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Saturday, January 31, 2009
Darwinian Aesthetics?
Denis Dutton has just published The Art Instince: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. In his NYTimes review, Anthony Gottlieb says that “His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating, and I doubt whether much of it really depends on the ideas of evolutionary psychology.” That feels right to me. EP is a good way to toss out a certain range of older and extant ideas, but once that operation is over, it is short on new insights.
Here’s Dutton in dialog with science-writer John Horgan:
And here he is delivering a lecture at Google headquarters:
Dutton is a very engaging speaker. In both talks he advances a “cluster” concept of art: 12 features, some, but not necessarily all, of which will be characteristic of anything we would call “art.” Sounds like a descendant of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance.
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"In both talks he advances a “cluster” concept of art: 12 features, some, but not necessarily all, of which will be characteristic of anything we would call “art.””
From Jerry Fodor’s “Who Ate the Salted Peanuts?” (London Review of Books, 21.9.2006):
“I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’”
Sounds like a descendant of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance.
Not really.
Watched 20 mins of second clip. How is this not family resemblance? His prototypical art has 12 features/functions, less prototypical examples have fewer, some produce conflicts between categories, etc?
I don’t understand his argument’s need for EP or its need to be framed against cultural studies or social constructionist arguments or whatever he’s talking about (all criticism influenced by continental philosophy?!). And why do we have to choose between examining convergences in artistic practice across cultures and examining points of irreducible difference? I’m glad academics are doing both of these things. That said his project does sound interesting and I’ll probably take a look at his book.
I don’t understand his argument’s need for EP or its need to be framed against cultural studies or social constructionist arguments or whatever he’s talking about (all criticism influenced by continental philosophy?!).
I doesn’t need to be, but . . . .
There is a fair amount of work in Darwinian aesthetics and lit crit these days and a lot of it rants and raves against cultural relativism, etc. It’s clear that at least some of these folks got interested in EP as a way of combatting critical post-modernism and they remain wedded to that critique. As a rhetorical gesture that has the significance of assigning great importance to ideas that are not very compelling otherwise. Absent that critique some Darwinian lit crit looks like standard issue lit crit from 50 years agao.