With these notes I'll try to sum up any recent readings both to integrate what I'm learning, and to share more than just a status of whether I read or not in a given day :) I'll include rough citations, more for my benefit later than anything else. Today's books focused on emotions as portrayed in the arts, and the role of science in viewing the arts.
So for today...
On the essential significance to each other of art (as emotional communication) and humanity:
“There is a core of emotional communication that has to do with being human" (James Russell). Artists are all about this, and according to Ede, they have an "intuition for communication" drawing on others' inner lives because we are social [-emotional] beings. Art is viewed as a human universal related to our shared emotional nature. Artists have the special role of communicating these deeper parts of our shared experience, and they "touch us emotionally, even without clear or literal meaning" (Brown). They draw on something we seem to have inherent to all of us, underneath our outer differences of experience, culture, etc.- whether it's biology, evolution, the nature of consciousness and the human mind that we share, something... more on that after more readings. (Also a note- this universality does not exclude individuality; art clearly has a place for that. More on that later, too, when I find the right books.)
Sources:
Brown, 1996.
Ede, 2005.
