Cognitive Interpretation of Kant’s Theory of Aesthetic Ideas

COGNITIVE INTERPRETATION OF KANT’S THEORY OF AESTHETIC IDEAS MOJCA KUPLEN The aim of my paper is to argue that Kant’s aesthetic ideas can help us to overcome cognitive limitations that we often experience in our attempts to articulate the meaning of abstract concepts. I claim that aesthetic ideas, as expressed in works of art, have a cognitive dimension in that they reveal the introspective, emotional, and affective aspects that appear to be central to the content of abstract phenomena. I Most of us share the intuitive feeling that abstract concepts are harder to understand than concrete, empirical concepts.1This is evident, for example, from the feelings of insecurity and struggle that we experience each time we try to explain the meaning of concepts such as truth, love, hopelessness, or vulnerability.2Ralph Ellis nicely describes this experience: ‘When we begin to say what we mean by “in love”, most of us find ourselves struggling, questioning and revising what we think we mean by it […] There was an unsureness, a hesitance, a fear of saying what we did not mean, or not being able to say what we did mean.’3Yet we do not experience any difficulty in grasping the meaning of Cognitive Interpretation of Kant‘s theory of Aesthetic Ideas I thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their generous comments. Special gratitude is reserved for Sam Stoner, who provided valuable insight and suggestions. 1One should bear in mind the distinction between abstractness and abstraction. Even though all concepts are abstracted from experience, not all of them are abstract concepts. Category members of abstract concepts are non-material, non-concrete, and non-sensory-perceivable objects in contrast to superordinate concepts (like the concepts of animal, furniture, artefact, and so forth), whose members are all concrete and sensory-perceivable objects. See Anna Borghi and Ferdinand Binkofski, Words as Social Tools: An Embodied View on Abstract Concepts (New York: Springer, 2014), 3–4. 2Even though concepts of emotions such as ‘love’ or ‘hopelessness’ are usually included in the category of abstract concepts, since they both refer to non-concrete and nonphysical objects, contemporary cognitive science and psycholinguistics tend to keep them apart. This is because emotion concepts (such as happiness, hopefulness, love, sadness, anxiety, jealousy, and loneliness) refer directly to internal affective states and have a direct bodily counterpart, while abstract concepts lack these two characteristics. Rather, they refer to mental states, cognitive processes, personality traits, situations, and events (for example, concepts such as time, thought, death, truth, infinity, chaos, patriotism) which might have an indirect emotional or affective association (for example, the concept of death might be associated with negative emotional experiences such as fear). See ibid., 2–11. In this paper I refer to both kinds of concept as abstract. 3Ralph D. Ellis, Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Cognition, and Emotion in the Human Brain (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1995), 73. 48 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 48–64 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 48 concrete, empirical concepts. The meaning of a concept, say, the concept of a flower, is quickly available to us in terms of a specific set of physical properties that can be perceived by one or more of the senses. Ellis writes that our attempts in explaining the meaning of empirical concepts are accompanied by the feeling of confidence ‘that we could call up certain images, but normally without actually calling them up in order to prove to ourselves that we can do it’.4Our understanding of concepts is ultimately dependent on our ability to explain their meanings in imaginable terms. In comparison with empirical concepts, however, abstract concepts do not have a physical, perceptual and thus imaginable referent. To the extent that such concepts lack a direct perceptual and imaginable counterpart, they are more difficult to comprehend and understand. Such a view is supported by contemporary studies in cognitive science. Numerous research studies show that abstract concepts are much more difficult to understand than concrete or determinate concepts.5This difference is known as the concreteness effect and is commonly explained by two main theories – Dual Coding Theory (DCT) and Context Availability Theory (CAT). In short, DCT claims that comprehension of concepts depends on two interconnected systems: a verbal system, responsible for processing verbal information, and an imaginal system, responsible for processing nonverbal information and for generating mental images.6According to this theory, abstract concepts are harder to understand because they lack an additional perceptual source of information that concrete concepts have. CAT, on the other hand, claims that conceptual processing depends on contextual and situational information.7For example, understanding