Grounding Aesthetic Preference in the Bodily Conditions of Meaning Constitution Towards an Enactive Approach

a bstr act Mark Johnson’s work The Meaning of the Body presents John Dewey’s pragmatism and pragmatist aesthetics as the forerunners of the anti­ Cartesian embodied enactive approach to human experience and meaning. He rejects the Kantian noncognitive character of aesthetics and emphasizes that aesthetics is the study of the human capacity to experience the bodily conditions of meaning constitution that grows from our bodily conditions of life. Using Mark Johnson’s view as a starting­point, this paper offers the be­ ginning of an enactive approach to aesthetic preference contributing to bring­ ing human aesthetic behavior research closer to the enactive approach to human experience. Following enactive studies on bodily sense­making and embodied emotions, I identify the bodily conditions of meaning constitution in which aesthetic preference is grounded with the subject’s self­regulatory visceral embodied constitution of viable degrees of value of the environmen­ tal factors according to her bodily structure. Unlike mainstream aesthetic preference research in empirical aesthetics, I claim that the subject’s aesthetic preference constitution requires the lived experience of the bodily conditions of meaning constitution through the conscious experience of the subjectively aroused lived body. The implausibility of the mind/body dichotomy of cur­ rent aesthetic preference research is highlighted. k ey wor ds Pragmatist aesthetics, enactivism, Mark Johnson, John Dewey, embodiment, lived body, phenomenology