Passivity in Aesthetic Experience: Husserlian and Enactive Perspectives

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Documents

This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and surprise. Analyzing this material through the lens of passive syntheses, helps explain these experiences as well as the sense of subject-object fusion that occurs in some of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience. These analyses are then contrasted with a potentially contradicting take on aesthetic experience from a recent trend in cognitive science, namely enactive aesthetics, which insists on the active subjective construction and sense-making of aesthetic experience. Finally we show that the two positions are in fact compatible.
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology
Volume6
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)1-20
ISSN2053-9320
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2019

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - Husserlian phenomenology, passive synthesis, enactive aesthetics, artworks in museums, musical absorption

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 210058088