Art imitates life: René Magritte’s La condition humaine (1933): it’s only human to see nature as art
Psychologists are taking a new interest in the evolutionary history of beauty. But there are still large unknowns. Evolutionary theory has had no problem explaining many—even most—of the things that give human beings pleasure: honey, orgasm, sunshine, lullabies, flower gardens. But, the closer we get to high art and beauty proper, the less easy it is to see how people’s attraction to it can be contributing to biological survival. If beauty were of relatively minor significance in human lives, we could push it to one side. But in reality it’s the opposite. With beauty, people can find the very point of being alive.
John Hadfield, the publisher and critic, said, for example: “What is it that makes life so abundantly, so triumphantly, worth living? If I had to answer the question in one
Jacob Reynolds
Nicholas uses the same bankrupt reasoning which so undermines much of the biological determinist argument. Because peacocks respond to symmetry, it is of course inevitable that human will as well because after all we are all bound in the same “universal language of the biological courtier”.
Typically he fails to realise that there is a concept called consciousness which distinguishes us from the animal.
The determinist’s need to realise that perhaps some things are inexplicable by biology, and that the peculiar instance of consciousness enables us to perceive things without an underlying sexual motive.
James l Grove
Nicholas Humphrey has constructed (with a little help from his friends) a tangled web of non sequitur and cherry-picked quotation that I suppose was always going to lead to God. The source of his error is language. Our language is so constructed and so used, especially by philosophers, that to ask a question generally implies that there must be an answer to it if only we can find it. But there are many questions to which the only answer is that there is no answer. “Why does beauty move us as it does?” is such a question.
He mentions the work of others which attempt to answer the question “How does beauty move us?” but that is a different question. The question “how?” has to do with the machinery of perception, to acculturation, to comparative physiology and other processes that we can get a useful handle on. The question “Why?” implies that there must be a purpose behind the matter, that there must be a mind at work. But perhaps there is not. Perhaps those things re just as they are for no reason at all.
The question “Why are we here?” is not answered by the theory of evolution, which only explains how we came about. For those who feel a need to answer the question “why?” God seems to be the only one with a purpose. But what if we are here for no reason at all?
I too am moved sometimes to tears and very often to something resembling orgasm by great works of art, music, poetry, invention, scientific discovery and also by natural beauty. I am currently at work on a sequence of watercolour drawings of sunsets (generally failures, as you might expect) so I am currently very interested in this matter. I see it rather differently.
Art and aesthetics are not a part of our biological heritage with some as yet undiscovered purpose to do with the survival of our species. It is a cultural matter developed since the invention of language and other skills such as cave painting, tool-making and self decorating. We know that aesthetics has changed during recorded history – there was a time when mountains were not thought beautiful but merely grotesque and inconvenient. Civilisation has enabled some of us to enjoy more and more sophisticated cultural experiences. But for perhaps a majority of our fellow women and men, the fight to survive the next day probably eclipses any chance of aesthetic experience.
The physiological effects that we treasure so are the ones that our evolution happens to have made available to us: orgasm (or neo-orgasm), weeping, laughter, love, excitement or sometimes fear, revulsion, anger and rejection. These are contingent, not consequential.
The world is a place of surpassing beauty and a miracle of self-organisation. Art has made it even more so. If I wanted really to belittle, devalue and trivialise this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,I might say: well it was all made by an old toymaker in six days, only about 7000 years ago.