Art, Darwin, Dutton

Art in Darwin's terms, TLS Mar 20.2009
Denis Dutton's book, The Art Instinct, talks adaption, natural selection, and painting
Roger Kimball
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In the second part of the Critique of Judgement, Kant declared it “quite certain” that mankind would never be able to plumb, let alone explain, the mechanics of life. “It is”, he wrote, “absurd for men to make any such attempt or to hope that another Newton will arise in the future, who shall make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no design has ordered. We must absolutely deny this insight to men.” Today, there are many observers who believe Kant was too modest. Advances in genetics, they believe, present the possibility that what Newton did for the physical world will shortly be done for the world of organic nature. Not only will there be a Newton of a blade of grass: the sequencing of the human genome assures that there will also be a Newton of human nature.
Whether this confidence is misplaced remains to be seen. Perhaps the sheer complexity of nature, including human nature, has ordained that the progress of knowledge is never-ending. If so, then while we know more today than we did yesterday, part of what we know is the ever-broadening expanse of what lies beyond our ken. Be that as it may, advances in our understanding of the process of evolution have underwritten ambitious new intellectual sorties into every aspect of our social life. There are now neo-Darwinian reflections about everything from altruism to Zoroastrianism, illuminating or obfuscating in proportion to the probity and sophistication of the observer. Denis Dutton’s book The Art Instinct is a lively addition to this library of disabusement.
Disabusement? Explaining art in the stringent naturalistic terms required by Darwinian evolution – natural selection is a most exigent taskmaster – is perforce a coming-down-to-earth for aesthetics, a discipline that has been wont to look upward in hushed tones whenever words like “art” or “beauty” are uttered. But it is part of Dutton’s goal in this book to take a thoroughly naturalistic approach to the phenomena of art and aesthetic delectation without sacrificing art’s native prerogatives. He brings both a scientist’s sobriety and a connoisseur’s enthusiasm to his subject. If the two do not always cohabit without friction, Dutton is none the less careful to make sure that each gets its innings.
This is a not insignificant rhetorical feat. Superficially, at least, Darwinian explanations share something with Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean explanations. They are systematically cynical about appearances, instances of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. How often have you heard it said that really, at bottom, all human relations are a matter of (take your pick) economic exploitation, unconscious libidinal impulses, or the Will to Power? Or, if you are a Darwinian, that they are all coefficients of natural and sexual selection?
Dutton, who teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is the founder and presiding spirit of the popular website Arts & Letters Daily, acknowledges that the whole idea of explaining art in Darwinian terms will strike many of us as “an oxymoron”. Art denominates a region of human freedom, instinct a realm of animal necessity. But, he reasons, if evolution endowed Homo sapiens sapiens with acute colour vision, a taste for sweets and an upright gait, why not also a penchant for certain sorts of aesthetic expression and pleasure? Man is clearly an art-producing and art-enjoying animal. Why?
Dutton’s answer to that question is the classic Darwinian answer: down through the ages, art has been adaptive, i.e., it has helped mankind to survive and reproduce. Like language, Dutton argues, art hones “imaginative and intellectual capacities that had a clear survival value in prehistory”. What Dutton calls the art instinct is “selected for”: like opposable thumbs or the maternal instinct, it helps increase an animal’s chance of survival and reproduction.
It is worth pausing to note that not all disciples of Darwin agree with Dutton about this. Adaptation, as Dutton puts it, is “the gold standard for evolutionary explanation”. But Stephen Jay Gould, for example, argued that the arts were useless embellishments, not adaptations but mere by-products (“spandrels” he called them) of our big brains. One of the reasons to find Gould’s contention unsatisfactory is that it encourages us to regard something of compelling human interest as epiphenomenal. It is not so much reductive as dismissive, in a way similar to E. O. Wilson’s comment that “an organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA”. Wilson is a great scientist (and one of Dutton’s heroes), but that “only” sticks in the craw.
Dutton endeavours to avoid that species of existential deflation even as he sets about elaborating his core idea that art and aesthetic experience are part of humanity’s Darwinian toolkit. Why, for example, is a certain type of landscape picture so popular? Studies have shown that landscapes with a bit of water, open spaces in the middle distance, some low-branching trees and other greenery, and an animal or two, beat all-comers in the popularity stakes. Such scenes decorate calendars and greeting cards the world over. Why?
