Being Moved by Art: A Phenomenological and Pragmatist Dialogue

RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACT This article integrates John Dewey’s Art as Experience, Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, and phenomenological interviews with museum visitors to answer what it means to be ‘moved by art’. The interviews point to intense affective and existential experiences, in which encounters with art can be genuinely transformative. We focus on Dufrenne’s notion of ‘adherent reflection’ and Dewey’s notions of ‘doing and undergoing’ to understand the intentional structure and dynamics of such experiences, concluding that being moved contains two merged forms of intentionality: one overt aspect of perceptual intentionality directed at the work, and a covert affective intentionality directed back at oneself in one’s situated existence. These are operational simultaneously but can work in loops, one leading to an intensification of the other and vice versa. As such, these analyses emphasize the value of phenomenological interviews and advance the integration of phenomenological and pragmatist thinking in the context of aesthetic experience. Being Moved by Art: A Phenomenological and Pragmatist Dialogue Simon Høffding University of Southern Denmark, DK Carlos Vara Sánchez Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, IT Tone Roald University of Copenhagen, DK CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Simon Høffding University of Southern Denmark, DK [email protected] KEYWORDS: adherent reflection; affectivity; being moved; doing and undergoing; John Dewey; Mikel Dufrenne; pragmatism; phenomenological interview; phenomenology TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Høffding, Simon, Carlos Vara Sánchez, and Tone Roald. ‘Being Moved by Art: A Phenomenological and Pragmatist Dialogue.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LIX/XV, no. 2 (2022): pp. 85–102. DOI: https://doi. org/10.33134/eeja.246 86Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 What does it mean to be moved by art? One characterization harkens back to Friedrich Schiller: ‘Being moved, rigorously understood, designates the mixed sentiment of suffering and the pleasure taken in its suffering.’1 More recently, being moved has been described as a particularly strong and ambiguous set of emotions that ‘intrudes on whatever one is doing’.2 In both ideas, there is a latent sense of tension and disruption in being moved, which we will investigate through three main perspectives. The first comes from qualitative, phenomenological interviews with museum visitors. The second is from Mikel Dufrenne, a phenomenological thinker inspired particularly by Immanuel Kant and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience has regrettably gone relatively unnoticed in contemporary debates within aesthetics. The third perspective comes from John Dewey’s philosophy of art and experience. We bring Dufrenne and Dewey into a conversation about how to understand the experience of being moved by art. Neither of them conceptualizes aesthetic experience precisely in terms of being moved, which is an integrative lens we use to establish a focused discussion on aesthetic experience. Dewey and Dufrenne are often complementary, but the phenomenological interviews we present revitalize their ideas and show that neither of them is complete. Our chosen combination of perspectives has another advantage. The growing trend in philosophy and cognitive science – namely, the position known as enactivism or 4E cognition,3 is starting to spill over into aesthetics.4 Many enactivists claim an intellectual inheritance from phenomenology and pragmatism. The link between phenomenology and enactivism is well established – for instance, in Evan Thompson’s work – but a link to pragmatism is not always easy to find.5 Rarely have the two perspectives been placed side by side to enlighten a single issue. This paper can then also be seen as a kind of test of whether phenomenology and pragmatism can jointly contribute to an enactive understanding of, in our case, aesthetic experience. I. BEING MOVED This paper rests on the assumption that being moved is one kind of aesthetic experience, though not just any kind: importantly, being moved represents one of the most intense, significant, and prized forms of aesthetic experiences and, for that reason, it is important to understand it.6 We hold the pragmatic position that interviewing people about their most memorable or meaningful experiences in an 1 Winfried Menninghaus et al., ‘Towards a Psychological Construct of Being Moved’, PLoS One 10 (2015): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0128451. 2 Nico H. Frijda, The Laws of Emotion (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007), 38. 3 Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (London: Oxford University Press, 2017); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 4 Alfonsina Scarinzi, ed., Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015); Carlos Vara Sánchez, ‘Enacting the Aesthetic: A Model for Raw Cognitive Dynamics’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (2022): 317–39. 5 See Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, chap. 3. 