Re:Seneca on The Shortness of Time (2017)
by IggleSniggle on Sunday February 02, 2020 @02:45PM
(#22218934)
Haven't watch this video, but thanks for posting this. For some reason, despite being deeply involved in the arts my entire life, and despite believing that the classic liberal arts are about enculturation more than knowledge, I never quite put it together that aesthetics more generally had a kind of behavioral utility beyond personal "satisfaction."
Behavioral cognitive therapy is aesthetics for beginners, or maybe "applied surgical aesthetics"
The difficulty is that you can't reason yourself into having them, but must nurture them by other means. This used to be one of the primary goals of education, and is the primary value of a (proper) liberal arts education, as opposed to "critical thinking" skills.
The Stoics wrote about the importance of cultivating a contempt for pleasure. The Christians teach that you should "Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world" (1 John 2:15). Understood naively, these statements are a sure recipe for unhappiness and disaster. But properly understood, within a healthy aesthetic framework and with emotions trained in accordance to it, these statements obviously contain a large chunk of the secret to happiness and success.
I recommend watching this video for an extended introduction to this way of thinking: https://youtu.be/tX5e6eSkaMc