Art, for Darwin's sake

Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain our mental states with reference to our status as a species of binocular, bipedal mammal of puny physical but mighty mental stature. It seeks to understand violence, love, sex, art, personality, mind, passions, emotions and all the other components of our mental states by putting these in the context of the full, long history of our species and the situations that may have allowed our mental faculties to affect our species's development. One of the more perplexing questions which evolutionary psychology seeks to answer is, Why do all humans like art? The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has written four books that draw heavily on evolutionary psychology and his third, How The Mind Works (Penguin, 1997), gives a good introduction in one large chapter to the evolutionary psychology of art. Denis Dutton, editor of the excellent website-commonplace Arts & Letters Daily, has reviewed Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature, an entire book on the evolutionary psychology of one branch of art (and which, I should say, is much more than a pendant to Pinker). Carroll, Dutton and Pinker agree on much, in fact much more than Dutton would suggest.

Evolutionary benefits of art and cheesecake

One of Pinker�s more memorable lines describes the consequences of our being bipedal apes evolved in the Pleistocene who meet, in the modern world, sensory pleasures in proportions for which we are under-prepared after a million years of hard living:

"We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons." (Pinker, 1997 p525)

Pinker isn�t discussing culinary issues; he is constructing a metaphor. He later opines, "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties" (p534). This one-line dismissal of an important art is enough to provoke Dutton and, though I have only the quotes Dutton gives to go on, Carroll. Pinker is, as Dutton is quick to point out, correct in his description of art's effects in the brain but only to a degree, since Pinker either undervalues or wholly fails to grasp that literature is an "important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions depend" (Carroll). The pleasure derived from fiction, according to the Dutton version of Pinker, is but a side-effect of experiencing the fiction, like cheesecake, being merely the agent of the "sensual wallop", owes its existence solely to its wallop-conferring capability. "The arts," writes Dutton in summarizing Pinker, "are pleasure short-cuts … [providing] … little jolts of enjoyment". Dutton implies that Pinker does not consider that art "helps us cultivate or socially adaptive capacity for entering mentally into the experience of other people." Dutton believes that our theory of mind, our empathic sense, our civilized self, are not, for Pinker, augmented by the experience of art.

This is not what Pinker argues. Pinker is not being dismissive of music when he calls it cheesecake (any more than he is being dismissive of cheesecake). Crucially, he does not compare literature with cheesecake. The cheesecake metaphor describes the results of modern ingenuity in creating a pleasurable sensory overload, by lasing detectors calibrated to reward us for mere blinks and flashes. Along with music, Pinker claims that pornography is another marvel of crafted self-overload. But literature is not. Pinker quotes Horace on the purpose of literature: "to delight and instruct". Some art, if it merely delights, is cheesecake; art like good literature instructs and so is not part-cheesecake, part-other--it is something for which the cheesecake analogy is unsuited. As an example of how literature goes beyond cheesecake, Carroll quotes Dutton on the scene in David Copperfield where abused David discovers some works of literature:

"What David gets from these books is not just a bit of mental cheesecake, a chance for a transient fantasy in which all his own wishes are fulfilled. What he gets is lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It is through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations of his own local environment."

Dutton comments, "This is some distance from pleasure buttons."

Yet how is this different from Pinker? In one important way, it isn�t. Here is Pinker on the second half of what literature does (i.e. after it has delighted):

"The author places a fictitious character in a hypothetical situation in an otherwise real world where ordinary facts and laws hold, and allows the reader to explore the consequences. We can imagine that there was a person in Dublin named Leopold Bloom with the personality, family, and occupation that James Joyce attributed to him…Characters in a fictitious world do exactly what our intelligence allows us to do in the real world." (p541)

and

"The intrigues of people in conflict can multiply out in so many ways that no one could possibly play out all the consequences of all possible courses of action in the mind's eye. Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face some day and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them." (p543)

