"You can't be happy, while your heart is on the roam, you can't be happy until you bring it home." —The Brothers Four
"A quick smile is more seductive than a slinky dress." —Mason Cooley
Human life concerns not only, or even mainly, the present, but rather, and to a significant extent, the realm of imagined possibilities. The fundamental human capacity of being aware of the possible does not merely reveal reality, but also guides our activities. I implement here James Gibson’s most valuable notion of “perceptual affordances” to the romantic realm (Ben-Ze’ev, 2024).
At the basis of James Gibson’s ecological approach to (visual) perception is the claim that perceptual affordances are meaningful possible activities offered by the perceptual environment to the perceiver. In order to sustain this view, Gibson adds two characteristics that confirm the genuine nature of perceptual affordances: (a) affordances are perceived in a direct cognitive manner, and (b) affordances have a unique ontological status that is neither subjective nor objective (or both). The first characteristic maintains the authentic nature of the information constituting affordances by eliminating the presence of mediated processes, which may contaminate the information. The second characteristic maintains that the possibilities of activities exist in our environment.
Gibson (1979) proposes a direct approach to perception, in which perceivers directly encounter meaningful objects and activities. Instead of assuming preparatory deliberate processes, such as inferences or judgments, the perceiver is assumed to have a kind of sensitivity that expresses the structure of the perceptual system. Perceptual learning, which is developed through changes in the sensitivity of the system, does not need to postulate deliberate processes involving cognitive mediation (Ben-Ze’ev, 1981, 1984, 1988, 1993).
Concerning the ontological status of affordances, Gibson claims that the affordance of something does not change as the need of the observer changes: “The observer may or may not perceive or attend to........