The Cognitive Aspects of Aesthetic Experience – Selected Problems

Is it possible for beauty to be analysed? Should not beauty be merely experienced and contemplated? Is there a way to analyse such a subjective, evanescent and indefinable notion as beauty? What is beauty anyway? Is it an objective feature, the quality of an object, story or process which may be subjected to measurement and scientific analyses? Is it the characteristics of a sensation, experience and the subjective inclination of people to their imaginations, ideas and states?

The origination of cognitive sciences and the invention of certain (especially projection) technology led to new opportunities to examine beauty and aesthetic experience, this time even with (natural) sciences, considering the subjectively and individually experienced character. Although previously we had been forced, in particular, to describe and comprehend the inner experience of our feelings when we liked something, the nature of the content structure of aesthetic experience or a statistical evaluation of the subjective preferences, it suddenly became possible to concentrate on the hitherto hidden brain processes that accompanied a given experience and to search for neuronal correlates or bodily and biochemical aspects of aesthetic evaluation and experience. Aesthetic experience essentially became capable of being objectivized both bodily and scientifically, not only allowing for the measure of its intensity but also of its individual constituents, aspects and processes. The bodily experience of beauty became a correlate of the inner experience that could be tracked, a way to reveal its unseen aspects and also a way to better understand individual mechanisms, determinants, reasons and purposes of aesthetic evaluation and experience.

The new possibilities for examination undoubtedly opened doors to new scientific issues and approaches. Scientists are starting to use the potential of the new technology, which involves the establishment of new disciplines and institutions. One of the most important steps made in this field was the creation and formulation of the basic principles of neuroaesthetics. In the words of Semir Zeki, neuroaesthetics is a science examining “the brain mechanism that engages with the experience of beauty” (Zeki in Sriran 2016). His work was followed by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (1999); Anjan Chatterjee (2014); Arthur Shimamura and Stephen Palmer (2012); Eric Kandel (2012, 2016); Joseph P. Huston et al. (2015); Martin Skov and Oshin Vartananian (2009); and many others. Neuroaesthetics became an important yet disputed part of the research into aesthetics, and its origination allowed for the establishment of numerous institutions, conferences and societies.

One of the most serious issues of the naturalized and cognitive approach is that it does not examine the basic terminology of aesthetics. It does not clarify what beauty is, what creates it, what relationship there is between the individual aspects of beauty and various types of sensory modalities. Similarly, it does not usually grasp the nuances between affection, charm, elegance or other particular aesthetic emotions. The naturalized approach to beauty truly tends to examine the neuronal and biochemical basis for the processes accompanying an aesthetic experience or evaluation. However, the aesthetic experience thus loses its essence, content and meaning for an individual. Numerous philosophers believe that it is impossible to comprehend this content from a mere description of how and what takes place in the brain, but quite the opposite. In order to understand it, we must peek into the inner semantics, the experience and meaning of the experience for the given person. This may only be realized from a first-person perspective and the description of an aesthetic experience from the individual’s perspective.

The majority of philosophers realize that despite the immense contribution and potential of neuroscientific or natural-scientific knowledge, a number of aspects in our everyday lives, including the values or the existential aspects of experience, cannot be fully described by physics. The reason is that the method of examination determines its scope, and if we attempt to focus on individual aspects or details, we are inevitably forced to renounce addressing other ones. In the course of history, scientists have therefore abandoned a number of (especially normative) domains of research and become resigned to the limits of their understanding.

The approach preferred by many therefore diverts attention from reductionism and directs its focus to inter- and multidisciplinary research. The advantage of such an approach is that it respects the particularities of the individual objects of research and does not attempt to transform or reduce them, quite the contrary – it scrutinizes them from various perspectives (Klein, Newell 1997). However, even this approach has its drawbacks.

Bohr’s research into the character of light (Bohr 1928) showed us that the method of research is part of the subject of the research itself. Approaching light as waves or as a flow of particles determines what can be observed and how. The optics of the methodology frequently tend to be very limiting. Similarly, if our point of departure when examining beauty is the presumption that beauty is the product of neurocognitive principles and processes in our brain, we may overlook different possibilities in its research. This may be very limiting because beauty is not merely a feeling evoked in our brain when we perceive beautiful objects. It is assumed that it cannot only be reduced to the milliliters of dopamine released by the nucleus accumbens or nucleus caudate into the synaptic loopholes of our reward systems. Neither can it be explained by other chemical substances (oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphins etc.) or physical processes that occur in our bodies, even though, evidently, in order to fully comprehend what beauty is and how an aesthetic experience occurs, such understanding is undoubtedly relevant. However, beauty is equally the content of an individually perceived and felt experience. It is the motive for our actions, contemplations, wants or desires, but also the object of happiness, the source of peace and sometimes even the reasons for living. We may not know anything about the neurophysiologies of our bodies, but beauty and aesthetic experience will always be an integral part of our lives, actions and feelings and will be more relevant to us than any other science of the physiology of aesthetic delight or abhorrence. Ignoring this aspect of experience – its subjective meaning and feeling – as an important and inherent element would mean diverting attention from the basis of any, even scientific, experience (Démuth 2018, 2019). Scientific experience also builds on this type of perception and understanding, on an individual experience which is fundamentally individual, yet is often ascribed attributes from an impersonal and objective approach by the diversion of attention from the individual particularities.

The presented book focuses on several of the above-mentioned levels of beauty and aesthetic experience. We believe that in order to understand the phenomenon correctly, it is necessary to combine all possible approaches and describe them as widely as possible. Therefore, one of the approaches employed will be an attempt at a phenomenological description and hermeneutic analysis of aesthetic experience. We will use them to draw our attention to certain common features of the different modalities of aesthetic experience, what creates and characterizes them. The phenomenological description is understood not only as the description of what individuals feel when they like something, but also what it means to them. One of the essential features of the hermeneutics of aesthetic experience is finding ourselves in it. Whether we like something or not is an expression of the reflection on our own relationship to the perception. This seems to be important in terms of liking.

On the other hand, a large part of the presented texts tries to harmonize bodily (leiblich) experiences and evaluations with knowledge of neuroscientific and cognitive research into somatic mechanisms that accompany or provoke an aesthetic experience. All of this will be performed in the context of reflections on the evolutionary-biological and sociocultural presumptions of the aesthetic experience.

The Cognitive Studies Centre of the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Trnava has recently organized a series of workshops and cycles of lectures on the topic of the cognitive aspects of an aesthetic experience. There, we focused our attention on the issue of sensory perception and its principles (Beauty Is in the Senses of the Beholder, 2 October 2015, with Professor Fiona Macpherson, Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, Glasgow University), as well as to the structure and activity of the processes of aesthetic experience at the level of the brain (Beauty Is in the Brain of the Beholder, 11 May 2016, with Professor Semir Zeki, The Laboratory of Neurobiology of University College London). One of the conclusions drawn at these events (among others) was that an aesthetic experience is a massively parallel experience not only containing inputs of sensory data but also contaminated by previous beliefs and experiences.