THE FIFTH DIMENSION
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta
aestheics and neuroaesthetics
     
   

in memory of Natália Pais and Madalena Perdigão
to Fernando Galrito and Antónia Grilo

 

   

 

 

 

It is a monumental, remarkable and extraordinary contribution to the universal thought!
Dário Moreira de Castro Alves


The Fifth Dimension is the result of a course for teachers created and taught by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Institute of Early Childhood Education, in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1997 and 1998.
They resulted in thirty books, fourteen volumes, which are now published in two different editions - one in English and another in Portuguese.
In addition to other information, on this website you can read the introduction written by the diplomat, translator and philosopher Dário de Castro Alves; the general introduction with a "map" of all books; as well as the indexes of names present in the texts and also in the images, making possible to identify in which volumes a given name is referred to.
The books (on paper) are internationally distributed by Amazon. They are also accessible in digital format, free of charge, on the academia.edu platform.

 

The Fifth Dimension is a project on aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. The ancient meaning of the word "aesthetics" is "perception", how we perceive and understand the world, and how that understanding changes over time.
Of course, it deeply implies not only art, music and architecture, but also philosophy, economics, law, religion or politics.
Neuroaesthetics is the vision of this continuous metamorphosis under a neurological approach - field which I've studied since the early 1980s, as a natural development after the ideas of the brilliant American philosopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce, who lived between 1839 and 1914 .
In general, neuroaesthetics is presented by physicians talking about art. Here, it is said by someone who works with art - who has studied and applied the so-called neurosciences in his own musical, architectural or art creations for more than forty years - who presents an approach to neurology and the metamorphosis of human thought over about two hundred thousand years.

Read it. Spread out among your friends! Day after day fewer people read books. Memory quickly disintegrates. Few people already know who was Zeuxis, Cicero, Augustine, Ficino, Blavatsky, or even Giotto or Leonardo (I am not exaggerating, if you do a Google search today with the word "Leonardo", in most countries it will appear a company, a singer or the actor Leonardo di Caprio). Few know Debussy, Varèse or Fernand Léger. Not to mention Max Plank, Heisenberg, Helmholtz or Marvin Minsky.
Stockhausen, Ligeti, René Berger or even Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Merce Cunningham are unknown to most people. Everything was quickly replaced by the Big Brother (in both senses: television programs and surveillance and social control systems). Everything is quickly replaced by the continuous consumption of entertainment, which is the absence of thought. But, all these characters that are being erased are an essential part of who we are, without whom we cannot understand our lives. Their lives, their ideas, their questionings, are not of interest to dictatorial spirits.
No defense of the dictatorship, whatever its nature, is acceptable when one knows the human in some depth.
We live in a moment of rapid erasure of knowledge in an apparent transition to an instantaneous, volatile and ephemeral culture - just as the nazi universe aspired: total control of the State and absence of thought.
The negative freedom - freely elaborated by each one of us - according to which our right ends when the other's begins, is the primary condition of the Rule of Law, is not imposed by a superior power and, therefore, is an act of consciousness that cannot exist without free knowledge, without free-thinking.
Such freedom, preserving our independence, reveals the creative dimension of the human... something that brings Picasso to my mind when he said that every child is an artist, the question is how to remain artists when we grow up.

Emanuel Pimenta

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird", Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food".
John Cage

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emanuel pimenta

introduction by Dário de Castro Alves
"map" of the books
covers of the books
books by emanuel pimenta

index of names in the texts
index of names in the images

The Fifth Dimension at academia.edu

Amazon (United States, Italy, France,
Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, Brazil)


Emanuel Pimenta talks about The Fifth Dimension

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