The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [114]
Long tradition is certainly correct in seeming to recognize that sight hearing are historically, and doubtless prehistorically, far more than smell to human beings as survival tools. We imagine upright-walking hunter-gatherer ancestors gazing across the savannas of eyes and ears. The nose too afforded knowledge, and therefore survival value, but not to the same degree. To this day, we use “I see” understand,” and the vocabulary of knowledge is shot through with phors of light and vision. “I hear . . . ,” on the other hand, implies secondhand information, while “I smell” is almost absent from the vocabulary of knowledge, except to denote suspicion or to suggest mild irony (“I smell a rat”). Unlike colors and sounds, smells are largely built around attraction and aversion: single smells can be “mouthwatering” sexy” or “repulsive” in ways that no single color or sound can be. In par-tic lar, in terms of raw survival, smells associated with revulsion are very likely the most important in evolution: unlike that of the the African hyena and other scavenging mammals, the human digestive system did evolve to cope with the bacterial dangers of rotted meat; extreme averse reactions to it are therefore a crucial evolutionary survival tool.
Nevertheless, given the vital importance of the sense of smell, discriminative capacities of human olfaction, and the fact that many fragrances are pleasurable in themselves, you might think that smell would have become the medium for a grand art tradition—that it would have developed into an art form to stand beside the big three of visual arts, language arts, and music and dance. The fact that this has not happened ought to strike any philosopher of art as curious and counterintuitive, but it has been the subject of remarkably little scientific philosophical speculation. One worthwhile stab at the subject is found passage by Monroe Beardsley in his Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. He claims the fundamental problem with smells as artistic medium is that, unlike musical tones, they cannot be ordered intrinsic relations” among themselves. With musical pitches, one note always higher or lower than another, they stand in scales with octaves, they can be arranged in serial order with regard to loudness or duration. Smell defies any such rational arrangement. Beardsley has us imagine “a scent organ with keys by which perfume or brandy, the aroma new-mown hay or pumpkin pie could be wafted into the air.” How, Beardsley asks, could such an instrument be built?
On what principle would you arrange the keys, as the keys of harmonious and enjoyable as complexes? . . . Some smells are certainly more pleasing than others. But there does not seem to enough order within these sensory fields to construct aesthetic objects with balance, climax, development, or pattern. This, and not the view that smell and taste are “lower senses” compared with sight and hearing, seems to explain the absence taste-symphonies and smell-sonatas.
Beardsley may have identified part of the problem with smell as an artistic medium, but there seems to me to be more to it than a lack systemization. Smells are certainly disanalogous to sounds in forming what appears to be a rational system—with octaves and fifths, consonances and dissonances—but they are actually not so far from colors: the visual spectrum is systematic, to be sure, but the use of mixed colors the history of painting has always been intuitive and singular, and never especially depended on observing the rainbow or on Newton’s demonstration of the