[lit-ideas] Aesthetics and Evolution/Denis Dutton RIP
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 11:45:20 +0000 (GMT)
David had written:-
>I originally sent it to just Donal but then I realized I should send it to
>everyone and now I think I shouldn't send it at all.>
It was well-sent (and since my parents told me never meet strangers except in
public places where there are witnesses, it was well-sent to the list).
Some comments (with apologies for inevitable deja lu):
1) This is a very important and interesting issue. The issue might be
characterised as to what extent art/aesthetics can be explained in terms of
'evolution' in the way we might explain the existence of an elephant or the
human eye as the products of the 'descent-with-modification' of adaptive
characteristics.
2) There almost certainly has to be something in this evolutionary approach to
understanding art and aesthetics.
As a broad summary it might be said that when the double-helix breakthrough
solved a central weakness in Darwin's theory, namely the absence of a testable
mechanism through which 'descent-with-modification' occurs, it did not take
long for some to draw to the obvious conclusion that if this newly-enhanced
Darwinian framework applied so powerfully to the every strand of the biological
world including the animal kingdom it must also be capable of applying
powerfully to the human kingdom - including the fields that study the human
mind and its products. To say there must be something in this approach is to
say it can hardly be the case that human psychology and human culture arise
without being subject to 'selection pressures' in the way that an elephant or
the human eye are subject to them and not explicable without reference to them.
3) There almost certainly has to be something incomplete in this evolutionary
approach to understanding art and aesthetics.
One way of approaching this is to examine what makes art worthwhile or valuable
and to ask what this much has to do with 'selection pressures' in the sense
that we might readily accept these explain the elephant and the human eye. On
this view, there is an important autonomy of art/aesthetics [given its values]
from evolutionary 'selection pressures' in the Darwinian sense. And this
autonomy also marks the point where such a Darwinian explanation fails to
capture what is _artistically valuable_ and instead tries to reduce what we
regard as artistically valuable to some other level of explanation. Certain
defenders of the 'autonomy' of art in this sense might even feel that trying to
explain art in Darwinian terms is a kind of category mistake - like trying to
explain relations between numbers in terms of the relations between colours.
However, even if there is an autonomy of art, this kind of defence of it by
reference to artistic values is liable to strike others as question-begging and
as an involving an 'immunising strategem' - namely, that any attempt to explain
art in terms that are not per se artistic must fail because it cannot therefore
explain what makes it art. In addition, this kind of defence is liable to
appear naive, uninformed and hostile to Darwinian 'explanation-in-principle'
without seeing the potential flexibility and sophistication of the Darwinian
model (a flexibility and sophistication it has shown repeatedly in the field of
biology).
Another way of approaching this is to start by examining the limitations of
Darwinian model in general terms (without assuming art has a different status
in evolution than the elephant or the human eye, because it has intrinsic
values or suchlike).
"He says beauty is an "adaptive effect" which is probably true although it's
not at all clear how or even why this is true."
To this we might add the question raised by (3) - it is not clear _to what
extent_ this is true. To what extent is it merely an "adaptive effect"? For
insofar as it it not merely an "adaptive effect" it can no longer be explained
as merely an "adaptive effect".
There is much else to discuss but this post seems long enough for now.
Donal
Salop
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
