Art and Embodied Aesthetic Emotions
Joerg Fingerhut, Corinna Kühnapfel
May 30, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/z7gt2_v2 via OpenAlex
Summary
Aesthetic emotions like being moved, interest, and wonder structure how people explore artworks through distinctive embodied cognitive styles. These emotions also contribute to evaluating artworks as artworks, linking exploration and evaluation closely together. The chapter situates aesthetic emotions within the embodied-enactive framework, building on accounts of art as reorganizational practice and the unaffordable in aesthetic experience. It addresses a gap in existing approaches by specifying the embodied and emotional processes through which artworks are explored, experienced, and evaluated, thereby contributing to a critical neuroaesthetics and understanding of aesthetic emotions in philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Aesthetic emotions structure exploratory activities afforded by artworks and critically contribute to their evaluation, closely intertwining exploration and evaluation in aesthetic engagement. |
Abstract
In this chapter, we situate aesthetic emotions within the embodied-enactive framework of the mind. Building on central enactive accounts of art, Noë’s account of art as reorganizational practice and Gallagher’s account of the unaffordable in aesthetic experience, we examine the transformative potential of aesthetic engagement while highlighting a remaining challenge: these approaches leave comparatively underspecified the embodied and emotional processes through which artworks are explored, experienced, and evaluated. We propose aesthetic emotions to address this gap. Paradigmatic candidates for aesthetic emotions are being moved, interest, and wonder. We argue that such emotions structure the exploratory activities afforded by artworks through their distinctive embodied cognitive styles. Yet, aesthetic emotions also critically contribute to the evaluation of artworks as artworks, thereby providing a promising pathway to naturalize aesthetics in this respect. Exploration and evaluation are therefore closely intertwined in aesthetic engagement. By bringing recent empirical work on embodiment in aesthetics into dialogue with enactive theories of art, the chapter contributes to a critical (neuro-)aesthetics and to a better understanding of aesthetic emotions as an under-explored class of mental processes within philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.