Noel, Noel

Nothing like Christmastime with lots of family--and four generations together--

to make one feel hopeful, grateful, expectant again. . .

Joy, peace and love to all: Life is beautiful!

Feeling "greatful" for my mother, nana, and son

Images of love from around the world to celebrate its unique forms and potential:

Wuluk Bu kissing young cafe, just a few days old.
In the Afghan Kyrgyz community, courtesy of National Geographic

In the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Congo,
Courtesy of African Parks Network 

Zebra love, courtesy of Safaridotcom

Syrian artist Tammam Azzam projects Gustave Klimt's The Kiss.
"I chose it as an icon of love, a way of looking for the stories of love 
behind this wall that was completely obliterated by the machinery of war."
Courtesy of Thingsglobe

Emotions: Aklishta or Klishta?

Art by Estonian artist, Mirjam Siim,
who lives in Porto, Portugal

We might not think of it unless it is pointed out, but emotions, according to leading research on this "new" topic, help us prioritize and organize our strategy of behavior and inquiry within the complex web of human social life, as Dr. Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto) says in an interview.

EMOTION. "At first blush, the things we ordinarily call emotions differ from one another along several dimensions. For example, some emotions are occurrences (e.g., panic), and others are dispositions (e.g., hostility); some are short-lived (e.g., anger) and others are long-lived (e.g., grief); some involve primitive cognitive processing (e.g., fear of a suddenly looming object), and others involve sophisticated cognitive processing (e.g., fear of losing a chess match); some are conscious (e.g., disgust about an insect in the mouth) and others are unconscious (e.g., unconscious fear of failing in life); some have prototypical facial expressions (e.g., surprise) and others lack them (e.g., regret). Some involve strong motivations to act (e.g., rage) and others do not (e.g., sadness). Some are present across species (e.g., fear) and others are exclusively human (e.g., schadenfreude). And so on." [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

My mentor recently directed me to interdisciplinary research being done on emotion and health at the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE). I was struck by the comments that seasoned scholar and author Ronald de Sousa makes while discussing his research on emotion and language, as well as the implications of the findings for perception, literature, and art. His thoughts provide insights to the way we actually live our lives: the relation of emotion to truth, a highly individualized experience. The validation of emotion coupled with the search of truths is what I hope to reflect on, as noted in my post from October 26, "Formality of a Punch Line," when I looked to ways of thinking about aklishta versus klishta in order to determine whether emotions are leading me on the right path: As I mused, "To detangle ourselves from our identification with mental thoughts, which are either klishta or aklishta, sounds very easy to say and I wonder how hard it is to do--especially when all areas of life seem to be bound up into one giant ball. But again, the next step is to observe whether our thoughts are colored or uncolored, useful or not useful, and it is said that this can be done as one goes about one's day." De Sousa's work certainly seems to take my question to a more informed level.

What a never-ending effort: sorting out illusions and emotional truths, sifting through them in an analytical way so as to make life decisions that are emotionally and rationally sound. This is essential to directing one's energies in the most efficient, healthy, authentic way, and so this interview is very thought-provoking for anyone looking to be more aware of the role feelings play in our lives.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with De Sousa, courtesy of ISRE. Keep reading for the fuller context, or see the full interview.

To a considerable extent, our emotional life is conditioned by ideology, which in turn is shaped to some (but exactly how large?) extent by words. A leading question concerns the extent to which that ideology is dependent on and malleable on the basis of explicit norms. How, for example, can an experience of indignation, envy, love or jealousy be explicitly rationalized? Emotions are modulated by verbal expressions and descriptions. They also influence behaviour, both intentional and reflexive. The ways in which they do this raise a number of puzzles. One stems from our susceptibility to recalcitrant emotions, i.e. those that subsist despite the removal of their cognitive basis. Another is “imaginative resistance”, which is our inability, first noticed by David Hume, to imagine ourselves endorsing judgments that conflict with our current evaluative and moral commitments. Both raise the question of how our explicit reasons relate to our felt emotions. Yet another example stems from the difficulty of communicating aesthetic judgments by explicit verbal description of works of art, as well as the converse question of the ability of art and literature to influence our emotional repertoire.

