|
The Artful Mind
Mark Turner, editor
© Mark Turner and the contributors, 2003.
Draft. Please do not quote.
Francis Steen
http://www.cogweb.net
steen@commstds.ucla.edu
Chapter by Francis Steen:
A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics
Headnote: The study of aesthetics within an
evolutionary framework has focused on the appetite for beauty as an
engine for driving adaptive behavior in habitat and mate choice. In
this chapter, I propose instead that aesthetic experience is its own
goal, in the sense that the experience implicitly provides adaptively
useful information utilized for purposes of self-construction.
Introduction
At the cognitive roots of art is a subjective
phenomology of aesthetic enjoyment. Private and intimate, or
ostentatiously public, such feelings constitute on the one hand a
centrally gratifying dimension of being alive, and on the other a
mystery, a gift without a card. To the project of reimagining and
reconstructing the full depth of human history, of situating our
current cognitive proclivities and capabilities within a renewed
narrative of human origins, the phenomenon of aesthetics presents a
crucial and delicate challenge. Current work in evolutionary theory
is animated by the seductive promise of a functional explanation for
every key human trait. Yet the variety and complexity of the
aesthetic impulse, along with its myriad expressions, may make us
conclude, very sensibly, that reality simply overflows our theories.
Nevertheless, I submit wholeheartedly to this
seduction, with the caveat that a functional analysis of aesthetic
enjoyment must be shifted into a new dimension. The field of
evolutionary aesthetics (for an overview, see Voland and Grammar
2003) has principally focused on landscape preferences as a function
of adaptations for habitat choice and the experience of human beauty
as part of mate selection. While these perspectives are not
unsupported by convincing evidence, they leave out vast tracts of
aesthetic experience – from neolithic symbolic art to what Robert
Hughes (1991) called "the shock of the new," from the
frivolous to the sublime. What evolutionary aesthetics has so far
failed to provide is a credible framework for understanding the
surprising range of aesthetics. Just as significantly, the implicit
underlying assumption that aesthetic pleasure is comparable to the
pleasures of sex and food in driving adaptive behavior (Orians and
Heerwagen 1992: 555) is clearly false: the subjective phenomenology
of aesthetic enjoyment differs qualitatively from desire. In
contrast to hunger and lust, the experience of beauty is
prototypically its own reward; unlike these, it does not find its
release, fulfilment, and satiation in possession. To the extent that
this is so, we must look for an explanation that honors beauty itself
as a resource, without seeing it as a proxy for something else.
In the following, I argue that the aesthetic
impulse and experience is an appetite for certain types of
information – in a word, that beauty is a kind of truth. I take my
cue from John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which famously
and rather fatuously proclaims that beauty is the only kind of truth
we have or need. My claim is both more modest and in some ways more
far-reaching: while beauty is certainly not the only kind of truth we
need, we appear to use it for a most intimate and crucial task, that
of constructing ourselves. Not to skimp on the complex subjective
phenomenology involved in this process, let us turn for a moment to
the poet's animated description before I elaborate.
In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the speaker
addresses the artifact as a "sylvan historian," praising
its skillful telling of a "flowery tale." Although urns, as
everyone knows, don't talk—Keats obliquely acknowledges this by
calling it "foster-child of Silence"—the object can be
used to convey a story through images. The scenes depicted on its
exterior are understood as snapshots of a fictive or historical
narrative, the details of which the onlooker may attempt to infer:
"What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?" In this
narrative, the characters portrayed have both a past and a future.
To understand the scenes as adding up to a story, the onlooker must
see them as iconic representations of entities whose existence is
independent of the urn itself, illustrations of events to be filled
in by memory and imagination. In Korzybski's words (1933),
they are no more to be confused with the events themselves than a map
with the territory.
In the second stanza, the poet immerses himself
imaginatively into the depicted scenes, pretending that the
bas-relief marble figures are in fact real human beings in a state of
permanently suspended animation, yet with a fully intact
consciousness, including perceptions, emotions, and intentions. In a
surprising attempt to console them, he informs them about the
peculiar nature of their situation, of which he assumes they are
unaware:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though
winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade,
though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she
be fair! (Keats 1820)
In this perspective, the world imaginatively
reconstructed on the basis of the artwork on the urn exists only on
the urn itself. No longer depictions of independently existing
events, the scenes are now perceived as mini-worlds of their own,
subjectively as real for its inhabitants as ours is for us. Keats
highlights what he sees as the salient feature that distinguishes it
from our world: it is uniquely characterized by the absence of time.
