As readers enter each of the debates in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology–the psychology of the aesthetic; emotion in aesthetic experience; beauty and universality; imagination and make-believe; fiction and empathy; music, dance, and expressivity; and pictorial representation and appreciation–the richness of the volume rapidly becomes obvious. Chapters consistently illuminate preceding ones in an anthology expressly given to testing boundaries between philosophical and psychological enquiries. As the editors remark, “What one discipline takes for granted may constitute an unwarranted presupposition in another” (1) which implicitly acts as a rationale for how chapters are interwoven.

The editors begin by declaring, “Aesthetic…experiences are remarkable case studies for anyone interested in the mind” (1). The twenty-five chapters, mainly by Anglo-American contributors, in part derive from a conference focused upon the possibility of aesthetic psychology. Sixteen philosophers and eleven cognitive or neuropsychologists figure amongst the thirty-one contributors variously engaged with instances of the visual, performing, and literary arts. However, constraints upon length will limit this critique to two central, ultimately entwined, themes of the compilation. The first theme emerges from the pervasive appeal to the motor neuron system as a means of explaining our attunement to natural phenomena and engagement with artefacts; the second, from the conception of emotion operating within the affective dimension of our aesthetic experience.

I

Whilst acknowledging the problematic nature of empathy when readers feel “real emotions” such as “joy or sorrow” about fictional characters (285), David Miall adopts the view that readers do not copy or simulate characters’ emotions imaginatively. Instead, they “enact them” (287). So readers, as they “move…along the continuum of emotional distance” when encountering the “incompleteness” of literary texts, experience “feeling as a process not an accomplished state” (287-288). To disclose “what feelings are and how they occur,” especially “bodily feelings and how these are invoked by the response to text,” Miall looks to neuro-psychological evidence (288). Upon summarizing the findings of Rolf Zwaan and others, Miall identifies the key to interpreting them in the “discovery of mirror neurons…in the monkey” which supposedly “play a major and more extensive role in human neural processes” independently of “whether an action or feeling is located in another or in the self” (291-292). He then begins to extend the application of the mirror neuron system which “enables” humans “to represent the disposition of an animal, an insect, or a tree; and does so…ahead of the conscious, cognitive response to an unfolding event” (295). The response to nature by such “romantic” English poets as John Keats and William Wordsworth acts as further testimony for Miall’s “enactive” account of the role of empathy in literary reading:

enactive, given that the human mirror neuron system appears to simulate in our motor systems and feelings the events, objects, actions, and emotions that we encounter while we read.  …the mirror neuron system puts the action on stage, as it were, making us bodily participants in what we read… (296).

          Neither Mark Rollins, emphasizing perceptual rather than imaginative responses to style, nor Stephen Davies, critical of psychological methods of eliciting instances of expressiveness, do much more than acknowledge in passing mirror neurons in acts of simulation and emotional contagion (cf. 385 & 394, n. 2). By contrast, others pursue the mirroring hypothesis liberally. Noel Carroll and Margaret Moore, for example, whilst upholding Alexander Baumgarten’s original 1750 definition of aesthetics as “the science of how things come to be cognized by means of the senses,” explore how dance develops “the intimation of movement” intuited in both “accompanying music” and other “dancers’ bodies” (334 & 339). Carroll and Moore call the phenomenon of our “involuntary tendency to mirror automatically the behavior of our conspecifics” the “mirror reflex” or “emotional contagion” (340 & n. 18), an outward manifestation of mirror neurons “based on research with macaque monkeys” (340, n. 20). Indeed, they continue, the “activation of mirror neurons suggests a physical basis for the claims…by dancers that choreography involves a dimension of kinesthetic communication” (340) which is also said to provide “material grounds for claims of intersubjectivity” (340, n. 21). In short, mirror neurons underscore the way choreography is a “performative interpretation of the music that accompanies it”: it is “a sensuous realization of the features of the music, rather than a propositional elucidation” (342).  Similarly, when William Thompson and Lena Quinto probe the psychological aspects of music and emotion, they, too, seize upon emotional contagion and mirroring underlying the relationship between music and emotion because their effects can be “observed in behaviors that involve synchronizing with music” (365). Synchronizing, whether explicitly in physical movements or implicitly in “entrainment of attention” or “alignment of mental representations,” is purportedly “guided by activity in the mirror neuron system (…when performing or observing an action)” (365).  Thompson and Quinto expansively claim that synchronizing is as much a “process of assimilation” as it is one of mimicry and it is, moreover, traceable “on psychological, social, political, and economic levels” (366).

          The editors do not leave the mirroring hypothesis there. They include a doyen of mirror neuron research, Marco Iacobini, who collaboratively contributes a chapter, “Mirroring Fictional Others.” The chapter reframes the mirroring hypothesis in terms of Einfühlung or empathy–nowadays succinctly summarized by Laura Edwards in the November 2013 issue of History of Psychology. Mirroring is found in fictional characters, or, more precisely, their narrated (inter)actions, within prose fiction excerpts from Leo Tolstoi onwards. Iacobini simultaneously recapitulates key characteristics of mirror neurons in the brains of monkeys and, by analogy, those of humans (314-317).

