Apologies for the Ologies

25/10/20
I'm posting this over a week since the phenomenology lecture because I am still floundering.

First up a few definitions: 
Phenomenology = study of being, experience and consciousness
Ontology = what exists; Epistemology = how we know something exists

So Prof Shaw's lecture  was peppered with throwaway lines such as "does the world end when we stop perceiving?" and "Where is the self?"  and a handy quote from Edgar Allan Poe: "All that we see or seem is but a dream." He also included the mind-blowing idea which was new to me that particles behave differently when observed. This has been discovered thanks to quantum physics. Need to dig further. 

Reading matter:
Art & Emobodiment Biological and Phenomenological Contributions and Understanding Beauty and the Aesthetic Adrienne Dengerink (2005) She argues that art is not merely a symptom of human need but a symbolic articulation of our embodied experience and understanding of the worlds.
 
Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Richard Shusterman Body Consciousness (2008)

Trying to decipher my notes is a challenge. Here's an example:  Living, sensing the dynamic,  perceptive body. unconscious consciousness = unreflective and un-thematised; conscious noticing something, makes it look bigger, feel heavier. 1. somaestheic perception v. 2 somaesthetic reflection
Whatever.
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The good news is that it all brought me to Merleau Ponty (1908-1961) who I think I could grow to like. He is quoted in the article as saying: "The words, lines, and colors which express me...are torn from me by what I want to say as my gestures are by what I want to do...[with] a spontaneity which will not tolerate any commands..."

He describes Cezanne as "a faithful phenomenologist, letting the solid, weighty, voluminous presence of perceived things appear. By attending to surfaces and the structures perceptible beneath them, by painting the modulations of colour at the edges of things and including perspectival distortions, he made canvases in which these elements ‘are no longer visible in their own right, but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.’  

Need to read his work on Francis Bacon too.

As my mind is now scattered to the four winds and who knows where my body is - where do I end and where do I begin - I decide it's tIme to go to the beach.  Aterwards I will  look at and make some art to bring me back to earth. Or should I say back to the world as I think I experience it?.
Read on for a brief look at Time

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