So implausible is this conceit that no attempt is made to explain how
a whole community and their natural environment ended up in a waking
and blissful but otherwise cryogenic state in the permanent
exhibition of the British Museum. Somehow, and we are not invited to
contemplate how, the people in the story have become trapped by their
representation, life has transformed into art.
In the third stanza, the poet argues that this
artistic and imagined world is preferable to our own. In the real
world, "breathing human passion" leaves people in pain,
either through deprivation or surfeit; in contrast, in the world on
the urn, there is "More happy love! more happy, happy love!"
By removing time, art achieves an uninterrupted and unvarying
delight. It may be countered that art objects are just as subject to
change over time as are other objects, people, and events, and that
it is only in the imagination that the depicted worlds are frozen in
time. In his description of the urn, the poet is blurring the vital
distinction between what is constructed as it were out of whole cloth
on the basis of memories, supplemented by some curiously shaped
marble, and what originates in a genuine perception of reality.
If the poet is committing a category
mistake, however, he does so knowingly and on purpose.
In order to construct and contemplate the rich possibilities of an
artistic, fictive world, it appears to be necessary to dedicate our
working memory capacities to this task, unburdened by the challenges
of reality. Retracing his steps, Keats unwinds the fancy, performs a
controlled retreat from the depicted world and resumes his address to
the urn itself in the last stanza. He praises it for its capacity to
"tease us out of thought"—the implication being that
beauty is strongly experienced as its own reward and that the mind is
inherently attracted to it, to the point that it will temporarily set
aside its own engagement with reality in favor of the aesthetic and
imaginatively enhanced worlds of art. Finally, handing the
microphone to the urn, the poet imagines that the urn itself
formulates its enduring meaning and significance to future
generations:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye
know on earth and all ye need to know. (Keats 1820)
The claim is clearly exorbitant, even if we make
allowances for the speaker's being an urn. Coming on the heels of a
sequence of imaginative projections and self-evident counterfactuals,
the artistic object's claim to referential truth is weak. If beauty
is truth, what kind of truth is it? In the following, I provide a
strong if partial defense, situating the poet's intuition of the
importance of aesthetics within a cognitive and evolutionary
framework.
Natural
aesthetics: an appetite for beauty
In order to accomplish the complex task of
constructing a functioning brain, the information contained in the
genes does not suffice. While important target values appear to be
genetically specified, the paths taken to reach them are not (Turner
1996:25). For this, the organism depends on information that is
reliably present in the environment. We can think of the genes as a
series of switches activated by an orderly progression of
environmental conditions, starting with the sheltering and nurturing
enclosure of the womb. The power of the genome to determine the
development of the organism is wholly subject to the structure of the
environment in which it finds itself. Natural selection operates on
functional outcomes; these are joint products of the complex order of
the environment and some additional genetic information. If the
environment reliably contains the information required to construct
the brain, natural selection can be expected to favor mechanisms that
effectively access this information.
In many cases, the information required is
ubiquitous. A famous series of experiments showed that cats raised in
an environment without vertical lines failed to develop the capacity
to perceive them (Stryker et al. 1978, Tieman and Hirsch 1982). In
the long course of mammalian evolutionary history, there was never an
environment that lacked vertical lines. During critical periods of
development, infant cats from snow leopards to jungle jaguars have
been able to tacitly count on the recurring presence of vertical
lines around them. Over tens of millions of years, the inability of
feline genes to provide the information necessary to build a brain
that perceives vertical lines in the temporary absence of such lines
has had no functional consequences, and has therefore not been
subject to deselection. Since the necessary information was an
inherent and ubiquitous part of the structure of their environment, a
relatively passive mechanism for accessing it would have sufficed.
In other cases, the information may be unevenly
distributed and vary in quality. Here natural selection can be
predicted to favor mechanisms that detect relevant quality
differences and exhibit an active preference for features of the
environment that present high-quality information. The information
will in effect constitute a scarce resource to be monitored and
sought out. When found, it can be absorbed and utilized by the brain
to pattern a targeted function. The active case is what concerns us
here, as this is where I propose to ground aesthetics.
