The origin of the aesthetic: essays on the relationship between the philosophy of art and the earliest signs of aesthetic activity

Traditionally, philosophers and theorists, as well as non-specialist art-enthusiasts, have seen a close connection between art and beauty. One adjustment to this connection that philosophers have suggested is that we talk about 'aesthetic value', a category that would cover such things as the formal qualities of a poem or drama, as well as the balance, elegance and emotional power of a painting or statue, and of which beauty is merely a part. But more recently, and in the face of art-movements from the mid Twentieth Century onwards, theorists have been less willing to assert a close connection between art and either beauty or the aesthetic. This 'anti-aesthetic' turn is connected with such movements as minimalism, conceptualism, and post-object art, which sometimes prefer to see the activity of the artist as a kind of intellectual provocation, dedicated to challenging ideas in ways that may not involve the activity of conferring beauty or other aesthetic qualities on an object. Indeed, many artists pursue an 'anti-aesthetic' approach hostile to the very notion of beauty.

Attempting to accommodate the anti-aesthetic movement, philosophers have turned to so-called 'historical' accounts of art, which emphasise a continuous artistic conversation taking place over the centuries that connects art-movements which may have radically different aims and values. But the emphasis on a connected series of stages, each influencing the next, means that we can no longer make room for historically isolated art.

Do we need to make room for it? I believe that we do, and that many of the artefacts made between 35 and 10 thousand years ago deserve to be categorised as art. But these items may well be isolated from all but the most recent art and, if it were not for accidents of discovery, would not be known at all. This would not, I believe, be grounds for denying them the status of art.

There are artefacts which are aesthetically interesting from much earlier periods that this even, including carefully worked stone implements made nearly one million years ago. Should we regard these as art? I believe not, though they may well be made for aesthetic display. So even an aesthetic theory of art needs to acknowledge the difference between art and that which is merely aesthetic. I argue that the difference is concerned with the sorts of community-wide uses to which the artefacts of 35 thousand years ago were probably put.

Those who study the stone ages often invoke the idea of the symbolic as an explanatory tool, but are much less prone to treat the aesthetic in the same way. I suggest that the idea of the symbolic is often used in an imprecise sense and that we need an approach to Stone Age artefacts which is able to combine the symbolic (narrowly and usefully defined) and the aesthetic as complementary explanatory tools.

Put in a broad perspective, this project questions the assumption that it is wrong--philosophically and historically--to speak of very ancient artefacts, far distant from our cultural concerns, as art or as aesthetic objects. Deploying the notions of art and the aesthetic in this context does not mean that we have to adopt the slogan 'art for art's sake', or suppose that very ancient people crafted these objects because they had nothing else to fill their leisure hours. It will illustrate how art and the aesthetic mesh with such notions as cultural evolution, sexual selection, and the emergence of symbolic culture to provide a powerful explanatory framework.