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Topic: Music, fiction, EP, and cheesecake (Read 1235 times) |
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rhinoceros
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Music, fiction, EP, and cheesecake
« on: 2003-10-21 20:33:24 » |
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Here is an article starting with an old sin of Pinker's youth. Besides this catchy bit, the article is interesting. It is the second of two articles by Harold Fromm about what evolution has to say about culture. Maybe "Nature or Narture" is not such an "orthogonal" distinction after all...
Full PDFs of the two articles on "The New Darwinism in the Humanities" are available here:
From Plato to Pinker
http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSp03.pdf
Back to Nature, Again
http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSu03.pdf
The New Darwinism in the Humanities
Part II: Back to Nature, Again
Harold Fromm
Between the year 1997, when "How the Mind Works" was published, and 2002, the year of "The Blank Slate", Steven Pinker’s treatment of art seems to have undergone a certain amount of refinement. In 1997, far from seeing the arts as "adaptive," in the Darwinian sense of conducive to fitness for survival and reproduction, Pinker described music and fiction as "cheesecake" for the mind that provided a sensual thrill like the feel of fat and sugar on the taste buds. With a view such as this, there wasn’t much difference between the psychological impact of Bach’s "St. Matthew Passion" and pornography off the Web. Pinker made things even worse by adding, "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once." Whether the passage of time has caused him to reconsider or whether harsh critics such as Joseph Carroll 1 have had a chastening effect, by the time of "The Blank Slate", Pinker remarks,
"Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties." In other words, our response to art is a component of human nature and, even if he still considers it a pleasure-technology or a status-seeking feat, Pinker now seems to see it as more deeply connected with being human. "Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors," he writes, and he mentions food, sex, children, and know-how as well as visual and auditory pleasure. Not quite "adaptive" but serious nonetheless. If he has not already done so, I figure it is only a matter of time before he abandons the implausible view that nobody would profoundly miss music if it were simply to disappear. The number of totally music-insensitive people I have met during a lifetime would not use up the fingers of one hand.
<snip>
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Music, fiction, EP, and cheesecake
« Reply #1 on: 2003-10-22 04:16:25 » |
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rhinoceros
> Sent: 22 October 2003 0233
> Here is an article starting with an old sin of Pinker's youth. Besides
> this catchy bit, the article is interesting. It is the second of two
> articles by Harold Fromm about what evolution has to say about
culture.
> Maybe "Nature or Narture" is not such an "orthogonal" distinction
after
> all...
>
> Full PDFs of the two articles on "The New Darwinism in the Humanities"
are
> available here:
>
> From Plato to Pinker
> http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSp03.pdf
>
> Back to Nature, Again
> http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSu03.pdf
>
>
> The New Darwinism in the Humanities
> Part II: Back to Nature, Again
> Harold Fromm
>
> Between the year 1997, when "How the Mind Works" was published, and
2002,
> the year of "The Blank Slate", Steven Pinker's treatment of art seems
to
> have undergone a certain amount of refinement. In 1997, far from
seeing
> the arts as "adaptive," in the Darwinian sense of conducive to fitness
for
> survival and reproduction, Pinker described music and fiction as
> "cheesecake" for the mind that provided a sensual thrill like the feel
of
> fat and sugar on the taste buds. With a view such as this, there
wasn't
> much difference between the psychological impact of Bach's "St.
Matthew
> Passion" and pornography off the Web. Pinker made things even worse by
> adding, "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and
physical
> know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our
> lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure
> pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest
> through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once." !
> Whether the passage of time has caused him to reconsider or whether
harsh
> critics such as Joseph Carroll 1 have had a chastening effect, by the
time
> of "The Blank Slate", Pinker remarks,
>
> "Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two,
it
> is deeply rooted in our mental faculties." In other words, our
response to
> art is a component of human nature and, even if he still considers it
a
> pleasure-technology or a status-seeking feat, Pinker now seems to see
it
> as more deeply connected with being human. "Organisms get pleasure
from
> things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors," he writes, and
he
> mentions food, sex, children, and know-how as well as visual and
auditory
> pleasure. Not quite "adaptive" but serious nonetheless. If he has not
> already done so, I figure it is only a matter of time before he
abandons
> the implausible view that nobody would profoundly miss music if it
were
> simply to disappear. The number of totally music-insensitive people I
have
> met during a lifetime would not use up the fingers of one hand.
