Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Heifetz, Milton D. Sexuality, Curiosity, Fear, and the Arts: Biology of Aesthetics. New Studies in Aesthetics, vol. 33 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 130pp. ISBN 0-8204-5231-9. Hardcover, $47.95.

Reviewed by

Hans J Rindisbacher

Pomona College, USA

 

This is a curious book. Milton Heifetz, a renowned neurosurgeon who previously published in neurosurgery, in medical ethics, and – a bit of a deviation – in astronomy and celestial constellations, presents a slender volume that is intended “to help clarify the biological under-pinnings of aesthetics and thereby lead to a better understanding of why we feel what we feel upon exposure to the arts” (1). In this reviewer’s opinion the first three chapters  - “The Anatomy of Human Emotion,” “Basic Psychological Mechanisms,” and “Emotion and Its Relationship to the Arts” - are the most interesting in that they connect the aesthetic experience to elemental neurological data and basic psychological patterns. The following seven chapters, each between half a dozen and a dozen pages in lengths, focus on concerns of aesthetics proper (e. g., “A Definition of Aesthetics,” “Definition of Art,” “The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Ugly”) but do so in the most cursory manner only and at a level of theoretical sophistication that falls far short of the “professional” contemporary (or indeed, historical) aesthetic discourse. The weakness of the second part of the book is reflected, for one, in the fact that barely half a dozen quotes and references are to publications newer than the 1980s. Moreover, the artworks discussed or the types of art included in Heifetz’s discussions – music, literature, and painting – are traditional or canonical. While there is noting wrong with this per se, it contributes to the studies datedness and raises the more fundamental question how Heifetz’s approach might be able to address postmodern art and aesthetic phenomena. Installation and action art, even film and video in their fluid and immediate contemporary embeddedness and all too frequent distracted reception – noted already by Benjamin – seem to fall outside the author’s purview, if not in principle then certainly in practice. This is a serious shortcoming.

Heifetz sets up the argument by saying that “the assumption that art and emotion are always inter-twined will serve as the basis for the following discussion” (2). Emotion, in turn,  “must be awakened through visual, olfactory, auditory, taste, or tactile perception, understanding or imagination” (9). All emotion then “lies somewhere along a continuum of feelings from extreme pleasure of some form to extreme displeasure” (9). Works of art, like other objects in the human world, stir (dis)pleasure in the observer. In chapter two, therefore, Heifetz goes on to identify the six basic “psychological entities” involved in the generation of pleasure: sexuality, curiosity, proprioception of pleasure, release from displeasure, derivation from displeasure; and mastery (15); and in chapter three, he details the relationship of emotions to the arts. Referencing Freud, Heifetz outlines the discourse, by now well established, of the cultural development and shaping of childhood sources of pleasure into the highly complex providers of adult pleasures, often far removed from their biological origin. Heifetz follows Freud also in positing sexual pleasure as the ur-form of pleasure, but allows for other basic perceptions as forming part of the potential pleasure machine at work in aesthetic experience: rhythm (28ff), curiosity (31f), content, actually “the absence of specified content” (32) in the artwork, allowing for an “unrestrained and uninhibited flow of imagination and feelings” (33). Finally, there is the perception of “logical sequence” (38ff) that connects to “mastery” (40), the sense of complete grasp of the structures and the temporal unfolding of art works by the recipient as sources of intense pleasure. After addressing the tension between pleasure and displeasure as a further source of aesthetic experience that unfolds, for instance, in our emotional engagement with the performance of a drama (a variant on the catharsis debate), Heifetz concludes chapter three with the remark that “in essence, the mechanisms through which the arts incite emotion are fundamentally biologically driven, but markedly modified, enhanced, amplified, and controlled, or disciplined by the forces of acculturation” (47). This is a rather disappointing finding – as the modification of biological ur-patterns of perception or behavior in the process of childhood development and acculturation has been the working assumption in most social disciplines for decades; and, second, there is nothing specific that relates to the appreciation of art, nothing that sets art apart in principle within its own realm of aesthetics.

The subsumption of aesthetic experience under general patterns of perception may in fact be the ultimate result of Heifetz’s discussion; but it certainly seems unintended on his part, as in chapter four, he attempts to define how reactions to aesthetic objects are different compared to reactions to non-aesthetic objects. “The unexpected enhanced reaction to a stimulus is the common denominator underlying all art forms” (53). It is unclear how the deviation from a presumed standard reaction could be measured or assessed or generalized, and Heifetz does nothing to help solve this question when he writes that “the reaction to the work of art is the aesthetic reaction. It is purely subjective” (54). Chapter five, “Definition of Art” (59), provides no help either when the author states that “art may be defined as the method or vehicle by which an aesthetic relationship is established” (61) or that “art, by the force of its impact, sharpens perception” (63). While the last statement is uncontroversial, it too is not exactly new, and here – and throughout – the reader is left with a nagging sense of unfulfilled promises in a potentially interesting inquiry.

In sum: what at the outset looks like an intriguing proposition, the “biology of aesthetics,” turns, in Heifetz’s conceptualization, into a rather superficial reworking of old positions in aesthetics. The subjective-objective dichotomy (one of Kant’s old quandaries), the definition of “art” and the delimitation of a field of “aesthetics” are hardly advanced by the present study. Heifetz also barely acknowledges the radical cultural changes in the conceptualization of “art” in recent decades, the emphasis on process instead of product, the field of engaged or environmental art to which we no doubt do react emotionally (but aesthetically?), the new media, as well as the increasingly distanced and articulated ways of reception, if not consumption, of art. But Heifetz also falls short on the biology side, in that new findings in the neurosciences and cognitive linguistics remain outside his scope and evolutionary psychology (in essence, the Freudian paradigm) is hardly connected to the growing body of (evolutionary) neurobiology. For instance, the ideas by Lakoff and Johnson of an “embodied mind” that have come to challenge the traditional mind models of the humanities and connect to neurobiology directly, are not even referenced. This reviewer thinks that Heifetz is “on to something,” the notion of a potentially useful approach to aesthetics and art through biology – I would suggest specifically through the neurosciences. Unfortunately, however, this volume already lags behind, well, the “state of the art” today.