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A New Mind for a New Aesthetics

ANdREA LAVAzzA* | RIccARdO MANzOTTI**

Resumo

Embora a extensão da dependência entre teorias da estética e modelos da mente seja uma questão de aceso debate, é justo afirmar que as abordagens actuais da consciência sugerem novas perspectivas sobre a natureza da experiência estética. As recentes descobertas da neurociência têm afetado a nossa forma de ver a estética e a arte. Todavia, enquanto é frequentemente sugerido que a neurociência vai, em breve, obter uma descrição completa da natureza da mente e, portanto, da experiência estética, aqui consideram-se as consequências da recente bifurcação teórica a respeito da localização da mente (ou seja, as posições externalistas versus internalistas). A partir deste ponto de vista, as questões da unidade e do significado são usadas para investigar a natureza da experiência estética e da arte. A discussão baseia-se na distinção de William James entre núcleo e periferia, levando a uma perspectiva de convergência entre a psicologia, a fenomenologia e a neurociência. Por fim, a arte é explorada como uma janela para olhar para dentro de aspectos fundamentais da vida mental, quer por meio dos recentes resultados de imagens do cérebro, quer através dos modelos mais abrangentes da mente.

Palavras-chave : externalismo, modelos da mente, neurociência, unidade, W. James

Abstract

While the extent of the dependence between theories of aesthetics and models of the mind is a matter of lively debate, it is fair to claim that current approaches to consciousness suggest new perspectives about the nature of aesthetic experience. Recent findings of neuroscience have affected how we see aesthetics and art. Nevertheless, while it is often suggested that neuroscience will soon offer a comprehensive account of the nature of mind and thus of aesthetic experience, here we consider the consequences on the recent theoretical bifurcation as to where mind is located (namely the externalist vs. the internalist stance). From such a view, the issues of unity and meaning are used to probe into the nature of aesthetic experience and art. The discussion draws upon William James’ distinction between nucleus and fringe and puts forward a converging perspective between psychology, phenomenology and neuroscience. Eventually, art is exploited as a window to peer inside fundamental aspects of mental life by means both of recent brain imaging results and more extended models of the mind.

Keywords : neuroscience, models of mind, externalism, W. James, unity

501-524

** Centro Universitario Internazionale, Arezzo. [email protected]** Institute of Consumption, Communication and Behavior “GP. Fabris” - IULM University,

Milano. [email protected]

andrea lavazza | riCCardO manzOtti502

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Aesthetics and mind

Aesthetics has the goal to understand the value of form whereas “form” and “value” are here used in the broadest possible sense. For instance, one may adopt a functionalist theory of value and an

instrumental account of form. Or one may prefer a psychological theory of value and a Gestaltesque theory of form. Or any other combination one may venture to embrace.

Any artwork – be it a Rembrandt’s portrait or an Olafur Eliasson’s installation – has a form. At the very least, it should to be possible to recognize it either by perceptual or motor means, of course always admitting the possibility of error. Furthermore, it may be similarly held that any artwork must have a relation with a spectator whether contemporary, past, or future. This statement does not imply that the spectator’s judgment, critical evaluation, or subjective appreciations are necessarily relevant to establish the artwork value. The spectator may be only potential or even coincident with the artist. However, a subject of some kind has to be foreboded. A beautiful random configuration of radioactive material in the center of the earth, that no one ever conceived and no one will ever see, scarcely qualifies as an artwork.

These considerations, and many others of similar nature, suggest some connections between theories about the value of form and the mind thus encouraging many scholars to consider aesthetic experience as the natural connection between aesthetics and mind. Since aesthetics is firstly a theory of value, many scholars restrain from considering value as the outcome of psychological processes. Without being naive about the difficulties involved in such a strategy, we try to be careful as to the nature of experience. In fact, the notion of experience is rooted in the phenomenal aspects of the mind and pulls irresistibly towards the notion of consciousness. Experience is essentially conscious experience. Is aesthetic experience some special kind of conscious experience then? Is the scientific research of neural correlates of consciousness going to shed some light as to the nature of aesthetics experience too? And, more arbitrarily, is aesthetics going to reduce to some neuroscientific account of neural activity underpinning consciousness? The last step is particularly shaky since, as it will be argued at greater length in the following, there is not yet an accepted theory that suggests how mind (consciousness in particular) may be reduced to neural activity.1 No doubt these questions

1. manzOtti, Riccardo and mOderatO, Paolo – “Is Neuroscience the Forthcoming ‘Mindscience’?”. Behaviour and Philosophy 38 (2010), pp. 1-28.

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can be, and have been, phrased in different ways. However, the first two steps do not require any commitment to the last one.

After all, claiming that aesthetics resides in the subject is not an attempt to resurrect the debate as to whether aesthetics is based on the mythical existence of a special aesthetic experience, that will one day be identified and dissected by either psychology or neurosciences.2 On the one hand it is maintained, that “psychology is not relevant to aesthetics”.3 On the other, it is suggested that the roots of any artistic process are to be found in neural processes. Consider Semir Zeki’s claim that “There can be no satisfactory theory of aesthetics that is not neurobiologically biased”.4 It is obvious that each of the two opposing stances will inevitable have an effect on how we express judgments as to the value of artworks.

So which ones are the really great artworks? Are they the portraits, statues, works of music in which we see “not merely the form which the artist may not be wholly aware of, namely the pulsations within him of some kind of infinite spirit of which he happens to be the particularly articulate and self-conscious representative”.5 Or are those that produce a certain conscious experience? For instance, a sublime conscious experience? In The Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant defines sublime as absolute greatness, something beyond our understanding, something which goes beyond defined quantities, a magnitude which does not exist in nature but only in our own ideas.6 The sublime can only exist in our minds. By the mere fact of being able to conceive it, the sublime endorses the superiority of our mental faculties over our senses. The evolution of the concept of sublime tends this way.7 Yet, how is the sublime realized in our brain?

2. Beardsley, Monroe – “The Definitions of the Arts”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961), pp. 175-187; diCkie, George – “Bullough and the Concept of Psychical Distance”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22 (1961), pp. 233-238; diCkie, George – “Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic Experience”. The Journal of Philosophy 62 (1965), pp. 129-136; Beardsley, Monroe – “Aesthetic Experience Regained”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1969), pp. 3-11.

