A New Cultural Theory of Aesthetics: Genes, Memes, Symbols, and Simulacra 9781793626677, 9781793626684, 1793626677

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A New Cultural Theory of Aesthetics

A New Cultural Theory of Aesthetics Genes, Memes, Symbols, and Simulacra

Roberto Terrosi

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available 978-1-7936-2667-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-1-7936-2668-4 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

v Contents

Introductionvii 1 Archaeology and Genealogy of Aesthetics

1

2 Philosophical Premises of Cultural Theory

29

3 The Evolution of Culture

69

4 Memes and Simulacra

125

5 Bigaku: The Crisis of Modern Aesthetics and the Return of Beauty

161

6 Value, Power, Art, Economics

213

Conclusion253 Bibliography257 Index 265 About the Author

271

v

v Introduction

Many books on aesthetics open with considerations that already presuppose a certain conception of aesthetics. Then again, how to avoid it? It is a wellknown problem of hermeneutic circularity. Depending on one’s philosophical training, one starts from a starting assumption that remains unexplained and yet is not inert, but on the contrary, influences the whole work and often even predetermines the conclusions, which end up confirming what was already presupposed. In this way, the text becomes the explication and argumentation of a bias. Moreover, it often happens that all of us, instead of forming opinions on the basis of certain arguments, look for arguments to support opinions that are not based on the subject matter of the object of discourse but on the identity determinations of the speaking subject proffering the discourse. It is like saying that since one is a certain way, one can only accept theories that are compatible with one’s identity, and therefore one seeks arguments to support such theories. This is a well-known problem in the philosophy of science, where it has been found that ad hoc theories have even been constructed, some empirical evidence has been underestimated, and others have been overestimated in order to defend, for example, a dominant theory within which one has developed one’s career as a scientist. So my first problem has been to escape this primary conditioning, which is also often irrational in nature and has more to do with the location of one’s identity as a scholar. In order to be able to avoid this kind of preconceived view, I believe that the most rational method is to analyze the formation of aesthetics as an academic discipline, trying to arrive at the determination of the key concepts around which it has aggregated the discourses that compose it. In order to do this work of historical analysis of knowledge, I have referred to the analytics vii

viii  v  Introduction

of knowledge carried out by Foucault, which to this day represents one of the most effective tools for conducting this kind of research. In particular, I have referred to Les Mots et les choses (Foucault 1966) because it deals with three discursive formations that emerged as we know them today in modernity but which underwent a period of incubation during earlier phases in which they had not yet taken on a definitive physiognomy. That is, they were discursive formations in a still metastable state that were defined in a process of disciplinary individuation in the two ages preceding the turning point of modernity, which are the Renaissance and the Age classique. This method of analysis was called “archaeological” by Foucault, who clarified and, in a sense, theorized it in L’archeologie du savoir (Foucault 1969). To this type of analysis, which in his time was termed by various critics as structuralist, Foucault, after a period of intense readings of Nietzsche, joined another he called “genealogical.” In this type of analysis, the focus of attention shifts from the linguistic-structural organization of knowledge to the dynamic political organization of praxis and values. We can say then that the emergence of these disciplinary fields, typical of modernity, is not only due to problems of theoretical development inherent in greater knowledge of the object of knowledge itself, nor to simple needs for the coherence and structural constitution of the disciplinary field as academic knowledge, but is also affected by a change between stages of power in Western culture, such as the transition from sovereign power to disciplinary power and from the latter to biopolitical power. Inside the development of these stages also emerges a change in value systems related to the constitution of the ruling classes, which, within Marxist analysis, is defined as the transition from the aristocratic system of the ancien régime to the bourgeois system of the industrial age. This macropassage does not take place compactly and uniformly, but as in a pouring of fluids, currents and counter-currents nested within it are created. In this situation, various aspects of the aesthetic discourse can be related to the resurfacing within the bourgeois value system of old instances, peculiar to the aristocratic value system, which comes back into play in disguise and with different functions. The world of aesthetics then presents, especially in Romanticism, a kind of aristocratic reaction to the utilitarian values of the bourgeoisie, right within the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, in our case, this genealogy analysis will connect, unlike Foucault’s, to the Marxist analysis of power relations seen as a function of class conflicts. All these problems are dealt with in a very concise and condensed way in the first chapter. Now, to understand the transition to the second chapter, it is necessary to anticipate some of the conclusions of the first chapter. What emerges from this first analysis is that these studies focus on some

Introduction   v  ix

fundamental concepts such as beautiful, art, taste, sublime, pleasure, characteristic, and so on. If we also limit ourselves to these fundamental concepts, they are arranged around two polarities, which are those of the beautiful and taste. In fact, the arts are the object of aesthetics as fine arts, not as techniques; pleasure, on the other hand, is connected to taste; and the sublime is connected to a discourse on the beauty of the negative and the pleasure of the frightening as exciting. Thus, there remains an underlying opposition between the beautiful, which is posited as if it were an objective property, and the judgment of taste, in which individual pleasure has a determining weight. Between these two polarities, we can also glimpse the opposition between the eternal values of the aristocracy and the individualistic utilitarianism of the bourgeoisie. The existence of this dialectic, however, undoubtedly has a theoretical consequence of considerable importance for aesthetics. That is, it can never be reduced to a regime of objective properties present in the object (e.g., mathematical relations) or the subject (e.g., the innate idea of beauty). Nor, however, can it be reduced to a mere matter of individual choices that depend simply on individual character and experience. Thus, all objectivist attempts to find an absolute and independent beauty will fail, but so will all those attempts to reduce the aesthetic to the individual dimension of the transcendental subject. The fact is that both canons of beauty and tendencies in judgments of taste are based on an intermediate ground, which is culture, and vary as this varies, not only because of the somatic features or other physical aspects of the subject and also of the varying environment, but also because the value system varies, which leads to the formation of ideals that are shared to a greater or lesser degree by individuals. On the other hand, the fact that aesthetic values change geographically and historically as cultures change is such an obvious fact that it does not need to be demonstrated. And so if this change follows cultural changes, these cannot be misunderstood or relegated to the background, as philosophical aesthetics has done to date. Therefore, in order to analyze aesthetics, one cannot simply resort to one philosophical system or one philosophical current among the existing ones; a third way must be found between object-inspired tendencies and subjectinspired tendencies. Therefore, it is necessary to shape a cultural approach, which functions, however, in a small way, as an organon. This cultural approach must also have a theoretical character; therefore, it cannot simply be the vague notion of culture presupposed by cultural studies, nor can it be that of cultural anthropology, which has always applied aesthetic concepts uncritically to its own research without posing the problem of an anthropology of aesthetic value.

x  v  Introduction

Tendencies that reduce the aesthetic factor to the subject, such as Kantianism or phenomenology, fail to account for the characteristics of such cultures because they, being based on the individual transcendental subject, grasp society only as a mere numerical multiplication of individual transcendental subjects. In other words, it is as if one were to reduce the organism to the characteristics of a type cell. There is no doubt that the organism is composed of individual cells, but if we analyze only the general properties of the cell, we could never be able to understand the functions of the organs and the vital processes they carry out to keep the organism going. On the other hand, naturalism attempts to reduce the aesthetic factor only to processes or physical characteristics inherent in the aesthetic object or inherent in perceptual structures. Again, it is clear that the aesthetic object must be physically existent; however, it is not possible to find in it objective aesthetic properties that are independent of the value system according to which they are judged and thus independent of the observer. Likewise, however, it is not possible to find a physiological mechanism of either genetic or cognitive character that accounts for the complexity of the multifaceted landscape of aesthetic phenomena. Therefore, one cannot take shortcuts to reduce the aesthetic to the intrinsic purpose of the transcendental subject, nor to the apparent purpose of nature. The aesthetic must therefore be related to a purpose immanent to interpersonal communication processes and their articulation within social systems, which is precisely what we call culture. This then does not mean that the transcendental subject and finality do not play a role in all this, just as talking about organic systems does not mean denying the reality and importance of cells and intracellular processes. Only that it is these processes that should be put in the background and not the organic ones as such. Similarly, one should not denay the importance of the physical constitution of the aesthetics object and of the physiology of the percipient subject, either from the genetic or cognitive point of view. It is important to recognize, however, that from these to arrive at the formulation of aesthetic pheonomena, and that is, phenomena or things that have aesthetic meaning, one must always enter a world of meaning and sense. This cannot be done by skipping the crucial importance of cultural processes such as linguistic and symbolic processes in the broadest sense. The second chapter is devoted to this discourse. Once these clarifications have been made and the aesthetic problem has been correctly placed within a cultural perspective, it is necessary to elucidate the nature of the cultural mechanisms that regulate the formation of aesthetic connections and values. Then it is necessary to move on to analyzing these mechanisms within the general structure of culture. That is, it is

Introduction   v  xi

necessary to shift the level of aesthetics from the transcendental constitution of the individual subject to the transcendental constitution of culture, as in a kind of transcendental cultural anthropology. However, it is not possible in the case of culture to be pure transcendental analytic because the cognitions we have of culture are always based on learned knowledge of a synthetic kind. This is why such a tendency toward a transcendental dimension of culture cannot be brought to fruition, and we can only arrive at a general analysis of culture carried out with the help of the positive sciences first among all the natural sciences. Therefore, for an inescapable logical reason and not an arbitrary decision, a cultural approach must confront natural sciences such as genetics and, more generally, biology, as well as the social and historical sciences. However, this does not mean a return to positivism, as such confrontation can only be critical. In fact, no attempt is made here to naively constitute a scientific theory of aesthetics, but an eminently philosophical type of aesthetic theory that confronts the sciences critically and not naively. Now, the moment we assert the cultural origin of the values and parameters of aesthetics, the problem of subjectivity shifts to the very terrain of anthropology. In fact, if we accept the positivist vulgate that culture is a product of individuals, we return to the starting problem, and thus, it would make sense to say that aesthetics should be traced back to the transcendental subject. This would be tantamount to saying that organs are not only made of cells but also made by cells, and that is to say that their formal cause and even their final cause lie in cells. We now know that cells contain DNA, but that DNA is the result of the overall adaptation of the whole organism to the environment, in a dynamic in which mutation and natural selection induce a descending causality from the organism as a holistic unit to the specialization of cells for the formation of certain organs. That is, underlying everything is not fantastic intentionality and will of the cell, which does not have some awareness of what it is doing. However, the existence of a code of information is a kind of blueprint of the whole unfolding of organic development, which is shaped by the relationship between the natural environment and the organism. Similarly, we cannot assume that culture is the voluntary and conscious fruit of the activity of individual human subjects. This was indeed the naive modern assumption that led politics to the social contract theory. However, it collides with everything that emerges in relation to the history of the formation of human cultures. As in the case of organisms, cultures are shaped by the relationship with the environment, by external and internal factors of mutation and selection, which go to determine a kind of DNA of culture, which must necessarily be a chain of information, which in this case does not pass into all individuals through automatic copying but is transmitted in measure of

xii  v  Introduction

the possibilities offered by circumstances to the various individuals who make up the cultural community through communication. Thus, it is true that the cultural community is made up of individual transcendental subjects, but it is not true that it is made up of such subjects, just as any product of technology is made up. The action of descending causality from the system to the individual component is so decisive that, on the contrary, we could, if anything, say that instead it is the individual who is determined by the descending causality of the cultural system, so much so that we can, with Michel Foucault, speak of a production of subjectivity. So we need to start not with individuals but with their communications that convey patterns, actions, techniques, messages, and so on. All these tranches of communication have been called in various ways. Gabriel Tarde calls them imitations, others call them cultural traits, others representations, others memes, and still others simulacra. To explain this discourse, we will first address the concept of culture and the revived interest in the problem of culture formation within neo-Darwinist evolutionary thought. This interest has a specific reason; it is not mere curiosity. In the evolutionist system of thought, all living beings develop according to the same basic principles, and humans is not allowed any exceptionalist clauses of a metaphysical nature, which can find refuge in the idea of divine creation or dogmatic anthropocentrism. Thus, the fact that humans haven’t has a symbolic life and mathematical, scientific, and institutional abilities so different from those of other animals is a fact that needs to be explained, and the key to this explanation lies in the formation of culture. In this regard, an analysis of the main approaches to the problem of culture will be proposed in the third chapter. Then the question of the formation of culture will be entered into by making a distinction between reductionist and emergentist approaches. A cultural but not metaphysical approach such as the one presented here necessarily favors an emergentist viewpoint, as it is the only one capable of understanding culture as such and not as an artifact, surrogate, or derivative of other fundamental dynamics. In such an analysis of culture, special attention will be paid to the theories of cultural evolution based on the proliferation of communications and information called cultural traits or memes, which we have already alluded to and which, from a philosophical point of view, find particular assonance and conformity with the concept of simulacrum developed within twentiethcentury continental philosophy. Having clarified these issues, there is a basis for advancing aesthetic theory on a proper cultural basis, rejecting shortcuts that want to trace aesthetic appreciation back to innate instincts, neurological mechanisms, or intersubjective logical mechanisms. The fifth chapter will deal with precisely these aspects.

Introduction   v  xiii

The subject-based theory of aesthetics put at the center either the j­udgment of taste, or pleasure, or emotion, or finally the phaenomenology of aesthetic experience, leaving issues such as that of beauty, artistic value, and the institutional valorization of aeshtetic facts at the margins. On the contrary, a culture-centered theory will put precisely these aspects at the center. In this way, it can propose a new idea of beauty, no longer understood as the ideal classical canon, but as a general principle of aesthetic enhancement within culture. This general principle won’t be connected anymore to a specific aesthetics, like classicism, and could be found in nonEuropean aesthetics of Islamic or Chinese or finally Japanese calligraphy, or even in aesthetic phenomena that conflict with conceptions of modern Western aesthetics as in the case of the tea ceremony proper to the Chinese tradition and later developed by the better-known Japanese tradition. Finally, in this regard, even the opposition posed by philosophers such as Migliorini in Italy between artistic and aesthetic self-value falls in artistic currents such as those ranging from Duchamp to conceptual to public art, which has emphasized the value of the artistic operation from a semantic (e.g., in political art) and pragmatic (e.g., in operations that unveil the procedural dynamics of artistic value assignment) point of view. This is possible because the form that is valorized by this beauty in a general sense is not to be understood as the phenomenal surface of sensible appearance, but in general, the structure that underlies the constitution of the work of art as a “machine,” or as a mechanism even in the cases of non-art aesthetics, but landscape and situational aesthetics. Thus, the key to aesthetics will result in the value assigned to these “objects,” no matter how layered or abstract they are. Of the formation of such value, an explanation will not be offered in terms of the faculties of the transcendental subject or other characteristics that all resolve in the transcendental subject, but an entirely desubjectivized explanation will be offered based on the evolutionary drifts of memes-simulacra. Chapter 6 will be addressed to this theme, which will be followed by only a few concluding remarks. So the invitation is to read this book not as a discourse on the various types and tendencies of the arts or views, but as an argument and explanation of how one arrives at this new theory of aesthetics. It has to speak for most of the text on issues traditionally not internal to the disciplinary domain of aesthetics. It, therefore, lacks an applied part in which, in the light of this theory, the various arts and extra artistic forms of aestheticization are analyzed. However, if possible, this will be the subject of a future second volume. Happy reading.

CHAPTER 1

v

Archaeology and Genealogy of Aesthetics

Discursive Formations Michel Foucault, after analyzing the formation of psychiatric knowledge and the formation of internment institutions such as the asylum, posed the problem of the formation of humanities knowledge during the modern age. For the sake of clarity, the difference between the modern age, which runs from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century, and modernité, by which Foucault means only the last part of it and which begins in the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, should be clarified. Foucault thus realized that disciplines that seemed to have appeared only in the modernité and that seemed precisely to be characteristic of the modernité, had instead a kind of prehistory in the knowledge of the âge classique (i.e., the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries) and even had their roots in the Renaissance. That is, he realized that it was necessary to go backward in time in an excavation work similar to archaeological work, which proceeds by going deeper and deeper, thus highlighting a stratigraphy that he called the “archaeology of knowledge.” In this excavation work, instead of finding finds, he found utterances which he found ordered and interwoven in such a way as to arrive at the formation of discourses or disciplinary domains, which, as they formed, also gave conceptual form to their object of study, in a sense producing it, or, as Simondon might say, individuating it. Again, with Simondon, we could say that such discursive formations by individuating themselves also produced the individuation of their objects, which could also be forms of subjectivity, as in the case of the figure of the mentally ill produced by psychiatry. This is not to say that prior to psychiatry there were no individuals who manifested behaviors such as those that later came to 1

2  v  Chapter 1

be called psychopathological, but that although such individuals had such behaviors, they were not classified as psychotic or mentally ill for the simple reason that the disciplinary basis for identifying them as such was lacking, and such notions did not yet exist. The same applies to the figure of the delinquent created by police-prison knowledge. When Foucault spoke of psychiatric internment, he was aware that he was talking about a product of scientific or supposedly scientific knowledge, but he was also talking about an object of segregation produced by power. So at the first stage, Foucault attempts an epistemological analysis of how psychiatric knowledge separates raison and déraison, or reason and madness, and discovers the Archaeology of Knowledge by arriving at a kind of “linguistic turn,” whereby he analyzes the processes of knowledge formation. But then, applying this methodology to prison internment, he found that the question of power was left out, which led him to reread Nietzsche and reflect on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. In this first part, the intent is to apply both the archaeological and genealogical approaches to aesthetics in order to avoid falling into a preconceived definition of aesthetics that would result in a hermeneutic circle in which the study of aesthetics would merely attempt to argue what is already assumed at a level of simple prejudice. It is then a matter of starting with the archaeological approach. In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault had examined three disciplines of the humanities: linguistics, biology, and political economy. From this point of view, aesthetics appears exactly akin to and synchronous to political economy, although some problems related to periodization arise immediately. For Foucault, modernité begins at the end of the eighteenth century, which, to be clear, in the case of aesthetics, would coincide with Kant’s Critique of Judgment, if not even with idealist aesthetics. However, modern aesthetics was born, according to most scholars, in the early eighteenth century. Thus, the epistemic divide identified by Foucault would not coincide precisely with that between pre-aesthetics and eighteenth-century aesthetics but with that between eighteenth-century aesthetics, which presents itself as a general theory of taste based on the senses, and nineteenth-century aesthetics, which presents itself essentially as a philosophy of art, insofar as it is hinged on the sense-producing subject, who through art expresses the spirit of the age. Indeed, it was a close call, even nominally, for the nineteenth century turn to retire the notion of aesthetics, implicitly linked to the perceptual aspect, and replace it with the philosophy of art, which, as such, dwells on the productive aspect of artistic creation. In that case, we would have had two different knowledges: aesthetics (or taste criticism) and philosophy of art. It is also significant that even all aesthetics subsequent to the idealist turn in fact dealt with art until the end of the twentieth century.

Archaeology and Genealogy of Aesthetics   v  3

However, it is impossible to overlook the fact that all these aesthetics explicitly recognized a disciplinary continuity with eighteenth-century aesthetics. Various scholars have noted the rift between eighteenth-century aesthetics and idealist aesthetics, which finds its exemplary case in the contrast between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. However, the problem here is yet another, namely that aesthetics, like political economy, has an even earlier proto-disciplinary history, covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and rooted in Italian humanism. This era prior to the formation of aesthetics poses a problem for historians of aesthetics. It is in some cases simply left out, thus excluding centuries of discussion about the beautiful and the arts, or it is integrated in the name of a contentist approach, according to which it does not matter that aesthetics was considered as such, but that in the substance can be found the themes that are the subject of aesthetics. This kind of approach is also what allows many to speak of extra-Western aesthetics, as in the case of comparative aesthetics, giving rise to a universal history of aesthetics. The limitation of this approach lies in the fact that it uses exogenous parameters. The Polish historian of aesthetics Tatarkiewicz, author of a famous history of aesthetics of this kind, had observed about the Renaissance that “if the commonly accepted periodization has the defects of a mass-made suit—it fits everyone pretty well, nobody fits perfectly—the periodization taken from another discipline has the defects of a borrowed suit,” let alone then the disciplinary configuration taken from a later period, and what about that taken from another civilization? Isn’t making cross-cultural aesthetics then like putting a kimono on a statue of Venus? On the other hand, some Italian scholars (Ferraris, Givone, Vercellone) noted that one cannot even go backward by dint of precorrelations, as Croce did, for example.1 For these reasons, it is necessary to go out and investigate the forms of discursive organization that preceded aesthetics and led to its emergence. To do this, the Archaeology of Knowledge is the most appropriate theoretical tool available to us.

Roots Let us begin, then, with the beginnings and preconditions of the appearance or reappearance, after the long autumn of the Middle Ages, of an interest in poetry. Classical antiquity, in fact, had been interested in beauty, the mimetic arts, and poetry, considered by some as one of them and by others, such as Plato, as a form of inspiration more akin to mantic inspiration or divine possession. It is also worth mentioning this antecedent because the

4  v  Chapter 1

discourse that precedes and introduces aesthetics will be based precisely on the rediscovery of such positions. With the rise of Christianity, the poetry of secular subjects disappears almost entirely. Stories with a warrior background arise in northern European regions, rooted in the period of the Romano-Barbarian kingdoms, such as the Breton cycle and Beowulf, which probably remained at the level of oral tradition for a long time. But poetry, in the form of short compositions of sentimental or natural or moral inspiration, disappears or perhaps regresses to the level of the popular song of the oral type. Painting and sculpture become mere didactic illustrations of an impersonal character relating to religious themes and so fall into the pure dimension of illustrative technique (Hans Belting, Ernst Kitzinger); theater disappears completely, at least until the experiments of Hrotsvitha (c. 935–973), who attempted to take up Terentian drama in a Christian key. But what is most important is that in the early Middle Ages, the figure of the poet and artist of renown disappears. For there to be a return to talk about poetry and poets as objects of cultural debate, one has to wait for the appearance of the troubadours. Poetry, on the other hand, had survived in the Islamic world where the ghazal flourished, providing an essential stimulus and model for the birth of troubadour poetry. In Baghdad, there was a court poetry elsewhere that was now absent, and a model of courtly love also developed there. It is no accident that troubadorian poetry was born in a context of proximity and relations with Islamic Spain. Also symptomatic are the themes of idealization of women and of love, though not always so pure. With troubadour poetry, poetry returns to being presented in written form by poets whose names are known and who are not mere jesters but men often of aristocratic status. This poetry is followed by Sicilian court poetry, practiced by learned notaries and even the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II of Swabia. The son of that emperor, Enzo, king of Sardinia, is captured by papal forces and imprisoned in Bologna in a very central palace just a stone’s throw from the university lecture sites of the newly founded university. It was precisely in Bologna that the Dolce Stil Novo was born, in which we find for the first time poets who not only are learned but are also treatise writers, who, as in the case of Dante in the Convivio, come to theoretically discuss poetry itself. Dante’s case is followed by that of Petrarch, who adds to it an interest in classical letters, which in turn introduces humanism and philology. Poetry thus sees its value fully reaffirmed on the basis of vaguely Platonic theories as attested by Dante’s reference to Platonic love and the Symposium (the word “Convivio” is precisely its translation) and Petrarch’s Platonic-Augustinian culture. Petrarch also rediscovers the classical study of rhetoric. In the fifteenth century, poetry was

Archaeology and Genealogy of Aesthetics   v  5

placed by the humanists at the highest level. But just then, another change occurs.

The Visual Turn of the Renaissance In early fifteenth-century Florence, there was already a very fashionable circle of humanists celebrating classical literature and Petrarch, but painting, sculpture, and architecture were still stuck in International Gothic. There was thus an expectation in this regard that soon generated a response that went far beyond expectations. At the origin of such a turnaround was the journey that a young sculptor, Filippo Brunelleschi, disappointed by a contest gone wrong, made to Rome with his friend Donato, who was younger than him and was called Donatello (little Donato) for this reason. Having absorbed the echo of the discourses on the classics, they set out in Rome to research classical art, and so great was the interest that it became almost a mania, especially for Filippo, who wanted to stay in Rome to further his proto-archaeological research, which had expanded to the field of architecture. At the papal court, there were scholars of scholasticism who were also familiar with Arabic treatises on Aristotle and beyond. It was from these circles that Brunelleschi probably learned an optical theory about the progressive shrinking of forms with distance, which can also be expressed in geometric form so as to emulate reality. Filippo thus invented a device to put this principle into practice, mounting a painted board with a hole from which to look in front of a mirror. This was a very early form of virtual reality, which became known as central perspective. These two events are the origins of one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting. Back in Florence, Filippo gained popularity and gathered around him other craftsmen, all younger than himself, such as the ceramist Luca Della Robbia, the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia, and the youngest, the painter Tommaso, somewhat restless and affectionately called the “bad Tommaso” or Masaccio. Masaccio in painting and later Donato in bas-relief tried to apply the principle of linear perspective, but they also tried to bring back the style of the ancients. Only a year younger than Masaccio was a Florentine, Leon Battista Alberti, who was born in exile to a good family, who had made him study at the university, had remarkable fluency in writing in Latin, and spoke some Greek. In 1428, he was probably able to return to Florence for a while and make contact with Brunelleschi’s group. From Brunelleschi, she borrowed an interest in architecture, also strengthened by the discovery of Vitruvius’ De Architettura, and in perspective, which he was able to explain in a learned and appropriate way. From then on, the new perspective painting, with the

6  v  Chapter 1

idealized bodies of the classical world and related architectural structures inside, becomes an attraction that places painters at the center of interest, in a position they had never had in history since Apelles. A similar interest was provoked in Flanders by the rediscovery of oil painting, which made it possible to create images with brilliant colors, and to offer a sharp rendering of details on which Nordic painters would love to dwell, producing images of remarkable realism. The two innovations would not be long in coming together, allowing painters to compose images of stunning realism, so much so that they would bring about a change in the direction of painting from all the past and from all other cultures. Within a few decades, painting, from being a neglected art considered in the ranks of the mechanical arts, was not only elevated to the rank of a liberal art but even came to undermine the supremacy of poetry. In the second half of the century, the situation would evolve at an increasing pace, resulting in a total paradigm shift. Also contributing to this change was a new fact that shook the world of humanists, which was the fall of Constantinople and the arrival in Italy, along with Christian refugees, of the complete texts of Plato. Before then, Platonism had already aroused interest among poets (such as Dante and Petrarch) and humanists, but it was a very vague Platonism handed down from the medieval tradition. Instead, they now reread authentic texts that were translated into Latin, something that Marsilio Ficino dealt with in Florence. With the Platonic theory and with the reading of the Symposium, the theory of Platonic love, which in Italy is also rooted in the Stilnovist culture, regains strength, and it is probably in order to reconcile it with the tradition of courtly love that, along with Plato Plotinus, is also recovered. In this way, love is associated with beauty and beauty with the image, particularly the female image. Since, however, beauty is referred to in the classical tradition as bodies, it is associated with images that have bodies as their object. If Platonic beauty finds a foothold in painting, in turn, the success of painting places beauty at the center of interest as far as the arts are concerned, something that had not happened with poetry. The visual turn of the Renaissance, then, opens the space for a new sphere of discussion that is broader than that of mere poetic treatise and that involves the other visual and liberal arts, such as music, unified now under the banner of beauty, although there is still a long way to go before we come to speak of the fine arts. This openness is essential as a precondition for one day coming to talk about aesthetics as well. Another aspect that emerges right from Alberti’s treatment is the importance assigned to rhetoric. Going back to Roman culture means going back to a discursive paradigm centered on rhetoric, a paradigm that reached to the other arts as well and became a general doctrine of the composition and articulation of anything: from

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harangues to poems to architectural and pictorial works, and so on. Based on rhetoric and vague medieval Platonism, Alberti had coined the concept of concinnitas, which we could translate as concertation or orchestration, which is the art of harmonizing existing relationships within the work. This would no longer be deemed sufficient by his young and learned friend, Ficino, who placed mania, or as it was then called, furore (which would later become an inspiration in modern aesthetics), at the basis of artistic creation.

The Perspective Another key element is perspective, which has a far wider scope than has been attributed to it. The greatest hermeneutic emancipation from the ranks of the tricks of the trade was accorded to it by Panofsky, who posits it neoKantianly (through Cassirer) as a symbolic form. This kind of approach, already modern in conception, prevents one from noticing how decisive perspective has been precisely for establishing such a viewpoint since the perspective viewpoint seems simply natural to those with a transcendental conception. From this point of view, perspective is an important step in the constitution of the two fundamental expects of modern thought: on the one hand, the affirmation of the individual subject as a point of view on the world, which has not only an empirical and occasional character but a logical functional character. Perspective places the subject in geometric form in its relation to the geometric structure of perception so that it can be abstracted and mentally synthesized into a virtual point, which defines the subject concerning universally as a viewpoint on the world, exactly like a monad. On the other hand, with respect to this subject, the perspective holds that even the phenomenal world can be abstracted and geometrized and traced back to a set of logical and functional relations. Everyone is familiar with a well-known statement by Galilei that opened the history of scientific thought and in which he claimed that the book of nature “is written in mathematical language, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures” (Galilei, EN, VI, p.232), but a very similar thought had already been expressed by Alberti. Cassirer and other scholars had, for example, valued Leonardo as a step in the formation of scientific thought because of his discourse on observation and experimentation. This interpretation put the experience of observing nature first in the formation of scientific thought but undervalued its logical-mathematical aspect. This idea of a mathematizable world, because it is written in the language of geometric laws, emerges in the modern age precisely with perspective, beginning with Alberti. For these reasons, perspective was much more than just one symbolic form among others;

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it was a real philosophical breakthrough that underlies the two cornerstones of modern thought: transcendental phenomenalism and scientific thought.

After the Pictorial Model In this period, we can observe the appearance of positions that will have a number of developments in aesthetics proper. One of these is that which distinguishes mere appreciation based on pleasantness from competent judgment, which is advocated by Dürer and Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the more famous Galileo). Beauty becomes the center of this new discursive domain; it is defined as harmony or transcendent love, but it is also undefined, as when Dürer states, “But what beauty is, I do not know.” He is not alone in expressing himself about the non-definability of beauty. This, in fact, had also been juxtaposed with loveliness and grace. Petrarch had already used the expression “I do not know that” in an aesthetic sense (“I do not know that in the eyes,” Canzoniere). We find it taken up by Castiglione in the Cortegiano, where we also find the concept of sprezzatura, which is also destined to have developments in rhetorical-poetic discourse. Sprezzatura, too, is in fact something natural and spontaneous that makes one’s behavior, while studied, look effortless and casual, like a certain nonchalance. Francis Bacon also takes up a similar idea about beauty that eschews perfect harmony. The not-so-that affirms the presence of something elusive in beauty: that of neo-Platonic beauty, which takes up only the empty form of transcendence that eschews the conceptual determination proper to the understanding of the intellect. These developments often involve music, as in the case of Vincenzo Galilei, which for a while became the model art after the unchallenged dominance of painting that lasted for more than a century. Another fundamental change, destined to supplant the leadership of music, is the discovery of the original of Aristotle’s Poetics, which reintroduces the Stagirite into the theoretical-artistic debate, just as Aristotelianism was winding down with the decline of scholasticism. The Poetics puts imitation back at the center of the debate and places theater at the center of the arts, which in fact will have a remarkable development from the end of the sixteenth century until the crisis of the rhetorical-poetic paradigm and the consequent appearance of modern aesthetics. In fact, we speak of rhetorical-poetic discourse precisely because, alongside the assumption of rhetoric as the basic scheme for the interpretation of composition and artistic enjoyment in general, poetics, in the Aristotelian as well as Platonic (inspired poet) sense, became the dominant scheme until the eighteenth century. In the field of rhetoric between the sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries, a significant shift takes place. In humanist-Renaissance discourse, of the rhetorical approach, the cabs or dispositio and lexis or elocutio, which in turn were divided into electio (selection of words or parts) and compositio (combination), were emphasized above all. Otherwise, at a later stage, the focus shifts to the two extremes of the rhetorical structuring process, namely the conception (inventio) and the final result that reaches perception (actio). With regard to the first theme, this is connected to the discourse of ingenium and thus on ingenuity, on invention which then becomes discourse on wit in the English area and on agudeza in the Spanish area with Gracián and will eventually flow into the discourse concerning genius. Regarding the emphasis on the perceptual rendering of the work, we find an initial statement of interest in this theme in the discourse on the admirable made by Patrizi, who stresses the importance of surprise and wonder, which will later be found widely as a characteristic feature of the Baroque. Baltasar Gracián also develops the Castilian theme of sprezzatura rendering with despejo. As we said, the Baroque age also sees the prominence of theater as the fulfillment of the visual turn introduced by the Renaissance and as the integration of all the arts.

The Rhetorical-Poetic Paradigm Tatarkiewicz, in the third volume, enumerates the basic principles of what he refers to as “homogeneous classicist ideology” without realizing that this “ideology” is nothing more than the epistemic structure of a discursive formation, one that precedes the appearance of the disciplinary field of aesthetics and which we call here “rhetorical-poetics.” Why does Tatarkiewicz fail to notice the presence of a structure of knowledge that profiles the contours of a disciplinary field? The reason is that he could not see something that was completely foreign to the scope of his research. He, like many other scholars of the history of knowledge, lacked the approach that Foucault borrowed from the history of science, in which the formation and genesis of the various disciplinary fields and the theories that governed them from within were highlighted, exactly as an ideology that offered one or more common points of reference, which were functional for the identification of the practice of knowledge and which allowed the location of the utterance within discursive formation. What Tatarkiewicz calls “ideology” is thus roughly corresponding to what Foucault defined in the Archaeology of Knowledge as the “archive,” namely, an epistemic matrix generating utterances deemed relevant and appropriate to the function, in this case, of legitimizing or delegitimizing a given artistic practice. Tatarkiewicz writes:

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All these principles, to which we have given here a valid formulation for the visual arts, also applied, mutatis mutandis, to the theory of poetry. They were grouped into a homogeneous classicist ideology, despite the fact that they derived from different sources and traditions. The objectivity of beauty was derived from Plato, the idea of order from the Pythagoreans, the concept of the relationship between art and nature from Aristotle, spiritual beauty from Plotinus and later from Ficino, decorum fundamentally from the Stoics, the link between art and beauty from the theorists of the fifteenth century, the exaltation of antiquity from the humanists, and concinnitas is “design” from Alberti.2

To this, then, must be added the relationship with the construction of the image according to the rhetorical model, which is nevertheless explicitly reiterated even in the seventeenth century. One thinks of artists such as Bernini, who said that they followed the rhetorical procedure, or theorists such as Franciscus Junius, who, in De pictura veteribus, openly expresses the need to adhere to the rules of rhetorical composition in the work. Another significant aspect of this discourse is the concept of drawing. It comes not from artistic practice but from philosophical theory. Drawing is connected to the activity of designating, that is, of directing intention toward a specific purpose. Thus, design is an anticipatory projection of the purpose, much like the current concept of design. Design, however, more than a project, expresses a mental activity internal to reason that uses imagination or fantasy to give shape to the purpose. This mental activity later became such a common reference to graphic activity that Zuccari felt compelled to specify that he was speaking of “internal drawing,” that is, drawing in its original sense of mental conception.

The Two Ways of the Seventeenth Century With the seventeenth century, after a phase in which conceptualism asserted itself and after theorists, such as Baltasar Gracián, had shifted the focus true to Spain, we see a clear prominence of the French debate, although there was no shortage of other points of interest in England with Bacon and Hobbes, in Poland with Sarbiewski, and in Italy with Bellori, Monsignor Agucchi, and Tesauro, author of the then famous Aristotelian Cannocchiale. With the seventeenth century, the rhetorical-poetic paradigm reached a sharp divarication. On the one hand, it is institutionalized, as a canonization in the international arena of certain assumptions that emerged from the debate of the previous century in Italy. This is also thanks to the creation of the academies of art, which were also born on the basis of the Italian ones but which in France assume a higher institutional status. On the other hand,

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however, the main authors of the “new” trends in philosophical thought in the seventeenth century, first and foremost Descartes, frontally attacked it with the intention of delegitimizing it, denying the whole debate the dignity of a philosophical issue. This stance of sharp opposition is found not only in Descartes but also in the moralists, and then in England with Hobbes and in Holland with Spinoza. In practice, the leading philosophers of the time took a stand against the philosophical dignity of reflection on art. Another essential factor is that the attention of the major philosophers focused on the question of beauty for two reasons: first, because, along with that of mimesis, dealt with by Aristotle, it was the one that could most aspire to the dignity of a philosophical topic, having also been dealt with by Plato and Plotinus; and, second, because, unlike the theory of mimesis, which has no particular theoretical contradictions, the theory of objective beauty in the Platonic tradition, taken up by Renaissance neo-Platonism, is actually very fragile from the rational point of view and lends itself to being demolished through its reduction to a contingent matter related to the different tastes of those who judge it, which reduces it to a singular event (external to the scholastic scientia est de universalibus) and relative to the particular conditions of the viewer’s taste and therefore impossible to subject to rational discussion (de gustibus non disputandum est). This focus on beauty, however, has a secondary effect, which later will instead be of primary importance because it puts the question of beauty at the center of the whole debate, thus definitively shifting the axis of discussion from the modes of artistic production to those of sensory enjoyment, which precisely for this reason will be defined by the Grecizing term of aesthetics, that is, the science of aisthesis or sensation. This means that the field of reflections on art expands geographically. This expansion is not merely an accidental factor here because different areas of expansion transpose and rework these conceptions in accordance with their own cultural traditions. This is also due to the fact that this area of thinking is very different from disciplines such as mathematics or geometry, in which logical rigor is such that different local cultural approaches, which do exist and have played a role (think of Indian and Arabic mathematics), are irrelevant. Questions of beauty, poetics, and rhetorical composition are not objective and thus are affected by the various cultural conceptions, even in the way the problem is posed. This aspect of national cultures becomes particularly important precisely at the time of the birth of modern aesthetics, since it is impossible to reconstruct its genesis without taking into account the differences between the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish debates. From this point of view, the classicist tradition rooted in the Italian Renaissance represents the principle of identity cohesion in this sphere,

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although it is subject to even radical criticism and shows within it various faults and splits, which can be gathered around a fundamental distinction, which is that between Renaissance Platonism and Aristotelianism, old (scholastic) and new (regarding poetics and a certain empiricism). This split, far from being a reason for weakness, was instead a strength of this tradition because, as there was lively debate between opposing positions, it was believed to be an open system capable of containing all oppositions. In fact, the novelty of the Baroque phase is to pose, starting with Bruno, broad objections to the whole system and to the whole debate, arguing for radically subjectivist theses, whereby beauty varies, not only from area to area, from era to era, but even from individual to individual. This position of general critique also takes on tones of psychological reductionism in philosophers such as Descartes, who already intuited the principle of conditioned reflex. Descartes objects that if “one were to whip a dog five or six times to the sound of a violin, when the dog heard that music again, it would run away hissing” (Letter to Mersenne), thus anticipating associationist and behaviorist psychology. The objection, however, is pertinent because it shows how contingent or Aristotelianly accidental aspects, which vary over time and from individual to individual, can affect the perception of beauty. Descartes paves the way for an attitude that will be typical of seventeenthcentury rationalism and philosophy of the subject, which will tend to oust beauty from matters worthy of philosophical treatment because of relativism. Thus, we find that there are in various philosophers a series of more or less liquidating remarks toward the question of beauty. Even Pascal argues that beauty and poetry cannot be explained because there is no logical evidence, and therefore we can only state that their end is delight and thus return to the je-ne-sais-quoi. Malebranche states that our imagination, being undisciplined, can tell us nothing about beauty. La Rochefoucauld introduces the theme of the relativity of taste and the relativity of good taste itself, which can manifest itself for something but not for something else. Spinoza argues that things in themselves are neither beautiful nor ugly. Hobbes argues that the beautiful itself is a vague theme because it can be traced to different concepts. The only thing Hobbes believes can be argued is that beauty is a promise of good. Leibniz argues that beauty, relying on taste, cannot be explained in rational terms, as taste is akin to instinct, and he too returns to the je-ne-sais-quoi. These philosophers represent a relatively minority group compared to the academies, poets, and artists who continue instead to rely on objective beauty and poetic fury. Nevertheless, even though they are few in number, these philosophers are among the most important of their era, and their actions have had a strong impact on the exclusion of beauty

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and the arts from philosophical questions. Even in the arts, however, an attack on the rhetorical-poetic classicist paradigm is moving, questioning the eternal beauty of the classics, thus giving rise to the querelle des anciens et des modernes. To attack Homer then means not only to question the authority of the classics, which had been the basis of the Renaissance, but also to undermine the ideal of universal beauty, in favor of a historically determined taste. Practically on the eve of the eighteenth century, we are faced with a strong movement of delegitimization of beauty and of the very discourse on the arts, which are rejected due to the low rank of techniques of pleasantness and entertainment to escape boredom. Unless we understand this delegitimization movement connected with subjectivist and relativist interpretations of the beautiful, we cannot understand the birth of aesthetics.

The Turn toward Modern Aesthetics Practically, we had reached a level where, on the one hand, there was the subjectivist disqualification given by philosophers, especially rationalists, and, on the other hand, the strong social but theoretically weak presence of academics who undauntedly upheld the eternal or objective beauty inherited from the Renaissance. The ideal beauty was thus on its way to decline and was about to founder along with the ancien régime, of which it represented one of the ideological elements. In the rational subject promoted by “bourgeois” philosophy, there seemed to be no place for beauty and art, which seemed destined to return to the low rank of jester entertainment from which they had laboriously emerged after the year 1000. So what is the meaning of aesthetics that distinguishes it from the previous treatment? The answer lies in the fact that it is precisely within these rationalist and empiricist philosophical currents, linked to the philosophy of the subject, that a rational theoretical answer to the question of beauty is sought instead, despite its apparent relativity, in order to confer philosophical dignity on such questions. Thus, it is precisely in the new generation of Enlightenment thinkers, who advocate rationalism, that a new interest in beauty and poetics arises. This fact is of decisive importance because it opens a new chapter in the reflection on beauty that, instead of keeping it out of the subject as a ruin of premodern objectivist philosophy, seeks to find a place for it in the dynamics of rational consciousness, even at the cost of admitting processes of rationality and knowledge that we would today call “weak,” such as that of cognitio sensitiva inferior by its nature to the cognitio rationalis given by Baumgarten. Only if one understands this point can one also understand why the unexpected success of the new coining of the word “aesthetics” for this kind of

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research, although this came from a relatively marginal philosopher. Many textbooks on the history of aesthetics are at a loss to explain why Baumgarten’s neologism was so successful and consider it a mere fluke. But if we keep in mind this process of delegitimization of the beautiful in the seventeenth century and the need to react to the simple divestment of the beautiful and the arts in the development of those same philosophical currents, it becomes clear that it was necessary to refer to a new kind of rational analysis of the beautiful and the arts, and that to do so also required a new concept that would make clear the epistemic break with the old academic discourse. Then the success of the word “aesthetics” was no accident but was long overdue to indicate a new approach to the problem, namely a philosophical-rational approach to the question of beauty and poetics that was not incompatible with the modern philosophy of the subject but, on the contrary, rooted precisely within it. Thus, Baumgarten’s case, however unsuccessful his theories were among his contemporaries, was an emblematic case for referring to this modernly “scientific” way of approaching these issues.

Intermediate Stages and Readjustments This, then, does not mean that there was a sudden shift to a completely new way of posing these problems. Especially the French theories that followed the querelle des anciennes still suffered from typically seventeenth-century discourses. Batteaux proposes in his Le belle arts reconducted to a single principle the Aristotelian theory of mimesis, one of the cornerstones of the old theory, as the basis of all the fine arts. The concept of “fine arts” itself was at once old and new. Since the Renaissance, it has been said that the task of the various arts was to be beautiful, provoking in us that spontaneous sense of Platonic love that beauty arouses in the human soul. However, the various arts were still too proud of their own identity to allow themselves to be reduced to a single principle, although many were inspired by Horace’s ut pictuara poesis. Music and poetry, which traditionally belonged to the liberal arts, did not feel that they were reducible to common ground with the servile arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was even held that poetry could not be considered an art because it was the result of mania, or furor poeticus, which could neither be taught nor learned. It is precisely from this characteristic of ingenium that the modern notion of genius was later born. Therefore, the moment they came to think of a common ground in the arts, they came into contention with each other, and the querelle about the superiority of the arts was born. Which art was to be considered more illustrious? Significantly, painting from being a servile art was referred to from many quarters,

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not only as a liberal art but as the most illustrious art. Nevertheless, it was also a problem to accumulate the arts we now call visual, the so-called “three sisters” (painting, sculpture, and architecture), despite the fact that artists such as Michelangelo practiced all three. We have to wait until Zuccari for them to be found accumulated in the designation of drawing arts, which, however, did not immediately become a standard. Francisco de Hollanda is the first to speak explicitly of “fine arts” (boas artes), but it must wait until the time of Roger de Piles and Batteux for the term to come into use in art literature. In England, Shaftesbury still seeks a theory of objective transcendent beauty in line with the neo-Platonic tradition. To do this, he argues that beauty must be distinguished from mere instinctive attraction to forms, as in sex, and must be placed on a plane of mental discernment that requires an inner sense. Through this internal sense, the subject recognizes beauty as the product of a mind, which is the origin of beauty, but with a further step, it recognizes that such a mind is also the product of another lofty mind, which is the divine, reason why beauty rises toward the transcendence of the divine dimension. In France, Diderot still upholds the Renaissance ideal of beauty as a harmony of relations between the parts; however, on the other hand, he moves his attention from artistic composition toward the enjoyment of the arts, thus giving rise to modern art criticism. The focus on the polarity of the spectator is also found in England, where Addison publishes his own reflections in a journal significantly titled The Spectator, in which, before Diderot, he shifts the axis of attention from the rhetoric of composition to fruition and the parts that characterize it, such as taste and imagination. Also in England, Hutcheson claims to be defending the ideas advocated by Shaftesbury, but he actually departs from them. He takes up and frames as a philosopher “by profession” (unlike Shaftesbury) the concept of internal sense but then does not follow it in his neo-Platonic abstraction toward the divine and instead sets out to reorganize the old dialectic of harmony and extravagance in beauty through the formula of uniformity in the variety we are able to grasp through such sense.

National Debates and the European Debate This transition from the rhetorical-poetic paradigm to the proper aesthetic paradigm is also characterized by a double dynamic. On the one hand, there is a differentiation between national cultural areas, something that constitutes a typical feature of modernity, and on the other hand, there is intense communication between national cultural elites, which takes place not only through books but also through travel, often connected with the Grand

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Tour, that is, tourism to Italy, the destination of classicists but also of those who wish to see landscapes and natural spectacles, ranging from the peaceful vision of the Roman and Neapolitan countryside to the horrid (and sublime) of the Marmore Falls and Alpine passes. Concepts such as those of good taste or sublime fantasy owe perhaps more to such travels than to the spread of books, which nonetheless played a key role in the entrenchment of such concepts. So, after the undisputed predominance of Italy, followed by the Spanish interlude and then the important French debate, which characterized the rhetorical-poetic system, the new wave of studies, which then took the name of aesthetics, was characterized from the outset by a division into national areas, which we are going to examine briefly. Italy Italy was the country where rhetorical-poetic discourse was born, and over time it lost its centrality, but the debate on beauty and art never died out and continued into the eighteenth century. What really changes is that, until the dawn of the eighteenth century, Italy, thanks to thinkers such as Gravina and Tiraboschi, still exported concepts from its own system, which are now, however, reconverted, especially in France and Britain, into concepts of modern aesthetic discourse (good taste, sublime, fantasy, etc.). At a certain point, the situation reverses, and Italy instead begins to import the discussions of the debate from beyond the Alps with thinkers such as Beccaria and Verri. Between these two phases then arises a unicum, namely the case of Vico, who does not find aesthetics as it is understood in the eighteenth century but who poses a series of questions and theoretical positions akin to those that will emerge in the reflection of the philosophy of art in the nineteenth century. Hence his reputation as the “forerunner” of aesthetics, conceived, however, in an idealist sense. France As for the initiators of the new approach, aesthetics in the first place must be put in France because it is the place where there was the transition between the old system and the new and where there are still strong reasons for continuity but also for novelty. It all unfolds from the contrast between Boileau and Perrault, who are the two main challengers of the querelle des anciennes et des modernes, which marks precisely the point of crisis for the old rhetorical-poetic paradigm. At this critical stage, meanwhile, the Jesuit Bouhours had brought from Italy the concepts of good taste and non-sowhat, which he precisely translates as je-ne-sais-quois and which are related since good taste eludes rational definition. We have already mentioned

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Du Bos, who considers art entertainment but gives room for feeling, speaking of a sixth sense we have for judging art. Du Bos centers the experience of the viewer, no longer that of the producer, and also gives space to the problem of artistic representation of ugly and brutal facts, thus distinguishing the plane of representation in its axiological autonomy from the represented. Abbot Du Bos also frequented the salon of the Marquise de Lambert, which instead dwells on the concept of agreeableness. That salon was also frequented by Montesquieu, who, not unlike the marquise, followed the hedonistic relativism typical of rationalist philosophical culture. So far, we find ourselves in a sphere of transition toward the new sensibility centered on the percipient subject and form, but without being able to put up a serious philosophical argument against the relativist skepticism of the rationalists toward beauty, which is still the real obstacle on the road to the birth of modern aesthetics. On the other hand, a very significant step in this direction is taken by Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, who, even before Du Bos, published a Treatise on Beauty (1715), where he proposed an intellectualist theory of the beautiful in which feeling is not the indispensable point since one can judge something beautiful independently of it. The focus is thus directed on judgment and the fact that taste merely precedes reason in judging. Moreover, he establishes that the beauty lies between the capricious and the objective transcendent, escaping both of these extremes. Another intellectualistic solution is that of André, who makes a typical division of matter into classes and subclasses. The Enlightenment France of the Philosophes does not, with the exception of Diderot, devote special attention to the problems of art and the beautiful. Diderot himself devotes only a small treatise to the beautiful, in which he rejects the sentimentalist theses and the English theses of the inner sense, criticizes the turn toward the subject, and still seeks a definition of the beautiful in itself. That is, he still searches for the essence, aligning himself from this point of view with the intellectualist theories of the French rationalist tradition represented by Crousaz, whom, however, he rejects, and by André, whose own theory he would like to represent an overcoming in the continuity of the search. For him, beauty is everything that awakens in us the idea of relationships. This is an idea that has the merit of overcoming idealist objectivism, looking at relational value, but remaining very vague because even ugly objects can arouse a sense of relationship. More interesting, on the other hand, is the querelle involving him about spectacles, sparked by his friend Rousseau, who instead bluntly poses the question of the relationship between art and politics through a critique of mimesis and the concept of representation that caught everyone off guard. Rousseau, in fact, declared

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that theatrical representation did not suit the Genevan Republic because representation that leaves him a spectator of narrated facts and representation that deprives the citizen of power through delegation does not suit the people and democratic power. Instead, popular power befits celebration as a joyful and unmediated expression. At the birth of the bourgeois rule of law, Rousseau poses a radical critique of the dispossession of power and enjoyment, which reduces the citizen from master to spectator. This is a theme destined to resurface in many protest movements, as far back as those of the 1960s and 1970s, but also today in social media, where there is a debate about whether everyone should be equally protagonists in them or whether a division should be made between content producers and spectators. Great Britain The situation in British aesthetics has traditionally been divided into three trends: the proponents of internal sense and thus the so-called Scottish school; the proponents of imagination; and the proponents of association theory. The current that provoked the most discussion in Europe was the former. Diderot precisely discussed the theses of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. After these two theorists, whom we have already mentioned, followed Hume and Reid. Hume devoted a small but decisive treatise on the standard of taste, which still continues to exert an influence today, in that it connects taste to feeling, but in turn connects feeling to a certain delicacy that depends on education, thus returning to the Italian discourse of good taste and its social character without, however, straying from the fundamentally subjectivist position. Instead, before discussing Reid, it is appropriate to deal with theorists of imagination such as Addison and Burke. Addison’s theory is one of the first new theories, in Britain after Shaftesbury, from whom, however, he was not inspired, and in Europe. We have already emphasized the modernity of spectator theory on the subject, yet we are still indebted in some ways to Baroque theory. The pleasures Addison is interested in are those of the imagination, but they can be primary and secondary. The primary ones still have much to do with astonishment and wonder, although in one case they herald the sublime as an astonishment of greatness; then they remain in Baroque surprise as an astonishment of novelty; and only finally comes that for beauty, which, however, may be almost sensistically an attraction to medieval beauty. But the core of his theory lies in the secondary pleasures related to the imagination, for example, literary, in which the echoes of the issues of rhetoric and poetics of the earlier system also resurface. These kinds of observations also find correspondence with the coeval theories of imagination that were circulating in Italy. With regard to Burke,

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on the other hand, we shall merely mention the wide influence of his use of the concept of the sublime, which he used far beyond the intentions of Pseudo-Longinus, to hint at awe at the boundless spectacles of nature and to open up an interest in scenes of the horrid, nocturnal, and so on, which could not then find a place in the discourse on the beautiful and could only pass through Lucretian shipwreck with spectator, or Aristotelian catharsis. Burke, on the other hand, seems to herald an interest in dark or terrible aspects, which on the one hand, derive to him from the Nordic cultural tradition as opposed to the classical one, and in this herald, the turn toward Romantic sensibility. Returning to Reid, he clearly expresses two fundamental conceptions of modern aesthetics as subject-oriented. The first is that art conveys the expression of the artist’s emotions by exciting the viewer. And this attitude is at the root of a still widespread idea, especially among the uninitiated, that art is true and beautiful when it arouses emotions. Reid thus accomplishes that discourse in the British area in which, starting from the discourse of internal sense, instead of looking for social and cultural motivations that paradoxically are derubricated to individual preferences, we instead turn to something internal to the subject, with the “internal taste,” which, since it cannot be connected to reason, is linked to emotion and feeling. Also connected to this discourse is his second fundamental conception: namely, that the key to beauty cannot be sought in principle existing outside the subject, such as in the properties of the represented object, but rather that such a key, for beauty as for other aesthetic properties, can only be found in the mind of the subject who produced it. Germany German intellectuals first entered the European debate on art and beauty timidly, then gained prominence and eventually a hegemonic role from Kant onward. Even well-informed Frenchmen such as Diderot until the 1950s knew nothing more than the seventeenth-century positions of Leibniz and the more recent positions of Wolff, who, among other things, still shared a reductivist, subjectivist, and relativistic conception, which invalidated the very possibility of serious meditation on these “inferior” subjects precisely because they were proper to confused, non-intellectual forms of knowledge. However, it is precisely from here that Baumgarten’s reasoning starts, in order to elevate this area of clear and confused knowledge of a sensitive, non-intellectual character to a dignity of its own. He arrives at the notion of aesthetics by way of theory from a traditional Greek division, which he probably found in Greek patristics between noeta and aistheta. If the former

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is related to episteme, then the latter must be related to aesthetica, which he then famously defines as “scientia cognitionis sensitivae.”3 This domain has different capacities, such as invention, taste, correlation, and so on, so it is an analogue of reason, something that went far beyond what Leibniz or Wolff claimed. To understand the gap with earlier conceptions, we need only take the relationship with perfection, which is a key concept for Wolff. Wolff argues that beauty is the sensitive cognition of perfection. Differently, Baumgarten argues that beauty is the perfection of sensible cognition. This is a momentous leap between a conception still typical of the rhetorical-poetic system, which was oriented to objective realities, and the modern one, which poses the whole problem from the subject. This is why the notion of “aesthetics” is so successful, because it is emblematic of this new general approach and also because, after him, many publications on these topics appear in Germany, something not seen since Italy in the sixteenth century.4 Moreover, mid-century saw the beginning of the Italian adventure of Winckelmann, who proposed a return to Greek classicism in a purist sense and who introduced two fundamental conceptions: one was that of beauty as pure and tasteless as water, and the other was the temporal character of stylistic change, according to historical phases, which compose a cycle assimilated to that of life, something that only Vico had previously intuited but which we do not know whether Winckelmann took up from him or whether he arrived at it by another route. In 1766, at the height of the neoclassical boom, Lessing composed an essay in which he frontally attacked the whole debate that, since ut pictura poesis had tried to propose a system of the fine arts on unifying principles. Lessing opposes this tendency and inaugurates a strand of thought that will have a long future, up to Greenberg and medium specificity, which, instead of uniting artistic media, separates them, arguing that they have specific expressive capacities that cannot be translated into the other arts. Mengs, a friend of Winckelmann, then also writes a small Treatise on Beauty that is a kind of manifesto of neoclassicism. But, clearly, the decisive turning point in Germany came with Kant. Kant had already come to notoriety with the two important Critiques of Pure Reason and Practical Reason when, after making a rather unsuccessful attempt to treat the subject of the beautiful and sublime according to the approach of the metaphysics of morals, which he intended to be a kind of cultural philosophy, he decided instead to lead this field, which was already called “aesthetics,” back to the critique of the faculties of the transcendental subject. We will not dwell here on Kant’s theories expressed in the Critique of Judgment. What interests us, for the purposes of this archaeological reconstruction of aesthetics as a discursive formation, is that Kant recomposes, in a

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coherent transcendental system, all the main themes dealt with in the eighteenth century, from the system of the arts to the judgment of taste to the role of the imagination to the theory of the beautiful and the sublime. This general recomposition marks not only the climax of this kind of debate but also its endpoint. Kant, while rejecting the term “aesthetics” to refer to these issues, remains the point of reference for the delimitation of aesthetics as it was thought of in the eighteenth century. But after Kant, a caesura occurs. Moreover, Foucault had found that the transition from âge classique to modernité did not occur between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the entry of the vitalistic paradigm supplanting the mechanistic one. Aesthetics seemed to contradict this division between epochs of knowledge, but on closer inspection, it does so only in part, for while it is undeniable that aesthetics was born in the eighteenth century, it is also clear that, at the very end of the century, after Kantian theory, a profound rupture takes place, one that almost erases the disciplinary designation of aesthetics to replace it with that of philosophy of art. If the definition of aesthetics stood for the turn from the object to the subject, from precepts to art criticism and the philosophy of taste judgment, now a further step is taken because, as the transcendental subject enters the temporal and historical dimension, the centrality is no longer neither perception nor cognition nor judgment, but artistic achievement. Art is no longer an ahistorical activity aimed at mimesis with the effect of arousing feelings by which it is judged, but is an expression of the spirit while expressing its own intrinsic historicity. In a sense, there is a return to the side of artistic production, as in the rhetorical-poetic system, while overcoming the preceptistic approach; however, developing a modern approach to poetics that overcomes both the Platonic mathematizing attitude and the Aristotelian empirical-mimetic one. In this new condition dominated by temporality and life, the concept of style becomes central, so the philosophy of art is joined by modern art history, which is no longer a list of the lives of illustrious artists but a history of styles. This is a movement that also involves the arts. If in the determination of modern aesthetics an important role on the artistic front had been played by the typical emptying out of rhetoric, which tends to dissolve content into bombastic yet meaningless repetitions (so-called “empty rhetoric”), which had detached form from content and reduced art to an elegant but superficial play of pleasing forms, which were offered to the public’s good taste, now instead new contents are offered to the arts, which are no longer the groves and streams of the ideal landscape, but those, also of the landscape, understood, however, as a scene that expresses an inner state of mind, and through it a common feeling that is an expression of one’s time

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(Zeitgeist). Art thus finds a new truth of expression, which was already manifested in the late eighteenth century with Turner and Friedrich in painting and then with the primacy of symphonic music, opera, and the novel. From Winckelmann, who had proposed a history of Greek art based on the evolution of style, to Schiller, who divided Western poetry into two major eras (“naive” and “sentimental”), and finally Hegel, with his tripartition of artistic epochs within the temporal dynamic of the spirit that placed art between religion and philosophy. This new subsystem of idealistic-romantic aesthetics finally allows us to understand why Croce refused to ascribe the authorship of aesthetics to Baumgarten and instead chose to attribute it to Vico. This was not a nationalist motive, or at least there is a much deeper reason. Baumgarten was an exponent of rationalist philosophy who had converted to a philosophical interest in art according to a theoretical-gnoseological model. But the aesthetics Croce was thinking of as the center of aesthetic discourse was the Hegel-historicist one. So he went back to Vico because there he found the first appearance of the historicist paradigm, in which the characters of aesthetics are linked to historical phases. However, already in Croce’s time, there was an ongoing reaction to this same paradigm that took into consideration aesthetic experience in its manifestation independently of historical development, and this occurs even within Croce’s own aesthetics, but especially in other aesthetics, such as pragmatist aesthetics and aesthetics of phenomenological inspiration, not to mention the various explanations of art in psychological, psychoanalytic, and sociological terms, proper to studies of a positivist nature. Marxism, too, considers history primarily in relation to the historical condition of capitalism that characterizes contemporaneity, thus apart from a historical design of the development of humanity. Again, this is like returning to the modern aesthetics of our origins. But there is one case that resembles, even more, the already mentioned case of modern rationalism, and that is that of logical neopositivism, which at first refuses art and aesthetics the dignity of an object of philosophical attention as once again confused and impossible to treat analytically because it is based on pseudo-problems. This attitude will change only in the postwar period, when, in conjunction with the neo-avant-garde, the problem is made analyzable as approached from a different perspective, which is the procedural and institutional one.

The Reduction of Art to a Purely Sensitive Surface Meanwhile, a relevant contribution to aesthetics, including analytical aesthetics, was made by the emergence of the artistic avant-garde, which

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tested the existence and endurance of artistic paradigms and their underlying ideologies. Again, as in the eighteenth century, art, through research on light, had been brought to a condition of total flattening toward the pictorial surface. The next move, however, was to carry out a reversal of perspective toward the inner world of the artist, far more radical than that operated by the Romantics, which occurred with expressionism. The superficialization of art, meanwhile, however, continued and went to its extreme limits with abstractionism, Suprematism (in which Malevich intended to show pure sensibility), and, finally, concrete painting, in which the picture rejected all kinds of illusionistic and even semantic depths, presenting itself simply as a colored object. Painting and figuration were thus tested and ousted from the essential characters of art, so all that remained was to test even the artist’s object as a creation. This was famously taken care of by Duchamp, who, instead of creating objects or even composing them, took already-made, or “readymade” objects and simply renamed them as works of art. This is really already an analytical-type process and is an experimental procedure of an almost scientific type to evaluate the regime of legality of art, regardless of good taste, emotions, feelings, impressions, and so on. After this “reduction,” however, there still remains the ingenuity, inventio, and even the awe of the times of rhetoric and conceptualism. Such investigation of art was still done in the spirit of provocation and shock (Benjamin), and it was followed in the 1960s by the systematic and avowedly analytical experimentation of conceptual artists, who intended to permanently remove the object and any perceptual content without, however, succeeding in doing so, partly because of the prosaic demands of the art market, which, however, evidently showed the strength to enforce its own rules while allowing loopholes and compromise solutions. These solutions, however, bring us back to what Reid asserted, namely, that an object of aesthetics such as, for example, a work of art must still have a sensible or even thinkable aspect that leads it back to a sensible or structural form, a principle that is also assumed in the present text. This period ends in the 1970s. It is no coincidence that the 1960s and 1970s saw the last major attempts to offer an entire aesthetic theory in three trends: critical theory, Marxism, and phenomenology. These works are: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (unfinished and published posthumously); Lukacs’ Aesthetics; and Dufrenne’s The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Three mighty works that have been unmatched in importance and theoretical commitment in subsequent years to the present.

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The Crisis of Modern Aesthetics and the Postmodern Those who have suffered most from the impact of the avant-garde along with analytic aesthetics have been postmodern aesthetics or, rather, the post-structuralist and postmodernist forays into aesthetics that have not resulted in any systematic work on the subject. This is also due to the very character of postmodernism, which rejects the creation of systematic and all-encompassing theories. The most significant forays are those of Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida. Deleuze wrote a short but very dense essay on The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics (1963), where, however, he focuses on genesis in relation to faculties and not on the key points of aesthetics such as the beautiful or art. So the relationship to aesthetics is not the key aspect. Then Deleuze had devoted himself to Bacon’s painting, focusing on the relation to the body, the figural (which he takes from Lyotard), and then concepts such as the flesh or the animality of the head instead of the face. Finally, he had dedicated two volumes to cinema, opening a strand of philosophical contributions to film criticism. Lyotard introduced the concept of the figural from psychoanalysis, and he too made forays into aesthetics by writing about the work of certain artists. There are two main cases: the first and most famous one concerns an intervention, starting from Barnett Newman’s painting, on the sublime, in which Lyotard, although trained as a Kantian, detaches himself from the Critique of Judgment, placing the discourse of the sublime in relation to painting and in a condition far removed from that of the experience of the boundless or the shipwreck with spectators of Lucrezian memory, which had so much importance in the eighteenth century. The other paper, however, is the one dedicated to the Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello. As far as Derrida is concerned, the most important essay is The Truth in Painting, which brings us back to the thought of Heidegger, who likewise had a profound relationship with aesthetics (think of the importance of poetry or the work of art as the enactment of truth), but not systematically from the point of view of treatises. Other authors, like Foucault, have equally devoted small interventions to artists and writers (Manet, Magritte, Roussel). In addition, Foucault spoke of an aesthetics of existence in the History of Sexuality in relation to “self-care,” however, using the term aesthetics in an extended sense without connection to theoretical problems of art or beauty. Similarly, Baudrillard, Virilio, and Nancy have dealt with issues that also have an interest in aesthetics, but only laterally. Even in Italy, where some postmodern thinkers have occupied chairs of aesthetics, such as Vattimo, Agamben, and Perniola, as well as works of historical manuals, there has been no development of systematic theories of aesthetics, except in the case of Perniola’s

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book L’arte e la sua ombra. Thus, if in the 1980s postmodern aesthetics was, as for example in Vattimo, mostly related to Heidegger and Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics, in the 1990s postmodern aesthetics was interested in the body, technological communication, and the deconstruction or even critique of the categories of modern aesthetics. There was then talk of technological aesthetics and relational aesthetics, but it remained within sectoral discourses such as media studies, or more generally, cultural studies or art criticism. It is precisely from this sphere that the last phase of the postmodern approach to the issues of aesthetics emerged, with the so-called “visual turn” (or the “pictorial turn”), or with image studies and representation studies in general, or finally with a new interest in critical and political implications, culminating in Rancière’s aesthetic-political theories. Today we are witnessing the exhaustion of this last phase. Postmodern aesthetics, with its deconstructive practices, rather than having been the opening of a new phase, has been a development of negative twentieth-century thinking and has constituted a kind of self-disassembling phase of modernity, which has left, as after the demolition of a building, only a great deal of rubble made up of now disconnected parts. So we have witnessed in recent years a fragmentation of aesthetic discourse into a thousand different rivulets that often do not communicate with each other. A book by Michaud (2003) spoke of art in a gaseous state; however, perhaps we can say that it is aesthetics itself that finds itself transformed into a gaseous state by the panoply of local and disparate reflections to which postmodern thought has given rise. Compared to that dissolution of aesthetics in the treatment of occasional aspects, the only resumption of an organic treatment of aesthetics has come from the sciences, such as cognitivism and evolutionism, which, however, have offered a reductive view of it. However, today it is precisely from the relationship with these sciences that we need to start anew for an organic reflection on aesthetics that does not simply succumb to late-capitalist and postmodern dispersion.

