My Goal is Sensibility
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.
Josh Whitfield, my friend and philosophy student