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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral 1. Introduction2. The dilemma of aesthetic sensory perception 3. Seeing with feeling: first interpretation 4. Seeing with feeling: second interpretation5. The dispensability of cognitive penetration6. Aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments7. Conclusions Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Des propriétés esthétiques

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    Seeing vs feeling beauty: a plea for aesthetic ecumenism

    Jérôme Dokic

    Résumé

    We commonly talk about both feeling and seeing beauty and other aesthetic properties, but why should there be two experiential mechanisms (emotion and sensory perception) to access aesthetic properties? Some philosophers have argued that we cannot have sensory experiences of beauty, which is essentially felt. Others have tried to blur the line between feeling and seeing, suggesting that we can “see with feeling” (sensory perception is “hot” or affect-laden). I assume the traditional view that sensory experiences are affectively neutral or “cold” but argue that we can see at least some aesthetic properties, because our aesthetic affective dispositions silently contribute, at the subpersonal level, to the generation of sensory contents. Emotions come into play to make us feel these properties as values, i.e., as mattering to us, positively or negatively. In an “ecumenical” spirit, I suggest that feeling and seeing beauty play essential and complementary roles in the formation and justification of aesthetic judgments.

    Entrées d’index

    Mots-clés : aesthetic properties, perception, beauty, emotion

    Texte intégral Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1. Introduction

    1If we are asked why we judge that a composition, such as a drawing, is beautiful, we may answer by citing perceptual features of the composition (“Don’t you see how elegant these silhouettes are?”). Does it follow that aesthetic properties (such as elegance, harmony, clumsiness, etc., and more generally beauty and ugliness) can be perceived through the ordinary senses, i.e., can be seen, heard, touched, etc.? This essay gives a positive answer to this question by providing a novel account of sensory aesthetic perception.

    2One might be sympathetic to the possibility of aesthetic perception but claim that aesthetic properties are perceived non-sensorily, either through a sui generis perceptual modality or via a blend of sensory, imaginative, and emotional capacities.1 In contrast, the present account insists that aesthetic properties can already figure in the sensory (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) contents of our perceptual experiences.

    3Any defence of aesthetic perception must take a stance on two central issues. The first issue concerns the relationship between aesthetic experiences and emotions. Emotions obviously play a substantial role in our aesthetic evaluations of the world. Does it follow that aesthetic sensory experiences are emotionally charged, affect-laden, or “hot”?2 On the traditional view of perception, sensory experiences are emotionally neutral, or “cold”. Here I will defend the traditional view, but with a crucial twist, since I will also argue that aesthetic sensory experiences constitutively depend on our affective dispositions. The traditional view has rightly emphasised the coldness of sensory perception, which guarantees its capacity to warrant judgments about the world, but wrongly separated sensory perception from the appraisal mechanisms that underlie our emotions.

    4The second issue concerns the relationship between aesthetic sensory experiences and values. At least some aesthetic properties are (or involve) values, either positive (like elegance) or negative (like clumsiness). Does it follow that we can perceive evaluative properties through the ordinary senses? Dominic Lopes argues that “aesthetic evaluation sometimes amounts to seeing value. It sometimes takes the form of experiences of pictures as valuable – it is not merely a result of these experiences” (2005, p. 106). Taking up from Urmson (1957) the point that “an evaluation is aesthetic if and only if it represents an object as possessing aesthetic merit or demerit” (p. 97), Lopes claims that we can see something as possessing aesthetic merit or demerit. He mentions Paul Blee’s The Young Biologist, which many have judged to be a sentimental picture. On Lopes’s view, such a judgement can be based on “perceptual or quasiperceptual” aesthetic experience (2005, p. 108). We can see the painting as being sentimental, and thus as possessing aesthetic demerit.

    5The claim that visual experiences can present aesthetic values as such is prima facie independent of the issue of whether they are emotionally charged. More generally, one might argue that sensory experiences are hot but that they do not present values as such. Conversely, one might insist that they are cold but do present values as such.

    6According to an influential, “sentimentalist” view, which dates back to Hume and other British moralists, any experience that presents an evaluative property as such must have an affective dimension. Seeing a composition as possessing aesthetic demerit involves a visual experience, but also a negative emotional evaluation of the composition. The present account assumes that the sentimentalist view is basically correct. Thus, it is committed to the claim that, pace Lopes, we do not see evaluative properties as such. There is no contradiction here. We are visually aware of aesthetic properties, but we are not visually aware of them as evaluative properties. As I shall argue in an “ecumenical” spirit, relevant emotions are needed to make us aware of evaluative properties as such, although they already figure, as mere properties, in the sensory contents of our perceptual experiences.3

    7In a nutshell, on the account to be presented, we can see the elegance of the composition, but only thanks to our affective dispositions operating silently, at the subpersonal level. However, we do not see it as a positive value, i.e., as possessing aesthetic merit. We are aware of elegance as a value only thanks to our conscious emotional evaluation of what we see. This essay advocates aesthetic ecumenism, namely the view that we can both see and feel beauty (and other, more specific aesthetic properties), while keeping sensory experiences and affective experiences separate at the personal level.