Consider the recurring necessity of calibrating
the embodied brain's perceptual systems. These are highly complex
and sophisticated mechanisms, implemented in organic systems under
constant change and upheaval. Some of the work of the senses is dull
and monotonous. Under these conditions, the system may rely on
certain features of the environment for recalibrating itself. It may
be important, for instance, to obtain reliable information about
baseline values as well as a rich sense of the full range of sensory
phenomena the system is designed to handle. As long as all this
information is reliably present in the natural environment, even if
it is scattered in time and space, natural selection can be predicted
not to favor potentially expensive mutations that engineer it into
the genome. In this sense, it is more like food than gravity or
vertical lines: reliably present, but requiring an active search,
discriminating capacities, and a set of preferences expressed as
appetite.
It is in this territory, then, that I propose to
locate the phenomenon of aesthetics. In general terms, the
suggestion is that our attraction to beautiful objects and events,
and our experience of aesthetic enjoyment, may coherently be
understood as the results of a biological need to locate certain
types of information in our environments, as a supplement to genetic
information, for the purpose of constructing and maintaining our own
order. More narrowly, the prototypical function of aesthetics is to
bring our senses back to life, or to an optimal state. In this
sense, it constitutes an ancient evolutionary solution to the problem
of calibrating various components of our multidimensional sensory
systems. Natural selection, according to this model, has produced a
set of adaptations designed to search the environment for certain
types of information, and to engage in activities that will make this
information salient. We can be predicted to show an active
preference for a class of features of the environment, namely those
that in evolutionary history our ancestors were able to rely on to
supply information complementing that supplied by the genome. The
aesthetic impulse would be an appetite for information that in our
distant past was recruited and relied on for optimal
self-construction, regulated by a developmental chronology.
I'm not suggesting we know we're doing this. If
aesthetics is an evolved mechanism for constructing and maintaining
complex patterns of order in the brain, it does not advertise itself
as such. We do not seek out aesthetic experiences as the result of a
conscious and deliberate intention to reach a specific goal; in fact,
the distal cause of aesthetics is cognitively impenetrable. In order
to gather the necessary structuring information, the conscious mind
does not need a conceptual model of the distal purpose and function
of aesthetics, nor does it need access to the complex internal
logical of the operation of this function, any more than it needs
access to the intricate nanotechnology of digestion. The biological
function of aesthetics is complex in principle and execution, and
there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by clogging up the
limited bandwidth and processing capacities of the conscious mind.
What is made available to consciousness is a phenomenology of
aesthetics that is experienced as an end in itself and inherently
motivating, an experience that is rich and delightful, confirming the
exquisite order of the world and indeed our place within it.
Inversely, under conditions when our senses for long periods are
deprived of an aesthetic order, we experience a palpable
dissatisfaction with the quality of our sensory environment, a
nagging and aversive sense of boredom, and a longing for change.
Is this a credible theory of aesthetics? I should
note here that my aim here is not to construct an all-encompassing
theory; as Prigogine and Stengers (1984: 1) note, reality always
overflows our descriptions of it. Aesthetics is a delicate and
subtle cognitive event, and these qualities, I suggest, reflect back
on the complex and fluid organic order that forms and sustains a
human being. The social and cultural uses of aesthetics presuppose
rather than negate a biologically grounded explanation. If it had
not existed, surely the phenomenon would have been unimaginable: all
culture can do is tap into the capacity, in endless variations.
While aesthetic preferences themselves vary, for reasons I explore
below, the presence of art in all documented cultures, past and
present, indicates that the phenomenon itself is universal (cf. Brown
1991). The purpose of an adaptationist account of aesthetics, then,
is not to reduce a complex phenomenon to a simple one, but to gain a
genuine insight into its complexity.
This is a trivializing view of aesthetics only if
we view the order of the universe as trivial. Primary aesthetic
events and objects include the vast silence of the stars at night,
the brilliant play of colors in the clouds at sunset, tumbling and
crashing waters, the complex fluid dynamics of a rushing river,
birds' song, the delicate shape and coloring of flowers and leaves, a
bare tree, the shape and movement of a healthy animal. Our evolved
aesthetics has to be a natural aesthetics, responding to an order
that is reliably present rather than to one that is manufactured.
