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well, strange, that's all lovely. i'm particularly interested in your 18th century theory of art as expressive of some Spirit. it seems a bit at cross purposes with a materialist viewpoint, but hey no matter (literally).
when you say that you feel emotions & animals dont...all you're saying is that you have a linguistic capability which is knit into your perceptual apparatus in a fundamental way that enables you to name certain affect clusters as emotions and which also gives you the possibility of making self-referential statements.
so because we operate in a linguistically-mediated fashion, you can name (and so have) emotions (say) and because you can make recursive statements can tell others you have x or y emotion and imagine that, in the doing, some sense of what you're talking about transmits (even though it probably doesn't except in the most general sense)
you also say that your viewpoint is limited by that capability to the extent that it recognizes no other systems of communication as communication at all. this is of a piece with another problem: for you your experience is an experience; in attempting to understand other types of animals, your experience is limited to observation and inferences. so from a viewpoint shaped and limited by a specifically human relation to language--which is perhaps the central defining characteristic of being-human, the routing of dynamical system performances through the medium of language--you conclude that only humans feel. but that's a circle. all it does in the last analysis (engels--gotta love him) is say that you are human and so is your viewpoint.
this is not to say that therefore every other type of biosystem feels in the way humans would understand it.
but there are obviously any number of scales and any number of modes of performing imbrication with environments.
fact is that neither you nor anyone else knows what if any gradation there is at the level of experience, and the contents of experience (which would obviously include affect or emotion) may or may not link us to other biological systems.
and your way of thinking couldn't get you further away from even starting to get there because it's predicated on some quaint notions of being-human which render it the center of all creation. so some god enters the picture to explain that specialness that you create by repeating limitations of viewpoint as if they were the opposite of limitations.
because we seem to like categories and because in english (in particular) nouns which name features in the world tend to classify by abstract criteria (a mountain is a mountain because of its general shape--there are other ways of thinking space--in terms of pathways, say---that would never get you to an abstract notion of mountainness. there's a huge historical linguistics area in this kind of divergence, which points to linkages between overall cultural rationalities and the characteristics of languages as they develop. a kinda dialectic i suppose) and because we like classification systems, we combine the two (or did across the 18th century in particular) into these neat little grids that talk about biological systems as if they were objects in the world and by talking about them as objects impute distinctions (between object and environment, say, or between objects) that are mostly functions of the nouns we use. it's functional to think and talk that way in certain contexts, including our own (the circle that links rationality to expression back to rationality) but that doesn't mean the classifications are accurate in the sense that they may not enable a coherent understanding of what is so classified (particularly once you try to move beyond instrumental relations---the ways a community uses a particular species, say...)
it all gets quite complicated, running down this pathway, because it gums up some very basic assumptions about being-in-the-world as you and i tend to think of it because of the fact that we're embedded in a particular linguistic community.
i suppose in the end one chooses the circular relation to being that is most aesthetically amusing.
so if its flattering to assume that the advantages and limitations (in equal measure seemingly) that follow from being-embedded in a linguistic community (which is a condensed expression of a social history of being-in-the-world) necessarily imply the existence of some god which explains its specialness (an idea that follows mostly from the fact that you occupy such a position, and so) then who am i get in the way of this happy-place?
it's not necessary to move from there to quibbles over whether the god character exists or not--in such a debate the question is not the logic that would get one person to that place and another to a different one---the debate is really (again) about the framework within which debate can then happen. which criteria count, which do not.
suffice it to say that for the most part i do not see the existence of some god as required to explain much of anything.
i don't exclude the possibility that there might be such a thing--but i do think that if there is such a thing, neither you nor i know anything about it. so "god" is just another name.
but have fun with it.
millions do.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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