Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Making art is a biologically innate need as fundamental as the need for food, warmth or shelter, asserts Dissanayake, who teaches at Manhattan's New School for Social Research. In a provocative manifesto that extends the thesis of her previous book What Is Art For? she argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world. Her illustrated treatise sets forth a plausible Darwinian perspective on art as a primal, indispensable activity.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This book is an expanded discussion of the views Dissanayake put forth in her earlier work What Is Art For? ( LJ 10/1/88). Her central thesis is that the arts are universally present in human societies because play and ritual were essential to the adaptation and survival of our species. Utilizing the findings of anthropology and ethology--the study of animal (including human) behavior--she concludes that the arts have allowed us to differentiate the special from the mundane, thus enabling us to cope with unusual or inexplicable occurrences and to gain a communal focus that enhances our ability to flourish and survive. The author offers her theory as an alternative to the enlightenment/modernist and postmodernist views of art that grow out of overdependence on the written word. While Dissanayake may not have accounted entirely for art's unique role in contemporary Western society, viz. ritual and play, her discussion of the idea of "making special" offers many insights into human cultures. For specialized collections in the arts and anthropology.
- David B. Hegeman, King's Coll. Lib., Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 297 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press; Reprint edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295974796
• ISBN-13: 978-0295974798
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #350,429 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A profound work, June 7, 2001

By	John R Chang (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just finished this book, and... for the record, there are over 40 pages of footnotes and references in the back of the book. I'm not a expert in the field, but Homo Aestheticus feels like a graduate level text, and is certainly more "scholarly" than most books you'll find in a bookstore.

That said, I found Homo Aestheticus to be one of the most unique and insightful books I've read. A few spots were quite detailed and dry, but overall I found myself underlining interesting points like a madman. The concluding chapter was mindblowing. The author somehow cohesively pulled together such topics as human experience, modernism and postmoderism, literacy and writing, oral tradition, language, symbols, and thought, meaning and reality, human and culture evolution, and, of course, aesthetics and art. Certainly, it will have a lasting impact on my thinking about "art." Very much recommended for interdisciplinary thinkers.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's the Ontologies!, December 9, 2006

By	D. S. Heersink "D. Stephen Heersink" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Dissanayake marshals an eclectic hodgepodge of research, ideas, data, theories, and counter-theories to advance the simple claim that the aesthetic experience is fundamentally and innately a biological act born out of human adaptationism along the Darwinian struggle for survival. She grants that the adaptationist mechanisms may have subsided in more recent times, but the imprinting over eons of evolution still motivate us, and are still at the core of our aesthetic esperience. While entirely sympathetic to her objectives, I believe her excesses defeat her purposes.

Her core problem is wishing to remain with the 19th C. Tradition of "aesthetics" as the legacy of European Idealism while also appealing to more primitive understandings of "art." To straddle these disparate, indeed contradictory, traditions, one senses a desperation in throwing everything "including the kitchen sink" to defend her thesis. And yet, two primary resources she either does not know, or she choose to ignore, could have simplified her project immensely. But before adopting Aristotle and empirical empathy to her project, she would have to exclude the entire "aesthetic" tradition, which stands in opposition to it. She's unprepared to make that final leap, and that lack of daring in the end sabotages her project.

"Aesthetics" is a recent concept born of late-18th C. German Idealism that has made artistic behavior elitist, metaphysical, and quasi-supernatural, which as long as she accepts that model, she'll never reconcile her thesis to a more primitive biological model that has firmer and much older roots in classical Greek thought. Prior to modern aesthetics, art was simply art, which was "making" and/or "crafting" that stood in contrast to "doing," a very elementary notion prevalent in the works of Aristotle and his lineage of intellectual thought, of which Dissanayake shows no cognizance (yet, she cites Platonic Forms of beauty with relish and frequency, which is precisely the heritage of the German Aesthetic Movement).

When she thus appropriates "empathy" as a late-19th C. German Idealist heuristic device, again she ignores a richer, older, and empirical tradition prevalent in the 18th C. Scottish Enlightenment (i.e., Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Reid), which, unlike the German metaphysical version remains a viable, indeed prominent, biological model. Had she been aware/used either older tradition, she could have obviated much confusion and obfuscation, not to mention endlessly marginal studies to tinker with the Aesthetic Paradigm. She would not have needed to appeal to any and every alternative hypothesis, evidence, study, research, etc. to modify, refine, and thus, reform the Aesthetic Model in an unwieldy, untenable, and ultimately unsuccessful effort.