Prototypically beautiful natural events are characterized by a
dynamic and ordered complexity, or by evidence of what we might term
a generative order (Bohm and Peat 1984). By this I mean that we
experience the complexity of beauty as a complexity that emerges in
an orderly manner through the operation of an underlying generative
process; for instance, a waterfall is continuously generated by
gravity acting on water in motion, the slowly changing pink hue of
the clouds at sunset is generated by the gradually changing
refraction of the light from the setting sun, and the delicate leaf
is produced by a patterned order of growth. The aesthetic response
appears to pick out these dynamic processes and the intrinsic delight
of aesthetics appears to stem from an appreciation of the inferred
but invisible underlying order that generates the manifest
phenomenon. The present proposal is that we unconsciously make use
of such complex natural orders in wiring the brain and calibrating
our perceptual systems, that our self-construction relies on them,
and that natural selection has constructed a motivational system that
leads us to seek them out.
As long as it is embedded in nature, a society
might not feel the need to celebrate the beauty of its environment
explicitly. In the West, it was the large-scale industrialization
and urbanization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that
spurred an interest in the importance of natural aesthetics. The
poet William Wordsworth became a primary spokesman in England for
this growing cultural movement. In "Lines written a few miles
above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a
tour. July 13, 1798," looking back on his childhood, he
contemplates the impact the sheer sensory experience of nature had on
his formation as an individual. He emphasizes that he experienced a
wide range of natural forms as enjoyable and meaningful in
themselves, a passion and an appetite that did not rely on any
conscious purpose or perceived utility. "For nature then,"
he writes,
To me was all in all. – I cannot paint What
then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the
tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their
colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling
and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought
supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. (Wordsworth
1798: 76-84)
In "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth provides
a particularly rich account of the phenomenology of the experience of
natural aesthetics. He describes the mental state involved as
distinct and characteristic, as deepening and intensifying through a
sequence of stages orchestrated by emotions, and culminating in a
suspension of the body similar to sleep, in which the mind perceives
a profound truth:
—that serene and blessed mood, In which the
affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this
corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost
suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living
soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and
the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
(Wordsworth 1798: 41-49)
Truth, in this case, is "the life of things":
a hidden and generative order that is the target of the aesthetic
faculty and that delivers a climactic and perfect satisfaction to the
appetite for beauty.
Imagination and the virtual agent
By focusing on the dynamics of natural aesthetics,
I have attempted to sketch a model of how our appetite for beauty may
have a basis in biology, as aspects of an adaptation that dates back
millions of years. This model, however, does little to account for
the truth claims made for art, understood as the objects and events
that we design and manufacture for their aesthetic effects. Natural
forms and events actually take place, and an insight into their
underlying generative order, if accurate, carries a credible claim to
an interesting kind of truth. Yet the cognitive processes that
animate Keats' "Ode on a Grecian urn" appear to be
qualitatively different from Wordsworth's sensory rhapsody, dealing
as they do with imaginary situations that we have no reason to
believe are in any exact sense historical, and centrally involving
the wholly implausible claim of a transformation of inanimate
depictions into conscious agents. Who needs a notion of falsehood if
this is truth?
To get a handle on what is going on here, let us
consider some simpler examples of the same phenomenon. The
elementary guiding principle of artistic creation is to trigger a
controlled series of sensations that awaken an aesthetic response.
This definition is less vacuous and circular than it might seem: the
detailed characteristics of our aesthetic response system are unknown
to us, and in the making of art, it can be systematically probed. At
the same time, the proposed adaptive design of the aesthetic response
engine is to detect and acquire information in the environment that
is not present in the genes or in its own structure, for the purpose
of wiring the brain. This means that through art, an individual can
not only acquire a certain type of self-knowledge about his own
aesthetic preferences, but also use the art itself to propose new
orders. These new orders can then be selectively incorporated into
his own perceptual system, in effect teaching him to perceive and
sense the world in new ways.
As long as these orders tap into the adaptive
design of our aesthetic system, they need not replicate natural
aesthetics. Adaptive design is by necessity a product of particular
if usually prolonged historical circumstances, and gets constructed
within the context of a certain environment because it solves a
present problem. Any adaptation will have a built-in slack—areas
where it may function in interesting and potentially useful ways even
though it was not designed to do so (for a discussion, see e.g.,
Sperber 1996). By proposing new perceptual orders, artists tap into
both the core and the unused fringe capacities of the aesthetic
response system to explore complex sensory orders that have no
precedent in nature.
