“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, February 18, 2012

Fear! My Favorite Emotional State!

Oh, the levels, the levels: fear helps you to appreciate art. Jean-Luc Marion or Alphonso Lingis could've told you THAT!

Oh, and I note that he works at Chris Schaberg's place!

2 comments:

Schizostroller said...

Does this fit with the old chesnut that when there is greater economic insecurity, the art gets better?

Schizostroller said...

It's one of those really annoying things that you don't log a pssing titbit of information and then can't find the source when you need it.

However i remember reading about an experiment that measured whether the well-acknowledged perception that time slows down when you experience fear (I remember it happening when i rolled my car) meant that your reactions improved. I remeber the test subjects were test pilots but if i remember correctly there was no real difference.

However this was measuring physical reaction as opposed to the thinking time - how is that measurable? - as the theory that led to this experiment is that one of the purposes of fear is to slow us down to assess the situation (as opposed to our 'actual' thinking-acting speed), if there is something to that could this have something to do with the ability to take in more abstract aesthetic experience?