Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The mind is concerned with qualia that is the act of “what it is like for someone or something to have a particular experience.” The consciousness theories which have dominated the nexus of literary, scientific, and social sciences for the past two decades have increasingly focused on the evolution of the mind – of the definitive human nature and emotion which have shaped our culture and thought. David Herman assigns the narrative as “a mode of representation tailor-made for gauging the felt quality of lived experiences” [Herman, 138]. Herman also makes the caveat that this representation of consciousness is “subject to change across different contexts.” The concept of ‘situated cognition’ grown out of the interdisciplinary perspectives of cognitive theories focuses on the idea of cognition as spontaneous and relative. In her Journal Reborn, Susan Sontag makes the following entry; “Ideas disturb the levelness of life.” What Sontag was looking for and what she made her study over the course of her academic career is the ‘agony’ of conscious thought. This paper examines the theories of cognition and its relation to Susan Sontag’s idea of art as a “passion of the mind.” In doing so, it not only looks at cognitive perspectives on Sontag’s essays and notebooks most specifically Reborn, Under the Sign of Saturn, Against Interpretation – to name a few, but also examines how Sontag’s own experiments can be used to revaluate the idea of qualia, situated cognition, and humanities across disciplines.