the meaning of the concept ‘chair’ depends not merely on knowing its physical properties, but also on relevant situations in which the object occurs or is used. Abstract concepts are more difficult to understand because they have a weaker connection to contextual information. In sum, both theories show that perceptual information plays an important role in conceptual processing; in order for us to comprehend and fully understand abstract thoughts and ideas, they must in some sense be connected with concrete and imaginable representations. One way to evoke imagery for abstract concepts is by means of their associations with empirical concepts. For instance, 4Ibid. 5For asurvey of these studies, see Katja Wiemer-Hastings and Xu Xu, ‘Content Differences for Abstract and Concrete Concepts’, Cognitive Science 29 (2005): 719–36. 6The main advocate of DCT is Allan Paivio. See his Mental Representations: ADual Coding Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 7Paula J. Schwanenflugel, ‘Why Are Abstract Concepts Hard to Understand?’, in The Psychology of Word Meanings, ed. Paula J. Schwanenflugel (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991), 223–50. Mojca Kuplen Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 49 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 49 the abstract concept ‘religion’ can evoke imagery indirectly by means of its association with the empirical concept ‘church’. Or the concept ‘justice’ can evoke imagery through its association with a particular situation, such as a court trial. Availability of such referential imagery presumably eliminates the concreteness effect and produces better processing and understanding of abstract phenomena. It is difficult, however, to see how such referential imagery could convey the meaning of abstract concepts since it is determined by our own subjective experiences. Numerous studies in cognitive science have argued that the content of abstract concepts involves not merely features that can be explicitly articulated in words and propositions, but also experience-related properties, that is to say, ‘properties expressing subjective experiences’ that are more difficult to express in ordinary language.8Consider, for example, the concept of hopelessness. One can explicitly articulate the meaning of hopelessness as being an emotion with a negative view of the future. However, this conceptual meaning cannot give a full account of the idea of hopelessness as we experience it from the inside, as determined by our own beliefs, thoughts, memories, desires, feelings, interests, goals, and so forth. When we try to explain the meaning of the idea of hopelessness, we feel that there is always much more that is implicitly present in our awareness of the meaning than we are able to explicitly articulate, and that this implicit meaning we internally experience is far more specific, precise, and complex than we can capture in words. This is because, as Gendlin points out, our ordinary words and concepts refer to our experiences indirectly by means of general characteristics that are abstracted from our experiences, and as such they are logically incapable of grasping and communicating introspective, affective, and emotional aspects associated with concepts such as hopelessness.9But how we experience hopelessness does appear to have an effect on our understanding of the idea of hopelessness itself. Mark Johnson, who argues for the qualitative dimension of meaning as part of our understanding of abstract phenomena, captures this idea accordingly: ‘the meaning is in what you think and feel and do, and it lies in recurring qualities, patterns, and structures of experience that are, for the most part, unconsciously and automatically shaping how you understand, Cognitive Interpretation of Kant‘s Theory of Aesthetic Ideas 8Wiemer-Hastings and Xu, ‘Content Differences’, 719. See also Lawrence W. Barsalou and Katja Wiemer-Hastings, ‘Situating Abstract Concepts’, in Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, ed. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 129–63; Schwanenflugel, ‘Why Are Abstract Concepts Hard’; Stavroula-Thaleia Kousta et al., ‘The Representation of Abstract Words: Why Emotion Matters’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 140 (2011): 14–34. 9Eugene T. Gendlin, ‘The Experiential Response’, in Use of Interpretation in Treatment, ed. Emanuel Hammer (New York: Grune & Stratton,1968), 217. 50 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 50 how you choose, and how you express yourself.’10 Something similar is pointed out by Eugene T. Gendlin, an advocate of the theory of experienced or felt meanings: ‘Every individual lives in his subjective experiencing and looks out at the world from it and through it.’11 Both authors argue in favour of the idea that there is an additional meaning to our abstract concepts that goes beyond their logical meanings. While logical meanings of abstract concepts represent merely some general patterns of our experiences (say, that ‘hopelessness’ is an emotion with a negative view of the future), they cannot grasp all the details of our experience of hopelessness. That is to say, they cannot capture all the phenomenological and qualitative aspects associated with our abstract concepts. Accordingly, if it is true that the content of our abstract concepts also entails experience-related properties, then it would seem to follow we cannot fully determine the meaning of abstract concepts until we include some of our subjective experiences as well. These experiences provide an additional source of information that is required for a more complete understanding of abstract phenomena. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that Kant’s aesthetic ideas, as expressed in works of art, can help us to overcome cognitive limitations that we often experience in our attempts to articulate the meaning of abstract concepts. The gist of my argument is that aesthetic ideas make experience-related properties of abstract concepts salient and thereby available for our acknowledgement and further analysis. That is to say, aesthetic ideas make abstract concepts more cognitively accessible to us, by creating image schemas that allow us to think about these concepts in a way linked to sensory experience. To develop my argument, I begin the first part of the paper with a discussion of Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic ideas and explain how aesthetic ideas can serve as a sensuous counterpart of abstract concepts. In the second part of the paper I bring together the resources introduced and developed in the first part and propose an account of the role of aesthetic ideas in promoting the meaning of abstract concepts as it is determined by our own subjective experiences. II In § 49 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant puts forward his view of artistic beauty as being an expression of aesthetic ideas. According to him, an aesthetic idea is a‘representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking, though 10 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 61. 11 Eugene T. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 228. Mojca Kuplen Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 51 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 51 without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intel - ligible’.12 He adds, in § 57, that an aesthetic idea is ‘an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate’ (CJ, p. 218; AA 5:342). It is suggested accordingly that aesthetic ideas are concrete sensible representations of imagination, that is, images of some sort, and that these rich images give rise to much thinking that cannot be fully described by any determinate concepts.13 Aesthetic ideas are thus similar to ordinary images (for example, of a flower), but they are dissimilar to ordinary images in that no determinate concepts correspond to them (as an image of a flower corresponds to the concept of a flower). Since aesthetic ideas lack determinate concepts, they evade the possibility of cognition. That is to say, they cannot be cognized in an ordinary sense by connecting intuitions with determinate concepts. In Kant’s view, aesthetic ideas strive to exhibit concepts that go beyond the limits of our ordinary experience. He has two kinds of concepts in mind. On the one hand, there are concepts of reason (rational ideas), such as ‘invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc.’ They are ‘concept[s] to which no intuition (representation of imagination) can be adequate’ (CJ, p. 192; AA 5:314). What is distinctive about them is that they can be thought, but not empirically encountered. For example, we can think of the idea of hell, but have no empirical intuition of it. For Kant, concepts that lack an adequate sensible correlate are called indeterminate concepts (in contrast to determinate concepts for which empirical intuition can be given) (CJ, p. 215; AA 5:339). On the other hand, Kant writes that aesthetic ideas can also exhibit concepts ‘of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., […] with a completeness that goes beyond anything Cognitive Interpretation of Kant‘s Theory of Aesthetic Ideas 12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 192 (AA 5:314). Hereafter: CJ. 13 For a related reading of aesthetic ideas, see also Anthony Savile, Aesthetic Recon - structions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant, and Schiller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). For example, he describes aesthetic ideas as ‘concrete presentations of particular themes that are offered us by individual works of art’ (p. 180). Wicks explains aesthetic ideas similarly, as ‘meaning-rich images’; see Robert Wicks, ‘The Divine Inspiration for Kant’s Formalist Theory of Beauty’, Kant Studies Online (2015): 26. Among others holding a similar interpretation are Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 283–84; Brigitte Sassen, ‘Artistic Genius and the Question of Creativity’, in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays, ed. Paul Guyer (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 173, and Donald W. Crawford, ‘Kant’s Theory of Creative Imagination’, in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 156. 