Other issues concerning the relation of language to emotion pertain to the norms governing acceptable emotional responses and expressions, such as the quasi-moral demands for sincerity, spontaneity, and emotional authenticity; the culturally variable aesthetics of understatement; the contrary effects on erotic experience of explicit sexual language in different ‘registers’; the power of verbal information on the effects of drugs; the effects of ‘priming’ (subliminal exposure to certain words) on cognition and behaviour; and the surprising enhancement of well-being by sessions spent in writing about emotionally trying experiences demonstrated by some of the work of Jim Pennebaker. All of these phenomena call for a general theory of the way that our emotions relate to our capacity to reason explicitly about them, as well as to their verbal expressions.

This makes me want to delve into De Sousa's book, The Rationality of Emotion, which is described as a urbane and witty book in which Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists. He argues that emotions are a kind of perception, that their roots in the paradigm scenarios in which they are learned give them an essentially dramatic structure, and that they have a crucial role to-play in rational beliefs, desires, and decisions by breaking the deadlocks of pure reason.

Here follows more of the interview with Ronald de Sousa, courtesy of ISRE.

When did you first turn your attention to emotion? What was it that drew you to it?

It dawned on me that the topic of emotion would provide a pretense of specialization while inviting me to think, like a true dilettante, about just about everything: mind, language, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and even life. So that’s when I started thinking about emotions. I wrote an article on “The Rationality of Emotions”, which was published in 1979. The central idea was that emotions have a narrative structure and tend to rehearse “paradigm scenarios” learned in early life. This remained the core idea of The Rationality of Emotion, much of which was written during a blissful sabbatical year spent at the University of British Columbia in 1984. The book was published in 1987 by Bradford Books, a wonderful small press...

Your book The Rationality of Emotion (1989) has been a reference point for philosophers working in emotion ever since it was published, and has inspired a great deal of further research. What do you think were the most influential ideas in the book? Is there anything you think was overlooked? Is there anything you’d change?

The Rationality of Emotion explored two simple ideas, with a few corollaries. First, emotions play too important a role in our life not to be linked to some biological function. Second, whatever function that might be affects our capacity to make intelligent decisions in complex situations, not just to respond reflexively to threats or affordances of daily life. Emotions, I suggested, solve the “Frame Problem”, which is essentially the problem of knowing what to ignore without wasting time examining every possible consequence of a decision, to make sure it can be ignored as irrelevant. Emotions do this by controlling the salience of information, lines of inquiry, and live practical options. They narrow the focus of attention to ranges of factors that we have “learned”, on both the evolutionary and the individual scale, are the most likely to be relevant in any given situation. Emotions therefore contribute to our capacity for rational decision, even though, as is all too obvious, they sometimes distort judgement and interfere with rational deliberation. Emotions can also be said to be “rational” – contrasting not with “irrational” but with “a-rational” – in a second sense, more or less corresponding to what we mean when we describe someone as “reasonable” or “unreasonable”.

"Away from Near," Aida Nayeban

Although the book is quite frequently cited, I’m not sure it has been particularly influential. One idea that has been picked up here and there is the idea of “paradigm scenarios.” Probably the reason this has been picked up his that it was not particularly original in the first place. The core idea goes back to Freud, if not to Aristotle. On the therapeutic side of psychology it has often, if not always, been regarded as obvious that emotional patterns first learned in early childhood can be difficult to shake – both for good and for ill. Several philosophers, notably Martha Nussbaum, have emphasized the role of art and literature in getting us to refine and modify our more primitive patterns of emotional response and the attitudes that go with them. But the idea was, and remains, underdeveloped. I myself explored some of the problems it raises myself in a paper on “Emotions, Education and Time” published in Metaphilosophy in 1990 [....] Paradigm scenarios raise questions about flexibility in personality and emotional temperament which are vital to educational practice: How is it possible to control one’s emotions, to mature emotionally? Much also remains to be done to understand how similarity among situations, triggering similar responses, is implemented in the brain. Recently I have been very interested in the extent to which we can “re-gestalt” situations in such a way as to refashion our emotional responses. This is a domain in which emotional constructionists have much to teach us. We need to be aware of the extent to which we ascribe emotions, not only to others but even to ourselves, in the light of half conscious assumptions about how we are supposed to respond. Our emotional repertoire is partly dependent on our ideology.

