How can a landscape be melancholic? A phenomenological account of objectual expressivity

This paper addresses the topic of the expressive qualities of inanimate objects. More specifically, it examines how qualities referring to psychological states, such as cheerfulness, melancholy, liveliness, and sadness, can be attributed to non-sentient things. After presenting some of the main theoretical approaches to this issue in contemporary debates—including projective, arousal, persona, and contour theories—I argue that these approaches struggle to explain how the same expressive qualities can be ascribed to diverse things, such as an atmosphere, a piece of music, a personal feeling, or a bodily expression. As a way out of this issue, I focus on the irreducibility of expressive qualities to other kinds of qualities, presenting them as global qualities of gestalts. Although grounded in things themselves, expressive qualities cannot be reduced to primary (measurable) or secondary (sensory) qualities (Locke, 1690). This allows expressive qualities to be shared by diverse entities, such as landscapes, pieces of music, and psychological states.