Journal of Philosophy of Emotion - Song, Yujia. 2025. "What is Expressiveness?"

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2025: Volume 7, No. 1 (Summer)

Commentary

What is Expressiveness?

Yujia Song

Salisbury University, MD

Song, Yujia . 2025. “What is Expressiveness?” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 7, no. 1: 25-33. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.summer.5.

Abstract: Marta Benenti’s book, Expressiveness: Perception and Emotions in the Experience of Expressive Objects aims to answer the question, “what does the experience of expressive inanimate objects amount to?” The task is part conceptual (i.e., what does it mean for us to have an expressive experience of an inanimate object?) and part empirical (i.e., what does this experience involve? What makes it possible?). In this review, I draw on insights from the aesthetics literature to consider Benenti’s treatment of both the conceptual and empirical questions. My discussion focuses on three issues: (a) whether core affect is sufficient for differentiating expressive qualities from other kinds of affective qualities; (b) whether our expressive experience is importantly different for different kinds of objects; and (c) whether objects can be expressive of things other than emotions.

Keywords: expression, expressiveness, emotions, aesthetics, art, perceptual experience, core affect

Marta Benenti’s book, Expressiveness: Perception and Emotions in the Experience of Expressive Objects aims to answer the question, “what does the experience of expressive inanimate objects amount to?” (2020, 3) The task is part conceptual, part empirical.[1] In order to identify an object as expressive, we must first consider the conceptual question, what does it mean for an inanimate object to be expressive? On Benenti’s phenomenological approach, this question is taken to concern not just the object itself, but its relation to the perceiving subject. The conceptual question then becomes, what does it mean for us to have an expressive experience of an inanimate object? Having identified instances of expressive experience in our life, then, we can further investigate the empirical questions: What does this experience involve? What makes it possible–how is it that we can come to experience this object as being expressive?[2]

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Since expression and expressiveness are important concepts in philosophy of emotion and aesthetics, Benenti’s project makes valuable contributions to both areas. This review continues in the same spirit of dialogue between the two areas implicit in the book itself. Just as aestheticians have much to gain from Benenti’s account, I find their perspective helpful for evaluating her account. In §2, I take up Benenti’s treatment of the conceptual question. The challenge I raise regarding the role of affect in her account is informed by discussions of aesthetic qualities and their emotional impact on the perceiver. In §3, I explore the extent to which Benenti’s account applies to different kinds of inanimate objects, drawing on insights from the aesthetics literature regarding the nature of art. In §4, I return to the notion of expressiveness itself, this time asking, of what can something be expressive? This question is motivated by the recognition of the diversity of our aesthetic experience, a core tenet of a growing movement in aesthetics called everyday aesthetics.

While Benenti seems mostly concerned with the empirical task, offering a meticulous comparison of competing approaches and a promising proposal of her own, my review will address her views on both the conceptual and empirical questions. This is not simply because I came away from the book still wondering, but what is expressiveness? Regardless of the intrinsic value of this line of inquiry, more clarification on the conceptual question is important for Benenti’s project for at least two reasons. First, a more robust answer is necessary for fixing the phenomena that the empirical questions investigate, i.e., what Benenti calls “expressive experiences.” While she does touch on the phenomenal character and content of such experiences, it falls short of specifying what exactly constitutes an “expressive experience” to allow us to confidently determine whether an experience is or is not expressive. Second, a clearer notion of expressiveness is also necessary for evaluating the adequacy of proposed answers to the empirical questions, for without it, how would we know that the processes or mechanisms outlined in a theory really explain what is happening when we are having an expressive experience (rather than some other kind of experience)?

EXPRESSIVENESS AND EMOTION

For the conceptual question, Benenti does go on to distinguish between expressiveness and expression. I find the distinction illuminating and convincing, but as I will explain below, it is the beginning, not the end, of a satisfying account of what expressiveness consists in.