6 In The Psychology of Art Appreciation (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1997), Bjarne Funch has described such existential encounters with art from a psychological perspective. Roald has developed the concept of intrapellation to describe how we are moved by visual art: Tone Roald, The Subject of Aesthetics (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Funch’s and Roald’s works thus complement the analyses of Dufrenne and Dewey. 87Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 art museum can appropriately be labelled as aesthetic experience.7 Much in the spirit of both Dewey and Dufrenne, this article, rather than providing one precise, allencompassing definition, is one long explication of the term under investigation. We identify a necessary condition – namely, a certain affective, intentional structure. We believe that defining such a relatively stable structure,8 also constituted by neural, bodily, and worldly intertwined components,9 helps establish common ground between phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. Our analyses show that the central experiential structure enveloping self and world when moved by art is affectivity as a sense of existential replacement. Our appeal to an affective and existential dimension should not be confused with the claim that being moved involves a specific class of aesthetic emotions.10 When we are moved by art, we can undergo a number of different emotions, none of which is inherently essential to the experience: fear, love, or nostalgia can all excite or move us and make us lose touch or, inversely, re-establish touch with our reality and can equally be involved in being moved. We do not use ‘existential’ in the narrow sense of referring to, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre’s or Martin Heidegger’s ideas but in the broad sense of engaging with personal questions of meaning and existence: being moved into the work of art as well as into and away from oneself, bringing forth a new perspective on the world and oneself. Yet, as we shall learn from Dewey and Dufrenne, when moved, affective processes are not free-floating but attuned as specific responses: facing the work of art, one enters into a particular sort of relationship with overt and covert forms of intentionality. II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERVIEWS ON AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE II.1. METHODOLOGY As part of a research project in phenomenology and psychology on the relationship between aesthetic experience and pre-reflective self-awareness, the authors interviewed museum visitors, asking the general question: what do people experience when they have an intense or significant experience with art? We have argued elsewhere that, when museum visitors give elaborate descriptions in response to such a question, it ought to have implications for our definition of aesthetic experience.11 We have also elsewhere clarified that the descriptions to follow are not representative of most people’s experience in art museums.12 The analysis of being moved does not generally describe how most people experience going to an art museum. Rather, it 7 Overall, we find ourselves much in agreement with Nanay’s distinctions on the nature of aesthetic experience: Bence Nanay, ‘Aesthetic Attention’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (2015): 96–118. 8 Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28. 9 John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigee Books, 1980), hereafter: AE; Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions. 10 For a distinction between affectivity and emotions, see Giovanna Colombetti, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 1–3. 11 Roald, Subject of Aesthetics. 12 Simon Høffding, Mette Rung, and Tone Roald, ‘Participation and Receptivity in the Art Museum: A Phenomenological Exposition’, Curator 63 (2020): 69–81. 88Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 seeks to highlight the most important structures of subjectivity present in intense and meaningful encounters with works of art. There is a lot to be said about the methodology of qualitative interviews and about the possibility of integrating such methods with the sciences of the mind. For reasons of length, we offer merely a rudimentary introduction here. There has been a long debate on the combination of phenomenology and interview methods or qualitative research methods.13 One contender for a point of convergence consists in rules of thumb or best practices of the interview itself. The interviews are semi-structured conversations in which the interviewer’s task is to create a welcoming atmosphere, listen intently, and gently ask questions that open up possibilities of richer and richer descriptions. Rather than asking yes/no questions or asking for people’s opinions of a given past experience, the interviewer attempts to elicit as many details as possible by focusing on a particular past experience from many different angles. Further, the interviewer avoids using her own theoretical vocabulary. In our case, we would not ask an interviewee ‘What is the role of pre-reflective self-awareness in your aesthetic experience?’ but start by establishing rapport and listening attentively to the descriptions emerging from an initial question such as ‘I wonder if you have ever had a particularly memorable experience looking at an artwork in a museum.’ The interviews used for this study were informed by best practices in phenomenological psychology14 and ethnography.15 From March 2017 to March 2018, Høffding and Roald conducted twenty interviews at the Esbjerg Art Museum, the National Gallery of Denmark, and the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen. A ‘good’ interview is one that generates many detailed descriptions of a particular experience and usually lasts quite some time. In our case, five of the twenty interviews were sufficiently detailed, and we will now discuss two representative ones. After the interviews were conducted, they were transcribed, subjected to several close readings, and analysed first in emic terms (using concepts from the interview to generate experiential categories, into which the utterances are organized) and then in etic terms (relating the emic analysis to wider concepts from outside the interview from psychology and phenomenology).16 Of the two following examples, the first is translated from Danish to English and both are anonymized. 13 For a historical overview, see Dan Zahavi, Phenomenology: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2018). For presentations of the main methodologies, see Amedeo Giorgi, The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2009); Jonathan Smith, Paul Flowers, and Martin Larkin, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research (London: SAGE, 2009); Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (London, ON: Althouse, 1990); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Claire Petitmengin, ‘Describing One’s Subjective Experience in the Second Person: An Interview Method for the Science of Consciousness’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5 (2006): 229–69. For an overview comparing all these positions, see Simon Høffding, Katrin Heimann, and Kristian Martiny, eds., ‘Working with Others’ Experiences: Theory, Practice and Application’, special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (forthcoming). 14 Steinar Kvale, InterViews (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1996). 15 Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, eds., The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2011); Susanne Ravn, ‘Phenomenological Analysis in Sport and Exercise’, in Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Sport and Exercise, ed. Bret Smith and Andrew Sparkes (London: Routledge, 2016), 206–18. 16 See Susanne Ravn and Simon Høffding, ‘Improvisation and Thinking in Movement: An Enactivist Analysis of Agency in Artistic Practices’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (2022): 515–37. 89Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 The two interviewees are both experienced museum visitors, voicing what some would view as a traditionalist or romantic conception of art. They were, however, selected only on the criterion of offering rich descriptions. It might be objected that they simply regurgitate a romantic and elitist normative expectation about what to look for in a museum. Such expectations may certainly inform their experiences, but a fundamental principle of qualitative research is that you cannot and do not screen for bias, first because unbiased experience is an impossible scientific ideal and, second, because we as phenomenologists are interested in experience as lived with all its preconditions, biases, and idiosyncrasies. There is no mutual exclusion between expressing a certain norm and such a norm genuinely being part of one’s experience. As qualitative researchers, our job is to elicit as many experiential details as possible and faithfully report the most salient. As philosophers and psychologists, our job is to analyse these to say something important about the nature and structure of these experiences.17 II.2. KARIN’S EXPERIENCES WITH ART Karin is a middle-aged woman, with no particular training in fine arts, who goes to art museums on a regular basis. She describes experiences with two particular works of art but says that her experience is similar almost every time she visits any museum. If the exhibit is too pedagogical, however – that is, if she notices some kind of implicit agenda – she is put off and has no noteworthy experience. When the works of art have an impact on her, however, they activate intense feelings: I know it [the work of art] as soon as I see it, almost before I am aware that I have seen it […]. It happens with the speed of light. I think the thoughts come afterwards […]. I think it is a mixture of shock and falling in love the very first time I see it.18 Karin also mentions a feeling like having butterflies in the stomach, indicating that the emotions she undergoes also evoke bodily sensations. In order for this dimension of experience to come to the fore, she avoids thinking or reflecting too much, but rather lets herself be drawn in: Without really thinking too much about it, I just let myself experience the work of art, then it happens quietly by itself […]. I just try to let my body and my senses just experience it […]. And then it can happen now and again that a thought appears, and I have an ‘a-ha’ experience, but it is not something I try to force or make appear […]. I can of course analyse them, and I know how to do such stuff, but that does not mean much to me […] but these pictures […] or works of art which just say something immediately, with them I am not busy with anything else but just experiencing them. 17 Of course, a single paragraph is not sufficient to counter a sceptical objection to our methodology. For a systematic presentation, please see Simon Høffding, Kristian Martiny, and Andreas Roepstorff, ‘Can We Trust the Phenomenological Interview? Metaphysical, Epistemological, and Methodological Objections’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (2022): 33–51; and Roald, The Subject of Aesthetics. 