What benefit does the capacity for aesthetic pleasure bestow on the human organism? Pleasure, on the other hand, accompanies eating. The fuller you are, the less pleasant it is to eat, no matter how delicious the food. Like many drive-associated pleasures, hunger has a characteristic time-profile. Being hungry is unpleasant; being very hungry is exceedingly so. When you eat, you relieve the distress of hunger and begin to take pleasure in the food itself if it is tasty.
As you become sated, the pleasure dies away. Sexual pleasure has a similar profile, though of course its regulatory role is a good bit more complex. Eating and sex are drive-related pleasures, but we experience other kinds of pleasures, too. There is no drive to cuddle a loved one. Nor is there any orgasmic satiation point. Cuddling has a relatively flat time-pleasure profile. Of course, nobody goes on cuddling forever. But this is because other urges take over, or because they become sleepy or tire of it. Pleasure encourages the activity independently of any immediate result. Aesthetic pleasure is activity-focused, like cuddling, not drive-actuated or end-directed, like eating.
You are listening to an aria by Rossini or the sound of a nightingale; you are looking at the Rocky Mountains or a painting by Ingres: By contrast I can take pleasure in looking at the Rocky Mountains for different reasons — that are not aesthetic. Catching sight of the Mountains, I might be elated that my long journey to the ski-slopes is finally coming to an end.
Aesthetic pleasure by contrast, is pleasure in just looking at something, or listening to it, or pleasure in contemplating its qualities. A ctivity-focused pleasures can elicit characteristic bodily or behavioural responses. They might express themselves involuntarily in the face by a soft expression or smile. This dreaminess or absorption is mediated by endogenously secreted opioids, which also bring on feelings of pleasure. These effects are characteristic of what we might call physical pleasure, and we should recognise that some intellectual pleasures — a book, a Sudoku puzzle, friendly conversation — elicit physical pleasure.
And so does aesthetic pleasure. Whether drive-related or activity-focused, pleasure gives us information about things in the world — but its messages are relevant only to a specific activity. A book that makes for good reading might not look good on a shelf. Pleasure in a particular object for a particular purpose does not necessarily translate into generalised approval. The specificity of pleasure might seem obvious, but some writers on aesthetic pleasure miss this point.
Aesthetic pleasure is pleasure in contemplating something. This pleasure could be sensory, like the enjoyment one derives from looking at a painting or listening to music.
Or it could be intellectual, like the pleasure of reading the latest Robert Harris. In both cases, pleasure in contemplation has to be distinguished from wanting an object for other uses. Immanuel Kant in the 18th century was among the first to understand this. His example was that of a palace.
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You might long to live in it, or you might hate it for its extravagance and want to destroy it. But both of these responses are distinct from the pleasure or displeasure derived from merely looking at it. Only the latter pleasure counts as aesthetic.
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Darwin wrongly equates the lustful gaze with simple looking. Discussing sexual selection, Charles Darwin wrote: It confuses sexual desire with aesthetic admiration. It is pleasure just in looking. This brings me back to the puzzle. Aesthetic pleasure encourages us to contemplate its object. But why is this good, from an evolutionary point of view? Why is it valuable to be absorbed in contemplation, with all the attendant dangers of reduced vigilance? Wasting time and energy puts organisms at an evolutionary disadvantage.
For large animals such as us, unnecessary activity is particularly expensive. The answer might lie in our modes of perception. Vision gives us two slightly differing two-dimensional images; hearing gives us two sound images, each a summation of sonic emissions from many different sources.
Yet, perception delivers to our consciousness a remarkably clear and coherent presentation of discrete objects arrayed in three-dimensional space. This happens even in bad conditions, such as darkness or fog, or in chaotic soundscapes such as parties and concerts. In a huge range of conditions, many inimical to receiving information, perceivers have an extraordinary ability to construct a stable and coherent image of the world.
To do this the visual system has to be sensitive to pattern and order, to be able to sniff out signs of significant objects and events. Finding such patterns comes naturally to us, but like other natural activities it requires practice.
Evolutionary Aesthetics – Patrick F. Clarkin, Ph.D.
