Abstract
This article addresses the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. It first, critically, considers one of the most influential approaches to the psychophysics of aesthetic perception, viz. neuroaesthetics. Hereafter, it outlines constitutive tenets of aesthetic perception in terms of a particular intentional relation to the object. The argument comes in three steps. First, I show the inadequacies of the neuroaesthetics of beauty in general and Semir Zeki’s and V.J. Ramachandran’s versions of it in particular. The neuroaesthetics of beauty falls short, because it develops hypotheses of aesthetic experience which have no consequences for the understanding of what art is, that is, how artists produce visual meaning effects in their works. This is so because they make the rewarding feeling of beauty the cornerstone of aesthetic experience. Next, I show why and how aesthetic experience should be defined relative to its object and the tools for meaning-making specific to that object, and not relative to the feeling (of beauty) it may elicit. Finally, I sketch the import this fact may have on a research program in empirical aesthetics.
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Notes
Dustin Stokes uses this term in Stokes 2009: 718.
I use the word “subjectivist” in a sense akin to John Hyman in (Hyman 2003). Yet without the negative value he attributes to it.
As I define aesthetic experience exclusively in terms of the kind of object it is about, and the latter independently of the value it may have for viewer, I do not distinguish between subjective responses such as ‘feeling of beauty’, ‘positive evaluation’, ‘appraisal’, ‘acknowledgement of value’, or ‘appreciative judgment’.
All Ramachandran and Hirstein’s eight laws for artistic experience (except the last) revolve around object recognition as an explanatory source for aesthetic pleasure. The authors propose two paths for this: one positive or direct. when the artist enhances–be it by way of distortion or “caricature”–the essential traits of the depicted object, the “very essence” or the “rasa” of the represented phenomenon (e.g., “amorousness”, Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999: 18) thereby facilitating an accrued epistemic access to the latter (famously called the “peak shift effect”); or indirectly by “teasing” the visuo-cognitive system, “titillating” it, by hindering immediate object recognition while still providing the system with enough cues (bound together by means of grouping) to eventually achieve (rewarding) object recognition in noisy visual environments (ibid.: 21–24).
Zeki explicitly equates “the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Concept with the brain’s stored record of what it has seen. Whether art succeeds in presenting the real truth, the essentials, or whether it is the only means of getting to that truth in the face of constantly changing and ephemeral sense data, the opposing views are at least united in suggesting that there is (Hegel) or that there should be (Plato and Schopenhauer) a strong relationship between painting and the search for essentials” (Zeki 1999b: 83).
For an enlightening discussion of this topic, see (Hyman 2010).
Obviously, from such a program of neuroaesthetics does not follow the claim that there aren’t different appreciative responses to art. The problem is rather that it has not addressed the issue or pondered the relation between a stratified phenomenology of beauty and its neural correlate(s). Recent developments actually point in the opposite direction. Ishizu and Zeki thus announce a good candidate for one neural circuit in charge of the feeling of beauty tout court: “We propose that all works [whatever the modality through which they are conveyed] that appear beautiful to a subject have a single brain-based characteristic, which is that they have as a correlate of experiencing them a change in strength of activity within the mOFC [medial orbito-frontal cortex] and, more specifically, within field A1 in it” (Ishizu and Zeki 2011: 8).
A photo can by the way easily elicit an aesthetic mode of experience. I insist: it is not instrumental for my argument to establish a list of such design properties which are likely to trigger an aesthetic intentional relation to the object. What counts here is the existence of such an intentional relation, the ultimate task being of course to characterize its phenomenology.
The distinction, as I use it here, originates from Husserl’s (1980: 19) distinction between the painting as a thing and the painting as a depicting surface, in that the different intentional relations are not simply functions of some perceptual distance to the object (from which, say, only strokes and paint appear, but no represented reality); rather they are available frameworks for experience, so that I can either look at a painting as, e.g., an object to be moved from one wall to another or an artful representation of a pope.
In a highly interesting series of experiments, Hendersen and Clark (2007) have shown how the recognition of a categorial intention (i.e., the intention of producing a specific kind of object; here a fictional text vs. a non-fictional text) elicits significantly different kinds of cognitive behavior. In their experiments, two groups of subjects were given the same text passage, but told that it was either fictional or non-fictional. In the following recall task, those who retold what they believed was fiction produced stories that were 1,5 times as long, with far more informational details (1,5 times as much), and which contained significantly more of the original narrative’s language.
I am not for that matter convinced that such findings, if they were to be made, would teach us more about art, but at least they would capture the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience proper.
The present view follows Alva Noë et alii’s critique of the “snapshot” conception of visual processing which conceives visual computation in terms of a series of operations upon an original retinal image representing the object (Thompson et al. 1999; Noë 2004). This view has itself roots back to Husserl’s Ideen II where he states that an essential property of the perceived thing as pure shape is its “functional relations” to its surroundings, its perceptual background (Husserl 1952: §15c).
Art historical knowledge is, of course, indispensable for getting a fuller picture of the meaning intentions behind the Brillo box project, but this does not imply that the intentional frame, in virtue of which they are experienced as artworks, is extrinsic or extraneous to perception. It is given directly in the perceptual context. Similarly, we do not walk around in supermarkets asking ourselves, at some low level of visual processing, if these stacks of canned soup are there to be appreciated aesthetically, even though we know of cans that have been used in artistic creation. Of course, background knowledge also plays a role for our perceptual experiences which as a rule take place within anticipatory expectation frames: museums and galleries trigger such expectations, namely that we will encounter objects acknowledged as artworks, but (1) supermarkets, court houses and bookshops also trigger expectations as to the kind of objects and events we’ll encounter in them; and (2) museums and galleries also contain a considerable amount of objects that are (in general) immediately recognizable as non-aesthetic since they do not display the design properties which some of the other objects display.
On non-generic structures as direct expressions of meaning intentions, see Petitot 2009a, b and Bundgaard 2009, 2011. On the intrinsic meaningfulness of non-generic structure for the visual system in general, see Desolneux et al. 2003. Non-genericity is a parade example of a design property that elicits aesthetic perception (in the present sense).
The whole paradigm has roots back to Yarbus (1967), see also Molnar (1981). The present approach follows Yarbus when he claimed that “composition is the means whereby the artist to some extent may compel the viewer to perceive what is portrayed in the picture” (Yarbus 1967: 193; see also Nodine et al. 1993: 219).
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Bundgaard, P.F. Feeling, meaning, and intentionality—a critique of the neuroaesthetics of beauty. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 781–801 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9351-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9351-5