Schlagworte
Zitationsvorschlag
Abstract
This essay examines the contemporary resurgence of emotivist approaches to aesthetics through the lens of Paolo D’Angelo’s critical engagement with Benedetto Croce’s philosophy. Starting from Croce’s rejection of psychological and empathy-based aesthetics in favor of the cognitive character of intuition, the essay reconstructs a genealogy linking historical aestheticism to present-day forms of what could be called ‘neuroaestheticism’. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism cultivated an elitist devotion to artifice and sensibility, contemporary neuroaesthetics seeks a universal neurological basis for aesthetic experience through concepts such as empathy, mirror neurons, and embodied simulation. The article argues, however, that this naturalizing tendency risks reducing aesthetic experience to emotional immediacy and thus reproducing, in a new form, the same empty aestheticization it claims to overcome. Through discussions of Furio Jesi’s reflections on the “knowability of the festival”, Croce’s critique of Angelo Conti, and contemporary debates on embodied simulation, the essay highlights the dangers of confusing artistic fiction with reality and of equating mere emotional activation with genuine aesthetic understanding. D’Angelo’s critique of the “tyranny of emotions” is presented as a defense of the reflective and mediated character of aesthetic experience, against both sensationalist communication and the growing collapse of distinctions between reality and representation in contemporary culture. Ultimately, the essay argues that aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to neurophysiological mechanisms alone, since its cognitive, cultural, and social dimensions depend upon forms of shared judgment and “common sense” that exceed mere emotional contagion.