ELH

Explaining the phenomenon of the beautiful with reference to adaptive criteria has a history that extends back farther than Darwin’s theory of evolution. This essay compares eighteenth-century moral sense philosophy with the hypotheses about human nature that guide evolutionary psychology at the turn of the 21st century, concluding that adaptive questions about beauty yield instrumental answers--answers that artificially limit the scope of aesthetic inquiry. By contrast, William Hogarth, a skeptic about adaptive aesthetics, offers an alternative set of questions (and answers) about our experience of the beautiful: not what it’s for, but what it’s like.