Concepts of Form are Coupled with Exciting Qualities in Language

Concepts related to form are mixed in aesthetic expressions with those related to excitement, indicating that form belongs to a mental category of less exciting things.

Thermoaesthetics
8 min readMay 5, 2022

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Fernand Léger’s “Contrast of Forms.” Photo from Wikipedia. Public domain.

“From bodies various form’d, mutative shapes.”

— Ovid, Metamorphoses

Contents

Concepts of Form
Combinations of Less Excitement
Why This is Interesting
Heat (11)
Fluidity (22)
Dynamism and Speed (32)
Disorder (22)
Brightness (8)
Upwardness (37)
Outwardness (39)
Loudness and High-Pitch (11)
Length (5)
Multiplicity (Large Numbers, 23)

Concepts of Form

Psychological relatives of the idea of form such as “making,” being a “thing,” being “built,” “building,” having “shape,” having “figure,” or being “it” are consistently coupled with exciting (emotionally arousing) perceptual and…

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Thermoaesthetics

A concept of aesthetic complexity based on universal animal preferences for mixtures of simple, more and less exciting physical and psychological opposites.