The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [104]
But then, awe followed by a sense of indignation and betrayal are not feelings limited to music or the arts. Watching someone win the New York Marathon or break a world record in the pole vault can also bring tears to the eyes—and when it turns out the winner had taken a subway shortcut or had a used mechanically augmented pole, it is not just that athlete has cheated in a game: we the audience also feel cheated. The to this psychological effect is, I am now certain, an evolved emotion, long familiar to common sense but assumed to be merely cultural conventional by many theorists. There is no one word to describe it, but it includes feelings of awe, admiration, esteem, and elevation.
The structure of emotional life is not easy to analyze cross-culturally, which is why most psychologists are content to stick close to Paul Ek-man’s basic list, emotions that have clearly evolved origins and are in some cases shared with other animals: happiness, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust or contempt. Other emotions that are namable in Euro an languages can be closely related to each other and thus hard to distinguish in some cultural contexts: envy and jealousy, for example, or emotions that he regards as innate responses—presumably adaptations, although not as ancient as fear or anger—that are built into human sociality. He calls them “other-praising” emotions. They are not local manifestations of such basic affects as joy or curiosity or plea sure amusement but are a specific and irreducible family of human emotions their own right. These emotions are, I would add, deeply implicated Darwinian aesthetics. They include gratitude for the actions of others, admiration for excellence in another person, parpaticularly for the displayed skills, and a heightened sensibility Haidt calls elevation.
Haidt observes that while psychologists have studied “other-criticizing” emotions such as contempt or disgust, and emotions of (pride, self-satisfaction) or self-criticism (embarrassment, shame), very little research has been directed to other-praising emotions. What work has been done on gratitude has been in the context of economic while the literature on admiration is almost nonexis tent. Darwin himself actually defined admiration as an emotion: “surprise associated with some pleasure and a sense of approval.” Haidt sees it pleasurable “response to a non-moral excellence,” including extraordinary displays of skill, talent, or achievement. The experimental evidence supplies confirms what most people would intuitively guess: that feelings admiration motivate people to want to improve themselves, or to the admired person. But leaving this empirical outcome aside, is also a distinct feeling of pleasure, one that we may guess profoundly ingrained in our psychology as an adaptation for social living. If we bring together three facts about human skill displays, we them to make a prediction. The facts:
1. Human interest in high-skill activities—parpaticularly those with a public face, such as athletic or artistic perperformances—derives at least in part from their ancient status as Darwinian fitness signals.
2. High-skill per for mances are normally subjects of freely given admiration; in fact, achieving the plea sure of admiration is a reason audiences will pay to see high-skill exhibitions.
3. As signals, high-skill per for mances are subject to keen critical assessment and evaluation—the fastest or highest in athletics, the clearest, most eloquent, deepest, or most moving in the case of the arts.
The prediction entailed by these facts is this: highly skilled per for -mances that excite admiration will be a focus not only of critical evaluation but of continual inspection and interrogation about potential cheating. A sports star may beat his children and evade his income tax,