Art Over Biology

Art Over Biology
Adam Kirsch
The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/104870/charles-darwin-evolution-art-kirsch


For the artist to deny any connection with the enterprise of life, then, is to assert his freedom from this universal imperative; to reclaim negatively the autonomy that evolution seems to deny to human beings. It is only because we can freely choose our own ends that we can decide not to live for life, but for some other value that we posit

The exhilarating assault on bourgeois values that was modernism, in all the arts and in politics too, rested on the assumption, nurtured through the nineteenth century, that there was nothing enviable about what T.S. Eliot bitterly derided as the cycle of “birth, copulation and death.” Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today,July 22, 2012 9:20 AM  is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own

Denis Dutton’s much-discussed book The Art Instinct, which appeared in 2009: For Dutton, the exposure of the Darwinian origins of art was meant to build a case against the excesses of postmodernism. If human aesthetic preferences—for representation in visual art, tonality in music, and narrative in literature—are the product of hundreds of generations of evolutionary selection, then it follows that art which rejects those preferences is doomed to irrelevance

As Dutton put it: “The universality of art and artistic behaviors, their spontaneous appearance everywhere across the globe ... and the fact that in most cases they can be easily recognized as artistic across cultures suggest that they derive from a natural, innate source: a universal human psychology

Stephen Jay Gould suggested that art was not an evolutionary adaptation but what he called a “spandrel”—that is, a showy but accidental by-product of other adaptations that were truly functional

Boyd begins with the premise that human beings are pattern-seeking animals: both our physical perceptions and our social interactions are determined by our brain’s innate need to find and to make coherent patterns. Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding

human art refines our performance in our key perceptual and cognitive modes, in sight (the visual arts), sound (music), and social cognition (story

The problem, for Boyd as for Richards before him, is that there is not the slightest plausibility to the claim that art renders us more “organized” or more “fit,” and there is considerable evidence to the contrary

As Kant famously taught, the very definition of the aesthetic is that it is disinterested, that it has meanings but not utilities, that it suspends our involvement with practical and goal-oriented life, that it puts life at a distance so that we can judge it and escape it and even reject it.

Shakespeare had three children, one surviving grandchild, and no great-grandchildren: he singularly failed to perpetuate his genes. Yet he is regarded as one of the most successful, the most worthwhile, the most consequential men to have ever lived, because his spiritual children have thrived beyond measurement

Pagel argues that “culture became our species’ strategy for survival, a biological strategy, not just some bit of fun and amusement on the side.” This argument involves the vexed question of “group selection”—that is, the problem of whether evolution can select for traits that benefit a group while being detrimental to an individual

Pagel argues that so-called “cooperative altruism” can succeed if each of its participants and recipients share a gene for it. In this way, my death allows copies of my altruism gene to go on living in my neighbors’ bodies

the use of the arts is indirect: they promote group cohesion, and the survival of the group in turn promotes the survival of the gene

But what cannot at all be explained in this way is any art that works to separate the individual from the group—which is to say, most art, and certainly most modern art

much of the greatest modern art proclaims the value of the individual in direct opposition to the group, ruthlessly interrogating tribe, nation, class, and family sentiment

Kandel recognizes that between our genes and, say, our enjoyment of a painting there intervene two levels of experience that cannot be paraphrased away in Darwinian language. The first is intellectual: what we see in a painting is determined by our knowledge of art history and artistic convention. The second is neurological: what we see in a painting is determined by the way different parts of our brains respond to visual stimuli

Perception, Kandel shows, is not a matter of the brain passively receiving information about the outside world. It is, instead, a highly active process, dependent on the particular capacities our brains have evolved. This is not a new idea—Kant, again, explained how our knowledge of phenomena is inevitably structured by the categories of our understanding—but new advances in technology make it possible to locate the brain’s capacities with amazing precision

neurological analysis of our experience of art tells us as little about the meaning of that experience

Today’s Darwinists treat the aesthetic as if it were a collection of preferences and practices, each of which can be explained as an adaptation. But the preferences and the practices are secondary, made possible only by the fact that the aesthetic itself is a distinct dimension of human experience—not the by-product of something more fundamental, but itself fundamental.

