more on the power of Art

so the director was thinking about this quote by Lenin and thought, what if Lenin could have been forced to listen to the Appassionata just as he was getting ready to smash in somebody's head? and he (the director) then wondered whether he could create a dramatic situation in which Lenin had to listen to the Appassionata because he was really trying to listen to something else. an image popped in his head of a man in a depressing room, with earphones, "expecting to hear words that go against his beloved ideology, but actually hearing a music so beautiful and so powerful that it makes him re-think (or rather: re-feel) that ideology."

and here we have the beauty of one of the two major themes i see in the movie: the power of Art to push us toward the better. Plato says that when we see something beautiful, we are reminded of a divine Beauty that we are trying to pursue. i love that the director says re-feel instead of re-think. this is what i was talking about in relation to principle. i think this is what Lewis would call the chest in Abolition of Man (see my comment on the previous post, about the value of the waterfall). if our gut represents our instincts/natural reactions/feelings and the head represents extreme rationality, there exists between the two the principle of the chest-something between thinking and feeling and actually much deeper than either. it's so appropriate though, that he corrects himself to say re-feel rather than re-think because Art (especially music) very often doesn't make us think, it makes us "feel." but it's so powerful that it can change our thinking.