Emotions: From Jackson Pollock to Contemporary Science

摘要

The difference between emotions and objectivity is that emotions, by definition, are associated with an individual viewpoint, whereas an objective position is impersonal. Also, emotions are always intentional, i.e., are directed toward an object (1).Some philosophers contrasted emotions with rationality, whereas others attempted to integrate the two. David Hume in the 18th century said that “reason is, and ought to be, a slave of passions,” and Friedrich Nietzsche suggested a degree of complementarity between reason and emotions (2). Although it is accepted that emotions play an essential role in individual artistic expression, conventional wisdom all but rejects them from the scientific domain, maintaining that science relies exclusively on objectivity and rationality. I try to show below that such a claim is untenable.Before turning to science, let's consider entirely subjective creativity by looking at the story of Jackson Pollock, an artist who played a key role in Abstract Expressionism, an art movement in the 1940s and 1950s that established American leadership of the art world after the Second World War (3, 4).Pollock's early works contained figurative elements and referred to Native American culture. He was …