Institute for Culture and Society (Universidad de Navarre / University of Navarre)
March 7, 2024, 10 a.m. UTC // March 7, 2024, 10 a.m. in UTC
How does experience change when we feel good or bad? Is something added to experience—a special quality, a representation of value, or some kind of information? In Enjoyment as the Enrichment of Experience (2023), I argue that affect is an enrichment or deterioration of experience as a whole, rather than a special ingredient added to experience. This view derives from pragmatism and process philosophy, but it overlaps with certain enactive perspectives, especially Giovanna Colombetti’s The Feeling Body (2013), and Enara García’s “enactive-simondonian approach” (2023). In this talk I focus on explaining the central thesis of harmonic enrichment. A premise shared by pragmatism, ecological psychology, and enactivism is that experience is a thoroughly interactive, relationally determined process. Given that the relational context of experience is constantly evolving, the thesis states that changes of this relational context result in changes of a harmonic property—which I call harmonic intensity—that constitutes the affective tone of experience. What is the basis for this claim? How do we evaluate it? The first step is to pay careful attention to the harmonic character of effects achieved by interacting qualities in experience—for instance, the way in which color opposites like purple and yellow are intensified when joined together. Once brought to our attention in the interaction of qualities, harmonic enrichment and intensity can be considered as properties of relational determination in general. Even so, we cannot directly verify that the relational determination of experience has this harmonic character. To evaluate this thesis, we have to draw out its implications for understanding the relationship between affect and other aspects of experience (e.g., cognition), as I indicate in the last section of my talk.