52 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 52 of which there is an example in nature’ (CJ, p. 192; AA 5:314).14 These kinds of concept (typically classified as abstract) are dissimilar to rational ideas in that their concrete instances can be experienced. For example, the concept of (romantic) love is directly grounded in one’s emotional and bodily experience (through behavioural signs like smiling, accelerated heartbeat, loss of appetite, and so forth). On the other hand, they are also dissimilar to our ordinary (concrete) empirical concepts (such as dog, table, chair) in that they refer to non-material and non-concrete objects. For example, concepts such as love, envy and fame have no particular shape, size or colour, and one cannot see, touch or hear them. There is no single and concretely perceivable object that would correspond to such concepts. Their referents are mental and emotional states, situations and events. However, even though we can find examples of abstract concepts in ordinary experiences, their full meaning extends beyond such experience. This is because, as we have seen, the content of abstract concepts largely involves experiential features, emotional aspects, and other introspective properties, such as beliefs, memories, intentions, goals. For example, the content of the concept of alienation contains detailed features of the felt experience (what alienation feels like subjectively, how one acts when in this state of mind, and so forth). But the felt experience or the quality of such a mental state cannot be directly exhibited in ordinary experience.15 This is at least how I interpret Kant’s decision to include abstract concepts in the category of concepts that aesthetic ideas strive to exhibit, in spite of his claim that aesthetic ideas strive to exhibit concepts that go beyond sensory experience. Thus, the implication seems to be that there is an additional, indeterminate material to these concepts for which no sensible intuition can be given and it is this material that aesthetic ideas strive to exhibit. According to Kant, aesthetic ideas are generated by means of aesthetic attributes. He describes aesthetic attributes primarily in terms of what they do – namely, they ‘express only the implications connected with it [a concept] and its affinity with others’ (CJ, p. 193; AA 5:315). The function of aesthetic attributes is 14 Matherne uses the term ‘experience-oriented’ aesthetic ideas. She argues similarly that aesthetic ideas can represent not only moral and rational ideas, but also everyday kinds of ideas, concepts, and feelings. Samantha Matherne, ‘The Inclusive Interpretation of Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2013): 21–39. Among others holding a similar view are Rudolf Lüthe, ‘Kants Lehre von den ästhetischen Ideen’,KantStudien 75 (1984): 65–74; Kenneth F. Rogerson, Kant’s Aesthetics: The Roles of Form and Expression (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 99; and Emine Hande Tuna, ‘A Kantian Hybrid Theory of Art Criticism: A Particularist Appeal to the Generalists’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2016): 397–411. 15 Rogerson has, I believe, something similar in mind when he writes: ‘while we may have some experience of such things their full import is yet beyond ordinary experience, for example our psychological attitudes to such things’ (Kant’s Aesthetics, 99). Mojca Kuplen Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 53 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 53 to bring to mind various connections or mental associations between different concepts and objects that, when taken together, give rise to a general idea (that is, rational ideas or abstract concepts). Kant gives an example of the image of an eagle with a lightning bolt in its talons, which functions as an aesthetic attribute of the rational idea of the king of heaven in the sense that it expresses certain associations and implications connected with this idea (in terms of representing power, strength, freedom, being above the material world) (CJ, p. 193; AA 5:315). Kant says very little, however, about what exactly aesthetic attributes are and how they come to occasion mental connections and associations. Fortunately, he offers a few remarks that can help us to formulate a plausible explanation. First, he writes that aesthetic attributes are ‘supplementary representations of imagination’ that ‘go alongside the logical ones’, which means that imagination produces them in addition to logical attributes. Considering that logical attributes ‘constitute the presentation of a given concept itself’ (CJ, p.193; AA 5:315), that is, a schema of a determinate concept, and thus they refer to general representations that different objects of the same kind have in common and in virtue of which the determinate concept is applied, this means that aesthetic attributes must refer to features of the object that go beyond these