ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
When a friend of mine asked, ‘Why do you do evolutionary aesthetics?’ I responded,
‘Because I believe in it and because I like it and because it’s true.’ But, more and
more what I want is a stronger methodology, a taxonomy perhaps, that fits our very
real findings like Lock’s into a specific overlay onto literature or the visual arts. There
are wonderful broad strokes like artification but fewer fine-tuned ones like Dr. Dissanayake’s research on the mother-infant dyad. The EA theorists have done a great
job explaining that evolution must (of course of course of course) have some bearing
on literary representation, expression and understanding, but I am not quite sure that
the how (as in, how to bridge a working methodological theory that is systematic, repeatable and comprehensive) is quite in place yet. (But, I do wonder where are primatology’s findings [say, de Waal, et al. coupled with cognitive studies coupled with
linguistics/pragmatics]. Here are very direct correlations between human behavior and
our cousins’, each having been shaped back in our primordial pasts with a direct ancestor and thus sharing some tendencies toward like-action.) But again, how shall we
refine this into a workable aesthetic theory? Not simply pointing again and again to
the Westermark Effect or to less reliable neural possibilities like Mirror Neurons
(which I have admittedly done).
How can we mish-mash together quantitative and qualitative research agendas that
each rely so heavily on different epistemic qualifiers? Fact: ‘Evolution shaped the
human brain and thus the mind, etc. & etc’. But, fact? ‘Ergo, literature demonstrates
the definite fingerprints of evolution’. My question is: Where exactly? The demarcation required hangs out at such a fuzzy distance, often sounding its own depths with a
rope whose ends have been tied together, ‘Evolutionary selection pressures have resulted in the human capacity for abstract thought and reason, therefore literary works,
being repositories for this abstract thought capacity, should demonstrate this capacity.’
Okay. But, where does the knotaulogical (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) Gordian
knot-nest’s joint reside and can we then untie it and figure it out? We can surely teach
our students that there will be evolutionary evidence in books and poems that they can
locate, but what about those books and poems that self-consciously work against such
conclusions (‘Ah, you see, the ability to hide our evolutionary origins simply proves
the fact that they are there…’), or further, the only relatively furnishable thesis for,
say, a graduate student in this burgeoning field to make would follow the template of:
‘According to [insert broad evolution-based concept] Text XYZ demonstrates [insert
limited evolutionary function] in relation to the author’s focus on [insert even more
limited set of warr