Response

Abstract

like so many of our most heartfelt processes of introspection, Gabriel conroy’s comes to a touchingly premature conclusion. He moves too quickly to resolve the mystery of his absorbed wife into a fantasy of aesthetic creation that allows him to avoid further reflection. But we don’t have to stop. We might ask, using Gabriel’s own tellingly infelicitous formulation: What is a man looking at a woman a symbol of? What is a man imagining a painting of a woman a symbol of? What is feeling, even, a symbol of, especially feeling that has to route itself through the imagination of a work of art? Gabriel’s mystified ruminations came to mind, along with the questions with which i have supplemented them, as i thought of the important methodological and historical issues raised by the three papers above. to say “i feel” will only express something of interest in response to a concern about numbness. similarly, barring a prior worry about the faculties at issue, “i see” and “i know” are most usefully accompanied by some particular object of sight or knowledge. “i feel pain” (even “i feel your pain”), “i feel happy,” “i feel sad”—an object of perception is evidently necessary for perception to take place. and yet, as Pamela Fletcher reminds us, the fact of having sensations or emotions has served at times to identify oneself as a kind of person—one who has feelings or who is not indifferent to feelings—rather than as a person experiencing something in particular. Feeling without specific content, knowing without knowledge, “seeing” by looking away: Fletcher, ruth Bernard Yeazell, and simon Goldhill bring us to a richer understanding of what it