My own reply would probably start with a variation on the Kingsley Amis Principle of Aesthetic Preference: nice things are nicer than nasty ones. But a stock Darwinian response returns to mankind’s prehistory in the African savannah, “the habitat”, Dutton reminds us, that “meat-eating hominids evolved for”. Consider those trees I just mentioned. According to the savannah hypothesis, people prefer low-branching ones to other types because “a climbable tree was a device to escape predators in the Pleistocene”. “In the Pleistocene” is a phrase that recurs frequently in The Art Instinct. It has the same grammatical form as “in the nineteenth century”. But whereas we can populate the latter with all sorts of interesting facts, our knowledge about the former is exiguous, to say the least. If you are going to say that a majority of people the world over like certain sorts of landscape painting because 100,000 years ago clever people found that the appurtenances of such landscapes helped them survive and reproduce (whereas the ones who preferred something else perished young), your inference is – to put it mildly – highly speculative.
This was something that the great German evolutionary biologist August Weismann acknowledged. Limpets living among breakers on a rocky shore acquired thick shells. Is that a Darwinian adaptation? Maybe. But, as Weismann asks, what degree of thickness was enough? “We can say nothing more than that we infer from the present state of the shell that it must have varied . . . and that these differences must have had selection value – no proof, therefore, but an assumption . . . . We are reasoning in a circle, not giving proofs, and no one who does not wish to believe in the selection value of the initial stages can be forced to do so”. In the end, I am tempted to respond to the idea that art is “adaptive” in the Darwinian sense with the motto that the British travel writer Alexander Kinglake wanted inscribed on the lintels of churches in England: “Interesting if true”. Part of my hesitation flows from the observation that if art sometimes furthers the Darwinian desiderata of survival and reproduction, it often operates quite otherwise. The two great engines of Darwinian evolution are natural selection and sexual selection, “an animal’s capacity”, in Dutton’s gloss, “to generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce”. Dutton has many provocative things to say about all this: “sexual selection”, he writes, “explains some of the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality, including the most gaudy, profligate, and ‘show-off’ characteristics of artistic expression”. I wonder what Oscar Wilde, for example, would have to say about the relation between flamboyance and the effort to generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce? In a typical passage, Dutton writes that “the enjoyment of fiction shows clear evidence of Darwinian adaptation”. Except, that is, when it suggests the exact opposite.
Dutton is most convincing when he is least programmatic. It is one thing to set out to “explain” the arts as Darwinian adaptations. That sets a very (impossibly?) high cognitive standard. It also raises the question whether the explanation that results is not also an explaining away. Dutton sometimes writes as if he is offering some such account of the arts. Often he is more relaxed. I like it when he says that the “art instinct” is not a single thing but “a complicated ensemble of impulses” involving responses to “the natural environment, to life’s likely threats and opportunities, the sheer appeal of colours and sounds, social status, intellectual puzzles, extreme technical difficulty, erotic interests, and even costliness”. Quite right: but haven’t we then wandered pretty far away from the idea of art having “survival value” as a Darwinian adaptation?
Dutton ranges widely and entertainingly over the arts – painting, music, literature, dance and theatre – and he frequently pauses to engage with the tradition of aesthetic inquiry from Aristotle and Hume to Monroe C. Beardsley and Arthur Danto. One of the most refreshing things about The Art Instinct – and something that sets it apart from a great deal of recent speculation about art – is that it focuses on the centre of the artistic enterprise, not the periphery. In the end, Dutton notes, we care about art because it provides “some of the most profound, emotionally moving experiences available to human beings”. But at least since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp stunned the world by exhibiting an ordinary urinal as a work of art, this realm of experience has been off the official menu of critical inquiry. For decades, a guiding question in the art world has been “Is it art?”. This might have been an interesting question in 1917, but it has long since become the sterile province of epistemological bafflement.
Dutton wants us to regard art not as a dispensable ornament but as an irreducible expression of human nature. He opposes the popular academic parlour game of treating art as a sort of shill in some political narrative or “cause”, and is also careful to segregate art from religious aspiration, partly, I suspect, because he regards the latter with impatience, at best. But when it comes to the relation between art and religion, I wonder whether Dutton hasn’t left some deep filiations unexploited. Granted, art and religion describe different realms of endeavour and experience. But there are good grounds – including good Darwinian grounds – for regarding them as mutually supportive enterprises. The interpenetration of art and religion seems especially prominent in humanity’s past (a leitmotif of David Lewis-Williams’s The Mind in the Cave, 2002). It is telling, for example, that “aesthetics” is an eighteenth-century coinage, a product of the Enlightenment when the arts, like many other human activities, emancipated themselves from their explicit service ad maiorem dei gloriam. The careers of art and religion have long since diverged. But it is curious how the craving for transcendence continues to haunt art. “In the absence of a belief in God”, Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” The religious impulse has turned out to be far heartier than many observers had predicted. Perhaps this has a root in mankind’s prehistory. But, as with art, to appreciate its contemporary significance we need not only to look back to what we were, but also to look forward to what we would become.
Denis DuttonTHE ART INSTINCT Beauty, pleasure and human evolution224pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $25).978 0 19 953942 0 Roger Kimball is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.