Is that a Feeling or a Sensation?

I just came across a quote from Oswald Spengler, in "The Decline of the West," in which he writes that one of the key features of the end of a culture is when one can't tell "sensation from feeling." It's hard to dispute this claim as one looks around at our hyper-stupefied age where the general level of discourse is of a teen gossip magazine variety. It seems as if we distrust deeper and more "authentic" human emotions and prefer to hide behind the safe dishonesty of the "cool" surface. The culture of "cool" permeates our conscious environment. Cool means noncommittal and disaffected. The whole cool "facade" is about "trying too hard" to detach and steer clear of vulnerability. Our collective consciousness is blunted by the flood unfiltered trivia that permits undue influence to the insipid or the tasteless or even the the likes of bloggers without lives (personal references aside.) How have we arrived at this juncture in our evolution where a shrugging detachment has become a necessary survival method? We've even come to misunderstand "feeling" as opposed to "feelings." To have or discover "feelings" has an Oprah connotation - usually associated with something touchy-feely, sentimental and easily sold to a self-absorbed and gullible public looking for the next quick fix from the latest self-help guru. Then there's "feeling" - that "all-too human" condition in which one responds to stimuli by genuine engagement. Any of us who are products of this cynical branding culture are jaded in the knowledge that sensation sells. It keeps the presses warm and the heads of our media and entertainment industries well-remunerated. I don't want to accept that humanity is now reducible to sets of predictable shopping behaviour and that all the rest is history, but it's obvious that our failure to access a sense of the profound, of the transcendent is diminishing amid our unrelenting need to satisfy our shrinking attention spans. There are rare moments when I am transported by a piece of music, for example, and am touched with either a "feeling" of joy or gravity depending on what it conveys and I will be surprised by the genuine emotions that are stirred up from within. Music is particularly effective at doing this but so is art and literature -- albeit with more effort. A great work of art is able to connect the viewer to the universal -- to immortality. It has the power to access the higher senses and is not quickly digested and forgotten upon the viewer's exit. A great work of art doesn't merely take you by surprise and shake you out of your routine, it infiltrates your consciousness and quietly alters your perception and experience. Indeed, it ought to subvert and leave you a bit confused. We have not merely lost our ability to "feel" -- we have more importantly lost our ability to understand why we're feeling it. If you listen to the "Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart for example, there are arias that are soft and healing -- that literally take the weight of the world and liberate the listener with a "feeling" of heavenly levitation. This is not a mere sensation -- it's a humanizing experience that has a purgative effect on us. A great piece of jazz or even a well-crafted, melodic and intelligent pop song also have the same effects but we're now living in the age of the deejay and it seems that the technological advances that allow for deafening crystalline volume with earth-shaking bass are commensurate with a decline in quality or substance of the music being played. The twin trends of idiocy and mediocrity seem inescapable and the brash noise of a world impoverished by excess overwhelms higher and more reflective states of being.