Aesthetics as an Emotional Activity That Facilitates Sense-Making: Towards an Enactive Approach to Aesthetic Experience
Springer (
2015)
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Abstract
Nowadays, aesthetics are generally considered as a crucial aspect that
affects the way we confront things, events, and states of affairs. However, the
functional role of aesthetics in the interaction between agent and environment has
not been addressed effectively. Our objective here is to provide an explanation
concerning the role of aesthetics, and especially, of the aesthetic experience as a
fundamental bodily and emotional activity in the respective interactions. An explanation
of the functional role of the aesthetic experience could offer new orientations
to our understanding of embodied cognition and of aesthetics as a fundamental
part of it. We argue that aesthetic experience, especially its emotional
dimension, is an evaluative process that influences the anticipation for stable and
successful interactions with the environment. In other words, aesthetics facilitates
sense-making as they affect what might be anticipated by an action tendency with
respect to an environment.