Naturalized Aesthetics

A Scientific Framework for the Philosophy of Art

Richard A. Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032245423
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000567601
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book bridges the gap between the many insights into art provided by research in evolutionary theory, psychology and neuroscience and those enduring normative issues best addressed by philosophy. The sciences have helped us understand how art functions, our art preferences, and the neurological systems underlying our engagement with art. But we continue to rely on philosophy to tell us what is truly good in art, how we should engage with art, and the conceptual basis for this engagement. Naturalized Aesthetics: A Scientific Framework for the Philosophy of Art integrates a systematic and comprehensive naturalism, grounded in the sciences, with an "ecology" of art. It shows how the environments in which we make and experience art – our "engineered art niches" – affect the practice and experience of art and generate normativity – the goods and the shoulds – in our engagement with art. There are, in effect, two "streams" of normativity, according to this book: a niche-dependent, social, impersonal and objective stream and a niche-independent, individual, personal and subjective stream. Recognition of these two streams allows us to make progress in long-standing and unresolved philosophical disputes about how to interpret, evaluate and conceive art.

Key Features:

• Provides a structured and critical introduction to the scientific accounts of art based on evolutionary thinking, psychology and neuroscience.
• Develops an "ecology" of art based on the insight that we engage with art in engineered niches.
• Presents a naturalistic account of normativity based on the recognition of two streams: a niche-dependent, social, impersonal and objective stream; and a niche-independent, individual, personal and subjective stream.
• Serves as an introduction and critical analysis of the debates about the interpretation, evaluation and definitions of art.

Chapter 1 Aesthetics and Naturalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003007029-1

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art

To a casual observer of Western cultures, it might seem that humans are obsessed with art. We spend a truly impressive amount of time engaging with some form of art or other. We make music, by singing and playing musical instruments in churches, schools, theaters, clubs and bars and at sporting events. We listen to music, in person or on electronic devices, an almost pathological amount of our waking time as we relax, eat, socialize, drive, shop, work, fly and pair-bond to music. We dance at parties, clubs, music concerts, sporting events, religious ceremonies, village commons, plays, films and online platforms. We watch dancing on stage in ballets, online and in movies. Some of us study acting and filmmaking, and many of us attend live theatre, but almost all of us spend an impressive proportion of our waking hours watching dramas, comedies, romances, action films and more, in theatres and on televisions, computer screens and smart phones. We take classes in poetry and creative writing and read poems, romance novels, mysteries, spy thrillers, science fiction, coming-of-age dramas and more. We study drawing, painting, sculpture and computer-based visual design and make visual artworks to exhibit in galleries, museums, universities, homes, restaurants and online. We even put visually compelling images on T-shirts, billboards, buses and buildings and tattoo them on bare skin. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that our lives are saturated with art.

There are two important things to note. First, this systematic engagement with the arts doesn’t seem to be unique to Western cultures. Other cultures seem to similarly engage with art, albeit not in precisely the same ways and perhaps not to the same degree. An online search reveals music and dance videos from all over the world, from Tuvan throat singing to Chinese opera, and from African Zaouli dance to classical Indian dance. Natural history museums are filled with visually decorated and stylized artifacts from African and Abelam Yam masks to Northwest native totem poles, Olmec stone heads and Inuit carved soapstone figurines. Second, introspection and the common-sense observation of our engagement with art reveal a striking intensity to our experience with art. Music in particular seems to have powerful effects on our emotions and arousal, making us happy or sad, giving us energy or making us calm down. The visual arts, song, dance, theatre and literature seem to engage our imaginations, making us care about events that never happened, and things, places and people that don’t exist. And it goes without saying that much of our engagement with art is saturated with pleasure. It could hardly be more clear that we really do enjoy singing, playing and listening to music, acting and dancing, going to theatre and dance, making videos, watching movies, painting and drawing, and visiting an art museum.

Given the breadth and depth of our engagement with the arts, we might wonder how best to understand it. Obviously, there are many approaches we could take, including common-sense observation and introspection into our own experience, but these can take us only so far. We need to know more than just what it feels like to engage with art and what we see in those around us. Beyond that, there are, very roughly, at least two broad, cross-cultural approaches. The first is empirical and largely based on the sciences – biology, neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences. The second approach is conceptual and based on Western philosophical traditions, focused on how we think about and conceive the arts and art behaviors.

