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ABSTRACT
This paper explores Moritz Geiger’s work on the role of emotions in aesthetic appreciation and shows its potential for contemporary research. Drawing on the main tenets of Geiger’s phenomenological aesthetics as an aesthetics of value, the paper begins by elaborating his model of aesthetic appreciation. I argue that, placed in the contemporary debate, his model is close to affective models which make affective states responsible for the apprehension of the aesthetic value of an artwork, though Geiger also makes important concessions to the intellectualist. Like proponents of the affective model, Geiger argues that a work’s aesthetic values are extracted by means of an affective state, more precisely, a “liking”. However, like the intellectualist, he considers that a focus on the emotions might interfere in the aesthetic appreciation of the artwork. Next, I reconstruct Geiger’s distinction between surface and depth effects in terms of a distinction between two types of emotional responses to artworks. It is argued that Geiger offers a powerful tool to distinguish those emotions that are intrinsically related to aesthetic values from those that are not and that this distinction can be useful to understand how different kinds of emotions contribute to aesthetic appreciation. I examine the historical sources of Geiger’s distinction in Theodor Lipps’s aesthetics and compare Geiger’s account with the works of other early phenomenologists. In the final part, I illustrate the place of Geiger’s model in the contemporary discussion by means of an example.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Thomas Petraschka, Harri Mäcklin, and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an early version of this paper. I am thankful to Simon Mussell for improving my English.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Though there is some recent literature on Geiger, this has been centered mainly on his analysis of consciousness of feelings. There are very few approaches to his aesthetics. Cf., for some exceptions: Berger, “Die Bedeutung;” Berger, “Editor’s Introduction”; Henckmann, “Moritz Geiger’s Konzeption”; and Mickunas, “Moritz Geiger.”
2. Kivy, “Moodology”; Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature and “On Keeping Psychology.”
3. Feagin, Reading with Feeling and “Affects in Appreciation”; and Robinson, Deeper than Reason and “Emotional Responses.”
4. Though Geiger distinguishes between aesthetic and artistic values (artistic values are a kind of aesthetic value; and there are aesthetic values which are not related to art), in this paper I use the term “aesthetic value” to refer to the aesthetic values of artworks.
5. For the difference between both kinds of aesthetics, see Petraschka, “Quite Artificial.”
6. Geiger, The Significance, 45.
7. Ibid., 46.
8. Geiger, The Significance, 61. This idea was followed by later authors of phenomenological aesthetics such as Ingarden, Hartmann, and Hildebrand.
9. Geiger, The Significance, 65; Reinach, Three Texts; Scheler, Formalism.
10. Geiger, “Stimmungseinfühlung.”
11. Geiger, The Significance, 62.
12. Ibid., 63.
13. Geiger, Beiträge, 636. However, the distinction is already stated in Geiger, “Stimmungseinfühlung.”
14. Importantly, the form of attention involved here is not objectifying. We attend to the affective experience while undergoing it, i.e. without making the affective experience itself the object of our attention.
15. For this distinction Geiger draws on his previous work regarding the consciousness of feelings in which he argues that we can take a stance toward our emotions as they occur. See Geiger “Das Bewußtsein.”
16. Geiger, Beiträge, 639.
17. Geiger, Zugänge, 153.
18. Perhaps the most representative of them is developed in a collection of essays entitled Zugänge zur Ästhetik and in particular in the essay “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben.” While the term “dilettantism” has been used to describe the attitude of the artist, Geiger employs it to describe the attitude of the subject engaging with art. See Geiger, Zugänge.
19. Feagin, “Affects in Appreciation,” 647.
20. Her claim is not universalistic. She claims neither that all artworks are understood by our emotions, nor that all emotions aroused by an artwork are relevant for its understanding: “not every emotion aroused by a novel or a movie is relevant to understanding it. There are, however, a number of uncontroversial ways in which emotion can contribute to our understanding of a work of literature or film,” Robinson, Deeper than Reason, 107, original emphasis.
21. Robinson, Deeper than Reason, 107.
22. Gorodiesky, “The Authority” and “On Liking” For an analysis of Geiger on this issue, see Vendrell Ferran, “On Liking.”
23. Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature.
24. In this article, I will quote from the English translations of Geiger’s works. In case that the work has not been translated, I will refer to the German edition.
25. Geiger, The Significance, 47.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 51.
31. Ibid., 52.
32. Ibid., 53.
33. Ibid., 52.
34. Ibid., 53.
35. Ibid.
36. Geiger, The Significance, 181. The fact that Geiger describes happiness as central to aesthetic experience does not imply that his model does not leave room for painful art. In fact, it could be explained that though certain artworks are painful at the vital level, they can elicit happiness in the personal sphere because they connect the subject with high aesthetic values of sublimity, beauty, etc.
37. Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature.
38. Robinson, “Aesthetic Emotions,” 205–22.
39. Already in the Beiträge where Geiger introduces the notion of depth, he refers to Lipps. In “Surface and Depth Effects”, Lipps’s influence is not explicitly stated but it is easy to recognize.
40. While Lipps’s account of empathy has been widely analyzed in current research, the concept of a “feeling of depth” has received far less attention. Cf., for an exception: Hansen and Roald, “Affective Depth”.
41. Lipps, Ästhetik, 523.
42. Ibid.
43. I employ here the expression used by Hansen and Roald in their article “Affective Depth.”
44. Hansen and Roald, “Affective Depth,” 403.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 401.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 406.
49. Importantly, Scheler also employs the idea of depth in the sense of saturation. See Scheler, Formalism.
50. Stein, Einfühlung. Moreover, Stein distinguishes depth from the reach of a feeling which is close to Lipps’s idea of saturation.
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Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Marburg (Germany). Her research is in the areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, and aesthetics. She is the author of two books, Die Emotionen. Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie (2008) and Die Vielfalt der Erkenntnis (2018). Her academic papers have been published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Topoi, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Human Studies.