Autonomy and Heteronomy of Art Today, contemporary art presents an almost paradoxical situation. In the second half of the twentieth century, it had radicalized its autonomy, both theoretically and practically. From a theoretical point of view, Adorno’s aesthetics advocated a critical approach to capitalist society that aimed to defend research art from its subjection to the logic of the cultural industry. From a practical point of view, conceptual art had proposed an art without works and even without an audience (Kosuth), made of pure analytical propositions about its own condition, so much so that it competed with

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aesthetics, in some cases preceding the reflections of the so-called Institutional Theory of Art. Art was thus a terrain of pure theoretical research, in which value was not the effect of feelings and sensations on the observer but the consequence of the ability to innovate debate, as if operating within an academic or scientific community. Artists chose their content as a scholar chooses examples to make his or her theories understood; there was no intrinsic value in the phenomenal nature of such objects. However, this system, at some point, in historical conjunction with the rise of neoliberalism, came to a rupture. The rupture was presented in the form of a paradoxical utterance that invalidated the norm it ostensibly followed and served it in order to be admissible. Such an utterance has the form of the paradox of novelty. There is a line that says, “In the land of novelty, the novelty of today is that there is no novelty.” The culture of the neo-avant-garde had always been rejected as kitsch any attempt to return to painting because it was proposed as opposition to avant-garde research. Then the only way to get the return to painting accepted was to present it as a novelty as opposed to the novelty of conceptual art that had now become mainstream art. Thus, it was possible to return to the old concept of bourgeois decoration, to the general applause of all those collectors who wanted to return to having a painting to hang on the wall. However, this stance soon showed all its limitations, and there was a return to seemingly conceptual experiments that had, however, lost the innovative character and critical nature of modernity, according to which art “criticizes the system through self-criticism.”5 It was preferred to take an attitude of apparent social interest by choosing to deal with issues related to customs, civil rights, and so on, but in essence, art, as a whole, has not become heteronomous with respect to all these topics but rather has become heteronomous with respect to transnational capitalism and the globalization of markets. To better explain this transition, let us take the example of a newspaper. The articles are all about particular and different subjects, but the newspaper’s line does not depend on the news events. The editorial line depends on who owns it. The discourse of artistic heteronomy is the same: works of art are like articles that are always about something particular, but the real point at issue is the change in the corporate name of art institutions, which today are aimed at their own budget just like any business. This situation is already sensed by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, which today shows all its limits. For this reason, even the strategy of theoretical reflection cannot be the same as forty years ago. Back then, one prepared to face a situation that had shattered the systematic philosophies of modernity by claiming fragmentation; one

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responded to biopolitical control over identity by claiming deterritorialization; one reacted to the critique of utopia by proposing a Gaian nihilism; one opposed single thought by taking a relativist stance; and finally, one reacted to the attack on critical theory with weak thinking. Finally, philosophy, no longer being able to talk about the big issues, all of which were foreclosed, resolved to do the work of self-deconstruction. All this led to so-called withdrawal thinking. Thus, today, the dominant paradigm is that of fragmentary knowledge, which, instead of making syntheses, proceeds toward ever-new articulations (following the flows of the cultural market). In response to this condition, there is a need for strong and as rationally structured thinking as possible, in a kind of return to reason, against the new rhetorics of power and the return of regime propaganda. So even if an aesthetic more geometrico demonstrata cannot be written, one can think of proposing a “long reasoning” about it, or at least an articulated reasoning. That is, the centrality of reason must be recovered with a return to critical rationality. Criticism is a typical expression of even Kantian Enlightenment, but it is also the exercise of demystification conducted by Marx toward the liberal political economy, or finally, that conducted by Nietzsche toward the theory of the origin of moral sentiments. To speak of a critical approach, however, evokes, in particular, the link with critical theory, with respect to which three tendencies must be considered: the first is that of the Frankfurt School and, in particular, Adorno; the second is that of Walter Benjamin; and the third is the heterodox one of Guy Debord and situationism. With respect to a return to reason, we cannot overlook the fact that this has itself been subjected to criticism, precisely by Adorno. Regarding this critique, since we cannot address its analysis here, we will only say that it is addressed by Adorno in particular in two essays: Dialectics of the Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. In the first work, it was primarily to criticize bourgeois instrumental reason and the use of the concept as a form of domination over the object. However, in Negative Dialectic, we go further and realize that there is no way to criticize reason except through reason itself. The reason must be self-analytic, dialectical toward itself, capable of denying itself. However in doing so, it is also capable of performing a leap of self-understanding, which allows it a kind of self-transcendence, something akin to what Emilio Garroni would later call “a look through” (and which, while grounded in Kantian thought, may not be immune to Adornian influence). From this point of view, such a look through will also be used in this text, which allows the self-criticism of reason not to turn into a self-deconstructive cul-de-sac, capable only of resulting in a helpless and idle nihilism.

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Notes 1. Ferraris Maurizio, Givone Sergio, and Vercellone Federico, Estetica (Turin: Tea, 1996). 2. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. III, Modern Aesthetics (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1974), 331. 3. Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica/Aesthetik, 2 vols (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007). 4. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic (New York: Noonday, 1909 [1922]). 5. Joseph Kosuth, Within the Context: Modernism and Critical Practice (Gent: ­Coupure, 1977).

CHAPTER 2

v

Philosophical Premises of Cultural Theory

In the first chapter, we tried to understand the object and domain of aesthetics through a concise reconstruction of the way in which this discipline was constituted, replacing the rhetorical-poetic paradigm from which it inherited key concepts such as those of poetry, fine arts, beauty, ingenuity (which becomes genius), good taste, fantasy, and imagination. This allows us to already delineate a field of positivity to establish what we are referring to when we talk about aesthetics while avoiding providing an implicit definition of it. But this very brief historical-genealogical analysis has also allowed us to highlight the reversal of perspective that characterizes the transition from the rhetorical-poetic system to the modern aesthetic system. This reversal is analogous to what Kant called the Copernican revolution, that is, the shift from a thought based on the object (in this case the work of art or the objective beautiful as convenientia partium) to a thought based on a sixth sense or internal sense, because it is inherent in the individual subject, which allows us to distinguish the beautiful and which ends up being connected to emotion, again as an internal state of the subject. However, the problem is that if the system oriented to the objective nature of the beautiful and artistic value had been undermined by relativistic criticism, based on the emerging philosophy of the subject in the rationalist and empiricist spheres, subjectcentered aesthetic theorizing showed, from the outset, a constitutive inability to adequately account for the property of certain aesthetic phenomena to go beyond the mere judgment of individual taste, as in the case of the sense of objectivity of the beautiful, the normativity of style, and the difference of tastes in different eras and civilizations. Even before Kant, the problem of historical and geographical variation in aesthetic parameters was known, but no convincing answer had been provided. Hegel tried to recompose all this 29

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variation into a grand scheme relating to the development of the spirit, preceded in part by Vico and Winckelmann. However, his answer, while having a logical foundation in the idea of an overall development of human intelligence, fails to account for the differences in drifts between different cultures. With respect to these limitations, he resumed quota the analysis of the study of aesthetics from the experience of the subject, which in this case became the phenomenological one. The point at issue then was no longer the value of beauty or the arts but rather their consistency at the ontological level within an analysis of aesthetic experience. From this point of view, of particular importance is the analysis made by Roman Ingarden. To understand Ingarden’s aesthetics, it is essential to understand the philosophical circumstances in which it was born. At that time, Ingarden had expressed his disagreement with his teacher Husserl regarding the so-called transcendental turn, which brought phenomenology back into the groove of the modern tradition of philosophies of the subject. This, however, was not the outcome desired by Ingarden, who instead leaned toward a closer proximity to realism. Ingarden was also aware that, from a phenomenological point of view, one cannot go beyond experience in asserting an autonomous reality of things or a thing in itself. Therefore, it is necessary to find the reason for this reality and its distinction from unreality within experience itself. This ontological question leads Ingarden to be interested in our experience of ontologically intermediate entities, that is, entities that are neither real nor mistakenly unreal, such as the essences relating even to places, situations, and characters that are evoked in literature. Therefore, Ingarden will engage in an analysis of the ontological levels that make up the phenomenological structure of the literary work, relating them to the relative types of intentionality. This discourse will then be extended to the cinema. In fact, this kind of approach relates better to narrative arts than figurative arts, which are static and can also be abstract and thus lack virtual characters or settings. For these arts, on the other hand, a different kind of discourse has been developed in the phenomenological field, with more references to the psychology of perception and especially Gestaltpsychologie. Other phenomenologists, first and foremost Merleau-Ponty, have been more interested in this order of problems. However, here we are more interested in the discourse made by Ingarden in search of a dimension that is neither simply psychological nor materialistically objective, and which thus raises the question of the irreducibility of aesthetic experience to the subject and the subjectivist arbitrariness of his individual imagination, and likewise to the material object of the positive sciences. On this road, however, phenomenology, insofar as it differs from psychology and simple psychologistic subjectivism, comes up against an insurmountable

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limit, for this limit is relative to its own approach and even more so to the case of the transcendental subject. This limit especially emerges when we ask the question of aesthetic value, which goes beyond the simple question of the ontological consistency of the realities presented within the aesthetic experience of the work of art and their intentionality. For example, according to Maximilian Beck, the aesthetic object is a type of value, but as such, it remains precluded from phenomenological analysis. A similar argument is made by Moritz Geiger, who rejects a reduction of aesthetics to either psychology (empirical subject) or metaphysics (transcendental subject), invoking a specific study of aesthetic value, albeit within phenomenological observation, but of a non-transcendental orientation. This position stems from the difficulty of bringing in the conception of value, which he, like other phenomenologists in the Munich group, inherited from the value philosophy of Max Scheler, who had a conception of value as something autonomous from the subjective sphere. The philosophy of the subject, in its most rigorous reflections, has often been tempted to exclude the aesthetic object because of its intrinsic irrationality and because of the fact that value constitutively exceeds the subjective sphere, although this has not prevented, as we shall see, some neo-Kantians from proposing precisely a philosophy of values. In any case, the philosophy of the subject has, since Kant’s time, had a problem with its own circumscription to the sphere of the subject itself, with the need to resolve everything in terms of mental faculties or lived experience. On the phenomenological front, the cultural element is explained either as the product of intersubjective activity (which is like saying that the cells cooperating produce the organ) or as an element already present (dejà là would have said Bernard Stiegler) in the constitution of one’s world (like saying that the cell is found to be born in an organ, which, however, does not explain the organ). That is, these are approaches that do not grasp the superindividual nature of the aesthetic. Limitations are also found in the Neo-Kantian current, with Cassirer, when he attempts to constitute a philosophy of culture on the basis of a theory of symbolism, where such symbolism takes on a general scope that goes far beyond the coeval conceptions proposed by depth psychology and cultural anthropology, which see symbol not as a general basis of knowledge but only a particular form of signification, as is the case with metaphor and metonymy. In contrast, the concept of symbol used by Cassirer has a general gnoseological scope, partly because it has a different origin. Cassirer takes the notion of symbol from some of Kant’s statements, but his use of it is instead influenced by the scientific debate and, in particular, by Heinrich Hertz, according to whom it is a sign capable of relating to mental content. Therefore, culture can be read in terms of

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symbolic forms, that is, ways of connecting sign forms and mental content, according to the unfolding of a general process of human development, which echoes in a sense Vico and Hegel but also Comte. In fact, Cassirer starts with mythical thought, then turns to artistic thought, and finally to scientific thought, which are based on different ways of connecting reality with thought through different uses of different kinds of signs. That is to say, Cassirer is trying to get out of the narrowness of the sphere of the individual transcendental subject in order to Hegelianally posit a general subject of human knowledge. However, both the expedient of simulating the social dimension of culture through the indefinite multiplication of the same model of the subject in intersubjectivity and that of re-proposing the subject at a meta-subjective level, so to speak, through a larger and all-encompassing subject suffer from the same limitation, namely, that of not being able to tear open the veil of Maya, because they always look at the world from a subjective interior. They fail to grasp the existence of communicational dynamics external to the subject, which are beyond the subject’s control because of their heterogeneous nature. Anthropological and psycho-anthropological theories also prefer, in this case, to think of processes that are beyond the control of the subject because of their unconscious nature, and in this way, communicational dynamics external to the subject are instead placed in a supposedly deep sphere of the subject that is unattainable to self-consciousness and reason. This limitation of not being able to go outside the subject, even when it appears evident that the object of study requires it, is a typical trait of modern thought, which emerges all the more clearly in the case of aesthetics, where it is immediately clear that the social and cultural-historical elements, due to the transmission and morphogenesis of canons and styles, cannot be resolved by transforming the outside of social processes into the inside of the unconscious processes of the subject. However, both neoKantianism and phenomenology, while confusingly sensing the problem, cannot push themselves, due to the character of their theoretical foundations, into a terrain that would be completely uncovered and theoretically unfounded, such as the space of social communication as such. Instead, laying the groundwork for this kind of discourse will be positivists such as Gabriel Tarde, whom we will discuss later, or sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, who, however, in a sense, renounce moving within a theoretical philosophical discourse and instead try to paraphrase the scientific method. Then, in order to make an aesthetic discourse without moving out of its nature as a philosophical inquiry and falling into some form of science of sensible pleasure (see in this regard operations such as that of Dennis Dutton, who speaks of the instinct of art), an epistemological rupture must be made

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in the continuity of research with what has been done by phenomenologists, neo-Kantians, and others, such as Susanne Langer, who have attempted to open a way toward the cultural dimension from the philosophy of the subject of the modern matrix. It must now be accepted that a leap must be made to think outside the transcendental schema, which, instead of being a resource in the case of aesthetics, shows itself as an epistemological obstacle. When Ockham realized that scholastic thinkers could not give an adequate explanation of the individual element through theories of principium ­individuationis, he understood that an epistemological leap had to be made and that it was necessary to start directly from the individual entity without grounding it in a logical explanation. Moreover, even the subject was posited as foundational by Descartes through an apparent syllogism that is not such but is only an appeal to evidence. Culture and society, in what is essentially social about them, cannot be explained from the subject, either in the form of its numerical multiplication with the concept of intersubjectivity or through translation to the level of all-encompassing reality as in the idea of the spirit that animates history. This happens for the same reason that the properties of a whole are emergent with respect to its component parts and cannot be reduced in any way, either to their sum or to their magnification. To give an example, let us return again to the cell and the organ. Organ functions cannot be understood simply by imagining a numerical multiplication of cells or by imagining a supercell the size of an organ. An organ is a different entity than a cell and must be thought of as such. We must therefore take seriously these thrusts toward a third dimension between the psychic subject and the material object, between the psychic process and the impersonal realization, and instead of trying to reduce it to such terms as to put it back into the subject, we must consider a different schema with a different reality, consisting of an evolving network of communications. Aesthetics, then, asks us, in order to understand phenomena such as the beautiful, which are neither physically nor mathematically objective nor relativistically subjective, to open ourselves to a third ground than that of subject and object. It is then necessary to dwell briefly on the identification of such “in between” ground and to do so, once again, it is not possible to start directly from the concept as if we were still in an idealist context, nor from the positivistically understood object, as if we were in a realist context. This means that neither a physical explanation nor a logical explanation can be given, but it is necessary, again, to start with a historical explanation of how the polarities of subject and real object have been determined in the history of Western thought. This discourse, being very broad, we will touch upon it only with regard to the points that interest us most since its treatment is not an end in

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itself but is aimed at elucidating the structure and reasons for our argument, as far as it pertains to aesthetic theory, which we are going to propose here. That is, it is to make a kind of synthetic genealogy of the notions of subject and object, not so much in the tradition of the extensive Foucauldian studies as in that of the brief Nietzschean forays, as precisely happens in the Genealogy of Morals. There is no need, therefore, to ask whether there has always been a subject and an object in the relations we have with the world, for this question would be mystifying since it would already presuppose the modern concepts of object and subject. Instead, one must ask how thought in the West has constituted these two polarities.

The Birth of Philosophy If we are not to take anything for granted, the first question to be asked is whether philosophy, and therefore also aesthetics, having originated in the Mediterranean, is to be considered a peculiarity of the Western cultural tradition alone or whether it is to be considered a universal feature of human thought present in all civilizations. This also has profound implications in the way of posing the problem of the nature of aesthetics, namely, whether it should be considered the product of modern Western culture, in which universalist claims have been linked to colonialist campaigns, in determining its imposition in the geography of knowledge of other civilizations. And so this point also invests the following question: Does it make sense to talk about a comparative study of aesthetics within which different positions of different cultures regarding painting, music, and various forms of beauty are compared? Or should we be comparing not aesthetic ideas but the different containers relating to all these areas existing in different civilizations? So let us start from the foundation of philosophy. Is philosophy uniquely born in Greece through a miracle, owing nothing to other cultures, or is it just one form of a cultural universal found in all cultures, like a kind of diffuse wisdom we find in all latitudes? The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Philosophy historically arose in very circumscribed geographical and temporal circumstances. In contrast to the views of the exceptionalists, who argue for the Greek miracle thesis, it should be emphasized that philosophy was not born in the center of Greek culture, as could have been Athens, Sparta, Thebes, or Corinth, but was born in the eastern colonies and first developed in the western colonies before arriving in Athens as if it had been a strange foreign cult. The birth of philosophy is the result of an acculturation phenomenon due to contact with older and more advanced civilizations, such as Mesopotamian and Egyptian, without also considering

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the influence of intermediate civilizations such as Phoenicia, to which Greece owes the alphabet. This phenomenon of cultural contamination occurred at a crossroads of caravan and naval trade in a very narrow area of only about 100 kilometers, comprising the cities of Miletus and Clazomene and the island of Samos. Although the early philosophers could not speak Oriental languages, they must have used translators. This early form of knowledge insists on two points: The importance of geometric-mathematical knowledge, which imposes a strong type of rationality, and an interest in the origin of the natural world. When Thales argues that the principle of everything (archè) is water, he is not claiming that all bodies are made of water but is drawing on an ancient tradition of Sumerian origin that sees abyssal water as a symbol of primeval chaos and sees fresh water, which, according to them, derives from it, as the medium that enables agriculture and thus civilization.1 Only later will this rational-natural culture come into contact with dialogical and rhetorical culture, linked to political institutions, such as isonomy, and initiate logic.2 It will also come into contact with the new mystery cults, which often came from outside, giving rise to new theories about the soul and the discipline of behavior.3 This mix is the result of contingent circumstances relating to an area in a given historical period, which leads us to argue that philosophical thought is purely Western, but, at the same time, its obvious debts to the wisdom of the great archaic civilizations lead us to argue that it is nonetheless the development of forms of wisdom that were also widespread in other civilizations. Therefore, philosophy is a specific cultural form, but it is also constitutively open and interwoven with cultural motifs of a much more general character. The same argument then must be made with the theories within it that have covered such aspects as poetry, beauty, and other arts, all the way to modern aesthetics, which, as such, is certainly all Western but, not for that reason, is isolated as an alien from other civilizations. We can conclude from this that we cannot assert the universal presence of an aesthetic that is equally valid for all, an assertion that would only be an exercise in Eurocentric imperialist arrogance, but that this nevertheless does not preclude the possibility of a confrontation with other traditions on similar themes while respecting the relevant cultural classifications, which must not be supplanted by the fine arts system or other Western schemes. Remember, however, that in other great civilizations there were no terms corresponding to “philosophy,” “aesthetics,” or “art” (in the sense of fine arts). For example, in Japan during the Meiji Restoration, the government decided, on the one hand, to drive out the “Western barbarians,” but on the other hand, to equip itself with their culture to try to place itself at their

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level and not below them. Many intellectuals engaged in the gigantic task of transcribing from the horizontal script (alphabet) to the vertical script (Japanese). In doing so, they encountered terms such as “aesthetics” and “art” that they did not know how to translate. In the case of “aesthetics,” they took the kanji bi (美=beautiful) and combined it with -gaku (学-logy) and derived bigaku (美学), a kind of “beautology,” which is incidentally precisely the way of understanding aesthetics advocated in this book. More difficult was to render “art” and “artist.” Ars was the Latin translation of techne and indicated learned knowledge such as precise technique. In Japanese, gei (芸) was used to denote the skill proper to the dancer or actor; however, the person (-sha 者) who engaged in gei (芸) became geisha (芸者). More appropriate was the word geijutsu (芸術), where jutsu (術) denotes precisely art as technique, so “artist” became geijutsuka (芸術家). In any case, that term was more appropriate for the performing arts. To render the concept of “fine arts,” the term bijutsu (美術) was then coined, hence bijutsusha (美術者) for “artist,” but even this was not widely used and finally many simply transliterated the word “art” into aato (アート) and “artist” into aatisuto (アーティスト). This should make us realize how our concepts of art and artist are not at all natural but, on the contrary, are so problematic that they become a puzzle for other civilizations. So this example alone would be enough to make us realize how absurd it is to look for art in genes when it ceases to be perspicuous as soon as we leave Western culture.

The Two Worlds of Classical Tradition and Modern Tradition We have talked about what we mean by philosophical discourse and how this, in our view, relates to historical and geographical context. In the history of Greek thought, philosophy began as a question about the origin of entities or of the entity in general, as the principle of particular entities. We have seen how, however, a new element intervened in this question, namely, the abstract and ideal element represented by the number, the geometrical figure, and the regime of necessary bonds that govern these ideal entities. Thus, philosophy arises not only as a question about nature but also as an initiatory discovery of an imperishable world in which the being of things does not change and has its own character of necessity. Thus, two worlds are given: One natural impermanent and one ideal eternal. Some argue that at the basis of the mutable world there is nevertheless a permanent element, the archè,

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or that the world is impermanent only in appearance because, in reality, it is, always is, and cannot but be (Parmenides). We are part of this world; therefore, there is no substantial difference between investigating the world and investigating ourselves. The difference is that, having a soul, we are different from inanimate things, and having the ability to reason, we have access to the world of immutable and perfect immaterial entities. So the real division at this stage of philosophy arises only between the ideal world, which is the world of forms, and the natural world, which is the world of matter. Some philosophers, such as Pythagoras and Plato, place all importance on the ideal world of numbers and pure geometrical forms, or at any rate, forms that are models of earthly things. Others, however, assign more importance to matter, either as a set of the four elements (Empedocles) or as formed of atoms (as in Democritus and later Epicurus). But precisely in the philosophical generation of Epicurus, a new fact takes over. Philosophers like Pyrrho, who had gone with Alexander the Great in the conquest of the East, once they arrived on the banks of the Indus River (now Pakistan, but then the most important part of India), had learned of the doctrines of what they called gymnosophists and who were ascetics who walked around naked, perhaps of the Jain, Hindu, or even Buddhist faith. Pyrrho learns from this issue, which, if grasped in its radicality, was entirely new to Greek philosophy. The sophists had questioned the fact that we base our representation of the real on sensible representations, but they had not gone so far as to put the whole sensible world theoretically in brackets. Pyrrho, on the other hand, draws this lesson from the gymnosophists and comes back with a philosophy that reverses the relationship between reality and thought in a different way than Plato did because it does not refer to the reality of ideal objects on the model of numbers but to an inner individual mental reality. The classical world would later embrace some aspects of this thinking but would not assign it a fundamental role. Buddhist reflection, however, conceives of the illusory nature of all phenomena, śūnyatā, including the ego. In classical reflection, on the other hand, this discourse is limited to the already known issue of the fallibility of the senses and thus the certainty of the sensible world, so much so that the importance of the gymnosophists on skepticism has even been questioned. The problem is that the pre-existence of such themes already in Greece formed the basis for an interpretation of Indian theories that went in the direction of those already known. However, the Indian influence certainly must have been there because we see a quantum leap on this front. The Platonism of the Middle Academy takes up these themes by bending them to the Platonic demands of devaluing the sensible world in favor of the intelligible, or rather

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ideal, world. This fosters over time the change described by Panofsky (1968) in the very conception of the idea from an abstract model of the thing, which exists in a hyperuranium world, to the idea as a mental model of the thing, produced by our rational faculty and therefore residing in our mind. Finally, in Stoicism, as Epictetus tells us, the ethical implications of the Pyrrhonian assumption are recovered in that it is held that we can have power only over that which is internal to us and not over that which is external and which we know through the senses, and over which we have, in most cases, no control. All these interpretations go to point out the difference between an illusory or otherwise learned world that is fundamentally external to us and a real, internal world that belongs to us in its own right and is the prerequisite of our inwardness and moral subjectivity. Thus, the Platonic assumption that there is a true, geometrically and mathematically rational world as opposed to an apparent world is transformed into the opposition between the true interiority of thought and the apparent exteriority of the world. The whole is contrasted with matter. Thus, matter ceases to be the simple opposite of the abstract ideal of the hyperuranium world and becomes the opposite of thought and the mental, in the mental/real opposition. All of this examination serves to understand how the subject-object opposition matured in philosophical thought. In Aristotelian philosophy, which in the Scholastics comes almost to coincide with philosophy tout court, the subjectum is the substratum or hypokeimenon (ὑποκείμενον), that is, “that which is underneath,” that which sustains, and thus the basic component of substance. In the categories, this subject is one whose attributes are predicated. Thus, it is what is holding up all the various essential and accidental determinations of the thing. This same hypokeimenon in Physics can then be thought of as that which is most material, apart from any formal consideration, but, from the gnoseological point of view, it can be presented as the pure presence of something not further specified, as precisely in the case of tode ti (or “this”), which, in scholastic terms, becomes hecce (literally “behold,” from which derives the notion of haecceitas developed by Duns Scotus, which awakened Deleuze’s attention). However, historically, medieval scholastic thought retains the custom of referring by esse subiective to something present in reality outside the mind, as substance or as its own essence rests in itself, and instead calls object, esse obiective, something that is thought and has no consistency of its own. That is, the opposite of what will happen later. Consider that Descartes, despite redefining all philosophy by ego cogitans, still uses the term subjectum following the scholastic tradition. It is Hobbes and then Leibniz who make this shift instead. Hobbes thinks of a subject of

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sensation that, as such, is sentient, a definition that still moves to the limits of Aristotelianism. Leibniz introduces a new point of view with the idea of an individual substance, which is subject and which, as a monad, relates to the world through varying degrees of sensation. It is with Leibniz that the logical-linguistic and ontological functions of the subject are reunited in the name of the individual. The subject, then, matures slowly within modernity and does not change everything immediately after the Cartesian cogito. It is a fact that this maturation reaches its zenith with criticism and idealism and is re-proposed in a renewed vision by phenomenology, in a way that still mortgages the entire domain of philosophy. Already in the aftermath of idealism, tendencies emerged aimed at questioning the centrality of the subject and its role in defining all philosophical discourse, such as the so-called school of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud). The problem is that the Cartesian revolution enacts a rupture in knowledge from which not only are the meanings of subject and object overturned, but also an opposition between two foundations, the physical and the psychic, is sanctioned. The first is that of materialism, according to which matter is the basis of everything and exists regardless of whether one perceives it or not, whether one knows it or not, in an existing pure presence even unknown. Recall that Kant, despite being the implementer of the so-called Copernican revolution (which then is not Copernican but if anything Ptolemaic), still admits the “thing in itself,” that is, the existence of matter in itself regardless of being known and of knowing what it is. Otherwise, on the one hand, the empiricist tradition, starting with Locke, who ousts the notion of substance from philosophy, then with Berkeley, who reduces being to perception, and Hume, who takes up skepticism; and, on the other hand, idealism, which reduces the real to the rational, and phenomenology, which even deems the problem of the physical reality of things to be irrelevant, fail to recognize this autonomy of matter from knowledge, reducing the existential function of being, which affirms that a thing “is there,” to the specifying function of being as the “what is” of things. Today, we still find ourselves in a situation where the philosophical foundation of philosophies on specific topics such as aesthetics is still contested between a realist-materialist position and a transcendentalist-empiricist position, which does not recognize ontic autonomy for things. From this point of view, phenomenology constitutes the most extreme statement of the philosophy of the subject, as well as the last great philosophical current based on the subject.

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Soon thereafter, we will see attempts to realize a critique of the subject and to break out of the transcendental paradigm. The first to do so will be Martin Heidegger himself, posing the question of being not in relation to the subject but in relation to language and posing the problem of the hermeneutic circle, whereby knowledge is not a pure act of the subject but is already culturally oriented and predefined in its modes. Heidegger’s attempt is the most consistent in Europe. If one leaves aside the discourse of those structuralists who dialogue with the humanities, it is difficult for the post-existentialist generations to leave the basic transcendentalist framework. Post-structuralists like Deleuze do not succeed either. Many, like Foucault, prefer to gloss over the subject, avoiding getting entangled in gnoseological and ontological issues. So the only one who takes this issue head-on among post-structuralists and postmodernists in general is Deleuze. Deleuze takes up the Sartrian notion of a “transcendental field.” This transcendental field would be a kind of surface on which intentionalities appear without depending on a center that can be traced back to the Cartesian ego or Kantian self. However, the result is only a reduction of the ego to consciousness and a shift from a point conception to a plan conception. This idea is developed by Deleuze with the “plane of immanence,” a plane on which the haecceitas of the various “this” we encounter appear and are articulated into concepts. Deleuze realizes that he is not yet out of the phenomenal-transcendental paradigm and therefore does another operation; he opens to Simondon’s philosophy, which has realist elements. Simondon believes that the forming of the individual by the process of individuation is not exhausted in a cognitive process of individualizing objectification, addressed to a specific entity, as materia signata quantitate, and that is according to its position in time. According to Simondon, the individual entity individualizes itself, in re, regardless of the observer, rather than generating an implicit point of view about the world. Thus, according to Simondon, it is not the subject that makes the individual through a constructivist dynamic, but it is the self-identified individual that stands at the origin of the knowing subject. In other words, Deleuze brings the phenomenalist element closer to the realist element, but without finding the key to theoretically overcome the distance that separates them. Other philosophers, such as Nancy, will extol the function of touching, of physical contact, which evokes a direct relationship with matter. However, here again, there is no getting out of phenomenalism. There is no way to puncture these two dimensions, objective and subjective, by theoretically connecting them to each other since perceptual representation is already how the mind connects to the real world. Overcoming transcendentalism and the transcendental subject, which is its

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inevitable logical correlate, requires a change of viewpoint. It is of no use to “debase” the subject, showing it as unstable, uncertain, influential (by the media and social conditions), obscure to itself (because of the unconscious), socially constructed, or, it would be better to say, molded, since the ability to perceptually relate to the environment is not given to it by learning but by the physical conformation of the brain and sense organs. And that is precisely the point: The theoretical subject is connected to the basic functions of a cognitive system, reasoning that, from a gnoseological point of view, every animal, endowed with a brain, senses, and capable of movement, is a subject. This does not mean that it is then a moral subject (it should have the ability to consciously choose), a legal subject (it should have the ability to understand the norm), or a political subject (it should be able to consciously act in a society). Postmodernism thus attacked the subject, showing how little it was really aware of its social action and how little it was transparent to itself; however, it cannot prove that it is incapable of a priori awareness and self-awareness. Thus, not only can it not deny the phenomenal character of the cognitive relation to the environment, not only can it not deny that this relation, as Hobbes claimed, presupposed a subjectum, but neither can it deny, in principle, other forms of subjectivity. This means that postmodern thought, no matter how much effort it has made, has actually remained within the limits or right on the edge of the modern one. This was realized by the Italian philosopher Ferraris, who argued that in order to really get out of modern postmodernism, one had to get out of Kantian transcendental phenomenalism. This, however, led him to throw himself into the arms of realism. Ferraris makes a sharp observation about Kant and what he calls the “transcendental fallacy.” That is, Kant is said to have reduced ontology to epistemology in two moves: In the first, he states that “intuitions without a concept are blind,” thus “what there is (ontology) is determined by what we know (epistemology),” and then in the second, he states that “the I think must accompany all my representations” and thus “what we know is determined by our conceptual schemes.” To these two moves, Ferraris adds a third move that would be characteristic of hermeneutics, and that is that these schemata are determined in turn by previous (cultural) schemata, according to the hermeneutic circle, that would generate a regressus ad infinitum with the conclusion that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” a phrase said by Nietzsche but interpreted by him in the sense intended by Vattimo. The last phase is not Kantian but would highlight the fallacious character of transcendental phenomenalism, as it highlights the de-realization effect operated by this approach. Now, leaving aside the fact that in our view Nietzsche never thought that material objects

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did not exist (since he also made a number of overtly materialist statements), this discourse quite clearly hints at the cul-de-sac in which transcendentalism and constructionism, developed on a transcendental basis, find themselves: The outcome of these positions becomes Baudrillard’s simulationism, if not even the Matrix. It must be said that Ferraris’ realism may, in turn, fall into a fallacy that is symmetrical and opposite to the transcendental fallacy. This realist fallacy would occur when one instead claims that what there is automatically determines (ontology) what is known (epistemology). Thus, if in Kantianism, being as existence is reduced to being as “what is,” here being as “what is” is reduced to being as existence, as if things already show up with a tag on them, like products in supermarkets. Yet the very fact that products in supermarkets need a tag should already be symptomatic of the fact that the thing by itself, in its pure materiality, is mute, opaque, and insignificant. However, there are many forms of philosophical realism and therefore not all of them are subject to this kind of contradiction and criticism. For example, in the newer Object Oriented Ontology, real character does not imply material character, so that materialism and realism take two different paths, as in the Middle Ages, becoming a form of ontologism.

The Three Worlds We have seen that a range of different positions are given in modern philosophical thought, in which, however, we can observe a different polarization than in the thought of antiquity, which centered on the difference between the physical world and the ideal world. This new opposition is between subject and object. This does not necessarily mean that the ideal world coincides with the subject and the physical world with the object, but that nevertheless two polarities are constituted, in which, on the one hand, stand the ideal world and subject and, on the other, material world and objects. In the modern age, we see the definition of this polarization, with the philosophies of the subject as preeminent. On the other hand, philosophies of the object in the modern age are often based on materialist premises, apart from a few cases of spiritualism or metaphysical or finally ontological realism. Materialism ranges from sensectivist or Enlightenment materialism to Marxist historical materialism, nineteenth-century scientific materialism, and Lange’s neo-Kantian materialism. Another form of objectivism is that of scientific reductionism, particularly physicalism and scientific objectivism in general, which is found within positivism. Positivism is supposed to be based on empiricist premises, but in fact, most

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scientists have always held a viewpoint that we might call materialist objectivism. These two polarities, on the one hand, tend to be totalizing (and we might add totalitarian) and therefore mutually exclusive, but, on the other hand, they are complementary, precisely in their failure to be totalizing, because in fact they always have to reckon with a gap that exceeds their claim to totalization. Let us start with the materialist-realist polarity. We are born into a physical world populated with objects, living things, energies, and information. We are part of this real world because we have bodies and organs. Among these organs, we have the brain, which is connected to a nervous system that enables us to receive inputs from the environment, which we convert into information of various kinds and for various purposes. The integral materialist holds that there is nothing other than the physical world of which we are a part; there are no gods, angels, supernatural spirits, and so on. It is no accident that the “hard” version of materialism is often referred to as monism. There is nothing outside of the physical world that is not mere nothingness. Entity rests on matter primarily because of its character of existence and presence. Materialism does not exclude literally immaterial entities such as information, thoughts, or dreams, as they still belong to the physical world. The same applies to conventional entities. From this point of view, materialism is also fundamentally immanentist and holds that psychic phenomena, as natural phenomena, can be studied in the same way as any other object in the natural sciences and that the mind is a state traceable to the activity of the brain, although it is then divided between those who hold that it is an emergent system and those who reduce it tout court to a mere resultant of the activity of neurons. Finally, the mind processes information related to other material entities that are objects of its cognitive activity and exist independently of it. We will next discuss non-materialist-realist tendencies. We come instead to the subjectivist approach. It objects the materialist to looking at the world from a hypothetical Archimedes point placed in “reality,” which does not coincide with the concrete point of view from which we relate to the world. The more “real” and more “concrete” approach would then be to go to the origin of what we know about the world, which is the cognitive act that is inescapable. So the starting point of philosophical inquiry cannot be matter or external reality but must necessarily be experience. Each of us lives imprisoned in his own self and sees of the world only what he is allowed to see by his senses and understands only what he is allowed to understand by his intellectual faculties. According to such an approach, which we shall call “subjective” here (to distinguish it from

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“subjective”), the only true reality of our experience is experience itself, and therefore it is thought and consciousness. The problem of the cave thus arises again, albeit in a reversed sense from Platonism. Plato argued that we see nothing but the shadows of ideas projected into the natural matter of sensible reality. In contrast, subjectivist phenomenalism condemns us to another cave, in which we can never come into contact with things but only with reflections of them in our consciousness. Outside the cave for Plato was the blinding light of the pure idea, which human being can barely conceive. For Kantian transcendentalism, on the other hand, in addition to the phenomena that project reality into our minds, there would be a reality (the noumenon) that the mind can barely grasp and that is itself elusive in its essence (thing in itself). Then there are those who do not even admit the thing in itself, but here we are only interested in showing that in the subjective tradition, in which the radical approach of the Cartesian cogito applies, the problem of the external thing or reality and therefore matter, whose existence cannot be rationally deduced, remains unresolved of necessity. Idealism drew the consequence that only thought is truly “real,” thus once again reversing the relationship between matter and thought, as Plato had already done, but this time for the benefit of consciousness. Phenomenologists will say that the subject is in the world, but “actually,” the world is all in the subject, that is, as lived experience in its consciousness. This aspect also constitutes the outcome of a path of individualist reductionism in which, finally, there is nothing but the individual subject. When Kant spoke of the “thing in itself,” he used the word “Ding,” which indicates the concrete thing, but Husserl, in his famous dictum “toward the things themselves,” uses instead the term “Sache,” which indicates the thought thing. The problem of the thing is twofold: On the one hand, it raises the question of the dualism between thought and matter, between res cogitans and res extensa, and on the other hand, it raises the problem of the I-reality relation. Husserl disjuncts these two oppositions. His theory of the absolute ego prevents him from finding a convincing solution (he tries several) to the solipsistic consequences of this approach, but on the question of the thought-matter relation, he finds a key to the opening between the two substances through the body of the ego, which participates in the activity of the subject through its own living character. Again, the German language presents two notions: Körper, which indicates the body in the material sense, and Leib, which indicates the living body. This allows Husserl to escape immaterialist drifts, but it does not allow him to relate to materialism, which still remains excluded. Another problem concerns the possibility of thinking of the subject itself in a transcendental sense. The transcendental subject is really only the

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subject proper. It transcends everything else like a projectionist who allows us to see and enjoy the film of the world, standing locked in the booth away from any gaze. In this sense, Husserl speaks of transcendental subject, when perhaps it would be better to speak of transcendent subject. Husserl, in fact, seems to give no importance to the genesis of the concept of transcendental in Kant, who takes this notion from scholasticism, in which “transcendental” referred to something generalissimo and inescapable, and which for Kant becomes something that does not concern particular knowledge but that which lies at the very basis of knowing as generalissimo (everyone must have it) and inescapable (a priori). So the transcendental transcends particular knowledge, however general. The Husserlian transcendental subject is such because it is inescapable, because it transcends all particular knowledge, but it is not generalissimo, nor is it universal; it cannot be universal because, in order to think of a universal transcendental subject, it must of necessity be objectified, but it must transcend the object because it is precisely what allows objectification. In this sense, we should say that there is not a transcendental subject for each I, but relative to each I, the transcendental subject in the world, in the universe, is one and only one, mine. The transcendental subject is like a unique God, or the neo-Platonic one; it cannot be placed in one class but exceeds them all. The problem of intersubjectivity then arises. How does the absolute ego, the transcendental subject, think of the subject of others in a way that is not in fact an object? Dan Zahavi writes, When I have an experience outside, I experience the Other. But this experience is not an object experience, it is not a subject-object relation in the sense in which I understand the Other as a thing. On the contrary: I as subject experience the Other as subject, that is, as inaccessible and transcendent, and that is precisely why it is already then a subject-subject relation.4

However, it is one thing to project a film and quite another to put a character in the film who is a projectionist. The two cannot constitute a single entity because they stand on different planes of reality. Likewise, the other subject cannot stand on the same plane as the transcendental one. It is as if a character in the film came out of the screen and went into the booth to be a projectionist as well. If you place the subject as an absolute ego, because it is transcendent to the world, then there is no way to put it on the same level as a subject acting in the world. So what Zahavi calls the subject-subject relation on closer inspection is not such. Instead, it is a fallacy in that here the word “subject” stands for two different things that can be understood by the word “subject,” namely the transcendental subject and the empirical subject which I perceive as an object to which I ascribe the status of an empirical

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subject, and imagine to be in turn, by analogy with the transcendental subject, a transcendental subject also perceiving its own world within which among the objects there is me as an object behaving as an empirical subject. This means that if the transcendental subject escapes the thing in itself, a fortiori it escapes the other as a transcendental subject in itself. Husserl himself realizes the two levels of human subjectivity: “subject for the world and subject in the world.”5 Husserl admits that others are first and foremost phenomena, and “epoché creates a singular philosophical solitude.”6 However, he tries to salvage the idea of a transcendental constitution of intersubjectivity in the life-world without renouncing the absolutely unique and fungent ego. Too bad, however, that the two are mutually exclusive in their own sense, because it may also be true that the fungent ego can realize many facts and aspects concerning the subjectivity of others, but these are all objects of thought, not the thinker as a capacity to think. The transcendental functions of the transcendental subject (such as those of objectifying and having a world) can in no way be determined by the empirical objects of experience. And all those I call subjects in the world of my experience are nothing but objects with respect to me, and they are as much subjects or creators or agents as objects can be in my world of representations, just like characters in a movie. Suppose characters talk about their author. However much they do, this does not detract from the fact that they remain characters, and the author stands on another level. Even the talk of monadism omits this substantial difference. Because any monadic community exists only on the screen of my monadic consciousness, we are, therefore, on different levels. The only thing the transcendental subject can do is to represent itself as an empirical subject and therefore as an object and to place that objectified subject in the midst of the other objects that are supposed to be in themselves subjects. It is as if the author were to place among the characters one who plays the part of himself. However, this does not detract from the difference between author and character. The fact of using “we” concerns the empirical self, which is thus accumulated with others. Scheler, as a case of transcendental predisposition toward intersubjectivity, brought the case of feelings such as sympathy or compassion that we experience in our consciousness but which presuppose the presence of others, yet even this does not put the transcendental subject on a par with the supposedly subject objects of knowledge but replicates at the emotional level the subject-object relationship that already exists at the cognitive level. An alternative to all this reasoning is offered by Buddhist thought, starting from a similarly rigorous phenomenalism, which provides immediate evidence to question the empirical self as the first and most pernicious of illusions, unlike Western thinkers, who

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instead enthroned it as the only possible certainty in a world of uncertain perceptions. From this point of view, the transcendental subject would be nothing more than a mere illusionistic device animated by desire, managing to identify how much this represented not the affirmation of a principle of freedom nor a theoretical foundation, but only a conditioning or subjection to biological drives. Thus, in place of the absolute Western ego, there would be nothing left but a mere emptiness, and the reduction to this emptiness would be the reduction of reductions. What Buddhism understood, and what Descartes and his philosophical descendants did not understand, is that this “I” often, far from allowing us to better understand reality, divides us and sets us against it, so only by emptying the mind and arranging it like a mirror does one allow reality to appear on it in this way. Instead of the object being an effect of the constructive activity of the ego, we could think of the mind as nature’s way of mirroring itself. In any case, we are not interested here in proposing Zen Buddhism as an alternative to phenomenology, although this has shown itself to be immune to individualist drifts while developing nihilism, but in an entirely different way from that of the West.

Critiques of the Critiques of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Apel and Habermas Returning to the question of the sociality of the transcendental subject, the only way to conceive of an extrasubjective form of it and, therefore, in it, is not by stitching up the transcendental subject to other subjects with some sophistry, trying to cross what even Zahavi recognizes as an insurmountable asymmetry, but only by recognizing the inescapable functional interconnection of transcendental subject and language. This is the line along which Karl-Otto Apel’s objections, which are of particular interest to us here, run, because his theory goes along the path of establishing a transcendental cultural approach to philosophy. Apel makes two objections: The first is taken from Wittgenstein and is that language cannot be private; the second is that without language, there can be no access to the what is of things, and there can be no world either. On this point, we intend to go even further, as it must be recognized that the problem of language shakes the very foundations of the cogito and thus of Cartesian foundationalism. One cannot but admit that the reasoning of the cogito is based on language and thus leads back of necessity to the learning of elements external to the ego, precisely because language cannot be founded solipsistically. This, however, entails another consequence that perhaps would not please Apel, and that is that a foundationalist discourse cannot be made in general because the subjective

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dimension slips into the social one, and the social one either reverts to the individual one or slips again into the natural one of organic constitution and again into the atomic one, and so on. A not very dissimilar argument must be made for Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which is based on George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism. In a sense, Mead is one of the fathers of any cultural approach in that he argues that self-consciousness is the linguistic consciousness of the self objectified in communication so that the self is constituted as a reflection of social interactions. Habermas, referring to the studies of Piaget and other authors, describes the mechanisms of subject formation in social interaction. However, even Habermas refuses to land on any structuralist or systemic outcome; he fails to see that, from the transcendental consideration of the importance of language for the formation and execution of the functions of the transcendental subject, no demonstration of the transcendental subject other than as a mere communicative agent is derived; but the presence of a subject in all functions analogous to my own is not inferred. Other subjects are reduced by the linguistic perspective to emitter-recipients of information flows that encode and transcode incoming and outgoing information flows, performing functions. So it would have been more logical for these language-based theories to have opened up to Luhmann’s systems theory or the relational cybernetics of the Palo Alto school, and so on. Why, however, does Habermas not do this? Because Habermas stands in critical continuity with the modern subject, and with that much of humanism that is present in it, just like Apel, and is unwilling to give up individualist ideology as a pillar of Western culture, all the more so when it comes to yielding to perspectives that are also inspired by scientific research. Thus, there are philosophers who have been interested in an approach that foregrounds the role of culture in the realization of the subject, including the theorists of communitarian political philosophy Charles Taylor and Hans Georg Gadamer, who, rather than questioning how culture operates in society and how it articulates, organizes and disciplines subjects within, for example, social organs that have specific functions, have often fought to defend the tradition of humanist values from the onslaught of scientific theories and capitalist economism. This has clearly damaged the possibility of doing lucid research free of rhetoric. Adorno, in his Lectures on Metaphysics7, said that Auschwitz had marked the end of metaphysical positivity, as if a positive sense of being no longer existed, yet Voltaire had already noticed this, who in Candide bitterly ironized Leibniz’s theodicy. But if there is anything that has really come out of the tragedy of the Holocaust in tatters, it is the idea of an understanding, of an intersubjective empathy, which would even be transcendental and which would be

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connected to the idea of one humanity of which we are all part. It was seen on the contrary that not only was there no empathy, there was not even a recognition of humanity. Instead, there was a disavowal of subject’s h ­ umanity because the logic of identity prevailed, allowing the enemy to be degraded into an animal and even described as a pest to be exterminated. Where was the transcendental recognition of intersubjectivity? If it had been transcendental, it could not have been there. A similar rhetoric of empathy has resurfaced in more recent times in connection with the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons indeed allow us to empathically understand the teleonomic meaning of a behavior by activating similar circuits in our brains; however, this does not mean that the two subjects establish a harmonious relationship of mutual understanding and respect. On the contrary, if subject A understands that subject B is about to take what A wants, this allows A to do something so that this does not happen, in a dynamic of competition that can result in conflict. In a different context of intergroup conflict, on the other hand, this disposition can favor the group to gang up against the enemy group. Here it then becomes the instrument of identity dynamics that becomes overriding to any other consideration. When one goes to war, one collaborates with those who have the same identity connotation, that is, those who are of ours, those who are on the same side, pitting “us” against “them.” The combatant does not ask himself whether his teammate is good or bad; one does not wage war against the bad guys, but instead designates as bad guys those against whom one wages war. The principle of social identity overrides any generic principle of universal intersubjectivity. Should intersubjectivity then be denied absolutely? Some intersubjectivity must be there if it is true that we communicate, but there is not this intersubjective union with others in which we put ourselves in their situation; there is not this transcendental self that goes down a level to really believe that it is on the level of others (like the writer who makes himself a character, forgetting that he is a writer). There is not this mutual ontological interchange that the theories of altruism like so much. If at the bank the clerk gives us half the money owed, we get angry, and we don’t think about putting ourselves in her condition, even if she only made a mistake because, for example, she hadn’t slept at night because her husband is sick. We only care that she knows how to communicate and play her social role. Her experiential and emotional world is of no interest to us. This highlights another structural limitation of the discourse on intersubjectivity with regard to the analysis of society. Society is divided into functional sectors, exactly as if it were a superorganism that is divided into organs. Now, just as there is no way to understand from the behavior of a cell the functioning of the organ, much less of the whole

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organism, in the same way it is impossible to arrive at an understanding of the mechanisms of functioning of the social sectors or institutional organization of a complex society from the experience of a single subject X relating to other empirical subjects to whom he should transcendentally recognize a special character of subjectivity by analogy with himself. This is an epistemological limitation that we know well, because it is well known that from the parts we cannot know the qualities of the whole, and that is why they are called emergent. We said that the individual subject is constitutively open to communicational relationships with others, but this is comparable to what happens in computers with respect to the internet. One could argue that the internet is only seen on the computer (in the sense that a smartphone is also a computer), so the internet is all on the computer. We, however, can open the computer as we wish and analyze all its memory, but we will only find traces of internet connections. The internet is not on the computer. Therefore, we cannot expect to know the whole internet from studying a transcendental computer. We at the limit can investigate the internet using the computer, which is quite a different thing. So we are predisposed to connect with others in a common world, but there is no way to know the whole sociocultural organization from such an approach, which, being aimed at the transcendental subject, can only multiply the monadic subject to obtain a monadic community, like saying multiplying cells creates the organ, precluding the understanding of the qualities of the organ. These monads perform different tasks for different social machines. Therefore, a type of subject that fits all cases cannot be thought of. One must then think of subjects defined in their functional sense by their position in the structure, and one must think of structures as machines in a homeostatic system that encompasses them within itself by giving them function and meaning. Then it is clear that for those who believe, like Husserl or Apel, that in order to understand reality, there needs to be a foundation, and that this foundation can only be the transcendental subject. But if this foundationalist premise falls away, what need is there to gut the transcendental subject and transcendental intersubjectivity to explain phenomena that do not require such an approach at all? This means that the cultural approach does not propose to take culture as the universal foundation of philosophical inquiry but simply as an approach to explain cultural facts, sua iuxta principia. Then, where necessary, reductionist procedures of inquiry can be implemented at the lower levels, just as is done in medicine. For a kidney problem, one descends from the analysis of the organ to that of the cell, from the cell to the molecule, and from the molecule to the atom. This then does not take away from the fact that normally kidney problems are studied by the urologist, not the chemist or even the

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physicist. As for aesthetic value, the argument is similar. It should be analyzed at the level where value dynamics are decided, which are social and cultural. But then, however, in the case of a Wagnerian work, I could try to understand how emotions are involved in it at a level of psychology or neuroscience; for a work of op art, I could ask the opinion of an expert in optics; however, it would be foolish to think of establishing an emotional theory of aesthetics or an optical theory of aesthetics and claim with them to explain all cases of aesthetics, such as the value of Duchamp’s urinal. Duchamp’s urinal from the optical point of view is a urinal no different from others, and even from the point of view of emotional impact, it is not clear what emotions it should arouse. So it is a matter of reserving the possibility of reductionist inquiry at the most basic levels, only where the specific case makes it appropriate. Thus, there is a need to understand the limitations of phenomenological analysis in understanding aspects intrinsic to cultural phenomena, such as value and aesthetic value in particular. This is not to delegitimize phenomenology or, even less, to oppose it, but rather to go beyond it. Phenomenological theory in aesthetics, because of its basic settings, such as the descriptivist approach, based on the subject’s first-person experience, describes how the subject comes into contact with cultural processes but not the logic inherent in the cultural processes themselves as an emergent aspect with respect to the subjects who participate in them. The cultural approach, on the other hand, is especially interested in the question of aesthetic value independently of individual subjective experience through the derivation of the morphological and functional structures of knowledge itself (or memeplex). Thus, the value, for example, of attributed to a work of art is not derived from a kind of plebiscite on it but is based on an interplay of competent judgments and qualifying institutional acts. This also poses a difference from what is instead assumed by theories generically inspired by the abstract consideration of intersubjective communication. There is a need to go beyond the model of dialogue and its logical premises, primarily because aesthetic communication is often extra-verbal in nature, although it is usually accompanied by verbal comments and statements. But the main problem is that these theories lack an understanding of articulated systems of communication, which are structured like software. So it is not much use to talk generically about a subject or multiple subjects communicating; we need to get into the merits of how these communications enter into network relationships bound by roles, competencies, and acts that have institutional value. Otherwise, it is like making a political philosophy based on the generic recognition that some have more power than others without considering what a state is and a form of government, or executive, judicial, and

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legislative power. So one must first understand the rationale for the distribution of power. This is the premise for moving on to the analysis of the articulation of institutional forms. Finally, another of the problems with the subjective approach is the assumption, starting as early as Vico, that the mind was transparent to itself, which has proven to be far from true. Reason knows itself no more exactly than it knows natural phenomena through perception. So there is no such advantage of knowing them in essence over the knowledge of natural phenomena, of which only the “thing for me” is deemed knowable. If this were the case, the mind would have no difficulty at all in explicating its operation clearly and unambiguously, just as a computer is able to show its operating system. Mental phenomena are no more clear to the mind by the fact that they are mental, and the most effective way to study them is by using the same systems of controlled observation that are used for natural phenomena.

Culture as a Derivative Element in the Modern Tradition We have seen the two polarities of modern thought that claim to be allencompassing. All phenomena for the materialist-realist are traceable to the physical world and are ultimately reducible to a physical matrix. The result is that the individual is always decentered with respect to reality, and the appeal to reality also becomes a justification of ultimate meaning in its assertion that the world is made as it is and one must take note of it. This historically, however, has not translated into a fatalist ethic of resignation but, on the contrary, into an extreme appreciation of pragmatic elements through which one can effectively intervene in reality, especially since the materialist’s world is a world governed by physical laws but devoid of divine providence, and this entails an implicit call to commitment and action to improve one’s own condition or that of one’s social class. Marx, perhaps the most famous exponent of modern materialism, wanted to create thinking not only to understand the world but to transform it. To do this, however, requires a great deal of communal effort because the world for the materialist cannot be reduced to the order of our mental representations and can never be included in our consciousness. There is always an outside with respect to consciousness, a beyond that we do not yet know. This happens because reality is fundamentally independent of us and whether we perceive it or not, and therefore, if we do not prepare ourselves to consider an unforeseen obstacle, we will bump into it. So materialism is not anthropocentric in its basis, but there is room in it for an anthropocentrism of the will. The idea of the

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materialist-realist is that it, inhabiting a world governed by natural necessity, must enact within it and, in a society, must do so collectively. This, in fact, is the biggest difference in the social implications of subjectivism. For the materialist, the problem of having to theoretically justify collectivity through intersubjectivity does not arise since other individuals are real and are part of social reality. However, social reality, however important it may be, is always secondary to the primary reality, which is that of physical objects. Society is a system derived from biological needs, and so is culture. In the opposite polarity, the transcendentalist polarity, we have a consciousness with respect to which culture offers a hermeneutic inheritance of world preunderstanding that can influence our worldview. That is, culture has no substance of its own; it is relevant insofar as it affects us hermeneutically. Just as society has no substance of its own, it affects us to the extent of our intersubjective relations, that is, our relationship with others. Finally, the world of sociocultural experience has no substance of its own but exists only in experience. Thus, culture can be considered, but it cannot be a starting point. It is playfully decentralized from the subject and exists only for the subject, to the extent that the subject opens itself to it. Culture is then a concretization of semantic stratifications that affect the objects of our experience, and this makes it so that even in aesthetics, the work of art is valuable as an object that reveals a stratification of intentionality, insofar as it is intentionalized by the user, but through the hermeneutics of the work, the work reveals an intersubjective other intentionality, which has been conferred on it by the person who created it. This means that it does not have a value of its own but only lies within a play of relations of a rather complex kind with others, which I entertain in the world of life. Then the whole value of art lies in what it manages to convey to me. In the case of the materialistic-realist view, culture, as we have said, is a derivation of organizational necessity, whereby art or beauty is grasped according to criteria of naturalistic reductionism, as natural tendencies of a genetic type inherent in humans; or neuroscientifically in relation to certain specializations of areas of the mind or neural processes; or psychologically as devices for arousing emotions; or ethnologically as practices for signifying symbolic nexuses; or finally sociologically as practices used as instruments of propaganda by power. In the luckiest case, we are thus at the reduction of art to fait social, which Adorno reproached the positivists for. From our point of view, as we shall see art as a fait social, is not a wrong approach in principle. The problem with positivism lies in the responses marked by a simplistic functionalism of a utilitarian character, whereby the function of the various arts or aesthetic phenomena is resolved in their usefulness in causing a

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benefit of a practical kind to their proponents, as propaganda, indoctrination, entertainment, distraction from political problems, and reasoning that, as Adorno always noted, art in these functions ends up coinciding with the culture industry and beauty ends up coinciding with approval statistics.

Truth and Communication Another important aspect of this configuration is truth. In fact, talking and interacting cognitive systems could, for strategic reasons, all communicate false information to each other. This would create a bubble that, if referred to as real facts, would burst the moment some piece of it were to be subjected to verification. Then there are situations in which, rather than blatantly lying, one deviates somewhat from the correct representation of the facts. This can cause a drift toward the construction of knowledge that moves further and further away from factual reality. A similar dynamic at the individual level is that which leads to delusion. Just as deviation at the subjective level is sustained by drives that foster the entrenchment of certain deviant beliefs, similarly, in social mechanisms, these are fostered by authority and power dynamics. Comparable to delusions are the doctrines of some sects that revolve around the unquestionability of the charismatic leader. Others might argue that this mechanism is active in all religions, which might also be partly true but reductive. In the case of religions, the shift from factual to supernatural realities allows cultural thought to deal with a range of problems and issues and to access truths that are not reducible to mere adaequatio rei et intellectus, especially with regard to issues of morality and value. On the other hand, it is precisely the arts that evade the representation of factual situations in order to propose even completely fantastic themes that may, however, have profound philosophical meanings. Many in the last century have attacked the Thomist conception of truth as adaequatio, in some cases even sensibly, for example in the field of logic, yet from the point of view of communication, it should only be corrected. It should not be thought that the mind can reproduce reality perfectly in consciousness through reproductive imagination, so that it can be assumed that all perceived reality is collected in the mind in conceptual form. The adjustment of the flow of reality to the forms of linguistic-conceptual expression occurs only in the form of verification with regard to partial and specific points or segments. Thus, truth is the outcome of the verification of the points in question, that is, those that are of interest to some operation. Communication systems specialize in sectors or institutions that become like cognitive machines that operate according to parameters related to the rules of their operation. For this

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reason, it may happen that the truth of the legal process is not the same as the truth of political history, and it is not the same as the truth of economic history, even though even they deal with the same facts. This is because the judge is interested only in what is admissible on the record, the economist only in what has been quantified, and the political historian is interested in particular acts caught in their idiographic character, but only as long as they have relevance to political events. Thus, not only does this historical verification sample the actual flow at different points and in different ways, but depending on its own parameters, it turns out to be able or not to detect certain variations in a more or less precise way. The various institutions and social sectors, therefore, elaborate different discourses from reality depending on their mission and operational parameters. Then there are hegemonic discourses that act as the unifying principle of civilization in a given epoch and require each sector to subject itself to its ends and to bend its parameters and mission so as not to conflict with the dominant principle, or even to restructure itself to serve that principle. Until the Middle Ages, this principle was God, so all institutions had to take into account theological needs and avoid exposing positions that could be judged heretical. Similarly, today there is a perversion of all fields and their restructuring in the sense of business, so the problem to be avoided is not to be heretical but to go passive. The field of aesthetics and in particular art should be, in content, the one that escapes the disciplining of truth, but it cannot fail some internal truthful functions that are functional to its own discourse, and it cannot escape the domination of the managerial approach that is prevalent throughout our age, perverting even the sense of artistic operation. Let us first see these criteria of internal truth: The first is truth with respect to the author and the moment of execution, which is what distinguishes a true work of art from a false one. The second is truth, not with respect to reality, which it can willingly interrogate completely free of disciplinary parameters, but with respect to its action of communication or expression and thus in a sense of truth that is closer to parresia. The opposite of a true work of art is, in this case, a hypocritical, insincere work of art bent on propaganda or regime. This defect of veracity affects the value of the work to the point of making it ineligible for such status. Finally, it is true with respect to whether or not it is true art. Here we are within artistic hermeneutics in relation to a given definition or conception of art that varies historically, even within the same period, among different artistic trends. From this point of view, it not only exceeds the truth field of the various fields but, as discourse, organizes truth only toward itself. Even from the symbolic point of view, it is a domain of the surplus, since it can use all those forms of symbolic representation that

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exceed the ordinary use of language. To clarify this point, it is necessary to premise that there are two conceptions of the symbolic: A general one of the relationship between sign and mental content, and one in a narrow sense, in which is meant a type of communication that places a symbolizing element (usually an object or an animal) in a relationship of an analogical character with a content of a broader character of an ideal or spiritual type. A wellknown example is the cross, which becomes a symbol of Jesus’ torture and thus of his work of redemption and thus of his worldly mission. This more elastic way of using symbolic communication takes us back to a more archaic phase of human history in which signs and things had very broad and malleable links such that they could be used for the creation and organization of religious discourse. The moment this kind of religious communication was abandoned, this domain was reorganized as evocative language, and the former sacred value served to ground the aesthetic or artistic one. From this point of view, Vico and Hegel were right that the artistic phase followed the religious one. However, one cannot think of applying these principles to contemporary art, which instead must be understood by reconstructing its entire evolutionary-historical drift, arriving with systemic crises at an artistic mechanism that would be inconceivable from its initial premises.

The Cultural Approach We then come to the cultural approach. Culture lies in an intermediate realm between matter and transcendental subject, and in the relevant philosophical systems it has always been bypassed or placed in subordination, even with respect to what concerns it most. Consider, for example, the conception of language and meaning. The two approaches contrast over whether the thing or the mind comes first, and thus whether the concept derives from the thing or whether instead it is constructed by the mind, which contextually also constructs the object as such. But these theories then agree that speech is nothing more than the expression for communicative purposes of the concept. Language, then, is conventional sign subsequent to concepts, serving to communicate the concepts themselves with reference to the physical object when this is possible. As far as the mental-transcendental front is concerned, however, language is an instrument for communicating concepts. Husserl’s phenomenology does not speak of concepts but of essences. Language is a moment of intersubjectivity in which these essences come into communication through signs, reasoning that to Husserl, language makes sense as a mental act. To this, Merleau-Ponty adds that speech is more than a tool for communication; it is the very material of communication, so much so that if

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you take away the words from a narrative, there is nothing left of it. It tends, however, to be forgotten or to go unnoticed precisely insofar as it succeeds in expressing itself in a dynamic dimension in which the word itself is speaking. The real difference between the two approaches lies in the fact that in the materialist case, concepts refer back to classes of real objects, and language is used to communicate with real persons (or their artificial but nevertheless real surrogates), whereas in the second case, it represents mental content in each case and relates to other subjects that we know phenomenally. In phenomenology, and even more so in the hermeneutic tradition, attention is given to the linguistic tradition that pre-exists the subject and from which the subject inherits it. With Heidegger after the Kehre, since language is now thought of as the abode of being. The latter theory already comes closer to a cultural theory; however, it risks giving misleading weight to etymology as a historical inquiry into the truth value of the word. For example, it risks explaining the atom by its etymology instead of physics or using etymology to understand what the plague is instead of medicine. From the perspective of a cultural theory, on the other hand, the starting assumption is precisely that the concepts with which we think are neither written in things nor abstractly dependent on individual consciousness. The map of concepts is the result of classification, which is not the work of the individual mind or the transcendental subject. We must think of a community of agents who must find ways to communicate something with respect to something “real” (external to the mind). This means that individuals act as cellular automata that negotiate a common sign for a class of objects and also negotiate the criteria for constituting the class itself. Experience tells us that this class is not sharply and precisely established, with a step function, whereby in a certain set of cases, we have membership information 1 and then it goes to 0. Rather than establishing the perimeter of the set, it is a matter of establishing exemplary cases that serve as a model or reference point. The model is 1, and the further we move away from 1, the closer we get to 0, or “not 1.” It is no accident that children, when they have to draw something, immediately try to represent these common patterns. The house, the hill, the road, the river, and the tree all have forms in our minds that Jung would have called archetypal, but they are only basic instances of such negotiation. This system based on exemplary landmarks allows for the addition of satellites, which are other exemplary points that serve for specification or that stand halfway between one class and another. The various negotiators have greater negotiating power the longer the class is still at a metastable level. For example, when a new usage appears in the slang, it is still like a stem cell, which can be shaped. Otherwise, when a new

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term-class spreads widely or spreads over generations and generations, it has less and less chance to mutate. This does not mean that it will not mutate at all, but that it will follow an evolutionary drift. Up to this point, community action has no particular functional connotations within it and thus could also be described as an intersubjective whole that negotiates a common world through the conceptual tools for thinking about it, with the problems, however, that we have seen above. Today, mirror neurons offer us a more immediate pathway from the subject to intersubjectivity through something that is not a vague feeling of empathy but an actual attunement of neural processes functionally analogous to the performance of an act, whereby we can understand within certain limits the intentions of others. This process, however, can, depending on the circumstances, open up as much the way to empathy, competition, and mimetic conflict that René Girard spoke of. The other possibility is to pound on social actors as embedded in structures or systems that assign them specific functions. One would have a perspective that starts from a desubjectivized community, where, as Foucault said, “What does it matter who speaks?”8 But today we need to go beyond intersubjectivity, even Habermas’ intersubjectivity, and not only beyond Luhmann’s systems theory. We need to take another point of view that rests neither on subjects nor on their organized forms. We need to start from knowledge in consideration of its autonomous organizational drifts, relying on the selection of information at the level of memes, that is, segments of knowledge capable of replication. Aesthetics is knowledge that specifies a set of values that depends on a complex social and cultural organization. Thus, because of its inherent culturality, which manifests itself in the oscillation between normative principles and individual tastes, it is the area of philosophy that has a revealing role in the limits of realism and the subject’s thinking, making clear the need for a consideration of cultural dynamics from their very social nature. It is necessary to follow the structuring drifts of knowledge that are based on memes, which have a historical character unlike genes that change over much longer timescales of evolution. One of the basic memetic elements already studied by Cavalli-Sforza (although he did not like the term “meme”)9 are names are defined through a feedback mechanism in which many different options slowly reduce to one, which becomes prevalent and then institutional. This is an evolutionary process, which then leads to the definition of the semantic field. We do not make concepts for ourselves and then look for words to name them, but we learn the meanings of words and, through them, cultivate our conceptual map, so that it then responds immediately when it comes in contact with signifying inputs. Thus, from a

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cultural theory perspective, it is from language that concepts come and not vice versa. However, this operation of social cooperation that develops across generations does not act arbitrarily but takes into account the knowledge about the object recalled by the concept, and if it does not, then a more specialized concept arises, which is used, for example, in science, to refer to that thing in an unambiguous and non-deviating way. The fact remains that culture constructs the map of reality, in which the physical world, which in itself is indeterminate, is divided, selected, perimetered, albeit vaguely, and assigned a “being,” understood as the “what is” of things according to socially shared belief, but it does not construct the various “beings” in the sense that that thing “is there,” that is, it does not construct the physical reality of things or even determine their effect on the senses. For example, if there is in Japan a word like “ao” (青) that originally meant both “green” and “blue.” This does not mean that the Japanese had a different retinal experience from ours, just a different categorical approach. They then introduced the word “midori” (緑) to distinguish green from blue. Sensory information does not change; it is the way of reacting to it that changes, in that in response to it we activate, let us say, a certain folder file and not another. If it is then needed, we open that folder file and open sub-folders. We can choose the level of definition and accuracy of classification depending on the context. So the reality is always autonomous from the name we culturally refer to, unless it is a cultural reality, as in the case of institutions. This means that everything we think, we think because of culture. Even when we do epochè, we do a “cultural” mental operation, and what we discover makes sense according to the premises of our culture. Even the archetype of all phenomenological reductions, that is, the Cartesian cogito, far from being a reasoning capable of bracketing all influences, is presented as a typically Western reasoning, precisely from the language, Latin, which includes in the declension of the verb the specification of the person and therefore of the subject, which is thus surreptitiously included in the reasoning. If it had been Japanese, the “I” would not have been specified, and we would have a sentence that has an entirely different nuance: 思う、したがって在る(Omou, shitagatte aru), which would be “to think therefore to be,” but who thinks? Who or what is it? It could be that if one thinks something, that something somehow exists, at least as a thought. It could be referring to thought itself: If thought thinks, thought is. In short, it would take on a desubjectivized tone, so much so that in Japanese, the famous phrase has been translated as follows: 我思う、故に我在り (Ga omou, yueni ga ari), and that is, with the addition of “I” before each verb. Moreover, intelligence does not necessarily have to be connected to an individual entity. Culture, for example,

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is another form of intelligence. It could be argued that where there is an utterance, implicitly there is also an I. However, it is not clear what this I is supposed to be. If it is simply an enunciating system, then a speaker is also an I. Where is the “I” in all this? Moreover, when in its making, as in poplar poetry, the text completely mutates, who is the author or the enunciating subject? Culture shows us precisely processes of mutation, that is, evolutionary drift of concepts, precepts, words, and procedures, all the time, in a world of memes, where the ego is no longer a subject but a product, or where the subject is, as Foucault said, the fruit of a process of subjectification. Not even works of art, let alone figurative works from other cultures, in which copying is as impersonal as possible, escape this flux, as we shall show. Culture is a form of intelligence that processes concepts, and transmits them, evolves them, and so on. What would a human being, with all his absolute ego, be without culture? The answer to this question is provided to us by the cases of wild children found throughout history who behaved exactly like the animals they had lived with until then. Some of them, with the efforts of educators, managed, thanks in part to their young age, to learn a few words. Others did not. This shows that on his own, without the intervention of culture, human subject does not derive any concept from the world, either by virtue of innate ideas or experience, and there would also be an argument about whether that is a “world” (Welt) and not an “environment” (Umwelt). Like other animals, he can develop cognitive maps, in which, however, there is no real ontological difference between particular and universal entities but only recognition of more or less redundant facts, which can become concepts under the pressure of educational intervention. The famous case of the wild boy studied by Jean Itard shows that the boy, although learning some words and even learning to write them, never understood concepts in their universality and was only able to use words to refer to specific objects, as if they were proper names. This demonstrates that it is language that generates concepts and not vice versa, if learned in the appropriate time window. The development of concepts is not an automatic process of the human mind. So there is no phenomenological reduction that does not still arrive at something that is already cultural in nature. The transcendental premises of knowledge in general cannot be found in any particular individual because the process of knowledge generation is evolutionary and historical in nature. The individual alone does not think of any concept, only similarities to varying degrees of definition. Similarly, nature, the physical world by itself, bears no concept. It is thanks to culture that this indistinct physical world, which creation myths recount as a unique indistinct chaos or even a primeval monster, has become an oriented and ordered world in which things are

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distinguishable from one another and have a place, a use, and a meaning. The physical world alone is nothing specifiable. This is why the Neoplatonists merely said that the physical world by itself “is” nothing, where “nothing” does not mean that it does not physically exist, but only that of nothing in it one can say “what it is,” because it is by itself only presence without essence and is therefore inexpressible or ineffable. This is why Heidegger insists on the difference between being and presence. The opposite of being is not a void, but the absence of the conceptually determined. Culture creates the conceptual scansion from which the world is made. Culture can also create entities that have only essence without physical presence. There are supernatural beings and conventional entities such as money and laws. Thus, pure matter is mute and has no qualities or predicates. It is beyond speech; it is purely ineffable. Similarly, even the transcendental subject as such, being placed beyond any representation since it is what enables representation, can only be indicated or alluded to indirectly, but not expressed, nor therefore really known. Therefore, even this transcendental subject is itself unrepresentable and ineffable. Thus, the two polarities of modern thought are brought to their basic, ineffable condition because they are located outside the world itself. Any philosophy based on either principle will always have its limit in the fulcrum of its own discourse, which stands paradoxically outside any possible discourse. Culture, on the other hand, is a principle that is based on full representability and communicability since it is precisely made up of representations and communication. Thus, contrary to its secondary role as a derivative tool of knowledge, which has been assigned to it historically, it is a determinant, even from the point of view of a theory of knowledge, because culture is not only an accumulation of knowledge but also a matrix of knowledge. This also has immediate consequences for the discourse of aesthetics. A subjectivist aesthetics will not only be unable to consistently distinguish “I like it” from “beautiful,” but it will also place the engine of aesthetic choice in a transcendental subject that is itself unrepresentable, and likewise, what is purely subjective in the judgment of taste or the experience of pleasure also becomes incommunicable. Thus, a rigorous transcendental aesthetic would be compelled to always allude to something that escapes it but is at the same time essential to it. Aesthetics, like any other discipline, cannot speak of what is itself ineffable. Certain Romantic aesthetics were then thought to allude to these ineffable experiences, making aesthetics precisely the terrain of a paradoxical expression of the inexpressible and placing this function also

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at the bottom of art’s task. Now this is not to retort Wittgenstein’s famous maxim that what cannot be talked about must be kept silent, but at the very least cannot be made the focus of a philosophical discipline since no rational discourse would be possible. Moreover, it is also not true that the task of art is to express the absolutely individual, which, as such, is totally unique and incommunicable. Art is communication.

