I just watched a video on Vlad Vexler’s philosophy channel titled “The Most Misunderstood Skill in Human Psychology (EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE)”. Vexler’s video pieces entice me and often take me off course from what I was doing, but amusingly also from what Vlad is talking about. I find his thinking stimulating, in a challenging and sometimes borderline offensive way. I am not an intellectual, so listening to him is usually very invigorating.

Emotional intelligence

Vexler starts his video with a very straight forward, but to me rather unexpected inverted defenition of emotional intelligence.

“Emotional intelligence is the capacity to avoid an excess of error about the psychology of other people. That’s it.”

M’kay.

You see, this is why I keep coming back to his YouTube channels (he has three), even though I am regularly annoyed by his excessive intellectualization of war, dictatorship, propaganda, and other highly emotional topics. I often find myself shouting at my screen: “Yes, all that, but at the end of the day there’s a young man dying on the battlefield!” referring to a video of a wounded Ukrainian or dying Russian soldier that I have seen just half an hour earlier. That internal clash between intellect and emotion even deepened for me with the acute and extreme deterioration of the Israelian-Palestinian conflict in 2023.

Anyway.

Vlad continues to talk about three strands of emotional intelligence: psychological, aesthetic and intellectual. He describes the second type of emotional intelligence, what he calls aesthetic emotional intelligence, as “understanding human artistic or at least aesthetic expression”.

I am not sure where I fall on the spectrum of aesthetic emotional intelligence described like that. I am an artist, but what the fuck do I know. Vexler continued to talk about aesthetic clarifications of the work of Mark Rothko, which stung me like a bee.

This is what went through my mind

When I stand in front of a Rothko (which he talks about from an aesthetic intellectual standpoint in the video), there is no need for anything else to happen. I just stand there. No analysis, no intellectual movement, no reasoning, no interpretation, nothing to dissect. Not even discernible feelings. I just stand there and let go of myself. I float away.

In other times, a musical performance can make me weep unexpectedly, like Pergolesi’s Stabat Matar for example. I suddenly and hilariously started crying, out of joy. Out of absolution. It is as if I dissolve at that moment, or sublimate from solid into a gasseous state, instantly.

Here is the strange thing. Intellectual interpretation of aesthetics at this point, clarification or signification of it, is to me like a public toilet that smells of a thousand flavours of urine. I don’t hate it, but it’s nasty.

So what is that moment? Is that aesthetic trancedence?

About Vlad Vexler

Vlad Vexler is a public intellectual with a background in philosophy, specialising in political theory, ethics and aesthetics. He refuses to humor simplistic narratives, and goes to great lengths to expand into quite solid nuances. His stories, which he mixes into his videos, are usually quite awful. I don’t think he’s very good at it, which is fine. He’s an intellectual, not an artist. His thinking is very nuanced and touches on many contemporary issues such as the decline of democracy, authoritarianism and our personal attitude towards politics, propaganda and even art. You can find Vlad Vexler’s philosophy channel here.

Cheers, Ingmar