Estetický prožitek

Aesthetic experience is one of the key concepts of modern aesthetics (from A. G. Baumgarten up to the present), and implicitly also appears in ancient and medieval aesthetics. More detailed descriptions – preceded by attempts to capture the specificity of aesthetic experience in terms such as contemplation or disinterestedness, meta-interest in perception, and others – have mostly presented a linear ‘script’, from ‘raw data’ to a synthesis of aesthetic qualities, culminating in aesthetic value. Such a conception does not correspond to the development of disciplines related to aesthetics or relevant for aesthetic investigations. Of these the present book makes particular use of cognitive neuroscience and its ‘offshoot’ neuro-aesthetics, psychology, especially ‘revitalized’ gestalt psychology, and phenomenological philosophy and aesthetics. Thus, it presents a complex process of aesthetic experience, which includes simultaneously occurring processes in modularly arranged systems of information processing (and creation), the role of attention with its three-dimensional structuring (theme, thematic field, margins) and its special modality, the so-called hunting attention, recurrent neural networks with the possibility of backward and forward processing of stimuli, simultaneous processes of bottom-up and top-down information processing (stimuli controlled ‘from below’ and higher levels of processing of representations of greater complexity ‘from above’). The process culminates, in the case of a full, consciousness-restructuring experience, in the synchronization of processes of various speeds at the main level of embodied consciousness, including the cognitive and emotional unconscious, i.e., the maximum extension of the context of mental and sensorimotor activities.