The Cultural Way to Aesthetics According to the transcendental approach, culture, even if I understand that it influences my personality, is still something ontologically foreign to the subject, which I should always look at as if I were an anthropologist. Culture becomes something foreign and still to be explained, like so many other facts that happen far away from me. The only one in modern thought who considers culture as foundational, albeit with many theoretical limitations, is Vico, who is placed by Croce at the origin of aesthetic thought. From this point of view, one could say that this enterprise of ours has a neo-Vicoan character. Naturalist and subjectivist aesthetic theories have the problem of the “shortcut,” that is, they want to solve all the problems of aesthetics without leaving their system of reference. Thus, the Kantian wants to solve all aspects of aesthetics within the transcendental subject, the geneticist wants to solve everything in terms of genetic influences, the neuro-cognitivist wants to solve everything in terms of brain areas, and so on. Instead, one has to get out of the reference system and follow the whole path required. So it is clear that all these approaches avoid culture as much as possible, against all evidence, because the historical character of culture resists philosophical abstraction. Thus, aesthetics remains misunderstood in its cultural values by most philosophical approaches. This happens because of a methodological problem, namely, sociocultural phenomena being difficult to reduce to essentialist and universalist explanations; they seem unusable for philosophy. However, this leaves out a fundamental part of aesthetics. One of the few exceptions to this philosophical practice is found in Hume. Hume does not try to exhaust the explanation of aesthetic phenomena such as judgment of taste by confining them all to the system of mental faculties, but he opens to an awareness of the norms of taste, which have a cultural character and are based on delicacy, which is something that comes from learning. A cultural theory develops these aspects. However, Hume is unable to propose a satisfactory theory explaining the dynamics of delicacy, and his attempts in this regard show strong limitations. However, it is important that

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the recognition of the relevance of cultural factors comes from the protagonist of modern skepticism. Kant, too, seems at first to want to follow the path taken by Hume, and in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, he begins to talk about aspects that we might safely call cultural. However, it is the Kant of pragmatic anthropology who is speaking, not the first critique. The tones are those of saloon discourse peppered with curious tidbits, in which socioanthropological sensibility lapses into forms of ethnocentrism to the point of overtly racist statements such as the following: “But finally this rascal was black from head to toe clear proof that what he was saying did not make common sense.”10 Not to mention that the “negro carpenter” is quoted in regard to women’s too much freedom. Thus, in a single page, Kant has managed to offend women and Africans. But without detracting from the execrability of such statements, we here are interested in focusing on the theoretical inconsistency of his arguments, which wander from one argument to another without too much method. If Kant had always done this, he would certainly not have been remembered as a great philosopher. These weaknesses must have been noticed by Kant himself, who, therefore, saw fit to switch to a transcendental approach, trying to set aside all cultural elements that become a faded echo of common sense or of positing universality without concept in the case of beauty. The philosopher who most successfully integrated the cultural element into the transcendental perspective was Hegel. However, the Hegelian approach has shown many limitations, and this has often been noted by thinkers of the postmodern generation, starting with Lyotard, who considers the Hegelian system the grand récit par excellence. One of the major problems with the cultural approach in philosophy is that cultures relate to history and thus have an idiographic character, tending toward the study of particular situations, which leads to dissolving every problem into a series of historical accidents. This justifies the impatience with this approach, also shown by Adorno, who states, “if aesthetics were nothing more than a catalog, perhaps a systematic one, of what is somehow called beautiful, no idea would be gained about the inner life of the concept of beauty.”11 It is no accident that Adorno then refers to Hegel. At the bottom of such an opposition lies the idea of Aristotelian scholasticism, according to which scientia est de universalibus. An aesthetic theory that resolves itself into a historical consideration of the concepts of beauty, as, for example, Umberto Eco did, has no philosophical dignity and falls to encyclopedic explanation or, worse, to an exercise in erudition. One could respond by trying, as Croce did, to reverse this principle into its opposite, opposing it with Campanella’s dictum scientia est de singularibus. However, even Croce did not draw all the consequences

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from this reversal. Hegel, for his part, managed to overcome this problem by considering spirit in its essence as independent of being circumscribed to the individual mind of the empirical subject alone. In this way, the universality of the spirit can subsume within it both the mind of the individual, considered in its singularity, and the mind in the abstract, in its generality. This permits an expansion of the field of the transcendental manifestation of spirit, from the mere play of faculties in the individual mind to its maturing in an increasingly self-conscious form in the course of human history, until it reaches in principle a reconciliation and identification of subjective and objectified spirit, in the form of a perfect self-consciousness in the absolute. Now, we were saying that there are various problems with respect to this great teleological construction. Hegel, on the one hand, opened new horizons for reflection on aspects of human culture and, among them, also on beauty and art, through the dialectical conception and the idea of a historical movement in the development of concepts that ends in their overcoming. This entails various openings for cultural inquiry, which are the idea of a dynamic development of art and the beautiful and aesthetics themselves, which come to be part of phases of the history of the spirit without being considered as eternal components of the human spirit any longer, something, however, already anticipated by Vico. To Hegel, we also owe what we might call the “discovery of the negative” as an element that allows this historical dynamic to proceed and thus the role of alienation in that dynamic. All this has had consequences for undeniable theoretical depth in art history studies, less so in studies of the beautiful. Another important aspect of the Hegelian approach to aesthetics is also the openness, through this universal theory of the development of spirit, to all forms of art found in the world. This has allowed art history studies to open up to the study of non-Western traditions, with the same attention given, for example, to those of European antiquity. Where then is the problem? The problem is that this universalism of the spirit that leads us to speak of a universal art is implicitly ethnocentric and particularly Eurocentric. This means that all civilizations have their own art, but this art is implicitly inferior and subordinate to Western art. On the one hand, it is true that Europe was more developed than other countries, but the point is that if one uses Western art as a model, there is no way for other artistic traditions to surpass it.12 However, Hegelian theory has also given a chance to dignify different traditions that were previously completely neglected, such as those of so-called “Eastern” civilizations in particular. Indeed, it was through Hegelian influence that the Vienna School revalued the synthetic, decorative, and symbolic art forms found in Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions.

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The Intrinsic Sociality of Being We live in a world of entities that does not coincide perfectly with the physical universe or with the domain of what is actually existing, either because there are entities that do not exist materially, like Santa Claus, or because there are parts of the physical world that we do not yet know and do not know what they are. The world is made not of what is there but of what is something, that is, of what we can say is what it is. The world, then, presupposes an activity of symbolization that associates a being with things. If I see a tode ti standing in front of me and I am in a condition of structural isolation whereby I cannot communicate with anyone else, the activity of symbolization with respect to this tode ti, which establishes an equivalence between it and a sign, resolves itself into a tautology, whereby I can state that what stands before me is x and that x is what stands before me. The meaning of the use of signs and thus of symbolization is communication, and in the second instance, cataloging, since it is always functional to communication itself. For we cannot give a proper name to all things, for otherwise communication becomes impossible, and it becomes impossible because the transmission of information in absentia, namely when there has never been contact, is impractical. Indeed, when we refer to someone by the name of a person whom he or she has never met, we specify it with concepts, but this would be impossible if we had only proper names. Above all, it would be impossible to specify actions by giving a proper name to each of them. Thus, the synthesis of a set of things or events grouped together by similarity and thus classified so that I can always add new events or particular things to them (universal) is fundamental to the functioning of communication. That is, communication makes it possible to represent not so much exactly that specific action or that individual but must, above all, enable the transmission of information that makes possible some functional form of representation, through shared types, transmitted through shared signs. So when we say, for example, that there was a pen on the table, we share that the “what is” of the first object was to be a pen, and of the second, a table. So I can understand by imagining a pen on a table. Even though the pen and the table I imagined are types, this still allows me to find the pen and take it from the table. Being exercises its function by making the representation of what it refers to shareable, enabling the communicability of the event or thing. Being, then, presupposes not only the two dimensions of the dialectic but also the social and communal dimensions of the group engaged in the mutual transmission of information. In this sense, the discourse is not so much that of Mitsein, referring to a subject, conditioned by the community,

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in the condition of intersubjectivity, but that of an intrinsic sociality of being, which is not given outside this communicational and communitarian presupposition, whereby the being is always common. The world (Welt) is distinguished from the animal environment (Umwelt) precisely by the fact that it is made up of entities and is thus always a common world. Moreover, Dasein, which is in the Mitsein precisely because it does not merely entertain a relation with things within the limits of their ontic character, instead asking the question about the being of entities and its being in the world of entities, is playfully standing in a relation that is socializing or communal, that is rooted in the background of ontology. This means that if essence is not merely a solipsistic game played out within a monadic subject but is constitutively other, it predisposes the possibility of interaction with the thing but also presupposes a distance from it, especially since, as a class of things, it transcends the objects of its own class. This is very important because it marks, on the one hand, a shared relation to the thing as an entity and, on the other hand, a distance from it, insofar as it is precisely because of this that it is possible to question its essence by questioning it, making conscious choice possible. Otherwise, in the Umwelt, there is only a stimulus-response correlation mediated by the disinhibitors Von Uexküll spoke of. Thus, the moment the human being loses ontological distance, which is the premise of the relationship with the entity in the world, he enters into a dependency relationship with environmental factors. In this relationship of dependence, based on predetermined responses because of need, Dasein ceases to be such because it inevitably ends up being reified by its relationship with things, losing the capacity to question even itself. Thus, he also loses the ethical capacity to consciously choose, becoming a subhuman (in the sense understood by SF literature and not in the sense understood by the Nazis). This condition is also ethically negative, for the reason that, ethically speaking, the loss of the ability to consciously choose cannot be good. However, this discourse also has fundamental consequences for aesthetics, for where there is no world of entities, there is no possibility of idealization and no possibility of abstractly thinking about beauty, but only of feeling or not feeling pleasure. Without choice, there is no judgment of taste, and one cannot speak of aesthetics either, not least because the possibility of distinguishing the beautiful from the useful or, worse, from the necessary falls away. Thus there is also no distance, that detachment that allows one to think of an aesthetic value of beauty in a general sense, that transcendence of the beautiful over the thing without which there is only the gratification of various appetites. Beauty, on the other hand, is not to be confused with gratification, for it, in whatever form it may be, even the most disturbing, convulsive, and critical

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pushes the being more and more out of the biologically driven self into what Heidegger called the open.

Notes 1. Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Roberto Terrosi, La Genealogia: Nietzsche, Foucault e altri genealogisti (Roma: UniversItalia, 2012). 2. Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1977] 1999). 3. Giorgio Colli, La Sapienza Greca (Milano: Adelphi, 1977). 4. Dan Zahavi, Husserl und Die Tranzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht: Kluver, 1996). 5. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), III, § 53. 6. Ibid. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 8. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124–127. 9. Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 10. Immanuel Kant, Osservazioni sul sentimento del bello e del sublime (Milano: Bur, 2013), Ch. IV. 11. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 12. Chino Kori, “Gender in Japanese Art,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2003).

CHAPTER 3

v

The Evolution of Culture

Genes and Evolution Foucault, in the aforementioned The Order of Things (following in this a customary classification in France), argued that the modern epoch was divided into three phases: the Renaissance, marked by an episteme marked by similarity and analogy; the âge classique and that is, the age of science, characterized by rational principles of systematization and classification; and finally the age of modernity proper, which was instead marked by the rediscovery of the life and temporality of phenomena, including in the sense of their historicity. This later was also understood by Foucault as the age of biopolitics, although this concept was presented in two very different ways, so much so that they were mutually alternative. The first was that of biopolitics as the nationalization of life or the taking over of the lives of citizens by a Polizei Staat, in the sense of totalitarian politics, which is based on the biological notion of race. Then instead, he changed his mind, seeing biopolitics as an expression of the vitally self-regulating character of the market, which, as neoliberal theory argues, does not tolerate state meddling. If there is one discipline of science that accommodates all the potentialities and contradictions of this episteme of modernity, it is the theory of evolution. In fact, Darwin himself writes in the subtitle of his main work, On the Origin of Species: “by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” It was also thanks to him and studies from that era that many politicians began to pose the problem of interstate conflict in “scientific” terms of race conflict. The concept of race has no political tradition. The Romans, for example, spoke of gentes to express 69

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derivation from common ancestors or nationes to express derivation from the same geographical area. Race unites these two aspects in the idea of a dynasty of the same blood linked to a certain territory. Thus, we also understand the intimate connection between racism and nationalism. Jews had reacted to the Diaspora by exalting their character as a blood community in turn connected to an ancestral homeland. So from this point of view, the concept of race was precisely modeled on the case of the Jews, only to be twisted against them in yet another and more tragic cycle of persecution suffered in their history. Jews thus became the case par excellence of race, and the segregation of Jews was justified as the obvious consequence of a race war. Nazism thus presented itself as a new political theory based on race as a scientific concept. And it is no coincidence then that the Nazis were particularly interested in eugenics and the laws of biological heredity, especially through the study of twins, for which Mengele has remained infamous. These are the theories that Foucault was referring to with his early concept of biopolitics. Today, all these biopolitical theories are reemerging under a renewed guise. But back to Foucault: in this book, he does not go beyond the biological paradigm of modernity he does not get to the contemporary, although he did point out that a new age of mathesis universalis was being prepared, perhaps alluding to structuralism, of which some considered him an exponent. Perhaps he wrote so precisely to distance himself from it. However, there was much more already then. Those were the boom years of computer science, the second cybernetics, and the irresistible rise of genetics, all disciplines that put the concept of information at the center. In short, if we were operating by the same criteria as he did, we would have to say that the episteme of the contemporary era hinges on the concept of information, which is rampant in all the sciences. When Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, he was unfamiliar with the notion of a gene; he may have learned of Mendel’s experiments on peas, but even if that was the case, he did not give it any importance. Today, there is a lot of talk about neo-Darwinism and genetics, as if they were one and the same; however, from a scientific point of view, they belong to different periods and scientific paradigms. Classical Darwinism takes a fundamentally diachronic approach to problems in that it explains them by reason of their development. When questioning the entity, for example, the horse, it explains it on the basis of its derivation from earlier forms of animals. The essence of the living entity is still its class, but its class is defined according to its temporal cause, which is its evolutionary descent. Thus, in the theory of evolution, human being is defined

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by his descent from a primate common ancestor of even chimpanzees and bonobos. Therefore, his conception of human being can only be reductivist, in the naturalist sense, and continuist with respect to other animal creatures. The geneticist conception, on the other hand, has been based from the very beginning, with Mendel, on calculation. There are those who have argued that Mendel’s calculations were far too linear, according to the acquisition of modern genetics, so much so that they suspect that he adjusted the data a bit to make his math add up. Mendel, however, did not speak of genes. The concept of a gene was created later by Wilhelm Johannsen. The decisive step, however, was taken even later by Nobel laureates James Watson and Francis Crick, to whom should also have been added Rosalind Franklin, who, however, died prematurely. When Foucault was writing his pages, genetics in France was just booming, with Jacob and Monod having been awarded the Nobel Prize for their studies in genetics. It is impossible that he, as a historian of science, was unaware of this. On the contrary, it is possible that the concept of biopolitics was influenced precisely by the fashion for biology, which developed thanks to genetics. However, he did not realize the epistemological discontinuity that was occurring in his own time. Today, the three discourses chosen by Foucault as litmus tests for the history of Western episteme have all been profoundly changed by the concept of information. Today, economics is no longer about the concept of work but about financial algorithms, cryptocurrencies, and derivatives. Today, thinking about language is no longer focused on the relationship between signifier and signified or sign and thing. The development of artificial languages has led to computer programming languages. From the writing paradigm, we have moved to the software paradigm (which is dynamic) and have gone even further to AI. AI software applied to translation is blowing away the theories of generative-transformational grammar developed by Chomsky when Foucault was still alive. Finally, today, biology is no longer interested in tracing huge family trees but in decoding the genetic information in DNA. That is, genetics gives us another explanation of the (living) entity in relation to its genetic code. Thus, genetics and Darwinism have been integrated into the so-called “modern synthesis.” Let us be clear that our point of view, within this episteme, is not to carry on the old war of delegitimization raised by idealism against scientific thought and carried on later by phenomenology and Heidegger. This polemic, which tended to disqualify the sciences and empirical knowledge, is not only out of date today but is even in danger of being counterproductive. The old enemy of idealism was empiricism and its tabula rasa theory. Today, the polemic against empiricism and tabula rasa also connotes the more ideological and

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extremist aspect of genetic reductionism, which tends to re-propose forms of innatism, genetic determinism, and racism. Equally, however, this is not to call for a show of force against genetics. Instead, it is a matter of rekindling a vigilant critical attitude that does not target science and its empirical evidence but rather the use of explanations of complex phenomena through scientific shortcuts that are based more on ideological assumptions than on scientific observation. So welcome genetics, but not genetic scientism with its oversimplified answers. In connection with modern synthesis, theories have been developed that offer an explanation of aesthetic phenomena such as art. However, they generally offer simplistic explanations of the relationship between genetic drift, behavioral development, and aesthetic values. One of the most common temptations is what I call the “peacock theory.” The case of the peacock is the one most commonly reported by neo-Darwinists. The peacock’s tail does not serve any adaptive function toward the environment; on the contrary, it constitutes, if anything, a handicap. Why then does it exist? The explanation, according to evolutionary theory, lies in sexual selection. The larger and more intact such a tail is, with all its vivid colors, the more it manifests the good physical condition of the wearer. Precisely because of its physically wasteful character, it represents a litmus test about which one cannot lie. So the female who finds a peacock with a healthy and thriving wheel is guaranteed to mate with the right male. This is also due to the fact that peacocks only have to release good genes because then they do not participate in raising young. So the whole genetic-reproductive game of the male is played on the level of courtship and copulation. Let us stop here for the moment. We will return to the case of the peacock later. So far, the reasoning is broadly supportable, and there are no objections to raise. The problems come from outside the strict application of evolutionary theory. In fact, the researcher often cannot help but think, “What a beautiful wheel!” or to consider, according to an old cliché, the peacock as the animal of exhibitionism, and likewise to consider art an exhibitionist activity aimed simply at seduction. A series of stereotypes thus combine to give the feeling of evidence of a connection. But this intertwining of prejudices stands for aesthetics, as naive physics stands for scientific physics. And so many misunderstandings can arise. Meanwhile, a conception in which the figurative arts coincide with vivid coloristic representations of the iconic type is taken for granted. But this conception has no foundation. It is based on some paintings by Van Gogh, who is not surprisingly hailed by the masses because he best fits a simplistic cultural stereotype. Art has often shown that it does not need flashy colors, as in the case of so much Baroque painting that is dark, right

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down to the black monochromes of Ad Reinhardt. Moreover, in many cases, art has not needed colors at all. Think of all object art or conceptual art, performance, installations, public art, site-specific, and so on. Then we come to the cliché of the vain artist who loves “peacocking” (a word that does not exist in English but is present in all Romance languages). In fact, this assumption is necessary for theories such as that of Geoffrey Miller (2000), who argued precisely that art is the analogue of the peacock’s wheel, bringing the (completely irrelevant) example that artists use art to lure girls, and it was born for this. Now, not only are artists no more successful with girls than others, not only are many artists rather antisocial, shy, introverted, and even misogynistic, but the point is that all the evidence we have points to a sacred origin of the fine arts. The problem is not hypothesizing a connection between the peacock wheel and the sphere of aesthetics; the problem is trivial, simplistic, superficial solutions that seek shortcuts. The links between animal sexual selection and the human world of aesthetics are there, yet they are neither linear nor brief. To understand them, we have to go all the way from A to B, and what is most indigestible to some nature vs. nurture fans is that this road always passes through culture. The same goes for the hypothesis developed by Ellen Dissanayake about the relationship between motherhood and, thus, the mother-child relationship and aesthetics. Again, the starting intuition is appreciable, but the attempt to immediately arrive at an explanation of aesthetics by a reductionist shortcut is not, because here too the path passes through culture. We will return to this discussion later; instead, we need to lay the groundwork for our argument about the cultural character of human beings. To do this, we must investigate a very intricate and problematic thematic knot: The relationship between the emergence of culture and anthropopoiesis. It would take a whole book to carry out an examination of this problem. Here, however, we do not have that possibility, nor do we have the possibility of skipping this problem. So we have no choice but to treat it as succinctly as possible, as if it were an encyclopedia entry. To make matters worse, there is also the fact that this node also needs some historical premises. We will divide this issue into three areas: first, that of cultural anthropology; second, that of modern synthesis; and third, that of philosophical anthropology.

Cultural Anthropology and Anthropopoiesis Cultural anthropology was born precisely with Darwinism. Before then, we had descriptions by historians and travelers of the customs of populations

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who lived, as they said at the time, “in the state of nature.” These populations are viewed with curiosity. Christian theologians question whether or not they have souls and whether or not they are Aristotelian “naturally” brought to the condition of slaves by the fact that they are “savages.” This fiercely Eurocentric position is only shaken by utopian thinkers, who instead see in these distant lands the fabled place of a hypothetical civilization of sages, as in More’s Utopia, Bacon’s Nova Atlantis, and Campanella’s The City of the Sun. It was thanks to this Renaissance tradition that the fathers of the Enlightenment rethought the indies with a more favorable and less aggressive attitude. Traces of this different attitude can be found in Voltaire and Diderot, but the real change of perspective occurs only with Rousseau, who considers the savages morally better than the Europeans because they are not yet corrupted by civilization. Attention must be paid to this attitude, for it succeeded uncomfortably then and becomes uncomfortable again today, since it has again been put under indictment by proponents of the genecentric perspective, such as Pinker, as we shall see later. Romanticism then developed the naïve countercultural approach and extolled the rough imaginative nature of the barbarian peoples who founded the then dominant northern European nations and of whom Romanticism was an expression. In the late nineteenth century, on the other hand, positivist tendencies were born, beginning with Comte, who traced, on the model of Vico, a pattern of cultural development projected toward the victory of reason. The model confident in the development of technology, which was therefore called progressive, is typical of the Foucauldian phase of modernity. This progressive model also includes evolutionism, although, in Darwin’s case, evolutionary drift need not proceed toward the best and may even end in extinction. From an anthropological point of view, it is important to emphasize Darwin’s gradualist and continuist views. One of the dogmas of Darwinists is that between humans and other animals, there are only differences in degree but not in quality. This view, on the one hand, emancipates the status of animals, but on the other hand, lowers the status of humans because it eliminates the idea of a human essence in principle “equal,” in favor of the human “species,” which is traversed by biological differences, with all that this also entails in terms of politics and rights. Thus begins, with Darwin, the process of naturalizing human being. An attempt is made to explain his characteristics with the methods of naturalistic scientific observation. Sociology undertakes a similar undertaking, focusing on the use of quantitative analysis and tools such as statistics. The main purpose of anthropology at its inception is not to formulate a coherent theory of human culture but to understand in rational terms the

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oddities associated with the lives of so-called savages, their customs, values, morals, economy, and “art.” From this point of view, the project of cultural anthropology is compromised from the very beginning. It is compromised by the imperialist and colonialist framework within which it operates; it is compromised by racist, paternalist, and ethnocentric prejudices. The other problem with its inception is that it did not begin as a true discipline with the purpose of studying the nature of human culture, although some of its initiators had that goal as well. The uncertainty about this goal, however, undermines the mission of cultural anthropology from the ground up, influencing its future developments, which, not surprisingly, ended up placing this general epistemic goal outside the framework of the discipline itself. In its first phase, anthropology, as a social science, uses as material a whole series of reports by travelers and early ethnographers, trying to sort and classify them, in order to study them according to the comparative method. At this stage, therefore, anthropologists are great humanists who have very casual recourse to materials of all kinds (folk traditions, folklore, religions, exotic literature, historical texts, and geographical accounts) from all ages and latitudes. This classificatory work is enormous and requires great erudition. However, these studies have since been criticized in particular by later empiricist-influenced anthropology, for being desk-top anthropology, working from second-hand materials. A more important objection, concerning the very search for a general theory of human culture, was that cultural behaviors had meaning only within the specific culture to which they belonged and could not be extrapolated. Making a comparison with language, it is as if the great Victorian anthropologists had studied general linguistics, while the functionalist and empiricist anthropologists had argued that it was necessary to limit the study to individual languages. As can be seen, these are two completely different projects of inquiry, but for that very reason, they should not be mutually exclusive. In fact, the study of languages does not conflict with general linguistics. Instead, general culturology has been attacked and abandoned, so much so that today it no longer has any citizenship in cultural anthropology circles. When we talk about general principles of culture today, we always do so in relation to some other disciplinary field, as in the case of cognitive anthropology. Instead, the real problem with the early general theories of anthropology is an internal limitation of their project, and that is, since the disciplinary field also had to be determined, they selected the starting conditions of the investigation according to what they wanted to prove, and fatally, they then concluded that the data thus collected supported what they already thought. There was a problem with circular reasoning, which, as we mentioned at the outset,

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is typical of the humanities. No wonder, then, that Tylor derived from his data an intellectualistic theory of culture and religion in particular; Frazer a theory based on magic as the primitive stage of religion; and Robertson Smith a totemic theory that was also taken up by Freud. These theories often revolve around a key concept, such as animism for Tylor, magic by contact for Frazer, totemism, mana, dema, and shamanism, which becomes the pole of attraction for all the data. An important aspect of this period of study is its conjugation with evolutionism. After all, Spencer, one of the founders of the theory of evolution, although not as reliable as Darwin, was primarily interested in sociology, but at a time when the boundaries between anthropology and sociology were still far from marked. The major exponents of the evolutionist approach to anthropology, in addition to Spencer, are Tylor and Frazer in Britain and Morgan in the United States, to which in some ways could be added Engels, who, in his essay on the Origin of the Family, makes extensive reference to Morgan’s theses, although synthesizing them with Marx’s historicist ones. On the other hand, we know that Marx himself was a defender of Darwin’s theses, so much so that he sent his own book with a dedication to Darwin, who merely responded with a polite formula. Marx saw evolutionary theory as the naturalistic basis of historical materialism and class struggle, although he did not fail to criticize the emphasis on competition in clear liberal extraction. Evolutionary anthropology was accused, not without reason, of being marred by ethnocentric instances and perhaps also by an imperialist rhetoric that placed Western civilizations at the pinnacle of human progress. The reasoning behind it, however, was not foolish; the problem lay in the confusion of types of magnitudes. In fact, there is no doubt that technology proceeds, albeit nonlinearly (see the case of the European Middle Ages), from the simple to the complex, and thus it makes sense to compare similar levels of technology. What is nonsensical, on the other hand, is the idea of matching a gradation of technological development with a moral ranking relative to human beings themselves. It is as if human beings with more technology should, therefore, also be better, whereas, to many (starting with Rousseau), the opposite has seemed, if anything, more true. In any case, what is wrong in principle, both in the case of colonialists and primitivists, is to make such comparisons. So it is clear that if I want to get an idea of the living conditions of Upper Paleolithic European tribes that lived by hunting and gathering, it makes more sense for me to go and investigate tribes that today or recently lived under similar technological and economic conditions. This does not mean that these cultures must be identical, and this has been

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amply demonstrated by the many cultural differences that exist not only among peoples as distant but also as close as the various native peoples of New Guinea.

Neo-Darwinist Trends: Evolutionary Psychology and Sociobiology The history of the development of genetics today can be found in various books, some of which are pleasant reading, but with one fundamental limitation: They are all apologetic texts, in which the hagiography of scientists is traced and the long march of genetics studies to present-day affirmation is recounted in triumphalist tones. This is precisely the opposite of what a history of science, in turn, scientific should do. Yet, we find this attitude widely in publications on science that no longer have the excuse of popular intent, because these are not children’s books written by journalists but texts written by leading figures in scientific research. These are, therefore, publications to be taken seriously. Some of these books are not content with bombastic rhetoric but even go so far as to outline an ideology with very clear political implications, often of the neoliberal and anti-communist kind. None of these books, for example, ever fails to point out how Stalin, taken as a symbol of communism, was opposed to genetics research because he was a supporter of the quack Trofim Lysenko, forgetting that John Haldane, one of the fathers of modern synthesis, was also a communist and that the majority of communists are anti-Stalinist. This, of course, does not mean that politics should be left out of the history of science. Even a bitter discussion of the political implications, if done seriously, would be desirable. What is disappointing, however, are the propagandistic, McCarthyist, and sometimes even conspiratorial tones. Now, one must also consider that these publications often silence or downplay a whole chapter of heredity studies, namely the studies carried out under Nazism by doctors who became infamous, such as Mengele. They then talk with obvious embarrassment about eugenics, advocated by the Nazis but also by many liberal countries up to World War II, including the U.S., and then about the relationship between genetic determinism and racism. Some set out again to re-found a new racist theory, perhaps in a democratic sauce, without fortunately gaining much support in the scientific community, but if anything, clear-cut distances. In short, the encomiastic history of genetics has to deal with politically thorny issues, which justifies its interest in politics. However, a history that took into account, as Bataille would have put it, the “evil” as well, that discussed the Nazi shadows of this history without trying to diminish or balance them, would have been

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desirable. The latter tactic well explains the emphasis on Stalin, a convenient bogeyman to balance the horrors of Nazism and racism. Moreover, there is sometimes a feeling that, after forty years of neoliberal political hegemony, there is a desire to take revenge on the cultural hegemony exercised by the left in the 1970s. Fortunately, not all scholars have such an ideological attitude. At the heart of it is the struggle against empiricism. The most striking case of this is that of Pinker, who identifies three basic philosophical enemies, although they have no real relationship to each other, which are Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau, not to mention the socialists who are simply criminalized. Now, among these, the only real protagonist of empiricism is Locke. However, Locke is also one of the philosophical fathers of liberal thought. So attacking Locke involves a certain embarrassment, reasoning that people try not to rail against him. Thus, the real enemies become Descartes and Rousseau. Descartes, however, with his innatism, should really be put among the philosophical antecedents of genetic innatism. So here, one wants to attack rationalism. Similarly, why attack Rousseau, who advocated the innate goodness of human being in the state of nature and the corruption brought by culture? Rousseau could also figure among the philosophical premises of genetics. Then the goal is to attack with empiricism the progressive Enlightenment that underlies democratic and socialist theories. It is no accident that Pinker goes so far as to argue that the root flaw of the empiricist tabula rasa attitude that links him to communism, represented, of course by Stalin, is the idea of forging a new humanity. However, the idea of forging a new humanity meanders throughout modernity since the industrial revolution and affects all political currents, but above all, it concerns eugenics, advocated by the liberal right and Nazism, as a way of proposing, not metaphorically, a Nietzsche-like Superman or a socially new humanity, but ­physiologically new human being, an issue that is coming to the fore again today with the possibilities offered by genetic engineering and with the support of cultural trends such as transhumanism. So one might have expected an attack against Locke, but the attack against the foundations of the Progressive Enlightenment reveals a desire to fight precisely in general against the ideal of equality, whether understood as social equality or as equal rights, in order to restore a classist and hierarchical ideal typical of the right-wing political tradition. Then elsewhere, Pinker himself attempts to appropriate the Enlightenment, providing an altered and wholly historically biased view of it to make it suit his own purposes. At the heart of this attempt to expunge empiricist influences from the Enlightenment thus mystified is the attack on the tabula rasa theory, which is instead widely shared by the supporters of genetics. Are we sure, however, that this enemy is not actually a windmill? There is no denying that the tabula rasa

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theory has at first glance all the appearance of a target for the geneticist to hit, but it may be an apparent target due to a rough version of that theory being taught in schools. The tabula rasa theory derives from the medieval interpretation of Aristotelian theory made by the scholasticism and in particular by Thomas Aquinas, who wrote the famous phrase: nihil fuerit in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu (nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses). Then Locke took up this very argument, arguing that the intellect is like a tabula rasa, that is, the wax tablet that was shaved to clean it of any inscription. So the tabula rasa is like a blank page, so much so that Locke uses the expression “white slate.” However, Aristotle, the Scholastics, Aquinas, and Locke do not hold that the mind, as we understand it today, is a tabula rasa, but that the intellect is a tabula rasa. None of them hold that mind is devoid of innate instincts. All of them talk about instincts, and all of them consider them innate. What’s more, they do not claim that the structures of the intellect are learned because they refer only to content, especially concepts or ideas. But what is intellect? We do not have the space here for a historical reconstruction of the intellect in philosophical thought, so we will simply mention that intellect traditionally denotes the faculty of knowing and not that of reasoning, beginning with the Greek notion of nous, as distinct from that of dianoia, which represents reasoning. In the Aristotelian tradition, nuos and dianoia are proper only to the psyche, or human soul, but with other animals we also share the sensory and vegetative souls. Thus, animals have a capacity for sensory knowledge, but it does not come to be intellect, because in animals such knowledge is not conceptual. So intellect is a faculty of conceptual knowledge. In contrast, dianoia is the faculty of logic or deductive or inductive reasoning. Instead, we today have a notion of intelligence related to the ability to solve problems that is not coincident with intellect and we risk confusion. Today, we have a conception of the psyche that is unitary and includes instincts as well as concepts and logic. This means that when Thomas or Locke assert that our intellect is a tabula rasa or a “white slate” or that there is no content that does not pass through the senses, they are asserting that we are not born with innate ideas or innate concepts or, finally, with some kind of preformed dictionary in our mindjs. Otherwise, we should think that we genetically inherit all the concepts we have, but how do we do that in the case of things like smartphones? Did we make the smartphone because we had already inherited it genetically in our intellect, but it was not yet expressed? Did the iPad develop on the basis of the Roman wax tablet, or were the Romans with the wax tablet already trying to make an iPad? And if so, then perhaps the Paleolithic hunters at Lascaux were trying to make fast food? Perhaps then it is more plausible to think that we are not

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born with every conceivable concept already written in our brains, or at least those who would claim such a thing would have the burden of proof. Otherwise, if one simply wants to assert that, for example, certain behaviors tending toward mating and sexual reproduction are innate because they have a genetic basis, then this has never been denied by either Aristotle, Thomas, or Locke. So who would these “nurture-only” advocates be in the history of philosophy? The division between “nurture” and “cultures” is not based on scientific research and is not based on the philosophical positions of empiricism. Suffice it to say that such terminology was taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Francis Galton, who was a fanatical advocate of hereditary predetermination and eugenics. So the “nurture-only” advocate is either a culturalist who has similarly misunderstood the tabula rasa or is a typical case of the puppet fallacy. One crushes opposing positions on an untenable theory, thus creating a puppet that can be easily taken down with reasonable arguments. We come finally to the last theatrical enemy of genetic determinism, which is the advocate of cultural relativism, which is not coincidentally made to coincide with the hyper-empiricist puppet. To lash out against it was already Sperber in the name of cognitive universalism, which by the way connects seamlessly with genetic determinism, since he envisages a fabrication of the mind into functional domains, taking it from Fodor and advocating it even more rigidly than Fodor himself did. Sperber’s thesis was that cultures are basically all the same, that is, all based on the presence of a universal grammar, as per Chomskyan linguistics, made up of cultural universals, and therefore we do not live in different worlds but all in the same world. How else could we understand each other? Here again there is a philosophical banana peel, and that is the notion of “world.” It is taken to mean that different worlds should be incompatible with each other, impermeable, and not interpenetrable, according to an idea of the individual worthy of medieval scholasticism (divided from the outside and undivided within). But worlds are not bodies; there are no atoms that offer resistance to interpenetration. They are like web portals that contain many links and, among others, can contain links to other portals. They can be merged, they can open external collaborations, and so on strictly speaking, according to transcendental philosophy, from the proto-transcendental philosophy of Leibniz to the phenomenology of Husserl, each subject constructs through its phenomenal perceptions its own world, a world made up of representations. This, however, does not prevent the individual subject from also being largely part of a common world made up of common cognitions, such as concepts and words that are used in communication and thus values and myths,

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hopes, emotions, and so on. This world, which Husserl calls the “world of life,” does not mean that all our individual worlds are perfectly coincident, but that they are sufficiently so that we can understand each other and live together. Similarly, cultures are precisely the concretization of this common world. It has a whole series of elements that unite it internally, such as language, shared experiences, collective representations, certain values, a certain education, a certain way of life, and so on, but this does not prevent us from living within other cultural worlds, learning another language, practicing another way of life, understanding other values, and so on. In other words, it is true that different cultures live in different worlds, but it is also true that these worlds can communicate, interface, intersect, and so on. With respect to all this, if genetic determinism were such that we would come to determine the names of the people we marry, then we should all speak the same language, and we should all have the same customs, practices, and so on As we can see, cultures have similarities relative to underlying elements. In other words, the genes build the foundation, the culture builds the building, and that is why we have all these differences in buildings, although within certain limits, which are those of engineering which precisely physics or in our case biology are concerned with. The other problem is that geneticist determinism, if lacking a rigorously skeptical critique that limits it, tends to result in oversimplifications that result in pseudoscience as well as ideology. A typical case is that of homozygotic twins. Apart from the fact that it was Mengele’s favorite research ground, the problem is another, and that is that of overinterpretation. Indeed, it is surprising how, after centuries of scientific culture, which should have taught us to be skeptical of superficial coincidences, we tend instead, in the case of homozygotic twins, to attribute all common traits of behavior to the common genetic basis, thus inferring that genes can determine everything that coincides in their behavior. Now it is clear that not all coincidences can be attributed to the common genetic makeup. I give an example: If I ask A how much is 6 × 8, that one will answer 48, and so will his homozygous twin, even though they have never met, but not because 48 is determined by genes, but because it is determined by mathematical logic. Pinker, on the other hand, thinks that even the coincidence of very common actions, such as dipping toast in coffee, should certainly be attributed to genetic determination. Others, such as Tim Spector, report more unusual facts, such as the famous case of the Jim twins, who both had the same color Chevrolet, had married twice, and had a wife named Betty after having one named Linda. Now, apart from the fact that these twins were induced to bring up as many matches as possible, and the fact that not all stories are always true, as those

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who work in the courts know well, there is another problem, and that is: Is the unusual nature of the news the criterion for establishing the causal link between two factors? Is this a scientific criterion? I give an example of what I call the magic bench argument: there was a child in a small European town who went to elementary school. In the third grade, he moved with his family to a nearby town. His vacant desk was assigned to another child who had recently arrived with his family. Years went by, and the child who had left the desk went to Japan and married a Japanese girl and stayed to live in Tokyo, but at the same time, the other child, who was now an adult, also married a Japanese girl and went to live around Tokyo. Now if I were to say that they were homozygotic twins separated at birth, all our geneticists would say that those choices are too unusual to be mere coincidences and certainly depend on the genetic code as the only thing they have in common. But they don’t, and the only thing they have in common is the desk they studied on in elementary school. Should we then conclude that the desk was magic? But even making the assumption that they were homozygotic twins, doesn’t it seem that the genetic makeup is so reduced to the level of a horoscope? And then we become inclined to emphasize amazing coincidences that have always existed and have more to do with the history of magic than with the history of science. Back to the Jim Lewis twins. Tim Spector (2012) first explains their case admiringly, although he fortunately raises some possible criticism, and then, however, he explains that his research shows that homozygotic twins do not necessarily share the same sexual orientation. So do homozygotic twins marry spouses with the same name but not the same sex? Then, if these are the arguments, we can say that the idea that genes write names in our minds still remains unproven. In the 1970s, a new field of study also emerged, again based on genetic and biological studies, sociobiology, which, however, went on to concern itself with humans from a naturalistic point of view, but this time with a focus on animal societies and particularly those of eusocial insects. Its founder, Edward O. Wilson, a leading expert on ants, believed that he had deduced from the analysis of ant societies general principles of animal social organization that could also be found in other animal societies and eventually in human society itself. The comparison with animal societies managed to be indigestible to many people of religious as well as humanistic cultures. Wilson was also challenged during the hot period of the 1970s for some of his statements. However, Wilson could at best be the bearer of a positivist approach, but politically, a far more problematic ideological stance would come with evolutionary psychology, which is the bearer of a methodological individualism that finds striking assonances with that advocated by Von Hayek and the

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Chicago School, which systematically undervalues purely social aspects. With hindsight, then, Wilson’s theories should be reevaluated for their inescapable focus on social facts as well as for his idea of a meeting of scientific and humanistic cultures. Moreover, Wilson was also the one who most openly opposed Trivers’ so-called theory of reciprocal altruism or Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness, which evolutionary psychologists tried to pass off as the “physical” formula of genetic determinism, that is, a mathematical theory, perfect as in the hard sciences. Thus, sociobiological theories viewed from a nonreductionist perspective, as systemic theories, can be not only opposed to culturalist theories but of definite benefit to the construction of a theory of human culture. However, despite the many criticisms raised against geneticist determinism, we will adopt for the treatment of cultural processes the notion of meme developed by Dawkins, although we intend to interpret it in the light of multilevel selection theory, that is, a theory that privileges the perspective of groups and not individuals. Memetic theory has the merit of emphasizing the autonomy of cultural processes as processes that develop by evolutionary drift, in which human individuals are the habitat and no longer the subjects. Things then become complicated because Dawkins is not only considered an enemy by many culturalists but is also frowned upon by sociobiologists. However, it is important to maintain a clear principle in research, and that is that it is proper to consider and denounce ideological aspects when these are detected, but this does not mean that scientific insights per se have a party card. It is therefore necessary to look at the theories proposed in the naturalistic field without naiveté but also without obtuse and dozy prevention by always being ready to appreciate what is truthful and challenging in these theories.

Philosophical Anthropology The third trend dealing with culture and anthropology is philosophical anthropology. The expression philosophical anthropology refers generally to philosophical speculation on human nature or the essence of humanity from ancient Greece to the present day, but more specifically, in contemporary philosophical usage, it refers to a series of studies carried out in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century by three scholars and their epigones. These scholars are Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen. These are three scholars who are in some ways very different from each other, but in others there is clear continuity of thought. As for the differences, consider that Scheler was a Catholic philosopher with a strong religious background, close to phenomenology, and a friend of Husserl. Plessner

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was a liberal-social democrat, secular, with a strong scientific background. Gehlen was a conservative who joined Nazism with strong humanistic and scientific interests. To understand their thinking, one must make a theoretical premise, namely that they had as their historical philosophical reference the humanist conception developed by the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino of human being as “copula mundi,” that is, a link between two worlds, which are the natural and spiritual worlds. In the twentieth century, the problem was that the expansion of scientific disciplines to the study of humanity and the recent emergence of the humanities broke the humanistic pattern by tending to place human being all within the natural world through a form of naturalistic reductionism. This aspect is important in our discourse because, after the phase of critical thinking and cultural studies and after the crisis of the humanities, which in any case showed a tendency to convert from advocates of the primacy of science to advocates of the primacy of the humanities, we are seeing a strong revival of this maximalist attempt at naturalization even in our own day in some areas of neo-Darwinism and genetics. Instead, the trigger for the revival of interest in this debate in recent times has been the re-emergence of the philosophical question about humanity raised by the posthuman debate. This, however, has meant that the revival of this twentieth-century debate has been hegemonized for the umpteenth time by the question of technique, in the terms in which Heidegger and his school had posed it, and specifically Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition), Günther Anders (The Outdateness of the Human Species, 1956), and Hans Jonas (The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979). The result of this theoretical drift, however, has consisted in a demonization of modern technology, which merely continues a well-known anti-scientific tradition developed within philosophical thought since Romanticism and idealism with Hegel and other thinkers. But let us return to Ficino to understand what is the point of Scheler’s move. Max Scheler writes a short essay entitled The Position of Man in the Cosmos (1928), in which he starts from the conception of the two worlds (natural and spiritual), but in which he does not place human being at a point of equilibrium at the center of the cosmos, but rather at a point ­displaced toward the spiritual world and outside of nature. The striking fact is that Scheler uses the accusations of nihilism made against Christianity by Nietzsche precisely to show that der Mensch tends to move out of the natural world and deny it by placing himself in a naturalistic nothingness that is, however, densely spiritual. This position is then taken up by Plessner in a more articulate and argued way by positing as constitutive of the human being an eccentricity (Exzentrizität) with respect to nature, but with respect also to himself and to every possible human nature, because human being is such precisely

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because he tends to transcend his own limits. Gehlen takes this alienation of human being from nature for granted since he makes himself, taking up this humanistic tradition from Pico della Mirandola to Nietzsche. Gehlen believes that human being is the result of a particular project of evolution, because evolution with human being has done ­something that is unparalleled to other species, thus affirming an ­exceptionalist point of view while not denying evolutionism but introducing a kind of “miracle” into it, somewhat as Schmitt had done with respect to politics with the state of exception. The most important aspect, however, of Gehlen’s theory, which made him the most significant author of this school, is that he delves into an examination of the mechanisms of the development of culture and the anthropization of the human species himself. Gehlen reflects on certain aspects noted by biologists, zoologists, and physiologists, and in particular by three of them: the first is the Estonian biologist and zoologist Jakob Von Uexküll, who posited the division between Welt, or human world, and Umwelt, or animal environment, which also interested Heidegger; the second is the Dutch physiologist and anatomist Lodewijk Bolk, who identified a developmental delay and thus prolonged youthfulness as a typical characteristic of humans, which he called “neoteny” and which has also been recognized by more recent scholars such as Stephen J. Gould; the third is the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann, who described the human condition in terms of “second nestling” or “extra-uterine spring,” that is, the maturation of the fetus in the “social womb.” In humans, all this delay and youthful plasticity would be functional for cultural learning and his birth as a socially functional being. This allows humans to trigger a process of condensing experience and multiplying with and action through what Gehlen calls Entlastung or reliefs that come to be the sociocognitive key to technical and technological development. Technological development allows for the plasticity of humans and his open character, with which we return to Nietzsche through his famous sentence, “Man is the animal not yet stably determined.”1 This also allows us to return to the discussion introduced earlier on the question of technique in Heidegger, not least because, as rightly pointed out by various scholars (including Montani in Lo stato dell’arte, 2005), this has a direct interest in aesthetics as well. Heidegger has a dual attitude toward technique. On the one hand, there is the unveiling technique, that is, operating as a mode of truth, because it connects to the very making of human being as Dasein. But then comes a second phase of technique, in which it becomes extractive, in that it reduces nature to Bestand, that is, a standing reserve to be exploited, with a clear allusion to industrial technology, which, however, would be capable, according to Heidegger, of reducing human being himself to Bestand. However, this conception suffers from two important limitations. The first is

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that Heidegger places all this critical force on industrial technology in order to criticize through it science, which, according to Heidegger, would be the product of such technology, although, historically, the reverse is true, because the birth of scientific thought, as he knows, precedes the industrial revolution by almost two centuries. The second limitation is the economic-political one. The problem is the capitalist mode of production; it is not the washing machine that blackmails us, but it is big business. Heidegger, however, had to agitate the specter of science out of control, of the rebellious Golem destroying mankind. Placing all the blame on science is a good way to give the idea of making a harsh critique of contemporary civilization without touching the focal points of power relations. The real product of humans, who has taken over the voluntary expression of human organization is not technology but money. If we are at the gates of the posthuman today, it is not because technology has an internal drive for its own perfecting, but because of a drive for profit. Technological development is not going in the direction of mere efficiency immanent to the machine but in the direction of profit transcendent to it. Nor can technology in itself be truly autotelic, because the ultimate goal of technology, since it has no life of its own, must necessarily be in the living being who conceives and realizes it, which is human being. Technique must serve humans, not because it is good, but because it can only “serve” unless it serves something else, such as autotelic accumulation. There is an element of the human that is connected to its genetic component, selected by evolution, which leads it to desire goods continuously. If this finds a social device, such as money, which can be accumulated by allowing exchange for any commodity, the amount desired becomes virtually infinite, and humans can do nothing but desire money without limit. This unconditional and unlimited desire ensures stable fuel for the economic system, which can thus free itself from the control of the conscious human will. In this way, the economic system becomes autotelic and out of control. These accumulation tactics to extract profit will, in turn, make use of technology. The real problem then is not that technique has taken a quantum leap by becoming threatening, but that money has done so, screwing itself into an autotelic system that is recognized as such by the very founders of modern economics. Precisely in the autotelic character of the market, so extolled by the theorists of neoliberalism, lies the key that leads technology to be out of control, to the point of becoming a threat to humanity itself. Modern people, capitalist and technological, freed from the shackles of religion, use the arts and beauty to bring this “make special” to themselves. Thus is born the season of the Renaissance. Human being celebrates himself through art, but he also celebrates the arts and artists as humans. It all seems like a virtuous circle. By Nietzsche’s time, however, this human

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self-celebration was already in crisis, and the arts revealed the dark aspects of humanity. The human being finally finds himself subjugated again. It is this that made Foucault say that “Man” is dead after a brief appearance, vanishing like a drawing in the sand erased by the waves. Here, then, is that with this self-consciousness of its own death, that is, of its own negation, the arts themselves become negatized, and beauty is self-denying. And this is why Breton can say, “la beauté sera ­CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas” (“beauty will be convulsive or it will not be”). At this stage, just as the commodity stands as a fetish before the alienated worker, the market stands as a god before the whole of humanity alienated in its desiring character. If in the Middle Ages the highest beauty was all in God, in glory, now it is all in money in the form of success. Economic success is the way in which, in this base, beauty is subsumed and, at the same time, exiled. If the elites of past centuries felt the need to draw on beauty to make themselves “special,” today the elites ignore beauty because they do not need it; today it is success that makes beauty “special.” In fact, beauty is a form of value that is not autonomous; it is always related to something else: sensuality, magnificence, verisimilitude, abstraction, inner expression, and so on. Today, it depends on price and success. This means that we are on the way to a de-culturalization of beauty and aesthetics, which, being cultural in themselves, means a demolition of them, a vanishing of them from our lives.

Human Species and Human Being We have seen that there are three traditions of thought on the development of culture: that of cultural anthropology, that of neo-Darwinism, and that of philosophical anthropology. Cultural anthropology was not so much interested in the formation of culture as it was in the formation of other cultural phenomena such as religious cults, at least at first, but then the interest shifted to field research. So the problem of origins is of more interest to the other two currents, namely the neo-Darwinist and the anthropologicalphilosophical. These two currents have completely different, if not opposite, points of view. The first starts from the empirical sciences and biology in particular and poses the problem of the emergence of human culture from ethology, studying hominins as if they were other primates. The basic assumption of this approach is that humans are an animal species, which is to be studied with the theoretical tools of biology and is defined, compared to other animal species, by its biological characteristics. The second approach, on the other hand, starts from an ontological point of view, namely concerning the essence of human being, his “what he is.” Thus, if the Darwinist approach is

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interested in the human species, the approach of philosophical anthropology is interested in the human being and his logical, ethical, and gnoseological characteristics. It can be argued that they look at the same things. For example, the cognitive sciences are also interested in the functions that enable humans to act and know the reality in which they are immersed. The perspective, however, is diametrically opposed. The naturalist investigates the human species from the outside, that is, without taking into account the fact that observer and object of observation are actually coincident. Philosophical anthropology, on the other hand, investigates it from within the cultural world itself, which is made up of ontologically determined entities, through what Kant would call determinative judgment, with the awareness that they themselves are those entities, which pose the question of the being of entities and being as being. This perspective is historically internal and can only be historical; that is, it begins with the earliest evidence of the “spirit,” which, Hegelianly, becomes aware of the world. Ontologically, the fact of realizing the world and the birth of the world to knowledge are exactly the same thing. Thus, the birth of the world is merely the appearance of the world as a consciousness that imposes on it an order of essences. Let us take an example within everyone’s reach. What do we know about the origins of our lives? We have two ways of knowing: one is internal and one is external. The internal one is through our memories. The world appears to us with our earliest memories, which, however, are rarely before the age of 3 or 4. Our world then appears as if it was created then and before? For past, we have had to resort to other people’s memories or documents, which are external. And when do we appear? We appear when we can objectify ourselves in some way. So we discover ourselves in the world and do not have an awareness of our transcendental subjectivity from birth. Everything the mind thinks thinks it as its object; therefore, the subject discovers itself as an agent object, that is, as an empirical subject, not as a transcendental subject. So humans’ memories of their origins as a human being go all the way back to a confused first appearance of the world, which the human being interprets as the creation of the world, which is followed by the discovery of himself, which he interprets as the creation of humans by the same abstract subjectivity to which he imputed the creation of the world. Why do humans posit an abstract subjectivity as the creator of the world? Because he cannot help but express his transcendental subjectivity without yet knowing it. To recapitulate, the transcendental subject can only know by objectifying, and thus cannot know itself as the transcendental subject itself. It does, however, through the activity of the transcendental subject, know the being of entities, which otherwise would not be in its experience and would not be in toto. Thus, the being that

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manifests itself in lived experience is, in a sense, the very projection of the transcendental subject. The fact of experiencing the beingness of the thing makes the transcendental subject in a sense transparent, such that it can be said to become being itself. However, although being bears the imprint of the transcendental subject in the lived experience, it also already finds therein the imprint of something pre-existent, flowing through the subject itself, since the transcendental subject does not invent the being of things and thus perceives something that transcends the transcendental subject itself regarding the being of entities and to which the subject infuses life but not being, and whose origin of being is to be traced back to a higher principle. It is this further transcendence that is thought of as divine. The transcendental subject does not invent the entities, so above him, there is a creative power of the entities, which, however, creates them insofar as “what-is,” not insofar as they “are there” physically. So even when he knows himself as a human subject or as an empirical subject in the form of a universal concept, he knows himself not as transcendental subjectivity in act but as a product of the same transcendental subjectivity, unconsciously expressed, already previously, through the apriori of the appearance of the world in the form of creation. In other words, to say that X created humans is equivalent to saying that humans appeared to have knowledge and, that is, was created as an entity. Man himself has then been created; such creation is nothing but the emergence of something that presupposes a power that cannot but be there, but its full objectification eludes the human being because it is transcendent and is transcendent because it is an expression of the intentional activity of an unreflective transcendental subject. Such power is first posited as impersonal, but then it is concentrated in a power from which derives the possibility of thinking of a subject as that which has power. This discourse and the unfolding of this consciousness are akin to the discourse of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, in which, however, it is supposed to resolve itself in a final reconciliation, in the absolute. It could be, however, that this “apocalyptic” revelation never takes place and that, instead of it, we rather witness a transfer of consciousness to supports other than the human biological one, so that an age dominated by humans would be followed by an age of gods based on an artificial superintelligence. We come to the question of the “external history” of our beginnings. Others saw us from the outside as a living object; they cannot tell us what we felt, but they can tell us what we did. This perspective is about us as an object phenomenally perceived by another subject, not the thing itself, which in our case would be our self as a transcendental subject. These experiences are about our behaviors. In this case, our conscious perspective is reflected in

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their stories, and we can gain awareness of what we have done without being aware of it yet. If, however, we have no relatives, then we may, however, have records such as, for example, photos or videos. In this case, our consciousness can rest on objective accounts. One of the problems with the objective perspective from the outside is the reliability of sources. In the example of testimonies about our early childhood, a relative who had to keep a secret, for example, might be inclined to lie. In the case of evidence, this must be reliable. In each case, therefore, the internal and external perspectives, the ontological and naturalistic perspectives, talk about the same things but do not always see the same things. The main difference lies precisely in the beginnings. In the internal perspective, the appearance of the object and knowledge are concomitant. From the naturalistic perspective, they are not. In the ontological perspective, a human being is a being, a universal, a concept that can arise only from culture. In the naturalistic ­perspective, the human species is about a type of body, of organisms, p­ roduced by nature. Now, we can know from an internal perspective the birth of human being as a being only in the way that is given by cultural consciousness, that is, by knowledge of its uncertain mythical origins. Therefore, we should not be surprised if these myths portray human being to us as created by a god or other higher entity. God in this case is the impersonal form of being that becomes not simply an entity but a meta-transcendent subject, insofar as it is constitutively transcendent even with respect to the transcendental subject. From this point of view, the divine is much more than what has been understood by the theories of cultural anthropology, let alone neo-evolutionary theories. The divine, from a philosophical point of view, is the source of the meaning of the world and things; from an ethnoanthropological point of view, it is the mother cell of all culture. The sacred is what enables the transformation of vital instincts into meaning and significance; it is a kind of cultural reactor that produces the supernatural and thus the divine as an impersonal sphere, independent of the various individuals, from which emanates authority, rule, the articulation of knowledge and all that is invested in the process of social authority, up to the production of institutions, first and foremost those of power, the organization of the sacred itself with rituals, and temples, and practitioners of the sacred such as priests. From the realm of the sacred, the divine begins to generate by a process of emptying, we might say kenosis, all the elements of civilization. The great archaic civilizations all pass through the articulation of the sphere of the divine, from which they proceed to that of the division of social bodies. With the transition from the “animistic” sacred to the divine, the already existing culture goes from being a still unique cluster to producing what we call a civilization, and that is something completely irreducible

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to the dynamics of animal behavior and incomprehensible with the tools of biology or ethology. Thus begins the story. In the naturalistic view, this does not happen. Because with the tools of scientific research, we can go back far beyond the appearance of the first creation myths, which, by the way, are usually relatively late. In fact, the creation myths of humans that we have in the Middle East and China already use the metaphor of the figure fashioned in clay, which refers us to the period when the use of clay was introduced, namely the Neolithic. Long before that, however, humans already had sacred behaviors, painted graffiti in caves, and created musical instruments and figurines. That is, he used figurative representation and musical composition. This means that he already used verbal language, and already had myths, some of which, perhaps, have come down to us in an albeit altered way through archaic cultures. The problem with the neo-Darwinist approach to culture is that it starts with ethology and biology. So it tends to make all comparisons with animal behavior, which has no culture in the sense of civilization. This affects the very definition of culture, which is reduced to simply the hereditary transmission of behavior through learning. That is, it is a downward definition through a reduction of “culture” to “nurture.” This minimalist definition, however, is too vague and general, and this is not by chance, because it serves to be able to include many aspects of animal learning as well, and is, on the other hand, too thinned out in terms of intellectual depth for those who wish to delve into the symbolic depths of human civilizations. It is not surprising that this conception, then, does not see substantial differences between humans and animals. However, this is a consequence of low calibration, which just fails to perceive the most complex and significant aspects of human cultural activity. Thus, it fails to explain anything about complex cultural behaviors, starting from religion down to institutions, regulations, and, of course, art, which is trivialized with the comparison of the peacock’s tail, without considering styles, eras, and poetics. These are forms of reductionism, in which the reduction of a higher level of complexity, in the conceptual schemes that are made to analyze events of a lower order of complexity, simply is blind to a whole series of elements, even important ones, that have higher level functional values. It is as if one who has studied only single-celled organisms were merely to argue that animals such as mammals are made up of many cells. In some respects, these are all true. But how do we understand, on this basis, the functions of various organs?

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Reductionism Within the cognitive sciences, a complex controversy about reductionism has developed in the past decades, connected in some respects to a discussion of much more limited scope on emergentism instead. Reductionism thus comes with a very complex phenomenology. There is talk of ontological reductionism, epistemological reductionism, eliminativist reductionism, and physicalist reductionism; on the other hand, there is only talk of supervenience and emergence. From this point of view, the debate on supervenience has eroded the focus on emergentism even more. Let us try to clarify some essential points. Reductionism is a well-known epistemological attitude that is very important in the formation of scientific thought because it seeks to reduce natural phenomena of different types to a single common ratio that governs their behavior. Reduction to a common principle thus goes hand in hand with the search for a common denominator that makes it possible to explain the occurrence of a multiplicity of phenomena. The search for a rule, for a scientific law, for basic elements of, for example, matter, such as atoms, are all aspects that have played an important role in the development of scientific thought. In systems theory, we would say that reductionism is articulated around the reduction of complexity, which serves the knowledge and governance of the phenomena of the physical world. Reducing helps to know and operate; however, the problem is, to what extent, once we have an epistemological key, a hermeneutical formula, can we use it to understand different phenomena? It is well known that even the early philosophers of the school of Miletus were reductionists who sought a principle common to all things that they called archaea. So the first problem is that reductionism can use only one hermeneutical keyto try to open all doors with it. In this sense, it exposes itself to a monistic and totalizing drift. Research rewards those who apply a given formula to increasingly distant fields of knowledge. This limitation becomes critical, especially in relation to organization. The need to trace multiplicity and complexity back to a common denominator, or to basic elements seen as the building blocks of a certain reality, leads it to oppose in principle the idea that the overall organization can determine the presence of properties, functions, and potentialities different from those of the elements that compose it or underlie them. Reductionism, therefore, typically denies the idea of a quantum leap, not only in the case of quantitative development, but also in the case of formal development, that is, that relating to organization and that is, it denies systemic properties of a higher level than one’s own. Some say more simply that reductionism denies the possibility that the totality is greater than the sum of its parts. This means

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that any higher level of complexity and systemic organization above that in which the hermeneutic key is placed is believed to be fully explained and resolved without discarding that key, that is, by crushing the higher level of organization on top of the lower level. When we say “fully explained,” we are referring to an epistemological reductionism; when we say “resolved without discarding,” we are referring to an ontological reductionism that does not recognize the need to have to resort to the attribution of a different essence connected to different properties with which such a system is augmented. The philosophy of science teaches us that it may happen that reductionism is also connected to the dynamics of resistance by a dominant paradigm in crisis that does not want to give up its claim to explain what has been discovered to have different properties. On the contrary, it may be an expanding new paradigm that seems good for all situations and therefore rejects the autonomy of other levels of complexity as unnecessary complications. This situation of higher complexity, if it is recognized as having different functions than the components, would instead be called emergent. Now, however, there are cases where it is clear that we are in the presence of higher orders of complexity in which systemic functions are reorganized in such a way that they are intelligible when analyzed from a lower level. Let us take an example. Suppose I have pain in my kidney. A kidney is something that exists as a functional element within an organism. But if I think that the organism is just an aggregate of cells, for me there is no kidney; there are only cells of different types in various parts of the organism. There are only cells; there are no organs. There are no emergent properties of organs beyond the fundamental properties of the cell. If we go to an even more basic level, we might find a chemist who tells us that there are only molecules and no cells. Then we might find a physicist who tells us that there are only atoms, and so on. Now, no one questions the fact that we are made of atoms, but how can a nuclear physicist help us solve our kidney ache? So we need to recognize that cells have emergent properties compared to the matter studied by physicists and chemists and that the organism has emergent properties compared to the cells of which it is composed. As we move to a higher-order system, new functions become apparent as identifiers, and so the kidney is no longer just an aggregate of cells in the midst of other cells but must be understood in terms of structural consistency. For example, the fact that X’s kidney has more cells than Y’s kidney does not matter, because what is important is that it has enough cells to perform its function. This is also a problem with regard to memes. Memetic theory today mainly considers their self-replicating function. So the idea is that the meme works better the more it reproduces, as with genes. However, the meme is more likely to reproduce as part of a

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memeplex, so even more than a gene, it functions like a brick or a piece of a house type, so the more it propagates, the more it preserves it in propagation.

