The Artistic Expression of Feeling

In this essay, we provide an account of the basic emotions and their expression. On our view, emotions are experiences that indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are more or less sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that indicate and have the function of indicating emotions. We apply our account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions or any other mental states? In the next section, we provide an overview of unrestricted representationalism about experience. In section three, we offer a representationalist account of the basic emotions that combines exteroception and interoception. On our view, emotions are perceptual experiences that represent properties of our viscera and properties in our extra-bodily environment. Exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. In the fourth section, we survey aesthetic theories of expression in art including the resemblance, persona and arousal theories, and argue that each faces significant problems. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), we offer a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Finally, in section five, we apply our view to an example—Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—in order to illustrate how we experience emotions as represented properties of a painted canvas.

Routledge, 2020

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others' enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason.

Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2018

What role do the arts play in the study of the history of emotions? This essay reflects on the position that aesthetic works and arts-oriented methodologies have occupied in the field's development since the early 2000s. It begins by connecting artistic sources to anxieties about impressionism within cultural history, before looking at examples from literature that help illustrate the advantages works of art can bring to the study of emotion over time. Chief among these benefits is the power of artistic sources to create emotional worlds for their audiences-including, of course, historians. Ultimately, in arguing for a greater use of aesthetic works in our field, the essay makes the case for a more overtly emotional history of the emotions.

2000

In his 1976 book, Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman tackles the difficult problem of expression: what does it mean to say that such and such a work of art express sadness/melancholy/hapiness/etc.? His answer is that such utterances dealing with works of art are metaphorical and that expression should be defined as metaphorical exemplification, that is as reference to the property

2021

Most Art Therapists and Art Psychotherapists have a belief in the healing qualities of the media. It is a shared article of faith that creative material processes, of themselves, can promote the development of health and stability. Nevertheless, we also know that the relation to the material element is not without hazard. This is a problem for us, I think, because we can never be certain about the relationship between a service user, or client, and the physical material she manipulates. In terms of the relation that the other has to substance and process, we are always on the outside. This book by Jussi A. Saarinen, who is a psychologist and a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy, explores the painter's relationship to painting, the 'experience itself' (2021: 1. italics the author). Saarinen stresses that he is not concerned with expression but with what painters feel 'because they paint' (2021:1). His book is essentially a carefully constructed argument, which...

"Interdysciplinary Studies in Musicology" vol. 20, pp.51-63, 2020

The aim of this paper is to propose an interpretation of aesthetic emotions in which they are treated as various affective reactions to a work of art. I present arguments that there are three different types of such aesthetic emotional responses to art, i.e., embodied emotions, epistemic emotions and contextual-associative emotions. I then argue that aesthetic emotions understood in this way are dynamic wholes that need to be explained by capturing and describing their internal temporal dynamics as well as by analyzing the relationships with the other components of aesthetic experience.

2016

Can the art be used as a helping tool of understanding emotions and vice versa? Learning and understanding the emotions through art could help better understand the art? Can art therapy be taken as a form to liberalize practicing and consuming art for making art closer to the masses? How can the emotions be visualized

Themes from the work of Peter Goldie: emotion, narrative, and art, ed by Julian Dodd

It is common ground that emotions are expressed, be it through facial expression, expressive action or, in the most sophisticated way, through art. Nevertheless, it is still unclear what it means to express an emotion—as opposed to state, describe, or report it—and whether different ways of expression can be integrated into a unified theory. My aim here is to contribute to answering these questions, whereby my focus is on the intentional expression of emotion. I begin by presenting an approach to expressive action according to which this type of action both embodies and signals the agent’s emotional state, yet without this requiring any means-end reasoning on the part of the agent. Expressive action is rather completion and clarification of the emotion itself which often is not known before it is expressed. Starting on from this, I argue that expression of emotion in art is a special case of expressive action: in so far as it does express emotions, art, like any expressive action, embodies and signals not just a mental state but also how the world is evaluated in that state, thereby enabling us to share our point of view and to let each other know what matters to us.

Psychological Review, 2018

This is the pre-print of an article that will soon be published in Psychological Review. It is the first comprehensive theoretical article on aesthetic emotions. Following Kant’s definition, we propose that it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Each aesthetic emotion is tuned to a special type of perceived aesthetic appeal and is predictive of the subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure and the liking or disliking associated with this type of appeal. Contrary to the negativity bias of classical emotion catalogues, emotion terms used for aesthetic evaluation purposes include far more positive than negative emotions. At the same time, many overall positive aesthetic emotions encompass negative or mixed emotional ingredients. Appraisals of intrinsic pleasantness, familiarity, and novelty are preeminently important for aesthetic emotions. Appraisals of goal relevance/conduciveness and coping potential are largely irrelevant from a pragmatic perspective, but in some cases highly relevant for cognitive and affective coping. Aesthetic emotions are typically sought and savored for their own sake, with subjectively felt intensity and/or emotional arousal being rewards in their own right. The expression component of aesthetic emotions includes laughter, tears, and facial and bodily movements, along with applause or booing and words of praise or blame. Aesthetic emotions entail motivational approach and avoidance tendencies, specifically, tendencies toward prolonged, repeated, or interrupted exposure and wanting to possess aesthetically pleasing objects. They are experienced across a broad range of experiential domains and not coextensive with art-elicited emotions.

