Art and Human Nature

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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:2 Spring 2004

NOËL CARROLL

Art and Human Nature

I. INTRODUCTION

The concept of human nature unavoidablyimplies the existence of nearly universal regu-larities across the human species—regularities,like language use, most probably explicable interms of biology and evolutionary psychology.Thus, linking the arts to human nature implicitlypromises to connect the arts to long-term,enduring, nearly universal features of thehuman frame. That is, if art is rooted in humannature, then it is a response, at least in part, toelements of our evolved cognitive, perceptual,and emotive architecture that are either neces-sary for social life, or conducive to it, or that areside-effects from features that are.

For some, this will sound scarcely exception-able, since we are prone to say that virtuallyevery known human culture has what we callarts, including narrative (oral and written), image-making, carving, whittling, sculpting, chanting,dance, song, decoration, acting, mime, and soon.1 And inasmuch as this is a feature of humansocieties, exemplified across the species, wewould expect to find that its explanation—likethe explanation of our linguistic capacities—goes rather deep, to something inherent inhuman nature.

Although every known culture appears topossess art, it is improbable that this can beexplained in terms of art’s originating in a sin-gle location at one time and then being dissem-inated gradually therefrom. Rather, art seems tohave sprung up independently in differentlocales and at different times, often apart fromoutside influences. But if the world-wide distri-bution of art cannot be explained by culturaldiffusion, then the alternative that recommendsitself is that art has its origins in something

common to humankind, something bred in thebone, so to speak.

The reasoning here is straightforward,namely, that the same global effect is apt tohave the same cause. If that cause is not ultim-ately cultural diffusion from a single source,then we must look elsewhere—to enduring fea-tures of the human organism as it has evolved toengage recurring adaptive challenges.2 Or, toput the matter more simply, we must look tohuman nature as at least part of the explanationof why we have art as we know it.

Moreover, it is not just the fact that we findart distributed globally that suggests a considera-tion of its evolutionary heritage. There is alsothe related phenomenon that people of differentcultures are able to recognize, at rates that arehardly random, the products of other cultures asartworks. As Stephen Davies notes, “I amimpressed by how accessible to Westerners ismuch sub-Saharan music, Chinese painting, andwoven carpets from the Middle East.”3 And thesame sort of cross-cultural recognizability canbe observed of non-Westerners in regard to ourart; Western mass culture could not be so easilyexported were it otherwise.

This, of course, is not to say that the citizensof disparate societies grasp the significance intheir full cultural complexity of artworks fromother societies. Rather, the point is that, to anarresting degree, Europeans can recognize astatue of Ganesha as an artwork without beingable to know its symbolic import. Appreciatingthe meaning of such a figurine, needless to say,requires contextual or background knowledgeof the sort that is available to the untutoredWesterner only from a participant of the rele-vant culture, or by way of an anthropologist, oran art historian. Nevertheless, it remains a

96 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

striking fact that we can recognize—to a per-haps surprising extent—the artworks of othercultures, as other peoples can recognize ours,even where we are unable to decipher them ordiscern their historical significance.4 But how isthis possible?

Again, a very attractive hypothesis is that wehave an inbred capacity to detect the expressivebehavior of our conspecifics as it is inscribed inthe sensuous media of the traditional arts. Wemay not know what a tribal decoration means,but we know that, by means of it, its makerintends to communicate something special,something that is worth remarking on.5

Of course, it is not my contention that everyartwork is recognizable as such by anyone fromany culture. We would not predict that just any-one from anywhere could recognize many ofDuchamp’s readymades as artworks. Manyfrom our own culture have been tripped up bythese examples, though, it should be noted, thattheir manner of display ought to have givenonlookers food for thought.

Still, to a rather surprising degree, the art-works of foreign societies are cross-culturallyrecognizable as artworks and that calls forexplanation. And since the phenomenon is cross-cultural, and not readily explicable in terms ofmerely cultural diffusion, the invocation of humannature appears irresistible. Moreover, since thisrecognizability, where it occurs, seems mostlikely with what can be called the traditionalarts, the suggestion that human nature plays animportant role in our explanation here appearsapposite, since the relevant, enduring featuresof our cognitive, perceptual, and emotive archi-tecture were in place when the more traditionalforms of art and expression emerged.

Nevertheless, despite the prima facie casethat can be made that art has something to dowith human nature—conceived of in terms ofour enduring, evolved cognitive, perceptual,and emotive architecture—it is also true that forover two decades, researchers in the humanitieshave resisted universalizing modes of analysis,such as evolutionary psychology and cognitivescience, preferring, almost exclusively, to his-toricize artistic phenomenon in the convictionthat, as they say, “it’s culture all the waydown.”

In contrast, in this essay I want to stress thatbiologically informed research and cultural-

historical research on the arts need not be seenas locked in a zero-sum struggle. Both kinds ofresearch have important contributions to maketo our understanding of art and aesthetic experi-ence, not only in the sense that sometimes oneof these perspectives is better suited than theother to explain certain aspects of the pheno-mena, but also in the sense that sometimes theseperspectives can mutually inform one another.Indeed, I hope to show that in some casespsychology, including evolutionary psycho-logy, may enrich historical explanations. Inorder to motivate this claim, I will try to indi-cate how aspects of the development of certainmass art forms, such as film and TV, can befruitfully discussed psychologically in terms ofthe ways in which they address human nature.

II. THE CASE AGAINST HUMAN NATURE

Before attempting to substantiate the usefulnessof discussing art in relation to human nature, itwill perhaps be instructive to review briefly someof the reasons that specialists in the humanitieshave had for resisting this approach.6 Here mypurpose is not to reject the many deep insightsthat cultural-historical approaches have yielded.Nor is it to urge that cultural approaches besupplanted across the board by ones informedby evolutionary psychology and cognitive sci-ence. Rather, my point is that cultural-historicalapproaches may be profitably supplemented,especially in the explanation of certain artisticphenomena, by talking about human nature.