general features. Second, aesthetic attributes are ‘attribute[s] of a representation of sense’ (CJ, p. 194; AA 5:316), meaning that they must refer to features of an object with which we are directly perceptually acquainted. Third, they are product of ‘the imagination, in its freedom from all guidance by rules’ (CJ, p. 195; AA 5:317), which means that imagination produces them without being determined by the concept of the object. Taking all these points together, the suggestion seems to be that aesthetic attributes refer to the distinctive aspects of a particular object, in contrast to those aspects of the object which are shared by all members of a class and in virtue of which the concept applies. Since these distinctive features of a particular object are not determined by the concepts of an object, they are a product of imagination in its free play. Let me explain this proposal in what follows. According to Kant’s epistemological theory, in order to have a perceptual image, conceptual harmony between imagination and understanding is necessary. We must perceive a certain combination of the sensible manifold under some empirical concepts. However, even though recognition of objects proceeds by the means of a schema, an abstract form shared by all members of a certain kind, each particular image also differs from others of its kind. That is, they differ in the additional features which are not determined (entailed) by the concept. For instance, I recognize the flower by the application of the flower rule (schema) to the sensible manifold. The flower rule is abasic figurative mental representation Cognitive Interpretation of Kant‘s Theory of Aesthetic Ideas 54 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 54 of an object with petals, leaves, and stems in a specific relation. Yet a particular image of a flower may have a distinct shape of petals in a particular combination of colours (that is, a distinctive combination of the general features). But these distinctive features of this particular flower are not entailed by the concept of a flower.16 This is because, as Kant writes, a concept ‘refers to the object indirectly, by means of a characteristic that may be common to several things’.17 That is to say, concepts can serve as rules only for the features of the object common to members of a certain kind, but cannot be rules for the individual features and their combinations which are distinct and unique to the particular object itself. As Sarah Gibbons in her analysis of Kant’s imagination puts it: ‘Concepts can only provide a discursive unity of diverse representations possessing some common feature; they do not represent those diverse representations as parts of a single encompassing whole.’18 Thus, the presence of these additional features which are not entailed by the concept shows that the activity of imagination is not fully determined by the concept, and therefore can potentially be in free play. My suggestion is that aesthetic attributes refer to those specific and distinctive features of an object that have been left undetermined by the concept of the object.19 Such an interpretation appears to be suggested by Kant in his discussion of aesthetic ideas where he writes: in the use of the imagination for cognition, the imagination is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the limitation of being adequate to its concept; in an aesthetic respect, however, the imagination is free to provide, beyond that concord with the concept, unsought extensive undeveloped material for the understanding, of which the latter took no regard in its concept, but which it applies, not so much objectively, for cognition, as subjectively, for the animation of the cognitive powers. (CJ, p. 194; AA 5:317) 16 The flower example pertains to the relation of concepts and particulars in general, whereas my investigation is deliberately restricted to the reception of artworks. 17 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 366 (AA A320/B377). 18 Sarah L. Gibbons, Kant’s Theory of Imagination: Bridging Gaps in Judgement and Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 44. Among others making this point are Keren Gorodeisky, ‘Schematizing without a Concept? Imagine That!’, Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 2 (2010): 182, and Mojca Kuplen, Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination: An Approach to Kant’s Aesthetics (New York: Springer, 2015), 65–72. 