Out of body. Language, emotions and art in Vygotsky's "Notebooks"

Abstract

According to the extended mind thesis, the human mind is not limited by the boundaries of the body. In this paper, we propose a description of human emotions based on two distinct theories, not usually considered together: Vygotsky’s historical-cultural psychology and Chomsky’s theory of language. Together these two perspectives allow us to construct a global theory of extended mind that considers emotions to be artificial entities that have a specific “biological” goal and are external to the body. In the last short section, this model will be applied to the case of “artistic” human affect.

Keywords

• extended mind
• language
• vygotsky
• chomsky
• human emotions