Chapter 4. Sounds

DWill · Unread post Wed Aug 27, 2008 9:19 pm

Tom, I think I was doing with the word "sensualist" something similar to what Thoreau himself liked to do--reconsider a word based on what its root suggests, rather than go along with the commonly accepted meaning. Thoreau seemed to hold sight and hearing in higher regard than the senses of taste and touch--the senses a common sensualist would be be likely to prize. Still, they are senses just as much as the others. The Eastern mystical ideal that he reveres would entail freeing oneself from attachment to all the senses, not just to the "grosser" ones of taste and touch.

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

Thomas Hood · Unread post Thu Aug 28, 2008 12:05 am

DWill wrote:Romanticism as the rediscovery of feeling?

Yes, it is my understanding of European cultural history that Romanticism rediscovered feeling. Science discounts feeling on the ground that it is imposed by the viewer and is similar to a prejudice. In shallow reactions I grant that the expression "poetic fallacy" does apply. However, sincere poetic perception involves discovery of objective feeling.

I do not have a good handle on how this insight into the nature of things occurs, but I believe it is covered by modern psychology in the terms sensorimotor, ideomotor, and gestalt. Through our enactment in imagination, we experienced the feeling of the object in accord with the James-Lange theory of feeling.

This thread may be relevant to the topic:

http://www.booktalk.org/post36964.html#36964
Ch. 1: The Feeling of Knowing

Tom

WildCityWoman · Unread post Fri Sep 05, 2008 1:09 am

This reading of both chapters 3 and 4 tonight, led me to go to the window and feel the natural breeze, watching the trees sway for a few minutes.

And I wonder if that's just what the author intended . . . if he was conscious that someday people would read his story and enrich their lives with it.

Saffron · Unread post Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:51 am

Thomas Hood

Yes, it is my understanding of European cultural history that Romanticism rediscovered feeling....

I don't really think you can call Romanticism a rediscovery of feelings. No one ever forgot about feelings. The Rationalist in their zealous embracing of the scientific method, rationality and reason had discounted intuition and feeling as legitimate ways of knowing. They elevated reason and the scientific method to the highest form of seeking truth and knowledge, relegating feeling to the bottom of the trash heap. Romanticism rejected this notion of reason as the only true path to knowlege.

The following passage, copied from the Brooklyn College website, is useful. I have condensed a bit.

Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason...Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within.

The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity...On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

Saffron · Unread post Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:11 am

Thomas Hood

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?

Saffron · Unread post 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.

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 · Unread post 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 · Unread post 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 · Unread post Fri Sep 05, 2008 1:52 pm

Saffron wrote:Thomas Hood
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 · Unread post 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

Chapter 4. Sounds

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