The Human Instrumentality Project

November 17^th 2022

Introduction

Kendall Walton claims that there is a ‘correct category’ within which a piece of artwork must be placed in order that aesthetic judgements about that work are appropriate. The analogous claim, with respect to aesthetic judgements about nature, has been considered by various philosophers of aesthetics including Nöel Carroll and Allen Carlson who have attempted to amend Walton’s categorizations in order that they may be applied to judgements of the aesthetic qualities of nature. It is the purpose of this essay to show that these amendments, and in fact any amendments to Walton’s categories, are not sufficient to enable aesthetic judgements of nature in the same manner as with art. This will be argued with support of the distinction espoused by Kant regarding disinterested and instrumental appreciation as well as issues raised with how the purpose of art itself differs from the purpose of general aesthetic appreciation. Specifically, it will be explained how Walton’s categories are in line with this ideal of disinterested appraisal but by contrast, the extensions of Carroll and Carlson to nature are not, as nature is more directly influenced by instrumental evolutionary considerations while art is reflective and sublimated. In support, the research of Dennis Dutton regarding the instinctual and evolutionary basis of our aesthetic judgements will be called upon as well as the different connotations between so-called “folk beauty” appreciation of aesthetics versus the artistic interpretation of beauty and aesthetic merit that is driven by memetics and results from the application of frameworks such as Walton’s categories utilized when judging art disinterestedly. Now to begin with a summary of Walton’s relevant contribution to this discussion.

Waltonian Categories

Walton broke down three important properties concerning judging the objective characteristics and aesthetic interest or importance of a piece of art in his essay Categories of Art in the July 1970 issue of The Philosophical Review. These are standard, variable, and contra-standard. (Walton. 1970. p. 337-342) These properties are relative to the category a piece of artwork falls into. For example, a standard property of a painting is that it is two-dimensional and painted on a flat surface. A variable property would be whether the artist used color or only black and white. By contrast, a contra-standard property would be one that runs contrary to what we would consider a normal aspect of a painting. Something like three-dimensional elements which would be more typical of a mixed-media piece. In order to utilize these properties in the judgment of a piece of artwork, one must first correctly categorize said artwork to then determine which would be the standard, variable, and contra-standard properties.

To do this Walton envisioned four considerations to be utilized in categorizing a piece of art. They are as follows:

1. That the artwork has a relatively large number of qualities in common with respect to a specific category.
2. The fact that when considered in a specific category an artwork is “better or more interesting or pleasing aesthetically, or more worth experiencing”. (Walton. 1970. p. 357)
3. The artist expected or produced the artwork with the intention of it being regarded in said category.
4. The fact that the category was “well established in and recognized by the society in which [the artwork] was produced” (Walton. 1970. p. 357)

Based on these four considerations, in Walton’s view, artwork can be correctly categorized; thus enabling the determination of standard, variable, and contra-standard properties which then, along with an educated knowledge of the said artistic category, can lead to correct and objective statements about the aesthetic properties of the work of art. This leads to an issue when considering the aesthetic properties of nature since considerations 3 and 4 do not apply to items in the natural world sans creator. As stated in the introduction, others since Walton have attempted to amend his idea of categories to add considerations that would enable the correct categorization of natural objects. This in turn would allow those educated in the subject to make objective judgments regarding the aesthetic properties of natural objects.

A Case for Nature

In order to amend or extend Walton’s categorization to incorporate judgements regarding natural beauty, Allen Carlson devised a method whereby scientific categories could stand in for the categories pertaining to the artist and the artist’s culture. This could help give the proper context with which to assess the qualities conveyed by a natural object or animal. In his words, “Consider, for example, the aesthetic judgments we take to be true of Shetland ponies (charming, cute) and Clydesdale horses (majestic, lumbering). These judgments are made with respect to the category of horses. Similarly a foal (calf, fawn, etc.) typically strikes us as delicate and nimble when seen in the category of horses (cattle, deer, etc.), but a particularly husky one may strike us as lumbering or perhaps awkward if seen in the category of foals (calves, fawns, etc.). In the above example, particular natural kinds (elephants, horses) constitute categories which function psychologically as do categories of art; and our aesthetic appreciation is directed toward a natural object.” (Carlson. 1981. p.19) This is referred to as the natural environmental model.

