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By Root 1009 0

instance, if human sociality developed different ways, then history would have gone in unimagined directions. Until Darwin, most thinkers regarded human nature as God-given immutable. Darwin explained that human nature has a history too— speculatively. Many aspects of the human body result from evolution having taken arbitrary byways. We can follow back the structure human hand with its four fingers and an opposable thumb through de cessor species. It is not impossible to imagine that we might have ended up with five fingers plus thumb, or (like Mickey Mouse) three a thumb. Lost in the darkness of our evolutionary past is the forking path in the evolution of some pre de cessor species that brought us hand we possess, but it might have been otherwise. The same goes the instincts that make up our psychological human nature, including the art instinct.

In order to understand the art instinct and reverse-engineer probable functions for its general features, we also have to understand its prehistoric contingency—understand in that sense its mysteries and the limits what we can possibly know about it. To that end, I will compare kinds of sensory experience—smells and pitched sounds—in terms what they offer as potential art forms. This discussion will show two features of evolutionary aesthetics: first, that not every human sense organ provides a sensory basis for a developed art form, and, that why some sensory experiences developed into high arts remain forever unknown to us.

Smell

Philosophers of art Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets have argued that olfactory art is unjustly ignored by art theorists but that smell art is infancy” and is set to develop a solid place for itself in the future If this idea seems surprising, Shiner and Kriskovets attribute surprise to “a longstanding philosophical prejudice against the so-called lower senses of smell, taste, and touch that has often led to the denial their suitability for aesthetic reflection,” a prejudice many moderns share. philosophers, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, have regarded smell as “far beneath vision and hearing in dignity, intellectual power, and refinement.” As the sense closest to humans’ animal nature, has traditionally been disqualified from serious aesthetic or artistic traditionally been disqualified from serious aesthetic or artistic consideration.

But is there, as Shiner and Kriskovets put it, a “prejudice against smell” that keeps us from taking it seriously as an artistic medium? Looking around at the general culture, I find it hard to discern any bias against smell purely as a sense. Perfume is a widely advertised and sold luxury commodity; the food pages of magazines and newspapers continuously tout and critically discuss the aromas of foods and wines. Car manufacturers worry about the exact showroom smell of their new vehicles, and a hotel chain even injects into the lobbies and hallways of all facilities a pleasant but peculiarly distinct odor to stimulate the olfactory memories of its regular customers. Drugstores and groceries sell countless products to add, enhance, or remove smells in daily life, sprays and potions that come out of a gigantic international industry of research and manufacture of smell products.

Moreover, the human sense of smell is acute and highly discriminating. It is said that human beings can distinguish thousands of different molecules, which makes the nose at least as discriminating as or the ear for distinguishing different sensations. Many smells intrinsically pleasant to humans, such as those emanating from some fruits and flowers—especially cultivars that have been domesticated precisely to appeal to human olfaction. Shiner and Kriskovets claim that “purely sensuous, noncognitive character of scents” counts against smells in art-theoretical thinking, but this cannot be true. If anything, there is for human beings more potential cognitive information in a single smell than you’d normally expect from a single color or a single sound. Smells function as important cognitive signals, as in the attractive aroma