Only one contributor, David Davies, voices doubts about the mirror neuron hypothesis pervading The Aesthetic Mind. Davies questions the recent stance of Barbara Montero and Richard Shusterman when probing “explicit awareness of what one’s body is doing” (350) by proprioceptive participants training in the performing arts. (Proprioception, physiologically speaking, typically refers to an individual’s intuitive sense of his or her bodily position, motion, and equilibrium even when blindfolded, as influentially defined by Charles Sherrington in his 1906 Integrative Action of the Nervous System.) Bodily awareness introduces Montero’s and Shusterman’s appeals to mirror neurons which are said to involve

certain kinds of cross-modal neurological connections which ‘translate’ between our visual apprehension of the world and our acting on the world through our motor systems (351).

Yet their admittedly “speculative extensions” (353) ignore the actual scope, if not nature, of empirical findings.

Let us briefly elaborate some of the questions raised by Davies upon realizing that investigations of the visual-motor mirror neurons of macaque monkeys have yet to be “verified on human subjects” (353).  Even if these investigations were verified, how would they “translate” our visual apprehension of, say, someone momentarily shutting his or her eyelid and responding as if, to draw upon Gilbert Ryle’s 1968 “Thinking of Thoughts” lecture, this were an act of winking not blinking? Relatedly, as the scope of mirror neurons in macaques “only applies to movements of the face and arms” (354), especially in acts of grasping and tearing, how is this evidence for, say, movements of legs and torso upon which aesthetic qualities are attributed to dance or gymnastics?  Next, can we, as Montero and Shusterman do, presume that the putative “firing” of mirror neurons in human observers of an action “provides the observer with proprioceptive awareness of that action, and not merely proprioceptive information” (354)?  Indeed, is there any evidence relating mirror neuron activity to awareness since what has been investigated are “non-conscious, automatic processes” (354)?  Again, have empirical investigations of macaques actually demonstrated mirror neuron activity in the case of mimicking or imitating actions? Because they have not, how can they be legitimately construed as evidence of the neural basis for various forms of human imitation, let alone for such higher psychological functions as empathizing and languaging (be it verbal, signed, or graphic)?  Finally, is there an alternative hypothesis to the mirror neuron one for explicating the neural basis of supposed understanding of actions by macaques? Here, perhaps, neurons within macaques’ superior temporal sulcus region might provide an alternative as detailed in the curiously neglected critique of mirror neuron theory by Gregory Hickok in the July 2009 issue of Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences.

II

          The second major theme binding contributions to The Aesthetic Mind is centered upon the conception of emotion at work in aesthetic experiences. Jesse Prinz, who believes that “valuing of all kinds involves the emotions” (71), undertakes “an exercise in naturalized aesthetics” (71, 86) in an effort to pinpoint how emotions are part of responses to and appraisals of the fine arts. After discounting attempts to identify aesthetic emotions with attractiveness, sexual or other, and with an open-ended set of emotions, Prinz considers the possibility of a single, underlying emotion such as the “appetitive” one of pleasure and the “social” one of admiration (81-82). He rejects these in favor of wonder, “a culturally elaborated extension of a biologically basic emotion” depicted as “a feeling of reverence,” whose “object” is one of “veneration” (84). Although Prinz concedes not “all forms of wonder are forms of aesthetic appreciation,” nevertheless aesthetic appreciation is “wonder that has been re-calibrated to…things that we construe as artworks” (85).

          By contrast, Roddy Cowie argues for emotions to be construed as

syndromes involving various kinds of component (feelings, percepts, expressions, characteristic actions, and so on). Not all of the components, but many of them, vary continuously. Instead of reflecting divisions into natural kinds, words are seen as a particular way of summarizing that underlying, multidimensional, continuum (89).

In the course of applying his componential analysis to emotional and aesthetic responses, Cowie finds Prinz’s claims for wonder need to distinguish “different levels of wonder” where it plays “a major part of some responses” and “little or no part of others” (99) and to recognize that “appraisal” is a perceptually infused “awareness of significance to the exclusion of structural and surface attributes” (100; cf. 95). At the same time, he reminds us that aesthetic responses are “evaluated against examples” although their “boundaries” lack clarity (101). This deviates somewhat from Prinz’s belief that appraising an unfamiliar artefact begins by seeking “features it shares with paradigm cases” (86).

