PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS A NATURALIST PERSPECTIVE Laura Di Summa-Knoop SUNY Oneonta ABSTRACT Can a Naturalist Definition of art replace the historical and institutional positions argued for by philosophical aesthetics? This article considers Denis Dutton’s work in evolutionary psychology and his cluster Naturalist Definition of art. I begin with an analysis of the validity of what Dutton takes to be the most important criterion: Imaginative Experience. I propose a criticism of Dutton’s set of criteria coupled with a re-evaluation of what may be implied when referring to a naturalist basis for the arts. Specifically, I argue that philosophical aesthetics, which has been criticized by Dutton as a form of cultural relativism, is instead able to address features of our interaction with the arts that have adaptive and evolutionary value. Keywords: evolutionary psychology, philosophical aesthetics, naturalist definitions of art, Denis Dutton
Gustav Fechner’s idea of doing “aesthetics from below,” and his engagement in what he then called “experimental aesthetics,” inaugurated a new strand of analysis that combines the study of the arts with scientific practices, taken as including neuroscience, studies on perception and evolutionary psychology. Published in 1876, Vorschule der Aesthetik1 was followed by a number of other movements and figures, from Rudolf Arnheim’s work on the laws of perception in Gestalt psychology2 to more recent and quite ambitious attempts toward a naturalization of the field of aesthetics. These include applications of evolutionary psychology to aesthetics (often referred to as adaptationist), explanations that look at artistic behavior as a spandrel or as a by-product of evolution and some of the solutions proposed by aesthetic psychologists, such as Jesse Prinz’s account of emotions and aesthetic appraisal.3 The idea that aesthetics, from issues of taste to the conditions required for the definition of a work as an artwork, can be approached from a “naturalist” standpoint is certainly a fascinating one. It can also be argued that a naturalist approach might outgrow a number of theories, grouped under the term Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Volume 1, Issue 2, pp. 191–208. © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2014 DOI: 10.2752/205393214X14083775794998
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“institutional” and/or “historical” that, contrary to what is advocated by the aforementioned “naturalist” approach, find their strength in complex webs of theoretical conditions necessitating, at the very least, a deep knowledge of the history of artworks and of their intentional aims, a familiarity with the “Artworld” surrounding them at a specific time and place and an extensive knowledge of competing theories, past and contemporary. The “naturalist” approach is appealing for several reasons. To begin with, the idea that culture can be treated as a natural phenomenon closely related to our evolution as a species delivers a more democratic promise to the analysis of art and one which could, in principle, free it from the burdens of erudite criticism. The goal is to isolate a unified theory of aesthetics that, thanks to the contribution of scientific disciplines and experimental research, could disentangle and explain the system of aesthetic creation and appreciation. Such a theory would set the criteria for a cluster definition of artworks (a concept to which I will return), thus silencing the debate among individual theories. Second, along the lines of Dewey’s conception of art as experience,4 naturalist studies have moved the attention toward emotions, thus putting the audience’s reactions at the forefront of aesthetic research. For the purpose of this article, I will limit my analysis to a branch of the “naturalist movement” and focus exclusively on Denis Dutton’s Naturalist Definition of Art. My goal is to gauge whether his definition of art and the insights of evolutionary psychology are sufficiently powerful to replace the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. I propose a somewhat paradoxical solution. Despite endorsing a naturalist approach, I do not believe that a naturalist definition can erase previous efforts in philosophical aesthetics. In fact, I will argue that the conceptual and critical force of such accounts might stem from their ability to conjoin what is a fundamentally cultural analysis with naturalist issues related to our evolution. Philosophical aesthetics, broadly construed, is thus both more respectful of the complexity of aesthetic experience, and more accurate than Dutton’s Naturalist Definition. In the first section I will summarize the main tenets of Dutton’s approach. In the second section I will criticize this approach and outline some of the reasons why Dutton’s Naturalist Definition of Art cannot fully substitute for previous accounts in philosophical aesthetics. The last part, more speculative in nature, will address the possibility of establishing a naturalist justification of philosophical aesthetics.
