Niadi
Cernica
Summary Sensuality is, in the everyday life, subscribed
to the erotic. This subscription is however unilateral. Non-erotic sensuality
is the premise of reception of any work of art: perfume for the olfactory
sense, music for the hearing, fine arts for the sight. Poetic literature was
initially accompanied by music and nowadays is musical because of rhythm and
rhyme. Since antiquity until the end of the European Middle Age, to read meant
to read aloud, to hear. The whole of art is liberation of our own corporality.
This does not mean that we understand through art something which refers to the
“animal” feelings. Through the artistic sensuality man assumes his body in a
human manner. This kind of sensuality leads to a radical break between our body
and the animal self. Comfort is the practical use of sensuality, luxury (in the
elevate meaning) is an artistic use. It is a positive thing and a proof of
superior civilization to gather the maximum number of pleasures in life (all
belonging to the aesthetics in a sense or another).
Sensuality
is, in the everyday life, subscribed to the erotic. After all, it is neither
the worst nor the best association; it just represents a unilateral extreme of
the perception of this world. If there was one with only erotic sensuality such
a person would be incomplete. Non-erotic sensuality (seen as an art, as a
cultivation of the sensations) can offer much more but, paradoxically is less
popular amongst people.
Perfume
represents an object of art, in the same way as the arts of sight (painting,
graphics, and photography) only that it addresses itself to the
olfactory sense. Music, diction or theatre belongs to sensuality, to the
correct experimentation, to the refinement of hearing. It is easily
understandable that gastronomy addresses to the sense of taste. Feeling can
also be educated, cultivated. It has been too often said that art is a way of
enlightening humanity, forgetting that art addresses the body, the five senses,
in all of its forms accepted as such or not. Nevertheless we will be told that
literature is a game of ideas, any kind of idea, and that it has no connection
with the senses except the fact that we need eyes to read. It is omitted, in
this case, that the first poets where reciters, that the poems of the
troubadours where sung, and that in the period between Antiquity and the end of
the Middle Age, reading meant reading aloud, listening and modulating one’s
voice. In the second half of the Middle Age, the rhythm of the poem and then,
the rhyme had the purpose of musicality, thus for listening connecting it with
the sense of hearing.
We can
conclude that all arts forms are a celebration, a continuous festive honoring
of our own corporality. From this point of view, today’s music and painting,
the standardization of our preferences of gastronomy, ever the blank verse
belong to an unwanted and an uncertain „abstraction of the body”, to an
inflation of the idea into a sensuality which is solicited both equivocally and
partially. The abjection raised will probably be that instead of connecting art
with the most sublime sentiments we associate it with an animal feeling that
makes us feel uncomfortable. But we do not associate art with an animal feeling
but with a bodily one. An eagle has a better sight than we have, and
butterflies perceive colors that we can’t distinguish. And, nevertheless, they
have not developed an art of sight and do not even know what aesthetic
contemplation is. From the hundreds of smells that dogs feel, some are useful,
some not but none of them are “pleasant” or not for them. Animals use their
senses for the orientation, for conservation or perpetuation. Nowhere, for no
other being than man, have the senses a different role. On the other hand, a
great part of man’s sensuality is free; it does not consist in pure
environmental adjustment but in pleasure.
It has
been said, and often is repeated, thus becoming trivial, that man is separated
from the animals through reason (the logical-linguistic thinking) and the only
ballast that is a reminder of its origin is its body. But the corporality,
celebrated through gratuitous sensations (not useful, but pleasant) is a
transfigured corporality, a corporality that is differently used.
Through sensuality, man assumes his body in a human
manner.
Through art, man celebrates and loves his body;
sensuality (animals are not sensual) is an essential characteristic of the
human being, it represents a radical break from bestiality (etymologically
speaking). The senses of man, have suffered a real mutation since the time they
were used for pleasure, and not for survival, a mutation that has determined
the development of arts. Men’s body has been since educated for pleasure, for a
sensual incandescence that has nothing to do with orientation, perpetuation or
conservation anymore. An old prejudice, still an active mentality, makes us
locate the human essence beyond the body hitherto seen either sinful, or a
burden for the spirit. We do not deny that
having a body we are almost the same with the other beings, but we use our body
differently, we use it with a special finality that is specific to the human
being. That finality is represented by the art. The victory of man against
bestiality is not won by intelligence (gradually higher than that of animals),
but by assuming a kind of corporality that no animal possesses. Because of this
corporality, the human body is different from the body of other beings, not
only gradually, but also qualitatively.
Art will
remain specifically human as long as man has sensuality. As a gift of the body,
art will never be aesthetically “felt” by computers, even if they can replace
and give infinite potential to memory and to the operations of the intellect.
It is odd
that in a world that has replaced functionally and representatively the soul
with the body, the latter becomes schematic, undergoing a process of that we
call “abstraction”. The new painting, new poetry, new music, new gastronomy
etc. create powerful standards. Therefore, they are not meant to challenge
sensuality, but the mind. The hues, the variations fade away, get disqualified
for becoming the prop for a problematic which, after all, belongs to the
intellect. It is not necessarily more human what is intellectual, as long as
mankind possesses a non-animal sensuality, perfected in thousands of years.
Sensuality, in our time, is about to become primitive because standardized.
If we are
human beings, let us assume humanly reason as well as body. Wisdom and the
so-called “pleasures of the senses” (arts are not something else) can be
reciprocally influenced. It is a positive thing and a proof of superior
civilization to gather the maximum number of pleasures in life (all belonging
to the aesthetics of a sense or another).
Bibliography
Masek, Ernest Victor- Marturia
artei, Ed. Academiei RSR, Bucuresti, 1972
Vianu, Tudor- Estetica,
Ed. pentru Literatura, Bucuresti, 1948
Vianu, Tudor- Studii
de filosofie si estetica, Ed. 100+1Gramar, Bucuresti, 2001
Xxx Amor si
sexualitate in Occident (introducere Georges Duby), ed. Artemis, Bucuresti,
1995