    2. The dilemma of aesthetic sensory perception

    8Consider two arguments whose core premises have been influential in aesthetics and more broadly in the philosophy of emotions and values. These arguments have opposite conclusions, and their combination generates a dilemma about aesthetic sensory perception.

    9Let us call an experience “value-laden” if it is intentionally about, or present, a value as such, or an object as having a value, and “value-neutral” if it is not. When we have a value-laden experience, it is transparent to us that a specific value is instantiated in the world.4 The first argument can then be formulated as follows:

    The Sentimentalist Argument

    1. Only hot experiences can be value-laden.

    2. Sensory experiences are cold.

    3. Hence, if there are aesthetic sensory experiences, they cannot be value-laden.

    10The first premise is the sentimentalist claim that to experience something as having a value is for it to feel good or bad.5 There is no affectless experience of a value as such. In the case of values, experiencing is (or at least necessarily involves) feeling. The second premise embodies the traditional view that sensory perception is a passive, non-affective experience. To see something is not for it to feel good or bad: seeing is distinct from feeling. The conclusion is that the notion of aesthetic sensory experience cannot be that of an experience that is intentionally about values.

    11The second argument goes as follows:

    The Dispassionate Perceiver Argument

    1. There is no such thing as a dispassionate subject of aesthetic experience.

    2. If aesthetic experiences were value-neutral, they could have dispassionate subjects.

    3. Hence, if there are aesthetic sensory experiences, they must be value-laden.

    12The first premise echoes the intuition that aesthetic experiences must involve some emotional engagement. It is hard if not impossible to perceive the aesthetic value of a composition in a fully dispassionate way. A dispassionate perceiver could not experience a composition as elegant or beautiful. At best, dispassionate evaluation is parasitic on passionate evaluation (Prinz, 2011).

    13The second premise assumes that conscious emotions and more generally affective dispositions are not required to experience non-evaluative properties. Thus, dispassionate subjects could have aesthetic experiences if they were not intentionally about values. The conclusion is that the notion of aesthetic sensory experience must be the notion of an experience that is intentionally about values.

    14Each argument is initially plausible. Together they entail that aesthetic sensory perception is impossible. Their combination raises the following dilemma, which jeopardizes the very idea of aesthetic sensory experience:

    The Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception

    1. Sensory aesthetic experience is either value-laden or value-neutral.

    2. If it is value-laden, it cannot be sensory (from the Sentimentalist Argument).

    3. If it is value-neutral, it cannot be aesthetic (from the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument).

    4. Hence, no experience can be both sensory and aesthetic.

    15My aim in what follows is to salvage aesthetic sensory perception from the foregoing line of argument. I shall argue that the Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception is a false one: it is possible to accept the Sentimentalist Argument and reject the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument. I shall defend the following combination of claims.

    16First, aesthetic sensory experiences are not themselves emotionally charged. As sensory experiences, their role is to passively open the subject to the world, and more specifically to instances of aesthetic values. Still, they are not value-laden. They present properties that may in fact be values, but they do not present them as values. We can see aesthetic values, but we do not see them as such.

    17Second, aesthetic sensory experiences essentially depend on our affective dispositions, so that the first premise of the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument can be maintained. As we shall see, affective dispositions shape the visible contours of aesthetic properties. As a consequence, seeing a harmonious or more generally beautiful scene or composition inevitably comes with a distinct positive feeling, however attenuated, about it. What is wrong about the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument is its second premise: aesthetic experience can both depend on affective dispositions and remain value-neutral.

    3. Seeing with feeling: first interpretation

    18One way of dealing with the Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception is to reject the second premise of the Sentimentalist Argument, i.e., the traditional view that sensory perception is a passive, affectless experience. For instance, Prinz (2014) holds that sensory perception can be hot, i.e., “irradiated by” or “soaked with” emotion, so that “evaluation infuses perception”.6 In support of his view, Prinz cites empirical evidence about the complex interrelations between the sensory and the affective systems at the subpersonal level. Indeed, brain areas known to underlie emotions, such as the amygdala, have projections back to every stage of visual processing (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999, Pessoa, 2013). This strongly suggests, as Prinz observes, that “emotion is not just a response to what we see, but actually influences what we see” (Prinz, 2014, p. 150).

    19On the alternative view promoted by Prinz, at least some visual experiences are instances of “seeing with feeling”: they are both visual and affective experiences at the personal level. The sensory and affective dimensions of an instance of seeing with feeling are so intertwined that the subject is inclined to self-ascribe a single experience. The fact that the experience is co-generated by two distinct though interrelated systems at the subpersonal level does not surface at the phenomenological level. The cognitive architecture underlying this view can be schematized as follows (Figure 1):

    Figure 1

    Image 100002010000013A000000D3A4EDEB0C95F7E7C1.png

    20Aesthetic sensory experiences can involve “seeing with feeling” in this sense. Prinz writes that “the phenomenology of seeing beauty (or grace, or balance, etc.) involves an affect-laden sensory experience” (2014, p. 154). In a single experience we can both see and feel (positively) the elegance of a composition, as we can both see and feel (negatively) a painting as sentimental.

