The Aesthetics of Human Experience: Minding, Metaphor, and Icon in Poetic Expression (original) (raw)

2011, .. Special issue on Exchange Values: Poetics and Cognitive Science, ed. Mark Bruhn. Poetics Today 32.4: 717-752

This paper argues that the cognitive sciences need to incorporate aesthetic study of the arts into their methodologies to fully understand the nature of human cognitive processes, because the arts re ect insights into human experience that are unobtainable by the methodologies of the natural sciences. These insights di er from those acquired by scienti c exploration, because they arise not from the conceptual logic of reason but from the precategorial intuition of imagination. Aesthetics provides a methodology whereby we are able to understand how art enables us to experience emotions caused by sense impressions. This methodology lies at the heart of Giambattista Vico's Principi di scienza nuova (1725-44), which attempts to account for the way we live and participate in cultural, social, and civic communities. Vico's theory challenges certain Western philosophical presuppositions that still inform much of cognitive science, such as the relation of language to our experience of the natural world, the nature of subjective and objective representations, and the role of the arts in the evolutionary development of the human mind. In basing my approach to literature on Vico's, Susanne K. Langer's ( , 1967, and Maurice , 1968) theories, I argue that the language of literature is distinguished from conventional language use by its imaginative use of aesthetic patterns that make manifest the inherent character of the external world a we experience it. By introducing the concepts of minding, metaphor, and icon as structures of the imagination, I show how the language of poetic expression in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" enables us to apprehend the ways we intuitively par-