The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [111]
CHAPTER 9
The Contingency of Aesthetic Values
I
Immanuel Kant, a man with a capacious and hungry intellect, regarded himself as a modern, eighteenth-century cosmopolitan—from the Greek kosmopolitês, “world citizen.” Although he never left his hometown Königsberg, his mind roamed through the entirety of human knowledge and experience. Beyond philosophy, he studied and wrote extensively across subjects scientific and humane. In astronomy, he proposed plausible process for the formation of the solar system and suggested that blurry nebulae seen among the stars might well be distant galaxies like our own Milky Way. He wrote substantial physical geographies of North and South America and entertaining accounts of national characters of the Dutch, the Arabs, the Spanish, the English, French, the Italians, and the Germans. He had little taste for music, he possessed a sense of visual form (though, oddly, not color), poetry, and enjoyed English novels. In formulating his grand theory of aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment, he repeatedly refers arts of tribal peoples—the Carib Indians, the Iroquois, the Maori— an effort to shake his readers out of their Eurocentric prejudice and present a more universal conception of what art is for the human race a whole.
For Kant, Hume, and their Enlightenment inheritors, intellectual is achieved in part by recognizing that our most cherished Parochialism, in contrast, treats the values learned at your mother’s knee necessary givens and as indisputably superior to the values of other people (and their mothers): my religion is the only true religion, my customs are the only refined or civilized customs, my language is the only fit for writing great poetry, my music is the only beautiful music, and forth. That all cultures regard themselves as special and privileged their values and beliefs was something noted by the Greeks, but became a theme for objective investigation in the Enlightenment. The result for Europe an intellectuals was an inevitable progress toward cultural relativism, and by the time we get to the twentieth century, it is cemented in place as the prevailing ideology in the humanities and social sciences.
Charles Darwin’s discoveries brought into biology and the study of human psychology the sense of contingency that the Enlightenment already recognized in the cultural world. The eighteenth-century thinkers had contrasted the endless variety of beliefs and values across cultures with a permanent, unchanging, God-given human nature that underneath it all. Human nature is permanent, so the thinking went, human culture is created. Darwin agreed on the historic contingency culture. His theory of evolution, however, now added a radically new element to thinking about cultural values: just as they are to an extent products of historic contingency, so the unchanging, innate instincts, interests, and preferences that underlie cultural values are also to some degree accidents—products of prehistoric contingency.
Most culture and art theorists in the twentieth century have extended earlier ideas of cultural relativism into an all-embracing ideology of construction: it is not just that some of our artistic meanings value ascriptions arbitrarily derive from accidents of history and culture, the general view went, all of them do. For the usual culture theorist, picture came to look like this: to be sure, the biological structure body—the corpuscles of its blood, its organs, its musculature—were dictated by DNA and RNA. Darwin and the biologists were credited with that much. Culture, however, was completely different. It was realm of free creativity that engraved itself on a mental blank slate: culture was the uncontested domain of the humanities,