Response to Josh

Does art need to express to the artist at all?

            Cognitive art or art intended to make people think would not be expressing the artist’s emotions. Artists could also create a work intending to communicate an emotion to an audience instead of trying to understand more about their own emotions. People can understand what anger means and aim to communicate it without figuring out the unique aspects of their own emotions. Art could also be intended for the artist to develop their skills or to make them think without it being based around emotion, although I think most art has an emotional component. An artist could also fully understand their emotion having previously expressed it and intend a work of art as a way to revisit it. They could use art to reflect on their past. I suppose art could also be made as an attempt to understand someone else emotionally rather than the artist trying to understand their own emotions. Art could also be used to reflect on the subconscious an emotional response might then be secondary. Someone could also make art for the sake of beauty or to challenge the current standards. Many reasons exist for creating art that do not have to contain an expressive component.

            For any artists out there, what do you think you are trying to do when you create art? Express, communicate, challenge, etc?  

Response to Natalie

It is true that instinct comes prior to emotion, but without emotion would we use our instincts?

            I think that instincts come prior to emotion and can exist without emotion. An instinct is a response to stimuli that people are born with. They do not have the chance to use emotion or thought before acting on them. I suppose an instinctual behavior would be one that is acted upon without any learning or a reflex. An instinct could potentially be learned if it becomes a pattern of behavior acted upon without thought. I think we could have an emotional response after an instinct or in reaction to an instinct. Fleeing from a certain stimuli would probably occur before someone realized they were feeling fear. I guess we could have an instinctual emotional reaction, but not all instincts would involve emotion. Instinct is inherent, unlearned and probably the same throughout the majority of the species. Emotions are subjective and emotional dispositions are often included in the way we describe our personalities. I think emotions and instinct are closely linked. We react to stimuli without thought in instinct and we often seem to have emotional responses before we think through a situation. If we have an emotional response before thinking about something then this would fit under the category of instinct. Emotions also come from thinking about a situation though and instinct does not.

            How closely related are instinct and emotion?

Response to Brycen

Therefore, a question that I pose is can art be an expression of ideas without being able to communicate to the audience?

            I think art can express ideas without communicating them to others. This occurs when someone uses art as a method of getting their own emotions out as a way to understand them. The expression helps the person who creates the art but is not intended for the viewer to understand and the viewer may not be able to understand. This is I think what Collingwood means by art as expression, art allows the artist to recognize, come to terms with and clarify their own emotions. This is not to say that art cannot be intended to communicate to the audience, but if it is the goal is probably not expression of emotions. When someone makes art with the intention of having an audience receive it a certain way, they lose the freedom to fully explore their own emotional situation. When someone uses art to express emotions they are not entirely clear on what the emotions are beforehand so they cannot make art as expression and communication. I suppose this would not be the case if someone fully understood the emotional place they were in and still felt the need to articulate it. Someone might do this if they thought it would help them move past the emotions they understand, but are still weighing them down. Then they would be expressing them with a full understanding and could have a secondary goal of showing them to an audience. People could also create a work of art originally simply because they wanted to communicate a certain emotion to the audience and it could evolve into an expression of their own emotions. They could also express emotions in such a way that it is easily communicated to an audience, but I do think it would be hard to at the same time intend to communicate to an audience and to really plumb the depths of one’s own complicated emotional reactions. I think someone could hope that their expression of emotions would be relatable to other people, even if it was not a strict communication of a certain emotion. If people made are to express emotions and impart the general idea of what they were feeling to an audience, these two goals could be compatible.

            Do you feel when viewing art that you are receiving emotional communications from the artist?    

Horror and Philosophy

               I found a discussion on a forum that analyzes The Philosophy of Horror by Noel Carroll, which I read for my book review, and reaches a lot of the same conclusions that I do.  He also writes that it is not clear why people would not watch fantasy instead of horror and that it does not include human’s that act like monsters. He adds a criticism that if monsters are expected to appeal to our curiosity, then Carroll’s argument does not explain why we would watch films about the same monsters. It would seem that overtime vampires would stop inspiring curiosity and would start to seem normal. He does not mention that idea of breaking category distinctions that is so important to Carroll’s theory, but I think this is what is intended to be appealing to curiosity so it is somewhat implied. Overall I think the post at the top of the page on this forum is a good, quick look at horror and philosophy. He also finds that getting scared is an important part of horror even though Carroll finds fear to be a secondary part of horror and not why most people would read or watch it. I would agree that at least some of the appeal of horror has to do with the fear and other emotions like disgust that it inspires. Otherwise people would be content with non-horror fantasy and it is clear by the persistence of the horror genre that they are not.  

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/why-do-we-enjoy-horror-films-28527.html

Why do you think people enjoy horror?