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Listening to music can help us focus and work harder. Poetic experiences let us appreciate life and understand people around us. Some things give practical util
by makeitrain 5y ago
Listening to music can help us focus and work harder. Poetic experiences let us appreciate life and understand people around us. Some things give practical utility and some aesthetic value. Neither is more important than the other. We have to eat to survive, but that is only the bare minimum.
I definitely appreciate things more that provide valuable utility or some other derivative value. You're right that some works are appreciated beyond their utility, for how they are experienced.
I do think there may be utility in these things even when the pattern is more apparent than the application. A good poem makes us feel something. I just wouldn't get the same feeling from a math problem unless it solved something for me. Not to diminish your appreciation for this, just that I find a poem more accessible.
- noduerme 5y agoI was with you about valuing things that are utilitarian until you mentioned math. Solving math problems isn't really akin to the other things you mentioned. After all, you don't read poetry to solve a poetry problem and walk away feeling as if you benefited from it. Hopefully not. But poetry is a fantastic analogy, and I think you may have selected that subconsciously. A great moment of seeing something mathematical with total clarity is exactly like the moment you suddenly understand a poem and have access to what the poet meant. Math doesn't actually have problems and doesn't need to be solved. It exists whether you figure it out or not. What's sort of neat about this is that it physically demonstrates that fact.