Art, Affectivity, and Aesthetic Value: Geiger on the Role of Emotions in Aesthetic Appreciation

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.