    21If the notion of a hot sensory experience can be made coherent, the second premise of the Sentimentalist Argument should be rejected. Thus, the Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception, which depends on the soundness of this argument, cannot get off the ground. In contrast, the first interpretation of the notion of seeing with feeling preserves the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument. If aesthetic experiences are both sensory and affective, they are not available to fully dispassionate subjects.

    4. Seeing with feeling: second interpretation

    22Another way of dealing with the Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception relies on a different interpretation of the notion of seeing with feeling, which is (I contend) equally compatible with empirical evidence. Let us first acknowledge that sensory perception can depend on emotion, or more precisely subpersonal affective processes, without itself being hot. The existence of multiple subpersonal interactions between the sensory and the affective systems does not entail that the outputs of the sensory systems at the personal level, namely sensory experiences, are themselves affect-laden.

    23To begin with, affective processes can guide visual perception. Positive or negative appraisals of the stimuli at the subpersonal level can influence how visual experience develops over time. For instance, they can incline the subject to approach or to avoid the object, with different visual consequences. This guiding function of the affective system is purely instrumental with respect to the contents of visual experiences. Here I am interested in a stronger hypothesis, according to which affective processes constitutively shape visual perception. On this hypothesis, affective processes enrich the outputs of visual perception, enabling us to see objects or properties that we could not see otherwise. As I shall argue, the stronger hypothesis is still compatible with the claim that sensory perception is cold and does not itself deliver emotionally charged experiences.

    24As an illustration, consider visual empathy. It is plausible that the visual identification of an emotion or action rests on some internal simulation of the emotion or action (Goldman, 2006, Currie, 2011). We can see someone being sad because we internally simulate the emotion of being sad. Similarly, we can see someone descending a staircase because we internally simulate the action of descending a staircase. Thanks to these internal simulations, we can see the world as involving genuine emotions or actions rather than mere events.

    25We do not have to become sad or descend a staircase to simulate the corresponding emotion or action. We do not have to consciously imagine being sad or descending a staircase either. The relevant simulations are “low-level” compared to “high-level” simulative processes like imaginings (Goldman, 2006). They operate at the subpersonal level and can remain largely silent on the phenomenological level. How do they enable us to identify an emotion or action? Currie (2011) suggests that they “provide information which is accessed by the visual system, and which contributes to a visual experience in which various properties of [the perceived object] are made manifest” (p. 90). Some outputs of the affective or motor system, run in the simulative mode, become inputs to the visual system. The outputs of the visual system are enriched by pre-perceptual interactions with the affective and the motor systems, but they need not themselves involve emotions or intentions. We can schematize the cognitive architecture suggested by Currie as follows (Figure 2):

    Figure 2

    Image 100002010000013A000000D3F4A807CD682C9B83.png

    26Affective and motor processes contribute to delineate the sensible contours of an emotion or action and can structure other parts of the visual field as well. For instance, if the action is transitive and directed toward a visible object, the former can be seen as related to the latter, thanks to simulative motor processes. If the action were seen as a mere event, the relevance of the object as the target of action would not be visually available.

    27In this architecture, the outputs of the visual system are not themselves emotions or actions. We can have an affectless visual experience of sadness or a passive visual experience of someone descending a staircase. In some cases, such as emotional contagion, the affective system might generate some conscious emotion, as when I feel sad just because I see someone sad. Even in this case, though, my conscious emotion and my visual experience of sadness are produced in parallel and are distinct effects of a common cause. Typically, though, inhibitory processes prevent the affective and motor systems from generating inappropriate emotions or intentions. Slight postural and facial changes might remain as the only observable traces of the relevant subpersonal processes.

    28The foregoing remarks motivate an alternative interpretation of the notion of seeing with feeling, which can be applied to the aesthetic case. On this interpretation, aesthetic visual experiences remain cold even though they are constitutively shaped by the affective system. Consider a simple example. The instantiation of separate but similar chromatic features in the visual field can produce a pleasant “Aha!” experience which does not depend on their spatial distribution. This is best explained on the assumption that the visual and the affective systems already collaborate at the subpersonal level, and more precisely at the level of functionally specialized “maps” of sensory features (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). The result of this collaboration is the generation of new visual Gestalts. Separate parts of the visual field are experienced as “going together”, i.e., as consonant, non-spatial wholes. More generally, affective processing contributes to delineating the sensible contours of aesthetic properties. The subject can then see specific aesthetic properties, such as the overall harmony of a composition, which she would miss in the absence of relevant affective dispositions.

    29The first premise of the Sentimentalist Argument excludes cold experiences of values as such. Is it incompatible with the present interpretation? One might claim both that affective processes enrich the contents of visual perception and that values are not the kind of entities that can be seen. For instance, symmetry is often cited as an aesthetic value, but it might be a mere geometrical property. Still, affective processes might be required to see symmetries in a composition. Symmetry “feels good” and is aesthetically preferred (see Tinio & Leder, 2009), and the positive appraisal of symmetries at the subpersonal level might be an enabling condition of their visual awareness.