3. diCkie, George – “Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics?”. The Philosophical Review 71 (1962), pp. 285-302, here p. 285.

4. zeki, Semir – “Artistic creativity and the brain”. Science 293 (2001), pp. 51-52, here p. 52.

5. Berlin, Isaiah – The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 99.

6. kant, Immanuel – Kritik der Urteilskraft/The Critique of Judgment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1790/1978.

7. mOnk, Samuel H. – The Sublime. Ann Arbor (MI): The University of Michigan Press, 1960.


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What kind of neural activity is the one leading to the experience of the sublime? Is that a subset of the broader category of aesthetic experience?

Does aesthetic experience possess some intrinsic features or rather it is any kind of experience which is interwoven with aesthetic values originated in some further domain? Many scholars have argued in favor of the former hypothesis.8 Yet how may they single out any essential aspect? After all, many other authors have defended the opposite claim, probably with the aim of providing objective roots to value. For instance, Jerrold Levinson strived to outline a realistic account of aesthetic properties.9 On one hand, value may be originated by the relevant psychological process – thus value would be a subjective property. On the other hand, value may be an objective intrinsic quality of objects – thus the role of the mind would consist only in recognizing the presence of it.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, is aesthetics somehow dependent on aesthetic experience and thus on the nature of conscious experience? Notwithstanding the almost irresistible fascination of such an issue, here, we will not tackle head on the issue of whether or not we should think that aesthetic values are subjective in nature. For the purpose of the present discussion, it is sufficient to hold that understanding what are the mechanisms underlying aesthetic experience is of some interest to aesthetics.

In the next sections, we will try to flesh out a sketch of the relation between art, aesthetic experience and the mind that is not necessarily doomed to collapse neither on idealism nor on neural reduction. In the following paragraph, we will consider the state of the art of neural accounts of art-related mental activities. Then, we will consider the issue of the localization of the mind and of consciousness in particular. We will argue that such a debate has not yet reached a definite conclusion. Is there

8. diCkie, George – “Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic Experience”. The Journal of Philosophy 62 (1965), pp. 129-136; Beardsley, Monroe – “Aesthetic Experience Regained”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1969), pp. 3-11; galin, David – “Aesthetic expe-rience: Marcel Proust and the neo-Jamesian structure of awareness”. Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004), pp. 241-53; iseminger, Gary – “Aesthetic Experience”. In: J. Levinson (Ed.) – The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 99-116; lavazza, Andrea – “Art as a metaphor of the mind. A neo-Jamesian aesthetics embracing phenomenology, neuroscience, and evolution”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2008), pp. 159-182.

9. levinsOn, Jerrold – “Extending Art Historically”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993), pp. 411-423; levinsOn, Jerrold – “Being Realistic about Aesthetic Properties”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994), pp. 351-354; levinsOn, Jerrold – “Intrinsic Value and the Notion of a Life”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004), pp. 319-329.


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a common ground that may allow peeking inside aesthetic experience and the mind without having to accept any neural commitments? We argue that there is a promising field and that is constituted by the issue of unity and meaningfulness. Taking advantage of William James’s notion of nucleus and fringe, Tononi’s theory of information integration and Zeki’s theory of abstract concept formation, in the fifth paragraph we will compare unity in art and in conscious experience drawing tentative hunches as to their common roots. Eventually, in the last paragraph, we will reconsider art as the emergence of meaningful unities out of the physical continuum. We will consider the rather provocative notion that the physical underpinnings of aesthetic experience are extended to all aspects of art. As a result, the allegedly distinct concepts of aesthetic experience and art world would result as coextensive. The role of the brain would allow to such a complex network of different aspects to become a meaningful whole. Phenomenology, aesthetics, and neuroscience would then find a common root in the structure of reality itself.

Neuroscience and aesthetics

As mentioned above, in the last thirty years, the amount of scientific data about conscious experience skyrocketed to an unprecedented level10 thereby encouraging many neuroscientist to address the issue of art-related neural processes.11 Their enthusiasm encouraged many scholars to claim that art will somehow collapse to its neural underpinnings. For instance, Epstein concludes one of his essays by saying that “a scientific theory of art is possible and will be found as the inevitable corollary to a scientific theory of consciousness”.12

10. CriCk, Francis – The Astonishing Hypothesis: the Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Touchstone, 1994; kOCh, Christof – The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood (Col.): Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004; Jennings, Charles – “In Search of Consciousness”. Nature Neuroscience 3 (2000), p. 743; miller, Greg – “What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?”. Science 309 (2005), p. 79; tallis, Raymond – “Consciousness, not yet explained”. New Scientist 205 (2010), p. 28.

11. ramaChandran, V. S. and hirstein, William – “The Science of Art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), pp. 15-51; zeki, Semir – “Artistic creativity and the brain”. Science 293 (2001), pp. 51-52; zeki, Semir – “Neural Concept Formation & Art”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (2002), pp. 53-76; kawaBata, Hideaki and zeki, Semir – “Neural correlates of beauty”. Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004), pp. 1699-1705; gallese, Vittorio and freedBerg, David – “Mirror and canonical neurons are crucial elements in esthetic response”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007), pp. 411-411.

12. ePstein, Russell – “Consciousness, art and the brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust”. Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004), pp. 213-240, here p. 237.


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Such a perspective is plain in the hybrid discipline of neuroesthetics.13 Here neuroscientific methods are used to study how the brain responds to art, seeking neural correlates of experiences. The working assumption behind the discipline of neuroesthetics is that our experience of the world, including our aesthetic experience, is rooted in brain activity. Consider Semir Zeki’s claim that “My aim […] has been really to convey feeling that aesthetic theories will only become intelligible and profound once based on the workings of the brain…”.14

Nevertheless, many scholars objected that we are still far from being able to succeed in transforming neurosciences into anything remotely like a forthcoming ‘mindscience’. There are aspects of the mind that do not match our current understanding of the nature of the physical and, a fortiori, of the neural domain: quality, unity, intentionality, semantics, duration, and the like.15 One of the authors of this paper, Lavazza, deems that some kind of dualism seems a plausible hypothesis as well. Furthermore, many art historians and philosophers of aesthetics challenged the idea that art will ever be reduced to neural activity. On this regard, the philosopher of aesthetics Arnold Berleant writes that “[…] the traditional model of the aesthetic situation, in which the viewer is discrete from the object, is both inadequate and misleading […] a claim demonstrated in a direct manner ever more insistently by […] artists themselves. These workers in perception have increasingly expanded the boundaries of the art object to incorporate its perceiver. They offer us a realm of experience in which art and object are not ‘separate but equal’, but rather one in which both are fully integrated into a single perceptual field”.16

The idea that aesthetics must be accounted for by brain activity alone may produce misleading results about the nature of that experience and a

13. zeki, Semir – “Art and the Brain”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), pp. 76-96.

14. zeki, Semir – “The Disunity of Consciousness”. Trend in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003), pp. 214-218, here p. 217.

15. Chalmers, David J. – The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; faux, Steven F. – “Cognitive Neuroscience from a Behavioral Perspective: A Critique of Chasing Ghosts with Geiger Counters”. Behavior Analyst 25 (2002), pp. 161-173. Bennett, Maxwell R. and haCker, Peter M. S. – Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 2003. nOë, Alva and thOmPsOn, Evan – “Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?”. Journal of Consciousnesss Studies 11 (2004), pp. 3-28; kOOns, Robert C. and Bealer, George (Eds.) – The Waning of Materialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; manzOtti, Riccardo and mOderatO, Paolo – “Is Neuroscience the Forthcoming ‘Mindscience’?”. Behaviour and Philosophy 38 (2010), pp. 1-28.16. Berleant, Arnold – “Does Art Have a Spectator?”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1987), pp. 411-412, here p. 412.


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distorted view of how art functions. While it is undoubtedly enlightening to understand the role that the brain plays in our appreciation of art, it is equally important to consider such brain processes in connection with those aspects of the “aesthetic situation” that lie beyond the head. On this issue, recently Pepperell and Manzotti argued that “understanding aesthetic experience in this way can profoundly affect how we might investigate it experimentally; it will require an entirely different methodology from that employed by neuroesthetics […]. It will mean gathering data from across a wide spectrum of processes, from the phenomenological to the neurobiological, the psychophysical and the behavioral, and extending to the environmental and the cultural”.17

Where is aesthetic experience?

The attempt to naturalize aesthetic experience has unavoidable theoretical consequences. One of the most prominent is that, if aesthetic experience is amenable to naturalization, it must also be localizable. In fact, every natural phenomenon is located somewhere, no matter how fuzzy or ambiguous its boundaries might be. This question is all the more relevant since it is rooted in one of the hottest debate in the field of consciousness studies. Where are physically located the processes that underpin the mind? As mentioned above, naturalizing the mind in scientific terms entails that the mind must have a spatio-temporal location.18 In short, there are basically two conflicting views: internalism and externalism. Both views may be articulated and expressed in various ways. However, each of them may be roughly summarized as follows.

According to internalism, the physical basis of mental activity is taken to be inside the nervous system (more commonly inside the thalamo-cortical system). The world, which is external to the body of the subject, has only a contingent and practical role in supporting the development of neural connections. Once such connections are up and running the external world is largely irrelevant to their output. It is of course important to have the proper development inside a suitable environment. Yet mental activity may be produced, at least theoretically, in complete isolation. To different degrees, many neuroscientists express a strong

17. manzOtti, Riccardo and PePPerell, Robert – “The New Mind: thinking beyond the head”. AI & Society. Knowledge, Culture and Communication 24 (2012), in press.

18. manzOtti, Riccardo – “The Spread Mind. Is Consciousness Situated?”. Teorema 30 (2011), pp. 55-78.


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support for internalism to the extent that “The mainstream empirical theories in cognitive neuroscience all seem to accept internalism, at least implicitly”.19 According to Anil Seth and colleagues, “Any scientific study of consciousness is based on the premise that phenomenal experience is entailed by neuronal activity in the brain”.20 Christof Koch unabashedly writes that “If there is one thing that scientists are reasonably sure of, it is that brain activity is both necessary and sufficient for biological sentience”21 and that “the entire brain is sufficient for consciousness – it determines conscious sensations day in and day out. […] likely a subset of brainmatter will do”.22 William R. Uttal summarizes these views saying that “The most basic principle of psychobiology or the cognitive neurosciences [is] that any human mental process is solely a reflection of or equivalent to some aspect of brain activity”.23 And so forth. It is fair to maintain that a huge proportion of neuroscientists endorse internalist models of consciousness.24 This tendency to ascribe cognitive properties solely to the brain is often called “internalism”, and is a corollary to the idea that the mind is located inside the body.

If internalism were true, aesthetic experience may be the result of some special properties instantiated by specific neural processes inside the brain. The value of artwork would consist mainly in their ability to trigger the right kind of neural response. This is a strong statement whose validity should be the target of close scrutiny. However, as mentioned above, so far neuroscience failed to provide a final theory of conscious experience and

19. revOnsuO, Antti – Consciousness. The Science of Subjectivity. Hove: Psychology Press, 2010, p. 222.

20. seth, Anil [et al.] – “Theories and measures of consciousness: An extended framework”. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006), pp. 10799-10804, here p. 10799.

21. kOCh, Christof – The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood (Col.): Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004, p. 9.

22. Ibid., p. 87.23. uttal, William R. – The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes

in the Brain. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press, 2001, here p. 206.24. CriCk, Francis and kOCh, Christof – “Consciousness and neuroscience”. Cerebral

Cortex 8 (1998), pp. 92-107; llinàs, Rodolfo – I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press, 2001; lamme, Victor A.F. – “Why visual attention and awareness are different”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003), pp. 12-19; zeki, Semir – “The Disunity of Consciousness”. Trend in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003), pp. 214-218; kOCh, Christof – The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood (Col.): Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004; dehaene, Stanilas [et al.] – “Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: A testable taxonomy”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (2006), pp. 204-11; lamme, Victor A. F. – “Towards a true neural stance on consciousness”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (2006), pp. 494-501; tOnOni, Giulio – “Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto”. Biological Bullettin 215 (2008), pp. 216-242.


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such a lack of both a convincing empirical evidence and sound theoretical framework has encouraged a growing number of scholars to explore alternative avenues, many of which eschew identity theory in favor of views that regard the mind as been the result of something more than neural activity.25

The idea that the mind may be indeed spread to more than neural processes has been labeled externalism. In brief, it suggests that the mind is physically embodied in processes external to the nervous system and possibly to the subject’s body.26 It is a view that was suggested over a decade ago by the eminent vision scientist Jan Koenderink: “To put it bluntly: since the mind isn’t in the head anyway, what use is it for me to peer into the brain? I believe that many people who use brain scanning methods to get a handle on problems of psychology erroneously locate the mind in the head…The mind is far from being the product of the brain. It derives from the interaction of the embodied brain and the world”.27 Of course, there are many different versions of it which we cannot even remotely address here.28

In this regard, recently, Erik Myin and Johan Veldeman applied the externalist stance to a selection of artistic cases in aesthetics.29 They claimed that aesthetic theories have been biased by internalist views of the subject. Moreover, the traditional discussion against the role of aesthetic experience, as exemplified by the contrast between Beardsley and Danto, gets a twist from an externalist perspective in so far as the traditional perceptual chain is substituted by an enacted loop between

25. PePPerell, Robert – The Posthuman Condition. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003; nOë, Alva and thOmPsOn, Evan – “Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?”. Journal of Consciousnesss Studies 11 (2004), pp. 3-28; rOCkwell, W. Teed – Neither Ghost nor Brain. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press, 2005. manzOtti, Riccardo – “A Process Oriented View of Conscious Perception”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006), pp. 7-41.

26. rOBBins, Philip and aydede, Murat (Eds) – The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

27. kOenderink, Jan J. – “Brain scanning and the single mind”. Perception 28 (1999), pp. 1181-1184, here p. 1181.

28. dretske, Fred – Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge (Mass): The MIT Press, 1995; rudd, Anthony – “Two Types of Externalism”. The Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997), pp. 501-507; hurley, Susan. L. – “Vehicles, Contents, Conceptual Structure, and Externalism”. Analysis 58 (1998), pp. 1-6; lyCan, William G. – “The Case for Phenomenal Externalism”. In: tOmBerlin, James E. (Ed.) – Philosophical Perspectives. Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing, 2001, pp. 17-36; rOwlands, Mark – Externalism. Putting Mind and World Back Together Again. Chesham: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2003.

29. myin, Erik and veldeman, Johan – “Externalism, Mind, and Art”. In: manzOtti, Riccardo (Ed.) – Situated Aesthetics. Art Beyond the Skin. Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2011, pp. 37-61.


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subject and work of art. On the same lines Robert Pepperell defended an extended view of aesthetic activity. He wrote as to how characterizing the relationship between art and the mind:

The assumption that objects, including art objects, are delimited by their apparent surface boundaries is, when looked at from another perspective, more nonsensical than commonsensical. For if objects were confined only to the extent of their local boundaries there would be no means of contacting them beyond those boundaries, and we could have no experience of them of the kind we habitually have […] in the same way that we cannot restrict the constitution of a painting to its local physical boundaries we cannot restrict the constitution of a person to their skin. If nothing of a person ever reached beyond this barrier we would know little about each other at all. I would suggest a particular person is comprised not only by their local physical frame but also their actions, behaviours, habits, expressions, and all the various effects they have on the environment around them.30

To recap, what suffices to say here is that a psychology of art does not need to be necessarily based on neural reductionism: The mind itself might be more than the brain. The internalism and externalism debates is far from being settled and its outcome are going to be of great relevance as to the understanding of the nature of aesthetic experience.31

unity in neuroscience and art

A tentative testbed for this recent convergence between psychology, neuroscience, aesthetics, and art is offered by the case of unity. Unity is one of the most ubiquitous aspects both of psychological activity and of aesthetic experience. In fact, although unity has often been the target of specialized enquiry in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience, there are theoretical arguments and actual situations that suggest a common ground for unity in all these fields.

Consider the very famous George Braque’s painting of a violin (1909). If one looks at it, the beauty of forms and colors pops immediately out. Patterns of different shapes float freely in a space composed of a smoothly descending gradient of tones of colors. Yet, one cannot but look for some kind of whole – a very well-known fact in perception. Perceptual processes

30. PePPerell, Robert – “Art and Extensionism”. In: manzOtti, Riccardo (Ed) – Situated Aesthetics. Art beyond the Skin. Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2011, pp. 107-122, here pp. 116-117.

31. manzOtti, Riccardo (Ed) – Situated Aesthetics. Art Beyond the Skin. Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2011.


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try to single out some higher-order structure. Indeed, after a while, one may distinguish the shape of a violin like a perceived whole. Braque’s painting presents, according to analytic cubism intentions, multiple views of the same object. The perception of object is likewise similar to an integration of different views.32 Once one has seen it, it is impossible to return to the original condition of ignorance, a consequence of the irreversibility of perception.

In some sense, the unity arises in the spectator and yet, if the perceptual process has to be naturalized, it must be the outcome of physical processes and thus it must correspond to some kind of natural unity. Perception does not help too much. On the canvas, there are only scattered patches of colors and, eventually, in the brain, there are only scattered neural activities. Then, what is a unity? Is it a fact that perceivers experience by means of their brains or is it the outcome of some ontological nexus between the world and the neural activity? In metaphysics and in neuroscience no scholar has so far provided a definite solution.33 In the recent literature, the problem of unity keeps surfacing in many different fields, always stirring puzzles and conundrums. In philosophy, it was known as the mereological or the bundle problem;34 in neuroscience it is known as the binding problem.35

32. yarBus, Alfred L. – Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Plenum Press, 1967; sheinBerg, D. L. and lOgOthetis, Nikos K. – “The role of temporal cortical areas in perceptual organization”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (1997), pp. 3408-3413; lOgOthetis, Nikos K. and sheinBerg, D. L. – “Visual Object Recognition”. Annual Review of Neuroscience 19 (1996), pp. 577-621; lOgOthetis, Nikos K. – “Single units and conscious vision”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 353 (1998), pp. 1801-1818; tanaka, Keiji – “Columns for complex visual object features in the inferotemporal cortex: Clustering of cells with similar but slighlty different stimulus selectivities”. Cerebral Cortex 13 (2003), pp. 90-99.

33. E.g. van inwagen, Peter – Material beings. New York: Cornell University Press, 1990; merriCks, Trenton – Objects and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001; Cleeremans, Axel – The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; gOff, Philip – “Experiences Don’t Sum”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006), pp. 53-61; velik, Rosemarie – “From single neuron-firing to consciousness – Towards the true solution of the binding problem”. Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 34 (2010), pp. 993-1001.

34. simOns, Peter M. – Parts. A Study in Ontology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; stuBenBerg, Leopold – Consciousness and Qualia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1998; varzi, Achille – “Mereological commitments”. Dialectica 54 (2000), pp. 293-305; merriCks, Trenton – Objects and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001; gOff, Philip – “Experiences Don’t Sum”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006), pp. 53-61.

35. singer, Wolf – “Synchronization of cortical activity and its putative role in infor-mation processing and learning”. Annual Review of Physiology 55 (1993), pp. 349-374;


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Thus unity seems to play a fundamental role in perception, consciousness, and cognition. In any conscious experience (as in perception) anything experienced constitutes a unity per frame of time. When a subject looks at something, a unity emerges. In turn, any unity can be constituted by other unities. The subject looks at a landscape as a whole, but equally one can look at unities within the landscape as a tree, a mountain, a group of hills, a cluster of clouds, a pedestrian walking along a path. Each of these parts might be perceived as a further whole. The existence of unity is an original fact of consciousness: the phenomenal world seems to be composed of wholes that possess intrinsic unity.

Likewise the sense of unity (whether real or just imagined) seems to play a key role in most artworks: “An aesthetic object is often said to form a well-integrated whole, its parts unified and interconnected in an especially deft, compact way. The unistic aspect of the aesthetic is probably the single most common explanation for aesthetic excellence”.36 In fact, since the time of Plato, it has been noted that even small changes in a work of art can destroy its aesthetic effect. Its status as a coherent entity or object could, however, remain unchanged. This reason has led theorists to treat aesthetic artifacts as somehow having more wholeness or unity than ordinary objects.

One may therefore ask whether there are degrees of unity or whether the same process which normally ties individual parts into a single object also operates, more intensely, in aesthetic objects. The answer is that the parts of a successful work of art are highly integrated and fit especially well with one another.

Once Georges Braque explained that “when fragmented objects appeared in my painting around 1909, it was a way for me to get as close as possible to the object as painting allowed. […] this was a means of getting as close to the objects as painting allowed. Fragmentation allowed me to establish a spatial element as well as a spatial movement and until this had been achieved I was not able to introduce objects into my pictures”.37

CriCk, Francis – The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Touchstone, 1994; nelsOn, J. I. – “Binding in the Visual System”. In: arBiB, Michael A. (Ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1995, pp. 157-159; revOnsuO, Antti – “Binding and the phenomenal unity of consciousness”. Consciousness and Cognition 8 (1999), pp. 173-85.

36. mangan, Bruce – Meaning and the Structure of Consciousness: An Essay in Psycho-Aesthetics. Berkeley: Department of Philosophy, University of California, 1991, p. 19.

37. Quoted in riChardsOn, John – A Life of Picasso. 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life. London: PIMLICO, 1996.


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Why is this representation “closer to the object”? It is altogether clear that here Braque is talking of representation in art but his consideration would hold for conscious perception as well. How does the mind represent the world? And how do our mental images get so close to the external world?

A possible answer to Braque’s question is that the unity is in the process, neither the object nor the beholder. The classic object (the normally perceived three-dimensional violin) springs out of the relationship between a collection of separate physical events and the cognitive system of the brain which abstracts a particular form out of endless possibilities in “a world of speculation”. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso exploited and made visible the process between the beholder and the object. They tried rather explicitly, though with different approaches, to show this process through their paintings. A shared characteristic of their works is the breaking of the classic object into its components.

Unlike the Impressionists, Braque and Picasso tried to deconstruct the real object, not merely its phenomenal representation. They wanted to represent the object as it really is, independent of observers. Jacques Riviere observed that “The true purpose of painting is to represent objects as they really are; that is to say, differently from the way we see them”.38

Rather often, in Ancient art, the object was not represented through any subjective point of view. The object was absolute and autonomous. There was no linear perspective. For instance, Egyptians represented objects using a canonical projection, and even attempted to eliminate projection altogether, since, as Ernst Gombrich wrote.39

Vision is only allowed a very subsidiary part: things are rendered as they appear to the sense of touch, the more “objective” sense which reports on the permanent shape of things irrespective of the shifting viewpoint. – Here, too, is the reason why Egyptians shunned the rendering of the third dimension, because recession and foreshortening would have introduced a subjective element.

There is an interesting debate between Gibson and Gombrich about the birth of perspective. According to Gibson, perspectival representation was a result of drawing and painting and not a natural mode of visual perception: “I am suggesting that men had not paid attention to the

38. rivière, Jacques – “Present tendencies in painting”. Revue d’Europe et d’Amérique. March 1912, pp. 384, 406.

39. gOmBriCh, Ernst H. – Art and Illusion. A Study in Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 17.


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perspectives of things until they learned to draw and to perceive by means of drawings”.40 Gombrich never agreed. He always maintained that the reverse was true, and that perspectival representation was indeed a natural mode of perception.

The attempted deconstruction of our normal perception of reality can be analyzed in different ways. On one hand, we deconstruct the classic object into an arrangement of details in front of us at a given time in a given place. This is the strategy chosen by Braque. Everything in his paintings belongs to a precise moment in time and a precise location in space. Each detail is intentional. The emphasis of the whole painting is on the deconstruction of the perceptual abstraction, which creates a barrier between the subject and reality as it would be without the subject itself. On the other hand, each detail is the bearer of a given phenomenal experience and, as such, is the bearer of an eternal shape or form. What characterized a precise temporal and spatial situation was not in the details, but in the way they were arranged.41

Thus the cubist breaks up the canvas’s unity in such a way as to allow the spectator’s own ‘creative intuition’. The unity implicit – but in no way obvious – in the work of art now resides in the mind of the beholder. […] Thus interplays of volumetric forms have been abstracted from the subject matter and distributed throughout the canvas. These complex forms serve not to define the underlying imagery but to suggest it, thus allowing the beholder’s own creative intuition to be brought into play to establish unity.

The notion of ‘creative intuition’ is not an isolated example in the history of art. As we will see, it is the emergence of unities in the causal structure of perception. Whenever we perceive a unity the brain has performed an act of creative intuition. The same concept is expressed by Allard.42

The analytical relationships of the objects and the details of their subordination are henceforward of little importance, since they are left out of the picture as painted. They appear late, subjectively, in the picture as thought by each individual who sees it.

40. giBsOn, James J. – The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966, p. 236.

41. antliff, Mark and leighten, Patricia – Cubism and Culture. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001, pp. 86-87.

42. allard, Roger – “Au Salon d’Automne de Paris”. L’Art libre II (1910), pp. 441-443.


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The process of unity formation is thus shifted to the subjective process of perception. In this respect, two different concepts of unity are associated with the movements of Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. We are carried back to the difference between memory and dreams. In the former, the scrutiny of the external world highlights the existence of multiple views and features of objects. The unity of the external world is shattered in several different parts. It has been questioned whether Analytical Cubism succeeded in its main goal of representing the world as it is, independent of the subject.

Once the unity in the outside world has been shattered, and the underlying process between subject and object revealed, new unities can be freely created. These unities transcend time and space by means of memory and imagination – a process similar to dreams. A beautiful example is given by Juan Gris’s Landscape at Ceret (1913), an artwork that “transcends the limits of human vision as the artist includes subjects at a great geographical remove from each other within a single painting, conjoined in memory and associative meaning”.43

Nucleus and fringe from psychology to neuroscience

If unity is a common problem for art and for any theory of the mind, some help in its understanding may be provided by a famous distinction put forward since the ancient Greeks Plato. In particular, the dual structure between clear and distinct contents/vague and peripheral experiences or feeling44 dates back to Anaximandros, is mentioned by Plato and Plotinus, is accepted by Leibniz and Kant, is significant for Baumgarten, and reverberates in the thought of Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The step from a vague and peripheral experience is perhaps akin to the emergence of a unity out of a scattered set of items.

However, in the Principles of psychology, William James provides the most comprehensive and portentous account.45 In the chapter on the “stream of thought”, the American psychologist claims that consciousness is dynamic: it shifts constantly from idea to idea, from thought to thought.

43. antliff, Mark and leighten, Patricia – Cubism and Culture. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 80.

44. mangan, Bruce – Meaning and the Structure of Consciousness: An Essay in Psycho-Aesthetics. Berkeley: Department of Philosophy, University of California, 1991.

45. James, William – The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1890.


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Each idea is a kind of unity as well as each thought is also a unity. In other works, James explicitly referred to these moments of experience as if they were natural unities: “Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception”46 and “The unity into which the present mental state – binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the thought is there”.47 These “buds or drops” either of perception or of thought are thus unities.

James also states that its structure is complex: every explicit thought is related to a fringe or shade of content which is intuited. The fringe performs an important role in controlling the orderly progress of consciousness from one substantive thought to another – from one complete unity to the next. This process is expressed by the well-known metaphor:

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. Let us call the resting-places the ‘substantive parts’, and the places of flight the ‘transitive parts’, of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another.48

James also calls the substantive parts nucleus, as synonymous for the focus of attention. Mangan has highlighted the implications of this intuition with regards to psychology and aesthetics.49 Later on, Mangan

46. James, William – Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1911, p. 78.

47. James, William – The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1890, p. 223. 48. Ibid., p. 243.49. mangan, Bruce – Meaning and the Structure of Consciousness: An Essay in Psycho-

Aesthetics. Berkeley: Department of Philosophy, University of California, 1991.


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developed the idea of the “non-sensory fringe”.50 Many other scholars continued along similar lines.51

The main feature of the nucleus is stability (kinds of sensorial images, which are special in so far that they can be “held before the mind for an indefinite time” and “be contemplated without changing”) and unity. The kaleidoscope is the other figure of speech used to illustrate a constantly shifting stream of thought and its most important components: essentially stable substantive thoughts.52

There is another often quoted distinctive element, which is multimodality: the nucleus includes a wide range of representational means: “a word, a sentence, a particular picture, a practical attitude or a decision” can be the conclusion of a stream of thought. In any case, James admits that substantive thought includes a large quantity of images.

These two notions, nucleus and fringe, and their relevant features, unity and multimodality, closely resembles Tononi’s model of conscious experience. He writes that “This claim is motivated by two key phenomenological properties of consciousness: differentiation – the availability of a very large number of conscious experiences; and integration – the unity of each such experience”.53 Once again, consciousness – and thus experience in general – seems to be able to steer a perilous route between the contrasting pole of multiplicity and unity. According to Tononi, our experience is characterized by the process of singling out a unity, which he refers to as a “complex”, out of multiplicity of potential states.

50. mangan, Bruce – “Some philosophical and empirical implications of the fringe”. Consciousness and Cognition 2 (1993a), pp. 142-154; mangan, Bruce – “Taking phenome-nology seriously: The ‘fringe’ and its implications for cognitive research”. Consciousness and Cognition 2 (1993), pp. 89-108; mangan, Bruce – “Empirical Status of Block’s Phenomenal/Access Distinction”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997), pp. 153-154; mangan, Bruce – “Representation, Rightness and the Fringe”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (2008), pp. 75-82.

51. velmans, Max – “A View of Consciousness from the Fringe”. Consciousness and Cognition 2 (1993), pp. 137-141; Chafe, Wallace L. – Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; galin, David – “The structure of awareness: Contemporary applica-tions of William James’ forgotten concept of ‘the fringe’”. Journal of Mind and Behavior 15 (1994), pp. 375-402; Chafe, Wallace L. – “A Linguist’s Perspective on William James and ‘the Stream of Thought’”. Consciousness and Cognition 9 (2000), pp. 618-628; ePstein, Russell – “The Neural-Cognitive Basis of the Jamesian Stream of Thought”. Consciousness and Cognition 9 (2000), pp. 550-575; galin, David – “Aesthetic experience: Marcel Proust and the neo-Jamesian structure of awareness”. Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004), pp. 241-53.

52. James, William – The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1890, p. 246.53. tOnOni, Giulio – “An information integration theory of consciousness”. In: BMC

Neuroscience 5 (2004), pp. 1-22, here p. 1.


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There is a close similarity between James’s notion of nucleus and Tononi’s notion of integration. They both resolve the issue of constituting the thought as a series of discrete buds of experience. Contrast the following Tononi’s description of the experience structure with the above mentioned Braque’ approach to unity: “The integration of information in conscious experience is evident phenomenologically: when you consciously “see” a certain image, that image is experienced as an integrated whole and cannot be subdivided into component images that are experienced independently. For example, no matter how hard you try, for example, you cannot experience colors independent of shapes, or the left half of the visual field of view independently of the right half”.54 May be just a coincidence that unity plays such a prominent role both in the structure of perception and in the structure of an artwork?

Mind, unity, meaningfulness, and aesthetic experience

We have said that art is closely related with feelings and inferences and the reality of art is revealed through experience. However, although that experience is not inferential, it is described in mental terms. Consequently it can be linked to cognitive processes and, in particular, according to Mangan to meaningfulness, i.e. the positive part of the fundamental cognitive bipolarity.55 The constitution of a unity is related with the constitution of a meaningful whole. Significantly, in language, words communicate the “direct feeling of positive assessment in consciousness”.56 They also are unities that expresses one possibility among many. Once again unity is contrasted with multiplicity either potential or actual. The same condition holds for sentences. So, one might theorize that meaningfulness, unity, and aesthetic experience are closely connected: the aesthetic “data” would become a (positive) assessment. This would also allow the two diverging positions concerning “spontaneism” and the need for “conceptual reflection” to be reconciled.

As seen in the analysis of the fringe, meaningfulness monitors, synthesizes and directs the flow of information within our consciousness. Its main task is to signal the consistency or compatibility between the data contained in our space of awareness (which is very small compared to the

54. Ibid., p. 3.55. mangan, Bruce – Meaning and the Structure of Consciousness: An Essay in Psycho-

Aesthetics. Berkeley: Department of Philosophy, University of California, 1991, p. 81.56. Ibid.


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overall information available to us) and its appropriate non conscious context; this enables us to progress from one substantive though to another. Variations in the level of meaningfulness indicate the degree of significance: the closer the “adjustment” (in an evolutionary sense) between conscious and non conscious information, the stronger the feeling of meaningfulness. Maximizing meaningfulness means increasing integration. Problem solving can be explained in these terms: given that the context is able to recognize the solution, said process is a special case of the above-mentioned adjustment.

Meaningfulness performs a fundamental biological function: it assesses all new accessible information. Although it is a pervasive, ongoing feeling, it appears on the stage of consciousness very infrequently; this occurs only when its intensity is high (and, most probably, other secondary condition must also occur): in moments defined by ‘aha’ and ‘Eureka’ and intuition, not necessarily linked to intellectual pinnacles. Conceivably this feeling – when explicit – occurred by liking up to a gratification (a natural “booster”), a feeling of well-being, literally the feeling of going in the right direction. The ‘aha’ feeling is also the expression of a new unity popping out from the flow of our indistinct fringe-like flow of experience.

This state is very similar to an aesthetic experience which, consequently, could be the product of the problem solving function of consciousness. It may thus be concluded that “The capacity for aesthetic ecstasy appears to be the accidental outcome of a cognitive process developed for purely practical or biological purposes”.57

The goal of this paragraph is thus clear. We want to emphasize how the process that brings unity into existence is at the root both of consciousness and of aesthetic experience. If this identity were consistent, the neuroscientific data as to how the brain integrates experience into a unity may lead to an advance to our understanding of art as well.

Given the above premises, it should not come as a surprise that other authors highlighted the relation between art, experience and unity. A notable example is offered by Semir Zeki’s work on art as ideal formation. Starting from the basic notion that “one of the primordial functions of the brain is to obtain knowledge about the world”,58 he links together perception and abstraction “since abstraction is the necessary pre-requisite of any efficient knowledge-acquiring system, it follows that there are many abstractive systems […]. In a system such as the cerebral

57. Ibid., p. 15.58. zeki, Semir – ”Neural Concept Formation & Art”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9

(2002), pp. 53-76, here p. 54.


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cortex, where there are multiple specializations, one can conjecture that each one of the specialized systems or subsystems is capable of constructing, or at least contributing substantially to the construction of concepts and ideals, the final step in the process of abstraction”.59 Thus “abstraction leads to an Idea or concept, but our experience remains that of the particular, and the particular that we experience may not always satisfy the Idea formed in and by our brains. One way of obtaining that satisfaction is to ‘download’ the Idea formed in the brain, into a work of art”.60 To recap, according to Zeki, whenever one perceives something, the brain tries to form some structure that summarizes the relevant features of that particular stimulus and, hopefully, of many others. This process has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it allows the unification of many particulars into a unified structure (the ideal). On the other hand, any actual stimulus would never satisfy totally the complete requirement of such a unified structure. Art might be the attempt to realize objects that satisfy to a great extent the abstractions in the brain. In other words, art would be a process to embed higher unities than those usually obtained in everyday perception. Once again, there seems to be a strong dependence between the notion of art and that of unity. And yet, unity entails disunity and multiplicity as well as ambiguity and vagueness.

Getting back to James’ model, we may wonder whether the notion of fringe may express the state of things out of which unities and abstraction pop out. If the ‘aha’ feeling corresponds to the birth of a unity, a kind of “I don’t know what” expresses the condition of lingering on the verge of fringe. Such a mysterious ghost emotion would be nothing more than the unusually intensified fringe. Non conscious experiences prevail although they continue to preserve their phenomenological vagueness and are unable to enter into the nucleus. In the case in point the fleetingness derives from the fact that the fringe signals the presence of a huge quantity of information which is unable to access consciousness due to size limitations. Thus the possibility of an imminent and not yet achieved unity is the content of the experience. When looking at an artwork, we perceive the array of meaning, the flowing consistency but we are unable to grasp it fully like we may do with a common particular. Meaningfulness suggests something that stays on the border of awareness and leaves us with a feeling of an indescribable and mysterious presence.

59. Ibid., p. 58. 60. Ibid.


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In turn, the idea of an artwork as “fully integrated” comes from the degree of meaningfulness which we feel. When facing the opus, our limited consciousness shifts from one individual element to the next without being able to experiment them as a whole or assess their consistency. It is a typical example of the non-conscious process which takes place in the fringe.

So the process of unification may lead from the particular to the abstract, from the multiplicity to the unity, but also from the meaningless to the meaningful. Meaningfulness communicates the level of adjustment between conscious content (one single aspect of the artwork) and the contents which cannot be accessed by awareness (all or many other elements); this means that meaningfulness exactly corresponds to the consistency and meaning of creation and becomes the most important datum of the aesthetic experience. An artifact “works” – it is “successful” if its component parts integrate in line with the way our perceptive cognitive processes function.

In an aesthetic context, if resorting to the fringe seems to favor the automatic processing aspects, one must not forget that when we concentrate on understanding and assessing consciousness we implicitly refer to the degree of consistency between the two functional parts of thought. The structure and function of the fringe, as seen up to now, are decisive for the occurrence of the experience. This does not imply that the fringe is essential to art but only that is contingently useful to it. Finally, the analogy of meaningfulness with the linking networks makes it possible to consider them as an abstract model of the artwork in so far that they are holistic objects. Changes in one part branch out to impact the entire structure and change the level of the overall integration on account of the high degree of complexity and integration of the state of dynamic balance. Equally, even as small alteration in a work of art causes the global aesthetical impact to decrease.

Similar arguments and considerations have been put forward from different perspectives. For instance, Mangan emphasizes the noetic knowledge that arises out integration: “[aesthetics] is a state of consciousness (the noetic aspect) induced by highly integrated elements (the holistic aspect) which cannot be fully explained (the fleeting aspect) but which implies something very deep about existence (the transcendental aspect)”.61 James stressed the role of the dynamics between fringe and

61. mangan, Bruce – Meaning and the Structure of Consciousness: An Essay in Psycho-Aesthetics. Berkeley: Department of Philosophy, University of California, 1991, p. 24.


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nucleus in fleshing out the stream of meaningful thoughts. Zeki suggested that the process of integration from many particulars is going to lead to a kind of knowledge embodied in those unities he refers to as either abstracts or ideals. Tononi focused on the integration that brings together scattered information into a unified percept. All of them stress the fact that this process is a “natural” experience. This is the very aspect which must be considered in order to understand art. We are very much aware that Braque, James, Mangan, Zeki, Tononi, and other scholars outlined very different views. However, we tried to focus on their commonalities that show that they are indeed onto something important and deeply rooted in aesthetic experience and perception.

Finally, there is one last issue that must be considered. We showed how so many authors stressed the role of unity in art. Yet, we mentioned at the beginning that the notion of aesthetic experience encourages many to look for its neural underpinnings. This is an unnecessary and perhaps too hastened step. As argued at length in the first three paragraphs, we don’t know yet whether the mind is physically located inside the nervous system. Likewise, it may be that many of the unifying processes – we’ve just described – take place in a larger domain than that offered by the brain. In this respect, art is once more of great value since it offers the opportunity to wonder whether it is spread in the environment. In fact, if unity is a product of the interaction between the brain and the environment, Aesthetic experience and art would be extended as to comprehend not just the brain, but also the body, the artwork individual history, the used materials, the relevant institutions, the social environment, and all those aspects that are commonly considered constitutive of an artwork. We stress the rather obvious fact that the brain is part of a larger process which organizes reality in an ever increasing order of perceptual unities. When art is concerned, such unities may extend considerably. Yet the brain plays a crucial role. The spectator’s brain makes the artwork become part of a larger causal network. The artwork is among the causes of perception, but the brain structures perception single that artwork out of the continuum. There is a mutual process of creation.

To recap, we suggest that unity is a fundamental and elementary aspect of aesthetic experience and art, as it has been suggested in many cases (nucleus and fringe, abstract concept formation, perception, conscious experience, information integration, meaningfulness, and so forth). However, this does not entail that art has necessarily to be confined to the brain nor that aesthetics must be reduced to neuroesthetics. Rather it shows a kind of intimate nexus arising out of a delicate network of relation. Art is a delicate phenomenon made by a web of diffuse links


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between heterogeneous elements. The understanding of the relevant cognitive processes allows comprehending how such an extended network may get integrated.

The artist assembles past or present experiences in the brain and selects them in order to achieve a new unit that is then communicated and shared with other subjects. In other words, art is one of the highest forms of communication, in which the artist, if successful, is capable of: i) experiencing (an effective creation through the brain) a new unity; ii) shaping an object or a series of events (literature, music, visual art, video, theatrical performance) which is used to elicit the same kind of unity in other observers (at worst, the author for a single moment).

The idea of a unity between the spectator and the artwork has attracted many artists. The brain, by means of subsequent processes of abstraction, creates a hierarchy of an almost infinite number of layers and results. The brain is the part of a process in which the work of art is the beginning. The process cannot be divided in subject and object since it is a natural unity which is used to develop a theory for the process of perception in a human subject. When we see Braque’s violin, it is a piece of us. It emerges out of the physical continuum. Yet it is unlikely to be just a neural pattern. More likely it is a whole mesh of causal interaction. The fringe is akin to the notion of the undifferentiated continuum out of which new meaningful wholes are single out. And the value of their form is related both to the portion of reality that they objectively and physical flesh out and to the relation with the subject responsible for such an integration. In sum, it may be that the understanding of the physical underpinnings of mental processes required for aesthetic perception would not necessarily lead to the inside of the spectator. Art may be intrinsically constituted by the physical world. In the end, the study of the mind may find that art is extended to its original domain (the artwork, the art world, the artists, the spectators, the materials, the institutions) and yet that such a network is a natural whole whose unity derives from the processes occurring in the brain. The interplay between psychology, neuroscience, phenomenology, and art may result in a deep change of all the involved actors.

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