Eating as a Model for Enactive Aesthetics

Enactivism is an approach to cognitive science that diverges from the traditional view that mind and cognition occur only in the head. According to the traditional view (sometimes dubbed classical cognitivism), our task is to retrieve and represent inputs from the world, and the brain performs processes over them to result in an output—much like a computer. However, the enactivist contends that cognition is distributed amongst a brain, body, and environment system: meaning emerges through our embodied interactions with the world. Think, for example, of a sponge: it is not spongey “out there,” nor do we “give it” sponginess; rather, its sponginess arises through our squeezing of it and its recoiling, thus relying on not just the brain, but the body (hands and fingers squeezing) and environment (the sponge itself and its response) (Di Paolo et al. 2017). This process of interacting with the world to generate meaning is called sense-making (see Varela et al. 2016; Gallagher 2017; De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007).Recently, enactivist thought has seeped into aesthetics, with headway in embodied aesthetics set by Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics research program. For example, Shaun Gallagher (2021) and Jonathan Cole and Barbara Montero (2007) have argued that affective responses of and through the body play a dominant role in our experiences in the performing arts, and Joel Krueger (2009) that musical listening is a form of doing. Here, the body and how it interacts with the world are at the forefront of aesthetic experience. In the case of the performing arts, that is to be expected. One might, however, contend that “embodied interaction” doesn’t quite line up with our engagement with art forms like painting, sculpture, or film. Rather, our engagements with these appear to align more with the classical model of cognition and, indeed, are usually described as passive, disinterested engagements: we stand silent and still in front of the painting and retrieve whatever meaning it has by processing the visual input in our brains. In turn, it doesn’t look like aesthetic value, which is typically thought to be co-extensive with the aesthetic experience, can be couched in the interactive terms of sense-making above, that is, in a similar way to sponginess. How could Mona Lisa’s beauty arise from my interaction with it? As I will now show, I think eating and our aesthetic engagement with food can provide invaluable insights into these two issues, serving as a springboard to further, crucial developments in enactivist thought about aesthetic experience and aesthetic value.1To see what I mean, consider that you are eating a carbonara. The pasta is cooked perfectly: firm as you take your first bite, while the creamy sauce gradually spreads over your tongue. Shifting the food around your mouth, the guanciale disperses a salty taste that subtly blends in, until you bite down upon it and the smoky-salty flavor dominates. You then savor the taste, pausing to let the combination rest. Struggling to resist the temptation to continue, you chew the remainder of the bite. The sensations are felt as rich, fresh, and deep all at once. From this, it is clear to see that eating is, as recent work in food aesthetics has recognized (Shusterman 2016; Plakias 2016), a thoroughly processual and interactive affair between agent and world, and it is a process that brings about aesthetic qualities. Also, the flavors and sensations one experiences depend upon and arise through your body’s (teeth, nose, tongue, etc.) interaction with the food. Crucially, that is your body interacting with this food. As we are aware, pleasure and disgust at foods varies, and empirical work indicates this is because of how the properties of our body interact with the properties of the food. A good example is coriander, which may be disgusting to those who are “overly sensitive to several aldehydes” but pleasant to those without such sensitivity (Schifferstein et al. 2022: 309–311).What insights can this provide regarding aesthetic experience and aesthetic value? Let’s start with aesthetic value. Discourse about aesthetic value famously struggles with the tension between the subjective and objective. It appears to be dependent on our experience and is in that sense subjective, but we engage in disputes and think that the value really is “out there,” and as such appears objective (see Simoniti 2017 for a good explanation of, and attempt at resolving, this antinomy in terms of aesthetic properties). Indeed, we observe that there are great variations in our aesthetic taste, but, perplexingly, we also tend to agree on which artworks are good or bad. What the eating example shows, however, at both an intuitive level and as corroborated by empirical work, is that aesthetic qualities might be best explained as arising in virtue of how properties of individual agents meet and interact with properties of the environment—something “in between” subjectivism and objectivism.Recently, Thomas Fuchs has proposed precisely that: a relational approach to value. Values, he argues, are forms of affective significance that arise at the point of interaction itself (Fuchs 2020: 23). Consider: sugar has significance for a bacterium at the point of interaction. It is positive