18 The quotations from the interviewees are sometimes not grammatically correct. We have sought to retain the original language to give the readers a sense of the interviewees’ struggle to put their experiences into words. 90Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 From the outset of the interview, Karin is very explicit in expressing why she goes to art museums and why she often seeks out the same artworks, such as the pink room in the installation Your Atmospheric Color Atlas (2009) by Olafur Eliasson at ARoS, the Museum of Modern Art in Århus, Denmark. The works that ‘just say something immediately’ allow her to open up to what we could call existential feelings, by which she manages to better cope with her emotional life and overall situation: I feel as if some bricks are physically moved around in my head or body […]. And it feels strange to say, but it is as if a cleaning takes place or that some issues are more solidly put in place […]. Occasionally, there are also different trains of thought running, and then gently, it becomes, not necessarily tied together, but everything nevertheless becomes a greater whole […] in which I, how to say, where they all suddenly make sense together in a way different from before. I arrive at a bigger picture of something that before was separate directions […]. It gives me a collected sense of clarity or sense of wholeness […]. Both works [Eliasson’s Your Atmospheric Color Atlas and Edvard Munch’s Moonlight (1895)] make a lot of feelings present at once and make me have them […] make me able to deal with them. It [the work of art] can bring forth a lot of feelings, but just in a way that makes them okay […]. It is not because they disappear, but they are reduced in strength, perhaps, in comparison to how large a negative influence they could otherwise have. Much of Karin’s language avoids positing herself as the grammatical subject. She is not the primary actor or initiator of these kinds of experience. The artworks and experiences themselves are put in the active role and she is the one who undergoes: Something happens to me when I am there, and I feel calm […]. Munch’s Moonlight, which I have been in love with ever since I saw it for the first time, and again I cannot explain what it does, but it has to do with its symbolic, mixed with the colours, and yes, mixed with […] which just does something to me. A final dimension to mention is the sense of communication Karin enjoys with the artwork. As it is not primarily presented to her in acts of deliberate reflection, this kind of communication is also not primarily verbal but somehow emotional. I am mostly focused on, I don’t know if one could say communicate with [the artworks], but it feels as if that is what I do. I know very well that, that is just me. That is actually what is most important to me […]. It belongs to that side of things that we cannot fully verbalize, but which comprises some kind of insight, a kind of knowledge or feelings. In the interview with Karin, we can observe an existential longing that becomes actualized in the aesthetic experience. Rather than thinking about or analysing the paintings, she simply looks at them and then they begin to work in her, transforming her emotional life. Even if she is attentively directed at the works of art, her experience is not about them alone. It is about herself, as a subject, changing with the impact of the artworks. She is not in the nominative subject position but in the dative ‘to me’ or ‘for me’, through a necessary mediation of the artworks. 91Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 II.3. SABINA’S EXPERIENCES WITH ART Asked to mention an intense encounter with art, Sabina, also a middle-aged woman with much museum experience, describes seeing André Derain’s Woman in a Chemise (1906): You come in, and that Derain, which comes right out of the picture at you, I thought it was fabulous. I loved that […]. I wasn’t really expecting it to be so powerful […]. Well, the colors of course are very strong, but also this impression of the woman leaning right out of the picture […]. And the, the life in the picture which is indicated by the lines and by the colors, uhm, I think that was what struck me […]. It affects me here in the diaphragm […]. I don’t really get physical sensations except, ha ha, you know I didn’t grow up with the Nordic winter, and as November goes into January [in Norway], I feel actually thirsty for colour, so then when I see colour, the feeling of thirst is removed […]. Yes, completion, that’s a very good word. Sabina feels revived and replenished by Derain’s expressive colours, which she, like Karin, takes in, without deliberate reflection: You just stand there, and it sort of goes into you. The memory is very vivid later and you just take it in, you, in Norwegian you would say ‘man tar imot’ [you receive], you just sort of feel receptive to it, I guess […]. I can’t think of any special thoughts I have actually, but I find that I, when I go to galleries, museums, I usually only look at a few of the pictures, I mean I walk past the rest, I think, because otherwise it is too much, it feels, you feel full and you can’t take any more. When Sabina encounters a painting of significance to her, she gets absorbed in it. This heightened sense of receptivity is demanding and easily exceeds her mental capacity: Yes, but it’s not a choice, you can say that the picture attracts me and the more I look, well then you can say the more absorbed I get in the picture. So the picture has an active role, but also, I allow myself to be absorbed, because very often I look at a picture I mean, you know, and then I look at that one for example, I suppose if I looked at it long enough I would probably get absorbed in that too, but I don’t, I have to economize it in a way because otherwise as I say you would get too tired, or sort of had enough. Like you’re over-saturated or so? Exactly. Okay, so it invites you and you let yourself… Yes, I answer the invitation in a way. As for Karin, Sabina’s attention is directed at the painting, but she is also engaged in a kind of self-communication marked by these existential feelings concerning her identity: It gives me a feeling of being myself […] it contributes to my sense of identity in fact […]. It’s more existential, this is me, this is who I am, and that might also relate to the fact that because we lived removed, you change friends, you change cultures, and so your sense of identity can be a little fluid, so everything that gives me this feeling of [being myself], 92Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 strengthens my sense of identity. But it’s not an intellectual thing, it’s not because I am a person who appreciates art, that’s not the feeling I get, it’s more existential. Sabina puts herself in the dative as the person to whom something happens and puts the artwork in the nominative rather than the accusative, as the agent enabling a certain kind of experience. The painting invites her, and her role, besides perceptually attending to it, is to ‘allow’ herself to get absorbed. So again, though directed at the work of art, the experience is not about it, but about letting it mediate and enable a kind of self-relation that ultimately re-establishes or ‘contributes’ to her ‘sense of identity’. These two excerpts portray rather detailed lived experiences of being moved. Note that, besides Karin’s ‘bricks’ that are ‘moved’, neither of the two women explicitly mentions being moved, which is an etic concept we apply from the top down to interpret their experience. The excerpts depict a heightened affective dimension and the formation of a certain kind of relationship with the works of art, leading to an existential reorientation. III. INTERPRETING BEING MOVED WITH DUFRENNE III.1. DUFRENNE ON ADHERENT REFLECTION Dufrenne’s notion of ‘adherent reflection’ can help us to understand what it means to be moved, even if he does not use that specific term. We are appropriating his concept of adherent reflection to suit our purpose and to emphasize how the subject can be affectively and existentially changed in the aesthetic encounter. Dufrenne’s thinking on reflection in aesthetic experience is in line with those phenomenological conceptions of reflection that emphasize a heightened prereflective awareness that in some way or other unifies subject and object.19 His magnum opus, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, is a systemic work covering most of the classical art forms. He distinguishes between ‘the work of art’ and ‘the aesthetic object’;20 the former is the stable material being of the work (the paint on the canvas, the score of the sonata), while the latter pertains to a special attitude that sometimes emerges in the meaningful relation between subject and the work of art. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is an ambitious work in four parts. Here, we exclusively treat the third part, the ‘Phenomenology of Aesthetic Perception’. Dufrenne constructs a layered account of aesthetic experience, in which each new layer presupposes the previous one, striving toward a full-fledged experience involving several mental capacities. He begins with the 19 Philosophers, especially in the phenomenological tradition, have worked extensively on characterizing reflection; see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), chap. 2. While some, such as Dreyfus, define it as distanced or ‘a stepping back’ from the world, others, such as Sartre and Marcel, develop new conceptions in which reflection unifies us with the world, with concepts such as ‘pure reflection’ (Sartre) and ‘secondary reflection’ (Marcel). See Hubert Dreyfus, ‘The Return of the Myth of the Mental’, Inquiry 50 (2007): 354; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Estella Barnes (London: Routledge, 1991), 155; Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1, Reflection and Mystery, trans. G. S. Fraser (London: Harvill, 1951), 83. 