In the end, the irreconcilable tension between opposing traditions remains unresolved, and instead of resolution, she simply adds nuance after nuance of qualification and refinement to tweak the Aesthetic Tradition towards a more Darwinian inclination. Then, in a odd move, she tries to deal with postmodernism, but on its terms, which already puts her behind the proverbial 8-ball. Yet, in her defense, she was a pioneer in her own field of aesthetics, and was stabbing at everything to get a foothold on a better conception of why humans make things. But as long as "aesthetics" figures into her overall conception, she straddles two opposing worlds that cannot be reconciled. She even appeals to the "ontological" in another context, but then fails to see her own problem as itself a deeply ontological one, as the biological and metaphysical ontologies are simply unbridgeable. And demonstrating this difficulty, even if unintentional, is its own rewarding reason to peruse this book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creating something "special", February 25, 2006

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Tracing evolutionary roots to human creativity is a risky endeavour. The Romantic Era dismissal of "nature red in tooth and claw" misapplied to humans has its adherents even today. In more modern terms, the "postmodernist school" attributes human creativity solely to cultural environment. Dissanayake takes up the challenge and responds to these allegations from widely spread scholarship sources. She makes a solid case for human universals in many areas of expression, from graphic art through music and dance to poetry and prose. Even spoken language is addressed with an eye to derivations and commonalties.

She presents her support for a Darwinian basis for art and expression with flair and enthusiasm. There's no hesitation in offering new terms or definitions as means of breaking the bonds of tradition or rigid thinking. Acknowledging that some of her ideas are ironic, or even heretical, she intends to builds a new framework for where art truly sits in our lives. Among other "heresies", the author roundly denounces the notion that "art" is a separate or fleeting aspect of human existence. Instead, she contends, art is integrated with religion and other human social conditions. Some aspect of art is as necessary as eating or sleeping to our species. Dissanayake contends that art must be raised in importance when considering what is valuable to us.

Perhaps, Dissanayake suggests, in order to break the bonds restricting our view of "art" we need a new term. She coins "making special" for various objects or activities we now call "art". The "special" relates to the common means all organisms have in separating the mundane from the unexpected - the "extra-ordinary". If something extraordinary can promote emotions of delight, we can recreate it as something "special" and pleasurable. It might be removed from the mundane aspects of life, but the mundane may become art. A pot is made for storage or cooking, but if it's decorated in ways that bring a sense of "good" or of "pleasure", elevating it to art isn't a false promotion. Noting that both Nature and artefacts can be beautiful, only the beautiful that is created can be considered art. Much of Nature is beautiful, but only humans can create beauty. Hence, she declares that considerations of art must be "species-centred" or "bioevolutionary". Species-centrism, she warns, must not be misconstrued as detaching us from the rest of Nature. Indeed, as part of our evolutionary heritage, "species-centrism" is essential to understanding who we are. And what we can achieve.

In her final analysis, Dissanayake notes that a radical idea arose toward the end of the Enlightenment. Art was placed in a realm where only the few educated in its precepts could comprehend it. The "critic" became a mediator between the artist and the observer. The too-common expression, "I don't know about art, but I know what I like" represents this break. Later, the "French philosophers", known as the postmodernists, insisted that everything should be reduced to text. This concept has further widened the Enlightenment detachment of art from the beholder. She scorns this notion, reminding us that for nearly all of Homo sapiens' existence, none could read nor write, but art flourished. In contending with the postmodernists, the author hails the work of linguists who seek evidence of a Primordial Language [PL]. PL is another indication of the unity of expression among early humanity that was disrupted only by time and distance.

Dissanayake's analysis, which has been enhanced but not supplanted, has been strangely overlooked. The attitude of art as "outside" reality or only a distant adjunct to daily life apparently has an even stronger hold on our thinking than she suggests. Although she hasn't updated the book with recent work in cognitive studies, which can provide further insight, others have taken up the challenge [see "The Mind In The Cave" by David Lewis-Williams for an innovative example], this comprehensive work is an excellent starting point for understanding why our view of "art", or "making special" needs reconsideration. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]