Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind (original) (raw)

The Nature of Aesthetic Experiences

2000

This dissertation provides a theory of the nature of aesthetic experiences on the basis of a theory of aesthetic values. It results in the formulation of the following necessary conditions for an experience to be aesthetic:(i) it must consist of a (complex) representation of an object and an accompanying feeling;(ii) the representation must instantiate an intrinsic value; and (iii) the feeling must be the recognition of that value and bestow it on the object.

Is Aesthetic Experience Possible?

Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, ed. Gregory Currie, Matthew Kieran and Aaron Meskin (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

It is common for current views of aesthetic experience and appreciation to propose that these activities involve some sort of second--order grasp of one's own mental states or processes. In some accounts it appears that second-order awareness is required for aesthetic experience or appreciation at all, while in others it is implicated only in some varieties of aesthetic experience or appreciation. Psychological research over the last several decades, on the other hand, raises serious questions about the viability of second--order awareness of mental processes. In this paper I enumerate the problems that this research raises for accounts of aesthetic experience and appreciation and explore the prospects for solving these problems. I propose an account of 3 related notions, aesthetic experience, (mere) aesthetic appreciation, and deep aesthetic appreciation, in light of the empirical findings. On several current views, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves a second-order grasp of one's own mental processes. Matthew Kieran says, "When we truly appreciate a work, we appreciate its pictorial composition, the arc of the lines, the shading, the foreshadowing, the ways in which the artistry shapes and guides our responses" (Kieran 2005, p. 213; emphasis added). Gary Iseminger suggests that "[s]omeone is appreciating a state of affairs just in case she or he is valuing for its own sake the experiencing of that state of affairs," and is thus in "the aesthetic state of mind" (Iseminger 2005, p. 99; emphasis in original). Jerrold Levinson suggests that valuing an experience in itself, in Iseminger's sense, might be cashed out as "tak[ing] satisfaction in such an activity for its own sake while, at some level, endorsing or approving doing so" (Levinson forthcoming; emphasis in original). Thus, in Levinson's version, we have the experiencing of a state of affairs, the taking of satisfaction in this experiencing, and the endorsing of one's satisfaction. Levinson ultimately holds that higher--order valuing of one's own experience is only one variety of aesthetic experience, though. He says, "Aesthetic experience is experience involving aesthetic perception of some object, grounded in aesthetic attention to the object, and in which there is a positive hedonic, affective or evaluative response to the perception itself or the content of that perception" (Levinson forthcoming; emphasis in original). Since a positive response to the content of the perception is sufficient, second--order awareness is not required for all forms of aesthetic experience. Noël Carroll, like Levinson, incorporates second--order awareness into his account of aesthetic experience, but without making it a requirement: "attention with understanding … to the ways in which [the work's formal and aesthetic properties] engage our sensibilities and imagination" is one variety of aesthetic experience, but simply attending to those formal and aesthetic properties themselves, without any second--order awareness, is another (Carroll 2002, p. 167). 8 Paul Locher et al. (2007, p. 75. 9 "[W]hen asked directly about a possible effect of the position of the article, virtually all subjects denied it, usually with a worried glance at the interviewer suggesting that they felt either that they had misunderstood the question or were dealing with a madman.

Questions about Aesthetic Experience

These brief comments raise some questions about Murray Smith's remarks, in his new volume Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, on the nature of aesthetic experience. My questions concern how we might best draw a viable distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences and focus in particular on possible links between self-awareness and aesthetic experiences. In sum, I agree with Smith in holding that we should not give up on the notion of aesthetic experience, even though aestheticians continue to disagree regarding even the most basic questions pertaining to its nature.

A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments

British Journal of Psychology, 2004

Although aesthetic experiences are frequent in modern life, there is as of yet no scientifically comprehensive theory that explains what psychologically constitutes such experiences. These experiences are particularly interesting because of their hedonic properties and the possibility to provide self-rewarding cognitive operations. We shall explain why modern art's large number of individualized styles, innovativeness and conceptuality offer positive aesthetic experiences. Moreover, the challenge of art is mainly driven by a need for understanding. Cognitive challenges of both abstract art and other conceptual, complex and multidimensional stimuli require an extension of previous approaches to empirical aesthetics. We present an information-processing stage model of aesthetic processing. According to the model, aesthetic experiences involve five stages: perception, explicit classification, implicit classification, cognitive mastering and evaluation. The model differentiates between aesthetic emotion and aesthetic judgments as two types of output.

The Aesthetic Aha: On the pleasure of having insights into Gestalt

Acta Psychologica, 2013

Are challenging stimuli appreciated due to perceptual insights during elaboration? Drawing on the literature regarding aesthetic appreciation, several approaches can be identified. For instance, fluency of processing as well as perceptual challenge are supposed to increase appreciation: One group claims that fluency of processing increases appreciation. Others link aesthetics to engagement: Creation and manipulation of sense itself should be rewarding . We experimentally tested the influence of insights during elaboration on liking. Pairs of stimulihardly detectable two-tone images including a face (Mooney face) and meaningless stimuli matched for complexitywere presented repeatedly. Having an insight as well as the intensity of the insight predicted subsequent gains in liking. This paper qualifies the role of insight (-aha!) on aesthetic appreciation through the effects of elaboration and problemsolving on understanding the processing of modern art.