EVOLUTIONARY PROMISES The connection between our psychological makeup and art is not an invention of evolutionary psychology. Aristotle’s interest in catharsis, Hume’s ambitious pamphlet “Of the Standard of Taste”5 and Kant’s common sense are regarded 192
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by both Dutton and his critics as attempts to recognize the presence of natural and universal features characterizing the modes of aesthetic experience. What Dutton and his critics disagree on is how to assess these observations and, if accepted, on how to proceed beyond them. According to Dutton, the potential of a naturalized theory of aesthetic preference, the natural heir of the standard of taste (or as in Kant of an intersubjective universal agreement) was shattered during the second half of the twentieth century. What shattered it was a relativistic tendency where “aesthetic values were regarded as whatever culture taught was aesthetically valuable; aesthetic values and meanings were considered without residue constructed by culture, and works of art were both created and appreciated within the norms and conventions of cultures.”6 Dutton’s remarks are meant to target philosophers such as Clive Bell and R.G. Collingwood and their emphasis on formalism, George Dickie’s institutional theory and, inevitably, Arthur Danto’s distinction between a work of art and a mere thing. Dutton neither touches upon any of these theories individually nor does he engage in a consideration of their analytic faults. He instead points to recurring methodological biases. At least three elements, according to Dutton, affect the elaboration of historical and institutional theories. First, rather than investigating universal factors in aesthetics, non-naturalistic theories are confined within their own times, satisfied with prominent works and movements contemporary to them. Second, personal idiosyncrasies and the consequent predilection for works to the liking of the authors are too often the sole focus of attention. Finally, and because of the very nature of philosophical rhetoric, historical and institutional theories are guilty of embracing extreme positions, positions that concentrate exclusively on providing explanations for the most bizarre cases and tend to shy away from less eccentric but, in Dutton’s opinion, more meaningful works. In this regard, one need only think of the number of theories stemming from works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915). This form of criticism is, I believe, a bit simplistic. Yet, the problem is not, strictly speaking, that of whether or not to accept historical and institutional accounts but rather of whether or not Dutton’s naturalist perspective can replace them. In his analysis, Dutton relies on the findings of evolutionary psychology and on the belief that cultural phenomena can be explained in terms of sexual selection and genetic inheritance. In evolutionary terms we have a Pleistocene mind, a mind that is nearly identical to the mind of our ancestors 10,000 years ago. Our psychological and emotional traits are based on adaptive mechanisms that were in place in a world that hardly resembles present-day society. For instance, our Stone Age mind is still afraid of snakes, despite the fact that snakes do not comprise a threat in present-day New York City. 193
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But being afraid of snakes helped our ancestors prosper. The emotions that developed in that distant environment were essential for survival then and are still recognized, by our present brain, as positive or negative according to their adaptive value. Water, trees and a fertile meadow tend to evoke more pleasant emotions than a rocky desert, thus showing a natural inclination to what was an obvious preference for hunter-gatherers. At this point consideration of art becomes pertinent. We find artworks in the primordial stages of human evolution and it is plausible to justify the widespread presence of artworks and aesthetic practices in light of their adaptive value. There are at least two reasons for assenting to this inference. First, art ignites emotions and emotions are our best learning tool for survival. Second, the characteristics usually associated with the creation and appreciation of art are highly prized. The bright colors and adornments displayed in tribal dances can attract a future partner and the same can be argued for a vast vocabulary or poetic expressions, creativity, a sense of style, humor and a number of other abilities such as storytelling, irony and so on. These abilities and traits provided the individuals who possessed them with higher chances of finding a mate, procreating and surviving. Art is in this sense crucial in matters of sexual selection. This is not to say that Michelangelo’s David is adaptive, but that some of its features, such as a proportionate body, youth and strength are, and have been, fundamental to the Darwinian scheme of natural selection and sexual adaptation. As Dutton concludes: … it is the display elements of producing and admiring artists and their art in the first place that has grounded art in sexuality since the beginning of the human race.7
In his book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,8 Dutton takes a further step and formalizes his findings in a theory of art that aims to define what art is in naturalistic terms. Dutton presents a “cluster” definition of art, namely a definition that combines twelve recognition criteria that collectively draw the boundaries for the establishment of something as art. These criteria are: Direct Pleasure, Skills or Virtuosity, Style, Novelty and Creativity, Criticism, Representation, Special Focus, Expressive Individuality, Emotional Saturation, Intellectual Challenge, Art Traditions and Institutions and, most importantly, Imaginative Experience. It is important to note that these criteria are observable cross-culturally and that they can be found in non-aesthetic fields—we admire, for instance, the “skills” of a surgeon. Not every criterion has the same value. Imaginative Experience, as was mentioned previously, a criterion related to Kant’s disinterestedness, is more important than Criticism (the ability of a work to be presented alongside an evaluative analysis). Finally, these criteria are supposed 194
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to cooperate. For instance, Direct Pleasure, the immediate experiential pleasure triggered by the work, is enhanced by Special Focus: the bracketing of an aesthetic experience—the special setting, as a theater or a museum, in which we experience works of art as such.
