Abstracts

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez

"Situated Affect and the Values of Art"

Art is often taken to promote empathy by expanding our experiences, allowing a deeper access to other minds, and offering what Olivia Bailey calls “humane understanding”, a “direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions” (Bailey 2020, 2). For art to afford this understanding at the centre of popular accounts of its ethical and cognitive values, the engagement with artworks needs to involve experiential imagination: an imaginative projection to different circumstances to recreate what it would be like. This paper argues that because emotions and experiential imagination are robustly embodied, perspective-taking exercises are significantly constrained. Art, therefore, cannot offer humane understanding of those differently situated that is meant to motivate empathy and moral concern. There is room, however, for a different kind of understanding of the incommensurability of perspectives that follows from the situated character of our affective life. By highlighting the limits of our own imaginative capacities, the embodied approach can illuminate the role of artworks in bringing forward the need to rely on the second person perspective to gain insight into the minds and experiences of others.