Earlier I claimed that the appeal to humannature seems unobjectionable on the face of it,since it appears that almost every known culturepossesses art. Undeniably, this art comes inmany different forms. However, the diversity ofart across different societies should no morediscourage us from looking for a common causehere than the diversity of different languagesdeters us from attempting to locate the humancapacity for language in our common humannature. That is, where we are dealing with cog-nate phenomena, it pays to look for a commoncause.

But many in the humanities today are apt toquestion my first premise. They will deny thatart is universal, thereby vitiating the grounds foran appeal to human nature. They may point out,

Carroll Art and Human Nature 97

for example, that many cultures lack a word for“art” that is equivalent to our usage. However,this is not a very compelling consideration, since,though certain cultures do not have a word for“economics” in their vocabulary, this does notencourage us to think that the pertinent societieslack economies. Nor should the fact that artshows such astounding cross-cultural variationoverly impress us, since, as already noted, thediversity of different languages does not lead usto suspect that the nearly universal capacity forlanguage is not a biological endowment.

A perhaps more sophisticated way of denyingthat what we call art is universal, or nearly so, isto allege not that other cultures lack a word forart, but that they lack a concept for it, or, atleast, that their concepts are so wildly differentfrom the Western concept that they mark differ-ent phenomena. That is, once we recognize thatthe concepts that underwrite different artisticpractices in different cultures are wildly non-converging, we will realize that the phenomenawe boldly suppose belong to the same class—and for that reason, we say, call for the sameexplanation—are really only a series of disjunctpractices, best explained culturally and histor-ically with attention to local detail, rather thansomething global, like our purportedly commonhumanity.

For example, it might be said that what wecall art is very different from what we find inmany other societies. What we call art is puta-tively designed for disinterested contemplation,a source of pleasure divorced from the prospectof practical or utilitarian advantage, includingsocial or religious benefit. This conception ofart has been especially influential in Westernculture since the eighteenth century, notablydue to certain interpretations of the aesthetictheories of Immanuel Kant. However, this is nothow the comparable expressive, decorative, andrepresentational artifacts of many other culturesare regarded. For those cultures, the artifacts inquestion are often practical.

The designs on the shields of Sepik highland-ers are intended to frighten off their enemies,not to invite them to savor their expressivedesign. Likewise, what we would regard as rep-resentations of the gods in many cultures are notrepresentations in our sense—that is, statuesthat stand for the gods—but rather are taken tobe the very gods themselves, incarnate in stone

or wood in whose presence worshipers avowtheir reverence and advance their desires. Thatwe place these objects in our museums wherewe contemplate them in a supposedly disinter-ested manner is a matter of wresting theseobjects out of their cultural context and usingthem for our own purposes. It is a matter ofprojecting our concept of art onto artifacts thatbelong to an entirely different category altogether.

For, it is said, art in our sense is not universal.Indeed, art in our sense is parochial. It is histor-ically specific, as are the ostensibly comparablepractices of other cultures. Thus, there is not asingle class of behaviors here that warrants anexplanation in terms of generic human nature.There is rather a series of nonconverging prac-tices best accounted for in light of the historiesof the cultures in which they obtain.

Though admittedly seductive, this argumentis not finally conclusive.7 For it rests upon iden-tifying an arguably skewed concept of art as thecanonical one in Western culture. Though thereis a tradition that has been influential for just overtwo centuries in Western culture that identifiesartworks as things designed for disinterested,nonutilitarian contemplation, this a controver-sial view. It is not universally endorsed, even inthe relevant precincts of Western culture. It is atheory of our concept of art, often called “theaesthetic theory of art” or sometimes “aestheti-cism,” but it is a theory that many, specialistsand nonspecialists alike, reject, even in Westernculture. One reason for this rejection is theobservation that this theory does not encompassall the objects and performances that we are pre-pared to categorize as art in our own culture.For even in our own culture, we are happy toclassify works designed, intended, and used fortheir practical consequences as artworks.

For example, much Western art was createdto serve religious and/or political purposes,rather than for the sake of disinterested contem-plation. The stained glass windows of churcheswere originally, first and foremost, vehicles forteaching articles of faith and doctrine to theilliterate. So many war monuments and victoryarches are intended to commemorate historicevents and to remind the populace of their polit-ical heritage and civic responsibilities.8

That is, despite the cultural authority of thetheory that art is an occasion for disinterestedcontemplation, the theory does not really track


even the way in which Westerners, as a group,actually categorize things as artworks. Andwhen we look at how we in fact go about doingthis, we notice far more correspondencesbetween what other cultures count as artworksand what we do, which, of course, suggests thatour prevailing, de facto concept of art is not asdifferent from theirs as we have been asked tobelieve.

Like the Sepik highlanders, we too considerarmor designed to intimidate and terrify theenemy to be art.9 And it should be noted thatwithin our own tradition the notion of represen-tation has not always been parsed in terms ofsomething like the relation “x stands for y” (asin “the portrait of Wellington stands forWellington”). We too find in our own heritageartworks where the operative notion ofrepresentation is better understood as akin toincarnation. It was, for example, believed thatByzantine icons put one in the presence of thesaints, and, as well, one of the celebrants of theEleusinian mysteries, from which Greek tra-gedy is descended, was thought to become theembodiment of Dionysus himself. Moreover,both these conceptions of certain types of repre-sentational art were, of course, in the service oflarger purposes than art for art’s sake. Thus,once we cease to allow ourselves to be misledby the eighteenth-century theory that art isexclusively an affair of disinterested contempla-tion, we find that our operative conception ofart coincides approximately to what we findelsewhere in other cultures.

In short, those who complain that othercultures do not share our concept of art and,therefore, that art, so-called, is not universal errbecause they take an impoverished view ofwhat counts and has counted as art in Westernculture. They have uncritically accepted a blink-ered conception of art, hypostasizing it as theWestern viewpoint, and this has led them toignore the fact that many of things categorizedas art within Western culture have unequivocalcorrelates in the supposedly incommensurableart of other cultures. The contention that Westernart is essentially different in kind from the art ofother cultures is fundamentally the result of notlooking closely enough at what we count as theart of our own culture and of how we areprepared to count it. For once we look closely atthe art of our own culture and that of others, it

seems that a great many of the relevant prac-tices are universal, or nearly so.

