A friend of mine was fortunate or unfortunate enough to visit one of those lyrical Welsh border towns
where the English bien pensants migrate to and use as weekend cottages to ...'write, paint, oh you know...jut think.
All the people (4) she interviewed laid claim to the fact that their real problem in life was they
we well...you know, deeply sensitive people. Now you might think the avowal that you are a deeply sensitive person...is...well not a very sensitive thing to say.
Which bring me to the late Susan Sontag's thoughts on sensibility.
"Though I am speaking about sensibility only - and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual,
that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason.
They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art.
But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive.
There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and
good taste in people and taste in ideas.
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
So to the claim that ' I am a deeply senstive person" must be grounded in a sensibility
and any sensibility that can be packaged or crammed into an overall mold and then presented to the
'other' (this extremly bright interviewer) as a package. And how do these sensitive people
come to the conclusion that they are peculiary sensitive, well they use what are the only means
available to them - the rough inevitably biased tools of truth,
If you want to access Bosco Redmond on your Kindle
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-blogs&field-keywords=bosco+redmond
where the English bien pensants migrate to and use as weekend cottages to ...'write, paint, oh you know...jut think.
All the people (4) she interviewed laid claim to the fact that their real problem in life was they
we well...you know, deeply sensitive people. Now you might think the avowal that you are a deeply sensitive person...is...well not a very sensitive thing to say.
Which bring me to the late Susan Sontag's thoughts on sensibility.
"Though I am speaking about sensibility only - and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual,
that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason.
They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art.
But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive.
There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and
good taste in people and taste in ideas.
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
So to the claim that ' I am a deeply senstive person" must be grounded in a sensibility
and any sensibility that can be packaged or crammed into an overall mold and then presented to the
'other' (this extremly bright interviewer) as a package. And how do these sensitive people
come to the conclusion that they are peculiary sensitive, well they use what are the only means
available to them - the rough inevitably biased tools of truth,
If you want to access Bosco Redmond on your Kindle
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-blogs&field-keywords=bosco+redmond
No comments:
Post a Comment