One way to put the problem of expressiveness is, how is it that it makes sense for us to say, “The landscape is sad,” when we clearly know that the landscape cannot literally be sad since it is insentient? The first step Benenti takes is to separate expressiveness and expression. While expression implies felt emotion or at least the (actual or imagined) capacity to feel emotion, expressiveness only implies apparent expression–it is about how something “looks” (23) or otherwise appears to us (20).[3] To say, “the landscape is sad,” is really to say, “the landscape is sad-looking,” not that it is actually sad (14-15). This is how we can have expressiveness without expression.

This all sounds quite reasonable. But now we are faced with a further question: if expressiveness is a matter of appearing to express, what is it for an object to appear that way? There are elements in Benenti’s account that suggest an answer, but it is hard to piece together a coherent picture. Benenti divides cases of expressiveness into three kinds: (a) those that exhibit “manifest resemblance” (102) to human expressions of emotion (exemplified by “the weeping willow”), (b) those that share similar dynamic structures (118) as emotion expressions (“the musical gesture”), and (c) those that occupy the same locations in the “dimensional space” of the subject’s “core affect” (160) (“the minor chord”). Benenti’s treatment of (a) and (b) preserves and refines the central idea in Stephen Davies’s and Peter Kivy’s theories, namely, we experience expressiveness in virtue of some sort of resemblance between the object and expression (100). Her discussion of (c) is meant to remedy a major flaw she

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sees in the resemblance approach: it fails to account for cases where no relevant resemblance exists, manifest or implicit. The notion of core affect allows Benenti to still get at expressiveness while bypassing the requirement of resemblance.

Or does it? Let’s take a closer look at the mechanism of core affect. Citing James Russell, Benenti writes that core affect is a basic, “neurophysiological” structure underlying our affective states like emotions and feelings (157-58). It varies along two dimensions: pleasure/displeasure and activation/deactivation (158). Most importantly, it mediates between what we perceive and how we feel: we can perceive an object as potentially altering our core affect along either of the two dimensions, which in turn enables us to ascribe affective qualities to the object (158-59). Also importantly for Benenti, this perception of affective qualities can occur without actual change in core affect itself (159). This way, her theory can avoid collapsing back into arousalism. Resemblance falls out of the picture for expressiveness. Instead, “certain properties of the world are experienced as expressive as long as they are recognised as being capable of modifying one’s core affect” (160).[4]

Given that we certainly respond affectively to things in our environment, I have no doubt that some mechanism exists in us that links what is “internal” to what is “external” to us.[5] I also do not doubt that our affective responses are tied to our assessment of the potential impact of these external “stimuli” on our wellbeing (160, 169).[6] So I will set aside issues with the theory of core affect. My concern is rather that core affect alone does not get us to expressiveness. More specifically, the affective qualities we attribute to an object may or may not be expressive qualities. Let me explain. According to Benenti, the reason why we can find a simple feature like the minor chord expressive is that “certain low-level perceptual features share with core affect a dimensional space, which is plausibly structured along the dimensions of dynamism and value, mirroring the dimensions of arousal and pleasantness” (164). What does it mean for the perceptual features of the object to “share the same dimensional space” of one’s core affect? Suppose I find caterpillars disgusting–and disgusting because of the way they look–regardless of whether I actually feel disgusted by one in a particular case. It seems we would not then say the caterpillar is expressive of “disgustingness” (and certainly not of “disgust”). Yet, I can very well say that the caterpillar as it looks to me is capable of altering my core affect along the dimensions of arousal and pleasantness–potentially a high degree of unpleasantness and arousal. It must be noted that Benenti herself distinguishes between expressive properties and what she calls “arousal properties such as being sexy, disgusting, or appealing” (127).[7] Benenti would probably agree with me that a change in core affect can mean quite different things: it could be merely a reaction to what we perceive, or a reception of what appears to be expressed in the object.[8] Only the latter justifies attribution of expressive qualities. Therefore, expressiveness cannot be identified with a disposition of perceptual features to alter our core affect, or else a kind of arousalism creeps back in.