This, of course, is not to say that every sort ofart can be found transculturally; we do notexpect to find conceptual art flourishing intribal cultures. Nevertheless, there are certainvery frequently recurring features in a great dealof what are called artworks across cultures,including their embodiment in a sensuousmedium that calls for an imaginative responseto their decorative, representational, emotive,and symbolic properties. Also, these things aretypically the product of the application of skills,acquired from a tradition, and they address bothfeeling and cognition, often affording pleasure.Though there may be artworks that elude allthese criteria, at the same time, things of thissort are to be found in every culture, and, to thatextent, art is universal. Moreover, it is exactlythis dimension of art that warrants beingthought about in terms of human nature.

Another reason that contemporary represen-tatives of the humanities resist talking about artand human nature is that they do not think thatthere is such a thing as an enduring humannature. Or, if they do, they believe that it is thenature of human life at any rate to be utterlyplastic or malleable. From Hegel and Marx,they have inherited the idea that it is the natureof humankind to create itself through its prac-tices, especially the practices through whichhumans secure their means of existence, notablytheir material existence. Moreover, as liberals,many humanists have learned to distrust thelanguage of human nature, since it has oftenbeen invoked to resist social change, while talkof biological endowments gives them theshivers, because it raises the specter of racism.In order to stave off these undesirable politicalconsequences, they are disposed to regardhumans as open to the permanent possibility ofimprovement.

It is hard not to be sympathetic to these veryhumane concerns. However, it is not clear thatthese legitimate worries mandate a completeblackout of reference to human nature andobliviousness to cognitive science and psych-ology. With regard to the discussion of art and ourbiological endowment that I have broached, theissue of racism does not arise, since I am talkingabout universal or nearly universal featuresacross the entire human species, and not about


invidious contrasts between different racialgroupings.

Furthermore, though talk of human nature isalways worthy of suspicion for its potentialreactionary bias, it does not seem realistic forpeople committed to improving social condi-tions to ignore the possibility that the space inwhich they operate may be constrained by ourbiological make-up. Surely, in designing publicpolicy with regard to social problems, like obes-ity, it is more socially enlightened to realize thatmany are afflicted with this disability becausenatural selection, in certain locales, favoredthose who were capable of storing largeamounts of fats and sugars, rather than thinkingit to be simply an issue to be solved by coun-seling, motivation, and willpower.

We are bodies, and our bodies were shapedby an evolutionary history in response to envir-onments often very different from the onespresently inhabited in the industrial world.Much of our cognitive, perceptual, and emo-tional make-up, including our associative dispos-itions, are legacies of that process. Hegel andMarx were correct in observing that, in largemeasure, humans create themselves throughtheir cultural and material practices, but we donot start from nowhere; we are not empty recep-tacles; we come onto the scene with certain bio-logical endowments. (It is certainly a greatirony that contemporary “cultural materialists”in the humanities—who relish speaking of the“body” metaphorically—seem to have a genu-ine aversion to talking about the actual bodiesproduced by natural selection.)

There is a diversity of cultures because webring our endowments, our biological resources,to diverse environmental challenges, and becausethese initial differences themselves then generatediverse histories. But cultural diversity does notentail the utter plasticity of the human frame, sincethat variation occurs within the parameters ofpossibility set by our biological make-up—whichincludes the evolved cognitive, perceptual, andemotive hardware that we share cross-culturally.This is not a plea for political conservatism, butonly a reminder that the emancipatory projectswe pursue need to be adjusted to the humanmaterials we hope to improve.

It is not “culture all the way down” then,because the living, human stuff from whichculture is, in part, woven is a product of the

evolutionary process of natural selection, whichinvests us with a certain cognitive, perceptual,and emotive architecture. That this is so isespecially significant in coming to understandimportant features of art and aesthetic experi-ence. For much art, especially of the traditional,transcultural variety, addresses our evolvedsensibilities, feelings, emotions, and perceptualfaculties in a fairly direct manner, while alsodepending on activating relatively basic cogni-tive and imaginative capabilities, such as theability to follow narratives and to entertain fic-tions.

Art involves more than this, of course, andmuch of that “more” may be best explained inlight of cultural history. But that art addressesthese transculturally distributed human powersas well, in fairly straightforward and importantways, indicates that we would be remiss inneglecting the contribution that thinking abouthuman nature can make to our understanding ofart and aesthetic experience.

III. ART AND EVOLUTION

So far the discussion has been extremelyabstract. I have been trying to defend the plausi-bility of thinking of art, or, at least, of some art,in terms of human nature. But apart fromdefending this as a conceptual possibility, Ihave not given the reader much reason to thinkthat this is a promising line of inquiry. Let metry to do that in two ways: first by suggestinghow certain of the recurring features of art aswe know it may serve universal adaptive pur-poses that account for the emergence and con-tinuance of art; and second by showing howcertain forms of historically specific art, such asfilm and TV, have become mass art formsbecause of the ways in which they engage ourevolved cognitive, perceptual, and emotivearchitecture.10

Though there is a tradition that holds that artand aesthetic experiences are only valuable fortheir own sakes, this is open to dispute on atleast two fronts. On the one hand, as a matter offact, the arts seem to have emerged primarilyfrom unquestionably purposeful cultural practices,such as religion, ritual, the transmission of socialand political values and mores, the reinforce-ment of cultural identities, the reproduction of


social relations, and world views, the dissemin-ation of ideas and understanding, the mobiliza-tion of sentiment, and so forth. On the otherhand, for millennia, people transculturally haveinvested a great deal of time and energy inproducing and consuming art, often makinggenuine sacrifices to do so; it is difficult toexplain adequately why this could be the casewere art only valuable for art’s sake.

