Animal Aesthetics

Abstract

Why am I addressing the unusual topic of animal aesthetics? At our last meeting in Tokyo-Makuhari, I suggested a turn to transhuman aesthetics: a type of aesthetics that no longer follows the modern decree that everything is to be understood in departure from the human and by referring it back to the human.[2] Instead, we ought to conceive of the human in a larger than human context, taking into account, for instance, our place in the cosmic and natural environment, or our primordial connectedness with the world, or the non-human layers of our existence.[3] In this spirit it is quite natural to turn to evolution to ask whether the aesthetic attitude might be not a uniquely human invention but one that already originated before man appeared on earth in the course of prehuman evolution, in the animal kingdom. Maybe human aesthetics developed from animal aesthetics I am not, of course, suggesting that sophisticated aesthetics as practiced by humans already exists among animals. There is certainly no Picasso in the animal kingdom, nor any sensibility for the flamboyant style or works by John Cage. Yet the aesthetic attitude as such - in however modest a form - might have originated in the animal kingdom. Drawing on this animal resource,[4] human aesthetics might have evolved and, later on, when cultural evolution (so typical of humanity) emerged, ha had reached results very different from animal aesthetics.[5] With this idea in mind, I thought I would only have to go through the vast literature on evolutionary aesthetics in order to find the relevant materials and appropriate answers to my question. I was overly optimistic back then. In fact, reading the literature turned out to be very disappointing. Evolutionary aesthetics, as commonly pursued today, falls prey, in my opinion, to serious shortcomings.