Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
New Model ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Brain

The naturalization of the aesthetic experience of film and art can benefit from the contribution of neuroscience because we can investigate empirically the concepts we use when referring to it and what they are made of at the level of description of the brain-body. The neuroscientific subpersonal level of description is necessary but not sufficient, unless it is coupled with a full appreciation of the tight relationship that the brain entertains with the body and the world. In this article, I will discuss aspects of Murray Smith’s proposal on the aesthetic experience of art and film as presented in his Film, Art, and the Third Culture against the background of a new model of perception and imagination: embodied simulation.

The Empathic Screen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese ◽  
Michele Guerra
Keyword(s):  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Brain Circuits ◽  
The World ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Full Metal Jacket ◽  
Film Experience ◽  
The Brain

Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To what extent does our perception of the fictional nature of movies differ from our daily perception of the real world? The authors, a neuroscientist and a film theorist, propose a new multidisciplinary approach to images and film that can provide answers to these questions. According to the authors, film art, based on the interaction between spectators and the world on the screen, and often described in terms of immersion, impressions of reality, simulation, and involvement of the spectator’s body in the fictitious world he inhabits, can be reconsidered from a neuroscientific perspective, which examines the brain and its close relationship to the body. They propose a new model of perception—embodied simulation—elaborated on the basis of neuroscientific investigation, to demonstrate the role played by sensorimotor and affect-related brain circuits in cognition and film experience. Scenes from famous films, like Notorious, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Persona, The Silence of the Lambs, and Toy Story are described and analyzed according to this multidisciplinary approach, and used as case studies to discuss the embodied simulation model. The aim is to shed new light on the multiple resonance mechanisms that constitute one of the great secrets of cinematographic art, and to reflect on the power of moving images, which increasingly are part of our everyday life.

scholarly journals Film, Art, and the Third Culture

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-136
Author(s):  
Murray Smith
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Naturalistic Methodology ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, I reply to the eleven commentaries on Film, Art, and the Third Culture gathered here, organizing my responses thematically and seeking to find points of similarity and difference among the commentators as well as with my own perspective. I address arguments on embodied simulation; the analogy between films and dreams; aesthetic experience and the “expansion” of ordinary experience; the relationships between culture and cognition and between fiction and emotion; theories of the extended mind and of niche construction; the place of neuroscience in aesthetics; and the relationship between naturalism and normativity. I conclude with some reflections on naturalistic methodology.

Anthropology and the Critique of Metaphysics in the Early Herder

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Heinz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World

The chapter presents a synthetic account of the young Herder’s metaphysics and epistemology, based on several short pieces from the 1760s, with the intention of bringing into relief their strikingly systematic and coherent nature. The objective is to give the reader a greater sense of the philosophical depth of Herder’s anthropology. The first section examines God’s relationship to the world he creates. The second turns to the analogous relationship, based on interaction, between the soul and the body it builds for itself. And in the third, we bring this all together in order to understand how the embodied soul, through engagement with the world, obtains knowledge, and acquires its identity as a historical-cultural being.

Schopenhauer and the Paradox of the Sublime

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.

Embodied Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
pp. 890-910
Author(s):  
Barbara Gail Montero
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Embodied Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Bodily Movements

Although great art frequently revers the body, bodily experience itself is traditionally excluded from the aesthetic realm. This tradition, however, is in tension with the experience of expert dancers who find intense aesthetic pleasure in the experience of their own bodily movements. How to resolve this tension is the goal of this chapter. More specifically, in contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as observers’ embodied aesthetic experience of seeing bodies move.

Questions about Aesthetic Experience

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Paisley Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Third

These brief comments raise some questions about Murray Smith’s remarks, in his new volume Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, on the nature of aesthetic experience. My questions concern how we might best draw a viable distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences and focus in particular on possible links between self-awareness and aesthetic experiences. In sum, I agree with Smith in holding that we should not give up on the notion of aesthetic experience, even though aestheticians continue to disagree regarding even the most basic questions pertaining to its nature.

Hearing the Contradictions: Aesthetic Experience, Music and Digitization

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Nancy Weiss Hanrahan
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
The Aesthetic

If, as Susan Buck-Morss (2003) suggests, aesthetic experience is an occasion for “making critical judgments about not only cultural forms but social forms of our being-in-the-world,” or if it is linked, in David Hesmondhalgh’s (2013) account, to the possibilities of collective flourishing, potential changes in the nature of that experience merit critical attention. This article reflects on the ways in which these social or ethical dimensions of the aesthetic experience of music are affected by digitization. It moves from a discussion of aesthetic experience as a form of encounter that refers to a common world, to consideration of recent work in music sociology that engages themes that emerge from that discussion: aesthetic judgment, and the question of difference and commonality. With illustrations from focus group interviews, I suggest that the quantization associated with digital environments is altering the cultural form of aesthetic judgment, just as personalization is changing the meaning of “difference” in this context. The essay is intended as a disclosive critique that takes as its primary object not the world observable through thick description or hermeneutic interpretation of actual cultural practice, but a world evoked through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of meaning.

The Aesthetic Triad

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Oshin Vartanian ◽  
Anjan Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Large Scale Systems ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Meaning System ◽  
The Brain

Following the rapid growth of neuroaesthetics, there was a need to systematize and organize the findings into a coherent and testable framework. With the “aesthetic triad,” the authors presented a model according to which aesthetic experience was viewed as the emergent property of the interaction of three large-scale systems in the brain: sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning. Features that distinguished this model from others was that it was meant to apply to all aesthetic episodes (e.g., art, faces, architecture, etc.) and it acknowledged explicitly that a large variety of aesthetic experiences can emerge as a function of the specific ways in which these systems interact in the course of their emergence. To probe the model, the contribution of the knowledge-meaning system is likely of greatest interest, at least in part because that system encapsulates a large breadth of factors ranging from the personal to the cultural.

Boundaries of Art in Nabokov's The Gift: Reading as Transcendence

Slavic Review ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-625
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Blackwell
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Restricted Movement ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Russian Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Given

The author's actual creative act always proceeds along the boundaries of the aesthetic world, along the boundaries of the reality of the given, along the boundary of the body and the boundary of the spirit.—M. M. BakhtinThe spirit finds loopholes, transluscences in the world's finest texture.—V. V. Nabokov, "How I Love You"Are boundaries real? This, to a certain extent, is the central question posed by The Gift when Fyodor suggests that "definitions are always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet." Written in one of the most border-conscious eras of history (the Treaty of Versailles had just created nine new independent countries and changed the boundaries of many others), Vladimir Nabokov's last complete Russian novel addresses head-on the most pressing issues he and his fellow emigres faced. Cast beyond the edge of their homeland, the exiles were forced to accept unnaturally restricted movement within Europe as well, due to their lack of a valid nationality. So one might say that for Russian exiles of the 1920s and 1930s, boundaries constituted the single most unrelenting feature of reality.

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