That is, art taxes human resources. Onewonders how societies, especially where life isarduous, can afford to pay the price, if art reallyhas no adaptive benefits.11 Were that truly so,would not we expect to find history littered withcases of societies swept away because they hadtoo much art? Of course, it could be just dumbluck that societies that have lavished sizeablesubsidies on artistic activities have never beencalled upon to pay the piper. But, given theextent of the investment by so many societiesover so much history, that would be an amazingrun of good luck.

At the same time, the notion that art is valu-able simply for its own sake does not provide avery satisfactory explanation for its emergenceand continuance. The idea that art and aestheticexperience are valuable for their own sakesdoes not fit neatly within our best theoreticalframeworks for understanding nature, includinghuman nature. That art could be a universal ornearly universal feature of human societies butafford no adaptive advantages would be a mys-tery. It would be as if art were not at all part ofthe rest of the mechanism, a wheel that neitherturned anything else nor was turned by anythingelse. To say that art is only valuable for its ownsake sounds less like an explanation than aconfession of ignorance.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that the universal ornearly universal distribution of art across timeand place can be explained in virtue of its diffusionfrom a single source. Artistic practices appear tohave sprung up independently in isolated societieswhere the possibility of outside cultural commu-nication seems remote. Thus, it is natural tohypothesize that in all likelihood the appearanceof artistic practices across the board negotiatescertain recurring human exigencies. What couldthat involve? Here are some speculations.

One generalization that is uncontroversial isthat art and aesthetic experience have somethingto do with feeling, at least in an astronomically

large number of cases. Much art, in other words,addresses feelings. Moreover, the feelings engen-dered by artworks are very frequently sharedby audiences.12 That is, art standardly elicitsconverging feelings among viewers, listeners,and readers.

Sitting in a theater, in the best of cases, we alllaugh at the same time, for roughly the samereasons. Sitting in a concert hall, the audienceanticipates the crescendo at approximately thesame rate of expectation and then thrills to itsarrival all at once. The flight of the ballerinamakes us simultaneously forget the pull of gravitymomentarily, and, even when reading a novel athome alone, we generally do so with the confi-dence that others will weep at the same parts we do.

Artworks, in this respect, coordinate feelings;they attune audience members to each other. Inthis regard, one might say, along with Tolstoy,that artworks cultivate fellow-feeling; artworkshave the power to build communities of senti-ment in their audiences and/or participants. Inthis, artworks have the capacity—at a fairlyelemental level—to promote cohesion amonggroups.13 Among other ways, they do this byengendering cognate feelings amongst specta-tors in response to the same subject, which maybe of especial cultural, political, or religioussignificance. But even where the subject is notof the utmost importance, the social cohesive-ness borne of fellow feeling is still functional. Itstill supplies social cement.

Quite clearly this is an aspect of the aestheticexperience of artworks of value to any humangroup. Furthermore, it is a potential that we seeexploited everywhere—people bound togetherin feeling by religious ritual, images, and archi-tecture, by folk songs, patriotic songs, and evenby the songs of their youth; people bondedtogether in movement in national and ethnicdances, and often, quite literally, marching tothe same drummer, perhaps around the samecommemorative monument; and also there arethe people gathered together to hear or to see thesame stories and to share common feelings withregard to their cultic origins (Indian villagers gath-ered to hear the Ramayana) or to the plight ofcontemporary society (e.g., us viewing a perform-ance by the San Francisco Mime Troupe or maybean evening of West Wing or Law and Order).

Not all art does these things, but so much of itdoes that it is difficult to think that this is not


one of the reasons that art is universal, sinceevery society benefits from social cohesion.14

Art, of course, can also promote dissension andcohesion simultaneously—pitting one groupagainst another. However, from inside the rele-vant groups, the capacity of art to quicken thesocial glue of fellow feeling is an advantage thathas no obvious substitute. Art is a lever onhuman nature that enhances sociability. Ifhumans are social beings, it is, in part, becauseart is conducive to this. And insofar as art pro-motes social cohesion, it has adaptive value.Nor is this an advantage that belongs only to thegroup, since it is also an advantage to individualsenfolded emotionally in social entities.

Though art is not universally expressive, thepossession of expressive properties and theappreciation thereof is a feature of art acrosscultures. Expressive properties are the anthro-pomorphic qualities that we attribute to art-works when we say that the music is sad or thatthe architecture is majestic. They are the humanprofiles we find in artworks that remind us ofemotive states, like joyfulness, or charactertraits, like nobility. Detecting properties likethese occupies a large part of our traffic withartworks. We work hard at trying to discern theplaintiveness of the dancer’s gesture or the irein the actor’s voice.

But if this is so, then it seems reasonable tosuppose that artworks enable us to refine andenhance our sensitivities for discriminating theemotive states of our conspecifics, which, amongother things, is advantageous to us, since scop-ing out the emotive states of others is a livingnecessity for social beings such as ourselves.Likewise, many artworks call for interpretations,thereby exercising our abilities for decipheringthe intentions of others, which is a related skillfor conducting human affairs. Art, in short, isone of the most important cultural sites we havefor training our powers for detecting the emotionsand intentions of others. And in this regard itwould appear to be unquestionably adaptive.For “mind-reading” is the cornerstone of humansociability—one modeled and refined by artworks.

In addition, much art addresses the imagin-ation. This is no more apparent than in the prac-tice of fiction, which receives its fullestelaboration in the realm of art. From the earlieststories that we hear as children, art teaches us tothink counterfactually—to think of how things

might be otherwise than they are. Our capacityto imagine is, of course, an inestimably valuableadaptive asset.15 It enables us to plan, to envisionalternatives, to take heed of warnings of dangersnot immediately at hand, to run in our minds, soto speak, cost-free trials of future events, and toconfigure chains of events into meaningfulwholes.16 The practice of fiction, especially nar-rative fiction, augments the range of our imagina-tive powers, including, notably, our capacityfor empathy—the imaginative understanding ofothers—which like the ability to detect the emo-tions and intentions of our conspecifics is anaspect of mind-reading that is indispensable forvirtually every sort of human intercourse.