AN ASSESSMENT As mentioned earlier, Dutton’s reliance on evolutionary psychology can be particularly appealing. Yet his theory has been subject to several lines of criticism. In this article I am primarily concerned with an assessment and analysis of his naturalist definition of art. However, it is worth outlining some of the objections that have been raised toward the bulk of Dutton’s theory, namely the idea of building a theory of aesthetic behaviors based on evolutionary psychology. We have, in this case, two families of objections. On the one hand, critics have questioned the accuracy of some of the tenets of evolutionary psychology and of their application to aesthetic behaviors. This criticism is not so much of philosophical as of empirical nature and depends on considerations related to the understanding of adaptive mechanisms and on an assessment of brain functions in relation to such mechanisms. On the other hand, and more closely related to the scope of this article, critics have pointed to how Dutton’s theory (and more generally theories of art based solely on naturalist criteria) can hardly encompass the nuances and complexities of the Artworld. Let me present a brief summary of both lines of criticism in the order in which I introduced them. EMPIRICAL OBJECTIONS The first line of objections questions the way in which evolutionary psychology describes the human brain and its development. As mentioned in the previous section, Dutton’s hypothesis equates the evolutionary status of the brain of our ancestors 10,000 years ago with the present state of evolution. This is motivated by the fact that evolution operates very slowly and that significant changes could not have occurred in this “relatively” short time. Yet this assumption has been questioned by other theories that instead focus on brain plasticity and on its ability to change according to environmental and cultural stimuli. There is abundant evidence, for instance, that so-called “intellectual technologies,” namely technologies that extend our cognitive functions, can sensibly alter our cognition and reasoning processes. The philosopher David Buller, in this respect, emphasizes how we are able: … to adapt to local environmental demands throughout the lifetime of an individual, and sometimes within a period of days, by forming specialized structures to deal with those demands.9 195
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In addition, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has recently developed the idea of neural recycling, according to which practices such as reading and arithmetic are based on the brain’s ability to create new uses for evolutionary older circuits.10 It follows that even though our brain is, in evolutionary terms, similar to the one of our ancestors, it is nonetheless able to create new functions. Two further objections address two of the key points of Dutton’s argument, namely his theory of landscape preferences and the connection between aesthetic behavior and sexual selection. Stephen Davies, in The Artful Species,11 points to how the open landscape offered by savannah-like environments might not have been what our ancestors would have necessarily chosen. Potable water and a greater quantity of hunting animals are certainly desirable, but being in an open valley like the savannah would not have protected our ancestors from potentially hostile strangers. Lastly, the savannah hypothesis is weakened by the fact that human civilization developed in multiple and different environments across the globe thus showing that, if anything, what matters in the link between the environment and adaptation is our ability to survive and to adapt to radically different conditions. The fact that aesthetic behaviors might lead to higher chances of procreation has also been called into question. This form of criticism questions the utilitarian value of aesthetic behaviors. Aesthetic behaviors are extremely costly in terms of time, mental abilities and skills, which makes it difficult to understand why they would be the ones to be specifically selected for adaptive purposes. There seems to be no intrinsic advantage, for instance, in the coordination we learn by playing an instrument and creating music, when the same coordination can be learned through dull exercises and repetitions. Other evolutionary psychologists, such as Steven Pinker, are aware of this difficulty and have shifted from the exclusive emphasis on utilitarian advantages to cognitive advantages resulting from imaginative abilities.12 This is a valid point, of course, and yet there is, as we will see, still much to add to the notion of imagination in relation to the arts. Immediately related to these points is the connection, emphasized by Dutton, between the recognition of beauty and sexual selection. Beauty and a proportionate body are fairly reliable health indicators and they are likely to attract potential partners. But it would be mistaken to see in beauty, a central concept in Dutton’s analysis, the sine qua non criterion for the selection of a partner. Like-mindedness, stability of character, generosity and so on are equally important factors and are likely, in the selection of a mate, to matter more than beauty alone. The same is true for other aesthetic traits such as a vast vocabulary, creativity, storytelling abilities, irony and so on. Despite being desirable, they are not necessarily conducive to survival and are perhaps less so than non-aesthetic traits such as stability, moderation and strength. A great deal more can be said in terms of an empirical criticism of adaptationist accounts. The joint combination of archeological data, evolutionary 196