    30However, it is plausible that at least some visible aesthetic properties are also values. Elegance is a good case in point. Ceteris paribus, what is elegant possesses aesthetic merit. So, what is the difference between symmetry and elegance on the present interpretation? One might suggest that to see elegance, we need special affective dispositions. More precisely, we may need aesthetic affective dispositions, which are not required in the case of symmetry. Lacking such dispositions, we would be blind to genuinely aesthetic properties such as elegance or harmony in a composition. In contrast, we would not need aesthetic affective dispositions to see something as symmetrical along some axis.7

    31Should we then reject the first premise of the Sentimentalist Argument, according to which only hot experiences can be value-laden? Not necessarily. The point of the present interpretation is that we can coldly see aesthetic properties, not that we see them as values. To see something as a value, we should be able to see it as positive or negative, or as possessing aesthetic merit or demerit, but (pace Lopes) sensory experiences are not intrinsically valenced. To visually represent properties such as danger or elegance, my visual system relies on my affective dispositions, but danger need not be seen as a negative value, just as elegance need not be seen as a positive value. Of course, both properties are experienced more globally as feeling good or bad. To experience them as values, we need more than mere visual experiences, even informed by subpersonal affective processes. We need conscious emotions, in conformity with the sentimentalist claim that the experience of values as such must be hot (see §6).

    32The coldness of seeing with feeling, on the present interpretation, is compatible with the fact that the same affective processes that shape visual experience also generate, in parallel, conscious aesthetic emotions. Indeed, while inhibition is typically required in visual empathy, to avoid emotional contagion or inappropriate behaviour, it has little role to play in the aesthetic case. We may refrain from expressing our enthusiasm for a work of art in a public place, but we are generally not required to do so. Hence, we may both feel the beauty of a composition and see specific properties of the composition that drive our aesthetic emotion.

    33The foregoing picture, assuming that it can be fleshed out, preserves the Sentimentalist Argument. However, it also shows why the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument is flawed. We cannot see the beauty of a composition without having at least the capacity to be moved by it, because our aesthetic visual experience is shaped by subpersonal affective processes that are silent manifestations of our aesthetic affective dispositions. Thus, the second premise of the Dispassionate Perceiver Argument is false: aesthetic visual experience is value-neutral but nevertheless cannot have a fully dispassionate subject.

    34We may allow for some dissociations between the subject’s emotional response and her sensory experience of an aesthetic property. A detached critic may try to contemplate the visible aesthetic properties of an artwork in the coolest way possible, by inhibiting her emotional responses. However, such inhibition must have its limits. It is empirically implausible that the affective system can run at the subpersonal level without any consequences on the subject’s conscious emotional life. In real-life cases, this system provides the subject with some “valence marker” associated with the contents of her visual experience. We can thus exclude the possibility of latching on to aesthetic properties in sensory experience without having any clue as to whether they are positive or negative values. This is enough to block the Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception.8

    5. The dispensability of cognitive penetration

    35One might be sympathetic to the idea of aesthetic sensory perception but consider that it always results from some form of “cognitive penetration” (see Stokes, 2014). On this view, we can see aesthetic properties such as elegance or clumsiness, but only because our visual experience is a relatively sophisticated form of seeing-as that itself depends on “high-level” concurrent mental states, including emotions, imaginings, and beliefs. Aesthetic sensory perception would involve a “construal” of the world that is at least partly constituted “from above”, i.e., by how we respond emotionally to the object and what we imagine and believe about it.9

    36The alternative view defended here is compatible with the existence of perceptual or post-perceptual aesthetic construals, but it locates aesthetic sensory perception at a more fundamental level, by grounding it on direct interactions between the affective and the visual systems at the pre-perceptual, sub-personal level. Thus, aesthetic sensory experiences are constituted from below rather than (merely) from above.

    37Some have argued that aesthetic properties are “higher-order appearances” (Levinson, 2005), or Gestaltic ways of organizing colours and shapes (Stokes, 2018). The claim that some aesthetic properties are “high-level” compared to “low-level” properties such as colours and shapes is fine if it is meant to capture the fact that perceiving a property such as elegance depends on perceiving other, more “basic” properties such as the shape of silhouettes in a line drawing. However, it should not convey the misleading idea that our visual experience of aesthetic properties is special in being more dependent on higher-level mental states than the visual experience of colours and shapes. On the contrary, the former can be given in perception in much the same way as the latter.

    38The present view provides a convincing answer to the objection that what we see when we see elegance in a composition is not an aesthetic property per se but merely organized shape properties (Majeed, 2018). What makes the relevant organizational Gestalts correspond to aesthetic properties is their connection to the affective system. The principle of their organization lies in our affective aesthetic dispositions. Why do these patches of color at different corners of the painting look good together? Because our affective system yields a positive appraisal of this non-spatial enhancement. Assuming that “looking good together” is a (minimal) aesthetic property of the color patches, it can be seen only thanks to subpersonal aesthetic appraisals.

    39Moreover, it is plausible that simple appearances can have aesthetic significance too. Instances of hyper-saturated colours, as in Claude Monet’s Les Coquelicots (1873), can be experienced as vivid and powerful (see Mamassian, 2008). The use of Vantablack, which absorbs 99.9% of light, in Anish Kapoor’s Descension (2015), can be experienced as sombre, perhaps even sublime. Again, these aesthetic ways of seeing these artworks are made possible by inputs from the affective system, which can operate independently of synchronic causal influences from above.

