On thinking and feeling and art

“People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.”
-Soren Kierkegaard


All thought is a response to feeling—an interpretive balancing of multifarious perceptions. Therefore, if your feelings are not intuitive, if you react uncritically to the rhetoric of your immediate social context, the thoughts this context generates within you will not be your thoughts, though they will feel like they are...or rather, you will not be yourself but merely a product of your social context.
Far from being a cultural anomaly, this banality is one of the most natural tendencies we have. It is merely a corruption of our moral instinct, our inclination towards solidarity, which we experience as ‘noble’ feelings.
If you perceive intuitively and critically, and if you are sincere, your thoughts will project your feelings, and so you may potentially think and express something new and useful. So the cultivation of noble feelings is the highest calling of any good thinker/artist. From the perspective of the critic, this is also the ultimate standard for any artist/thinker, so it is imperative for the critic to perceive the feelings behind the thoughts/expression. To understand an original thinker it is necessary to feel their thoughts—to experience the thought’s inception for yourself. Only then can we determine whether or not to surpass it.
Art’s first and highest purpose is to create noble feelings within us: feelings that bind us to some greater cause(s), whether it be solidarity with our fellow humans, God, the universe etc, and, as a necessary consequence, to set us against other things, which oppose our cause, our solidarity, our moral paradigm. The thinker/artist’s first and highest purpose is, therefore, simply to experience these noble feelings. Having created true nobility within him/herself, the only charge of the artist is to effectively express these feelings; similarly, all that remains for the ‘thinker’ is to critically reflect upon these feelings, manifest similarly noble thoughts and express these thoughts through well crafted rhetoric. The assumption that effective rhetoric is the beginning and end of a ‘writer’ and that technique is the beginning and end of an artist is a terrible miscomprehension.

-EB