A Qualitative Study of Aesthetic Reflection as Embodied Interpretation

Abstract

In his book, The Meaning of the Body: The Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Mark Johnson (The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007) built his case for the importance of aesthetics in a conception of cognition as inherently embodied upon the writings in psychology and philosophy of William James and John Dewey. He devoted significant portions of the early sections of the book to each of these authors, who, with phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, he has considered critical to the developments in neuroscience that have debunked the Cartesian mind/body dualism. Writing elsewhere, Johnson (Daedalus 135(3):46–54, 2006) asserted, “I regard American pragmatist philosophy, which came to prominence early in the twentieth century, as the most scientifically and philosophically sophisticated naturalistic, non-dualistic approach to mind available to us even today” (p. 48). In this chapter I will focus on Dewey’s influence on Johnson’s theory of embodied mind as a theoretical framework for a qualitative research study on aesthetic reflection as embodied interpretation.