Call it “The rape of emotion”. Emotion is a word much abused in the context of art. Many scientific academics describe artists as people driven by emotions. Many artists fall into the fallacy and agree. Learned psychologists must chafe under their collars to hear all these.
In Psychology, “Emotion is often defined as a complex state of feeling that results in physical and psychological changes that influence thought and behavior.”
This reaction refers to very specific conditions. When a person feels fear, the blood vessels at the bodily extremities constrict, the heart rate increases, blood rushes to critical central areas of the body, the hair at the back of the neck rises from some primordial human instinct.
The person is preparing himself for fight or flight. The body reacts instinctively in a manner universal to humans. It has been studied inside a lab.
From this, psychologists like Gordon Allport have called love not an emotion but an attitude. Sexual arousal, on the other hand, definitely qualifies as emotion. There are clinical tracts to define all these. The appreciation of art is often reduced to being also an emotional response. But this is not at all correct.
It is true that certain art might draw from the viewer an emotional response. Such as when the good doctor thought he was having a heart attack from listening to a rendition of an opus by Beethoven over cable TV. He felt his breathing grow shallower. He felt his heart race as the piece climbed to its climax. But it was only a coincidence of various psychological phenomena racing through him because of the music.
And so it is, that the appreciation of art might elicit an emotional response. But the aesthetic experience is a response unto itself and different by all means from emotion.
As theorists like Immanuel Kant have pointed out, the aesthetic experience results from something inside the mind which Modernist philosophers like him called “the faculty of taste”. In practice, this faculty produces in the mind a pleasurable experience whenever the mind processes particular stimuli through the senses.
Some philosophers theorize, this experience is related to the human’s internal moral sense. The theory is that whenever humans confront or see a good act being done, something inside them clicks and they feel good themselves. Humans are internally a sucker for good acts. The opposite is likewise true. Which is why we respond negatively to acts of abuse, such as for instance an act of bullying. We may remain silent looking at this, but we would not enjoy watching the act.
Indeed, we universally react negatively to any bad act.
This manner of reacting either positively or negatively to particular conditions is an easy device used by many writers and artists to guide the reader emotionally (but really aesthetically) through the twists and turns of a narrative. Movies like the Rambo series of movies give us the good if more banal example of this.
Which warns us immediately how aesthetics (not emotions) can oftentimes be very manipulative. This also explains why the understanding of the aesthetic experience is central to some art disciplines especially those engaged in the marketing of commodities. But all in all and through art history, serious artists have always been disinclined to art which is manipulative especially of human psychology. All the more so when this form of psychological manipulation is applied through institutional propaganda.
This does not mean that artists are disinclined from looking at art from an aesthetic paradigm. It does mean they are very careful with it. Emotion is only an automatic response. Aesthetics on the other hand is a mysterious, holy, “thingy” they do not fully understand. Nor do they wish to.
The artist or writer need only “feel” their way through the art that is in front of them. They need only feel what it is doing to something inside them. If the art or text goes this way or that, does it become more “pleasing”? There is something inside them which guides their path. Call it: “The Force.”
Does it matter to them if others will feel the same way about their work? Academic theory says they will. Aesthetics is a universal phenomena. It transmits. But this is only of secondary importance. The artist’s personal aesthetic experience itself justifies the act of making. All other considerations only follow from that experience.
The fact of this aesthetic experience transferring to an anonymous viewer of the same art work in some gallery or museum somewhere in this universe validates the fact of our humanity. But it is not required to validate either the artist, or his or her art.
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