Scientists, Poets and Iconic Realities: A Cognitive Theory of Aesthetics

Cognitive scientists who study poetry and aesthetics often write with great craftmanship (e.g. Gibbs, 2017, p. 14; or Young, 2014). In her recent book, The Poem as Icon (2020), Margaret Freeman does not disappoint in this capacity. She writes: “Just as the far reaches of the visible and the invisible worlds are experienced through scientific knowledge, so are they experienced through artistic feeling. Scientists and poets are not pursuing different realities: they are pursuing them from different perspectives.” In introducing the topic, she rightly puts forward the claim that art is not beyond scientific reach. Indeed, there are increasingly publications coming forth on cognitive poetics (inter alia Brône & Vandaele, 2009; Csabi, 2018; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Stockwell, 2020; Tsur, 2008; Turner, 2006, 2014; see also the reviewed book’s bibliography). This is also the case for other areas in cognition and aesthetics such as dance (Bläsing, Puttke, & Schack, 2012; Fernandez, Evola, & Ribeiro, in preparation), music (Pearce & Rohrmeier, 2012), and art (Solso, 1994). These studies reveal the human experience of aesthetic objects and also contribute to basic science by confirming that cognitive aesthetics are an integral aspect of our cognitive system. Freeman begins the book by exploring the roles of icon, semblance, metaphor, and schema and concludes with her arguments for the poem as icon and a theory of cognitive aesthetics. Her work appeals to an interdisciplinary audience including philosophy from the classics to the phenomenologists, poets from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath, and those doing the empirical and theoretical work in this area including Raymond Gibbs, Zoltán Kövecses, Reuven Tsur, and Mark Turner to name a few. This book does not intend to provide a comprehensive overview of all of the studies in the area of cognitive poetics; it aims to build a cognitive theory of poetics and it is successful at advancing a theory of poem as icon. In the introductory section, Freeman argues that “taste, beauty, and pleasure are produced by, not constitutive of, the aesthetic faculty” (Freeman, 2020, p. 12). She situates the goal of poetic cognition as providing an explanatory methodology for poetic effects and a theoretical basis for poetic evaluation. The terminology gives her approach a more dynamic tone, such as preferring the term minding rather than mind, proffering a reading that the mind and the associated faculties, including the aesthetic faculty, are an emergent quality. This proposition is compatible with dynamic theories of cognition and with the cognitive view of embodied subjectivity that Freeman alludes to. The idea that our felt subjective bodily experiences inform our cognition on higher level cognitive tasks, such as reading poetry, is a modern theoretical position (Gibbs, 2005) although it may date back to pre-Cartesian times (pp.141–142). Poet Elizabeth Acevedo once described the power of poetry: “I think poetry is amazing because it is so easily carried in the body” (Acevedo, 2016). This resonates with Freeman’s main proposal that the very nature of the poem is to act as an icon of felt reality by “capturing the essence of the particular individuality of experienced reality” (Freeman, 2020, p. 5).