Implicit Assumptions in Weed’s Reflections on the Implicit Assumptions of Neuroaesthetics

In the stimulating article ‘Looking for Beauty in the Brain’ (Estetika XLV, 2008, No. 1, pp. 5–23), Ethan Weed considers contemporary approaches and methods in the neurosciences, which examine aesthetic experience. As the subject of his examination he selected three different perspectives on aesthetic experience, or three methods of searching for a correlation of states of the brain and aesthetic experience. He explicitly states that he will simultaneously engage with the implicit or hidden assumptions of these approaches, which he does in a scholarly manner. First of all it is necessary to assess the persuasive substantiation of the limits of the neuroaesthetic approach and the rationalization of frequently excessive expectations in connection with these studies, which evidently also cover the fulfilment of the dream of experimental aesthetics since the end of the nineteenth century – the anchoring of a humanities discipline in ‘hard science’. The only embryonic cluster of cognitive neurosciences, neurophilosophy, and further disciplines, which we may, together with the author, term neuroaesthetics, is distinguished by its emphatic focus on the ‘neuro-’ and by the limited amount of attention it pays to aesthetics, traditional or contemporary. This emphasis is partially employed also by Weed himself, and the result is a range of implicit and frequently contentious assumptions relating to the second half of the combined term ‘-aesthetics’. I shall now consider in detail the most serious of these. The author refers to Martin Skov, asserting: ‘[A]n aesthetic experience cannot be explained by a description of the aesthetic object alone. The aesthetic experience of an object involves an interaction between the object and a human mind’ (p. 5). This is certainly not a new observation in the history of aesthetics, and it suffices to mention Kant, Czech and French structuralism, Stephen C. Pepper, phenomenological aesthetics (Roman Ingarden, Nicolai Hartmann, and Moritz Geiger) or semiotics for example. Strictly speaking (Weed does not take this step), the aesthetic object is then a construct of the mind, the result of the aforementioned interaction, and the object, which enters into this interaction at the outset, is thus not an aesthetic object but a mere component thereof, a point of departure, a sign-carrier or basis. By the same token any perceptional object is also the result of interaction, and if we are to speak of a description of the object, then we should have in mind what we are actually