The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [103]
It is interesting to note that Kant himself found this position ultimately unsustainable. Although he begins his Critique of Judgment claiming that art ought to be subject to free and disinterested contemplation, he later abandons this by distinguishing what he calls free from dependent beauty. Beauties of nature, such as flowers, are free beauties, appreciated “without any concept,” as he puts it, without any notion what they are supposed to be. Works of art are dependent beauties. The beauty of a church, for instance, depends on its being in accord with purposes of a church as a dignified place of worship. A church that looked like a summer house or an arsenal, he says, could never be properly beautiful.
Later still, in the same book, Kant argues that even the experience of the beauty of nature requires that we accurately understand exactly what we perceive. He asks us to imagine visitors to a country inn who sitting on a verandah enjoying “a quiet summer eve ning by the soft light of the moon.” What the scene needs to make it perfect is nightingale, and since there are none in the vicinity, the innkeeper hires a boy with a reed in his mouth to hide in the bushes and imitate bird. No one who catches on to the ruse, Kant says, “will long endure listening to this song that he had before considered so charming.” The same thing would happen, he says, were we to try to make path through a forest more beautiful by sticking artificial flowers among the shrubs or perching “artfully carved birds” on the branches trees. A direct response to the beauty of nature, Kant insists, that it be authentically natural.
Kant does not extend to what he called the fine arts the idea that per for mance must be accurately represented in terms of achievement, his positions on both dependent and natural beauty have clear implications for forged, copied, misattributed, or plagiarized works of art artistic per for mances. Disinterested contemplation may be Kant’s default stance toward art objects, but even he has to allow that the origins of object—whether or not it is artificial, or what it is intended to be— make a crucial difference to aesthetic perception. The logic of the Kantian position may even seem to open the door for the claim that works are skill displays that require us to intuit the capacities involved in their creation.
VII
Even before the Pleistocene, many animals, as well as our proto-human ancestors, would have assessed potential mates with an eye toward their abilities to acquit themselves adequately, or better than adequately, in fitness tests. The sexual selectionist view is that performance in fitness tests may have begun in courtship contexts, but it eventually came to spread out and saturate the whole of human social life. Fitness displays modern humans are not, in a word, just about mating: they have been extended into our regard for human achievement more broadly conceived. Beyond this, there is very likely an adaptive advantage that we could see today in any human grouping that valued displays of skill by of its members, whether for courtship purposes or not. This helps explain why, in something like the Hatto case, we can be so awestruck pianist who had enjoyed only a modest success,