    40The present view rests on the empirically plausible hypothesis that the visual system takes inputs from the affective system, but it leaves open the nature and structure of the latter system. How stimuli are affectively processed at the subpersonal level depends on our affective dispositions. I have assumed that some of our affective dispositions are especially relevant to aesthetic experience, but the suggested cognitive architecture is compatible with the alternative hypothesis that there are no intrinsically aesthetic affective dispositions.

    41Another important issue that will not be addressed here concerns the malleability of the affective system. Even if affective processes are “synchronically” impenetrable by the subject’s emotions, imaginings and beliefs, they might be “diachronically” penetrable, i.e., longitudinally affected by experience, training and education.10 If they are, what aesthetic properties are visually available to the novice and to the expert might not be the same. The present view is compatible with the claim that at least some of our core aesthetic affective dispositions are common to all human beings whatever their culture and idiosyncrasy.

    6. Aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments

    42The picture sketched in the previous sections raises a legitimate worry. Aesthetic sensory experiences are about properties that are in fact values, but do not present them as values. The worry is that they cannot ground and justify aesthetic judgements. Aesthetic judgements have evaluative contents. If the coldness of sensory experiences makes them evaluatively opaque, how could the subject make justified evaluative judgments on their basis? Aesthetic sensory experiences seem to be epiphenomenal with respect to the formation and justification of aesthetic judgments.

    43One might object that the worry relies on an internalist conception of justification. On an externalist conception, it might be enough for a sensory experience to be about what is in fact an aesthetic value to justify an aesthetic judgment. However, I am prepared to accept that the evaluative opacity of sensory experiences prevents them from justifying aesthetic judgments, at least from the subject’s point of view. Aesthetic judgments, however subject-relative, are internally justified or backed up by experiences that we can in principle cite and share with others when challenged about our aesthetic evaluations.

    44An obvious answer to the worry is to insist that aesthetic judgments are based on both sensory experiences and emotions. The judgment “This composition is elegant” would arise from and be justified by a complex mental state, involving a cold visual experience and a positive emotion, both directed at the composition and shaped by a subpersonal affective appraisal of its elegance. Although this answer will prove essentially correct, it does not completely alleviate the worry. For it might seem that once emotions have entered the picture, aesthetic sensory experiences are still epiphenomenal with respect to the justification of aesthetic judgments.

    45Consider the standard view of emotion, according to which emotions stand in intentional relations to values. On this view, emotions are correct or incorrect depending on whether relevant values are instantiated. (For instance, the subject’s fear of the dog is correct only if the dog is dangerous.) Whether values are represented in the contents of emotions (as in the perceptual theory defended by Tappolet, 2016 and Döring, 2007) or determined only at the level of the emotional attitudes (as in the attitudinal theory favoured by Deonna & Teroni, 2012), the standard view can acknowledge that aesthetic emotions are enough to justify aesthetic judgments.

    46The standard view does not leave sensory experiences behind. Emotions need so-called “cognitive bases” to latch on what they are about (Mulligan, 1998). Sensory experiences can be such cognitive bases. The subject’s fear of the dog barking at her is based on her sensory experience of the dog, which provides the emotion its object. However, cognitive bases of emotions are typically conceived to be about the bearers of values rather than about values themselves. The subject need not see the danger instantiated by the dog; all she needs to see is the dog barking at her. The reference to danger as a value is mandatory only to account for the correctness conditions of fear. Therefore, the emotion is apt to justify at least the evaluative part of the judgment “This dog is dangerous”. The issue of whether the cognitive base of the emotion is already about danger appears to be irrelevant from an epistemological point of view.

    47So why insist that sensory experiences can already be about values, especially if they cannot represent them as such? One option is to reject the standard view of emotion. This view assumes that types of emotions neatly correspond to types of values, but the connection might be much more indirect (see Dokic & Lemaire, 2013; 2015). If emotions underdetermine the type of value at stake, they cannot justify substantial evaluative judgments. This is plausible at least for some aesthetic values. For instance, there does not seem to be a specific type of emotion corresponding to elegance. When we feel the elegance of a composition, our emotion seems to underdetermine the type of value at stake. The affective system plays an essential role in delineating the sensory contours of elegance, but it may not be part of its function to generate a type of conscious emotion that neatly corresponds to elegance. Even if aesthetic emotions can justify thin aesthetic judgments like “This is beautiful, ugly, worthless, etc.”, it is less clear that they can justify thick aesthetic judgments like “This is elegant, harmonious, balanced, sombre, etc.”. The latter must be justified at least partly by cognitive bases that are about specific properties further identified as values thanks to our emotional responses.

    48Even if we accept the standard view, there is another, independent consideration in favour of the claim that aesthetic judgments are justified by both aesthetic sensory experiences and corresponding emotions. This consideration relies on a crucial difference between the phenomenology of sensory experiences and the phenomenology of emotions: the former, contrary to the latter, is “attributive”.11 When we see a red tomato, we seem to be presented with properties that the tomato itself possesses; our visual experience involves the straightforward attribution of properties such as redness and roundness to the tomato (even if in fact, some of these properties might be response-dependent and hence subject-relative in some sense). Todd (2014) notes that the attributive phenomenology of sensory experiences is a characteristic that “naturally accompanies transparency”. If we attend to our visual experience of the tomato, all we find are the tomato and its visible properties (Tye, 2002; Kind, 2003).