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studies and cognitive research continues to provide new insights on the topic that are likely to further deepen both our questions and answers. Yet, as mentioned in my introduction, the main focus of this article is on the comparison between a naturalist definition of art, in this case Dutton’s, and the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. Let me begin by sketching what I take to be the theoretical background to my question. CONCEPTUAL OBJECTIONS Objections posed by philosophers and art critics against evolutionary approaches stem from what is perceived as the lack of a distinction between the domain of the aesthetic and that of the artistic. Aesthetic behaviors are extremely common, and despite their indisputable contribution to the variety of our cultural manifestations, only a very small fraction of these behaviors can be deemed artistic. When dealing with artworks and with the unfolding of art history, we do not rely solely on aesthetic behaviors but on a much more complex set of values that are taken to define something as a work of art than seeing it as the result of an aesthetic tendency. When aiming at the delineation of a definition of art, we must then keep in mind its peculiar nature and what has, in many ways, been celebrated as its unique status. Naturalist analyses tend to reduce the arts to a common cognitive and evolutionary denominator. Such an approach can certainly shed a light on brain mechanisms and on how we interact with the environment. But saying something about the brain is not the same as saying something about art. The reduction to a common denominator has been criticized even by scholars such as Gabrielle Starr, who are very interested in a cognitive and brain analysis of artworks and in what, from a neural standpoint, assimilates different arts. In Feeling Beauty,13 Starr denounces the methodology applied by evolutionary psychology by pointing to its inability to capture one crucial aspect of the arts, namely, variability. The variability she refers to is multifaceted and involves changes in emotional reactions as well as the social and cultural mutations that affect the production and reception of the arts. Art is related to shifting paradigms and has the ability to make us re-cognize experience. Briefly put, art seems to work with manifestations of the human mind that go beyond basic survival. To be fair, Dutton acknowledges some of the difficulties pertaining to the Artworld. For instance in his chapter “Intention, Forgery, Dada: Three Aesthetic Problems,”14 he attempts to solve a few aesthetic conundrums such as the problem of forgeries, the role of artistic intention or apparent contradictions, as in the unnerving case of Komar and Melamid’s project The Most Wanted Paintings, (1994) which aimed (among other goals) to critically highlight how features that the public considers “most wanted” can compose a painting that no critic would ever evaluate positively.15 I do find some of Dutton’s arguments to be quite 197
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plausible, but I am also under the impression that these might not be the most urgent questions. Responding to these questions is not sufficient to establish the validity of a naturalist definition and, what is more, the answers provided may not be universally applicable. After all, Dutton is the first to question the artistic status of a number of works in conceptual art, thus showing a certain reticence toward the multiplicity and variety of the artistic panorama. It is worth mentioning one last criticism, one that addresses Dutton’s choice of a cluster definition as the best candidate for a naturalist definition of art. This choice, which, importantly, has not been endorsed by a number of other authors advocating naturalist definitions of art, is also unable to satisfy the purpose of identifying something as a work of art. Berys Gaut, for example, has accused the methodology leading to cluster definitions of anti-essentialism. A work unable to be properly defined by the twelve criteria need only to introduce a new one to be considered an artwork, thus making the definition of art too vague and open-ended.16 As a response, Dutton emphasizes how, rather than adding criteria, borderline cases should be explained by establishing potential combinations among criteria.17 The solution to difficult cases does not reside, Dutton argues, in the introduction of new criteria, but in a careful analysis of how each criterion affects the others. Differently put, the solution to the problem of the definition of art requires the joint consideration of naturalist criteria and, one might add, a bit of alchemy. I am also not sympathetic to cluster theories and to what seems like an overly rigid quantification of evaluative standards. But rather than lingering on this point, I wish to now introduce my own take on the debate. As mentioned, what I find most troubling about Dutton’s Naturalist Definition is its dismissal of historical and institutional positions in philosophical aesthetics. My concern, in line with what I emphasized at the beginning of this section, is that Dutton’s arguments might end up depriving art of the kind of criticism and analysis that makes it a unique feature of our species. I will begin my criticism with an assessment of Dutton’s most important criterion, namely, Imaginative Experience. I will then introduce what I take to be some of the features of philosophical aesthetics that might be regarded as having a naturalist, if not, in certain cases, adaptive value.
IMAGINATIVE EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS Dutton defines Imaginative Experience as follows: […] objects of art essentially provide an imaginative experience for both producers and audiences. A marble carving might realistically represent an animal, but as a work of cultural art it becomes an imaginative object. […] This is what 198
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Kant meant by insisting that a work of art is a “presentation” offered up to an imagination that appreciates it irrespective of the existence of a represented object: for Kant, works of art are imaginative objects subject to disinterested contemplation. All art, in this way, happens in a make-believe world. This applies to nonimitative, abstract arts as much as to representational arts. Artistic experience takes place into the theater of imagination.
