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The Cognitive Role of Beauty: How Subjective Agency Transcends Cultural Frameworks

Linguistics / 2025,7(3): 196-202 / 2025-09-02 94 43

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• Authors: Xinlei Zeng
• Information:

  MianYang Teacher’s College, Mianyang

• Keywords:
  Aesthetic Exploration; Prototype Theories; Idealized Cognitive Model; Cultural Cognitive Linguistics
• Abstract: This paper challenges the traditional paradigm that cultural frameworks restrain aesthetic production and reinterprets Auguste Rodin’s claim to the individual’s proactively subjective agency of beauty in the material world. Besides, as cognitive capacity serves as the mediator between individuals and the material world, which empowers individuals’ subjective agency to play its central cognitive roles, namely, explore, incorporate, and refine the aesthetic elements from the outside world, thereby generating aesthetic language. Furthermore, although the limiting role of cultural frameworks, such as formulating aesthetic norms, individuals can liberate themselves in building beauty. Meanwhile, the frontier of culture can extend according to the generative role of subjective agency. Hence, through analysis of aesthetic linguistic production, this paper employs a cognitive linguistic framework—drawing on construal, categorization, and conceptual blending—initially to elucidate how subjective agency in yielding aesthetic expressions, then to delineate how cultural frameworks constrain aesthetic Cognition, and ultimately to demonstrate how these three mechanisms become methodological toolkits for transcending those very constraints. Consequently, this paper’s central thesis is that subjective agency is the crucial catalyst to foster the expansion and dynamic evolution of cultural aesthetics itself, thereby bypassing and expanding cultural boundaries. Then, this paper has proved that beauty is not a pre-existing entity to be explored, but a dynamic product co-constructed by the individuals whose subjective agency is able to see, challenge, and innovate.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.35534/lin.0703020
• Cite: Zeng, X. L. (2025). The Cognitive Role of Beauty: How Subjective Agency Transcends Cultural Frameworks. Linguistics, 7(3), 196-202.