The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [54]
Erotic passion is saturated with intense sensations, bottomless emotions, fantasy, concord, danger, conflict, and the adventure of every kind human intimacy and estrangement. The connections between eroticism and reproduction are obvious. The aesthetic realms of natural artistic beauty are not so clearly connected to reproduction. But art create sublime plea sure and excitement, and expand our understanding of the humanly possible. The aesthetic, like the erotic, arises spontaneously as a source of plea sure in cultures across the globe, which means no curious Darwinian ought to ignore it. Given their evident universality, the pleasures of the arts should be as easy to explain as pleasures of sex and food; that they are not is a central problem for anyone wanting to broaden the relevance of evolution to the whole of human experience.
In chapter 1, I showed how innate interests and emotional reactions natural landscapes impinge on tastes many people have assumed to however, to regard these modern phenomena as by-products of prehistoric impulses or emotions: rather, they directly address and satisfy ancient, persis tent interests and longings. Pinker is justified in his doubts about trying to validate the arts, to make them seem even more deep important, by inventing adaptive stories about them. However, no validation in either direction is required: what evolutionary aesthetics asks is to reverse-engineer our present tastes—beginning with those that appear to be spontaneous and universal—in order to understand where came from. It is as legitimate to do this with the arts as we experience them today as it is with sex or food.
As examples of pleasures conceived as by-products, Pinker has on more than one occasion referred to recreational drugs: chemicals that ingest to directly excite the pleasure circuits of the brain. He has described recreational drugs on the analogy of keys that open shortcuts plea sure centers: they give us plea sure without the toil that might have been required to achieve it by natural means. Here we may be able agree that the term “by-product” is appropriate. If some chemist ever invents a pill that would give us the feeling of plea sure we get from having climbed a mountain without the bother of having to climb it, I suppose many people might be tempted by this pharmacological shortcut. But there would be no intrinsic connection between the emotion you might feel standing on a mountain peak, having climbed it, and the emotion you would feel having taken the pill.
An emotionally moving landscape painting, however, cannot be affect us in the same manner. The connection between a Salvator Rosa landscape and our Pleistocene feelings about landscapes is not product relation. Rosa painted the work precisely to excite those feelings: the connection is therefore intrinsic. Nor is painting a pill alters brain chemistry and gives us “beautiful landscape” feelings. Pinker in the context of explaining the arts that they can be seen as “a figuring out how to get at the plea sure circuits of the brain and little jolts of plea sure without the incon venience of wringing bona fitness increments from a harsh world.” True, the painting might some sense be conceived as a con venience. (“Let’s drive out to the country and enjoy the scenery.” “No, it’ll take too long. I’d prefer we sit here and look at some pretty landscape pictures.”) But a by-product it is not.
My arguments are built on the idea that a vocabulary of adaptations versus by-products cannot make sense of the ancient origins and present reality of aesthetic and artistic experience. To be illuminated by evolution, the arts do not all need to be glorified as Darwinian adaptations similar to language, binocular vision, or the eye itself. Neither should be dismissed as by-products of a collision of human biology with culture. The arts intensify experience,