George Santayana - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Science provides explanations of natural phenomena, but poetry and religion are festive celebrations of human life born of consciousness

philosophers have to take off the bandages of epistemology and metaphysics altogether, accept the finite and fallible status of their knowledge claims, and get on with confessing their belief in the things that make life worth living

Drawing attention to what is given in an instant of awareness (the smallest conceivable moment of consciousness), he maintains that any knowledge or recognition found in such an instant would have to be characterized by a concept (or “essence” to use Santayana's term). Concepts cannot be limited to particular instances; rather the particular object is seen as an instance of the concept (essence). Thus, pursuing doubt to its ultimate end, one is confined by the “solipsism of the present moment.” That is, in a single instant of awareness there can be no knowledge or belief, since both require concepts not bounded by a moment of awareness

Philosophy must begin in medias res (in the middle of things), in action itself, where there is an instinctive and arational belief in the natural world: “animal faith"

Ours is a long-standing primitive credulity, and our most basic beliefs are those of an animal creed: “that there is a world, that there is a future, that things sought can be found, and things seen can be eaten

there are certain inevitable beliefs; they are inescapable given nature and our individual physical history. And like Wittgenstein, he maintains that these beliefs are various and variable. They are determined by the interplay between environment and psyche, i.e., between our natural conditions and the inherited, physical “organisation of the animal” (the psyche).

The environment determines the occasions on which intuitions arise, the psyche — the inherited organisation of the animal — determines their form, and ancient conditions of life on Earth no doubt determined which psyches should arise and prosper

the origins of all events in the world are arbitrary, temporal, and contingent. Matter (by whatever name it is called) is the principle of existence

Matter is the non-discursive, natural foundation for all that is. In itself, it is neither good nor evil but may be perceived as such when viewed from the vested interest of animal life. Latent animal interests convert matter's non-discernible, neutral face to a smile or frown. But “moral values cannot preside over nature"

An essence is a universal, an object of thought, not a material force. However, consciousness of an essence is generated by the interaction of a psyche and the material environment

Santayana uses the term “spirit” to mean consciousness or awareness

Awareness evolved through the natural development of the physical world, and he demurs to scientific accounts for explanations of that development. Almost poetically, he sees spirit as emerging in moments of harmony between the psyche and the environment. Such harmony is temporary, and the disorganized natural forces permit spirit to arise “only spasmodically, to suffer and to fail

Accepting the world's insecure equilibrium enables one to celebrate the birth of spirit. Reasoning, particularly reasoning associated with action, is a signal of the nascent activities of the psyche working to harmonize its actions with the environment, and if successful, reason permits individual and social organization to prosper while spirit leads to the delight of imagination and artistry

His view of consciousness is more celebrational, as opposed to being a burden or eliciting action. Spirit is “precisely the voice of order in nature

explanations of human life, including reason and spirit, lie within the sciences. The nature of truth simply is correspondence with what is, but since humans, nor any other conscious being, are able to see beyond the determinant limits of their nature and environment, pragmatism becomes the test of truth rather than correspondence

Pragmatism is rooted in animal life, the need to know the world in a way that fosters successful action

Most commentators classify Santayana as an extreme moral relativist who maintains that all individual moral perspectives have equal standing and are based on the heritable traits and environmental circumstances of individuals. This naturalistic approach applies to all living organisms

The moral terrain of animals, viewed from a neutral perspective, places all animal interests and goods as equal. Each good stems from heritable physical traits and is shaped by adaptations to the environment

There are specific goods for each animal depending on the specific heritable traits and interests of the psyche and on the specific circumstances of the environment. Self-knowledge, then, is the distinguishing moral mark. The extent to which one knows one's interests, their complexity and centrality, will determine whether one can achieve a good life, provided the environment is accommodating

Self-knowledge requires a critical appreciation of one's culture and physical inheritance, and the ability to shape one's life in streams of conflicting goods within oneself and within one's community

His basic contention that individual suffering is the worse feature of human life, not social inequality, causes him to focus more on the natural dilemmas of the individual rather than on social action

Santayana's focus is on the individual, and the role of the state is to protect and to enable the individual to flourish

it is the celebration of life in its festivities. It is Aristotle's practical wisdom: structuring individual life as it is, living it joyfully, and assuring that one's commitments are conducive to the delights of the intellect and consistent with the demands of the time and tradition

Consciousness essentially is only awareness, an attention to what is given, rather than being an instrument in reshaping the world. Consciousness, emerging late in the evolutionary pathway, is a flowering of happy circumstances that celebrates what is given, and when truly recognized, does only that. It is joyful, delighting in what is presented, and not troubled by where it leads or what it means

Spirit, or consciousness, is momentary, fleeting, and depends on the physical forces of our bodies and environment in order to exist. Shaping one's life to enhance these spiritual, fleeting moments, extending them as long as is practical, is one of the delights of living  George Santayana. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/