Art and Embodied Aesthetic Emotions

Aesthetic emotions such as being moved, interest, and wonder play a central role in how people engage with artworks. Within the embodied-enactive framework of the mind, these emotions structure the exploratory activities that artworks afford through their distinctive embodied cognitive styles. They also contribute critically to evaluating artworks as artworks. Exploration and evaluation are closely intertwined in aesthetic engagement. By bringing empirical work on embodiment in aesthetics into dialogue with enactive theories of art, the chapter advances a critical neuro-aesthetics and a better understanding of aesthetic emotions as an under-explored class of mental processes within philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.

Study at a glance

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.