Undoubtedly, there are more ways than thesethat art serves the exigencies of human nature.17

But mention of these selected few should atleast lend succor to the hypothesis that there is aconnection between art and human nature thatcan begin to limn the reasons why art is univer-sal. For these are the kinds of reasons we wouldhave had, were we cosmic engineers, fordesigning human life in such a way that art is acomponent of virtually every human culture. Byreverse engineering, that is, we may postulatethat these are the kinds of factors that abettedthe survival of societies with art through theblind processes of natural selection.

Of course, evolutionary scenarios, like theones canvassed above, often provoke the worrythat they are “just-so” stories, unconstrained byany canons of proof. In order to ensure that onehas not simply concocted a just-so story or awhole series of them, some, like Elliott Sober,have suggested that for any instance where oneclaims that such and such an attribute is adap-tive for a group, one should be able to point to acontrasting group that lacks the attribute inquestion and that did not survive.18 I am notpersuaded that we always need to find such acontrasting group in order for an evolutionaryhypothesis to be satisfactory. Is not commonsense enough to assure us that an organism’sfaster speed relative to all the available preda-tors is a naturally selected adaptation? Andmight not the same be said with respect to thefeatures of artistic and aesthetic experience thatfoster social cohesion? That is, is it not, ana-logously, pretty much a no-brainer?

However, if a skeptic rejects this appeal astoo facile, we might nevertheless be able to


satisfy him or her by producing the desiredcontrast-group. Cro-Magnon peoples possessedart; the Neanderthals, it appears, did not.Neanderthal social units were small, whereasCro-Magnon social units were much larger,enabling Cro-Magnons to engage in moreambitious economic activities and a greaterscale of warfare. Whether by more effectivelyexploiting the environment or by conflict, theCro-Magnons bested the Neanderthals in thecompetition for survival. Cro-Magnon socialorganization was undoubtedly an importantingredient in how this came about. Insofar asthe experience of art contributes to social cohe-sion, as conjectured above, it is probably anevolutionary plus, permitting, as it would, moreextensive social organization. Consequently,the anxiety that ours is merely a just-so storymay be alleviated somewhat by pointing to thecontrasting case of the Neanderthals who do notappear to have had the advantage of the aestheticexperience of artworks and who, therefore,lacked an important means for fostering andexpanding social cohesion.19

Needless to say, to postulate the operation ofsuch factors does not conclusively prove theirrelevance to the emergence and continued exist-ence of art, though it does alert us to the kindsof things that we need to think about confirmingor disconfirming in arriving at an explanation ofart—its emergence and its persistence on aglobal or nearly universal scale.

Art celebrates human powers. We all move,but dancers test the limits of human movementpossibilities.20 We all speak, but poets anddramatists refine verbal communication expo-nentially. We are interested in artists becausethey show us things about what we all do athigher levels of accomplishment and, by doingso, they inspire us to do better, thereby enhanc-ing our capacities for expression, communica-tion, representation, and signification21 (talents,all of which contribute to more effective social-ity). The exemplary feats that artists performundoubtedly occur in culturally specific con-texts, but it is important not to lose sight of thefact that these cultural variations are rooted atbase in recurring human exigencies, albeit modi-fied, as responses to concrete and diverse situ-ations and environments.

Possibly all this talk of human nature andnatural selection in relation to art will sound too

deterministic for some. In contrast, it may beurged that the great diversity of art and artforms across cultures and within cultures atteststo art’s freedom. Indeed, in our own culture, artis often taken as the very emblem of freedom.Nevertheless, the link between art and humannature is consistent with the cultural diversity ofart, since that diversity is a matter of so manylocal responses, culturally specific responses, tothe enduring, regularly recurring claims ofhuman life on organisms like us, including thebenefits of social bonding, planning, and mutualunderstanding, both cognitive and emotive.

Different cultures, responding from differentcontexts, including the availability of differentmaterials, arrive at different artistic adaptations,just as they evolve different ethoses and worldviews, which, moreover, are often—to animportant extent—conveyed by art. In fact, per-haps nothing transmits cultural values betterthan art, for inasmuch as art may engage feel-ing, emotion, perception, imagination, and cog-nition all at once, it encodes, so to say, culturalinformation redundantly across a number offaculties, thereby embedding it more deeply inmemory and making it more readily availablefor retrieval than it would otherwise be. Thus, itis the way in which art engages our cognitive,emotive, and perceptual architecture—ourhuman nature—that makes it so serviceable forculture. This is the reason why art is the pre-ferred currency for dispensing the shared under-standings of a society. Nothing else is aseffective in inculcating the individual in thebyways and main thoroughfares of his or herfolk. Culture, art, and human nature, in con-sequence, are indissolubly intertwined and willcontinue to be, unless and until evolution takesa radically unexpected turn.

IV. MASS ART AND HUMAN NATURE

The considerations advanced so far suggest thathuman nature may have something to tell usabout why art has emerged and taken root cross-culturally. However, it may be thought thatonce art becomes a going concern, humannature has nothing else to add to the story. Soci-eties may have and sustain artistic activities forsome of the reasons given, but understandingthe inner workings of those activities once they


are in play is a matter of cultural history, notnatural history. There is little cause to refer fur-ther to human nature—to our enduring cogni-tive, perceptual, and emotive architecture. Arthistory and cultural studies rather than cognitivescience and psychology are all we know and allwe need to know.

This may be in large measure true. Neverthe-less, although art is primarily a cultural affair,aspects of its history may still be elucidated byreference to human nature and the disciplinesthat study it. For the specific, historically motiv-ated projects that a culture elects for artisticdevelopment may succeed exactly because theyexploit, and not merely presuppose, some of thecognitive, perceptual, and emotive capacitiesbequeathed to us by human nature. That is, atspecific historical junctures, artists may turn tohuman nature to find solutions to their prob-lems. In order to evaluate this conjecture, let ustake a brief took at film and TV.