Experiments have shown that, when provided with
the means, non-human animals are capable of formulating and carrying
out the intention of creating aesthetic objects. The lowland gorilla
Koko, whose work featured prominently in a primate art show at the
Terrain Gallery in San Francisco in December and January 1997-8, uses
broad strokes of primary colors to achieve a remarkably lively and
complex aesthetic effect.
Figure 1. A painting by Koko
I'm speaking for myself here, and leave open the
possibility that much of the distinctive effect is due to the human
scaffolding: the laying out of the canvas and the paint, the focused
encouragement, the choice of the moment of completion, and of course
the selection of canvases to exhibit. Moreover, I find it intriguing
to contemplate the difference it makes for my appreciation of the
painting to consider the mind of the creator. Are these lines clumsy
strokes that arbitrarily criss-cross and fortuitously suggest a
complex order, or are they the intended results of a delicately
sensitive mind, sharply aware of the subtle play of form and color?
In the former case, it would be misleading to call this art—or to
put it differently, the artistic act should be attributed to their
human friends and handlers rather than to the gorillas themselves. A
distinctive feature of art as communication is that at some link in
the chain must be the act of declaring something to be an aesthetic
artifact. Treating Koko's paintings as art carries with it the
necessary implication that gorillas have a sense of aesthetics.
In fact the anecdotal evidence strongly suggests
that our closest simian relatives have an independent and
self-motivated urge to create art, and that this enjoyment drives and
orders their activities towards end results that humans have no
difficulties relating to as art, even high-quality art. Desmond
Morris (1962) reported in the early 1960s that chimpanzees would get
so absorbed by their painting that they forewent food, evidently
finding the activity inherently enjoyable. When systematically given
a reward for each painting, however, their work would degenerate to a
minimal smear to obtain the reward. This suggests that the animals
have aesthetic response systems very similar to ours, that they
experience aesthetic pleasure, and that, just like us, they are
capable of targeting this aesthetic pleasure through their own
exploratory and original creations in ways that are unprecedented in
their natural history.
Koko's work is not obviously figurative, but the
paintings are given titles that suggest a subject (the one above is
titled "Bird"), based on signs exchanged with humans at the
time of painting. Representational art relies on a complex suite of
cognitive adaptations, some of which are clearly present in apes (for
a discussion, see Steen in preparation.) The gradual development of
the capacities required to make sense of images can also be observed
in infants.
I sometimes read picture books with a friend;
younger than two years, she likes to point at various items she is
familiar with and name them. The items, of course, are depictions
and not the objects themselves; they are two-dimensional, stylized,
small, and feature-poor versions of the actual things she names. In
order to utilize the affordances of the depiction of hats and balls
and to interpret the drawing as iconic, rather than as a colored blot
on a piece of paper, she must activate her personal memories of these
objects, memories that are laced with emotions and motor activity.
"Ball!", she exclaims with passion, likely the same passion
she feels for the real object. In her mind, there is a simulation of
a ball, or more conservatively a simulated response to a ball, and it
is this simulation that constitutes the act of understanding the
image. This act of making sense of an iconic depiction is very
similar to the act of pretense: it involves the reinterpretation of
perceptual input based on a counterfactual scenario, one in which
there is a hat (for a more detailed treatment, see Steen and Owens,
2001).
It may appear excessive to invoke the notion a
simulation to explain something as elementary as understanding a
picture. After all, pictures of hats and balls look like hats and
balls; why should it be any harder to understand one than the other?
The point here is that since images are not what they represent, it
is not adequate to respond to them as if they were. Understanding a
picture is not a matter of making a mistake, of momentarily confusing
pictures of hats with hats, and then realizing that you missed the
mark. At the same time, understanding a picture of a hat involves
precisely something very like this type of confusion: it requires
activating the response system that handles real hats. Only by
activating the appropriate target response system will the picture of
a hat make sense to you as a hat. In less paradoxical terms,
understanding the picture of a hat requires that your brain respond
to it as if it were a hat, but that it simultaneously track the fact
that it is just a picture. In this sense, the picture prompts a
simulated response: a response that duplicates key features of the
real experience, but lacks its real consequences.