We don't see with our eyes and hear with our eyes:
"We see and hear with our brains."
Distinctions help us navigate the world;
it's important that those things be identifiable.
Source: "Gestalt Principles and Why Search for the Whole"

One very influential idea in the book was that in some important ways, emotions are much closer to perception than judgement. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that emotion just is a form of perception. What’s your view of the way in which that idea has been developed since the book was published?

The leading contemporary exponent of the perceptual view is Christine Tappolet, who argues in her most recent book that emotions are essentially perceptions of values. They are therefore susceptible to being either correct or incorrect, depending on whether the value perceived in a given situation or state of affairs is warranted by that situation or state of affairs. This seems to me to be a very nice idea; but I am not convinced that it has any ontological implications. It may seem that if values are perceived, then they must be real and independent of our projections. But perhaps this may signal nothing more than a kind of grammatical fact about the relation between emotions and their “formal objects”.

I am inclined to emphasize the metaphorical character of the analogy between emotions and perception. Analogies are useful in getting us to notice both resemblances and differences. But they don’t really explain anything, and shouldn’t be taken to do more than they can.

‍Another important theme that has emerged in your writings on emotion is that of emotional truth, which you’ve explained in terms of ‘axiological holism’ Can you explain what you mean by that? And why has articulating a notion of emotional truth been important to you?

Insofar as I do agree with Tappolet that emotions are prima facie apprehensions of value, their rationality will be neither purely cognitive nor purely practical, but rather axiological. This raises the question of how our values can be appraised, reappraised, refined, or improved, when the material for doing so ultimately derives from emotions themselves. The thought behind the notion of axiological holism is that all our emotional responses, including all the reasoning and argument that we might bring to debates about their justification, are potentially relevant to our evaluative stance as we face the world. Reflective equilibrium is the best we can hope for in the realm of values, just as, if we give up on epistemic foundationalism and the naïve correspondence theory of truth, epistemic coherence is the best we can aspire to in science.

My thoughts about emotional truth embody a further parallel between emotion and cognition: just as coherence in beliefs guarantees (only) that they could all be true together, so axiological coherence requires that our emotions could all be “correct” together in a relevant sense of correctness. That correctness is what I choose to call emotional truth. The idea actually arose from some earlier work I published in Mind in 1974. Typical intentional states, notably including belief and desire, have both conditions of satisfaction (a correspondence between the representational content of the state and the objective situation they purport to refer to), and conditions of success (which depends on whether the state in question meets its own inherent point, or defining standard of correctness). For belief, both of these coincide: the truth of a proposition constitutes its satisfaction, and it is also sufficient for its success as a state of belief, because belief inherently aims at truth. Desire, by contrast, aims at goodness. So for desire, unlike belief, the two conditions diverge. If I desire something that is not good and get it, then my desire is satisfied, but it was not successful. A similar pattern, it seemed to me, holds for any typical emotion: its formal object both identifies the emotion in question and specifies its condition of success. Thus if “the dangerous” is the proper object of fear, fear will be successful in its own terms only if its target is indeed dangerous. My proposal was that we should focus on the notion of success, and hence extend talk of truth to an emotion in the light of is success or failure in its inherent point. In truth, this idea has gained little traction. In a very sensible article, Mikko Salmela pointed out that it would seem more natural to speak of “true emotions” if and only if they satisfied both satisfaction and success. Since this is to some extent a verbal issue I chose in my later book to dig my heels in. My reason was that I wanted to suggest that the important dimension in which we should evaluate emotions was the one that measured fittingness, not the one that measured their – much disputed – representational function.

Art by Mirjam Siim

In closing this post, I'll add that further interviews and articles on the ISRE site offer a wealth of research on emotions, trustworthy sources for investigating these sneaky things that "make life worth living and sometimes worth ending"--to return to De Sousa's entry on EMOTION in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . 

"No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the emotions."

Alas!

Why one who seeks, seeks

While this is so true in this world, with all the losses and disappointments we have faced and will yet face, this is also not how is best useful to live life thinking. 

Impermanence points to something that can be intuited and learned about, a devotion that is much more deeply fulfilling than what the world, bound up in time, karma, and violence as it is, offers. 

And so that which is beyond and above those things, that's most likely what inspires devotion of the kind that is never disappointed. Faith is like a butterfly as it becomes rekindled and more deeply felt. Once the light is burning, there isn't much that could take its flame away. This is why many saints and holy men and women survived really crazy scenarios, even torture or death. Only love of the very most compelling, beautiful and true kind can make anyone do that.