Aesthetics and Affectivity

Aesthetics and Affectivity, ed. by Laura La Bella, Stefano Marino and Vittoria Sisca, issue n. 60/1 of "The Polish Journal of Aesthetics" (2021), 2021

Feelings, emotions, phenomena of empathy and sympathy, appetites, desires, moods, and generally the whole sphere of affectivity make up one of the most fundamental dimensions of human life which, also with the advent of the so-called “Affective Turn” in various fields of the human and social sciences, has been the object of recent rediscovery and revaluation. Sometimes this renewed appreciation of the affective and emotional dimension of experience in contemporary thought has also been put in contrast with a certain primacy of the purely representational and cognitive dimension that has been quite characteristic of modern thinking and culture. As has been noted about the notion of atmosphere (Griffero 2018), “the humanities […], bypassing positivist conventions and endorsing more […] affective paradigms rather than […] cognitive ones,” in the last decades have been focused “more on the vague and expressive qualia of reality (the how) than on its defined and quantified materiality (the what)”: mutatis mutandis, a consideration of this kind can probably be applied also to the revaluation and rehabilitation of the sphere of affectivity in general. If what has been said above is true with regard to our experience of the world in general, it is probably even more accurate and more evident in the specific case of our experience with art and the aesthetic. In fact, the abovementioned fundamental elements or components of the human experience of the world as such, i.e., of the human experience understood at the most general level, also seem to play an essential role (although in different and sometimes problematic ways) in art and aesthetic experience. Of course, this has been widely (although variously and hence not always systematically and coherently) recognized since the beginning of Western philosophy and culture and in non-Western forms of thinking and worldviews. Focusing our attention again on the present age, we may notice that this has led in our time, among other things, to significant developments in several fields and subfields of contemporary aesthetics variously interested in the role played by the dimension of affectivity in human experience; including—for example, and without any presumption or claim for completeness—recent aesthetic conceptions connected to theories of embodiment and the extended mind (Noë 2015; Matteucci 2019), phenomenological aesthetics of atmospheres and emotional spaces (Griffero 2016), and also somaesthetics with a significant revaluation of the bodily dimension in its entirety (Shusterman 1999, 2019). As noted by Richard Shusterman about his original disciplinary proposal (namely somaesthetics), its roots in the original project of aesthetics as not only a theory of fine art and natural beauty but also (if not mainly) as a theory of sensory perception and its status of a discipline of both theory and practice: “the senses surely belong to the body and are deeply influenced by its condition. Our sensory perception thus depends on how the body feels and functions; what it desires, does, and suffers. […] Concerned not simply with the body’s external form or representation but also with its lived experience, somaesthetics works at improving awareness of our bodily states and feelings, thus providing greater insight into both our passing moods and lasting attitudes” (Shusterman 1999, 301-302). As guest editors of “Aesthetics and Affectivity,” vol. 60/1 (2021) of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, we are now happy to present to our readers a volume that, as the Table of Contents clearly shows, includes seven contributions offered by several scholars of aesthetics. As readers will immediately see by simply reading the titles of the essays collected here, and then understand better by carefully reading the full papers, these contributions are all strictly focused on the question concerning the affective dimension(s) of human experience as explained before. Nevertheless, at the same time, they are all different from each other as far as the cultural backgrounds, the theoretical interests, the chosen methodologies, the particular topics studied, and the specific aims of the various authors are concerned.

The Anatomy of Aesthetic Experience

The primary aim of this work is to formulate an intensional definition of aesthetic experience. Its secondary aims are (i) to show how this definition might be used for empirical research and (ii) to better understand other terms that are qualified by ‘aesthetic’ (chiefly, ‘aesthetic properties’ and ‘aesthetic value’).

Sense and Subjectivity. Hidden Potentials in Psychological Aesthetics

Classical philosophical aesthetics held several assumptions about the psyche, both in relation to psychic structures and psychic functions. Whereas contemporary psychological aesthetics are dominated by reductive approaches when it comes to the nature of the work of art and the nature of experience, this article identifies some early nonreductive or complex psychological themes in classical aesthetics, namely the nature of sensing and aesthetic form, and locates their importance in contemporary conceptualizations of the functions of art. Sensing and aesthetic form are discussed in relation to other features of subjectivity, such as rationality, emotionality, and sociability. Just as the different senses are never fully interchangeable, neither are the arts, and the existence of a unified aesthetic experience rests on an aesthetic form that is amodal. The article proposes a psychological aesthetics that retains some of the features present in early philosophical aesthetics, while coming to terms with a contemporary experiential subject.