Dear Jinan,
I’m not missing your point, I’m dodging it.
Common to drawings and writing is the process of visualization as old as History is. Why is that? Even people interested in brain hemispheres or in the flamboyant aesthetics of scientific knowledge should adhere to this question. We must not neglect that alphabets are drawings and each word a drawing is. We must question ourselves why visualization was the process by which translation of verbal language become universal and considered, as you say, a vehicle for “thinking”. There is nothing in the “proposal of writing” that says: we will conjure you to think! What writing does is to fixate what is verbalized in a visual manner. Some verbalizations makes you think, others don’t. Over the years, centuries, we tend to forget and believe that those visual signs conveys you directly to thought. You don’t even think that they are visual!
Some years ago, listening was also a vehicle for thinking. Reading loud was sometimes a social event and Radio a big thing. People used telephones for conversing instead of texting! However, more and more, seeable words overwhelmingly took over.
Nevertheless, some of my American friends, accustomed to long commuting travels, use audio books to occupy the otherwise idle hours of going home to work. There is no doubt that audio books only use words that are not confused with printed or written words. So, oblivious of their fastidious roads, they think, hearing words that being listened can only produce thoughts. Now imagine that I’m driving listening to Thomas Piketty’s Capital. Will I understand what he is writing without seeing the graphs and tables? A “Capital in the 21st century” audio book would only work if someone could describe verbally graphs and tables. Boring or not, that description would with no doubt conjure thoughts, but a special kind of thoughts: imagination. *
And this connects with Terry’s post.
Feynman’s imagination allows him to see the beauty in what he (really only) knows. Whereas, his artist (if a good one) friend was navigating through Van Gogh’s, Josefa D’Obidos, R. Harmenszoon Van Rijn or Zurbarán flowers, he, rightly looked for a sense (a sensible sense) in what he knew inside the flower both were looking at.
( I must interlude here and state my opinion about flowers: they are the way Nature found to exemplify what Corny is. It is very rare that a real artist will call upon beauty in flowers, at least in our days)
What I am saying is that even the twisted, uncultivated and rudimentary notion of aesthetics claimed in Feynmman’s parable requires imagination.
So to the question "does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?” I will answer YES, if the lower forms are human.
Why is it aesthetic? It is not! Aesthesis deals with with non rational knowledge. That’s why Baumgarten invented the word. It means that is not "science knowledge (that) only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower". It is precisely the part of science knowledge that is not scientific that adds excitement, mystery and awe. On the other hand, are real lower forms perceptions aesthetic? No, because aesthetic perception is defined as different form rational or abstract perception. We can only talk about aesthetically perception as something possible in organisms able to differentiate forms of perception.”
The lessons in this parable, however, deal with imagination and how imagination is conjured both by drawings and written texts.
For that matter, Feynmman’s final interrogation depends only from his friend stupidity and not from any real question about art and science. Any fine artist, at least since Leonardo, would probably not only find Feynmman’s views an addition to purely artistic purposes but would probably steal as much as he/she could from these visions.
Best regards,
Eduardo
* Can you imagine Design PhD dissertations transformed in audio books?
> No dia 19/10/2015, às 09:18, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> escreveu:
>
> does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.
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