Emergentism We have so far spoken of reductionism. Compared to reductionism, which has a long tradition, emergentism has a more recent tradition and is still struggling to emancipate itself from the mists of finalist spiritualism or philosophy of nature in a Platonic-Romantic setting. Yet, the structuring of the sciences, as we know it today, seems to take precisely an emergentist approach for granted. It separates the disciplines that study natural facts according to an intuitive classification into levels of complexity. At the base are atomic physics, then chemistry, then microbiology and genetics, then the sciences that study the living individual, such as botany, zoology, and medicine, then the behavioral sciences, such as ethology, cognitive science, and psychology, and finally the social sciences, such as sociology and cultural anthropology. Otherwise, according to a strictly reductionist approach, there should be only one: Physics. We should be able to explain everything as a combination of states of matter connected by deterministic relations, just as Laplace’s demon example intended. Then emergentism is not a mystical setting, evoking mysterious properties by which the system exceeds the whole of its parts, which mysteriously appear in the chaotic nature of nonlinear causal relations. Cells per se do not walk, but if organized into an animal organism, then they will have the property of walking. Cells do not think. But animal organisms equipped with a brain do think. The existence of emergent properties is an irrefutable fact that cannot be escaped. At this point, we can make other obvious observations; for example, animals do not build space rockets. The reductionist idea that between NASA and sparrows there are only differences in degree and not in quality is just a pseudo-religious dogma, all the more incomprehensible the more we consider that even Darwin can be counted among the forefathers of emergentist thought. So, today, we no longer have to ask whether emergent properties exist or not, but how they are formed. As for culture, we know that it is impossible to explain the differences between the Chinese and American Civil Codes on the basis of comparison with the lives of bonobos. It is customary to have emergentism begin with the theories of John Stuart Mill or, according to others, even Darwin, although they do not expressly speak of emergent properties or systems. Logically and ontologically, the problem is much older, and that is the relationship between the whole and the parts, that is, the difference between totality as the mere sum of the

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parts and the whole as a systemic unit of a functional nature. This problem finds its first analytical treatment already with Aristotle. Today, therefore, we can no longer think of emergentism in a naturalistic-romantic setting, nor can we limit ourselves to the debate of the philosophy of mind, which is concerned with emergent properties only in relation to the “hard” problem of consciousness. Today, we need to go philosophically beyond these merely contingent and opportunistic uses of the question of emergentism and pose, starting again with Aristotle’s ontological problem. Only by doing so will it be possible to overcome at once all the reductionist criticisms that are not based on a true logical and ontological conception of emergence but on widespread prejudices and ideas. An ontology of emergence should get out of the way of the approaches that belittle the problem right from the way it is posed, and that is the so-called epistemological approach. By epistemological approaches here, we mean in particular two approaches: (1) that of reducing the character of emergence to that of the unpredictability of the behavior of a given entity from that of its parts. Typical is the example of water, according to which, from the two oxygen atoms and the hydrogen atom taken separately, I can have no idea of the properties of water; (2) that of emergence as supervenience, whereby the properties of the whole are added to those of the subvenient elements that compose it. Both of these two approaches are the result of problematizing emergence from a reductionist perspective, which poses the problem weakly from the outset. In fact, epistemological emergence prospects emergence not as a substantive difference but as an apparent difference due to a knowledge deficit. That is, we are still at Kant, who, having to speak of finalism in the growth dynamics of living beings, merely posits it not as real, which would have created serious problems for his mechanistic approach, but as apparent, arguing that in nature, living beings develop “as if” (als ob) they were finalistically oriented. Then again, from a phenomenalist perspective, all ontological differences become epistemological differences. However, it is different when substantive and apparent differences are considered to exist. For example, Kant does not say that the cause-effect relation is apparent but that it is transcendental and a priori; so is finality, but not that of nature. From such premises, Kant clearly could not have accounted for concepts such as feedback, homeostasis, and teleonomic behavior anyway. However, Kant began to realize that nature is dynamic and that growth phenomena are at least apparently anti-reductionist. In this respect, on the other hand, Aristotle, although belonging to the classical world, was in some ways at an advantage, for several reasons: first, because in this case, transcendentalist phenomenalism is more of a hindrance than a help; second, because Aristotle’s training was not based on

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mathematics but on the naturalistic tradition. Aristotle was keenly aware of the unity of the organism and the difference between the parts, so much so that he wrote a treatise on the parts of animals. From this awareness, Aristotle developed a discourse that combined natural and ontological issues. However, Aristotle manifested a viewpoint that was still rudimentary from a biological point of view, and his philosophical concern was seen as an obstacle to scientific understanding, and modern science rightly wanted to get rid of it. However, Aristotle, through this linkage of science and ontology, could realize how the whole is ontologically different from the part and not simply for contingent reasons related to the knowability of the properties of the whole. In other words, having all the parts of an automobile in a garage does not mean having an automobile. Having an automobile means that it must be organized to satisfy certain functional properties. Artificial entities, however, have the limitation of being hetero-telic; they are generated by others for further purposes. So the fact that properties emerge from their structuring is only the effect intended to be achieved through the conjunction of the parts. The artificial system, then, is ontologically emergent because it is something functionally different from the mere copresence of the parts, but not epistemologically emergent because the emergent function is predictable on the basis of the knowledge of the parts; otherwise, the mind could not come to design the machine. In this sense, it is an extremely weak form of emergence, although we do, however, find within the machine already important aspects of the emergent system, such as mereological identity, and thus a substantial difference between the form of the structure and the substitutability of the parts. This allows the economic identification of the whole as purely such and the functional detachment of the form from the matter of the parts, which, although it is not possible to eliminate altogether, it is possible to replace with functionally analogous parts or even to transpose completely to another plane, in which the functions are respected on a completely different technical basis. One thinks of the case of the socalled Von Ehrenfels effect, in which a melody can be transposed in different keys while remaining perfectly recognizable, despite being played with all different notes. From this point of view, machines, while being a weak model of emergence because they are not such from an epistemological point of view, are in other ways a very interesting case precisely because we know everything about them. On the one hand, one accuses emergentism of being vague and mysterious in assuming nonlinear causal relations between the lower level of organization of matter and the higher level of organized form; however, if this incomprehensibility were lacking, then one would not understand why

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that level should be emergent. One of the reductionists’ tricks is to focus their attack on the concept of emergent property. But emergent property is very much subject to problems of hermeneutical circularity. Indeed, who determines when a property is truly emergent or not? Everyone can raise or lower the threshold depending on their own argumentative strategies, such as when Kim talks about emergent properties lacking in importance or “modest kind emergence.”2 This, however, is a rhetorical strategy, not a logical one. One must mean by emergent properties all properties that emerge only in relation to the connection of the elements and that are not simply the summation of the known properties of the elements in question. The fact that they may be very common or trivial does not detract from the legitimacy of their emergence. One must proceed by level. The real quantum leap occurs with the systemic processes that underlie those of descending causality. Let us take the example of the organism. Genes structure the organism, but then it is the organism that has to deal with natural selection. And it is natural selection that then interacts with the organism as a whole, in that natural selection does not selectively act on certain cells rather than others. This necessarily involves, over the long run, a dynamic of back-propagation of functional needs from the whole to the parts. It is in this way that the organism as a whole shapes the organs in its confrontation with natural selection from the lottery of genetic error. And it is this same process that imposes a teleonomic structure on otherwise inexplicable living organisms that so troubled Kant’s rational design. Even feedback, which systems theory has long told us about, is not about the parts taken independently of each other but about the organism as a whole. If the organism cannot find food, all its parts will suffer sooner or later. So it is from the whole in its environmental feedback that derives, in turn, in the body the selective feedback that shapes the organs and, in general, the parts of the organism. And that is why all parts playfully submit to the demands of the whole.

The Emergence of Culture The debate on altruism that has developed in evolutionary circles since the last century, regardless of the fact that it includes the huge fallacy of often confusing altruism with goodness and of the fact that the adoption of the term itself is highly questionable because it originated for a different use, has had the merit of highlighting the question of the relationship between natural selection and social systems. The possibility of group selection had already been glimpsed by Darwin. Then such a possibility had been developed by the anarchist Kropotkin, precisely in controversy with the idea of survival of

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the fittest, which was too steeped in free bourgeois competition. Then the possibility of a group survival instinct was advocated naively by Lorenz and finally by Wynne-Edwards. In England, on the other hand, a series of studies followed that sought to merge the dynamics of natural selection and the mathematics of genes, attempting to infer mathematical models of natural selection on an obviously reproductive basis and thus starting with the sharing of genes among inbreeds. Animal altruism used as evidence for group selection had to be explained genetically, and this led to taking the path of altruism as a genetic tactic of propagation. Fisher had combined, through the use of statistical mathematics, evolutionism and genetics, initiating modern synthesis. Haldane had developed a mathematical theory that altruism would be proportional to the percentage of common genes, that is, the degree of relatedness, so that his saying that he would give his life to save two brothers or eight cousins became famous. Hamilton devised a famous mathematical rule on reproductive altruism (r × B > C), where r is the ratio of genetic commonality or kinship, B is the reproductive advantage, and C is the cost of action. The problem is that these are not unambiguous and clearly quantifiable factors. So treating it as some sort of physical principle is misleading and dangerously parascientific. This is not to say that mathematical models are not useful in science, but they should not be confused with laws, as they are fundamentally tautological and not falsifiable by empirical means because they are not predictive. More interesting, however, was Price’s equation, which provides a broader picture, to which we will return later. Also in the early 1970s, Trivers applied game theory to the question of altruism, deriving from it the theory of reciprocal altruism, which would therefore always be based on self-interest. From this, a few years later, Dawkins derived the selfish gene argument, in which he attacked the easy target of group selection naively conceived by Winnie-Edwards (1962). However, Price’s equation already left room for a theory of group selection on several levels. Already Hamilton had noted that, although he did not consider it a biologically relevant matter, competition between groups promoted internal cohesion at the price, however, of xenophobia, so much so that he saw something fascistic in this mechanism.3 After Dawkins’ book, group selection seemed defunct, but in the following decades, it revived thanks to the two Wilsons: David Sloane Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. They were responsible for a new reorganization of the subject that took into account mathematical-statistical problems and was called multilevel selection theory. The basic concept was summarized by the two scientists as follows: “Within a group, selfishness beats altruism. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” So group selection at the second level retroacts on the first level

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by limiting its antisocial drives. This also explains why, despite strong selfish impulses, in the end, however, group logic and its values prevail in groups. This mechanism in hominin groups is reinforced by two factors: mimesis and technique. Techno-mimetic development has offered enormous adaptive advantages, but it has also imposed greater levels of cooperation. This made possible a runaway effect of symbolic communication, which is also necessary for technical development beyond a certain threshold, and thus initiated another level of immaterial evolution of memes. In turn, these memes have reproduced, following drifts that re-propose the question of group selection at the memeplex level, and the whole has resulted in a push for the creation of a cultural universe that is completely outside the conscious control of hominins. It is this second evolutionary pathway that produces the leap to the emergent level that we call culture in the sense, however, of civilization and that Sloane Wilson calls “major evolutionary transitions.”4 The moment the technique shows its effectiveness and mimesis is the channel for transmitting and enhancing it, then sexual selection will favor those who show greater mimetic aptitudes. This means that individuals who are more refractory to communication will find it increasingly difficult to find a partner and reproduce. Thus, the internal selection principle would have shifted from physical strength (dominant male) to communicative aptitude. Incidentally, the moment social bonds involve the use of mimetic skills, it is through mimesis that social communication passes, and to have a sexual relationship with a partner, mimetic communication becomes more and more implicitly indispensable. The ability to adapt to the group may have made a difference at an early age. Those who were more able to interact effectively with the group had a better chance of survival. Similarly, parents who had more nurturing skills had a better chance of propagating their genes. Thus, human evolutionary drift would have favored a strong adaptation to the group, which would form a social microhabitat in this way. This group as a whole then functionally measured itself against the problem of adaptation to the environment as if it were a meta-organism. If this meta-organism proves to have a better chance of survival than the isolated individual organism, then by a statistical law, the evolutionary fate of the species is sealed: it will inevitably go in the direction of ever greater social cohesion and ever stronger internal communication, which has the function of cementing the parts together. This might justify the preponderant phatic function of human language, which has often been compared to that of grooming among anthropomorphic apes and which likewise has the function of cementing interindividual relationships. If this reasoning of ours makes sense, then it is likely that language began to develop with

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the earliest emergence of technical skills and accompanied them, shifting more and more decisively toward phonatory activity, involving the transition from ape-like verse to the more pliant activity of the human phonatory apparatus. Protohuman primates thus immediately began to strive to communicate both gesturally and phonetically, later developing more practical phonatory production for many reasons: one can communicate even while having one’s hands busy, even while not facing away and being covered from view, which is most useful while hunting. The fact that the cultural group operates as a superorganism has important consequences in terms of feedback and its cybernetic organization. It, in fact, becomes like a super-homeostate, capable of exerting evolutionary pressure of an internal organizational type for the improvement of its own environmental response with the division of roles, exactly as happened in the organism when it was articulated into organs, which were themselves subject to processes of functional sub-evolution. Many will already be familiar with the famous case of the evolution of the eye, which was used as an argument against evolution but was later explained with Darwinist theory by influential scholars such as Gould and Dawkins. Dawkins explained how we find various modes of sensitivity to vision that can be lined up to explain the evolutionary path that led to the formation of the eye. Gould added an extra explanatory element by showing how the formation of the eye is in a sense a NietzscheanFoucauldian genealogical process, in which each step, while not being made by virtue of the next step, was coincidentally advantageous to be used as a resource for the transition to new developments that erratically led to the formation of the eye. Thus, the genealogical development of the eye would consist of a series of fortunate events. However, even so, this whole series of developments might appear far too “fortunate,” but then again, how is it possible to think of a finalistic drive without incurring some appeal to a providence or metaphysical force? If, however, we assume the fact that a system poses a “systemic pressure” toward the determination of a satisfactory configuration with respect to the functional needs of exchange with the environment, then it will be easy to understand that this systemic need of a type we might say homeostatic has constituted an element of statistical preferentiality of the selection operation of genetic mutation, channeling random genetic changes on an inclined plane toward the realization of a real instrument capable of satisfying the need to see. This systemic pressure is also describable in other terms, namely, in terms of descending causality from an emergent system. Cybernetics has explained to us that the internal selective pressure under homeostatic drive depends in turn on the needs imposed by the exchange with the environment.

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We now come to sociobiology. It may seem paradoxical for a culturalist to invoke sociobiology, but it has definite grounds of interest for the present research. Wilson’s thinking starts with insect societies, which no one knows better than he does and of which he has shown a complex organizational capacity, albeit based on the availability of very small brains and a very simple type of communication based on olfactory messages through the use of genetically predetermined pheromones. Insect societies, according to Wilson, are superorganisms. That is, ants, for example, all behave as functional parts of an organism shaped by natural selection. Early on, sociobiology was a firm believer in genetic determinism, extending this approach to human societies. Culture was understood as a mere superstructure held on a leash by genes. This idea was contrasted with the one, for example, held by some memetics theorists that genes and memes are independent self-replicators, or the theory of Boyd and Richerson (2006) and in Italy of Remotti (2011) that culture influences genes. Wilson himself later espoused the idea of a coevolutionary relationship between genes and culture, called the dual inheritance theory. Our idea is that of a dynamic coevolution in which at first the genetic element predominated, so memes could also be said to be held on a leash by genes while still entering into a relationship of interaction with them. And in this relationship, as time went on, memes, because of their efficiency, took on a stronger and stronger role, until we came to the emergence of culture, in which the relationships were reversed and culture took control of genetic reproduction by taking control of sexual selection through kinship structures. But also by ensuring the full replication of the genetic pull in all configurations compatible with the cultural set-up. Culture does not require beings with different bodies for various tasks. Culture requires availability for the use of language and a rather indeterminate physical configuration so as to be employed in the most diverse uses. The other aspect that untethers the memetic structure from the genetic one is the construction of an artificial world with the consequent subjugation of nature, which is thus no longer the environment to which to adapt. The further development of this process could eventually lead to the construction of an artificial form of life that allows memes to dispose of genes completely. Sociobiological theory, therefore, has become more reasonable on the question of genetic influence. Differently, the proponents of genetic determinism today cluster in a subsidiary of sociobiology itself, whose social interest, however, they have left out in order to focus on the individual aspect. We are talking about evolutionary psychology. They argue that at the foundation of social groupings is altruism and that at the bottom of altruism is genetic selfishness, according to which an individual helps others to the extent that he or she shares their genes.

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In this regard, they refer to Hamilton’s formula (r × B > C), according to which the fraction of genes (r) for the benefit bestowed (B) must be greater than the cost (C), which they regard as a fundamental physical law. From this follows a parental theory that would underlie all societies, including human societies. A famous thought experiment is cited in support of this: If a person falls into a river and you know that to save him you might risk drowning, would you save him? Probably not. But if he is your brother, would you save him? Probably yes. This theory is credited with explaining a whole range of behaviors such as familism and nepotism that are present in many cultures. However, it is also true that familism and nepotism have a negative connotation almost everywhere. This is inexplicable if one believes that inclusive fitness is the basis of human society. Instead, we come to the idea of group selection. Dawkins in The Selfish Gene had harshly attacked the idea of a group or even species survival instinct placed at the basis of so-called altruistic behavior. It was against such naive altruism that he had thought up his title. However, a new theory of altruistic instincts arose with the theory of group selection formulated by Wilson, among others, himself. The group selection theory has relevant merits because it is able to explain why we find conflicting instinctive behaviors in humans. In fact, this would be explained by the fact that selection operates at two levels: the individual level and the group level, responding to two different fitness principles: one, toward group cohesion, to cope with competition with other groups, and one, toward the individual, in competition with other individuals. According to this theory, at the basic level, individuals either compete with each other or cooperate, but if one were to remain only at that level, the cooperators would inevitably tend to be replaced by the competitors. But since at the group level, collaborators win, collaborators cannot disappear from the group, or the group will disappear. Sloane Wilson (2015) gives the example of the mixture of two types of sexual behaviors (one violent and the other not) that occur among gerrids, which he divides into “rapists” and “gentlemen.” In direct competition between “rapists” and “gentlemen,” the former should prevail and the latter should become extinct. But the raped females make fewer eggs, and at the level of group competition, the larger groups, that is, those with more eggs, win, which puts a brake on the rapists’ ambitions and limits their numbers. Their mixing, therefore, is explained by the multilevel theory. This also happens among humans, where we find the coexistence of gregariousness between cooperators and self-centeredness; however, this discourse, in the human case, can also be interpreted at the level of individual behaviors always remaining within the covariance treated by Price’s equation. In fact, we often find self-affirming and cooperating behaviors in the same person.

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Classical morality, for example, is all about separating the two types of behavior by describing the former as innate or wild and the latter as polite or moral. Thus, the former, being self-affirming, are placed as vices, and the latter, being cooperative, are seen as virtues. Significantly, the latter include self-restraining behaviors such as temperance, prudence (related to wisdom), and then cooperative balancing virtues such as justice, and finally fortitude (which might seem self-affirming but is actually about the ability not to yield to fear). Classical morality thus tells us about social virtue and individual vices. One might observe that, if so, a simple group selection theory is enough to explain it without reaching the transcendence of an emergent cultural reality. The fact is that morality does not limit itself to this but assigns moral virtues a universal value. To better specify this further, highest level, and for this reason described as heavenly, Christian doctrine has added to the four virtues listed above three more virtues considered theological, that is, divine, which are faith, hope, and charity, while in the Platonic tradition, the absolute transcendent moral value is the ideal good. For aesthetics, the same thing happens: At a level of individual self-affirmation, we have vulgar pleasures or the merely pleasant; at a level of cultural cooperation values, we have good taste; and at a universal transcendent level, we have the value of the ideal beautiful. The qualitative leap produced by the cultural emergence is manifested by an order of values that cannot be reduced to, and cannot be traced back to, the mere sphere of the games of interests of individuals or their mere organizations. Egoistic values are proper to the level of individual competition; cooperative values, belong to the meta-individual functional level relating to competition between groups. But absolute value is at stake here. It is the product of one of the logics of group selection in memes, in which higher orders can always be generated, giving rise to systemic runaway. The existence of a group level was also understood by Price, but he was dissatisfied with this solution because it clearly appeared to him that there was a higher value, which is neither functional for the individual nor meta-functional but absolute. This absolute needs a qualitative leap, a level leap, which is an ontological leap and which introduces the world as an ontological environment of essences (Welt) and not simply of stimuli (Umwelt). To do this, since he did not think about the possibility of the emergence of culture, he simply broke with the rational perspective and turned to faith. Then today, it is necessary to deal rationally with what Price was looking for. In contrast, inclusive fitness theory does not believe that there is social pressure. It simply believes that altruism is the product of a law of gene conservation that is mathematically calculable in that it is inversely proportional

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to the degree of relatedness, that is, the number of genes shared with the other individual. In all this discourse, there are ideological implications that split the front of the naturalistic approach to culture from within. Before briefly addressing this discourse, however, we want to make a disclaimer, and that is, by this, we do not mean to say that the roots of even rather bitter controversies between these two fronts are to be considered as necessarily ideological. In fact, the primary cause of such a clash is a circumstance well known to the history and philosophy of science, and that is the clash between academic theories, which involves a whole series of strategies and stratagems such as delegitimization of the opponent, recourse to ad hoc explanations, and so on, on which, from Popperian falsificationism onward, a wide-ranging debate has developed in the last century with Lakatos and Khun, among others. The ideological implication, far from being the cause of the clash, is merely a flap, but a significant flap from the point of view of a critical approach. The implication is as follows: many followers of the inclusive fitness theory do not simply claim that the gene is selfish, which would be a simple but effective metaphor to clarify that genes are selfreplicators that simply tend to replicate under the conditions imposed on them by natural selection. The idea here goes further, and that is, not only is the gene selfish but also the individual is selfish, and is altruistic only to the extent that he or she shares genes with someone else, so this rules out, in principle, the relevance of social systems to the theory of evolution. In short, societies and cultures are nothing more than epiphenomena, the side effects of individual survival strategies. The old liberal idea of the social contract is thus reaffirmed. A group of selfish individuals found it convenient to establish a non-aggression pact with other individuals to defend life and property. The whole thing can be summed up with Margaret Thatcher’s famous saying, “society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women.” While this position is not accepted by all in its radicality, the devaluation of the importance of society is an underlying theme of so-called evolutionary psychology, which, not surprisingly, is an individual psychology and not a sociology, much less an anthropology. This approach cannot be reconciled with that of sociobiology. The sociobiologist may have conservative or liberal democratic political sympathies, but he cannot acquiesce to the Thatcherian dictum. For the sociobiologist, society exists. The mutual behaviors of ants are inexplicable without the concepts of society, social organization, and social function. The utilitarian principle of the social contract cannot be invoked for such a social organization. One cannot think that ants are born individualistic, but then realize that it is more convenient for them to establish a cooperative pact with other ants by obeying laws. Ants

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are born social and are social genetically. The inclusivist describes this to the circumstance that ants, being all sisters, all share the queen’s DNA; however, this in no way explains the articulation and complexity of the social structure of ants, which are the only animals besides humans to even practice a form of agriculture, despite having individually tiny brains of incomparably less power than those of humans. Wilson (2012), moreover, has shown that there are common organizational characteristics in all animal societies even when they are not sister societies but are more or less related individuals like humans. This is, for example, the case with mice, but Wilson reports cases of many other animal societies. Wilson does not like to talk about emergentism; he mentions it only occasionally, yet it is clear that his superorganism is an emergent system, evolving all together as a system. By this, we are not saying the theory of inclusive fitness is without foundation. However, it is clear that it is not a physical law but only an explanatory model, one that is well suited to certain circumstances and less so to others. More importantly, it cannot be argued that it can be the pillar on which the study of human societies rests. Group selection, on the other hand, not only better explains the, in our view, epistemologically overstated case of so-called “altruism,” but also forms the basis for understanding the factors of social organization the contrasting aspects we see in many societies. Moreover, among human societies, fitness is no longer measured in terms of prolificacy. Dominant populations are not the most prolific. Instead, in competition between civilizations, the DNA of the dominated is often dominant. But this is not a paradox because elites dominate over majorities. History offers us countless instances of enslaved populations being forced to conform to the cults and customs of the victors. This happens because, among humans, the DNA that is imposed is not genetic but cultural. This also means that it does not make much sense to go looking for the origin of a civilization in the DNA found in some tomb, but it is better to understand the origin of its religion or language. Sloane Wilson rightly states that natural selection among individuals within the group leads to competition and thus friction and conflict, so it goes in the opposite direction to group unity. Only competition between groups promotes the collaboration necessary to overcome the challenge. Collaboration for competition with other groups or simply to cope with hostile environmental conditions, especially in the case of primates who enjoy the use of hands to manipulate and communicate, has another consequence, which is to accentuate the use of technique. This factor, as Darwin also sensed, increases the importance of group selection, but it also changes the rules of selection in the group. The technical group constitutes a microhabitat. So even competition in the group does not simply aim for the resource

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at the expense of others. The prize at stake becomes important to the group. Thus, we move from direct competition for the thing to competition for leadership, which is not a thing but a relationship that presupposes the group. The fact that the group is a microhabitat means that those best suited for life in the group reproduce, such as the best communicators, who, as such, also attract more sexual partners to reproduce with. This expands mimetic capabilities, which in turn expand technical ones. Those techniques make it so that the power of the group should no longer simply be counted by the sum of the strength expressed by the sum of the group members; it must be added to the power produced by the technique that makes the difference in competing with other groups and with the difficulties of the natural environment. All this grafts a systemic runaway, the progression of which becomes geometric, leading to the formation of the emergent system of culture-civilization, that is, to the dimension of the open, to the “creation” of the world, or kosmos as a world of meaning. Clearly, as biologists often tell us, there are insights into the big picture that seem to be quite clear, but when we get down to the details, a far more complex and problematic situation emerges. This is also true of palethnology. The human development situation is neither simple nor linear. One gives populations such different characteristics that they can be considered different species. Information is then patchy, and records are scarce precisely in the periods that interest us most, such as the dawn of Homo sapiens. We also know little about issues fundamental to human development, such as the use of fire, in which we have a striking gap of as much as a million years between the earliest manifestation and the later. It is likely that increased research in places as fundamental to this history as Africa will return us in the future with perhaps a different map of human development than we have today. So we make arguments today about general issues in principle, but these are quite different from a precise and circumstantial knowledge of what currently happens. So we think we are proposing an explanatory idea, a hermeneutic key, not a scientific truth. The hermeneutic key in question clearly leans toward the so-called dual inheritance theory advocated by Wilson, among others, but with an added emphasis on the question of organization and its relative autonomy as an emergent factor that follows its own evolutionary drift as a functional unit that confronts other functional units, and to do this we refer, however, precisely to an insight of Wilson’s opponent, that is, to an insight of Dawkins namely, the idea that memes as well as genes should be considered in their capacity as self-replicators via hominins, and thus capable of undergoing the shaping of selection in this case social or communicative, with the consequence of developing not simply according

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to human utilitarian functions in a direct way but according to functions of self-organization and self-preservation, like any other evolving entity. Wilson speaks of a superorganism for insect societies but argues that human societies, for obvious differences, cannot be attributed to this same concept. However, the German biologist and collaborator of Wilson, Bert Hölldobler, has pointed out basic social functions that we also find in human societies. The point is that in human societies, we go far beyond such functions. The Microhabitat and Dual Fitness We have seen how there are two theories of social solidarity: one centered on genetic sharing, according to which so-called altruism is inversely proportional to the degree of kinship, and one centered instead on a double level of natural selection. Both are likely to have a kernel of truth. However, the former turns out to be weak in explaining the strength of nonkinship social relationships. That is, one has to know that one is our brother to behave altruistically. Among other things, these behaviors in humans depend on knowledge. To get around this problem, we have talked about the viscous condition in which generally cohabitants are also relatives. This, however, could mean that we behave altruistically according to Hamilton’s definition with all people whom we think are connected to us by some deep connection. Moreover, ordinary experience shows that siblings can also be not at all altruistic with each other but highly competitive and even enemies, or, on the other hand, totally indifferent. Now, if it were genetically predetermined behavior, this would not be possible. Brothers and sisters, not infrequently, although they have more genes in common, often lead completely separate lives, unless they are forced to take an interest in each other by the fact that they both depend on the welfare of the family. More often, they just say, “We are in this togheter, and we have to help each other.” The family is a fundamental economic unit. In Italy, we use the image of being in the same boat. Everyone has to work together to make the boat float and move. Often, the family is the first level of organization where individuals experience this challenge for survival. If the family is rich, they will be rich; if the family is poor, they will be poor. So very often, in altruistic behavior a community of interests and identity matters. That said, the proposed thought experiment is also a bit ambiguous. In fact, first the person is said to throw himself into the river risking his life and then it is inferred that he faces certain death for his brother. But this is not true. The person who risks it does so first and foremost because he believes it is possible to save his life and the lives of others. In fact, if we asked how many would face certain death to save their brother or sister, we would get decidedly different answers. Otherwise, how

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many would be willing to even risk their lives for a brother who has always lived away from the family and with whom they have never even spoken? In many cases, the sibling is also the closest friend with whom we share all our experiences from early childhood, so it may be because of this ingrained life in common that we are willing to take risks. The genetic code alone says nothing if this person has always been absent from our lives. In other animal societies, similar circumstances might occur. The instinct of protection toward offspring is different. In my neck of the woods, a story is told about a group of partisans coming down a hill, at the base of which, however, the Germans were waiting for them. One of the young men, before even realizing it, was pushed to the ground; he could only make it in time to turn around and see the father who had pushed him fall to the ground, struck by the bullet that would otherwise have killed him. That father acted promptly to save his son’s life without thinking for a moment about his own. The situation of being in the same boat may then be decisive. In some situations, the family or generally group micro-community may close like a shield to immunize the inner members from external dangers. This implies that the group is such that it constitutes a microhabitat reason why one does not adapt only through the group but to the group itself. This means that within the group, there is not only competition but also internal selection processes by sex or by the community that reward cooperators. For example, according to Kropotkin’s reasoning, under harsh environmental conditions, even in the absence of intergroup conflict, adaptation to the group microhabitat can become crucial to survival. Because cooperation is the only way to create a space that is immune to danger. From this point of view, the concept of “immunity” reworked by Roberto Esposito may be useful. That is, the social microhabitat would be a space that is immune from external dangers but requires a commons within it in which the members, that is, must sacrifice a munus, that is, a part of their interest, but not by a conscious social contract decision but by a homeostatic feedback mechanism. Such a munus would be nothing but that ethological altruism that neo-Darwinists talk about. The member is born into the group and adapts to it and its needs; therefore, the sense of interindividual competition in the group also changes, from competition for external resources to competition for consensus, that is, for prestige. Clearly, such an aspect becomes all the more important, the more important the communication through which this consensus is manifested. It goes without saying that animal societies that do not have developed communicative activity do not develop competition for a prize in consensus. This does not mean that interindividual competition is less tough, but only that it is becoming more culturalized as communication develops.

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So much so that today the “egoists” still fight for success and money, which is a social convention. The group, therefore, is also tested by internal conflicts. However, if the group fails in its functional unity to prevail over internal drives of a centrifugal nature, it breaks up, and so the ship sinks with all its passengers. This is why all cultures have developed immune mechanisms of internal reaction against conflicting individuals, which in complex societies implies preventive subjugation mechanisms that result in some cases in practices such as human sacrifice. Then those who have high fitness toward the group are the ones who reproduce most easily by triggering a collaborative evolutionary spiral, but at the same time they are also the ones who have won in-group competition against other group members. Thus, a strange form of infra-competitive but collaborative group is created. Thus, these two elements, though contradictory, both benefiting survival have developed, giving the human species an inherently dialectical and unresolved nature. This dialectical behavioral physiognomy, however, at some point with the development of communication and language, went through a phase of strong pressure toward a total reduction of behavior to functional needs aimed at group organization. Communication as Connection Let us then come to communication to understand its role in the jump from animal society to culture in the sense of civilization. Communication exists in all animal societies, although at levels that are often very rudimentary. We range from biochemical communication via pheromones in ant societies to some monkeys that have specific alarm cries for different aggressors, which involve rudimentary forms of shared conceptualization. The affinity between language and grooming has already been noted, in the sense that this is practiced to establish social relationships. Certainly, human language has also fulfilled the function of creating relational connections within a group so as to make it more united. Language, by the way, allows this to be done even at a distance and allows for an escalation of organizational possibilities, up to and including representational ones that allow for the escalation of knowledge, through a process that Gehlen calls Entlastung (relief) and that allows for the benefit of shortcuts, which compress information, developing its capacity, as well as action, through technique. Referential information, through symbolic communication, enables the learning of facts in summary form without having to experience them firsthand. In the same way, the tool makes it easier to do things that would otherwise have involved more effort and time or would even have been impossible. These enormous advantages brought by language soon set hominins on the road to becoming chattering

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monkeys, but they also opened up a new dimension of represented experience, a new organization of our cognitive system that was, in a sense, cultivated. This cultivation of the mind is based on communicative redundancies that lead the brain to order thought into a preordained checkerboard of concepts, which need not be matched by a checkerboard of neurons. Of course, it is the “software” that organizes itself through a checkerboard or, at any rate, a classification system of universals that is functional for communication. In fact, where the communicative need would fail, the classificatory need directed toward everything would also fail. The solitary animal does not have to communicate with anyone; therefore, it will have memories of elements taken from their individuality, but it does not need classifications. It can tell by smell that something is good to eat. It can recognize similar smells and similar shapes. These are all precursor conditions of conceptualization, but they do not come to conceptualization as in humans but are maintained in similarity relations ranging from the most precise, in the case of recognition of the individual, to the most general, in the case of recognition of good things to eat, the condition of daylight or night. Human being has at its base the same faculty of remembering things with greater or less precision that animals have, only that the need for communication requires him to calibrate this recognition to a certain distance or proximity from the individual case. So it can recognize the individual cat to which it has given a proper name; it can recognize the class of cats, the genus of felines, mammals, animals, and living things. The pyramidal structure of genera and species in the Aristotelian tradition identifies precisely these calibrations of recognition at various levels. That is, communication orders memory to make classifications, according to the reduction to stepped functions of variations that would otherwise be continuous. The animal focuses only at the level it needs and does not need a tabula of classifications according to different levels of specificity or generality. That is why it has no concepts. But concepts manage to do even more because communication creates classifications inherent in, for example, communication itself and its parameters that otherwise would not exist. Thus, the meme goes through an explosion of complexity, in which new concepts are always being added, going from a few hundred to thousands with which to then describe an infinite series of cases, through the combinatorial explosion from their union into chains endowed with meaning. This communicational reality made up of memes, therefore, tends to baste a dense network of propositions and communications and tends to create communicative standardizations even beyond the gestural or phonetic sign, as in the movements of dance or the configuration of rhythms and sounds on occasions that are also standardized and become rituals. Communication

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builds standardizations everywhere, even in manual techniques and even in the visible aspects of things, with the emergence of geometric ornamental patterns (another sign of standardization). From Group Selection to Cultural Unit Selection It is important to understand that this whole network of communicative conventions does not just wander in an indeterminate infosphere but is purified until it reaches a conventional codification in a process of selection in which the environment is represented by the human mind. This is exactly what Dawkins intuited when he introduced the meme discourse. But there is more: all these conventions are linked and interconnected to form a large memetic skein of information. What limits the propagation of this skein and prevents it from degenerating into chaos? This aspect is interesting because some Babylonian creation myths say that men (black heads) had become too noisy, and so the gods sent the universal flood. The myth suggests that the limit to the expansion of communicational and memetic chaos is imposed by environmental conditions (natural catastrophe). The memetic skein then expands, except, however, that it must come to terms with the environment. The environment modulates this communicational skein and imposes on it principles of internal organization with a type of standardization, which is not simply the effect of the memetic impact but its impact on the efficiency of the group in measuring itself against the environment or other groups. Then the memetic complex of culture must model itself internally according to functions, but these functions are not deliberately decided by men; on the contrary, they are imposed on them by the feedback processes of the group. So the first thing in this situation is the creation of an accumulation of information and instructions, which, in their ability to influence human behavior pose what we now call “power.” This power that Lévi-Bruhl would have called prelogical is not political power in the modern sense but a kind of magical power, which is just an expression of the intensive capacity of memes to superordinate themselves. So who has this power? No one has it, because it is nothing but the expression of the impersonal feedback dynamics of the collectivity through its internal communicative flows. The Autonomous Drift of Memes and the Emergence of an Evolutionary Cultural System with Descending Causality Communication between individuals constitutes a network, but not a system. Thus, the fact that for millennia hominins have practiced communication more or less assiduously does not make the network of communication exchanges an emergent system. There are many theories about the origins of

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language and many different opinions about the temporal placement of these origins. We are not in possession of linguistic records and therefore have no direct evidence on these two questions, but we do possess indirect evidence concerning the physiology of hominins. We know the location of the pharynx, and we know what the auditory features are. The problem is that all this information needs interpretation. With respect, however, to the formation of these physiological changes, which the verbal language we use today needs in order to exist, we have two broad alternatives. One is gradualist and holds that they developed under the evolutionary pressure of the effort to communicate; another says that they developed to fulfill other functions and then were “exaptated” for linguistic purposes. Why, however, would we need an exaptation theory if gradualist theory was already sufficient? The problem is that with gradualist theory, communication and the effort to communicate would thus be backdated from a widely held view that regards language as a relatively recent cultural achievement. The objection of the ex-attachmentists to the gradualist theory is: why, if language began in such ancient times, were there no findings on the level of symbolic productions earlier and we had to wait until so-called “behavioral modernity” to find them? So the exaptationist idea is that these features developed for other reasons and were exploited only at the time of behavioral modernity. However, this theory is not convincing for two reasons: first, what would be the different reasons why evolution would have selected these features? How do you explain the fact that features such as pharynx position are “costly” in evolutionary terms? In fact, if costly features were developed, there was clearly a need for them; why then were these easily divested for reuse in favor of language? Much more sensible, on the other hand, is the theory that hominins would have sought communication very early on because of the obvious advantages that even rudimentary communication entails and thus exerted a sex-selective pressure aimed at rewarding those that carried pro-communication variations, even at the cost of some heavy disadvantages, such as the risk of suffocation at feeding time, which we still have to deal with today. All right, but then why did it take this Homo sapiens so long to get to behavioral modernity? So let’s go back to the opening of this paragraph: the presence of a skein of communications is one thing, and the presence of a functional system of communications capable of rising above the community and disciplining it as if it were its master or lord is another. Long had to go from the mimetic behaviors of very simple techniques to their use as signs in hunting actions, then to the use of phonations, and to the ever-increasing word that leaves the hands free and increasingly engaged in something else. From this use, it also develops its fàtic use, intended, as we have said, for the

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maintenance of important relationships in-group balances. It is clear that language, however rudimentary it may be, also has clear advantages in keeping the group together. There is thus a long period in which this initially very rudimentary language is enriched with more sophisticated functions that enable it to tell the facts. It involves shared communicative rules on word order to arrive at the formulation of increasingly complex and detailed propositions. So language follows its own evolutionary line that cannot be lightning fast if we believe, with many generativists, that it has influenced genetic evolution enough to make us predisposed to language. The development of language has codetermined along with other environmental factors, the shaping of our minds and contributed to the expansion of our brains. It is likely that for a very long time, individuals were trying to communicate but understanding each other little and poorly. So there was a continuous effort to come to understand each other, especially to coordinate actions in risky activities such as hunting or warfare. Once a fairly stable common language was established, syntactic and grammatical forms developed on it that allowed its referential and not just emotional, conative, and phatic use. Reporting a fact that has occurred is more difficult than being in touch (just touching), than expressing emotions (we do it involuntarily), than giving orders (in the simplest cases, we can express ourselves with gestures). This is what has engaged our resources, because it is useful not only in hunting and warfare but also in social relations and especially in learning. The volume of communications fills our heads with experiences condensed succinctly into Entlastungen (reliefs), because, at the level of the microphysics of culture, every experience learned, without having to experience it directly, is in a small way a case of Entlastung. Moreover, hunter-gatherer men had to be as knowledgeable as possible about everything in order to survive in the wilderness. So he needed a big memory and a big brain. Thus we come to the question of altriciality. So many different dynamics fit together like pieces of a mosaic, but this happens not, as some people believe, because of incredible luck but because of the long smoothing activity carried out by evolution. Homo sapiens therefore has a large brain, has the ability to tell facts, has the ability to learn and teach techniques, and is predisposed from an early age to speak (phonatory-wise) and learn language thanks to genetic devices that enable him to learn it spontaneously. Evidently, for a long time, speaking was possible but difficult, as we well know when we study a foreign language as adults. With practice, we have introjected this ability into our DNA. Thus, a point was reached where there were all the conditions for the cultural reactor to be set in motion. And this reactor was ignited probably in the period of behavioral modernity. The reactor is ignited, and you start to see things

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that you had never seen before. Culture emerges; it breaks away from the simple instrumental level of communication. It rises as an autonomous system, with immaterial figures empowered (or given powers); what was a skein of redundant communications becomes a structure, becoming what some myths describe as the cosmic egg that opens and makes the world appear. This means that we are not only born with the ability to learn language more easily, but we are also born as conscious beings, as entities living in a world of entities endowed with meaning, and that our minds are cultivated in fields of concepts with which we relate to reality as an ordered kosmos. The core of this reactor is sacred. The sacred from this moment will only develop and grow, creating the heaven from which souls are assigned to these talking monkeys. Thus, is born the human being. This trend will reach its climax with the great archaic civilizations. After that, it will begin the phase I call kenosis, deliberately taking it from the jargon of theology. There are those who have said that Homo sapiens was born twice: as a physical entity 200,000 years ago and as a mental entity upon reaching behavioral modernity.5 However, this can only be well understood if we realize the initiation of this emergent dynamic, which leads culture to constitute itself as a relatively autonomous immaterial system (in that it obeys its own evolutionary dynamic based on the self-organization of memes). We thus witness another step in evolution with the determination of an emergent system, which posits itself as a whole in the selection of social systems, functionally shaping itself internally by regulating the behavior of humans and dividing them into categories according to hierarchical and functional patterns, just like a metaorganism. In this sense, we are dealing with the classic example of descending causality, in which we can clearly see how the cultural system imposes roles and actions on humans. And we can also see how this descending causality is manifested through the modeling of the organization, consisting of more or less explicit instructions.

Technique, the Arts, and the Sacred In the humanist myth of man unprovided for by nature, on the one hand, there was the victimistic idea of an inept human being who was forced to use technology to defend himself and create his own scales, claws, armor, and so on. In reality, we know very well that there are many animals that are no better provided for than we are, starting with our cousin monkeys, not to mention pigs, chickens, rabbits, groundhogs, and many other prey that spend their lives in terror of being killed at any moment. The only positive aspect of this legend is that it recognizes the coessentiality of technique and human

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being. The limitation, however, of the speculation carried out in this regard in the last century by German philosophical anthropology and French paleoanthropology is to think of human being idealistically, in the singular. Technique, also in the singular, becomes the obligatory way for human being to make up for his own natural deficiencies, as if there were a fixed nature of human being that escapes the dynamism of evolution. In this way, the reader is led to imagine a kind of Vitruvian man with many tools, as if he were a Barbie doll packaged together with his accessories. We are not to think of human being in this exemplary, illustrated dictionary image. Technique would not exist if human being were an animal living in isolation. It is the collective that produces technical development and the artificial. Humans are the emulators par excellence, but the point of technological evolution, however, is not captured by the simple story of humans seeing and repeating. Social groups are microworlds, small microhabitats to which individuals adapt and which respond as an overall unit to the challenge of natural selection. That is why humans not need tusks, claws, a good sense of smell, keen eyesight, or fine hearing. Humans are made to adapt to his environment, which is the group. He must be generic and indeterminate so as to be suitable for the most varied tasks within the group. He is so ungenetically specialized because, otherwise, he does not function well as a social module. This generic, generalist character of his makes him suitable for the most varied organizational configurations. So this is why he is said to be a supercooperator. The most significant technical works for their survival are such that they can hardly be done by a single person, and the more technical and social complexity increases, the more impossible it becomes for the individual to make and even design technical works. It is the collective structure that directs human beings toward cooperation in making works that far exceed the capacity of individuals. As early as prehistoric times, human groups began to compete with each other in the accomplishment of “superhuman” works. This tells us that the fulfillment of the human dimension, needs the “superhuman.” We start with dolmens, then move on to the great megalithic works such as Stonehenge, and then on to stone structures, megalithic walls, and finally to the pyramids, which are from a technological but also symbolic point of view, the apotheosis of the “superhuman.” Who needs a pyramid? No one; those who enter it will already be dead. Pyramids, like human sacrifices in the transition to sacred monarchy in archaic Mesopotamia, are not tools for humans but are works or rituals in which humans are tools. Humans bow to the gods and humbly serve them, which no animal has ever done, and it is by doing this that they transcend the animal condition permanently, placing themselves in a constitutive Exzentrizität. Then it is not we who, with technology,

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compensate for the horns, which we do not have, but it is culture, as an adaptive unit, that decides what it needs to adapt to the environment or adapt the environment to itself, instrumentalizing the environment as it instrumentalized Homo sapiens and, to do so, in addition to regulating human organization, by formal descending causality, it organizes humans so as to produce what it lacks in order to function adequately. This “what it lacks” can be boats and fishing nets, but it can also be sepulchres, temples and altars, and finally pyramids. Then it is within the determination of the artificial for the fulfillment of symbolic needs that techniques of decoration and figuration, or of sound production, rhythmic and melodic, appear. Just as in nature, natural selection, for a fundamental task, which is reproduction, stuffs the various species of birds with colorful feathers, in the same way, in the cultural group, to satisfy the fundamental task of establishing a strong unity through a common identity, the need is felt to adorn these moments and certain elements with colors, drawings, songs, and dances, which emphasize their importance and specialty. Hence, evolutionary scholars, such as Dissanayake, are right in identifying a close relationship between the sacred and “fine arts,” but, first, the sacred does not fundamentally serve to come to the rescue in times of stress, because, if it did, rituals and celebrations would intervene only in times of hardship for the community, but it has a structural function of guaranteeing identity unity, which, not passing through genetics, as is the case in insect societies, must necessarily pass through culture. In other words, the psychoaffective theory of the sacred, which believes that ritual is an action of stress abatement caused by external danger or explosive internal social conflicts, does not consider that these ritual events and celebrations do not follow the rhythms of social crises but seeks to establish a basic order on the basis of which social actors can act in the game with relative freedom. In other words, they create the conditions for the breeding of humans. Ritual establishes the playing field and the rules of the social game. It then retrogresses more and more in this normative function, as positive normative activity advances instead, to the point of positive law. The emotional theory of the sacred and ritual had much fortune in the last century, either in the existentialist form of responding to a sense of anguish (Lévi-Bhrul, Cazeneuve) or in the functionalist form of inhibiting social crisis through a controlled venting of antisocial drives (Gerard, Burckert), and we could call them safety valve theories. According to such theories, when emotional pressure increases, either as fear from a difficult environmental situation or anger from internal conflict, ritual by pooling everyone’s souls allows a controlled release of such emotions and, through their sharing, dilutes them, making them controllable. If this were the case, ritual should function like the whistle on the teapot and manifest

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only when the water boils; that is, this emotionality begins to be excessive. But instead, ritual is typically something prefixed, that is, independent of particular dynamics. If anything, one might speculate that the existence of such social schematization might constitute a periodic channel of venting designed to prevent the accumulation of social tensions, like canals that line rivers to prevent flooding. However, even so, ritual should still be characterized by an ineradicable emotional and cathartic bearing, but it is often simply a social obligation, and so we must look to this prepolitical normativity for its function. This is the sense given to ritual by Confucius, who therefore assigned essential importance to rituals for the maintenance of social organization. In modern industrial societies, this function of ritual has largely been replaced by the disciplinary apparatus of the division into institutions of education, work, care, and so on within which human life takes place. This makes ritual a mere survival of an earlier social rationale, and in these societies, participation in rituals is not infrequently disregarded. In contrast, many third-world countries living under conditions of deficient and uncertain social organization generally attach great importance to rituals, not for emotion but for social cohesion and organization. So to think, as Dissanayake does, that ritual is the result of the emotional union aroused by the arts is to exchange means for ends and effects for causes. The fine arts are used by rituals to mark the special space of their occurrence. So the arts owe their existence to myth and the sacred, and not vice versa. The node of the sacred is not emotion. Bourgeois people try to explain everything that is not of economic interest with emotion, but there is also so much more, outside the narrow-mindedness of this supermarket imagery. Beauty, too, is not resolvable in emotion but is ab origine connected to the sacred, and in the case of the arts, to the ability of those arts to well meet the needs of communicating the spiritual aspects of the sacred world. Then there are some theories of what I would call “naive Darwinism,” according to which the arts come directly from innate tendencies transmitted genetically. First of all, it sounds very much like a deus ex machina to give an answer to the origin of art, an answer that we are still unable to verify today. However, the fact that the absence of genetic implication cannot be proven does not prove its presence, just as the fact that we cannot prove the non-existence of Santa Claus does not prove its existence. Second, against the innate character of the arts, there is an analytical argument, namely, if the arts were innate, then they would not be arts because the arts are by definition something that is learned. Cicero wondered whether one becomes a good orator more by nature (i.e., by innate gifts) or by art (i.e., by learning and studying particular techniques). Art is technique, the term “ars” being nothing more than the Latin translation of

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the term “techne,” and as such, it is not something natural but something contrived by humans that can be learned and replicated memetically. In the Middle Ages, the liberal and mechanical arts system represented the official education system of the time, where the liberal arts were those that were suitable for free men because they did not involve manual trades but abstract knowledge such as that of mathematics and grammar, while the mechanical arts were also called servile because they were connected to work, and painting, like sculpture, was classified among the latter. So not only were they intrinsically connected to learning, but they were also connected to the “lower” dimension in the classist sense of labor.

Cultural Kenosis Humans are physiologically formed; he is a communicator who is now able to have a critical mass of concepts that allow him to have a name for the things he relates to. At this point, the “world effect” is triggered; that is, one no longer lives in an unknown “environment” whose meaning escapes us, but one lives in a known “environment” in which all things have a being. Turning this “environment” into a “world” still requires operational connectors, which serve to hold us and things together, holding causes with effects and intentions with ends. These operators are the spirits. The sacred thus extends to create a kind of film of superhuman immaterial substances that covers all activity. This supernatural film holds the world together and gives it the ability to appear as an ordered kosmos. Thanks to it, society can become more complex and can divide itself into functional spheres, just as a body divides into organs. This happens with the division of labor and the appearance of the power of command in the form of, for example, the divine king. These spirits, often still existing in a pre-individual state, are individualized through a process of cultural individuation that transforms them into deities. In the form of the deity, culture thinks of the subject. Hegelianly, one could say that humans are an unconscious matrix of the spirit, of which the spirit is unaware; however, that is not why the spirit can be reduced to man; this is the fundamental insight of memetics, for which Dawkins must be credited with taking a substantial step forward from previous positions on this front. Previously, only the art historian Focillon had adumbrated such a reality by speaking of the life of forms. The spirit knows only the object, and it knows itself indirectly only through the determination of spiritual objects, spirits, which, however, are special objects, not only because they do not physically exist but because they are active. Thus, this unconscious matrix of the spirit comes to conceive the subject through the

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individuation of such spirits by transforming them into gods. It also vaguely constitutes human being as an essence in a world of essences, but not yet as a subject. It is still a vague acting substance, somewhat like spirits. In order to come into being as a subject, it needs to borrow the attribute of subjectivity from a subject, that is, from a God, and that is, it needs to be created. Therefore, in order to become a subject, it first needs to be an object once again, but the object of a subject, to which, however, the subject transmits subjectivity itself. This means that the act of the creation of man is not to be understood in the sense that beforehand humans physically did not exist, but in the sense that beforehand humans were not humans, was not a subject, was not even an essence, was just an animal, devoid of identity, an obscure animate materiality. This undeniably tells us that the principle of subjectivity is culture, not the self. The system of polytheism reinforces kosmos and social organization and establishes a situation whereby there is a god for every activity. Society undergoes a process of pan-divinization. In this situation, deification also begins to take the form of an objective social and spiritual structure through the emergence of the institution. The institution, in fact, is objective in its conventional nature but is at the same time immaterial; it is not a thing; it is a form of organization within society, that is, a social organism. The institution allows greater activity of the human subject; this leads to a process of separation of the space of human decision and action from the space of divine decision and action. It is as if in the kosmos of humans, a sacred yolk is separated from a profane albumen. This can also be seen in the formation of the city, in which a sacred citadel separates from the profane city, which is then organized for socially functional tasks (the market, the barracks, etc.). This also involves a process of retreating from the sacred. It is as if the sacred empties itself to shape the social organisms of the human world. As it creates them, it recedes and empties itself. Theology also speaks of a similar process through the concept of kenosis. The term comes from Paul of Tarsus’ letter to the Philippians, in which he states that Jesus, although he was God, emptied himself, becoming like men. This notion of emptying the divine in favor of the human has been related to the process of secularization and desacralization of the world enacted in the modern age. Thus, the concept of kenosis has taken on a more general scope, especially in the field of radical theology and in Italy in the thought of Sergio Quinzio (1984). In our understanding of kenosis, the divine creates the world, but in creating it, it empties itself. This kenosis at first permits the growth of archaic civilizations, but its further development brings about their crisis because humans take the reins of the organisms of society but are still too subject to their animal appetites not to create upheavals and not

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to be tempted by a dark principle of self-feeding that is at the basis of the animal self. In Asian civilizations, and especially in Buddhism, we see very clearly how this “I” is not the principle of the knowing subject but is an animally obscure principle of desire for appropriation, a kind of autonomous gravitational center that inserts a centrifugal dynamic with respect to the centripetal dynamic of culture. Hence, arises the negative meaning of egoism, which we also know in the West. This ego is a residue of our animal condition, and at the moment of crisis in the divine and theocratic order of the archaic world, it constitutes a destabilizing factor that gives rise to a series of conflicts for power and leads key figures in society to regret the archaic order and do something to restore it. However, the fact that a human does something to restore the archaic order is something paradoxical, because the very fact that human subjects try to restore the divine order is already outside the archaic order centered on the divine. This phase has been studied by historian of religions Angelo Brelich, who noted that between the seventh century BC and the fifth century BC, a number of figures tried to create new forms of archaic order, but based on the divine or simply wise inspiration of a human. This is the case with the Buddha (Siddhartha Sakiammuni), Zoroaster, Lao Zi, and Confucius, but also with the early philosophers in Greece and the biblical prophets. All of them seek to recompose the social and cultural unity of archaic civilization, but they can only do so in a new way, and thus this determines not the repair of the cracked order but its complete overcoming and the opening of a new phase. This period is of particular interest to us because the question of beauty appears in this ridge, along with the appearance of authorial poetry in place of the traditional poems of oral culture. Among other things, this period also corresponds to the emergence of a new technology of communication and recording: writing. Writing comes out of the scribe’s sack of the archaic civilization and becomes a tool of social use, through which the meme truly acquires a precision of reproduction ­comparable to that of the gene. It could perhaps be said that a secular human being is born through writing. This wave of attempts to reconstitute archaic unity through revealed religions or renewed sapiential traditions is followed by other attempts. With the crisis of the Roman Empire comes a wave of Eastern cults, among which Christianity will prove prevalent but which other Middle Easterners will later try to undermine with Islam. These attempts late in the historical period, however, also involve, in various cases, a retreat from the conditions of civilized life. In more recent cases, this has been mixed with the rise of ideologies. If before the positive order of politics was opposed to the dogmatic order of religion, then with ideologies, even in politics, a dogmatic and pseudo-religious order arises, which tends

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to transform theories of social organization into a kind of secular cult, and even in religions, there appear to be drifts tending to reconfigure religion in an ideological sense through so-called religious radicalism. An interesting aspect for us that these regressive movements have in common is the ban on the autonomy of beauty and the arts. Beauty as a value in its own right and the arts that pursue it are seen as means of perdition or distraction of the subject from his true tasks. It is also symptomatic that, along with beauty, the autonomy of human being as a subject is denied in order to re-propose the conception of the human as an object, a subject of communal power impersonated by the leader or ­representatives of divine dictates.

Kenosis and the Birth of Beauty and Aesthetics Once the ontological autonomy of culture self-posed as divine reaches its apex, it begins its descending phase in an axiological sense, although it becomes increasingly broader and more articulate, but through functionally organized institutions and knowledge. This means that the sacred no longer contains within it the whole cultural universe because it begins to empty itself by giving birth to the institutions, the knowledge, the powers, and the arts. The beautiful is born at this stage, it is one of the parts of the sacral kenosis. From this moment, not surprisingly, history begins: human being as a cultural actor becomes more and more significant, and the divine emptying itself is lowered more and more to the level of the human. As is always the case in evolution, there are different evolutionary lines, and not everywhere do things go the same way. To want to trace a single story a priori would be an idealistic approach, yet it is clear that in a world that becomes smaller and smaller, all paths of cultural evolution are bound to meet and reckon with each other. The history of kenosis in the West finds its most linear course toward the secularization and desacralization of the world, albeit with important reactions in the opposite direction. The beautiful then asserts itself as a divine imprint in human sensory experience. In this kenotic development in the West, there is a resounding return to the sacred with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. However, this return to the sacred is not a real return to preclassical and, thus prehumanistic conditions, operated at a lower level through the incarnation of the god in the “son of man.” This return to the divine, however, fails to reproduce a stably archaic society and enters a crisis in the course of a millennium. Epistemic-institutional kenosis will resume stronger than before with the development of an aggressive worldwide culture manifested through colonialist domination of the world. The sacred is again emptied, and the beautiful again reaffirms itself at the beginning of this

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emptying, but the aesthetic comes precisely when the divine character of beauty is again and more strongly challenged, with a call to the beautiful as a nostalgia for the telos, for the divine order of the world, that is, as a nostalgia for the kosmos. Then each different civilization places beauty as a concept at different degrees of cultural kenosis. For example, in Islam, the beautiful is still all within the sacred. In Indian civilization it is at a level that, for Westerners, can still be considered premodern. In Chinese civilization, it is on a level that is in some ways secularized as in modern civilization, but in other ways still not, thanks to an inherently sacred conception of nature and naturalness and thus also of society itself, which still allows poetry to be assigned a poignancy that it has long since lost in the West. One does not have to be idealistic and believe in a single telos for all culture in essence; however, even if one wants to take an empiricist attitude toward culture, it is impossible not to notice how, at least in the West, an extreme of kenosis has been consummated, to the point of reducing us to a world in which humans carry on their shoulders the full weight of their destiny and are disoriented because, along with the sacredness of fate, which used to govern them, they have also lost the meaning of their existence. This nihilistic humanity is approaching the extreme threshold, the threshold beyond which there is only a return to the animal condition. Humans thus may find themselves leaving the relay of thought, intelligence, and emergent consciousness to intelligent machines or even superintelligence, to reimmerse themselves in the animal condition and return to being a mere ape trying to survive and satisfy its genetically determined desires. But then, is beauty dead? Not yet, not only in other civilizations, in some of which it is still in the bud of the sacred, but also in Western civilization, it, too, persists in different, increasingly secularized, but persistent forms. It is threatened by naturalization, which does not say that beauty does not exist but that it is nothing more than a functionally positive reaction toward certain sensory inputs, for some even genetically predefined. Naive naturalism, which launched its assault on humanistic culture in the good faith of bringing the clarity and truth typical of the natural sciences, actually produces a simplification, reductionist, in the negative sense of the term, which denies the complexity and emergent character of human culture and therefore of human nature, to hand us back the idea, no longer of a human being, but of an individual of the human species from the physiological point of view that, quite honestly, they consider as not so different from chimpanzees from whom we are separated by only 3 percent of DNA.

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Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), § 62. 2. Jaegwon Kim, “Being Realistic about Emergence” in Clayton & Davies (eds.) The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis. from Science to Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192. 3. Oren Harman, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). 4. Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015). 5. Telmo Piovani, Homo Sapiens e altre catastrofi: Per una archeologia della globalizzazione (Roma: Meltemi, 2015).

CHAPTER 4

v

Memes and Simulacra

The Meme The notion of meme indicates a cultural trait that reproduces itself, can be preserved, and is subject to selection. It appeared in various forms over the course of a century before it was expressed in the successful designation of “meme.” The intuition of the existence of cultural traits, which could spread geographically and temporally within a culture or from one culture to another, has its roots in nineteenth-century culture, even before the emergence of Darwin’s evolutionism. These were mostly theories about the origins of words and languages, which led to the birth of the famous Indo-European theory, but they also went into the spread of religious traits in archaic or even prehistoric times. Max Müller was one of the first to take an interest in these aspects, especially in relation to Indian culture. But the real breakthrough was made only by Friedrich Ratzel with his idea of Kulturkreis (although everyone remembers him for the much less successful Lebensraum idea that Hitler so liked). After studying Darwin’s theories, he became convinced that cultural traits spread from a central area, in which they originated, to other areas through trade and migration, while cultural complexes spread through migrations of peoples or invasions. The interesting thing about this theory is that it already distinguishes two levels of individuals and groups, like memes and memeplexes today. These so-called diffusionist theories were influential for a time, going on to interest even famous anthropologists such as Leo Frobenius or Franz Boas, but then fell out of favor, especially after Reverend Wilhelm Schmidt tried to bend their use to the demonstration of universal primitive monotheism, which drew criticism from the entire positivist intelligentsia and cast a shadow over the whole of diffusionism. 125

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Another line of meme development comes from Gabriel Tarde, who discusses these issues in Les lois de l’imitation (1890), which we will discuss later. Then it should be noted that an area related to aesthetics, such as art history, has been one of the most sensitive in this regard. In fact, we can recall Henry Focillon’s Vie des Formes (1934), in which forms are assumed to have a life of their own and whose modes of temporal evolution and spatial organization are studied. Also interesting are the developments carried out by his student Henry Kubler in The Shape of Time (1962). However, the real father of memetic cultural aesthetics is undoubtedly Aby Warburg, with his project of an atlas of forms called Mnemosyne, begun in 1924 and left unfinished at his death in 1929. Warburg also referred to the studies of evolutionary biologist Richard Semon, from whom he takes the term “engram,” and seems to have wanted to shape a new discipline, which Agamben, in an essay on this topic, calls the “science without a name.”1 Perhaps that name could be memetics or memetic aesthetics, which links forms to cultural content. Instead, the term “Meme” was coined by Dawkins in his successful book The Selfish Gene (1976). At the same time, however, other scholars were also working on similar ideas, even using the key parallel to the gene, as in the case of geneticist Cavalli-Sforza, who from the 1960s began to expand his studies of genetics to interdisciplinary research that included anthropology, ethnology, and linguistics. He thus began to study the linguistic spread of words as if they were genes. Finally, another concomitant theory was that of French anthropologist Dan Sperber, who spoke of an epidemiology of ideas. As is often the case then in these cases, the meme proposal was not an isolated case that emerged from nowhere but a discourse that appeared because the time was ripe. The term “meme” was the most successful, even being embraced by established philosophers such as Dennett; however, it was also opposed and still sometimes is, as in the case of two leading scholars of cultural evolution, such as Boyd and Richerson, who argue that they still prefer the traditional notion of a cultural trait. Perhaps it is time to make a more impersonal use of the term meme by avoiding confining it to Dawkins’ discourse alone and making it, so to speak, a “common good” to be used in different meanings as well, that is, allowing it to evolve in turn. “Meme” did not appear in a central part of the book The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976), which was instead aimed at riding on the interest in genetics and attacking theories of group selection. At the heart of the book, however, was the idea intended to overturn the hermeneutic perspective of the gene/body relationship. It is not the body that uses genes to reproduce, but only genes that build bodies to win the struggle of natural selection and reproduce. Genes are self-replicators, not interested in anything other than

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their own reproduction. Actually, the issue of hermeneutical relativism is very old. It is a matter of seeing the bottle as half empty or half full. However, while not changing anything in factual reality and not proposing a different theory from those then in circulation, a reversal of perspective can mark a momentous turning point, such as the one we saw between subject and object. Today, in fact, we are still living in the hermeneutic turn introduced by that book, in which the protagonism of genes advances more and more every day, putting politically dangerous elements such as eugenics and racial theories back on track. The meme was just an insight that Dawkins added at the end of the book, imagining transposing the same reasoning and reversal of perspective into the realm of culture, considering that cultural traits, since they are passed on, can also be regarded as self-replicating genes. In this case, the reversal that was being configured was even more resounding. In fact, all scientific theories of culture have always been characterized by considering all entities, which we can call “spiritual,” as products of humans, as opposed to religious theories, which instead admit the existence of autonomous spiritual entities. Thus, all cultural reality, from the perspectives of positivist and materialist studies, always fell into the object dimension. To think of the cultural or spiritual as a subject was to be a mystic, a religious person, a spiritualist, or finally a Platonist. The idea of memes, on the other hand, goes to consider cultural and/or spiritual entities as subjects in a completely materialist way, without concessions to religious metaphysics. Memes are subjects as much as genes or organisms are subjects, insofar as they are shaped by the laws of evolution. This conception has a fundamental implication: culture and its manifestations are not a product of the human subject but follow an autonomous drift, which sees humans as both objects and environment. The subject itself can be said to be a construct of the evolutionary drift of memes, so that the subject is an object. Dawkins unintentionally opened the way to conceptions that were close to those then advocated in French poststructuralism, which he probably detested, by philosophers such as Foucault, who argued that the subject is the product of a cultural device. So beyond the barricades of an episteme divided by the parameters of the two cultures, similar positions were actually maturing. And that is why we today, defying skepticism, if not scandal, from the two traditions, dare to propose a theory that jumps over fences.