Nöel Carroll builds upon Carlson’s addition of scientific contextualization by including the experience of emotion felt when appreciating nature. Carroll did not believe scientific understanding was enough, as he states in his essay On Being Moved by Nature, “My major worry about Carlson’s stance is that it excludes certain very common appreciative responses to nature – responses of a less intellective, more visceral sort, which we might refer to as ‘being moved by nature.’ For example, we may find ourselves standing under a thundering waterfall and be excited by its grandeur; or standing barefooted amidst a silent arbor, softly carpeted with layers of decaying leaves, a sense of repose and homeyness may be aroused in us. Such responses to nature are quite frequent and even sought out by those of us who are not naturalists. They are a matter of being emotionally moved by nature.” (Carroll. 1995. p. 245) This is dubbed the arousal model.

While these are both interesting and useful considerations when contemplating natural beauty, they are not sufficient when attempting to categorize and judge the aesthetic quality or beauty of nature in the same way that art is judged using Walton’s categories. There are instrumental, evolutionary, and memetic elements of the appreciation of aesthetics when speaking of art that cannot translate to the appreciation of nature for reasons expounded upon in the next section of this essay.

Instrumentality and Evolution

To begin with, what does it mean to be disinterested when judging art?To appreciate something disinterestedly means to appreciate it for its own sake and not for what you can get out of it. As Kant explains in his Critique of Judgement, “Everyone must allow that a judgement on the beautiful which is tinged with the slightest interest, is very partial and not a pure judgement of taste” (Kant, n.d p. 24) This type of disinterest is only seemingly possible when the object of reflection is isolated from everyday needs and desires. If one were to use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs model as a simple illustration, it is not possible to appreciate beauty, form, and balance (the aesthetic needs) until level 6 of the hierarchy once the biological needs, safety, love/belongingness, self-esteem/respect of others, and the meaning/predictability of the world are achieved. (McLeod. 2018) Reaching this level removes art from the instrumental and allows it to be viewed disinterestedly, this is only possible when it is sufficiently separated from our biological needs, instincts, and drives. As Malcolm Budd explains in his article Natural Beauty in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Kant also considered aesthetic judgements to be judgements of “free beauty” separate from any contextual considerations. (Budd. 1998. VII) So according to Kant, judgements on beauty would not be dependent upon scientific categorization as well as being wholly independent of human needs from lower on Maslow’s hierarchy.

Denis Dutton believes that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. In his book, The Art Instinct, he states, “People in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation; a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals. More remarkable still was the fact that people across the globe preferred landscapes of a fairly uniform type.” (Dutton. 2009. p. 40) Dutton goes on to explain the reasoning for this shared preference as our shared prehistoric Pleistocene environments and the social situations from common ancestry which left an innate impact on what we find pleasurable or beautiful for the purposes of encouraging evolutionary fitness. This foundation for what we find aesthetic feeds into and forms the basis of our aesthetic judgements more broadly. This makes it very difficult to objectively and disinterestedly judge the aesthetic qualities of nature, including which scientific categories are most relevant and/or our emotional responses when observing them, since the very metrics we are inclined to use are by their nature instrumental.

