Adriana Clavel-Vázquez: "Failures of Imagination and the Values of Art"

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez, University of Oxford: "Failures of imagination and the values of art"

Abstract
Art is often taken to promote understanding by expanding our experiences, allowing a deeper access to other minds, and enlarging our empathic abilities. This experiential knowledge is at the centre of popular accounts of the ethical and cognitive values of art. For art to afford this experiential knowledge, the engagement with artworks needs to involve experiential imagination: an imaginative projection to different circumstances to recreate what it would be like. Nevertheless, exercises of experiential imagination are constrained by one’s embodiment, by one’s orientation toward the world. This paper examines the consequences of an embodied approach to imagination for the cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic values of art. The bad news is that if imaginative engagement with art is embodied, it is significantly constrained by who we are and where we have been. The worry is that one cannot simply imagine oneself inhabiting different circumstances because the way one responds to even imagined circumstances depends on one’s previous experiences. If that’s the case, it isn’t clear that experiential imagination can offer the relevant understanding at the heart of most popular accounts of the ethical and cognitive values of art. Moreover, this might be bad news for aesthetic value insofar as we often praise works for their complexity, insightfulness, sensibility, etc. The good news is that the embodied approach leaves enough room to rethink the values of art. We propose that artworks are valuable insofar as they exploit a tension between imaginability and unimaginability. Moreover, by highlighting the limits of our own imaginative capacities, the embodied approach can illuminate the role of artworks in bringing forward the need to rely on the second person perspective to gain insight into the minds and experiences of others.