Emotion and language in aesthetic experiences

What we call art has continuously been questioned, renewed and differentiated, yet its link to affect and emotion has been persistently confirmed since the very beginning of modernity. In this chapter we answer the question of how art affects us, beginning with a historical overview of the most important theoretical positions. We present discussions of aesthetic phenomena as varied as abstract emotion, aesthetic pleasure, catharsis, empathy, flow experience, and perceptual dynamics with a point of departure in phenomenological psychology and discuss the nature of affect, language and perception based on selected accounts of aesthetic experience. We rely on the theoretical framework of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and show how language is fundamentally embodied. How art affects us depends on the kind of perception in question as the different art forms appeal to their respective sense modalities. Differences in art experiences, however, are also based on amodal parts of experience, such as movement, affect and language. It is concluded that to language dynamic experiences are much more demanding than naming objects and consequently language in its narrow sense is not a possible foundation for aesthetic experience. Using the concept of language in a broad sense shows how the most common language of art is affect and emotion.