if the bacterium needs energy, neutral if not. Another bacterium may need energy in the way the previous did not, and thus the value of the sugar is significant for one, but not the other. This is explained by value being relational. Might aesthetic value be of this same nature? The eating process seems a clear-cut case of this: what kind of aesthetic qualities arise depends upon how my properties—such as “the density of fungiform papillae on [my] tongue” (Schifferstein et al. 2022: 304)—interact with the properties of the food. And, I think, we can also extend this to other artforms when considering a wider variety of properties that constitute us and the environment (or, artwork).Indeed, many enactivists and aestheticians (and enactivist aestheticians), and some cognitive scientists more widely, posit an intimate relation between the self, who we are as humans, and aesthetic experience (Sibley 2001; Riggle 2016; Gallese 2019; Vara Sánchez 2022a, 2022b). The self is constituted by many different properties, including and beyond the density of fungiform papillae on the tongue. At the basic level, we have embodied, biological, and evolutionary properties that might be relatively consistent amongst individuals; at more complex intersubjective and narrative levels, things might diverge—we have different life narratives, are involved in different social worlds, and so on. So, while aesthetically valuable properties like “violent or energetic or menacing,” or else like warmth and balance, may be consistent amongst agents in their interactions with artworks as these reach “deep into human life and interests” (Sibley 2001: 31) (e.g., warmth and violence are part of biological and evolutionary interest), variations in life stories, sociocultural narratives, and so on, may be the source of variations in our aesthetic valuing. Where one sees beauty in a romantic tale, another may not, simply in virtue of different narratives—different properties of agents meeting the properties of the world, thus giving rise to different affective significances in interaction, different aesthetic values. To be sure, such relationality does not mean those values are not real: the properties of the environment are there, and so are you and your properties. So too, then, is what is made of and by that interaction.What about aesthetic experience? Well, it looks like eating now joins work, seen earlier, regarding the performing arts demonstrating the interactive nature of aesthetic cognition. Resultantly, a passive spectator model of aesthetic experiences of, for example, painting would be an outlier. By itself, that isn’t a robust argument—it could, after all, just be an outlier. However, I think it gives us at least motivation to consider how different aesthetic experiences might be interactive, generously supported by the body, and, especially, more interactive and embodied than we currently view them. This is not to say that we should go ahead and bite, shake, and rotate the next painting we see. Rather, it is a call to recognize how factors such as moving around a painting, or where one views it (exhibition, gallery, laboratory, or on-screen), make non-trivial contributions to aesthetic experience. Even more, we might consider how the kinds of bodies we have contribute to our aesthetic experiences such that, if we didn’t have the bodies we have, composed as they are, we wouldn’t have that same experience. For example, how we might move around a depicted scene, or our understanding of the emotions of depicted others owing to similarities in bodily comportment. While these are not interactions of the kind, as in eating, involving “literal incorporation” (Plakias 2016: 3), nor of the kind in dance where foot meets floor, they are nonetheless interactions between embodied agent and world. Embracing this could offer insights into aesthetic experiences that may otherwise have gone unacknowledged.Eating, then, can serve as a model for future enactivist developments in the aesthetics of other arts: it is a strikingly clear example of how aesthetic experience and value are generated through embodied interactions between agent and world. The aesthetic qualities arising in the eating process seem to depend upon how our individual bodies are composed and how we interact with the particular food, and in that sense might be relational. Extending that conception of value to aesthetic value overall may, in turn, bypass entrenched issues in aesthetics that befall subjective and objective accounts of aesthetic value and properties. Secondly, the growing list of aesthetic endeavors that involve interactions between agent and world gives us motivation to look at the ways in which our engagements with paintings are interactive. From just a short analysis we have seen that these ways are many, thus warranting further investigation

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive science · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies · Psychology

• Enacting the aesthetic

  Open Access•Carlos Vara Sánchez•Phenomenology and the Cognitive…•2022

  Add to list

• The unaffordable and the sublime

  Open Access•Shaun Gallagher•Man and World•2022

  Add to list

• Participatory sense-making

  Open Access•Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A Di Paolo•Phenomenology and the Cognitive…•2007

  Add to list