ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
Anthony Lock Response to Commentaries
My thanks to everyone for their comments. I’ll try to make some brief clarifications.
The first of my two main aims in the paper is to show that the fourth culture, as José
calls it, is possible, similar to what The Evolutionary Review’s editors intended. There
is, surely, no advantage to the consilience approach over humanities approaches, or
vice-versa. The advantage is integrating both, necessarily together, with the scientific
as a supplementary, but essential, role. It is important to stress, as David Sloan Wilson
says, the relationship between science and the humanities is “evolutionary social constructivism”. But this still means phenomena, like social effects and subject preferences that the sciences explore, should be looked at more enthusiastically in art criticism, as they are part of the whole, wider phenomenon of art experience.
The second main aim of the paper is to argue that the relationship between artist and
viewer is based on adaptationary origins. The way I phrase the introduction is misleading, so I’ll rephrase it and focus on it here: the fourth culture argument I make is
not an argument for the adaptationary viewpoint; rather, I employ the interrelationship
between artist and viewer in a fourth culture analysis. I think Ellen’s work, Denis’s
work and theory of mind suggest potential extra adaptationary reasons, in pre-history,
for our interest in other people, from which the importance of an artist / viewer interrelationship emerges. The interest in other minds and products of the mind is the essential element of the interrelationship between artist and viewer. The evidence I give
throughout the paper about the interrelationship between artist and viewer tries to
show that the interrelationship between artist and viewer is universally important and
often understated. There are two hypotheses this creates for adaptations back in prehistory that are now employed in art experience, focusing around an artist / viewer
interrelationship. I should have stated these much more specifically in the paper.
The first comes from Ellen’s mother-baby interaction theories. Mother-infant interaction can be described as an aesthetic experience (if being in love is an aesthetic experience, the joy of engaging in baby-talk is aesthetic). Further, it is play-acting with
repetitions and devices used in art-making. If so, it is an example of a viewer / performer interrelationship based on aesthetic feelings. If the cognitive impulses for interaction behind the interrelationship of mother-baby interaction, and not just the rituals and rhythms of the interaction, were also utilized in the first experiences of artification, then the same psychological and neurological activity would be used in both.
This would provide an adaptationary reason within a previous natural environment for
a psychological predisposition towards an interrelationship between artist and viewer
to emerge. Whether this was the case can be determined by experiments into