December 18th offerings

Love is an attribute of God wanting nothing
repentance is an attribute of man, it is a worm
to Love's dragon, absurd in Love's presence.
Love for anything but Him is unreal
for that which is not Him is a gilded object
shining outside yet empty inside,
light and golden on the outside yet dark within.
The moment divine light disappears
darkness is revealed and unreal love
is extinguished like a candle,
the body is discarded and beauty returns to its source.
The moonlight goes back to the moon
and its reflection disappears from the black wall.
Divine Love is the Sun of Perfection
the Divine Word is its Light
and the creatures are its shadow.
~Rumi

You have been caught in the claws of a lion
my friend, do not look for happiness.
Only harshness can defeat the hidden enemy inside you.
A man beating a rug with a stick does not
aim at the rug but at the dust inside it.
Your ego is covered with many dusty veils
you cannot remove them at once.
With each blow, little by little
they will disappear from the face of your heart.
But do not try to escape into sleep
the Beloved's sharp claws will chase you in your dreams.
A carpenter does not carve a piece of wood out of cruelty
but in order to create a beautiful shape.
The harsh hand of the Beloved is a blessing, my friend,
it will refine you and make you pure in the end.
~Rumi

The lover's concern is passion and madness
the charming game the Beloved plays is aloof detachment.
Learn the dance of light from the atoms
learn to jump into the fire like the moth.
Learn to charge like a lion, not sneak like a fox.
Learn to soar like a falcon, not flutter
from flower to flower like a butterfly.
Spring water tastes sweet but is incomparable
to the majesty of the ocean.
Your being is the cup that holds all secrets
do not let them leak through your eyes and ears.
~Rumi

Tree of Lights

Feliz Natal

A lovely reminder of family values.

The warm time being shared by the people in the foreground was as bright as the tree. I'm guessing these ladies are loving daughters, nieces, or friends of the older men in the wheelchairs who they so lovingly were making laugh. 

Beautiful moments, wishes for all.

Poesia dentro e fora

La praia

I didn't need to touch it

because it got in my hair

~
O Palácio

In the silence, in the echoes

I pursue my path

Covert depression

and ripples of revelation

Structures of power as in history

soon discoverable

with the voice

that arose

I discovered

the mechanisms at work

in the brutishness of time memorial

where pain grazed many days after

The start of fresh tears before the dawn

destinies entwined

in his small hand

Time confined to a particle,

its reflection in a fun house mirror

at all hours of the night.
I doggedly made haste

Only through the camera lens

which fell on my body like drops over time
could I comprehend the mark and spasm,
see the soul and what happened to it

Can you believe it?
I ask myself.

In the process it was, I let go

and out of nowhere I'm ready to speak

Can you hear it?

Silence waking up

I didn't know I had been waiting

 

Words seeking light within

Unfolding as if for a friend

Armistice Day in Paris: Crossing Paths with World Leaders

It was raining off and on in Paris last weekend. We took our time with le petit déjeuner and the rain, and made our way to the Louvre, but because of the line, we decided to keep walking and try our luck with the line at the Musée d'Orsay. There we stood under umbrellas, cold and damp.

Then, a voice comes over the intercom announcing that the museum will close at 14h (2pm) due to raisons officielles, although in English they said "special event." It was 12:30pm. As I said to Carol, even if we get in at 1:00 it's still worth it to see the museum, which is itself a historic monument. The old Orsay train station, with its gorgeous original clock, was built in 1900 for the World Fair.

1900, Exposition universelle au bord de la Seine

And today under a gorgeous glass roof....

      ...the Musée d'Orsay houses art from the latter part of the 19th century through WWI. 

As we slowly move up in line while people are being turned away behind us, we hear that Trump is in town and that he and Melania are coming to the Musée d'Orsay, thus the reason it is to close. And when we leave as the museum closes an hour later, we see national security outside with vans and guns, waiting to sweep the museum before the president enters. Carol says what he would appreciate of the museum and I wonder where can one find old tomatoes for sale in the city center.