And again: […] the experience of art is notably marked by the manner in which it decouples imagination from practical concern, freeing it, as Kant instructed, from the constraints of logic and rational understanding.18
Dutton relies, in his definition, on the Kantian concept of “disinterestedness.” Dutton’s reliance on Kant is controversial and open to criticism. Furthermore, contemporary aesthetics has taken a distance from Kantian aesthetic concepts such as disinterestedness and the freeplay of the imagination. Critics and artists alike seem instead to agree on a more inclusive notion of aesthetic experience, one that, in part inspired by Dewey’s essay Art as Experience, opens aesthetic analysis to a wider set of questions and concerns. For one thing, the exclusive connection of Imaginative Experience to a make-believe world leads one to conclude that works of nonfiction, hence works that do not rely on any make-believe mechanism, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, memoirs or even nonfictional essays, are not works of art. Yet, this is not a conclusion many would be willing to accept. Even if one embraces the notion of make-believe as characterizing fictional narratives, this in itself is not enough to support Dutton’s twelfth definitional criterion. Since Aristotle, accounts of fiction have taken its pedagogical role into consideration. Fictional narratives, whether filmic, literary or other natures are often charged with strong ethical considerations: they trigger in us an evaluation of character that can lead to dispositional changes and to very practical selfgoverning policies. There is, in other words, interest. In fact, it can be argued that practical interest is proportional, in a number of cases, to aesthetic appreciation. It is my being absorbed in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca that leads to practical considerations concerning her character in the book as well as my own dispositions in real life. The unnamed protagonist obsesses over the deceased former wife of her husband, the mysterious and gorgeous Rebecca. Asking myself how I would react if I had to live in the shadow of the former (and plainly more beautiful and capable) wife of my husband is a legitimate aesthetic experience, but one informed by practical, ethical and social concerns. Lastly, a broader conception of aesthetic experience has recently allowed for promising developments in aesthetics such as everyday aesthetics. An example is the burgeoning work in the aesthetics of food. Philosophers such as Karolyn 199
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Korsmeyer, Aaron Meskin and others have led to a rediscovery of food and eating practices based not on whether food itself can be considered art—a question that is, however, not entirely dismissed—but on the aesthetic experience that is often associated with food and eating practices.19 Such activities require an in-depth reflection on the functional, social and ethical components of eating, and they simply cannot be analyzed within the framework of disinterested contemplation. Further, the exclusion of nonfiction from imaginative experience, the ethical import of fiction and the attention to everyday life and activities paid by new branches of aesthetics are only some of the reasons why a deeply Kantian criterion such as Imaginative Experience cannot capture the reality of art and aesthetic behaviors. However, fully dismissing the notion of imaginative experience might not be the best strategy either. A different but perhaps more promising approach to tackling the problem is to explore different ways in which we might want to understand the meaning and aesthetic significance of imaginative experience. The kind of reformulation of the criterion I have in mind keeps imagination as a crucial component of aesthetic experience while altering its scope in relation to both cognition and adaptive mechanisms. Alternative conceptions of imaginative experience are motivated by the difficulty of seeing any evident or immediate adaptive advantage in the kind of disinterested activity described by Kant. One solution, recently proposed by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Gianluca Consoli, is to see imaginative experience as a feature of the aesthetic mind and to concentrate on the function and the development of “aesthetic imagination” as an important evolutionary feature of our nervous system. The starting point of Consoli’s account is that aesthetic experience and the imaginative abilities allowing for it were not manifest since the beginning of our evolution. Thus the appearance of aesthetic imagination and aesthetic behavior has to be understood as co-occurring with the evolution of the mind. There are, in this sense, different stages to the development of imaginative abilities, stages that together contribute to its specific adaptive value. In Consoli’s story, imaginative experience is at once decoupled and engaged. The latter feature, engagement, follows from the impossibility of dissociating early aesthetic experiences, such as the ones related to collective, multimedia and ritualistic ceremonies, from a concrete and determined token or event.20 The beginning of imaginative experience, and with it the emergence and development of the aesthetic mind, are based on the perspective encompassed by what is known as the “acquaintance principle.” The acquaintance principle, which has been advocated by Richard Wollheim,21 highlights the necessity of firsthand perceptual experience of artworks. Despite a justified criticism of this principle when seen in relation to more recent works of art—as for instance works of conceptual art—we might be willing to grant, with Consoli, that such a principle was effective in relation to what were instead collective and ritualistic aesthetic 200