    49In contrast, it is plausible that emotions have a partly nonattributive phenomenology (pace Tye 2008). When we are afraid of the dog barking at us, we are aware of the dog via our sensory experience, but we are also aware, at least marginally, of our own subjective response to the world; we experience ourselves as being affected by the dog. The nonattributive phenomenology of emotions is related to their non-transparency. If we attend to our fear, we may find the dog that triggers it but also attitudinal features of our experience (see Mitchell, 2020).

    50Now Todd claims that aesthetic experiences have a nonattributive phenomenology:

    Aesthetic experiences lack transparency in virtue of the fact that they represent evaluative content (i.e. evaluative aesthetic properties) whereas the kind of representational content possessed by perceptual states comprises what we might call value-neutral content. (Todd, 2014, p. 109)

    51Todd’s claim is questionable from a phenomenological point of view. At least some aesthetic experiences involve the attribution of aesthetic properties to the world. What we seem to see is the elegance of the composition itself, not properties of our visual experience or more generally of ourselves (Brady, 1998). This point holds even if elegance and other aesthetic properties turn out to be subject-relative in some sense. The phenomenology of sensory aesthetic experience is fully attributive, but it does not follow that it cannot be about properties that are in fact values. We are generally not aware of our own subjective (affective) contribution to our sensory experience of values because the latter operates silently, i.e., at the subpersonal level.

    52In contrast, when we feel the elegance of the composition, we are aware, at least marginally, of our own subjective contribution to the aesthetic construal of the object, which typically involves imaginings, memories, and various other emotions and feelings. Aesthetic emotions have a non-attributive phenomenology.

    53What is commonly called “aesthetic experience” involves both an aesthetic sensory experience and a corresponding emotion. Each component plays a distinctive role in the justification of aesthetic judgments. On the one hand, aesthetic sensory experiences without aesthetic emotions could not justify aesthetic judgments because the relevant aesthetic property would not be presented as a (positive or negative) value. On the other hand, aesthetic emotions without aesthetic sensory experiences would be too coarse-grained or would not justify the attribution of specific aesthetic properties to the object itself. Aesthetic sensory experiences are needed to identify the relevant properties, which are further represented through our aesthetic emotions as mattering to us, for good or bad. Thanks to rich cognitive bases, i.e., sensory experiences of properties that are in fact values, we can experience our emotions as a response to the instantiation of specific aesthetic properties in the world. We can both see and feel beauty and other aesthetic properties, and neither experience is epistemologically epiphenomenal or redundant.12

    7. Conclusions

    54In this essay I have defended the possibility and existence of aesthetic sensory perception. Against the Dilemma of Aesthetic Sensory Perception, we do not have to choose between non-aesthetic sensory experiences and aesthetic non-sensory experiences.

    55Aesthetic sensory perception is possible because subpersonal affective processes can enrich the contents of our sensory experiences. It does not follow that aesthetic sensory experiences are hot. On the contrary, they are not themselves emotionally charged. They are not cases of affective or emotional perception, if this means that some affective aspect internal to them participates in their phenomenology (Fulkerson, 2019).

    56Aesthetic sensory experiences are not cases of evaluative perception either, if this means that they involve an explicit representation of values (i.e., what Berqvist & Cowan, 2018, call “Canonical Evaluative Perception”). They are about properties at least some of which are values (like elegance or clumsiness), but they are not experiences of values as such.

    57I have promoted the “ecumenical” view that experiences of aesthetic values as such result from both aesthetic sensory experiences and corresponding emotions. The role of sensory experiences is to coldly identify specific aesthetic properties (simple or complex appearances), while the role of emotions is to make us warmly aware of these properties as values and thus as mattering to us.

    58This division of labour, between sensory experiences and emotions, is compatible with but does not entail the standard view that emotions are intentionally related to values. Even if the standard view is true, aesthetic sensory perception is still needed to attribute aesthetic properties to the world. On the other hand, if the standard view is false, and types of emotions do not neatly correspond to types of values, emotions are still needed to provide us with genuine evaluative experiences based on our sensory perceptions of aesthetic properties.