We were staying in the 8th arrondissement by the Madeleine in the center of the city. With police and closed roads here and there, a major stage set up under the Arc de Triomphe, and flags up the Champs Elysées where we had lunch, it made even more sense when we learned that in fact 72 of the world's leaders were having dinner at the Musée d'Orsay that evening. Those were pretty official reasons for cutting our museum visit short! It was kind of cool, in the end, that the trip I'd planned for my friend's 40th fell on the same weekend as the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the WWI armistice. (That part was not planned!)

And if many were delighted to see a reprint of the Le Figaro from 100 years ago declaring that Germany had surrendered in that morning's edition, we can only imagine the joy and relief of readers back then....

The next day, as we waited in a rainy line once again for the Louvre, three jet planes flew overhead with puffy, faded trails of the French tricolore, bleu, blanc, and rouge. I read that Macron urged world leaders gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to cast off nationalism. Admirable. Later, a young French man would tell me that he doesn't much like Macron. I ask why and he says, taxes. I asked, mais c'est votre système, non? He nodded, wobbling his head. Macron's speech is worth quoting in part as the French president asked how the photos taken that morning would be remembered in the future: "A symbol of lasting peace? Or the last moment of unity before the world falls into disorder? That depends on us."

To the ears that needed to hear it most, and which are perhaps the most deaf of all, Macron said: "Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying ‘our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: its moral values."

  

Screw tomatoes! These women were much more resourceful.

In his speech, Macron also stated: "Old demons are resurfacing. History sometimes threatens to take its tragic course again and compromise our hope of peace. Let us vow to prioritise peace over everything."

LET'S!

And on a special note, when we'd fly home last monday, a 93-year-old WWII veteran who was invited by the president to the ceremony played the harmonica over the intercom in his pins and leather jacket, dedicating his rendition of the national anthem to pilots, crew, and passengers. It was very touching.

And when a young woman thanked him for his service as we boarded, I overheard him respond: "Thank you for yours!"

Impressionism & Belle Époque Paris

Salon of 1890

Paris of the Belle Époque was imbued with an ethereal quality and gave rise to revolutionary forms of art, music, and literature. The years between 1879 and 1914 bore elements of beauty, innovation, and highly multidisciplinary art forms, a legacy embedded in the ambiance of present-day Paris. The first metro line opened in 1900, daring women exchanged confining skirts for trousers, and artists, writers, and musical composers gathered in cafés and music halls. 

The Gare St-Lazare, Claude Monet (1877)

It was the era of invention—not only of the motion picture and telephone, but also of self-fashioning women who entered the public sphere as writers, actresses, and scientists. Yet if Belle Époque Paris was the center of progress and pleasure, it was also a time of decadence. In contextualizing both the hope and melancholy of the times, we look to Impressionist art for a sense of modern subjectivity as it grapples with changing conceptions of time and beauty. The Impressionists’ audacity to situate the mundane in the visual arts was deeply unpopular in the Belle Époque—a controversy that speaks to the angst underlying modernity as it continually brings about new forms of society and, with it, ways of feeling and seeing.

Today, we may look at serene, light-filled landscapes and portraits by Impressionists like Renoir, Monet, or Pissarro and wonder what is so radical about them. Why did these painters in Paris suffer, even starving at times? Unlike artists of the past who painted or sculpted in exchange for support from kings, popes, or nobility, Impressionists didn't create to endorse the status of any man or institution. They were shockingly autonomous!

Gustave Courbet’s La Rencontre (1875)

Scandalous paintings such as Courbet’s La Rencontre (1875) allow us to understand emerging notions of the artiste libre who makes a forceful break with long practiced arts patronage to make his own artistic choices. Here we see the haughtiness of the artist who looks upon his mécène, Alfred Bruyas, accompanied by his valet and dog. This painting caused a scandal at the universal exposition, where it was described as une manifestation d'un monstrueux orgueil.

Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet (1854)

In contextualizing Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet (1854), we can imagine the shock it gave jurors who criticized its “vulgar subject matter” of half-clad, working-class men. 

Argenteuil, Édouard Manet
(1874)

And when Manet submitted Argenteuil (1874) to the Salon, critics ridiculed it for the vivid blue of the water, calling it “too intense” as they preferred the traditional, somber colors of academic painting. In its defense, writer Emile Zola offered this perspective: “Imagine that on the ruins of classical rules and romantic humbug, in the waste of dullness and the impenetrable fog of banality and mediocrity, a tiny flower has sprung up, a green shoot on the old, exhausted stump [….] That is why I feel cheerful when I look at Manet’s works amid those others, reminiscent of decay, that are hung alongside.”