Philosophical approaches go back at least to Plato and the ancient Greeks but have continued through to the present, as a search in the catalogs of any of the major publishers for “philosophy of art” will attest. Empirical approaches, in this scientific sense, are much more recent but have proliferated in the last few years. Most notably, biologists have tried to understand the arts in evolutionary terms, psychologists have studied aesthetic preferences and judgments, and neuroscientists have studied the neurological bases of art behaviors and experience. Both of these approaches are now alive and well, but there has been little systematic integration of them. Scientists generally ignore the philosophical issues, and while the philosophers pay more attention to the science, they typically do so piecemeal and strategically. Denis Dutton, in his The Art Instinct (2010), for instance, uses an evolutionary approach to just briefly address philosophical problems about the creator’s intentions in interpretation, the problem of forgery and definitions of art. Stephen Davies more systematically addresses both the science of art and the philosophy of art, but does so in two very different books, one focused on the science and the other on the philosophy (2007, 2012). These and other efforts are a good start, but we can more systematically integrate the science and the philosophy. This book is an attempt to do just that, bridging the gap between the science and philosophy of art.

The full title of this book, Naturalized Aesthetics: A Scientific Framework for the Philosophy of Art, promises a naturalistic approach to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, based on a scientific framework. This scientific framework, laid out in the first part of this book, has three main components: (1) the evolutionary theories of art that look at functions art might serve related to survival and reproduction, (2) the psychological studies of our experience of art and the neurological mechanisms underlying that experience, and (3) the ecology of art that examines how the environment affects our engagement with art. This framework can help us understand what is going on at multiple levels when we make and experience art, but it can also be used, I shall argue in the second part of this book, to address long-standing and unresolved philosophical questions about the interpretation, evaluation and conception of art. The title of this book also implies that it will be a study in naturalized aesthetics. This raises two obvious and immediate questions. What is aesthetics? What does it mean to naturalize it?

The term ‘aesthetics’ can be traced back to the ancient Greek term for perception or sensation, ‘aisthēsis.’ For the ancient Greeks, there were two main questions: a physiological question about how perception works and an epistemic question about how perception could be a source of truth and a basis for knowledge (Peters 1967, 8–15). The first modern use of the term is usually traced back to Alexander Baumgarten’s use of the Latin word ‘aesthetica’ in his 1735 dissertation on “Philosophical Meditations on Some Matters Pertaining to Poetry,” where he turned from these physiological and epistemic questions to questions about beauty and taste (Guyer 2005, 25–26). Immanuel Kant followed Baumgarten’s lead, using the German word ‘ästhetisch,’ in his 1790 Critique of Judgment, where he distinguished judgments of beauty, which command universal assent, from the judgments of mere individual taste. For Kant and others in the 18th-century European philosophical debates, aesthetics was largely the study of topics related to beauty and taste.

This early modern use of the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer to judgments of beauty and taste can be seen as an extension of the ancient Greek use of ‘aisthēsis’ to refer to perception or sensation. After all, beautiful flowers, people, sunsets and natural landscapes are beautiful at least in part because of how they appear in perception – they look or appear beautiful. And when we talk about matters of taste, we are typically referring to sensory preferences. This central role of sensation is explicit in David Hume’s 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” where he argued that the true standard of taste and beauty rely in part on a “strong sense.”

Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.

(Hume 1910, 228)

A sensory-based meaning of ‘aesthetics’ persists today in a philosophical approach that, while it is less concerned with beauty, still focuses on the nature of sensory-based aesthetic experience and related questions about the grounds of aesthetic judgment, the origin of aesthetic value, and what makes an object appropriate for aesthetic experience and more. (See Stecker 2005a, for example.)

A similar focus on sensory-based aesthetic experience is found in two relatively new subdisciplines of psychology: empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. Empirical aesthetics uses observational and experimental approaches to study aesthetic judgments and experience in general. Institutional advocates of this research program include the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. Neuroaesthetics studies aesthetic experience from a neuroscientific and biological stance and is represented by organizations such as the International Network for Neuroaesthetics. These sensory- and perception-based approaches to aesthetics are comprehensive in that while they often focus on the experience of art, they are also concerned with sensory experience of non-art objects, human bodies and faces, natural objects and scenes, and more. In this broad sense, any hedonic sensory experience – whether it be looking at colorful flowers or an attractive person, drinking a refreshing glass of cold water, or eating a tasty meal – potentially counts as an aesthetic experience and is worthy of study (Shimamura 2014, 4).

There is another, partially overlapping understanding of the term ‘aesthetics,’ one that is sometimes traced back to Hegel’s lectures on the fine arts, published posthumously in 1835 as “Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art” (Guyer 2005, 26). Aesthetics in this sense is simply the philosophy of art and addresses conceptual questions about the nature and definition of art and the ontological status of art objects, as well as theories about the interpretation and evaluation of art; the roles of expression, emotion and representation in art; the relationship between art and ethics; and more. Sensory experience may be relevant to each of these questions but is not typically the focus of the philosophical discussion. In this book, we will be approaching aesthetics in this general philosophy of art way, focusing on some “big questions” about interpreting, evaluating and defining art while also looking at our engagement with art relative to our sensory, aesthetic experience, through empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. We will not, however, directly address aesthetic experience and judgment outside of art contexts.

