As an aesthetician, I have little use for notions of “evolution” or “progress.” I can give you some examples from my own field of study as to why this is so…
It is axiomatic that there is no progress in art. This is because art is always an exact reflection of its particular time and place, the circumstances of its creation, and the artist’s unique experience and expression at the moment of creation.
For example, the history of drawing and painting is not like the history of technology. The history of vehicular technology – to choose one of countless examples – is about how human beings gradually improved vehicles from the discovery of the wheel through the Space Shuttle. In contradistinction to that, the history of drawing and painting is not about how humans learned to draw and paint better and better. I see students come into Art Appreciation classes thinking that cave men drew stick figures because they were unskilled at the craft and that the history of drawing and painting chronicles improvements in draftsmanship and chromatic skill that reach certain apogees and thresholds in artists’ quest toward increasing “realism” – or some similar notion.
No, the history of drawing is not about how people learned to draw better and better. The elegant and sophisticated drawings on the caves of Lascaux are equally whole, valid, complete, perfect, and fully realized as the drawings of Picasso. Art simply moves with the time and space of its creation – it does not progress toward any particular higher plane.
I’m thinking of this today because of an interesting confluence of factors. Over the weekend we escorted our art classes on a tour of the local museum and as sus did not mention the “There is no progress in art” axiom, I decided to explain it to the assembled group of students. Additionally, today I spent some time on
www.howardbloom.net thinking about this notion of “progress” and how it is applied everywhere – especially since Darwin – and I also happened upon an entry in roachboy’s journal in which he ruminates on a related matter as regards museums of Natural History.
I get a sense that anything that smacks of anti-Darwinism these days quickly becomes hopelessly politicized. I hope that doesn’t happen here. If it does, I’d expect we can discuss the ways in which all aspects of the political spectrum are contaminated by notions of “evolution” or “progress.”
My problems with a Darwinian notion of “progress” as applied everywhere is not religious – it is aesthetic and more generally, philosophical. I have a sense that if we could purge the hopelessly lopsided and problematic idea of “human progress” from all of the frameworks in which it does not belong, we’d be the better for it.
Can you see other ways in which we have allowed notions of evolution or progress to permeate areas of thought in which other - less linear and hierarchical - ways of thinking might do us much better as a thinking collective?