These art forms were not destined to ariseby a process of natural selection. They emergedat specific points in history, due to socialprocesses, such as urbanization (and then sub-urbanization), in order to perform a social func-tion, the entertainment of large numbers ofdisparate people, often with very differentcultural backgrounds. That is, history suppliedthe opportunity—large numbers of people withgrowing amounts of leisure time in search ofaesthetic amusement. The problem was how toexploit this opportunity. Film, which later passedits achievements on to TV, was one solution tothe problem. Moreover, its solution, along withthe historically contingent discovery of therequisite technologies, to a surprising degree,involved taking advantage of our cognitive,perceptual, and emotive make-up.22

One way to appreciate this is to recall that thebasic symbol in film and TV is the movingimage. Though a symbol, the moving image isnot the sort of symbol upon which semiologistsdote; its relation to what it is a picture of is notarbitrary. The word ‘dog’ is arbitrarily correl-ated with dogs. But a picture of a dog, say,Lassie, is the result of a causal process in whichLassie actually pranced before a camera, and,more importantly for our purposes, the movingpicture of Lassie will be recognized as an imageof a dog by any sighted human being familiarwith dogs. That is, anyone capable of recogniz-

ing a dog in, as they say, “real life,” will be ableto identify a moving image of a dog.

There are at least two reasons to believe this.The first is that children not raised with picturesare able to recognize what pictures are picturesof at rates well above random without priortraining. This indicates that whatever hard-wired perceptual capacities are engaged inobject recognition are also engaged in picturerecognition, including moving picture recogni-tion. And second, moving pictures are under-stood cross-culturally with amazing alacrity, atleast in terms of people’s ability to comprehendat the level of the recognition of what is repre-sented, the basic symbols of the art form, that is,the moving images. Unlike language, the basicsymbols in film and TV do not require a pro-tracted process of learning in order to decode ordecipher them. We simply look at a picture of abearded man, and we recognize what it is a pic-ture of without any subtending processes ofinferring, translating, decoding, or deciphering.Moving pictures access our natural recogni-tional capacities, capacities shared across thespecies, and this is one reason that they are ableto engage mass audiences around the world,audiences often lacking common cultural back-grounds and any special training in how todetermine what a moving image is an imageof.23

This is a simple fact, but it is important not tounderestimate its significance. The movingimage is the sine qua non of film and TV as weknow them. It is the fundamental symbol inthese art forms. That it operates on innate rec-ognitional capacities implies that, at a certainlevel of comprehensibility, these art forms areaccessible to nearly everyone without back-ground training. Thus, though the project ofengaging mass audiences was a historically spe-cific one, its success, to a significant degree,relied upon capitalizing on nearly universalcognitive and perceptual features of humannature of the sort best elucidated by cognitive/perceptual psychology. Had film and TV beenused only to project words, rather than pictures,they would not have succeeded as mass artforms on a global scale. Nor is this merely afanciful, cooked-up counterfactual, since part ofthe technology that would become televisionwas developed with the intention to communi-cate information across the Atlantic Ocean by


wire.24 Had film and TV developed simply asdelivery systems for script, their aesthetic bestwould have been as some sort of language-bound literary art. But, in fact, they were able totravel cross-culturally, to the extent that theydo, in large measure because they tap into ourcommon human nature.

Moreover, a related aspect of the success ofmotion-picture communication has to do withthe fact that not only are we able to recognizeautomatically the objects moving pictures por-tray; from infancy, we are also able especiallyto recognize human faces and the basic emotionsthey express, including (most probably): enjoyment/joy, surprise/startle, distress/anguish, disgust/contempt, anger/rage, shame/humiliation, andfear/terror.25 This nearly universal, evolvedcapacity is, of course, extremely adaptive, as itenables us to derive information from and aboutour conspecifics. But also, to a large extent, astriking amount of the basic information that wederive about the characters in moving-picturenarratives is communicated facially. This iswhy the close-up (of faces) and point-of-viewediting are such staples of film and TV.26 Weknow that the gun shown in the first shot isthreatening, even without further narrative con-textualizaton, because it is coupled with a close-up of someone’s terrified visage—rather thanwith the face of one of those folks who laugh atdanger. We know that one character has saidsomething very stupid, even if this is not imme-diately obvious, because there is a reaction shotof someone else looking contemptuous.

As early as the 1920s, the film theoreticianBéla Bélasz announced the centrality of the faceto film communication, claiming that, throughthe close-up of the face, the new mediumafforded special access to the soul. But, ofcourse, it did not take an explicit theory to alertfilmmakers to the power of facial close-ups.They had already discovered that in the previ-ous decade, perfecting the point-of-view shot,the reaction-shot, and the glamour close-up to adegree that the passage of decades has added lit-tle to what was already available, formallyspeaking, in the period of silent filmmakingwhence these devices continue to impart indis-pensable narrative information about what char-acters are feeling and that sometimes evenfacilitate empathy with them. Moreover, thefacial close-up remains essential to television

and not simply because the talking-head fits soneatly into the box (after all, the box is gettingbigger and flatter), but because the way inwhich natural selection has designed the humanframe, as has been revealed by contemporarypsychological research, makes the human faceone of our greatest sources of information aboutothers—indeed, sometimes a source that wevalue over the spoken word when we mobilizeour capacities to track the telltale signs of lyingas manifested by dissembling conspecifics.

There are, of course, many debates amongpsychologists about precisely what is involvedin our attributions of emotional states on thebasis of facial displays.27 Are such displays bestunderstood as a means of social communicationor as eruptile expressions of fundamental emo-tions?28 Which emotional facial expressions arerecognized nearly universally and which aremerely very pervasively identified, and, if so, atwhat frequency? At this stage, far more researchis needed. However, there does seem to be con-sensus that some facial displays of emotionelicit nearly universal attributions. This, ofcourse, allows that certain emotional displaysare culturally idiosyncratic—it is said theChinese stick their tongues out when surprised—while others are generic: the disgust reaction,for example, would appear rooted in a physio-logical strategy for rejecting offending smellsand tastes. Moreover, it is the emotional dis-plays on the generic side of the ledger that themass arts gravitate toward—such as fear, ela-tion, sadness, anger, surprise, lust, and so on.29

This is the stuff upon which mass art thrives, asa quick review of the most popular motion pic-ture genres attests. Moving-image mass art isable to convey, to a significant degree, thisemotional information so effectively to largeand diverse audiences of heterogeneous back-grounds because of its reliance on close-ups offaces, something that within a certain range ofemotional expressions, ones particularly ger-mane to the territory mass art cultivates, audi-ences can comprehend in large part by dint oftheir innate biological equipment.

