I keep directing my Shakespeare authorship friends and enemies to this poem, but none has commented on it, that I recall.   I tend to think Shakespeare fans rarely are much interested in newer forms of poetry.   I made it around twenty years ago.  It was the first of my visual poems to get accepted for Kaldron, the leading American visual poetry magazine of the time (but international in scope).  Unfortu- nately, I can’t show it large enough for the small print to be visible her.

Here’s an annotated detail of it showing what the small print says.

I now know more about pleasure and pain than I understand.   My problem, I think, is that what I know seems right, but I can’t organize it into any kind of neat, accessible package.  The thing bothering me is what beauty is.  I once pegged it as simply the right ratio of pleasure to pain a stimulus produces.  Then I remembered something obvious to almost everyone but me: that there are stimuli that are automatically perceived by healthy minds as beautiful.  Nothing wrong with two kinds of beauty, but the two seemed to me too different from one another to share a name.  Next thing you know, I’d have to accept an elegant mathematical proof as beautiful.  Okay in bull sessions, but not if one is concerned with useful serious communication since a term loses its linguistic value to the degree that it can be applied to significantly different things.

So, how about calling the stimulus with the proper familiarity to unfamiliarity ratio . . . ?  I can’t think of anything.  There’s the beauty our instincts are sensitive to, and the truth our instincts about what contradicts, what harmonizes, are sensitive to.  Empathy would be what our instincts derive pleasure from when interacting with others–that which is anthroceptually pleasurable, in terms of knowlecular psychology.  There’s good, too, or the pleasure–instinctive in many cases–we feel when we, or others, act in a manner we consider moral.

Okay, folks, I have to turn to neologization, again.  “Assimlatry.”  That is now my term for any stimulus causes that has the right r/f ratio (or “resolution/frustration” ratio, resolution being what happens when a psychevent leads to the familiar, frustration being what happens when it leads to  unfamiliarity).  “Assimlatrous” is the adjectival form.  Yes, grotesque terms, but naming is the first step toward understanding, and essential.

There’s also the need for the instinctive pleasure one feels when achieving a goal.  “Triumph” may be sufficient.  No, I think “success” better.  And “resolution” for “assimilatry.”  No, no” “comprehension” is the perfect name for it!  So, I have the following pairing on my list of kinds of pleasure and pain (with which of my theory’s awareness’s is involved in each case):

instinct-based evaluception

beauty/ ugliness: fundaceptual evaluception
empathy/ hostility: personal anthroceptual evaluception
good/ bad: moral anthroceptual evaluception
success/ failure: sagaceptual evaluception

logic-based evaluception

truth/ error: reducticeptual evaluception

experience-based evaluception

comprehension/ perplexity: combiceptual evaluception

I think I may be getting somewhere, after all. And, wow, a list of terms none of which is a coinage!  (I mean aside from the names of my awarenesses.)

I now propose that the three human emotional responses are instinct-based, assimilation-based and logic-based.  And I’m back to naming the three evaluceptual (or emotion-evaluational) types dionysian, apollonian and hermesian, with the claim that dionysian and apollonian have much in common with Nietzsche’s two personality types but aren’t identical to them.  It’s true that when introducing my theory I have to spend time explaining my types, but that would be the case whatever I named them.  So why not go with interesting names?

In any case, the dionysian’s primary emotional reaction to stimuli will be on the basis of his innate instinctive evaluation of them as painful, pleasurable or neutral.  A wound will be painful, a smiling face pleasurable, a nondescript meadow neutral.  Near-universal direct emotional responses to commonplace realities.  He will thus generally be one of the crowd, and instinctively enjoy the feeling of oneness with others that fusing with a crowd can give one, as is true of Nietzsche’s dionysian.  His enjoyments will be mainly sensual, unreflective.

The apollonian’s primary emotional reaction to stimuli will be on the basis of his evaluation of them, mostly instinctive, as to whether or not they lead to contradictions.  If they harmonize with his other relevant understandings, he will find them pleasurable.  If they contradict those understandings, they will pain him to the degree that they contradict them.  If they lead to neither significant agreements or disagreements, as will most often be the case, they will cause no emotional reaction.  The apollonian’s enjoyments will tend to be abstract, austere, thoughtful.  He will feel himself above the masses, as is the case with Nietzsche’s apollonian.

The hermesian’s emotional reaction is similar to the apollonian’s inasmuch as it is determined in the cerebrum rather than coming already tagged the way the dionysian’s does.  However, whereas the apollonian is concerned with unchanging contradictions, the hermesian is concerned with how familiar a situation comes about, which is constantly in flux.  That is, if a psychevent leads to contradiction X, it will always cause pain, but if a psychevent leads to situation Y, the result may be pain on Tuesday but pleasure on Thursday, or even later on Tuesday, since what is familiar is a matter of one’s constantly growing knownledge of existence, while what is contradictory will always be contradictory.

Ergo, the hermesian’s response will tend to be the most sophisticated of the three.  It will be due to the hermesian’s long-term, cummulative experience of life, whereas the apollonian’s will be due to his innate, permanent sense of consistency, and the dionysian’s to his unchanging instinctive attraction-to/repulsion-from his immediate experience of life.

Still, the dionysian response will be the most natural, the generally most rich. the most unarguably valid of the emotional responses.  The apollonian’s the most scorned but probably the one most important for establishing the final value of an artwork, with the hermesian’s irrelevant if concerned with stimuli of not instinctual resonance or logic.

Okay, I’m still fumbling for my take.  I’m getting close to it, though.