    Bibliographie

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    Roberts, Jane, Christian J. Kay, and Lynne Grundy. “A Thesaurus of Old English, Volume 1”. []. BRILL, January 1, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004485235.
    Stokes, Dustin. Rich Perceptual Content and Aesthetic Properties. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786054.003.0002.
    Tinio, Pablo P.L., and Helmut Leder. “Just How Stable Are Stable Aesthetic Features? Symmetry, Complexity, and the Jaws of Massive Familiarization”. Acta Psychologica. Elsevier BV, March 2009. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.01.001.
    Reboul, Anne, ed. Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. []. Springer International Publishing, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8.
    Tye, Michael. “Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience”. Noûs. Wiley, March 2002. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0068.00365.
    Audi, Robert. Moral Perception. [], Princeton University Press, 24 Feb. 2013. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691156484.001.0001.
    Bergqvist, Anna, and Robert Cowan, editors. “Evaluative Perception”. Oxford Scholarship Online, Oxford University Press, 2018. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786054.001.0001.
    de Vignemont, Frederique. “Fifty Shades of Affective Colouring of Perception”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 101, no. 1, Informa UK Limited, 15 Aug. 2021, pp. 1-15. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2021.1965176.
    Dokic, Jérôme, and Stéphane Lemaire. “Are Emotions Perceptions of Value?”. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 43, no. 2, Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2013, pp. 227-4. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2013.826057.
    Dokic, Jérôme, and Stéphane Lemaire. “Are Emotions Evaluative Modes?”. Dialectica, vol. 69, no. 3, Verein philosophie.ch, Sept. 2015, pp. 271-92. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-8361.12117.
    Döring, Sabine A. “Seeing What to Do: Affective Perception and Rational Motivation”. Dialectica, vol. 61, no. 3, Verein philosophie.ch, Sept. 2007, pp. 363-94. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2007.01105.x.
    Fodor, Jerry. “Observation Reconsidered”. Philosophy of Science, vol. 51, no. 1, Cambridge University Press (CUP), Mar. 1984, pp. 23-43. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1086/289162.
    Fulkerson, Matthew. “Emotional Perception”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 98, no. 1, Informa UK Limited, 3 Apr. 2019, pp. 16-30. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2019.1579848.
    Goldman, Alvin I. Simulating Minds. [], Oxford University PressNew York, 1 Aug. 2006. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/0195138929.001.0001.
    Levinson, Jerrold. Contemplating Art. [], Oxford University PressOxford, 5 Oct. 2006. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206179.001.0001.
    Logue, Heather. “Can We Visually Experience Aesthetic Properties?”. Oxford Scholarship Online, Oxford University Press, 2018. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786054.003.0003.
    Lopes, Dominic McIver. Sight and Sensibility. [], Oxford University Press, 5 May 2005. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/0199277346.001.0001.
    Majeed, Raamy. “Do Gestalt Effects Show That We Perceive High-Level Aesthetic Properties?”. Analysis, vol. 78, no. 3, Oxford University Press (OUP), 12 Mar. 2018, pp. 440-5. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/any002.
    Mitchell, Jonathan. “The Attitudinal Opacity of Emotional Experience”. The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 280, Oxford University Press (OUP), 28 Feb. 2020, pp. 524-46. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqz085.
    Mulligan, Kevin, and . “From Appropriate Emotions to Values”. Monist, edited by Sherwood J. B. Sugden, vol. 81, no. 1, Oxford University Press (OUP), 1998, pp. 161-88. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist199881114.
    Nanay, Bence. Aesthetics As Philosophy of Perception. [], Oxford University Press, 1 Jan. 2016. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199658442.001.0001.
    Schellekens, Elisabeth, and Peter Goldie. The Aesthetic MindPhilosophy and Psychology. [], Oxford University Press, 13 Oct. 2011. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691517.001.0001.
    Currie, Greg, et al., editors. Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. [], Oxford University Press, 2014. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.001.0001.
    Roberts, Jane, et al. A Thesaurus of Old English, Volume 1. [], BRILL, 1 Jan. 2000. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004485235.
    Stokes, Dustin. “Rich Perceptual Content and Aesthetic Properties”. Oxford Scholarship Online, Oxford University Press, 2018. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786054.003.0002.
    Tinio, Pablo P.L., and Helmut Leder. “Just How Stable Are Stable Aesthetic Features? Symmetry, Complexity, and the Jaws of Massive Familiarization”. Acta Psychologica, vol. 130, no. 3, Elsevier BV, Mar. 2009, pp. 241-50. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.01.001.
    Reboul, Anne, editor. Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. [], Springer International Publishing, 2014. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8.
    Tye, Michael. “Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience”. Noûs, vol. 36, no. 1, Wiley, Mar. 2002, pp. 137-51. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0068.00365.

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    Notes de bas de page

    1 See, e.g., Audi (2018) for the analogous claim about moral perception.

    2 For a positive answer, see Prinz (2014), whose notion of “seeing with feeling” will be discussed in Section 3 below. There are many other attempts in the literature to explain the sense in which perception is affective, some of which can be applied to aesthetic experience: see, e.g., Fulkerson (2019) and de Vignemont (2023).

    3 Thus, our sensory perception of aesthetic properties is not purely de re or non-epistemic in Dretske (1969)’s sense (see Bergqvist and Cowan, 2018, p. 4). At least some aesthetic properties are visually apparent to the subject, even though their evaluative character is not.

    4 I use the notion of being (intentionally) about a value, or being presented with a value as such, broadly enough to capture emotions as value-laden experiences even if they are construed along the lines of the attitudinal theory (Deonna & Teroni, 2012), i.e., even if emotions are intentionally about values not because their contents represent values, but in virtue of the fact that they belong to a specific attitude. The standard view that emotions are about values in this broad sense will be discussed in Section 6.

    5 See Prinz (2011) and Prinz (2014). The claim at stake here is specifically about experiences or presentations of values as such and is compatible with the possibility of affectless conceptual beliefs or representations of values.

    6 One can distinguish the view that some sensory experiences are hot from the more radical view that all sensory experiences are hot or affect-laden in some way. What is at issue here is the former view.