In other words, the non-cheesecake part of literature affords us a sense of possible worlds, or the gamut of the human experience. We see inside other heads and out of other eyes, and we have systems that light up when we have this experience because there is an adaptive benefit to having this capacity. David Copperfield, to quote Carroll once more, "is not escaping from reality [into literature]; he is escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world of healthy human possibility." Carroll believes this is the important thing about the evolutionary psychology of literature, while Dutton claims that Pinker misses this point. Pinker, on the other hand, takes pains to say that we have evolved many pleasure buttons, not just the vicarious zing from escapism but also for useful strategies we will need in later social puzzles in our own lives, and, crucially, for wider knowledge of the social status and motions of others. Literature does not pack the "sensory wallop" of cheesecake because it is not crafted to carpet-bomb our pleasure centres; it is designed to provide us with appropriate, measured, adaptive levels of zap to parts of our mind which signal the receipt of top-drawer input for our imaginations, our worldviews, our social bookkeepers, and our gossip subsystems. This sounds to me like exactly what intellectually capable yet impoverished David Copperfield gets from Robinson Crusoe and the rest. He didn't get the cheesecake, but Pinker never said he would. We have an adaptive capacity to enjoy fiction as fiction, not fiction as concentrated reality.

Any apparent disagreement between Pinker and Carroll seems based on an interpretation not of the facts but of Pinker's way of expressing himself. The evolutionary psychology of the arts deserves more than to descend into the kind of gnarly, trivial squabbling that characterised the pedantic tensions between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould (who, frankly, should've arm-wrestled for it and thereafter devoted their considerable intellects to unravelling the natural world). Pinker and Carroll agree that there are adaptive advantages to the imaginary arts and their appreciation. I hope I have shown that neither claims that literature, in its most adaptive (because verisimilar) form, is mere escapism or vicarious living. It seems odd that Carroll and Dutton, both expert analytic readers (Dutton calls Carroll "one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I have ever encountered"), should fail to spot that Pinker agrees so readily with them, albeit in his own idiom. Indeed, Dutton quotes Carroll that Pinker agrees with the more-than-cheesecake interpretation of literature's utility, but that his "wider exposition makes it apparent that...he regards literary representation as largely a matter of pleasurable fantasy". Carroll's literary acumen does not, it seems, extend to the actual words and sentences used by Pinker but instead equips him to posit an overall gist to Pinker's arguments that omits the parts where Pinker agrees with him.

Is art a trialogue?

David Copperfield, according to the quote from Carroll above, received "lively and powerful images of human life" from his reading, and I have argued that evolutionary psychologists, Pinker included, would concur. Carroll is also quoted by Dutton as saying that these powerful images are "suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them". While this may be true of Dickens's protagonist--and is certainly true of Carroll reading Dickens, and of Dutton reading Carroll--I believe this to be incorrect and wholly irrelevant to discussions of evolutionary psychology.

As background, Dutton quotes Carroll on the over-rated and over-discussed nature of maximising reproductive success in our species, pointing out that most people hardly demonstrate startling attainment in this field (the occasional Sultan, father to hundreds, notwithstanding). This is an interesting observation: evolution by natural selection is a thing that happens to individuals, and it is an observable fact that few individuals sire six hundred offspring. Consequently, the evolution of our mental faculties has been subject to selective pressures under a regime of everyday life, with its small goals of individual survival, family health, and tribal fitness. There has been little adaptive value in cerebral specializations that thrive in the palace or the harem.

With this in mind, consider that Carroll also states that the meaning of a literary work is not in the events recounted but the interpretation. This is relatively uncontroversial. According to Dutton however, Carroll goes on to say that the interpretation of a literary work has three elements: author, character, audience. There is "a communicative transaction between reader and author understood as a real, not an implied or postulated author". In Darwinian art appreciation then, "literary forms are analyzed and understood in terms [of] the complex relations between authors, characters and audiences". Furthermore: "the author is always a palpable presence".

These statements made me squirm.