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practices often featuring intensive dancing and highly engaged physical activity. The “acquaintance” with early aesthetic phenomena is thus to be understood as deeply physical, sensorial and emotional, and by no means “free” of practical constraints. But it is precisely the high level of engagement required by ritualistic practices that opened the door to the “decoupled” side of imaginative experience. Ritualistic practices, as for instance shamanistic practices, culminated with trance states and enhanced states of consciousness and understanding. Such states are “decoupled” because, despite originating from the physical phase described above, they are able to sublimate what was purely sensorial into an imaginative activity tending toward what Consoli defines as the “epistemic goal of knowing.”22 Epistemic goals achieved through aesthetic imagination and its activation through different aesthetic experiences—from ritualistic practices to more complex examples—include mind reading (which is related to make-believe activities), meta-cognition and the ability, triggered by the repeated practice of aesthetic imagination, to read and represent our own mind. The advantage of an account such as the one presented by Consoli is that it shows the dynamism characterizing aesthetic experience, a dynamism that is propelled by the intertwined relations of cognitive, sensorial and emotional stimuli. Aesthetic imagination is both embodied and deeply cognitive; in fact, it might be seen as the quality allowing for the combination of perceptual stimuli and higher order conscious states. The reformulation of imaginative experience I presented is, as most hypotheses in the field, partly speculative. Yet it highlights features of our encounter with art that are essential to the recognition of something as art and that are also able to clarify the extent to which art had, and has, an important naturalist value for our species. Moreover, an embodied, sensorial, while simultaneously cognitive account of imaginative experience as the one described is, I believe, more in tune with the way in which art is not only experienced but also received, criticized and analyzed. My claim is that philosophical aesthetics and art criticism have enabled such a conception, more or less explicitly, and that they are, in this sense, not to be dismissed as entirely cultural and relativistic constructions. In the next section, I will further explore this intuition and provide a few reasons why philosophical aesthetics and criticism can be aligned with a naturalist analysis of the arts.
A NATURALIST TAKE ON PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS Art and aesthetic behavior neither directly increase our chances of survival nor do they play a truly significant role in sexual selection and reproduction. However, aesthetic behavior and art still claim a natural and adaptive basis in that they 201
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are highly influential on the promotion of a refined sense of community, as well as in the establishment and critique of social norms, and more generally in their contribution to the conception of human beings as social beings. Such concepts are essential to our evolution and survival and should be accounted for when looking into the possibility of a naturalist basis for the arts. Contributions in philosophical aesthetics stem, I assume, from this enlarged conception of adaptation. Philosophical aesthetics is a valuable tool to foster our development as social beings and it can, in this sense, relate and respond to evolutionary and naturalistic needs. Yet to simply refer to the benefits of artistic criticism and philosophical aesthetics in relation to the development of our social nature is not enough. Too many practices, artistic and not, contribute to such a development. If we are to postulate a naturalist vein in what has so far primarily been labeled as cultural or relativistic—if not fully idiosyncratic—we must point to what distinguishes the role of philosophical aesthetics not only among other activities, but specifically in relation to the arts. The account I will present is not exhaustive and does not aim at scientific completeness. Philosophical aesthetics is characterized by variety and by the acceptable coexistence of multiple perspectives: it cannot be reduced to another set of fixed criteria. In fact, it is specifically the ability to deal with variety and perspectivism, while at the same time recognizing a distinction between the domain of the artistic and what is instead simply aesthetic behavior that singles out the efforts of philosophical aesthetics. In the following analysis, I refrain from a defense of individual or specific positions. My aim is to look at criticism as a whole and as something that, despite being practiced by very few people, is nonetheless symptomatic of something that should be regarded as useful, if not adaptive, in the description of our encounter with art. I argue that the leading function of criticism and philosophical aesthetics so construed is to allow for the summarization, organization and conceptualization of the specific kind of aesthetic experience offered by artworks. To better understand the importance of this function, socially and adaptively, I will begin with a short digression on what I regard to be some of the crucial characteristics of art. Artworks are not just passive objects, silent in their appearance and reception. They are active objects or, as I prefer, event-like objects. This is not only true in the case of arts such as music, dance and so on, which involve, as necessary representational features, the presence of a performance, but also of works of art that we might regard as “static.” Works of art are inseparable from the perceptual and cognitive aspects that characterize their reception. Walking around a sculpture, rereading a passage in a novel, tilting our head to better focus on a detail in a painting are actions characterizing the appearance of a work of art as an eventlike object—its experience as inseparable from its being. Yet it is important to 202
