Saturday, July 03, 2010

Qualia and appreciation

In many cases, qualia provide the effective frame or rather guidance for evaluation in which one judges the value of a particular artifact.

It is certainly true that solid factual and contextual information about an artifact helps one in doing justice to it in the evaluation process. The knowledge about the historical backgrounds, cultural contexts, materials and techniques used, and what various people have said about the artifact certainly helps one in understanding the work of art. These are in fact the main ingredients of any scholastic work.

However, the full scope of subjective feelings that arise in one's mind cannot be effectively captured by the academic descriptions. Indeed, an adherence to the factual and contextual information often hinder, rather than enhance, the "true-to-life" appreciation of a work of art.

For example, when one stands before the painting "Girl with a pearl earring" by Johannes Vermeer, one has a certain set of emotions and feelings in a spectrum extending from the unconscious to the conscious. The various qualia in one's phenomenological perception, from colors to sheens and textures, characterize the phenomenology that is the "Girl with a pearl earring".


Girl with a pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer.

3 comments:

yuzu said...

Dear:Mr.Mogi
Vermeer is one of my favorite artist, I feel it is profoundly sweet.
Mr.Mogi teaches something marvelous view again.
I understand it,I think.
I will think of it more by myself. Thank you very much.

Greg said...

It seems that the academic descriptions reside at some higher level of abstraction in relation to qualia. (I have to admit my ignorance of the nature of quale and reveal that I am thinking of them as "sense perceptions" in the interim.) I wonder if a set of quale, whether they are consciously or unconsciously discerned, are connecting with, constructing, or revising a cognitive construction of some sort that includes some of those academic descriptions, such as historical and social context as well as scholarly analysis. When I consider the ideas you have presented, I imagine a "molecule of thought" forming and floating somewhere in my mind.

renpoo said...

What you've recognized is similar to my master's comment. He is an old painter in realism. He said "you have to go to the museums to face directly to those compositions". I kept myself to do it, but now it became hard for me since I got a schezophrenie.