[Buddha-l] FW: beauty--or art-- (?) and the restraint of thesenses

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Jayarava schreef:
> --- O
>> Erik's idea of the experience of beauty as close to enlightenment goes 
>> to this idea. Wasn't the poet Wordsworth (and other poets of
>> that ilk) into something of this sort in the presence of
>> nature?
>>     
>
> Wasn't it more to do with opium or ether than nature per se? ;-) 
>   
Certainly not, you barbarian! ;-)
> Isn't rasika more like good taste, literally appreciation of tastes or colours, and hence 'delight'? I'm not familiar with it's technical use, but the dict doesn't imply anything sublime. 
>
> Don't have much to say about Western thought or aesthetics. I think it has been many centuries since Western Art had much interest in the sublime - with Pärt et al as possible exceptions. Indeed art has more recently tended to consciously celebrate the banal. Where there is no conception of "sublime" how can there be an appreciation of it, let alone a submersion into it? That said there is a Richard Long retrospective on at the Tait Britain which I hope to catch! 
>   
You might be surprised what interest in the sublime you'll find if you 
would investigate it. Not only Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but also 
Wittgenstein, Mondriaan, Klee, Mereleau-Ponty and many others. Kant even 
defined art as that which doesn't evoke desire. I think that the ideal 
of Kant has been very well illustrated by the poem of Gendun Rche which 
has been discussed before on this list 
[http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/poetry/vajrasong.html]. But 
there is much more, look at 
http://www.viewonbuddhism.org/resources/poetry.html and learn, you 
follower of Calvin and Savornarola.
> The last thing that occurs to me is that even the joy, bliss and rapture of meditation have to settle and be calmed before the conditions for knowledge and vision arise - according to some presentations anyway. After that neurotic desire for pleasant vedanā is not a problem.
>      
>   
Hatred for pleasant feelings is as much a problem as the desire for them.

Erik

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