19 My interpretation accordingly differs from the view that aesthetic attributes supervene on logical attributes, that is, general features of the object. For this view, see Andrew Chignell, ‘Kant on the Normativity of Taste: The Role of Aesthetic Ideas’, Australian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2007): 415–33, and Steven Ravett Brown, ‘On the Mechanism of the Generation of Aesthetic Ideas in Kant’s Critique of Judgment’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (2004): 487–99. Mojca Kuplen Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 55 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 55 As I read this passage, the ‘unsought extensive undeveloped material’ that sets imagination and understanding into a free play refers to aesthetic attributes that furnish an aesthetic idea. Kant explains this undeveloped material as something that has been left out by the ordinary synthesis according to a determinate concept. That is, the object has been recognized as the particular kind of thing it is, say, an eagle, yet the sensible manifold in this object contains an additional material that is not determined by the concept of the object. It is this additional material of the object that aesthetic attributes take into account. To illustrate my proposal, I will consider Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937). The painting depicts a grief-stricken face of a woman, weeping into a handkerchief. One can immediately recognize that this is a painting of a human face. One perceives the head, eyes, nose, and lips (that is, logical attributes), as presented by the schema of a human face. But one also perceives a specific and distinctive configuration of these features. The face is painted in different geometrical shapes, split into fragments; the shapes of the mouth, teeth, tears, and the handkerchief used to dry the tears are almost fused into each other; the sides of the face are juxtaposed in such a way that they offer simultaneously a frontal and a profile perspective of the face. But these distinctive features are not specified by the schema of a human face. Hence, they are products of imagination in its free play. Yet one can also notice that it is precisely these distinctive features of a face, combined together in this specific way, that bring to mind the thoughts, feelings, moods, sensations, and other mental representations associated with the idea we generally have of grief and loss. For instance, the feeling of disorientation and anxiety as occasioned by the simultaneous presence of the frontal and profile perspectives of the face, the idea of emotional brokenness conveyed by the fractured shapes of the face, brought together in an unnerving way or the idea of a paralyzing emptiness as beautifully expressed through the image of woman’s chattering teeth, convulsively nibbling the handkerchief. It is the imaginative synthesis of these distinctive features of a woman’s face which bring to mind different associational thoughts connected with the idea we have of grief or loss. Even though these ideas do not have a determinate empirical counterpart, they can nevertheless be depicted through the synthesis of aesthetic attributes (a collection of associations). In this way we are able to think about these ideas in terms of a concrete perceptual experience. Kant writes that in contrast to an empirical intuition, which is an external representation of imagination, an aesthetic idea is an ‘inner intuition’ of imagination (CJ, p. 192; AA 5:314). Although he does not explain what he means by such inner intuitions, taking into account his remark that an aesthetic idea is Cognitive Interpretation of Kant‘s Theory of Aesthetic Ideas 56 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 56 a crowd of people, detached and isolated from one another, with indistinct faces. Thus, by emphasizing the experience of anonymity, isolation, and loss of selfawareness, the painting adds to yet another meaning that the idea of alienation can have for us. Both, Haneke and Munch have instantiated the same concept of alienation and emotional isolation, yet they express a different meaning of an experience of alienation. That is to say, they express two different aesthetic ideas and communicate in two different ways the meaning of our abstract concepts since it is determined by our own subjective experiences. Aesthetic ideas, as expressed in works of art, are equipped with a rich and sophisticated vocabulary, a collection of associative images (aesthetic attributes) that can, furthermore, carry finely determined, more specific aspects of our experience, which are more difficult to grasp and articulate by ordinary language. They can make us explicitly aware of what we formerly had only an implicit sense. Aesthetic ideas afford us with an opportunity to imagine the introspective, emotional, and affective aspects connected with our concepts, thereby imbuing them with a more substantive meaning and understanding. Mojca Kuplen Faculty of Education, Fluminense Federal University, Rua Prof. Marcos Valdemar de Freitas Reis D 201, Campus do Gragoatá, Niterói – Rio de Janeiro, Brasil [email protected] BIBLIOGRAPHY Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Barsalou, Lawrence W., and Katja Wiemer-Hastings. ‘Situating Abstract Concepts.’ In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan, 129–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Berry, Kenneth. ‘Kandinsky, Kant, and a Modern Mandala.’ Journal of Aesthetic Education 42 (2008): 105–10. Borghi, Anna, and Ferdinand Binkofski. Words as Social Tools: An Embodied View on Abstract Concepts. New York: Springer, 2014. 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