It may be objected that the example of the disgusting caterpillar does not work as I intended, for what disgusts me is a complex whole of colors, shapes, and perhaps even properties I attribute to the caterpillar from my memory and imagination. But Benenti’s account based on core affect only applies to simple, “low-level” perceptual properties like colors and sounds. My perception of the caterpillar involves much more than the core affect, compared to my perception of the minor chord. As Benenti suggests, the mechanism of core affect “fixes the lower limit for enhanced, more fine-grained expressive experiences” facilitated by high-level cognitive processes such as the application of emotion concepts (169). Given the two dimensions of core affect, simple features can only be perceived to carry a “vague affective load” in terms of some positive or negative degrees of valence and arousal (166). Expressiveness of such features lies in this “vague affective load.” By contrast, my feeling of disgust at the sight of the caterpillar is much more “fine-grained” than a negative appraisal of pleasantness and a positive one of arousal, and so I would not be able to ascribe expressiveness to the caterpillar in the same way. I can grant this asymmetry in my perceptual experiences of both objects, but the asymmetry also gives rise to a question: why think that the affective qualities we ascribe to simple features are expressive

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qualities in the first place? If the answer is that they are expressive in virtue of the capacity of the features to alter the core affect, then we are back to the same problem: how does the core affect framework help us distinguish between expressive and arousal properties?

EXPRESSIVE OBJECTS

Benenti’s theory of expressiveness is supposed to apply across a variety of objects, including art, artifacts, and natural objects, but I wonder if there are important differences among these different kinds of objects. Is a sad landscape painting sad in the same way as a sad landscape? (What is a sad landscape anyway?) As Benenti draws heavily on the literature on artistic expression -- and musical expression in particular–and relies mostly on examples from art, I find myself wondering about other sorts of objects: What makes an outfit “cheerful” (7)? Is it like the weeping willow or the musical gesture? What about a “desolate landscape” (71)? Do I find the marsh in winter desolate because it makes me feel sad and lonely or because it just looks sad and lonely -- and if the latter, how so? As I try to look for more non-art expressive objects, I also realize how difficult it is to come up with good examples. This is not so much a criticism of Benenti’s account as a friendly suggestion–it’d have helped strengthen and clarify her position if there was more attention to cases outside of art.

As for the cases she does consider, I find it interesting to explore how the expressive experience of art may be different from that of other kinds of objects. Even if we set aside the issue of creation and connection to human expression, art is a particularly fascinating case of expressiveness because to know what a work of art expresses or is expressive of goes beyond taking in the “perceptual features” of the object. Guernica depicts a scene of violence, but the work does not express a thirst for gore. Experiencing a painting as art can make a difference to what we experience, including its expressive qualities, even though nothing has changed in the object. Benenti’s account offers valuable resources for accounting for such phenomena. As she rightly points out, expressive experience involves a kind of “experiencing-as,” which is key to explaining how affective qualities can enter into our perceptual experience. This point applies equally to art, and experiencing an object as art brings an additional layer of complexity to our perceptual experience.[9] Here we find an important sense in which the expressiveness of natural objects may come prior to that of a work of art, for in order to “decode” what the work appears to communicate (whether or not it matches what the artists intends to express), say, in a landscape painting, we must first respond to what is perceptually given, i.e., the landscape depicted in the painting. Similar to the audience’s interpretation of the work, the artist’s expression through the painting is predicated on the fact that we have emotional responses to landscapes.[10]

On Alva Noë’s (2015) view, this dependence relation is central to what art is: it brings to our awareness facts about us that we take for granted. Art for Noë is thus a “second-order practice” that “puts on display” (and so also plays with, reflects on, or subverts) “first-order activities” that we go through unself-consciously as part of our day-to-day life such as looking, talking, and moving our bodies. In the case of a landscape painting, we can call our natural emotional response to the landscape a “first-order activity,” a basic element of our everyday interactions with our environment, so basic that we do not usually take notice when it occurs. The artwork, the landscape painting, is a “second-order practice” that predicates on this fact about us. Benenti makes a similar point in terms of the “objective” and “subjective” aspects of expressive experience: “The ‘objective’ side of expressive experience is relevantly attested by the way in which properties are manipulated by artists and experts: creative expertise can be taken to consist… in the ability to employ materials characterised by certain perceptual properties to convey expressive outcomes. Designers know (or should know) how to make a place look welcoming or alienating, composers know how to make a music sound threatening, painters know how to juxtapose colours so as to make a painting look mournful” (118). I wonder, however, what Benenti would say about a painting that looks mournful. Is the painting as art mournful if its content is depicted as such? For Noë,

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the expressiveness of the painting depends on, but is not determined by, that of the scene in the painting, for the artist can use the expressive quality of the scene for her own expressive purposes.

