Dear Keith,
Re: David Brooks. I like that he popularizes ideas, some of which I recognize, and others that poke at my thoughts. I also read him out of interest in his writing style, which is very simple-sentenced and direct. Perhaps you’re not allowed to write about ideas at the NYT unless you commit to a straight declarative jacket. But I also feel sorry for someone whose conservative raison d’etre has run off and left him at the alter, holding all those addictive gifts from his W. F. Bucklian past.
I think you’re right. “The significance of affects in all of this needs radical attention.” A non naïve thinker feels/knows that they and their thinking are in the world and that the thinking that has risen into their attention out of the flow of their experience has been thrown forward for reasons they will want/need to probe and contemplate. “Hmmm, they might think, that ‘lipstick on your collar’ thing may be trying to tell me something.” Affect: mysterious, curious, serious, urgent? Problem?
I like what Mark Johnson says about embodied meaning in experience being relational in its flow. That it “means” by reaching back into the embodied history of a present situation and forward into what it might entail. So the awareness of my delight with the evil character in a film or play, as you point out, has to do with the present situation and need not mean I’m going to be all right tomorrow with stealing a loaf of bread.
So right, yes, “Affects are the bindings of cognitive events and, as such, they require their own attention.” Except maybe they need to be characterized less as “things,” as Mark Johnson says, and more actively as an integral ingredient in the conative, affective, cognitive processing of qualitative situations in the flow of experience.
Thanks for the neo-Nietzchean insights and thoughts. I hadn’t thought of Antonio Damasio as a “rather gentle philosopher,” but after thinking back about his modest presentation of an immodest scope in The Strange Order of Things, it seems particularly apt.
Warm wishes,
Jerry
Jerry Diethelm
Architect Landscape Architect
Planning & Urban Design Consultant
Prof. Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
and Community Service • University of Oregon
2652 Agate St., Eugene, OR 97403
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