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My Goal Is 2024-2026
My Goal is Sensibility
Joshua Whitfield — Graduate Student in Philosophy, Kent State University
Art is the cultivation of an experience. In order to cultivate something, one must be familiar with it.
To know it, be aware of it, so that the artist can mold, shape, reframe, color, and otherwise construct the particulars,
like that of a practiced farmer planting seeds the fruits of which she will one day subsist upon.
My ideal lifestyle is a dedication to the immaterial experience. I desperately want to escape the normal
process of creating products in exchange for a mode of living that revolves around curating an experience both for yourself and others.
All of this requires sensibility.When someone critically thinks in a manner such that they cleverly solve a difficult puzzle, one would say they are sensible. On the other hand, if they are comforting in a time of emotional hardship through empathy, relatability, and understanding, you would also call them sensible. Consider the process of learning a new skill or sport. Excelling at skill acquisition requires both robust theoretical knowledge through reflection and analysis as well as raw exposure to as many varied situations within the desired field.
At the intersection of these two methods of awareness, the intellectual theory and the dedicated exposure is what in sports is sometimes called game sense -and in music, feel.
Make no mistake, this sensibility is not divorced from our faculty of reason, rather it is the synthesis of
our intuitions in combination with our deductive capabilities.
For a long while, I desired to encapsulate and conceptualize all of this within only the rational and the intellectual.
However, no argument will ever make you more creative. At the core of a person lies their fundamental values,
from which they may build upon using their reason, and others may partake and contribute if they share the same roots.
But like a favorite color, or a beloved song, at times there is no rhyme or reason to what we value, and the capacity for
concepts cannot penetrate the deep bedrock of that which we covet most.
All we can do is remain open to our intuition, yet pursue our reason in whatever direction their harmony in sensibility takes us.
My Goal Is Clarity
In response to Joshua Whitfield’s “My Goal Is Sensibility”
Art is, in part, the cultivation of an experience. In order to cultivate something, one must surely be familiar with the elements that they will utilize in their cultivation.
To know, to be aware- even in an underlying, or even implicit sense: This will allow the artist's system to mold, shape, reframe, color, and otherwise construct the particulars of the new experience.
At the intersection of intellectual theory and dedicated exposure, is what in sports is sometimes called game sense - and in music, feel. It is the synthesis of intuition in combination with deductive capabilities.
Sensibility is required to escape the normal mode of living that revolves around inventing products in exchange for curating an experience for yourself and others. How can we lift up the foundation of our qualia's currency? We become aware of it. That might even be the closest one can get to unraveling the normal experience.
When someone critically thinks in a manner such that they cleverly solve a difficult puzzle, they're viewed as sensible. Too, if they're comforting in a time of emotional hardship through empathy, relatability, and understanding, they are also sensible.
Peering into Sensibility, there are labrynthine narratives residing within the worlds of opportunity, there. Yes, within the sensible schemas.
There are a number of avenues in which one can demonstrate their sensibility. Perhaps, a number that is not yet quantifiable by modern science - any computational model. Perhaps, it is a living writhing Being so fluid that it snakes in between the neurons and divvies up the schemas themselves as they are created.
If one desires to commit themselves to the immaterial, they could benefit from considering a goal of Clarity.
Clarity- My Goal is Clarity. To know which Sensibility I am speaking with at a given time. I can see that I produced something into the physical: A sound- a combination of sounds- a sight. It probably won't be too difficult for myself to deduce that I am expressing something. I can know that there has been something pre-supposing the expression. I can intimately know, even if not fully supplied to my conscious awareness, the "materials" in which I will construct my Art.
Make no mistake- I am not keen on knowing the minute distinctions between the domains in which I am performing my Sensibilities upon and within. If it were true, it maybe has great potential to counter intuit the entire destination! To disrupt the revolving goal. I want to experience my Sensibility with Clarity. No, I need not know every minutia of feeling, every entanglement and knot in those wrapping slapping fishing lines - I need not etch the atoms of it into stone. I rather seek to maintain a logical awareness that I am feeling that Something- and to recognize the pulse on the Somewhere it originated from... I want to have the ability to trace it back home.