Broader contexts

Over five chapters we have developed the thesis that art is valuable because it can offer a plenary experience of emotion, an experience in which we are able to escape emotional isolation. As such, we can conceive of the thesis as a claim about overcoming emotional isolation, as a claim about how one might experience art, and as a particular way of thinking about emotion and perception. In each case, we can locate the claim in a broader context. How does the claim about overcoming emotional isolation sit with our intuitions about other ways in which we might overcome emotional isolation, perhaps through personal relationships? (A claim concerning practical philosophy or ethics, broadly conceived.) How does the claim that our experience of art is valuable, because it involves a plenary experience of emotion, sit with theories that value the experience of art on account of its disinterested nature or hedonistic tone? (A claim to be considered in the context of historical approaches to artistic value.) How seriously is the thesis threatened if one rejects certain aspects of the psychoanalytically informed theory of an emotional economy involving psychologically real mental states and mental dispositions, their activity and passivity, and our capacities to perceive things as being suitable to project such emotions onto? (A claim about theory of mind and psychology.) It remains to investigate the implications for the thesis that we have developed when we locate it within these broader debates in practical philosophy, aesthetics and theory of mind.