Sensibility = Art

Cranz begins by explaing that before the twelfth century, the soul, the seat within the human body in which all sensation and intellection takes place was believed by philosophers to be a complete world onto intself (the locus of "all beings" as Aristotle expressed it). For the ancients, Cranz emphasizees the soul did not just reflect reality in some symbolic fashion, as we assume today, but was understood to receive the true form and substance of whatever was sensed or intellected in the external world. When a thing was perceived by the senses, its form and substance actually entered the soul.

Argument - Art is intellectual or sensory?
For - the occurance of poetry, language denotes art in a transformative quality.
Against - Abstract works- yet.... form is the outer expression of inner content. Is art based on human experience or a further intelligence of the mind? In other words does the transformation lie in the process of empirical senses.

Would Art representing existence beyond human reality have any relevance, if art is grounded in human experience only?

'We relate to the world through what one might regard as a single sense organ, our bodies. and it is only with the advent of conscious reflection that we try to divide our experience into five separate sectors each patrolled by its own sensory modality. We are originally connected to the world, in short, not through separate channels of sensation but through integrated networks of perception.'

The most skeptical philosophers have accepted uncritically the sense data theory, which considers the data conveyed by perception as a secure unquestionable basis for our understanding of objective reality.

If we insist on defining experience in terms of the worlds effect on our senses as opposed to our perceptual explorations of the world, then we will obliterate the space in which Art is able to do its work - its probing, disturbing, challenging and rearranging of the terms of our shared engagements with reality. Works of Art exist to surprise, refresh and retune our perceptions and our relation to our fellow perceivers.

Art = A pleasure of the senses, in a cognitively expanded interpretation- which exceeds and ruptures the fixity of determinate judgement, in a singular but logically indeterminate manner.

Lyotards Moralites Postmodernes make an interesting point about art and the senses: 'Style does no separate the soul from an existence enslaved to the sensible; it casts doubt on the latters existence. It contrasts the sensibly with itself and thus it contrasts the soul that consents to mere seeming... with the soul that awakens to appearance and trembles.'

The pure sensible is in no way the impressionists play of appearances. How we feel is the sensible that is behind words, that is the point of identity between the sensible and thought, or the point of their reciprocal annihilation; the point of identity of the sensible with the non-sensible, of thought with non-thought.

Therefore does this agree that if Art doesn't arouse feeling or cross the barrier from sensible to thought, it is not relevant to us as humans. It cannot transform us because the concept has no actual meaning.