describe the aesthetic experiences of the past lived by the protagonist of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s The Wilko Girls, and answer the question about the possibility of repetition. Elaborating on the arguments proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science and by Søren Kierkegaard in Repetition, the author proves that even with a favourable attitude to one’s own past, an attempt to repeat past experiences is impossible. Nothing can be experienced again. The past is closed. The possibility of only partial access to it is created by human sensuality referring to the notion of aisthesis, which is the source of aesthetic experience. The senses stimulated by various sounds, smells, tastes, images, and the accompanying memories and emotions, constitute a vast spectrum of aesthetic experiences, making the experience of the past an existential experience of time.

scholarly journals Rola „zmysłów wiary” w zrozumieniu sakrametów inicjacji chrześcijańskiej według Cyryla Jerozolimskiego

Vox Patrum ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 297-308
Author(s):  
Piotr Szczur
Keyword(s):  
Material World ◽  
Christian Initiation ◽  
Spiritual Senses ◽  
The Senses

St. Cyril of Jerusalem (circa 315-387) in his catecheses before baptism often refers to a feeling of the physical senses – what catechumens have heard and what their “corporeal eyes” have seen. The experience of the physical senses, after Christian initiation, took on a new meaning. Therefore, in his later delivered mystagogical catecheses, based on the thoughts of earlier Christian writers (espe­cially of Origen), he introduced a new set of senses – “spiritual senses”, “senses of faith”, which were according to him the essential key to the correct perception of the divine reality, which is located outside of the visible material world. According to Cyril the feelings of “spiritual senses” – “senses of faith” were closely related to the rituals of initiation. He assumed that each baptized person is able to use the “senses of faith”. Although Cyril does not devalue the feelings of the physical senses, he does not attach too great importance to them. He attaches much more importance to the feelings of the spiritual senses, which always subordinated the physical senses. The article discussed the role of the senses – physical and spiri­tual, which were important in the catechesis of Cyril, because they helped in un­derstanding the essence of the liturgy of the sacraments of initiation.

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