          Arguing for the separation of psychological experiments about how, for example, “readers as a matter of fact respond emotionally to poetry” from “what the critic can reveal about a poem’s meaning and achievement” (302), Peter Lamarque focuses upon Jenefer Robinson’s recent attempt to identify five conditions necessary for an artist to express emotion in an artefact (305). He reminds us, for example, that although a writer’s emotions may well form raw material for his or her work–the death of a child for instance–what matters from a literary rather than biographical perspective is the expression of emotion attributed to personae in the work. “Why?” asks Lamarque, “Because the emotion expressed is not an occurrent emotion, only an emotion attributed to a dramatic speaker constructed in the text” (306). Consequently, emotion becomes “explicable through the rhetorical devices employed not through the mind that created them” (306). Granting this still leaves open an appeal to the asymmetrical relationship between readers and writers. Lamarque counter-argues that, if personae, narrators, implied authors are needed for the expression of emotion, then is it not equally plausible to “postulate an implied reader for response emotions,” the implied reader’s emotions being one of the “characteristics of the work, not necessarily of any actual person” (309)?  Fundamentally, Robinson believes that an understanding of the work and its characters necessitates an “emotional engagement” with them because “understanding character is relevantly like understanding real people” (309). If “understanding character” conveys the sense of “imagined people,” then, should this evoke emotional responses in readers, such responses could be had with any non-literary recounting of the work. If, however, “understanding character” conveys the sense of “elements in a literary work” along with its plot, symbols, and themes, then an actual emotional response is not required as a “precondition of understanding” (309ff.).

          Finally, let us briefly consider Edmund Rolls’ lengthy account of the neuro-biological foundation for affective feelings underpinning aesthetics. Two systems are hypothesized: the “evolutionary process in which genes define the (pleasant or unpleasant) goals for action” and the complementary “reasoning, syntactic, brain system which evolved to help solve…problems,” said to be “encouraged” by “pleasant feelings” with the attainment of “simple…aesthetic…advantageous…parsimonious” solutions (116; cf. 126-129, 159). Amongst the initial, salient features of Rolls’ exposition are, for example:

(a)  his appeal to a neurological version of stimulus-response-re-enforcement processes associated with behaviorist analysis in his efforts to show “how different emotions could be produced and classified in terms of the rewards and punishments received, omitted, or terminated” (117);

 (b)  his tendency to blur the conceptual difference between emotion and mood in such comments as “normally,” excepting some types of depression, “the mood or affective state is produced by an external stimulus, with the whole process of stimulus representation, evaluation in terms of reward or punishment, and the resulting mood or affect being referred to as emotion” (121); and

(c)  his claim that the “functions” of emotions disclose the nature of emotion, including preparing “the body for action”; providing “the motivation for actions performed”; and “current mood state[s]” affecting “cognitive” evaluations of events or memories (122-124).

          Rolls’ account here seems vulnerable to doubt. Can we, for instance, legitimately assimilate the causal conditions for feeling emotions–namely, a set of cerebral functions–to the cause (“production”) of specific emotions on specific occasions? What we are frightened by (say, the sound of shooting in a nearby street) is the cause of fear, not the cerebral conditions making fear possible, nor need it be what we are frightened of (namely, being killed). Again, do we categorize emotions in terms of neurologically processed re-enforced stimuli (“rewards” and “punishments”)? Or, do we discriminate our emotions and their objects owing to the classificatory reach of our language–apprehensive of impoverishment, fearing unemployment, terrified about contagion (cf. 117, fig. 8.1)?  Next, are moods merely emotions?  Our mood, say, of feeling irritable, may be a brief occurrence or an enduring disposition or proneness. However, our irritable state of mind need not be tied to any object whereas our emotion–feeling fear–implicates someone or something. Also, our irritable mood is anchored not so much to motive for action as it is to the way in which we behave because of how it pervades our very thoughts. Further, many emotions–apprehension, fear, and terror included–not our moods–can specify motives for action. Following Anthony Kenny’s analysis in Action, Emotion and Will (1963, 86ff.), emotions articulate characteristic patterns of our aims in service of which we might undertake actions. For example, being frightened by sounds of shooting in a neighboring street, not concurrent moods, sees us hiding soundlessly indoors with the aim of avoiding being killed. Finally, on the one hand, if the emotion we feel is relief rather than fear, how does it prepare, if at all, our bodies for action? On the other hand, does our “emotional state” have an exclusive role in the formation of particular “episodic memories” (124)? Do agitations and appetites crisscrossing our emotions have no role to play here?

III

          Without exhausting the rich array of The Aesthetic Mind–its anthropological and sociological frameworks; its debates over the nature of imagination and representation–we have nonetheless located serious conceptual confusions in two of its major themes. That, however, testifies to the provocative nature of so many contributions: they do not invite passivity on the part of their readers.

 

© 2015 R.A. Goodrich

 

R.A. Goodrich is an associate of the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions (University of Melbourne) and of the European Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group (Deakin University), co-edits the online refereed arts-practice journal, Double Dialogues, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating behavioral, cognitive, and linguistic development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.