Chapter 4. Sounds

Saffron · Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:29 am


	DWill wrote: Romaniticism as the rediscovery of feeling? The 18th century had plenty to say about feeling, but this was pre-Romantic. Doesn't it have more to do with the discovery or belief that human feeling finds some correspondence in nature, has a home there? This may be why the so-called pathetic fallacy did not seem such an error or stretch to Thoreau. DWill

I am working on back to Thoreau and Thomas Hood's comments on the discussion DW mentioned we'd had about Thoreau as sensualist par excellence. The first step is to consider the place of nature in Romanticism.

Again, this is a condensed paragraph from the English Dept's webpage at Brooklyn college.


	Quote: While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"

Sounds like Thoreau to me.

The next step is to reiterate what DW said with regard to the term sensualist.

From Thefreedictionary.com

Noun 1. sensualist - a person who enjoys sensuality.

Now, let's see if I can pull all the pieces together. As defined above, I think is fair to say Thoreau was a sensualist. There is much supporting evidence in Walden for my assertion. I would go a step further to say that sensual experience, which again I would argue Thoreau had honed to an art and what makes his writing so powerful, was essential to the formation of his ideas.

Saffron · Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:53 am

Just an aside. One thing that I sometimes find very frustrating in these discussions is that we, myself included, get hung up on the limitations of the words and isms we use to describe. Words are fixed entities, with boundaries. When using a word such as sensualist or existentialist or romantic to describe a person, period of history or movement we unintentionally limit our ability to portray reality. No person is ever completely one thing or another. Thoreau for example was a Transcendentalist, but not every thought he ever had or every action can be described by this term. In fact if we use that concept or any other too freely when speaking of him we will lose the man. People are full of contradictions; there is no internal continuity of the sum of a person's actions, feeling and thoughts. For one thing we change over time; occasion radically. For another, people have been know to say one thing and do another. Thoreau is no exception. Sometimes I think we try too hard to make all the piece fit together, nicely and neatly.

DWill · Fri Sep 05, 2008 11:14 am


	Saffron wrote: . People are full of contradictions; there is no internal continuity of the sum of a person's actions, feeling and thoughts.

Politicians get skewered on this all the time. But they are in a peculiar business where they are expected to have some kind of robotic consistency. I agree with you fully. My knowledge of Walden had grow hazy (or maybe it always was), and I had an image of Thoreau as more rigid in beliefs than turns out to be the case after a somewhat careful reading. He gives you different looks, and he doesn't seem to be alarmed at the prospect of inconsistency. I agree about the tools and labels of intellectual history, too. They seem sophisticated but are fairly crude. They encapsulate and organize for us the welter of history; they serve our need to think we know how our times differ from the past. But do they reach truth as well as serve this need? In a partial way I'm sure they sometimes do. But this describes a very limited success. Skepticism is always warranted.

DWill

Thomas Hood · Fri Sep 05, 2008 1:52 pm

Saffron wrote:

Thomas Hood


	Quote: However, sincere poetic perception involves discovery of objective feeling.

Tom, could you explain this? I'm not sure I am reading this correctly. What do you mean by objective feeling?

I'll try, and the other posts too.

Suppose while driving down the road, a leaf blows on the road and you drive over it. Don't you cringe a little bit? When as a child you enjoyed breaking ice, wasn't it because in some degree you had dominion over the cold and the hard ice, as well as getting one up on your brothers? Such feelings are an inherent part of existence, with the same objective status as vision, smell, and taste. The jagged pattern of distruction gives us the cringe feeling, and this is an objective feature of experience, even when we realize it in imagination. Dark colors are inherently depressing, varying with stage of life. Imaging dressing little children in black business suits. Thus, "sincere poetic perception involves discovery of objective feeling." My opinion is that all insight, whether in geometry or art, involves such discovery of feeling.

