Learning from animals and animal studies, ethology and evolutionary theories have offered inspiration for the “biologically-oriented aestheticians”42 for well over a hundred years. This also explains why evolutionary aesthetics has gained increasing interest in the recent debates on aesthetic experience.
As Tuan reminds, “ethological studies show that non-human animals also have a sense of territory and of place”.43 Thus understanding of the actions and behaviours of non-human animals may in some cases help us to determine how
41 Berleant 1992, 10. 42 Leddy 2012, 184. 43 Tuan 2008, 4.
environment affects human behaviour, and how this behaviour relates to the specifically human experience. However, one must not forget the complexities of human nature, since “people also respond to space and place in complicated ways that are inconceivable in the animal world”.44 Ethology and anthropology thus teach about the human way of inhabiting and responding to space, but these results have to be taken cautiously and complemented with accounts of different kinds of experiences, both fictive and factual.
It goes without saying that not only human beings show intentionality in spatial behaviour. The evolutionary point of view in researching spatial relations and territorial issues is helpful since it opens one’s eyes to notice other possible ways of organising the spatial dimension of life. At best, the rich variety of behaviour and solutions shown by other species in natural environments enriches an understanding of our own actions and point to new possible directions for consciously directing them. This is hardly a new insight, since ethological notions of animal pathways, for example, have affected street planning in cases when trodden paths are formed into more formal roads and streets for the growing human habitation.45
Evolutionary aesthetics can be seen to provide a sort of “non-human” per- spective on human beings. Denis Dutton lists as “innate, universal features and capabilities of the human mind”, among others, “an intuitive physics that we use to keep track of how objects fall, bounce or bend” and “an intuitive sense of space, including imaginative mapping of the general environment”. He also mentions instincts such as fear of heights as shared by humans, although it has on other occasions been questioned whether humans actually have proper instincts in the sense that birds, for example, have.46 These capacities affect the ways in which different phenomena are experienced. But honing of skills attached to these capacities is equally important. In the larger perspective of aesthetic and somatic experiences, I put tentatively forth the idea that each individual possesses a certain set of body technologies or somatechnologies. This is since being able to
44 Tuan 2008, 4.
45 See Diaconu 2011a; Diaconu refers here to Bollnow. 46 Dutton 2009, 43–44.
experience spatially, for example, is based on a set of capacities, sets of skills to use them, and properties of the human body that enable both the capacities and the skills. These skills can also be enhanced by both learning and technology.
Evolutionary aesthetics47 provides an especially acute insight in the sense that it tilts the perspective towards a more holistic approach, considering man to be quintessentially a part of his environment. As this view is further developed, it can provide interesting parallel points with the quite recent notions of both environmental and aesthetic engagement. In a sense, the full potential of evolutionary aesthetics has not yet been made use of in the complex setting of the human relation to environment in which pressing ecological questions can no longer be overlooked.
What is of interest and easy to comprehend is the evolutionary perspective’s focus on the ability to perceive and interpret space. The emphasis is on a skill that has collectively an evolutionary history but which is individually cherished and developed. The focus is also then directed on the amount of common ground for appreciating and evaluating aesthetic issues that all human beings share. This fading out of cultural differences also takes away the emphasis on linguistic and other such derived meanings and brings the somatic, “innate” manner of experiencing back into the limelight. This return has to be emphasised, since for philosophy this belief in the universal human nature has been a defining one before the rise of social sciences during the 20th century.
Dutton emphasises the “messiness” of aesthetic experience,48 because it is affected by a concatenation of different sets of “sub-instincts” that are in no way in harmony with each other.49 Not only “evolved capacities”, such as the sense of hearing in its rich differentiating ability and the limits they set, but also our perception, knowledge, and interpretation of these capacities direct human activity. Some aspects of being a perceiving, experiencing human being have simply not been that well articulated and brought into the realm of philosophy,
47 Dutton uses systematically the notion of “Darwinian aesthetics” instead of evolutionary aesthetics, which is however the more established form.
48 For “aesthetic unreliability”, see Chapter V; Melchionne 2012. 49 See Dutton 2009, ch. 8.
science, or even language. Such include everyday activities, many various somatic phenomena, and their relation to objects. This unknowingness is already proven by the attention given to these issues by contemporary philosophy and science that, however, does not seem sufficiently informed.
Landscape preferences recounted by Dutton tell not only about actual preferences but also which aspects in landscapes draw most attention.50 Assessing risks and opportunities are practical survival skills when associated with primal settings of life but when transferred to the social and more developed cultural realm, they become the skills necessary in order to interpret and place value on the phenomena linking people and their interests and passions. In a sense, the evolutionary perspective emphasises the old tradition of sensus communis when it comes to certain perceptive and aesthetic abilities, for example in perceiving spatial forms and dimensions. This universality of shared abilities is seen as something developed for evolutionary purposes.
Dutton considers that during the Holocene, the epoch of the rapid growth and technological development of the human species, the collaboration of skills and human sociability gain more and more importance in coping with the environment. Dutton compares these properties to human reflexes in the sense that they are universally shared and instantaneously in action in all or most human activities.51 Learning to live and work together, to tolerate and share space with others is thus considered essential for the survival and further flourishing of the human species. This development is reflected in different aspects of culture, from introspective art to common jurisdiction. Reflected in these burgeoning forms of human activity are also the feel, need, and experience of space, which are deeply embedded in each individual.
According to Dutton, the emphasis has been on the intellectual components, particularly since Kant explicitly denied the value of the sensual components of aesthetic experience.52 This criticism of one-sidedness has been heard from other very different directions as well. Concerning the spatiality of sensory
50 For prospect–refuge theory and more on landscape preferences, see Appleton 1975.
51 Dutton 2009, 45. 52 Dutton 2009, 49.
experiences, it can in any case be stated that ever since Darwin, “space no longer was a neutral void; rather, the organism and the environment were mutually affecting each other, in a system where organisms also had a ‘will’, acting out the advantages in biological adaption”.53 This mutual affect is also the basis for a more comprehensive ecological understanding of a human being’s relation to the environment.