Aesthetic Anthropology (interview question #6)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
You have spoken of art and aesthetics but we haven’t yet discussed, in any depth, the notion of beauty, which you have mentioned a few times. In your writings on the poet-philosopher, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), you seem to endorse and develop his idea that humanity was in some sense ‘birthed’ by the experience of natural beauty. This is a highly unconventional idea, especially as an anthropological thesis. In what sense could beauty give birth to humanity?
The claim does indeed sound strange, but Schiller’s point is subtle and extraordinarily rich. He is saying two things, although not always very clearly. First, he is saying that prehistoric humans literally emerged as a self-aware species when they developed the capacity to experience beauty; second, he is proposing that humanity can only become fully human through the awakening of aesthetic consciousness, or what he called the ‘play drive’. These are complex claims, and they require careful unpacking.
In relation to the first, historical claim, we should start by recalling Schiller’s own words. In the Letters on Aesthetic Education (1795),he writes: ‘so long as man in his physical condition accepts the world of sense merely passively, merely perceives, he is still completely identified with it, and just because he himself is simply world, there is no world yet for him. Not until he sets it outside himself or contemplates it, in his aesthetic status, does his personality become distinct from it, and the world appears to him because he has ceased to identify himself with it.’
Schiller’s position here extends an insight that is indebted to Immanuel Kant, so let us begin the analysis there. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that aesthetic experience – especially the experience of beauty – is characterised by what he calls a ‘free play’ between the faculties of imagination and understanding. In such moments, we are not driven by desire (as in mere sensation), nor are we constrained by determinate concepts (as in scientific or instrumental reasoning). Instead, we experience a kind of disinterested pleasure – a perception of things ‘in themselves’, free from utilitarian calculus.
This is the experience of beauty. Whereas an animal merely sees things in the world as either useful or not-useful, a human animal capable of the aesthetic experience of beauty can experience the world in itself, valuing it not for its usefulness but just because it is beautiful. This is the meaning of Kant’s idea of ‘disinterestedness’. It does not mean uninterested, which is the common misunderstanding. It means that the interest one has in the experience is not for what it can do for oneself (i.e. its utility), but just because it is, in itself, beautiful.
According to Schiller, aesthetic experience is not merely a refinement of an already fully formed human being, but the very condition of our emergence as a distinct kind of being. This is why he suggests that it was the experience of beauty that gave birth to our humanity; it gave birth to, or created, our self-awareness or self-consciousness. Early human beings – what we might call pre-aesthetic hominids – were essentially immersed in nature, governed by instinct, lacking reflective self-awareness, just like every other animal. They were at one with the world. There was no clear distinction between subject and object, self and environment. This is the unified experience of the non-human animal.
A decisive shift occurs when this immersion is interrupted – when in moments of encounter with the beauty of wild nature, a new mode of perception emerges. This is the aesthetic moment Schiller isolates: a new form of contemplation in which the organism is no longer simply reacting to stimuli, but perceiving the beauty in a disinterested fashion. In that moment, the self becomes aware of itself as a perceiving subject. Nature is no longer simply lived – it is seen and appreciated as something ‘other’. This is the birth of subjectivity or self-awareness. And with it, Schiller argued, the birth of humanity.
So when Schiller says beauty was humanity’s ‘Creatress’, he meant that the aesthetic experience of the world – the beauty of wild nature – provoked the emergence of our defining self-consciousness. It created a distance between human beings and the world, allowing us to reflect, to interpret, to imagine, and eventually to create. But this birth is also a fall. In becoming self-aware, we lose our original unity with nature. We become divided – between sense and reason, instinct and reflection, wilderness and civilisation. This is what I call ‘the curse of beauty’. Beauty awakens us as a self-aware species, but it also separates us from nature.
Having experienced the beauty of wild nature, and having lost our immediate unity with it, we are driven to recreate, imitate, and respond to it through artistic expression. The arts, in this sense, are not luxuries – they are attempts at reconciliation. They are ways of giving form to a world that is no longer simply given as whole. This also explains the emergence of abstraction and language. Once we begin representing the world – drawing animals, making symbols – we also begin forming concepts. The aesthetic act of representation becomes the seed of rational thought. In this way, aesthetic experience does not merely accompany reason; it gives birth to it.
And yet, the story does not end there. Having been separated from nature, we carry within us a longing for return – a longing for what Sigmund Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’ of unity with the world that we all experienced in a primordial way while in the womb. This longing for unity expresses itself in art, in music, in encounters with wilderness, and in those rare moments of aesthetic transcendence where the boundary between self and world dissolves again.
(For my longer analysis of Schiller, see here).
