This text was written for the European Yoga Congress in 2026 Bhāva and Rasa in Yoga Practice by Julia Schärer
Philosophy, Art, Emotion, and the Gesture of the Question
Or why I’m hoping for nothing more than preliminary insights at this year’s Zinal Congress
Reflecting philosophically on art—at least in contemporary Western aesthetics—often resembles a game of hide-and-seek more than a steady advance toward knowledge.
Every attempt to explain what works of art are, what they are not, or what exactly they do to us is soon challenged by counterexamples. Art seems to evade definition in a systematic, almost amoeba-like fashion. We cannot quite pin it down with our concepts or our words.
Yet one intuition recurs throughout these attempts. Much of what falls under the heading of art appears to have something to do with emotion. The two seem almost to belong to the same family, although it is difficult to say which depends upon the other, or which came first. Perhaps this kinship explains not only why art moves us, but also why it may offer a distinctive way of understanding emotion itself.
One thing seems remarkably constant. When we encounter works of art, we experience emotions. A painting of the sea at night revives my melancholy at the passing of summer. A pop song brings back the pain of unrequited first love.
On closer inspection, however, the relationship is anything but straightforward. Does the artwork generate emotions within us, or does it simply awaken memories of emotions we have already lived through? Do we all experience the same feeling when listening to the same song, or is every response unique? Has the artist somehow placed an emotion into the work? If so, how does the work manage to evoke it? Can emotions be poured into a medium, like paint onto a canvas? Is the song sad—or am I?
As soon as we begin asking what happens emotionally when we engage with art, we seem to enter a labyrinth of uncertainty. Experiencing art becomes, in part, an exercise in letting go: accepting that what we experience in the moment remains, to some extent, mysterious and resistant to explanation.
This ineffability of a work’s meaning or effect mirrors our difficulty in expressing the nature of our own emotions: What does it actually feel like to experience both melancholy and happiness in knowing that even the longest summer eventually comes to an end? What, exactly, does first heartbreak feel like?
Psychological terminology or neurobiological accounts of what takes place in the brain may explain certain aspects of these experiences, yet they rarely satisfy us.
Art, by contrast, often does. If I want to understand heartbreak in all its depth — because I may convince myself that this understanding could help me cope with it better — then one of the most valuable experiences can be to watch a love story such as Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name or read a poem such as Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art.
Works of art do more than evoke particular emotions; they seem to offer the clearest kind of knowledge about their subject that we can realistically hope for. It is almost as if their materials constitute a vocabulary that comes closer to the very substance from which feelings are made than scientific conceptual language ever could.
Perhaps it is precisely because both artworks and emotions are fleeting, and because both are inseparable from the presence of the moment, that each is so well suited to revealing the other. Both resist a language intent on fixing their essence once and for all. Both refuse forms of inquiry in which the observer remains detached.
The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously suggested that where we cannot speak clearly, we should remain silent. In the case of art and emotion, however, this thought seems almost to invite a reversal. It is precisely where conceptual language reaches its limits that artistic forms of showing begin. What cannot be fully articulated may nevertheless be felt and approached through poetic practice.
The outcome of such an inquiry is therefore unlikely ever to consist of definitive answers. Its conclusions retain the form of questions or guesses. Perhaps this is not a weakness but a reflection of the subject matter itself.
This is why I am travelling to Zinal this summer. Not because I expect to discover final answers about what it is that I encounter when I feel, but because I hope to sharpen my questions: questions capable of attending more carefully to the elusive material from which moods, emotions, and feelings are constituted, and questions that invite me to rethink the kinship between works of art and emotional life.
I know that lecturers and teachers often shy away from ambiguities. And it is easier to nourish an audience with certainties than to offer the provisionality of intuitions. Questions— and the language of “perhaps”—are understandably regarded as difficult terrain in conferences. Yet this topic, in all its material richness, seems to invite exactly that.
Learning to remain with such incertainty—and perhaps even to delight in it, trusting, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke suggests, that one may eventually live one’s way into the answers—is something that the practice of yoga is particularly well suited to cultivate.
Julia Schärer is the EUY-delegate of YCH (Yoga Schweiz). She teaches yoga, literature, and philosophy in Fribourg, Switzerland. Her PhD research in contemporary philosophy explored theories of art and non-conceptual content.
Further Online Readings on Art and Emotion in Contemporary Philosophy
Gregory Johnson: Theories of Emotion. Emotion, Theories of | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Hichem Naar: Art and Emotion. Art and Emotion | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Saam Trivedi: Evaluating Indian Aesthetics. Evaluating Indian Aesthetics – American Society For Aesthetics
