From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 05:17:50 MDT
"Taking this view, one could try to make an argument that music, although it still has a strong effect, serves no purpose today and that it is only a leftover. Psychological and social studies could step in here and tell us whether this is true or not."
In all honesty, the music example has the look of attempting to make the evidence fit the theory, that is that since music does not neatly fit into the model of "adaptive human capacity for creating cognitive models" and therefore has to be discarded though. In fairness, music is difficult to account for in the same terms as other art forms (since it is non-representational).
"One could still say that our biological mechanisms for art and music have been put to different uses today, but this is also something which happens with all our evolutionary traits."
Doubtless and I expect that applying to evolutionary psychology to understanding the role of art and literature is likely to be interesting. What I'm not convinced about is whether applying evolutionary psychology to literary criticism is likely to be anymore satisfactory than the bulk of Marxist literary criticism was. The particularly objectionable part is this:
"He corrects Virginia Woolf’s jocular remark that human nature (actually, she wrote “human character”) changed in 1910 by explaining that “Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside.”"
I seem to recall EM Forster commenting that whether human nature changed or not was largely unimportant in comparison to whether how we view human nature had changed or not. In this case, artistic representation of human nature tends to be response to how the culture of the time views it. Medieval artists saw human nature in terms of a set of social and religious typologies. Eighteenth century novelists often as human nature in the same terms as Locke, that of the blank slate. It's difficult to conceive of any of these conforming to what Pinker would deem acceptable.
More to the point, if the acme of artistic achievement is "pleasing the human palate" then Pinker has advanced a view that would displace most of the artistic canon. In particular the idea that modernism created a form of elitism in contrast to previous popular notions of art is somewhat misconceived. From Maecenas to Kreutzer, patrons have been needed to fund artists whose works did not please the human palate as much as their now forgotten contemporaries. The problem of defining artistic value is that definitions are either too vague to exclude works that aren't part of the canon or too narrow to include works that are: Pinker is to be congratulated for forming a definition that would be likely to exclude much of the canon.
"We know that late Beethoven, late Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Picasso, some of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, etc., were at first regarded as “ugly” and now are so naturalized as to present few problems. What hasn’t been assimilated—Finnegans Wake, Moses und Aron—may be the sort of artifacts that affirm Pinker’s judgment."
Possibly. But why stop there? Eliot, Picasso and Stravinsky were equally controversial in their own time and had no more interest in pleasing the human palate than Joyce did. Frankly, having an erroneous conception of human nature is perhaps rather less the point in those cases than deliberately setting out to create something in opposition to perceived norms.
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