Cognitive versus Aesthetic? - Reader comments at The New York Sun

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Reader comment on:
The Uncertainty Principle of Beauty

Submitted by Dilip Chitre, Mar 25, 2007 00:07

Desire has a cognitive aspect. It is difficult to imagine a passionate pursuit of pleasure without the curiosity to know what pleasure in itself could be. In human life, the cognitive and the erotic are intertwined, often tragically. Nietzche proposed that Attic Tragedy was born out of a reconciliation between what he called Apollonian and Dionysian. In the Hindu philosophical world-view of Kashmir Shaivagama, Shiva (the male cosmic Entity) is endowed with Shakti ( the female cosmic Entity) that is synonymous with the passion to know oneself. The cognitive and the aesthetic cohere in all human experience. Their mutual coherence in seeming conflict is reflected in art.

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Other reader comments on this article

Comment	By	Date
Desire has a cognitive aspect. It is difficult to imagine a passionate pursuit of pleasure without the curiosity to know...	Dilip Chitre	Mar 25, 2007 00:07
Perhaps the pursuit of beauty has been abandoned because of our abandonment of the pursuit of truth. We now live... [MORE]	Arthur Pontynen	Feb 22, 2007 13:25
"beauty is identical to desire, that desire longs for engagement". Engagement with the object? And we desire this engagement because... [MORE]	James Kirwan	Feb 21, 2007 09:32
From personal experience, the diagnosis that philosophy departments have given up, not only on the idea of beauty, but of... [MORE]	Alex Dunn	Feb 18, 2007 19:45
Actually, Plato states clearly in the Republic and related texts that beauty is strongly linked to virtue and the good;... [MORE]	Philosopher	Feb 18, 2007 12:14
My teacher, Thomas Hora, M.D., defined beauty as "that which is uplifting to the spirit." Inciting desire, which is always... [MORE]	Bruce Kerievsky	Feb 18, 2007 11:49
I wonder if our inability to consider or engage with the question of what is beautiful can be construed as... [MORE]	Cyril Reyes	Feb 18, 2007 02:36
It seems to me that there is one major error in this article i.e. the claim that philosophers have long... [MORE]	Shalom Freedman	Feb 18, 2007 01:41
I am a girl of 18 from The Neherlands, and my experience of the never ending discussion about beauty is... [MORE]	Daphne Andersen	Feb 17, 2007 23:44
Fine review (really more than a review--a mini-essay, which in my experience nearly all very good reviews are). I was... [MORE]	Jim Lilly	Feb 17, 2007 17:41
"There is no a priori judgment that might reveal what will prove evanescent and what sustaining." "As a reader, one knows... [MORE]	Christopher Orloff	Feb 18, 2007 22:52

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