The Aesthetics of Memi-Simulacra For Kant, aesthetics, in its proper sense, is the study of the faculty of feeling a priori. It is no accident that he speaks of transcendental aesthetics in the

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Critique of Pure Reason, where it concerns the a priori categories of space and time. Otherwise, what was then conventionally called “aesthetics,” for Kant, was not a simple matter of the senses and thus did not fall under the simple analysis of the faculty of sensibility, but found its theoretical node in the faculty of judgment and, in this case, in that of reflective judgment. Similarly, following this logic, memes-simulacra are connected to the aesthetic realm in two different ways. In the sense of the empirical act, mediated by the faculty of sensibility, they are posited as mnestic objects or structured information that seek to penetrate via the senses within the mind, which constitutes their habitat of sedimentation and replication. Now, this character, however, as Kant rightly points out, is not properly “aesthetic” in the modern sense. Indeed, it is not the rules of sensibility, which allow access to such information, that govern either the beautiful or the pleasant. It is no accident that today, to indicate this, we speak of meme viscosity and not beauty. Such viscosity also includes the indispensable mnestic fixation. Indeed, the meme, in order to replicate, must first be able to take root in the mnestic surface, just like a virus. Replication in the case of the virus involves actual fabrication; differently, in the case of the meme, replication consists of two steps: memorization of the meme and its expression in communication. As can be seen, the strictly “aesthetic” aspect, in the literal sense, is only one part of memetic replication. This involves the fact that memetic information must have characteristics suitable to be grasped by the senses, which entails criteria of “good” usability, that is, good compatibility with the senses. However, it would be wrong to think that the sounds that are most easily heard, or the most conspicuous colors, are those most conducive to information penetration. We are constantly bombarded with memes, which therefore act in competition with each other, and we are also automatically inclined to make a selection or filter. Now, this filter acts just strongly where these are most crowded because it operates in terms of attention. A bright sign in a quiet little town, where they are not used, attracts everyone’s attention. However, if these signs begin to increase, their effect will tend to diminish. So attention tends to be inversely proportional to the multiplication of signs occupying the same sensitivity band. So it is under these filtering conditions that the action of evolution deploys its plastic intelligence. Indeed, a selection mechanism is activated that promotes, in the chaotically differentiated proliferation, the solutions most likely to cross these barriers. However, this is still not enough. Information must be storable; otherwise, it is lost and vanishes into thin air. Again, the information must adapt to the properties of the mnestic surface. However, this is no longer a discourse of literal aesthetics in the Kantian sense, that is, it is

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no longer a discourse of pure sensibility. Here we enter the field of another faculty resoundingly neglected by Kant, which is the faculty of remembering. Again, we find, in cultural productions, many mnemotechnical elements that testify to the action of this selection. Consider, for example, the case of rhyme in poetry. However, it is not always true that what is most easily remembered succeeds, again because of the inflectional tendency we mentioned earlier. In this case, we are not talking about attention but rather about interest. From this point of view, identifying memes with advertising jingles or so-called “memes” of the internet is a very reductive representation since it refers to memes of a completely irrelevant character. Instead, it is the memetic complexes, which we learn slowly, sometimes through study, that act most deeply. In certain cases, in the absence of a spontaneous reaction of interest, a specific social injunction arises, aimed at the installation of the meme in memory. Then, finally, there is the problem of meme output. This is a practical and productive form, which can also include the use of technologies outside the organism. Here again, the principle of the most suitable being for the means involved in such a stage does not work. In such a case, such a suitable being would go under the name of ease. Clearly, what is easier, in the absence of other outputs, might prevail over the difficult, but, again, the crowding of easy tasks is hit by another kind of filter, which is that of performativity. The easy-performing meme is also unlikely to be a competitive meme in input for another subject. In this sense, the meme in the output must be not easy to perceive, not easy to remember, not easy to perform, but worthy of expression. Then there are many cases of memes that are only absorbed without being reproduced, somewhat like the worker ants in an anthill, which are sterile and do not reproduce because it is the queen that specializes in reproduction. Similarly, many memes, especially those belonging to memeplexes or memetic complexes, are only “imparted” but not replicated by all their recipient subjects. In fact, in these cases, the role of queen bees is played by teaching memes, which operate by specializing particular human subjects in the replication and impartation of them to subjects, who in turn will not be able to teach them. In complex societies, the complex and layered structure of memetic formations necessitates such specialized memes, which in turn produce those specialized subjects who are the teaching staff. The meme can also reproduce itself by producing technical goods. Technical goods are all those tangible and intangible goods that are the product of the transformation of other elements. Memes have a relationship with material entities that is reminiscent of the relationship that financial derivatives have with their object, which is called “subject.” Derivatives in their

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typological form are also memes. We can say in general that the materially present entity is the subject of the meme. From this point of view, the individual has a dual identity. On the one hand, the individual is an organic unity, an organism endowed with various organs that cooperate in the homeostatic balance of vital functions. This identity responds to a type of individuation, such as that thought of by Simondon, which is immanent to the material constitution of the entity itself. On the other hand, we have the individual as a memetic formation. The individual, insofar as it has what is formally communicable, becomes a memetic product and a meme itself. The most basic fact that testifies to this reality is to have a name and even a surname to specify ourselves. However, since the establishment of modern society, even these data alone are no longer enough, and identifying data have multiplied with the expansion of the infosphere, which is also a memosphere. However, our name normally circulates among a few people. That is, we have, as memes, a low replication potential. Only a few come to optimize their memetic constitution, proliferating their image and name to the four corners of the earth. This also serves us to understand the difference between the genetic human individual and the memetic human individual, just from the point of view of proliferation, which makes it immediately obvious. The genetic individual allows the proliferation of its genes by reproducing itself through offspring. The memetic individual, on the other hand, reproduces itself in the form of the replication of its own name and image through fame. This fame, if it is sufficiently appreciated, can also enter the genetic code of the culture itself and be passed on to posterity through teaching within the system of school education. This is all the more true in the case of the artist, who is a specialized memetic operator. What does the artist aspire to? Either fame or glory, and that is the memetic proliferation of his works and name. We cannot understand art if we do not take this aspect into account, the importance of which is unknowingly emphasized again and again in art literature. Thus, the human animal has the genetic goal of reproducing itself by making offspring; the human being, on the other hand, has the memetic goal of reproducing itself by promoting its name and image, making itself known for something. When, for example, Michel Foucault speaks of devices, which are producers of subjectivity, we must trace this activity to a mechanism of memetic production. Institutions are memetic complexes, shaping the memetic structuring of human beings according to different aspects and giving them partial identities. The school produces the student, who acts like a student, the hospital produces the patient, the barracks produces the

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soldier, and so on. That is, all these institutional places also have ontological functions, some of which concern aesthetics, such as the spectator or the listener. These partial identities suck the individual into his singularity within the preformed canons of the typos. Each of these partial identities is an ontological state corresponding to an essence. This essence is also a set of practical instructions, which must produce certain behaviors and prohibit others. Institutions, then, are connected to role identities that we automatically impersonate as consummate actors, and these roles are supported not only by identifying information of the 0/1 type but also by values that are continuous and not stepped functions, that is, they are of the +/− type. Aesthetics, then, is interested in the fact that the memeplex produces specific roles reserved for the enjoyment of works of various kinds, which affect various senses and which, however, are subject to a judgment, which is always a judgment of value, even when they appear to have stepped functions, as in the case of art/non-art. In fact, the 0/1 function of non-art/art, can always be converted to a +/− function, in which below a certain degree one cannot even speak of art and above a certain degree one can begin to raise artistic value. Partial identities can also be converted into values and, thus, into functions. The less one acts as a student, the less one is a good student, the more one acts as a student, the more one is a good student, and so on for all other functions. These roles can be temporary or permanent, such as those related to the type of task one performs in society. In an organicist comparison, one could say that individuals are like stem cells, which then develop almost irreversibly toward conformations related to a particular role, which in turn is linked to an institutional function within society. In aesthetics, what interests us is the production of identification as an artist and the ontological production of the work of art. The artist is an institutionally produced form of subjectivity, but in a more fluid way than other social identifications. This is because the artist, deriving as a figure from the sacred realm, from the inspired aedo, and even earlier from the shaman, cannot be a mere graduate from the system of positive law but must also have an extra-institutional, outsider’s path, something on which a whole rhetoric of Romantic derivation insists greatly. Paradigmatic is the case of Beuys, who embodied the shaman artist and, at the same time, was a pillar of the Düsseldorf Academy. So the social and memetic production of the artist is a complex issue, and the problem of natural talent and inspiration on the one hand versus learning and study on the other is part of a debate that begins in antiquity and reaches all the way to the eighteenth century with the question of genius. The artist-poet also needs something natural in addition to technique; however, this happens, not because there

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is a natural drive that legitimizes him or her independently as if they were agrapta nomina, but because this component is demanded by the legitimizers, the institutions themselves, and thus by critics and art historians, who intend to produce a social figure that always stands on the border, because it is from this position that he or she derives part of his or her justification to exist. The social and memetic production of the work of art therefore first passes memetically through the production of the artist, who alone, through such ontological consistency, is legitimized to produce ontologically artistic works. However, it is said that the artist becomes such through the works, and not only that the works of art become such through the artist. We find ourselves seemingly caught in a vicious circle. In reality, this circularity is only apparent. In fact, the process of legitimation is first focused on the works, which are to all intents and purposes memes, even if, in the case of the visual arts, they are not reproduced as a fetishistic object but only as an image. In this case, the work, in a material sense, is the physical medium of the meme, but not like the book for writing. Pictures have a close relationship with the work because they constitute its principium individuationis, and this is crucial since the uniqueness of the work plays an essential role in the constitution of its fetishistic value, giving it what Benjamin called an aura. This aspect could be related to the fact that works of visual art are collected in collections, where, even apart from other valuations, the value varies according to the rarity of the piece. This also implies that the visual artwork is very susceptible to being devalued in relation to its material replication. The greater the number of copies in circulation, the lower their value in the art market. This would seem to contradict the principle of memetic replication based on the relationship between value and circulation condensed into the concept of success. Have we seen that this applies to the circulation of books, to movie viewers, to reruns of a play, to streams of songs, and to works of visual art? In the meantime, success is a component of value, but it is merely quantitative and thus subject to qualitative valuations, which in this case also affect price. However, this does not mean that such works cannot also be successful through replication, but not at the level of physical copies but rather representations. It is for this reason that Benjamin’s talk about a crisis of auraticity never came true and thus proved unfounded. The multiplication of the image does not compete on the same level with the principle of rarity of the authentic work. So the two are not inversely proportional. The clearest refutation of this aura crisis comes to us precisely from the digital art world, which in theory would be constitutively replicable but which today can be reduced to a new form of singularity and

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uniqueness through blockchain technology, such as an NFT work that was auctioned at Christie’s for $69.3 million. Art shows itself to be a privileged field of inquiry for the analysis of memetic dynamics because it has for its object precisely form, which constitutes the architecture of meme replication. If, for example, geology has for its object the structure of the earth’s crust, the arts do not have a material or practical object that is offered as an objective natural fact but instead have as its object forms, which in turn can have the most disparate objects as well as none at all. In any case, the arts are evaluated on the basis of their formal outcomes, where form should be understood in a very broad sense so that it can also relate to a practice or project or event. In fact, contemporary art, from the Dadaists onward, plays with the pragmatics of communication connected to the art system, which has been very useful for scholars of aesthetics because, in doing so, it has brought to light the devices of the art system and the procedures of artistic legitimation, which Romanticism, on the other hand, had attempted to conceal in order to produce a mysterious and numinous image of art and the artist through the so-called Kunstreligion. This means that not only is art not like geology, all unbalanced in its constitution on its own object of inquiry, but also the artist is not like the geologist. The artist, much more than the geologist, is immersed as such in memetic dynamics, even in terms of his own person and role. For a geologist to be such, it is enough to have a degree in geology and to be recognized as such by the professional order of geologists. After that, the geologist usually has no interest in becoming famous or even a star. For the artist, on the other hand, it is different. To become an artist is not only to be recognized as such, but also to have the power to produce works of art that are already legitimately so, without the need to submit each of his works for approval, giving them the artistic character himself, just as a central bank can print money without having to wait, in order for the money to have value, for government approval. The comparison is all the more apt when one considers that such works then turn into economic value by becoming cash on sale. The artist, then, does not just want to become famous out of mere vanity, which is part of human memetic character anyway. The artist also needs to become famous out of a definite memetic necessity, for he must transfigure himself into the meme in order to become a generator of authorized memetic devices, that is, a producer of works of art that enjoy the character of artfulness from the outset. It is no accident that Vasari dedicated a book to artists based on the genre of a collection of the lives of illustrious men.

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Critique of the Meme as an Analogue of the Gene The meme was thought by Dawkins to be an analogue of the gene. However, this analogy cannot be taken literally. The notion of the meme is now well established, but we need to understand how much and how the development of a neo-Darwinist theory of culture is possible. So far, we have used the notion of meme in a very vague and generic sense of a unit of information that is subject to the dynamics of replication and differentiation. From this point of view, it is assimilable to similar notions such as cultural trait, idea, collective representation, imitation, and simulacrum. However, if we get into the specifics of Dawkins’ conception, then we should also try to take the analogy with genes more seriously. First, we need to consider that, in nature, genes contain information for the construction of the body, but the body contains much more than just genes. The body is not made of genes alone; the cell itself shows us that DNA is contained only in the nucleus of the cell. In the examples often given about memes, we find messages trying to persuade us to replicate them. So there is a piece of selfreplication information in them. In a first sense, then, one could say that the meme analogous to the gene contained in the message is represented only by that replication instruction. The rest then would be the cultural body reproduced by the meme. However, what about many novels or poems that contain no invitation at all? It could be argued that the replication device is hidden in a relationship that parasitically exploits psychological and social mechanisms capable of triggering replication, as in the other aforementioned case of the advertising jingle. In this case, however, it is the whole jingle that creeps into memory. In other cases, however, as in pop songs, it is only the refrain that sticks in the memory and carries with it all the rest of the song. The same function was performed in opera by arias, which crept into the memory as parasitic melodies and yet allowed the whole opera to be required to be replicated. The same function is performed by famous scenes from movies, which prompt one to see and have seen movies, or by famous passages from books, which prompt one to read and have them read. This means that there is a part of the meme that opportunistically passes through the active part. Then at this point, there are two hypotheses: one is that the recitative of the work, the body of the text, and many other parts that are not easily memorized are the body that the meme intends to reproduce; the second is that they are nonetheless parts of the memetic code, comparable to the so-called junk-dna, that are not coding, but nevertheless can intervene in various ways in development. So there would be coding and non-coding memetic parts. The solution could be in the middle. The coding part of the meme, could have the function of carrying with it all

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the rest of the meme. So the rest of the meme too, later, can have a coding role. For example in the case of a song at the beginning, only the chorus attracts the listeners allowing the whole song to be repeated. Later the rest of the song will also have the ability to become influential by entering the coding of other songs. So a memetic body is the active meme endowed with greater viscosity, such as the air of the opera, which is just the pick to open the door of attention, or the crow’s beak bridge used to hook the ship and invade it. In this sense, the meme body is still memetic code, but then what is being constructed from all these memetic codes? So the goal then would be to colonize the ship, take it, but also modify or even rebuild it. But what then would this ship, or at any rate, this object built by the memes? The answer is the psyche and what we can philosophically call the function of subjectivity. In the world of religious sects, we always find the presence of specific messages aimed at proselytizing. These serve to bring the adept closer and to involve him more and more until the disciplinary and dogmatic corpus is imposed on him, an action that may be preceded by an initiatory rite that is aimed at imposing on the adept a new social identity, that is, at transforming him as a memetic unit. The action of religion is very complex because it is aimed at the production of the believing subject. It is no accident, for example, that “propaganda” originates as a religious act, but it would be naïve to assume that religion exhausts its memetic bearing in propaganda. It is necessary to capture the follower, but the bulk of memetic transmission and transformation of the memetic structure of personality will be realized only later. So the memetic body of the cult spills over and takes possession of that of the follower, taking control of it. This happens in second-generation religions; those that find existing cults already have to proselytize. In first-generation religions involving indigenous ancestral cults, the process of religious culture formation developed hand in hand with the process of civilization. Fine arts arise within this memetic macrosystem and are used a fortiori by second-generation ones, which always see the figure of a deified or semi-divine human in the role of founder. The effectiveness of the artistic meme therefore on the former rests on its structural coherence with the mythic-sacral system, such that the art has no value in its own right beyond that of instrumental efficiency in conveying the religious message. To have value and meaning in its own right, this religious value must be weakened. In the first stage, religion also controls accuracy in the replication of the message that goes by the name of orthodoxy as observance of precepts. This is very important for a second issue, which is that of Lamarkian or Weismannian evolution, which according to Blackmore corresponds to two types of instruction: copy the product (Lamrakian) and copy the

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instructions (Weismannian). “Copy instruction” serves to give more precise and stable information through repetition, where instead Lamarkian evolution can vary continuously as in a “Chinese wispers game.” In the field of the arts, we find both of these two types of drift combined in the same situation. In the case of sacred art, for example, both exist. On the one hand, it tends toward schematic forms that can also be controlled in terms of procedures. This, then, is a type of upstream control that is followed by a downstream one relating to any errors made in execution. This means that the problem of controlling memetic proliferation was felt not only in dance and song but also in images. In Far Eastern painting, writing has strict rules of execution, and since ideogrammatic painting is made up of drawings, figurative painting is also treated similarly and often associated with poetry. So there are precise procedures, for example, to draw a bamboo cane with its leaves, a mountain with its trees, and so on. One of the problems faced by Renaissance artists who wanted to remake ancient painting was that they still had the products to imitate, but they no longer had the techniques and procedures, in other words, what Focillon called “the hand.” This meant that no matter how hard they tried, the figures were never like the ancient ones. In the end, neither resulted in a different academic classicism, and not even the most experienced authors of the eighteenth century, at the time when with the excavations of Pompeii ancient painting came back into fashion with neoclassicism, were able to render the naturalness of ancient painting. In art, however, another problem also arises, and that is not only that of the preservation of the meme but that of its adaptive change through innovation. Innovation is considered such only when the change is adaptive; otherwise, it is considered a mistake and does not initiate a new current. The earliest exponents of such adaptive change take on historical significance, which in turn turns them into models to be imitated. Painting, then, can root its receptive efficacy in religion or even in a relatively conventional system of expectations. The idea that art shows itself generically to taste and does not appear within a system of prejudices, assumptions, and preordained expectations is part of the aesthetic ideology of the eighteenth century, which wants to place the question of beauty in the terms of a judgment of taste of an abstract individual in the face of certain forms. The situation that memetic analysis shows us, on the other hand, is more like that described by information theory, where information passes from an encoder to a decoder, and what the decoder is unable to decode is derecognized as noise and is detrimental to value. What is clear is that the encoder and the decoder are already part of the same system. So art has

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never historically addressed itself to the simple transcendental subject but to subjects prepared within the operation of certain memetic machines. Outside of such assumptions, one does not convey the beautiful because one does not understand its meaning, and it becomes difficult for one to have even the merely pleasant. Thus, even the pleasantness of the ditty, although easier to transmit than the beautiful, far from being the basis of aesthetic appreciation, is also a mode of memetic transmission that requires a reception that is somehow already predisposed, or at least in a condition of openness of meaning.

Memes and Simulacra Between Repetition and Difference In 1968, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition was published in France. This text constitutes the founding act of a true philosophy of difference. Before him, Heidegger had spoken of the difference between being and entity, and Derrida in 1963 introduced the concept of différance in his well-known polemical text against Foucault, who is also the one who wrote the introduction to Difference and Repetition. So we can well say that the philosophy of difference was born in France, marked immediately by a division: on the one hand the Derridean line and on the other the Deleuze-Foucault line. On one side there is the reference to Husserl’s phenomenology, and on the other side there is primarily the debate on Nietzsche’s eternal return, something that will lead to the notion of simulacrum. We are also interested in the Deleuzian line here because Deleuze, in addition to referring to Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, refers to the work of Gabriel Tarde. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, when Deleuze was still philosophically in his prime; however, Deleuze did not even notice the existence of the notion of meme. Indeed, discourses on memetics began to circulate only much later in the continental sphere, in the 1990s, especially after cyberpunk, after the idea that all information could be thought of as a computer virus acting on our minds. In the 1990s, the writer was working with Mario Perniola, the only Italian philosopher traceable to the philosophy of simulacra and the philosophy of difference in the Deleuzian sense. Nevertheless, neither to me nor to him then did the connection that united the concept of meme to the concept of simulacrum appear clear. This section will instead discuss this connection and its importance, so much so that one could say that they are two different names for the same thing. To show the evidence for this, we must precisely go back from Deleuze to Tarde, since we could say, in evolutionary jargon, that Tarde and Dawkins have in their theoretical training a common ancestor, which is Darwin. In a sense, the first discoverer of what we now

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call memes was Tarde himself. Tarde was a philosopher and sociologist who has remained famous in particular for one of his works, The Laws of Imitation (1890). That was the time, as we have seen in cultural anthropology, of theories in which the archè of society and culture was sought. This archè, for Tarde, consisted of imitation. Human society is a cultural society based on mimesis, which enables communication. However, Tarde does not speak of representation, as Durkheim did; it was still too early to speak of information; he could not even imagine a genetic-type model because then the concept of the gene was only in embryos. Tarde titles the first chapter of his book, “Universal Repetition,” and the fourth paragraph of it, “Differences between the Forms of Repetition.” Here he explains that the two axes of the drift of imitations consist precisely of repetition and difference. This means, on the one hand, that he had already identified a principle of evolutionary drift in imitations, which replicated themselves but also differed in this replication. On the other hand, this means that Deleuze’s debt to Tarde is much more important than we usually think, since it concerns the fundamental concepts of his work and draws its very title from it, for “difference and repetition” could have been the subtitle of Tarde’s book. Tarde notes that imitation or repetition of forms is present within biological evolution itself, since living things reproduce hereditarily with the same conformation. Society, regardless of culture, also includes forms of functional reproduction. For all these reasons, he speaks of universal imitation, implicit even in the life forms of the plant and animal worlds. He also analyzes the dynamics of proliferation with geometric progression, as in epidemics. So he already comes to think of an epidemiology of imitations (which anticipates Dan Sperber’s epidemiology of ideas). Again referring to Darwin, Tarde talks about natural selection related to heredity and variability. Thus, competition, heritability, and variability go into the evolutionary context of imitations. The proliferation of differences in the evolutionary drift of imitations, however, also involves the spread of similarities and analogies. He already brings examples drawn from word change in the linguistic drift (anticipating the work of Cavalli-Sforza). Tarde, then, is the unknown father of the whole family of theories we now call memetics.

The Simulacra The concept of simulacrum, historically, derives from the Epicurean theory of perception transmitted to us by Lucretius. It is likely that Lucretius translated with the Latin simulacrum the Greek eidolon, which had been used as

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a key concept to denote the copy of the ideal typos in Platonism, which, however, had also shaped another term that was idolum. Hobbes, for example, does not speak of simulacra but of idola. In the philosophical journals of the first half of the 1900s, simulacra is mentioned only in relation to Lucretius’ Epicureanism. Lucretius believed that corpuscles were detached from bodies, which reproduced their form by going to our senses. This was an incredibly advanced theory for that time, because he had already guessed what science had said, namely, that light has a wavelike and corpuscular nature at the same time and that light rays are reflected from bodies and go to strike our eyes. For Lucretius, these casts were physical entities that were made of corpuscles and had precisely the name of simulacra. They are then connected to the phantasmata, that is, the forms of things that we see in our eyes and minds. In the postwar period, this concept suddenly came back into fashion, immediately breaking out of its original niche, and this happened at the same time in Europe and America. How come? Meanwhile, it should be said that it developed in different spheres. In Europe, it developed in the artistic-philosophical sphere, thanks to the painter, writer, and philosopher Pierre Klossowski, who used it in reference to Nietzsche’s thought, while in the US, it was taken up in the sphere of science fiction literature. In 1962, Klossowski published Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody. Klossowski took up simulacrum not from studies on Lucretius but from a text by the anthropologist Roger Callois on play, Les jeux et les hommes (1958), in which he used the term to designate games of an imitative character (mimicry). In the US, a little later, in 1964, two science fiction books came out almost synchronously, hinging from the title on the concept of simulacrum. The first was Simulacron 3 by Daniel F. Galouye, and the other was The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick. The two books use the concept of simulacra in two different meanings. Philip Dick uses it in the Lucretian sense of a body copy. The dictatorial president of a great Euro-American Atlantic empire is actually an artificial copy of a human being. Galouye, on the other hand, speaks of something more global, that is, entire worlds. Simulacron is the name of a supercomputer that has produced an entire simulated universe. It turns out later that there are several worlds inside each other. Two films were born from this novel: Reiner Fassbinder’s The World on a String (1973) and Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor (1999), but much more famous is another film that is based on the same basic insight, and that is the Matrix. Dick sought to renew a tradition of humanoid robots that had already appeared in famous prewar films, such as the Maria of Metropolis (1927) or the protagonist of L’inhumaine (1924). In contrast, Galouye’s discourse was much more innovative. It was presumably based on two new technologies: the computer and

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television. Galouye’s idea, destined to have great future success, is that even our reality can be thought of as a great simulation and thus a great simulacrum of the world, or simulacral world, anticipating the Matrix. Instead, to understand the development of the philosophy of simulacra, we must rewind the tape to before Klossowski, namely to Nietzsche. Let us make it clear right away that Nietzsche never mentioned simulacra. Nietzsche died at the dawn of the twentieth century. His fame was consolidated in the first decades of the century. After a focus on the Superman, or for phrases such as “God is dead,” for categories such as the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the will to power, there remained on the table more obscure topics, such as perspectivism, the idea that the real world has become a fable, but above all remains the knot of his Enlightenment that caught him in the summer of 1881, during a walk, during his stay in Silvaplana, Engadine. Although Nietzsche was still young— in fact, he was 37 years old—he felt burdened by many physical and moral sufferings, which forced him into a life of sickness, and he sought refreshment in vain in holiday resorts. Nietzsche affirmed the importance of overthrowing the Platonic scheme that devalued the physical world into submission to the ideal world, just as he believed that Christianity had continued to carry out this overthrow by adding the gregarious values of the subordinates against the self-asserting values of the aristocrats. The consequence of such devaluation and mystification is a form of value nihilism. Western people, instead of loving life, joy, nature, matter, and the earth, despises all that and exalts a supposed afterlife, a world of the dead, an ideal heaven, and an immaterial dimension, all of which would be nothing but impostures. According to him, one had to love the immanent world, the world of vital impulses, even if this world is sometimes, or even often, bitter, and painful. One had to affirm the positivity of desire, even if, as the Buddhists (and other nihilists according to him) say, this involves suffering and attachment. Nietzsche’s solution, in fact, the opposite of the Buddhist one, is not to avoid desire in order to avoid suffering but to also accept suffering in order to accept life, because if you reject life, you invoke death and nothingness. According to him, the will to power, being unable to have what it wants in order not to give up wanting, preferred to want nothingness (nihilism). Then it is necessary to get out of this perversion of will and return to what he calls “sense of the earth.” However, one fine day during a walk, he is thunderstruck by an insight. Rendered freely, the speech is roughly as follows: you say you want to rediscover this life and give it back the value that Platonists and Christians have taken from it, but would you, with your life of sickness and suffering, be ready to relive every moment of your life for eternity? Would you be able to say such a strong “yes” to life? We know where

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such a type of Enlightenment comes from: from the mythical tortures of the Greek tradition, such as the torture of Tantalus, Sisyphus, or Prometheus, tortures in which a cycle of suffering is endlessly repeated. At the same time, he feels challenged by an abysmal demon, like Oedipus meeting the sphinx on the way to Thebes. In tragic terms, the argument is: would you be willing to relive everything eternally, or would you not rather say, “It would have been better for us never to have been born?” (Sophocles). This could likely be the classical cultural substratum of the Nietzschean electrocution. In this universal repetition, then, one must first trace a motif of moral inspiration, which is the primary key to understanding all Nietzschean reflection. However, Nietzsche was so impressed by this illumination that he felt it must also have the value of naturalistic revelation. So he searched the scientific literature for matches. He thought he had found a universal natural principle alternative to Darwin’s, which, in his eyes, appeared too bourgeois. Nietzsche believed he had discovered that nature repeated itself continuously and cyclically. This, too, is an old idea, known from the time of the mystery cults. However, he did not want to refer to the well-known soteriology of the death/resurrection cycle, which seemed to him to be too prone to cults such as Buddhism and Christianity. He wanted to think of a completely immanent dimension of the return of the same without transmigrating souls. He thought of a recursiveness so immanent as to be almost overwhelming and oppressive. Nietzsche, although he had studied Haeckel, had not grasped the dynamics of heredity and was completely unaware of the first steps of what would be called genetics. He could not even suspect the idea of a gene blindly driven by nature’s will to power, driven only to replicate itself again and again, theoretically infinite times. However, the question of recursiveness without a clear beginning, without a Platonic pattern, was another way in which Nietzsche challenged the Platonic legacy in Western thought, proposing a nature that does not copy patterns, that does not tend toward a purpose, but blindly and stubbornly repeats itself immemorially from any origin. In fact, toward the end of his existence, Nietzsche had planned a work that was to be titled The Will to Power, of which we are left with only many preparatory notes, many of which deal with the Platonic opposition between the “true world” and the “apparent world.” Nietzsche was always bitterly critical of what he considered to be an imposture, consisting of making people believe that the real and natural world is merely a sensible appearance, without essence, because it is subject to continual mutation, and that the truly existing world is that of ideas. Plato made people believe that the real world did not matter, that it was only an illusion, an imperfect copy of a “truer” world made of ideas. In contrast, Nietzsche, who stands as a true

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materialist in this, claimed that only the real world, the physical world, was true and that the ideal world was a world of “nothingness,” and therefore was a nihilistic world. However, in a well-known and controversial fragment in which he tried to trace the fortunes of this Platonic imposture, he asked: after Western thought has emancipated the phenomenal world and thus rehabilitated the “apparent world,” dismissing the “true world” as a metaphysical fiction, is it not the case that with the “true world” the West also erases the “apparent world?” This, of course, does not mean, as has been erroneously claimed, that Nietzsche believed that as the world of ideas disappeared, so did the real world. As we have shown elsewhere,2 Nietzsche’s argument is different. He does not believe that the bed, the shoes, or the walls have become unreal or illusory, but he believes that all this is in danger of losing its value and meaning. According to Nietzsche, we are then in the noontime hour, when the shadow is shortest. This means that things are shown to be meaningless in their mere presence. This is a total nihilism of values. In life, there is neither an end nor a destiny, but only things as they are, in their randomness. For him, however, this is the point that can mark the transition to new values, based on the blind will of life, nature, and the reality of the world we inhabit. This transvaluation of all values in the direction of worldly values is what Zarathustra advocates. And indeed, that famous fragment ends with “INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.” What then does this discourse have to do with the discourse on eternal return? Nietzsche no longer thinks of a world whose meaning is based on the relationship essence/copy, truth/ appearance, but a physical, natural world in which everything simply repeats itself in which everything is a copy of itself. This nature that copies itself and repeats itself by blindly copying itself, is the nature of eternal return, and this blindly returning copy is what Klossowski thought of as the simulacrum. So the simulacrum in this sense is not something unreal, but reality itself in its repetitive, self-replicating dimension. Reality is not made of copies of something else, as modern phenomenalism still thinks, according to which the subject perceives things as copies of an unattainable reality and cannot consider their essence, which, in measure of their appearance, reason why “being is appearing.” Repetition goes beyond this relationship. Just as nature repeats itself, ideas repeat themselves, and words repeat themselves. Now Deleuze adds, thanks to Tarde, another piece to this ontology of repetition. Nature repeats itself, ideas repeat themselves, words repeat themselves, images repeat themselves, all imitations lack an original that grounds them, but they also vary; they differ. Here we must be careful because the difference in repetition thought by Tarde is precisely a Darwinist difference, in which imitation is never perfect and thus becomes subject to diversifying drift.

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In contrast, Deleuze, while also considering this aspect from a purely ontological point of view, attempts to move out of the ontology of classes and universals and in the direction of an ontology of singularity. And so he argues that even in the repetition of the same, there is still a difference—a difference of number, a difference of event. “The simulacrum is the system in which the different relates to the different by means of the same difference,” writes Deleuze (1968) and then adds, “The system of the simulacrum affirms divergence and decentralization, so that the only unity, the only convergence of all the series is an informal chaos that includes them all.” This decentralization is precisely the system of series drifts, whose elements are self-replicating. Nevertheless, Deleuze is not thinking of Darwinist scenarios, but of coeval structuralist scenarios in which structures are given without a hierarchical ordering criterion. Indeed, he writes, “No series is privileged over another, none possesses the identity of a model, none the similarity of a copy.” Each series “is made up of differences, and communicates with others by differences of differences. Crowned anarchies replace hierarchies of representation, like nomadic distributions to sedentary distributions of representation.”3

Simulacra and Representation Functions So far, we have said that the simulacrum does not stand in relation to subject dependence, as in the case of the copy, which is dependent on and subject to the original. We have said that the simulacrum is autonomous and different as such and is not bound to an original either by ontological dependence or by some form of “participation” in the Platonic sense. All this is to make it clear that a discourse of axiological subordination and Platonic ontological hierarchy no longer applies. Copying in the conception of the simulacrum is not only about representation in its relation to the model, nor is it about the translation of that relation, which sees real nature as a subjected representation of the ideal model. Nietzsche speaks of an ever-returning natural and semiotic reality, in an eternal return, which cannot but be animated by the will to power. Many have emphasized the concept of will, which Nietzsche borrows from Schopenhauer, where the latter sees in will the principle of the physical world, its ratio, its essence, or, in a word, as Spinoza puts it, the substance. It is clear that the will grasps nature under the determination of a vital force that animates it. Nietzsche adds to this concept of will that of potency. The concept of potency is Aristotelian in origin, and it has both ontological and naturalistic significance. Power is what is concretized and substantialized in an act, but it is also an indeterminate matter that is

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determined in form. This potency, then, also alludes in nature to a processual dimension in which entities become something. In nature, entities become such by being born, growing, and then reproducing other entities, within this dynamic relationship, so that between the horse and the horse born of it, there is not a simple symmetrical and synchronic relationship of mirroring as between copy and model. The child horse is not even a cast of the parent horse; it is instead a reproduction of the same entity but different in its singularity. The point is that despite Tarde’s very advanced conception, Deleuze did not address the problem of evolutionary drift and difference as a gap in the replication of the same, a gap that goes from having a marginal value to having an essential value, because at a certain point it no longer marks a difference in the identity of the class or series but comes to mark a difference in the identity of the class and series. In this process of detachment and drift, there is also a phase of latency and ambiguity, or, we might say, perhaps in a more Deleuzian (but actually Leibnizian) way, of indiscernibility between identical and different, in which one no longer knows whether a thing is the same divergent thing or whether it is already a different thing. Instead, the problem Deleuze faces is that of the difference between the entities at the base of the pyramid of specification, namely the individual entities that are distinguished only by numerical difference. That is, at the base of this pyramid, we find the concrete, a material entity that is distinguished by its concrete characteristics, which pertain to its presence, beginning with its location in space and time. This is in fact the principium individuationis, according to Thomas Aquinas, who therefore speaks of materia signata quantitate. The real problem is that materiality and concreteness, if grasped as such, stand outside the system of logic. Pure matter is outside essence and therefore outside being, according to, for example, the neo-Platonists, not because it does not exist but precisely because, as such, it does nothing more than “exist,” without “being” anything specific. Thus, pure matter has no name. According to Duns Scotus, the only thing that can be said “logically” in such cases is that they are something indeterminate of which we can only say, “There!” They, therefore, as essence, can only have their “this-ness,” which in Latin he calls haecceitas. But the series of entities that come to constitute a class before they are classified according to that universal class are nothing but so many “this-nesses,” differing from each other only in number and quantity. We are thus in an Aristotelian context, in which the concept responds to a formal essence, which in turn is like a folder containing many singularities in relation to the differences between them. Deleuze speaks in this regard of an idea, although platonically the pattern is different. The Platonic idea is a mold, from which many specimens may be drawn that

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are essentially the same but which may vary according to the qualities of the material or according to the circumstances of copying (i.e., birth). Platonic discourse, in some ways, is not very different from genetic discourse in two senses. The first is that, as the so-called “central dogma of biology” states, DNA gives rise to an RNA cast (transcription), which in turn produces other casts that are proteins (translation). Genes, therefore, are also molecular “molds.” In a more general sense, all DNA is a mold, which, as it replicates, gives rise to bodies. Variation among bodies is due, as in Platonism, to an imperfection in copying. From this point of view, genes, since Mendel’s time, have been conceived more as mathematical entities or units of information than as physical entities, the chemical composition of which, not surprisingly, Mendel and several of his successors ignored. The gene, as a unit of information, is perfect and would never change in an ideal world. Change is due to its implementation in a concrete physical environment. It is the conditions of the sensible world that determine the accidental factors of copy alteration. This makes Plato say that all copies are even partially different from the ideal model. However, Plato fails to understand, in his idealism, that this is how models also change, evolving. Aristotle, on the other hand, splits the Platonic idea into two different issues. On the one hand, there is the question of essence (ousia), which can be established at various levels and from various points of view, but which he ultimately imputes to form, although by form, he also means the structure, for example, of the living being, with its body and organs. These entities, which obey the same formal rule, are organisms that reproduce according to that form. A horse begets a horse, which begets a horse, and so on, so there is an essence immanent to the horse (in re). However, this argument works only with beings that reproduce. Differently, with regard to the classification of other things, which are thus brought back to a common “is this,” this happens, not because of the human mind’s participation in the ideal model, but because of the selection and collection of perceptions concerning objects with homologous and homogeneous characteristics. This is why the Aristotelian concept is a collection of similar perceptions about similar or equal objects. Now, if reproduction is a principle of classification “in re,” that of conceptual classification is instead “post rem.” From the point of view of essence, then, animals adhere by themselves to a common essence, but, from the point of view of knowledge, all entities, that is, all the “what is” of things are established post rem, or a posteriori, by the intellect, which collects them into classes, which are like folders containing so many apperceptions, which, in turn, refer to so many objects, which, in themselves, are but haecceitates. Then, when Deleuze writes that “an idea is neither one nor

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multiple, but a multiplicity constituted of differential elements, of differential relations between those elements, and of singularities corresponding to those relations,” we understand well that, with the discourse of the ontology of difference and repetition, Deleuze is trying to analyze what we might call the “microphysics” of the idea or its subatomic physics. He identifies three dimensions of this microphysics of the idea: “elements, relations, singularities, constitute the three aspects of multiple reason: determinability or principle of quantitativity, mutual determination or principle of qualitativity, and complete determination or principle of potentiality.”4

Ontology of the Simulacrum-Meme Today So far, we have examined positions on the ontology of the simulacrum in the debate of the last century. Simulacra in the new century was soon forgotten. The philosophy of the simulacrum, while in principle an ontological option concerning a general approach to all entities in a relationship that went on to remove the dependence of existences on essences superior to them and therefore transcendent, should have changed the course of ontological reflection, at least for those who advocated such an approach. Probably Nietzsche, had he been able to develop his thinking, would have come to similar conclusions. The scope of this assumption, then, does not seem to have been well understood even by the simulacra philosophers of the last century. These, in fact, after having all made general discourses on the simulacrum, in which they attribute to it general characteristics of an object not dependent on a model, return, however, to using it as a synonym for industrial multiple, mass media image, multimedia representation, simulation, even presenting it as mystification, falsehood, imposture, and so on, denying, by such practical use, what had previously been claimed in theoretical statements. Klossowski, for example, speaks of simulacra to mean painted images. Baudrillard argued that signs no longer represent reality but refer to each other and convert into each other on the model of the sign par excellence, money. Money is no longer a commodity convertible into other commodities, no longer a unit of account, but pure circulation. So we no longer live in a real world, in which we use signs to refer to it, but we live in a world of signs as an end in themselves, which have produced a hyperreality that has usurped the place of the real, and that is why he says that simulacra have killed reality. So we are in the world of simulation, in which everything is false in its supposed relation to the original but is true insofar as it is simulacra. In Précession des simulacres (1978), Baudrillard writes, “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth; but it is the truth that hides the fact that there

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is no truth. The simulacrum is true.” He thus renews, with a sophistic paradox, the condemnation of the mass media civilization, which had previously been by the Frankfortians, by Greenberg, and then by Debord, through the idea of the spectacle, through which capitalism commodified the experience and daily life of the masses. From Adorno to Baudrillard, this Lutheran condemnation of the mystifying image continued. Perniola, too, having been a friend of Klossowski, Debord, and Baudrillard, took up this discourse of the simulacrum in a key in theory general, but in practice referring to the mass media, although he took an attitude, which he himself called “Catholic,” of not rejecting images. The mass media society’s proliferation of signs and representations creates a hyperreal world of self-substantiated simulacra, which is describable as Baroque, as the realm of appearance, but Perniola did not judge this fiction negatively, as if it harbors within itself an ontological evil connected with its falsity. In this sense, he is, with Klossowski, more polytheistic and more Nietzschean, giving fiction a nonnegative sense. Behind Baudrillard’s hyperreal imposture, perhaps there was also “the imaginary” theorized by Sartre, which, as an image, dialectically denies the real. We thus remain in the game of the ontological negative, as the action of denying something, which in the case of the image is reality, and the ethical negative, in which the denial of reality is constituted as false and thus as opposed to the verum et bonum. This is the main weakness of simulacrum thinking. Its ontological premises have not been given coherent development, and on the various problems, it has reverted to the modern paradigm of entity as thing. The simulacrum has been seen as a particular type of representation, typical of the society of the spectacle, in which the image is established by its power of seduction in marketing and social control through models to be imitated, no longer being held accountable for what it represents. In this sense, it becomes, like the artistic image, a “concrete,” self-referential image that copies only itself, even when it represents something, because the pragmatic value of the use of the image and its seductive power go beyond its representational function. This is how one explains, for example, all of Baudrillard’s discourse on the simulation that killed reality, making people believe that they were expressing or depicting it, when in fact they were merely replacing it. Here then, the discourse on imposture developed by Klossowski as Zarathustra’s strategy to create new values, after the noontide of accomplished nihilism, becomes instead the imposture of the image that replaces represented reality, instead of bowing to it. Summing up, then, Nietzsche posits the return of things and events as an ontological perspective, opposed to the Platonic metaphysical hierarchy,

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according to which the “true being” of things refers back to a “true world,” compared to which the physical world is an ontologically minor, apparent, essentially false, illusory world. Nietzsche, in this way, is merely reaffirming the unity of being and existence in the becoming of the physical world, which is not an appearance of transcendent essences but a self-representation, and it, if it is to be understood as a copy, is to be understood as a repeating copy of itself. So the returning copy, for Nietzsche, is not the image but reality itself, animated by the will to power. Heidegger says that the will to power then becomes a kindergarten of metaphysics, and this makes sense for two reasons: because it takes the place of the true world as the source of essence and because it is in act and thus re-proposes the priority of presence. However, one could argue with Heidegger that it is he who, with the condemnation of presence, is in fact re-proposing classical metaphysical thinking, according to which the reality of being is hidden and does not appear. If one identifies simulacra with the self-returning nature of eternal return, then all entities are simulacra. However, the simulacrum of twentieth-century thinkers also seems to be inspired by mass-produced industrial objects. Baudrillard explains this discourse very clearly, tracing a kind of historical pattern of the simulacrum in the modern age. There would be the first Renaissance phase in which the simulacrum is seen as a fake, or a fake entity. In the second phase, dominated by the industrial revolution, the simulacrum is a product because it is an element of a mass production of copies, and finally, in the present phase, the simulacrum is a simulation that is information, software, and data. Deleuze also relates the simulacrum to industrial production. Another discourse that is developed is that of the spectacle as a simulacrum in the wake of Debord. Now, the point of view of twentieth-century thought on this issue is that the simulacrum is not seen Nietzscheanly as an entity in becoming, as an event, but as a copy of something, which is considered in its autonomy from that of which it is a copy. However, this leaves the simulacrum with a basic open question, namely, that it is useless to consider a copy autonomous if it is still considered a copy, since something truly autonomous ceases to be a copy. This is a problem that Gabriel Tarde, on the other hand, did not have when he spoke of his “imitations.” Because imitation is a repetition that proliferates quantitatively and yet also has a tendency to diverge in this series because of the accumulation of errors of reproduction. Moreover, there is another misunderstanding. The simulacrum is a serially produced copy; it is interpretable as a repetition or copy of every other element in the series. But take the case of a ceramic baby elephant. The little elephants are all there, all the same except for very small accidental differences that arose in the course of their production. They are all copies of each other. But that

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does not detract from the fact that each of those figurines is also a miniature copy of the form of an elephant. So there is a mimetic relationship of a figurative kind with an entity completely unrelated to the circumstances of production: an elephant. Finally, let us add that in order to make that elephant in series, workers had to make a mold, which served as a cast for everyone, and so we are also back to the case of the Platonic example par excellence. So, the limitation of the twentieth-century ontology of the simulacrum is that it thinks the ontology of the entity uniquely, so it is either Platonic copy or it is Nietzschean repetition, or iconic representation. Add to that, authors such as Baudrillard have then claimed to read the whole media world of information production and entertainment as a great simulacral imitation, which claims to exauthorize what it copies, emancipating itself from it. But then, in this case, it is understood that this simulation, which goes to constitute hyperreality, copies, not itself as reproduction or repetition, but reality as masking representation. So repetition, reproduction, replication, depiction, representation, image, icon, symbol, information, and language all enter together in an ontological welter, with different philosophical and more generally theoretical purposes. For these reasons, here we would like to propose a reset of the discourse of the simulacrum in order to make it more consequential, and, in order to do so, we think of identifying the simulacrum as the meeting point of the reflection on imitation that starts from Tarde and the reflection that starts from the eternal return. Thus, the simulacrum, as such, is a self-replicating entity that attempts to reproduce itself but is subject to drifts of differentiation. The fact that it has this cyclical character and that it is variable means that its origin can virtually always slide backward, without a clear beginning, because it fades into the other, of which it is variation, admixture, or both. However, repetition implies temporality, for the simple Aristotelian reason that a before and an after are given. Variation then expresses itself in temporal flux. In this sense, the entity itself, even considered in its physicality, which is what Aristotle would call substance, is subject to variation over time, such that it can become trace, residue, ruin, remainder, or deformation of itself. Such a process always alludes to the dimension of becoming, but in that case, the differentiating drift is expressed not in reproduction or replication, but in the substance itself, in such a way that the replication could be more identical to the conditions of origin of the individual substance than the substance itself. So let this be said with regard to the ontologicaltemporal or diachronic line of reproduction or replication. Substances are subject, according to Aristotle, to corruption and reproduction and, we add, variation in reproduction. However, this ontological character, in which the

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essence of the thing is always at risk of changing into something else or undoing itself, is not the only ontological character of simulacrum, imitation, or reproduction. In fact, this imitation, besides imitating or reproducing itself, can have synchronic imitation relations with other substances. Let us return to the example of the little elephant imitating not only a cast or model but also an animal. So here we must consider the cases of representation that are not merely reproductive in the sense of copying the same series, or replication, or regeneration. What are these functions of representation that can add to the ontological structure of the simulacrum? Jakobson attempted to identify some basic communicative functions that also fit this circumstance. The most common is the figurative or referential function. That is, the representation is given as an object that refers to another object through formal modes. It may be an image, which in turn may contain the form of the other object on its surface, or it may itself be shaped in such a way as to recall the other object more or less precisely. This is the typical case for which Wollheim spoke of “seeing in,” in that this “other” object is seen within that which depicts it. The other case of representation as a synchronic function of the simulacrum is that of expression. In the case of expression, the relationship of analogy and similarity does not proceed from the object to the representation but from the subject to the representation. Expressive functions are mostly coincident with what Jakobson referred to as emotional functions. We often find this kind of ontological function in the simulacrum, in the case of music. However, more often than not, we can find these two functions intertwined, where the emotional and expressive functions go to be modified by distorting the referential or figurative one. Typical is the case in this regard of expressionist painting, in which objects are still recognized through “seeing in,” but these are visibly altered in order to convey the expression of emotions. Then we have a function that even mixes the synchronic and diachronic dimensions. This function is the design function. Thus, if we place the time series function of repetition on a vertical axis and that of depiction and expression on a horizontal axis, putting the latter on opposite sides of the vertical axis, the design representation will have to be placed on a diagonal axis. This is because design representation has an inherent temporal dimension, as it is based on the representation of a purpose prior to its realization and is functional to it. Furthermore, the design representation is a referential representation of an object that does not yet exist. Thus, the object representation and the actual object stand at two different heights of the vertical time axis. Another diagonal function of the representation is the “conative” one. As in the case of road signs, here the representation has a connection

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that can be figurative or merely abstract and conventional with something that must be done. The sign representing the deer warns us of the possible presence of animals in the lane and urges us to keep driving more cautiously, before encountering the possible deer. Similarly, the stop sign warns us to slow down before reaching the intersection. There remains a function of representation that lies outside these axes, which is the meta-representational one. In theory, it could be considered a borderline case of referential representation; however, a number of mixed cases cannot be excluded. In fact, the best known cases are those of the image en abime, of cinema about cinema. However, one could also make a project en abime, that is, a project that contains a project and thus with various stages in time, because once the project is accomplished to accomplish also the project contained in it, one might also have to change the whole or a part, only to discover that there is hidden another project that brings further changes. Who knows whether the development of the organism from DNA is such a thing? This evades our expertise. Compared to the famous pattern drawn by Jakobson, we have left out precisely the aesthetic function as well as the phatic function. These two functions, in fact, exorbit representation because they are iconically empty. That is, they have no object. In the fàtic function, we only try to keep the relation active, which is the carrier of information, but it does not give us information about objects but only about the continuation of the relation between subjects in communication. Similarly, a purely formal function modulates representation, but insofar as this function detaches the concrete form from its iconic content, it is empty or self-referential. In fact, in ordinary perception, form enables us to distinguish things; it, therefore, plays an instrumental role for the intellect as a term of relationship between the essence of the entity and the intellect. The mode of judgment competent to it is the determinative one, in which, from a universal already constituted as such, the object of empirical experience is recognized and thus classified, attributing to it a determinate essence. In the case of pure form, however, it is not the object and its essence that are in question, but the form of the object in itself or even the form of the percept itself. So when we consider form as such, we prescind from the nature of the object and examine volumes or colors and their interaction. If we then only consider the percept, it is as if we only consider the pixels of a single frame of a camera without consideration for what it frames. However, even in the case of phatic communication, which includes greetings, for example, or pleasantries, we notice that these are learned and replicated, even if they do not communicate anything in particular. Then

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these types of communication are themselves empty, purely formal, and have no object whatsoever, but this does not mean that they cannot themselves be the object of communication or representation of a higher logical order, such as meta-communication and meta-representation. This has far from negligible consequences for aesthetics. So going back to the ontology of simulacra, we can say that they have, as a basic reference, the Nietzschean intuition of the repetition of the whole sensible universe, which, however, must be taken for what it is, namely, a suggestive image of the Heraclitean type, a reading of the meaning of the world that has a moral value regarding the so-called amor fati, but not a rational theory about the reality of the physical world. In fact, if we wanted to apply it to the physical world, this could only apply to the beings that reproduce, that is, living beings, and their basic components, according to which they reproduce, that is, genes. Moreover, it must be taken into account that Nietzsche speaks of a reproduction of the same. Which, however, hardly happens in nature. However, one should not draw general conclusions about Nietzsche’s thought, as he is also the thinker of genealogy, who sees in reproduction or evolution (since the reference to the term “genealogy” was precisely Haeckel’s evolutionism), the seat of abrupt changes capable of deviating or even subverting the meaning of the entity. What do eternal return and genealogy have in common, given that one is the doctrine of repetition and the other of difference? The common element is the reference to the will to power that underlies both. So the ontological modeling of the simulacrum on the repetition of the event in the eternal return is only a suggestion concerning the ontological dimension of a replication as a repetition of the same or, Perniola would have said, as a transit from the same to the same, but without there being a model or an original element from which to derive its essence in terms of an inferior copy on the ontological level (in the sense that it does not enjoy full essence being derived from it) and on the axiological level (in the sense that as a derived element it has an inferior value to the one from which it is derived). However, if repetition were really the domain of the same, there could be no transformation and no becoming. So we must derive from this the doctrine of the simulacrum as a replica different not only in number but also in “form” in the Aristotelian sense of the term. Now, however, if we were to follow Nietzsche in his application of the eternal return to the physical world, we would find ourselves in a dead end, that is, in a doctrine that does not fit with reality. This may be why the philosophies of the simulacrum have simply set aside this aspect of the ontology of the simulacrum. Then, if we exclude an application of the simulacrum to a literally naturalistic and physiological principle, to what can we apply the

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simulacrum? Obviously, everything that concerns the world is information, that is, not the world of things but the world of shared knowledge, which is based, as Tarde said, on imitations and their propagation, accumulation, development, combination, and so on. Well, we today could also call these simulacra or imitations by another name: memes.

Memes and symbols This book aims to propose a new cultural theory of aesthetics, but there have been others before. In particular, we will consider two: that of Ernst Cassirer and that of Susanne Langer, both of which are based on the concept of symbol and the idea that human being is an animal symbolicum. The notion of symbol has a long history and wide use in many disciplines, which makes its meaning ambiguous, as it can have opposite meanings to each other. In symbolic logic, symbols are determined and conventional signs that perform unambiguous functions, but in the history of religions, symbols are signs that have an open, polysemous character, referring to a hermeneutic tradition and a participatory dimension. Todorov wrote a history of theories of symbolism in a cultural temperament then deeply influenced by semiotics (Todorov 1977). He, therefore, tended to distinguish the sign, which is always transitively connected to an external object (in the sense of Frege’s Bedeutung), from the symbol, which, on the other hand, is intransitive. Todorov argued that, beginning with the rupture of modernity, the rhetorical-classicist conception of the symbol ends, and a point of view, which he calls romantic, that is consistent with aesthetics and generalizes the symbol is established. Only later, with the humanities, on the other hand, do a number of more specific, but no less problematic, conceptions appear. In the nineteenth century, therefore, we see a philosophical use, but also a philological-hermeneutical use of the symbol that paves the way for its use in the history of religions (think Bachofen) and from there to the newly born cultural anthropology. On the other hand, the nineteenth century was also the year of the discovery of the symbol in the logical-mathematical and more generally scientific debate. Symbolic logic was already in gestation with Leibniz, but it came to maturity with Boole, thus laying the foundations for computer science, which makes use of Boolean logical operators. So at the beginning of the twentieth century, we found symbols in the most diverse fields: aesthetics, history of religions, anthropology, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, sociology, logic, mathematics, and philosophy of science. Cassirer’s theory of culture takes the notion of symbol apparently from Kant, who, however, speaks of it very little, but draws more consistently from the scientific debate, of which

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he had in-depth knowledge, and in particular from Hertz, except, however, keeping his conception within the framework of a fundamentally Romantic and subjectivist tradition of a constructivist and anti-materialist kind. According to Cassirer, the symbol has a very general character in that it is an element that mediates a perception and a spiritual content internal to the subject. Thus, the symbol, as Cassirer understands it, escapes all problems of distinction between sign, signal, metaphor, and so on. in that it is posited as a basic activity of consciousness in relation to communication. This generality is the strength, not the weakness, of the Cassirerian conception, for it enables him to decline the various forms of thought in the formation of culture and civilization in terms of transitions between different symbolic forms. Thus, he is not forced to propose rigid distinctions between symbols and other semiotic forms or between symbols of different kinds because the difference, in agreement with the cultural approach, is historical. In this sense, he therefore takes up the attitude of Vico and Hegel, who unfold differences within a temporal type of processuality and not through a synchronic type of classificatory tableau. From this point of view, Cassirer’s position is more advanced than that, although inspired by him, advocated by Susanne Langer, who has the problem of keeping the two matrices—logical and anthropological—of the symbol distinct with the distinction between discursive and presentational symbols, perhaps due to the double matrix of her formation in which stood on the one hand the logical formation of the analytic type and on the other hand the influence of Cassirer which may have been mediated curiously by the reading of Whitehead, who played an important role in Langer’s formation and who, although a logician just like Cassirer, advocated a very general conception of the symbol in a small but dense text devoted to that very subject, in which he writes that “Mankind, it seems, has to find a symbol in order to express itself. Indeed ‘expression’ is ‘symbolism’.”5 Despite this very general basic assumption, however, it is he who speaks of “presentational immediacy” as an alternative to “causal efficacy,” the pair of which underlies the aforementioned division of symbols into presentational and discursive, where the domain of aesthetics falls mostly within the former. This distinction is actually not at all new in aesthetics, for it takes us right back to the dynamics of the very origins of eighteenth-century aesthetics after the refusal to grant philosophical dignity to the question of beauty and art by the great seventeenth-century philosophers such as Descartes or Leibniz. Leibniz denied dignity to the question of the beautiful because it did not fall within the clear and distinct knowledge of the intellect but concerned confused or even elusive perceptions, such as petite perceptions. Baumgarten, then, accepts this inferior status of poetic and artistic knowledge related to the senses by

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opposing it to the clear and distinct knowledge of discursive logic, but claiming for it a cognitive role and processing capacity analogous to that of reason. It thus follows that such knowledge is aesthetic because it is not distinct enough to be the object of intellectual understanding. In Kant, too, we find affirmed, alongside the principle of practical disinterest in taste, that of intellectual disinterest from the standpoint of judgment, which is therefore not resolved into determinative judgment but requires a further form of judgment such as reflective judgment, in which an ad hoc rule is sought for a form that must be grasped as such, since it cannot be understood according to the encapsulating activity of the intellect. Thus, the aesthetic is a domain of sensations and sensible nexuses that constitute, as Baumgarten put it, a “gnoseologia inferior” that emulates the structuring of reason (analogon rationis). In fact, Susanne Langer believes that aesthetics is a domain that is concerned with sensations such as images, sounds, and actions, and therefore, since it is not tied to precise cognitions, it is based on presentational symbols, which express meaning not because of a precise semantic nexus but because of a more open interpretation of form, which is therefore itself intransitive and refers not to conceptual nexuses but rather to sensations and emotions. Thus we return to the division of the English sentimentalists between the relation of language to cognition on the one hand and of internal sense to emotion on the other. Art once again remains locked out of the intellect. However, this approach to aesthetics, which then becomes a kind of implicit premise in Romantic conceptions, was then empirically negated by the experiments of the historical avant-garde and in particular by the Duchampian ready-made, which demonstrated through artistic practice that the art object is not such because of its sensible forms, nor because it expresses itself in a nonconceptual way, nor finally because it addresses feelings, but because of its legitimacy to be such according to certain social procedures. Within this legitimacy prevails as a norm, not the production of something harmonious or exciting, but what Thierry De Duve has called the principle of “Fais n’import quoi,” which is exactly the analogue, on the pragmatic plane of artistic production, of what je-ne-sais-quoi is, for the aesthetic theory of taste judgment, on the semantic and cognitive plane. What is important is that these two principles meet, although the variable of the ready-made also lends itself to theoretical justifications that allow its legitimization, without resorting to theje-ne-sais-quoi. In this “whatever” of art, there can be statements, theories, mottos, and slogans, such as those of Jenny Holzer, which sometimes have a moral sense and other times have a sense of, for example, environmental militancy, in which the use of language is not poetic but aims at effectiveness by inspiring propaganda. The meaningfulness of such phrases is part of

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the value of the artwork, without the need to be transfigured into something sentimental by poetic evocation. Here then, the visual arts, after Duchamp, are no longer necessarily figurative, but not even necessarily visual, not even however poetic in the traditional sense, but if anything, they meet with visual and experimental poetry on a new terrain, which is that of research art that prescinds medium specificity. The only form that remains is the form of experimentation in the research project. Thus, from the point of view of aesthetic theory, the division of symbols proposed by Langer takes us further back than that proposed by Cassirer. Indeed, if we take the conception of the symbol in Cassirer and compare it with that of the meme, we must conclude that the meme is nothing but a symbol or a symbolic formation (rather than a symbolic form). However, we cannot conclude from this the identity of memes and symbols because memes are external, real entities that function for the human subject as inputs that convert to outputs, which implies that there has been a conjunction or determination of an inner state of the mind (whether conscious or unconscious). What does this mean? It means that from the point of view of the meme, what goes on inside the mind may also be unknown, as in the black box metaphor, whereas for Cassirer’s theory, it is the symbolic device outside the mind that is secondary and variable to the spiritual content, since it is the latter that enables the construction of the world for the human subject, and its sensible aspect is but a vehicle. Thus, symbol and meme are two sides of the same coin, of which one refers back to the transcendental subject and the other to the cultural communication system. For Cassirer, the subject constructs through symbols its world; for memetics, on the other hand, it is memes that proliferate and construct subjects. This means that we find symbols and memes on the two sides of the same threshold, which divides not only two perspectives but two approaches and two epochs of thought, just as happened, for example, with regard to the subject of taste, with the threshold between good taste necessary for the production of works, typical of the rhetorical-poetic system, and taste necessary for the judgment of works, typical of modern aesthetics. Today, we can say that Cassirer, with his focus on the spiritual content of the symbol, still stands in continuity with the discourse of modern aesthetics, while the external point of view, based on communication as memetic proliferation, stands across the historical threshold of modern aesthetics, insofar as it starts from the premise of a desubjectivized system of communication. This threshold then also coincides with another threshold: that between anthropocentrism, ideologically advocated by both Cassirer and Langer, and that of the postanthropocentric perspective, which instead places information at the center. In this sense, the memetic approach is no longer humanist, but it is in a first

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sense culturalist and, in a more general sense, naturalist; it could then, at its limit, be considered “neo-humanist,” in that the meme addresses human being as an environment and also constructs him as a subject. Again, constructionism is present in both perspectives, but in reverse. And so memetic “neo-humanism” is such only because human being is the construct of the meme, for as we shall see, the meme begins its activity in a state prior to the development of human subject as such, that is, in a sphere that is still animal, and it is precisely the memetic storm that transforms this particular animal into human being. This does not mean that the meme cannot then produce nonhuman, that is, artificial, forms of consciousness in the future. But, returning to symbolism, the connection between symbol and meme could not, for obvious historical reasons, be glimpsed by Cassirer and Langer, although Gabriel Tarde had already developed the concept of imitation on an evolutionary basis. Thus, before today, no one could have imagined such a connection, except perhaps for Dan Sperber, who had all the pieces of this puzzle at his disposal, having written a paper on the theory of symbolism and having written another on the epidemiology of ideas. There are, however, definite theoretical reasons why Sperber could not come to the conjunction of symbol and meme (even though he was probably aware of memetic theory). The first reason is that Sperber rejects the theory of the symbol as a basic element of human communication and expression. For Sperber, the symbol represents a particular class of cultural expressions different from the conventional discursive sign, signal, and so on. Thus, it would not make sense for him to speak of symbol epidemiology to express the evolution of culture, as this would refer only to a part of it. The other problem then lies in the fact that he is interested in the cognitive character of the symbol relative to the cognitive activity of the mind, which he traces back to Fodor’s modular theory. This means that his interest is still all about the subject, and this is due to the persistence of a fundamentally humanist and anthropocentric attitude, which is the reason for his search for a universal dimension of the human being and his polemic with cultural relativism. This is also the reason why he speaks of the epidemiology of ideas and not memes, as he rejects a non-anthropocentric and non-subject-centric perspective such as the neo-Darwinist perspective of the meme. From this point of view, cultural anthropology remains true to its humanistic matrix; those who have been more inclined to recognize autonomy in the symbol than its simple gnoseological function is the field of religious reflection, which overrides anthropocentrism from the opposite side of naturalism. In a paper on memes, Sperber places his model alongside the memetic model but not convergent with it.6 The point is that Sperber uses the meme in a narrow sense to criticize the comparison with the gene.

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The objection, in brief, is that cultural transmission is mostly transformative, while replication should not be. The geneticist response tends to distinguish Weismannian memes from Lamarckian representations, but in our view, the answer lies in recognizing the meme as having its own autonomy from the gene, with which it shares only the character of a self-replicator subject to forms of “natural selection” and thus to evolutionary drift, after which it may present itself differently from genes in more or less variable forms because it is functional to the culture that now has the need to transmit information, sometimes in plastic and sometimes in static form. Then, returning to the symbol, paradoxically, a theologian like Paul Tillich has come closest to the conjunction of symbol and meme, attributing to it an autonomous life, unlike conventional signs. Tillich maintains, like Sperber, the division of the symbol from other signs; however, he considers it an evolving element and part of cultural evolution. Today we can finally conceive of the symbol as an entity connected to the meme in its relation to the interpreting subject and look for in memetic drifts, rather than in the unconscious, the production of a series of religious, artistic, and so on symbolic connections.

Selfish Genes and Culture But let’s return to the gene-culture relationship. Does the notion of “selfish gene” then oppose that of emergent culture? The answer is: absolutely not. Emergent culture is nothing but the realization of the selfish “desires” of genes. Why do we say this? Because there is nothing better for geniuses than a system that will secure them from natural selection. In this regard, we need to clear up a misunderstanding: genes are not necessarily on the side of genetic determinism. Genes do not want to be selected to be forced to determine our every action, but on the contrary, they tend to delegate such functions to other mechanisms where this is possible and to escape natural selection. To understand this point, let us take an example. Let us take students in a school. A strict selection system will train them hard and make them capable of performing even very difficult and demanding tasks. But do the students want all that? No, the selfish student just wants to be promoted, that is, he just wants to get through to the next round without having to go through the forks of school selection, and he does not want to suffer failures in order to enable some other colleague to do difficult tasks. Even his colleague who will pass the filter does not want to put effort into solving difficult problems if there is, for example, someone who is willing to do it for him. The selfish student just wants to pass with minimal effort and have no hassle. So if he can delegate tasks, there will be no reason to keep

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him from doing so, and this will be the shortest route to problem solving for him. The gene has no mysterious drive that leads it to engage in shaping human behavior; the gene has only a tendency to replicate, filtered by natural selection, which thus shapes the characteristics of the genetic pull. From this perspective, what could be better than learning and culture becoming an easy promotion for all genes? In fact, one of the effects of culture is to find technical solutions to adaptation problems, which weaken the filtering effect of natural selection. Therefore, the argument that one should not explain by culture what can be explained by genetic evolution should be rejected by invoking Ockham’s razor’s saying of Linnaeus that natura non facit saltus In the case of solving an adaptive problem through culture, that is, through behavior, genes take the shortest route. In fact, the problem in this way is solved within years; with genetic adaptation, on the other hand, it would take millennia. Culture thus became the preferred solution for all problems, and genes thus ended up leaving the keys to the house to culture. Culture thus came to manage kinship systems, distributing matings according to a rational criterion to find a partner for each. Practically, the combination of these two factors results in the suppression of natural selection; that is, they guarantee reproduction for all selfish genes. What then is more convenient for the selfish gene to do—oppose the culture or facilitate it? It is clear that statistically all those traits that, by facilitating culture, put the genetic pull away from natural selection will be more rewarding for reproduction. Culture is precisely the secret weapon of selfish genes to overcome selection and enjoy a stress-free life. Perhaps it is no accident that human species has changed very little in the past 100,000 years. It is true that evolutionarily, it is a relatively small time, but the development of culture may have created conditions of genetic indifference. That is, Homo sapiens has not changed because, thanks to culture, he has not been forced to do so, except for what little it took not to get in the way of culture and rather help its development. In short, the culturalist par excellence is precisely The Selfish Gene. On the other hand, it is no accident that, as the foundation of culture and cultural logic, Levi-Strauss placed kinship systems. Perhaps then, genetics scholars should also have a more positive attitude toward culture, since the greatest product by which genes have overcome the challenge of natural selection, even going so far as to overthrow the selective relationship with nature so as to no longer have to adapt to it but to adapt it to the needs of Homo sapiens, has come about through the development of culture. The genes of Homo sapiens, thanks to culture, have won the game of the struggle for survival and dominate the planet so resoundingly that, having no more natural enemies, they now risk extinction through self-destruction.

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Notes 1. Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg e la scienza senza nome (Firenze: Nuova Italia, 1984), 51–66. 2. Roberto Terrosi, The Fable of the World as Fable, 2003 (lecture). 3. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968). 4. Ibid. 5. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (New York: ­Putnam and Sons, [1927] 1959). 6. Robert Aunger, Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

CHAPTER 5

v

Bigaku The Crisis of Modern Aesthetics and the Return of Beauty

The Crisis of Theoretical Aesthetics Naturalistic reductionism represents the typical trait of our age. Looking back, we can say that we have found, throughout the last century, attempts to propose naturalistic explanations, whether neurological, biological, or genetic. However, in the past, these theories were unsuccessful because their naive reductionism made them too simplistic in the eyes of specialists. Today, these theories still have at their basis the same reductionist assumptions, but they have a greater body of studies and scientific findings to refer to. However, the main cause of the success of these theories lies in the weakness and fragility of the discourses on the side of philosophical aesthetics proper, which, over the past decades, has become self-disaggregated without advocating any theory, indeed often claiming the impossibility of a systematic aesthetic theory and a definition of its fundamental concepts, such as that of art or beauty. Continental philosophy today no longer speaks of aesthetic theory. The last to propose a real aesthetic theory, albeit an unfinished one was Adorno. Today, it either talks about sectoral aesthetics, such as the aesthetics of cinema, the aesthetics of music, and so on, or sectoral approaches to aesthetics, such as the anthropology of aesthetics, the psychology of aesthetics, and the sociology of aesthetics, or finally, it devotes itself to particular issues: the philosophy of images, the question of representation, the spectacularization of politics, the politics of images, and so on. The latency of continental aesthetics has left a vacuum, which at first was filled by analytic aesthetics, which was belatedly discovered by continental philosophy. This field, however, after generating some proceduralist theories, soon exhausted 161

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its innovative thrust, returning to themes typical of Anglo-Saxon culture, such as interest in the emotional aspect of aesthetic experience. This aspect, being consistent with the approach of the cognitive sciences, was developed by the latter. So today, it is the cognitive sciences that represent the analytical field approach to aesthetics. On the other hand, the season of analytic aesthetics has now basically stopped in Anglo-Saxon countries. This is also due to the fact that theories such as the Institutional Theory of Art were born at a hotter time of experimentation between the 1960s and 1970s, but then the mechanism of operation of the so-called art system changed. Back then, the theory behind experimentation was very important, and the role of critics and intellectuals was important, but then all that changed. The power ended up in the hands of big collectors and big galleries, which produced the season of VIP artists (such as Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, etc.), which was then followed by the season of super-museums, which produced a series of managerial technicians, such as curators, who replaced critics; and finally came the financial phase, in which art became a betting ground on artists’ ratings. The system, then, has changed, although each system has developed elements that were already partly present in the previous system. The system of the great collectors emptied the theoretical character, reducing it to cynical humor. At the time of the great museums, it corporatized contemporary art, subjecting it to the economic regime of the cultural container. Finally, the financial regime has seen art as a field for betting and has emptied the professional consistency of curators, and for artists, it has created a system of art residency grants in the logic of the foundation that prevails over that of the old galleries.