    7 Another option is to drop the idea of an essentially aesthetic property and talk only of “aesthetically relevant properties” (Nanay, 2016).

    8 One might object that the second interpretation of the notion of seeing with feeling eventually reduces to the first. Prinz (2014) claims that sensory perception and emotion form a “coupled system”, and “there is no easy way to separate the elements”. I insist that it is possible to separate the elements because the relevant dependence and independence relations operate at different levels: although the inputs of aesthetic perception depend on subpersonal affective processes, its outputs remain independent of conscious emotion.

    9 See Roberts (2013) for an analogous use of the notions of construal and seeing-as in an account of moral perception.

    10 I borrow the distinction between synchronic and diachronic (im)penetrability from Fodor (1984, p. 39).

    11 I borrow the terminology from Todd (2014). Todd himself refers to Watzl (2011), who argues for the nonattributive phenomenology of attention.

    12 De Vignemont (2023) argues that sensory experiences and affective attitudes can be bound together in much the same way as different sensory modalities are bound together in multimodal perception. Her account is compatible with mine if sensory experiences and emotions still belong to distinct attitudes. (One might question the analogy with multimodal perception since it is not clear that, say, a visual-auditory experience, such as seeing a bird while hearing it singing, involves two distinct sensory attitudes.)

    Auteur

    • Jérôme Dokic
      EHESS, Institut Jean-Nicod
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    1 See, e.g., Audi (2018) for the analogous claim about moral perception.

    2 For a positive answer, see Prinz (2014), whose notion of “seeing with feeling” will be discussed in Section 3 below. There are many other attempts in the literature to explain the sense in which perception is affective, some of which can be applied to aesthetic experience: see, e.g., Fulkerson (2019) and de Vignemont (2023).

    3 Thus, our sensory perception of aesthetic properties is not purely de re or non-epistemic in Dretske (1969)’s sense (see Bergqvist and Cowan, 2018, p. 4). At least some aesthetic properties are visually apparent to the subject, even though their evaluative character is not.

    4 I use the notion of being (intentionally) about a value, or being presented with a value as such, broadly enough to capture emotions as value-laden experiences even if they are construed along the lines of the attitudinal theory (Deonna & Teroni, 2012), i.e., even if emotions are intentionally about values not because their contents represent values, but in virtue of the fact that they belong to a specific attitude. The standard view that emotions are about values in this broad sense will be discussed in Section 6.

    5 See Prinz (2011) and Prinz (2014). The claim at stake here is specifically about experiences or presentations of values as such and is compatible with the possibility of affectless conceptual beliefs or representations of values.

    6 One can distinguish the view that some sensory experiences are hot from the more radical view that all sensory experiences are hot or affect-laden in some way. What is at issue here is the former view.

    7 Another option is to drop the idea of an essentially aesthetic property and talk only of “aesthetically relevant properties” (Nanay, 2016).

    8 One might object that the second interpretation of the notion of seeing with feeling eventually reduces to the first. Prinz (2014) claims that sensory perception and emotion form a “coupled system”, and “there is no easy way to separate the elements”. I insist that it is possible to separate the elements because the relevant dependence and independence relations operate at different levels: although the inputs of aesthetic perception depend on subpersonal affective processes, its outputs remain independent of conscious emotion.

    9 See Roberts (2013) for an analogous use of the notions of construal and seeing-as in an account of moral perception.

    10 I borrow the distinction between synchronic and diachronic (im)penetrability from Fodor (1984, p. 39).

    11 I borrow the terminology from Todd (2014). Todd himself refers to Watzl (2011), who argues for the nonattributive phenomenology of attention.

    12 De Vignemont (2023) argues that sensory experiences and affective attitudes can be bound together in much the same way as different sensory modalities are bound together in multimodal perception. Her account is compatible with mine if sensory experiences and emotions still belong to distinct attitudes. (One might question the analogy with multimodal perception since it is not clear that, say, a visual-auditory experience, such as seeing a bird while hearing it singing, involves two distinct sensory attitudes.)

    Des propriétés esthétiques

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    Dokic, J. (2024). Seeing vs feeling beauty: a plea for aesthetic ecumenism. In A. Declos & C. Tiercelin (éds.), Des propriétés esthétiques (1‑). Collège de France. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15603
    Dokic, Jérôme. « Seeing Vs Feeling Beauty: A Plea for Aesthetic Ecumenism ». In Des propriétés esthétiques, édité par Alexandre Declos et Claudine Tiercelin. Paris: Collège de France, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15603.
    Dokic, Jérôme. « Seeing Vs Feeling Beauty: A Plea for Aesthetic Ecumenism ». Des propriétés esthétiques, édité par Alexandre Declos et Claudine Tiercelin, Collège de France, 2024, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15603.

    Référence numérique du livre

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    Declos, A., & Tiercelin, C. (éds.). (2024). Des propriétés esthétiques (1‑). Collège de France. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15173
    Declos, Alexandre, et Claudine Tiercelin, éd. Des propriétés esthétiques. Paris: Collège de France, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15173.
    Declos, Alexandre, et Claudine Tiercelin, éditeurs. Des propriétés esthétiques. Collège de France, 2024, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15173.
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