This is exactly the kind of theory one might come up with if one reads too many books, if (excuse me while I pander to a stereotype) one is a Professor of Literary Something-or-other. Consider the lack of Sultans in our evolutionary past (though, if there were a few, they contribute disproportionately to our generation by virtue of their vices). We are mostly descended from a long line of Joe Sixpacks, of John and Jane Does, of Men and Women On The Clapham Omnibus. Admittedly, these were folk who successfully passed on their genes but, still, they were not Sultans. Nor were they textual analysts, postmodern interpreters of the dialectic between author and reader, or Professors of Literary Something-or-other. Without wishing to denigrate the majority of our species that does not attend departmental seminars or write books, I would like to suggest that the everyday experience of art is not high-falutin intellectual engagement. Dutton knows this: he even quotes musical aestheticist Eduard Hanslick that "few people respond adequately to beauty in music...they do not listen actively, intellectually, but as passive recipients of emotion". This is not a failing of uncerebral individuals but a clue to our species's relationship with art over evolutionary time.

Authors of all forms of literature certainly, and unavoidably, offer a single and biased point of view but this is not part of common readers's interpretations, nor is its recognition adaptive. Why is Stephen King such a wildly popular writer (i.e. one who is staggeringly successful at accessing whatever it is that a huge number of our species use to interpret fiction)? It is not because, when reading Stephen King, one is actively aware of his "palpable" authorial presence. One does not understand his books in terms of a "communicative transaction". King is a successful storyteller because he gets out of the way, as all great (popular) story-tellers do. We readers "fall through the hole in the page" (King's phrase) or "forget ourselves". We do not know the authors of much of antiquity's great literature (assuming we do not naively presume that such works were autobiographical) and I suggest there might be a good reason for this, related to the purposes to which our species has put the narrative arts over the last hundred thousand generations.

For some people today, the experience of literature and other high art is indeed one of active intellectual engagement. This is valid but I am suggesting that it is also a relatively uncommon (by the numbers) use to which fabrication and narrative have been put. Simply put, it has not been a force in the evolution of our psychology. Our ancestors relished the experience of the kind of fictions that we, en masse, enjoy today, not the kind in which some of us take exams or review at length for their philosophical implications. Literature and other forms of high art stir our empathic sense and, perhaps naively, we could hope that this is necessary exercise for a capacity which we value and wish to keep healthy. Furthermore, we could claim that, supported by several decades of pedagogical input to the audience, literature can, in addition to its other effects, be a valid and new kind of "communicative transaction" involving authors as well as characters and audience. But the function over evolutionary time of story has been to extend our repertoire of social strategies and our understanding of the motives and mentation of others. In the average human brain (6 billion of us today, 30 billion since Homo habilis), literature does not play a role in line with the mores of modern literary criticism. Historically, and evolutionarily, storytellers get credit after the story is over for making us forget they are there. Or they get credit for the quality of their communicative transaction, assuming the audience has previously undergone two decades or more of intellectual upskilling. But the primary experience of literature for us today and for our Pleistocenean ancestors is one of cheesecake and daytime TV.

Is this disappointing? Do you hope, like Dutton, perhaps desperately, that "working through and understanding in experience a work of art is an achievement, and an intrinsic value"? Such personal, subjective values are understandable (I share them, and both Stephens King and Pinker probably do too) but have nothing to do with the process or results of natural selection. Like all conclusions of evolutionary psychology, the fact that our species, while capable of high art and its appreciation, universally prefers gossip and action-adventure says nothing about the future. It has no implications for what we should be like, for whether our species's current propensities should be a source of pride or disappointment, or how a better society can be achieved without rubbing up against our innate capacities. It merely indicates that, despite a knee-jerk gasp from the Humanities Department, we must recognize that James Joyce, while something new and powerful in one field of art and of likely tremendous impact in the future, would have been sidelined around the Pleistocene campfire by Stephen King. In this respect, popular, ostensibly non-literary writers better serve adaptive needs honed since we left the trees; great art uses the same channels to do much, much more.

• Denis Dutton's original review, The Pleasures Of Fiction (Philosophy & Literature 2004 28: 453-66)