Perception is a skill that has to be developed by repetition. Think of motor skills. Animals and humans play and roughhouse to develop skills, and evolution has made it pleasurable to do so. Similarly, infants babble, then talk … and talk, and talk. They do it to play, and by this play they acquire the capacity to communicate. It is the same with perception. As the psychologist Daniel Berlyne noted in the s, infants begin perceiving by staring, and cocking their heads to listen, to take in simple patterns.
As they grow older, they become interested in more and more complex displays, staring with special fascination at incongruities, asymmetries, and the like. This is perceptual play, and it develops perceptual skill. As we grow to adulthood, the patterns that give us pleasure are more complex than those that first entranced us. As infants, we might stare at checkerboards; as adults, we are moved by the mysteries of complex landscapes and the star-filled expanse of the sky. Aesthetic pleasure is the fun of perceptual play, and it is valuable because it develops perceptual skill.
This complements a suggestion made by the British neuroscientist Semir Zeki: Evidence with regard to this claim is rather mixed, though. Nettle and Clegg , e. Additionally, the number of children and time spent in a steady relationship also did not differ between the creative and the uncreative subjects.
Their study did not investigate if creative activity is more frequent in either one of the sexes, though. Further study is definitely needed in this area. In addition to this empirical issue, there is also a theoretical problem that needs to be solved, namely the question of what the selective benefits for signalers and signal recipients are, for being willing to engage in a communicative exchange outside the narrower sense of the sexual domain via making special? If they are to have an explanatory value of their own, i. Elsewhere these three hypotheses are explained in more detail and measured against empirical findings, whereby the conclusion manifests itself that in the aesthetic practice of humans very frequently making special actually merges into making expensive Voland [].
Even the earliest known evidence of artistic activity, dating back more than one million years, namely skillfully crafted stone axes which were refined to a degree exceeding what was necessary for the practical use of the axe as a tool Mithen [] argue in favor of the early transfer of the handicap principle from what is natural beauty to what is artistic beauty.
The producers of the beautifully crafted stones axes give evidence of their special suitability for tasks of this kind to all who want to know. However, the theory of costly signals does not capture all of the aspects of aesthetic practice. Besides phenomena for which the handicap principle seems to offer a valid explanatory matrix, in aesthetics phenomena are also observed, the communicative significance of which tends to lie in the regulation of emotional sensitivities.
Music, dance and ritual performance definitely belong to this category. Certainly there also are events of competitive artistic performance, e. It is easy to see, however, that there is a bit more to productive artistic activity of this kind. What we enjoy, eventually, is the music itself, although we need someone to reproduce it, error-free!
What is brought to light here is an effect of art which influences and regulates emotional constitutions. The demand for such effects may initially seem to be a personal matter in which personal moods are reflected and processed in the consumption of art. However, these effects do not remain limited to the individual because emotional regulation can also lead to an emotional synchronization of many, which results in reinforced group cohesion.
Making special thus becomes an integral element of social rituals, the function of which is to bind societies and to align them to common values or tasks and to emotionally synchronize their members; in particular if challenges requiring extraordinary efforts on the part of the members arise like, e. This aspect of the production of music cannot have been without evolutionary significance. Whoever was not receptive to the emotionally invasive power of rituals was hardly likely to be one of our ancestors.
In this way, the arts become agents of social cooperation, coordination and cohesion Menninghaus [] and thus generate an explanatory contrast to those evolutionary models of art which view the competition-driven self-projection of personal fitness indicators as their evolutionary engine. With the current status of the research, it is still unclear for the most part how these two complexes of functions, namely honest communication via fitness indicators and the genesis of emotional communion, correlate evolutionarily.
Menninghaus makes some interesting suggestions here, by introducing concepts into the discussion which essentially utilize the arguments of expansions and overlapping of biologically evolved modular brain functions. In this way, it is possible to find the evolutionary and anthropological roots of the elaborate art events of modern times without at the same time having to deny the increase in complexity compared to pre-historic art practices. These intellectual advances are interesting and quite promising and demonstrate that evolutionary aesthetics is a very dynamic field.
