I argue that “The Rotation of Crops” represents one of two culminations of the aesthete’s (i.e., “A’s”) position in Either/Or. Under the guise of his bantering remarks, A sketches a theory of the modern self as specifically constituted in relation to the problem of boredom: To be modern is to be bored and to be motivated by the desire not to be bored. A’s boredom is thus in some sense an experience of ultimate significance, a religious experience imminent within the terms of the secular life itself. A’s solution to the problem of boredom turns out therefore to require a wholesale conversion; the cure is nothing short of a totalizing spiritual practice that one must make the center of one’s life, if one hopes to keep things interesting. A’s position amounts at once to a transcendental critique and to a theology of boredom.

How to explain the curious movements in which people of the past engaged? Critique of interpretivist approaches – cultural theory and post-modernism. Movements as intentional acts are best described by means of cognitive theory and phenomenology. Movements as a matter of attuning oneself to the mood of the situation one is in. All meaning is grounded in such fundamental movements. The history of movement is a history of the world that we made.

In Chapter 8 I examine Lacoste's study of affective experience and consider the possibility that God might be recognised in the affect as an event. For Lacoste, God’s presence to affection takes place in moods rather than feelings. The recognition that God has passed in experience is always subject to self-deception and must be tested against the tradition of the believing community. Revelation and truth are connected by means of Augustine's reversal: when it comes to God, we do not love what we first know but know what we first love. This attends to the paradox that occurs in the reception of phenomena appearing only to freedom – paradoxical phenomena appear as credible rather than indubitable and are open to acceptance or rejection. For Lacoste, such phenomenality ‘cannot be perceived without our decision to see it’ and begins in ‘an experience formed in the element of non-self-evidence’. It arouses love; it is the experience of love that first draws the 'believer'. Revelation touches experience in an encounter that is felt before it is known. Prepredicative, signifying by way of moods rather than feelings, the revelatory encounter is primarily relational rather than doctrinal.

As many chapters in this book describe, aging, even in the absence of disease, is associated with many changes in brain function. Emotions are among the major factors that determine our actions and interactions, as well as our quality of life. Emotions are primarily mediated by the brain, and thus, with aging, there can be alterations in brain functions that can change emotional functions. This chapter will discuss changes in the brain with aging and how these changes can alter the means by which we communicate, experience, and control and regulate emotions.