Abstract
At least since the Enlightenment, aesthetics has suffered from what Gadamer calls a “subjectivism” that relegates aesthetics to a theory of judgments based on feeling, where feelings are regarded as non-cognitive, non-rational, and private. I argue, to the contrary, that aesthetics lies at the heart of our capacity for meaningful experience. Aesthetics concerns the patterns, images, feelings, qualities, and emotions by which meaning is possible for us in every aspect of our lives. Empirical research from cognitive science reinforces this picture of the pervasiveness of aesthetic conditions that emerge from the nature of our bodies, our brains, and the structured environments we inhabit. Following Dewey, I then suggest that the arts constitute exemplary achievements of human meaning-making, which is a process that draws on all of the aesthetic dimensions that make up our mundane experience. Consequently, in any adequate account of mind, thought, language, or values, aesthetics moves from the periphery to center stage as the key to our capacity for meaning, imagination, and creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
In the infamous section nine of the Critique of Judgment Kant says, “this subjective universal communicability can be nothing but [that of] the mental state in which we are when imagination and understanding are in free play,” and “this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the presentation by which it is given, precedes the pleasure in the object and is the basis of this pleasure, [a pleasure] in the harmony of the cognitive powers” ([19], 217–218).
- 2.
Indeed, Kant insists that judgments of taste have a “universal subjective validity”, in contrast to knowledge judgments that have “universal objective validity” that is based on shared concepts ([19], 62).
- 3.
This obsession with aesthetic disinterestedness was taken to its logical absurdity in Clive Bell’s ultraformalism in Art (1913), and also in Edward Bullough’s infamous treatment of “psychical distance” as a model for the aesthetic attitude – the proper distanced stance for perceiving the aesthetic qualities of an object [5]. The “myth of the aesthetic attitude” was demolished by George Dickie [12], and much earlier by John Dewey [11].
- 4.
Positive emotions can, of course, sometimes come to be associated with pleasurable states (such as a drug-induced high) that are actually dysfunctional. However, this does not challenge the hypothesis that positive and negative emotions arose over evolutionary history to help types of higher organisms survive, realize well-being, and avoid harm. That these pleasurable feelings can be activated by ultimately harmful substances and situations is simply a reality of contemporary global events and practices.
- 5.
As Lakoff and I [21] have shown, via the STATES ARE LOCATIONS metaphor, we can understand change of state as a change of location (as in “I fell into a depression,” “She pushed me over the edge,” “I went from joy to anger in a flash”). In the poem, then, a change of location (i.e., being “carried away” by both the cloud and the birdsong) enacts a change in your emotional state.
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Johnson, M. (2015). The Aesthetics of Embodied Life. In: Scarinzi, A. (eds) Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 73. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9379-7_2
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