However, they also require increased empirical research by evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists, the results of which are urgently required to improve the formation of theory within EA. Evolutionary aesthetics formulates very specific questions for the academic disciplines involved.
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Successful proceeding in all these disciplines is indispensable for the whole enterprise, in order to make progress both theoretically and also empirically: Evolutionary theorists see themselves faced with the challenge of explaining the evolutionary status of aesthetic preferences and motivations. Are we only dealing with biologically functional adaptations in aesthetic life contexts or also with functionless by-products of a cognitive apparatus which has evolved for reasons other than aesthetic judgments?
Behavioral ecologists and also empiricists from other academic disciplines face the task of capturing the variability of the aesthetic judgment and tracing it back to its conditional cause. Ultimately, the question is what portion of aesthetic diversity if any can be depicted by evolutionary theory and through what mechanisms observable variety can be generated and maintained. Once again, philosophers have to deal with a problem already touched upon in ancient Greece, namely of how beauty and goodness could be linked.
Recent empirical results, especially from the imaging processes of neurosciences, provide new material for this situation, which is still unclear. In the following, we wish to outline and specify the three research questions cited in more detail. Adaptation or functionless by-product? Many theorists have tried to explain the enjoyment of art in terms of an adaptive value, i. Alternatively, it was assumed that our aesthetic preferences are useless by-products of otherwise functional adaptations, e. In this view, aesthetic pleasure can be compared to drinking alcohol: Rather, ethanol molecules seem to destructively interfere with our neural architecture in a way that, as a by-product, releases opiates, making us feel happy see, e.
Once this effect had been discovered by chance, however, humans learned how to control it and culturally developed a rich variety of alcohol related traditions and huge industries serving our need for alcoholic drinks. This does not mean, however, that we need an adaptive account of alcohol production and consumption.
An interesting intermediary position, though, was proposed by Tooby and Cosmides and, e. The behavioral ecology of aesthetics: What causes the observed variability of aesthetic judgments? Biological evolution does not happen through the gradual change of a type but through the gradual conversion of populations. Typological thinking is, therefore, not suitable for evolutionary theories Mayr [] , which is why a search for the aesthetic judgment formed by natural history would not be an enterprise justified by evolutionary theory. Populations show variability in their biological traits, and one of the key scientific objectives of an evolutionary behavioral theory consists not only of comprehending the central evolutionary tendency of a trait but also the adaptive backgrounds for observed variability in the trait.
Behavioral ecology research registers some functional fields in which adaptive variance also occur in aesthetic preferences. They can become visible intraindividually , interindividually or intraculturally , whereby — as is frequently the case — sexual aesthetics has more often found the attention of researchers than other aesthetic phenomena. Strikingly, and very indicative of the evolutionary background of mate choice mechanisms, e. During a short timeframe close to ovulation, e.
Depending on whether women are in the non-fecund or fecund phase of their cycle, they evaluate sexual attributes differently. In comparison to the non-fecund days, body and facial symmetry Thornhill et al. Women of above-average attractiveness need to make fewer compromises with regard to mate selection than women who are less attractive, by waiving the sexual attractiveness of their partners in favor of familial virtues — or vice versa. Women of above-average beauty in the market for mates can afford to raise their personal standards with regard to both aspects, and therefore, their aesthetic cognitions are more critical concerning masculine sex appeal Buss and Shackelford [].
Intercultural variability regarding the question of which traits are perceived as sexually attractive to what degree and become in demand during mate selection, are lastingly derived in accordance with the good-gene model from the magnitude of pathogenic stress experience to which the population is exposed.
Actually, Gangestad and Buss were able to find evidence for such a link in a comparison of 29 countries. Accordingly, the significance of physical attractiveness in mate selection preferences is dependent on local pathogenic prevalence. The same argument is formulated even more sharply by an investigation conducted by DeBruine et al. The authors have ascertained female preferences for masculine faces in thirty countries and correlated them with the medical developmental status of these countries, as indicated in the statistics of the World Health Organization WHO.