I raise the question not as a challenge, but to probe into the complexity of actual expressive experiences given the distinct ways in which we experience different kinds of objects. Take Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon as an example. This is what Derek Matravers (2014, 64) says about it: “What does the painting express? The awe and terror of something too vast for us to comprehend, yet which can comfort us as we cannot, now, be destroyed by it.” Now the color blocks Rothko painted certainly evoke (or provoke?) such feelings just as the night sky does something similar to us. The question is, is the painting expressive of these feelings? Perhaps Rothko himself wanted to express these feelings of his own through the painting.[11] But it seems to me that what makes this painting (and others by him) striking and artistically significant is the powerful effect it has on the viewer. Whatever Rothko himself feels, the painting is an occasion for the viewer’s (expression of?) feelings. So if the painting expresses something, it probably expresses a concept (the sublime), to which the viewer responds by simultaneous, conflicting feelings of awe, terror, and comfort. Or we might say that it expresses the (amazing) fact that we are creatures who are caught in such (external and internal) conditions that we can simultaneously experience sheer terror and security despite that terror. (But even if we separate the expressiveness of the artwork and that of its content, we can ask a further question, What are the color blocks expressive of? Do they provoke reactive feelings such as awe, terror, and comfort in us, or are they expressive of these feelings?)

EXPRESSIVENESS AND EMOTION, AGAIN

The painting raises yet another question about expressive objects: of what is the object expressive? Benenti’s work focuses on emotions, which makes sense since a lot of our expressive experiences do seem to fall under this category. I say “this category” because emotions do not exhaust what an object can be expressive of. Benenti herself acknowledges that we find objects to be expressive of “emotions, intentions, and even concepts” (1). Besides these, objects can also be expressive of things like beliefs, perspectives, values, attitudes, qualities, functions, states, and so on.[12] Certainly a lot of these categories have affective components, but not all do. What I wear, for example, can be expressive of (which may or may not be an expression of) taste, lifestyle, personality, goals, femininity or masculinity, wealth or poverty, and so on. When we say that expression is an external manifestation of an internal state, the emphasis on the external-internal contrast obscures a more fundamental contrast essential to the nature of expression, one between what is manifest and what is not. Expression is often making manifest an affective state (which, by the way, is itself one kind of psychological or internal state), but it is fundamentally making perceptually accessible that which is otherwise.

Now if it’s true that expressiveness does range over affective as well as non-affective states (including non-psychological states), then a theory that focuses on the former is not yet a general “theory of expressiveness” unless a case has been made that this theory applies to the latter sort of cases as well. I am skeptical that such a case can be made given Benenti’s proposal, according to which we can perceive emotions in objects either because we perceive some sort of resemblance to human expressions of emotions or because certain perceptual features of the object “occupy the same dimensional space in our core affect.” Both prongs of the solution rely on establishing connections between perception and affect–unsurprisingly, since the problem (of expressiveness) is already framed in terms of emotion.

But perhaps Benenti’s project is really about expressiveness of emotions or affective states rather than expressiveness in general. Indeed, chapter 1 begins with many examples of expressive qualities that indicate affective states: “We may contemplate a sad landscape, choose a colour because it is lively, a certain outfit because it is cheerful, find a sunset melancholy, and a piece of music joyful. Our descriptions make use of adjectives that

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belong to the semantic field of psychological and especially affective states, such as happy, cheerful, gay, lively, agitated, nervous, sad, melancholy, mournful, quiet, serene, peaceful, etc.” (7). Benenti refers again to this “linguistic evidence” in 1.4 in characterizing expressive experience as “two-faced”: while it seems like perceptual experience, it also has an “affective component” (21).[13] Although linguistic usage does not settle what expressive qualities or experiences are, Benenti’s account certainly helps us better understand a good deal of what we can all agree qualifies as expressive experience.