>
> <snip>
[Blunderov]
Perhaps the following point has been overlooked?
<q>
Ancient art has a specific inner content. At one time, art possessed the
same purpose that books do in our day, namely; to preserve and transmit
knowledge. In olden times people did not write books, they incorporated
their knowledge into works of art. We would find a great many ideas in
the works of ancient art passed down to us, if only we knew how to read
them.</q>
G.Gurdjieff
Now think of Neolithic cave art in this, so to speak, light!
Best Regards
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Kharin
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In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
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Re:Music, fiction, EP, and cheesecake
« Reply #2 on: 2003-10-22 07:12:01 » |
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Hmmm, and indeed, hmmmm.
I think a certain degree of scepticism may be required here (more due to the evident bias of the reviewer than the reviewed). The general problem with much literary theory is that for something concerned with cultural studies it runs the risk of being overwhelmingly concerned cultural production rather than how a culture actually manifests itself. In other words, concerning oneself with whether the theme of the interconnection of organisms in Victorian literature is to be primarily understood in Marxist or Darwinian terms is perhaps simply not very interesting in either case. Similarly, whether sexual dynamics within a novel are understood in feminist, Freudian or Darwinian terms is also not especially interesting (largely because the answer to these can essentially be summarised as 'choose your favourite prejudice' since it is by definition impossible to falsify any thesis here). In any of these cases, the theoretical perspective brough to bear changes the terms in which literature was produced but says rather less about the nature of the text itself (with the possible example of Easterlin who sounds potentially interesting).
One example of how Darwinian theory is likely to be interchangeable with other forms of theory is the role of the author. Both post-structuralist and Freudian schools accept that meanings may be manifested in a work of art irrespective of authorial intention. Such a view is fairly sensible within the context of either of those schools, but I'd be interested to know how it applies in a Darwinian context (if we are to speak of Darwinian interpretations of novels whose authors, like Pushkin, were not familiar with the theory of natural selection).
Regarding Caroll's critique of post-structuralism, I would be interested to know what this actually consists of. The difficulty is likely to be that post-structuralism and evolutionary psychology are not especially likely to actually 'speak' with regard to each other. The former is concerned with how the characteristics of language manifest themselves, the latter is concerned with how the origins of language manifest themselves. I'm not sure that those two really have much in common and are as likely to be compatible as incompatible, regardless of how much the possibility of compatibility might horrify the prejudices of either group.
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
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Re:Music, fiction, EP, and cheesecake
« Reply #3 on: 2003-10-22 10:29:40 » |
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Still, what Pinker said about music in 1997, in "How the Mind Works" shows that there was still room for improving his understanding of some social phenomena. In Joseph Carroll's reply mentioned by Fromm, among some compelling and some not so compelling arguments, we find this:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_C98.html
<quote from Carroll>
Now, art, music and literature are not merely the products of cognitive fluidity. They are important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions depend. Because he does not understand the necessity of such cultivation, Pinker believes that we could do without music and undergo no significant loss in our capacity to function. "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once" (p. 528).
<end quote>
These days, evolutionary psychology finds it a more compelling task to try to incorporate things like music or fiction into its framework. Of course, since EP explanations rely mostly on things that happened 100,000 years ago (a point which is also disputed in Carroll's piece), these EP explanations of art and music have mostly to do with tribal rituals and group cohesion.
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. Carroll's quote which I pasted argues that art and music still serve a purpose and I think he has good reasons to say so. 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.
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Kharin
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Re:Music, fiction, EP, and cheesecake
« Reply #4 on: 2003-10-24 07:17:50 » |
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Quote:| "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).
Quote:| "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:
Quote:| "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.
Quote:| "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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