Marta Benenti

Among the most pressing questions in aesthetics is that concerning the role of emotions in aesthetic experiences. In this article I try to provide an answer to this question by exploiting the explanatory potential of affective affordances. After analyzing emotionally charged aesthetic experiences in terms of arousal and expressive features, I account for the relationship between these two types of experiential qualities through affective affordances. Then, I suggest that, as they are sensitive to norms, affective affordances allow us to do justice to the evaluative nature of most aesthetic experiences.

In this section I try to reply to my commentators’ questions, criticisms and suggestions. Where possible, I address them one by one, following the order in which they were raised, while sometimes I gather them together in order to elaborate more systematically on the topics they raise. I am extremely grateful for these comments and I am at the same time aware that a number of issues that deserve attention will go neglected. I take this as a prompt to develop these and related topics further in the future.

This book addresses the philosophical problem of expressiveness, defined as the capacity of objects to convey affective states. Common in both everyday language and artistic contexts, expressive attributions pose significant philosophical questions. The book has a dual aim: to clarify the nature of experiencing objects as expressive and to propose a novel theory of "expressive experience." The first aim involves examining existing attempts to understand expressive experience, identifying misunderstandings about the mental states involved, and specifying the role of emotions. The second aim builds on this clarification, presenting an original theory that synthesizes key insights from previous accounts. While the primary focus is the analytic debate of the past fifty years, the book also incorporates perspectives from phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and ecological psychology. Expressiveness intersects with various philosophical and psychological issues, challenging theories of perception and emotions, and bridging aesthetics with the philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive sciences.

In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emotions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for regulating felt affective states. We argue that this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon.

Caterina può apparire arrabbiata, ma anche un brano musicale può manifestare emozioni: un passaggio triste, una marcia gioiosa, una modulazione che apre a nuovi sentimenti. Anche gli oggetti inanimati possono manifestare emozioni che pure, a differenza di quanto accade per persone e animali, non possono esperire. Sebbene le attribuzioni di emozioni agli oggetti inanimati possano essere trattate, in linea di principio, come esempi di metafore, esse sembrano invero catturare un’esperienza reale. Per quanto anche un bollitore possa fischiare gioiosamente o un salice piangente apparire malinconico, non vi è dubbio che le opere d’arte siano particolarmente suscettibili di manifestare emozioni - essere espressive di emozioni1. Tra queste, la musica occupa da sempre una posizione privilegiata. Un brano musicale, che in quanto oggetto inanimato non può provare alcunché, è nondimeno in grado di raggiungere straordinarie vette di espressività emotiva. Ciò avviene del tutto indipendentemente da vari elementi - il testo, il titolo del brano o il programma di sala che lo accompagna - i cui eventuali significati emotivi espliciti possono semmai innestarsi, arricchendoli o persino contraddicendoli, su quelli di per sé manifestati della cosiddetta “musica pura”.

A natural landscape can look serene, a shade of colour cheerful and a piece of music might sound heartrending. Why do we ascribe affective qualities to objects that can't entertain psychological states? The capacity that objects, and especially artworks, have to express affective states is a bizarre phenomenon that needs to be clarified in numerous respects. Philosophers are still struggling with the phenomenon of expressiveness being a matter of imagination, perception, or mnemonic association, and usually do not agree on the role that emotions and human bodily expressions play in it. Benenti questions the main theories that populate the aesthetics domain using the tools of philosophy of mind. This study deals with crucial debates concerning seeing-in, cognitive penetration, the relation between phenomenal character and representational content and between emotions and expressions. It aims at providing a viable account of the experience we have of expressive properties by casting light on its fundamentally perceptual nature. The outcome is an empirically informed and critical overview of a topic which has been rather neglected in the philosophy of mind. The book will be of interest to scholars of the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, the cognitive sciences, and psychology.

This chapter addresses fictional narratives as a specific kind of fiction capable of eliciting particular effects on their recipients. The first section of the chapter considers the status of climate fiction (cli-fi) as a literary genre, and identifies a set of standard properties that qualify most works in the category. The second section addresses the specific fictional engagement prompted by cli-fi and discusses its relationship with thought experiments. The third section examines, from a psychological angle, whether and how climate narratives can induce changes in the recipients’ beliefs and attitudes toward environmental issues. The chapter closes by listing some of the research questions raised by cli-fi that still await exploration. In the conclusion, it is tentatively suggested that, although the experience of consuming cli-fi will not change the planet, it might nonetheless heighten recipients’ concerns and willingness to take action against climate change.

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory.