Improvisers shape meanings whilst in the act of composing. Words that describe what they have made come later, even to themselves.
Al Wunder is a teacher of movement improvisation whose method involves finding enjoyment though moving. In finding the things we enjoy to do, we identify things we value. Meanings we find in actions we value are subjective and can change over time.
The work of Max Scheler seems to be in tune with this.
The philosophy of Hungarian Max Ferdinand Scheler (1874-1938) is described by Francis Dunlop as “applied phenomenology” (Dunlop; 1991;19). Scheler, he writes, admired Kant’s work, but associated it with “the neglect of love and joy that he saw in the Russian ethos.” Scheler described his own position as “ethical personalism”, where:
…”the ultimate sense and value of the entire universe is…to be measured by the pure being (not the achievements) and the most possible goodness…of persons: (GWII 16)…
…Scheler called values “the emotional a priori“. They are emotional because they are intuited or apprehended in feeling. They are a priori not because they are produced by feeling or any other faculty, in Kantian fashion, but because they are fundamental and irreducible data.
Goods are goods because they have value, goals and purposes are only intelligible when something is striven for as having value. Even pleasure is always sought because of its value. Values are, then, material qualities of things. That they are not mere logical or linguistic abstractions from their “bearers” is show by experience. We may, for example, meet a person for the first time and be aware of some exceptional spiritual quality about him without knowing what. Or we may sense the high aesthetic value of a work of art before we have really taken in its sensory elements.Or we feel “the atmosphere of a value” in memory, perception or anticipation, before its bearer is given to us at all. In the same sort of way we may feel ourselves half-consciously “striving for” something we feel to be very important, without having clearly conceived what it is, or accepted it as one of our goals. In such cases we are guided by an awareness of value that precedes our knowledge of what exactly it is we are after. In Scheler’s view, our feeling-perception of the world precedes our intellectual grasp. The world is first given as valuable in various ways; only subsequently do we see it neutrally, as though it were “value-free”.
(Dunlop;1991;17)
…knowledge of persons requires sympathy, and sympathy is only possible because all human beings share in the same life which pulses through all living things. But there is an “intimate sphere” at the heart of every person which is wholly unknowable. (Dunlop; 1991;23)
Ref.
Francis Dunlop, Indoctos Docere: thinkers of our time, Claridge Press London, 1991.