Evolutionary Aesthetics: Pre-Human Aesthetics or Pre-Aesthetics? The problem with naturalistic approaches to aesthetics, regardless of whether or not a more or less scientifically proven theory is correct, lies in the fact that in order to make any theory of aesthetics, there needs to be some prior definition of the object of inquiry, or at least the field of inquiry. This is the real weakness of naturalistic theories. If you define aesthetics or the field of aesthetics in a trivial way, through platitudes or some old theory, taken without critical reasoning behind it, even the most authoritative scientific theory will turn into a bluff. The theory of evolution is a very respectable theory, but if we set as conditions that aesthetics is a type of experience that connects a type of perception to a feeling of pleasure, we can only have a series of trivialities. The same is true for genetic theories or cognitive theories. Thus,

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we have a series of discourses looming that posit aesthetics as a mechanism determined by natural selection to favor our adaptation to the environment or our reproductive performance. Given these premises, everything that can be said is already compromised. Similarly, in cognitive theories, everything is resolved into a catalog of emotions, which would be due to the kind of stimulation received through the senses and processed in certain areas of the brain. If I believe that Switzerland is an island, I may have even the most accurate catalog of all the islands on earth, but I will never find Switzerland. Maybe I read about a Swiss man saying that Switzerland is an island, but I didn’t realize that he was expressing himself in a metaphorical sense. Underlying all this is often the presumption of many men of science, even reliable ones with respect to their field of expertise, that philosophical problems are simple and that the problem consists only in the fact that philosophers, to give themselves importance, enjoy complicating them. The only chance for these theories is to run into serendipity. Indeed, reading some of these studies across the board, one can also find some interesting insights. But the proposed theories are generally half-truths at best. The theory of evolution explains the modification of various living species on the basis of error in replication and natural selection and thus pays special attention to the conditions of survival and reproduction, that is, their environmental and reproductive fitness. Now, compared with asexual reproduction, sexed reproduction not only increases DNA recombination but also increases the complexity of selection, which results in greater variation and more adaptive modeling dependent on the conditions of empirical experience. This modeling action produces a wide variety of biological forms, but also behavioral attitudes, which act more or less deterministically as appropriate: the so-called instincts. Instincts, however, should be read not only as an automatic reaction but also as a drive for learning and selective targeting toward them. This is why the old notion of instincts had fallen out of favor but is being resurrected today, once we take for granted the pliant and complementary nature of their experience. Now, it has been noted since the birth of evolutionary theory that sexual selection in particular emphasizes flashy and colorful forms. This has prompted comparisons to the field of human activity in which flashy and colorful forms are used, such as painting. Painting is related to the field of art, and so it was felt, rather naively, that we had found something that could shed light on human aesthetic behavior and thus aesthetics. All these steps in such reasoning, however, are only seemingly consequential. In fact, they have no logic at all. Colorful and vivid forms are connected to a very vague conception of painting, but not everything that is colorful is pictorial, and not all painting is so colorful, but

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rather also dark, gloomy, gray. So the kinship between painted paintings and peacock tails is entirely superficial, and nothing can be inferred from this comparison. The differences are much wider and more significant than the similarities. Peacocks are born with their colorful feathers; humans, on the other hand, paint. One could argue that garden birds build some kind of colorful hut, although in reality, petals or colored objects are scattered there rather chaotically. Thus, if one starts with the enthusiastic descriptions of naturalists and then looks at the photographs, one quickly realizes that the alleged aesthetic properties have been greatly overstated. But even if you want to admit the artificial nature of this decoration, there remains a huge difference. No one generally goes to a girl they do not know with an all-colored painting to mate with her. Works of art are not for mating, and their display does not usually precede mating. Instead, we come to the case of an evolutionary scholar who offers one of the most articulate theories. That is, we speak of Ellen Dissanayake. The merit of this scholar is that she speaks, albeit in terms of evolutionary psychology, about human, not animal, facts, which also include the analysis of cultural behaviors such as sacral ones. She proposes an aesthetic theory based on instinctual elements, genetically transmitted but still peculiar to humans. Among these, her preference goes to the period of early childhood and the processes of making special, which she then redefines with a neologism of her own making that is artification, which has become her key concept. Dissanayake’s problem is, as with Kant, that he cannot step outside his own epistemological paradigm. In her case, this means staying within genetic transmission, which requires her to reduce the aesthetic to the artistic and the artistic to the genetic. Thus, once again, the cultural is skipped or is seen as an exogenous element whose existence is not explained. Simply, religion and language appeared as deus ex machina some 50,000 years ago. Then, as much as you also refer to material from anthropological-religious research, it always plays a secondary role and is not one of explaining the origins of aesthetics or art. Culture is not completely ignored, but it is seen only as support for one’s nonetheless innatist theses. The crux of this scholar’s interest is the mother-child relationship, which leads her to focus on a series of cases drawn from pedagogy, and here a first problem emerges. In fact, she does not draw the concept of art from aesthetics or even from art history, but from art education in schools. In this way, art becomes a generic creative activity that has beneficial effects on the psyche and is therefore a trivial recreational activity. Then she looks to the mother-child relationship for the origin of such activity. This gives rise to a first methodological objection: why should we call this activity “art,” when it is clear that it has a very tenuous relationship

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with art, based only on vague platitudes? Art education is connected to art in much the same way as physical education is connected to physiology, but no one thinks they can explain the latter by the former, yet in aesthetics, where everything is allowed, even this is allowed. But there is another problem, and that is, you take a concept of art from modern society, through a vague interpretation of it, based on a vague family air, you take the concept derived from it of artistic expression, proper to art education, and you derive from it the concept of “artification.” Then one makes this concept of artification a basic element of human creativity, which is innate in human subject and manifests itself from birth, and finally, thanks to this universal concept, one claims to give an explanation of aesthetics in general and, therefore, also of the concept of “art.” Thus, in the end, one explains art by art, taking care, however, to pass such a concept through the ways of genetics. A similarly circular dynamic we also observe in the case of ritual. One takes the notion of ritual from religion, then extends it, or uses it metaphorically, as a concept to explain the schematic behaviors of some animals, and afterwards uses such behaviors, based on genetic inheritance, to explain the appearance of ritual among humans. Again, ritual is explained by ritual. In the same way, the concept of aesthetics is taken from modern philosophy, then you make it general enough to include all the animal behaviors that you want to include in it. You say that these behaviors have a genetic origin and that’s it. Here you can explain aesthetics with aesthetics, but after dipping it in genetics. This is a fallacy that is aimed at getting your facts straight with a rhetorical device.

Aesthetics between Genetics and Cognitive Science But then does the fact that genes are the originators and major promoters of culture mean that genetics has nothing to do with aesthetics, due to the fact that genes have delegated everything that was possible to delegate to culture? It cannot be said that genes have nothing to do with aesthetics, but genes do not decide what is beautiful and what is not because they do not attribute ontological meaning and teleological meaning to human cultural experiences and productions, except in a very vague way. Genes intervene at the level of the foundations of the cultural edifice, but from the foundations, one cannot predict the form this edifice will take from time to time. In fact, these foundations are the same throughout the sapiens species, but the buildings are all different, though not so different as to appear alien. Again, it will be better to give examples. Let us give an example where the presence of underlying genetic factors is beyond question. The example is that of odors. There are odors that trigger an instinctively repulsive

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effect—odors that we might call abject, in the sense given by Julia Kristeva. This instinctive reaction has been evolutionarily ingrained in our genetic code. This does not mean that there must be an abjection gene, but that natural selection has found a way to conserve in a number of biological devices this kind of reaction. This implies that we can predict that no culture of rotting dead rats would be used as body or household perfumes. However, this genetic basis does not tell us much more than that. Then there are other smells that do not particularly impress us, and finally, there are smells such as those of flowers and fruits that we call perfumes because of their vaguely positive character. Generally, in all cultures, the odor of flowers and fruits is regarded positively, with a few exceptions, as in the case of durian. The disgust caused by certain odors, especially those related to decay, has such a broad character that it goes beyond our species. Even dogs and cats are shown in their behaviors to be nauseated by these odors. In fact, many other animal species have a much more developed sense of smell than ours, and it is also an essential factor in mating, playing a key role in triggering sexual arousal. In the human case, however, these do not play a particular role in mating, so much so that androstadienone is usually covered with deodorants. Moreover, the human species has a decidedly weak and generic sensory apparatus for smell, and this may be the cause of the fact that the sense of smell is not of special interest in artistic production or even aesthetic reflection. So we instinctively inherit a very cursory division of the odor spectrum, ranging from smells to scents, but nothing more. What does this tell us about the aesthetics of scents? It tells us nothing more than a knoll followed by a depression tells us about a hypothetical mansion we would like to build—one part will be higher, one part lower—or what a playing field tells us about the outcome of the game. The terrain and the playing field are important, but all diriment questions are posed outside of these simple, basic data. Marylin Monroe used to say that she went to sleep wearing only a few drops of Chanel No. 5. Now, for Marylin, the choice was not just between Chanel No. 5 and a dead mouse. She could choose from many perfumes, all derived from the essences of flowers and fragrant plants. Why did she choose Chanel No. 5 specifically? For genetics, all those scents are indifferent because they are all generically pleasant. For the aesthetics of scents, which is usually about scents alone, the game starts right here. The whole history of scents is about choices among pleasant smells. It runs from the Egyptians, though, and likely even earlier, to the present day with ever-changing solutions. Not only that, but these solutions vary even today across cultures and, within them, across sexual genders and social occasions. We find perfumes

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for men and women, for the home and for the church, for the bedroom and for the bathroom, and so on. Another case that has a strong genetic connotation is that of food, which is related to taste in the literal sense of the word. Again, there are unpleasant tastes that are related to putridity and have been selected for the obvious reason that those who do not find them repulsive can easily die intoxicated. Except for a few repulsive flavors, however, a very diverse picture of sweet, salty, bitter, and sour flavors opens up. In general, sweet should be the sensory equivalent of sour, as it represents the characteristic of fruit. However, fruit is often sour as well. Bitter flavors could be considered evolutionarily negative, but we know very well that there are many successful dishes and drinks that taste bitter. Again, we find a clear uniformity throughout the human race on the existence of salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy flavors, but this does not really tell us anything about the cuisine of various peoples, which appears to be clearly related to various cultures, as it varies as cultures vary. It is no coincidence that we now classify cuisines by nations and speak of Chinese, Italian, French, Indian, Japanese, and Thai cuisine, to name but the most famous. Then there is high-end cuisine, called haute cuisine in France, which we also find in other regions where a refined court cuisine has been created. The problems we have seen in relation to the influence of genetics are exactly repeated in with neuroscience and cognitive science in general. Neural circuits play an important role in aesthetics because of the importance of perception in this area and also because they allow us to analyze many aspects of the mental mechanisms that come into play in aesthetic experience, such as, for example, identification with the protagonist of films thanks to mirror neurons. However, these dynamics are never decisive for the formation of artistic or aesthetic value in general. Michelangelo used bright colors that have an opposite impact than the shadowy colors used by Leonardo; however, there is no principle of better usability according to which to infer that Michelangelo’s lighter works are more valuable than Leonardo’s. From this point of view, some cognitive science studies risk making the same mistakes as Gestaltpsychologie, trying to infer from perceptual schematism rules about beauty that it is a value and not relative to optimizing the conditions of perception. Perception is important because it conveys the form that becomes the element subject to enhancement or otherwise related to aesthetic enhancement, but this does not mean that such enhancement is relevant to the conditions of perception. Let us take an example: if I see a movie on a large high-definition screen, it will be better than seeing it on an old cathode ray tube television set, but this does not affect the value judgment concerning the movie, but rather that concerning the television

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set. So a lot of talk about the importance of perception in art resembles that which was already made in its time about the technical quality of works, in which a similar principle of correspondence between technique and artistic value was in force, without considering that they are on two different planes, which led to virtuosity. But precisely because of the failure of virtuosity, we can also say with empirical certainty that perfecting the medium and aesthetic value are two different things. This is an important problem because almost all investigations based on neuroscience and cognitive science in general have this limitation of mistaking slavishly formal or neurological circumstances for value qualities, which depend on quite different dynamics. Let’s take the example of neuroaesthetics right away. Scientist Semir Zeki argues that beauty is accompanied by the neural activity of a part of an area of the brain located on the orbitofrontal-medial cortex (mOFC), which is called field A1. He says that he does not care what the examined subject considers beautiful, but only that when the examinee believes he experiences beauty, he activates field A1. Two problems immediately arise here. If the examined subject is tested according to what he thinks is beautiful, the possibility is high that he will point to things that are also pleasurable, and so we mistake the beautiful for the pleasurable. It would be more interesting to understand what happens when the subject perceives something that is recognized as beautiful and which he also accepts as such but personally dislikes. For example, some people do not like the Mona Lisa but cannot avoid recognizing its value for art and aesthetics. In other words, it is a matter of understanding what happens when we find the beautiful and the pleasing dissociated. The other problem is, what happens if we try to do the reverse test by going back up from the states of positivity in field A1 versus a bombardment of random information? Can one trace back from field A1 to beauty? This point specifies another problem related to the need for a control group that is subject to random stimuli instead. Thus, it may not recognize the presence of beauty but merely respond to social input or stereotypes that are recognized with satisfaction. Why is it that after Leonardo’s death, when some people found the panel drawing of his St. Jerome, no area of the brain was automatically activated in them such that the panel was used to make a stool out of it? And then does this area respond to sensory data or notions? What happens if you show them a work of art by an artist they like and then reveal to them that it is fake? This is a fundamental point because it shows us that in aesthetic value judgment, perception is always subservient to conceptual knowledge. Many scholars aware of the weaknesses of such a literal approach have not gone along with these theories and have taken refuge in the well-known association of beauty and

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emotion that we have already seen in Thomas Reid. Very often, we hear that beautiful is that which excites. A well-known objection to this principle is a tenet of new criticsm known as the affective fallacy. Let us take the case of a poem that tells the story of three little dogs who are snatched from their mother and of whom one is lost, but the mother finally manages to find him. This is a simple example of the sentimentality with which literature was invaded in the late nineteenth century, but which today is considered kitsch. Paolo D’Angelo has sifted through a number of theories of beauty as emotion from the cognitive and analytical areas and shown their theoretical weaknesses. With respect to this fallacy, he adds an observation by nineteenthcentury musicologist E. Hanslick that although music since Pythagoras has been associated with emotion, judging a work by emotion is like judging wine by getting drunk. Another thing that D’Angelo wonders about is what is then meant by emotions and how these are classified, for example, when talking about aesthetic as opposed to utilitarian emotions (Klaus Scherer). Isn’t there already, even here, a bias about aesthetics, which functions as an unspoken definition? Another common ground between emotions and art is cinema, thanks to the dynamics of identification or involvement. And then there is the well-known problem of negative emotions such as fear, leading Noel Carroll to argue that there is a paradox, which he formulates with the following question: why does horror appeal?1 Jerrold Levinson proposes a number of solutions, but the problem is that even in this case, the measure of artistic value is not in the measure of emotion or simply fear, because otherwise making a gruesome joke, such as to scare someone to death, would be the ultimate in artistic value, when in fact it has none. So coming to the conclusion of the discussion about emotions, it is not true that it is beautiful or artistic what excites because otherwise driving counterclockwise would be better than seeing Hamlet, bungee jumping would be better than listening to Bach, and looking at a kitten would be better than looking at the Monnalisa.

OOO and AI We have seen cases of genetic reductionism in trends related to evolutionary psychology and neural reductionism in neurocognitive trends. These types of reductionism share a common belief in science and the possibility of exhaustively resolving the central questions of aesthetics within such scientific discourses. Now, however, we move to an area in which various philosophical and scientific influences converge, even though we sense a prominent imprint of postmodern continental philosophy, which, however, we intend to overcome. So we are in a condition in many ways similar to the present

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text. However, there are some basic differences. We are talking about the trend known by the acronym OOO, which stands for Object-Oriented Ontology. This realist ontology feels, as the writer does, the need for an overcoming of modern transcendental phenomenalism on the one hand and postmodern constructionism on the other hand, which is the child of such phenomenalism. However, as has happened before in Italy with Vattimo’s pupil Ferraris, the idea is to break out of the trap of the veil of representations by moving from the subject to the object, but not in the materialist sense, since materialism would impose a distinction between physical, conventional, and imaginary objects. The name derives from a programming technique called Object-Oriented, which is widely used in computer science for producing applications that, having a modular organization, simplifies composition operations (with the possible reuse of objects) and software maintenance or modification. Objects are characterized by properties called “attributes” and behaviors, called “methods,” and interact with each other by exchanging information. For example, in an online bookshop, books are objects equipped with the attributes related to the book, which can be put into another object, which is the shopping cart, which has as its behavior or method that of calculating the total price. This system is also widely used in the creation of video games, where objects that have certain behaviors and can be placed in different scenes. These objects communicate with other objects through mutual relations but are not defined by the network of connections, as they still maintain their own core that remains extraneous and is a mere variable, an x, which Harman (2017) defines as a black box. Harman is careful to specify that the philosophical theory, however, does not derive from video game programming. Another of the theorists of this trend, Ian Bogost (2006, 2012), comes precisely from the world of video game programming, yet even he has trouble talking about OOO, lest there be confusion with object-oriented programming. All these stances are so calculated as to be suspicious. In fact, if one wanted to give a simple explanation of OOO, the videogame example would be very clear to explain how subjects can be reduced to objects. In the video game, both humans and cars or houses are, but there are so many computer objects that have behaviors that fit together. In the video game, all the entities thus defined can not only be any kind, from gods to animals to rivers, but they all stand inexorably on the same plane, with no way out. The “human being” object has no self, any more than the “gun” object or the “zombie” object does. We could almost think of a situation in which it is no longer the real world that is modeled by the video game, but the video game that becomes the ontological model of the real world, because it proposes in a small way a whole universe, and OOO has the

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aspiration of being a theory of the whole. Obviously, the videogame example is our interpretation, from which the authors instead seem to want to keep away. The writer in the 1990s had noted a tendency in digital culture to order the whole of the essential horizontally on the same ontological plane of coexistence of everything with everything, thus avoiding stratification and divisions such as that between representation and represented. At that time, however, the intent was not to pander to this tendency but to criticize it. Differently, another OOO theorist, Thimoty Morton (2013), radicalized these positions with the creation of two concepts: that of hyperobject and that of subscendence. He does not come from the field of video games but from deep ecology, whose anti-anthropocentric tendencies and attention to the environmental dimension he inherits even in art. The context is clearly different from that of video games, although the fact remains that video games also propose an artificial environment within which all objects stand on the same plane. The concept of an ecosystem then in this author becomes quite different from that of the romantic tradition that imagines a return to nature, which he also studied but which he criticizes, to the point of speaking of an ecology without nature. It should be noted that all three of these theorists come from the field of literary studies, and in a sense, even the literary space of the novel is a world in which all entities stand on the same level: a falling tree, a famine, a character, an angel, and a monster are all objects on the same level. Morton thus thinks of phenomena of environmental scope as hyperobjects, which gives them a viscosity (a concept taken from Sartre but also from the Matrix), so that we cannot exempt ourselves from coming into contact with them; we cannot get rid of them, which, however, ends up becoming a discourse that in general must be applied to all objects so that hyperobjects are merely the objects re-proposed with greater emphasis. The second concept, on the other hand, opposes the concept of transcendence, and in particular the case of the transcendence of emergent units, which manifest, as a totality, properties that their parts do not have. Against this verticalization, then Morton takes a stand for the opposite motion, and that is from the whole to the parts, arguing that, on the contrary, the parts are more than the whole, which is certainly true from the point of view of numerical quantity, but all to be demonstrated on the level of other properties. In fact, as we have said with respect to reductionism, there is a dynamic reductionism that comes into action only when it is necessary to go down a level in the investigation, such as when going from the organ to examining the cell. Then instead, there is a maximalist reductionism that claims to reduce everything to a certain level of understanding, as in the case of physicalist reductionism. Now this whole desire for the reduction of the

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whole to the parts recalls the most traditional of British philosophical and political conceptions, ranging from Ockham to Thatcher, and that is the emphasis on the singularity of the individual, which does not subject itself to a system and which does not need justification. The OOO is in fact also interested in politics, although it would be more correct to say policies, particularly in the case of Harman, who tried to draft some principles of political theory, and Morton, who is instead implicitly interested in environmental policies, especially concerning global warming. That being said, despite their reference to authors such as Badieu, Latour, and Deleuze, all of whom had a history of political militancy behind them in the radical left, their attitude in this regard never goes further than a generic progressivism, which does not go beyond emancipating racial minorities and fighting global warming. From this point of view, objectivism arranges all entities in a simple copresence exempting the theorist from getting into questions of power relations or the history of social conflicts. From this point of view, shifting the perspective to the model of the nonhuman entity is a good alibi for extricating oneself from social issues, where social classes, conflicts, and relations of production are all derubricated to objects on the same level as lichens, ufos, bacteria, and fairy tale gnomes. This is a problem that emerges regarding even the discourses of aesthetics to which they often allude, though without proposing an aesthetic theory. Aesthetics is an object that is grasped in a destorified way, a concept assumed to be clear even though it is not. It does not matter how it is constituted, what positions it expresses, or what ideological rhetoric it conceals; it is simply there. In this sense, this way of understanding aesthetics and art as if they had been there all along is not unlike the old idealist approach that thought of eternal concepts. Harman is interested in Ortega y Gasset’s aesthetics for reasons that are instrumental to his ontological theory, in which the gnoseological approach is rejected, but also the approach related to truth, whereby the way of relating to objects rather than (true and justified) knowledge in the epistemological sense is instead that of metaphor. For Bogost (2006), the point instead is to relate to the examination of games through the tools of text criticism and then to mutate these tools, updating them in relation to the reality of videogames. This discourse has innovative aspects; in fact, it is about using literary criticism to adapt it to video, which then also allows the reverse process: to adapt the peculiarity of this criticism thus adapted to literature and art. Finally, Morton was born precisely as a professor of literature specializing with regard to English Romanticism, with an interest in environmental aesthetics and critique of the aesthetics of nature, and who also provides a range of insights related to trendy music, going from alternative to punk noise. Even the way the art is treated, however, remains

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aseptic. Even if one were to consider works as hyperobjects, this would only be a petitio principii since if all objects are in some way hyperobjects, so are works of art. But from all this again, neither an art theory nor an aesthetic theory emerges. From the point of view of memetic theory, all the ontologies of objects we discussed above could, in theory, be included in memetics. Now, everything that is objective is cognitively something. If an object is such, it is because it has an essence, and then it also has a concept and a name, and so it is something predisposed for communication. If it is such, then it is a meme, in that outside the meme there is only the ineffably subjective or the ineffably material, and since this kind of realism rejects both, it moves within the ontological dimension of the meme.

Aesthetics and Artificial Intelligence Today, we have chatbots that are powerful enough to express opinions on any subject, including art and aesthetics. In this regard, I addressed a number of questions to ChatGPT, which is still a relatively primitive form of AI but has already developed enough to allow some considerations about how AI relates to art and aesthetics. In general, it can be said that what Feuerbach said about human being applies to AI: “man is what he eats,” keeping in mind that in this case AI feeds on data. Then the problem first burdens the selection, classification, and cleansing of this data. These data are then processed according to parameters (ChatGPT uses 175 billion of them) that allow different statistical weights to be assigned to their connections. In this sense, the more parameters there are, the more sophisticated the machine’s reasoning is, but at the same time, the risk of overlearning is also increased, that is, leading to the input of data that is too individualistic, with a loss of generalization ability or noise. From this point of view, AI then proceeds according to what has been called a blind view, that is, as a blind person who finds a way to perform a task even without seeing, simply by connecting the input with the desired output. Thus, any expressed position of the AI regarding aesthetics, whether in theoretical questions or in expressing statements about the value or beauty of this or that object, always depends on its training data and adopted parameters, and in any case, the AI does not express subjective taste judgments, but only impersonal considerations, just as it does not express personal advice or say what it thinks is better or worse. However, it is possible to get around this antisubjective barrier by asking it to express itself “as if” it were someone or “as if” there were a story in which a certain situation is given. In these cases, taste and value judgments also emerge, which are clearly based on the data and parameters of the model.

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AI also implicitly expresses aesthetic preferences in the generation of multimedia content, especially in the production of images from prompts. These kinds of productions have so invaded social networks that a kind of AI style can now be recognized, emerging from the way it treats images and the errors most commonly found in them. In the past, in science fiction literature, the electronic brain was talked about and believed to be able to perform only a series of rational tasks, even conversing with humans, but always remaining imprisoned in an icy logic without feelings or imagination. It was believed, following a widespread romantic prejudice, that artistic creativity was the inimitable mark of human essence. Then, when the AI that talks like a person actually arrived, it turned out that it is not so precise and cold and that the very thing it can simulate most easily is the creative production of images, music, and lyrics. This happens because the rigidly logical computer model cannot communicate. Language requires elasticity and flexibility, and to simulate these features, networks with different probabilistic weights have been used, which allow the software to have elasticity, but this implies a reduction in accuracy and logical rigor. So, it is not surprising that some AI chatbots make math errors because math, which would be very easy to deal with simpler software, becomes difficult to handle with complex systems made for understanding and using language. This also helps us understand why mathematics is so hostile to our very powerful linguistic mind. So AI shuffles all the pieces of memes around, thus doing a very similar job to that done by the imagination. There are differences: machines feed off huge databases of images through crawling and then tag them through parameters, thus being able to construct new images based on simple text prompts. There are still problems, however. AI applications often draw hands with varying numbers of fingers. These are mistakes that even a child would not make because human drawing proceeds from concepts to percepts. So the child very crudely draws a man with arms, but at the ends, the hands will always have five fingers. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, operates without concepts, exactly as Kant said about the aesthetic dimension and particularly the beautiful, but in operating without concepts, it does not realize a number of essential properties. So this means that artificial intelligence is a great program of imagination, but of imagination without intellect, because precisely it has no classificatory filter in its output that connects it to a set of notions. This also means that human s­ ubject, when he paints, involves the faculty of intellect, even when he makes Surrealist drawings. So the human mind is not a block diagram in which faculties are connected to each other in a processual way. In the human mind, all these elements work together, so there is no way to untangle

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them, and therefore there is no way for the human to draw without noticing a hand with two or seven fingers. So this also applies to beauty, which cannot be what is universally liked without concept. We do not perceive a confused set of forms for which we look for a formal rule immanent to it; we always perceive concepts, even works and landscapes, and then evaluate them by means of other, more abstract concepts. So we cannot think of reflective judgment acting separately from determinative judgment. If there is something wrong, the overall formal perception is also affected. Without considering the level of aesthetic value judgment, we reason in terms of abstract concepts. Going back to AI, the processes in detail are different. The mixing of memes to compose the image behind a verbal request is analogous to what happened in premodern art. The patrons would give verbal instructions to the painters, after which the painters would rummage through their mnestic archives and rework what they had seen, filtering it with what they knew how to do technically, and this eventually allowed the production of the painted image. The painter depended, like AI, on training, and that is why in the education of painters in the academies, as many examples as possible of often classical works were given to draw inspiration from. The broader this base was, the more eclectic the style could be; the narrower it was, the more conventional and impersonal the style became instead, because as the data base was smaller, so was the entropic oscillation and thus the possibility of choice and personalization. Today, this imagination is scattered throughout the global network. This data that the painter used to make use of, as well as the AI crawling, is nothing but memes. Thus, we today have a great faculty of memetic imagination that, for the first time, is objective and not subjective. With AI, memes are articulated in the infosphere for the first time in such relative autonomy that they give the impression of dealing with a subject. For the first time, machines are not only intelligent but seem to understand concepts in the sense that they can provide appropriate responses as if they understood. Every machine is, in a sense, intelligent because it proceeds in its operation by following a logic, and for that reason, it can be modeled through software. But in this case, these machines connect the object to the communication, just as we do. What they lack is a transcendental subject in the phenomenological sense that allows these entities to go beyond the mere objective dimension of “for me.” Entities processed by machines are still the only entities for us that have a living subject capable of giving meaning and significance to things that are not just bundles of semantic connections. So the semantics of AIs still cannot be anything but an extension of our own. This fact, however, already has an important consequence. Humans, in technology, alienate a part of themselves and their actions. That is, he delegated a

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number of tasks, as precisely in the Entlastungen Gehlen mentioned, whereby an activity that used to be performed by humans is now no longer necessary because it is performed by the machine. Then these technological solutions were, in the past, primarily aimed at relieving people from fatigue and heavy labor by channeling more physical strength into them than human strength. In the past, people have tried to produce machines for mathematical calculation precisely because it is not congenial to the linguistic dimension of our thinking. The result has been a decline in our ability to compute, as this has been delegated to the machine. Today, however, these technologies allow the Entlastung of reason and imagination. What is left for an individual to be human once he has freed himself from the labors and yet he has also freed himself from the rational works of calculations, but then finally also from his rational and creative activities? First human being got rid with machines of his animality in the sense of the use of physical force. Today he is getting rid of the use of his rationality. So humans are left with only their pet animal functions, remaining to them only their natural drives. This means that if the process of civilizing man tried to depress the animal component of the drives of instincts and passions, then later with Romanticism he tried to recover the relationship with this human emotional passionate substratum through its reintegration into high culture, today that humans delegate to the machine even the expressions of high culture nothing remains to them but their instinctual affective animality from which they had done so much to e­ mancipate themselves. So the last observation to be drawn from the aesthetic point of view is that the human being will tend to the mere satisfaction of pleasure that is typical of the subhuman, and in the arts will seek the outlet that is typical of the hobby that conceives only the need for distraction but not the need for elevation and idealization. This shift in the conception of art as a recreational tool with no pretense of value is already entering the way art is conceived in schools and institutions. But this is simply the liquidation of aesthetic value in favor of recreational entertainment.

Pre-Aesthetics and the Animal and Plant World We will try at this point to make a very elementary point. We live in a thermodynamic universe dominated by a tendency to degrade energy, which is ultimately dispersed in the form of heat. This is also what living beings do, which, although apparently acting in a sense that has been called neghentropic, can be considered energy-dispersal machines since they consume a lot of energy to live, adding, if anything, efficiency to the entropic tendency. Besides, if the second law of thermodynamics is a physical law, it is hard

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to see how the opposite could be true. Now, in order to consume energy, they have to supply themselves with adequate materials. So a key aspect of these machines is the power supply, along with the tightness of the system. But since this wears out over time, the other necessity is its reproduction. This is why biologists Maturana and Varela (1980) spoke of an autopoietic system. This reproduction is also connected to the variation and dynamics of natural selection in relation to the environment, which automatically results in the adaptation of species to the environment as mutations that are not compatible with environmental conditions are simply eliminated. There are living things that simply grow in a particular place and others that move in space. Movement in space favors a tendency to have limbs and senses and thus a nervous system that arises precisely from the need to direct movement so that it can be directed toward food. The beings that do not move are mainly plants. Many living things have benefited from sexual reproduction, which increases the variability of genetic characteristics and the chances of adaptation to the environment. However, in the absence of movement, plants have had to rely on elements of nature, such as the wind, to make sexual contact, which is a form of communication through the exchange of genetic material. The development of small animals, such as insects, that feed on pollen enabled another sexual strategy that interests us here. These animals had a parasitic relationship with the plants whose pollen they “stole,” which contains the plant’s gamete, that is, the genetic material necessary for reproduction. In this case, the plant benefited from a side effect of this pollen theft. In fact, these pollen-stealing animals soiled themselves with the pollen itself, and when they went to other plants to do the same thing, they involuntarily pollinated them. This side effect had the function of improving the environmental fitness of these plants. So these plants started using blind means to attract these animals. Clearly, the plants knew nothing about the sensory apparatus of these animals, and the selection of the most suitable solutions was only due to chance. Those that were successful allowed subsequent variations that were increasingly efficient. The result of this drift is the transformation of the reproductive apparatus of plants in such a way as to make it more and more perceptible as if it were an advertising poster or a large target, constituting a literally “aesthetic” form of communication between entirely different life forms. Thus, flowers were born. These flowers have the ability to act on three levels of the insects’ sensory apparatus. Thus, to effect sexual communication between two plants of different sexes, they have developed a communication apparatus to attract those who are intended to be the intermediaries, and that is the medium of sexual communication. The plant’s communication with the

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insect is thus a communication that is selectively tailored to the insect’s perceptual abilities. Flowers are presented as large, colorful targets. Their shape and the vividness of their colors, standing out against the environment, are made to try to attract the attention of the insects, which must act as sexual communicators. So the first form most obvious to us humans of this kind of communication is visual. However, probably far more important is another form of communication, which is the olfactory one, through scent. Why do we say this? Because the animals in question, when they have to mate, use, as communication signals for sexual mating, chemical signals of the olfactory type, through the use of pheromones, which, not surprisingly, are called semiochemicals. And semiochemicals are also senomones, which are those that act as a semiotic bridge between the plant and animal kingdoms. So the color must have been an addition to make the point of origin of the olfactory signal more precise. So insect eyes are not convergent but convex, perhaps also for safety reasons. Then the plants took advantage of this opening of the insect’s eye to insert visual messages about food targets into this visual landscape. However, pollinating insects, such as bees, do not see colors as we do, as their eyes perceive a range of frequencies that is higher than ours, so they do not see low frequencies such as red, but they see higher frequencies than we do, such as ultraviolet. Flowers, viewed in ultraviolet, reveal concentric circles, just like a target on whose center the pistils stand out. The colored signal had to be large relative to the size of the insect so that it could also visually fit inside. However, another element is missing: what is the motive that leads the insect to go after that particular target? That motive is feeding. So these plants have also adapted in this respect to the needs required by the transporter by adding nectar, which contains sugars and is thus palatable to the insects’ sense of taste. Plants not only developed these advertisements for insects, but in natural competition, they attracted other kinds of animals for different functions, such as seed dispersal. For larger animals, they had to offer something as bait or a reward, regardless of the food type. Then in this case, natural selection arranged for the formation of elements that were both visually attractive, through the use of bright colors, but also through smells, with scents, but especially through taste and also with greater consistency in terms of quantity, so that the animal would be induced to take the fruit to eat it, finding within it hidden the seed that is swallowed along with fruit and then expelled with defecation. The strategy used with these larger animals, for example, mammals, is of a different kind than that used with insects in flowers, even from the sensory point of view, in that the fruit may be less conspicuous than the flower, but in such a way

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that it is still identified by the more specialized eyes of mammals. Now this has a relation to beauty for the simple reason that even today we still consider fruit “beautiful.” Many people may think that they put beauty first in relation to flowers rather than fruits. This is not wrong because flowers were later used specifically for aesthetic purposes. However, these uses are always found in cultural situations, whereas the custom of eating fruit must be much older and probably predates the hominy itself. So it is probably because of fruit that we appreciate flowers, not vice versa. Having said that, we regard fruit as something beautiful, but in this beauty there is also an interest that is related to the physical existence of the element in question, which is the basic interest par excellence, and that is the food interest. When we say “What a beautiful apple!” we are not referring Kantianly only to the apple as a sensible form regardless of its existence, but we are referring to something that is found attractive because in addition to having a well-defined shape, in addition to having a vivid color, in addition to having a pleasant smell, in addition to having a sweet taste, it has nutritive properties that make it desirable since nutrition is indispensable for our survival. According to this reasoning, the basis of the sensible pleasure we feel for the fruit is the association of ideas between the perceptual experience of the fruit and its functional utility for our survival. This, however, does not mean that Kant is wrong and that aesthetics instead is based on the association of conspicuous form and physiological utility, but simply that this dimension, while having to do with aesthetics, is not yet the specific situation of aesthetic judgment and, in our view, of aesthetic appreciation, in the proper sense, and that is why we have proposed the term “pre-aesthetics.” It could then be said that at the biological root of the beautiful there is the useful, but this useful is not that of the utilitarians, because it is not a conceptualized and objectified useful, but a transcendental useful implicit in the living dimension of acting, perceiving, and therefore willing. Food is the archetype of value, although the transcendental root of value is something else; in fact, as the organism moves and knows, it establishes criteria of priority within a dynamic of homeostatic interaction with the environment, in which preferences and differences already emerge, testifying to the implicit existence of value functions. However, this, at an empirical level, is still fundamentally connected with self-support and nurture. And so the pleasurable is “archetypically” connected to the satisfaction of a fundamental biological interest, the most fundamental of which is nourishment, which is followed by all other needs. There is always underlying in these experiences of pleasure some selective type of advantage in terms of survival, but that is what makes the difference with the beautiful, as far as aesthetics is concerned. In all these

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sensorially positive experiences, which are also accompanied by affective elements, we always find, at their basis, some kind of selective and adaptive advantage that makes them desirable. It is likely that the young of each species appear “beautiful” to their parents, since we are able to consider not only our own young but also those of other mammals as “cute.” However, it is also significant to note that such a mixture of pleasantness and affectivity in culture, rather than the dimension of beautiful, underlies that of “cute,” in that they inspire tenderness and sympathy rather than admiration and complacency. This discourse, however, opens the door to the one about the beautiful as “worthy of love,” which, however, is again different in humans because love is also culturalized in humans. If we now move to the famous discourse of the peacock’s wheel or the gardening bird’s hut, we will find that these animals are using more or less the same means used by plants for pollination, to attract attract, instead of intermediaries, their sexual partner. The peacock, with its wheel, shows a great advertisement, which is also a proof of its own state of health as well as of its young age. Similarly, the gardening bird creates a large advertisement and selects colors to try to create what we might call “the flower effect.” In fact, the bird collects all elements of the same color to reinforce the visual message. What is interesting in the case of birds and what unites birds and flowers is that they rely almost primarily on the visual signal, since birds do not have a strong olfactory apparatus. In contrast, what distinguishes birds from flowers is that birds add the sound dimension to the visual signal through song. In the case of mammals, there are other types of signals, which are more complex because they involve behavioral situations. Now, birds also use behavioral sequences, which are called, because of their rhythmic scansion, dances, from which the dances of humans are probably also derived. Birds, then, perform dances, and these dances often have to do with food-seeking behaviors. The male pretends to peck at something to attract the female’s attention and then begins a series of ritual behaviors, punctuated and predetermined, that have effects, also predetermined, on the female. The fact, however, that the male resorts to simulated feeding by pecking on the ground leads us to believe that these animals must also have something like mirror neurons. The partner, when he sees the male pecking on the ground, evidently is prompted in the activation of a similar neural circuit, which leads him to think that the one is pecking to eat. So, again, the interest is not immediately sexual, but the primary interest used to activate sexual communication is always food. Even in the maternal relationship in mammals, the affective exchange that binds the young to the mother is alimentary. So the living person here has, as the basis of value and assignment of an interest or desire, always the food

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element. At the level of genetic predetermination selected through evolution, food-based interest is inevitable. Not surprisingly, some birds, in an attempt to attract the female, give her food. It would seem that underlying the female’s interest in the male, according to these examples, is food interest, which serves as the trigger for sexual interest. Now all this discourse in culture constitutes, as usual, the premises of cultural behavior, but it does not replace them because it goes far beyond sex and beyond its food premises. Let us see then, before turning to human being, the behavior of some mammals who, in their practice of sexual selection, prefer specimens that do not have bright colors comparable to those of flowers or those of bird plumage. This means that these animals should not need this kind of advertising. Why? One hypothesis might be that they have a more specialized visual ability that is capable of grasping even small differences and does not need overly conspicuous signals. However, the mammal also relies extensively on olfactory-type signals above all. In addition to the olfactory signal, however, behavior plays a very important role in sexual selection among mammals, which is not schematized in a dance, as in birds, but in a series of approaches and refusals, which serve to test mutual interest. In other cases, we have even more complex behaviors, because they are related to social situations. In this case, we have the so-called alpha male, who, in order to have a chance to fertilize all the females in the group, competes with the other males in the group in a series of tournaments, of which the winner precisely will have as a prize the chance of reproduction. This serves to introduce an element of internal selection; however, this internal selection is based primarily on the physical strength of the male, compared to which, on the other hand, the female must not have any particular elements of interest because the male’s level of selectivity is very low. So throughout the animal world, the rule generally is that the female selects and the male shows off and therefore must possess special attributes, which the female does not need. In mammalian societies, such as, for example, the case of deer or related groups, even this selection by females lapses because it all plays out in the tournament between males. We are particularly interested in this system because mammalian societies are closest to us. Even among humans, we have had similar dynamics with fighting among males for females. However, the situation is not exactly the same among deer because females have a certain ability to choose. This ability to choose was instrumental in giving greater evolutionary importance to the male’s abilities, which went not only in the sense of physical strength but also in the sense of communicative ability. The latter was linked to organizational ability, which in turn was linked to the ability to carry out profitable hunting operations, requiring the cooperation of

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several individuals since, given the size of the hunted animal, it could not be taken by a single individual. Thus, the specific function of group hunting, operated by hominins, had a decisive influence in emphasizing communication skills and causing females to prefer those most capable of communication, imposing a very strong selective-type stress on the selection of traits suitable for communication. This means that human or protohuman women considered a man skilled in communication more attractive than a man of great physical strength, although we know that even today many women nevertheless have not ceased to appreciate the physical prowess of the male. This communicative ability is also an organizational and directive ability that leads the female to easily identify as preferable the individual capable of organizing the behavior of others, which is the basis of the formation of the power relationship among human societies. Thus, the basis of power among humans does not lie in dominance, which people also express at the cognitive level on the known over the object, as a certain tradition of idealist and Hegelian type in particular wants, but lies instead in the ability to be a connecting element of group behavior for purposes of hunting, warfare, and so on. In this activity, physical prowess does not hurt, so physical prowess did not go completely out of the picture, not least because it also continued to exert its importance in the functions of communicative coordination that presupposed the leader’s ability to be personally capable of dangerous and courageous actions. However, this encouragement of the cognitive and communicative aspects within human collectivity has emphasized aspects that do not exist in other animal societies, such as, for example, the importance of elders as people who have accumulated in their memory a quantity of experiences useful for leadership and in general for group life. This has also led to a longer life expectancy since the human group needs to accumulate experiences and information. Therefore, the elderly person is an individual who is still useful to society because of his or her ability to retain memories of past experiences and learn from them. Thus, in human society, prestige and power are becoming increasingly detached from mere physical performance, which remains a mere remnant of an earlier evolutionary stage. Moreover, these people, who are capable of communicating, coordinating, being obeyed, and accumulating prestige, are also able to increase their own availability of goods and resources for their family and descendants. This additional advantage ensures an element of preferability that is related to what we now call status. This aspect becomes clear even in archaic times before the use of money. For example, in the Homeric poems, we already find a whole series of rather articulated social functions without, however, any mention of the existence of money. With the spread of money, however, a

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whole series of evaluative elements are simply summarized by money, such as the availability of goods, organization, and comforts for life. Hence, money replaces in its function the peacock’s feathers, the garden bird’s colorful cottage, or the deer’s big antler stage, the gorilla’s muscles, and so on. However, money soon wins the supremacy of desirability, even in the wedding field, but not that of beauty. This means that beauty derives from a minor branch of human evolutionary history, which has been reemployed for minority purposes, ranging from sexual selection (but with lesser importance than money and power) and going to affect certain social situations, which instead need to be emphasized and highlighted through the use of techniques, precisely, of advertising, such as those used in nature by flowers or the plumage of birds and which, for this, must be made “special,” in that they go to characterize social functions of a special kind. These social functions of a special kind, which need to be enriched from the point of view of their sensitive impression content, are mostly those of the sacred. Thus, it is the sacred, not sex, that is the real basis of the sense of beauty among humans.

The Beautiful and the Pleasant We have here a division between the pleasurable and the beautiful, which is far more consistent than that advocated by classical aesthetics, for the pleasurable, being subjective, acts at the level of individual psychology and, in theory, could be resolvable in an aesthetic analysis of the subject. However, the beautiful transcends this subjective dimension, not to place itself in the objective dimension of natural entities but to place itself in the supra-subjective, that is, emergent, dimension of the social circuits of culture, that is, in the drifts of memetic complexes. This means that the beautiful can be explained only at the level of an analysis of the meta-individual organization of culture. Beautiful and pleasant are thus not only two different things but stand on different planes, so it is not the pleasant that determines the beautiful through its mere quantitative proliferation, but it is the beautiful that, by formal descending causality, disciplines and refines the pleasant. This explains a number of facts that completely elude naturalistic evolutionary and cognitive reductionism. Let’s look at them. According to naive evolutionism, the beautiful should be connected primarily to sex and only by extension to other domains such as enjoyment, which is intimately connected to pleasure, and only marginally connected to more spiritual activities, which are also less enjoyable. Instead, just the opposite happens. What becomes beautiful is not what has excited the most, but what is most appropriate to the genetic, or rather, memetic code of a culture.

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Beauty therefore lies between two thresholds, namely between the rigidity of religious dogma, on the high level of the self-organization of culture, and between the relativity of the mere standard of hit parade pleasures, on the low level of psychosocial relativism. Below that threshold of the standard, one plunges into mere subjective relativism, in which there can be no beauty but only pleasantness, for the simple reason that there cannot be, despite Kant, that generality of value that is necessary to the canonical form of the beautiful. The pleasure of the beautiful, therefore, as is always the case in emergent phenomena, must be supported by the lower level of pleasure and disciplined by the higher level of the beautiful. The lower level therefore supports the existence of beauty by giving it interest, passion, and even emotion, while the higher level shapes the principles of beauty by disciplining, through education in “good taste,” interest, emotion, and passion. It is not, however, simply a matter of delimiting vague interest and emotion. Beauty, through the education of taste, succeeds in making the subject appreciate values that he would otherwise never have understood, in making him taste aspects of the sensible world that he would otherwise never have tasted, and in making him feel emotions that he would otherwise never have felt. The subject thus enters into that capacity for refined and subtle tastes, which are the basis of the good taste that so interested pre-Baumgartenian aesthetics and later delicacy, on which Hume so insisted, and which distinguishes the sphere of aesthetic experience of civilized people from that of the crude individual, who suffers as such from an inability to taste. This is why sexual pleasure, connected simply to the extrusion of an instinctual response, is completely irrelevant to aesthetics, and traditional aesthetics places the pleasures of sex outside the domain of aesthetics, which should instead be inconceivable to an evolutionary psychologist. Aesthetics, then, is not a discourse that runs according to a dynamic of simple majority statistics, which goes bottom-up, but is a discourse that goes in the reverse direction, from top to bottom. This explains many things: It explains, for example, the aristocratic character that interest in aesthetics has had, as tapping into higher values; it explains at the opposite end a whole series of stances against beauty by the avant-garde and artists linked to the protest movements; it also explains, however, its defense in circles that are always progressive but critical of the flattening brought about by consumer society; finally, it also explains the continuing failure of all those market logics that seek to bring beauty into the world of consumerism and which instead end up with the effect that the beauty they purport to draw on punctually turns into kitsch. Bringing the beautiful to the general public of the consumerist

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market is like bringing snow to the equator; you can’t do it because the closer you get, the more it melts. From this point of view, beauty reveals a tendency to intensify itself through abstraction and thus through intellectualization, which even leads it to assume a negative attitude toward sensible pleasure, leaning instead toward a desensitized form of pleasure, which can become spiritualized or simply intellectualized. We find this tendency at work in aesthetic phenomena of great cultural refinement and sophistication, which, however, should not be understood as pretense or unnatural artificiality. It is true that these phenomena of aesthetic elevation often have to do with elitist cultural situations that are very exclusive, to the point of being hermetic. In Japan, for example, we find the case of Noh theater, which is a form of entertainment that has very little that is spectacular in the Western sense of the term, since it is more of a secular ritual than a performance. In Noh theater, all entertainment is banished. In this way, all vulgar pleasures are also excluded. It is a deliberately exclusive aesthetic form because it is totally indigestible to those who have not previously been educated in the “philosophy” of Noh theater. These principles, however, are not contrived, not a form of lambasted and smug intellectualism, but, on the contrary, have much to do with the deepest principles of Japanese “spiritual” culture. Indeed, the aesthetic principle underlying Noh is that of yūgen, which refers precisely to depth and naturalness. Finally, even contemporary art, even which opposed the old canons of beauty, however, pursued an elevated aesthetic of beauty, which therefore stood in a condition of denial of the principles of aesthetic experience related to the world of spectacle proper to the culture industry.

The Upward Motion of the Beautiful The beautiful, therefore, is not on the same plane as the pleasurable. The pleasant is subjective; it is connected to our needs and also to our instincts. The pleasant therefore always operates in the sense of a reduction of cultural sensibility to one’s own subjective condition, regardless of whether one is educated or ignorant. Thus, for the educated people, the pleasant will be able to approximate more to the beautiful because they have been educated to beauty, and beauty has acted as a disciplining form of his tastes. From this, an old seventeenth-century argument may be inferred that just as the cool person desires hot things, the ignorant person will desire what he can comprehend, and that is trivial things. This kind of argument has classist overtones. Those who have more possibilities have more refined tastes, and

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those who have fewer possibilities have cruder tastes. However, this is not what we mean, because history shows that this equivalence is false. It is not the scarcity of goods and means that makes a person, group, or class culturally poor. Two examples: first, Hesiod was a simple peasant who nevertheless laid the foundations of Western poetry; second, today, many super-rich people or stars of the entertainment industry manifest absolutely vulgar and kitsch tastes. Wealth is often not synonymous with refinement but with arrogance. The rich people today are as much a slave to money as the poor people, and in a system all based on profit, the rich people are no longer capable of magnificent dépense, but at best only of some useless waste, and that is to say, of pomp without fastum. The subaltern classes, today, do not manifest vulgar tastes because of their material poverty, but because they are driven to triviality by a marketing circuit that, being based on the most shared traits, reinforces the tendencies of the pleasant downward. This is also because of their “alienation” from the popular culture of their origin, which has been completely destroyed through what Pasolini called the “cultural disaster,” which he describes as a cultural erasure that not even fascism was able to do. The result is a dislocation immanent to the pre-individual condition of the multitude, which, because of social fragmentation, is precluded from the path of cultural coalescence. Thus, it always finds itself tending toward the “low” of aesthetic value, which is not constituted by “ugliness” but by “squalor.” Squalor is an expression of a situation in which the secularization of symbolic values passes, with their zeroing, into the de-cosmization of the world, that is, in the fact that the world no longer presents itself as a kosmos of meanings but as a meaningless set of trivial contingencies, in which there is no possibility of constructing a cultural telos within which to positively define an identity and a life story; this is the reason why both the self and the world for the self become inexpressive. The cultural dynamic of beauty follows an upward motion in its form, up to an elite condition, and then defluxes downward in its propagation and vulgarization to dispersion. Why should memes, however, since they are self-replicators, avoid the criterion of quantitative expansion of information? The answer is that the valorization process allows elevation in the value hierarchy to control a much larger mass of information for much longer. Thus, it is an evolutionary strategy, meta-memetic in nature. In fact, value is a regulative principle of behavior, and it is connected with power since power also regulates behavior. However, values and powers regulate behavior in different ways and with different purposes. Powers regulate behavior from the outside; values are truths that act on the subject from within (such as what Foucault calls “veridition”). The function of values is generically

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ethical because they act for the survival of the group at the level of sociality they affect. However, the moment culture is elevated as an emergent memetic reality, then the relationships between value organization and survival needs become enormously complex and nonlinear. This is why the naively functionalist approach in anthropology that sought utilitarian functions for every aspect of culture was found to have failed. Aesthetic values therefore follow an upward motion relative to this emergent character that takes them to ever higher, more general, and inclusive levels of sociality in a trend toward the universal. This sheds new light on Lukács’ theory of art as an expression of the universal in the particular, whose materialistic premise is that the universal always manifests itself in a particular case. In these cases, there are two axes of value determination: the qualitative one, that is, the increase in quality for which it is desirable, and the quantitative one, that is, its rarity. Of these two principles, the former is modulated by the latter. In fact, even a highly useful good, such as water, takes on very different values depending on its availability. Therefore, for values of the first kind, we say that “X is valuable.” For those of the second kind, on the other hand, we say that “X has value.” So only the former are values in essence. Beauty is a value; works of art, on the other hand, have value. We will therefore call the former ontological values and, instead, the ontic values the latter. The principle of rarity of ontological value is due to the concentration of power, which reduces its extent as one approaches the apex, as in a pyramid, since the closer one is to the apex, the broader the base on which one exerts one’s power. The higher the beauty, the more universal it is—not logically, but because it radiates more and more. As it radiates, however, it, on the one hand, spreads memetically, but on the other hand, it disperses and weakens in its ability to confer value on objects of value. Thus, the value at the top of the pyramid must necessarily be exclusive. At its base, on the other hand, we find only the degradation of it. The beautiful, then, aspires to reach the summit of values in a social game that relaunches it in increasingly exclusive, important, and hermetic versions, causing its detachment from the vulgar pleasures of the masses. Folk cultures, on the other hand, stood somewhere in between, without gaining as much power but without lapsing into the banal. Mass culture, on the other hand, tends, because of market dynamics, to transform any cultural intensity or depth to the maximum extent of enjoyability with a process of vulgarization and trivialization from top to bottom that is inevitable on pain of loss of profit. Thus, consumerism can only act in the sense of trivialization and vulgarization of any aesthetic value it touches. Since the postmodern years, there has been a critique of the attitude of the Frankfurt School and critics such as Greenberg (who spoke of kitsch) or

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Macdonald (who spoke of masscult and midcult), trying to revalue pop culture, for example through the whole discourse on subcultures, through disciplines such as semiotics, mediology, or media studies, with the consequence of clearing all commercial production by burying all traces of social critique, and leaving room only for the narcissistic “I like it.” Clearly, the situation since the 1950s has changed, but the economic system has not. Inside the jungle of competition of the so-called free market, which is more properly a liberal market, there is the possibility of implementing different marketing strategies referring to different sectors of the public and creating aesthetic means and values related to different communities of taste. However, this differentiation, which is found on the internet, merely translates the hierarchy of values in the breadth of supply, that is, the vertical into the horizontal, putting rubies and stained glass on the same level.

Aesthetics and Commonplace Today we talk about widespread aestheticization, the aestheticization of communication in relation to marketing, the aestheticization of politics, but also widespread aesthetic production. It seems that beauty is everywhere, but it is not. Today we witness the triumph of an intermediate element between the subjectively pleasing and the beautiful: the pretty. Japan, whose aristocratic radicalism of Noh aesthetics we recalled, today is dominated by a completely different situation that sees the triumph of a different concept, that of kawaii, which in turn is connected to a different aesthetic approach and a different cultural dynamic. Aesthetics is always based on commonplaces; the aesthetics of beauty tries to narrow the commonplace commonality through a process of abstraction from inferior pleasures, but it cannot prevent it. Thus, the beautiful seeks to ascend through a process of sophistication supported by value, which can have paradoxical effects such as the pursuit of absolute but profound simplicity. Subjective pleasure poses serious problems for aesthetic scholars because, in it, the self-interested pleasure of personal usefulness is mixed with formal pleasure and thus cannot be easily grasped as such precisely because it is indistinguishable from the self-interest of the subject. Kant has often been criticized by thinkers on the opposite side for his theory of aesthetic disinterestedness, but from a rational point of view, it responds to a very clear rational need for the individuation and selection of the aesthetic as such. Moreover, the ineffable pleasure that cannot be converted into any shared experience does not allow us to know what kind of pleasure we are talking about or even whether it is an aesthetic pleasure. By the same Kantian requirement of isolating aesthetic pleasure as

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such, just as interested pleasure must be excluded, so must ineffable pleasure. The aesthetic pleasure that can be reasoned about can only be that which is constructed in the web of social communication relations. One can say more, and that is that since this web of communication is governed by autonomous evolutionary dynamics, the whole field of the aesthetic is cultural because it is self-determined in the logic of the evolutionary drift of culture. In this drift, we have seen that the phenomena of aesthetic enhancement are higher in value and less common, at least at the level of their value, since they can then radiate to the lower levels, conditioning them, but at the price of their watering down. Let us then see what happens when aesthetic phenomena do not follow the axis of value but that of social diffusion. This aspect of horizontal extension of aesthetic communication, which seeks to broaden the denominator, is important in all types of societies but is essential to understanding the mass aesthetics of market society since in it aesthetic value is converted into money and the pursuit of maximum profit is converted, as with any other commodity, into the pursuit of maximum diffusion. Expanding the denominator, however, inevitably entails the inability to mature choices that are more difficult to make understand. Now the cultural industry market today is not like it was in the days of the 1960s when the Frankfurt School authors wrote. There is no longer centralized, uniform standardization, tending to maximization and systematic reduction to the level of broadest comprehensibility of the aesthetic proposal. Today we have a market that offers a panoply of cultural propositions ranging from the broadest and most generic 1960s-style to the narrowest. This always happens because of a market discourse, because at a time when the market for large-scale mass productions has already been broken up, those who were looking for new business sought to make gains, albeit more limited, from the niche markets that were left out of large-scale production. These markets were explored in every sphere in the hope of making a profit from even the smallest trend in place. Then digital platforms were born that do not have to radiate a single message to all users because it is the users who log on to find what is to their taste, like those who go looking for something in an immense flea market. However, this dynamic does not produce value, only saturation of variants on a given cultural basis. In fact, the creation of ascending dynamics needs an apparatus of specialized delegation by the whole society through institutions that goes to legitimize a given trend, thus ensuring compliance with it even by those who do not understand it. Otherwise, this flourishing of proposals of all kinds without selection instead of concentrating value dissipates it to the point of indifference and to the point of making everything so obvious and taken for granted that it becomes insignificant even for the very

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market niches to which it refers. Today, the unfiltered cultural supply of this kind far outstrips the demand, and it is easy for this marketplace to turn into a big garbage dump in which no one believes it is worth searching because what is sought after at the end of the day is always valuable. The capitalist economic system seeks to exploit every element that can be translated into money intensively, just as the peasants of the early Middle Ages exploited the land while getting less and less harvest until famine set in. Only later did they realize that one must exploit the land less in order to get more from it. But this is difficult for a human swarm that swarms over resources like locusts to understand. The culture industry seeks to make profits even at the cost of making scorched earth everywhere and ultimately leaving a desert. The net has created a situation of widespread access to cultural offerings in the marketplace that represents not freedom but yet another disregard for high culture by the market economy. Indeed, economists should know that when supply exceeds demand, the value of the commodity collapses, and the commodity either sells out or remains unsold. Indiscriminately opening up the supply mechanism of often unfiltered self-produced cultural productions means that the user will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of productions that he or she will not even be able to evaluate and will remain a dead letter. They are a small fraction already to date managed to sell, which means that the business shifts from the purchases of such productions to the expenses incurred by the producers to be placed on the market. Such a mechanism has long plagued the poetry and painting industries. Since there are more poets than readers of poetry, the poetry publishing market is not based on sales of books to the reading public but on the production of books at the expense of poets, books that poets will give to their friends in the hope of at least being read, a hope that is often doomed to disappointment. Painters are attracted to unscrupulous gallery owners who organize exhibitions where painters must pay to exhibit and where they are unlikely to sell even a single painting. So the painting gallery does not make money from the sales of paintings but from the participation of painters. Today, anyone can upload their book to the big online bookstores. Needless to say, many of these books remain not only unsold but completely unknown. The same argument can be made for music platforms. The basis of the business lies in access to the platform even before selling the music. Such an undifferentiated system of supply and indifferentness to cultural content kills culture like the most oppressive of dictatorships. Even relatively recent history shows us that culturally effervescent situations are those where, first, demand exceeds supply, where there is a compact situation with an audience following different authors and judging them by

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exercising a filter function. But the filter alone is not everything, because otherwise, whether or not it sells in the digital or niche markets would also be enough. What is needed is for there to be connections in addition to filters, making it possible for networks of producers and users to stratify and interact according to feedback links of various solutions, which allows for modifications of productions in dialogue with audience expectations and values. In this way, these layered and interconnected networks will behave like neural networks capable of processing intelligent drifts. This has historically occurred in cities that have become powerhouses of the production of cultural value and aesthetic value pertaining to beauty. The first and most famous city where this phenomenon of neural layering occurred was Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries, then Rome of Augustus, Chang-han of the Tang period, Baghdad of Hārūn Ar-Rašīd, then Florence of the Renaissance, and so on. These were all cultural laboratories where there were different networks that proposed and selected emerging information. Then came the internet, and a great cloak of indifference descended on the world of cultural production. The internet, in the hopes of its early cultural theorists (myself included), was supposed to expand this laboratory and produce a worldwide Renaissance, but it did not. We did not realize that there is a problem with the internal economics of culture, which demands the presence of open, but nevertheless limited, systems, thus allowing the various networks of thought to superordinate themselves to select and empower memes. That is, there is a need for the formation of a device for selecting, concentrating, and amplifying messages, which ascend rapidly by winning the consensus of expert micro-communities made up of individuals in collaboration and competition with each other. In these situations, there is at the base a lot of production going stochastically in all directions, but there is also a very rapid system of selection, which focuses on only some of them and appropriates them by modulating them until agreement is reached in very small but very representative communities. Why, however, should these specialized micro-communities be there at all? Because it is the city itself that attracts them. From the period of the Impressionists to that of the historical avant-garde, anyone who wanted to be an artist, trying something new, went to Paris, which thus became a concentration of all the brightest minds in Europe. These laboratory cities in history created situations of concentration of the intellectual forces of the whole civilization, and they always operated on the basis of rather narrow intellectual communities that favored encounters. But the problem is also a different one: if you want the water to boil, there needs to be a fire lit under the pot, and that is, you need social transformations of a more general scope that include economic

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transformations. The Athens of the fifth century BC was a city that alone was richer than entire kingdoms because it was the economic and commercial center of the entire Mediterranean. In the Rome of Augustus, money flowing in from all over the empire is no longer spent on war. Tang-era Chang-an was the richest and most populous city on the planet at that time. The Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights was the capital of a booming empire. Florence of the Medici alone was richer than the entire Kingdom of England. Brains attracted by career possibilities came to these cities, and the demand for culture was supported by the availability of large amounts of money and by new or self-made men who wanted to use their wealth to lend luster and prestige to their image. Thus, there is not only a demand that exceeds supply but also a demand that can afford to spend to support cultural development and wants to do so in competition for prestige. Thus, courts and intellectual circles are sustained by this initiative are created, and within them various proposals and various querelles arise that animate the cultural debate. It is in these situations that new aesthetic and stylistic paradigms are established, which revolutionize the state of affairs present up to that point, and they do so because they have the support of reigning or emerging powers. The idealist history of culture has led people to believe that the arts developed only by the innate force of the genius of artists who unknowingly and unwittingly embodied the Zeitgeist. But as the coeval Antonio Labriola said, “Ideas do not fall from the sky.” The cultural mind still needs a whole range of factors for the machine of aesthetic production to produce certain results. This, however, does not mean making economicist reductionism. Money alone does not make aesthetic ideals of beauty, just as fire alone does not boil, especially if there is no water or no pot. Let us then come to conclusions regarding market aesthetics. It does not produce ideals of beauty but only genre art, based on even niche standards that result in the cute, the cool, the kawaii, the trendy, and so on. To understand the difference between the ideals of beauty in high culture, consider, for example, the field of music. Today we have mainstream genres such as indie music, which is a large container with many subgenres, but there are also many other classifications, old and new. In fact, in the situation of the extended network market, old fads never disappear and remain as survivals alongside new trends, sometimes mixing with them. For example, on one side we have old 80s music and on the other side “modern” 80s music. Also in cinema, we find the multiplication of genres: war, horror, fantasy, western, thriller, action, and so on. The genre film must stay within the confines of the genre, which standardizes expectations, and so the film must respond to certain characteristics with a set of topoi. Within the genre, there

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is innovation, but it is always internal to the strand. Then, in contexts such as contemporary cultural overproduction, the problem is not to find the new style but to build the new mechanism for activating the dynamics of valorization and vertical development of cultural value in relation to innovation in directions that become meaningful precisely because of valorization. It is such valorization that decides the style and its developments, not the genius who magically invents a new style that everyone likes. Today, it happens to be said by many artists and art lovers that there is a lack of the right artistic idea or a lack of the right artist, the genius figure who renews all art. It is also believed that since, according to inveterate prejudice, this genius is innate, it is a matter of genetics. But then why were so many genius painters and sculptors born in Greece between the fifth and fourth centuries only to never appear again? Was there a crisis of infertility? The same argument could be made for other cities where so many genius artists were miraculously born at a particular time. Why are these genetic traits concentrated in the richest cities during the period of greatest economic momentum? What about cognitive traits, then? Do these suddenly activate and then disappear when the money runs out? In fifth-century Athens and fourteenth-century Florence, much the same thing happened, and that is, the ample flow of money affected the demand for high-culture productions such as painting and sculpture for celebratory purposes, as well as literature and philosophy. There has been no mysterious change in neurotransmitters; it is competition that creates a swirling increase in quality, pushing it to unthinkable heights in a short time. And this is also how we explain the fact that a land of ordinary craftsmen becomes a land of peaks of human ingenuity within a few decades. The same thing happened in Flanders, where, in a short period of time, one went from the traditional medieval miniature to oil paintings of astonishing precision and realistic attention to detail. In the Edo (Tokyo) of the 18th and 19th centuries, economic flourishing led to a competition of increasingly complex colored prints with refined shading effects between one color and another that no one in the West had ever done. With respect to these changes, even the approach that uses the concept of supervenience shows itself in this view of heuristic capacity as being wholly insufficient. Indeed, this is not to deny the fact that some forms may make more sense than others, yet this consideration is made only for works that historically owe their success and thus also their beauty to other dynamics. Indeed, visual solutions that were considered highly effective in one era were no longer so in another era. When we admire the works of Raphael, why do we do so? Why do we consider them beautiful? Because we like them? No, because we consider them beautiful regardless of our subjective judgment.

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Because their form is effective? Their formal solution may be perceptually effective, but equally effective solutions are full of them on gallery walls. Because of technique? But the technique of nineteenth-century academics was even more developed. We therefore received through education, values and, among them, aesthetic values, and within these values lies most of what we consider beautiful.