By distinguishing art and non-art contexts and treating aesthetics as the philosophy of art, I am assuming that there is this thing art that can be distinguished from non-art and studied in some relatively well-defined manner. This seems to assume that we can say what counts as art and what does not. A satisfactory treatment of this topic will ultimately need to wait until Chapter 8 (“Defining Art”), where we will look at ways of conceiving art from a naturalistic stance, based on insights from previous chapters. But for now, we can focus on what seem to be straightforward, central and unproblematic examples of art, found in our practices of storytelling (verbal, written, staged and filmed), the music-related arts (instrumental music, song and dance) and the visual arts (painting, sculpture, decoration and more). In adopting this particular focus, I am not implying that other activities are not art. As we shall see in Chapter 8, I favor are rather broad conception of art.

Metaphysical and Methodological Naturalisms

So how will aesthetics – as the philosophy of art – be naturalized? An initial answer to this question is that we will do it through a framework based on a naturalism. But, as with ‘aesthetics,’ there are multiple uses of the term ‘naturalism.’ A philosophical use can be traced back to the 17th century and meant, according to one entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, “a view of the world, and of man’s relation to it, in which only the operation of natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces is admitted or assumed” (quoted in Flanagan, Sarkissian, and Wong 2016, 16). This statement of naturalism can be construed as a commitment to what there is or what exists. Naturalism in this sense would deny the existence of anything supernatural, in particular supernatural substances, forces and laws. Thomas Hobbes is usually taken to be this kind of naturalist, by denying the existence of immaterial substance, when he begins his 1651 Leviathan with the apparently materialist claim that “life is but a motion of limbs” (Hobbes 1909, 8; Duncan 2019).

But one might also reject the assumption of anything supernatural on methodological grounds, as we see in David Hume’s “experimental philosophy” a century later. According to Hume, the starting point of his philosophical inquiry is to be found in the “science of man,” an empirical investigation into human psychology. All important questions were to be addressed through this science, which must be based on experience and observation, as he tells us in the introduction to his 1740 A Treatise of Human Nature.

There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science…And as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.

(Hume 1978, xvi)

There are a lot of subtleties in Hume’s views, but initially at least, in limiting a philosophical inquiry to those things that can be studied through experience and observation, he seems to rule out the assumption or admission of any unobservable, supernatural forces and things on methodological grounds.

More recently, naturalism has come to be associated with the general claim that philosophy should somehow reflect and conform to science in general – what Penelope Maddy calls “a vague science friendliness” (Maddy 2007, 1). The attraction of a science-friendly approach is obvious. Science, whatever its limitations and flaws, seems to be the most successful way we have of acquiring knowledge about the world. As Kelly James Clark puts it:

Privileging science has much to commend it: there is no other domain of human inquiry that has been so remarkably successful in understanding the world and achieving rational consensus. Tradition, authority and Holy Writ, for example, have failed to produce the rational consensus that we find in science (or rational consensus whatsoever) … More than consensus, though, science also seems to be uniquely capable of attaining the truth: the universal law of gravitation, for example, or our sun-centered planetary system…

(Clark 2016, 3–4)

Partly on the basis of this “great success of science” argument, many contemporary philosophers are sympathetic to naturalism, and it is often claimed that most would identify as naturalists (Ritchie 2008, 1; Papineau 2015). The account developed here will certainly be “science friendly,” but we need to say much more precisely what this might involve. We might do so by returning for a more careful look at the two ways to be a naturalist: metaphysical (following Hobbes) and methodological (following Hume).

Metaphysical naturalism (or, as some prefer, “ontological naturalism”) is a commitment to what exists. At minimum, it is usually understood to reject the existence of obviously supernatural entities and processes, ruling out beliefs in a God or set of gods, angels, spirits, demons and immaterial souls as well as prayer, revelation, mind reading, communication with the dead, spells and fortune telling (Ritchie 2008, 2; Clark 2016, 2). More philosophically, we might expect that a metaphysical naturalism will also rule out beliefs in transcendent Platonic forms, Kantian noumena and Hegelian spirit as well as appeals to special intuitions or senses about morality and some ultimate reality.

Following the lead of Hobbes, sometimes metaphysical naturalism is taken to be a commitment to materialism (the view that everything ultimately consists of material substance) or, more recently, physicalism (the view that everything is ultimately “physical”). Physicalism is sometimes construed to allow everything postulated by modern physics, which would at minimum include energy and forces along with matter, all operating according to physical laws (Stoljar 2010, 2015). Vaguely understood, physicalism seems to be a popular stance. In a recent survey, 59% of philosophers identify as physicalists (Montero and Papineau 2016, 201). But there are some obvious...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Aesthetics and Naturalism
• Chapter 2 The Evolution of Art
• Chapter 3 The Psychology of Art
• Chapter 4 The Ecology of Art
• Chapter 5 Art Criticism
• Chapter 6 Interpreting Art
• Chapter 7 Evaluating Art
• Chapter 8 Defining Art
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index