Grounding aesthetic preference in the bodily conditions of meaning constitution: Towards an enactive approach

Nordic Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 23, Issue 43, 2012, Pages 83-103

  Scarinzi, Alfonsina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GÖTTINGEN   (Germany)

Author keywords

Embodiment; Enactivism; John Dewey; Lived body; Mark Johnson; Phenomenology; Pragmatist aesthetics

Indexed keywords

EID: 84872957380     PISSN: 20001452     EISSN: 20009607     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2007), 218.
2. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 6.
3. The view that aesthetics is a source of pre-linguistic knowledge has been supported in aesthetic research in the field of empirical aesthetics in Allan Whitfield, "Aesthetics as pre-linguistic knowledge: a psychological perspective", Design Issues 21, no. 1(2009):3-17.
4. Whitfield looks at aesthetics as a pre-linguistic cognitive stage of human evolution. Even if he develops his claim following the mind/body dichotomy, his view of aesthetics is close to Johnson's claim that the aesthetic is pre-linguistic sensory-perceptual meaning. While Mark Johnson focuses on the embodied meaning constitution rejecting the Cartesian dualism, Whitfield follows the idea of a dualistic interplay of emotion, cognition and perception based on representationalism. He argues that the function of aesthetics is to elaborate the categories by which we understand the world by attaching emotion to sensory perception and cognition. In formulating his claim he draws upon the emotional response category theory developed in Paula Niedenthal and Nathalie Dalle, "Le mariage de mon meilleur ami: emotional response. Categorization and naturally induced emotions", European Journal of Social Psychology 31(2001):737-42. According to this study, emotional states provide a type of conceptual coherence such that objects and events that elicit the same emotion are grouped together into categories and treated as the same sort of things.
5. Cf. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 212-13.
6. Cf. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 10.
7. Cf. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991);
8. Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
9. Giovanna Colombetti, "Enaction, sense-making and emotion", in Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, eds. John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 145-164;
10. Giovanna Colombetti, "Enactive appraisal", Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(2007):527-46.
11. Cf. Ezequiel Di Paolo, "Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency", Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(2005):429-52
12. and Giovanna Colombetti, "Enaction, sense-making and emotion".
13. Daniel Berlyne, "Complexity and incongruity variables as determinants of exploratory choice and evaluative ratings", Canadian Journal of Psychology 17(1963):274-90;
14. Daniel Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1971);
15. Colin Martindale and Kethleen Moore, "Priming, Prototypicality, Preferences", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14, no. 4(1988):661-70;
16. Colin Martindale, Kathleen Moore, and Jonathan Borkum, "Aesthetic preference: anomalous findings for Berlyne's psycho biological theory", American Journal of Psychology 103, no. 1(1990):53-80;
17. Paul Hekkert, Dirk Snelders, and Piet Van Wieringen, "'Most advanced, yet acceptable': typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design", British Journal of Psychology 94(2003):111-24;
18. Allan Whitfield, "Predicting preference for familiar, everyday objects: an experimental confrontation between two theories of aesthetic behavior", Journal of Environmental Psychology 3, no. 3(1983):221-37;
19. Allan Whitfield, "Beyond prototypicality: toward a categorical-motivational model of aesthetics", Empirical Studies of the Arts 18, no. 1(2000):1-11;
20. Paul Silvia, "Emotional responses to art. From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion", Review of General Psychology 9, no. 4(2005):342-57.
21. Cf. Mark Browne, and Ellen Dissanayake, "The arts are more than aesthetics: neuroaesthetics as narrow aesthetics", in Neuroaesthetics, eds. Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian (Amityville, N. Y.: Baywood, 2009), 43-57.
22. Cf. Martindale and Moore, "Priming, Prototypicality, Preferences".
23. Cf. Colombetti, "Enaction, sense-making and emotion".
24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
25. Cf. Daniel Berlyne, "Complexity and incongruity variables as determinants of exploratory choice and evaluative ratings"
26. Cf. Silvia, "Emotional responses to art. From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion".
27. and Martindale, Moore and Borkum, "Aesthetic preference: anomalous findings for Berlyne's psychobiological theory".
28. Adrian North, and David Hargreaves, "Collative variables versus prototypicality", Empirical Studies of the Arts 18, no. 1(2000):13-17.
29. Paul Hekkert, Dirk Snelders, and Piet Van Wieringen, "Most advanced, yet acceptable: typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design".
30. See Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 140, 121.
31. Thompson, Mind in Life, 246-48.
32. Claire Petitmengin, "Towards the Source of Thoughts: The Gestural and Transmodal Dimension of Lived Experience", Journal of Consciousness Studies 17, no. 4(2007):54-82;
33. Claire Petitmengin and Michel Bitbol, "The Validity of First-Person Descriptions as Authenticity and Coherence", Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, no. 10-12(2009):363-404.
34. Les Todres and Kathleen Galvin, "Embodied interpretation: a novel way of evocatively re-presenting meanings in phenomenological research", Qualitative Research 8, no. 5(2008):568-83.
35. Cf. Di Paolo, "Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency"
36. Cf. Colombetti, "Enactive appraisal"
37. Cf. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934).