The Abstract Level of Emotionality

The article examines lyric emotion as a distinctive form of emotional experience arising in poetic creation and aesthetic reception. The topic is particularly relevant to contemporary debates about the nature of emotion, including discussions of artificial intelligence and its distinction from natural intelligence, as well as to the increasingly prominent philosophical question of whether emotions play a constitutive role in cognition or merely accompany cognitive processes. The article focuses on the specific phenomenon of “lyric emotion,” a term introduced by D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky to describe an emotional experience associated with art. Lyric emotion is experienced both by the poet in the process of composing a poem and by the reader or listener in the course of its reception. The aim of the article is to develop an account of lyric emotion as an emotion belonging to an abstract level of emotionality and to distinguish it from other forms of emotional experience. Whereas some scholars approach artistic emotion in terms of the paradox of emotional responses to fictional events (among them C. Radford, M. Weston, P. Lamarque, K.L. Walton, and N. Carroll), while others examine it through the concepts of aesthetic distance and the enjoyment of negative emotions (including E. Bullough, A. Smuts, and W. Menninghaus), the present approach treats lyric emotion neither as a weakened or merely hypothetical version of everyday emotion nor as one rendered less immediate through aesthetic distancing. Rather, it is understood as a manifestation of a fundamentally different – abstract – level of emotionality. Lyric emotions call for neither practical action nor deliberate non-action on the part of the experiencing subject; instead, they involve inward attention, understanding, and a sharing of meaning. This is why suffering expressed in a poem or represented on stage can be experienced with great intensity without giving rise to the practical responses that would normally be prompted by an actual event. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s account of lyric feeling, Joseph Brodsky’s reflections on the poet as a phenomenon of language, and an analysis of the figure of the lyric persona together make it possible to describe the transition from individual experience to experience of universal human significance. Through abstract emotions, humanity comes to know itself.

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