The outcome is a finding according to which the sexual preference for masculinity increases to the degree that the average health status of the population decreases. The authors see the result of a trade-off problem here: Under living conditions with an increased disease burden it is more advantageous for women to select masculine men as the fathers of their children, even if these men function less reliably as caregivers owing to their success in the sexual competition.
These brief comments might suffice to illustrate that evolutionary theory offers a perspective which deals with an improved understanding of variability in aesthetic judgments and not — as frequently assumed — in the search for a normative standard for beauty fixed by natural history.
Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico
Psychological adaptations are information-processing mechanisms for solving biological life and reproduction problems which naturally also process personal data and therefore can generate variable output with the same input. For reasons of biological individuality, there are simply disparate life problems with different decision-making processes and therefore also different tastes, even though the Darwinian algorithm of the aesthetic judgment must be thought of as a biologically evolved species-specific universal. Even Kant himself links aesthetics and morals in his famous passage on the two main causes of veneration and awe regarding the constitution of our world: In current philosophical aesthetics, ethicism, e.
Current empirical moral psychology and neuroscience, with their rigorous methodologies, actually are on the trail of this link. It has been found, e. Furthermore, it was experimentally found that witnessing unfairness in an economic game triggers exactly the same physical facial motor activity that an awful taste does Chapman et al. Finally, neuro-imaging studies have shown that there is an overlap in the brain regions that process moral and aesthetical judgments Zaidel and Nadal []. While some philosophers doubt that the moral evaluations investigated in these studies are representative of what philosophers mean when they speak of moral judgment see, e.
If it turned out e. As Hume already suspected in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Moral , we think that moral judgment eventually involves feelings and sentiments which so far have successfully eluded the attempts of rational philosophical enquiry to fully explain them.
If, however, new findings in moral psychology could really establish that, e. Let us briefly summarize: In our view, it is a rather straightforward task for theorists using the framework of EA to explain human aesthetical preferences in the domain of natural beauty. Although more research is needed here to fulfill the requirements of complete evolutionary explanations see 2. Things are more complicated, however, when we turn to artifacts, including music and recital, since it is not quite clear whether human art production has an evolutionarily relevant function or if it is, like the production of alcoholic beverages, just a culturally evolved way of satisfying a coincidentally existing demand.
As interesting and theoretically distinguished this question doubtlessly is, yet it cannot be exploited for the purpose of questioning the evolutionary approach as a whole. After all, even by-products are based on evolutionary adaptations, so that the question of the evolutionary basis of art is not abrogated but only shifted by one level, if, at the end of the day, the by-product hypothesis for the production of art were to be proved to be the more powerful explanation.
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What are these adaptations then, the by-product of which is art? Are the by-products co-opted secondarily by evolutionary processes? Is beauty inherent in the objects themselves or in the minds of the viewers? Is beauty a category of the objects or of the subjects recognizing beauty? In the almost two and a half thousand year-old philosophical debate, realistic positions which view beauty as objectively existing in reality are confronted with absolutely implacably idealistic positions, which — in their hardest versions — interpret aesthetic perception as a solely subjective achievement, not justifiable, not objectifiable, not even communicable.
It should have become clear that neither of the two positions find unrestricted support from an evolutionary standpoint. Of course beauty is inherent in things to a certain degree. Just as self-evidently, aesthetic judgment is the result of a subjective evaluation process of the empirical state of facts. The same signal can be evaluated very differently, because it is only the brains that perceive and process the individual bits of information which generate meaning. They evaluate what has been perceived in accordance with personal criteria how else?
Aesthetic judgment is a subjective performance of an objective species-specific adaptation. Symons expressed this more pithily: Attractive women want it all: Reviewed by Killin, A. The health of nation predicts their mates preferences: How can evolutionary biology enrich the study of literature? Vanderbeke, de Gruyter ed. Literature and evolution , Berlin, pp.
Do representations of male muscularity differ in men's and women's magazines? An enquiry concerning the principles of moral , available, e. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft , available, e. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft , Reclam, Stuttgart. Kritik der Urteilskraft , available, e. The origins of symbolic culture, in: Maxims or myths of beauty?