Tom

DWill · Fri Sep 05, 2008 4:19 pm

Something to think about, Tom. I'm not used the idea of conjoining "objective" and "feeling," but I'll mull it over. Do you recall T.S. Eliot's term the "objective correlative"? I think that thereby an object becomes the stand-in or image of the feeling, in a poem for example. This could be related to your term, but I don't believe Eliot was necessarily claiming that the object had an inherent nature that was more or less true for anyone, only that the poet had made it speak to us in the context of the poem. In Robt. Frost's "Bereft," the speaker notes, "Out in the porch's sagging floor/Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,/Blindly struck at my knee and missed." He's makes dead leaves function for him in terms of his feeling of bereavement. So I tend to feel there is almost always subjectiveness in feeling and that few objects have inherent power to make us feel in a specified way. I know this goes against belief in archetypal images or Freudian symbology.

DWill

Robert Tulip · Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:48 pm


	DWill wrote: Something to think about, Tom. I'm not used the idea of conjoining "objective" and "feeling," but I'll mull it over. ... I tend to feel there is almost always subjectiveness in feeling and that few objects have inherent power to make us feel in a specified way. I know this goes against belief in archetypal images or Freudian symbology. DWill

DWill's comment here, and earlier posts in this thread, pick up how contrarian Thoreau was regarding the dominant paradigm of western epistemology. The scientific enlightenment held that truth was a property of statements, whereas the romantics and sensualists, among whom we should class Thoreau, found truth in experience and the disclosure of being. Thoreau found an objectivity within subjectivity, in his connection to the cosmos, revealed in his experiential feelings and moods. This is why he is so hated by the adherents of the mechanistic paradigm who run the world, because he articulates a coherent alternative cosmology that opens a path to cultural change. For such a 'subjective objectivity' our attunement to our surroundings reveals a power within nature of which we are entirely a part, not the alienated controllers of the Cartesian myth. RT

Thomas Hood · Sat Sep 06, 2008 11:31 am


	DWill wrote: I'm not used to the idea of conjoining "objective" and "feeling," but I'll mull it over. Do you recall T.S. Eliot's term the "objective correlative"?

Will, I am aware of Eliot's term, but my source is a book by a Canadian educator on the importance of kinesthesia in education. I do not remember the name of the author or the book, but have it in written notes somewhere. The book was self-published and donated by the author to university libraries.

Tom

WildCityWoman · Mon Sep 08, 2008 11:19 am

Robert Tulip wrote:


	DWill wrote: Something to think about, Tom. I'm not used the idea of conjoining "objective" and "feeling," but I'll mull it over. ... I tend to feel there is almost always subjectiveness in feeling and that few objects have inherent power to make us feel in a specified way. I know this goes against belief in archetypal images or Freudian symbology. DWill

DWill's comment here, and earlier posts in this thread, pick up how contrarian Thoreau was regarding the dominant paradigm of western epistemology. The scientific enlightenment held that truth was a property of statements, whereas the romantics and sensualists, among whom we should class Thoreau, found truth in experience and the disclosure of being. Thoreau found an objectivity within subjectivity, in his connection to the cosmos, revealed in his experiential feelings and moods. This is why he is so hated by the adherents of the mechanistic paradigm who run the world, because he articulates a coherent alternative cosmology that opens a path to cultural change. For such a 'subjective objectivity' our attunement to our surroundings reveals a power within nature of which we are entirely a part, not the alienated controllers of the Cartesian myth. RT

Robert, your posts are always thought provoking, and I can see you put a great deal of thought into them . . . I think what you are saying here reflects my thoughts.

My way of expressing same would be to say that the big money-makers, the movers and shakers, the corporate level folks . . . they find what Thoreau was doing to be distasteful because of the 'movement' that got started because of it.

And what mainly do they have against such 'movements', people trying to 'go back to the land', turning their backs on the entrapments created by these 'movers and shakers', these 'money-makers'.

People like that live and die by the gawd-fearin' dollar, and movements that encourage turning down what they have to sell, or systems designed to 'entrap' are seen as a 'threat' to the flow of money, to which they have become accustomed.

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