Dotting the eyes.

Reflections on aesthetic for aesthetic's sake are, for all intents and purposes, rather useless.  Pondering beauty can not bring any results which have real-world applications, or at least one would assume so.  But still, so much is done merely for enjoyment and no other scope, why should this be any exception?  If for no other reason, let us reflect upon aesthetic just to flex our brains a bit and enjoy doing so.

A common question regarding the arts is how is it that people enjoy tragedies when the point of such works is to exhibit negative emotions?  So many works in so many art-forms across all genres - from fiction to fantasy - are focused entirely on the pains and woes of good people.  From sad songs to tragic plays to gritty movies to moving books, how do negative emotions give rise to pleasure?

This conundrum, however, is founded on an important mistake made from the get-go.  We assume that emotions can be classified into two large groups with sadness, grief, anger, disappointment and all the "negative ones" on one side and all the "positive ones" - surprise, joy, relief, excitement and so on- on the other.  We then ask how is it that elements on the negative side can give us a positive effect.  But we only put these things on the negative side because we thought they would give rise to a negative effect, and likewise for the positive side.  If we are questioning the very criterion with which we have formed our two large groups, evidently our method of organization was incorrect - for what was meant to be negative is acting as if it were positive!

I propose, therefore, that "positive" and "negative" are not inherent traits in an emotion, but rather an emotion gets its traits from the context in which it is put.  At once this seems foreign to us.  Can we contemplate a "sadness" without the negative aspect built-in?  Well, we can agree that sadness and disappointment are both negative emotions and still tell them apart, so there must be some other defining features to an emotion other than its polarity- it's emotional "shape" which we intuitively recognise, despite the fact that there exists no established word in the English vocabulary to describe such a concept (at least not yet).  And so I propose that we do not recognize emotions from one another by their polarity but by their shape.

Why then, do emotions appear outside the traditional positive/negative framework only in the arts?  This question is entirely misleading.  Very often we experience "good sadness" outside the arts, such as when we leave a place where we want to remain but know that leaving is so much more beneficial, or when we work ourselves to the bone and feel so depressed by the work, yet at the same time satisfied.  In both cases, as in many more, we feel an emotion we would typically identify as negative, but simultaneously that feeling invokes a positive response in us, such that we know that given the choice we would do it again.

And what then of a reverse case; a traditionally positive emotion causing a negative response?  Another common occurrence in everyday life, from feeling joy at another's expense, for example, or from indulging in a pleasure only to be wrecked by guilt afterwards.

From this analysis one can see how a dichotomy approach to organizing emotions is quite lacking. Rather than using such a cut and dry approach perhaps an approach which is based on the shapes of emotions and knowing that positive/negative responses arise from an emotion's context may be more useful- particularly in predicting how we will feel about our decisions after we have made them. 

And so it seems our intellectual indulgence has had a pragmatic result after all.

The Shape of the World.

The story of man is a vast and complex thing.  It's the stories of countless individuals contained within the stories of several cultures, which in turn are contained in the stories of several lands, which in turn constitute the story of the species.  Every individual's story is subdivided into even smaller stories, and the stories of the species as a whole is just a small fraction of the story of biological life.  It is, to be sure, a self-similar object in the respect that zooming in to any one part will show you a segment that is similar to the whole- but at the same time it is a chaotic object in the respect that no two points are identical.  To add to this conundrum it is not even clear where one story ends and one begins - where does "his" story become "their" story become "our" story?  By no means is the story of man a straightforward thing, and by no means is any meaningful description of it going to be straightforward.

At some points in time we observe that man lives in a fully autonomous manner while in others we observe that man lives in highly organized societies.  Taking into account the continuity of the story in question, there must be a point between these two where society arose from a collection of individuals.  And since, as previous stated, this story is a self-similar one, there must be countless events dotted through history of societies rising from individuals- at all levels of scale- from simple individuals banding together to form a sports club to the merging of companies or the amalgamation of countries.

At all these points of amalgamation, a group realises that its co-ordination is overall more beneficial to them than their individual toils.  However the exact grounds on which this organization is to be formed is not so evident.  To many of those who realise the benefits of organizations but do not know how to achieve and maintain it a strategy of force and fear seems the only path, especially in cases where full co-operation is difficult to accomplish.

At several points through history, and even today, organization is established and preserved by means of a governing body wielding some economical or military force which then forces others into submission either by direct and violent confrontation or by methods of fear and coercion.  From schools which push children by threatening sanctions to workplaces which dangle the threat of termination over their employees to governments which threaten their citizens with incarceration this method of organization is evident in almost every facet of life throughout history.

Granted that in the past, when man was intelligent enough to the see the benefits of the ends, but not the proper implementation of the means, this approach was an unavoidable tactic which had to be employed for the greater good.

However, just as we moved from individual toils to organized societies so can our thinking mature from one pushed by fear to one pulled by aspiration.  Should a society be constructed appropriately- that is founded on sound laws which are derived from indisputable axioms using infallible logic- the several individuals which constitute the society need not be coerced. Rather they need be educated so as to garner the understanding of the laws themselves and so be driven to obedience not by fear but by the will to see the fulfilment of society's ends which in turn - if society has been correctly constructed- will fulfil their own ends.

That is not to say that there should be no response to the infringement of law, but rather that this response should be one that exists to educate the perpetrator and wherever and to whatever extent possible for the perpetrator to atone for his or her wrong doings by contributing over and above what is normally expected so as to compensate for the damage done.

Currently, the law is literally made up as we go along and sentences are not calculated but rather guessed by the self-entitled from their own little and subjective frame of reference.  What more, the "correctional" facilities serve uniquely as a behavioural deterrent and do nothing to contribute to the education of the impeached or the atonement of damage done.

What I am suggesting is no small feat, I am well aware of that, but as things currently stand the world is upside-down and it is required that we should turn it over.  Presently people are pushed by fear, but we must reach a state- or at least come as close to a state as possible- where people are pulled by aspiration.

I will not end on a closing note, for this is by no means the close.  We must begin a dialogue amongst ourselves regarding where democracy has failed and how we are to correct it.