14 ideas
| 20429 | Most of us are too close to our own motives to understand them [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The motives we actually experience are too close to us to enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.30) | |
| A reaction: Fry is defending the role of art in clarifying and highlighting such things, but I am not convinced by his claim. We can grasp most of our motives with a little introspection, and those we can't grasp are probably too subtle for art as well. |
| 7861 | Libet says the processes initiated in the cortex can still be consciously changed [Libet, by Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Libet himself points out that the conscious decisions still have the power to 'endorse' or 'cancel', so to speak, the processes initiated by the earlier cortical activity: no action will result if the action's execution is consciously countermanded. | |
| From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 1.4 | |
| A reaction: This is why Libet's findings do not imply 'epiphenomenalism'. It seems that part of a decisive action is non-conscious, undermining the all-or-nothing view of consciousness. Searle tries to smuggle in free will at this point (Idea 3817). |
| 6660 | Libet found conscious choice 0.2 secs before movement, well after unconscious 'readiness potential' [Libet, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Libet found that a subject's conscious choice to move was about a fifth of a second before movement, and thus later than the onset of the brain's so-called 'readiness potential', which seems to imply that unconscious processes initiates action. | |
| From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.9 | |
| A reaction: Of great interest to philosophers! It seems to make conscious choices epiphenomenal. The key move, I think, is to give up the idea of consciousness as being all-or-nothing. My actions are still initiated by 'me', but 'me' shades off into unconsciousness. |
| 20424 | Imaginative life requires no action, so new kinds of perception and values emerge in art [Fry] |
| Full Idea: In the imaginative life no action is necessary, so the whole consciousness may be focused upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience. Hence we get a different set of values, and a different kind of perception | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.24) | |
| A reaction: Good. A huge range of human activities are like scientific experiments, where you draw on our evolved faculties, but put them in controlled conditions, where the less convenient and stressful parts are absent. War and sport. Real and theatrical tragedy. |
| 20427 | Everyone reveals an aesthetic attitude, looking at something which only exists to be seen [Fry] |
| Full Idea: It is only when an object exists for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it, …and then even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.29) | |
| A reaction: A painter of still life looks at things which exist for other purposes, with just the attitude which Fry attributes to the viewers of the paintings. We can encourage a child to look at a flower with just this attitude. |
| 20433 | 'Beauty' can either mean sensuous charm, or the aesthetic approval of art (which may be ugly) [Fry] |
| Full Idea: There is an apparent contradiction between two distinct uses of the word 'beauty', one for that which has sensuous charm, and one for the aesthetic approval of works of imaginative art where the objects presented to us are often of extreme ugliness. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.33) | |
| A reaction: The gouging of eyes in 'King Lear' was always the big problem case for aesthetics, just as nowadays it is Marcel Duchamp's wretched 'Fountain'. |
| 20430 | In life we neglect 'cosmic emotion', but it matters, and art brings it to the fore [Fry] |
| Full Idea: Those feelings unhappily named cosmic emotion find almost no place in life, but, since they seem to belong to certain very deep springs of our nature, do become of great importance in the arts. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.31) | |
| A reaction: Focus on the sublime was big in the romantic era, but Fry still sees its importance, and I don't think it ever goes away. Art styles which scorn the sublime are failing to perform their social duty, say I. |
| 20431 | Art needs a mixture of order and variety in its sensations [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The first quality that we demand in our [artistic] sensations will be order, without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed, and the other will be variety, without which they will not be fully stimulated. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.32) | |
| A reaction: He makes good claims, but gives unconvincing reasons for them. Some of us rather like 'troubled and perplexed' sensations. And a very narrow range of sensations could still be highly stimulated. Is Fry a good aesthetician but a modest philosopher? |
| 20423 | If graphic arts only aim at imitation, their works are only trivial ingenious toys [Fry] |
| Full Idea: If imitation is the sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, and are ever taken seriously by grown-up people. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.23) | |
| A reaction: But then you might say that same about fine wines. A mere nice taste is hardly worthy of grown ups, and yet lots of grown ups feeling quite passionately about it. What about Fabergé eggs? |
| 20428 | Popular opinion favours realism, yet most people never look closely at anything! [Fry] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary people have almost no idea of what things really look like, so that the one standard that popular criticism applies to painting (whether it is like nature or not) is the one which most people are prevented frm applying properly. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.29) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, though there is a streak of Bloomsbury artistic snobbery running through Fry. Ordinary people recognise photographic realism, so they can study things closely either in the reality or the picture, should they so choose. |
| 20432 | When viewing art, rather than flowers, we are aware of purpose, and sympathy with its creator [Fry] |
| Full Idea: In our reaction to a work of art (rather than a flower) there is the consciousness of purpose, of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse precisely the sensations we experience. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.33) | |
| A reaction: I think this is entirely right. I like the mention of 'sympathy' as well as 'purpose'. |
| 20425 | In the cinema the emotions are weaker, but much clearer than in ordinary life [Fry] |
| Full Idea: One notices in the visions of the cinematograph that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the conscious. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.25) | |
| A reaction: Fry had probably only seen very simple melodramas, but the general idea that artistic emotions are weaker than real life, but much clearer, is quite plausible. |
| 22688 | The Aristotelian idea that choices can be perceived needs literary texts to expound it [Nussbaum] |
| Full Idea: To show forth the Aristotelian claim that 'the decision rests with perception', we need - either side by side with a philosophical outline or inside it - literary texts which display the complexity, indeterminacy, and sheer difficulty of moral choice. | |
| From: Martha Nussbaum (The Golden Bowl, and Lit as Moral Philosophy [1983], II) | |
| A reaction: Berys Gaut observes that this depends on a particularist view of moral choice (usually seen as Aristotelian), with little interest in principles. |
| 20426 | For pure moralists art must promote right action, and not just be harmless [Fry] |
| Full Idea: To the pure moralist, accepting nothing but ethical values, to be justified, the life of the imagination must be shown not only not to hinder but actually to forward right action, otherwise it is not only useless but, by absorbing energies, harmful. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.26) | |
| A reaction: I think this is the sort of attitude you find in Samuel Johnson. Puritans even reject light music, which seems pleasantly harmless to the rest of us. 'Absorbing energies' doesn't sound much of an objection, and may not be the actual objection. |