The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [88]
Veblen’s economic and aesthetic insights have been regarded by many commentators over the last century as being essentially about capitalism and the distortions it imposes on human life. This is wrong. His are drawn as much from early European history and tribal ethnography, such as the Kwakiutl potlatch, as they are from the hyper-capitalism of the Gilded Age. His chapter on aesthetics contains admiring references to Hawaiian feather cloaks and the elaborately carved handles for Polynesian adzes, both of which he adduces to support that uselessness is connected to beauty. Veblen wrote not about local historically unique situations but about the general human condition he understood it. He put much research into analyzing cultural constructions, but his target is the human nature that underpins them: per-sis tent innate tendencies that are spontaneously manifest in widely separated cultures and historical epochs.
Seen in this light, however, there is no reason to accept that we doomed forever to respond to art in terms of costliness, conspicuous waste, or its bearing on social status. Pleistocene landscape preferences just as innate but need not control our tastes in landscape painting even our choice of a calendar. Once we understand and know an impulse, can choose to go along with it or we can resist it. There are elements the art world as described by Veblen—for instance, the intimate association of art with money—that ought to disturb us. But better should know this dev il than deny it or pretend it is but a product of capitalism.
In the same way, there is no reason to deny the sense of wonder we photorealist painting of a bowl of ice cream. Our innate aesthetic tastes have many constituents, including not only awe at skill displays but intrinsic connections with wealth and therefore with social status. Like our innate moral sentiments, these tastes ought to be open to endless rational reconsideration and judgment. Kant had it right: the experience of art is practice of contemplation—in it, we need not be slave to our innate proclivities, our passions. Even in free play, our intellect counts.
VI
In a curious but oft-quoted utterance, Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” Unless this is intended as some kind of gnomic defense of psychological behaviorism, it’s certainly wrong. The best picture we can have of the human soul is gained by listening to what a person says and how he says it. Language—the human voice, and writing—is not only a communication medium (“Looks like rain today”; “There’s game over the next hill”) but is an expressive and creative instrument, revealing the peculiar insights, individual interests, humor, and special talents of an individual. As a form of cognitive foreplay in courtship, language can give us, in Geoffrey Miller’s words, “a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” Darwin himself was right in his own speculation about the origins of language, foreplay of a sort is indeed where it began: as a means for first arresting the interest of members of the opposite sex and then demonstrating something to them. On this speculation, ordinary descriptive communication would have come later. Language originated in grabbing attention and expressing something compelling. Miller argues that this aspect of language, verbal courtship, spreads throughout cultures and has come to be associated with many social skills and capacities: “Language puts minds on public display, where sexual choice could see them clearly for the first time in evolutionary history.”
But what began in the courtship context seeped into areas of human far removed from sex. Art in the most general sense is also an extension