WHAT EMOTIONS ARE AND HOW THEY OPERATE WITHIN THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE, 3-23

Abstract

An attempt to answer the question announced in the title, namely what emotions are and what relevance they have for the aesthetic experience, leads us to a more general framework of the spectrum in which the emotional reactions we can have in front of a deeply meaningful experience for us can be seen. Of the myriad of experiences that we have every day, only a part proves to be important enough to remain in our memory, and that part contains a wide range of emotions and feelings and relates to those situations that are personally meaningful to us. This paper follows, from the perspective of pragmatist philosophy, the relationship between aesthetics and the embodied mind thesis, with the aim of clarifying how mind and body interact to shape our emotions. After a brief introduction to the theory of emotion, where I will emphasize the dominant cognitivist perspective, I will try to highlight the role that emotions play in an aesthetic experience, and then see how these emotions differ from the emotions involved in other types of experiences.