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| Bibliography | Author's Preface |
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| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | Conclusion | Index |
says, "You are here!")|
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(Most quotes verbatim Henri Louis Bergson, some paraphrased.) |
(Relevant to Pirsig, William James Sidis, and Quantonics Thinking Modes.) |
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"The aesthetic feelings offer us a still more striking
example of this progressive stepping in
"And as those movements are easy which prepare the way for others, we are led to find a superior ease in the movements which can be foreseen, in the present attitudes in which future attitudes are pointed out and, as it were, prefigured. If jerky movements are wanting in grace, the reason is that each of them is self-sufficient and does not announce those which are to follow. If curves are more graceful than broken lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes its direction at every moment, every new direction is indicated in the preceding one. Thus the perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present. A third element comes in when the graceful movements submit to a rhythm and are accompanied by music. For the rhythm and measure, by allowing us to foresee to a still greater extent the movements of the dancer, make us believe that we now control them. As we guess almost the exact attitude which the dancer is going to take, he seems to obey us when he really takes it: the regularity of the rhythm establishes a kind of communication between him and us, and the periodic returns of the measure are like so many invisible threads by means of which we set in motion this imaginary puppet. Indeed, if it stops for an instant, our hand in its impatience cannot refrain from making a movement, as though to push it, as though to replace it in the midst of this movement, the rhythm of which has taken complete possession of our thought and will." |
(Our bold, color, and violet bold italic problematics.) Bergson restarts his footnote counts on each page. So to refer a footnote, one must state page number and footnote number. Our bold and color highlights follow a code:
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| 13 | "Thus a kind of physical sympathy
enters into the feeling of grace. Now, in analysing the charm
of this sympathy, you will find that it pleases you through its
affinity with moral sympathy, the idea of which it subtly suggests.
This last element, in which the others are merged after having
in a measure ushered it in, explains the irresistible attractiveness
of grace. We could hardly make out why it affords us such pleasure
if it were nothing
but a saving of effort, as Spencer maintains. (1)
But the truth is that in anything which we call very graceful
we imagine ourselves able to detect, besides the lightness
which is a sign of mobility, some suggestion of a possible movement towards ourselves,
of a virtual and even nascent sympathy.
It is this mobile sympathy, always ready
to offer itself, which is just the essence of higher grace.
Thus the increasing intensities of aesthetic feeling are here
resolved into as many different feelings, each one of which,
already heralded by its predecessor, becomes perceptible in it
and then completely eclipses it. It is this qualitative progress
which we interpret as a change of magnitude, because we
like simple thoughts and because our
language is ill-suited to render the subtleties of psychological
analysis. "To understand how the feeling of the beautiful itself admits of degrees, we should have to submit to a [m]inute [This word, "inute" is original. We suspect it is archaic for inutile. Or perhaps it is mute mistyped. It could also be minute. We think Bergson means beauty's qualitative quintessence is inaccessible via classical analytic and objective lingual techniques. It would be like seeing a beautiful woman's image in a mirror, then breaking said mirror to understand her beauty. Consider! That is exactly what Subject-Object Metaphysics (SOM), philosophy, science, language, and mathematics do to reality! Doug, 20Feb2001.] analysis." Note (1): Essays, (Library Edition, 1891), Vol. ii, p. 381. |
(Our brackets, bold, color, and violet bold italic problematics.)
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| 14 | "Perhaps the difficulty which
we experience in
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(Our bold, color, link, and violet bold italic problematics.)
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| 15 | "If musical sounds affect us more powerfully than the sounds of nature, the reason is that nature confines itself to expressing feelings, whereas music suggests them to us. Whence indeed comes the charm of poetry? The poet is he with whom feelings develop into images, and the images themselves into words which translate them while obeying the laws of rhythm. In seeing these images pass before our eyes we in our turn experience the feeling which was, so to speak, their emotional equivalent: but we should never realize these images so strongly without the regular movements of the rhythm by which our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet. The plastic arts obtain an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator. While the works of ancient sculpture express faint emotions which play upon them like a passing breath, the pale immobility of the stone causes the feeling expressed or the movement just begun to appear as if they were fixed for ever, absorbing our thought and our will in their own eternity. We find in architecture, in the very midst of this startling immobility, certain effects analogous to those of rhythm." |
(Our bold, color, and violet bold problematics.)
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| 16 | "The symmetry of form, the indefinite repetition of the same architectural motive, causes our faculty of perception to oscillate between the same and the same again, and gets rid of those customary incessant changes which in ordinary life bring us back without ceasing to the consciousness of our personality: even the faint suggestion of an idea will then be enough to make the idea fill the whole of our mind. Thus art aims at impressing feelings on us rather than expressing them; it suggests them to us, and willingly dispenses with the imitation of nature when it finds some more efficacious means. Nature, like art, proceeds by suggestion, but does not command the resources of rhythm. It supplies the deficiency by the long comradeship, based on influences received in common by nature and by ourselves, of which the effect is that the slightest indication by nature of a feeling arouses sympathy in our minds, just as a mere gesture on the part of the hypnotist is enough to force the intended suggestion upon a subject accustomed to his control. And this sympathy is shown in particular when nature displays to us beings of normal proportions, so that our attention is distributed equally over all the parts of the figure without being fixed on any one of them: our perceptive faculty then finds itself lulled and soothed by this harmony, and nothing hinders any longer the free play of sympathy, which is ever ready to come forward as soon as the obstacle in its path is removed." |
(Our bold, color, violet bold italic problematics, and violet bold problematics.)
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| 17 | "It follows from this analysis
that the feeling of the beautiful is no
specific feeling, but that
every
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(Our bold, color, violet bold italic problematics, and violet bold problematics.)
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| 18 | "But the greater number of emotions are instinct with a thousand sensations, feelings or ideas which pervade them: each one is then a state unique of its kind and indefinable, and it seems that we should have to re-live the life of the subject who experiences it if we wished to grasp it in its original complexity. Yet the artist aims at giving us a share in this emotion, so rich, so personal, so novel, and at enabling us to experience what he cannot make us understand. This he will bring about by choosing, among the outward signs of his emotions, those which our body is likely to imitate mechanically, though slightly, as soon as it perceives them, so as to transport us all at once into the indefinable psychological state which called them forth. Thus will be broken down the barrier interposed by time and space between his consciousness and ours: and the richer in ideas and the more pregnant with sensations and emotions is the feeling within whose limits the artist has brought us, the deeper and the higher shall we find the beauty thus expressed. The successive intensities of the esthetic feeling thus correspond to changes of state occurring in us, and the degrees of depth to the larger or smaller number of elementary psychic phenomena which we dimly discern in the fundamental emotion." |
(Our brackets, bold and color, and violet bold italic problematics.) Students of quantonics may wish to take a look at our graphic of Bergson's I-cubed. His instinct corresponds QVF (quantum n¤nactuality). Our quantum stage minds are a quanton whose intellect is analytic or Static Quality (quantum actuality). Bergson's intuition sympathetically compenetrates both actuality/intellect and n¤nactuality/instinct. We also call QVF/n¤nactuality "reserve energy." We have already averred how our quantum stages may be thought of as SONs. Consider an important implication that "reserve energy" is also only partially describable manifolds quantum isocoherent SONs! Does It have a memory? Does it memorize reality and all its complex behaviors? Is this what we tap into when we access our reserve energy? Is this how our quantum multiverses preserve and reuse progress? |