In this view, the act of responding to an image is
an act of pretense. It requires that you set up a distinct mental
space in consciousness to handle the perceptual input of the image as
well as the output of the target response system. While the
cognitive machinery of pretense can be utilized for executive
purposes such as symbolic communication and planning, it seems likely
that the capacity to pretend first evolved to enable behavioral
simulations such as chase play and play fighting – that is to say,
to solve problems related to self-construction (Steen and Owens
2001). As such, pretense represents one of the central cognitive
innovations of the organizational mode. It is designed to solve a
particularly complex adaptive problem, that of improving performance
on a task in the absence of the normal eliciting conditions.
Pretense allows the young mammal or child to make use of affordances
in its environment to devise learning situations that are safe,
readily available, and developmentally appropriate. This amounts to
saying that natural selection acts on the organizational mode to
elaborate what might be termed an evolved pedagogy. We can thus make
sense of the developmentally and contextually calibrated boredom and
thrill of play as motivational and regulatory mechanisms designed to
optimize the kind of learning that benefited our ancestors in the
environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
In representational art, aesthetics and play join
forces. When engaging with an artistic representation, such as
Keats' Grecian urn, the mental spaces created are neither precisely
counterfactual (they not primarily contrasted with a real state of
affairs) nor hypothetical (they are not primarily formulations of a
possible state of things). Rather, they are defined in a
deliberately playful manner to optimize the conditions for
self-construction. A striking feature of this optimization is the
creation of virtual agents, which permit an intense and likely
extremely effective first-person learning.
Consider the situation when you encounter real
human beings. You know they see you, and that what you do will make
a difference. In order to act coherently, you need to track who you
are, what your goals are, along with your available resources and
possible obstacles. These elements constitute what we may term your
agent memories. When you encounter a human being in a piece of
representational art, you realize that there is no need to respond to
him or her – the person isn't there, it's just a picture. She
cannot see you, and you are not called upon to act. In this case,
what do you do?
First of all, you may lower your defenses and
enter an aesthetic frame of mind; this may play a role in the
effective implicit information gathering. Because you do not need to
respond, you may set your own agent memories aside—an act that
frees you from worrying about the real problems in your life. In
this way, the aesthetic attraction and imaginative possibilities of
the object teases you out of thought, to use Keats' expression.
Secondly, you may use your imagination to fill in the blanks, to
attempt to reconstruct a past and a future that fits the cues
provided. In doing this, you are in effect constructing a model of
the fictive agents in the representation, attributing to them a
social and biological identity, a goal, and a set of resources and
obstacles relating to reaching this goal. This act of reconstruction
creates a complete set of agent memories—wholly fictive of course,
and attributed to the individuals depicted. In the third stage, you
may swing your wand and undergo yourself a temporary transformation
into the person represented, handled either as a personal
identification or an imaginative projection. You do this by as it
were writing your own agent memories to disk and reading in the
fictive ones you constructed in stage two, thus becoming a virtual
agent. By creating a virtual agent, you are able to enter the
fictive scenario and contemplate from a first-person perspective the
full experience presented in the representation.
This virtual agent allows the pretending
individual to use fiction to access and to explore the vast space of
possible human action. Human beings are not born with operating
manuals, and the competitive nature of social and natural reality
means that there will always be a premium on new and original
strategies of action. Discovering the small subset of useful
strategies among the vast number of possible actions is a non-trivial
problem, especially in domains where the cost of an attempt is high
and the tolerance for failure low. In pretense, we can explore this
abstract and unmanifest but nevertheless real phase space of human
thought, feeling, and action in a manner that is safe and sheltered
from real consequences, and we can do so at a negligible cost. Great
representational art, in this perspective, provides a set of
affordances that allow us to open up this phase space in new and
original ways, suited to our local individual and cultural
conditions.
Conclusion
If we accept to use the term "beauty"
for whatever qualities it is that attract us to aesthetic objects and
events, we can now return to the question raised by Keats' ode: what
kind of truth is beauty? In the first approximation, this model of
natural aesthetics suggests that beauty can meaningfully be thought
of as an important type of truth. Referential truth makes a claim
about a systematic relation between an external manifest and an
internal symbolic order; in natural aesthetics, there is no symbolic
order. Instead, aesthetic truth makes an even more basic claim: that
there is a significant and systematic relation between certain orders
that are externally manifest and the internal manifest order of
certain aspects of our being. The truth of beauty, in this view, is
that particular subset of truths that we are designed to feel
inclined to seek out and enjoy as an end in themselves, and that are
relied on by the organism and by natural selection for the purpose of
constructing and maintaining our own order.