20 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), lii. Hereafter: PAE. 93Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 term ‘presence’, a bodily-based, pre-conscious, and primitive perception that puts me on a par or unifies me with my surroundings. From here, he moves through ‘imagination’, ‘understanding’, ‘feeling’, ‘reflection’, and a reworked notion of feeling ‘as being-in-depth’, in order finally to arrive, almost one hundred pages later, at the ‘aesthetic attitude’. Presence is at the root of the relation with the aesthetic object; a kind of mystical or pre-intelligible and pre-linguistic experience of unity, ‘forming a subject-object totality’(PAE, p. 339) or a ‘communion between the object and myself’ (PAE, p. 375). Presence is only the starting point for the subsequent mental powers of imagination, understanding, and so on, which add complexity and increasing differentiation between subject and aesthetic object. Dufrenne is inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pre-reflective bodily intentionality (PAE, p. 337) and Husserl’s notion of passive synthesis (PAE, p. 348), both of which precede standard reflection in their accounts of our primary relation with the world. In other words, aesthetic experience contains a heightened pre-reflective dimension of experience. When looking at a painting, I can intentionally direct my gaze at its shapes and colours as with any other mundane object and reflect upon its formal features. But, when it comes to aesthetic experience, this mundane work of art is transformed into an aesthetic object that, in conveying an existential and affectively laden meaning, has the capacity to transform its spectator, as demonstrated with Karin’s and Sabina’s excerpts: here is an intentionality that positions both subject and object and constitutes a certain relation between the two. To name this relation, Dufrenne needs a concept that can ‘speak of its [the aesthetic object’s] reverberation within me’ (PAE, p. 376) and therefore distinguishes ‘between a reflection which separates us from, and a reflection which makes us adhere to, the object’ (PAE, p. 392): By means of adherent reflection, I submit myself to the work instead of submitting it to my jurisdiction, and I allow the work to deposit its meaning within me. I consider the object no longer as a thing which must be known through its appearance – as in critical reflection, where appearance has no value and signifies nothing on its own – but, rather, as a thing which signifies spontaneously and directly, even if I am unable to encompass its meaning: as a quasi-subject. (PAE, p. 393) In normal reflection, I am separate from the object and examine it by submitting it to my jurisdiction as a one-way form of communication in which I transfer my beliefs, opinions, and judgements onto it, as if evaluating the truthfulness of a Facebook post. In contrast, in adherent reflection, I let myself be moved and changed, not just by an appearance but by an immediate signification. Although I perceive the same content in the mundane work of art and in the aesthetic object, the effective principle, which accounts for how I am moved by the latter, is an affective stance: I am directed at the painting but what moves me is its meaning. The givenness of this meaning is not identical to that of the work’s materiality. The operation of this affective intentionality of openness, receptivity, or sensitivity is not determined by its directedness at a particular object but rather by its ability to be impressed and to contain. The move of reflection from imperious imposition to adherent receptivity has epistemic implications: ‘I restrain myself from questioning in the way that the 100Høffding et al. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.246 undergoing when Sabina adheres reflectively to the strong colours in Derain, feel that they contribute to her sense of identity, and saturate a thirst for life caused by the dark Norwegian winter. And we see it when Karin, immersed in the pink of Eliasson’s Your Atmospheric Color Atlas, has her existential brickwork reorganized and feels at ease in going through difficult emotions. To be moved by art is a complex experience that reveals the affective and aesthetic meaning(s) of a work of art, as well as important aspects of our own existential situation related to it. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for suggesting improvements to the paper. Høffding’s contribution was supported by the Independent Research Fund, Denmark (DFF-6107-00273), and the Research Council of Norway, Centres of Excellence (262762). Roald’s contribution was supported by the Independent Research Fund, Denmark (DFF-6107-00273). Vara Sánchez’s contribution was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement no. 794484. COMPETING INTERESTS The authors have no competing interests to declare. REFERENCES Alexander, Thomas. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany: State University of New York, 1987. Colombetti, Giovanna. 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