Mark Johnson’s work The Meaning of the Body presents John Dewey’s pragmatism and pragmatist aesthetics as the forerunners of the anti-Cartesian embodied enactive approach to human experience and meaning. He rejects the Kantian noncognitive character of aesthetics and emphasizes that aesthetics is the study of the human capacity to experience the bodily conditions of meaning constitution that grows from our bodily conditions of life. Using Mark Johnson’s view as a starting-point, this paper offers the beginning of an enactive approach to (...) aesthetic preference contributing to bringing human aesthetic behavior research closer to the enactive approach to human experience. Following enactive studies on bodily sense-making and embodied emotions, I identify the bodily conditions of meaning constitution in which aesthetic preference is grounded with the subject’s self-regulatory visceral embodied constitution of viable degrees of value of the environmental factors according to her bodily structure. Unlike mainstream aesthetic preference research in empirical aesthetics, I claim that the subject’s aesthetic preference constitution requires the lived experience of the bodily conditions of meaning constitution through the conscious experience of the subjectively aroused lived body. The implausibility of the mind/body dichotomy of current aesthetic preference research is highlighted. (shrink)

Volume 51, Issue 1, January 2020, Page 88-89.

Diese Sammlung von Aufsätzen leistet einen Beitrag zur Debatte um das Geist-Körper-Problem aus der Sicht des enaktiven Ansatzes mit einem Fokus auf Sinngebungsprozesse und Wahrnehmung. Sie deckt dabei die Fachgebiete der Soziologie, Philosophie des Geistes, Ästhetik, Musikwissenschaft, Human-Robot-Interaction, Medien, Literaturwissenschaft, Kognitionswissenschaft und Computer Science ab. Der Band wendet sich an alle Forschende und Studierende, die sich über die Grenzen des eigenen Faches hinaus mit menschlicher Kognition und der Interaktion von kognitiven Systemen mit ihrer Umwelt auseinandersetzen.

The volume presents the results of the 1st International Conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind. It discusses from different points of view the role of embodiment in the reevaluation of aesthetics as a process of bodily mediated meaning-making.

Volume 51, Issue 1, January 2020, Page 88-89.