DENIS DUTTON

I've
encountered stiff academic resistance to the notion that Darwinian
theory might greatly improve the understanding of our aesthetic
and imaginative lives.  There's no reason to worry.  The
most complete, evolutionarily-based explanation of a great
work of art, classic or recent, will address its form, its
narrative content, its ideology, how it is taken in by the
eye or mind, and indeed, how it can produce a deep, even life-transforming
pleasure.  But nothing in a valid aesthetic psychology
will rob art of its appeal, any more than knowing how we evolved
to enjoy fat and sweet makes a piece of cheesecake any less
delicious. Nor will a Darwinian aesthetics reduce the complexity
of art to simple formulae.  It will only give us a better
understanding of the greatest human achievements and their
effects on us.

One is reminded of Feynman as well :

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.

(from Wikiquote - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 4