Social Thinking and Beauty We are accustomed not only to sharing knowledge through communication but also to living in a system of available knowledge; therefore, we not only transmit knowledge but also live with and rely on virtually accessible knowledge. How many of us have gone to the South Pole? Yet, we rely on knowledge about its existence and consistency. We live in a world of knowledge that we experience, and we know it with relevance and competence only to a very small degree. Anyone knows that to fight a bad bacterial infection, you need antibiotics. But how many know how they are made chemically, how they are produced, and according to what principles they act in our bodies against bacteria? We simply do not know but trust that someone else knows. We are accustomed to saving information, so when we can, we share tasks or expertise. That is, we tend to become complementary, neglecting a range of knowledge that we can simply dispose of through other people. This is what we are told by scholars of the social theory of knowledge, and all of this is correct, yet this discourse does not explain the existence of institutions that are delegated to be competent in certain areas of knowledge. Indeed, to believe that such institutions depend on a psychological attitude is the usual reductionist oversimplification, which must seek to reduce social phenomena to the individual. Meanwhile, it is not true that spontaneously, individuals living together, for example, in couples, tend to share competencies; instead, very often, they influence each other in their interests, and thus, instead of having mutually exclusive interests, they have common interests. In couples, there may be mechanisms of compensation, but also of competition or, finally, of simple, relatively independent coexistence. Moreover, if the division of competencies in institutions depends on a psychological issue, they should always fluctuate in their consistency because the psychological lives of individuals vary according to experience, just as it might be a group of friends who meet to talk about a common topic. But institutions are not groups of friends who see each other occasionally. Institutions have a life independent of the psychology of the people in them, requiring specific skills from the members. These institutions are not

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the result of the deliberate choice of someone with the entire organization of society in mind. They, although the result of human decisions, exist, endure, and functionally interlock with other institutions and social realities through a feedback mechanism in the system that, in turn, is connected to the way the system itself exists and endures as a total entity. So this system is emergent with respect to the desires and wills of individual people. If we go to the city and we have to do some paperwork, we will arrive in the city by train, we will arrive at a station, we will take a bus, we will go to the city office to do some paperwork, and so on. None of what we saw all day was done by one person, and none of it was done on the basis of occasional psychological nudges. One person alone does not even know how to do all these things. A lone person is completely powerless, both intellectually and physically, with respect to what he experiences in his daily life. Everything, whether in logic, management, or organization, overwhelms his or her abilities. Even simple psychic relationships are not enough. It’s not like a group of friends didn’t know what to do one afternoon, so because one was good at one thing and one was good at another, they made a train station. So all these things were done by men who brought forth their little piece of knowledge and planning, which was able to work to the extent that it could fit into an overall logic, which escapes them. So the existence of all these things is due to human work, but within a more general government that responds to the dynamics of what is called in emergentism “descending causality,” which should be divided into two different factors: a first factor of possibility (e.g., it was impossible to invent TV in ancient Rome), and a factor of adaptation, which consists of a way of proceeding to configurations of the elements within the system in such a way as to initiate them toward a structuring of the same so as to meet the functional needs of the system. That is, the system, relating itself to the environment or simply to the challenge to remain whole and “alive,” tends to exalt everything that goes in the direction of its own most adequate functional configuration, even when this is not yet in place, by virtue of a kind of selective intelligence of the system, which thus becomes almost able to take a path not very dissimilar to that of a design, precisely because of the principle of so-called “descending (formal) causality.” This synchronic systemic pressure toward diachronic transformation in a way that is functional to the system through organs or other functional adaptations is at present only a hypothesis that would recall a certain teleonomic and finalistic attitude peculiar to Lamarckism, but on a completely different basis. In fact, it would not be arguing for a learning mechanism that converts phenotype to genotype but for the claim that the mechanism of natural selection to which the organism relates, as a whole

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and integrated set of parts, imposes an organizational pressure toward the functional organization of the parts. Back to the good, however. There is, in any case, no doubt that society, for one reason or another, has organized itself by endowing itself with an institutional arrangement to which individuals delegate their knowledge and skills. This means that we are willing to accept as truth what we are told by these institutional sources, even in the absence of direct experience. We say that we also delegate to them our own experience and judgments of merit regarding it. We do this for science that we do not understand, and we also do this for aesthetics. Most of the things we consider beautiful among works of art and among natural beauty are to be referred to as value judgments that we have learned. Then it is normal for us to make the difference between what we consider beautiful for everyone, at least within our civilization, and what we think is beautiful. That “in my opinion it is beautiful” is not to be confused with liking it, and Kant also realizes this. “In my opinion it is beautiful” means that it should be considered beautiful by everyone. However, this does not mean invoking, as Kant claims, a universal pleasure; it means that one finds in it characteristics that distinguish it precisely from the pleasant. Thus, it is not merely a numerical difference between the subjective judgment of the pleasant and the plurality of the collective judgment of all. The judgment of the beautiful differs from that of the pleasant not only in quantity but also in quality. In fact, numerically extending the pleasurable leads to the nice, not the beautiful; the mass pleasurable invokes only a more generic enjoyment. The beautiful, on the other hand, invokes a higher appreciation, a being deserving of appreciation apart from mere individual pleasure that ends its course in the inevitable de gustibus non est disputandum. That is to say, it is a form of elevation through the idealization of formal experience, which as a rule is also enriched by non-sensible conceptual elements, which is why beauty requires not only contemplation but also understanding. So for example, the fact that the avant-garde movements broke away from realism, then from figurative representation, and finally from the picture itself, even encroaching on the immaterial, does not mean, as many have believed, including myself, that contemporary art has left the field of aesthetics to move toward a pure artisticity in its value autonomy. In this regard, it is worth recalling the theses of Ermanno Migliorini, who argued that conceptual art was a tendency that resolved all art into a reduction to its own essential element, which he called Póiesis, in contrast to minimal art, which instead pursued the same rigorous reduction to the essential atom of perception, which he called aisthesis for this reason. It was inferred that conceptual art was by its very nature anesthetic because it was interested

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only in the idea underlying the work and the basis of art itself. “Art as idea as idea,” therefore, for Migliorini, meant “art as Póiesis.” However, if, as Kosuth rightly argued, art after Duchamp was all conceptual because it placed the key to its valorization in the conception of the work, which is its justification, and not in its mere appearance, then it must have been true that all art after Duchamp was also anesthetic. Migliorini’s reasoning, however, was naively eighteenth century and assumed that aesthetics derived from aisthesis and was limited to the sensible. The key to aesthetics is not resolved by pure sensibility. The key to aesthetics, even according to Kant, is judgment. Now the point is that this judgment is not entirely fabricated in the subject, something Kant had intuited but could not develop, because that would have taken him outside the transcendental setting, or rather outside the transcendental subject in turn identified with the logical model of the individual empirical subject. Kant could not venture on the to this day vague paths of a transcendental analysis of collective knowledge. However, this task can no longer be postponed and must be undertaken, albeit in full awareness of all its burden of uncertainty. The judgment of beauty then is a judgment of value, which is collectively constituted, and for this reason, it prefers a certain degree of loftiness and seriousness that is conjoined with a character that is implicitly transcendent as opposed to merely pleasurable. Here passes another fundamental qualitative difference between the beautiful and the pleasant. The beautiful owes its value to a process of abstraction and social selection, which emphasizes the ideal implications of what is considered beautiful. Conversely, on the other hand, the pleasurable becomes greater and more intense according to a psychological mechanism that has physiological implications and instinctive, or rather genetic, foundations. Therefore, although it may seem paradoxical, pure pleasure lies outside of aesthetics because it is a simple instinctive response that contains no judgment whatsoever. Just to give an example, orgasm is not a judgment, and it is not decided by a voluntary act of consciousness; it is achieved, not decided. A woman who wants to have an orgasm to please her lover cannot have it through a conscious decision. This is why the simulation of orgasm is so widespread that it has become a commonplace thing that we find in movies and novels. For the male, a similar discourse concerns, even before orgasm, the erection that is its precondition, with respect to which, under normal conditions, no simulation is possible. At the opposite extreme, however, a valorization that in this process of abstraction would abandon all reference to the realm of form and sensibility would trespass from aesthetics and spill over into pure moral or political abstraction as a discourse on the good or the just. Thus, the range of aesthetics thus conceived requires that there is

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always a conscious mental component that is more or less intellectual and conceptual, accompanied, however, inescapably by form and in some way by the sensibility that is its vehicle. This implies that pleasure is modulated by passing through very different stages and degrees, from physical and even sensual pleasure, which Kant, consistently with his project, excludes because he is concerned, to an intellectual pleasure of pure spiritual satisfaction. Orgasm does not need to be learned, but the beautiful cannot contain elements that are culturally derived because it is primarily concerned with a form of social judgment, which is what gives it its particular form of objectivity. In fact, what is objective about the beautiful is only the fact that it is shared, the fact that it is conventional in its way. It requires the learning of concepts and categories that structure it. In our view, even the judgment of taste limited to the pleasant requires a learned component of cultural character, for without it there can be no true judgment, but only instinctive reaction.

The Life of the Artwork: Identification and Articulation According to Kant, in the determining judgment we place the particular as the case of the universal; in the reflective judgment we do not have a universal to classify what our experience provides us with; therefore, we look for a rule immanent to the content of our experience. This rule, in the case of the arts, concerns form, because otherwise the sensible content relative to the object of representation would itself already be resolvable in the determining judgment. It is the pure form that lacks a corresponding class in the intellect. This pure form, therefore, requires that we reflect on it (that is why it is called reflective) regarding its purpose and sense of purpose, which, however, is not objective but depends on the subject. Indeed, Kant writes, “In other words, nature is represented, by means of this concept [that of finality], as if an intellect contained the unitary foundation of the multiplicity of its empirical laws.”2 It is the subject who has a priori the concept of purpose and the sense of finality. From this point of view, the subject interprets form finalistically because it obeys its own constitution. Then, after psychoanalysis, we could say that the subject projects its own intimate a priori finality, due probably to the finalistic constitution of vital action itself, onto the form, thinking of it as apparently conforming to a purpose, which, however, is not objective. Elsewhere, Kant states that the beautiful comes from the fact that, through the faculty of imagination, the content of experience is related to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. However, why should something turn out to be more pleasurable than something else? Then one theory might be that

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pleasure is related to desire and desire to purpose, since it is always directed toward something. Now, desire is biologically directed toward the satisfaction of the primary needs for the continuation of life: to food, to ordinary biological functions (sleep, dejection, etc.), and, uniquely physiologically connected to pleasure, to sex. As for the apparent finality of forms derived from reflective judgment, this conforms not so much to pleasure per se as to the finalistic form of desire. Then the idea, not supported by Kant, that judgment is reflective because it reflects the subject’s finalism could become, according to our reasoning, a separate theory. If we consider that work on mirror neurons has revealed the ability to understand the purpose of the actions of others through comparing the purpose at work in the other’s behavior with the purpose at work in our own behavior, activating the same neural circuits, it follows that the purpose in another’s behavior is reflected in us, thanks to the activity of mirror neurons reflecting the various points of a process that we can recognize by the fact that we have put it on, enacted on the basis of our own purpose. In this case, we are empathically comparing two similar processes between living beings who are both desiring. However, it is not the case that only apparent traces of teleonomic behavior may echo in us, even when these are not actually there; for example, we are not in the presence of a living being but of a representation or a curious arrangement of elements in nature. That is, we may be able to initiate a type of interpretation in an empathic mode even with things, exalting aspects that recall a finality behavior analogous to our own. In this sense, to the extent that this finalistic behavior can be evoked as a holistic key to the perceived form, it comes to stand in analogy and attunement with the subjective form of desire, and therefore we can think of a desire that is satisfied in the recomposition of the form in question, thus eliciting pleasure. In this way, one infuses life into the inorganic and infuses a dynamism that seems to resolve itself into its own conclusion, which becomes a satisfaction by analogy. It is a satisfaction in image, which can also be seen as an image of satisfaction. This reciprocity should not surprise us, as it is typical of mirror situations. This reasoning allows us to rethink other aspects of Kantian aesthetics and modern aesthetics in general. Take the case of the famous statement that nature appears beautiful when it looks artistic, and art, on the other hand, is beautiful when it looks natural. This seems like an exchange of very different principles, but in fact these are two relatively mirror dimensions of purpose. Their coincidence is so admirable because they proceed in a constitutively different way, which leads them, as a rule, to be out of phase. Aristotle already stated that technology imitates nature but proceeds differently. In nature, entities grow; they are always active and cannot be turned off. In contrast, the machine and

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tool before they start working must be ready. Machines do not grow. They start with the representation of a purpose and then build them; only when they are finished can they begin to perform their function. Moreover, their function always rests on a principle external to them, whereas natural entities have no external purpose. Machines, in this respect, can be compared to organs but not to organisms. The natural and technical purposes are thus asynchronous, and it is difficult for them to meet or even to resemble each other too much. Thus, when this happens, it seems that the one has fulfilled its purpose by decanting into its opposite, as if the supreme purpose of the machine is to be natural and of nature is to be useful. So, it is clear that when a natural element looks like an artifact, as in the case of the olive tree that looks like a frowning face or the rock that looks like the sculpture of a bear, this arouses interest. Realism in painting aroused interest for the same reason. Pliny tells us the anecdote about the grapes painted by Zeusi, which the birds wanted to peck at, and then about the curtain added to it by Parrasius, which Zeusi, believing it to be real, wanted to shrug off with his hand. Still in the Renaissance, according to Federico Zuccari, Cardinal Pesia, Datarius of Leo X, bowed before the portrait of the pope painted by Raphael, mistaking him for the pontiff, to whom he tried to hand pen and inkwell. However, we also know that these are all exaggerations that respond to the characteristics of an apologetic eloquence, which loves to lavish itself in inordinate sumptuousness. Although the portrait is painted with technical expertise, no one would mistake it for the real person. But then the question must be asked: to what does this approach lead? The product of it was the trompe l’œil. But trompe l’œil, far from being the highest form of art, is a minor genre of decorative use and of little value. The heart-shaped clouds and the hyperrealist-style flower on your tube may arouse attention and, in some people, pleasure, but these are forms of curiosity without significant aesthetic value. What is important, then, is the reference to an organic form, or one that otherwise has its own individuality or even seems to have its own teleological principle. Goethe went further in this direction by speaking of beauty as a “living form,” thus also picking up from Kant the idea that the sphere of aesthetics could build a bridge between transcendental knowledge and the world of nature, which seems to be guided by a teleological principle of its own. Schiller goes a step further by also calling into question the ethical realm, and of reason. He, in fact, proposed different definitions of beauty depending on the case. But we are particularly interested in one of them: beauty is “the analogy of an appearance (Erscheinung) with the form of pure will, that is, of freedom.” If we relate this reflection back to Goethe, it takes little to see

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in the living character the idea of freedom, so that we move from the living form to the form of freedom. In this sense, the work is thought of as a subject and not an object. Indeed, the work seems to have a force of its own, its own systemic tendency to enclose itself as a form in its own right that requires its own principium individuationis in the sense of formal self-individuation à la Simondon. Perhaps this is why, with Romanticism, organicist aesthetics, such as in Coleridge, take off. Atsushi Okada sees in this development of poetics and art institutions a development in aesthetics to biopolitics whereby the work of art is seen as an organism.3 Maurizio Ferraris compares the work of art to an automatic girlfriend, that is, a machine that looks like a subject. Then again, Gestaltpsychologie also noticed a structural character gravitating on the form itself. Adorno deals with this question through the concept of articulation, which is very interesting because the question of the making of the unity of the work “correlates with the principle of individuation,” in relation to the multiple, that is, to the elements that compose it, so that it “does justice to the heterogeneous.”4 This relationship between the multiplicity of factors and unity in the identification of the work refers us on one hand to the covariance of variable traits within the group prospected by Price’s equation, so much so that we could say that the covariance of memes determines the form of the work of art as a unitary meta-meme at a higher level (i.e., at the level of the group, understood, however, as a new unity). The covariance of memes that concur to form the work, however, should not only be understood as pure formal elements but also as discourses that underlie them and regulate the use of, for example, certain figures and certain iconographies, layering as highlighted by Chiyori Mizuno (2011). In addition, the discourse of articulation also adds another factor, which is that of structural relationships between the parts. Thus, we return to the principles of organization of the work of art traced in in premodern “aesthetics,” or pre-aesthetics, by the rhetorical-poetic paradigm. The parts must be articulated coherently in the compositio. This means that a work is not just a group of variants but is given by its organization in a coherent framework in which they fit together, making possible the unity of the work as a whole. On the other hand, the principle of covariance of stylistic traits becomes fundamental for a discourse such as Warburg’s that analyzes the dissemination of forms within various works within artistic or stylistic movements such as the Renaissance. This idea makes the work of art a special object because it is precisely an object that looks like a subject, or perhaps, in a sense, a subject, since it “demands” a structural coherence, which even dispossesses the artist of his

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sovereign creative power. Perhaps this is due the myth of poetic and artistic inspiration in general. The artist, far from being an active builder, must open himself up to the outside to give birth to a work capable of having a life of its own and of not remaining stifled by being a mere extrusion of the artist’s will as a particular subject. How can an individual remaining as such give birth to something supra-individual and supra-personal? He must therefore allow himself to be invaded by an impersonal external reality, which is why, archaic Greek culture, this becomes a form of divine possession. This all seems extremely mysterious and calls to mind obscure stories of living products such as the Golem. However, if the matter is seen in the light of memetic structures, everything becomes much clearer. Let us take an example from an area of aesthetics that has only recently been rediscovered and that is the culinary arts. I may have a set of ingredients that I use to make recipes. However, this alone is not enough; one needs to understand the way they are combined or articulated. Thus, instructions on how, where, and when ingredients are used are also instructions that are part of the bundle of variables that constitutes the principium individuationis of the recipe. In producing a new recipe, this will show an apriori of possible articulation immanent to it, which will go to limit my freedom so that I become an instrument for the realization or individuation of the recipe itself, which takes on an identity of its own. What are these apriori? The fact is that as I make choices, they prevent others and foster still others. As I add ingredients, I cannot add others that will not blend and spoil the flavor of the dish. Eventually, the space for these choices becomes narrower and narrower, as if the recipe itself is telling us what it needs to be completed. A similar process occurs in the musical composition, which takes shape, increasingly showing an autonomous physiognomy and its own identity. The component memes attract or exclude each other, and the probability game gradually reduces, with a reduction in complexity, finally leading to the closure of the system and its individualization. This explains why it is so difficult to imitate a work of another culture from one’s own modus operandi: once one arranges things in a certain way, they tend to close in on the already known outcomes. That is why, in the fifteenth century, while wanting to imitate the classics, late Gothic figures were still coming out. It may be objected, however, that in some cases we are dealing with very simple works. What to say about a readymade? What to say of four strokes on the canvas given by Hans Hartung? Or the circle (enso) made with a single brushstroke by Jiro Yoshihara? These authors create works with a single gesture or a little more. Where, then, is the work of articulation? One has to consider that these kinds of works worked at a specific historical moment and in a specific culture, which was informal.

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So where was the articulation then? It was “externalized” and outside the framework. To go back to the kitchen, it is as if the cake is already on the table, and the artist just adds icing to it. The artist only adds the master’s touch because the context is already significant. Modern art had a strong artistic theoretical apparatus, which served as an artistic premise and allowed the artist to add only a few elements of specification. Today, this theoretical substrate is not there and cannot be taken for granted by the artist. So today the artist constructs the work in two senses: as an operation and as a justification of the operation, which has now become a correlate of the work. However, in the case of modern art, this theoretical basis has a completely different importance. It is the conflict of theories that animated the development of art history. If we transposed a work by Hartung into a context where it is not known, we would, in order to make it understandable, have to bring along with it its roots, that is, also its justification. However, this is true to varying degrees for all works of art, because the less it is articulated internally, the more it rests on an external articulation. If I have to turn on a light where there is nothing, I will have to create a small electrical circuit with a battery, wires, and a bulb. If I however I already have the circuit, I will only have to add the bulb. If I also have that, I just close the circuit and I can do it with a finger. Articulation, then, can also go outside the work in its materiality and invest procedures, operating at the level of meta-communication as long as justification is provided or implied. This external articulation of the work today is also symbolic of an externality, or Exzentrizität, of art with respect to the issues debated when it operated in a regime of autonomy that nonetheless diagonally and critically traversed the most burning social and cultural issues. Today, on the other hand, this art, however, much it strives to talk about such issues, is dramatically out of them, just as it is now de facto out of its own autonomy, which is now only a ghost of the past.

The Beautiful and the Pleasant: Selective Reversal and Aesthetics. News stories are replicated according to their trustworthiness and, thus, according to their truthfulness. Political propositions are evaluated on the basis of our ideas about the ought-to-be of social organization. Propositions about the facts of daily life are evaluated on the basis of our moral “values,” and particularly on the basis of justice. But there are a whole series of propositions that propose to us associations of words and ideas, such as poems, that, in addition to a judgment on the ideas expressed, ask us for an opinion on their form: a formal evaluation. In the case of novels, we are grappling with

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untrue, unreliable stories, which, however, are meant to be pleasant, intriguing, captivating, fascinating, and so on. Then there is a series of memes of an extra-verbal nature. These memes are images, sounds, sounds and images combined into stories, and so on, In all these cases, it is not a question of truth or justice, but of formal enhancement. Again, we have works that are submitted to us for us to judge. However, in some cases, these works are traditionally approved, and their value is not only communicated to us but also taught to us through schooling. So their value is not in question, which is beyond question, but only our ability to understand it. As in the case of a prestigious university or religion, it is she who selects us, not the other way around. This is the ideal condition of our selfish meme, which does not have to mutate to please since it is the judge who has to adapt to it. In aesthetics, there are two basic concepts: “taste” (“I like it”) and “beauty” (“it is beautiful”). In many theories, these get mixed up and confused, especially if one starts with a subjectivist philosophical approach. But from a memetic point of view, their difference is crystal clear. “Taste” concerns the meme that is subject to aesthetic selection. Differently, “beautiful” concerns the meme that is immune to aesthetic selection, in that due to various social circumstances, its shared approval is already out of the question, especially when it has become part of the cultural heritage of a given civilization (in which case it is said to be part of a culture’s memetic pull). Beauty is said to be supravenient to the physical nature of the object. In one sense, this is correct, in the sense that beauty is not an intrinsic property of matter; on the other hand, however, it is incorrect. While it is true that the property of beauty operates at a higher level than that of matter, it would be simplistic to think that it simply concerns the formal structure of the material element as a whole. Let us take the example of a sculpture; the material is marble. Then we have the typical appearance of marble with its violet veins, which still has its own sensory impact. Then we have the shape of the marble. This shape is not random; it was imposed on the marble by the sculptor. Often, it is a representation. Take the case of Michelangelo’s Moses. One recognizes in it the figure of Moses with his attributes. But that is not why we say it is beautiful. It reveals a clear technical skill, an appreciable fact. It reveals a particular tension in the body, as if the figure in question is about to rise. This expressiveness of the sculpture is also appreciable. Overall, the sculpture can be liked. But why say it is beautiful? This sculpture has a history connected to the life and work in general of Michelangelo, which in turn is connected to the expression of the principles and

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ideals of the Renaissance. The work was then widely appreciated, to the extent that it became famous. Michelangelo himself was widely praised for his work, to the extent that he became a star. Then the beauty of the work is not simply supervenient over physical form but over the crystallization of taste judgments stratified in our culture. This gave Moses its character of beauty. Its renowned beauty precedes our experience of it. And so we, in the face of Moses, conform in our tastes to a memetic complex of aesthetic character well known and well present in our consciousness. Differently, if I take a girl from another culture who knows nothing about this sculpture, she will probably have no parameter for judging this work as more beautiful than the faux-marble sculpture adorning the fountain in the mall. From this point of view, although the beauty of a sculpture is a property surely placed at a higher level than material, it is difficult to consider it a supravenient property in the analytical sense. The supravenient property in the analytical sense lies in a relationship of biunivocal correspondence with the subvenient level. But even if a piece of Michelangelo’s statue were chipped, its proverbial beauty would not be affected. The Venus de Milo is a largely ruined work. It is missing both arms. The same is true of the Nike of Samothrace, which is missing not only its arms but even its head. We could say that these are the two most famous sculptures in the Louvre. Yet they are not even the work of particularly famous sculptors. How did the myth of the beauty of these two sculptures come about? To understand this point, we need to go back to Michelangelo’s Rome. When Michelangelo was working in Rome, the pope devoted himself to the collection of ancient statues then all the rage, and he also promoted excavations to find them. Thus came forth a mighty Hellenistic complex, having as its subject the death of Laocoon and his children, crushed by a snake. The pathos of the Laocoon, the expression of the exertion of the bodybuilder’s muscles in a spasmodic attempt to free themselves from the serpent’s grip, left sculptors and sculpture enthusiasts of the time stunned, including Michelangelo himself, who must have been aware of the dynamism of the Laocoon’s muscular masses precisely when he sculpted Moses. The work was not particularly famous in antiquity, although it was probably the one described by Pliny, who saw it in the house of the emperor Titus and whose praise is limited to the coils of the serpent. Interest in Hellenistic musculature also arose in the case of another find: the so-called Belvedere Torso. It is so called because only the torso remained, which shows, however, all the muscles in tension. So even though the statue was missing many parts, this fragment aroused the enthusiasm of art lovers. Again, Michelangelo was greatly affected by this discovery because he realized that a statue does not have to be complete

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to gain appreciation; rather, the fragment focuses attention on the details, amplifying its aesthetic power. So, too, he decided that it was not necessary to complete statues in order for people to appreciate what is intended to be expressed through them. Michelangelo had thus discovered the pathos of the unfinished. Today, the Laocoon is still a very famous statue, but nothing like it was then. All this fame, which even led Lessing to name his book on aesthetics after the statue in question, was also due to the fact that it was discovered by the pope’s court. The pope therefore built the fame of his collection by amplifying the echo of the wonders of his own finds. So the Belvedere statue collection is said to be famous because of the beauty of the statues it contains. Those statues are undoubtedly valuable and probably derive from imperial collections, so they represented the best of the production of their time, but it is also true that the fame of those statues is also due to the pope’s cultural policy, which promoted their enhancement by involving artists and experts. The Louvre did the same thing, although the statues in its possession were not remembered from classical sources and therefore were not of particular importance. France, which had become a world colonial power, put the most interesting statues in its collection in the spotlight and made masterpieces of them, involving artists and academics. Consider that the measurements of the Venus de Milo have long been understood as the standard measurements of female beauty, a kind of Venus meter. For every statue considered “beautiful,” there is a story about the cultural formation of that primacy. And if a Malaysian or an Afghan comes along who does not understand its beauty so much, the worse for them. The beauty of these famous works will not cease because of that. Their legendary beauty has been built on a castle of discourse. Finally, the same discourse applies to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which was benefited by the legend of the mysterious painting, which Leonardo kept with him until his death. Indeed, beauty tends to free itself from dependence on the simple judgment of taste, and the more it “is” posited as “beautiful,” the more it is freed from it. So to think that beauty is simply an emergent property of matter or a supravenient property that is established in a generic and indiscriminate relationship with the observer is very naive. Beauty requires much more than that. It requires that the meme manage to individuate itself through an evolutionary drift, not of the characteristics of the meme being valorized but of the valorizing memetic frame that is what guarantees its intangibility and immortality. It is therefore an immune dynamic. Beautiful is that which is immune to disgust, that which is immune to simple subjective judgment.

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The Functions of Memes and Aesthetics Memes can perform logical functions and act as software operators. They can also operate according to analogue or protological functions. The symbolic meme has a very open character and can be associated with other symbolic memes. It knows four functions that we might already call logical: (1) identity or overlap; (2) opposition or symmetrical noncompatibility; (3) compatibility or partial overlap; and (4) diversity or simple non-overlap. These are all synchronic relations in the sense that they operate on the same logical plane. The diachronic element, on the other hand, enters into two forms, which are those of paternity and filiation, which stand in classical logic as genus and species. But the meme is an evolutionary entity that varies over time in some of its properties. The identity of the meme then can be identified according to the criterion of the bundle of properties, because this makes it possible to decompose the unit into properties whose variation we observe in a populational way in terms of covariance. That is, it can be assumed that the meme, in the same way as other evolutionary entities, is subject to a form of drift by reproduction and selection, which is formalizable in terms of Price’s equation, which is not a natural law but a logical model that is universally applicable. Now, according to Price’s equation, we have average variations with respect to certain properties that change from one generation of parents to one generation of offspring, and we can also establish dimensional relationships that subordinate into levels of selection, which can then be used to understand the hierarchy of levels of selection. From this point of view, we can analyze memes and memetic systems (or memeplexes) as instances of multilevel selection. This is very important for two reasons: one because it is evident that memes are almost never simple isolated messages (viral chain letter type). The characteristic of memes is that they occur in complex sets or systems. Within these systems, we find memes that have no mnemonic or pleasurable appeal, that require study or effort, but have a crucial function in enabling the system as a whole to be competitive. Even in the history of the arts, we find complex sets, which are the styles, in which we find in varying degrees filiations of stylemes inherited from the past, and covariance gives us precisely the reason for this internal variation of properties. However, these systems in culture tend to order themselves into levels on top of each other, forming hierarchical pyramids. Models of multilevel evolution tell us that it is always the highest level of competition that prevails over the lower levels, constituting the limit of variability with respect to lower-level competition. This means that the hierarchy of levels gives us

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an account of value formation, which cascades from the higher level to the lower levels. Thus, in aesthetics, covariance gives us an account of form, and the hierarchy of levels gives us an account of value. The value of the form is given in the intersection of the covariance of the possible mutation with the level of selection and, thus, enhancement in which it manifests itself. This means that, at higher levels, we have increasingly general systems of thought that include a general worldview, such as religions or ideologies, or finally philosophical “narratives.” The most valued beauty will not be the most merely pleasant, but the most “spiritually” or “intellectually” authoritative. Thus, the unfolding of value in aesthetic phenomena will tend toward the complex, the intellectual, and the abstract, not toward vulgar or instinctive pleasures, which as such are quodlibetalia, that is, just anything without any particular meaning. Thus, according to the reasoning presented here, it is easy to see why Adorno was right in arguing for the irreducibility of aesthetic value to the average of what is judged pleasurable. This also means that even if one wants to embrace the foundations of an evolutionary logic (inspired by modern synthesis and neo-Darwinism), one cannot possibly be satisfied with crude and hasty solutions that simply strip aesthetics of their essentials in order to reduce them at all costs to the practical thinking of naive naturalism, which is like taking a Christmas tree, stripping it of all its branches, and sawing the trunk in two to make it fit in a supermarket package. In the package, it fits, but that is no longer a Christmas tree.

The Drifts of Beauty Modern aesthetics has thus always placed the beautiful in relation to the subject in various forms, from the more abstract forms of the transcendental subject to the more contingent forms of the empirical subject. For Kant, the beautiful is the outcome of judgment according to disinterested pleasure toward the object. For Hegel, on the other hand, the subject itself rises above the empirical subject and becomes a universal subject that expresses itself in historical development. In phenomenology, the subject intends to works. In the human sciences, on the other hand, the empirical subject is considered. In-depth psychology, the subject through beauty experiences pleasure and through art expresses unconscious contents that are sublimated. In the sociology of aesthetics, the preferences of individuals are discernible in standards through statistics, so the beautiful is what is statistically pleasing. In certain anthropologies, art expresses a cultural unconscious, shaping culturally determined anxieties and joys that correspond to individuals’ unconscious tendencies. This is why the memetic reversal operated by Dawkins is

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very important, because if we posit culture as an activity that evolves according to its own adaptive drift, based on its own premises and environmental response, then all such discourse on the subject skips, except perhaps that of Hegel, because in it the subject coincides with the autotelic development of culture. Let us give some examples here to offer concrete cases of how an aesthetic placed on this autotelic basis differs from traditional modern approaches. Let me begin with the case of opera. Mario does not have the vaguest idea of what opera is, although he may have happened to hear arias on TV. However, clear to him from the beginning is that the value of opera does not depend on his appreciation of it. And so Mario does not raise the question of the opera’s aesthetic value coming down from his own judgments of taste. In case he does not appreciate the opera, this would not be a problem for the opera and its existence, but a problem for him and his ability to understand music history aesthetically. The memetic drift of the organization of culture has now endowed opera with its own cultural objectivity. Thus, beauty goes from the object to the subject and not vice versa, which is why an aesthetic object is beautiful regardless of whether I like it or not. Let us now take another example that is even more problematic from the point of view of modern aesthetic subjectivism, that of the tea ceremony. The tea ceremony was introduced into Japan from China, although it was reformulated in relation to the ideals of Zen doctrine by Sen-no Rikyu. In doing so, it was enriched with the ethical, political, and aesthetic meanings typical of Japanese tradition. It thus forms the basis of the so-called wabi-sabi aesthetic. What is interesting about the tea ceremony is that its character as an aesthetic manifestation is undoubted, yet it is equally clear that it contradicts all the parameters of aesthetics established by the theories of the history of Western aesthetic reflection. Starting with Kant, we do not find a moment of taste judgment other than the gastronomic one related to tea, but that is very little compared to the tea ceremony, and that would be invalid because it is not disinterested. We cannot take away the matter. Tea is to be drunk. Then the representation is missing. There is also no expression of an internal state of mind. The tea ceremony is not a performance. It is a collective experience to take part in personally. The tea master is a master of ceremonies, not a theater director, so he is not an artist. The perspective pyramid presupposed by Western aesthetics breaks down on the humble little house or hut where the ceremony takes place. There is no vantage point. A space of isonomy is enacted in the tea ceremony, albeit a temporary one, and this is the political aspect of it, which may even be revolutionary in a culture based on rigid hierarchy such as that of premodern Japan. Then the aesthetics of the tea ceremony are all in the space between people, not in the expression of one

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subject or the representation of another, not in a reflective or encompassing judgment that is. That is, it is a situational aesthetic dimension, evading the categorical strictures of both subject and object philosophy. There is no object to be admired or constructed according to the rules of rhetoric or formal articulation. Here there is a norm (the ceremony) that is the skeleton, or rather, the occasion for the development of the situation. But the “spirit” of the tea ceremony also evades the pseudo-ritual norm of the ceremony: it is a non-so-what. Finally, we come to the third case. Here we will refer to one of the most famous moments in the history of art and aesthetics: the Renaissance. Perhaps never in history have art and beauty mattered so much. In this case, we find ourselves at the antipodes of the tea ceremony. This is the time when the perspective pyramid and the camera obscura were invented. The image is likened to a transparent window, with an approach worthy of an empiricist philosopher a century later, and finally, anticipating rationalism, it concludes with the theory of design as originating from an “internal design” of the mind, a theory that is still popular in cognitivist circles. So the Renaissance, in one respect, is the time when the foundations are laid for all the prejudices about aesthetics developed by modern philosophy, and much work would need to be done on the recognition of these theoretical foundations. So the Renaissance should be the apologia of the subject deciding the beautiful, but it is not. Even the Renaissance, from a historical and pragmatic point of view, turns out to be a much more impersonal and memetic phenomenon than its worship of the personalities of art, which so impressed Jacob Burckhardt, would suggest. In the historical genesis of the Renaissance, we see very clearly the unraveling of the memetic drift, which we can trace in the way the philological culture of the early humanists determined an expectation for works of art of the ancient type. We can see these artists beginning to respond to these expectations, meeting each other, influencing each other, and taking steps forward on the stylistic front, alternating with steps backward of adjustment and compromise with the Gothic tradition, which are followed by more courageous steps forward, but which also result in a new synthesis that is no longer mere copying of the ancient. An art history marked by the principles of the cultural theory of aesthetics should retrace all the steps through which Renaissance “memes” or the Renaissance “memeplex” were historically formed. We can make a memetic analysis of the drift of aesthetic phenomena and the constitution of their value based on the assumption of the autonomy of memetic evolution, albeit in its relation to human minds as habitats. However, does this not risk reducing aesthetics to a sociology of taste? No, because

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the sociology of taste claims to accumulate data on tastes and establish the beautiful as its statistic. Beauty, in this way, becomes the standard of taste on a statistical basis. But this is a drift from eighteenth-century subjectivism to twentieth-century scientism. It is a reductionism that explains beauty on the basis of allotropic factors that, in turn, statistically underlie the statistics on taste judgments. In this way, beauty is reduced to a social fait social. But the memetic drift of the beautiful is something else; it is an autotelic formation. That apparent proper purpose that many philosophers have glimpsed in works of art and in the beauties of nature as an expression of spiritual freedom and presence is nothing but a reflection of the autonomous teleonomy of the memetic entity inherent in its evolutionary drift. The beautiful changes, but it does not change according to mere external changes as an instrument in the hands of a historical or transcendental subject. On the contrary, it mutates as a transcendental or historical subject that evolves in relation to the external environment that selects it. Let us take the iconography of Buddha statues in the Far East as an example. This iconography does not mutate as a mere tool in relation to technical and social changes in Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Japanese society. These countries have gone through radical social transformations, but the typology of Buddha sculpture has changed very little. The Buddha iconography follows its own drift, but it changes only compatibly with what is appropriate to that iconography within that formal system to which its religious significance is attached. Art is not a reflection of social reality or even an expression of the spirit of an era, art is a part of the spirit of an era, it is a part of a culture, and it is not always the most changeable, on the contrary. The fact that art is often concerned with representations does not mean that it itself is a representation, much less a representation of the social. In stating this, however, care must be taken not to fall back into an idealist conception of the concept of art, understood as if it had its own essence of an ahistorical kind. The point then is another, and that is that in a logic of imitation between repetition and difference, we must go beyond Deleuze. Deleuze thinks of a repetition and difference connected to the occurrence of such repetition that unties the repeater from subordination to the repeated, or the representation from subordination to the represented, the copy from subordination to the model. However, more needs to be done; we need to return to thinking of difference as change within the concept, in a drift that leads to change itself of the concept, that is, it leads from alteration to becoming other. Within this drift must be thought, not only the works that are serially repeated but also the aesthetic canons, but, what is more important, the fundamental

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concepts and categories of aesthetics themselves, and finally aesthetics itself as well as art. In this way, historical variation is not a “biographical” accident, not a social change to be studied, but a change in the very substance of thinking, in the terms of thinking and its essence. That is why it is a philosophical change and not trivially a cultural change in the ethnological or anthropological sense. The difference between the humanities and scientific approaches lies in the fact that, in all these approaches, we find all the categories on the side of the subject, which remain fixed and unchanging, in that they are taken for granted regardless of the evidence of the object, and on the other side is placed the object, which instead changes and whose change is described through the above categories. This attitude does not grasp aesthetic facts iuxta propria principia; it does not go to the heart of aesthetic problems or aesthetic phenomena; and moreover, it also produces theoretical artifacts, evidences that appear to be such only because they are provoked by the use of a certain parameter. An example of such fallacious evidences are historical categories such as that of “Byzantine art.” There is no Byzantine art for the simple reason that no Byzantine empire ever existed. Historical periodizations in art are, in most cases, arbitrary. Relative to certain eras, all figurative artifacts, which today would be considered simple handicrafts, are considered “art” in the modern sense. All because the parameter of artistic value is not considered as well as that of aesthetic value, although these play a central role.

Notes 1. Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: ­Routledge, 1990). 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3. Atsushi Okada, Ars to Bios (Toyko: Heibonsha, 2006). 4. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970.

CHAPTER 6

v

Value, Power, Art, Economics

Aesthetic Value We cannot dwell here on the examination of theories of value, which cover a very broad spectrum and range of economics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. In philosophy alone, they range from ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy to trends such as neo-Kantism, phenomenology, spiritualism, analytic philosophy, and pragmatism. These theories of value understand value itself in different meanings, ranging from commodity-related economic value to transcendent spiritual value. Rickert, a neo-Kantian philosopher who made the philosophy of values the pivot of his thinking, argued that value is what is important to civilization and that there are six domains characterized by the pursuit of a good, which are those of logic (truth), aesthetics (beauty), mysticism (impersonal holiness), eroticism (happiness), ethics (morality), and philosophy of religion (personal holiness). Thus, Rickert traces aesthetics back to the pursuit of beauty. In a certain sense, then, our approach follows Rickert’s in several respects, since we also consider human peculiarity of living in a “realm of meaning” (highlighted earlier by Whitehead) and thus in a cultural dimension, which is not of mere generational transmission but of the development of a civilization, within which values are given, among which beauty is the one on which aesthetics hinges (precisely in the sense of a bigaku). This is an important point in aesthetics because, as D’Angelo rightly noted, aesthetics has revolved around three fundamental concepts, which are beauty, sensibility, and art. Given these three concepts, but we could also add others, as Tatarkiewicz did, it was my opinion that a unified theory of aesthetics was impossible, above all due to the division between sensitivity and art, which, according to Migliorini, has 213

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become an irreconcilable opposition with conceptual art. But then I realized that they could both be traced back to two determinations of form: perceptual form and formative form (both as “formativity” in Pareyson’s sense and as a social formation of value). Furthermore, if we place beauty, freeing it from the strictures of the classicist tradition, as the valorization of form as form, in order to proceed from that valorization then to other cultural and value contents, which may have the most diverse characters but which are always subordinate to it, then we will find that even contemporary art, even in the most daring experiments, is subject to this criterion. I used to believe in the past that the ready-made was in itself anesthetic, that is, unconnected with aesthetics, because its artisticity prescinded from sensible form and judgment around it. However, two things need to be noted: the first is that in the case of the ready-made, it is not even a simple procedure of legitimation. It is not true that the work of art depends only on a procedure; it must respond to the ability to produce a significant innovation referring to the field of the artistic and must somehow maintain reference to the sensible form, although one can reach the borderline case of referring to it through negation. In the case of the ready-made, therefore, the work unfolds formally on two levels, intertwining them together as in a paradox. On the one hand, there is an object language in which a sensible object is presented as a work to be seen in continuity with modern artistic culture. On the other hand, however, there is another pragmatic level, governed by a third meta-communicative level in which the true form of the work acts, just as happens in some paradoxes, such as the injunction “Be original,” or “Do not obey me,” in which the pragmatic aspect is trapped in the logical contradiction. The value aspect, however, lies at the level of considering the utterance value of the paradox itself that qualifies it as such and therefore meta-communicates about it. Duchamp placed the perceptual work in a paradox whereby if it is perceptually beautiful, then the importance of institutional acceptance loses meaning, but if it has meaning, then perception loses meaning, thus arriving at a third logical level of metacommunication in which the ready-made is proposed as a paradoxical work, but which, in its proposing itself as such, claims value. In the end, therefore, it is neither a matter of mere sensible form nor of mere institutional legitimacy, but of agudeza, which is the true form of the work and becomes like the move of the horse overrunning the pawns and exploiting the surprise effect, making the game win. The Duchampian provocation with its brilliant logic has all the makings of a highly successful meme, as it exerts an appeal toward the mind of the progressive viewer but also wins the approval of the expert. The Duchampian irony did not assert a flatly procedural theory of art, and in fact, the modern and contemporary art world has shown itself incapable

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of not taking in art without style or work and has clung to every material reference or complement to derive a style and work to sell. The failure of the attempt to produce a purely philosophical art should make us reflect on the limits of art as a “field” in the sense understood by Bourdieu and as discourse in the Foucauldian sense. After all, art as we understand it today in aesthetics is nothing more than the product of classifying certain arts (i.e., techniques) under the common denominator of beauty (fine arts). If we disentangle valorization from mere pleasure, then we will realize that even the valorization of the avant-garde arts, precisely in its conceptual abstractness, far from being a case that deplores the centrality of beauty, is the typical case that shows the tendency of beauty as a value to disentangle itself from mere sensible pleasure. So it is not that the avant-garde arts were not beautiful, but that beauty was not mere sensible pleasantness. Sensibility, which played a central role in the paradigm of the subject, became only a reference to a field of experience, as a discursive object, as a subject, not as an active principle. This was posited as dogma by the philosophies of the subject because otherwise the very possibility of an aesthetic theory would be compromised, but from a cultural point of view, this limitation is no longer there. If there is any way today in which art can escape the domination of some form of beauty, it is, if anything, another, which is not experimental but economic. The work, especially in the age of NFTs, is becoming the mere pretext for a financial transaction, exactly as if it were the issuance of a Bitcoin. The work is nothing more than the underlying of a bet or derivative. The important thing is not the underlying, but the derivative. So the form is there, but in and of itself, it is completely irrelevant. So the real threat to the world of art comes from its total reduction to the art market, since poetic and ideological issues have been reduced to mere accompanying justifications and are no longer the mainspring of the dynamics of artistic and stylistic development. On the other hand, outside the financial field of art, there is only a chaos of forms, usually of the kitsch type, which do not materialize into a stylistic value proposition. So just when art wants to raise its voice with huge dimensions to expand meaning, its significance becomes irrelevant because the quality of these messages is nothing more than a Facebook “meme.” In this triad of beauty, sensible form, and value, we now seek to specify how we understand value. To do so, we will start from minimal naturalistic premises and move to a discourse of cultural Darwinism. Multilevel Value and Selection Thus, let us begin with the issue that in a thermodynamic universe tending toward energy dissipation, animals are “machines,” which do not act in the

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opposite direction to entropy, namely, neghentropically, except apparently. In fact, while it is true that the living system is a system that manifests orderly organization at high levels of complexity, it is also true that it can only do so if it consumes a lot of energy. The greater the level of complexity, the greater the expenditure of energy, so at higher levels of organization, such as social, civil, or technological, the utilization of energy proceeds in tandem. So the animal organism is a system that uses energy to find sources of energy, consumes energy to find more energy, and so on. It is equipped with a sensorimotor apparatus, which enables it to locate the energy source and move through space to supply itself. This means that under the conditions of such a system, the object of perception is not all the same but is differentiated at least between the source of energy (or nourishment) and the rest. Value already appears at this level. Information concerning the source of energy has value because it is functional for vital activity, and this value consists of a difference in attention and action from information concerning elements of other kinds. We may also add that in this case a whole series of intermediate differences are determined, concerning, for example, information indirectly useful to the procurement of the source of nourishment or information concerning other useful functions for the organism, such as rest, protection, and reproduction. Reproduction is also crucial; however, it does not require continuous attention and can be deferred over time. Thus, as important as reproduction is, it is never as pressing as feeding. The existence of groups of animals, all in need of food, is primarily a cooperative strategy of maximizing the conditions for continuity of feeding, where this is threatened by difficult environmental conditions (as Kropotkin argued) or by the action of competing groups. In fact, the presence of a group leaves no room for individuals to compete and forces all competitors to organize themselves into groups. Animals all basically compete with each other for food, so without the presence of external hardship factors that threaten security or supply, a group is unlikely to resist internal competition. This means that intergroup competition acts in the group as a higher principle capable of inhibiting internal competitive tendencies through natural selection. Translated into other terms, it simply means that groups in which this does not occur either disintegrate or succumb in competition for food to the better organized groups. That is, we are still grappling with Price’s equation, which assumes a covariance of characters, for example, in the tendency to cooperate or compete. Now, very often, it has been thought of as altruistic one and selfish the other, or even good one and bad the other. This moralistic way of posing the question is completely misleading, as are the speeches about altruism being nothing but a selfish strategy and therefore a form of selfishness in

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disguise. The issue is entirely different, and that is that what matters is the overall performance and thus the ability of these different types to function to the benefit of the team. In fact, a competitor who tends to prevail in the group while taking away resources and incurring a cost to others can act as a leader by uniting and coordinating the group as a team, thus making it successful in confrontation with competing groups. The problem is not how many “egoists” there are but how they function in the team economy of the group. Accounts of archaic wars abound with instances in which the most competitive and confrontational individuals are also the ones who become decisive in the event of war with other groups. In the Iliad, we see that each team has two types of “egoists,” the king and the hero, who are in different age groups so as not to bump into each other but among whom there is no shortage of rifts. In this situation, value comes in two forms, which we might call horizontal, or immediate, and vertical, or retroactive. Horizontal value is that which the subject develops in relation to that which procures the direct satisfaction of a need (such as food or sex) and which is often inherent in some form of physical pleasure. Vertical value, on the other hand, is retroactive in nature and underlies all cultural values because it concerns those characteristics that enable the team to function and be effective. Now, the family itself, independent of the genetic community, may simply be the first level of this community of interest or a situation in which one and the other simply find a way to overcome natural selection. Horizontal value can sometimes conflict with vertical and systemic value. However, natural selection favors situations in which “team” value prevails over direct value, namely the situation in which common interest prevails over individual interest, although the former is based on the physiology of the latter. However, this does not result in the disappearance of the so-called “selfish” or “defectors,” because these agents can play a positive role in team fitness. Thus, immediate value is felt more clearly, but retroactive value is still prevalent as a rule, and it is in the difference or gap between these two that the figure of social value is given, upon which hinges cultural value, which is basically that relating to the set of instructions of social organization transmitted through behavior and experience. Social value can be structured at various levels. The first might be precisely the family unit, then the clan, the polis, the state, and the empire. Various family nuclei belonging to the same clan may compete for its leadership. Various clans may wage war against each other to vie for the leadership of the polis. Various polis can make war on each other to create a single state. Various states can war with each other to create an empire, and finally, various empires can compete for world dominance. Each level of sociality imposes its own values as superior to those of lower levels

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of sociality. However, the most felt value is always the most urgent, and that is the one related to the level of sociality where our survival is threatened. To specify this urgency, which hegemonizes value in its dynamic and historical character, one could use the French term “enjeux.” Value, in its dynamic, aspect is conditioned not only by the hierarchy of levels of sociality but also, within it, by the conflictual enjeux. The conflict-related enjeux, for example, strongly influence the perception of value in a way contrary to the hierarchy of values ordered by natural selection, but they can also be misleading and lead to negative outcomes. Take here the example of the city of Thurii, near Tarentum, at the time of Magna Graecia, which fought against the Lucanians and also had problems with Tarentum. They were so involved in this regional conflict that they did not hesitate to turn to a powerful emerging state like Rome for help, without considering the fact that at a higher level of competition, it could have been a threat. Thurii easily got the hoped-for help, but the Romans got all of Magna Graecia. However, we now come to the question of aesthetic value in relation to multilevel selection applied to culture and thus to memes. Memetic plexuses, in contrast to individuals, are not traversed by their own energy-hoarding drive. Even when they appear as systems, they do not have an autonomous life drive, and they do not have their own “will to power.” Their drive rests on the human one. It is the dynamics of intergroup adaptation that drive humans to communicate almost compulsively and to continually emit memes that are repeated with variations dependent on occasional or systemic factors. So memetic value in an autonomous sense is also based on retroactive social value. Thus, aesthetic value lacks the conflict between immediate and systemic valorization, but this does not mean that conflicts cannot arise between successive levels of valorization as a result of the different momentary forces of cultural enjeux, which concentrate value in a dynamic sense at a given level. From this point of view, we can say that enjeux concern the dynamic, becoming, and contingent dimension of valorization in contrast to the organizational dimension of the hierarchy of values, which stands between them as “parole” stands to “langue.” We can see examples of this memetic layering in the stylistic elements that make up a work, which, however, are subject to the criterion of the work’s unified effect. In a musical group, musicians must submit their inventiveness to the criteria of the group’s overall effect. A similar thing happened in the workshop works of the Renaissance. Artists, even individually very gifted ones, had to adapt to the work for the success of the work, adapting their skills to the situation. In avant-garde groups, the styles of the various artists had to entertain a double relationship of individualizing division and generalizing communion.

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Take the example of surrealism. The various artists tried in relation to each other to distinguish their styles, but at the same time they were also careful to create a superior Surrealist style under Breton’s control and not exceed it on pain of expulsion. The value of Surrealist work, then, passes through various levels, from the individual work to the artist, to the group, to the political, to the metaphysical. The result is a series of increasingly generic and abstract levels that rise like the spires of a Gothic cathedral. The more pressing the selective system is, the more it performs a shaping action on the works as well, because the feedback of valorization, leads the artist to adapt. The dispute between two schools of thought or style also has significant effects on the internal complexification of the memetic plexus. For example, in ideologies, the clash leads to a preference for the formation of authoritative memes that are not easy to understand, which are therefore tedious to learn and not easy to remember, but which have a legitimizing, and structuring function. Enhancement, then, is not only important for aesthetics but in general for what Foucault called discursive formations. In fact, Foucault saw discursive formations as systems structured according to an internal rationale, the structuring dynamics of which, however, he did not understand in competition with other discursive formations. “Discourses,” then, are not static entities but dynamic entities that are subject to the shaping action of cultural selection, which leads them to structure themselves internally so as to exert a lasting and solid influence on human minds—something therefore quite different from advertising jingles. Even the competition between artistic trends does not evolve in the direction of mere pleasantness but of intellectualistic or spiritualistic legitimacy, because the higher the level of enjeux raised, the more complexly the content is shaped and structured. If the competition evolves along the directrix of technique, we will see the formation of works of ever-increasing compositional complexity, as happened, for example, to tonal music or to Renaissance painting in Italy and Flanders. If, however, the competition occurs at an intellectual level, we will then witness the formation of sharply critical and even analytical theories, as in the case of conceptual art or the experimental novel. This should be enough to show how far aesthetic value is from the simple judgment of individual taste based on mere pleasantness. From this point of view, most modern aesthetic theories have always been flat aesthetics, which flatten aesthetic value based on the experience of the subject. Only Hegelian aesthetics attributed a relative value of autonomy to culture over the empirical subject, as it tied it to the dynamics of spirit development. Then phenomenology tried to push on a layered analysis, but it always goes in the direction of another subject, which is the artist. The limitation of both is to narrow the field of aesthetic

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valorization to the arts without understanding that the mechanism of aesthetic valorization is a differential mechanism (since value is produced in the difference between levels of competition and selection). The Quantitative Route to Value Another way of enhancement is quantitative enhancement through memetic diffusion. Greater quantity does not automatically correspond to greater quality. However, there are cases in which quantity is significant. Generally, for example, in the theory of natural selection, the quantity of reproduction is regarded as an objective index of environmental fitness, since a zero quantity is a clear indication of a lack of fitness. Certainly, where there is reproduction, there is fitness, but in certain environmental settings, an optimization of fitness does not necessarily go hand in hand with the quantity of reproduction. Indeed, in an environmental imbalance, excessive reproduction is the antechamber to a food crisis. In communication, the quantity of distributed communication generically has a positive value with respect to the meme in question. However, there is a difference between communication simply offered and communication demanded. The former expresses the existence of a source of communication that is trying to express power or conditioning, as is the case in marketing; on the other hand, the latter assumes the existence of a consensus, so the greater the demand, the greater the “success” (an ambiguous term that would indicate a kind of communicative environmental fitness). Many mistake “success” for value tout court. Let us then consider a particular type of meme, which is money. Money does not construct things, yet it has a connection with them in the form of a commodity. Now let us do a thought experiment. If I have one hundred products or commodities of equivalent value and one hundred coins of equivalent nominal value, I will be able to use each coin for each commodity. Thus, I will be able to say that the value of each coin is represented by a product, and the price of a product is represented by a coin. If I produce more coins for the same commodity, I will have a phenomenon of inflation, that is, a decrease in the value of the coin because more coins will be needed for a product; on the other hand, if I have less, the value of the coin relative to the commodity will increase. This economic reasoning shows how value is not proportional to the number of memes but is inversely proportional. In our example, the number of commodities was considered deliberately fixed because the memes have the psyche as a reference anyway, which, acting over time, has a necessarily limited possibility of corresponding to the memes. This is why a competition of memes to vie for mental space is automatically determined. Please note that here we are talking about memetic

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value under another determination, which is that of its actual mnestic retention. Success, understood as fitness, however, also acts on the same plane as the ability on the part of the meme to reach the mnestic retention of as many minds as possible within the finite space of their capacity. Thus, we have an apparent antinomy for the quantitative value of the meme. The more they increase in number, the more they lose value with respect to mnestic space in one individual; the more they increase in number, the more they increase in value because they “infect” more mnestic space in more minds. This antinomy is resolved by a twofold movement in which value shrinks intellectually and psychically as it rises up a hierarchical ladder from which, however, memes propagate descendingly by “emanation,” to increase their fitness, going to control, from the summit of a pyramidal system, a whole series of memes below. In this way, restriction to the summit and diffusion to the base reinforce each other because the higher the summit, the wider the base. This means that mere proliferation without hierarchy is only inflation of meme value and meaning. Similarly, hierarchy alone, without proliferation, cannot even “penetrate” minds, which are already assaulted by competing memes. This game of memetic value production must therefore find a strategy that allows the value hierarchy to spread its memes, and this strategy lies in joining the social hierarchy. So the game of the memes, even artistic memes, is always also a social and political game, as well as a psychic and intellectual game. Then also the consideration of memetic value development, from a quantitative determination, reflects the same structure evidenced by the stratification of selection that captures value with respect to the function for survival at the relative higher level, proper to group selection. So it explains why the most valuable products have limited diffusion. It also means that success can bring value only to the extent that it is relative to the level of enhancement and does not incur inflationary excess. Consensus at the highest level manifests itself not in the proliferation of the meme itself but in that of those underlying it. In this sense, the continued importance of the aura, the existence of mysteries at the top of a discipline, the use of initiatory languages, and so on are well understood. Thus, the quantitative dimension of memetic diffusion is subordinate to the level of diffusion in value creation, and its increase manifests itself in a descending manner. The theme song of the cartoon program may get millions of views on YouTube, many more than a masterpiece of contemporary cultured music, but this does not mean that it has greater aesthetic value. The old theory of good taste was intended to account for this phenomenon of qualified

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consensus, and it is no coincidence that its history takes its starting point from the Spanish translation of the Cortigiano, namely from an elitist and courtly context, which would then place an ineffable “nonsoché” at its apex. Thus, “nonsoché” stands to mark not the meaninglessness of the beautiful but its inaccessibility to proliferation and dissemination at its highest level. Our task, therefore, is not to unveil what the nonsoché conceals but to explain the mechanism of its formation and its raison d’être. The Qualitative Way to Aesthetic Value The third aspect of value, however, concerns its specifically aesthetic character in contrast to others. Technical knowledge aims at efficiency; value is measured by efficiency, not by historical relevance, identity, or consensus. All of these things also exist in engineering, but their significance is insignificant compared to efficiency. In terms of aesthetic value, there is no similar criterion of aesthetic efficiency that many scholars have sought in vain. It all depends on the stratification of cultural patterns, identity, religious, ethical, and political values with which aesthetics interacts. There is no pure physics or mechanics of aesthetics based on the effectiveness of the sensitive impact on the feeling of pleasure that automatically determines its value. Everyone who looks for the formula of beauty to make a song, a novel, a painting, a poem, a film, or a sculpture that everyone will like is bound to be disappointed. Such a thing does not exist. Aesthetic memes are oriented in relation to sensible or formal data. Then the problem becomes understanding how these sociocultural patterns of organizing aesthetic memetic plexuses work. From this point of view, aesthetic value is not about the object the communication is about. In this sense, it differs from marketing because, in that case, the value is all in the object, that is, the commodity. It is no accident that aesthetics arose at the time when painting lost its content value. This does not mean that in modern art the arts could not corroborate something, but this corroboration no longer addresses the object represented, as in sacred art, but addresses the way in which the object is problematized stylistically or even meta-stylistically, as happens in the whole strand from ready-made onward. In this regard, the structure of the media and its conditions of operation become essential to understanding both its aesthetic value and its real political potential. Oral culture sees the emergence first of myths and songs without any artistic characterization, but only ritual or sacral. Then, however, with the development of the length of poetry and the appearance of poems, the need for greater control over reproduction arises, and the figure of the aedo is born. Indeed, as Dawkins also noted, memes may have a Lamarckian

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evolutionary character, in which they mutate far too much to compare their mutation to natural evolutionary drift. This problem had also appeared to the ancients, who tried to remedy it with memory specialists. Here, the first figure of artist in the Western world, the aedo, was born precisely to contain memetic variation and not to modify the epic song by adding chaos to it. Even more will contain the use of writing to which the figure of the artist’s birth is linked, not surprisingly. Authorial poetry appears in writing and has also brought authorship to other arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Poetry and the poet, art and the artist, thus arise only at the moment when precise transmission of the meme in the Weismannian sense is possible. In history, the more the figure of the artist is defined, the more the message becomes unambiguous and precise in its transmission, so much so that the figure of its unchangeable uniqueness was transformed in the nineteenth century into the myth of the individuality of the work of art, which was also supported later by Focillon, Croce, and historicist criticism. The invention of photography helped to drown out the illusionistic character of painting and to open the way to formal experimentation in a painting now considered “concrete.” At this point, however, we have moved from a problem of medium to a problem of style. Aesthetic value always has to do with whether one wants it to or not, with a matter of style, and style, however capable in theory of encompassing all the parameters of communication, centers on morphology. Considering the three domains of communication distinguished into semantics, morphology, and pragmatics, we see that art and aesthetics dwell on all three as appropriate, but their center of gravity always remains in morphology, that is, the domain of formal value. Attempts have been made to resolve all value in the subject from a semantic point of view, but in this way we arrive at the precedent of art being the divine idol1 or at the transcendence of art in scientific illustration or advertising. As we have seen in the case of Duchamp’s the conceptual and more recent experiences, it has been attempted to resolve all value in the pragmatic play of the action of the work or operation in relation to institutional devices. But again, no artist has been able to leave behind a form because even the formless is stylistically interpretable. Even attempts to theorize art, such as Art & Language have in fact been stylistically transposed, not because of levity but because the understanding of what they express, while not evaded or misunderstood, always acts on a plane subordinate to style, and there is no way to reverse this state of affairs because it is a limitation of the system. The postconceptual art of the last few decades has brought this whole discourse back within the levees of stylistic interpretation, although it is no longer a matter of understanding style in a way that is so purely related to medium specificity,

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as was the case until the advent of the neo-avant-garde and postmodernism. Style, although in a renewed, broader, and more articulated sense than the modern tradition, is inescapable in the field of aesthetics and is not limited to the field of the arts. Landscape aesthetics, across cultures, always shows a dependence on stylistic factors and the existence of a circular relationship with the arts. The arts are inspired by particular views, and they typify them and culturalize them, initiating a drift and leading to the creation of a real “visual culture” in which enhancement is based on stylistic criteria. This can be seen in landscape culture by crossing descriptions of experiences of landscape delectatio in parallel with figurative culture, since classical antiquity, not to mention the case of the Italian Renaissance, admirably studied by Eugenio Battisti (2004), in which the connection with the garden is also emphasized. These links also emerge in the aesthetics of the picturesque, which is connected to the painting of ruins, beginning with Lorrain, but also with the birth of the English garden, and finally with the birth of tourism, which in turn derives from the Grand Tour,2 in which men of culture and numerous artists and poets, including Goethe, Corot, Turner, Byron, and others, came to Italy to admire its landscapes of ruins. This attitude later blossomed into a particular romantic sensibility for the landscape, which even become a reflection of inner states of mind.3 This kind of coevolution between landscape art, garden, and environmental aesthetics is also found in the Far East, in China, particularly since the Tang Dynasty, where it led to the birth of the Shan-shui, or “mountains and waters,” genre,4 which also had a strong impact on garden aesthetics.5 From it derives the Japanese genre of Kare-san-sui (Shigemori, 1977; Ono, 2009), which is particularly developed in Zen. But in literature, this link between landscape and mood is famously thematized as far back as the Heian era, with the mono-no-aware. But we find a particular interpenetration of poetry and landscape aesthetics in later eras as well, as evidenced by the studies of Sasaki Ken’ichi. Even today, the film industry has repurposed the idea of a style connected to a particular landscape, so much so that the locations of some films have become tourist destinations or have influenced a whole other range of cultural productions. Style, therefore, must be brought back to the center of aesthetics, precisely because it implies an enhancement in profiling a transcendent ideal of form, even if not in a conceptually precise way, and presupposes a cultural essence of feeling, the game of which is played outside individual consciousness. Illuminating from this point of view is the line with which art historian Federico Zeri responded to a person who claimed to have had a vision of the Madonna: “In what style was she?”