Like Monet and Renoir who worked with tubes of paint and canvas in the open air, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Morisot, and Gauguin decided artwork would be their own way of seeing the modern world, foregoing mythological, biblical, and aristocratic subjects of the past. This meant a more democratic type of painting, one that arguably mirrors France’s shift from monarchy to republic. What they were painting, how they were painting, and where they were painting were radical. Light changed the appearance of what one saw hour to hour and became an object of study itself as Monet painted haystacks or train stations at various times of the day. Impressionists realized something that John Berger said in the 1970s: “In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and [seeking] such a justification.” Impressionists invented ways of seeing the present, inviting spectators to engage with change itself, with the modern world, and with reforms in society. In this way, painting became a privileged mode for accessing and witnessing the world.

Un Atelier aux Batignolles, Henri Fantin-Latour (1870) 
Manet painting, with Astuc seated nearby. Standing, from Left to Right:
Scholderer, Renoir, Zola, Maître, Bazille, and Monet

To appreciate Impressionism, we turn to literature, musical composition, and poetry of the Belle Époque as these art forms looked to painting for interplay and innovation in the struggle to represent their experience. Literary movements such as Naturalism, which was also inspired by scientific methods of observation, became interchangeable with Impressionist painting: Zola was an Impressionist with a pen. As Kahnweiler, a well-known art dealer of Cubists Picasso and Braques, said: “Painting is in fact a form of writing.” The French musical composer, Erik Satie, contemporary of the Impressionists, would agree as he said he learned more from painters than he ever did from musicians. Like composers Ravel and Debussy, Satie was seeking new paths in musical expression, a quest predicated by “the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure.” In his view, it did not matter whether music made use of methods discovered by Symbolism or Impressionism, so long as one went one’s own way. 

Indeed, the painting in series that Monet invented suggests that our observations of the world are incomplete and that modern life needs constant revision. The Belle Époque marks the awareness of change, and the back-and-forth of the various arts therein allows us to delve deeper into the limitless debate between Classical traditions and modernity.

Monet's study of the portal of the Rouen Cathedral

Bazille's Studio; 9 Rue de la Condamine, Frédéric Bazille (1870)
Left to Right: Renoir (sitting), Zola (on stairs), Manet & Monet next to Bazille

Poetry, musical composition, and paintings of the Belle Époque occasionally hearkened back to the Classical period, a period that--not without coincidence--witnessed the birth of La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In peering from our own viewpoint to the Belle Époque, we exercise historical perspective once again as we look from the Belle Époque back to the early modern period, a time when Louis XIV’s renown was derived by the way he framed his own portraiture with attributes of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. If seventeenth-century Paris is regarded as a time of high art and renown, it was in part due to its artistic emulation of the high beauty of Classical Greece. In observing how society grafts itself onto previous ones for stability, we see how art embodies the struggle to release the restraints of a heavily coded past and create newer expressions of experience. As Apollinaire wrote in “La jolie rousse” (1919), Pitié pour nous qui combattons toujours aux frontiers de l'illimité et de l’avenir.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Édouard Manet (1863)
The woman looks directly at the viewer, interrogating his or her way of seeing.

A guiding symbol for a discussion of modernity and the shifts it produced is the Eiffel Tower. This iron tower emblematizes the dramatic shift from classical to modern aesthetics, the effects of which toy with notions of time, timelessness, and beauty--as can be sensed in the protests that arose with its construction (1887-89): “We come, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, passionate lovers of the beauty, until now intact, of Paris, to protest with all our force, in the name of threatened French art and history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."

Technology and progress inspire disenchantment and nostalgia for former ways of living, sparking questions surrounding identity, culture, and history that merit ongoing discussion. The visual arts serve as an ideal point de départ for comprehending the crossroads of tradition and modernity. In truth, painting maintained a remarkable role in buffering, interrogating, and ultimately forming our modes of seeing. When we look deeper into Impressionist painting and its context, we understand the sacrifice and remarkable passion that these artists demonstrated as seers of the world: They took a decidedly active role in questioning the boundaries set forth by the values of their culture and their time. Still today, their perspectives intimate alternate ways of coping with reality as modernity marches on.

Many thanks to Dalia Judovitz for teaching me about the aesthetics of the visible.