In the second approximation, the truth of beauty
encompasses the use of imaginative immersion and the creation of
virtual agents in representational art. In this case, beauty's claim
to truth is more diffuse. It is centered in the proposition that the
set of actions, thoughts, and feelings—modes of relating to the
world—that are possible but not yet manifest or realized
constitutes a genuine and important truth. It has supreme practical
value, for it is in this phase space that new strategies can be
found. Art provides us with the occasion and some of the tools to
explore this possibility space in ways that are cheap, safe, and
effective.
Both of these types of truth – the aesthetic and
the imaginative – are precarious. It is not the case, pace Keats,
that aesthetics and the imagination are the only kinds of truth we
have or the only kind we need. This matters, as they are not
infallible paths to truth. First, the processes of natural selection
that have endowed us with these admittedly very powerful modes of
acquiring truth are effective only with regard to truths that have
persisted and mattered for survival for very long periods, and even
then only to some pragmatic degree of approximation. Second,
cultural innovations in the arts rely in part on deliberately
exploiting the slack in our adaptive machinery; in these cases, the
truths we discover, if any, can be chalked up to our own account.
Third, the fact that the real work of beauty takes place in large
part below the horizon of conscious awareness, but according to
principles that can be at least in part discovered, creates a
situation where the instinctive conviction that beauty is truth lends
itself to manipulation for political and other purposes. Finally,
according to the present argument, the very design of aesthetics and
imaginative play is to explore a vast phase space of human action,
much of which has not been realized and thus cannot have been acted
on by natural selection. In brief, we are on our own. Beauty is a
profound guide to a kind of truth we might term "existential":
if it has a referent, it is the order that unites us with the cosmos.
References:
Steen
(In the final manuscript, the
references will be combined into one section at the end of the book.)
Bohm, David, and F. David Peat (1984). Science,
order, and creativity. New York: Routledge.
Brown, Donald E. 1991. Human universals.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hughes, Robert. 1991. The shock of the new.
Rev. ed. New York: Knopf.
Keats, John. 1820. "Ode
on a Grecian Urn." Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of
St. Agnes, and Other Poems.
London, UK: Taylor and Hessey. Also
available in John Keats. 1982. Complete Poems. Ed.
Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Korzybski, A. 1933.
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to
Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
New York, NY: The International
non-Aristotelian library publishing company.
Morris, Desmond. 1962. The biology of art: A
study of the picture-making behaviour of the great apes and its
relationship to human art. New York, NY: Knopf.
Orians, Gordon H. and Judith H. Heerwagen. 1992.
"Evolved responses to landscapes." In Jerome H. Barkow,
Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The adapted mind:
evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture 555-579.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984.
Order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature. Boulder,
CO: New Science Library.
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining culture: a
naturalistic approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Steen, Francis. In preparation. "A deep
history of narrative."
Steen, Francis F. and Stephanie A. Owens. 2001.
"Evolution's pedagogy: an adaptationist model of pretense and
entertainment." Journal of Cognition and Culture 1.
4:289-321.
Stryker M.P., H. Sherk,
A.G. Leventhal, H.V. Hirsch. 1978.
"Physiological consequences for the
cat's visual cortex of effectively restricting early visual
experience with oriented contours."
Journal of Neurophysiology 41. 4: 896-909.
Tieman, S.B. and H.V. Hirsch. 1982. "Exposure
to lines of only one orientation modifies dendritic morphology of
cells in the visual cortex of the cat." Journal of
Comparative Neurology 211. 4: 353-62.
Turner, Mark. 1996. The literary mind: The
origin of thought and language. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Voland, Eckart and Karl Grammer, eds. 2003.
Evolutionary aesthetics. Berlin: Springer.
Wordsworth, William. 1798. "Lines written a
few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye
during a tour, July 13, 1798." In William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. 1798. Lyrical Ballads. Bristol, UK:
Longman. Also availabe in Wordsworth, William. 1969. Lyrical
ballads, 1798. Ed. W.J.B. Owen. 2nd ed. London, UK: Oxford
University Press.
|
|