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add, approaching artworks, understanding them and the aesthetic experience they provide are far from being automatic and effortless activities. Philosophical aesthetics intervenes at this point; it clarifies the import of aesthetic experience. The psychological, emotional and also interpretative and intellectual difficulty of art is not a recent phenomenon. It is a crucial component of art’s revolutionary quality, namely, its ability to make us change and shift views. Art requires effort, attention and the willingness to alter previously held conceptions. This is true on a collective and social level as well as on an individual level. Historical testimonies abound recording the poor acceptance of works of art, from the Impressionists to John Cage. Yet even more interestingly, the puzzlement of art as an event acts on an individual and subjective level, emotionally and epistemically. The evolutionary psychology narrative about the connection between aesthetic emotions and survival is, at best, partial. The literature on aesthetic emotions is burgeoning but there seems to be a growing consensus on the fact that aesthetic emotions might constitute a separate category. Jesse Prinz relies on the emotion of “wonder” as representative of aesthetic appraisal. Gabrielle Starr moves a step further and conjoins her beliefs on the variety of aesthetic experiences with the variety of emotional types evoked by art. At the center of her analysis is the fact that fMRI studies on emotional stimulation in front of art showed the significant participation of brain regions involved with selfassessment, forward planning and autobiographical memory.23 Her hypothesis regarding the nature of aesthetic emotions is thus close to what was emphasized, with Consoli, in the case of imaginative abilities, namely that there is a physical dimension but that there is also, importantly, an epistemic component capable of affecting us deeply and subjectively. Briefly, the emotions evoked by artistic experience are not simple and their emergence is only loosely related to basic survival goals. Following from these intuitions, my thesis is that philosophical aesthetics has acted as a mediating force: philosophical aesthetics has recognized, often explicitly, the complex and unique nature of aesthetic emotions, and has found, through its theories and speculations, different ways to channel and unfold them. Philosophical analysis has long recognized, before and often independently of neurocognitive analysis, that the emotions and intellectual challenges provoked by art were of a different and unique nature. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” David Hume emphasizes the features of “experts” of taste. Among such features we find, significantly, a certain “delicacy of taste” and with it the ability to recognize “fine” emotions. A distinction between simple and aesthetic emotions has also been recognized by John Dewey and Clive Bell and it is customary to find artists referring to the complexity of the emotions they meant to trigger. The very encounter with new works of art is often described in emotional terms. Leo Steinberg tells us about the complex feeling that his first encounter with the 203
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work of Jasper Johns caused him: he moved from anger, to depression, to a state of anxiety, to the realization that the work is “not translatable.”24 Criticism and philosophical aesthetics thus allow for an understanding of the aesthetic experience of art in a way akin to what Peter Kivy25 refers to as the “reflective afterlife” of a work, or what in William Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads is the very definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” This is very different from what Dutton refers to as the evaluative activity embodied by “Criticism”—the least important criterion for the definition of art. Evaluation is one of the components of the understanding of art and even if it might be argued that it is, frequently, concomitant to it, it can also be regarded as subordinate to the organizing and structuring activities that precede it—which are at the very core of philosophical analysis. True, philosophical aesthetics remains the domain of a few, select number of individuals. But their attention to the emotional and cognitive complexity of art affects the way art is understood on a collective, social and historical level. While Dutton thinks of philosophical aesthetics as a redundant addition, I argue that the contribution of philosophical aesthetics might have simplified our approach to the arts by giving a name and structure to entangled cognitive stimuli. Philosophical aesthetics has been able to filter emotional experience, to describe it and to link it to our subjective nature. This is not just a social or generally cultural improvement. Critical and philosophical writings have thus served to expose the emotional and cognitive complexity of art and to organize it in stories and narratives that allow us to see art as fundamental for our cultural history and as a tool for subjective development. Organizing, summarizing, structuring, conceptualizing and so on are necessary cognitive traits. They are even more necessary when facing something, such as art, which has the ability to generate unique sets of emotions capable of altering life-conceptions and affecting subjective awareness. This is not to say that philosophical aesthetics is always correct in its assumptions. My claim is simply that it “did it right”; it captured the “how to” of dealing with art on a social and also on a cognitive level.