While art has its basis in evolution as well (specifically in sexual selection as opposed to more direct fitness), it has been hijacked by memetic selection and runaway sexual selection and the original drives have been sublimated to higher disinterested consideration. “When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can be passed on again, and again and so take on a life of its own. We might call this thing an idea, an instruction, a behaviour, a piece of information… but if we are going to study it, we shall need to give it a name. Fortunately, there is a name, it is the ‘meme’.” (Blackmore. 2000. p. 4) The pressures on these ideas or ‘memes’, described by Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine, limiting or encouraging their propagation through the conduit of human brains and culture, mimic those of natural selection. Thus is born memetic selection. In addition, the drives of sexual selection are always changing in a type of arms race that often moves counterintuitively in relation to simple biological fitness. (Dawkins. 2015) These drives are also not based on a veridical perception of the world but only on shortcuts we developed (for example, specific parts of the electromagnetic spectrum representing an object like a ripe apple).  This can result in phenomena like the male Australian jewel beetles which mistakenly attempt to mate with discarded beer bottles. (Hoffman et al. 2015) Furthermore, consider the peacock’s tail or the bower bird which collects and displays many colorful items for the female to judge in order to secure a mate. These come from a runaway effect of sexual and memetic selection stemming from a surplus of resources and/or being fit enough (high enough on something like Maslow’s hierarchy) to have the time/energy/fighting ability to gather items to display at great risk to oneself in order to attract a mate.

Additionally, through methods such as Walton’s (as well as other created or cultivated standards for objectivity), the judgment of art has been made more reflective and is no longer tied as closely to its biologically based aesthetic foundations. The very discussion in the philosophy of aesthetics itself on how to objectively judge art is in and of itself what cultivates artistic judgment as a disinterested act. The conversation and debate being almost more important to the process than any standards or model created by the discussion. Attempts to use the natural environmental model, the arousal model, or whatever other model to categorize or observe nature in the same manner as art only fall victim to the subjective selection of relevant information from those categories based on ethical considerations which are difficult if not impossible to disentangle from our own self-interest.

Conclusion

This is not to say that nature cannot be appreciated disinterestedly. One way this could be done, and function with the application of Walton’s categories, could be through curation. If an artist or curator were to remove parts from the context of the natural world, either literally or through photography or some other representation, that curator would then take on the role of the artist, and considerations 3 and 4 from Walton would thus apply in the same manner as with any other form of art. In this way nature ceases to be judged as nature and becomes art, this would have the bonus effect of remedying the framing problem. Walton himself, in the very essay where the categories thus amended arise from, clearly states that objective judgements of nature in the same way as with art are not possible. He believed natural objects can be categorized but that there is no single correct category with which to judge them, unlike art which generally does have a correct category. (Walton. 1970. p. 354-358)

Thus, in conclusion, when accepting Walton’s claim of a ‘correct category’ within which a work of art must be placed in order that it be judged appropriately, the same cannot be said for judgments of nature like those proposed by Carroll and Carlson due to the instrumental constraints embedded in considerations of nature no longer associated with art, which has gained, through sexual and memetic selection, a disinterested regard that is only possible at the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy when direct fitness considerations can be sublimated thereby creating a wholly different standard for aesthetic appreciation cultivated through the ongoing conversation of artists and philosophers which is quite separate from the “folk beauty” appreciation of nature.

Bibliography

Blackmore, S., & Dawkins, R. (2000). The meme machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Budd, M. (1998) ‘Natural beauty’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 38(1), 1+, available: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20468772/AONE?u=tou&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=d9e8e2bd [accessed 06 Nov 2022] pp. 2-5.

Carlson, A. (1981) ‘Nature, aesthetic judgement, and objectivity’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 40, no. 1

Carroll, N. (1995) ‘On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history’, in Kemal, S. and Gaskell, I. (eds) Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Dawkins, R. (2015) ‘The Blind Watchmaker’. W. W. Norton & Company.

Dutton, D. (2010). ‘The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, & human evolution’, Bloomsbury Press, pp. 14-79

Hoffman, D.D., Singh, M. and Prakash, C. (2015) ‘The Interface Theory of Perception’, Psychonomic bulletin & review, 22(6), pp. 1480–1506. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8.

Kant, I. (no date). ‘Critique Of Judgement”. Infomotions, Inc. pp. 23-25.

McLeod, S. A. (2018). “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html 6 November, 2022.

Walton, K. (1970) ‘Categories of art’, Philosophical Review, vol. 79, no. 3.