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Notes

[1] Derek Matravers distinguishes between these two questions of expressiveness in Matravers (2007, 2014, 2020).

[2] The empirical questions can be further divided into descriptive and explanatory ones, for Benenti aims to account for both what the experience is like and why we experience certain objects this way.

[3] “Apparent expression” is Jenefer Robinson’s (2007) term for characterizing expressiveness. Since Benenti agrees with Robinson that expressiveness is a matter of appearance, I suppose it fits Benenti’s view as well.

[4] I am leaving aside Benenti’s discussion of the role of emotion concepts in recognitional expressive experience as it does not affect my argument here.

[5] Benenti takes Russell’s theory of core affect as affirming that “a fundamental connection exists between what happens ‘inside’ as a feeling and what is recognised ‘outside’ as a property of the world (159).”

[6] This point is widely recognized in the philosophical literature on emotion. John Dewey (2005) also gestures at it in his own theory of expression. He argues that art is not the only kind of expressive object for we imbue all kinds of objects with significance as a result of our interactions with them. Natural objects can become expressive “because when they are matter of an experience they, too, have undergone a change similar to that which the painter or poet effects in converting the immediate scene into the matter of an act that expresses the value of what is seen” (80).

[7] I wonder whether cases like the “threatening” Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner are indeed expressive as Benenti claims (35).

[8] Kivy (1990) makes the same point when he insists that “we must keep apart the claim that music is expressive (of anger, fear, and the like) and the claim that music is arousing in the sense of moving” (153). Arousalism is wrong not only because we can perceive expressiveness without arousal, but, as Benenti (2020, 35) also recognizes, because identifying emotions in music is conceptually distinct from being emotionally affected by music.

[9] Benenti’s theory makes room for “conceptual intervention” such that background knowledge about the object can enhance one’s expressive experience (161). Experiencing-as-art would be a kind of conceptual intervention.

[10] Although the artist may fail to communicate to the audience what she intends to express, it is still true that she relies on the audience’s capability to “read” the landscape depicted in the painting in order to express her artistic vision.

[11] Matravers (2014) quotes art critic David Sylvester, “’Often, towards nightfall’, Rothko once said to me, ‘there is a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration–all of these at once. I would like my painting to have the quality of such moments” (54).

[12] Robinson’s (2007) discussion of expression in art focuses on the artist’s task as expressing her “point of view.” Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson (2012) write of objects such as buildings as being expressive of their function. Yuriko Saito (2017), following John Hospers and Allen Carlson, looks at the “life values” that objects

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can express -- for the environmentally conscious, wind farms “express values such as stewardship, appropriateness, progress, safety, and cleanliness (105) while green lawn expresses “monotony, conformity, lifelessness, and sterility” (143).

[13] It seems that not all of Benenti’s examples fall into the “affective” category (though they probably still fall into the “psychological” category). The “threatening” Ride of the Valkyries (35) and the “inhuman” white color (161) are such examples.

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References

Benenti, Marta. 2020. Expressiveness. Perception and Emotions in the Experience of Expressive Objects. Berlin, GER/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Publishing Group.
Kivy, Peter. 1990. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Matravers, Derek. 2007. "Musical expressiveness." Philosophy Compass 2, no. 3: 373-379.
______. 2014. Introducing Philosophy of Art: In Eight Case Studies. London: Routledge.
______. 2020. Peter Kivy, “The Corded Shell” (1980) MPSG Retrospective Review, no. 4.
Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang.
Parsons, Glenn, and Allen Carlson. 2008. Functional Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robinson, Jenefer. 2007. "Expression and Expressiveness in Art." Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 4, no. 2.
Saito, Yuriko. 2017. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Author email: ysong147[at]gmail[dot]com

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