CONCLUDING REMARKS Naturalist definitions rely on a scientific methodology commanding us to dissect, separate, recognize and eventually combine the different components of a work. The naturalist critic is active but not involved. He is active in recognizing what might count as “aesthetic traits.” However, such an encounter lacks a true consideration of the expectations, emotions, curiosity and eventual puzzlement or bewilderment that often characterizes artistic experience. This latter, perhaps more complex, reaction is harder to capture and describe but it is nonetheless an intrinsic feature of the way in which human beings respond to art. 204
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Centuries of philosophical aesthetics and criticism have provided ways of “regulating” artistic experience in a fashion that acknowledges the status of art as an event-like object and thus acknowledges the complexity of aesthetic experience. Providing a paradigm for understanding art is fundamental on a naturalist level because it mimics the very process in which we cognitively process artistic stimuli, from their emotional import, to the epistemic possibilities they open for individual subjects. Art and artistic experience remain subjective and the experience of the very same work is likely to change over time. And yet its assimilation as a unique experience related to our development must be recognized and certified. Philosophical aesthetics has given us multiple tools to do exactly this: it has created cultural scenarios and arguments to understand subjective, naturalist and fundamentally cognitive reactions to art. Laura Di Summa-Knoop is a Lecturer in philosophy at SUNY Oneonta, New York. She received her Ph.D. from CUNY, The Graduate Center in 2013 under the guidance of Professor Noël Carroll with a thesis on autobiographical narratives in film and literature. Her research interests include narrative theory, philosophy of film, everyday aesthetics and issues related to the cognitive analysis of art. Her work has been presented at a number of national and international conferences. She has been the managing editor of the Philosophical Forum since 2010.
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Notes 1. G.T. Fechner, Vorshule der Aesthetik (Pre-School of Aesthetics) (Leipzig, Germany: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876). 2. R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: The New Version (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1974). 3. J. Prinz, “Emotion and Aesthetic Value.” In The Aesthetic Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4. J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Penguin Group (USA), 1934). 5. D. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste.” In S.D. Ross (ed.) Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). 6. D. Dutton, “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology.” In Jerrold Levinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 7. Ibid. 8. D. Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). 9. D.J. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 136. 10. S. Dehaene, J.R. Duhamel, M. Hauser and G. Rizzolatti (eds) From Monkey Brain to Human Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 11. S. Davies, The Artful Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 205
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12. S. Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 538–40. 13. G.G. Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 14. Dutton, The Art Instinct, pp. 164–202. Komar and Melamid’s work is instead justified in terms of environmental preferences. 15. An overview of the project can be found at http://awp.diaart.org/km/intro.html (accessed August 2, 2014). 16. B. Gaut, “The Cluster Theory of Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 44: (2004): 297–300. 17. D. Dutton, “A Naturalist Definition of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64(3) (2006): 375. 18. Dutton, “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology,” pp. 58–9. 19. A. Meskin, “The Art and Aesthetics of Food.” The Philosopher’s Magazine Issue 61(2) (2003): 81–6. 20. G. Consoli, “The Emergence of the Modern Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective on Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(1) (2014): 40–44. 21. R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 233. 22. Consoli, “The Emergence of the Modern Mind,” p. 47. 23. Starr, Feeling Beauty, p. 46. 24. L. Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 52–4. 25. P. Kivy, Philosophies of Art: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
References Arnheim, R. 1974. Art and Visual Perception: The New Version. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Buller, D.J. 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Consoli, G. 2014. “The Emergence of the Modern Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective on Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(1): 37–57. Davies, S. 2012. The Artful Species. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dehaene S., Duhamel, J.R., Hauser, M. and Rizzolatti, G. (eds). 2004. From Monkey Brain to Human Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dewey, J. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Penguin Group (USA). Dutton, D. 2003. “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology.” In J. Levinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics, pp. 693–706. New York: Oxford University Press. Dutton, D. 2006. “A Naturalist Definition of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64(3): 367–77. Dutton, D. 2009. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. New York: Bloomsbury Press. 206
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Fechner, G.T. 1876. Vorshule der Aesthetik (Pre-School of Aesthetics). Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Gaut, B. 2004. “The Cluster Theory of Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 44: 297–300. Hume, D. 1994. “Of the Standard of Taste” In S.D. Ross (ed.) Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kivy, P. 1997. Philosophies of Art: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsmeyer, C. 2011. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meskin, A. 2003. “The Art and Aesthetics of Food.” The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 61(2): 81–6. Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton. Prinz, J. 2011. “Emotion and Aesthetic Value.” In The Aesthetic Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starr, G.G. 2013. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Steinberg, L. 2007. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Wollheim, R. 1980. Art and Its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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