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2021

CALL FOR PAPERS: “Aesthetics and Affectivity” The Polish Journal of Aesthetics No. 60 (1/2021) Editors: Laura La Bella (Independent Scholar, PhD) Stefano Marino (University of Bologna, Associate Professor of Aesthetics) Vittoria Sisca (Independent Scholar) Submission Deadline: October 30, 2020 Emotions, feelings, and, generally, the whole sphere of affectivity make up one of the most fundamental elements of human life, and also play an essential (although sometimes problematic) role in art and aesthetic experience. In this regard, let us simply consider this: on one hand, it is certainly possible to think and talk of something like a “common world” in terms of sensations shared by all human beings; on the other hand, if we focus on each individual’s emotions and feelings, and the way the latter often condition our perception of the real, this same notion becomes somewhat ambiguous. If this is true concerning our experience of the world in general, it is even truer and clearer in the specific case of our experience with art. Reflections on the fundamental role played by affectivity in the whole realm of human experience leads us to recognize, for example, that every experienced object, apart from its purely factual properties, presents some “splits” into which the subject fits, so to speak—specifically, to recognize (following Merleau-Ponty) that our description of reality, even as it appears in perceptual experience, is always full of “anthropological predicates.” This becomes fully apparent if we consider such experiences as fantasizing and dreaming (or, in a more radical and even dramatic way, certain psychological pathologies in which the subject’s “private world,” especially influenced by his/her emotions and feelings, sometimes almost completely eclipses evidence of what we conventionally consider “real”), and also applies to a great extent to art and aesthetic experiences of different kinds. From Plato and Aristotle to modern and contemporary times, philosophers have always assumed a close connection between art and what we may call the realm of affectivity (passions, feelings, emotions), sometimes also developing forms of skepticism and suspiciousness towards them as supposedly non-rational or irrational components of human life. However, throughout the history of philosophy there have always been also other voices, so to speak, that have proposed to think about affectivity, feelings, and emotions in a different way, leading to identification with emotional and even instinctual aspects, such as that of the feeling of horror, no less than with the obscure origin of the brightness of ancient Greek culture and art (Nietzsche), or to acknowledgment of the undeniably powerful and indeed constitutive role of “attunement” and “mood” in human existence (Heidegger), or to the proposal for the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the specific “intelligence of emotions” (Nussbaum). Of course, philosophical reflection on affectivity, with a specific focus on its role in the aesthetic dimension, can also lead to questioning of the validity and appropriateness of categories such as “rational” and “irrational” that we sometimes tend to use in an easy, unproblematic, and somehow dualistic way, both in everyday language and in philosophical discourses. In fact, it is a widely shared and quite common belief that our feelings and emotions (or at least some of them) are irrational, but it is also true that many philosophers and especially artists (poets, novelists, composers, painters, performers, etc.) have shown that it is often very difficult to simply draw a line sharply differentiating between the rational and emotional components of our knowledge, inasmuch as the affective component is not at all marginal in the general economy of our convictions and beliefs. In adopting a broad and open philosophical approach—the only one which can do justice to the multiform and complex character of a question such as that of emotions and feelings—we invite authors to submit articles concerning the role of affectivity in human experience, with a particular focus on aesthetics, as broadly understood. Thus we welcome proposals addressing (but not limited to) the following aspects: – phenomenological analysis of emotions and their intentionality; – the relationship between emotion and perception in normal, pathological, or dreamlike/fantastic experience; – the phenomenon of affectivity as part of the grounds of philosophical thinking and aesthetic experience; – the revealing power of affective dispositions and emotional states understood as primary expression of human embeddedness in the world; – the investigation of the various roles played by moods in the history of aesthetics; – questions concerning the corporeality of emotional states, including somaesthetic investigations; – the relationship between moods, aesthetic enjoyment, and moral sentiments; – the interaction between intellectual and emotional components within the aesthetic experience, including (but not limited to) artistic creation and fruition. We encourage authors to seek original perspectives on aesthetics and affectivity. We are interested in articles that address this topic in innovative ways, including both historical and theoretical approaches. We accept submissions written only in English. *** We kindly ask all authors to familiarize themselves with the journal’s guidelines, available under “For Authors,” and to double-check the completeness of each article (with the inclusion of an abstract, keywords, a bibliography, and a note on the author) prior to submission. Only completed papers should be submitted, using the submissions page, which can be found here. All articles are subjected to double-blind reviews. Articles published in The Polish Journal of Aesthetics are assigned DOI numbers. Please do not hesitate to contact us via email: [email protected]. Please visit our website at: http://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/