Aesthetics Naturalised: Schlick on the Evolution of Beauty and Art

Abstract

In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. Having countered these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature.