A New Priority for Neuroaesthetics Research: the Reifying View

Abstract Neuroscientific approaches to aesthetics have been almost uniformly disappointing. They are either shallow, unconvincing, or merely addenda to our knowledge of traditional psychology. Because the nature of the endeavor is to go beyond phenomenology, their weakness is evidenced in their tacit epistemology. They either presume some naïve realism with neural “tuning” or else a kind of parallelism where the nature of interaction is never explained. Most damningly such approaches can never explain the profundity of art. Just as a neuroscience requires a reification function, where holistic brain processes can genetically cause our perceptions, so too in neuroaesthetics we need a reification function. The benefit for art is that, as Arnheim outlined already in 1949, percept formation already explains expression and symbolism. Using examples, I will show how a neuroaesthetics has to go “all in” if it wishes to provide important insights into art.