This is not to say that filmmakers realized theclose-up would secure uptake in the way it doesbecause they held a certain theory. They tried itand it worked, and it worked because many ofthe emotions that mass art motion pictures rep-resent are identifiable by viewers transculturally


as a consequence of evolutionary processes ofnatural selection that favored the humans bio-logically prepared to suss out automaticallyconspecifics along certain emotional dimen-sions. In this regard, the people who popularizedthe close-up of faces for motion pictures wereintuitive experimentalists. And their experimentpaid off by augmenting the reach of visual massnarration because of the way in which it inter-sected felicitously with our biological make-up.So, once again, we see that, to a perhapsunexpected extent, a rather fundamental level ofcommunication in film and TV transpires byactivating elements of our innate cognitive, per-ceptual, and emotional equipage. And, further-more, to a significant degree, it is because thesemedia, in terms of their very structure, engageour shared human nature, that they have becomethe dominant mass art forms of the twentiethcentury, and now the twenty-first. They are ableto elicit mass uptake, in large measure, justbecause they trigger evolved capacities.

Of course, what has been said so far is hardlythe whole story of what is involved in under-standing film and TV. And much of the rest ofthat story requires close attention to culture andhistory. But the point that I wish to underlinenow is that human nature is also part of thatstory. I have indicated two ways in which itmight figure in an account of the rise and dis-semination of film and TV; there are others thatcould be discussed. But, in any event, this muchshould be clear: though art has a history andthough it is probably through studying that his-tory, and the pertinent cultural contexts, that wecome to most of our deepest understandings ofart, this does not preclude the possibility that, incertain cases, human nature and natural history,as studied by naturalistic disciplines like cogni-tive science and psychology, may also affordinsight into art. The reason for this, as our brieflook at some of the fundamental structures offilm and TV indicates, is that sometimes histor-ically and culturally specific projects succeedby mobilizing components of our evolved cogni-tive, perceptual, and emotive architecture.

V. CONCLUSION

Though for over two decades there has been ade facto moratorium in the humanities regard-

ing the relation of art to human nature, it is timeto break the silence. Adverting to human natureis not the answer to every question we haveabout art—maybe it is not the answer to most,or even to most of the important ones. But it isnot a resource that should be neglected alto-gether. It is unlikely that the story of art is arthistory all the way down. Explanations of theemergence and continued robust existence of artmay profit from evolutionary considerations.And, sometimes, the history of art, as the casesof film and TV suggest, could be amplified bynoticing the ways in which culturally and his-torically specific artistic problems may be suc-cessfully addressed by activating our nearlyuniversal, evolved, cognitive, perceptual, andemotive capacities. That is, sometimes art his-tory and human psychology may work hand inhand; art history may tell us what to look for,and then psychology may help us find it. It istime for the two cultures—the humanities andthe sciences—to come together.30 And theremay be no better meeting place than the topic ofart and human nature.31

NOËL CARROLLPhilosophy DepartmentUniversity of Wisconsin–MadisonMadison, Wisconsin 53706

1. Stephen Davies, “Non-Western Art and Art’s Defin-ition” in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (Universityof Wisconsin Press, 2000), p.199.

2. Of course, even if art was diffused culturally fromseveral different independently arising sources, the resort toevolutionary explanations would still recommend itself.

3. Davies, “Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition,” p. 199.4. It may be said that some cultures have no concept of

art and, therefore, their members will not be able to recog-nize our artifacts as artworks. The view that some cultureshave no concept of art is usually advanced where it is saidthat they do not have our concept of art. I will deal with thisobjection shortly. Where it is alleged that cultures lack anyconcept of art whatsoever, I speculate that they will never-theless be able to recognize matchings between much trad-itional Western art and the products of comparable practicesof representation, decoration, and expression in their ownsocieties. This, of course, is a speculative response. We willneed actual empirical studies here if indeed there are cul-tures without anything remotely akin to the sorts of globallyrecurrent concepts of art limned by Davies and Dutton.

5. Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (New York:Free Press, 1992), chap. 13.

6. In this essay I am concerned with the rejection ofhuman nature by academics in the humanities. Resistance tothe notion of human nature in the social sciences has been


documented and attacked by: Leda Cosmides, John Tooby,and Jerome H. Barkow in “Introduction: Evolutionary Psych-ology and Conceptual Integration,” in The Adapted Mind:Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed.Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 3–15; and StevenPinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of HumanNature (New York: Viking, 2002).

7. Both in setting out and refuting the arguments aboutthe nearly universal reach of the concept of art, I have bene-fited greatly from Denis Dutton’s “But They Don’t HaveOur Concept of Art” in Davies’s Theories of Art Today, pp.217–238.

8. See Noël Carroll, “Art and Recollection,” Journal ofAesthetic Education (forthcoming).

9. Some might argue that in our culture if the armor inquestion were designed solely with the intention to intimidatethe enemy, we would not count it as art. However, I thinkthat if it were a truly frightening expression of menace—which presumably is the means by which it terrifies theenemy—then we would count it as art. Certainly, skilled,intentional expression is a characteristic and prevailingpurpose of art in our culture.

10. Which, in turn, makes them ripe for naturalistic ana-lysis in terms of cognitive science and psychology.

11. The proposition that art has no adaptive benefits, ofcourse, becomes even more curious once one recalls thatmany of the animating functions of art listed above, such asthe reinforcement of cultural identities, are still operating atfull throttle after thousands of years.

12. Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the ArtsBegan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).

13. Ibid.14. In this regard, it is interesting to consider the relation

of art to religion. Many early religions derive their identitythrough ritual rather than theology. Religions that are ritualrather than theological obviously serve to coordinate theirfollowers—quite literally they do the same things and are,consequently, apt to share the kinds of feelings the relevantrituals are designed to promote, often through the deploy-ment of artistic processes like representation, figuration,expression, emotional arousal, enactment, song, music,dance, and so on. Especially where the artistic dimension ofthe ritual is participatory, shared feelings are predictable.But even where rituals are observed by audiences, thecommon effect on them can still be quite strong. In thisway, ritual religions and religious rituals contribute to socialcohesiveness. It is probable that artistic processes both asoriginally components of religious rituals and then descend-ants of ritual discharged, still continue to perform the genera-tive functions of ritual.

15. Though skeptical of the adaptive value of art in gen-eral, Steven Pinker appears to concede that narrative fictionhas adaptive benefits. He regards the consumption of suchfictions as a training regime whereby we familiarize our-selves about what to do and what not to do in myriad life situ-ations. Just as a chess player studies the scenarios of agreat many games in order to gain knowledge about whatworks and does not work in a wealth of concrete board situ-ations that he has not yet encountered but may, so we con-sume fictions in order to store up a repertoire of possiblemoves and countermoves for the game of life and, in theprocess, refine our understanding of how to maneuver in

diverse social and personal circumstances. We readbildungsromans, for instance, in order to garner a sense ofhow lives might go. Perhaps the notion that narrativesprovide a way of mulling over responses to life situationsfinds support in the activity of early Greek choruses whocomment by drawing multiple comparisons between thecircumstances of central characters and parallel cases fromthe lives of the gods. What seems to be going on is thedevelopment of a catalogue of recurring situations alongwith information about reactions to them; these detail-sensitive scenarios can then be stored for possible future use.Narratives (written and spoken) might, in this regard, bethought of as virtual conversations—virtual informationtransfers—about problems, situations, and strategy. ForPinker on narrative fiction, see his How the Mind Works(New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 538–543.

16. This last item, configuring chains of events andstates of affairs into wholes, is the capacity to make narra-tives, which, of course, is logically independent from thecapacity for fiction, even though many of the most import-ant cultural narratives are fictional. As well, the kind ofimaginative activity required by narrative per se and thatrequired by fiction—both in terms of production and recep-tion—differ. One is the power to construct or to configurewholes, the other to suppose counterfactually. Nevertheless,both tend to find their most elaborate and best-known mani-festations in artworks and, for this reason, art may be desig-nated a primary tutor of both sorts of imagination, each ofwhich brings with it its own adaptive advantages.

17. Though I have been emphasizing the adaptive valuefor social existence of artworks and the experience thereof,it should also be noted that significant benefits may accrueto the individual as well. By exercising certain of our pow-ers of perception, association, comparison, contrast, and soon, interacting with artworks enhances cognitive fitness bytuning our organizational powers. Characteristic experi-ences of art help develop the mind’s capacities for organiza-tion and discrimination, while also sharpening and refiningthem. See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does BeautyBuild Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theoryof Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts,” SubStance 30 (2001):6–27.

18. S. Orzack and E. Sober, “Adaptation, PhylogeneticInertia, and the Method of Controlled Comparisons,” inAdaptationism and Optimality, ed. by S. Orzack andE. Sober (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 45–63; andE. Sober, “Intelligent Design and Probability Reasoning,”International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 52(2002): 65–80.

19. The information about Neanderthal and Cro-Magnonsocial organization and art is derived from Steven Mithen,The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Artand Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990). Mar-shaling that information so as to claim that art and aestheticexperience can be seen—by contrasting the Neanderthalsand the Cro-Magnons—to be an evolutionary bonus is myown doing.

20. Alan Lomax has hypothesized that the dance move-ment of a given culture is actually a celebration of the kindsof work-movements that are essential for the material exist-ence of a society. Fancy stepping, for example, correlateswith agricultural cultures that demand swiftness and dexter-ity moving through furrowed fields. And so on. In this


regard, virtuoso dancers would be exemplary movers withrespect to culturally exemplary movements of a sortengaged by most of the workers in a particular society. SeeLomax’s film Dance and Human History.

21. Paul Hernadi, “Literature and Evolution,” SubStance30 (2001): 56.

22. Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1999), chap. 3.

23. Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies” in Theorizingthe Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press,1996).

24. David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher, Tube: TheInvention of Television (Washington, DC: Counterpoint,1996), chap. 1.

25. Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Facesand Feelings to Improve Communication and EmotionalLife (New York: Times Books and Henry Holt and Com-pany, 2003), chap. 1.

26. See Noël Carroll, “Film, Attention, and Communica-tion: A Naturalistic Perspective” in Engaging the MovingImage (Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 10–58; and CarlPlantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face onFilm” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion,ed. Carl Plantinga and Gregg M. Smith (Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1999), pp. 239–255.

27. James A. Russell, “Is There Universal Recognitionof Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of theCross-Cultural Studies,” in Human Facial Expression: AnEvolutionary View, ed. Alan J. Fridlund (San Diego: Aca-demic Press, 1994), chap. 10.

28. Alan J. Fridlund, “Epilogue,” in Human FacialExpression, p. 316. Fridlund, pace Ekman, favors the socialcommunication model. But either perspective is compatiblewith what we wish to say, since we are postulating a hard-wired recognitional capacity; whether it is detecting mes-sages or symptoms or a combination of the two is reallyirrelevant to the point we are trying to make.

29. Furthermore, the fact that converging, cross-culturalresponses to the pertinent emotional displays grows statisticallywhen the photos of the faces in question are posed, strengthensrather than weakens our claim of the relevance of thiscapacity for mass market motion pictures, since the close-upsin the vast majority of films and TV programs are posed.

30. A similar sentiment is shared by Denis Dutton in his“Let’s Naturalize Aesthetics,” ASA Newsletter 23 (Summer,2003): 1–2.

31. I would like to thank Elliott Sober, Jerrold Levinson,and the audiences at St. Norbert’s College and Wayne StateUniversity for their helpful comments in response to this paper.Of course, only the author is responsible for any errors herein.

Art and Human Nature

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