Edelman (1992: 176):
What is perhaps most extraordinary about conscious human beings is their art — their ability to convey feelings and emotions symbolically and formally in external objects such as poems, paintings, or symphonies. The summaries of conscious states constrained by history, culture, specific training, and skill that are realised in works of art are not susceptible to the methods of scientific analysis. Again there is no mystification in this denial, for understanding and responding to these objects requires reference to ourselves in a social and symbolic mode. No external, objective analysis, even if possible, supplants the individual responses and intersubjective exchange that takes place within a given tradition and culture.
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, human art, like higher-order consciousness, is made possible by language. The construal of experience as linguistic meaning provides the raw material for, not only the expression of those meanings across various artistic forms, but also for the reconstrual of meaning as the meaning of theories of art, such as music theory, thereby further expanding the potential of artistic expression.
The reason why such matters are not susceptible to the methods of scientific analysis is that Galilean science is only concerned with the material-relational domain ('primary qualities'), not with the mental-verbal domain ('secondary qualities') that processes meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment