ART AND Moon: PRELIMINARY NOTES AND CONJECTURES I. ART AND AFFECT In recent years, the philosophy of art has profited enormously by applying to the study of art insights derived from the philosophies of mind and language, naturalized epistemology, psychology, evolutionary theory, and cognitive science. A case in point: the discussion of the nature of picturing and pictorial perception has obviously benefited from the influence of perceptual psychology and cognitive studies. Likewise, the theorization of art in relation to the emotions has also exploited contem- porary advances in adjacent areas of inquiry.! Of course, that art has something to do with feeling is a common- place, not only among plain viewers, readers, and listeners, but also among theorists, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle, iterated maybe most vociferously by proponents of Romanticism, and argued, as well, by Tolstoy, Collingwood, and Langer. Outside the Western tradition, the rasa system of Hindu aesthetics echoes the conviction that art and feeling are intimately joined. Thus, the relation between art and the emotions has been an article of faith for a long time, not merely in the minds of common folk, but in addition, for theorists. Yet, although the nexus between art and the emotions has been observed almost perennially, it has not always been well understood. The proposals of previous philosophers, though suggestive, were also often obscure. Collingwood proposes that art clarifies emotions, but precisely what he means by an emotion as well as how he thinks someone would go about clarifying one is unclear. Perhaps a reason for the limitations found in earlier theorists of the connection between art and the emotions is that the concepts of the emotions at their disposal were often not as refined as they might have been. The vagueness in their theories of art, in other words, mirrored the vagueness in their theories of the emotions. But, then, “Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures” by Noél Carroll, The Monist, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 521-555. Copyright © 2003, THE MONIST, Peru, Illinois 61354.522 NOEL CARROLL as philosophers of mind over the last three decades have begun to evolve more explicit and precise theories of the emotions, philosophers of art have followed suit, employing emerging theories of the emotions in order to study art and its emotive address with greater subtlety and detail. For example, the cognitive theory of the emotions, including both stronger and weaker versions, provided philosophers of art with ways of seeing what is at stake in such longstanding issues as the paradoxes of fiction and tragedy as well as the question of the emotive address, if any, of music. Cognitive theories, and variations thereon, in fact not only afforded philosophers with more fine-grained ways of posing recurring quandaries, but also with suggestions about how to go about resolving them. For instance, if it can be shown that the paradox of fiction arises because of the strong cognitivist commitment to belief as the cognitive component of an emotional state, the weaker cognitive theories of emotion— that maintain that the cognitive component of an emotional state may be less than a belief (a thought imagined rather than asserted, a construal, or a pattem of attention)—suggest ways of dispelling the conundrum. Moreover, by analyzing occurrent emotional states into their components—cognitive, conative, somatic, and behavioral—contemporary research in the emotions has given philosophers of art the wherewithal to isolate the variables artists manipulate in order to elicit emotion and, relatedly, to convey expression. The notion, for example, that the emotional state of comic amusement requires cognizing an object in accordance with at least the criterion of nonthreat- ening incongruity provides the art theorist with a way of beginning to zero-in on the functionally significant elements in jokes. But though cognitive theories of emotion, and variations thereof, have much to offer the philosopher of art, they also come with certain shortcom- ings. Not surprisingly, these limitations have to do with blindspots in the relevant theories of the emotion. Cognitive theories of emotion were originally advanced as perfectly general accounts of everything we are wont to call emotions in everyday language. Thus all emotions were said to possess cognitive states directed at objects subsumable under general criteria (as the object of an occurrent episode of fear meets the necessary condition of harmfulness); which cog- nitive processing, in turn, ensues in bodily or somatic changes (strictly physi- ological ones, like accelerated heart beats and/or more phenomenological ones, such as sensations of chilling).ART AND MOOD 523 However, not everything that has a claim to being called an emotional state in ordinary speech meets those requirements. Some of what people count as emotions are affective reflex responses, such as being startled by a loud noise or a fast movement. Yet these appear to proceed without an interlude of cognition. They bypass higher regions of the brain and go straight to the amygdala. On the other hand, some other states, which people also call emotional ones, seem to lack a particular object toward which they are directed. Free-floating anxiety is a frequent counterexam- ple in this regard to cognitive theories of the emotions. It can stand for an entire class of affective mental states, namely, moods, which are arguably beyond the purview of cognitive theories. Moreover, these gaps in the comprehensiveness of cognitive theories of the emotions have ramifications for the philosophies of art that are modeled upon them. For there are crucial affective responses to artworks that—inasmuch as they are more akin to affective-reflex responses and moods than they are to the emotions as characterized by even weak cognitive theories—will go theoretically unnoticed, underappreciated, and/or misunderstood by the aesthetician equipped with some or another framework tailored to the sorts of mental episodes that inspired cognitive theories of the emotions. For instance, the arts of spectacle, including theater, film, circus, and fireworks, traffic in startle effects; while there is a great deal of music which may unapologetically be called mood music—music which evokes affective states like elation, but not elation about anything in particular. So long as the philosopher of art treats the entire gamut of the affective dimension of art in light of a map borrowed from cognitive theorists of the emotions, these regions of the heart will go aesthetically uncharted. Thus, it is time for philosophers of art to look beyond cognitive theories of the emotions in order to broaden their appre- ciation of the affective life of art. By this juncture, it appears fair to conjecture that the cognitive theory of emotion is not a comprehensive account of all the affects people call emotions. The upshot of this, however, should not be the wholesale abandonment of the cognitive theory of emotion. For there are some affective states it characterizes ex- ceedingly well, both in terms of naturally-occurring affective states and those induced by artworks. So perhaps the moral should be: use the cognitive theory of emotions where it well suits the data, whether found in life or art, and develop other models for affective phenomena, such as