Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper treats the topics that have been of long interest to aestheticians. Traditional aesthetics, i.e., aesthetics in philosophy, is broad and diverse, including such topics as the beauty of ideas as well as the beauty of body form, natural landscapes, scents, ideas and so on. Some colleagues have suggested that I provide a succinct definition of aesthetics. It is not possible, however, to provide an objective definition based on Darwinian theory. As D. Symons (pers. comm.) put it: “... [T]he whole notion of ‘aesthetics,’ as a ‘natural’ domain, i.e., as a domain that carves nature at a joint, is misguided... All adaptations are aesthetic adaptations, because all adaptations interact in some way with the environment, external or internal, and prefer certain states to others. An adaptation that instantiates the rule, ‘prefer productive habitats’, is no more or less aesthetic than an adaptation that instantiates the rule, ‘prefer a particular blood pressure’.” Although there is no way to objectively define the aesthetic domain, there is value, I believe, in treating the various topics of traditional aesthetics in a modern, Darwinian/adaptationist framework.