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Conclusions on Aesthetic Value Thus, an aesthetic value is generated within a cultural dynamic and then, however, acquires a structural consistency of its own, which is proposed in its entirety to the scrutiny of cultural selection. As long as the dynamics that motivated its generation are active, it will remain active on the basis of them, but after that, it will have to be seen whether it has reached a sufficiently capable critical mass to make it accepted as a common identity heritage or even a genetic endowment of culture. Once a cultural product has come into being, it is on the market for cultural selection, and cannot be revoked, and thus begins a life of its own—what in some cases is narrowly called “critical luck.” This principle explains to us that there are no absolute criteria of beauty, but there are only criteria of beauty that are in play, and there are “objects,” in the theoretical sense of the term, that are also in play in seeing their original beauty recognized or not, or any beauty that keeps them alive, that is, in play. This means that regardless of their actual qualitative merits, when a new sociocultural pressure is formed and expectations are created for a certain kind of product that is not yet there, the first supply for the new demand goes to form the cornerstones and masterpieces of the new cultural strand. Consider the case of the Renaissance. In Florence, a new class of wellto-do people had already been formed who aspired to social advancement, which could not come easily because of outright ennobling, and here they sought to collect social prestige through culture. This dynamic had already been in action for more than a century and had mainly affected literature, resulting in a new taste for classical antiquity. However, this new trend had not yet lapped the visual arts, which had remained anchored in the first steps and moved in this direction by Giotto, which, however, were still too limited. On the other hand, the more courageous attempts made by Nicola Pisano had been too early and had not received sufficient attention, being stifled by the fashion of the International Gothic. So in the early fifteenth century, there was great anticipation for something that had yet to see the light of day. As always, demand creates supply, and so the supply came with Brunelleschi’s group. Of them, only one was a painter: the group’s mascot, the very young Tommaso, known as Masaccio. Masaccio set about painting, trying to imagine a “classical” style according to the dictates of his older friends, such as Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Della Robbia. Unfortunately, he died too young. His paintings are technically clumsy and sometimes even contain explicit foreshortening errors, as in the famous crucifixion. But no matter, Masaccio has remained in art history as a supreme artist. His works, though clumsy, are to be considered de jure beautiful. We have seen how the same phenomenon occurred for Cézanne in postimpressionism, and we

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could add to it Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and all the works that served as ­forerunners, albeit deliberately in defiance of common sense around beauty. These works then become worthy of being considered beautiful, even if they do not look beautiful in the eyes of the common viewer, and this happens not because beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder but because beauty is a value culturally regulated according to a set of parameters that are in turn culturally validated and expressed by qualified people. We thus delegate specialists to determine true beauty. And the specialists explain to us, in university lecture halls and books, why these works are valuable, which is converted into cultured beauty, which is that more cultured, the more it is detached from common sense. Then such a viewer, when he goes to see the painting in an exhibition, will stand ten minutes in front of the painting looking for technical details, although these are nothing special, but which he will judge to be sublime parts of the masterpiece for the simple reason that, for him, a masterpiece can only be made of sublime parts. Here there are a number of points to be made about the role played in aesthetics by the illusion of knowledge, which in aesthetics and art is particularly prevalent. On the one hand, people rely on the judgments of experts for the appreciation of a work; on the other hand, everyone thinks they can discuss what is beautiful and what is artistic but ends up repeating only the most widespread clichés of the moment. To sum up, the element at the heart of aesthetics is value, and this value, being based on memetic dynamics, is organized, stratified, and accumulated in bounded situations in which memes, shall we say, have intense activity by colliding, mixing, and ordering themselves by bouncing off one another. Otherwise, the widening scope of this memetic activity causes memes to simply disperse, following the dynamics of cultural fads, going from the richer centers where trends are elaborated and spreading more and more until they become too common to arouse interest and finally disappear. This dynamic is exactly that of epidemics that spread until they create herd immunity and disappear. It is no accident that Sperber spoke of the epidemiology of ideas. In this situation, no cultural protagonists are created, only meteors; no cultural values are created, only momentary fads. Moreover, the internet represents such a vast market that it no longer even allows for that ephemeral cultural hegemony exercised by the fashion of the moment, since multiple fads can cross different market segments: one for kids, one for parents, one for lovers of one genre, and one for those of another. In this way, memes spread only by following the statistical law of incessant proliferation, plunging all content and all forms into utter meaninglessness (memetic chaos). This memetic chaos produces what De Martino would have called a crisis of

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presence and destorification, that is, a situation in which subjects no longer have their place in history. But this, for De Martino, is precisely the symptom of the cultural crisis and what he always called the “cultural apocalypse.”6

Aesthetics, Art and Power Art, Instrument of Power? Then, at this point, we need to clearly address the problem of the relationship between social subjects such as constituted power, institutions, economic powers such as financial power blocs, the self-regulated market, and aesthetic and artistic facts. We speak of “social subjects” when we find entities such as, for example, the state, a financial group, or even the entire self-regulated market acting for their own ends and not for the realization of ends external to the entity itself, in which case its essence is instrumental and its role is summed up in the performance of a function. With respect to these subjects, a reductionist approach in aesthetics is one that posits aesthetics as an object that is subject to teleological dynamics external to itself, which leads to the determination of it in the key of the performance of a certain function. Functionalist conceptions, from the social point of view, are thus theories of the heteronomy not only of art but of all aesthetics. Let us take as an explanatory example the case of the well-known theory of religion as instrumentum regni. It is clear that this theory strips religion of its own functional autonomy and offers a trivially simplified representation of religion to reduce it to politics. Many analyzes of aesthetics, such as Ranciere’s, involve in a similar form of reductionism of aesthetics to politics. Many scholars in the field of cultural studies also fall into this fallacy in good faith, believing that they are doing a genealogical analysis, a Marxist critique, a gender analysis, or a critique of colonialism. It is easy in these contexts to come to think that aesthetic factors have been employed or even created to propagandize power, appease the masses, subjugate colonized peoples, subject women to patriarchal standards, and so on. Thus, if we have so far criticized naturalistic reductionism, now it is a matter of criticizing sociopolitical reductionism. The various agencies of power and the economic system do not act on aesthetic phenomena in the same way that a subject acts on an object, such that, having found the means of using it, it submits completely to the reason for use and has no truth other than the instrumental purpose assigned to it. So we do not claim, for example, that the king cannot intend to make use of art for self-celebration, that the dictator cannot intend to use art for propaganda purposes or to showcase his political action, and that the self-regulated market cannot be interested in art or beauty to the extent

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that these generate profit. We have numerous examples of these attempts at instrumentalization, but if we look closely, we never find a simple reduction of beauty and art to a mere tool; rather, we always find resistance and surplus. Why? Because aesthetic phenomena always behave toward such pressures as a subject, that is, in an active way, and not as a mere object, that is, in a passive way. A political leader or a business manager may give orders to an individual, but this individual, even in the event that he or she obeys, will never be reduced to a mere machine in the hands of the superior. The relationship will always be somewhat nonlinear, and he may even rebel against orders or take an evasive attitude. The subject, unlike the object, has its own purpose and has its own systemic logic, from which it cannot deviate more than a certain extent, upon reaching which the adverse reaction is triggered. Art history is full of cases of formal and stylistic rebellion. In fact, we are not concerned here with the artist’s rebellion, which is a fact attributable to the human subject in an ethical and political sense but not an aesthetic one. The aesthetic subject is impersonal. Michelangelo’s rebellion against Pope Julius II is a human fact; the decision to depict all nude bodies, on the other hand, is an aesthetic decision that conflicts with the guidelines of papal power. Renaissance art manifests an indomitable character in pursuing its own ends, not limiting itself to the sole wishes of the lords, who must therefore enter into dialogue with the artist and figurative art, recognizing to it the status of “liberal art” or subject and no longer “servile art” or mere instrument. Take the case of tragedy and the famous Aristotelian definition that posits it as aimed at catharsis. This could be seen as the archetype of social reductionism in art. There are interpretations on this front that tend to justify this point of view, whereby the function of tragedy would be to offer reconciliation and prepare the spectators for baleful events. In this sense, even according to authors such as Adorno, catharsis, and thus tragedy aimed at it, would have a socially conservative role aimed at taming the masses. Adorno therefore prefers an art that excites the soul without performing cathartic action. However, the problem is another: tragedy does not perform cathartic action to foster social or political stability. Catharsis is not treated by Aristotle as an external end of aesthetics but as an internal end. Catharsis is a purification in conflict and mourning because conflict and mourning are purifying in their mimetic emergence. Tragedy does not serve, like the bourgeois drama with a happy ending, to send us home with our hearts at peace, reconciled in our affections. The tragedy in this is still truly a sacred act of contact with the otherness of the sacred. The conflict that goes on in it is not that between rulers and ruled, but that between men and gods, which is why

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tragedy trespasses from the realm of the political and stands on the borderline between authorial art and impersonal sacred ritual, and that is precisely why it belongs to a brief period, to a threshold, crossed which it loses its cathartic force and becomes mere dramatic art. Power and Beauty The creation of beauty values rests on concepts and conceptions that we learn and think with and that have their own social and socially constituted history and significance. Thus, beauty is not only social because it owes its relative objectivity to its social and impersonal formation, but also because it rests on concepts that are themselves socially formed and implicitly bearers of cultural values and conceptions. Then, on the other hand, there is a more specific factor, which has already been partly examined, of social knowledge, in which social organization operates a distribution and structuring of specialisms and related institutions, complete with related prestigious offices, and to which we delegate our judgments, trusting the specialists who have studied the subject thoroughly, even if in their judgments they manifest views that are far removed from our naive conceptions of the subject. If we talk about astrophysics and the physicist tells us that the universe is expanding, we just believe it; we don’t ask to be shown evidence. But we rely on specialists even for more mundane things, such as car breakdowns or sink repairs. Our trust in specialists is not always so full because we know that they are human beings and therefore fallible. Therefore, on important health issues, we listen to a second opinion, and we do the same when we have to make a major expenditure. For the same reason, we also trust experts who, in various capacities, deal with beauty, such as experts in art, music, and theater, even if they point out to us the beauty of works that we do not like at all. In fact, since the avant-garde, the gap between beauty sensed and beauty explained has deepened more and more. The masses have become increasingly recalcitrant in their reliance on critical appraisal. The modern art system has subsisted as long as the recognition of the validity of institutional specialism in aesthetics and art has stood. We learn to judge something as beautiful, and even when we do so intuitively, we do so on the basis of conceptual grids, which incorporate certain aesthetic parameters. These aesthetic parameters, whether implicit or explicit, in turn refer to the social structure of which they are an expression. For this reason, the poor person takes on the aesthetic parameters of aristocratic pageantry or bourgeois luxury and replicates them mimetically to the extent that he is able to understand them, often in the simplified form of the status symbol. Through status symbols, a kind of unintentional parody of the

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phenomenon of aesthetic enhancement is created, in which the caricature of the object of style is revealed, on the one hand, in the tawdry object to be displayed, and on the other hand, the caricature of the subject of taste, which in reality shows nothing but the figure of its own inadequacy, manifesting itself as kitsch, trash, camp, and so on. Inside this contradiction, which is often ridiculed by film comedies, lies a much deeper political issue, in that through the vulgarity of the status symbol, the justification of the taste of the upper classes is rooted; the superiority of these classes is justified precisely because of their unattainable taste; one condemns the subaltern to his own subalternity and makes him co-responsible for it in the memetic propagation of reductive stereotypes, which he uses to try to understand such high styles, thus also justifying subalternity; and finally consolidates the status symbol industry. Thus, the relationship between inadequacy, crudeness, and status symbols is not occasional but functional. The inferior must be inadequate, and this is part of the self-representation of society. The average people must be inadequate. But there is worse still: if the average people suffer from the gap between them and their idols, a harsher sanction politically arises toward those who, being in a certain culture but coming from another, assume aesthetic criteria that play against them. These differences also emerge as racial differences and take on implicitly racist overtones. An eloquent example of this is shown by director Spike Lee in the film BlacKkKlansman, which reports a speech on beauty by African American rights activist Kwame Ture, who said that the power of exclusion manifests itself immediately at the aesthetic level. Kwame Ture urged the audience to stop thinking that to be beautiful, one must have a prominent nose, thin lips, and white skin, and to understand that having thick lips, a wide nose, and black skin is beautiful because otherwise they would end up hating themselves. Such is the power of aesthetics and the power in aesthetics. That is, by referring to Euro-American standards, they implicitly assume a set of cultural parameters that value something that they can never be, and that condemns them to a kind of inner exile from beauty. So one of the first things to do, according to the activist in question, is to reclaim an African American sense of beauty based on models consonant with their own reality. The film referred to the 1960s, and so things have changed since then, yet in general, the problem remains whenever the subaltern classes espouse the aesthetic criteria of the classes that dominate them. This raises not only the fact that aesthetics is part of a power system, but that it also wields a power: the power to be beautiful and to make people feel ugly. Every value corresponds to a power. Beauty has the power to attract, and feeling ugly or making a certain human type perceived as ugly has the

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power to weaken them from the inside or outside, to bully them. Aesthetics, therefore, are not so harmless, as anyone who has been teased in school because of their physical appearance knows. These powers can be used on individuals, but also on social groups or, finally, on whole peoples. As Western culture has hegemonized the world, this problem arises today on a global level, despite the many attempts to reevaluate local traditions and their aesthetic parameters. Since once a country has been opened to the international market, with all the proffered aesthetic models it finds there, it cannot be hoped that it will lock itself up and resign itself to the traditional models of its own culture alone, especially when these clearly show their limitations in comparison with the most popular models on the market. Regarding power, we should make a distinction between what we might call, in parallel with the law, positive power and natural power. Positive power is deliberately shaped and imposed by politics, while “natural” power, on the other hand, is manifested spontaneously by the social configuration in the homeostatic search for a stable arrangement as the descending causality of an emerging systemic order. On positive power, we will not dwell because, although it is of a very complex type, it is quite clear what it refers to, as it refers to the institutional forms of power of government, as these are either imposed by force of violence or by force of law and consent. Natural power, on the other hand, is more umbratile and elusive because it operates in the background through feedback mechanisms, but it is very important in that it forms the substratum of positive power and also goes to define its range of possibility of existence. Social systems tend to find an operational and functional arrangement, unless, however, they are disrupted by new historical changes that set everything in motion again. We can also consider here a superhomeostat, which, in reaction to inputs, assigns different values to effectors. These take on different values in a metastable arrangement precisely because of certain imbalances, or processes of imbalance, which resolve themselves into a compensatory mechanism only within the framework of an economy of difference at the level of the totality of the system. Consider, for example, the transition from the Roman world, to the early medieval world. In the Roman world we find a complex network of social structures, with a great variety of tasks and services connected to relative social levels. With the barbarian invasions, a whole series of intermediate tasks, with related social positions, collapse, collapsing to a lower level, and we arrive at a downward simplification of society. Civil and religious functions collapse and overlap into a single figure in a process of forced simplification. This background dynamic becomes an inclined plane that incentivizes the possibility of certain positive power solutions, such as the return of kingship,

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and diminishes others, such as the separation of powers. This background limits the functions of positive power that are easily feasible but also limits the organization of aesthetic production and enhancement. For example, the disappearance of luxury handicrafts also means that workshops devoted only to mosaic, sculpture, or painting cannot exist. Thus, both the demand and supply of aesthetic products contract drastically. The power that enables the formation of institutions we have discussed also acts in the formation of the aesthetic parameters consonant with certain social functions and distinctions. We cannot fully understand the nature of aesthetic values of beauty by abstracting them from the dynamic in which they appeared. In fact, they owe their fundamental characteristics to the satisfaction of cultural needs related to underlying cultural dynamics. This does not mean that beauty value can have meaning only in relation to its generative conditions, because cultural elements are made of memes that multiply and repeat themselves by mutating and persisting in mutation within the limits allowed to them by the environmental conditions of their evolutionary drift. Power and Modern Art The shift in the role of modern art from figuration to formal research also resulted in a narrowing of the audience to the most educated elites. This produced a “double bond” relationship between the neo-avant-garde and the upper middle class, which drove this insistence of value on the form of communication to a paradoxical structure of communication itself. We speak of “double bind” because it was during this period that relational theory and pragmatics of human communication emerged in the field of psychological studies, which attempted to explain the autistic or schizophrenic behavior of many adolescents as a function of paradoxical dynamics of communication. Now it is interesting to note that even the communication strategies of the neo-adolescents are, from a relational point of view, as paradoxical as those described by Bateson or Laing. In them, for example, a daughter tries to rebel against the pathological structure of family communication, in which things cannot be said as they are because of the risk of upsetting family homeostasis. So in communication, the subject tries to evade communication itself, but this attempt breaks down in the face of the problem of the impossibility of non-communication. Some avant-garde artists would not want to be participants in the direction of power; however, neither would they want to give up making art, so they make art in a way that boycotts communication. In fact, power apparatuses interested in defending their investment in art have no interest in supporting supinely adulatory art, not least because

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nineteenth-century bourgeois art was born precisely in direct polemic with the celebratory art of the aristocracy. If, however, it had made politically tooopen opposition campaigns, then it would not even make sense to present its works in institutional settings. So the solution was either to be with the institutions without being with them, at least in words, or to boycott communication itself, trying not to communicate, or finally target communication as an art object. All the neo-avant-garde suffered from this paradox and used various tactics of inactivating communication. This was not because they were expressing a form of neurosis, but because a paradoxical condition had been created in the dual need for autonomy and institutional support. This situation is typical of a liberal regime, which, being anti-absolutist, recognizes autonomous powers internally, at least formally. Art was supposed to embody the autonomous power of the imagination, but on the test of facts, it turned out that this autonomy was not really such and was only the concession of a certain arbitrariness of choice, just enough to support the rhetoric of pluralism and freedom of expression, provided that this is totally ineffectual because it is separated from social struggles precisely because of its autonomy. Otherwise, however, the avant-garde project spoke clearly: It supported the union of art and life, of fantasy and revolution. But this was a simple narrative that did not go hand in hand with the artistic and exhibition practices of these avant-garde, which systematically denied it in their practices. Thus, we could say that the function of the avant-garde was more cathartic than revolutionary. This becomes especially true with the neoavant-garde of the 1960s. The early avant-garde still expressed a strong sense of rupture, and artists risked everything for the cause they believed in. Impressionism had shown the tenacious will of bourgeois and politically liberal artists to oppose the aristocratic academic tradition. The artists claimed an expressive freedom similar to that of poets. Thus, on the one hand, they denied academic oleography, which was instrumental to the celebration of a class society, but, on the other hand, they also denied the role of illustrator, which was the only alternative offered to them by the nascent culture industry. The so-called “bourgeoisie” also aspired to cultural leadership and, in order to do so, was willing to grant art a kind of autonomous power, namely to be a fully liberal art like poetry. Modern art thus opposed itself more and more sharply to the emerging mass culture, entrenching itself in increasingly elitist positions, so much so that it sometimes seemed neo-aristocratic or increasingly difficult to understand, so much so that it destroyed all academic conventions step by step. These elitist movements take on a parapolitical attitude. That is why they speak of movements and not schools, of vanguards like those of the proletariat, and draw up manifestos, such as the communist

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one of Marx and Engels. In the neo-avant-garde, however, the discourse is, from a pragmatic point of view, different. The neo-avant-garde are already acting within an art system that accepted the principle of autonomy of art and experimental research but perhaps never accepted the avant-garde ideal of transfusing artistic liberation into social struggle. The bourgeois idea is to recognize freedom within the limits of a game of non-effectual social representation. Thus, art is no longer forced to be the representation of objects and can move to their direct presentation. However, it is the whole field of art that becomes the representation of a political fantasy that cannot become reality. The condition of art’s existence and subsistence is for it to say what it wants, but at a fictitious level devoid of consequences for political life. This is where the double bind comes in, with the boycott of language, so that it cannot become political and remain only metaphor, because artists are told, “Make a revolution in art, but don’t use art to make a revolution!” So communication becomes self-critical and self-destructive. If the autonomy of art had been a brilliant ploy to prevent the devaluation of art and its dissolution into the cultural products industry, however, it now risks becoming a trap in which art finds itself condemned to self-referentiality. The struggle between conceptual art and political art in the 1970s was aimed at restoring to art the possibility of speaking about the social. This challenge had the claim to change all art, making it a site of amplification and expression of social issues. This claim was followed by the return to order and the recreational function that characterized postmodernism in the 1980s, comparable to that which occurred in the 1920s under the impetus of totalitarian tendencies. But what was the totalitarian trend in the 1980s as the communist bloc was collapsing? It was the neoliberal one that asserted the unchallenged dominance of market logic. However, the intimate and consolatory rhetorics of this period were soon replaced by a pale evocation of the progressive tendencies of the 1970s, purged of their revolutionary ambitions. The citadel of art’s autonomy was effectively conquered by institutions. In this way, autonomy, which was meant to protect artistic value from the encroachment of the cultural industry market, was in fact emptied from within. The conceptual challenge to allow art to return to content against the reactionary art of the return to painting has been won, but in the meantime, a far more important battle has been lost, and that is the battle for real autonomy for art that is now such in name only. It is useless to say that a newspaper is free to talk about all subjects if the ownership of the newspaper passes into the hands of someone who controls all the internal nomenclature, gradually putting all trusted people in it. We have thus returned to the institutionalized situation of academic art, in which beautiful design and its neo-Platonic precepts have been replaced

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by bureaucratic proceduralism and an insistence on justification. This means that that of artist is a normalized curriculum and there is funding to meet the survival needs of institutionalized artists. In this way, the art institution is reformulated as a kind of business, referring to a niche market of investors who mostly work in finance and for whom lavish new museums have been built, which often have difficulty being filled with events and become the party backdrop for the private events of the wealthy classes. Then value slides back downward, artistic debate tends to dissolve into a series of conventional and useless discourses, and the trend proceeds toward an Alexandrian drift, effectively dissolving the value that had been attempted to be saved by the autonomy of art. Meanwhile, however, the culture industry has also changed. The culture industry, too, is no longer made up of the great general managers of Adornian memory. It too is dispersed in the endless rivulets of the network. So today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation in which there has never been as much cultural production as there is now, but cultural production has never been of such little value and so irrelevant. The final blow may now come from artificial intelligence, which is increasingly capable of churning out all kinds of cultural products automatically. Thus, the arts sector will definitely become a market for individual creative leisure, no more than it already is for children’s creativity. This means that in a sea of aesthetic products, we are coming to the dismissal of aesthetics. Creativity and Widespread Aesthetics Thus, we have arrived at the crisis of culture, not because of a lack of information but because of an excess of it. Today we are in a world of widespread creativity that destroys art and in a world of widespread aestheticism that destroys the beautiful, replacing it with the cute and the standardized pleasant. A nineteenth-century progressive ideal, also linked to Marxism, argued that there was a need to move from a situation of artistic alienation, in which the ordinary individual was deprived of his or her creativity, to delegate it to a specialist who was the artist, to a situation of realized humanity in which everyone would regain possession of his or her own creativity and there would no longer be a need for artists. This theory, supported even by prestigious artists such as Joseph Beuys, is, in our opinion, fundamentally wrong, and we go on to explain the reasons why. The first reason is that it assumes that the artist is such a function of a mysterious property called “creativity.” The second is that it assumes that creativity is a human faculty, of which a part of human beings can be dispossessed. Third, it reaches the inconsistent conclusion that humans, being able to express their creativity, would be reintegrated into their humanity and would not need art. All these

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three assumptions are actually unfounded. If creativity is the faculty that makes artists such, then it is not a faculty common to all men. Then it is hard to see how artists could expropriate human beings of such a faculty. A political system can expropriate people of goods and money, and then accumulate them; it can expropriate the physical strength of workers in order to translate it into profit. But one does not see how artists could expropriate others of creativity, and especially one does not see how they could benefit from the expropriated creativity. It could be argued that the system of the division of labor prevents some from expressing their creativity because they are oppressed by exploitation, while it grants others more creative jobs and finally allows some to make their creativity their trade. This, however, would be quite a different matter, as in no way would artists take advantage of the creativity precluded by some workers. But there is a far more basic problem: what is creativity? Very often, this is traced back to the Greek Póiesis, from which the term “poetry” is also derived. However, according to the Greeks, poetic disciplines also involved many jobs that today we do not think of as creative at all, such as that of the fisherman. The other idea is that it is an activity related to imagination and fantasy. However, no one can stop someone else from fantasizing, not even the most exploited slave. Moreover, the history of art classifies the works of famous and extravagant artists such as Michelangelo, William Blake, Van Gogh, or Jackson Pollock as works of art, but also considers the reliefs of the Trajan column and the mosaics of Hagya Sophia as works of art, without considering that these are works organized in an “industrial” way, exactly like many of the works of today’s workers. The point is that kidnapped or alienated creativity is a romantic fable. Art does not express creativity taken from anyone, but only productions of aesthetic value that otherwise would not have existed. In the nineteenth century, many middle-class people owned a piano and were able to play it, yet there was a division between the artist-composer and the amateur, who precisely played the piano for pleasure. No one prevented such amateur pianists from writing music and expressing their creativity instead of playing other people’s music. Before the appearance of records, the custom of printing copies of sheet music that were played at home was widespread, and to do so, these performers also had to have some practice. A good level of musical knowledge was in proportion to the population, perhaps more widespread in the late nineteenth century than today. Today, “creative” is the name of a well-known brand of electronic music entertainment products based in Singapore, once famous for its Sound Blaster. Today, very common devices such as the iPad have already implemented a music composition app (Garageband), which has the features

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of professional software from a decade ago. Today, one can easily purchase a keyboard with pre-programmed accompaniments and lighted keys that light up to help us perform the melody. Are we sure that all this equipment stimulates our creativity and Wagner’s sheet music instead alienates it? The point is that this whole thing about creativity, its development and alienation, as well as its saving effect on business, is in all likelihood just a highly successful romantic meme at the bottom of which there is nothing specific, which has turned into one of the clichés of discourses on aesthetics, just like the one about genius or divine inspiration. In fact, genius has taken the place of the inspired poet, and the creative has taken the place of genius. Then there is no creativity taken away, only free time taken away from the lives of workers, free time that is rarely used for artistic activities any more than in the past. However, this has generated the belief that there is no need for artists, only creativity, to live happier lives for everyone. This also engendered the idea that the child is more creative than the adult, and thus the idea that creativity goes down with age, while entering into open contradiction with the fact that many retirees, having nothing to do, devote themselves to socalled creative activities more than younger people. Then finally, along come evolutionary psychologists to claim that creativity is not just a human faculty but concerns all animals, and in this regard, they cite the whole circus of animal painters whose exploits can be found on YouTube, and so the ideology is cooked and served. The only thing that is true is that this ideology is detrimental to art and to the figure of the artist as a specialized figure. Thus, if the arts have been attacked by the ideology of communal creativity, beauty is attacked by the idea of widespread aestheticism. In Art in the Gaseous State (Michaud, 2003), the thesis that aesthetics is everywhere, more so in shopping malls than in museums, was repeated for the umpteenth time. This thesis is a continuation of the thesis of aesthetics in the city and aesthetics connected to the society of the spectacle that we have found since the 1960s. However, this approach systematically confuses aesthetic value with the memetic viscosity of marketing, just as it confuses the “pretty” or “pleasant” of the culture industry with the “beautiful” of the major arts. From this point of view, the judgment of aesthetics in contemporary society lends itself to an aporetic consequence: on the one hand, following the critical line that does not recognize in the products of the culture industry and marketing (where these increasingly tend to blur together) a true aesthetic value but only statistical forms of pleasantness, one should infer that beauty is dead. On the other hand, however, the crisis of the arts derived from the avant-garde and the search for value, starting with what Migliorini called aisthesis or aestheticism, lead us to conclude that the future of the arts

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lies precisely in a rebirth of beauty. Perhaps the two conclusions might not be aporetic to the extent that we talk about old and new kinds of beauty. Cultural Theory and Restoration Although one should not reduce aesthetics to history sic et simpliciter, historicity is an intrinsic and essential element of the formation and thus explanation of cultural phenomena. The cultural phenomenon can never be completely abstracted from its historicity, not only because it is temporally determined in all its aspects, which are therefore all subject to change over time, but because such temporality becomes historicity precisely in its taking on cultural meaning or meaning for humans as entities endowed with meaning. It is impossible to abstract art from historical temporality. In the work, even the physical parts change with the passage of time, and their change is never inert from the point of view of how it is interpreted, so much so that it may come to compromise its specific essence or its aesthetic essence as an art object. On this ontological alteration must be placed the theoretical basis of restoration intervention. Restoration is never a simple technical operation but is always also a theoretical operation that goes to affect the object in its ontological dimension. It intends, on the one hand, to restore the art object to its initial conditions, but since they are also specifically historical conditions, that is, linked to a precise temporal determination, such restoration can never restore an ontological reality of the initial conditions, since the very intervention of restoration assumes as known the fact that the work belongs to a past, and, therefore, in the moment in which this act seeks to reproduce the initial conditions of its appearance, it certifies its historical hiatus from them. It also thus historicizes the work itself and certifies to the historical difference of the present operation, thus distinguishing the present technical and material plane from the past. This historical difference thus becomes part of the restored object on an ontological level. On the other hand, a difference nevertheless comes to pass since the object, even left to itself, in the continuity of deformations or decay connected with the passage of time, produces a difference in the very “substance” of the work. In other words, once the work is produced, it will no longer be exactly the same. At first, first this difference will be imperceptible, but then it will grow to the point of threatening its legibility or even its very integrity. The work then must be recognized not as an unchanging object but as an individuated entity that has a dialectical relationship of identity and difference, in which that identity is not an essence magically trapped in the physicality of the thing but a collective representation connected to a value. The task of restoration, then, is neither the atom-by-atom reintegration of the physical

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thing nor the preservation of the original document at the price of distorting the whole, to prevent an alleged mystification, which is all to be proven, but the reintegration of the form in its connection to value, in a relationship of continuity with the original entity, in the awareness of its intrinsic difference. The documentary approach to restoration, typical of the last century, which elevates the original physical component to a fetish and brands additions as false, with the consequence of imposing half-measures, which let the difference between original material and modern technical intervention be understood, is not only a victim of the modern, historicist myth of the original in relation to its fetishistic truth value, but also accomplishes with such an attitude deformations to the art object, which alter its perception and compromise its ontological consistency much more seriously, abstracting the object from its context and transforming it into an enigmatic ready-made, that is, into something that produces the ontological alienation of the object. Restoration intervention, therefore, instead of running after the phantoms of the fetishism of the original and the real, which one wants to coincide with the material in a way that is theoretically naive and philosophically unacceptable, must first reconstitute the wholeness as far as possible of the object in order to restore its ontological sense, in relation to its own individuation as a whole and in relation to the context and function in it. From this point of view, if it is true that the work of art as an entity has an identity, which is always in dialectical relation with temporal alteration, it is also true that precisely because of this, it has an elastic nature, which prevents its physicalist reductionism to a pure sum of atoms and tolerates interventions and alterations to the extent that these do not compromise its place and meaning in the world. From this point of view, restoration could also go beyond the mere technical dimension of material reintegration, posing the question of the reintegration of contextual conditions that allow its proper hermeneutic experience. This is by no means new, since we have also been talking about environmental restoration for decades; however, contextual restoration has never been discussed in depth, precisely because the modern work of art is conceived in an individualistic way, according to the model of the commodity, which is closed ontologically within itself as a product, with its own value reduced solely to its price. This kind of conception may be appropriate for works of modern art that have already been conceived according to the commodity model, but it is not at all appropriate for archaeological artifacts, such as sculptures and decorations, which were part of temple complexes and, whose significance, out of the context of the place of worship, in the sterile environment of the museum, with steel tubes in the missing parts, produces a totally mystifying experience, which alters the very essence of the

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thing, alienating it in the dimension of the cultural good, which is the way the administered world manages the governance of the relationship with our memory, in such a way that we cannot reappropriate it. Then this mystification, this falsification, is something far more serious than any invisible physical integration or any supposed “historical forgery,” because what is mystified is the original itself as such, as it is subjected to an “ontological washing,” which strips it of its very being.

Aesthetics and the Posthuman The Early Memetic Regime: The Age of the Gods. Orality and the Sacred Vico, one of the fathers of aesthetics, wanted to make a “new science” that would talk about the development of customs and laws, a kind of cultural anthropology. But to focus on the development of these forms, he analyzed in particular, the link between religion and poetry. He drew from this a progression of three ages: Gods, heroes, and men. This tripartition, from a memetic point of view, is much more appropriate than that elaborated by German Romanticism, all hinging on the transition between classical (naive) civilization and Christian (sentimental) civilization, to which Hegel premised an archaic (symbolic) civilization. The Vichian tripartition also coincides with the tripartition discerned by Dumézil in his studies of IndoEuropean cultures, in which he finds a preponderance first of sacral power, then of military power, and finally of economic power. Clearly, many things have changed since the time of Vico, and perhaps we should add other ages, but we will see this later. As we have seen in the previous pages, humans developed from a condition of animality through increased communicative interaction to a predominantly cultural condition with the exponential production of memes, which gave rise to an emergent cultural system. This emergent system reached such a degree of interconnectedness that it generated a “world” of essences, but only after a long time that communication was already being used habitually. We believe that this moment coincides with the advent of behavioral modernity. In this period, the sacred is developed, namely a regime of symbolic behaviors that are absent in any other animal, involving a world of shared beliefs, group ritual behaviors, with dances and especially the use of figurative representation. Humans in this period are physiologically the same as those of today; perhaps there was already a vaguely used concept for humans. What is missing, however, is the idea of humans as subjects, and it is missing for a specific reason, and that is because these humans replicate memes,

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and in doing so, they structure memes. So it is no accident that instead of seeing individuals emerge who talk about their interests and their will, we find discourses about supernatural beings and invisible substances such as spirits. These discourses then also tell about the creation of the world, that is, the creation of their world. The memes are articulated through myths, and instead of being regulated by humans, they regulate human activity through rituals and precepts that we now call religious. This mythic reality, considered “prelogical,” has always been an enigma to anthropologists, but it becomes a crystal clear fact if we take a memetic point of view. At some point, an early memetic regime was formed that was largely analogical and relied mainly on oral communication. This type of communication, from an evolutionary point of view, is, at this stage, still largely Lamarckian, although it manages to create forms that manage to maintain a stable form over time. This mix of pliability and stability allows memes to create complex symbolic structures, giving form to divine persons who wield power over humans and even dictate the rules regarding their reproductive system through what Levi-Strauss called the elemental structures of kinship. In this way, culture and its component memes break free from the leash of genes and try to turn the tables by regulating genetic transmission. Indeed, what good are cultural kinship systems otherwise from an evolutionary point of view? It is true that there is still a trade-off between genes and memes, because in this way memes depress sexual selection and ensure all genes are transmitted; however, it is the memes that hold the leash. This memetic regime becomes much stronger with agriculture. Agriculture helps humans to a certain extent because they find themselves working harder and in worse conditions; however, it allows for more organization and this is a winning aspect in the logic of competition between groups. As society stratifies, there is the possibility for an elite to live without working, devoting themselves only to the sacred, which allows for further memetic development. We are at the stage when the memetic sacral structure tries to impose itself on the biological principle in order to subdue it without reservation, and to achieve this, in some cases, it comes to human sacrifice.7 Human sacrifice obviously does not involve any practical benefit, and even then, it is an enigma from a traditional point of view, while it is crystal clear from the memetic point of view because it sanctions the total submission of genes to memes. Especially the sacrifice of the first offspring should be impossible if Hamilton’s rule were as universal as some say. Human sacrifice occurs with the advent of great civilizations. The great memetic structure of archaic civilization builds the pyramids but crushes humans biologically so that they become cogs in the great memetic machine. Through this machine appears writing, which

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is a much more precise method of memetic transmission but which has not yet detected its full power because it is in the hands of a very small caste of scribes. The Second Memetic Regime: The Age of Heroes. The Epos and the Alphabet In this age, there is a crisis of sacred power and divine kingship. Warrior peoples defeat the theocratic regimes. Heroes defeat the theriomorphic and terrifying deities of the old sacral regime, which was based on irrational fears. A large mythological production can be read in this sense: Theseus and the minotaur, Perseus and the gorgon, Oedipus and the sphinx, and so on. The new memetic regime comes into conflict with the old and supplants it, negating it. Similarly, a new generation of gods subdues the previous gods in various cases. All of this transformation is underpinned by social mutation, with the advent of predominantly military systems, and medial with the specialization of oral storytelling, the spread of writing in “civil society,” and the creation of the first alphabets that are easier to use as they are linked to spoken language. Through the use of aedi who are memory specialists, one can, through verse singing, recall even very long sequences. From these oral traditions come the compositions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is no accident that, in homage to this oral mnemonic tradition, the first philosophical treatises on nature were written in verse. This is referred to by Vico as the Age of Heroes, but in fact it is only a transitional age between the Lamarckian memetic regime of orality and the Weismannian regime of writing. This system must, in turn, come to terms with the power of writing. Therefore, another clash of memetic regimes is being prepared. The myth of warrior power will not disappear but will be subjected to political logic governed by economic mechanisms, as Thucydides explains well in the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, in the war between Athens and Sparta, not only two symbolic polis of Greece clash, but two social and memetic regimes: Economic power clashes with military power. The battle is won by Sparta, but in an epochal sense, the war is won by Athens. Sparta, the city of heroes, faces inevitable decline as the star rises in Athens city of men, something also expressed politically by the use of democracy. The Third Memetic Regime: The Age of Humans Already in the Odyssey, we can see how the protagonist, Ulysses, departs from the model of the warrior hero to become a subject capable of devising many solutions, therefore called polymetis. Adorno even sees in Ulysses the archetype of the bourgeois. Ulysses is no longer the hero who defeats the

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monster by force; he is the human who defeats him by cunning. However, such cunning is also an affront to the gods. This theme that human ambition, or hybris brings affront to the gods is developed by tragedy. This is an even stronger clash than that between old and new gods seen in the Age of Heroes. In that sense, it is not only a clash between types of memes related to different systems, but it is also a clash between memes and memebearers. In other words, it is not only a conflict between two software but also between hardware and software. This new conflict is made possible by the development of writing, which allows, on the one hand, the transition to a very precise Weismannian inheritance with control procedures in the copying of texts, so much so that we still have the texts of this era. On the other hand, with the appearance of the author, there is also the possibility of giving origins to memetic offspring without the need to alter previous texts. In this way, we combine plasticity and fidelity of transmission. However, this means giving the keys to memes to humans, who are also regulated by genes. The ideal of archaic society was total control of humans because it was necessary to reduce behavioral entropy and bring it under the domain of organic modeling of social functions. In this way, the community could function as one machine that, instead of adapting to the natural environment, was able to adapt the natural environment to its own needs. The archaic world had already begun to generate institutions and a secular space as opposed to a sacral one. But the bulk of cultural kenosis occurs at this stage. Thanks to writing, positive law replaces consecrated customs and divine law. The community discusses how to govern itself, giving rise to politics. Social functions are specifically pursued. Arts, knowledge, and powers are all articulated. In this way, social entropy itself can be, on the one hand, compressed, but, on the other hand, set free, giving rise to civil liberties. This means a less rigid discipline of marriages, allowing for greater genetic fluctuation, and also greater arbitrariness of human actions, which therefore require the presence of an ethic that restrains genetic emotional tendencies (those that were the basis of primitive social cohesion) that conflict with social functions and imposes a form of self-control. The ideal of archaic society was thus a closed system; that of anthropocentric society is inevitably an open society, because it allows for greater organizational elasticity, and in it, even situations of centralization of power as in tyranny can only be temporary. The classical tragedy that stands at the entrance of this society expresses the reaction of the previous memetic regime by highlighting the limits of the human, warning humans of their hybris and phtonos theon. Tragedy is thus against this memetic regime, but in its being already authorial it already manifests the overcoming of the sacral paradigm it invokes. Socrates, too,

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is nostalgic for the archaic order, but in setting the daimon against power, he introduces an even more “modern” attitude than the one he condemns. The same argument can be made for Platonic political utopianism. A similar transition occurs, as we have said, in other cultures in which religions or similar forms appear, founded by humans, as in the case of Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, and Taoism and Confucianism in China. This is the context in which poetry, beauty, and the first budding of the idea of fine arts were born. Poetry needs authorship and the invariable transmission of writing. Beauty needs a conception of form that allows it to be separated from the good and the divine. Authorship and beauty, thus understood, can also be transferred by extension to other arts such as architecture, sculpture, and painting. The Crisis of the Classical World in the West Although Roman society had always been traversed by a now latent open stasis within it, it managed to offset centrifugal forces with centripetal ones thanks to its expansion. At the moment, however, its expansive force began to disintegrate. Christianity established itself in a contradictory way in this situation. In fact, on the one hand, this religion called for the restoration of an archaic condition of homogeneity; on the other hand, however, it put the believer in conflict with the system by creating the crisis of the system itself. Constantine’s idea of using Christianity to consolidate the empire turned out to be right only in part as Christianity continued to exercise the dual function of cohesion and crisis through theological disputes. The neoarchaic ideal of Christianity depressed social organization, the use of scripture in a throwback in which all culture was reduced and engulfed by the sacred. If the Constantinian model of empire was a half-failure, no better luck was had by the other model called “feudal.” Here, too, the empire failed to produce cultural organization, and when culture reappeared in Europe, this was in spite of the empire and in spaces of immunity from it and not because of it. The Schilllerian and Hegelian idea that Christianity ushered in the sentimental and sublime age that distinguished modernity was only a half-truth because it did not hold against the fact that in reality, Christianity proposed itself again as a return to the archaic symbolic order and that modern culture in reality presents itself as a re-proposition of classical anthropocentrism, first from the Renaissance and to the Enlightenment. So the continuity invoked by the Romantics with medieval Christianity was actually the fruit of mystification attributable to the reaction to the Enlightenment. In fact, the Christian paradigm entered a crisis as early as the end of the Middle Ages and then waned as a source of legitimacy definitively with the Thirty Years’ War.

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The cultural development from humanism to the Enlightenment represents the phase of greatest development of the human memetic regime. After that, it again enters a crisis. It is in this passage that aesthetics appears, not as an apologia for beauty advocated by the humanists but as its questioning. Aesthetics asks why beauty is not “like”? And in doing so, aesthetics seeks to somehow lead beauty back to “I like it.” This happens because the human regime is slipping out of itself thanks to the over-emphasis on the individual and the coincidence of homo memetic with homo genetic, believing that everything can now be traced back to some mental activity within the socalled “empirical subject.” The Fourth Memetic Regime: The Age of Money. Toward the Posthuman This subject reduced to the individual cannot but be individual-centric, that is, egocentric or, more simply, selfish. This paradigm that has reduced homo to the individual has no way of escaping the selfishness and thus the insatiable greed of this selfishness that has been maturing precisely in the development of humanism, in which a new economic system has also been maturing: capitalism. The memes, therefore, took to swirling more and more around that meme that was able to subjugate the human will precisely because of the individual’s own selfishness and greed. This dominant meme is now money. The religious memes of archaic civilization leveraged irrational fears. The memes of the Age of Heroes on aggression and recognition in the ideal of glory. Anthropocentric memes focus on the ideals of fame and power. The memes of the age of money give the individual money itself the certainty that one will always find someone ready to do anything for a congruous sum. This means that money can enjoy uninterrupted, continuous input. In turn, this means that money does not depend on the individual, and then it is the individual who depends on money. Yet, money has existed since the archaic age and has always held a certain fascination: why did it become predominant at some point? For three basic reasons: (1) it was previously restrained by religion, which, however, has passed into subordination; (2) modern humanism has degenerated into individualism, which has never happened before; (3) money has been able to make use of science to impart unprecedented development to technology, capable of flooding people with goods to satisfy individualist greed. As after the Neolithic revolution, most humans do not lead a more comfortable and relaxed life but a more strenuous and graver life. The free market is described by its own theorists as a self-regulating and autotelic system in which the now unquestioned selfishness is transformed by an invisible hand that replaces god’s into social good, thanks to a heterogenesis

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of ends. Again, the declining memetic regime reacts against this transformation, speaking of subject’s alienation, enslavement, and reification. It seeks to produce an overthrow of this system through the ideal of a socialist government, which, however, has the weakness of being based on goodwill and failing that on the authoritarianism of a central system that speaks for the interests of humanity. The communist reaction is neo-humanism, just as the Christian reaction was neo-archaism. The self-regulated market has shown that it is capable of defeating this kind of reaction, although the game is not quite over. However, it is difficult for a socialism that is not “market” to be realized, in a kind of compromise with humanistic instances that does not, however, harm the direction of economic development. The problem is that, thanks to memes, culture consumes more and more resources and could run into a disastrous environmental crisis. However, this may not mean the end of development, but the end of Homo sapiens. From the point of view of beauty, this world tends to reduce it inevitably to marketing and market success. The beautiful is confused with pleasure, and pleasure with emotion. The beautiful surplus one, the value one, is a residual element, but it could still be exacted by the transformations taking place. The Fifth Memetic Regime: The Self-Determined Machine or the Realized Posthuman The market is an autonomous system that today is based on its interfacing with the physical world through humans and machines. Humans enable this activity in four ways: by desire; by instrumental rationality; by labor; and by consumption. Machines in their present state are analogous to humans in this that they lack only desire. Once such a quantum leap occurs, whereby the machine becomes capable of asserting its own ends of survival, nothing could stop the dismissal of human being. But already in its present state, it is increasingly reduced to its only desiring function pertaining to its animality. Indeed, the technologies of intelligence allow a transfer of all other human capacities to the machine with better results than in humans, making “Man,” as Anders said, “obsolete.” For this man in this declining phase, the world tends more and more to lose its character of essence, to make way for a “bare life” without essence and without humanity, without spirituality and divinity. Human being is no longer an inverted tree with roots in the sky, as the Sabeans, heirs of the Neoplatonists wanted. The human now is an animal held on a leash by money that is increasingly satisfied with his animal impulses alone to suit his function as the actuator of the system. Already, posthuman individual is asked only to want to live, and such individual asks only to live and enjoy. Today, then, it is not surprising if aesthetics retrogrades from the beautiful to pure instinctive enjoyment.

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The beautiful, on the contrary, becomes more and more comprehensible to the machine through algorithms, which may someday amaze us in this regard. Today, therefore, human being has begun a process of animalization, which results in a process of dehumanization. The dehumanization of people means that they become less and less capable of meditative reflection with respect to the world, of posing general problems, of making radical choices, and, instead, enters into a relationship of direct connection impulses between instincts and stimuli that come to them from the environment. Human being was such, according to Heidegger, because he lived in the dimension of the open, in which he inhabits the world in an ontological distance that separates him from things that precisely give themselves to him in the Ereignis, in the event of being. People therefore finds themselves more and more intubated in the machines of capital and can only follow the inputs and adapt to the situation created by the self-regulated market, no longer having the ability, typical of humans since the Neolithic period, to adapt the environment to themselves and their own needs. This increasingly animalized human loses his world, which tends to turn into an environment (Umwelt) exactly as it is for animals. The individual, in the posthuman, like animals, mutates himself to adapt to the environment and thus is simply a peripheral element in the structuring of pulviscular phenomena, like a bee in a swarm. This individual is increasingly a mere piece of a global social device who fails to be center to himself and fails to give meaning to his own existence other than to follow the imperative to adapt to the needs of the system. He is just an actor within the systemic dynamics of the market, which overpower and exploit him as a worker, just as they alienate him as a consumer. So the question is: What becomes of aesthetics in this situation, where the character of appreciation is reduced simply to a marketing character, to a series of automatisms that appeal to conditioning elements of forced associations and subconscious forces that human being cannot control? What becomes of beauty when it is no longer linked to a meaning of value relative to a world? So, is the posthuman also the post-aesthetic? In a sense, the answer is affirmative. An aesthetic value in the full sense, a conception of beauty in the full sense, which, precisely, endows with a spiritual value a formal material element of one’s empirical experience, no longer finds a place in a situation such as this, where simply there are tendencies that push the consumer to approach certain cultural commodities simply in a dimension of consumption that is not different from that of the more immediate or more mundane consumption, such as precisely that of food or that relating to the household appliances that serve in the home. This immediacy of need, this immediacy of subjective pleasure, artfully stimulated to arouse a type of compulsive consumerism, is the death

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of beauty. At the same time, this world is also that of the hyper-proliferation of “aesthetic” commodities, which stimulate human senses and lead people to consume. Thus, there an the explosion of aesthetic consumption, but this aesthetic is an aesthetic emptied of value, emptied of reflection, emptied of that ontological distance with the thing, and, therefore, it simply becomes mere entertainment, which serves the stressed worker to recover from increasingly hard working days, which increasingly kill any element of private life. This, in relation to aesthetics, means that that master subject of taste judgment, which used to be emphasized and placed at the center of aesthetic perception, as the new ruler, in place of the old canon, typical of the Aristotelian and rhetorical conception of poetics, will be shattered against a new mode of standardization of taste, managed by artificial intelligence machines, which we already see at work in the proposal of audiovisual materials, in applications such as Netflix, which seem to favor the difference of individual tastes, but which in reality always work in a homogenizing way, since they intuit our preferences based on the preferences of people, who have preferences in common with ours, according to the so-called “nearest neighbor” principle. This causes the software to suggest homologous choices to us, establishing chains of homologies that will have a tendency to rest on common choices, which will produce the same homogenizing effect typical of the old mass society. The great availability of individualized choice promoted by artificial intelligence is thus only illusionary and transitory because it tends, in the long run, to flatten out. In fact, even the production of audiovisual and film content promoted by Netflix, while varying greatly in genres, does not vary much in the type of format, in the type of standards, or in the type of underlying ideology that is propagated there. The problem of capitalist society is to offer a great mass of choices over differences, which are insignificant, however, compared to the underlying choices, which must be unequivocally functional to the logic of the market. Moreover, the kind of interaction that we have with technology means that we interact with more and more intelligent machines, which take it upon themselves to understand us and tell us what we want to know, dispensing us from having to do so by our own mental effort and therefore inducing, in us, a state of mental laziness, which will lead us to be a kind of pet in the hands of an assistant seemingly caring but basically devoted only to the dynamics of profit. In this condition, the space for a critical understanding of the world shrinks more and more, which becomes more and more difficult to do at the individual level and also at the structural level within the institutional structures of knowledge, which are no longer aimed at these purposes. For this reason, it becomes increasingly difficult to be able to identify faults, which highlight clear and non-instrumental

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elements of opposition, on the basis of which social and cultural conflict operates, but also the production of values that arise from all this and that go to affect aesthetics in its ability to give meaning and value to forms for their form. The lack of these situations of cultural fertility, which go into the merits and depths of political oppositions, weakens our ability to understand the world and appreciate the beautiful, which are two dialectically connected elements in our common effort to make sense of improving society and, in doing so, our lives. Our lives, on the other hand, lie in “starvation, laziness, and the disappointment of defeat already known before we even engage in any struggle as a kind of universal Oblomov. The thought of everything is useless” leads to nihilism, and not in the gaiety dimension of the gaiety nihilism theorized by Vattimo, but leaves room only for a nihilism of the “last man,” who can no longer find a reason to live, a meaning of life, a project for the realization of his own humanity even on the political and social level, in which he can productively and positively insert himself. This problem of meaning and the meaning of existence, embedded in a dimension larger than our simple life, which transcends us and also gives us reason to fight when necessary, is also a fundamental theme for aesthetics, because there can be no aesthetic value where there is no meaning of existence. The decadentist idea that the aesthetic sense succeeds the ethical sense and the political sense as a simple surrender to selfish enjoyment is actually not purely aesthetic because it lacks the capacity for idealization necessary for the production of the value of the beautiful and is merely the praise of pleasure—that pleasure that even our pet peeves yearn for when they are simply a little bored resting on the couch. In conclusion, therefore, even Nietzschean superhomism, which advocates a transvaluation of all values in order to repropose a materialistic spirit of the earth, animated solely by the free action of the will to power in opposition to the nihilistic mystifications of religions and ideologies, believes it is proposing an overcoming, but in reality, it risks proposing nothing more than regression to the pre-human, that is, to the animal that does not consciously depress nihilistic values of vitalism for the benefit of the constitution of an ideal or even divine sphere. Significant from this point of view is Scheler’s objection to Nietzsche, to whom he did not contest the nihilistic character of religions and the sacred, nor even the “sick” character of civilization, but who claimed it as a unique and characteristic capacity of human being to affirm his spirituality by going against that vital principle that the all of the animal’s experience, thus trespassing on the domain of the natural. In this sense, in the posthuman, where we witness the naturalization of the human as an implicit de-humanization of it, the cultural values, which were proper to the emerging constitution of culture, can only

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be nihilistic from the naturalistic or will to power point of view, and thus, in a dialectical sense, can only be negative, precisely insofar as the human in one sense (of biological substratum) fulfills the basic biological needs of nourishment of the organism and reproduction of genes, but in another sense, it as a mental entity or ideal transcendent of merely material reality, denies matter, and opposes materialist reductionism. We can already see this principle expressed in neo-Platonism, which considers matter void in the opposite sense insofar as it lacks being. So we have a double and reciprocal attribution of nihilism, depending on what is considered real and what is considered value. Now the beautiful is relative to the world of entities, of that which has being and therefore meaning. This, therefore, is implicitly negative with respect to the merely organic, and it is no accident that sexual enjoyment has been left out of philosophical aesthetics and thus out of the discourse on the beautiful. Beautiful may be the love that gives meaning to orgasm, but it cannot be vice versa, because orgasm in itself has no meaning whatsoever. Instead, orgasm stands at the pinnacle of subjective and organic pleasurable. Thus, in the age of the posthuman, it will be primarily the pleasurable and the orgasm that will predominate over the beautiful, which will instead be proportionately denied. On the other hand, the cultural decomposition we are witnessing and the simplification of communication and meanings are already showing us day after day the flattening of the beautiful to the advantage of the merely pleasant, amusing, or exciting, which then fail to structure themselves, confining all these sensations to the mere biographical incident that put together only succeeds in creating hit parade phenomena, or best sellers. The fact that many people are convinced that it is artistic to be the work that gives an emotion is the grave of artistic value, and its depletion is not coincidentally already evident. However, if it is true that the posthuman condition by its very nature gives privilege to naturalistic reductionism and the animalization of feeling, it is also true that it will also generate opposing tendencies that we already see, for example, in the trends inspired by the enhancement of transhumanism and those of the critical attitude that are in the wake of the cyberpunk tradition within which the present approach to posthuman is also located. What then becomes of the intellect and reason that had enabled humans to trespass from nature into the noosphere? In the posthuman, this encroachment gradually ceases to be about humans and passes to machines, leaving humans to regress to the animal dimension and machines to rise to gods. The next aesthetic, as an understanding of beauty, will then concern machines, but it will not be an aesthetic of the machine in the sense that it will have the machine as its object, but in the sense that it will be appreciated and felt by the machine.

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Notes 1. On the power of which see Freedberg, 1991. 2. Cesare De Seta, Storia d’Italia. Annali 5: Il Paesaggio (Torino: Enaudi, 1982) and Cesare De Seta, Bella Italia: Patrimonio e paesaggio tra mali e rimedi (Milano: Electa, 2007). 3. Raffaele Milani, L’Arte del Paesaggio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017); Paolo D’Angelo, Filosofia del Paesaggio (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010). 4. Yolaine Escande, Montagnes et eaux: la culture du shanshui (Paris: Hermann, 2005). 5. Xiaofeng Fang, The Great Gardens of China (New York: Monacelli Press, 2010). 6. Ernesto De Martino, La fine del mondo, 1977 (Torino: Einaudi, 2019). 7. Angelo Brelich, Presupposti del sacrificio umano (Roma: Editori Riuniti University Press, 2011).

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Conclusion

In conclusion, we can say that the crucial element of aesthetics is the assignment of value to the form; this value is determined by the fact that the individual elements of a group are subordinate to the fitness of the group. The value of the parts of a painting or film lies in its being functional to the unity of the work; the value of works is functional to the artistic movement and is subordinate to the development of a broader cultural trend, and so on, where all these overall elements are in dialectical opposition to other elements. This means that by delving into mechanisms of cultural selection on the model of natural selection, we can come to define transcendental dynamics of cultural phenomena and enhancement phenomena that otherwise remain mysterious. To do this, we have drawn on Price’s covariance equation, which allows us to frame the question of the proliferation of what Warburg called Pathosformeln, although it does not allow us to delve into the question of their functional structure. This is important because competing teams do not win only if they have a certain number of elements, but if they compose them into an effective structure. In aesthetics, this is especially important since it is concerned with form. This covariance of formal elements and their arrangement plays an essential role in determining style. However, style must be thought of in such a way that it also includes the operation of public or site-specific art or critical meta-communication about art, the modus operandi, the choice of an approach to the problem of artistic production, or the types of fruition enhancing the forms of the environment. This value of form can be associated with pleasure, enjoyment, joy, and even love; however, it does not reside in any of these aspects and can also present itself in an abstractly intellectual form. Style reminds us that this kind of enhancement, however inwardly experienced, has a resonance that points 253

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back to the outside because style is independent of us, even when we are artists. We are an offshoot of style; we fit into it, and altering it is no easy thing. Style is constructed from memes, but not all memes that affect aesthetics and art are stylistic. In fact, style always holds together and manifests other kinds of memes that convey other cultural traits and values. It should not be forgotten that the father of the approach used here is Warburg, who is also the founder of iconology, which was born out of an awareness of the dryness of pure formalism. Thus, a rift was created in artist studies between the Viennese and French formalist traditions and the iconological tradition. The iconological tradition, however, failed to account for artistic and aesthetic value. It focused only on the cultural program and, with Gombrich, ended up reducing the meaning of art to a subjectivist and psychologist mental pattern. Stylistic theory had a theory of artistic value, however, which was naive, often based on technical ability or unfounded expressive values. The present theory, in addition to providing a theory that provides aesthetics with a new autonomy, thinking of it not as a besieged citadel but as an area of memetic subjectivity, does more: It aims to create a unified theory that is capable of connecting in a coherent logic the aspects of meaning, form, and value of the arts. In this way, it not only reunites the legacy of the Viennese school with that of iconology but also adds an organic theory of artistic value that can find use in the study of the history of the visual arts and beyond. These memes can then be connected to pleasure or beauty. But the difference between these two elements, which are often mixed in aesthetics, from the memetic point of view is as clear as can be. In the case of pleasure, we are the ones who select memes according to our individual tastes, which depend on our particular memetic mix. In the case of beauty, on the other hand, the external memetic organization succeeds through enhancement processes in overturning this selective logic, becoming immune to the selection of likes and becoming able to select us as people of taste. Aesthetics then arose in a world where canonical beauty represented a structure of aesthetic values rooted and codified in traditional culture, especially academia, against which the individual subject wanted to bring about a renewal through the heterodox character of subjective taste. Thus, in modernity, aesthetics serves not to reaffirm the norm but to give the subject the permissibility to intervene beyond the canon and beyond institutional reality, foregrounding the audience’s individual judgment and liking. This reversal reflected the desire for prominence and novelty of the so-called civil society acting outside the insiders and producers. This allowed greater freedom, and to this different, less regimented climate, we also owe the birth of modern art.

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Today, however, that new social system no longer breaks any oppressive traditional conventions because it has been in power for some time now. It has arranged an organized system for shaping tastes through the management of highly advanced marketing techniques. Individual taste is no longer something that comes out of the lines but is something very predictable through the algorithms of artificial intelligence systems. Today, individual taste plunges us into the anonymous dimension of statistics, in which our choices are studied and directed in order to produce profit. We are simply led to agree on increasingly mundane tastes, toward a pleasantness that is less and less culturally sophisticated and tends toward the forms of animal enjoyment once even excluded from aesthetics. It is perhaps in this sense that biopower has determined a bioaesthetic, which goes in the direction of the naturalization and dehumanization of humans. With respect to this trivialization of experience, with respect to this reduction to the commercial, with respect to the liquidation and destruction of the instances culturally connected to the idea of a divine spark that inhabits the human and is irreducible to the biological substratum (precisely because it is connected to an emergent reality), beauty today is revolutionary, precisely in its transcendent character, in its ideal aspiration, which is capable of refracting itself even in the small particular, allowing for an elevation from a world of mere presence and mere stimuli, not only of the element that is the object of our experience but of ourselves as capable of welcoming beauty into our world of entities in which human being is still capable of dwelling as a meditating entity and agent endowed with a critical intelligence of things.

v

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v Index

Art & Language, 223 articulation, 198–203

Addison, Joseph, 15, 18 Adorno, Theodor W., 23, 25, 27, 48, 53, 54, 63, 147, 161, 228, 201, 208, 242 aesthetics, vii, viii, ix, xi, xiii, 2–4, 6–9, 11, 13, 14, 16–26, 29–36, 39, 51, 53, 55, 58, 61–64, 66, 72, 73, 85, 87, 103, 121, 126–28, 131, 133, 152–56, 161– 69, 172, 173, 176, 179, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 196, 197, 199–204, 206–10, 212–15, 219, 222–24, 226–31, 235, 237, 238, 240, 245–50, 253–55 Agamben, Giorgio, 24, 126 âge classique, viii, 1, 21, 69 Agucchi, Leon Battista, 10 AI (Artificial Intelligence), 173–76, 235, 248, 255 Alberti, Leon Battista, 5, 6, 7, 10 Alexander the Great, 37 Alighieri, Dante, 4, 6 ancien régime, 13 Anders, Günther, 84, 246 André, Yves-Marie, 17 Apel, Karl-Otto, 47, 48, 50 Apelles, 6 archeology of knowledge, 1, 2 Arendt, Hannah, 84 Aristotelianism, 12 Aristotle, 5, 10, 8, 11, 79, 80, 95, 96, 145, 149, 199, 228

Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 153 Bacon, Francis, (painter), 24 Bacon, Francis, (philosopher), 8, 10, 74 Badiou, Alain, 172 Baghdad, 4 Baroque, 9, 12, 18, 72 Baruchello, Gianfranco, 24 Bataille, Georges, 77 Bateson, Gregory, 232 Batteux, Charles, 15 Battisti, Eugenio, 224 Baudrillard, Jean, 24, 42, 146–49 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 154, 155, 184 beauty, ix, xiii, 3, 6, 8, 10–20, 24, 29, 30, 34, 35, 53, 54, 63, 64, 66, 86, 87, 117, 120·122, 128, 136, 154, 161, 167–69, 173, 175, 179, 183–88, 191–94, 196, 197, 200, 204–6, 208, 215, 222, 225–30, 232, 237, 238–47, 250, 254, 255 Beccaria, Cesare, 16 Beck, Maximilian, 31 behavioural modernity, 113 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, 10 265

266  v  Index

Belting, Hans, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 27, 132 Beowulf, 4 Berkeley, George, 39 Brelich, Angelo, 120 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 10 Bestand, 85 Beuys, Joseph, 131, 235 bigaku, 36, 161, 213 biopolitics, 69, 70, 71, 201 birds, 181 Blackmore, Susan, 135 Blake, William, 236 Boas, Franz, 125 Bogost, Ian, 170, 172 Boileau, Nicolas, 16 Bolk, Lodewijk, 85 Bologna, 4 Boole, George, 153 Bouhours, Dominique, 16 Bourdieu, Pierre, 215 Boyd, Robert, 101, 126 Breton, André, 87, 219 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 5, 225 Bruno, Giordano, 12 Buddha, 120, 211 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 15, 167, 204, 205, 206, 228, 236 Burckert, Walter, 116 Burke, Edmund, 18, 19 Byron, George Gordon, 224 Callois, Roger, 139 Campanella, Tommaso, 63, 74 Carroll, Noel, 169 Cassirer, Ernst, 7, 31, 32, 153, 154, 156, 157 Castiglione, Baldassarre, 8 catharsis, 228 Cattelan, Maurizio, 162 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, 58, 126, 138 Cazeneuve, Jean, 116 Cézanne, Paul, 225 Chat GPT, 173

Chomsky, Noam, 71 Cicero, 117 Clazomene, 35 cogito, 39, 44, 47, 59 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 201 compositio, 9 Comte, Auguste, 32, 74 Confucius, 117, 120 Constantinople, 6 Copernican Revolution, 29 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille, 224 creativity, 235–237 Crick, Francis, 71 Croce, Benedetto, 3, 22, 62, 63, 223 Crousaz, Jean-Pierre, 17 culture/nurture, 91 cyberpunk, 250 D’Angelo, Paolo, 169, 213 Darwin, Charles, 69, 70, 74, 76, 94, 97, 105, 125, 137, 138, 141 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 7, 167, 168, 206 Dawkins, Richard, 83, 98, 100, 102, 106, 126, 127, 134, 137, 208, 222 Debord, Guy, 27, 147, 148 De Duve, Thierry, 155 De Hollanda, Francisco, 15 dehumanization, 247 Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 38, 40, 137, 142– 45, 146, 148, 172, 211 Della Robbia, Luca, 5, 225 De Martino, Ernesto, 226 Democritus, 37 Dennett, Daniel, 126 De Piles, Roger, 15 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 137 Descartes, René, 11, 12, 33, 38, 47, 78, 154 design, 10 dialectics, 27 dianoia, 79 Dick, Philip, K., 139 Diderot, Dénis, 15, 17–19 discursive formation, viii, 1, 9, 20, 219

Index  v  267

dispositio, 9 Dissanayake, Ellen, 73, 116, 117, 164 DNA, xi, 105, 113, 122, 134, 145 Dolce Stil Novo, 4 Donatello, 5, 225 Du Bos, 17 Duchamp, Marcel, xiii, 23, 51, 156, 197, 214, 223 Dufrenne, Mikel, 23 Dumézil, Georges, 240 Duns Scotus, John, 38, 144 Dürer, Albrecht, 8 Durkheim, Émile, 32, 138 Dutton, Dennis, 32 Eco, Umberto, 63 electio, 9 elocutio, 9 emergentism, 94 Empedocles, 37 Engels, Friedrich, 76 Enlightenment, 13, 17, 27, 42, 74, 78, 244, 245 Entlastung (relief), 85, 109, 113, 176 Epicurus, 37 Esposito, Roberto, 108 Exzentrizität, 115, 202 Fassbinder, Renier, 139 Ferraris, Maurizio, 3, 41, 42, 170, 201 Ficino, Marsilio, 6, 7, 10, 84 fine arts, 14, 15 Fisher, Ronald Aylmer, 98 Flanders, 6 flowers, 178 Focillon, Henry, 126, 223 Fodor, Jerry, 80, 157 Foucault, Michel, viii, xii, 1, 2, 9, 40, 58, 60, 69, 70, 87, 127, 130, 137, 186, 219 Frankfurt School, 27, 187 Franklin, Rosalind, 71 Frazer, James, 76 Frege, Gottlob, 153

Freud, Sigmund, 39, 76, 137 Friedrich, Caspar David, 22 Frobenius, Leo, 125 fruits, 179 furor, 14 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 25, 48 Galilei, Galileo, 7, 8 Galilei, Vincenzo, 8 Galouye, Daniel F., 139 Galton, Francis, 80 Garroni, Emilio, 27 Gehlen, Arnold, 83–85 Geiger, Moritz, 31 gene, 69, 94, 126, 145, 158, 165, 166 genealogy, viii, 2, 34 Gestaltpsychologie, 30, 167, 201 ghazal, 4 Giotto, 225 Girard, René, 58, 117 Givone, Sergio, 3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 200, 224 gothic, 5, 219, 225 Gould, Stephen J., 85, 100 Gracián, Baltasar, 9, 10 Grand Tour, 15–16, 224 Gravina, Giovanni Vincenzo, 16 Greenberg, Clément, 20, 147, 187 Habermas, Jürgen, 48, 58 haecceitas, 38, 144 Haldane, John, 77, 98 Hamilton, William Donald, 83, 98, 102, 107, 241 Hanslick, Eduard, 169 Harman, Graham, 170 Hartung, Hans, 202, 203 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 22, 29, 32, 56, 63, 64, 84, 89, 154, 208, 209, 240 Heidegger, Martin, 24, 25, 40, 57, 61, 67, 71, 84–86, 137, 148, 247 Hertz, Heinrich, 31, 154 Hesiod, 186

268  v  Index

Hirst, Damien, 162 Hobbes, Thomas, 10–12, 38, 41 Hölldobler, Bert, 107 Holzer, Jenny, 155 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 14 Hrotsvitha, 4 Hume, David, 18, 39, 62, 63, 184 Husserl, Edmund, 30, 44–46, 50, 56, 80, 81, 83, 137 Hutcheson, Francis, 15, 18 hypokeimenon, 38 Ingarden, Roman, 30 Institutional theory of art, 162 Itard, Jean, 60 Jacob, François, 71 Jakobson, Roman, 150 Je-ne-sais-quoi, 12, 16, 155 Johannsen, Wilhelm, 71 Jonas, Hans, 84 Junius, Franciscus, 10 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 19–21, 29, 31, 39, 41, 63, 95, 97, 127, 128, 153, 164, 184, 188, 196–99, 208, 209 kenosis, 119, 121, 122 Khun, Thomas, 104 Kim, Jaegwon, 97 Kitzinger, Ernst, 4 Klossowski, Pierre, 139–41, 146, 147 Kosuth, Joseph, 25, 197 Kropotkin, Pyotr Alexeyevich, 97, 108, 216 Kubler, Henry, 126 Lacoon, 205 Laing, Ronald David, 232 Lakatos, Imre, 104 landscape, xiii, 16, 21, 224 Lange, Friedrich Albert, 42 Langer, Susanne, 33, 153–57 Lao-zi, 120 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 12 Latour, Bruno, 172

Lee, Spike, 230 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 19, 38, 39, 48, 80, 154 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 20 Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien, 116 Levinson, Jerrold, 169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 159, 241 Locke, John, 39, 78–80 Lorenz, Konrad, 98 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus), 138, 139 Luhmann, Niklas, 58 Lukács, György, 23 Lyotard, Jean-François, 24, 26 Lysenko, Trofim, 77 Macdonald, Dwight, 188 Magritte, René, 24 Malebranche, Nicolas, 12 Malevich, Kazimir, 23 Manet, Edouard, 24 Marquise de Lambert, Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, known as, 17 Marsenne, Marin, 12 Marx, Karl, 27, 39, 52, 76, 234 Marxism, 22, 23, 235 Masaccio, 5, 225 materialism, 39, 42, 43, 44, 52 76, 170 Maturana, Humberto, 177 Max Müller, Friedrich, 125 Mead, George Herbert, 48 Meiji Restoration, 35 meme, 125, 134, 137, 153 Mendel, Gregor, 70, 71, 145 Mengele, Josef Rudolf, 70, 77, 81 Mengs, Anton Raphael, 20 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 30, 56 Michaud, Yves, 25, 237 Migliorini, Ermanno, 196, 197, 213 Miletus, 35 Mill, John Stuart, 94 Miller, Geoffrey, 73 Mitsein, 65, 66 Mizuno, Chiyori, 201

Index  v  269

Monod, Jacques, 71 Monroe, Marilyn, 166 Montani, Pietro, 85 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 17 More, Thomas, 74 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 76 Morton, Timothy, 171 Nancy, Jean Luc, 24, 40 Nazism, 70, 77, 78 Neo-Darwinism, 70, 72, 77, 84, 87, 91, 134, 208 Neo-Platonism, 8, 11, 15, 144, 250 neuroaesthetics, 168 Newman, Barnett, 24 NFT, 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich, viii, 2, 27, 39, 41, 84–86, 137, 139–41, 143, 146, 148, 152, 249 Nihilism, 27, 47, 84, 140, 142, 147, 249, 250 Noh theatre, 185, 188 Ockham, William, 33, 159, 172 Odyssey, 242 Okada, Atsushi, 201 OOO (Object Oriented Ontology), 169–73 Ortega y Gasset, José, 172 Panofsky, Erwin, 7, 38 Pareyson, Luigi, 214 Parmenides, 37 Parrasius, 200 Pascal, Blaise, 12 Patrizi, Francesco, 9 Paul of Tarsus, 119 Peacock’s theory, 72, 91, 164, 180 Perniola, Mario, 24, 137, 147 Perrault, Charles, 16 Perspective, 7 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 4, 6, 8 Piaget, Jean, 48 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 85

Pinker, Steven, 78, 81 Plato, 6, 10, 11, 37, 44, 141, 145 Platonism, 6, 7, 12, 37, 141, 143 Plessner, Helmuth, 83 Pliny the Elder, 205 Plotinus, 6, 10, 11 Pollock, Jackson, 236 Portmann, Adolf, 85 posthuman, 246 postmodern, 24, 26 Price, George Robert, 98, 102, 201, 207, 253 principium individuationis, 33, 132 Pseudo-Longinus, 19 Pyrrho of Elis, 37 Pythagoras, 37, 169 Pythagoreans, 10 querelle des anciens et des modernes, 13, 14 Quinzio, Sergio, 119 Rancière, Jacques, 25, 227 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 200 Ratzel, Friedrich, 125 reductionism, 92 Reid, Thomas, 18, 19, 23, 169 Reinhardt, Ad, 73 Remotti, Francesco, 101 Renaissance, 5, 11–13, 15, 86, 136, 148, 201, 205, 218, 225, 228 rhetorical-poetic paradigm, 15 rhetorics, 9, 18 Richerson, Peter, 101, 126 Rickert, Heinrich, 213 Robertson Smith, William, 76 Romanticism, 176, 201 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 17, 76, 78 Roussel, Raymond, 24 Rusnak, Josef, 139 Samos, 35 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz, 10 Sartre, Jean Paul, 171 Sasaki, Ken’ichi, 224

270  v  Index

Scheler, Max, 31, 46, 83, 84, 249 Scherer, Klaus, 169 Schiller, Friedrich, 22, 200 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 125 Schmitt, Carl, 85 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 143 Semon, Richard, 126 Sen-no Rikyū, 209 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of, 15, 18 Shakespeare, William, 80 Simondon, Gilbert, 40, 201 simulacrum, xii, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153 sociobiology, 77, 82, 101, 104 Spector, Tim, 81, 82 Spencer, Herbert, 76 Sperber, Dan, 80, 126, 138, 157, 158, 226 Spinoza, Baruch, 11, 12 sprezzatura, 8, 9 Stalin, Joseph, 77, 78 Stiegler, Bernard, 31 Stoics, 10 sūnyatā, 37 Suprematism, 23 tabula rasa, 71, 78, 79, 80 Tarde, Gabriel, xii, 32, 126, 137, 138, 142, 144, 148, 149, 153, 157 Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw, 3, 9, 213 Taylor, Charles, 48 Tesauro, Emanuele, 10 Thales, 35 Thatcher, Margaret, 172 Thomas Aquinas, 79, 80, 144 Thucydides, 242 Tillich, Paul, 158 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 16 tode ti, 38, 65 Todorov, Cvetan, 153 Trivers, Robert Ludlow, 83, 98 Turner, William, 22, 224 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 76

ut pictura poesis, 14 Van Gogh, Vincent, 72, 236 Vasari, Giorgio, 133 Vattimo, Gianni, 24, 25, 41, 170, 249 Venus de Milo, 205, 206 Vercellone, Federico, 3 Verela, Francisco, 177 Verri, Pietro, 16 Vico, Giovan Battista, 16, 20, 30, 32, 52, 56, 64, 74, 154, 242 Virilio, Paul, 24 visual turn, 5, 6, 9, 25 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollici), 5 Von Ehrenfels, Christian, 96 Von Hayek, Friedrich, 82 Von Uexküll, Jakob, 66, 85 Wagner, Richard, 237 Warburg, Aby, 126, 201, 253, 254 Watson, James, 71 Welt/Umwelt, 60, 66, 85, 103, 247 Whitehead, 154 widespread aesthetics (estetica diffusa), 235 Wilson, David Sloane, 98, 99, 102, 105 Wilson, Edward O., 82, 83, 98, 101, 102, 105–7 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 20, 22, 30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 46, 62 Wolff, 19, 20 Wollheim, 150 Wynne-Edwards, Vero Copner, 98 Yoshihara, Jirō, 202 yūgen, 185 Zahavi, Dan, 45, 47 Zeki, Semir, 168 Zeri, Federico, 224 Zeusi, 200 Zoroaster, 120 Zuccari, Federico, 10, 15, 200

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About the Author

Roberto Terrosi (b. 1965) studied until his doctorate in philosophy at Tor Vergata University in Rome, where he studied aesthetics (Storia del concetto d’arte, Milan, 2006) and Foucault’s thought (La Genealogia, Rome, 2012). He was a student of Mario Perniola and participated with him in the journal Agalma. He took part in the Italian cyberpunk movement and in 1997 published a book on the posthuman (Filosofia del postumano, Genoa, 1997), then became interested in visual studies and the culture of representation (Storia e antropologia del ritratto, Milan, 1912). Since 2005, he has settled with various interruptions in Japan, where he did research first at Kyoto University, then he taught as associate professor at Tohoku University in Sendai until the tsunami. After going back to Japan, he taught at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. In Japan, he published a book on Italian theory (イタリアン・セオリーの現在, Tokyo, 2019).

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