Religious music does weird things to me

[Brant Gaede]

Greg needs a new brain. Time for the first human brain transplant. From a liberal. I've got one on the shelf--I mean, in the cooler.

He won't mind because he's not his brain.

That means it's a win win for both us and him. (I need to get rid of it before it turns good by turning bad.)

--Brant

honest

[moralist]

Yeah, think of how far "common sense" would get you while flying an aircraft in zero visibility.

What a silly thing to say, Jonathan. That you could actually make a statement like that is evidence that you don't even know what common sense is. No one who HAD common sense would ever fly an aircraft in zero visibility without instruments and the ability to properly interpret them.

Common sense is the ability to navigate through this world intact.

Think about it.

Greg

(edited)

[Ellen Stuttle]

I think that what she was talking about in that context was visual art, not art generically.

She used her definition's genus in the statement. She said, "As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational..." That is the same thing as saying, "As a work of art, a work of art has to be representational." There is no getting around the fact that she is referring to her criteria of all art

The start of the sentence refers to her definition. It doesn't therefore follow, despite your insistence that it must, that she was talking about all art in the whole sentence.

No, I don't think that she thought that literature doesn't have to be intelligible.

Why don't you think that? After all, you claim that she was only talking about visual art in that statement. You seem to be randomly picking and choosing which aspects of the statement that you want to apply to all art and which that you want to apply only to visual art.

She wrote lots on literature. She thought that literature had to be intelligible. Again, this doesn't mean that she was talking about literature in that sentence. I wonder, what do you suppose she thought "nonrepresentational" literature is?

The statement doesn't make sense interpreted as you interpret it, since Rand didn't think that music - or architecture, or dance as such - present "subjects," intelligible or otherwise. (Also, she specifically said that architecture doesn't "re-create reality.")

You're confusing the concept of "subject" with the concept of "subject matter." Rand's requirement that all art must have an intelligible subject applies to all of the arts, including music, architecture and dance: She expected and required them to be about something [and so on].

Jonathan, you can continue inventing to suit yourself things which you say Rand thought which don't agree with what she wrote. The enterprise has become similar to the way you take as her "rational definition of 'subjective'" a sentence (from the same article) which wasn't presented as a definition of "subjective" at all but instead as a description of "perceptual consciousness," and then you say she was contradicting another statement which was about "subjective" (in the same article).

There are features of her presentation on music which I'd like to get into critiquing - but the actual features, not the pseudo ones you're progressively weaving into your caricature of Rand on music.

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

Yeah, think of how far "common sense" would get you while flying an aircraft in zero visibility.

What a silly thing to say, Jonathan. That you could actually make a statement like that is evidence that you don't even know what common sense is. No one who lacked common sense would ever fly an aircraft in zero visibility without instruments and the ability to properly interpret them.

Common sense is the ability to navigate through this world intact.

Think about it.

Greg

I agree. Screw reason and scientific methodology.

--Brant

it's commonsensical

[moralist]

Yeah, think of how far "common sense" would get you while flying an aircraft in zero visibility.

What a silly thing to say, Jonathan. That you could actually make a statement like that is evidence that you don't even know what common sense is. No one who HAD common sense would ever fly an aircraft in zero visibility without instruments and the ability to properly interpret them.

Common sense is the ability to navigate through this world intact.

Think about it.

Greg

I agree. Screw reason and scientific methodology.

--Brant

it's commonsensical

Hah, Thanks for catching that, Brant!

Greg

[william.scherk]

Can music 'communicate' meanings?  Can a piece of music 'engender' emotion in the experiencer? Lots of arguments in this thread -- which thread did not ultimately contain much data from scientific study.

On 11/13/2014 at 4:56 PM, Jonathan said:

We're discussing aesthetics and the limits of communication in the non-verbal arts. Not morality. The issue here is whether or not music can communicate meanings, not how superior you imagine yourself to be morally. Try to focus. Try to get control over yourself.

From Science Daily: Music-induced emotions can be predicted from brain scans.

Journal Reference:

1. Vesa Putkinen, Sanaz Nazari-Farsani, Kerttu Seppälä, Tomi Karjalainen, Lihua Sun, Henry K Karlsson, Matthew Hudson, Timo T Heikkilä, Jussi Hirvonen, Lauri Nummenmaa. Decoding Music-Evoked Emotions in the Auditory and Motor Cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 2020; DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhaa373

[Jonathan]

Cool. Tanx.